The Great Northern Express (6 page)

Nearby a tow truck was bellying up to my ancient Chevy. Two burly men with shaved heads, resembling nothing so much as a World Wrestling Federation tag team, got out and eyed the Cruiser. “There's hardly enough left of her to hook onto,” one of them remarked.

“Excuse me,” I called out. “That's my car. Is it parked illegally?”

“It's abandoned illegally,” the larger tag team member said. “No license plate.”

I waved the battered plate I'd salvaged from the gutter. “It fell off. Back up the street.”

The guys continued to search for a place sufficiently rust-free to attach the tow hook.

“For God's sake,” I said. “I'm a novelist from Vermont. Out on a book tour. I've been signing books at the store around the corner.”

And I will be hornswoggled if the head WWF brother didn't unhook my car, straighten up, grin at me, and say, “Oh, Politics and Prose? Why didn't you say so? My wife and I buy all our books there. Have for years. What's the name of yours?”

The following morning, on the pretext of doing research for his Civil War novel-in-progress, Harold Who drove over to the Manassas National Battlefield Park at Bull Run. Where, almost a century and a half ago, his great-great-great-grandfather, one Padraig Mosher, fresh from County Cork and newly enlisted in the preening New York Zouaves, took to his heels at the first volley, leaped Bull Run Creek in a single bound, and skedaddled back to Washington in record time.

I drove around the battlefield with an eye out for anything that might work its way into my story. Should my Vermont hero come this way? Should he participate in the Battle of Bull Run? Catch a glimpse of fiery old Stonewall harrying my fleet-footed ancestor back to the Union capital? On that sunny June morning nothing jumped out at me as potential material. Until, that is, I approached the creek my forebear reportedly had vaulted—a
feat no gazelle could accomplish—and noticed a dozen or so cars backed up before the bridge. Was this a historical reenactment? I detest historical reenactments.

On the bridge, basking in the sunshine, sat a monstrous snapping turtle.

“Go ahead,” said my uncle. “Show these city slickers how to handle this situation.”

I got out of the car and walked up to the reptile, which must have weighed a good thirty-five pounds. She was covered with moss and creek scum and had wise, courageous, no-nonsense eyes. “Good morning, turtle,” I said.

Mrs. Snapper was unimpressed. So unimpressed that she opened her cotton-white mouth and gave out a hiss like a steam kettle. I sprang back, in the grand old tradition of Grandpa Padraig, to considerable laughter from the occupants of the nearby cars.

Approaching the turtle again, I distracted her with my left hand and, as I'd seen my uncle do any number of times, lifted her by the tail with my right hand. Holding her well away from my legs, I started off down the bank toward a sandy little spit along the creek.

I don't know if you've ever tried to pick up an irascible snapper weighing thirty-five pounds, hold the thing out so it can't take a fist-sized chunk of your calf, and walk a hundred feet with it. But suddenly, from a Hummer on the bridge, came a woman's angry voice. “Put that animal down. I'm going to report you on my cell phone to the Humane Society.”

Oh, gladly, madam, gladly
. Gingerly, I released the now-furious snapper on the nice warm sand beside the stream and started back toward my car. Why were the spectators laughing and honking their horns? They were laughing and honking because, posting along behind me hell-bent for election, came
Mrs. Turtle, determined to get back to the road, where she'd wanted to lay her eggs in the first place.

Once again I distracted her with my left hand. Once again the Samaritan in the Hummer shrieked at me. This time it was something about the SPCA.

I ran, yes, ran with the hissing, snapping, washtub-size turtle—how Reg would have laughed—toward a reedy swale upstream, where I deposited my reptilian friend for better or for worse, then bolted for the Loser Cruiser. Horns, mock applause, more threats from Mrs. Battle-ax Armstrong's sister up on the bridge. Padraig Mosher probably ran faster, spurred on as he was by the Rebel cries. But he was no more relieved to reach the safety of our embattled nation's capital than I was to pile into the Cruiser and move on down the line on my Great American Book Tour.

During my just-concluded treatment, I too had chosen not to pore over my X-ray images and medical charts, though what was brave defiance and profound faith in Reynolds Price's case was something closer to terror-stricken denial in mine. Still, I found a certain amount of sneaky self-deception useful, so long as it didn't preclude treating the problem immediately. For instance, information I'd gleaned on the Web from the National Cancer Institute stated that radiation usually makes patients “very tired.” How could I possibly set out on a hundred-city book tour in a state of fatigue? No, no, I resolved, I damn well was
not
going to be very tired. Or, if I was, I wasn't going to admit it to myself. As for the “diarrhea and frequent and uncomfortable urination” that the booklet
What You Need to Know about Prostate Cancer
warned I would almost certainly experience, well, I'd deal with it, too—as long as I didn't have to dwell on it.

