The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Up onto the stage rampaged the real Prof, red-faced, demanding that the production be halted, cuffing Big and Little, rushing from actor to actor like a mad bull. I ran onto the stage and shouted, “The play’s the thing! It must go on.”

  Our undaunted leader had been drinking all afternoon, and his efforts to stop the presentation were ineffectual. Big and Little were laughing at their father. “Hand over that Christly flask,” he roared, lunging for Big. The boys tossed the flask over Prof’s head, behind their backs, under their legs, playing keep-away with it.

  “Mosher, you crazy son of a bitch, stop this so-called play,” Prof bellowed.

  “The play must and will continue,” I intoned. “Get back to your right lines, kids.”

  “No!” bayed Prof. Lowering his big round cannonball of a head, he came charging across the stage, determined to butt me into next Wednesday. Prof had several inches and a good hundred pounds on me. But I was young and wiry and brimming over with a whole school year of grievances against him and the board of education and authority in general. My employer’s words of a year ago, at our teaching interview, flashed through my mind. “If you have to knock ’em down, make sure they stay down.” As he charged me, trumpeting like a rogue elephant, I slipped aside and administered a swift, ungentle rap to his right ear, and he crashed head-first into the six-by-four-foot plywood flat of Teddy from Arsenic and Old Lace. Prof’s head, sticking through the splintered hole in the flat, bore a striking resemblance to Teddy’s. All my superintendent needed was a pith helmet.

  “Waaah!” Prof roared. With the sheet of plywood still attached to his neck, he began to plunge around the crowded stage in a panic, scattering the young thespians.

  “Dad! Hold still. What are you doing?” Big Prof shouted.

  “Where’s Mosher?” Prof shouted. “I’m going to kill Mosher.”

  School board members were hastening down the aisles, making for the stage. That was fine by me. I’d give them a dose of the same, the cheapskates. Prof was swinging the plywood flat from side to side. Finally, he pushed the thing off his head.

  I don’t know what the audience thought. Later some claimed that they supposed Prof’s antics and mine were part of the performance. Then a transformation seemed to come over the old administrator. Grinning hideously, he approached me, right hand extended. “I’m sorry, Mosher,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

  As he started to extend his hand, he said, “Oops. I dropped my hat.”

  He hadn’t been wearing a hat, and that should have tipped me off. As he bent over to retrieve his nonexistent chapeau, I too bent over, and Prof delivered a tremendous uppercut to the side of my jaw. Miraculously, he didn’t break it, but the blow lifted me off my feet and sent me sailing backward into the flat of the dear old-maid sisters. As I slid down it, I saw Prof collapsed facedown nearby. I was sure he was dead. Somehow, I had managed to murder the superintendent of schools. But no, he’d merely passed out. Students and school board members rushed hither and yon on the stage, which, Jim Hayford later remarked, resembled nothing so much as the body-strewn stage of the Globe Theater in the last scene of Hamlet.

  Bill, the Middlebury-bound scholar and narrator of Our Town, put his arm under my shoulders and helped me to my feet. Some of the students laughed. Others applauded. Slowly, I raised a directorial finger.

  “Ring down the curtain,” I croaked out, and as someone blessedly did, I had the distinct impression that the curtain was about to come down on my short-lived career as a teacher as well.

  “Not necessarily,” Prof said to me a couple of nights later. His wife had kicked him out of the house temporarily, and he was holed up at the local hotel. “Up here in the Kingdom, folks will just respect both of us more after our little dust-up at the hall.”

  We sipped our beers, bought earlier that evening in the next town over. Prof grinned at me. “No hard feelings?”

  “None,” I said. After all, what was a little slugfest, in front of half the town, between fishing partners and friends?

  “Remember when we went to get old Hayford’s piano?” Prof said, chuckling.

  “I do.”

  “That was a good time, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  For the fourth or fifth time that evening, Prof put out his hand, and for the fourth or fifth time, somewhat warily, I shook it.

  “Don’t fall for that ‘I dropped my hat’ business again, okay?” Prof advised. “That’s the oldest bar-fighting trick in the book.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “So which do you think it’ll be?” he asked, genuinely interested. “The University of Pennsylvania? Or another year here in the Kingdom?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “I can’t really see myself as an Ivy League graduate student. Or as a professor at some college. Can you?”

