The Last Best Place (28 page)

Then he found the tiny island of Eastern Points by Blue Rocks, where the strangest thing happened. “I fell in love with the most amazing family of men & women the like of which I have never in my life seen,” he wrote to a friend after meeting the Masons, a fishing clan who had lived there for generations. Nothing figurative—he seemed to have meant love of the head-over-heels, pain-in-the-solar-plexus variety. Francis and Martha, the parents, “are so utterly & completely free of neuroses of any sort, and maintain an enviable balance between the material & the spiritual worlds that they symbolize for me the term, ideal,” he gushed. Their two sons drove him to even more embarrassing rapture. “I love both Alty & Donny & if I were a woman I’d have a time choosing,” he wrote, “for Alty is wild and all flair, all demonstrative. Donny is shy as a thrush and never ventures out of the deep forests of his being until he is sure that he is safe.” Just think about it for a second: this dissipated world-weary sophisticate, friend and confidant of Mabel Dodge, John Reid, Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein searching the world for something to love and finding it amongst these wild, noble folk on the South Shore with their beauty, spirituality, endurance and loathing of cheap affectation. “I feel as if I had found my chosen people,” he said in a letter to a friend back in America. “Think of me being completely happy in the arms of the Mason family.”

This was one smitten man. He boarded with the Masons for a
month, returned to New York for a show that was savaged by the critics, then headed back to Eastern Points. It was a tranquil, productive summer. He finished the last in a series of paintings begun in Gloucester, this time using the boulder-strewn landscape of Blue Rocks as a model. Evenings were quiet affairs, often spent listening to the radio in the Mason family parlour. He bragged about how he was becoming a good seaman from spending time on fishing boats and mused about building a shack near the family.

Then, the calm shattered. “I don’t want to tell you what I have to tell,” he wrote to a friend, “but a terrible tragedy has fallen on our home here, & the two big lovely boys of the family & their pretty young cousin were drown Saturday night in the teeth of the gale that swept up from Florida all along the Atlantic seaboard.” Wracked with anguish, Hartley wanted to leave, but one of the daughters persuaded him to say to provide support for the ageing parents. In despair, he closeted himself away in the boys’ old blacksmith shop, painting his brooding landscape scenes and working on a manuscript called
Cleophas and His Own
. Eventually he returned to New York. Years later he began a series of paintings based on the Masons, the first figurative works of his career, which he called a commemoration of “one of the most elevating experiences of my life—in truth the most elevating.” Finally he moved back to Maine, where he died of heart failure.

Yale got hold of the first draft of
Cleophas
. The original subtitle was “A North Atlantic Episode.” The word
Episode
has been crossed out and replaced with
Tragedy
. In the text he writes:

I came to the yarn in a round-about way after I read about how a fraudulent Toronto stockbroker had spent $200,000 for a Nova Scotia landscape of Hartley’s entitled
Church on the Moors
and wondered why I’d never heard of the painter. Today I find not a hint of his life around Blue Rocks. I do get a glimpse of what I think was the house where the old painter would have cast those amorous glances at the young fishermen. But I’m a little reluctant to go around asking members of the Mason clan about the whole business. For all I know the event could stand as some seminal event in family history. If I asked a Mason about something that happened at some particular moment in time, she might reply, “Well, let’s see, it was fifty-five years, seven months, four days and
eleven hours after that painter fella fell in love with Alty and Donny,” then shake her head.

Hartley? Everything I know about him indicates that brief period may have been
the
moment. No matter what came after—no matter how deep into despair he would sink—he would always have Blue Rocks, the Masons and the perfection they symbolized. It was something he carried with him always, like a fetish.

