The Last Chairlift

32. A TURN IN THE ROAD

The residents of River Bend preferred the rooms with the river views. At low tide, their rooms overlooked mostly mudflats, but the residents preferred the mud to the golf course. Not my grandmother. “I rather like the mud, but I would prefer not to see the cows or even think about them,” Nana said. The long view, across the river or the mudflats, was of the black Angus farm. At such a distance from River Bend, it was pointed out to Mildred Brewster, the cattle would appear to be the size of small dogs. “I do not care what the cows appear to be—I know what they are,” my grandmother pointed out. “I would prefer not to see or think about cows, not even small ones.” There was Bartleby’s I would prefer not to, again—Nana remembered her Melville. She also remembered moments of her early childhood, unknown to us. Her life as a young woman had remained intact—most of all, her reading as a young woman.

“Her short-term memory is shot to shit,” Dottie pointed out. “She don’t know the difference between yesterday and fifty years ago.” This was true. My grandmother’s understanding of chronological order was shot to shit, too. Moby-Dick was clearer to her, and more real, than the births of her children or her children’s children. Nana knew who Dottie was, but she always seemed surprised when Dottie showed up—as if Dottie belonged somewhere else, or Dottie herself were somehow out of chronological order.

Near the end, even before she left the Front Street house for River Bend, my grandmother didn’t recognize Abigail and Martha—not until they spoke to her. “Oh, it’s you—you should have said something,” Nana told my aunts, as soon as she heard their harping voices.

Once, when Dottie was still taking care of her, my grandmother asked Dottie why she couldn’t smell the diaper man. “Did you just change Principal Brewster’s diaper, Dottie?” Nana asked.

“Wrong time, Mrs. Brewster—the diaper man is dead,” Dottie answered her.

“Oh, it’s that time—well, it’s all downhill from here,” my grandmother said.

It would have made my mother cry if Nana ever failed to remember her, but Rescue Ship Rachel didn’t need to worry. Little Ray had been named for “the devious-cruising Rachel.” Mildred Brewster, who could recite the rest of that last sentence of Moby-Dick, would always recognize her dearest Rachel.

Once, when my mom visited her aged mother at River Bend, she made sure she was recognized; she stomped into my grandmother’s room, doing her single-leg lunges. “Stop, Rachel—you’ll shake the chandelier!” Nana cried, but they weren’t in the dining room. There were no chandeliers at River Bend, where my grandmother chose a room overlooking the golf course.

“Well-to-do men with clubs,” Nana said, whenever she looked out her window and saw the golfers. “Are they all Republicans?” my grandmother asked me once, pointing to the golfers. They were a long way from the window; I could make out only the brighter colors of the golfers’ clothes.

“I don’t know if they’re Republicans, Nana,” I said.

“I know I’m not being fair—maybe the golfers just dress like Republicans,” my grandmother said, sighing. She had great disdain for golf as exercise. The nurses at River Bend reported that Nana sometimes shouted at the golfers. “If you’re doing this for exercise, just keep walking—don’t keep stopping!” my grandmother yelled at them. It upset her more to see women playing golf—the women were definitely dressed like Republicans. “If women are Republicans, they’ve been brainwashed—the men have brainwashed them,” Nana said. The nurses at River Bend reported that my grandmother was always saying this. There were residents at River Bend who refused to sit with Nana in the dining hall; probably they were Republicans.

Near the end, this made Nora like my grandmother—at least a little more than Nora used to like her. Nora actually said it was a good thing Nana never knew that Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had predeceased her.

“No woman wants to outlive her children, Adam—not even them two children,” Dottie would tell me later. “I knew I shoulda gone back to Maine, when them two moved your grandmother to the bend in the river.” Yet my aunts had persuaded Dottie to stay in the Front Street house. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha hadn’t chosen a Realtor; my aunts were still renovating. Someone had to keep the old house clean, my aunts decided, and Dottie knew the Front Street house.

“Have you seen the ghost, Dottie?” Aunt Abigail asked my grandmother’s faithful housekeeper.

“The Realtors have heard about a ghost in the house,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“I don’t do spirits—I don’t see ’em or clean ’em,” Dottie answered. “There’s people I know who sure as shit saw somethin’, but if I can’t see it, I’m not messin’ with it,” Dottie told them.

“What on earth does that mean, Dottie?” Aunt Abigail asked her.

“I can keep the attic clean, but I’m not recommendin’ that you mess with it,” Dottie answered her. “I was wastin’ my breath, Adam—I shoulda known that them two aunts of yours weren’t listenin’,” Dottie would tell me later. Fortunately, my grandmother would never know that them two had died—or how they’d died. Among the marbles Mildred Brewster had lost, she’d lost the marble for time. For Nana, losing the time marble was a blessing.

When had Abigail and Martha last visited my grandmother at River Bend? Why, it was just the other day, Nana would have answered, although Dottie had moved back to Maine, and my aunts had been dead for four or five years. The Front Street house kept changing hands; in four or five years, that house had seen as many new owners. The Realtor would keep lowering the asking price, following the repeated renovations to the attic.

It didn’t matter what the Realtor renovated. The problem in the attic didn’t stay in the attic. Granddaddy’s ghost knew how to keep quiet. Principal Brewster had always known how to bide his time. Not even my aunts could boss the diaper man around, though those two would try. After Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha managed to move my grandmother to River Bend, those two harassers went after the ghost in the attic.

Realtors hear everything. A ghost in the Front Street house was big news in the town. Even Rose, who no longer limped, said someone had told her there was a ghost in my grandmother’s attic. “Yeah, I’ve already heard about it,” Rose had replied, but my aunts were dead set on doing something about the ghost of the enfant terrible. Ghosts were bad for the real estate business, my aunts were told; in an old New England house with a history, a ghost will bring down the asking price. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha wouldn’t hear of it. My aunts were determined to give this ghost a talking-to.

“Daddy will listen to us,” Aunt Abigail told my mother.

“This is all your fault, Rachel—Daddy stopped talking because of you,” Aunt Martha added, rubbing it in.

“Daddy stopped listening before he stopped talking—Daddy went batshit crazy before I was born!” my mom told her sisters.

“Them two aunts of yours were born batshit crazy, Adam,” Dottie would tell me later. Dottie didn’t encourage my aunts’ plan; wisely, Dottie wanted nothing to do with it. In Dottie’s opinion, the idea of those two sleeping in my attic bedroom was just asking for trouble. Ghost or no ghost, this sure as shit constituted “messin’ with it,” as Dottie had said.

“You didn’t say anything about Jasmine?” I’d asked Dottie.

“Not to them two,” Dottie said. “Them two have made their beds, haven’t they?” Dottie asked me.