  Prof cracked open two more cold ones, shook my hand again, and looked me square in the eye. “Nope,” he said. “I most surely cannot.” And then, echoing Verna’s words on the evening of the day Phillis and I got married, “Welcome home, my friend.”

  62

  Pay Dirt

  Like my uncle Reg, Francis Phelan, the on-the-skids hero of William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed, was once a promising young baseball player. In Ironweed Kennedy evokes Depression-era Albany the way Reg evoked the Catskills in his own long-missing stories. Yet as I walked along Francis’s Broadway, headed from downtown out toward the SUNY Albany campus, there were few signs of Kennedy’s shabby old watering places where hard-nosed minor-league third basemen were lionized, aldermen bribed, union organizers shot and clubbed, and local stories spun into myth at a time when myth still mattered. Half-looking for Frankie Leikheim’s plumbing shop, where Francis, marvelously, finds a piece of twine to tie up his flapping shoe, knowing that the only place I’d ever find it was between the covers of Kennedy’s great novel, I wandered out to the university campus and sat down on a bench near the library.

  Three hours before my final event, at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, I was tired. Tired of the driving, the talks, the interviews. Tired from the aftereffects of my MacArthur Grant treatments, tired of the swirling memories of my life as a reader and writer. Disappointments from the Great American Book Tour? Not a one. I’d never supposed that canvassing the bookstores of America like a latter-day Willy Loman was going to make me a best-selling author. Only that the tour would help me reach whatever potential audience was out there for my stories, as indeed it had. When I’d left home, the late-spring woods of northern New England were still more gold than green. Now the trees on the SUNY Albany campus were starting to yellow again. My journey had encompassed parts of three seasons.

  You’d think that a writer would be temperamentally introspective, if not outright introverted. Actually, I’ve always found other people’s stories to be more interesting than my own. For decades my working life has consisted of sitting down at the kitchen table every morning and filling up yellow legal tablets. My fellowship temporarily emancipated me from that regimen. It allowed me the time to take a trip I had long wished to make and also to take inventory of my own life at a critical juncture.

  True, I hadn’t found the elusive Canadian novel I’d been looking for for thirty-some years. But what the hey. This close to a university library, why not try once more?

  I went in, poked around in the fiction section, and scanned some New Yorker reviews from the fall of 1977, when I was pretty sure the con-man book had been published. Nothing. Then I checked the baseball scores and standings in William Kennedy’s former newspaper, the Times Union. I was thinking about baseball, Uncle Reg, and, fleetingly, my canceled legacy, when the dimmest of dim recollections flared up in the recesses of my mind. It was as if some part of me knew something of tremendous importance that I hadn’t yet consciously processed. I walked over to the information desk. How far back, I inquired, did the library’s files of SUNY Albany master’s theses go? The young man at the desk wasn’t sure, but af
ter I explained what I was looking for, he punched the name I gave him into his computer, made a quick note to himself, and told me he’d be back.

  At length the librarian returned with a cardboard box. “Is this by any chance what you’re looking for?”

  The flaps, as I recall, were fastened with twine, like the twine Francis Phelan found on Broadway to tie up his poor broken shoe. Inside, wrapped neatly in plain brown paper, was a hefty manuscript. The title page read “The Mountains Look Down: A Study of a Catskill Village. A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the N.Y. State College for Teachers in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Education. By Reginald R. Bennett.” What followed was, as nearly as I could determine, Reg’s long-missing history of Chichester. It began with the stately, assured cadences I remembered from my early boyhood when Reg first read me his stories: “In the winter of 1863, a man came west from the Hudson River, traveling by easy stages, and slowly, with horse and sleigh, to the foothills of the Catskills.” I could scarcely believe it. Searching for one book, I had found another, infinitely more precious and personal. I had found the book whose stories, so long ago, had inspired me to write my own. The stories that I had supposed to be lost forever.

  The manuscript was about five hundred pages long. The librarian ran off a copy for me, for which I paid thirty dollars—the last cash in my wallet. Then I walked out of the library into the cool fall evening with my legacy.

