The Great Northern Express (21 page)

I probably could not do anything to reclaim the house and property, even if I were disposed to try. But I had to find out what had become of Reg's memoir of our hometown.

Clearly, it was not going to be easy.

I did not need a GPS to notify me that I was heading west again. Nor did I need a West Texas Jesus, an Oliver Sacks, or my deceased uncle to tell me that by doing so I was pressing my luck and the Loser Cruiser's. Probably I was pressing my luck by including Minnesota on my itinerary to begin with, given the highly problematic and personal nature of my mission. Nevertheless, I was determined to seek out Mr. Garrison Keillor, fellow author and host of the delightful
Prairie Home Companion
radio show, and, Red Sox cap in hand, apologize to him.

Dawdling along through the big woods of Aldo Leopold's and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Wisconsin, I half-hoped I'd be late arriving in St. Paul and therefore not have time for the apology before my event that evening. But like all of us sorry Lords of the Moss, yea, back to the peat dwellers themselves, no doubt, I am—for better or for worse—compulsively punctual. I hit St.
Paul right on schedule in the late afternoon, with enough time to scout up Mr. Keillor and try to set things right between us.

To this day, I cannot think about this matter without the utmost mortification. Sackcloth and ashes don't begin to convey it. “Blockhead” is the word that springs to mind, and I don't mean the gracious Garrison K. Some years ago, a prominent Vermont bookseller invited Keillor to visit her store. She received this reply:

Oh, dear. The gentle irony. The devastating good humor. The sheer writerly
genius
of this kindly and unanswerable put-down to that churl from Vermont, Howard Frank Mosher. And then, wouldn't you know, it got up on the billion-tongued Net, where any damn body could, and did, Google it. Trouble was, rack my memory and conscience though I did, I couldn't remember saying such a thing. I enjoyed Keillor's Lake Wobegon novels and his show. I admired his tireless efforts on behalf of
artists and the arts, not to mention his fine St. Paul bookstore, Common Good Books. Nor could I recall using the nail-in-the-coffin phrase. Gloomy, morbid, and dispiriting, it runs against my grain. Straightaway I wrote to Mr. Keillor, care of
Prairie Home Companion
, to apologize for the misunderstanding and exonerate myself. I received no reply.

Accordingly, and exactly as a person with a very guilty conscience would do, I wrote again. I hate self-exculpatory letters. So this time I admitted that, in a hideous, inexcusable lapse of manners and sanity, I
just might
have said that awful thing. The second letter—abject, reeking of the shameful “I'm sorry if you were offended” genre, as if anyone wouldn't be—was even worse than the first. Again, no response. “This Vermont character, Mosher, is a bad human being and a kook,” I could hear Keillor's nice Lutheran secretary saying as she tossed the letter into the file marked “Bad Human Beings and Kooks.” I had only one recourse left. I must
look up
Brother Garrison in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and personally apologize to him for what I was now 99.9 percent sure I'd said. Said out of pure, mean-spirited, smart-aleck, vicious, green-eyed jealousy.
If thy tongue offend thee, Harold, pluck it out
. Yes, yes, I'd do that, too, right on his show if he wanted me to. But perhaps the apology might suffice, and it would be nearly as painful.

GENERAL FICTION AND NON-FICTION, GOOD POETRY, CLASSICS ALL SIZES, QUALITY TRASH
, announced the sign in the window of Common Good Books. Of course, Garrison had composed it. I laughed at “Quality Trash” despite myself, but the store, located in a small shopping area, is at the end of a long corridor that resembled nothing so much as Stephen King's Green Mile. Astonishingly, my own books were well represented there.
Gathering them up to take to the counter to sign before asking directions to the
Prairie Home Companion
studio, I turned and nearly bumped into someone I recognized. I just couldn't think of his name. A middle-aged, midwestern-looking chap, very probably a walleye-eating minister, with a youthful cowlick and a benign countenance. My God. It was Garrison.

