Even Billy Thunder, still cocky and self-assured on that night in October, didn’t know that in two days, he and his dog would move from the freezing camper and into Buck’s little house. He didn’t know he would find a job with Harry Plunkett, who would teach him how to fix small engines and restore cars. Or that the first car they restored would be the white Mustang, the one with the perfect canvas top that went up and down on command once Harry fixed the hydraulic mechanism. He didn’t know yet that Phoebe Perkins had fallen in love with Tony Cameron, who always came into Murray’s Restaurant & Bar for just a glimpse of her.
Billy also didn’t know that he would marry Little Lucy and they would have their own family. Or that he and Harry Plunkett would grow so close in friendship that he would feel at last he’d found the father he always wanted. He and Harry would add vintage motorcycles to their auto restorations, and Billy would build them a website so they could sell them to the nation. The world would have come to Mattagash by then, since Mattagash was too isolated and shy to go to the world.
No one knew that one day, in that spaceship of a future, Billy Thunder and his grandson would drive the same white Mustang in a town parade celebrating the completion of the new, two-way Mattagash bridge. Harry Plunkett would be there watching, one of the lucky American veterans who seemed immune to the effects of Agent Orange. At eighty-seven, Harry would have two more years to sleep next to Blanche, free of nightmares. He and his fishing buddy, Orville Craft, would never tell anyone who backed up first, that famous night on the one-way bridge.
But no one knew yet the denouement.
***
Florence Walker stood in the path of her porch light and watched the white flakes twirling down from the sky like tiny windmills, covering the mailboxes, the railings of the one-way bridge, rooftops, the bodies of pickups, and the hoods of cars, filling up the old mistakes with a new beginning. Then Florence went back inside her house and let the first storm of the year discover her word.
As midnight arrived, all the clocks in town, the modern ones with luminous faces and the old-fashioned ones with keys and knobs, clocks on nightstands, grandfather clocks, clocks on walls, clocks on shelves, and clocks hooked to watch straps—all the clocks felt it. Their numbers flicked, or their hands moved silently. As if taking one unanimous breath, they went forward into a new day, pulling everyone in town closer to the future, pulling all those threads in the tapestry tighter and tighter.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is my tenth novel. In all my other books, I may have a character mention a certain war now and then. Perhaps his or her father fought in Korea. Or died in World War II. But I have never tried to create a fictional character who has actually been in combat. It seemed too disrespectful to the real soldiers who fought real wars. And then, how to do it? Where to start? But writers don’t always write about what we know, contrary to literary rumors. Sometimes, we write about what we should know.
This novel has several main characters. One is Sgt. Harold “Harry” Plunkett. I didn’t want to write about a Vietnam veteran because I have never been to war. I’ve never been to Vietnam. I have never even visited a military base. As a writer, my wars take place around the kitchen table and in the bedroom. They are fought over lovers, leather purses, Christmas lights, and mailboxes. Sometimes, they last the weekend. Other times, they go on for years and my characters are in them for the duration. Those are my wars. Fictional. Easily erased. And as time passes, they are even quickly forgotten.
Harry Plunkett first appeared to me in 1991 while I was watching CNN late one night in Nashville, Tennessee, where I was living. A news clip was showing images of a one-way bridge being swept away like tinsel in an ice jam. Allagash, Maine. The St. John River. This was a bridge in my old hometown that crossed my childhood river. It was then that I realized I’d never used a one-way bridge in my fiction. As I thought about the metaphor of a bridge and all that it implies, Harry Plunkett and mailman Orville Craft began to take shape. I jotted down pages of notes and ideas for a possible future novel. That’s when Harry announced that he was a Vietnam War veteran. “Okay, Harry,” I told him. “But you keep quiet about Vietnam, or I’ll cut you out of this book.”
Here in this northern Maine town, the Vietnam War had a different impact on us than it did protestors in the big, faraway cities. We were proud of the men (no female soldiers from this town back then) who went to fight it, almost all of them having been drafted. We knew them personally, knew their hearts, knew the last thing they wanted to do was fight or die in a jungle halfway around the world. We saw them come home, some with medals, some wounded, some just glad to be alive. The Vietnam War played out differently in Allagash, Maine, than it did in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. There, the protests grew bitterly personal, and the anger was often directed at the soldiers themselves, instead of solely at our government. But it was still a war I only heard about from letters to and from soldiers I knew. And from Walter Cronkite’s nightly reports. It was a distant war, and I was a safe girl in tiny and remote Allagash.
Over a decade passed as Harry and Orville rested on my shelf. By 2004, after I’d moved to the Eastern Townships of Quebec, I was ready to assemble my characters and notes and settle in to write the full novel. By the end of my first draft, Harry Plunkett began having flashbacks from his combat experiences in Vietnam. I was frantic. Writers know that characters take on lives of their own and suddenly start talking about stuff, and it seems as if we are only recording what they say. But, of course, it’s all coming from that trunk of memories we keep in our subconscious minds, our own emotions, our fears, our joys, our loves, our hates. We run the show, not the characters we invent.
I could not delete Harry Plunkett, nor could I change what he was insisting on remembering, on reliving, on teaching me. He was too real to me by then. So I began reading about the Vietnam War and first-person accounts of the soldiers who had fought it. Some of them haunt me still. One incident involving an old Vietnamese man in a sampan was so horrific that I softened the facts for this novel. The truth was too over-the-top to be believable in fiction. That story would better serve a compelling and painful work of nonfiction. I was haunted for months by all I read, and yet I was safe in Quebec, doing research forty years after real soldiers suffered those heart-wrenching experiences.
