The Great Northern Express (23 page)

True, I hadn't found the elusive Canadian novel I'd been looking for for thirty-some years. But what the hey. This close to a university library, why not try once more?

I went in, poked around in the fiction section, and scanned some
New Yorker
reviews from the fall of 1977, when I was pretty sure the con-man book had been published. Nothing. Then I checked the baseball scores and standings in William Kennedy's former newspaper, the
Times Union
. I was thinking about baseball, Uncle Reg, and, fleetingly, my canceled legacy, when the dimmest of dim recollections flared up in the recesses of my mind. It was as if some part of me
knew
something of
tremendous importance that I hadn't yet consciously processed. I walked over to the information desk. How far back, I inquired, did the library's files of SUNY Albany master's theses go? The young man at the desk wasn't sure, but after I explained what I was looking for, he punched the name I gave him into his computer, made a quick note to himself, and told me he'd be back.

At length the librarian returned with a cardboard box. “Is this by any chance what you're looking for?”

The flaps, as I recall, were fastened with twine, like the twine Francis Phelan found on Broadway to tie up his poor broken shoe. Inside, wrapped neatly in plain brown paper, was a hefty manuscript. The title page read “The Mountains Look Down: A Study of a Catskill Village. A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the N.Y. State College for Teachers in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Education. By Reginald R. Bennett.” What followed was, as nearly as I could determine, Reg's long-missing history of Chichester. It began with the stately, assured cadences I remembered from my early boyhood when Reg first read me his stories: “In the winter of 1863, a man came west from the Hudson River, traveling by easy stages, and slowly, with horse and sleigh, to the foothills of the Catskills.” I could scarcely believe it. Searching for one book, I had found another, infinitely more precious and personal. I had found the book whose stories, so long ago, had inspired me to write my own. The stories that I had supposed to be lost forever.

The manuscript was about five hundred pages long. The librarian ran off a copy for me, for which I paid thirty dollars—the last cash in my wallet. Then I walked out of the library into the cool fall evening with my legacy.

How do you know when you've finished a story? In real life, after all, stories tend not to have well-defined endings. There is always one more thing to tell. And that is true in the case of Reg's legacy. Up on that mountainside looking down on the village of Chichester before he died, just prior to Reg telling me he had something important to say and then apparently changing his mind, he asked me a question.

“Howard, do you think Margaret loves me?”

I am far from proud of some of the things I did and said and thought in regard to the matter of my disinheritance. But I am glad to report that, in reply to this question, I said, without hesitation, and meaning it as much as I've ever meant anything, “Yes. I know she does.”

Reg nodded. I believe that may have been the moment when he made up his mind what to do with his property. Certain
mysteries remain, as they are apt to with true stories. Where
did
Reg's fly rods and first-edition books and manuscript go? Why did Margaret get married and divorced in less than a year? What was the true nature of Reg's undeniable love for her and hers for him? Was she a surrogate daughter? Were they lovers? I'll never know. The point is that Reg had trusted me to understand his decision.

At last I did.

I didn't sleep much that night at my Motel 6 in Albany. I was too excited about discovering Reg's book and about going home. Around three a.m. I got up for good and headed north. Up through the dark foothills of the Adirondacks and on into the Green Mountains of Vermont. The two-lane mountain road coming into Irasburg from the west cuts across a saddle, where I pulled over to watch the sun rise on the Kingdom. From here, in the chilly September dawn, I could hear the factory whistle in Orleans, five miles to the east.
Welcome home, Moshers. Keep the kids out of the mill
.

I could see the woods northeast of town where, long ago, Verna made moonshine to feed her family and save her farm.

Closer by was the village where Phillis and I have now lived for more than thirty years, with its brick store and post office and scattering of white houses around the common. Just south
of the green sits our old farmhouse. And, between the foot of the mountain and the town, the cemetery where, a few weeks before I left for the Great American Book Tour, Phillis and I bought our plot and commissioned a bench with our names and birth dates and a heart carved between them.

Snap
.

I looked to my right and there he was in the catbird seat, cracking open his first tall boy of the morning.

“I was hoping you'd show up again,” I said. “Back in Montana when you made off with my fly rod? What was it you called out to me when I asked you about the unfinished business with my uncle?”

The West Texas Jesus raised his Corona to me and then, if I'm not mistaken, to the panoramic vista of the Northeast Kingdom spread out before us in the sunrise. “What I said,” he told me, “was go back to the Kingdom and write about it.”

And with that he slipped away, leaving me to drive the last mile home to Phillis.

A few weeks after he got back to Vermont, Harold Who located a fine regional publisher specializing in Catskill Mountain history and literature, and in due time his uncle's book,
The Mountains Look Down
, was well published and enthusiastically received.

At about the same time that Reg's book came out, I discovered, through
ABE.com
, that damnable Canadian novel, a picaresque romp called
Farthing's Fortune
. I am delighted to report that I liked it just as much as I had three decades before.

Monty the snake got thirsty and came out of the ductwork. To celebrate, I ordered for Phillis a life-size stuffed emperor penguin from Anderson's Bookstore in Naperville, Illinois. Also, I presented her with an eight-by-eleven framed photograph of me reading to several of his feathery brood one rainy night on
the outskirts of Chicago. It is my favorite photograph from the Great American Book Tour.

I still have not heard from Garrison Keillor. But after apologizing to Fred Gustenson, I feel that I have done about as much as I can.

The jury is
still
out on the long-term results of my MacArthur Fellowship. It always is, with any kind of cancer. So far so good, however, and as my friend from West Texas might and, come to think of it, did once say, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. To which I will take the liberty of adding, the joy of the day as well.

$25.
RUNS GOOD. DEMO DERBY?

This, of course, was Phillis's idea. The day after I got home from the book tour, we stuck the sign on the catbird-seat window of the Loser Cruiser, now parked on the front lawn. Within five minutes, two pickups had pulled into our driveway and four teenage boys were kicking its tires and squabbling about who'd gotten there first. The Cruiser took second in the preliminary heat of that year's demolition derby at the Orleans County Fair, a fitting Kingdom County conclusion to a remarkable twenty-year run.