I took a deep breath and, with the do-or-die rapid-fire chagrin and unspeakable remorse of a wicked sinner at the pearly gates, I blurted out, “Mr.-Keillor-I'm-Howard-Frank-Mosher-and-I-owe-you-a-huge-apology-I'm-sure-I-did-say-that-bad-thing-about-you-coming-to-Vermont-and-out-of-context-it-must-have-sounded-even-worse.”

On I blabbed, while kind, friendly, erudite Garrison, the host of
Prairie Home Companion
, the author of many funny novels, looked—puzzled. “I'm afraid I don't—” he started to say.

“No, no, no,” I sputtered, waving, as if to avert an imminent train wreck. I was off and running again. Then I stopped. Grinned. And said, “Hey, Garrison. I'm sorry I shot my stupid mouth off.”

We shook hands. Mr. Keillor still seemed a bit baffled. “Excuse me,” he said. “Who did you say you were?”

“Howard Mosher. Howard Frank Mosher? From Vermont?”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry, Mr. Mosher. I think you've mistaken me for someone else. My name's Fred Gustenson. I'm over from Thief River Falls for a convention. I came in here looking for a copy of
Eat, Pray, Love
for my wife.”

Prairie Lights. What a gorgeous name for a novel or a poem or, in the case of downtown Iowa City's long-time literary gathering place, a bookstore. Prairie Lights Books is one of my favorite independents anywhere, but what did I encounter in Iowa City this Saturday afternoon but an angry outpouring from the university stadium, a vast army of the Hawkeye faithful, absolutely furious because their football team had just lost a conference game. The blasting horns, the squealing brakes, the snarls of starting-and-stopping SUVs—why did everyone in this pancake-flat prairie town need a four-wheel-drive SUV?—the scrumming melee and red-hot, palpable despair unique to disappointed college football enthusiasts and European soccer fans. And there in the catbird seat beside me, just when I least wanted to see him, was the West Texas Jesus, struggling to wrench the
cap off a bottle of pale ale from an upscale local microbrewery with the seatbelt clip.

“You got a church key on you, bub?” he said.

I didn't, but he finally got the seatbelt clip to work, whereupon he chugged down half of that ale in three long gulps.

While we waited for the bottleneck outside the football stadium to clear, the West Texas Jesus picked up my copy of Marilynne Robinson's
Home
, on the front seat between us. “What's this about?” he asked.

As I told him about Robinson's Boughton and Ames families and the doomed attempts of Jack Boughton and his sister Glory to return to the rural Iowa village of Gilead to make new lives for themselves, he finished his ale and pried open another. Now he was riffling through Richard Dawkins's latest,
The God Delusion
, which I'd bought in Minneapolis at Garrison Keillor's Common Good Books.

I shut off the Cruiser so it wouldn't overheat in the traffic jam and, to make conversation, asked the West Texas Jesus which side of the debate over intelligent design he came down on. He thought a minute, then tapped the cover of the Dawkins book. “I'm a man of my times, I reckon. Always was—‘render unto Caesar,' et cetera. I don't have any big quarrel with this fella. Nothing in his book changes what I said about doing unto others, does it?”

I acknowledged that the theory of random natural selection, as I understood it, in no way contradicted the Golden Rule. But, connoisseur of paradoxes that he was, my old road bud wasn't finished. Holding his now nearly empty second pale ale up to the late-afternoon sunlight, as we finally started to creep forward, he said, “Then again, you ask me,
this
bad boy is the best evidence I know of a
very
intelligent de—SON OF MAN, HIT YOUR BRAKES!” I did. So did everyone else. All horns went
silent. A cathedral quietude fell over the clogged main drag in front of the stadium. Not one $30,000 suburban vehicle moved an inch.

I craned my head out the Cruiser window. About a hundred yards ahead, a mama Canada goose was leading one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—count them,
nine
—fluffy yellow goslings from a second brood across the busiest street in Iowa that afternoon. Oh, America. Thoreau was surely right. The sun
is
a morning star. There
is
more day to dawn—randomly or otherwise.