“You didn’t tell them what happened to Jasmine?” I would ask my mother later.

“I don’t tell tales out of school about you, sweetie—you’re my one and only,” my mom reminded me.

After the fact, even Nora would ask me the same thing—in her fashion. “I don’t suppose you said something to my mom or Martha, regarding Jasmine’s encounter with Granddaddy’s ghost—or whatever you want to call it. Did you, kiddo?”

I was looking at Em while I shook my head. “I thought you might have already told them,” I lied to Nora, speaking as slowly as possible. Em was shaking her head emphatically. You would be crazier than batshit to try to tell those two anything, Em was saying.

“Who would try to stop those two from sleeping in that attic?” Nora asked me. “Not me, kiddo,” my cousin answered herself. Em was pantomiming something inexplicable. “Em says those two wouldn’t have listened to me, anyway,” Nora said.

All Dottie did was leave a light on in the kitchen. Dottie’s bedroom, in the back of the Front Street house, was above the kitchen. My aunts left another light on, in the upstairs hall; it shed some light on the attic stairs and dimly lit the attic bedroom, enough for my aunts to find their way to the bathroom. Abigail and Martha were in their late sixties; maybe they needed to get up at night.

“Them two didn’t get up that night,” Dottie would tell me later. As always, when anyone was sleeping in the attic, Dottie left her bedroom door open—“just a crack,” Dottie said, “just enough to hear somethin’, if somethin’ happens.” According to Dottie, “There was nowhere near as much yellin’ as the racket Jasmine made, and no shittin’ whatsoever—them two were scared shitless before they could shit,” as Dottie put it.

“Not Little Ray!” my aunts screamed; they were in chorus, but Dottie heard them scream only once. By the time Dottie clomped upstairs, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had stopped breathing. They were hugging each other in my bed, their eyes wide open and staring. I knew where they would have been staring—at a spot on the floor, at the foot of my bed, under the skylight. It was the spot where the principal emeritus chose to appear—in my experience, when the tyrannical infant was in no mood to listen. What else could have frightened those two to death? It had to be Granddaddy’s ghost, in his enfant-terrible phase.

“It sure as shit looks like somethin’ scared ’em to death,” was all Dottie would say to the police about it.

Not surprisingly, Dottie wasn’t quoted in the Exeter Town Crier. “Two Sisters Pass Away Together” was the headline in the “Police Report.” There was mention of their dying “in the house where they were born”—even more comforting, “in their sleep”—which made my aunts’ deaths sound enviable.

“Them two didn’t die when they were sleepin’!” Dottie exclaimed, when she read the “Police Report.”

Mr. Barlow, as usual, disparaged the writing. “The words scared or frightened are avoided—the piece seems willfully unclear,” the little English teacher observed.

“The cause of death was not immediately apparent,” the Exeter Town Crier stated.

“As apparent as a turd in your beer!” Dottie had shouted. She had no doubt—those two had sure as shit seen somethin’.

The way the “Police Report” ended caused a little criticism. Of the two Mrs. Vinters, the elder Brewster sisters, it was written: “They had no known illnesses.”

“That’s like saying the house killed them—or like saying there’s a ghost, without saying it,” the snowshoer said. Mr. Barlow still subscribed to the Exeter Town Crier, even in New York. The snowshoer showed the “Police Report” to Em and Nora; for Nora, the piece amounted to an obit for her mother and Aunt Martha.

Em immediately did a couple of death scenes; she acted out two deaths from unknown (or at least unrecognizable) illnesses. “It’s bullshit that those two had no known illnesses—they had sexual intolerance up the wazoo!” Nora was raving. “They had incurable hatred of sexual differences!” Nora shouted. This somewhat explained why I didn’t understand the cause of death in the death scenes Em was pantomiming.

Realtors must know how to read between the lines of an obituary. All but one of the agents lost interest in selling the Front Street house. The one who remained lowballed the asking price. My mother couldn’t have cared less; she wanted to be rid of the house, and she didn’t care if she didn’t make a killing. In fact, my mom had already removed herself from the inheritance. When my grandmother’s marbles were still intact, she’d granted power of attorney to Little Ray to act on her behalf. (It would have killed my aunts to know that Nana had done this.) Nana and my mom had long ago agreed that my grandmother’s estate would go, in equal parts, to Nora, Henrik, and me. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had been cut out of the picture some years before they saw the thing that appeared in my attic bedroom, under the nighttime skylight.

Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—depending on our inclination.

I wrote, of a fictional grandmother, that she had died one day short of her hundredth birthday; I suggested she’d died “deliberately,” knowing the hullabaloo over her centenary would doubtless have killed her. This almost happened to Mildred Brewster, who would have wanted no part of her hundredth birthday. Once—this was at River Bend, when I was reading to her from her beloved Moby-Dick—my grandmother said, “I should have gone down with the Pequod, Adam.”

“Why, Nana?” I asked her.

“Because I’ve lived long enough, my dear boy,” my grandmother answered. “Who wouldn’t prefer to die at sea? Doesn’t that beat being surrounded by golfers?”

This was during a period of conflict between the golfers and those River Bend residents whose rooms overlooked the golf course. A golfer had “relieved himself,” as Nana put it, within sight of several River Bend residents who were looking out their windows; my grandmother was among the offended gawkers.

As I understood it, a golfer had to go; he’d unzipped himself and had taken a whiz in a grassy area between the putting green and the marshland along the river. There was only one green within sight of the River Bend residents. I don’t play golf; I can’t recall which hole it was. The flag that marked the green had been stolen from the cup; after the peeing incident, the golfers claimed, one of the River Bend residents threw the flag in the Squamscott River. The flag was not replaced, but juvenile hostilities persisted between the golfers and the residents. One morning, when many of the residents were looking out their windows, a golfer gave them the finger.

“It was a woman, Adam—she did that,” my grandmother said, giving me the finger. A lady golfer had flipped her the bird, one of the brainwashed Republican women. Among the River Bend residents, Nana knew there was talk of retaliation.

The townies, the local people of Exeter, who weren’t well-to-do or part of the academy community, called the River Bend residents River Benders; the near-death residents, of course, were called River Enders.

The act of reprisal against the golfers was expected by both River Benders and Enders—not by the golfers. “It appears that one of us pooped on the putting green,” my grandmother told me, in hushed tones—as if she were speaking of a sacred act. A River Bender—maybe a River Ender, with nothing to lose—had retaliated by taking a big dump on the putting green, very close to the cup missing its flag.

