The Great Northern Express (14 page)

Here's Harold, scribbling away at a tippy table in a hole-in-the-wall breakfast joint, in my Red Sox Nation jogging sweatshirt and coffee-stained khaki jogging pants, low-cut ratty sneakers, and sweaty Sox cap. He is as yet unshaven, unbathed, and suddenly quite undone, as the counterman hollers over at him, “Hey! You there. You hungry?”

“Well, maybe in a few—”

Outside the café, two young forklift drivers were racing their loaded machines down the crowded sidewalk as hard as they could go, devil take the hindermost. I was chronicling their contest in my notebook.

The counterman's sharp eyes took in my seedy appearance.

“What are you writing?” he said.

“Oh, just some notes. Maybe for a book.”

“Right,” he said. “Everybody's writing a book these days. I'm writing one. You know how to sweep?”

“Sweep?”

He came around from behind his counter, walked fast to a little closet, and returned with a push broom. He shoved it at me handle-first. “First you sweep. Then you eat.”

The kindly counterman had assumed, not without good reason, that I was homeless (close), unemployed (closer), perhaps slightly deranged (on the verge), and
lacking the price of breakfast
. As in fact, having left my wallet back at the motel, I was. Naturally, it followed that I would claim to be a writer.

Fine. I swept the floor. It didn't take long and I was actually proud of myself. Fleetingly, I imagined a whole new career, my first honest-to-goodness real job in the real world in thirty years.

The counterman slapped down in front of me a paper plate heaped with gleaming fried eggs, several strips of crispy bacon, homemade toasted bread, and strawberry jam. He handed me
plastic tableware and a large, steaming, paper cup of delicious coffee. I enjoyed every bite, then offered to mop the floor.

“No, thanks,” said the counterman. “You can move along now and write your book. Somewhere else, not here. Goodbye. Good luck.”

“Good luck with your book, too,” I said, and headed out the door. Jack would have been proud of me, I thought. He'd swept a few floors in his day, too.

My short stint as a sweeper in Jack London Square wasn't my first foray into the janitorial field. For Christmas money in 1964, I took a temporary evening job at a downtown five-and-dime store in Newport, ten miles north of Orleans, at the south end of Lake Memphremagog.

Every day after school I parked our station wagon in the lot beside the frozen lake and made a dash for the store with the north wind howling at my back, blasting right out of Canada and producing a chill factor that would make International Falls in January seem tropical. My part-time night job consisted of general clerking, stocking shelves, unloading trucks, sweeping the old hardwood floor, and cleaning the restrooms, all for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. The store was failing and slated to close right after the holidays. My aging boss was testy and didn't like schoolteachers.

It's Christmas Eve. There's a raging blizzard outside, what in the Kingdom is called a Canadian thaw—four feet of snow and a hell of a blow—with hordes of last-minute shoppers tracking in mud, slush, and snow. I'd swab out the restrooms, and half an hour later they'd look as if Attila the Hun and his outfit had just availed themselves of the facilities. Every hour on the hour I repaired to the janitor's closet to fetch the store's single push broom. An even more feckless predecessor of mine had managed to snap off so much of the handle that it now measured slightly under two feet long. To shove it along in front of me, I had to bend way over at the waist, which delighted my boss. He began to call me Igor of the North. Over the years the horsehair bristles had curled back like gnarled fingers. If, at the end of an aisle, I turned to survey my handiwork, I'd see a diagonal line of dust, lint, sidewalk salt, and indeterminable debris that the ancient, crippled push broom simply would not pick up. My sadistic employer would chuckle. “Mr. Teacher Man,” he'd say, “you're leaving a trail. Do it again. Then get onto those restrooms. They look like hell.”

What would Philip Marlowe do? What would Jesus do? What in the name of heaven would
I
do if one of my students happened in and saw me, like Roger Miller's King of the Road, pushing broom at this dump? On Christmas Eve, no less. No sooner had that unsettling thought come to me than Prof himself stumbled through the door, three sheets to the wind and tacking down the aisle toward me like a derelict freighter headed for the breakers. “Mosher,” he shouted, “you've got to lend me five dollars so I can get my wife a box of Christly candy. I forgot it was Christmas.”

“I can't, Prof,” I said. “Not until I get paid. Can you come back in a hour?”

“No, I can't come back in an hour,” Prof roared. “In an hour I'll be passed out. You've got to help me.”

