Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  I poked the fire with a stick, wondering if my nose was growing.

  I had no doubt Jimmy had loved Emma and spent years grieving for her. Recently, though, my second cousin Roger, the family’s de facto historian, a retired missionary, had told me something utterly astonishing. Aunt Emma Dodson had committed suicide by hanging herself from the rafters of the house Jimmy was expanding, undoubtedly the reason he never finished the place. I’d asked Roger if he had any clue why she’d done it and he merely looked at me and shrugged. Suicide was extremely uncommon among Christian settlers but Emma had come from the Indian world before she became a Methodist—perhaps that duality accounted for whatever demons possessed her. Her grandsons had adored her and she’d always seemed content and happy. The suicide, at any rate, became the family’s darkest secret for generations—yet another tale to be told somewhere further down the road.

  “Dad,” said Norumbega Girl as I tucked her and her pal Susie Bear into her sleeping bag, “you really shouldn’t feel bad about your cooking.”

  “I don’t. You do.”

  “Well, at least Amos liked it.”

  Something else seemed to be on her mind. I asked what it was.

  “Well. I was kinda wondering. What do you think happened to the bull?”

  “Hard to say.” It probably wouldn’t have made her feel any better to say somebody probably turned him into a nice freezerful of steaks. “I’ll bet he missed Uncle Jimmy, though.”

  She nodded. There was something else hanging fire. So I asked what that was, too.

  “Could we, like, call Jack and Mommy?”

  A few moments later, I used the cell phone in Old Blue to connect us with the hotel room of my wife and son on Nantucket. They’d just returned to their room from dinner. The stars were out on Nantucket; they’d gone for a ride on a bicycle built for two, walked the beach collecting shells, and made friends with some nice people and their two children at supper. I eavesdropped as Maggie happily revealed to her brother that I’d fallen out of the canoe and she’d caught the trip’s first trout, a fish named Ishy. I was sure she’d mention the naked people but she didn’t.

  Was this indeed the new world awaiting us? If so, it didn’t feel quite as bad as I’d imagined it would, though being lost in the Adirondacks probably helped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Maid of the Mist

  WE TRIED OUR luck in Indian Lake once more in the morning and, proving luckless, broke camp in a deepening mist and fog and drove to Speculator for lunch.

  A couple and their young son were at the table next to us and a conversation started up. They were up from Washington for the week, a pair of schoolteachers in running clothes named Mark and Robin and their three-year-old son, Josh. Mark taught social studies at a junior high near Bethesda, and Robin, who taught earth science, explained that she’d been coming to Indian Lake since she was born because her grandfather had owned one of the first wilderness camps on the lake before the government opened up the area to developers and ruined the lake. She was only thirty-five but could remember when going to her grandfather’s place felt like going to Alaska. The camp had no running water or electricity and you had to drive on a dirt road for nearly two hours to reach it. She saw her first bald eagle there when she was six.

  Mark volunteered that Robin’s grandfather had hunted and fished with Teddy Roosevelt.

  “Who’s that?” Maggie asked.

  “He was president of the United States,” Mark told her. “Though not then. After he went out West.”

  “We’re going out West,” she informed him.

  “Really?” Mark smiled at her. “Maybe you’ll be our first lady president.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll either be a scientist or a country music singer or maybe a movie actress,” she primly explained. I looked at Maggie. The “country music singer” bit was new and I wondered if it was just to please me. Once upon a time, as she knew, so long ago it sometimes felt as if it had happened to somebody else, I’d seriously considered striking off to Nashville to try and find a career making what an overeducated pal of mine called “goat-ropin’ music.” We all have our dark little secrets. Mine was goat-ropin’ music. Her mother had one, too.

  From the sidelines, I added: “Maggie’s mother went to Harvard but secretly always wanted to be a Solid Gold dancer.”

  “Dad!” Maggie was mortified that I was blabbing family secrets.

  “It’s nice to have so many talents,” Mark told her with the smile and grace of a good teacher, and she rewarded him with a shy smile over her hot dog.