The groundskeeper for the golf course was the one who discovered the giant mound on the green. It was suspicious that my grandmother and all the residents with views of the putting green had waited at their windows for the groundskeeper’s arrival. “The residents definitely knew the poop was on the green before the groundskeeper got to it,” a young nurse confided to me; she was more candid than the older nurses at River Bend, but she didn’t go so far as to say the residents had foreknowledge of the outrageous act of defecation. Whatever person did the defecating became “an overnight legend at River Bend,” or so the young nurse earnestly told me. Yet the defecator would remain an unnamed hero.

If Nana knew who did it, she took her knowledge of the daring dumper to her grave. (To Mildred Brewster’s thinking, even defecating was better exercise than golf.)

When Dottie’s postcards came, Nana didn’t know who Dottie was—not to mention what Dottie was saying. “How are you, Mrs. Brewster? I’m still kicking,” Dottie always wrote, before signing her name in the surprisingly legible handwriting of her grocery lists.

“Who is Dottie? Exactly what is she kicking?” my grandmother would ask me, or one of the nurses. When we reminded her who Dottie was, and how “still kicking” was just Dottie’s way of saying she was alive, Nana was indignant about the misunderstanding. “Well, why doesn’t Dottie sound like Dottie—why doesn’t she say it the way Dottie would have said it? It’s not ‘kicking,’ it’s kickin’!” my grandmother exclaimed. It was Dottie’s voice she still remembered, and mine.

In the end, Nana didn’t remember me when she saw me. Even if I had visited her as recently as a week before, or only a day before, she would stare at me, not knowing who I was. “It’s me, Nana—it’s Adam,” I would have to tell her each time. She always recognized my voice.

“Oh, Adam—you’ve gotten so old, dear,” she would say.

Moby-Dick has a first-person narrator. It was Ishmael’s voice my grandmother remembered. It didn’t matter where Nana started reading, or where she stopped. She didn’t remember where she’d stopped, or where she’d started the day before; she knew the story. She remembered all of Moby-Dick. Nana knew everything Ishmael said, and exactly how Ishmael was supposed to say it.

The young nurse at River Bend knew only that my grandmother’s old eyes got tired from her constant reading, especially in the winter months, when there were no golfers and Nana read and reread her Moby-Dick day and night. For Nana, the winter was one day long; it had happened overnight and would newly arrive, again, every tomorrow, but her old eyes knew how long winters were in New Hampshire. “Oh, look, it snowed last night—enough to discourage the cowardly golfers,” my grandmother would say every winter morning.

The young nurse, Emmanuelle, was from one of New Hampshire’s French Canadian families; she spoke no French, only English. In the early going in Moby-Dick, Nana needed to correct Emmanuelle’s pronunciation. “It’s Queequeg,” my grandmother told the intrepid Emmanuelle. “Keep your eye on the cannibal, dear—Queequeg is important. He’s not just any harpooner; Queequeg isn’t a Christian,” Nana forewarned the young nurse, who (fearlessly) began reading Moby-Dick at the beginning.

I happened to encounter Emmanuelle when she was discouraged and in tears—this was following her mispronunciations in Chapter 32, the “Cetology” chapter.

“No one needs to know the names of ‘the leviathanic brotherhood’—my grandmother won’t know if you skip chapters like that,” I told the young nurse. I forewarned her not to read Chapter 92, the “Ambergris” chapter—knowing that whale vomit, and everything to do with “the inglorious bowels of a sick whale,” was distracting and not what was important.

It was not just Queequeg’s name that caused trouble for young Emmanuelle; the stalwart girl had been chastised by my grandmother for mispronouncing “Tashtego” and “Daggoo,” and Nana never failed to remind Emmanuelle that Queequeg is a savage (not a Christian) for a very good reason. “And there’s his coffin,” Nana revealed to the young nurse. “Please don’t forget about Queequeg’s coffin!”

Poor Emmanuelle; the nurse had read no farther than the end of Chapter 40, the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter. It was commendable how the young nurse had devoted herself to reading all of Moby-Dick, but she would not get to Queequeg’s coffin before Chapter 110. I didn’t want to tell Emmanuelle that my grandmother might have spoiled the story by spilling the beans about the coffin too soon. When I was visiting Nana, I took over the reading from Emmanuelle—not necessarily where the dutiful nurse had stopped reading. Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn’t know was where she was in her own story.

I often began reading to Nana from Pip’s prayer. Pip is the Black cabin boy on the Pequod. At the end of the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter, Pip has overheard the sailors swearing their allegiance to Ahab—“that anaconda of an old man,” Pip calls Captain Ahab. Pip is afraid. “Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness,” Pip prays, “have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!”

“Poor Pip,” my grandmother always said, sighing. We both knew what would happen to him; in a sense, the cabin boy would drown twice. Lost overboard, alone on the sea, and then rescued, Pip goes mad. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.” Pip would live, to drown again—the last time, with the rest of the Pequod’s crew.

Or I would begin with “The Blacksmith,” the gloomy Chapter 112, because Nana said she knew nothing as comforting on the subject of death as the line she loved in that dark chapter. “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried.” Melancholy comforted my grandmother.

Nana liked the door to her room at River Bend left open. The doors to the residents’ rooms were closed at night—“for fire reasons,” Emmanuelle had told me—but during the day, my grandmother insisted that her door remain open. Some of the residents who’d lost their marbles would wander in when I was reading, but they never stayed to listen. Moby-Dick wasn’t written for passersby.

“Just keep reading, dear—perhaps ‘The Shark Massacre’ would be an appropriate chapter,” Nana would tell me, when one of the marbleless trespassers entered her room, picking up photographs and putting them down, and otherwise aimlessly snooping around.

I would, as directed, turn to that passage in Chapter 66, where the sharks are snapping “at each other’s disembowelments”—especially that bit where “those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.” These images were sufficiently unpleasant to make most of the trespassing residents leave my grandmother’s room—even though they’d lost their marbles, or perhaps because they’d lost them. Only occasionally did I need to read to the end of the chapter, where poor Queequeg almost loses his hand to a dead shark on deck. In his semiliterate way, the savage speculates on what kind of irresponsible god could have created the shark. “Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” the cannibal says, “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.” Queequeg’s irreverent, sacrilegious dialogue did the trick. Even the most marbleless of the intruders were offended; the trespassers quickly left Nana’s room, not wanting to hear more of Moby-Dick.

“If you would close your door, Mrs. Brewster, the other residents would not wander into your room,” one of the older nurses was always telling my grandmother.

“Fiddlesticks!” Nana always replied.

Nurse Fiddlesticks, as I now think of the well-meaning but wrongheaded nurse, couldn’t understand how my grandmother might have enjoyed the intrusions by the River Bend residents who wandered into her room—the more marbles they’d lost, the better. Nana was not once disdainful of her fellow River Benders for being lost or addled; what Mildred Brewster disdained was the trespassers’ lack of interest in reading. Yet, contradictorily, Nana did everything she could to discourage the intruders from staying to listen.

