The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  More than any other activity, reading helped me through my cancer treatment and subsequent recovery. But not just reading—talking about the books I was reading as well, mainly with booksellers and their customers. Not once did my prostate cancer so much as cross my mind in any of the nearly two hundred bookstores I visited on my Great American Book Tour.

  18

  Gone Fishing

  One evening on our way back from an afternoon of hunting partridge, I told Prof the “Bad Boy and the Battle-ax” story. A few days earlier I’d expressed to him my frustration over not finding suitable literary subjects for my students to write about. “Well, maybe the old Battle-ax was on to something,” he said. “Try getting the kids to write about what they know, as she put it. Their own experiences. Then you can nudge them along to write about the books they’re reading.”

  Prof had thick white hair parted in the middle, like a headmaster from the 1930s. He wore large, square, horn-rimmed glasses perched low on the bridge of his bulbous two-quart-a-day nose. At six feet three (his boys, Big and Little, were an inch or so taller) and with the build of an NFL linebacker, he’d been a standout, three-sport high school and college athlete. His proudest moment was scoring fifty points for Orleans High in a basketball game decades ago. He still officiated at local high school games.

  Prof’s uniform was an old-fashioned double-breasted suit, a wide, multicolored necktie (in an era of dark, narrow ties), and wingtip shoes. He used Old Spice shaving lotion, which, like the three or four packs of clove-scented gum he chewed every school day, diluted, without entirely masking, the beery redolence that enveloped him and his immediate surroundings after ten o’clock each morning. He had a voice like the foghorn of a Great Lakes steamer and never spoke at a normal level when he could shout. He was spontaneously generous. He genuinely liked and understood kids, pretended to be mad more often than he really was (which was often enough), and—the bottom line—always supported his teachers. That is to say, he could and frequently did holler at us, but he brooked no criticism of his staff or beloved school from anyone else, including the school board members. “Old school” was how he accurately described himself. He’d taught three generations of Orleans students and was, in his own eyes and those of nearly everyone else in town, an icon.

  Prof’s wise advice to encourage my students to write about their own experiences didn’t register with me immediately because, good old Kingdom boy that he was, he drank Scotch out of a flask while he road-hunted, and he carried his double-barreled Remington twelve-gauge business end up on the floor between us, on half-cock at all times. That very afternoon, after what Prof had confided was another three-quart day, we were riding the back lanes looking for partridges dusting themselves, when a grouse flew up into a wild apple tree. Prof frantically reached for the loaded gun, brought the barrel sharply up into my chin, yanked the car off the road under the apple tree, jumped out, and missed the bird by a mile.

  “Welcome to the Kingdom, sweetie,” Phillis said when I got home. “I’m glad he didn’t shoot you.”

  Teaching may be principally a matter of faith. First you must have faith that what you’re doing will make a difference. Then you need to have faith in your students. Finally, there’s the little matter of faith in yourself. As a first-year teacher at Orleans High School, mine was beginning to evaporate. How was I going to coax, cajole, threaten, or otherwise elicit some written work from my students? Maybe Prof was right. My students might enjoy writing about their own experiences. But what did they know well enough to write about? What were their stories?

  On the morning after my hunting mishap, I loosened my necktie, rubbed my black-and-blue chin, and told my seniors that a writer I admired once remarked that the story people want most to read is one they’ve never read before. I let this sink in for a moment, then said that the one story they could write that no one had ever read was their own. Almost everybody, I continued, had a unique story to tell. I was interested in reading theirs.

  It would be gratifying to report that the kids went straight home and wrote stunningly original autobiographical essays, won all kinds of writing awards, and received full-freight scholarships to Ivy League colleges. Nothing of the sort happened. Still, I persisted. In school and out, I spent hours talking with my students and, maybe more important, listening to them, trying to help them discover their stories. It was a glacially slow process. Ironically, I was probably the main beneficiary of my students’ memoirs when they did begin to trickle in. After all, I was the spy in their midst, looking for stories to write myself. To this day I clearly remember three extraordinary essays and the kids who wrote them. I’ll call them Ethan, Becca, and Cody—the young hero who borrowed my car on the first day of school.