I looked beseechingly at the store manager. He smiled and held up his index finger: one more hour to go. No advance.

“Prof, I'm sorry,” I said.

“Goddamn you, Mosher,” he shouted. “I thought you were my friend. You should clean shithouses for a living. It would do you a world of good.”

With that he headed back out the door—but for once in my life, I thought of the perfect rejoinder right on the spot.

“Prof,” I called after him, just before he plunged into the raging blizzard like Lear himself, “I already do!”

Now it came to pass that HAROLD WHO and the WEST TEXAS JESUS, out cross-country joyriding, journeyed up through the land of microbreweries and vineyards and good independent bookstores, past white-capped Mount Shasta, and into that region called Oregon. And here they paused to refresh themselves at a place of rest where there were outdoor faucets gushing rust-colored water, chained-down picnic tables, and brick facilities, both for men and for women, of which HAROLD had much need to avail himself.

And as our self-styled scribe came forth from the place of ease, a great clamor arose from a hard-used station wagon that had stopped near the Loser Cruiser in the parking lot—a clamor not of timbrels and lutes, but of a much anguished voice crying out, “Bob! Bob! Take me to fucking Roseburg, Bob.”

And another voice, very wroth, shouting, “I ain't taking you nowhere, you no-good drunken son of a bitch.”

And behold, two men conducteth an affray, one inside the station wagon and well stricken with years, the other in the prime of his manhood and as tall as the cedars of Lebanon, who sought to pull the thrashing ancient out of the front seat.

And the tall man saith, in a voice as loud as the ram's horn on the day of reckoning, “I don't care if you are my brother-in-law. Get out of my car, you COCKSUCKING BASTARD.” And he would fain beat the rheumy-eyed elder, who wished nothing more than to be carried to Roseburg, and he did lay upon his shoulders and head many thudding blows, whilst a goodly number of wayfarers stood about, and were mazed, and knew not what to do. But one man in a semi hauling Douglas fir logs got on his CB and called 911 as the beating proceedeth.

Then spake the WEST TEXAS JESUS to that craven HAROLD, saying, “Best get your ass down there, boy, and put a stop to that business.”

“Hurry up,” added my uncle. “Otherwise that's going to end badly.”

Otherwise?
I was utterly persuaded that it was going to end badly whether I intervened or not. The only difference was, if I got involved, it could only end badly for
me
.

But the battle did rage on, and “Take me to Roseburg, brother Bob,” wailed the old man in the car, and he did cling to his sloshing bottle of WILD TURKEY with one hand and the steering wheel with the other, for he was much loath to be pulled out of the car of BOB. Who, in a towering rage, seized the elder's cardboard suitcase and strewed its sorry contents galley-west over the parking lot. But when BOB bent over to take his brother-in-law's leg and draw him out, the old rip's foot snapped
up and struck him full in the nose, causing BOB'S LIFEBLOOD to gush forth.

“What are you waiting for, that big fella to kill him? Get on down there,” the Undocumented Jesus said and, though much affrighted, HAROLD WHO ran toward the station wagon, not like the roebuck running to the doe at break of dawn, nor yet the fleet-footed Jacoby Ellsbury of the Boston Red Sox stealing second base, but he got there soon enough, and, NATURAL CRAVEN though he was, interposed himself between the loving brothers-in-law and lifted his hands in a placating manner and said, “Gentlemen, please. Is there some way I can be of assistance here?”

Whereupon BOB, with his bloody nose still flowing copiously, said, “Yes, you can help me drag this son of a bitch out of my car.”

At which the elderly brother-in-law rared back and hurled his now empty Wild Turkey bottle at BOB, narrowly missing HAROLD's head.

Ooo-ahh, oo-ahh, oo-ahh
, waileth the sirens of the police cars summoned by the Doug fir trucker. “Are you tied in with this outfit in the station wagon?” the first cop to arrive asked me.

“Never saw them before in my life.”

Wild Turkey, however, pointed right straight at me and shouted, “He said he'd take me to Roseburg, officer.”

The cop frowned. “You sure you want to do that, buddy?”

Off to the side, the Jesus of West Texas was nodding vigorously. I knew exactly what he was thinking. Not only did the Samaritan in
his
parable pick the robbed man up out of the road and clothe him in his own raiment and set him on his ass, he
took him to the nearest inn and paid the innkeeper in advance for extended care.

