The Great Northern Express (8 page)

“Mosher!” A voice I recognized all too well was hissing my name from the press of men lined up outside the Paris Revue tent.

It was Prof, tricked out in an old raincoat with the collar turned up, a fedora with the brim pulled down, and an outlandish red muffler. He couldn't have called more attention to himself if he'd dressed up in a clown's costume.

“Fall in here, Mosher,” the old soldier shouted. “My treat!”

I looked at Phillis. “Go ahead, lover boy,” she said. “I'll wait outside if it's all the same.”

I'm not sure what I expected to see inside the Paris Revue
tent at the Orleans County Fair. Some sort of burlesque show, I suppose. What I discovered was a new side of the Kingdom. A seething mob of mostly drunken men had congregated around a platform to engage in oral sex with the “performers.” “Don't bite, you old bastard—if you do I'll piss on you or rip off your ears,” snarled one of the women. A barker wielding an electric cattle prod hovered nearby to keep the drunks off the stage. A somewhat younger woman, Miss Paris Golightly, stumbled out on the platform. From the crowd came a feral growl.

By degrees, it dawned on me that these poor women were not over-the-hill Las Vegas showgirls but very probably sex slaves, transported from one backwater to another to engage in a kind of barbaric prostitution. Later I would learn that most of the women were addicted to heroin or cocaine and were coerced to perform to support their drug habit. Also, that these girlie shows were what kept the fair running in the black. Earlier that week Prof had relayed to the faculty a complaint from a school board member that some of the young women teachers were wearing their dresses too short. I recognized this sanctimonious old codger in the knot of men pushing up to the platform. Two or three of my older students were there as well.

“Only in the Kingdom,” I said to Phillis later that night. “What do you do about something like those shows?”

“Write about them, sweetie,” she said. “You tell the truth about what you saw and hope that sooner or later someone will put a stop to them.”

So, time being a sneaky old bastard, this afternoon I'm in Nashville, turning into the parking lot of the Davis Kidd Bookstore to talk about my new novel from the old Kingdom.

Just down the street from the bookstore was the Bluebird
Café, where so many Nashville singers and songwriters have launched their careers, and where, ten years before, I had first met my old country songwriter friend Durwood. His iron-gray hair flowing down onto his shoulders, a double shot in one fist, a foaming draft beer in the other, he beckoned a young singer over to his table, and said, in a voice as rusty as the trailer hitch of a junked tour bus, “Little girl, when you set down to write them purty songs of yours, remember two things. All the best stories are love stories. And don't
never
hold nothing back.”

This summer, Durwood was in the middle of a one-man war. His shotgun row house on the west edge of town sat hard by the main line of the Norfolk Southern Railway. For the past several months, one of the rails behind his house had been working its way loose from the ties. Each time a boxcar passed over the unmoored rail, it banged like a rifle shot. Several times through the day and night, the long freights going by turned the entire neighborhood into a battle-zone firefight—
bam bam bam bam—
for up to ten minutes at a time.

Earlier that week Durwood had decided that enough was enough. As the 7:10 City of New Orleans approached, he leaped out from behind the chinaberry tree in his backyard and peppered the lead engine with a double handful of gravel, like David squaring off against Goliath. I had very much hoped, this evening, to witness a rerun of his performance. Instead, when I arrived, Durwood was on the phone to the Norfolk Southern headquarters in Atlanta. Sotto voce, with his hand over the mouthpiece, he informed me that he did not intend to get off the horn until he reached the company's CEO. An hour of nonstop shouting later, Durwood hung up with a grim smile. Within twenty minutes, a railroad repair truck was pulling into his driveway.

Nashville is full of singers and musicians who, like Durwood, have persisted almost beyond the point of human endurance. Their persistence and faith were not lost on Harold Who, prodding the Loser Cruiser back to his motel through downtown Music City that night. (Have I mentioned that the shock absorbers were shot?)

No doubt someone had left a light on at my Motel 6 that evening, but like the dash lights on the Cruiser, it seemed to have burned out. Groping in the dark for the doorknob, I began to laugh. It must have been the rinky-dink piano music from the club next door to the motel that reminded me. For the first time in years, I found myself thinking about a battered old piano in a Prohibition-era Northeast Kingdom roadhouse and the chain of events leading to my thirty-year friendship with Jim Hayford.

