The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  The last good-sized town we passed through was Manchester, Vermont, and Diana stopped there and said to me, with this kind of wistful expression that she wears half the time, “You know, this time of year I’m always picking out my back-to-school fall wardrobe, but this is the first year in sixteen years that I’m not going back to school. Still, I think we ought to have a fall wardrobe anyway, don’t you?”

  So we spent a day going through these shops in Manchester, and she spent I don’t know how many dollars on as much stuff as we could stuff into our packs and still have to carry some in the hand—all of it mostly stuff we needed for cool days and nights in the woods: wool things, wool and flannel mostly, plaid shirts and sweaters and new boots and everything. Gee, when I took a couple of twenty-dollar Pendleton shirts I knew I must be dreaming her up.

  Vermont is quite a lot different from Connecticut. Most people wouldn’t notice too many differences except that Vermont’s mountains are bigger, but I noticed all kinds of differences. For one thing, there’s a greater range of color, and I don’t mean the autumn color, which hadn’t really got started yet—a lot of the maples on the higher slopes were already red but nothing like the real riot of color that would come later on—but just the greens, for instance. Somebody (maybe me, eventually) ought to work out a list of the forty-seven different shades and tints of green that you can see in Vermont, whereas they’re only about twenty-six in Connecticut. And even the wildest parts of the Housatonic country, like Dudleytown, don’t begin to compare with the really wild wilds that you can get into here in Vermont. I saw a few stands of trees which I could have sworn are genuine virgin timber, and you hardly ever find any virgin timber in New England.

  We had a good time. Late one afternoon around the middle of September we climbed a steep hill and came into one of the prettiest little villages I’ve ever seen, called Plymouth Notch, which would have certainly become a ghost village except for one thing: it was where a President was born and buried. We found this out when we stopped at the little store there, and they had these leaflets that tell how Calvin Coolidge was born in the house across the road and sworn in as President in that house by his father when Harding died, and where he’s buried in the little cemetery back down the road. Diana and I walked back down to the cemetery and looked at his grave, a very simple and modest piece of granite with just his name and the presidential seal and his dates: 1872–1933. He would have been just eight years older than Daniel Lyam Montross, and right away we started wondering if maybe he had known him, because Daniel Lyam Montross had told Diana that Five Corners was in this same township of Plymouth, just a few miles from Plymouth Notch.

  Plymouth Notch is a store, a church, maybe three or four houses, a cheese factory, and that’s all, all of it painted white and set like a huddled toyland on this high valley, with range after range of green hill and bluegreen mountain and blue peak rising and rising behind it. Something about the place really got to me, especially while I was looking at old Calvin Coolidge’s humble grave and reading his words printed in the leaflet about him—he was talking about Plymouth and he said, “It was here I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride; here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of the everlasting hills.” I know he wasn’t a great President, just a good President; still the idea that this was his home, the idea of a homeland, where people lived simply and honestly, and had devotion to work and to duty and had faith in democracy…well, hell, it raised a lump in my throat. And I wished that Plymouth Notch was Five Corners, even if it wasn’t quite a ghost village. But I hoped that Five Corners, because it was in the same township, would look just exactly like Plymouth Notch…only be abandoned.

  We went back to the store to ask how to get to Five Corners but the store was closed for the day, so we had to knock on a door, and the man told us to take the road that goes up through Calvin Coolidge State Park, but he said we’d never make it on foot before dark and why didn’t we just spend the night with him if we cared to, but we were in a hurry and thanked him and went on.

  The state park swarms over the crest of a high and steep hill, and consists of a number of platforms for tents, and a number of rustic brown shelters—they call it an Adirondack shelter everywhere except Vermont, and here they call it a Green Mountain lean-to: a windowless log cabin with one side open to the air, the floor just about twelve or fourteen feet square. Nobody was staying in the park, this late in the season, so we just decided we would like to see what it’s like to stay in a log lean-to, and since it was late in the day and lightly raining we just picked out one of them, that had a fine view overlooking the mountains. Each of the lean-to’s had the name of a native tree, and for no particular reason other than the view, we picked the one called Hornbeam, which is a tree of the genus Carpinus with smooth gray bark and hard whitish wood—the tree, not our lean-to. There was a supply of cut wood, so we started a fire right away in the brick grill which fronts the open end of the lean-to. Just as supper was getting hot, a truck came along and this crusty old Yankee said he was the caretaker of the park and the camp was closed for the season and what did we think we were doing camping without permission or without paying the fee, which was four dollars a night. We offered to pay the fee but he just kept saying the park was closed for the season. He was standing there with the rain running down his neck, and we were standing there with the rain running down our necks, and Diana, she began this act, rather convincing I thought, of breaking down and crying. It must have got through to his granite heart, because he finally said we could stay, and took our four dollars, and then said as he was leaving, “You kids aint even married, I bet.”

