The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  HFM: Except for the sack of money and the parachute—yes.

  40

  The Lords of Moss

  Like many another touring author, I never feel that a West Coast swing is complete without a visit to Village Books, Chuck and Dee Robinson’s oceanside emporium of literature, ideas, and good fellowship in Bellingham, Washington. I love working cities, which Bellingham very much is, with a going fishery and wood-product industries. Also it’s a jumping-off place, via ferry, for southern Alaska. Tonight I was slated to talk to a large (thank you, Village Books) group of readers about my corner of the country, three thousand miles away. And who’s this? An early arriver, a dapper, self-possessed, middle-aged gentleman, his countenance fairly shining with anticipation. He was making for me with a very purposeful stride, waving—dear Jesus, no—that most dreaded of all documents a writer can receive, short of a subpoena from the grim reaper himself.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re a writer with a manuscript of a novel you’d like me to read.”

  “Wrong!” he gleefully shouted. “My name’s Mosher, too. You’re my long-lost relative!”

  So, like that fabled little girl in the nursery rhyme, the one with the pretty little curl right in the middle of her forehead, when the Great American Book Tour is good, it’s very, very good. And when it’s bad—but no, that way lies cynicism. Suffice to say that it’s not unusual for touring authors to encounter people sharing their last name, laden with genealogical charts and documents so deadly dull that by comparison an unpublished manuscript reads like War and Peace.

  In the event, I got off pretty easily. Moshers, my newfound kinsman told me, are descended from Huguenots in Alsace-Lorraine. Inverted, the name Mosher means “Herr Moss” or “Lords of the Moss.” In other words, my ancestors probably mucked around for centuries in the peat bogs of Europe. For all I know, the first Mosher scrabbled on all fours out of the peat bogs, having been spontaneously generated in the depths of the fen. But would Mr. Herr Moss, of the mossy-haired Moshers of Bellingham, Washington, perhaps like to stay for my event? Not tonight, thank you. Tonight Herr Moss must get home to his genealogical research. If, however, I happened to have a box of complimentary copies of my new book in the car … Oh, soon enough, Cousin Moss, soon enough, the remainder bins would be overfl—. But let us not venture there tonight, when, absent Herr Moss, I have a full house at a great bookstore and am about to turn the corner and head east toward home and the love of my life—Mrs. Herr Moss? Frau Moss?

  41

  Margery Moore

  The winter of 1964–65 was a rough one in the mountains of northern Vermont. The Kingdom was hit with record snowfalls and then week after week when the temperature rarely rose above zero. One morning our outdoor thermometer read 50 degrees below.

  One day in late January a thaw set in, melting the snow a little, but that night the temperature plummeted again. By the following morning the drifts in Verna’s driveway had frozen solid, marooning us and our car with no way to get in or out. What’s more, we were running low on kerosene, our sole source of heat.

  A farmer on the edge of town owned a bulldozer, but when I asked if he’d plow us out he replied, in the grand old Northeast Kingdom tradition, “Why should I? You aren’t from around here.” So much for Vermont’s help-thy-neighbor ethos. Help thy neighbor? Absolutely. But only if he’s from Vermont.

  “Call Margery Moore,” another neighbor advised me. “She’ll know what to do.”

  I’d already met Margery, a big, good-looking woman with friendly blue eyes, who owned a farm on the Willoughby River. In the fall Phillis and I had stopped to ask permission to cross her property to fish the river. “You young folks are welcome to fish or hunt here anytime you want to,” she told us. “And if you ever need anything at all, just give me a shout.”

  I had no idea what Margery could do about our blocked driveway, but I called her anyway. “I remember you very well, Mr. Mosher,” she said. “I’ll see what can be done.”

  “Jesus to Jesus and seven hands around!” Phillis exclaimed ten minutes later. “There’s a bulldozer plowing us out.”

  I never did learn what Margery said to the farmer who didn’t like outsiders, but from that day forward the old coot couldn’t do enough for us parvenu transplants from upstate New York, and neither could Marge.

  Jim Hayford is who he is. Prof is who he is. Verna is who she is. I couldn’t count the number of times I heard this phrase applied to the residents of the Kingdom during our first year in Vermont. More than anyone else I’ve ever known, Margery Moore is who she is.

