Rose & Poe Read online

  Rose & Poe

  a fable

  by Jack Todd

  Praise for Jack Todd

  For Rose & Poe

  “Shades of William Faulker! We have known for years that Jack Todd is one of North America’s great sportswriters. With Rose & Poe he elevates his game to fiction — and does so magnificently.”

  — Roy MacGregor, author of The Home Team and Canoe Country

  For Rain Falls Like Mercy (2011)

  “The hard-hitting final volume of Todd’s trilogy about the Paint clan (after Sun Going Down, 2008, and Come Again No More, 2010) covers the years 1941–49 as it tells a sweeping story of violence at home and abroad. Todd masterfully captures both the larger historical moment and the more intimate details of family life.”

  — Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

  “This Western-based tale of murder, war, love, and the pursuit of justice cuts a wide swath from Japan to Germany before returning home to Wyoming and leaving readers breathless. A brilliant, compelling, at times repulsive, and highly readable novel.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  For Come Again No More (2010)

  “Todd has based these novels on his own family history, and he shows the passion of someone telling a story he wants and needs to tell. Montreal sports fans may still find it a challenge to accept that the man who’s been making their blood boil for years is now a first-rate novelist with a tender touch, but the effort will be worth it. Everyone else can simply enjoy the arrival of a late bloomer on the scene.”

  — Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

  On Sun Going Down (2008)

  “A writer in the vein of Mark Twain . . . entertaining, heartbreaking, and inspirational.”

  — The Ottawa Citizen

  “An impressive, grand work.”

  — Booklist

  “Very few historical novels I have come across since I first read the manuscript of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove have impressed and pleased me more than Jack Todd’s Sun Going Down. Jack Todd has offered further proof that the big Western novel is at once a living part of our national literature and as much a part of popular fiction as ever.”

  — Michael Korda, author of Ulysses S. Grant and Ike

  “A beautifully written link with human ancestry that will resonate with all who treasure reading. Once begun, the pages do not stop turning.”

  — Michael Blake, author of Dances with Wolves

  On The Taste of Metal (published in the U.S. as Desertion, 2001)

  “Gracefully and eloquently and honestly, without falling into the traps of self-pity or misspent anger, Jack Todd has written a stunning account of his desertion from the U.S. Army in 1969. In tight, powerful prose, Mr. Todd captures the terrors and doubts and humiliations that must necessarily accompany such acts of spiritual and political valor.”

  — Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato

  “If you read only one Vietnam-era history, make it Jack Todd’s memoir. It is powerful, thoughtful, and very human. Todd writes well, remembers clearly, and forgives his country with a grace it has not yet earned.”

  — The Austin (Texas) Chronicle

  “If you missed the 60s . . . you aren’t likely to find a more unblinking, honest, vividly drawn account of their dark side.”

  — The Globe and Mail

  “Through his personal story, Todd conveys, in a voice that haunts and sings, the impact of an unpopular war on a generation of young Americans.”

  — Publisher’s Weekly

  “The Taste of Metal is a powerful book: fresh in the writing, unflinching, courageous, affecting.”

  — Quill and Quire

  For John Xiros Cooper

  If by your art, my dearest father, you have

  Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them . . .

  — William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  ~ I ~

  ~ II ~

  ~ III ~

  ~ IV ~

  ~ V ~

  ~ VI ~

  ~ VII ~

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  If you, a traveler, should one day pass along the banks of the pristine Belle Coeur River at the northernmost extremity of this great country, you will hear a dozen versions of the legend of Poe the Giant and his mother Rose, and of the events that befell them.

