Idyll Banter (2003)

by Chris Bohjalian

  The fish were something like a bribe, and by accepting them I became the first official marketing director for the Lincoln Firemen's Barbecue Baste--famous in Lincoln for more than fifteen years and ready now to take Vermont by storm.

  Of course it wasn't called the Lincoln Firemen's Barbecue Baste back then. Then it was simply The Sauce--an oil and vinegar concoction that had been doused liberally on chickens for more than fifteen years at the volunteer fire company's annual fund-raising barbecue.

  Now I wasn't altogether sure what was involved with being marketing director for a local fire company's barbecue sauce. Although I had no delusions that the job would involve complex taste-tests against Kraft, or managing an advertising budget as large as General Motors', I wasn't sure what was expected. After all, it's no small task to take what is essentially a backyard barbecue sauce and bottle it--especially with nothing but volunteer labor. So I asked Rudy what being marketing director meant.

  It meant, he said, making a label.

  So I said yes.

  But I was sure I could do more for Rudy than merely make a label, and I was sure the fire company could use the help. To get some insight into the sauce itself, I asked Rudy if he would be interested in my putting together a small research focus group of volunteers to explore the taste: what people liked about the product, and what--if anything--they disliked.

  Rudy didn't think this was especially critical. "People seem to like the taste of it just fine," he told me. "We've used it at the barbecue every summer for fifteen years, and we haven't had a piece of leftover chicken yet."

  I couldn't argue with that.

  But then the very next day I wandered over to Rudy's house, and said helpfully, "This is a food product you have here, Rudy, and that means you need to get approval from certain groups--like the FDA." He nodded and pulled from an envelope a very important-looking piece of paper from something called the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Vermont. And then in a notebook he found for me some even more official-looking stationery from the Food and Drug Administration's Department of Health and Human Services. It seems they had already approached the FDA.

  Still determined to provide Rudy with invaluable marketing guidance, I stopped by his house that weekend when I saw him out by his chicken coop. (He swears those birds have no idea that he has anything at all to do with a chicken barbecue sauce.) I wanted to talk to him about distribution, and why we should approach supermarkets. Think big, I told him, think big.

  Rudy listened patiently to me (Rudy always listens patiently to me), and then explained that he thought distribution was under control. Jeff was talking with Grand Union, Bill and Dave were coordinating the efforts with the small general stores and "mom and pops," and he would be meeting with A&P the following week.

  Undaunted, I brought up the subject of bottling. I said I knew a fellow in St. Johnsbury who might be able to help. Rudy nodded, and told me that the fire company was getting together over at the town hall for a few nights later in the month to bottle the first hundred cases. They would be bottling the baste in the dining room right below the auditorium. Claude, who owns the Lincoln General Store, had arranged everything: the vats, the ingredients, the production line.

  Yup, Rudy said, the best thing I could do right now would be to come up with a real handsome label.

  So I tried. I sat down for an evening or two and worked out all of the legal logistics, came up with a list of names, and then met one Wednesday night with the Lincoln Volunteer Fire Company's formal "Sauce Committee." Originally we considered naming the sauce Chief Bob's Barbecue Baste because we liked the alliteration (although we didn't use that word), and because our fire chief really is named Bob. But one of the committee members pointed out that it wasn't Bob's recipe, and besides, it was a project of the whole fire company. So we settled instead on the Lincoln Firemen's Barbecue Baste. It was longer, but we all felt pretty good about the name because--"from a marketing perspective"--we were suggesting in the brand name that it was a product from a nonprofit group. Plus, no one in the fire company could possibly feel left out.

  The next step was to write the copy for the label and design some artwork. Someone wanted a drawing of a barbecued chicken breast, and someone else wanted a drawing of a fire helmet. One of the committee members suggested combining the two ideas: a chicken (albeit a living one) wearing a fire helmet and a barbecue apron. Although I figured I could write the copy just fine, I knew I'd need some help designing the artwork. I called on Reed, a friend of mine up the road who just happens to be one of Vermont's finest illustrators.

  I told him the volunteer fire company needed a chicken. Now one of Reed's brothers-in-law is the fire chief, and another is the fire company's volunteer accountant. So I shouldn't have been surprised when Reed took me into his living room and showed me some of the sketches he had already worked up.

  "Something like this?" he asked, showing me a drawing of a rather robust chicken wearing an apron and fire helmet, and holding a barbecue basting brush. "Yup," I said, not unduly concerned with the somewhat cannibalistic nature of the concept, "something like that."

  And so we had a label. And two or three weeks later, we had a couple of thousand printed labels. And a week after that, in plenty of time for the first Memorial Day barbecues, we had a hundred bottled cases.

  That was more than a year ago, and in that year the barbecue baste has done all right for itself: It can be found in a pretty fair number of grocery stores around the state, and the original recipe has been preserved ("makes just about everything from chicken to steak finger-Lincoln good"). And from my perspective, I have learned that when someone from Lincoln's library, or craft shop, or historical society asks me to be the "marketing director," I should simply smile, say sure, and be flattered that they have included me in their project at all.

