The Great Northern Express (2 page)

“Howard Frank,” my uncle said—as a boy, I was often addressed by both names to distinguish me from my father, Howard Hudson—“Howard Frank, I am here to tell you that Ted Williams is the greatest pure hitter in the history of the game.”

“Maybe so, Howard Frank,” my father shot back. “But you have my permission to inform your uncle that Joe DiMaggio is the most complete
all-around
player in the history of the game.”

I usually said nothing. For one thing, I was only four. Also, though I already had a keen appreciation for my relatives' many eccentricities, I didn't like arguments any more than Dad did. Fortunately, about the time full darkness settled in, we would lose the radio broadcast altogether. Then I would ask my uncle to tell me a story.

“Tell me a story” was my mantra, and Reg knew scores of good ones. Stories of the old bear hunters, ginseng gatherers, mountain guides, hermits, witches, and pioneer families who had settled Chichester. Like the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont when Phillis and I first arrived in the mid-1960s, Chichester in
the '40s and '50s was a gold mine of stories. My feisty uncle was its Homer, as well as my first storytelling mentor. Reg was working on an anecdotal history of Chichester, and sometimes he would read aloud to me from the manuscript.

Of all Reg's stories, my favorite was the one that hadn't yet happened. That was his description of the road trip he and I would take the summer I turned twenty-one. We'd start out in Robert Frost's New England, then head for New York City, where my uncle's favorite
New Yorker
writer, Joseph Mitchell, had chronicled the lives of his beloved gypsies, street preachers, and fish vendors. We'd visit the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-first Street, with its two stone lions guarding the main entrance. Next we'd strike out for the Great Smokies, Thomas Wolfe country—my uncle loved
You Can't Go Home Again
and
Look Homeward, Angel
. We'd drop by Oxford, Mississippi, and have a gander at Faulkner's home, slope down to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's (
The Yearling
) Florida. Then we'd head for the American West—Reg, a huge fan of Zane Grey, would read me Grey's Westerns by the hour. We'd walk the streets of Raymond Chandler's LA and Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco, check out James T. Farrell's Chicago (with a side visit to the Windy City's great bookstore, Brentano's,) take a look at Hemingway's upper Michigan and Aldo Leopold's Wisconsin. We'd eat at greasy spoons and roadside custard stands, stay at motor courts and tourist cabins. Throw our fly rods and baseball gloves in the backseat and see a ball game in every town that had a team.

Our long-planned trip was no pipe dream, but my uncle and I never got to take that literary odyssey. By the time I turned twenty-one and graduated from college, Reg's wife, my aunt Elsie, wasn't well, and I'd gotten married and taken a teaching job in northern Vermont. Writing my way from book to book
and decade to decade, I set most of my own fiction in my adopted Northeast Kingdom. I turned fifty. Then sixty. Approaching my sixty-fifth birthday, with regrets for the trip not taken, I began to feel that I had to do it now or never.

Then, in the late autumn of my sixty-fifth year, came the walk to the post office that would change my life forever.

In this era of instant text messaging and walk-around cell phones clamped to our ears like alien appendages, most news, good and otherwise, arrives quickly. Still, I am certain that when my MacArthur Fellowship arrives, it will do so the old-fashioned way, by U.S. mail. One morning I will set out on my regular six-days-a-week walk to the post office, and there the notification will be. Likely it will come in a cream-colored envelope constructed of the highest-grade linen. My full name will appear on the front, perhaps with an “Esquire” tacked on in deference to a soon-to-be-Fellow. The foundation's return address will be stamped in a discreet but stately font across the sealed flap on the back.

Some years ago I heard that the MacArthur Fellowship carried a stipend of $350,000. Recently, someone told me they'd gone up to half a mil.

“That ought to cover the gas for our cross-country trip,” I said on my way to the post office to pick up my grant that fateful fall morning.

You see, I still like to talk out loud to myself. And to the gallery of companions that my mother tells me I've had since I was two. I will rattle along for hours on end to relatives living and deceased, friends and adversaries, other writers, even some favorite fictional characters, like rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call from
Lonesome Dove
. This morning I was conversing with my storytelling mentor, Uncle Reg, who had passed away fifteen years before.

Suddenly, an onrushing eighteen-wheeler blasted its air horn. Preoccupied by my conversation with Reg, I'd come within half a step of launching myself into the path of a log truck.

“That was close,” the postmaster said to me.

“I don't know what I was thinking.”

“You seemed to be talking to someone.”

“Yes. I was … practicing. For an upcoming interview.”

As I had expected—expected for the last twenty-five years, or so—here was the long-awaited cream-colored envelope. Why prolong the suspense? I tore the thing open with trembling fingers. But wait. So far from a “Dear Mr. Mosher, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is delighted to inform you that you have been awarded …,” so far from a notification that if I so chose, I could spend the rest of my life crisscrossing the United States in commemoration of the trip my uncle and I never made, what I found myself scanning was a notice from my physician informing me that the prostate count from my annual bloodwork was high. Anything over 4.0 can indicate cancerous activity. “See me immediately,” she had scrawled beside the 5.9 reading.

“There it is, at long last,” said my uncle.

“There is
what
?” I said.

“Your MacArthur Fellowship,” he said. Then, “You need to have that taken care of right away, Howard Frank. Prostate cancer kills thirty thousand men a year in this country.”

Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer, as did my dad's younger sister. My mother—now ninety-six and living on her own, just up the street from our house—has survived both breast and bladder cancer. But right here and now, I want to tell you that this is not a medical memoir. Nor is it, believe you me, an inspirational memoir extolling how, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a breakthrough procedure in radiation therapy, and a supportive family, I licked prostate cancer. Though in fact, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a remarkable new development in medical technology, and a very loving family, I
may
have done just that.