  Margery was and is famous—some might say infamous—throughout the Kingdom. First of all, she is famous for helping people. Like Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Margery never refused anyone a ride or something to eat or an encouraging word. Over the years she’s taken in scores of homeless people of all ages, though she herself is poor and proud of it, her farm always teetering on the brink of failure. As a young teenager, she left home with all her belongings in a cardboard suitcase. She worked as a lumber-camp cook in Maine, a dance-hall waitress in Dodge City, and a horse trainer in Connecticut—Margie loves horses. She was the caretaker of a Long Island estate, attendant at a state hospital, dairywoman, forewoman on an airplane assembly line, hotel barkeep, and bouncer.

  One evening when Phillis and I, still new in town, were walking past the tavern in the basement of the big wooden hotel at the end of Main Street, someone called out in a brisk voice, “Gangway, folks!” A woman in an apron appeared at the bottom of the steps, conveying, by the seat of the pants and the back of the neck, a very large, very intoxicated patron whom she proceeded, without ado, to toss up onto the sidewalk. “All in a day’s work,” Margery told us, whisking her hands together. After I got to know Margery, I saw her, on two separate occasions, knock down rugged men. I’ve never heard her say an unkind word to or about anyone.

  Though she loves all living things, and is as much of an unreconstructed romantic as anyone I’ve ever known, Margie was unlucky at love. Her first husband was given to “catting around.” She left him high and dry in Dodge City. Back in Vermont, her footloose second husband got up from the breakfast table one morning, said he was going out to the barn to sweep down the cobwebs—and disappeared. Margie liked to tell us that for all she knew, the rounder was still at the barn sweeping cobwebs. In that same cheerful, matter-of-fact tone in which she’d called out “Gangway” before tossing the drunk up the tavern stairs, she informed us that she’d traded gentleman friends five times and “traded downhill each time.”

  Margery wrote beautiful poems about her travels and life on her hill farm. Once I saw her walk right up to a wild buck deer with her hands behind her back—“It’s our hands they’re afraid of; deer don’t have hands.” Another time I watched her call an eagle out of the sky. The bird lived with Margery for an entire summer. She named it Uncle Sam. Long before it was fashionable to claim Native American ancestry, she was proud of her Mohawk blood. She drove junk Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Chryslers. She was never on time in her life. She earned her high-school equivalency diploma at fifty and her paralegal degree at sixty-five. To save the expense of a dorm room, she slept in her car in the college parking lot, even in sub-zero weather. No one appreciated the irony of the law diploma more than Margie herself: although I have never met a more fundamentally honest person, she had long cultivated the image of a Northeast Kingdom Bonnie Parker, Belle Star, and Robin of Sherwood Forest rolled into one.

  Like many Kingdom residents, Margie saw no reason to pay Vermont’s unconstitutional poll tax. Incredibly, poll-tax delinquents lost their driver’s license. For years troopers would stop Margery and ticket her for driving without a license. Not to be outdone, she kept in the glove box of her hundred-dollar Coupe de Ville or Continental a book of specially printed citations, and she’d ticket the arresting officer for driving on ancestral Indian lands without a proper license. Into court she’d sweep, with her waist-length glossy hair and sna
pping blue eyes. “A Vermont driver’s license? There was no Vermont when my ancestors first came here. I thought the young officer was stopping me to ask for a date.” Within moments she’d have even the most saturnine circuit judge laughing so hard he’d throw the case out the window.

  Margery’s mother died soon after she was born. By the time she was eight, she was doing most of the cooking, housecleaning, even keeping the farm’s accounts for her dad and several hired men. One winter night she caught wind that the revenuers were on their way to raid her father’s still. Not yet ten years old, Marge whipped up a batch of her famous molasses cookies and served them to the G-men hot out of the oven, detaining her guests until the old man had dismantled and hidden his still. Soon after I met her, she poached a well-fed doe in the next county over to help see her five children through the winter. She dressed the out-of-season deer in a man’s overcoat, a scarf, and a slouch hat, then propped it in the front seat of her car with just the tip of its black snout sticking out between the scarf and the downturned brim of the hat. Sure enough, the game warden was waiting for her at the county line. Unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing after searching her car, he angrily asked why she was laughing. Had she been drinking? No, she said, but her “cousin,” slouched up against the passenger door, had taken one nip of applejack too many. Whereupon the warden brusquely told her to get her drunken relative home to bed where he belonged.