  63

  Resolution

  How do you know when you’ve finished a story? In real life, after all, stories tend not to have well-defined endings. There is always one more thing to tell. And that is true in the case of Reg’s legacy. Up on that mountainside looking down on the village of Chichester before he died, just prior to Reg telling me he had something important to say and then apparently changing his mind, he asked me a question.

  “Howard, do you think Margaret loves me?”

  I am far from proud of some of the things I did and said and thought in regard to the matter of my disinheritance. But I am glad to report that, in reply to this question, I said, without hesitation, and meaning it as much as I’ve ever meant anything, “Yes. I know she does.”

  Reg nodded. I believe that may have been the moment when he made up his mind what to do with his property. Certain mysteries remain, as they are apt to with true stories. Where did Reg’s fly rods and first-edition books and manuscript go? Why did Margaret get married and divorced in less than a year? What was the true nature of Reg’s undeniable love for her and hers for him? Was she a surrogate daughter? Were they lovers? I’ll never know. The point is that Reg had trusted me to understand his decision.

  At last I did.

  64

  Homecoming

  I didn’t sleep much that night at my Motel 6 in Albany. I was too excited about discovering Reg’s book and about going home. Around three a.m. I got up for good and headed north. Up through the dark foothills of the Adirondacks and on into the Green Mountains of Vermont. The two-lane mountain road coming into Irasburg from the west cuts across a saddle, where I pulled over to watch the sun rise on the Kingdom. From here, in the chilly September dawn, I could hear the factory whistle in Orleans, five miles to the east. Welcome home, Moshers. Keep the kids out of the mill.

  I could see the woods northeast of town where, long ago, Verna made moonshine to feed her family and save her farm.

  Closer by was the village where Phillis and I have now lived for more than thirty years, with its brick store and post office and scattering of white houses around the common. Just south of the green sits our old farmhouse. And, between the foot of the mountain and the town, the cemetery where, a few weeks before I left for the Great American Book Tour, Phillis and I bought our plot and commissioned a bench with our names and birth dates and a heart carved between them.

  Snap.

  I looked to my right and there he was in the catbird seat, cracking open his first tall boy of the morning.

  “I was hoping you’d show up again,” I said. “Back in Montana when you made off with my fly rod? What was it you called out to me when I asked you about the unfinished business with my uncle?”

  The West Texas Jesus raised his Corona to me and then, if I’m not mistaken, to the panoramic vista of the Northeast Kingdom spread out before us in the sunrise. “What I said,” he told me, “was go back to the Kingdom and write about it.”

  And with that he slipped away, leaving me to drive the last mile home to Phillis.

  65

  The Apocryphal Book of Harold

  A few weeks after he got back to Vermont, Harold Who located a fine regional publisher specializing in Catskill Mountain history and literature, and in due time his uncle’s book, The Mountains Look Down, was well published and enthusiastically received.

  At about the same time that Reg’s book came out, I discovered, through ABE.com, that damnable Canadian novel, a picaresque romp called Farthing’s Fortune. I am delighted to report that I liked it just as much as I had three decades before.

  Monty the snake got thirsty and came out of the ductwork. To celebrate, I ordered for Phillis a life-size stuffed emperor penguin from Anderson’s Bookstore in Naperville, Illinois. Also, I presented her with an eight-by-eleven framed photograph of me reading to several of his feathery brood one rainy night on the outskirts of Chicago. It is my favorite photograph from the Great American Book Tour.

  I still have not heard from Garrison Keillor. But after apologizing to Fred Gustenson, I feel that I have done about as much as I can.

  The jury is still out on the long-term results of my MacArthur Fellowship. It always is, with any kind of cancer. So far so good, however, and as my friend from West Texas might and, come to think of it, did once say, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. To which I will take the liberty of adding, the joy of the day as well.

  $25. RUNS GOOD. DEMO DERBY?

  This, of course, was Phillis’s idea. The day after I got home from the book tour, we stuck the sign on the catbird-seat window of the Loser Cruiser, now parked on the front lawn. Within five minutes, two pickups had pulled into our driveway and four teenage boys were kicking its tires and squabbling about who’d gotten there first. The Cruiser took second in the preliminary heat of that year’s demolition derby at the Orleans County Fair, a fitting Kingdom County conclusion to a remarkable twenty-year run.

  About the Author

  HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten novels and two memoirs.