“Would you mind telling him,” I asked, “that I’m short and fat and blond, and that the birthmark is on my right shoulder?”
“I hate to lie to people,” Dr. Fox said.
“But don’t you often have to?” I asked, reminding him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I often do.” And he gave me that familiar mock-punch on my shoulder and walked out of the room.
“My doctor won’t tell,” I said to Diana. “He’s a good guy.” But she wasn’t there, she must have fallen asleep, it seems.
When I got out of the hospital, the first thing I did, although I was still pretty weak and didn’t feel like doing much walking, was hitchhike back up to Bridgewater to locate the house of the Mrs. Peary that Dr. Fox had mentioned. It was a very modest green frame house on one of the hills behind the village. She lived there alone but told me she had a son and daughter and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren who often came to visit, so she wasn’t lonely, she said. She was eighty-eight years old, she told me. Yes, she was born in Five Corners, she said, one of the Headle girls. Was she related by marriage to the Mrs. Peary who had operated Glen House? I asked her. Where did you learn that any Mrs. Peary run Glen House? she said. I said, Oh, I knew quite a lot about Five Corners back in the old days. Well, she said, she was sorry to inform me, but she had never heard of any Mrs. Peary who run Glen House. Glen House was run by a couple name of Johnson, far’s she could recollect. Was she in school at the Five Corners Academy? I asked. Yes, but dropped out in the seventh grade to help her mother keep house. What year? That was ’ninety-five. Did she know the new schoolmaster who came the next year? No, but she’d seen him. What was his name? She didn’t remember.
Did she know Henry Fox? I asked. You mean the doctor in Woodstock? she said. No, I said, the man who ran the Five Corners gold mine. Oh that Henry Fox, she said. No, she’d never known him, never even seen him, but she’d heard plenty of him. He was just a lonely old hermit, crazy as a coot. What had become of him? They had taken him off. Who was “they”? The authorities or whoever. Seems they must’ve taken him off to the bughouse.
Had she ever heard of Daniel Lyam Montross? The old woman mulled that over for a while, admitting the name sounded familiar but saying that so many people had come and gone during the years she lived in Five Corners that she just couldn’t remember all their names. I told her that Daniel Lyam Montross had lived there for at least eight years, and had been a carpenter after having been schoolmaster at the academy for a couple of years. I told her that he had lived most of the time with the McLowerys. Joel and Melissa? the old woman said. Why yes, she said, she remembered the McLowerys, they always had a hired man or two living on the place, but she couldn’t recall knowing the names of any of them. What happened to the McLowerys’ daughter, Rachel? I asked. Oh, that poor thing, the old woman said, she drowned herself in the millpond, but everybody knew she hadn’t been “right” for several years.
Then the old woman got out an ancient scrapbook which was also a photograph album. She had one photograph of the schoolchildren at Five Corners Academy, taken a couple of years before Daniel would have arrived. That one’s me, the old woman said, pointing to a pubescent girl in a pinafore, and this one’s Rachel, pointing to another pubescent girl in a white dress. The photograph itself wasn’t large, and had twenty or more kids crammed into it, so that Rachel occupied only a very tiny piece of it, but even so I could tell, by squinting close at the photograph, that she had been a beautiful girl. I asked the old woman if she didn’t know anything about Rachel’s lovers, but she said that she had the impression that Rachel during her last years didn’t have anything but “phantom lovers”…although there’d been rumors that a certain half-wit named Marshall Allen had “fooled around” with her. What had happened to Marshall Allen? Somebody had shot him. She didn’t know who? No.
She showed me another picture. “That’s the first day the mail came,” she said. The town was having a celebration because the mail was being delivered for the first time in 1896; in the photograph you can see Glen House on the left, part of Five Corners Academy on the right, several freshly painted houses up on the hill in the background (“That one’s where the McLowerys lived,” she said), a mob of people and horses and wagons in the foreground surrounding the mail wagon. The driver of the mail wagon is standing up in his wagon and shaking the hand of some prominent-looking citizen, but in doing so his head is turned nearly around and about all you can tell about him is that he has heavy black hair and is tall and youthful. Even so, this might be the only picture in existence of Daniel Lyam Montross. I asked the woman who this was. “Oh, that’s the feller who brung the mail that day. Young feller out of Ludlow.” She didn’t remember his name. Would she possibly consider giving me—or selling me—this picture? Well, she said, she’d like to, but it was the only one she had, and she was sort of attached to it. So I took another long look at the picture, and the old woman put it back in her scrapbook-album and I thanked her very much for her time and for helping me out.
