The Great Northern Express (5 page)

“What's so funny?” said the indignant landowner.

“I'm sorry,” I told her, clambering up the bank. “I caught my first trout right here when I was four. This is where my uncle and dad and I used to come to listen to ballgames on the car radio.”

At this point I think “Mrs. Armstrong” realized that, whoever or whatever I might be, I was relatively harmless. A calculating
tone crept into her voice as she said, “Actually, I'm not around all the time. I live in New York City. I'll tell you what,” she continued. “You're welcome to fish up here if you'll keep an eye on my property. You know, notify me if you see anybody suspicious-looking.”

By then, however, I was hotfooting it back to the Loser Cruiser. Ten seconds later I was bouncing down the old logging road and waving out the window to the Battle-ax.

Yet as I drove back over to the Thruway, leaving the tiny mountain hamlet I'd left behind all those years ago, I knew I was taking along some unfinished business.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, or if it isn't it should be, that lighting out on a road trip is almost never the wrong thing to do. The Blackfoot Indians knew this back when the only roads were buffalo trails. They had plenty of bison to hunt right in their own backyard, but frequently they would range over hundreds and even thousands of miles just to see what they could see. We hardly ever regret a road trip, and on the best ones, no matter the vicissitudes of the highway, the times, our age or career or health, there comes a moment when we know that it was
exactly
the right thing to do.

For me, on the Great American Book Tour, that moment came in about as unlikely a place as I can imagine. Late in the afternoon on the hazy June day when I was harried out of my hometown by the Battle-ax, I found myself traipsing from bookstore to bookstore in New York City. I was thinking of what
my uncle and I had planned to do here—visit the great writer Joe Mitchell's beloved fish markets, have a look at the Battery, immortalized by Herman Melville in
Moby-Dick
—when I stopped in my tracks in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Surrounded by honking delivery trucks, street vendors, tourists, homeless people, and fans in Derek Jeter sweatshirts hustling to catch the subway out to the stadium for that night's Yankee game, I stood stock-still. Staring at me from less than one hundred feet away crouched the two lions I'd first seen as a boy of six, holding my uncle's hand and wondering if they were getting ready to spring. Not that I was all that worried. If the big cats attacked, I had no doubt that Reg could handle them, just as he had that assailant in the grocery store, whom he'd beaned with the can of corn.

“Get out of the way, Clyde, you're not home in East Jesus,” a cab driver screeched as he swerved around me.

I did as he said. Then stood on one of the busiest sidewalks in America, looking at those lions. And right then, I knew that setting out on this improbable journey, at this fraught juncture of my life, had been exactly the right decision.

I have to confess that I'm no fan of misogynistic old Paul (formerly Saul). I've always suspected that on the road to Damascus, he was either falling-down drunk or struck by lightning. How else to account for his promptly going out and inventing a new religion that would consign me, for the better part of my youth, to that exquisitely cruel inner circle of Hades known as Sunday school? Still, personal epiphanies do happen. I experienced a small one in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library that day. And I'm pretty sure I'd had another one, many years before.

On the day of our wedding, Phillis and I drove from upstate
New York to the Northeast Kingdom, just as we had done in the spring for our teaching interview. We arrived in Orleans around midnight, but Verna, our new landlady and soon to be our dear friend, was waiting up for us. “Welcome home, Moshers!” she called out as we approached her lighted porch. “Welcome home.”

Until that moment we'd had doubts, and plenty of them, about deciding to come to this little outpost a few miles south of the Canadian border to start our married life. With her simple, warm greeting, Verna laid those doubts to rest. Whatever lay ahead for us, we knew that at least for the next year, this was the place we would call home.

Phillis was loyally waiting for me outside Prof's office at six o'clock on the evening of my less-than-triumphant first day as a teacher at Orleans High School. That's when the red-faced old superintendent finally finished explaining to me why lending my car to a bona fide juvenile delinquent and taking the name of the Lord in vain at the top of my lungs in front of my senior English class were pedagogically unsound decisions. Prof told me that in all his years in the school business, “No damn fool of a first-year teacher ever got off to a worse start than Howard Mosher.”

Well. Like Phillis, I was teaching six classes and supervising two study halls and a shift of lunch duty. I was coaching various sports and directing student plays. Not to mention advising the senior class, which would entail writing multiple college or job recommendations for thirty or so kids. We'd received dinner
invitations to the homes of students and offers to take us fishing and hunting. Despite my blasphemous outburst on that first day of school, the officials of the United Church of Orleans beseeched us both to teach Sunday school. “Just be sure to buy your beer in the next town over,” Prof said when I told him the news.

My problem wasn't that I did not like teaching, which I did, or even that I wasn't very good at it, which I wasn't. My main concern was that I didn't have an hour of time for my writing. Maybe that's just as well. At twenty-one I wasn't ready to write the stories of the Northeast Kingdom. But I was more than eager to hear them, and as those busy early weeks in our new home raced along, it soon became obvious that in the Kingdom we had discovered a mother lode of stories. Our landlady, Verna, a twice-widowed woman in her late sixties, had lived most of her life on a Kingdom hill farm. The morning after we moved in, she invited us downstairs to her apartment for coffee with several elderly neighbors. “These are the Moshers, Howard and Phillis,” Verna announced. “They got married yesterday in New York State and drove clear up here to Vermont to go to bed together.”

One evening not long after we arrived, Verna told us how, during the Depression, she had saved her farm by manufacturing and selling moonshine. Years later she married the revenue agent who had caught her red-handed but declined to arrest her because he knew she'd lose her home if he did. When Verna finished her story, I looked across the kitchen table at Phillis, and she looked back at me. Neither of us spoke. But I knew, and Phillis knew, not only that I
wanted
to write stories about the Northeast Kingdom, but that one way or another, I was
going
to write them.