For Hank Snow, Nova Scotia was something altogether different. He is in his eighties now, a frail little man living in Nashville whose voice can no longer stand the strain of the hard-driving songs that are his trademark. On the South Shore of Nova Scotia, where he hails from, no one seems to remember his rough, uneducated ways, his drinking, his brawling and his monster ego. Or maybe they just love him all the more
because
of the nightmare side of the Hank Snow saga. Either way, Brooklyn has its Hank Snow Park and Liverpool the Hank Snow Country Music Centre, complete with photos of the fishing schooners he worked on, his cream 1947 Cadillac convertible, a 1928 T. Eaton Special guitar like the one he owned and a collection of Fuller brushes similar to the ones he peddled around Halifax when times were tough.

In my view the best shrine to his life and career is in Blue Rocks, at Graham “Buz” Baker’s house, which is perched atop a little hill across the road from the water. Baker is a rough-hewn Renaissance man, a seascape painter, fierce Red Sox fan and Lunenburg’s harbour master. He is also an articulate expert on the history of country-and-western music. If anyone acts as the keeper of Hank Snow’s flame
around here it is this tall, raw-boned, slightly dangerous looking redhead. Throw a Stetson on him—which is what he wears when he’s fronting his country blues combo—and he’s the mirror of one of those hungry-looking Steinbeck cowboys who showed up on the stage of the Opry the same time as Snow. Like his hero and hundreds of other Maritimers, Baker grew up in the sway of the hillbilly music of the rural South, which he heard camped in front of the radio listening to nighttime broadcasts from the Allegheny Mountains. “I think the hard times we’ve always experienced in the Maritimes breeds an interest in country music,” he says when I ask why Snow, Wilf Carter and so many other top-notch old-time C&W talents emerged from these hard-scrabble shores. “When people don’t have the money to go out and do anything else they have to entertain themselves. I’m firmly convinced that coming from here led to the blossoming of these talents. Country music is the music of the people who work close to the earth, the fishermen, the farmers, the lumberjacks, the miners, all of whom had difficult lives. Country music is just the blues with a twang.”

And Clarence Eugene Snow was born to the blues. He came into this world in a tiny house in Brooklyn, a milltown sixty miles west of Blue Rocks, in 1914, the fifth of six children born to George Lewis Snow and Marie Alice Boutilier. For some reason his schoolmates started calling him Jack. The name stuck until he began recording in 1936. By that point, he knew first-hand about struggle, misery, disappointment and the other standbys of the country songwriter’s stable. His parents had split when he was six and he
became the responsibility of an abusive grandmother who forbade him to see his mother and had him put in jail when he rebelled. By the time mother and son were reunited she had hooked up with a sociopathic fisherman who liked nothing better than to bounce the youngster off the four walls of their decrepit house.

To escape the abuse he got a job on a Grand Banks schooner sailing out of Lunenburg. He was twelve at the time, small for his age and fragile at that. But he stuck it out for four years, enduring the storms and the backbreaking work, marvelling at the sharks that followed their ship and the icebergs that seemed as high as mountains. At sea he often entertained the crew by playing the mouth organ, doing a sort of tap dance he’d made up and singing songs he had learned from his mother, including “Was There Ever a Pal Like You” and “The Wreck of the Altoona,” which he heard on the family Victrola. When the crew really liked the performance they’d give him pieces of homemade fudge and throw him the occasional nickel. He spent the $5.95 earned from his first voyage on a guitar through the Eaton’s mail-order catalogue.

Back on dry land he hustled like everyone else to cobble together a living in the Depression, trying bootlegging and diving off the wharf at Blue Rocks for nickels and dimes thrown by tourists. Once he nearly cut off his hand while splitting kindling wood and had to walk four miles in the dark to see a doctor in Lunenburg. But he was young and ambitious, dreaming of the big time, a full belly and fame. His first musical gig was a minstrel show in Bridgewater, which he performed in blackface. He was nineteen,
wearing his best suit of clothes and lugging his guitar (now upgraded to a $12.95 model) when he bluffed his way into the offices of CHNS Radio in Halifax. After hearing him play, the station’s chief engineer asked him to come back that night at seven to do a live fifteen-minute show. When the station offered him a Saturday-night spot he decided to change his stage name to Hank Snow the Yodeling Ranger after his idol Jimmie Rodgers. Soon he was spending his mornings trying to sell Fuller brushes in the slums of Halifax before heading to the radio station for a noon-hour spot as part of a combo set up to raise the profile of a company that sold a potion with “laxative qualities.”