My interview with Mrs. Peary left me feeling pretty good. Even if it hadn’t proved definitely that Daniel Lyam Montross had lived in Five Corners, there were so many other details that were just perfect, and it helped quite a lot to ease the pains of my “solipsitis.” Back in Woodstock again, I visited the library of the Windsor County Historical Society in an old colonial brick building off the square. I told the very nice lady who waited on me that I wanted to find out whatever I could about the village of Five Corners. She poked around through her card files for a long time and then she brought to my table several things: an atlas with a map of Five Corners, showing the location of all the buildings and the gold mine camp with its various buildings, a copy of the Vermont Life magazine article about the gold mine, which I had already seen back home in the high school library, and, from a defunct magazine of 1928, a story called “Vanished Life Among The Hills,” about the village of Five Corners. Also assorted newspaper clippings and town histories of Plymouth. I didn’t learn very much from these things. None of them mentioned Daniel Lyam Montross. I did learn, however, that Henry Fox in his old age had come down with Bright’s Disease and had been taken to a place in Brattleboro, Vermont, called The Retreat, where he died in 1919. I asked the librarian if she knew what The Retreat was. Yes, she said, it was—and still is—the largest privately maintained mental hospital in the country. You mean insane asylum? I asked. If you want to call it that, she said. I wondered how long Henry Fox had been kept there before he died; in 1919 he would have been about seventy years old, and that would have been some fourteen or fifteen years after Daniel Lyam Montross last saw him. I wondered what Daniel Lyam Montross would think if he knew that his old mentor, that sage preceptor, had died in the funny farm. If I told Diana, I would have to make her promise not to tell Daniel.
After leaving the historical society, I went to the Woodstock Public Library and tried to do some research on ghost towns in warmer climates. The only thing in the card catalog was about ghost towns out west, and the image of the western ghost town is so stereotyped that it just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve never had any desire to go out west. I tried the Reader’s Guide, and found an article about a ghost town in Florida, but when I read the article I discovered that all of the country around that particular place was very flat, and Daniel Lyam Montross only liked mountain country, so I doubt very much that he ever went to a place like Florida. The trouble was, almost all of the really warm parts of the south, both on the Atlantic coast and the Gulf coast, are very flat. There’re probably some ghost towns in the mountains of Georgia, though, but I couldn’t find anything in the Woodstock library, even though I asked the librarian to help me. What we would probably have to do, if it came to that, I decided, is go on down to Georgia and I could leave Diana at our motel while I went off and tried the local libraries. But before leaving the Woodstock library, I did get a surprise, though: the librarian showed me this book called Ghost Towns of New England. I told her I wa
s interested mainly in ghost towns down south, but since we couldn’t find anything on that subject I thought I might as well browse through this book. The guy who’d written it had just sort of scratched the surface, but he’d found something like fourteen or fifteen genuine ghost towns in all of the New England states except Rhode Island. Five Corners wasn’t included, but Dudleytown had a whole chapter on it, which I read, without learning anything I didn’t already know. There were several places over in New Hampshire that I wanted very much to look into, but we really couldn’t go off exploring any more places in New England until the late spring or summer.
After the Woodstock library closed for the day, I had my supper at the corner cafe, and then just killed time around Woodstock while waiting for evening visiting hours at the hospital. I thought a lot about Georgia, trying to picture it, and wondered what the trees look like down there. I wondered if Daniel Lyam Montross would have any problems in picking up a southern accent.