  A few weeks later, when the Orleans bank was robbed, the local constabulary went too far by fingering Margery as a “person of interest” in their investigation. It was time, she decided, to make a statement. First she marched into the bank and announced, in a voice loud enough to be heard two townships away, that she would very much like to rob it—this august institution had recently seen fit to turn down her application for a two-hundred-dollar loan—but she doubted that the bank had enough cash on hand to make it worth her while. The police stepped up their investigation and began appearing at her farm to question her at all hours of the day and night. It was time for phase two of our friend’s plan. She hinted to a neighbor woman, a notorious gossip, that maybe she did know something about the bank robbery after all. And just maybe the loot was buried behind her barn under the towering manure pile that she’d wanted gone for thirty years but lacked the wherewithal to have moved. Only in the Kingdom (as Phillis might, and indeed did, say) would the cops fall for this ruse, showing up at the Moore place at three o’clock one morning with backhoe and bulldozer. Margie got her manure pile moved all right. At the bottom, the police discovered what one usually discovers at the bottom of a manure pile, and not one thing else.

  42

  The Howard of Moses Lake

  MOSES LAKE the sign announced. THE OASIS OF EASTERN WASHINGTON.

  On the day I arrived, the Oasis of Eastern Washington looked as arid as the Gobi Desert. I parked downtown and trudged through the most oppressive heat I’d encountered since leaving home—it was not yet 9:30 and already 100 degrees in the shade—into a small and blessedly air-conditioned bank to cash a traveler’s check. While I waited in line for a teller, a man about my age came through the door, weaving a little.

  “I’m here for my monthly withdrawal,” he hollered.

  “You can’t make your withdrawal until the end of the week,” one of the three tellers said with exaggerated patience, as if she were speaking to an overtired child. “You know that, Howard.”

  Howard?

  “I need it NOW,” Howard shouted. “N. O. W. I’m having a sugar attack. I have to buy my medication.”

  The trio of tellers looked at one another and rolled their eyes.

  “Howard, Howard, Howard,” the oldest teller said. “Come back on Friday. As you can see, we’re very busy this morning.”

  This didn’t seem right. They were denying this poor diabetic an advance on whatever stipend they were supposed to disburse to him?

  “See here—,” I started to say, but just then Howard looked at me and, I could have sworn, winked. In stentorian tones, he bellowed, “I’m feeling a spell coming on. Here she comes, here she comes. I’m going to loud up. Look out below, I’m going to fall down. I’m going to GET ROWDY AGAIN.”

  Maybe it was that “again” that did the trick. As the Howard of Moses Lake started to flap his arms spastically and lurch and stagger, the head teller capitulated.

  “This is the last time, Howard. The very last time.”

  So it’s five minutes later and I’m at the mini-mart next door, filling the thirsty tank of the Loser Cruiser. Standing at the clicking pump, daydreaming of cabbages and kings and my friend Howard, I noticed a new white three-quarter-ton pickup parked in the handicapped slot in front of the convenience store. On the shiny, outsized rear bumper, beside the license plate displaying the familiar wheelchair symbol, a sticker declared, I’D RATHER BE FISHING. That made sense. So would I. But as I replaced the nozzle and twisted the rusted gas cap back on, charging out of the store came, dear God, the Howard of Moses Lake. He was toting a twenty-four-pack suitcase carton of Bud, the King of Beers, in each hand. Without breaking stride, Howard heaved first one case, then the other, over the tailgate into the bed of the white pickup. Then he turned, winked at me again, and said, in the voice of a man who knows exactly how he is going to spend the rest of the day and, very probably, the rest of his life, “I got my medication. Now I can go fishing.”

  43

  Sacagawea

  How my uncle Reg would have loved the Howard of Moses Lake, I thought. Reg’s unpublished and now missing history of Chichester had been full of colorful scamps, and I had no doubt that Howard would have fit right in.