Yes, yes
, mouthed the nail-driving, pedal-steel-playing, unemployed Jesus, hands extended palms up, imploring me as if my very salvation hinged on driving this old sociopath up to Roseburg.

“I'll pass,” I told the cop.

“Good choice,” he said in his most official-sounding voice, and here, believe you me, endeth the Parable of the Reluctant Samaritan, from
The Apocryphal Gospel of BOB
.

As a teenager, I fell in love with Hemingway's early stories, set in upper Michigan. To this day I would rate them among his best work. Like many another young writer, I tried, self-consciously and futilely, to imitate Hemingway's inimitable style. For several years the sentences in my sad little shoot-'em-up Westerns and baseball and fishing stories were clipped-off sound bites, five or six words long. Except for their brevity, these snippets had no more in common with Hemingway's prose than with Sanskrit. Midway through my junior year in college, I was rescued from my slavish emulation of a writer who has never been successfully emulated by my devotion to another novelist. William Faulkner was totally different from Hemingway in his approach to writing, but after reading
Light in August
, I became a lifelong Faulkner fan. Predictably, my own sentences began to lengthen
out. By the end of the semester, a short one was a hundred words long.

In my senior year at Syracuse I took the only creative writing class of my career. I had a good and sympathetic teacher, one who had already published several prize-winning stories and a novel. For these admirable attainments, not to mention his tremendous popularity with students, he was denied tenure and summarily discharged at the end of the year. The fact that he was, so far as I know, one of only two Jewish professors in Syracuse's relentlessly Waspish English Department may have been regarded as a black mark beside his name. At any rate, he was a fine writer, a fine teacher, and a fine guy, who has long since far exceeded the literary accomplishments and reputations of his mean-spirited former academic colleagues. During the winter of 1964–65, while I was teaching at Orleans High and going through an especially bad patch in my writing apprenticeship, in which I'd produce one five-word sentence like Hemingway, followed by a five-hundred-word sentence like Faulkner, my former professor wrote to assure me that if I persisted, I'd come up with my own voice. Night after night I kept struggling to do so, while I wracked my brain each day for ways to keep the kids I was trying to teach “out of the mill.”

Like the off-again, on-again furniture factory back in Chichester, the Ethan Allen furniture mill kept Orleans alive economically. Not unionized, Dickensian in its working conditions, slouching between the river and the railroad tracks like the infamous nineteenth-century textile mills of southern New England, it was, by all accounts, a horrible place to earn one's living. Parents of backsliding offspring held up working at the mill as a fate worse than jail. Night and day, from inside our apartment across the river, we could hear the whirring
blowers on the factory roof. Their perpetual low thrum was a constant reminder of the mandate we'd been given. “Keep the kids out of the mill, keep the kids out of the mill,” murmured the big tin ventilators hunkered down on the factory roof like gargoyles, in the same part of my mind where I sometimes heard Huck Finn talking. But never the voice of my own that I was desperate to find. “Keep the kids out of the mill,” said the blowers when I sat down late at night and tried to write the stories of our new home. “Out of the mill,” chanted the blowers the next morning as I mogged off down School Street toward my day job.

Soon after the first of the year, at the advice of Prof, Phillis and I took a tour of the mill. Powdered with sawdust from head to toe, gray-faced, half-deaf, often minus one or more digits, lung-shot workers not fifteen years our senior looked ancient as they worked fast, fast, fast, doing piecework on shrieking saws, whining planers, roaring drills, and screeching edgers for wages that made my pathetic teaching salary seem princely. After the tour, “Keep the kids out of the mill” acquired a new urgency for us. But as the Kingdom winter arrived in earnest, the ever-present admonition of those blowers—I could actually hear them in my sleep—began sending me an urgent personal message. I loved working with the kids. I loved reading to them, talking to them about books, telling my ridiculous Bad Boy stories, reading the essays in which they poured out their hearts. Yet the harder I worked at teaching, the more evident it became that my heart wasn't entirely in what I was doing. Lord knows I tried. But to me teaching remained a road on the way to writing. Every day I heard more wonderful Northeast Kingdom stories crying out to be written. Yet I couldn't find the voice to write them in. Scribbling late into the night in our three-room garret,
going to sleep every night and waking up every morning to the endless chivvying of those damnable blowers—“Keep the kids out of the mill”—I began to fear that it was not only my students who were in danger of tailing a ripsaw inside that inferno for the rest of their lives. If I couldn't teach and couldn't write, I might wind up there myself.