  Chapter 8.

  THEATER, ON STAGE AND OFF,

  INSPIRES YOUNG ACTRESS

  FEMALE BOXERS Laila Ali and Tonya "Tabloid-fare" Harding have nothing to fear from my nine-year-old daughter.

  Last month I taught her how to make a fist and throw a punch. This was, in hindsight, a case of the blind leading the blind, because I've never punched anyone in my life, either. Once I hit a mailbox, but that was when I was seventeen and it was with my parents' car.

  In any case, I knelt in our den, and I asked her to make a fist and take a swing. It wasn't pretty. She reminded me a bit of the head guy from the Munchkin City Lollipop Guild. This probably shouldn't have surprised me because my daughter's interests have always tended toward dancing and dolls--not boxing or athletics. This is a child who as recently as last autumn had to be told by the school gym teacher that after her foot (much to the astonishment of everyone present) actually whacked the big rubber orb in a game of kickball, she was supposed to run to first base.

  She curled her thumb so that it was beside her index finger--five digits lined up in a row--rather than blanketed over her index and middle fingers. Then she flailed at the air like a toddler struggling for balance. I offered her my upper arm to whack, and after a few minutes, she was capable of delivering what I considered a reasonably authentic stage punch. It was never going to inflict serious damage, but at least it looked right.

  I was proud of her, and not simply because she's so gentle that she hasn't the slightest idea how to inflict physical violence on anyone. I was pleased because the reason for this bizarre tutorial was an upcoming callback audition she had for the Vermont Stage Company's May production of To Kill a Mockingbird, and she was endeavoring to transform herself into that iconic tomboy named Scout. My daughter is many things, but she will never be mistaken off stage for a tomboy.

  On stage? Maybe someday--though, sadly, not with this production.

  But what is wonderful about my daughter's interest in drama--and it is more of an all-consuming, night-and-day passion than a mere interest--is the opportunity it has given the two of us to share something that I had never expected would link
us together: theater.

  My daughter is, clearly, going to be a drama jock. This also means, alas, that she is in for a world of rejection. I remember telling her last year when she did not get the part of Gretl in the Lyric Theatre's production of The Sound of Music that the disappointing news here wasn't this one rebuff: It was the reality that if she wanted to act, this rejection would be the first of many.

  Her commitment to drama also means that we have savored together an extensive litany of musicals performed in area high schools and theaters, and a glorious few on Broadway. We have watched teenagers play Wendy and Peter Pan (and then dissected their performances), and speculated aloud upon what Reba McEntire was feeling when we saw her in her last week as Annie Oakley.

  Moreover, it has added an unexpected depth to books we've cherished when we've seen them brought to the stage. When we are in the audience for the Lyric's The Secret Garden next month, we will see a new Victorian orphan girl named Mary Lennox: This one will sing of her sudden faith in the earth. We will meet a different grieving widower named Archibald Craven: This Craven's ardor for his late wife results in some of Broadway's more poignant love songs. When we see To Kill a Mockingbird in May, we will meet an Atticus Finch who almost certainly will broaden our image of Harper Lee's softspoken moral compass.

  And in all the auditions, the callbacks, the successes and disappointments, there is the opportunity to read together, to think together, and, once in a while, to do something wondrously silly like learn how to throw a solid stage punch.

  Chapter 9.

  TWO TYPES OF WRITING

  I'VE BEEN WRITING essays for this newspaper every Sunday morning for years, and I have always tried to separate the novelist from the columnist.

  The only time that I can recall acknowledging in this space that I happen to write books was when one of my earlier novels, Past the Bleachers, was being filmed for a movie, and the ironies that surrounded the production were impossible to ignore. My favorite? Among the hundreds of people who were involved in the hard work of transforming a novel into a movie, I met two who had actually read the book.

  I'm not precisely sure why I insisted on keeping the novelist out of my library when I was writing these columns, but I have a sense there were a number of reasons--some more prosaic than others.

  I know, for example, that I never wanted to exploit the great gift of this space to sell my books. I never wanted to risk losing a reader because Sunday morning seemed to have become a commercial for a specific novel.

  I know also that there has to be a Berlin Wall separating fiction and journalism--even fiction and the incoherent babble I sometimes offer about my chimney fires or my cats. Sometimes a person will ask me whether, for example, my friend Rudy once really climbed onto my roof with me in a blizzard to unblock an ice jam. It always gives me great pleasure to answer he did.

  For better or worse, I really have had all those chimney fires. The Christmas tree really did once fall on my daughter. And I really do take her into the ladies' rooms in airports when we travel.

  I don't make this stuff up.

  My novels, of course, are another story. I make up every word. As far as I know, there isn't a ski resort in New England that depended upon a half-dozen female dowsers to halt a drought and bring rain . . . and thereby resurrect a river the resort needed to make snow. I'm not aware of a couple in Vermont who adopted a little boy whose father might once have played baseball for the Boston Red Sox. And I have never met a midwife who performed a cesarean section on a woman in a bedroom.