  A lean-to in the rain is quite different from a tent in the rain. With a tent, if it’s raining pretty hard, you’re just plain miserable. You can only sit there and listen to the drops splat on the canvas and know that regardless of how good the tent is, you’re still going to get a little wet, and anyway you’re all cooped up. But with a lean-to, you can sit there out of the rain and watch the fire roaring like mad and keeping you warm, and still feel that you’re out of doors without getting wet at all. It’s very nice. So maybe that’s when I decided that when we got to Five Corners I would build us a lean-to to live in. It was getting too cold for a tent anyway.

  In the cozy lean-to that night, Diana got pretty affectionate. I can tell the difference between when she makes love because she really wants to, and when she makes love only because I want to, and that night was of the former variety. We played and teased and laughed a lot, which is always good for setting the right mood. She ran her fingers through my hair and teased me because my hair was getting nearly as long as a hippie’s, which was true; I guess the only thing about those Jesus freaks that rubbed off on me was the idea that long hair is okay on a boy if you want it that way, and besides, when would I have had a chance to see a barber? But I told Diana she could cut it if she wanted to. She said she didn’t really want to, even if the long hair made me look so “un-Day.” Anything that makes me “un-Day” is just fine with me.

  It ought to be plain that she doesn’t really love Day, and probably can’t, and probably never will. But she likes me, and tolerates me, and occasionally, like that night in the lean-to, she will get very affectionate, and then we will make love and if I try very hard and don’t let myself get carried away I can hold out long enough for her; then she will be happy, and for a while afterwards, at least until she goes to sleep, I think she really does love me, for a while.

  That night a raccoon got into our knapsacks and ate up all of our food, even the bags of dried and dehydrated stuff, which must have given him a bad case of dry-mouth, unless he took it to some nearby brook.

  So the next morning, when we packed up and started off on the last stretch toward Five Corners, I told Diana that we ought to try to live off the land for a while. I know how to do it. We could thrive on berries and nuts, and jerusalem artichokes and arrowhead tubers and acorns and other wild things, and catch fish and small game.r />
  The only thing the raccoon left us was our coffee, which must have been a brand he didn’t care for, so we had coffee for breakfast at least, and I found enough wild raspberries to keep our stomachs from growling at us.

  The old road to Five Corners leaves the state park and drops and turns and dips and twists…and it branches too, at least three times, and the third time we took the wrong branch and followed the road to its end at a compound of old buildings with a big sign tacked up: “Road’s End Lodge.” There was an old car parked there, so we knocked on the door to ask for directions, but nobody was home. We poked around the other buildings, including one with a skylight that looked like a studio or something, but it seems that nobody was living there. Off in the distance on a knoll, however, we could see what looked to be the tops of a long row of tombstones, so Diana immediately made me into Daniel Lyam Montross and when I woke up she said that he had told her that, sure enough, that cemetery off in the distance, across a wide meadow and on a knoll, was the Five Corners cemetery. So we started out for it, finding the remains of the road through high grass, two ruts that not even a jeep could take.

  The Five Corners cemetery is quite an operation (or I should say set-up or lay-out instead of operation, because it hasn’t been “operating” for at least seventy years). This is an interesting contrast with Dudleytown, where we never could find any sign of a cemetery or even a private family plot—I think they must have buried them without stone markers or else they had hauled them off to one of the cemeteries in Cornwall or some other place. The Five Corners cemetery is a big one; I didn’t bother to count but at a rough guess I would say there are at least three hundred headstones in the cemetery, and footstones too, because each grave had a small marker at the foot too, I suppose so that you wouldn’t chop off somebody’s feet when you were digging a grave in the next row. I don’t mean to be funny, because the Five Corners cemetery made me very sad. Nobody was taking care of it. Here were all these three hundred people, lying, like Coolidge said, “pillowed on the loving breast of the everlasting hills,” but that breast was all covered with brambles and weeds and wild useless vegetation that I couldn’t even identify, and second-growth trees were growing right up out of half of the graves, their roots probably tangled all up in the skeletons, and the thought that this was once a neat breezy lay-out in this picturesque bowl of a knoll nestled in this bowl of a valley and visited by folks at least on Memorial Day with flowers and where once preachers hollered to God to rest the souls of the departed, and now all abandoned and forsaken and uncared for. We just stood there misty-eyed for a while and then we pledged that we would come up here often and try to clean away some of this overgrown brush and straighten up the toppled stones.

  But even while I was standing there brooding I had the presence of mind to memorize a lot of the names on the tombstones in case Daniel Lyam Montross needed to have his memory refreshed or something. There were a lot of common names that didn’t need to be made up: Johnsons and Butlers and Browns and Adamses and Allens and Smiths, but a lot of names that were a little bit unusual: Headles and Slacks and Earles and Braddocks and Claghorns and Spooners and McLowerys and Rookes, with a lot of unusual first names too: Alpheus and Adelphia, Joel and Melissa, Potie and Kermit, Jeems and Lavinia, and so forth.

  The fact that the cemetery was completely run-down and forsaken prepared me in advance to expect that the town itself was probably not taken care of. Since I was halfway hoping that Five Corners would resemble Plymouth Notch, it’s a good thing that I was prepared in advance to expect the worst.