First, though, I had to learn something about teaching, and quickly.

Phillis was a well-trained science teacher. She knew how to prepare interesting lessons, set up labs, devise fair tests. I was an aspiring storyteller who did not know jack. “Read aloud to the kids, a little every day,” Prof suggested. “Even high school kids love to be read to. Read them something they wouldn't be apt to read on their own. Dickens, Frost. They'll love it.”

Under his desk Prof kept several quarts of Budweiser. He assessed his school days according to whether they were one-quart or two-quart days. A two-quart day was a bad one. “This is number three,” he said the day he advised me to read aloud to my students.

As the fall progressed, I discovered that not only did the kids I taught like to be read to. They wanted me to
tell
them stories, especially from my boyhood in the Catskills. For survival purposes, I bribed them. Two stories a day, one at the beginning of class, the other at the end,
if
they turned in their homework on time and did their outside reading. For their listening pleasure I invented a character I called the Bad Boy of Chichester, whose life and times we followed from one misadventure to the next. The Bad Boy was a composite of several rapscallions I had hobnobbed with as a kid, mixed with a great deal of my own personal history. Of my many Bad Boy of Chichester stories, my students' favorite was “The Bad Boy and the Battle-ax.” The kids begged me to tell it at least once a week.

Now, my aforementioned junior-high English teacher, Mrs. Earla Armstrong, aka the Battle-ax, hated kids. Not just some kids—all kids, everywhere. It was confidently retailed in the Chichester of my boyhood that there was never a child Mrs. Armstrong did not despise. Her favorite prediction was that not one of us would “amount to a hill of beans.”

“Look here, Mosher,” she said one day when she apprehended me writing a Wild West outlaw tale instead of starting my homework. “If you want to write stories, you have to do three things. Read the classics. Revise your work. Write what you know. But even if you do,” she added with delphic certitude, “I very much doubt that you'll ever amount to a hill of beans.” With this happy prophecy, she tore my little attempt at a Western to shreds and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

To which I replied, “Thank you, Battle-ax.”

A dreadful silence ensued as Mrs. A, who had a cruel flair for the dramatic, let that “Battle-ax” hang on the dusty air of the classroom. Then she nodded grimly, marched back to the Bad Boy's desk, and, without breaking stride, belted him smack upside of the head with her big, hard, meaty hand, knocking him clean out of his seat onto the floor. Seeing many fine constellations never viewed by any astronomer, ancient or modern, the Bad Boy of Chichester struggled to his feet, slumped into his chair, and raised his hand.

“What now?” she said.

“Thank you, Battle-ax,” I said again, to the horror of everyone, most of all myself. “I deserved that.”

And I will be damned if the old buzzard didn't hammer me again, knocking me into the
other
aisle.

Two quick footnotes. When I complained about Mrs. Armstrong to my father, by then the school principal, he readily agreed that she was a battle-ax but suggested I not call her one to her face again. Many years later, when I resurrected Mrs. A as the draconian schoolteacher in my novel
Northern Borders
, she was the only real person I ever used in a work of fiction without changing her name. I don't think I did this for spite. By then Mrs. Armstrong had long since been recruited to lord it over some unruly classroom in the celestial beyond. The truth
is that I simply could not think of my fictional schoolteacher-character as anyone other than Earla Armstrong, whose advice to me about writing stories remains, to this day, the best I have ever received: “Read the classics. Revise your work. Write what you know.”

What else can I say? Thank you, Battle-ax.

The novel I'd been searching for over the past thirty years certainly wasn't a classic. Not, at least, in the sense that Mrs. Earla Armstrong had meant. (Mrs. A read
Pride and Prejudice
and
Emma
at her desk during lunch hour while sipping coffee laced with gin out of an enormous black thermos.) The book I was looking for was a comic novel about a Canadian con man, set during World War I and the Great Depression. I'd loved it, just roared over page after page, but I had loaned it to my mother-in-law, who loaned it to a schoolteacher friend, who passed it along to someone else, and
do
you think that I could remember either the title or the author? My search for that damn novel had, over the years, turned into a quest, and if every journey is to some extent informed by a private agenda quite different from its stated purpose, my private agenda on the Great American Book Tour was to find that con-man story.

What better places to look than the great independent bookstores I was visiting, sometimes several a day? Not that I really expected to find the book. The search had become an end in itself, a perfect excuse to haunt the fiction sections of bookstores, new and used, and libraries, small and large. While I love to write, and can do so almost anywhere and under almost any circumstances, like many other writers of my acquaintance, I live to read. There's no place I'd rather hang out than a bookstore or library.

I didn't find the con-man novel in the extensive fiction section of 192 Books in New York City, where I had a terrific event on the evening after my visit to the Catskills. Or in the public library on Fifth Avenue, where the marble lions kept their own counsel and were of no help to me at all. Nobody at Chester County Book and Music, the wonderful indie on the western outskirts of Philadelphia, had heard of it, though my bookseller friend Michael Fortney suggested that after I got home from my tour, I should send a summary of the story to the book-search Web site
ABE.com
and see what I could find out.

No luck at Baltimore's fine Ivy Bookshop or at the world-famous Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Washington. Just good, lively book discussions at every indie on my itinerary, and several copies of my latest book sold at each store. Right now I was walking along the dusky side streets of Washington, trying to remember where I'd left the Loser Cruiser, when, hello, what's this? In the gutter near a speed bump, I noticed a green Vermont license plate: my own. Evidently the plate had fallen off earlier that evening.