As soon as evening visiting hours began, I went back to the Woodstock Hospital. But I couldn’t find Diana. I mean, she wasn’t in the room where I had left her. I located Dr. Fox’s office, but had to wait while he finished talking to somebody else. Then when he saw me, he said, Oh, it’s you again, Day. I thought we cured you. Yes, I said, but I had just come to visit Diana, and she wasn’t in her room. He just looked at me for a while, puzzled, as if he didn’t know anything about where they had moved her. He wasn’t her doctor, after all. But he was my friend. He stood up and said, Come on, and I’ll help you find her. He took me down several corridors and turned a corner, and left me in a waiting room, saying, Wait here just a sec, and went through some swinging doors. The doors had glass in them, I could see him down the corridor, talking to a nurse. In a little while he came back and said, Yes, she’s been moved. Room 128. Right down the hall there on the left. I thanked him, but before I could go on he asked me if I could drop by his office on my way out for a little chat. Sure, I said.
Then I went on to Diana’s room. A nurse stopped me and tried to give me an injection. Hey! I said, I’m not a patient any more, I’m just a visitor. Yes, she said, but she had to give me this so Diana wouldn’t catch anything from me. She said it was the same stuff they’d been giving before when I was with Diana. Okay, I didn’t mind needles, I said. Good boy, she said and gave me the injection and became very chatty, wanting to know what I’d been doing since I left the hospital, and did I think it was going to snow tomorrow? and so on. I chatted with her a couple of minutes, but I was impatient to go on in and see Diana.
Finally the nurse opened the door and said, Have a nice visit, and let me go on in. Diana seemed to be sitting up, or rather her bed appeared to have been cranked up so she was sitting. She had something in her hands, which I recognized as a ball of wool and two knitting needles. She said she was trying to learn how to knit. A nurse had shown her, she said. She was trying to knit me a sweater, but was wondering if she should settle for just a scarf. I thought that knitting must be more boring than watching TV, but she said it gave her something to do with her hands. She said she was dying to get out of the hospital, and the doctors had told her she might be able to leave tomorrow or the next day. Where shall we go? I asked. Five Corners, of course, she said; we’ve got some unfinished business there, don’t we? But aren’t you uneasy about going back to a place where you nearly got killed? I asked her. Lightning never strikes the same place twice, does it? she said. That’s an old myth, I said. Well, the hunting season is over now, isn’t it? she asked. I don’t know, I said, Maybe. Well, what would you rather do, Day? she asked, Don’t you want to go back to Five Corners? Not especially, I said, I’d rather go on to some other place, to the next place where Daniel Lyam Montross lived after he left Five Corners. And where is that? she asked. Georgia, I said. Really? she said, How do you know? I told him, I said. Oops. I mean, he told me. Diana smiled her smile. That’s a long way off, she said, but I suppose it’s probably a lot warmer than Vermont, and we would have an early spring. So I’ll ask him. Go to sleep, Day.
Soon enough she brought me back. She was smiling and shaking her head, and she said, Not Georgia. It was North Carolina. Shit, I said, North Carolina? I’ll bet it’s a lot warmer in Georgia. What part of North Carolina? I asked her. The mountains, of course, she said. And the name of the place is “Lost Cove.” How’s that for a good name for a ghost town? And it will be a ghost town, won’t it, Day? Yeah, I said, it probably will. But listen, she said, we simply can’t abandon Five Corners, just yet. Daniel won’t let us. I think he’s rather disappointed that you want to go off to some other place without making any effort to finish his story. He doesn’t feel that you have to tell all of his story, but he says you ought to at least give it a final chapter. I told Diana that that final chapter must be a very sad one, even a tragic one, and then I told her about the old woman I had met and the picture she’d shown me of Rachel, and what she said had happened to Rachel, and I told her what I had found out about the ultimate end of Henry Fox. But was it Daniel’s fault, Diana wanted to know, that Rachel drowned in the millpond? I don’t know, I said. Maybe. But we have to find out, Diana said. We have to. Don’t you imagine? We just can’t help it, can we? And I shook my head and said, No, we probably just can’t help it, it seems.