Emmanuelle had told me that my grandmother once made her read “The Whiteness of the Whale”—not only all of Chapter 42 but the terrible footnotes in small type. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me”; if only Ishmael had stopped there, but “the thought of whiteness” gives Ishmael no peace. There are footnotes concerning “the intolerable hideousness” of the polar bear and “the mild deadliness” of the white shark; an even longer footnote describes Ishmael’s sighting of a white albatross, a “mystic thing.” Then came “the Albino man” passage; the chapter’s willful, “all-pervading whiteness” was enough to make a nonreader out of anyone. I loved Moby-Dick, and I knew that Emmanuelle wanted to love it—the young nurse was sincerely trying her hardest to love it—but both of us hated “the incantation of this whiteness,” which Ishmael kept reciting in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which was not about the whale’s whiteness.

“I hate that chapter,” Emmanuelle told me, near tears.

“I hate it, too,” I said to the young nurse, who didn’t like it when my grandmother asked her to skip ahead in her reading of Moby-Dick. In my estimation, Emmanuelle was a principled young woman; she wanted to read the entire novel, in order. On one occasion, when a female resident at River Bend wandered into Nana’s room, my grandmother had resorted to a trick she liked to play with Chapter 81. Just reading the title (“The Pequod meets the Virgin”) or speaking suggestively about the chapter would compel a female trespasser to leave the room. Em once imagined Moby-Dick was a pornographic novel. God knows what a female River Bender might have imagined about “The Pequod meets the Virgin”—that chapter could sound pornographic to the uninitiated reader, or to a nonreader. (Although I could imagine the male River Benders and Enders might have been intrigued.)

I knew Nora’s feelings about Nana’s reading Moby-Dick to me. I’d been trying to explain to Nora and Em how Nana and I had reversed our roles—how I was reading Moby-Dick to Nana; how a young nurse at River Bend seemed committed to reading the whole novel to her. I told Nora and Em that Emmanuelle was intent on finishing her reading of the novel before Nana died. This hadn’t sounded maniacally obsessive to me—not until I heard myself say it out loud to Nora and Em, when I made Emmanuelle sound like as much of a lunatic as Ishmael on the subject of whiteness. I saw that Em was writhing all around; she appeared to be depicting a series of tragic mistakes and subsequent agonies, what Em imagined might transpire in “The Pequod meets the Virgin.” Em knew how to make a tragic story worse.

“Are you sure Emmanuelle is a nurse, kiddo?” Nora asked me. “How does a nurse have time to read Moby-Dick to one of the patients? Do you know how old Emmanuelle is? She sounds like a kid who doesn’t have enough to do,” Nora told me. Em’s saga of unending errors and resultant grief was ongoing.

“Is that what Em’s saying?” I asked Nora.

“That’s what I’m saying, kiddo—you don’t want to know what’s bugging Em,” Nora said.

I’d first thought Em was acting out what happens in “The Pequod meets the Virgin,” which Em had interpreted as a succession of grotesque and humiliating wedding nights—a Nibelungenlied of lost virginity, leading to several deaths. It occurred to me, only then, that I might have misunderstood Emmanuelle when we were first introduced. She was young, she was shy, she mumbled; maybe Emmanuelle told me she was a nursing student, not a nurse.

Nora was inexactly reading my mind and Em’s when she said, apropos of nothing, “If you didn’t know what Moby-Dick was about, and you had no clue the Pequod was a ship, a chapter called ‘The Pequod meets the Virgin’ might make you think the Pequod is a nickname for a guy with a big dick, a bad idea for virgins.” Then Em went off on a possible tangent—maybe related to her epic of the repercussions ensuing from lost virginity, maybe not. “Em says most dicks are a bad idea for virgins,” Nora added.

“Is that all Em is saying?” I asked Nora. Em was violently shaking her head.

Em had more on her mind than what happens in “The Pequod meets the Virgin.” In Chapter 81, the eponymous Virgin is a German ship—the Jungfrau, sailing out of Bremen. The Jungfrau encounters the Pequod at sea, but the captain and crew of the German ship are a bunch of amateurs; the Jungfrau is a ship of virgins, when it comes to knowing about whaling. Of course this wasn’t what Em was worked up about. I was beginning to get the feeling that the loss of anyone’s virginity, real or imagined, wasn’t what Em was worked up about in the first place.

“It’s about me, isn’t it? What is Em saying about me?” I asked Nora. Em had crumpled; she was exhausted and she looked angry. Em wasn’t only angry at me; she was angry at Nora, for being less than forthright in translating her.

“Em says you must be fucking Emmanuelle, or you soon will be, kiddo,” Nora said.

“I’m not fucking her!” I cried, but Nora had touched a nerve—yes, I’d thought about fucking Emmanuelle.

“You soon will be,” Nora repeated. “Em says you have to grow up. You have to stop fucking these women you feel sorry for, just because you know they will fuck you—and don’t fuck young women, like Emmanuelle. Em thinks Nana will die before Emmanuelle finishes reading Moby-Dick—then Emmanuelle will want to read it to you, kiddo. Em says you’re going to be taking turns reading Moby-Dick aloud to each other, and you know what that will lead to,” Nora said.

“I have no intentions of reading Moby-Dick with Emmanuelle, or doing what that will lead to,” I said, not as indignantly as I tried to sound. My indignation was muted, because (of course) I’d imagined Emmanuelle reading Moby-Dick to me, and our taking turns reading to each other, and what that would lead to.

It used to disturb me that Em knew so much about me. I didn’t know as much as I’d wanted to know about Em, beginning with why she’d stopped speaking, but Em was not inclined to pantomime what I could only guess was a dark and twisted tale, and Nora wouldn’t tell me Em’s story.

The snowshoer knew only bits and pieces: what my mom had overheard or reconstructed from Abigail and Martha’s gossip. Em had a Canadian father and an American mother; their marriage became unglued when they were outed, or they outed each other. How Em’s speech was affected by her parents’ divorce, or their coming out as gay and lesbian, Mr. Barlow didn’t know; my mother hadn’t overheard that part. “As for Emmanuelle, I’ve not met her—I’ve only heard about her. You should talk to your mom and Molly about Emmanuelle—they’ve met her,” Elliot said, in her most offhand manner. She was still Mr. Barlow to me, but she’d had enough of living as a man.

The snowshoer was in her forties before she came out as a transgender woman; she’d been taking estrogen for three or four years. Dr. Dave’s specialty was endocrinology. Dave had been prescribing and overseeing Mr. Barlow’s hormone therapy from the start. Back then, most endocrinologists weren’t prescribing spironolactone as a testosterone blocker. Nora and Em had confided to me what Elliot told them. After the snowshoer had been taking the estrogen, she started to feel desire more like women do—not the gross way men do, Em had vividly acted out for me.