  Once we were back on Route 8, headed south to connect with the New York Thruway at Utica, the mist and fog turned into a light rain and the Beatles sang about love in a yellow submarine. Amos slept on the rear seat, and Maggie sat Indian style in her shoulder harness practicing a cat’s cradle with a piece of red yarn. We were following a yellow Ryder van with New York plates and Maggie wanted to know more about Teddy Roosevelt. I explained that he’d been America’s first conservationist president and that, because of his intense love of the outdoors, perhaps originally kindled here in the Adirondacks, he was responsible for establishing the nation’s system of national parks—a visionary feat of leadership that got his head put on a mountain in South Dakota. Yellowstone, our destination, had been the model for the entire federal park system, I pointed out.

  “Can we go there?”

  “That’s the plan, babe.” The plan was finally taking shape.

  “Why did he go out West?”

  I thought about her question for a moment and explained that Teddy Roosevelt went West because of a personal tragedy. Almost unimaginably, his wife and mother died on the same night, only hours apart, in the same house on the Hudson River just down from Albany, the state capital. His mother had been ill and his wife was giving birth to their first child, a little girl he later named Alice.

  “Did the little girl live?”

  “Yes.” I explained, though, that Roosevelt was so devastated by the dual tragedy—“This house is cursed,” he said to his brother Elliott—he decided a radical change in his life was in order. Among his peers in the corrupt New York General Assembly, where Roosevelt aimed to make his mark as a moral legislative reformer, the energetic young man was considered a force to be reckoned with, but also something of a dilettante and a dandy—a rich boy, as I explained it, who’d never gotten his hands dirty. His wife’s death changed all that. She was twenty-two, the light of his life, and she died on the fourth anniversary of their wedding engagement. It was Saint Valentine’s Day.

  “That’s a really sad story,” Maggie said feelingly.

  “I know,” I agreed, thinking how maybe every person’s life has a pivot point like that. Roosevelt’s had. Emma’s had. Opti’s had. Ditto son of Opti’s. My daughter’s surely would, too. Sorrow is sacred ground. The question was what you did with the sorrow, I said—learned from it or cursed your bad luck, let it pry open your heart forever or shut it down for good. With this kind of lyrical right-brain thinking, I’d probably have made a helluva goat-ropin’ songwriter.

  “What did Roosevelt do?”

  I explained he ditched politics, bought a cowboy suit made by Brooks Brothers and a hunting knife from Tiffany, then bolted West. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough, he wrote to a friend from the Dakota Badlands, where he took up the life of a rancher. Only a fair horseman and an average shot, and a poor rope handler, TR never publicly spoke of the tragedy that had changed his life but caused him to shed the “dude” label forever by proving his courage in the West. Mark had probably been right—it made him a good president, too.

  I started to say something meaningful about good things coming from bad things when something bad nearly ruined our nice little chat and ended our own trip West.

  As we rounded a rain-slick curve where the black rock face of a mountain descended like a ragged wall to the right shoulder of the highway, I noticed the yellow Ryder van in front of us
begin to lose control. The rear wheels slid left and then slithered back to the right as the driver, obviously going too fast for conditions, fought to regain control of his vehicle. He went into a terrible fishtail and for a second I was certain he was going to roll the van. Instead, he veered off the highway to the right, slamming off the mountain’s rock face with a shuddering crunch, then spun back onto the highway directly in our path.

  I had only a second or two to react, cutting the wheel of Old Blue sharply to the left, which threw us into the oncoming lane and narrowly permitted us to avoid ramming the van but placed us in the path of an oncoming Cadillac, the owner of which was laying on the horn. As we slid around the stalled van, I turned Old Blue’s wheel back the other way and missed the Caddy’s front bumper, I think, by a mere whisker of the driver’s chin. Fortunately there was no one following the Caddy because our rear end slithered dangerously to the left and we were suddenly wildly fishtailing, too. For several seconds I steered into the direction of the sliding wheels and finally coaxed the slowing truck back under control as we hit the loose gravel on the left shoulder and barreled down a small incline into a little grassy creek.

