by Jim Nisbet
By the time she was ready to give birth to her son, the letters had achieved a feverish, pellucid intensity that many of her correspondents considered madness. Indeed, the epiphanal nature of these last communications was undeniable; but if to one sort of reader they betrayed a mind no longer certain of its bearings, to another they clearly detailed an ephemeral, poetic beauty that transcended the circumstances of its production, and reception.
There was a hell of a story there, in the letters. And Jedediah had them. After Vietnam he’d gone to Ireland, and there chanced upon a remote aunt who had collected all of Maureen’s correspondence, and when she realized who Jedediah was and had spoken to him, she gave him the letters without so much as being asked. The trove was stored in a mahogany chest lined with cedar and edged with brass, wonderfully appointed, wrought by a Dublin coffin-maker especially to contain it. Inside, the letters were in neat piles, arranged by chronological order, indexed by recipient. Where possible the original envelopes were included with the letters they’d borne, with their stamps, postmarks, and signs of distant travel intact.
Merely to open this chest was to begin a journey into the past, drawn there by the mingling smells of Lebanese cedar and decaying paper. For that reason alone, Mattie cherished them. She had seen them: She’d read the whole collection four times, and certain favorites more often. Jedediah had brought them along when he returned to Washington. And, she knew, it was as much for these letters and the spirit of his mother contained by them as for any other of his qualities that Mattie thought she might be in love with Jedediah Dowd.
Maureen Dowd died giving birth to her son, much as her prescience had given her to understand she might, and she died virtually a stranger to Electric City. The boy was inversely healthy, with his father’s red hair and his mother’s green eyes. On the advice of a historically inclined foreman the bewildered Seamus named him Jedediah Smith Dowd, in honor of one of the first white pioneers to walk along the Columbia River. It took Seamus another twelve years to drink himself to death.
Jedediah subsequently found himself going through a succession of foster homes and orphanages, the last of them in Walla Walla, where he was taken in by a prison guard and his wife, a childless couple under the impression that the state adoption agency was in the business of finding good homes for indentured servants. He joined an army eager for young men, and not so eager to check facts, before he finished high school. Then he got to see Fort Bragg, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Bangkok, Southeast Asia…
“. . . Where I met him,” Scott added thoughtfully, as the car began to rock slowly up the last five miles of the washed out road that led to the front gate of the Cloverleaf. This road ended on the south bank of the Columbia, at the edge of the reservation, where there was no bridge, and since Jedediah’s was the only active ranch in the thirty tortuous miles between the highway and the river, the county didn’t pay much attention to its maintenance. “But he never told me much about his past.”
A few fence posts went by.
“Shit,” said Eddie, shaking his head. “That’s the most depressing story I’ve heard in my four thousand years as a perpetually resurrected owner of ten-year-old Chevrolets.”
“It is not,” Mattie retorted. “It’s… it’s…” The thread of her narrative at an end, she was at a loss for words.
“Like I said.”
“It’s beautiful! It tells how beauty… can occur in spite of… in spite of… maybe because of…”
“In spite of all circumstances to the contrary,” Eddie sighed.
“Yeah,” she snapped her fingers, “that’s it.”
“So what about Mrs. Dowd?”
“What about her?”
“She died.”
“No, but don’t you see?” Mattie said earnestly, “She’s alive in her letters.”
“Yeah,” Eddie responded caustically, “and Ronald Reagan’s alive in his foreign policy.”
“I’m telling you.”
“Tell her.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Dowd.”
“Tell her what?”
“Tell her nothing’s worth dying for.”
Mattie was puzzled. “She didn’t die for anything.…”
“What about the letters? Sounds to me like she died writing those letters.”
“She died while writing them.”
“Nothing’s worth dying for,” Eddie declared with finality. “Nothing.”
“That’s right,” Scott piped up. “People die all the time for exactly that—nothing.”
“Same reason they live,” Eddie muttered, looking out his window.
They’d been in the car together for nearly an hour. Neither had pressed the other for information or gossip, but, as before in the parking lot, when she had inexplicably blurted out an outrageously intimate confabulation, concerning not only herself but also Jedediah, Mattie had ingenuously begun to spin tales about life around Dip. This time she’d been a little more truthful, however, and, though she might have shown even more discretion, and confined her stories to her own life, she didn’t really see how Jedediah’s origins could embarrass or compromise him. In fact she thought it was rather a good story and, truth to tell, she considered it more the story of Maureen Dowd and her beautiful letters describing life in the Northwest in the forties than that of Jedediah’s origins. Moreover, though she didn’t say as much, it had been and remained the signal discovery in Mattie’s life, unpublished material of whose genuine literary merit she remained unshakably convinced. Of themselves the letters had plunged her into an orgy of reading of works by fractious and brilliant authors, which had come little short of alienating her from her own world as thoroughly as they had Maureen Dowd from her own. Such a find was no small event, in the life of one who had come to love literature for its own sake. And finally, Mattie had less interest in Jedediah Dowd than she did in somehow arranging to have his mother’s letters published in a fashion she felt they deserved. This had become her sole ambition; and in that respect she was profoundly grateful to Jedediah for allowing her to read his mother’s correspondence. It was only some time after her first perusal of these letters that he told her nobody else had read them since they’d left Dublin.
