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“And the best?”
“Hunting in the 30-Mile,” he said promptly. “We went the second week of November from the time we were teenagers right up until Butch mounted his steel pony and set sail for the golden west. We stayed at a little cabin in the woods that my grandfather built. Butch claimed that his grandfather pitched in when it came to the roofing, which might or might not have been true. It was a quarter-mile or so beyond Jilasi Creek. We had an old Willys jeep, and until ’54 or ’55, we drove it across the plank bridge, parked on the other side, and humped it to the cabin with our packs and our rifles. Then we got so we didn’t trust the Willys on the bridge because floods had undercut it some, so we’d park on the town side and walk across.”
He sighed, looking off into the distance.
“What with all the clear-cutting by Diamond Match, and that housing development on Dark Score Lake where the Noonan place used to be, 30-Mile Wood is more like 20-Mile Wood now. But back then there was plenty of forest for two boys… then two young men… to ramble around in. We sometimes shot a deer, and once we shot a turkey that turned out tough and sour, but the hunting was the least of it. We just liked being on our own for those five or six or seven days. I guess a lot of men take to the woods so they can drink and smoke, maybe go out to the bars and bring back a night’s worth of poontang, but we never did those things. Oh well, yes, we did drink a little, but if we brought a bottle of Jack it’d last us the whole week with some left over, which we pitched into the fire to watch the flames shoot up. We talked about God and the Red Sox and politics and how the world might end in nuclear fire.
“I remember once we were sitting on a log, and a buck, biggest one I ever saw, an eighteen-pointer, maybe the biggest one anybody ever saw, at least in these parts… it came walking through the marsh below us, as delicate as you please. I raised my rifle and Butch put his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t. Not that one.’ And so I didn’t.
“Nights we’d lay a fire in the fireplace and have us a knock or two of Jack. Butch brought a pad and he’d draw. Sometimes while he did, he’d ask me to tell him a story, and I did. One of those stories eventually became my first book, The Lightning Storm.”
I could see her trying to remember it all. It was like gold to her, and it was like gold to me. Pop never talked about the cabin.
“I don’t suppose you’ve read an essay called ‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,’ have you?”
Ruth shook her head.
“No? No, of course not. Nobody reads Leslie Fiedler anymore, which is a shame. He was outrageous, a slayer of sacred cows, and that made him fun. He argued in the essay that homoeroticism was the great engine of American literature—that stories of male bonding were actually stories of suppressed sexual desire. Bullshit, of course, probably says more about Fiedler than it does male sexuality. Because… why? Can either of you tell me?”
Ruth looked like she was afraid to break the spell (the one he’d cast over himself as well as her), so I spoke up. “It’s shallow. Turns male friendship into a dirty joke.”
“Oversimplified but not wrong,” Pop said. “Butch and I were friends, not lovers, and during those weeks in the woods we enjoyed that friendship in its purest state. Which is a kind of love. It wasn’t that I loved Sheila less, or that Butch didn’t enjoy his trips up the city less—he was so crazy about rock and roll music, which he called bop—but in the 30-Mile, all the bump, bustle, and roar of the world fell away.”
“You kep’ close,” I said.
“We did indeed. Time for your last question, Miss.”
She didn’t hesitate. “What happened? How was it that you stopped being men of the town and became men of the world? Cultural icons?”
Something in his face changed, and I remembered my mother’s distress call when I was in college: Your father looks like he saw a ghost. If so, I thought he was seeing it again. Then he smiled, and the ghost was gone.
“We were just two talented bastids,” he said. “Leave it at that. Now I need to get inside and out of this bright sun.”
“But—”
“No.” He spoke curtly, and she recoiled a little. “We’re done.”
“I think you got more than you expected,” I told her. “Be content with that.”
“I guess I’ll have to. Thank you, Mr. Carmody.”
Pop lifted one arthritic hand in acknowledgement. I guided him back to the house and helped him up the porch steps. Ruth Crawford stood there for a bit, then got in her car and drove away. I never saw her again, but of course I read the article she wrote about Pop and Uncle Butch. It was lively and full of amusing anecdotes, if short on real insight. It was in Yankee magazine, and twice the length they usually allowed for their articles. I’m sure she really did get more than she expected when she stopped by the house on her way out of town, and that included the title: “Two Talented Bastids.”
My mother—Sheila Wise Carmody, Our Lady of the Daylilies—died in 2016, at the age of seventy-eight. It came as a shock to everyone who knew her. She didn’t smoke, she only drank the rare glass of wine on special occasions, she was neither over nor underweight. Her mother lived to ninety-seven, her grandmother to ninety-nine, but Mom suffered a massive heart attack while driving home from the Castle Rock IGA with a load of groceries in the trunk of her car. She pulled over on the shoulder of Sirois Hill, set the emergency brake, turned off the engine, folded her hands in her lap, and went into the darkness that surrounds this bright flash we call life. My father was shaken by the death of his old friend Dave LaVerdiere, but his wife’s death left him inconsolable.
“She should have lived,” he said at her funeral. “Someone in the clerical department has made a terrible mistake.” Not very eloquent, not his best, but he was in shock.
For six months, Pop slept downstairs on the pullout couch. Finally, at my urging, we cleaned out the bedroom where they had spent over 21,000 nights. Most of her clothes went to the Goodwill in Lewiston, which was a favorite charity. He shared her jewelry out among her friends, with the exception of her engagement ring and her wedding ring, which he carried in the watch pocket of his jeans until the day he died.
The cleaning out was a hard job for him (for both of us), but when it came to clearing her little study, hardly more than a closet adjacent to the mudroom, he flat refused.
“I can’t, Mark,” he said. “I just can’t. It would break me. You’ll have to do it. Box up her papers and put them in the basement. I’ll look at them eventually, and decide what needs to be kept.”
But so far as I know, he never did look. Those boxes are still where I put them, under the Ping-Pong table that nobody has used since Mom and I used to have spirited games down there, Mom swearing colorfully every time I hit a smash she couldn’t handle. Cleaning out her little “think room,” as she called it, was hard. Looking at the dusty Ping-Pong table with its sagging green net was even harder.
A day or two after Pop’s extraordinary picket-fence interview with Ruth Crawford, I found myself remembering how I’d fortified myself with a Valium before going into her think room with a couple of empty banker’s boxes. When I got to the bottom drawer of her desk, I found a stack of spiral notebooks, and when I opened one, I’d seen my father’s unmistakable backslanted printing. They predated his breakthrough, after which every book, even the first, became a bestseller.
His first three novels, written before word processors and computers became commonplace, were composed on an IBM Selectric, which he lugged home each afternoon from the Harlow Town Office. He gave me those typed manuscripts to read and I remembered them well. There were places where he’d scratched out words and added different ones between the lines, and he’d make a pen-slash through a paragraph or two if they went long—that’s how it was done before the delete button was invented. Sometimes he used the x key, where A beautiful lovely day might become A xxxxxxxxx lovely day.
