The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  To this day, I cannot think about this matter without the utmost mortification. Sackcloth and ashes don’t begin to convey it. “Blockhead” is the word that springs to mind, and I don’t mean the gracious Garrison K. Some years ago, a prominent Vermont bookseller invited Keillor to visit her store. She received this reply:

  The last time I went to Vermont, there was a big outcry in the papers on account of a rumor that the show intended to move to Vermont. Vermonters were up in arms. I remember a comment from a distinguished Vermont writer named Howard Frank Mosher, who said, “This would be the last nail in the coffin for Vermont.” I thought to myself, if it troubles Howard Frank Mosher so much to contemplate the possibility (non-existent) that I might move to Vermont, then I don’t need to visit Vermont again and cause Howard Frank Mosher all this trouble. If Vermont is troubled by outsiders, that’s fine by me. I don’t need to trouble anybody. In Minnesota, Howard Frank Mosher would be heartily welcomed, even if he wished to live here.

  Oh, dear. The gentle irony. The devastating good humor. The sheer writerly genius of this kindly and unanswerable put-down to that churl from Vermont, Howard Frank Mosher. And then, wouldn’t you know, it got up on the billion-tongued Net, where any damn body could, and did, Google it. Trouble was, rack my memory and conscience though I did, I couldn’t remember saying such a thing. I enjoyed Keillor’s Lake Wobegon novels and his show. I admired his tireless efforts on behalf of artists and the arts, not to mention his fine St. Paul bookstore, Common Good Books. Nor could I recall using the nail-in-the-coffin phrase. Gloomy, morbid, and dispiriting, it runs against my grain. Straightaway I wrote to Mr. Keillor, care of Prairie Home Companion, to apologize for the misunderstanding and exonerate myself. I received no reply.

  Accordingly, and exactly as a person with a very guilty conscience would do, I wrote again. I hate self-exculpatory letters. So this time I admitted that, in a hideous, inexcusable lapse of manners and sanity, I just might have said that awful thing. The second letter—abject, reeking of the shameful “I’m sorry if you were offended” genre, as if anyone wouldn’t be—was even worse than the first. Again, no response. “This Vermont character, Mosher, is a bad human being and a kook,” I could hear Keillor’s nice Lutheran secretary saying as she tossed the letter into the file marked “Bad Human Beings and Kooks.” I had only one recourse left. I must look up Brother Garrison in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and personally apologize to him for what I was now 99.9 percent sure I’d said. Said out of pure, mean-spirited, smart-aleck, vicious, green-eyed jealousy. If thy tongue offend thee, Harold, pluck it out. Yes, yes, I’d do that, too, right on his show if he wanted me to. But perhaps the apology might suffice, and it would be nearly as painful.

  GENERAL FICTION AND NON-FICTION, GOOD POETRY, CLASSICS ALL SIZES, QUALITY TRASH, announced the sign in the window of Common Good Books. Of course, Garrison had composed it. I laughed at “Quality Trash” despite myself, but the store, located in a small shopping area, is at the end of a long corridor that resembled nothing so much as Stephen King’s Green Mile. Astonishingly, my own books were well represented there. Gathering them up to take to the counter to sign before asking directions to the Prairie Home Companion studio, I turned and nearly bumped into someone I recognized. I just couldn’t think of his name. A middle-aged, midwestern-looking chap, very probably a walleye-eating minister, with a youthful cowlick and a benign countenance. My God. It was Garrison.

  I took a deep breath and, with the do-or-die rapid-fire chagrin and unspeakable remorse of a wicked sinner at the pearly gates, I blurted out, “Mr.-Keillor-I’m-Howard-Frank-Mosher-and-I-owe-you-a-huge-apology-I’m-sure-I-did-say-that-bad-thing-about-you-coming-to-Vermont-and-out-of-context-it-must-have-sounded-even-worse.”

  On I blabbed, while kind, friendly, erudite Garrison, the host of Prairie Home Companion, the author of many funny novels, looked—puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t—” he started to say.

  “No, no, no,” I sputtered, waving, as if to avert an imminent train wreck. I was off and running again. Then I stopped. Grinned. And said, “Hey, Garrison. I’m sorry I shot my stupid mouth off.”