  It was over faster than you could say Bully good piece of driving, Pops.

  I switched off the truck and turned to look at Maggie. She was sitting rigidly in her shoulder harness with her bare legs still crossed, ashen, clutching Susie Bear on her lap and the string between her fingers. The Beatles were now singing “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da….”

  “Are you okay?” I felt my heart pounding the bars of my rib cage like a drunk in a holding tank demanding his rights.

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded slowly. “I think Susie Bear fainted, though.”

  Amos was on his back on the truck’s floor directly behind us, struggling like a sea turtle to get back up on the seat he’d tumbled from. I unbuckled my seat belt and tried to assist the old gent back to the vertical but he growled at me as if to say his lawyer would soon be in touch with mine.

  The truck’s left wheels were mired several inches in the Adirondack mud but there didn’t appear to be any other structural damage. I locked the hubs, shifted into four-wheel drive, and cranked the engine, really expecting to go nowhere fast. But Old Blue surprised me. Spewing mud and grass, she clawed her way back up to the shoulder of the road, where I once again got out to survey the damage. There didn’t seem to be any. She would need a nice warm bath and perhaps some chamomile tea to soothe her jangled nerves, but we’d been incredibly lucky. I could have kissed the chairman of General Motors or, at least, his secretary.

  We drove back to the highway to where the Ryder van was now parked beside the road, its right side caved in like a crushed beer can. Two men stood beside the vehicle, both pale as mackerels.

  “That was pretty close. You fellas okay?”

  The younger man nodded. He was skinny, probably about nineteen, with acne, very short hair, and two small silver rings in his nose. His oversized black T-shirt read: Live Fast. Die Hard. Fear Nothing. He’d nearly done just that, and appeared to be mildly in shock as a result.

  The other man was overweight, about my age, wearing a blue work shirt with the name Paul in red script above the left breast. “That was close as shit,” Paul said, shaking his head. “A goddamn miracle nobody got killed.” He tried to smile and then saw my daughter hop out of our truck and looked at me and mumbled, “Sorry.”

  I didn’t know if he meant sorry about the language or sorry about nearly killing us. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The important thing is that nobody got hurt. I guess we’d better call a cop.”

  Paul looked at me, then my truck, then me again. “If it’s all the same to you I’d rather not. I mean, if your truck is okay and all. We can limp on down to Utica. The truth is, the kid had a couple open beers in the cab.” I looked at Paul’s eyes to see if that meant he had a couple open beers in him but his eyes looked clear and I stood for a minute trying to think what to do. “That was a piece of driving you did,” he said, resorting to simple flattery. “I thought you were gonna nail us for sure.”

  “Fur sher,” echoed the kid, who was perhaps rethinking his ambition to live fast and die hard.

  “We were all lucky.”

  Two passing cars slowed. I turned and looked at a woman who was frowning at us as she passed. The third car to pass was a New York state trooper. He pulled over and got out and walked slowly toward us. I was relieved because the decision was no longer mine to make. Paul immediately began explaining what happened, babbling about the rain and the slick road. The trooper calmly asked for his license and registration and then checked mine. He looked at my truck and at me. He asked me how fast I thought we were going. I said probably about forty, forty-five tops. He glanced at my daughter and smiled a little bit. “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Maggie.”

  “That your dog in the truck?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s old.”

  The trooper asked me if we were all okay. I said we were. He asked us to return to our vehicle and wait for him to come take down our statement. We went back and sat in the truck. “Dad,” Maggie asked nervously, “are you going to be arrested?”

  I glanced at her and smiled. “Of course not. He just wants to make sure he knows what happened.” Amos began to fidget, obviously had to pee. I asked Maggie to walk him over to some bushes on the lead so he could do his three-legged balancing act. Why did talking to cops make me so uncomfortable? I’d had only a few traffic tickets in my life and lived an embarrassingly dull life well inside the paint of the law.