  The people of northern New England are famously taciturn, but given a good yarn, they can’t resist improving it a little. Like the child’s game, the tale as it is passed from mouth to ear becomes a bit of a stretch, then expands to outright fabrication, and so on until it takes on a mythic cast, as though handed down from the gods to the first peoples on earth. If you keep a notebook close at hand, you might fill page after page with observations on Poe the Giant, and yet you will be hard put to distinguish fact from old wives’ tales, because the truest thing about Poe is that he was passing strange, and some of the folklore that has accrued to his name is as accurate as a compass needle — although fancy more often has its way, as a sampler from our own notebooks will show:

  They say that Poe was tall enough to grab the weather vane atop a barn and bend it so that it would always follow the track of the full moon.

  It is claimed that Poe had eighteen fingers and three eyes. His teeth were the size of dominoes, and just as black. A tiny troll lived inside the hump on his back and was let out at night to make mischief hither and yon.

  On summer nights, Poe climbed a towering beech tree and slept in its branches, like a bear, attended by all manner of mysterious and sometimes ferocious creatures.

  After the events chronicled here, the tales told about Poe Didelot and his mother, Rose, became darker, but not a whit more true. That they persist to this day is a tribute to the human tendency to cling to a falsehood, even when the unadorned truth stands before us, solid and incontrovertible as an oak tree. The fabrications of decades cannot be swept away with a wave of the hand, but there is surely no harm in attempting to set down the truth for posterity, or preparing the visitor for an excursion to a part of this country that may seem like the setting for a dark fairy tale.

  The truth is simpler. Rose and Poe were of the earth itself, formed of its clay, great souls adrift in a world that grows smaller by the day. This is their story. The rest is memory and metaphor.

  ~ I ~

  Goatman

  Poe, at dawn

  The Giant Poe, six-fingered and six-toed, clambers up the rocky hillside to the goat pasture. He is quick and agile for a man of his size, and from a distance he resembles a great black bear as he scrabbles over the rough ground, ignoring the brambles that tug at his legs, the sharp edges of granite that could slash a finger or toe, the burrs that cling to his coveralls. He is barefoot, and the extra fingers and toes help his callused feet and hands grip the rock as he works his way over stones and boulders, gullies and sinkholes, past outcrops, fissures and ravines, and through a narrow graveled draw. In his wide footprints, oval pools emerge, where luminescent dragonflies will skitter through the hot afternoon.

  The wide gravel county road is a far easier route to the top, but Poe gave that up years ago. On the road, teenage boys in pickup trucks called him “goatman” and “mutant” and accused him of having sexual congress with his goats. He didn’t understand half of what they were saying, but when they took to throwing beer bottles at him and a bottle split his eyebrow open, he took refuge on the rocky goat path. There he has remained, exchanging the ease of the well-traveled road for the difficult ascent of the narrow and
craggy path.

  Poe sings as he climbs, a wild song without words. In the pale wash of light just before daybreak, his face is rapturous. This is his world, daybreak and dew and the drift of mist in the Belle Coeur Valley far below. When he reaches the goat meadow, he pauses to wipe his brow with a red bandana and pulls a fob watch on its long tarnished chain from a narrow pocket of his OshKosh B’gosh bib overalls. He scans the time. The big hand licks like a black-tongued dog between the “1” and the “2.” The small hand is on the “6,” a number that looks like a bucket with a curved handle. It’s one of the two hours he can distinguish, six o’clock and high noon. The first six o’clock means it’s time to milk the goats. When the little hand joins the big hand at the top of the watch, it’s lunchtime, and when the little hand meets up with the bucket number again, it’s time for the evening milking.

  The fob watch brings order to Poe’s world, parses his days one tick at a time. He believes there is magic in the coiled metal of its innards — that the sound he hears when he presses the watch tightly to his ear and listens wide-eyed to the tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK is a kind of sorcery and Rose has magicked the device so that it will tell him the time. He winds it gently, careful not to twist too hard, because Rose says he doesn’t know his own strength and he busts things without meaning to. He hears the distant bell toll in the steeple of the Lamb of Jesus Gospel Church, and counts the strokes using the thumb and all five fingers of his left hand, the way Rose taught him. The bell tolls six times. The watch is right on time. His lips flap with glee, a stream of spittle trickles down his chin, and he dances a little jig. Right time right time right time.

