by Van Reid
Jared McCannon was, in fact, arriving at Portland’s Boston and Maine Station at about the same moment that Mister Walton realized the reason for the confusion at Bowdoinham. Phileda was waiting on the platform to meet her brother. On the train, Jared had met a dark-haired, dark-eyed, and extremely handsome woman, who, in her middle years, carried herself with an unaffected air of sophistication and impressed him as something of a sensualist and (contradictorily) an innocent. He was dazzled.
Phileda watched with fascination as her brother helped this enchantress down from the train, bowing over her hand like a courtier. The woman said good-bye with sincere warmth and thanked him for making the miles so short with such interesting conversation, but it was he, he was sure, who must thank her. A handsome, confident man, Jared realized too late that he had never asked the woman her name.
“I don’t know,” he said after they had greeted one another and the sister inquired with raised eyebrows who that striking personage had been. “And so, this Mister Walton I met last summer is to be my brother-in-law,” he said. “I quite liked him.” But Jared cast a glance or two up the platform for another sight of the woman he had met on the train.
Phileda smiled past her brother. She was surprised to see the elegant woman met by an old curmudgeon she had been observing on the platform. The old man carried a cane as if he was unused to it, and he grumbled and waved the stick when someone offered him a seat. His face lost its grumpy expression, however, when the woman from the train greeted him.
“Mrs. Roberto,” he said out of Phileda’s and Jared’s hearing.
“Nicholai,” said the woman musically. She put her hand out as a dancer might and he took it, his own hand shaking slightly. “What a pleasure to see you again,” she said.
“I’m sorry to make you come sooner than you might,” said Nicholai Bergen.
The conductor had personally taken charge of Mrs. Roberto’s things and soon a small caravan of chests and trunks followed them to the curb, where a carriage waited. All the men tipped their hats when she approached; the driver almost fell from his seat rushing to open the door for her. Her thanks and greetings were always gracious, and more than enough reward.
In the cab, she asked Nicholai Bergen what had happened in her absence.
“It’s a proper muddle, I should tell you, ma’am,” he pronounced. “I tossed one fellow out who was skulking in your room, and that was weeks ago, but last Friday I was set upon by a gang of them and would be lying there still, tied up like a Christmas goose—begging your pardon—if not for Thaddeus Spark from the Faithful Mermaid and these fellows from the Moosepath League.” He pronounced this last appellation as if he hardly believed it.
“The Moosepath League!” said Mrs. Roberto. She had never heard of such a society but thought the name delightful.
“Yes,” said Nicholai. “There’s a fellow among them who thought you were in danger. He had me a good deal concerned, I want to tell you.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Roberto, and she patted the old man’s hand.
“But he was hard by to rescuing you, whatever the cost,” continued Nicholai. “His name was Thump, and he claimed to have a calling card of yours, though I never saw it.”
“A calling card? Thump?” said Mrs. Roberto, her eyes flashing as she searched her memory. “Did you have his first name?”
“Thump,” said Nicholai. “Just Mr. Thump, they said. A short fellow. Broad as a stump.”
“Did he have a beard?”
“Aye.”
“A marvelous beard?”
“It was a proper sheaf of hay, to be sure.”
Mrs. Roberto sat back, and the carriage rattled on for a block or two before she spoke again. “The dear man!”
“They took one of your parachutes, the daft beggars! Not the Moosepath League or this Mr. Thump, but the fellows who conked my head and tied me up!”
She took the old man’s hand again and held it. “My poor Nicholai!”
All complaint left him, and he leaned back.
“Mr. Thump,” she said, still holding the old man’s hand. “The dear man.” The carriage pulled up before Mr. Bergen’s place on Winter Street.
“Here we are,” said the old fellow.
“Thank you, Nicholai. I’m sure I met Mr. Thump last summer. I must thank him for his concern, however mistaken.” She stepped out of the carriage onto the wooden sidewalk of Winter Street. “Another summer,” she said. It was a narrow avenue, filled with clattering wagons and carriages, and frequented by the laboring classes. A man in the dress of a mariner raised his watchcap to her, saying, “Ma’am.” Several young men hurried up with her name on their lips, offering to help her with her things. “They’re going to the hotel,” she explained, “but thank you.”