  Perhaps I had been going a shade too fast for the conditions, and perhaps even following the van too closely, but I wasn’t going to admit that to the trooper because, God knows, life was complicated enough. No harm, no foul, we were lucky, let’s leave it, shall we, and just go on? “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, Life goes on,” as the other Paul had been singing. The trooper came back and listened to my explanation of what happened.

  “Maine, huh? Nice place. Lived there your whole life?”

  Not yet, I almost replied, remembering the old joke.

  Instead, I said I was from North Carolina but had lived in Maine for a decade; my children were from there, though. Born and raised. I added that to a real Mainer this alone didn’t make them native Mainers, though, because as they say in Maine, Just ’cause your cat has kittens in the oven don’t make ’em biscuits.

  The trooper smiled. He liked my little Maine funny.

  “Where are you all headed?”

  “Wyoming. Goin’ fishin’.” That had a nice innocent ring to it. Unless you’re the fish.

  “Trout?”

  “If we can find some.”

  He handed me back my license and registration.

  “I’m a bass man.” He told me he had a bass boat with twin Johnson outboards which he kept on Lake Erie and was fishing in a big Bassmaster tournament that weekend. I wished him good luck. We were suddenly brothers of the Holy Order of the Rod and Reel and it was like we were having small talk outside a diner. He even told me a pretty lame fishing joke. How can you tell if a fisherman is lying? His lips are moving.

  Maggie and Amos came back. The trooper scratched Amos’s head and told us we were free to go. He said we should have a nice trip and hoped we caught some real hogs.

  As we pulled out, I glanced back at Paul and the kid standing beside their crumpled truck. Paul was gesticulating and I wondered what kind of fish tale he was spinning for the trooper.

  “Nice driving, Dad,” Maggie complimented me quietly, resuming her leg position and yarn game. I could almost hear her brain whizzing as it processed everything she’d just witnessed. Then she giggled.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “That policeman,” she replied. “He thought we were going to catch pigs or something.”

  —

  We drove across upper New York State in a sensational thunderstorm, unable to see much through the rain-streaked windows except lightning bolts pounding th
e earth. I taught my daughter the redneck goat-ropin’ way of measuring the lightning’s distance by saying “one-Mississippi-two-Mississippi” in the gap of silence between the flash and the boom. The closest strike was a mile away and actually seemed to make Old Blue shudder.

  I thought of Jack, how I sometimes lay with him at bedtime telling stories during electrical storms, how storms of any kind really frightened the Rocket. I’d always told him that his fear was quite natural and storms deserved our respect and explained that at his age I’d feared them, too, until my father told me that thunder was nothing more than the gods bowling and lightning couldn’t hurt you if you outsmarted it by staying put in your cave, the way the ancients did. Perhaps a thunderstorm was really nothing more than the random collision of hot and cold air molecules, the violent electrical nexus of negative ions and positive protons. Or maybe, as I explained to Jack as my father had explained to me, a rocking thunderstorm was good old Zeus hurling lightning bolts at philandering chaps while neatly overlooking his own indiscretions in that category. In any case, I sure hoped Jack was having better weather on the Cape.

  “Dad, are we going to fish in this rain?”

  “Do you want to try?”

  “Well…maybe. I dunno.”

  I’d hoped we might stop long enough to toss a line in Onondaga Lake, where a Manhattan sportswriter friend of mine assured me the smallest smallmouth bass was the size of an average NBA sneaker. But the rain was coming in such torrents I honestly didn’t see how that would be any fun. Lakes are like golf courses that way—best to steer clear of them when there’s fire in the sky. I suggested, instead, that we crank up the radio and push on for Buffalo—my parents had some friends there who hoped to take us out to dinner—and Maggie vouchsafed the plan. After all, she’d safely replenished her stock of Blow Pops and Wild Blue Raspberry Gatorade and Patty Loveless, one of her favorite singers, was wailing about some no-good cheatin’ ole deadbeatin’, two-timin’, double-dealin’ mean mistreatin’ sorry sumbitch she’d left in her dust.