“I wasn’t wanting it all the time—what a relief that was,” Elliot herself would tell me, later. There’d been a distinct disgust in the way Mr. Barlow spoke of wanting it.

You could look at this two ways, Nora and I decided. Either Elliot’s admission of wanting it, as a man, meant that Em was wrong: the snowshoer had certainly been doing it. Why wouldn’t she? Or Em was right: Elliot’s self-disgust for wanting it all the time, her hatred of male lust, meant that the snowshoer had not once acted on wanting it—she’d never actually done it. “You should ask your mom and Molly if Elliot ever did it, kiddo,” Nora said, but I knew it would be easier to ask those two about Emmanuelle.

In truth, I chickened out of asking my mother if she and Elliot ever did it—just as I’d chickened out of asking Elliot. And it simply felt wrong (it felt like prying) to ask my mother if the snowshoer had actually done it with men. My reasoning for not asking Mr. Barlow if her desire for men had ever been consummated was more convoluted. If Em was right, would Elliot Barlow be embarrassed that she’d never had sex with anyone? In truth, I was the one who was embarrassed; I was ashamed to ask the snowshoer if she’d actually done it, if she’d ever pulled the trigger. What business was this of mine? What did I know about a boy who’d always wanted to be a girl?

“Don’t ask Elliot if she ever did it, kiddo. Ask your mom and Molly about that,” Nora kept telling me. “If you want to ask Elliot something, ask her what she goes through—just being a woman. Ask Elliot how it’s going, how she’s treated as a woman. You have no idea, kiddo,” Nora said, with Em nodding her head off.

I thought I saw how the estrogen was working. In just two or three years, Mr. Barlow had become more womanly; she’d put on weight, in a womanly way, and weighed as much as my mom now. The snowshoer had hips, she had boobs—little ones, but she was shapely, and she filled out my mother’s clothes. Elliot could wear Em’s clothes, too. Did the estrogen make her skin softer? Maybe the orchiectomy had helped.

On the days when the snowshoer saw the electrologist, she stayed overnight with Em and Nora; her face was so swollen and sore-looking after the hair removal that Elliot didn’t want to be seen in public. Elliot was lucky that she didn’t have a heavy beard; the process of applying an electric current to the face with a needle-shaped electrode, one hair at a time, was more painful for those transgender women who had heavy beards. “It takes a few years,” was all the snowshoer said to me about the electrolysis, but Em or Nora had held her when she cried.

Elliot was lucky that her parents loved her, unquestioningly; the little Barlows were supportive when Elliot told them she was going through the transitioning. The writing team knew a surgeon in Zürich, a pioneer in facial-feminization surgery. At four feet nine, with small and delicate bones, Mr. Barlow did not have much in the way of masculine features; her jaw didn’t jut and she did not have a prominent brow ridge. She wasn’t seeking corrective surgery of a cosmetic kind. Elliot Barlow wasn’t looking for beautification. An Adam’s apple reduction was all she wanted, and the little Barlows found an Adam’s apple wizard in German-speaking Switzerland—someone they could speak to and understand.

Nora and Em and I got tired of hearing how lucky the snowshoer was; even the snowshoer kept saying how lucky she was. There was a small scar under Elliot’s chin where the Swiss surgeon had pulled apart the skin in the front of her neck—exposing her larynx. “The surgeon just scraped off some cartilage,” Mr. Barlow said dismissively. Even the surgeon had told her she was lucky. Elliot was more feminine than many women, even when she still had an Adam’s apple; Elliot was already prettier than most women, and she would keep getting prettier (even over fifty). As a woman, Elliot was luckiest of all for her smallness, the Swiss surgeon said. Were we supposed to believe that the snowshoer’s smallness was no longer a burden?

“Bullshit,” Nora said. “You’re lucky if you can take your gender for granted.” Em was acting out the throes of puberty; it looked like Em was having her first period, and not knowing what it was, again and again. I had to look away. “Is Elliot lucky that she feels like a thirteen-year-old girl, thanks to a shitload of estrogen?” Nora asked.

The snowshoer hadn’t grown up as a girl; she wasn’t lucky to be finding out what dickheads most men were when she was an attractive woman in her forties. Her smallness notwithstanding, Mr. Barlow had been a confident man. No matter how passable she was as a woman, her confidence was diminished. Elliot had the orchiectomy in Zürich—a different surgeon. “Don’t tell me Elliot is lucky to lose her confidence—no woman wants to think her confidence came from her balls!” Nora said.

Nora had grown up hearing bad testosterone jokes. She’d been told she had more testosterone than most women—more than most men, Nora had heard. And one night at the Gallows, when Nora and Em were onstage, some dickhead in the audience had hollered at Nora that she should get her sex chromosomes checked. “Come up here, hamster-penis—I’ll check your sex chromosomes for you!” Nora had shouted from the stage, reprising the hamster-penis from Jasmine’s repertoire.

In certain circumstances, the snowshoer’s smallness was still a burden. As a gay man, Mr. Barlow hadn’t been out for very long. Whether Elliot actually did it or not, the gay men he dated didn’t feel deceived by him. As a transgender woman, the snowshoer kept meeting heterosexual men who felt they’d been misled by her, but Elliot did nothing to mislead the men who were attracted to her. She did not flirt; she was conservative (to the degree of appearing overly proper) in the way she dressed. And why shouldn’t Mr. Barlow try to look as pretty and as much like a woman as she could? When a man was interested in her in that way—when he asked her out on a date, before anything romantic or physical happened—the snowshoer never hesitated to talk about the trans part of her being a transgender woman. Over time, the little English teacher learned it was safer for her to initiate the transgender revelation publicly.

She had to tell the men what was different about her, didn’t she? Before there was any awkward touching—certainly before Elliot reciprocated a man’s advances—she had to tell the guy she had a penis, or there were questions and answers to that effect. Don’t tell me the snowshoer was lucky. And how did the straight guys respond to her telling them the truth? All Mr. Barlow would say to me was: “Once in a while, you meet a really nice guy—I’ve met a couple of guys who were very nice about it.”

Nora and Em—later, Molly and my mom—told me about the other guys, the majority of them. They called Elliot a tranny or a fag, or both; it didn’t matter if the transgender subject came up in a private conversation or in public. Some of the men shoved her or hit her—this had happened even publicly. The men seemed to think it was okay to hit her or rough her up because she wasn’t a real woman. Molly told me that Mr. Barlow knew how to take a punch and just walk away. “You know what happens when the guys keep hitting her, more than once—you know, you’re a wrestler, Kid,” was how Molly put it.