Nicholai drove the young fellows away and let her gaze about for a moment. She always did this when she first arrived. She always took in the air, and appeared to count the very doors and windows along the street. One would have never guessed she had been born there. Nicholai certainly didn’t.
“Thank you,” she said when the old man opened the door for her.
“I straightened things up as best I could,” he said.
“That’s her, that’s her,” Timothy Spark was saying to Melanie Ring. They were standing on the opposite sidewalk. “Mr. Thump saved her from a burning building!” Timothy shook his head. He wished he could save Mrs. Roberto someday. He was quite in love with her, for all his eight years. “And she was rescuing some poor horses, tied up in that stable, and a dog with her puppies.” You just had to love a person who would rescue a dog.
Melanie Ring gazed about them. She was apprehensive of the street ever since Timothy had taken a black eye from a bigger kid; he had been trying to stop a couple of boys from tormenting her. She almost wished she were still a boy herself, and wasn’t entirely sure why she didn’t wish it with all her heart. Only adding to her confusion was the excitement of being invited into the Spark household, as well as the fear that she was abandoning her father. The little girl was taken by the sight of Mrs. Roberto, however, and she allowed herself to be swept up in Timothy’s admiration.
“Yes,” he said. “They rescued her from a burning building and a gang of kidnappers!”
The door to Bergen’s place had closed behind the old man and the beautiful ascensionist. The carriage waited at the curb, but otherwise traffic on Winter Street carried on as usual.
Melanie solemnly shook her head. “That was some business!”
Timothy tugged at her elbow. He had seen trouble in the form of a roaming gang of boys coming up the sidewalk. In a moment he and she had skipped over a fence and scaled a shed. Soon they were skimming the roofs toward Danforth Street like Indians on the wild hills of yore, or like their notion of the Moosepath League in search of hazard and heroics.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
No member or satellite of the Moosepath League has ever caused more confusion for the novice historian of that society than did Benjamin Granite Gunwight. Even certain authoritative sources have aspired to make something significant out of his presence at the announcement of Mister Walton’s and Miss McCannon’s engagement, but latterly this has been considered a stretch.
Ben Gun would make his fortune chronicling the adventures of the Moosepath League (later “the Caribou Club”), and, in his own indirect and inadvertent way, contribute to some of them. One critic, Basil Penwall, has characterized Ben Gun’s writing as “harboring a peculiar, purple charm,” while admitting that the writer was “not only inaccurate in his portrayal of characters and events but sometimes wildly and willfully eccentric! The only saving grace about these books is that Mr. Gunwight had the discretion to employ fictitious names, even if he did, in the first volume, make actual use of the term ’Moosepath League’ like a canopy over his bare-faced liberalities.”
A sample of Mr. Gun’s prose will suffice to inform the reader. (The parenthetical marks are mine.)
Myriad Canebrake (meant to stand in for
Sundry Moss) attempted to wrest his friend from his desperate purpose, but the powerful Jeremiah Pound (Mr. Gun’s version of Joseph Thump) shook off this well-intended restraint and plunged headlong into the raging inferno of the doomed icehouse. With the desperate cries of the beautiful Mrs. Rambineaux (guess who) in his ears, and the white-hot flames singeing his broad beard, he was yet blinded to all but his valiant goal ...
from Chapter Seventeen: “Flame and Ice!”
The Caribou Club and the Icehouse Firestorm (1898)
Clearly, several elements in this narrative (in the words of Mr. Penwall again) “are out of plumb.” But nothing could have startled the reticent Mr. Thump any more than to read that his fictive counterpart “held the rescued Mrs. Rambineaux to his own panting breast and pressed his lips, heated as much by the flames of his passion as by the inferno he so recently braved, upon her full, red mouth, reviving her with the electricity of his emotions.” It is no wonder that Sundry Moss and Mister Walton sought out Mr. Gunwight in his new digs on Munjoy Hill to politely request that he desist from, at the very least, using the actual name of the club. Nonetheless, it is telling that the members never missed a single volume, and Sundry Moss relates that Mister Walton could be heard “hooting with laughter” whenever he ensconced himself in the parlor to read Mr. Gunwight’s frenzied prose. “It would quite cheer you to hear him,” Sundry said more than once, years later.