  We shook hands. Mr. Keillor still seemed a bit baffled. “Excuse me,” he said. “Who did you say you were?”

  “Howard Mosher. Howard Frank Mosher? From Vermont?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Mosher. I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. My name’s Fred Gustenson. I’m over from Thief River Falls for a convention. I came in here looking for a copy of Eat, Pray, Love for my wife.”

  57

  Iowa City

  Prairie Lights. What a gorgeous name for a novel or a poem or, in the case of downtown Iowa City’s long-time literary gathering place, a bookstore. Prairie Lights Books is one of my favorite independents anywhere, but what did I encounter in Iowa City this Saturday afternoon but an angry outpouring from the university stadium, a vast army of the Hawkeye faithful, absolutely furious because their football team had just lost a conference game. The blasting horns, the squealing brakes, the snarls of starting-and-stopping SUVs—why did everyone in this pancake-flat prairie town need a four-wheel-drive SUV?—the scrumming melee and red-hot, palpable despair unique to disappointed college football enthusiasts and European soccer fans. And there in the catbird seat beside me, just when I least wanted to see him, was the West Texas Jesus, struggling to wrench the cap off a bottle of pale ale from an upscale local microbrewery with the seatbelt clip.

  “You got a church key on you, bub?” he said.

  I didn’t, but he finally got the seatbelt clip to work, whereupon he chugged down half of that ale in three long gulps.

  While we waited for the bottleneck outside the football stadium to clear, the West Texas Jesus picked up my copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, on the front seat between us. “What’s this about?” he asked.

  As I told him about Robinson’s Boughton and Ames families and the doomed attempts of Jack Boughton and his sister Glory to return to the rural Iowa village of Gilead to make new lives for themselves, he finished his ale and pried open another. Now he was riffling through Richard Dawkins’s latest, The God Delusion, which I’d bought in Minneapolis at Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books.

  I shut off the Cruiser so it wouldn’t overheat in the traffic jam and, to make conversation, asked the West Texas Jesus which side of the debate over intelligent design he came down on. He thought a minute, then tapped the cover of the Dawkins book. “I’m a man of my times, I reckon. Always was—‘render unto Caesar,’ et cetera. I don’t have any big quarrel with this fella. Nothing in his book changes what I said about doing unto others, does it?”

  I acknowledged that the theory of random natural selection, as I understood it, in no way contradicted the Golden Rule. But, connoisseur of paradoxes that he was, my old road bud wasn’t finished. Holding his now nearly empty second pale ale up to the late-afternoon sunlight, as we finally started to creep forward, he said, “Then again, you ask me, this bad boy is the best evidence I know of a very intelligent de—SON OF MAN, HIT YOUR BRAKES!” I did. So did everyone else. All horns went silent. A cathedral quietude fell over the clogged main drag in front of the stadium. Not one $30,000 suburban vehicle moved an inch.

  I craned my head out the Cruiser window. About a hundred yards ahead, a mama Canada goose was leading one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—count them, nine—fluffy yellow goslings from a second brood across the busiest street in Iowa that afternoon. Oh, America. Thoreau was surely right. The sun is a morning star. There is more day to dawn—randomly or otherwise.

  58

  Up in Michigan

  Away up north in Petoskey, Michigan, where, as a boy, Ernest Hemingway summered with his family, I spent several happy hours the following afternoon walking the shore of the freshwater sea that is Lake Michigan. That evening, during the Q and A after my reading at Petoskey’s excellent independent bookstore, McLean and Eakin, I related how I’d imitated first Hemingway and then Faul
kner and then both of them.

  In the spring of 1965, in the midst of struggling to find my own writing voice, getting my seniors ready for graduation, finishing my master’s thesis, and dithering about the Pennsylvania fellowship and the rest of my life, I sat down one evening at the kitchen table to have another go at the novel I was trying to write. It was raining, the first soft spring rain of the year, the sort that stirs up the trout and makes them bite. For once, though, I wasn’t thinking of fishing. Some time passed, and suddenly I realized I had written the opening pages of my book. Not from Hemingway’s point of view. Not from Faulkner’s. From mine. “My father was a man of indefatigable optimism,” I’d begun. And, though another fifteen years would elapse before I finished and published Disappearances, my first novel, I knew that with that sentence, I’d found my voice.

