"...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
Acknowledgements
This is my Easterner's homage to the American West. A betrayal? Maybe.
I'm not maligning the coast of Maine, the dunes of Cape Cod, or the mountains of New Hampshire. But to descend Bear Tooth Pass in the summer and find pink snow, to drive north from Jackson and gasp at Grand Teton towering in the late-day sun, to amble about the top of Rendezvous Mountain shivering in July...they exert their hold on me in a different way.
And so Flood Moon and Sage, Montana.
But first, there is no Sage, Montana, unless like the fictitious Sage it lies hidden at the base of some mountain. But most of the settings in this story do, in fact, exist, from the little outpost of Kelly, Wyoming, to Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Even then the truth lies only in their geography; the license of imagination paints them differently.
At least decade ago I began this novel—a different story with different characters. Most significantly, it began in a different world but concluded in this one. It makes a difference. In 2001 I was nearing the completion of a different novel when the 9/11 attacks occurred. I put the pages away. Writing felt trivial and even petty in light of what had happened. This past year has aroused some of the same misgivings, but this time my little fictitious world, despite its failings and tragedies, has been more welcoming. I hope it will be for you too.
For guiding me through this journey I am grateful for the encouragement of the Chimney Crest Writers: David Fortier, Dawn Leger, Frank DeFrancesco, Don Paglia, Ira Morrison, and a host of others who have been part of our writing group. There were many more who shared in this journey: Mary Galiette who likes to know why and doesn’t let me off the hook; my daughter Jennifer who has a wonderful sense of tone and consistency; Tom Ward, displaced Easterner himself, who provided valuable insights into that made-up town; Cindy Satagaj-Radda who can and does verify the day-to day life of Jackson; and my brother Jim with whom I had my first first "semi-post-publication" discussion. Thanks again to Jennifer and to John Brookhouse who once more provided assistance with cover design.
Finally—thanks to my wife Deanie who has read Flood Moon more times than I have, and whose assistance sometimes fixed the little things (shouldn’t there be only one l in counselor?) and at others, mended more important glitches (How come there’s no chapter 14?) She has been meticulous, thorough, and patient—and always encouraging. Without her there would no Flood Moon.
For Deanie
Chapter 1
The village appeared almost monastic in its stillness. A few lighted windows and a traffic signal blinking yellow a block or more down from where I stood shielding my eyes from the mist. Here and there a pickup truck was parked nose-in at some odd angle, one of them, inexplicably, with its flashers on. It was the only sign of life: Sage, Montana, had shut down for the day.
Almost. For at the far end of the street, well past the blinking light, stood two gas stations, both of which seemed engaged in a contest involving lumens or candlepower or whatever lighthouse keepers discuss when they talk shop over a beer or two. The Sinclair green and the Exxon red reminded me of harbor buoys and that old "red right return" mnemonic that helps incompetent sailors like me locate the channels in Nantucket Sound. It was all very nautical in a landlocked, mountainous, petrochemical sort of way.
Nantucket Sound was indeed a long way off, but I knew it well enough, having spent the first eighteen years of my life in Harwichport on the Cape, one village over from Chatham. Confession: visitors prefer Chatham for a reason. A poem by that revered New Englander Robert Frost—the one born in San Francisco—points out how people love to gaze at the sea, as if all life's answers exist there amidst the stinging jellyfish and the plastic six-pack rings. All right he may not have mentioned those, but it's true that people seem intent upon getting as far out into or as close to the water as they can: the last plank on the pier, the last rock in the jetty. Chatham is that last rock and people fight to stand on it; Harwichport is merely the second plank from the end.
But it's a pretty town—if it were a town and not simply a section of Harwich. To its greater shame, officially it's merely a census-designated place or CDP, something its residents probably discuss only in a whisper and only when they're good and drunk. I'm not a resident anymore: I haven't lived there in three decades, but I still consider it home. Some might see that as an indictment of the life I've led and my inability to root myself anywhere. I might even agree, when I'm good and drunk, although even sober that fact doesn't bother me. The thirty years away has made it easier to recollect my childhood as a series of tenuously interconnected incidents rather than the continuum it must have been. I think we do that as we get older—start to see our lives as books with an infinite number of short chapters, many of which appear to be out of order. Not a problem, we tell ourselves. Eventually it gets sorted out.
Somewhere in that disjointed continuum is the story of Evelyn Kessinger of the actual town of Harwich. Evelyn died earlier this year, having outlived her husband by three decades. Officially Julius Kessinger died in a household accident, though some have always maintained that Evelyn killed him, for it was she who, unaware that he was cleaning the blades of a ceiling fan, flipped it on, startling him enough to make him lose his balance and fall two feet from a wobbly kitchen chair to his death. (Those who enjoy blaming the victim used to point out that, less than ten feet away in a hall closet was a steadier stepstool.) Regardless it was not the distance he fell: it was toppling chin-first into an antique cast iron ornamental umbrella stand that the couple had picked up recently at a flea market. Immediately after the fall Julius apparently sprang to his feet, waved off Evelyn's concern, showed the facial movement of an incipient smile and, while the blades above him slowed to a final lazy revolution or two, took two steps backwards and died. He was fifty. We heard the sirens. Evelyn was never charged with anything, but for years afterwards nobody could turn on a ceiling fan in my house—or any house in the mid-Cape—without hearing someone offer the macabre suggestion that he not "pull a Julius." By rights it should have been "don't pull an Evelyn," but she was still alive and it seemed cruel to saddle her with that burden. Now that she's passed on, it's unlikely the story will survive much longer.
Except in my head. As inconsequential as this all was to everyone other than the Kessingers, it instilled in me a fear of dying funny, of becoming the Julius Kessinger of the next generation or two. Even if I wasn't going to be alive to hear it, I didn't want people suppressing a smile when they met on the street and said "Oh, Calvin Hopper. Funny thing about how he died…."
It wasn't going to happen that night: it was unlikely that I'd drown in the mist or be attacked by some indigenous wildlife: I'd heard talk of bears and wolves but so far had seen only a cat—and that one running away. Of course an hour before I'd almost achieved that humorous death when a mountain goat dashed in front of our bus and the driver, making a decision I will forever question, swerved to avoid it. Such an event could never have occurred on the Cape where the mountain goat population is limited to some scraggly specimens at an infrequently-visited wild animal farm on the bay side. But coming into Sage, Montana, requires a twisting ride along the Beartooth Highway—a must-see for photographers and tourists and, apparently, a major hangout for various species of wildlife, mountain goats among the more prevalent.
Our bus driver's terse explanation after regaining control, "Mountain goat—we missed it," did little to subdue the nervous jabbering among my fellow survivors, many of whom agreed that the time had come to eradicate all wildlife. I assumed it was the fear talking.
I should probably qualify that phrase fellow survivors—it may be a bit Pollyannaish since none of them liked me very much. Hard to blame them—I was the one responsible for adding several hours to an already interminable trip across southern Montana, part of Wyoming, and just about all of Idaho. Idaho, that tall skinny state is skinny only on top. These people wanted to get to Boise,