  But there are other, more personal reasons for the way I have compartmentalized my professional life. I usually write my column on Friday afternoons, and I am usually writing for a Sunday a month in the future. I write this column at the very end of what we call the workweek, and I write it as a respite from the notion that I am in the midst of a book that will take many more months to complete, and no one will see for, perhaps, years.

  I write it because it allows me to leave, for an afternoon, the complexities of creating a grieving parent or a lobbyist with no soul or a midwife on trial for manslaughter. It's not about escapism; writing about my mother's death may have been therapeutic, but it certainly wasn't an avoidance of reality. It is, however, an opportunity to simply be me: the guy who lives next door to the church and hasn't yet figured out how to ignite the pilot light on his furnace.

  At 5:00 P.M. Monday, Vermont will be featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and a part of the program will focus on my current novel, Midwives. This will always be among the very greatest blessings I will ever receive, and someday I will figure out how to thank everyone involved.

  For now, however, I want to be sure to thank all of you who have written me letters or baked me cookies or casseroles or the single best apple pie I've ever tasted. I've consumed the food, and now I will get to your letters. I promise.

  And next week I will, once again, chronicle those other issues that matter to us all on a daily basis: School funding. The Southern Connector. The fact that I have, somehow, managed to lose my septic tank yet again.

  *

  PART II

  THE CENTER OF TOWN

  Chapter 1.

  LOSING THE LIBRARY

  ON A SUMMER night in 1666, six years before she died, poet Anne Bradstreet watched her home in North Andover burn to the ground, taking with it one of the larger libraries in the New World. Publicly, at least, she approached its destruction with a combination of Puritan stoicism and faith, and bid farewell to the collection in a poem. Privately, was she somewhat less poised? I've always imagined she was, especially when she considered the ruination of all those books.

  Lately, I've wondered as well how deeply her neighbors felt the loss of that library. I've envisioned them sifting through the black ashes in their black clothing and finding a charred spine from a book. A blistered cover. A flyleaf, singed along the edges.

  This is, of course, conjecture. But despite the fact that she was a woman and that there were certainly leaders in her small world who frowned on her writing, I believe that Anne Bradstreet must have shared her impressive collection with her friends. If so, when she lost her library, her community would have felt the loss, too.

  This summer, my small Vermont village lost its library. A hill town of roughly a thousand people, Lincoln sits in a valley midway up one of Vermont's highest peaks, the 4,052-foot Mount Abraham.

  In the early morning hours of June 27, swollen by weeks of rain and four inches on the night of the 26th, the usually lazy New Haven River overran its banks and pummeled the town. No one was hurt, perhaps because the waters crested between 1:30 and 4:30 in the morning, so the roads along the river were quiet. But the rushing waters carved chasms in adjacent paved streets--one hole was an astonishing forty-five feet wide and thirty feet deep--and swept away steel and cement bridges that had stood for decades. Homes beside the river were flooded, and the banks were narrowed: Houses once ten to fifteen feet from the edge were now within thirty-six inches.

  And though huge chunks of paved roads were chewed away and a pivotal bridge was destroyed, without question the greatest public casualty was that library: a library that doesn't bother with cards, because everyone knows everyone's name. Lost in the flash flood were nearly five thousand books, or eighty percent of the collection. Gone was the entire children's section--every book that wasn't checked out. Gone were first editions by Vermont writers Rowland Robinson and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

  And gone was the library itself, the room by the river that had housed all those books for the last sixty-five years. The building was still standing once the water had receded, but the librarian, Linda Norton, vowed that she would never put books back in the room on the banks of the river.

  The morning after the flood, when the rain had finally stopped and the New Haven River had fallen back behind its banks, a good part of Lincoln gathered at the library to begin sorting through the mess. As I watched my neighbors work, I was reminded of Bradstreet's lo
ss and what her neighbors must have found and felt the next day.

  Certainly, none of my friends had ever seen so many ruined books, and they were stunned. They moved inside the library with robotic deliberation, lifting from the floor the card catalogs, which had been spilled by the waters like ransacked dresser drawers, and tossing the books--saturated with river water and coated with mud--into blue recycling tubs.

  Among the people who had come to clean up the mess and salvage whatever they could were teenagers and elementary school students, as well as senior citizens in their seventies and eighties. Many of them worked there all of Saturday, and then came back for more on Sunday.

  It has been almost four months since that flood, and still I'm not sure which was more wrenching: the morning after the library was swamped, when my neighbors and I could see and touch the thousands of books that were destroyed, or the odd hollow that we endured in July, when the reality of a life without a library hit home.

  Though Norton reopened a minimalist interpretation of her once splendid collection in the upstairs of the town hall in the middle of August--and though the community has embarked upon a capital campaign to replace the books that were ruined and to construct a new building in a new location--all of us in Lincoln learned this summer exactly what it meant to live in a village without a library.

  We all understand on some level that there is something sacred about a book. Few people, after all, collect first editions of videocassettes or look for signed copies of CDs. So a roomful of books--especially a roomful of shared books, of books that have been savored and read and literally touched by one's neighbors--is particularly magical.