On my way out, I stopped by Dr. Fox’s office, as he had requested. He offered me a chair opposite his desk. It was a very nice room, with all his various diplomas and internship certificates on the wall. He lighted his pipe and leaned back in his swivel chair, looking me over for a moment before he said, “Well, how’ve you been feeling since you got out of the hospital?” I told him that I felt just fine, although sometimes I would get dizzy if I stayed on my feet too long. “You’re looking pretty good,” he said. “You’ll still be rather weak for a while, as a result of the pneumonia, and you should stay off your feet as much as possible for a couple of weeks, and certainly not attempt anything strenuous. Which brings up my question: What are you going to do now? What are your plans? You obviously have no intention of returning home to New Jersey.” I told him that the first thing I had to do was go back to Five Corners for a little while, maybe just a couple of days or so, and then we intended to go explore another ghost town down in North Carolina, where it would be warmer. That was your suggestion, remember? I said to him. You told me I ought to pick a warmer ghost town for the wintertime. “Yes,” he said, “but I don’t see why you need to go back to Five Corners. In fact, I don’t think that’s such a very good idea, at all.” There’s some unfinished business there, I told him. And besides, I had to go back at least to retrieve all of our stuff, all of our clothes and books and expensive camping and back-packing equipment. “All right,” he said. “How would you like for me to give you a ride up there in my car?” I started to protest that it was awfully nice of him but I didn’t want to put him to any trouble. Then I realized that when Diana got out of the hospital she wouldn’t be in any condition for walking or even hitchhiking. So I told Dr. Fox that I would appreciate that very much. “Good,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, then? About ten o’clock?” If Diana’s ready to leave the hospital at that time, I said. He looked at me. “Oh,” he said, “you have to take her with you, is that it?” Of course, I said. “Well,” he said, and gave me another one of those mock-punches on the shoulder, “tomorrow morning at ten.”
Oh, this is a story of some unfinished business, a story uncompleted about life and death in a lost town, oh, this is a story of living and loving and dying that never quite finished happening because it was entrusted to me who couldn’t tell it, oh, this might have been a fabulous, lurid, gripping tale rife with fine figures and strange turnings, if only there had been somebody else to tell it, oh, if somebody better than me had told it, he could have told the whole story of living and loving and dying, oh, he could have given it an end and a finishment, he could have wrapped it all up with a grand spine-tingling climax, but oh, there is nobody but me to tell it, and there are no spines tingling, b
ecause there is nobody, there is nobody, there is nobody some other place, but me.
And I’m nervous as hell.
So here we are back at “Reality Ranch.” And this is the final chapter. Some great writer, I forget who just now, once said that “reality” should always have quotation marks around it, because there isn’t any such thing. How true. But I discovered that I was glad to be back in Five Corners, and I immediately noticed that it seemed much more “real” than that hospital in Woodstock had seemed. I felt almost as if I had put myself together again, after being drawn out into “civilization” where I had been disoriented, confused and even sometimes frightened. I felt that I had come “home” by coming back to Five Corners, and home is a place of security, the right place. Woodstock had been some other place which seemed now like a nightmare. I discussed this with Diana, and she agreed with me. She had been feeling pretty much the same way herself, she said. Her injury and her operation and her recovery had seemed very “unreal” to her. There had even been moments when, she said, laughing, that she had begun to doubt whether or not she was really “alive.” But now, even though it was very cold in the woods, and getting colder, she was glad to be back. We mustn’t stay long, she said, but for now let’s enjoy it. It was a nice place, even an enchanted place, with all the ground covered with snow.
Dr. Fox himself had seemed reluctant to leave. I think he secretly wished that he could just stay here with us and share with us in the mood and atmosphere and experience of this place. He had had some difficulty driving his car all the way up into Five Corners; it was a sturdy Mercedes but the snow on the road became gradually deeper as we approached Five Corners, and he was worried about getting stuck. Then when we got here, I showed him our camp, feeling proud of it, although I was a little embarrassed to discover that the lean-to I had spent so much time building was not such a great piece of workmanship; the weight of the snow on its roof had caused it to sag and even to lean a little bit to one side. But Dr. Fox liked it here so much that I had a hard time getting rid of him, and when he finally did leave, it was only because I had promised that he could come back soon and visit. He said he would.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 58