“Nobody?” she’d asked, frowning.
“Except you.”
“What about you?”
“Nope.”
“But,” she protested, “they’re your own mother’s letters. Beyond them, you’ll never know her.”
He dissembled. “They could be anybody’s.”
“Yeah,” she shot back, “and you could be anybody’s son.”
He smiled and indicated the shelves of pulp Western novels lining one wall of his living room. “There’s something about coherent, meaningful writing that puts me off my feed.”
There was some truth to that remark, though Mattie didn’t believe a word of it. A typical male who refused to try to understand how and what he felt about anything. She dropped the subject.
But hardly a day went by when she didn’t think about those letters. There were hundreds of pages of them. They could easily be turned into a book, and it would be a good one. She had it all planned. First there would be a Selected. Then, when the public had seen their value and was hooked, there would come the Collected. She’d often wrestled with the problem of how to effect this metamorphosis, from a box of decaying paper to a book between covers. She knew that, at the very least, they would have to be transcribed merely in order to preserve them, let alone to research, edit, and publish them, a task she would undertake with pleasure, and this transcription would have to happen soon, because, in spite of the box, the climate of Washington seemed to be having a deleterious effect on the papers within. She was sure that a little tact in the matter would overcome any reluctance Jedediah might have about the idea, but her resources were meager. A transcription would have to be computerized to be useful, and that item stopped her right there. A decent word processor and a printer cost at least two thousand do
llars. Not to mention a trip to Spokane. Or even Seattle.
But first things first. She’d already gone so far as to send off for a book out of a magazine, Writer’s Market, and then, after carefully winnowing hundreds of publishers down to a list of about twenty respectable houses expressing interest in material of the highest literary merit, she sent each a query letter, telling them briefly about these marvelous letters she’d discovered. How they were of great historical interest, coming as they did from the era of ambitious dam-building in the West. About how they were written by a sensitive soul, and a woman to boot, lost in the rough-and-tumble world of big construction, poverty, and frontier isolation. About how she’d eked out an education and a life for herself in a harsh land in spite of a brutal husband. About how she, Mattie, would like to collect the letters, edit them, and perhaps learn enough to write an informed if not scholarly introduction to them, placing the letters in their proper historical, geographical, and sociological contexts. Surely any reasonably acute publisher would be most interested in material of this quality and historical authenticity. Wouldn’t they?
At first, as advised by Writer’s Market, she sent off this query to only one publisher at a time. The first one came back in less than a week. It came back so fast she thought she hadn’t put enough postage on it. But then she saw the words rubber-stamped across the top of her carefully addressed envelope in big stencil-like letters, like the printing she’d seen on old-timey wanted posters:
UNSOLICITED MATERIAL
RETURN TO SENDER
with a little hand pointing to her, the return, address. A little daunted by this rude response, she carefully retyped the letter, with the name and address of the second publisher on her list substituted for the first above the salutation, and sent it off again. This time three months elapsed before she received a response.
Thank you for showing us your manuscript.
We regret that your book does not fit into our present publishing schedule. We are gradeful for you interest however and wish you luck in the submission of your work elsewhere.
Sincerely etc.
A little taken aback by the brusque tone of the rejection, and by the quality of its author’s grammar, spelling, punctuation, and typing, after a little scrutiny she noticed that the publisher had sent her a Xerox of a Xerox of the original, which explained its fuzziness.
Realizing that she was getting exactly nowhere, and slowly at that, she then had made copies of her query letter on the Xerox machine at the Grange office, leaving the recipient’s address blank, to be filled in later, and mailed them to all the addresses remaining on her list. Only later, browsing through the worn copy of Writer’s Market, had she discovered that this practice is called “simultaneous submission,” and is frowned on by respectable publishers as a gross impropriety on the part of an author. She hoped they wouldn’t find out.
It was as if they knew. Ten of the queries were returned unopened, nine came back with Xeroxed notes expressing disinterest in varying degrees of politeness, and four were yet to came back at all.
Thus, fourteen months had passed.
Mattie had not yet made the brave step of deciding to do the book herself, but she was close to it; in fact she was closer than she knew. Because she already believed wholeheartedly in the project, she had only to make the determination that the book was possible to produce without anyone else’s help—or, as most individuals who get into doing their own publishing come around to looking at it, without anyone else’s meddling.
But what she was thinking now, as the front end of the old Chevy dropped into a deep hole in the road, was that this relationship with Jedediah might yield nothing more than her discovery of his mother’s letters and, if that were to be the case, the two years of hesitant, almost reluctant courtship (for lack of a better word) would still have been worth the trouble.