  Like Cody, Ethan detested school, a sentiment I readily understood. The Bad Boy of Chichester had detested school too, for the same reason as Ethan, who longed to spend all day, every day, hunting and fishing. How Ethan had gotten to be a senior I couldn’t imagine. Still, I liked him and wanted him to graduate and “stay out of the mill.” Therefore, we worked out a deal. Once a week he’d hand in a composition about fishing. We’d go over it together, and if he happened to reveal the whereabouts of a few of his secret trout brooks, that wouldn’t hurt his grade either.

  Three days later, Ethan produced a twenty-page opus on angling for rainbow trout at the falls on the Willoughby River, where Phillis and I had marveled at the leaping fish on our first evening in the Kingdom. It was a terrific story. Ernest Hemingway would have enjoyed it. I could see those hefty, crimson-sided trout jumping the falls, see Ethan carefully drawing a bead on them, hear the rushing water and the sudden, splitting crack of his .270 deer rifle as he fired down into the cataract. The next week he composed a spirited panegyric on the art of spearing wall-eyed pike with a trident made from a hay fork. Brook trout were next on the agenda, a fifty-page epic that made me want to grab my fly rod and head out for the streams on the spot.

  At the end of the brook trout essay, Ethan appended this succinct message: “Dear Mr. Mosher, so long, gone fishing, yours, Ethan.”

  19

  Two Writing Rebels

  “You win some, you lose some,” Prof consoled me, bleary-eyed from a multi-quart day, as we dumped a burlap sack of wild apples under his bow-hunting tree stand, in express violation of the Vermont Fish and Game Department’s regulation forbidding the baiting of white-tailed deer. “Don’t give up on those kids, Mosher.”

  If Ethan, now making his living by selling perch to local grocery stores, was a hard sell when it came to writing, Becca was tougher yet. She wore neon-red lipstick, had a more accurate jump shot than any guy in the school, and barely disguised her disdain for most of her teachers, especially me, because I was, at best, a mediocre speller and Becca had never misspelled a word in her entire sixteen years. One morning not long after my “write your own story” pep talk, she slogged up to my desk and slammed down several sheets of paper. “Don’t read this out loud,” she said. “It’s personal.”

  Becca wasn’t your shy, retiring type. What could be so personal that she’d care whether I read it out loud or not? Right after class I sat down with her essay, titled “Saturday Afternoon at the Orleans Dump.”

  “My boyfriend’s idea of a romantic date is an afternoon shooting rats at the town dump,” she began. What followed was a hilarious account of a bored-to-tears Becca, pegging away at gigantic dump rats with her boyfriend’s .22. She went on to write about what people hauled to the dump to discard and what you could deduce about their lives from the things that they threw away—dirty magazines, whiskey bottles, not-so-very-old furniture. She wrote about Punk Johnson, the local dumpkeeper, and the treasures he’d salvaged for his tin shack: an ancient Stromberg Carlson radio that didn’t work, an armchair with the stuffing leaking out, a cracked blue flower vase. She ended by writing about the mother bear that had ambled by for a late-afternoon snack with her two cubs. Not only could Becca spell. She could write.

&nbs
p; The best student composition I received that year came from the worst-behaved kid. That, of course, was Cody, who lived with his mom and little sister in a rusty house trailer slumped in the woods miles from anywhere. He’d been in and out of reform school for years and had Northeast Kingdom outlaw written all over him. Long hair several years before it became fashionable, a small but fiercely loyal gang of like-minded disciples, a mouth on him you’d have to hear to believe. He called me Teach, and despite the little incident with my station wagon on the first day of school, I liked him from the start.

  Cody had a pet raccoon named Budweiser, Bud for short, who followed him around like a dog. Bud would come barreling into our apartment, yank open the refrigerator door, sweep everything off the shelves onto the floor, and bare his sharp white teeth and growl if you tried to interfere. Bud was a very large raccoon, and I doubted he’d had his shots. I didn’t interfere.