Late one afternoon in the fall of 1964, at the glorious peak of the foliage season, with the hills surrounding Orleans solid blocks of polished reds, yellows, and oranges, Prof appeared at our door with his sons, Big and Little Prof, in tow. He informed me that he'd borrowed a farm truck from a school board member to “go fetch Hayford a Christly piano”—a nearly new Baldwin in mint condition, advertised for sale in the local paper by a recently retired teacher in nearby Barton. Jim Hayford, the school's music teacher, was a former student of Robert Frost's and a fine lyric poet in his own right. I will return to Jim presently. In the meantime our superintendent, having had another two-quart day, had stopped by to recruit me to drive the truck. The boys rode in the back, and Prof sat up front with me, working on quart number three.

The owner of the piano wasn't at home when we arrived, so
we poked around in an old carriage shed, looking at some other items for sale: a sleigh with elegant curved iron runners, some wooden maple-sugaring buckets, a crosscut saw, and another piano, this one lidless, with most of its ivories missing and a Rhode Island Red hen nesting in its innards. When the schoolteacher arrived a short while later, she told us that her husband had bought the beat-up piano in the shed for five dollars when an infamous local roadhouse called the Rum Hound closed its doors in the late 1940s. She invited us into her parlor to inspect the Baldwin, upon which Prof played a one-finger, three-quart bar of “Chopsticks.” Pronouncing the instrument satisfactory, he wrote a personal check to the teacher, and, with Big and Little rolling their eyes, we manhandled the thing out onto the porch and down two planks into the truck. Prof secured it with a frayed hank of baling twine tied off with a knot he claimed to have learned in the navy during “the war”—a lie so monstrous that Big and Little burst out laughing.

Back in Orleans, Prof had an inspiration. Why not slope over to Cliff Street and surprise old Hayford with the piano before carting it to the school? Instantly I thought of a number of very good reasons why not. Cliff Street had not been idly named; it was as steep as any street in San Francisco. Nor was the truck, whose regular brakes were at best questionable, equipped with a working emergency brake. Riding through Orleans, Prof called out to his fishing cronies on the street, whistled at two miniskirted young secretaries on their way home from the mill, waved his empty quart out the window like a frat boy on an initiation rite.

“Slap her in first gear and gun her, Mosher!” Prof roared, heaving the empty onto the village green, where a contingent of public-spirited church ladies were raking up leaves. “To the bold go the laurels!”

I jammed the shaky floor-shift knob into first and we started up Cliff Street. The bank president was out on his lawn burning leaves, the scent evoking a fleeting memory of Chichester and my uncle. Up the hill, Jim and Helen Hayford's big, yellow, ornately gingerbreaded house came into sight.

We never reached it.

“Stop! We can't hold the piano back,” the boys yelled from the truck bed. I mashed down on the worn metal brake pedal with every ounce of my weight. Prof piled out of the cab. Unsurprisingly, the baling twine had parted, and even though Big and Little Prof were as rugged as any two grown men in town, they were no match for gravity, and that quarter-ton piano was tilted up on the truck bed at a terrifying pitch. Somehow, with Prof's help, they lowered it onto the street. Before they could gee-haw it around at right angles to the hill, it got away from them. Down Cliff Street on its sturdy casters rolled the nearly new Baldwin. Down Cliff Street, running nimbly alongside the fugitive instrument, went Prof and his great big boys.

“T I M—
B E R
!” Prof hollered as the runaway piano hurtled over the riverbank. One of the legs snapped off, then another. The Baldwin flipped onto its lid and kept going. It skidded down the bank and plunged into the rapids where, with a final crescendo, it splintered into kindling.

“I got my piano, Howard,” Jim told me the next morning before school. “But it seems to have undergone a transformation. There's a nest of some kind inside it.”

I accompanied him downstairs to the music room, where I was amazed to see the battered old roadhouse piano from the former schoolteacher's carriage shed. Evidently, after dropping me off at my apartment, Prof and his boys had returned to
Barton, purchased this old wreck, and, under cover of darkness, brought it to the school. Jim listened gravely as I told him what I guessed had happened.