  Poe slips the watch back into the pocket on his overalls and turns in a full circle with his arms extended, inhaling the mountain air, drinking it all in: the goat-cropped, dew-soaked grass, the tamarack and hemlock, hackberry and beech trees, the way the air trembles red and yellow where the maples are turning early. Twisted ropes of fog lie in the ravines and the rising sun is sliced through the middle by a charcoal ribbon of cloud over low mountains dark with spruce and pine. To the west, the sky is still the deep indigo of his coveralls. A woodpecker clatters somewhere, barn swallows dart after insects, a solitary crow flies due north to Canada. His friend Wild Bill says Canada is so close that Ted Williams could have stood right here in the goat meadow and hit a baseball plumb out of the country. Poe doesn’t know who Ted Williams might be, but he reckons it’s true if Bill says it is.

  The green meadow is slick with dew and fragrant with wet grass and goat shit, riven by the bells of the nanny goats. He calls them by name: Jenny-Girl and Ostrich, the twins Bertha and Pearl, Roxie, Little Dipper, Maude, Lula May, Olive, Susie Q, Thelma Pearl, Aunt Nell, and Princess Sally, the pure white beauty of the flock. The nanny goats crowd round, bossy as church ladies. He lifts the latch and squeezes into the summer shed, where he stoops to fill a bucket with fragrant, dusty oats. The dust tickles his nose and he sneezes, banging his head on the roof of the shed. Poe rubs his head and chuckles. Damned fool Poe, he says, you manage to do that just about every doggone time.

  Back in the sunshine, the goats cluster to him, nuzzling and bleating. Impatient horns beat his rump and thighs as he fills their troughs, shaking out the contents of one bucket and then another. He steps back to watch them eat. When they finish, he upends a three-legged stool propped against the shed and sits to milk the goats, beginning with Little Dipper and ending with Princess Sally, always in the same order because if he milks them out of turn they get fractious.

  He crouches to wash Little Dipper’s bag with Rose’s special concoction, a mixture of water and Clorox. He nestles his broad cheek into Dipper’s warm flank and pulls, pulls, pulls in a slow and steady rhythm. The milk sounds like hsssssss-hsssssss-hsssssss-hsssssss as it sluices into the battered tin buckets, bubbling and frothing like witch’s brew. Two feral kittens mew at a safe distance. Poe squirts long jets of milk into their waiting mouths. When each tug yields no more than a drop or two, he moves on to the next goat. C’mon, Susie Q. Your turn. Come to Poe, girl.

  The goats milked, he totes the buckets, two in each hand, to the gravel road, where he waits for Wild Bill De Graaff and his pickup. Bill is their nearest neighbor up the mountain. Morning and evening, Bill drives Poe and his buckets of milk back downhill, waits for Rose to empty them, and hauls the empty buckets back up to the shed for the next milking. Rose turns the milk into the finest goat cheese in Belle Coeur County and pays Bill in cheese. He eases the truck alongside Poe and waits for him to load the buckets into the purpose-built box. Poe places the buckets carefully, covers them so they won’t spill, and slides his bulk onto the seat, his knees up against the dash.

  “Hey, Bill.”

  “Hey, Poe. How’re them goats this fine mornin?”

  “All good. Got to bring an extra bucket tomorrow. Too much milk.”

  “That’ll make some fine goat cheese when Rose gets through with it.”

  “Uh-huh. Ma always say, ‘Poe, don’t eat it all, got to save some for my customers.’”

  “I’ll bet she does. Man your size can get on the outside of a whole lot of cheese.”

  Poe’s breakfast is waiting on a yellow plate on the kitchen table. Six eggs scrambled with a little cheese and lots of pepper, a stack of six hot pancakes with maple syrup, a bowl of strawberries from the garden, a big hunk of toast with butter and strawberry jam, a pitcher of goat’s milk to wash it all down. Warm milk because he doesn’t like it cold — cold hurts his teeth. While he eats, Rose stands behind him, rubbing his huge pumpkin head.