The back end of the Chevy crashed into the hole the front end had just leapt out of.
“Damn,” said Scott, holding onto the wheel, “Jedediah must have to buy himself a new car every year, driving up and down this road.”
“It’s true, he would,” Mattie said, her voice rattling in her throat, “if he ever left the place.”
Scott twisted the wheel. “Doesn’t he come to see you?”
“Not much. I usually have to come up here.”
Scott shook his head. “Man,” he said, “that Agent Orange must have canceled Jed’s testosterone, as well as his brains.”
Eddie was sitting forward in his seat, one hand gripping its edge, the palm of the other pressed against the roof. “Normally,” he said to the windshield, the words jerking out of his throat, “normally I’d wonder where you got a word like testosterone, Scotty, but my theory is, if you rode up and down this road enough, you wouldn’t have any testosterone left at all. I think Dowd’s heavily into conservation.”
“Oh, right, thanks, Eddie,” Mattie stuttered. “Where’s that leave me?”
“The battered girlfriend,” Eddie replied. “P-persevering, f-faithful, o-o-b-bedient… One might s-s-say, s-spent in the c-cause of c-conservation.…”
Eddie’s book jumped out of his back pocket as he spoke. “Hey, Eddie,” Mattie said, catching it up just before it slid out of sight between the seat cushions, “before I kick your brains into the ditch, what’s this book you’re reading?”
“French poet,” Eddie said, not turning around, trying to keep his head from colliding with the ceiling. “Paul Verlaine.”
Chapter Eight
AND NOW, AS SO MANY TIMES BEFORE IN HER LIFE, MATTIE felt the need to be cagey.
It’s an edgy feeling, even to those accustomed to it, but due to the initial uncertainty of whether or not it’s too late to smarten up enough to survive, one sinks before one finds the edge. For someone with professional status, who has spent his life being cagey, a disingenuous hour is a wasted hour, a dangerous hour, an hour without protection. For the professional, caginess sharpens the wits. While the practice wears on the nerves of a novice, the professional thrives on it.
Mattie had some help from the environment. First, it was hot in the car, too hot to keep the windows up, so they were down. But second, this was a very dusty road. A tall plume of dust arose behind their passage and blew away to the southeast, carried by the incessant breeze, but every time Scott had to slow down for a pothole or stop completely so Eddie could get out and move a rock out of the road, the dust caught up with them and filled the inside of the car. It was everywhere, on the dashboard, on the headliner, the seat and the floor. When Eddie lowered the sunshade a cascade of dust sifted into his lap. When he sat back down on the seat after getting out to move a rock, a little cloud of dust rose around him. All of this contributed to the three passenger’s general discomfort. They squinted, looked generally weary, sometimes muttered grumpily. But the conditions also allowed them to mask whatever true feelings any of them might have cared to conceal. Thus, as Mattie held Eddie’s copy of The Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine against the seat with one hand, holding the other against the roof of the car to steady herself against the rough ride, the bead of sweat that suddenly sprang from her brow and began to work its way through the thin film of dust on her temple, before darting suddenly into and stinging her eye, might easily have been a direct result of their uncomfortable circumstances. Mattie knew better. She was sure that there was no way that a sudden renaissance of interest in the poetry of a man whose reputation had generally spent all of the last hundred years languishing in the shadow of his more famous coeval, Arthur Rimbaud—“Poet and Explorer,” it says on the plaque on the side of Rimbaud’s mother’s house in Charleyville, but although his appeal needs no enhancing it just as easily might read “Gunrunner, Guttersnipe”—no way, she was sure, that this sudden revival of interest, if such it could be termed, was going to have its origins in Dip, Washington.
Yet today she had heard Paul Verlaine’s name mentioned twice and it wasn’t even suppertime. Before today, the last time she’d come
across the name had been in college, eleven years ago. Her literary interests had since strayed far afield from the endeavors and antics of the so-called French Symbolists. Mattie preferred bucolic novels of manners by the likes of Jane Austen, of whom in truth there are none “like,” and in the last two years had pursued a reading list dictated mainly by the letters of Maureen Dowd, otherwise diverging narrowly into the histories of the Columbia Basin, Grand Coulee Dam, and Ireland in the 1930’s.
So that Mattie Brooke came up with a spontaneously guarded response to this spontaneously unguarded discovery. She pretended she’d vaguely heard of Verlaine, but expressed her avid interest only in the terms familiar to anyone who is a compulsive reader. While, at the same time, she wondered what in the world this fellow Eddie could possibly have in common with Tucker Harris, other than Paul Verlaine and—herself?
“Really?” she chirped, “Paul Verlaine? French?” She opened the book and began to browse through its pages. Not a word on them made sense. Her interest sounded pretty faked to her ears.
“A fun guy,” Eddie said, “although his erotic works are generally suppressed from the tonier university editions.”