“Elliot isn’t lucky to be small, sweetie. She’s four-nine, she weighs one-fifteen—one-twenty, tops. She’s my size, sweetie. No mouse-dick would try to beat her up if Elliot was a big girl, more like Molly,” my mom said.

So far, as in downtown Exeter, the snowshoer had been lucky—she’d won the fights she got into. “I’ve had a couple of shiners, and a split lip or two”—this was the extent of what Elliot would say to me. The homo-hating men who’d tried to beat her up didn’t know she was a wrestler. She had a good duck under, an arm drag, a slide-by, and a very quick single leg; so far, Mr. Barlow’s arm bars must have been working. Or the snowshoer hadn’t met a homophobic wrestler, or a homophobic boxer yet. I could see the scar from the stitches in one of Elliot’s eyebrows, where one of the homo-haters had landed a punch, or he’d caught her with a head butt or an elbow. Nora told me there’d been a scuffle when Mr. Barlow had broken a rib.

My mom said a homo-hater had tried to break Elliot’s arm; the snowshoer had slipped behind him and done her usual damage, but not before the guy had hyperextended her elbow.

I missed all this—I’d left the Northeast. I was back in Iowa, this time teaching at the Writers’ Workshop. The war in Vietnam was over; the draft-dodger college in Vermont would go belly-up. I wasn’t a household name as a novelist, but I’d published enough to get a good teaching job. I wasn’t getting to Vermont and seeing as much of my mother and Molly as I used to; I wasn’t getting to New York and seeing as much of Nora and Em and the snowshoer as I wanted to. And of course I knew why Elliot wasn’t telling me about her travails as a transgender woman—the dangers of her interactions with straight men, in particular. The snowshoer knew I loved her, and how much I worried about her. It was almost the 1980s. Why did I ever imagine that decade would be better?

When I was visiting Vermont, and had a moment alone with Molly, I felt like an idiot asking her if my mom and the snowshoer had ever done it. (In the light of Elliot’s risking her life to be a woman, this must have struck Molly as a trivial question.) “I don’t know the details, Kid—I just know they love each other, and we both know they like to fool around,” the trail groomer told me.

We both knew Mr. Barlow liked gay men, too. (Hadn’t Elliot become a teacher at Exeter to protect those boys who were picked on? Hadn’t she stayed until the school became coed, when she believed those boys would be safer?) It had to hurt the snowshoer when she became a transgender woman, and a few of her gay men friends wanted nothing to do with her.

Under the circumstances, it seemed truly extraneous for me to ask Molly if she thought the snowshoer actually did it with men, but I asked her anyway. “How would I know, Kid? Your mom’s going to ask you if you’re sleeping with Emmanuelle—that’s all I know,” the snowcat operator said. Under the circumstances, Molly was being kind. Even in my limited experience, I knew no one had ever behaved as badly as heterosexual men (except maybe Jasmine), and I wasn’t trying to be a transgender woman.

“You could probably go to jail for sleeping with Emmanuelle—Moby-Dick is not an excuse, sweetie. You’re not sleeping with her, are you?” was the way my mother asked me.

“I don’t think Emmanuelle is that young, Ray—I don’t think it’s illegal to sleep with her,” Molly said.

“You know what I mean, Molly,” my mother said.

“I’m not sleeping with Emmanuelle,” I told them. I admitted that I might have misunderstood Emmanuelle. “You’ve met Emmanuelle, you know she mumbles—not when she reads, but she doesn’t speak clearly,” I told them. “She may have said she was a nursing student, not a nurse—I may have misheard her,” I explained.

“Emmanuelle is a high school student, sweetie,” my mother informed me. This was embarrassing—to be almost thirty-eight and not have known that Emmanuelle was a high school kid. I was thinking she probably didn’t have a real job, just a volunteer position. Emmanuelle must have been doing what they call community service—something that would look good on her college application, I imagined.

Actually, it was the court-ordered kind of community service. Emmanuelle wasn’t exactly volunteering to be of use at River Bend; her service to River Bend was a substitute for other judicial remedies. “Emmanuelle was charged with indecent exposure, Kid—her community service is instead of paying a fine,” Molly told me.

“Or instead of going to jail, sweetie,” my mother said.

“She’s a kid, Ray—they weren’t going to send her to jail for mooning,” Molly said. You know you know nothing when this is how you learn that a girl reading Moby-Dick to your grandmother has been charged with mooning.

I’d read the “Police Report” citing “an outrage to public decency on the Swasey Parkway.”

“Another one!” the snowshoer had declared. To the little English teacher’s vexation—as always, with the writing—the various indecencies and obscenities performed on or near the Swasey Parkway were not described. There’d been no mention of mooning, not in the Exeter Town Crier. Naturally, given the age of the young mooner, Emmanuelle’s name had been withheld.

“She also flashed her titties, Molly—she flashed and mooned,” my mom said. In the “Police Report,” the unnamed Emmanuelle neither flashed nor mooned; readers were left to imagine exactly how a young female had exposed herself from a passing car on the Swasey Parkway.

“Exposed herself to whom?” the snowshoer had asked. To people who were outraged, Elliot and I could only guess. Older people, we’d assumed. It was a nice day. People were probably out for a stroll, or they were sitting on the benches in that grassy area along the Squamscott River. Along came a carload of high school girls; one of the girls stuck her bare ass out the passenger-side window. The couple who reported the indecent exposure said the car came by a second time; this time, the same girl flashed her tits out the window. “Was doing it twice what offended them?” the little English teacher had asked.

“Your mom asked Emmanuelle to tell us exactly what she did, Kid,” Molly explained.

“Poor Emmanuelle,” I said. “I would make the couple who reported her do the community service,” I added.

“You shouldn’t be seeing a high school girl, sweetie—not this high school girl, anyway,” my mother said. Didn’t my mom want me to meet the venerated Grace when she was still in high school—when Grace was only seventeen, and I was already thirty-one?

“Maybe later would be better, Ray,” Molly had said at the time.

As a woman, it was a burden for Elliot Barlow that sex markers for U.S. passport holders became mandatory in 1977. The denoted symbols, an M or an F, made international travel difficult for transgender people. Mr. Barlow was an M, but she looked like an F. Binding her breasts was a bad idea; she’d been strip-searched. It was better for the snowshoer to wear a loose-fitting flannel shirt, no bra, baggy jeans. When she was just starting out as a woman, sometimes the snowshoer would lay off the electrolysis (or she would stop shaving) before she flew to Europe, or before she flew back.