  I jumped up and sprinted the three steps into our kitchen and read my pages aloud to Phillis. When I finished, she smiled and said, “Only in the Kingdom, sweetie.”

  59

  The Legacy, Part 2

  Not long after my aunt Elsie died, Reg visited his dentist for a checkup. A young female technician who had just started work there remarked that she had never met a person his age—he was in his early eighties—with such excellent teeth. Reg was smitten. From that day on, Margaret was all he could talk about. She was beautiful. She was an amateur golf star. It went without saying, though Reg did say it, and many times, that she was an expert dental technician. She was well traveled. And she was keenly interested in Reg’s stories of Chichester and in Reg himself.

  In due time Phillis and I met Margaret. She and Reg visited us in Vermont, and everything he had said about her appeared to be true. It was also true, as my father remarked, that around her, Reg acted like an infatuated teenager.

  Margaret said little about herself, and only very diffidently. There was, I thought, a certain watchfulness about her. I did not think then, nor do I now, that she was a gold digger. She was simply an attractive young woman who had formed a close friendship with a much older man. Reg had been miserably lonely since Elsie’s death. He was not lonely now.

  Over the next year, my uncle’s infatuation with Margaret did not lessen. She told him that as a little girl on a camping trip to the ocean, she had seen her father drown. Reg acknowledged to me that Margaret probably perceived him as a replacement. At the same time, he hoped she might have romantic feelings for him. The following spring he returned to the Catskills after spending several months in Florida to discover that Margaret had married a man her own age. There were already serious problems with the relationship. Recently, she had discovered that her new spouse was an alcoholic. When Margaret wanted out of the marriage, Reg found her a lawyer and paid for her divorce. Several years later I made that last visit to the Catskills before his death, when he told me I would “understand.” Then came his final illness, the arrival of the will, and, soon afterward, the brusque telephone call from the executor informing me that Reg had deeded his house and property to Margaret just a few weeks before he died.

  What distressed me most was the disappearance of the Chichester manuscript, The Mountains Look Down. In fact Reg wrote beautifully. I feared that those stories chronicling the history of our hometown might be lost forever—a loss that I found almost unbearable to contemplate. By contrast, my quest for the long-lost Canadian con-man novel I’d given away seemed trivial. All trace of Reg’s stories seemed to have vanished as completely as the mountain characters he’d written about so lovingly, the long-defunct woodworking factory, and much of the village of Chichester itself. How could I fulfill my promise to Reg to publish The Mountains Look Down if I couldn’t even locate the manuscript?

  60

  The Industrial Belt

  Fess up, Harold. Prostate radiation treatment knocks the stuffing clean out of a guy. The first bombardment of rays tears the electrons off the molecules of the outer cells of the prostate and then, by the West Texas Jesus, that humming, behemoth X-ray machine rotates around and around you, zapping the now unprotected cancer cells and zapping, quite literally, the you-know-what out of your bowels. Oh, yes. Desperate situations do indeed require desperate remedies, and I will admit that, after forty-four rounds with Mr. Varian EX, followed by my zigzagging 20,000-mile odyssey through Bookland America, I was beat. I was counting the remaining days and wondering if I (and the LC) had the gas to get home.

  Yet I still find it thrilling to drive through the muscular sprawl of industrial cities on the eastern fringe of America’s Midwest. How Walt Whitman would have loved the steel mills and railyards and automobile plants and petroleum refineries of Detroit and Gary and Erie and Cleveland and Cincinnati and Buffalo! The colossal football and baseball stadiums. The busy river barges and ingenious technological know-how that even in an economic recession keeps America going from one day to the next. Whitman would have known exactly what to say about all this. Any one of these Rust Belt cities would be likely territory for a young contemporary Whitman or Twain to stake out a claim and dig in. So, sure, go West, you aspiring poets and playwrights and novelists of early twenty-first-century America. Just remember, you don’t need to go farther west than Buffalo if you don’t want to. The great Buffalo novel? You bet.