  Because there’s absolutely nothing in Five Corners.

  I mean, nothing. It’s even worse than Dudleytown in this respect. We could have walked right through it without noticing a trace of anything, and we probably would have, too, except that when we reached this old wooden bridge crossing a roaring brook down in a deep hollow completely surrounded and locked in by the hills around it, we happened to stop in this little glade beside the brook where there were the ashes and burnt logs of some camper’s or hunter’s or fisherman’s fire, and there we just barely managed to detect that there was another abandoned road branching off that way, and another branching off that way, and still yet the faintest trace of a road branching off up that way. Five. Five roads, counting the two of the road that we were coming in and going out on. Five Corners. So Diana immediately put me to sleep again, and when I woke up she told me that this was really the right place, Five Corners. After I got over the disappointment, she took me around and showed me the places that Daniel Lyam Montross had just finished taking her around to and showing her. Here where the five roads converged had been the school, which had been called “Five Corners Academy,” where Daniel Lyam Montross had taught for two years. But there was no trace of it, no foundation, no cellar hole, nothing. And here, where the brook was now spanned by a simple bridge of wooden planks, had been a covered bridge, a “king truss” affair that had washed away in a flood toward the end of the time that Daniel Lyam Montross had lived here. And here, beside the covered bridge, was a very large cellar hole, so overgrown with weeds and trees that we would never have found it without the help of Daniel Lyam Montross. This had been Glen House. Glen House had been a hotel. On the second floor of Glen House Hotel had been a ballroom, famous all over because the whole ballroom floor was mounted upon large rubber balls to make it springy for dancing, and over eighty couples could dance there at one time. It staggered my imagination—me, who’s supposed to have such a great imagination. And down there was the big sawmill. And here the millpond, which William Hankerson had paid $1000 for the privilege of sluicing and draining in hopes of finding sediment of gold washed down from the hills, a gamble, which paid off, to the tune of $7000. And up there beyond the sawmill was the cider mill. And over there, on the rise, almost in a row, were the four neat white houses of the Earles and Headles and Spooners and McLowerys. Now nothing.

  Why had Daniel Lyam Montross settled here? What drew him? To come from one dying town and wind up in another…. But maybe it wasn’t dying when he came. We had plenty of time to find out all the answers. First, we had to get settled. I thought it would be appropriate if, as in that glade of laurel in Dudleytown, we made our camp on the location of Daniel Lyam Montross’s home in Five Corners. But Diana, after putting me under again and having a long session with him, shifting him back and forth through different months and seasons and years, discovered that he had never had his own house here. He had lived for a time, a brief time at first, in a room at the Glen House Hotel. Then he had a miserable room on the second floor of some kind of handyman’s hovel. Then he had a room in a farmhouse high to the south of the village. Then he lived in a kind of shed out back of the McLowery house in the village.

  “So finally,” Diana said, “I just asked him which of these places he had liked the best, and he said the last one, the shed behind the McLowery house, and he showed me where it was.”

  She said also that Daniel Lyam Montross was very sad, really terribly sad, to see “what a sorry plight” the village had fallen into. “Yes, all my towns are fallen,” he had said, “but none like this.”

  We began construction of our lean-to on the very ground where the McLowerys’ shed had stood, which wasn’t a bad spot, at all. It was high, on a slope to the west of the village, with a great view of the village (or what was left of the village, namely, nothing) and far enough back from the road so that if any hunters or forest rangers or anybody came along they probably wouldn’t spot us.

  But building that lean-to wasn’t such an easy task. First of all, I had to hike about six miles north down along what was called the Hale Hollow Road and then along the state highway into Bridgewater, the nearest village where they had a grocery store that carried some hardware, so I could buy a good axe and saw and a hammer and some nails and other things. (And while I was at it some groceries too, because I wasn’t doing such a really complete job of demonstrating that we could find enough to eat in the woods and
stream and fields. So far we’d had only a couple of small bullheads, one scrawny squirrel I caught in a snare, berries and more berries until we were burned out on berries, and large loads of cooked wild greens of all kinds.) Then felling enough trees for the logs, and cutting and trimming the logs, took me about two solid weeks of sunup to sundown labor, and I was always in such a sweat from it that I never needed to go near the fire until late at night when it got cold, and Diana was always criticizing me for neglecting the fire, because she was cold.

  The chipmunks. I’ve nearly forgotten to mention the chipmunks. They were all over the place. Little, nervous, long-tailed furry creatures with white stripes and freckles on their brown and tan backs. They’re worthless to eat, even if you could bring yourself to kill one of the cute little things. But they will eat anything you throw at them, and even come up and eat out of your hand and sit in your lap after they get to know you. They sit up on their hind legs to eat. I guess they were trying to store away enough for hibernation.

  I noticed one thing about the chipmunks’ movements. Five Corners. The pattern of their darting resembles a map of the five roads coming into the village. They will run out into our camp, stop, run a few leaps one way, stop, run a few leaps the other way, stop, and so on, until they’ve made five runs in different directions. I mention this because I think it’s interesting.