Nora called the U.S. State Department “a bunch of sexual fascists.” She said the International Civil Aviation Organization had “a bug up its ass about androgyny.” Allegedly, there were more unisex-looking international travelers around; apparently, your photograph (your outward appearance) didn’t adequately determine your sex. A panel of passport experts cited unisex attire and hairstyles, but I’d been living in Iowa City; gender-confusing fashion was rare in Iowa—not too many androgynous-looking people there. In my world, Nora and my mom were the most androgynous-looking people I knew, and Nora looked more masculine than androgynous. My mother was a very pretty woman; Little Ray looked masculine only when she walked, or slouched around, and I’d always thought her masculine way of moving was a jock thing, not an androgynous thing.

Nora had a bug up her ass about the U.S. State Department and the restrictive sex markers imposed on U.S. passports. She said the M and F symbols were “heterosexual presumptions and impositions.”

Nora had a point. Not until 1992 did the State Department permit transgender people to change the sex markers on their passports, and only if they’d completed what was then called “sexual reassignment” surgery. (Not until 2010 would the surgical requirement be lifted, and only because Hillary Clinton requested it; she was then secretary of state.)

In the 1970s, Two Dykes, One Who Talks had a hard time getting the Gallows Lounge to let them do their thing about the State Department onstage. Not even the Gallows would permit Em’s pantomime of the State Department’s presuming to define her sex by a cursory and crude examination of Em’s genitals—while Nora tells the audience that the State Department has no business messing with our privates. “The country is getting more uptight, or uptighter—even at the Gallows,” Nora had told me.

This was what Molly and my mom and I were talking about in their Vermont kitchen when the phone rang. Molly was stir-frying; I knew she wasn’t going to answer the phone. We’d also been talking about Mr. Barlow’s unfamiliarity with being harassed as a woman. Something came up about androgynous-looking people. I’m sure I didn’t say that Nora and my mom were the most androgynous-looking people I knew, but my mother said, almost neutrally, “Some people, sweetie, say Molly is androgynous-looking.”

“I don’t think so,” I quickly said; I was hoping this didn’t entirely give away that I had always been unequivocally attracted to Molly, as a woman.

“Me, neither!” my mom cried, giving Molly a squeeze at the stove.

“Are you going to answer the phone, Ray?” the ski patroller asked her, still stir-frying.

“I can get it,” I said. But Little Ray, in her androgynous way, was always quicker.

“Whatcha want? It’s dinnertime,” Molly and I heard my mother say. It was funny to be in my late thirties, and only now understand why Molly usually answered the phone. I smiled at Molly, who just kept stirring. “Yes, this is her daughter,” we heard my mom say.

“Uh-oh, Kid,” Molly said; with her free hand, she gave my shoulder a squeeze.

“Just a minute,” we heard my mother say. “Please talk to my son, Adam—he’s her grandson,” my mom said, putting down the phone. Little Ray went into the TV room, where she lay down on the futon; Molly and I could hear her sobbing. My grandmother had been my mother’s advocate—for a while, her only advocate. Molly turned off the flame under the wok; she went into the TV room to lie down with my mom.

When the phone rang, we’d also been talking about moving my grandmother from River Bend to Manchester, where my mom could have seen her every day. But my grandmother had lost track of actual time; if you saw her every day or once a month, Mildred Brewster wouldn’t have noticed the difference. “We’re going to move her to Manchester, eventually,” my mother had kept saying.

Could you see cows or golfers out the windows of the old folks’ home in Manchester? I’d asked Molly.

“There are Republicans in the old folks’ home in Manchester, Kid,” the trail groomer had told me.

“There are Republicans everywhere, Molly,” my mom had said.

“This is Adam Brewster—my grandmother is Mildred Brewster,” I said into the phone, while my mother cried. Since my grandmother had arrived at River Bend, the voyage of the Pequod marked the passing of the only time Nana knew. She knew it was a long voyage; she knew how it ended; she knew only Ishmael would escape.

My grandmother had “passed away” in her sleep, or she’d fallen asleep when she was reading and had died in her sleep. This was what one of the older nurses at River Bend told me on the phone. “Her door was open, of course,” the older nurse said, with a lingering disapproval, “and when Emmanuelle checked on her, your grandmother had passed away with that big book.” I could still detect the disapproval, as if Moby-Dick had done it. I wanted to know which scene.

“Is Emmanuelle okay?” I asked the nurse.

“Stop thinking about Emmanuelle, sweetie!” my mother called from the futon in the TV room, between sobs. On the phone, I heard the nurse sigh; her sigh should have prepared me for her misunderstanding my question.

“As far as we know, Emmanuelle has been behaving herself,” the older nurse said stiffly. I listened to the disapproving nurse a little longer; there were “the usual arrangements” to be made. My mom was crying more softly; I could hear Molly’s voice, but not what the snowcat operator was saying. I spoke as quietly as I could into the phone.

“Please tell Emmanuelle I’m sorry she was the one who found her,” I said. Had she found Nana’s thumb between the pages?

“Forget Emmanuelle—she’s a stripper, sweetie!” my mother screamed from the TV room.

“Emmanuelle was upset, so we sent her home—she’ll get over it,” the disapproving nurse abruptly told me.

“Emmanuelle is just a kid, Ray,” I heard Molly say.

“A kid who strips, Molly—a kid who shows off her tushy and her titties!” my mom said. I didn’t want to think about Emmanuelle’s tushy or her titties, but of course I could imagine them. I was thinking I had no more relatives in the town of Exeter—none living, counting Granddaddy’s ghost. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother as a ghost. If Nana had wanted to see more of the diaper man, she wouldn’t have hired Dottie. I thought being a ghost would have struck Mildred Brewster as undignified; the suddenness of all the appearing and the disappearing was beneath her, like bad manners.

I’d hung up the phone—I was at loose ends in the kitchen. I wished I knew where in Moby-Dick my grandmother was when she died. It didn’t matter where Emmanuelle had stopped reading to her; Emmanuelle was way behind, just plodding ahead. But what had Nana been reading to herself, at the end? The rice was still steaming; the stove timer said the rice had two minutes to go. The stir-fry needed stirring. “Leave my wok alone, Kid,” Molly said. She’d come out of the TV room, with my mother clinging to her—the way I’d seen Em cling to Nora.

“I was wondering when we were going to eat,” I said. In truth, it was Emmanuelle I was wondering about: the kind of complications I might encounter, trying to track her down—just to ask her if she knew which part of the Pequod’s voyage had been the final part for Mildred Brewster. Had there been a bookmark or a dog-eared page?

“You know, sweetie, there’s another thing about that kid, Emmanuelle—I was doing some single-leg lunges with her, and some wall sits, and some squats,” my mom said.