  “I swear you’re gettin balder every week. Your head is like a big old billiard ball.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “I’m gonna have to get my cue, see if I can’t bank this ole head into a corner pocket.”

  Poe laughs. Rose can always make him laugh. When he’s done, he hands her his plate and says thank you kindly, ma’am, like he was taught. Then it’s time to go to the outhouse to do his business. He lowers his OshKosh B’gosh coveralls and counts the spiders, the way he does every morning. Nine spiders. He grins. Nine is a lucky number. It’s going to be a good day.

  He wipes himself with nine pages from the Monkey Ward catalog. Men’s socks and underwear. He’s careful never to use the ladies’ panty pictures, or the girdle and brassiere ads. Those he has tucked in a little cubbyhole to the side, against the day when he has time on his hands to gaze on the bosoms at his leisure. There’s no time today. He has to get back to work on Mister Sir Mister’s wall. He primes the pump and washes up at the well out back. Face and hands and the back of his neck, where it’s always sunburned. Rose hands him the paper lunchbag. Apples and bananas and three sandwiches, bologna and goat cheese on thick slices of homemade bread. She pulls his big head down to where she can kiss his cheek.

  “You back to work on the wall today, Poe?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know what I say, give the man a full day’s work and you’ll get your reward in heaven.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I always does.”

  “That’s my boy. You might have your addlements and particularities, Poe, but there ain’t nobody like you on God’s green earth, be sure of that.”

  ~

  The magic of stones

  Poe is building a thousand-foot stone wall for Prosper Thorne, a man he knows only as Mister Sir Mister. After four years of labor, it is six hundred feet long, with four hundred feet to go. Thorne takes little interest in the wall he commissioned, but his daughter Miranda supervises the work when she’s home and sometimes helps Poe find the stones that he quarries from the fields. The stones wait in piles along the unfinished section of the wall: big stones, medium stones, small stones. With a wall this size, they ought to run out of stones, but they never do. It’s a mystery to Poe, how the earth heaves up new stones each spring, gifts from someplace underground. The miracle never fails. A pasture that is s
mooth as a baby’s bottom in October will be dotted with stones come April snowmelt.

  When he sets the stones, Poe first hefts them in his palm to find the center of gravity. Once they’re in place, he checks their fit by running his fingertips over the stones with his eyes shut tight. Wild Bill taught him to build walls that way. A wall like this one is built without mortar, so the stones must fit together like puppies at their mama’s belly, says Bill. He says too that a man in a hurry never gets it right, so Poe takes his time. He pauses to watch jet trails crisscross overhead, listens to the ravens raising a ruckus in the spruce trees on the far side of the house, sniffs the warmth of the sun rising from the stones. From somewhere down in the Belle Coeur Valley, he hears the cough and gargle of a chainsaw and winces as the saw rips into a tree. Wild Bill says if death had to fart, it would sound like a chainsaw.

  Poe is about to start work when he sees a big black car far below, coming up the hill. The car pulls into a turnout about a quarter mile off. A man gets out and seems to be looking up Poe’s way through a pair of binoculars. Poe sees the sun flash off the lens. He shrugs, tugs off his coat, tilts the two-gallon water jug with one finger, and drinks deep. When he looks again, the black-car man is gone.

  Poe crouches to heft a hundred-pound granite stone. Bill showed him the proper way to lift the stones, crouching to take the weight on his thighs. After the first mighty heave sets the stone in place, Poe squares it with another tug or two. Then come niggling adjustments that can take an hour or more for a single stone. A nudge this way, a nudge that. Try it and look, try again, circle around, sight along the line of the wall, walk twenty yards down to squint at it from a different vantage point, then try again with eyes closed, searching for the fit where the stone sits true, as though it had been there since the earth was formed.