The Moosepath League became the Caribou Club in subsequent volumes, which explains why some people have believed the society originated in that Aroostook County town. This fictitious name was, in part, responsible for bringing the Moosepath League to Caribou in the 1920s for the still-perplexing “Adventure of the Dancing Deer.”
But change the name though he did, the damage (in so many words) was done, and, more than once, people in strange or desperate straits showed up at the door of one or another of the members like clients at the steps of 221B Baker Street. Life followed art as unpredictably as the converse.
Bright Deeds by Miss Marion Elfaid Plotte, was not Deborah Pilican’s last book, but it was her next to last. In the winter of 1898”1899 Siegfried and Son of Bangor published Always By the Way by Mrs. Rudolpha Limington Harold, and in it later Moosepathians have discovered three oddly familiar personalities—Mr. Eldton, Mr. Everide, and Mr. Thor. This trio of supporting characters move like guardian angels throughout the book’s narrative and exhibit (in the words of the heroine) “a stern resolve to right wrongs and derail misdeeds—that resolve softened by the most gentle of natures and the most charitable of hearts.”
Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump each purchased a copy of Always By the Way, but they apparently did not recognize themselves in it. Only Eagleton’s journal makes reference to the fictive trio. In his words, he “greatly admired them.”
The events of May 1897 described in this volume are variously termed, (among Moosepathian members and historians) as the “Adventure of the Pasteboard Card,” the “Adventure of the Startled Ascensionist” (a label that must owe something to Ben Gun’s version of events), and the “Adventure of the Widow’s Brigade.” It is not difficult to stumble across other versions of the affair surrounding “the woman in 12A,” but I urge the reader to pay no attention to these.
As the present narrative closes, the members of the club have much to anticipate—the wedding of Mister Walton and Miss McCannon, Mrs. Morrell’s annual June Ball, and summer in general. Sundry Moss planned, early on, to visit his family in Edgecomb, but there are only small hints as to his concern for the soon-to-be-orphaned Melanie Ring, and few suspicions of that little girl’s spunk and determination. Never was Sundry Moss’s ingenuity more obvious than in the events that began the evening before the celebrated wedding, though he was soon without recourse to the chairman’s presence and wisdom as well as the charter members’ willing assistance. The situation in which he and Melanie Ring would soon be involved—instigated by her father, Burne Ring-would come to be known as “the Adventure of Fiddler’s Green,” and also as “the Adventure of the Midstream Horse.” Present-day members of the Moosepath League insist on calling it “the Adventure of the Gentleman’s Gentleman.” Someday it may be told.
The story of Maine’s ice industry is surprising and dramatic. The waters of the Kennebec River were famous throughout the world for providing a clear, bubbleless ice, and from 1860 to the early years of the twentieth century a thriving business was to be had from the frozen surface of the river. South America, Hawaii, and even China would know Kennebec ice. Roger F. Duncan’s exceptional book Coastal Maine: A Maritime History gives us some telling statistics. In one mild winter in the late 1860s “30,000 tons of ice were cut on the Kennebec, requiring 1,000 vessels to carry it.” But that was nothing to 1894, when 1,050,000 tons were cut “on or near the Kennebec ...” and “in 1890, 25,000 men and 10,900 horses” were employed on that river alone. “When an icehouse burned,” writes Mr. Duncan, “it made a spectacular fire and left a huge stack of ice with no house around it.”
The birch tree is much beloved, not only for its beauty but, for the wintergreen flavor of its sap and of its twigs and bark when boiled. We in the Northeast are blessed with a nonalcoholic refreshment known as birch beer, that is bottled locally. It’s almost as delicious as Moxie but doesn’t take as much getting used to.