  A year or two before Phillis and I arrived in the Kingdom, Cody and the assistant principal got into it over Cody’s sneaking Bud into school. The assistant principal, a former leatherneck, told Cody to back off or else. Cody laughed and decked him.

  The only positive thing I ever heard anyone say about this kid was that he was good to his sister. As a toddler, she’d been struck in the head by a heavy wooden swing seat, leaving her with irreversible brain damage. Cody ate lunch with his sister, sat next to her on the bus, and generally looked out for her, more like a father than an older brother. Still, he was the student I worried most about.

  As the Thanksgiving break approached, I was desperate to get something—anything—in the way of a written assignment from Cody. Finally, I asked him if he’d ever considered writing about Budweiser. “Teach,” he said, “I never considered writing about nothing.”

  A day or two later, to my surprise, he handed me an essay on old Bud. Cody told how he had found the little guy in the road, trying to nurse from his dead mother. He fed the baby raccoon from a doll’s bottle and raised him like a house cat—a thirty-pound house cat with a mean streak. It was a wonderful composition. Next he turned to chronicling his life of crime, an essay that could have landed him back in the reformatory for years. Then Cody wrote about the adults he’d like to beat up. It was a long list.

  In early December, Cody announced that he and his mom and sister were moving to New Hampshire. On his last day at Orleans High, he gave me not a composition but a letter, beginning “Dear Teach.” It was about his sister. He described what it would be like to be teased by classmates, behind in school, constantly challenged by simple tasks. He told me how his sister might be able to lead a fairly normal life and what their working mom had sacrificed to nurture that hope. He did not mention himself, though he was probably more responsible than anyone else for his sister’s progress in school. It was the best student essay I’ve ever read, before or since. But Cody’s story didn’t end there.

  Some twenty years later, a tall, distinguished-looking man with a touch of gray in his longish hair showed up at our door. He was wearing a suit and tie, but I recognized him immediately. “I was on my way home from a conference in Montreal,” Cody said. “I thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

  Cody came in—I half expected old Budweiser to shamble through the doorway after him and make straight for the refrigerator—and sat down at the kitchen table. He handed me a card with his name printed on it and, below that, his title. He was the superintendent of a large school system in Rhode Island.

  “Well,” I said, “how did this happen?”

  “After I got out of the service and got my degree, I taught special ed for six years,” he said. “I was director of special education services for three years, and I’ve been superintendent of schools in the same district for the past decade.”

  “I’m going to put this card up on my refrigerator,” I told him.

  Cody grinned at me. “Hey, Teach,” he said. “Could I borrow your car? I’ve got a little emergency at home that I need to take care of.”

  20

  Unremaindered in the Cumberland Gap

  At dawn the morning after my well-attended event at Asheville’s Malaprop’s Bookstore, I was high in the Cumberland Mountains, making my way west in the general direction of Nashville. Just at sunrise I came upon a black bear, promenading along the top of a stone wall to keep the dew off its big padded feet, with all the aplomb of a seasoned Parisian boulevardier. The little sidehill farms and wooded hollows and quick mountain brooks of Kentucky reminded me of the Northeast Kingdom.

  Up ahead beside the road, a mountaineer in faded overalls and a dark slouch hat was selling snake-shaped walking sticks out of his dooryard. “Pull in here,” said my uncle. “He looks like someone we should meet.” The carver showed me his great-granny’s bed snake. It looked like an old-fashioned wooden wash stick, about three feet long and three inches wide, flat like a yardstick, with a shallow notch cut in the business end. Over time, granny’s bed snake had devolved into a stick for stirring boiled peanuts. But the walking-staff carver remembered his grandmother using it to beat the quilt on his boyhood trundle bed to drive out any blacksnakes that might have dropped out of the rafters of their cabin during the day. If necessary, you could pin down an unwelcome bedfellow with the fork in the stick, then remove it, unharmed, to the outdoors.