In the grand old Mosher family tradition of high-spirited hopefulness, combined with what a book critic once called a “lunatic sense of humor,” I immediately began referring to my
disorder, and to the treatment that followed, as my personal MacArthur Fellowship. The euphemism struck me as delightfully ghoulish, along the lines of the ancient Greeks referring to their gods' dreaded and relentless agents of revenge as the “gentle” Furies.

For the record, I will report that I had two gold bands about the size of ordinary staples fired into my ailing organ. The prostate gland is something of a gadabout. This free spirit of the male pelvic region floats around with an altogether cavalier insouciance, sometimes rubbing molecules with other organs that you decidedly do not want bombarded by millions of killer X-rays. The thin gold bands enable the radiation machine to determine the precise location of the peripatetic prostate before each treatment.

Next came forty-four ten-minute sessions at the Norris Cotton Cancer Clinic in Hanover and St. Johnsbury, supervised by Dr. John Marshall, a renowned radiation oncologist who interned under a former student of Marie Curie. Also an award-winning team of nurses and technicians who were as supportive of this talking-out-loud-to-himself storyteller as they were ruthless in their scorched-earth assault on those voracious little night-of-the-living-dead cells that can, if they start to spread, kill a man in a few short months.

Other than some “increased frequency,” by which I mean that, when driving, I had to stop to pee about every eight miles, I coasted through the first trimester of my fellowship period without much apparent difficulty. It occurred to me that my attempt at dark humor actually made good sense. A brush with any potentially fatal illness can be a wake-up call, a reminder—as if we needed one—of our mortality, and an opportunity. In a way, my personal MacArthur was better than a real one. What good would half a million bucks from the magnanimous John D. and
Catherine T. outfit do me if I had only three months to spend it before bidding my family and friends a tearful farewell?

In fact, my treatment gave me something infinitely more precious than cash—it gave me time, though the jury was still out on how much. Now, what would I do with it?

From the MacArthur Foundation guidelines:

For a novelist, expertise is a tricky proposition. Each time I start a new novel, I have to teach myself how to write one all over again. Like confidence, and the women speaking of Michelangelo in the T. S. Eliot poem, expertise comes and goes, with maddening unpredictability. In the fiction-writing game, there is no equivalent to the little gold staples implanted deep in my gut.

I was willing to keep this possibility in mind. But I'd already started work on a new Civil War novel with a young firebrand
from Vermont as its hero. How much bold new work could one writer handle at once?

Nope. At sixty-four I didn't have the faintest notion how to
do
anything else. I hadn't held down a job in the real world for more than thirty years. What's more, writing isn't merely my “field.” It defines who I am. Too late to change fields now.

At last we were getting somewhere. Writing may well be a glorious profession, but it's a hellishly uncertain career. Anything I could do to alter my decades-long holding pattern would have to be an improvement.

That spring, as I reclined under my new friend, the gigantic, humming Varian Clinac 2100 EX radiation machine that was frying my prostate gland and God knows what else to a crisp, I began thinking that maybe the time had come to
alter the direction of my career
.

I love to travel cross-country. Seeing new territory delights me, as does visiting bookstores. The June publication date for my latest novel would be within a week of my final radiation treatment and my sixty-fifth birthday, and as the date approached, I became increasingly excited. Why not combine my long-delayed uncle-nephew road trip with a book tour? And not just any book tour. Instead of the usual perfunctory, eight-city flying tour, I would drive, both to see the country, as my uncle and I had planned, and to stop at bookstores in smaller cities as well as the bigger ones. I'd economize by touring in my twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity, with 280,000 miles on the odometer,
the vehicle I often referred to as the Loser Cruiser. I would, by God, spend the entire summer out on the open road promoting my new novel, on what I was already thinking of as the Great American Book Tour. An adventure that might, with luck, enable me not only to alter the direction of my writing career but to gain a fresh perspective on what I loved enough to live for in the time I had left.

“Hi, there. This is the novelist Howard Frank Mosher.”

Silence.

I soldiered on. “May I please speak with your bookstore events coordinator?”

“Yeah, well. That would be me. I guess.”

“Terrific. I'll be publishing my tenth book this summer, and I'm putting together, if you can believe such a thing, a one-hundred-city book tour. Let's see, I'll be in New Mexico in the second week of July. I was hoping we could arrange—”

“Who'd you say this was?”

“Howard Mosher? The novelist?” Good grief. Could I possibly be losing momentum already?

“Harold who?”

“
Howard
. Howard Frank Mosher.”

“So are you a local author or what?”

“Well, actually, I'm from Vermont, but—”

“Vermont?”
The events coordinator, who might have been all of fifteen, could hardly have sounded more outraged if I'd announced I was from Guantánamo.

“Hey, Harold. I'm with a customer. Okay? E-mail me.”

“Howard.”

“Say what?”

“It's
Howard
. Not Harold.”

Mercifully for us both, the line went dead.

Scores of phone calls later, by virtue of sheer, bullheaded stubbornness, I had somehow managed to set up about one hundred and fifty book events in one hundred or so towns and cities nationwide. In introducing my new novel to the overflowing audiences that I would no doubt attract, I had decided to start by talking about my life and work in the place I have long called Kingdom County. I might even show some slides. That was it! For my old-fashioned Great American Book Tour, I would put together an old-fashioned slide show. I'd call it “Where in the World Is Kingdom County?”

“Go for it,” Phillis said. “There are worse things to promote than novels.”