Toward this end, I found that the following activities kept me from perseverating on my disease during my fellowship period:

One evening on our way back from an afternoon of hunting partridge, I told Prof the “Bad Boy and the Battle-ax” story. A few days earlier I'd expressed to him my frustration over not finding suitable literary subjects for my students to write about. “Well, maybe the old Battle-ax was on to something,” he said. “Try getting the kids to write about what they know, as she put it. Their own experiences. Then you can nudge them along to write about the books they're reading.”

Prof had thick white hair parted in the middle, like a headmaster from the 1930s. He wore large, square, horn-rimmed glasses perched low on the bridge of his bulbous two-quart-a-day nose. At six feet three (his boys, Big and Little, were an inch or so taller) and with the build of an NFL linebacker, he'd been a standout, three-sport high school and college athlete.
His proudest moment was scoring fifty points for Orleans High in a basketball game decades ago. He still officiated at local high school games.

Prof's uniform was an old-fashioned double-breasted suit, a wide, multicolored necktie (in an era of dark, narrow ties), and wingtip shoes. He used Old Spice shaving lotion, which, like the three or four packs of clove-scented gum he chewed every school day, diluted, without entirely masking, the beery redolence that enveloped him and his immediate surroundings after ten o'clock each morning. He had a voice like the foghorn of a Great Lakes steamer and never spoke at a normal level when he could shout. He was spontaneously generous. He genuinely liked and understood kids, pretended to be mad more often than he really was (which was often enough), and—the bottom line—always supported his teachers. That is to say, he could and frequently did holler at us, but he brooked no criticism of his staff or beloved school from anyone else, including the school board members. “Old school” was how he accurately described himself. He'd taught three generations of Orleans students and was, in his own eyes and those of nearly everyone else in town, an icon.

Prof's wise advice to encourage my students to write about their own experiences didn't register with me immediately because, good old Kingdom boy that he was, he drank Scotch out of a flask while he road-hunted, and he carried his double-barreled Remington twelve-gauge business end up on the floor between us, on half-cock at all times. That very afternoon, after what Prof had confided was another three-quart day, we were riding the back lanes looking for partridges dusting themselves, when a grouse flew up into a wild apple tree. Prof frantically reached for the loaded gun, brought the barrel sharply up into my chin, yanked the car off the road under the apple tree, jumped out, and missed the bird by a mile.

“Welcome to the Kingdom, sweetie,” Phillis said when I got home. “I'm glad he didn't shoot you.”

Teaching may be principally a matter of faith. First you must have faith that what you're doing will make a difference. Then you need to have faith in your students. Finally, there's the little matter of faith in yourself. As a first-year teacher at Orleans High School, mine was beginning to evaporate. How was I going to coax, cajole, threaten, or otherwise elicit some written work from my students? Maybe Prof was right. My students might enjoy writing about their own experiences. But what did they know well enough to write about? What were their stories?

On the morning after my hunting mishap, I loosened my necktie, rubbed my black-and-blue chin, and told my seniors that a writer I admired once remarked that the story people want most to read is one they've never read before. I let this sink in for a moment, then said that the one story
they
could write that no one had ever read was their own. Almost everybody, I continued, had a unique story to tell. I was interested in reading theirs.

It would be gratifying to report that the kids went straight home and wrote stunningly original autobiographical essays, won all kinds of writing awards, and received full-freight scholarships to Ivy League colleges. Nothing of the sort happened. Still, I persisted. In school and out, I spent hours talking with my students and, maybe more important, listening to them, trying to help them discover
their
stories. It was a glacially slow process. Ironically, I was probably the main beneficiary of my students' memoirs when they did begin to trickle in. After all, I was the spy in their midst, looking for stories to write myself. To this day I clearly remember three extraordinary essays and the
kids who wrote them. I'll call them Ethan, Becca, and Cody—the young hero who borrowed my car on the first day of school.

Like Cody, Ethan detested school, a sentiment I readily understood. The Bad Boy of Chichester had detested school too, for the same reason as Ethan, who longed to spend all day, every day, hunting and fishing. How Ethan had gotten to be a senior I couldn't imagine. Still, I liked him and wanted him to graduate and “stay out of the mill.” Therefore, we worked out a deal. Once a week he'd hand in a composition about fishing. We'd go over it together, and if he happened to reveal the whereabouts of a few of his secret trout brooks, that wouldn't hurt his grade either.

Three days later, Ethan produced a twenty-page opus on angling for rainbow trout at the falls on the Willoughby River, where Phillis and I had marveled at the leaping fish on our first evening in the Kingdom. It was a terrific story. Ernest Hemingway would have enjoyed it. I could
see
those hefty, crimson-sided trout jumping the falls, see Ethan carefully drawing a bead on them, hear the rushing water and the sudden, splitting
crack
of his .270 deer rifle as he fired down into the cataract. The next week he composed a spirited panegyric on the art of spearing wall-eyed pike with a trident made from a hay fork. Brook trout were next on the agenda, a fifty-page epic that made me want to grab my fly rod and head out for the streams on the spot.