The Great Northern Express (9 page)

“Now, Mosher,” Prof said. “This is not your little-kids Sunday school class. Stay close to me and keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.”

It was a hot fall afternoon in the Kingdom, but as I followed Prof into the partly collapsed house and down a rickety set of stairs, we were met by a draft of cool, earth-scented air. Milling around on the smooth dirt floor were fifty or sixty men. Along the unmortared granite walls sat stoneware crocks of wine, which, Prof later told me, the Leonards distilled from every berry and wild fruit native to the Kingdom. In the center of the floor was a shallow pit. Around it, in the crepuscular light falling through three small windows, the men formed a tight ring. To see over their heads, we had to stand on the bottom stair. Again Prof cautioned me to stay close to him.

Two men in slouch hats—Teague and Rolly Leonard, Prof whispered to me—knelt facing each other across the pit. One brother held a tall red rooster, the other the biggest White Leghorn I'd ever seen. Both birds wore three-inch-long razor spurs, shining dully in the dim light. The third brother, Ordney, jostled through the crowd collecting bets. Then, “Fight!” yelled Ordney, and the handlers threw the birds into the pit. As Teague and Rolly jabbed at them, the birds struck out with their spurs. A bloodthirsty roar went up from the bettors as the terrified roosters slashed at each other in a frenzy. Finally, the red bird leaped straight up in the air and came down, spurs first, on the neck of the white. A fine spray of scarlet blood jetted out onto the mob. The battle was over.

Rolly picked up the Leghorn and flung its limp remains out the window onto the growing pile of the vanquished in the dooryard. “Go fry, goddamn you,” he growled.

Keep the kids out of the mill?
Maybe Phillis and I should do everything in our power to
get the kids out of the Kingdom
. We were discovering, of course, that
no place
, no matter how idyllic, is without its dark underside. While some flatlanders might refer to the Kingdom as “God's country,” I could not romanticize this northern fragment of Appalachia if I intended to write about it. The abusive sex shows at the fair and the barbaric cockfights at the Leonard brothers' were as much a part of the Kingdom's traditions and culture as the colorfully dressed, comical straw harvest figures in old-fashioned overalls and sunhats that began to appear on farmhouse porches in early October.

But what about those vivid, Grandma Moses–style primitive paintings that we'd noticed on the sides of barns and covered bridges on our first day in the Kingdom? Who had created these pastoral Vermont landscapes, these scenes of mountains and rivers and lakes and deer and trout and cows lining up at the pasture bars at milking time? Prof told us they'd been painted some twenty years back by a shadowy figure known as the Dog Cart Man. He would appear in the Kingdom now and then in the summer with half a dozen mongrels harnessed, with bits of leather, rope, and baling twine, to a fire engine–red American Flyer wagon. The wagon, Prof said, contained a bedroll, a few cooking utensils, and several gallons of paint in primary colors. For a couple of dollars, a meal, or a corner of a hayloft to bunk in for the night, the Dog Cart Man would paint any rural scene you pleased on the side of your barn or shed, even your house. My favorite was a leaping trout that adorned the Irasburg General Store. But Prof, who knew everything there was to know about local history and who, drunk, sober, or in between, was
always happy to share that lore, told me that some years earlier, an impoverished local widow with twelve kids and a five-cow hill farm had sold her eight-year-old son to the Dog Cart Man for fifteen dollars. That night, Prof claimed, the painter attempted to molest the child, whereupon the boy grabbed a rusty old pistol out of the dog cart and shot him through the heart.

Seeing Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort this morning on Beale Street had reminded me that, well into the 1960s, the Kingdom still had plenty of local “characters.” Clarence the bottle picker. Joe Canada, the spruce-gum picker, who roamed the woods with a sickle blade attached to a long pole, slicing fresh pitch off spruce trees to sell for chewing gum. A nameless hermit lived in a hemlock-bark shack in the woods northeast of town, and we'd see the occasional tramp up from the railyard for a handout or a bindlestiff working his way from farm to farm in haying time. There seemed to be an unspoken but well-understood code for dealing with these individualists on the fringe of northern New England society. Up to a point, kids were allowed to tease them. Name-calling might be permissible. Rock throwing or setting your dog on a village character—never.