The Gaiety Theatre in downtown Halifax offered him a three-day job performing solo before an afternoon kids’ matinee. I love the image of him showing up the first day, wearing a white satin shirt his mother made with full sleeves, a big wide collar with a red star on each tip and another big red star on each breast. The shirt had black silk laces that ran up the front just like the shirts Gene Autry the singing cowboy, wore in the movies. Snow added black dungarees with a white cotton strip sewn down each leg and an orange and red neckerchief. On New Year’s Eve he was scheduled to appear at the exclusive new Capitol Theatre. The manager took one look at his outfit and ordered him to change into an usher’s uniform before he could step on stage.

In 1936 he signed with RCA Victor and made his first records. Back in the Maritimes he started to develop a following in places like Lockeport, Shelburne, Riverport, Hubbards Cove, Chester,
Sherbrooke and Ecum Secum, where he toured with his band throughout the 1940s playing in church halls, Legions, movie theatres and garages. He added a trio of black entertainers who tap-danced and did a comedy routine. Then he got hooked on the idea of making it in the States, moving to Wheeling, W. Va., where he bought a trained horse named Shawneee, outfitted him with an expensive silver saddle and began a travelling road show. Finally he landed a job on the Grand Ole Opry. Even that didn’t help his sad little career. When Snow happened in 1950 to mention to an Opry official that he was thinking of buying a house, he was urged to hold off. In truth, Snow was on the verge of getting fired when a 45 he had written and recorded,
I’m Moving On
, took off like crazy, going number one on
Billboard
magazine’s charts for an unprecedented forty-nine straight weeks. Hank Snow had finally arrived.

“He did have talent,” Baker says, walking me through his collection of the Great Man’s memorabilia: the covers of the albums spanning the thousand-or-so songs he recorded, photos of him being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and performing at the Hollywood Bowl and the London Palladium. “But you have to remember that he is a Taurus. He has this tenacious perseverance to see something through to the end. And that is what really carried him through difficult times. And I mean he did have difficult times. Out of school when he was in grade five, a broken family, and I’ve even heard him say on stage that he carries the marks on his body from the beatings by his stepfather. Times were tough and here he is in
this backwater of a place trying to make a name for himself as the Singing Cowboy. And I think that if he hadn’t known such hard times he would not have been able to sing with such passion about it.”

I take his point. Nova Scotia left Snow one hurt, wounded man; how could it have done otherwise? Even someone as untutored in country-western music as I am realizes you’ve got to live all those things—all the pain, poverty and loneliness—to sing songs that resonate like Snow’s. Whether the price was worth it only he can say. He had no choice, of course. You can’t escape who you are; you can’t escape the place you call home; all you can do is make your peace with it.

O
UR HOUSE IN
H
ALIFAX IS A LITTLE LIKE A TIME CAPSULE
. W
HEN
I
LOOK OUT
our living-room window I can see the classroom where I attended grade one and the steps where, when I was extra-good, the teacher let me clean the chalkboard erasers after school. Sometimes I’ll see the sister of the guy who that same year used a baseball bat to provide the rakishly handsome scar I bear over my left eyebrow. Sometimes standing on our back deck, performing the timeless male ritual of charring red meat over open flame, I see one of my oldest friends walking his dog on the field where we both shivered in the dark as kids sipping our first beer. Once, as I was coming out the front door, I was greeted with the wonderful sight of my old Cub leader, now in his late seventies at least, screaming down the street at the wheel of a motor scooter.