  I bought a walking stick, a beautiful length of native mahogany in the shape of two intertwined serpents sharing a single head. At fifteen dollars, it was by far the best buy, other than the books I purchased, on my entire tour. Then I bought Phillis a jar of sourwood-blossom honey. “Do you see that clump of snakeweed over there?” the carver said, pointing with the bed snake at a wiry bunch of grass on the edge of his neatly swept dirt dooryard. I nodded.

  Well, he told me, two days ago he’d witnessed a battle royal, right here in his yard, between a rattler and a king snake. Every time the rattler struck, the king snake would slither off for a mouthful of immunizing snakeweed to counteract the venom, then return to the fray. Eventually, the storyteller assured me, the king snake strangled its larger adversary and ate it whole.

  Was the raconteur storying a credulous Yankee descendant of those dastardly perpetrators of the War of Northern Aggression, as my beloved Georgia son-in-law refers to the Civil War? Who cares? Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but as that most accomplished of all American storytellers knew, it surely isn’t any truer. He was sitting in the catbird seat of the Loser Cruiser, looking right at home in his impeccable white suit, and of course I recognized him immediately.

  “What mainly ails fiction these days,” Mark Twain told me, “is that most of you newfangled writers have forgotten how to be entertaining.”

  Twain lit a cigar. “You modern-day storytellers grouse day and night about your poor sales. And they are poor. Do you know why? It’s because nine out of ten of you are boring. I ask you. Was Shakespeare ever boring? Was Dickens? Tarnation, son, if I want to be bored, I can go to church.”

  I laughed, but Mr. Twain was just warming to his subject. “How about the second-greatest yarner of all time? Did Jesus ever spin a story that was anything less than entertaining? Not that he didn’t try out a few stretchers from time to time. But they certainly weren’t tedious. Runaway spendthrift sons, friendless women about to be stoned to death, victims of highway robbery sprawled senseless along the pikes. Now there was a storyteller. And he liked to bend his elbow at a wedding and laze around in the sun and wet a line like Tom and Huck. No wonder Christianity’s so popular. What do the Bible and Huckleberry Finn have in common?”

  “Not much,” I ventured.

  “Maybe not,” Twain said. “But you aren’t apt to find either one in a remainder bin.”

  21

  The Long Apprenticeship

  With his humorous blue eyes, lightning wit, and love for a story, Uncle Reg reminded me of Mark Twain. Reg loved to travel, yet he was as deeply rooted in his home in the Catskills as Twain was on the Mississippi. As a teenager, I loved to sit up late with
my uncle listening to his console-model radio. If we couldn’t find a baseball game, we listened to country music on faraway relayed stations with exotic call letters: WSM Nashville, WWVA, from Wheeling, West Virginia—even a faint, crackling station from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

  My love of country music dates from that era. Patsy Cline, crooning her effortless, throaty “I Fall to Pieces.” Heehawing Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. And, of course, the late, great Hank Williams Sr. All rural America was stunned by Hank’s death from a drug overdose on New Year’s Day, 1953. Even the nationwide mourning decades later when the NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Sr. hit the wall at Daytona—WE LOVE YOU, DALE proclaimed handlettered cardboard signs in country dooryards from Alabama to the Northeast Kingdom—did not resonate in the little cafés and roadhouses and small-town barrooms of America like the shocking news that Hank Senior, not yet thirty years old, was gone.

  My favorite song in those days was Hank’s “Kaw-Liga (The Wooden Indian).” As my uncle and I listened to the story of the lovelorn cigar-store chief who fell for the carved maiden “over in the antique store,” Reg told me that on our long-planned cross-country road tour, we’d dip down to Nashville, look up Kaw-Liga, and get our picture taken with him. Maybe even have a snapshot taken of us standing by the baby-blue Cadillac Hank died in on that fateful New Year’s Day. Some years later Country Charley Pride would do a better rendition of “Kaw-Liga.” But no one ever achieved the same broken-voiced, brokenhearted, atonal authenticity, with that country song or any other, as Hank.