“Don’t, Ray,” Molly said. The flame under the wok made a popping sound—simultaneously with my mother saying squats.

“Emmanuelle is a fairly athletic kid, sweetie—she’s got pretty good balance, she nailed the squats,” my mom said.

Maybe the “Sunset” chapter—Nana loved that one, I was thinking. “(The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.)” I didn’t want to imagine Emmanuelle nailing the squats, anything but her squatting. “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail,” Ahab is musing to himself.

“You don’t know Emmanuelle is the green-dumper, Ray—I don’t think she’s got anything against those golfers,” Molly said.

I didn’t want to imagine Emmanuelle taking a shit on the putting green; I really must have known I shouldn’t be imagining Emmanuelle at all. My mother was pointing out how the River Bend residents wobbled; they even wobbled when they walked—not that all of them could walk, my mom told us. “Imagine the River Benders squatting—they’d fall over!” Little Ray was saying. I didn’t want to imagine the River Benders I’d met squatting, my grandmother included.

“I don’t think dumping is all that athletic a thing, Ray,” Molly told my mom, but I was trying to tune them out. Should I make contact with Emmanuelle, her athleticism notwithstanding? Could I spend the rest of my life not knowing where the voyage of the Pequod ended for my grandmother? Did I believe her reading Moby-Dick to me had made me a writer? My childhood attachment to Exeter had ended; not even my uncles were around to remind me of it.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were both in their seventies when their voyage on the Pequod ended. Nora said they were living like boys again. They’d moved up north, to be near the skiing; they’d traded their cars for a truck, like a couple of Carroll County old-timers. They’d bought a house near North Conway, and Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went everywhere and did everything together. “With one truck,” as Nora put it, “they had to.” My uncles never got tired of each other’s company; they just loved fooling around together. Everywhere they drove, they would sing along with the song on the radio.

I last saw Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan when they came to New York to see Nora and Em onstage at the Gallows. It was the first and only time my uncles saw Two Dykes, One Who Talks; it was understood (but unspoken) that they wouldn’t have enjoyed themselves as much if my aunts had been alive and with them. My uncles had laughed and laughed; they’d loved the show. They’d loved seeing the snowshoer, too; Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan kept telling the snowshoer how pretty she was as a woman.

My uncles also loved Damaged Don, who’d written and was singing a new song. That night at the Gallows, we were told it was the premiere of “No Lucky Star,” but, predictably, it was the same old song, and Damaged Don sang it in the same, near-death drone.

I met Fuzzy Ouilette

in a bar.

He’d lost his last job,

his wife just left him,

his dog had been killed

by a car!

Poor Fuzzy had

no lucky star.

No, Fuzzy had

no lucky star.

Don’t upset yourself

thinkin’ of Hal.

He got struck by lightning,

his balls caught on fire,

there was no one to say,

“Sorry, pal!”

You better not

dwell on poor Hal.

No, don’t ever

dwell on poor Hal.

I last saw Bill Brown

in L.A.

His bike blew a tire,

his dick got run over,

he could never go out

and get laid!

The poor guy would

never get laid.

No, poor Bill would

never get laid.

The dumb fucks had

no lucky star.

No, dumb fucks have

no lucky star.

That night at the Gallows, you would have thought that was the funniest song my uncles had ever heard. When we walked them back to their hotel, they sang “No Lucky Star” the whole way.

When we were saying good night, Uncle Johan expressed concern for me—that I wasn’t with someone. That was when Uncle Martin told me, “You can find anyone you’re looking for in New York, Adam.” Even an old Austrian zither-meister, I was thinking.

Of course I was remembering my mother’s wedding—how Uncle Johan had cried, “Wagner’s Lohengrin on a zither!”

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were killed on the Kancamagus Highway when their truck went off the road. Kancamagus, which means “Fearless One” in Algonquian, was the last sagamore of one of the Pennacook tribes. “The Kanc,” as the locals call New Hampshire Route 112, winds through the White Mountain National Forest; in a series of turns, the road crosses the Kancamagus Pass. Uncle Johan, who was driving, drove straight off one of the turns. Nora always wished she didn’t know the last song her father and Uncle Johan had been singing along with, on the truck’s radio. I always thought that “No Lucky Star” would be a hard song to have in your head for the rest of your life.

Damaged Don had complained; he’d had to clean up the lyrics before “No Lucky Star” could be heard on the airwaves. Poor Hal, who’d been struck by lightning, had his hair catch on fire—not his balls. Poor Bill had his head run over, not his dick. And, somewhat diminishing the scale of Bill’s bad luck, it was not the case that “he could never go out and get laid”; instead, it was only the last day he would get paid. As for the final stanza, the dumb fucks were changed to dumb guys. Censorship never made anything better, as Nora knew.

“Less bad ain’t better,” Damaged Don said.

But “No Lucky Star,” or what was left of it, went out on the airwaves. In northern New Hampshire, there was a country radio station—my uncles’ favorite—that played it all the time. Uncle Martin had told Nora that he and Johan always sang along when “No Lucky Star” was on the radio, but my uncles would insert the original lyrics, which they knew by heart.

Before the turn, Uncle Johan had overtaken a car of fall foliage gawkers; the leaf peepers later reported that the brake lights of my uncles’ truck not once flickered on in the upcoming curve. My uncles knew the Kancamagus; Nora said they drove it all the time. But there were no skid marks on the road where Uncle Johan had missed the turn. A logging truck was coming toward them, through the pass; the logger later said that both men appeared to be singing, but their eyes were fixedly on the road. They were not speeding, the logger said, but their steadfast determination compelled the logger to keep watching their truck in his mirror.

The logger said Uncle Johan seemed to speed up as he drove off the Kancamagus; as Nora and I preferred to imagine, those two Norwegians never stopped singing. The logger stopped his truck, put on his hazard lights, and made his way to the wreck. Nora and I would imagine a cluster of trees, an outcropping of rocks. The leaf peepers had stopped their car, too; one of them followed the logger through the trees or over the rocks. They could hear the truck’s radio—it was still playing.

“The dumb guys had no lucky star,” Damaged Don was singing. “No, dumb guys have no lucky star.”

“Those two weren’t dumb—they knew how to have a good time, and they knew when to call it quits,” was the way Nora saw it.

It looked like an accident to the leaf peepers. Uncle Johan may not have been speeding, one of the foliage seekers reported, but he appeared to be driving too fast for the curve; maybe he misjudged the particular turn.

The logging truck driver saw it more the way Nora saw it. “Those guys looked like they knew what they were doing,” the logger said.

We’ll never know, but Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan weren’t cut out to be River Benders. Those two Norwegians were telemarking men; they liked to go telemarking through the trees. Their bend in the river was a turn in the road.