Birch bark, I am to understand, has certain quantities of salicylic acid (the active ingredient in aspirin), so it is no wonder that American Indians considered birch-bark tea a revivifying drink. I do not honestly know or recommend its effect on pigs, but I will admit to having brewed with some friends a more potent concoction from birch tree sap following the directions in Euell Gibbons’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus and coming up with a sockdolager of a drink that tasted pretty awful (I blame the brewers and not Mr. Gibbons) and, contrarily, produced some pretty acute headaches—this happening in the days of my misspent youth. One can only imagine what Sundry Moss would have said.
The origin of the term hobo is lost, it seems, to history, though at least two likelihoods are suggested (from other sources) in the preceding narrative. Hoboes were a breed apart. They formed something of a migratory workforce in the late nineteenth century, and many of them considered themselves “knights of the road,” with their own strict code of honor.
For bibliography, I would direct the reader to the author’s note in the previous Moosepath adventure, Daniel Plainway, and to which list I would add Maine: Guide “Down East” by Workers of the Federal Writer’s Project of the WPA of the State of Maine; Village Down East by John Wallace; Imagining New England by Joseph A. Conforti; the second volume of W. H. Bunting’s A Day’s Work, a Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs 1860”1920; American Musical Life: A History by Richard Crawford; A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America by Donald Culross Peattie; The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson; and Listening to America by Stuart Berg Flexner.
A wonderful and hard-working group of people are, even as we speak, in the process of revivifying the Wiscasset, Waterville, and Farmington Railroad. There is a station and museum in Alna, as well the opportunity to travel, by narrow-guage, on a mile (and counting) of track. More can be learned about this enterprise—both historic and present day—at www.wwfry.org.
For me, one of the great pleasures derived from these books has been hearing from “Friends of the Moosepath League” by way of the mail, the Moosepath League’s website (www.moosepath.com), or my e-mail address ([email protected])—readers who have, to a person, proved kind, generous, and thoughtful. Thanks also to the book clubs and libraries that have kindly given my books room in their events and discussions. It has been a pleasure to communicate with these folks and to answer questions via e-mail.
I am not working at the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta these days, but I will always think of the people there as friends and colleagues. Thanks to Susan and Barnaby Porter, Penny and Ewing Walker, Joanne Cotton, Pat Boynton, Frank Slack
, and everyone else at the Maine Coast Book Shop for their constant support and goodwill, with particular appreciation to Kathleen Creamer, Jane and Mark Bisco, and Trudy Price.
Much gratitude to my agent, Barbara Hogenson; and her assistant, Nicole Verity; as well as to my editor, Carolyn Carlson; and her assistant, Lucia Watson.
Thanks to the bookstores that hosted me this past summer and fall—including Books Etc. in Falmouth, Sherman’s in Boothbay, Book/and of Brunswick, Longfellow Books in Portland, and Nonesuch Books in South Portland, Books and Things in Oxford, and the Owl and the Turtle in Camden. Thanks also to Jami Reed, the folks at CentralBooking.com, and Rebecca Willow at Parkplace Books in Kirkland, Washington, for their support and generous thoughts.
For camaraderie, advice, and the plain fun of talking shop—best wishes and thanks to writers and artists Michael Uhl, Carol Brightman, James L. Nelson, Nicholas Dean, Mary Beth Owens, Cynthia Furlong Reynolds, Jeannie Brett, Monica Woods, Michael Crummey, Tom DeMarco, and Norman G. Gautreau. Continued appreciation to David and Susan Morse, Joan Grant, and everyone at the Lincoln County Weekly. Thanks also to Dr. Edward Kitfield for identifying the metatarsal pads for me.
Thanks go to my parents, brothers and sisters, and my terrific in-laws for their continual interest, encouragement, and humor. And, of course, more thanks than can be articulated to my wife, Maggie, for always providing the calm amidst the hectic business of life; and to our children, Hunter and Mary, for providing the music of laughter, questions, and centuries-old revelations found new in their hearts and minds. Every day my family, my friends, my wife and children encourage my faith in the humor and goodwill, the courage and generosity that finds its way into the hearts and minds of Mister Walton, Sundry Moss, and the honorable members of the Moosepath League!