When I finished, he nodded and tinkled a couple of the remaining upper-register ivories. “I'm reminded,” he said, “of what my great-grandfather said to Mark Twain after hearing him speak in Burlington.”

“Which was?”

“Mr. Clemens, that was the funniest talk I've ever heard. It was so funny, it was all I could do to keep from laughing.”

“My name is Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort,” the gray-haired, deep-voiced black man said as he bent over the toy computer keyboard. Pecking away at the brightly painted letter keys, he rumbled on: “I was born during the Great Depression in the Mississippi Delta. Over by Greenwood, yeah. My parents were poor but honest sharecroppers. When I was six years old, my daddy left home. Oh, yeah. That summer I began work in the cotton fields 'longside my mama …”

It was five in the morning, and I was sipping very hot, very strong coffee in a café on Memphis's Beale Street. Down the block someone was picking out, over and over, the first few bars of Scott Joplin's “The Entertainer.” Otherwise, on this summery dawn, the blues capital of the upper Delta was as quiet as it ever would be.

Inside the café Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort was hard at
work on his memoir. He wore a long winter overcoat and a Russian commissar's fur hat. He'd left his shopping cart, piled with several bulging black plastic bags, out on the empty sidewalk. Franklin was treetop tall and as lean and rugged-looking as a power forward for the Memphis Grizzlies. He must have been a morning regular at the café, because the waitress had greeted him warmly and brought him a steaming cup of that delicious, ardent coffee, which he acknowledged with an abstracted nod.

Franklin looked up at me and frowned. Then he looked back at the pretend keyboard and began to peck again. “The memoir of Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort,” he said. “By F. R. Beaufort. I was born to poor but honest sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta country. Oh, yeah. When I was six, my daddy left home …”

Once again, going to work in the cotton fields with his mother was as far as Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort got. He paused, sipped his coffee, resumed work. “The memoir of Franklin …”

A couple of construction workers in yellow hard hats came into the café. “Morning, Franklin,” one of them said. “How's the memoir coming?”

“Coming just
fine
,” Franklin said, quite fiercely, and leaned in toward his keyboard. “My name is Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort. Yeah. I was born in the Mississippi Delta to honest sharecroppers …”

How Charles Dickens would have loved F. R. Beaufort, I thought. How Dickens would have loved the Northeast Kingdom in 1964. How many novels would he have been able to get out of it—a dozen? Two dozen? He'd have shoehorned the Dantean scene of the girlie show at the fair right into
Oliver Twist
.

Prof, for his part, purported to be chagrined and outraged by the live-sex exhibition. He said that since he'd last patronized a
girlie revue, as a “young blade,” they'd degenerated into something much uglier, and the only reason he'd gone (in disguise) was to apprehend his boys, Big and Little, who had reportedly been seen sneaking under the tent flaps. Still, when it came to initiating me into the rites, wholesome and otherwise, of the Northeast Kingdom, he clearly enjoyed playing Virgil to my Dante.

The following weekend, Prof showed up at Verna's place on Sunday afternoon. “Mosher,” he bellowed from the bottom of the stairs leading up to our second-floor rental. “Get your Sunday-school-teaching ass down here. It's time you met the Leonard boys.”

The Leonard boys turned out to be three aging brothers who lived in their falling-down family homestead overlooking the falls on the Black River, a few miles north of Orleans. The lane leading up the hill to their place was lined with beat-up pickups and farm trucks. In the backs of some of the trucks were crates containing live roosters.
FISH 4 SAIL
read a cardboard sign propped against a watering trough fed by a pipe from a spring. Swimming around and around in the trough were a dozen or so huge fall-run brown trout—lunkers—some over twenty inches long. Prof told me that the Leonard boys netted these fish at the falls and sold them, by the pound, to skunked out-of-state fishermen. A second hand-lettered sign, by the caved-in porch steps, read
COCKFIGHT TODAY NO WOMEN NO KIDS NO DOGS
. It was 1964, and James Dickey had yet to write
Deliverance
. But sitting on the porch, plucking feathers from a heap of dead roosters
near an open cellar window, was a boy who could have gotten a walk-on role in the dueling-guitars scene of the movie based on Dickey's novel. Another individual with what appeared to be, and was, a shiny tin nose stood over a makeshift barbecue pit grilling the losers.