  There were ghost stories in my uncle’s manuscript as well. My favorite began with the loud footsteps on the porch of the house where the ox driver John Everett had murdered his wife, Jenny, with an ax for a love affair she had not had. The footfalls—everyone in Chichester had heard them, even the village doctor—were believed to be those of the curiosity-seekers who gathered on Everett’s porch after the murder, to view Jenny’s bloody corpse through the front windows.

  Like my storytelling uncle, I have always been deeply skeptical of, yet fascinated by, tales of the supernatural. Back in the late 1990s, when I was out west researching my Lewis and Clark novel, The True Account, I’d planned to see the famous fountain statue of Sacagawea at the junction of the Clearwater and Snake rivers, on the Washington-Idaho border. I missed seeing it on that trip, so this time I decided to swing down—it was no more than sixty or seventy miles out of my way—and pay my respects to the remarkable woman without whose assistance the greatest expedition of exploration in American history might well have ended in disaster somewhere in the Rockies.

  Late in the morning I stopped at a pull-off beside the Clearwater to ask directions. Sitting on a grassy berm between the rest area and the river was an elderly Native American woman. She wore a plaid skirt and blouse, moccasins beaded blue and red, and a fringed shawl figured with elk, deer, and salmon. As I approached her, I realized that she was more than elderly. She was ancient. She was the oldest person I had seen since leaving home, perhaps close to one hundred, yet marvelously alive-looking, full of a serene vitality, with the kindest face imaginable.

  “You’re a long way from home,” she said.

  Had she spotted my green Vermont license plate in the Loser Cruiser’s rear window? I didn’t see how. The Cruiser was tucked out of sight below the berm, and she was gazing out over the river in the other direction.

  “About three thousand miles,” I said. “But this is beautiful country.”

  We continued to visit for a few minutes. I asked about the local fishing, then inquired about the statue. My friend told me it was another mile or so to the west. I wondered, had she lived here all her life? Not yet, she said, like the old Vermonter in the story Mark Twain liked to tell. But her Nez Perce ancestors had lived in the area for, oh, ten thousand years or so.

  Again I was struck by the light in her eyes and by her regal
beauty. I’ve noticed that women who are especially kind often retain their beauty throughout their lives, but you can’t really say that to someone you’ve just met, and judging by the care she took with her appearance, I was sure she knew it anyway. I thanked her for the directions and returned to my car.

  The fountain statue was fully as striking as I’d heard. Unlike the older, rather heavy-set Sacagawea outside the capitol building in Bismark, North Dakota, this Sacagawea was a pretty, slender teenager. Water flowed over her fingertips, splashing into a basin. And sitting beside the statue, looking out over the river, was the elderly Nez Perce woman I’d met upriver. The same figured shawl, plaid skirt and blouse, blue- and red-beaded moccasins. The same radiant beauty.

  How did she get there? Did she fly, like the old woman who taught Blue Duck to fly in Lonesome Dove? Was she, perhaps, Sacagawea herself? Unwilling to demystify the experience, I returned to my car and headed north to my event in Spokane. Some stories should simply be left to stand alone, like the statue of that brave and beautiful young mother and American heroine, overlooking the junction of two great western rivers.

  44

  Spring Comes to the Kingdom,

  Part 1

  My only other brush with the unaccountable took place during our first year in the Kingdom, at about the time spring began to creep north into the Green Mountains. The earliest harbinger of warmer weather in northern Vermont may be the shift in the blue jays’ call from a harsh, hawkish cry to what the naturalist Roger Tory Peterson described as a “musical queedle queedle.” In 1965 the big, showy jays we fed in Verna’s dooryard began their queedling in late February. A month later, when sugaring operations were in full swing in the maple orchards around Burlington and Montpelier, the Kingdom’s sugar bushes were still locked tight in four feet of snow. By the second week of April, the sap had finally started to run up north. Once again, as on the first day of deer season, our classrooms emptied out. In that pre-plastic-pipeline era, farm kids were recruited to tap trees, lug sap buckets, and help with barn chores while their parents sugared off. Rose-tinted clouds of steam lifted high over the bare, black maple trees in the sunset. There were sugar-on-snow parties to attend, and wild bobsled rides down Allen Hill. My seniors and I read Ethan Frome. When we came to the tragic sliding accident, we talked about whether some people were trapped by their circumstances. I assured the kids that not one of them was trapped—and I hoped to Jesus it was true.