One evening, out for a walk after supper, Phillis and I wandered into Joe Souliere's commission sales barn, behind the village hotel, during the weekly cattle auction. We climbed up to the top of the small grandstand and sat down to watch the proceedings.

“Yes! Here's a pretty little bull calf, boys,” Joe chanted into his hand-held microphone as a young Angus was led into the wooden-sided ring. “This gentleman is out of the Kittredge herd up on Guay Hill, he's a good bull, boys, start you a prize herd. Yes! Who'll begin the bidding at twenty dollars? Twenty, twenty, thirty, twenty—thirty? Thirty-five? Forty, do I have forty? I have
forty over there. Yes! Fifty dollars, boys? Fifty? Fifty in gold, boys, for this beautiful little bull?”

A fly landed on my nose. I reached up and swatted it away.

“Sold!” Joe barked into the microphone. “For fifty sponda-loons to the schoolteacher from New York State.”

Phillis couldn't stop laughing, the farmers and village hangers-on in the grandstand around us laughed, but Joe said, “Any motion of the head or hand's a bid, ain't that right, now, boys?”

The schoolteacher from New York had, it seemed, been taken to school. That's how Phillis and I acquired a Black Angus bull we had no earthly use for. He was the first of what would turn out to be a singular menagerie of critters. We kept the little—later not so little—Angus in Verna's barn out behind the house, where he was eventually joined by an intemperate donkey, two intelligent pigs, several laying hens, an orphaned fawn, a pair of very aggressive Toulouse geese, an injured sparrow hawk, a kit fox, and a tiny fisher cat. Many of these animals were gifts from Phillis's students, who assumed that as a science teacher, she could heal, train, raise, and, in the case of the fawn, fox, and fisher, return to the wild, anything on four feet. And that's what she proceeded to do.

The bull-calf debacle was all in good fun. We raised him through the winter as a kind of oversized pet, and Joe Souliere bought him back from me in the spring for exactly what I'd paid. But a week or two after acquiring it, Phillis and I were back at the commission sales, hands tightly folded in our laps like Quakers, as the entire Kittredge herd was auctioned off in an hour. The elderly couple, who'd been on their farm together for nearly sixty years, sat near us in the grandstand. Once I glanced over and noticed that Mr. Kittredge was weeping silently, his tears
falling directly onto his barn boots. Joe worked hard to get the Kittredges good value for their cows, but it was a sad, sad night. We'd been in the Kingdom less than two months and already some of it was disappearing before our eyes.

When we had time that fall, we read aloud to each other, scaring ourselves silly with Bram Stoker's
Dracula
, laughing over the incomparably fatuous Mr. Collins in
Pride and Prejudice
. But who would write the stories we were hearing every day right here in the Kingdom? If no one did, they too, like the little farms and big woods of this last Vermont frontier, would soon be gone forever.

Just as I remember every detail of the moment when I met Phillis and, later, when our son and daughter were born, so I remember where I was when I met Jim Hayford. It was the week before school started, and we were at a get-together at a colleague's house in Orleans. I remember the green upholstered armchair Jim was sitting in, the bow window behind the chair, the faces of other teachers standing or sitting nearby, even the mill lights glowing in the twilight out the window in the town below.

Jim was the Northeast Kingdom's unofficial poet laureate. He was also the first “real” writer I'd ever known. We spoke that evening about his favorite novelist, Jane Austen, and the rather unlikely friendship between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley. I remarked, with all the wisdom of my twenty-one years, that I couldn't think of many truly great books about friendship. Jim nodded thoughtfully. There really weren't too many, he said.
Then, as though these were exceptions to the rule, he quickly mentioned
Moby-Dick
,
Huckleberry Finn
, and Boswell's
Life of Samuel Johnson
. Not to mention the memorable friendships in the books of my favorite novelist, Dickens.