I wrote a dozen drafts of this novel, eight years of drafts, which involved the necessary cutting of 360-plus pages. I wanted to tell everything I’d been learning, how artists were brought in during World War II (Norman Rockwell was one) to create colorful posters to be sent to post offices all over the country, propaganda that would engage the public in support of the war. I scolded the New York City public relations company who sent forth Nayirah, an ambassador’s daughter, to lie about babies being ripped from incubators in Kuwait, thus helping push us into the Gulf War. “War is all in the words,” Harry told me, so I let him say that in this novel. There were many pages where I angrily denounced George W. Bush for taking us into Iraq and a useless search for WMDs. I wore my research on my sleeve, that place it should never appear. Advice from a fellow writer was good enough to take: You’re a storyteller. You can’t spend all that time on a soapbox about Bush and how heinous war is. She was right. And by that time, 2010, George Bush and his war were already fading into our collective memory.
But one reader suggested I find a “less Hollywood” way for a soldier to die than by throwing himself on a grenade. (I had been so moved by the account of a young man who had done that heroic act that I chose it for a character in this novel.) It was years later, when checking his name listed under the Medal of Honor recipients—it’s our country’s highest decoration for bravery—that I found other names of soldiers who had also done this. And some lived to remember that day. Please go to the Internet and read the names of all the soldiers who received the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. Look at their pictures, study their faces. While no list can ever be complete in any w
ar (over 200,000 American soldiers received the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam, as did my fictional Harry Plunkett), the Medal of Honor was given to a mere 248 soldiers. The most recent recipient was Leslie H. Sabo, 21, who died in Cambodia in 1970. His family learned just this year, 2012, of his amazing heroics on the day he died. Of those 248 men receiving the medal, seventy threw themselves on grenades or explosives to protect their comrades. Imagine that. And there may have been more, other Leslie Sabos.
A former Vietnam medic recently told me, “There is no one way to write about that war. Every soldier has a different story, a different way of dealing with it. Back then, we all had our own means of surviving.” So I guess this is Sgt. Harold “Harry” Plunkett’s version of the war and how he dealt with it. Are my facts and terms correct? I certainly tried to make sure that they were. Are Harry’s emotional thoughts valid as I imagined them to be? I hope so. Did any soldiers in the Mekong Delta ever hear the coop coop coop of the Crow Pheasant, or was it only in the Central or Northern Highlands? I don’t know. Writers take license at times for the sake of poetry. The harvest moon of 2006, for instance, did not occur when I suggested it did in this novel, but a week earlier. But that fact does not change the hearts of my characters.
If sometimes we write about what we should know, then I thank Harry for insisting I listen to him. And I thank the Vietnam vets, my friends, and those strangers I will never meet, for teaching me about their courage and their endurance. This book is for them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The people I should thank would outnumber the population of Allagash, Maine. This is my condensed list:
Tom Viorikic, my husband, and always the first to read.
My agent, the amazing Jennifer DeChiara, of the Jennifer DeChiara Agency.
Howard Frank Mosher, for encouragement and input so valuable it was indispensable. You are the godfather of the Delgato cousins. They belong to you now.
The gang at Sourcebooks, for all their hard work and faith in this novel: Stephanie Bowen, my editor; Jenna Skwarek, assistant editor; Heather Hall, production editor; Heather Moore, senior publicity manager; Jennifer Sterkowitz, digital content assistant; Anna Klenke, editorial assistant; Valerie Pierce, marketing manager; Katie Anderson, marketing coordinator; Dawn Adams, design manager; Will Riley, senior graphic designer; and Chris Norton, page production specialist.
Thank you Peter Lynch and, of course, Steve Geck at Sourcebooks Jabberwocky.
And Michael Malone, wonderful writer and wonderful friend. Thank you.
Friends who read early drafts: Randy Ford, Rosemary Kingsland, Kathleen Wallace King, Nancy Henderson, Jay Selberg, Bill
Andrews, Larry Wells, Leroy Martin, Allen Jackson, Chad Pelletier, and Cherry Danker, who is missed daily.
Bob Zimmerman, who told me many years ago about an electrical painting he once saw, on black velvet, of Venice, Italy. We miss you, Bob Z.
Jack “Doc” Mannick, former Vietnam medic, for your input and assurance.
Thank you to artist Ward Hooper of New York, for that wonderful watercolor that found a home in this story. And so did the use of your name.
And, as always, to those rescued animals who came, saw, and conquered, five fine and dignified dogs: Lance, Wylie, Rosie, Bear, and Allie. And a precious cat named Mali, or “Little One.”
And I always thank Mama and Daddy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cathie Pelletier was born and raised on the banks of the St. John River, at the end of the road in northern Maine. She is the author of nine other novels, including The Funeral Makers (NYTBR Notable Book), The Weight of Winter (winner of the New England Book Award), and Running the Bulls (winner of the Paterson Prize for Fiction). As K. C. McKinnon, she has written two novels, both of which became television films. After years of living in Nashville, Tennessee; Toronto, Canada; and Eastman, Quebec, she has returned to Allagash, Maine, and the family homestead where she was born. She is at work on a new novel.
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