Away up north in Petoskey, Michigan, where, as a boy, Ernest Hemingway summered with his family, I spent several happy hours the following afternoon walking the shore of the freshwater sea that is Lake Michigan. That evening, during the Q and A after my reading at Petoskey's excellent independent bookstore, McLean and Eakin, I related how I'd imitated first Hemingway and then Faulkner and then
both
of them.

In the spring of 1965, in the midst of struggling to find my own writing voice, getting my seniors ready for graduation, finishing my master's thesis, and dithering about the Pennsylvania fellowship and the rest of my life, I sat down one evening at the kitchen table to have another go at the novel I was trying to write. It was raining, the first soft spring rain of the year, the sort that stirs up the trout and makes them bite. For once, though, I wasn't thinking of fishing. Some time passed, and suddenly I
realized I had written the opening pages of my book. Not from Hemingway's point of view. Not from Faulkner's. From
mine
. “My father was a man of indefatigable optimism,” I'd begun. And, though another fifteen years would elapse before I finished and published
Disappearances
, my first novel, I knew that with that sentence, I'd found my voice.

I jumped up and sprinted the three steps into our kitchen and read my pages aloud to Phillis. When I finished, she smiled and said, “Only in the Kingdom, sweetie.”

Not long after my aunt Elsie died, Reg visited his dentist for a checkup. A young female technician who had just started work there remarked that she had never met a person his age—he was in his early eighties—with such excellent teeth. Reg was smitten. From that day on, Margaret was all he could talk about. She was beautiful. She was an amateur golf star. It went without saying, though Reg did say it, and many times, that she was an expert dental technician. She was well traveled. And she was keenly interested in Reg's stories of Chichester and in Reg himself.

In due time Phillis and I met Margaret. She and Reg visited us in Vermont, and everything he had said about her appeared to be true. It was also true, as my father remarked, that around her, Reg acted like an infatuated teenager.

Margaret said little about herself, and only very diffidently. There was, I thought, a certain watchfulness about her. I did
not think then, nor do I now, that she was a gold digger. She was simply an attractive young woman who had formed a close friendship with a much older man. Reg had been miserably lonely since Elsie's death. He was not lonely now.

Over the next year, my uncle's infatuation with Margaret did not lessen. She told him that as a little girl on a camping trip to the ocean, she had seen her father drown. Reg acknowledged to me that Margaret probably perceived him as a replacement. At the same time, he hoped she might have romantic feelings for him. The following spring he returned to the Catskills after spending several months in Florida to discover that Margaret had married a man her own age. There were already serious problems with the relationship. Recently, she had discovered that her new spouse was an alcoholic. When Margaret wanted out of the marriage, Reg found her a lawyer and paid for her divorce. Several years later I made that last visit to the Catskills before his death, when he told me I would “understand.” Then came his final illness, the arrival of the will, and, soon afterward, the brusque telephone call from the executor informing me that Reg had deeded his house and property to Margaret just a few weeks before he died.

What distressed me most was the disappearance of the Chichester manuscript,
The Mountains Look Down
. In fact Reg wrote beautifully. I feared that those stories chronicling the history of our hometown might be lost forever—a loss that I found almost unbearable to contemplate. By contrast, my quest for the long-lost Canadian con-man novel I'd given away seemed trivial. All trace of Reg's stories seemed to have vanished as completely as the mountain characters he'd written about so lovingly, the long-defunct woodworking factory, and much of the village of Chichester itself. How could I fulfill my promise to Reg to publish
The Mountains Look Down
if I couldn't even locate the manuscript?

Fess up, Harold. Prostate radiation treatment knocks the stuffing clean out of a guy. The first bombardment of rays tears the electrons off the molecules of the outer cells of the prostate and then, by the West Texas Jesus, that humming, behemoth X-ray machine rotates around and around you, zapping the now unprotected cancer cells and zapping, quite literally, the you-know-what out of your bowels. Oh, yes. Desperate situations do indeed require desperate remedies, and I will admit that, after forty-four rounds with Mr. Varian EX, followed by my zigzagging 20,000-mile odyssey through Bookland America, I was beat. I was counting the remaining days and wondering if I (and the LC) had the gas to get home.