Jim's conversation had not the slightest didactic flavor. Rather, it was as if Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley and Huck and Jim and Ishmael and Queequeg of that true place not to be found on any map were Jim's
own
long-time friends. As, in fact, they were. More than any other person I would ever meet, Jim Hayford had faith in the power of literature and books to transform our lives.

After school the next day I made a beeline to the village library and read Jim's most recent poetry collection,
The Equivocal Sky
, from cover to cover. Yes, there were echoes of Frost in his work, and of Emily Dickinson, too. The vision, though, was pure James Hayford.

The Trouble with a Son

The poet and critic X. J. Kennedy called Jim Hayford one of “the finest living metrical poets in English.” For nearly thirty years I was fortunate enough to call him my friend. Like my uncle Reg, Jim was a kind of surrogate father to me, the Dr.
Johnson to my Boswell. And if I was a son Jim never “got done,” in his presence my youthful imperfections never “suffered from rejection.”

A Vermont native who lived much of his adult life in the Kingdom, first as a farmer, carpenter, and piano teacher, then as the district music teacher, Jim Hayford had studied poetry under Frost at Amherst College. At graduation, he was awarded the first Robert Frost Fellowship, which allowed him to do nothing but write for an entire year. Frost's only stipulations were that during the fellowship period Jim must “stay away from graduate schools, art colonies, big cities, and Europe,” then “produce a book of poems in twenty years.”

Jim Hayford was my first personal link to the world of contemporary literature and ideas beyond the Northeast Kingdom and the upstate New York villages where I'd been raised. He was one of the founding members of the American Progressive Party and a Vermont delegate to the 1948 Philadelphia convention that nominated the former vice president Henry Wallace for president on the Progressive ticket. As a result, Hayford had been branded as a communist and, for some years, banned from teaching.

A characteristically brief Hayford poem called “The Waves” captures Jim's alienation from mainstream American politics and, perhaps, from the free-verse trends in poetry espoused by many of his contemporaries:

I soon realized that Jim Hayford could have excelled in any of the careers he once considered, from the Episcopal priesthood to college teaching. In the end, he chose to live simply in the Northeast Kingdom and to write elegantly simple poems about his life there. While I didn't entirely understand it at the time, Jim's commitment to his writing, and to the home about which he wrote, was precisely the inspiration and example I'd been looking for.

In the meantime, Prof told me that if I wanted to write about the Kingdom, I should get to know Fred Fauchs, a locally renowned trout fisherman, trapper, and deer hunter. As it turned out, Fred looked me up. A spare man in his sixties, with deep seams in his weathered face, he took me fishing to his second-best Northeast Kingdom hot spot, where we cleaned up on pan-sized brook trout. At twenty-one, the former Bad Boy of Chichester fancied himself an accomplished angler. God knows I should have been, after all the hours I'd spent playing hooky and fishing as a kid. And hadn't I learned how to fish from my father and uncle, two of the best fly casters in the Catskill Mountains? A day on the stream with Fred Fauchs disabused me of the notion that I had any particular expertise with a fly rod. Walking along the brook together, we passed a backwater not much larger than a rain puddle, where a recent cloudburst had stranded a pool of standing water about a foot deep and four feet long. Without breaking stride, Fred flipped his worm into the backwater and yanked out an eight-inch-long trout, which he unhooked and tossed into the nearby stream. “Sometimes a fish gets trapped in a place like that,” he remarked. Fred used worms exclusively. Like my dad and uncle, I favored flies. He outfished me three or four trout to one.

Fred also introduced me to deer hunting in the Kingdom. My poaching superintendent and I had done some illegal night
scouting a few days before the deer season opened, riding the backwoods lanes and logging roads—I drove while he directed a powerful jacklight plugged into the cigarette lighter. But I was flabbergasted to walk into my senior homeroom one November morning and find it nearly empty. It seemed that every boy in the class, and many of the girls as well, had taken the day off to go to deer camp, an annual Northeast Kingdom ritual that, I would learn, had much more to do with family tradition than with hunting.