  As for me, when I walked into my friend Jonathon Welch’s great Talking Leaves Books, in Buffalo, on the next-to-last day of my tour, and saw the colorful jackets of books that were my dear old acquaintances and books that might soon become new ones, I knew that wherever I have gone and might yet go, each time I step inside an independent bookstore I return again to the world of books, which has been my truest home for the more than sixty years.

  Back in Orleans in the uncertain spring of 1965, Phillis and I decided, with a few of our young teaching colleagues, to hold a huge end-of-the-school-year gala celebrating the history and literature of the Northeast Kingdom. One evening was dedicated to the kids reading their essays and stories on various topics: the Reverend Alexander Twilight, the African American graduate of Middlebury College who built the magnificent stone academy on the hill; Robert Rogers and his Rangers; Robert Frost’s connection with the Kingdom; and the early Abenaki and French Canadian history of northern Vermont. The next night Jim Hayford read from his poetry and talked about his life and times in the Kingdom and beyond. Old-timers visited our classes and told stories about Prohibition and the Great Depression. The grand finale of this well-intended, if slightly deranged, frenzy of local culture, at a time when the kids should have been preparing for their finals, was an absolutely lunatic brainchild of my own devising.

  Somehow, along with teaching, coaching, and story writing, not to mention finishing up my graduate thesis and embarking, with all the intrepidness of the absolutely clueless, on not one but two early attempts at book-length fiction—somehow I had found time to cajole our seniors into presenting, at the Orleans town hall on the final night of the Northeast Kingdom Weekend, a performance of Our Town. But not just any performance of Our Town. Nothing would do but, in keeping with the festival’s local theme, I must doctor Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece by adapting it to the Kingdom, with the assistance of my star pupil, Bill, and some of his classmates. Changing Grover’s Corners to Orleans, not scrupling to substitute the names of real townspeople for characters in the play, and replacing the New Hampshire geography of Our Town with that of northern Vermont, we rehearsed night and day, planning to take the town by storm and finish up the Festival with a production that the good people of Orleans would never forget.

  And to this day, they have not.

  61

  Our Town

  The town hall was the ideal venue for our project. With its heaving old wooden aisles, canted like the deck of a storm-tossed sailing ship, and its faded purple stage curtain redolent of mildew and the stardust of dozens of school and town plays and the brave collective hopes of scores of graduation valedictories—and let us not omit the bloody stains of not a few town-meeting brawls—the place was emblematic of our town. For a
backdrop, the stage boasted several painted flats left over from a long-ago production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Teddy in his pith helmet, headed down cellar. The two patrician poisoner aunts, offering tea to an unsuspecting gentleman boarder. The mad doctor with his gleaming instruments of terror. In the disused orchestra well sat a piano once used to accompany silent movies, whose sole function for years had been to bang out, in hideous, off-key strains, the graduation march.

  It’s amazing how well Wilder’s timeless play still reflects the human details of life in any American small town, and the hall was packed for the premiere. True, there was some ill-suppressed laughter when the curtain went up on the bare, stark stage, with the narrator—good old Bill—and the miming actors. But the audience was quickly drawn in by the stately rhythms of daily life in Grover’s Corners, aka Orleans, and the substitutions of Kingdom names and anecdotes.

  Soon it became apparent that other alterations had been made to the play, alterations I had not known about until now. These included references to old and current local love affairs, bitter feuds that had gone on for years, and the unsavory private habits, real or imagined, of a number of prominent Orleans citizens, including the local reverend, the mayor, the mill manager, some of us teachers, and old Prof. The audience began to murmur. A chill ran up my back as Big Prof, in the role of his father, came on stage staggering home from a school board meeting, muttering, “These Christly teachers aren’t earning their pay. I’ll get to the bottom of this or today isn’t a three-quart day!”

  Had the young rapscallions actually gotten their hands on some booze? The actors, now passing around a flask, were speaking directly to the audience about the townspeople’s most private transgressions. Interactive theater had come to Orleans years ahead of the rest of the country. The mayor, a notorious alcoholic, lay passed out on the proscenium. The reverend’s wife was picking the postmaster’s pocket; the lecherous old business teacher had his hand on little Emily Webb’s knee. What the hell was happening?