Where the Rivers Flow North

By Howard Frank Mosher and Peter Orner

A new edition of a classic short-story collection.
 
The stories of Where the Rivers Flow North are “superior work, rich in texture and character,” says the Wall Street Journal, and “the novella is brilliantly done.” That novella, the title story of the collection, was also made into a feature film starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox. These six stories, available again in this new edition, continue Howard Frank Mosher’s career-long exploration of Kingdom County, Vermont. “Within the borders of his fictional kingdom,” the Providence Journal has noted, “Mosher has created mountains and rivers, timber forests and crossroads villages, history and language. And he has peopled the landscape with some of the truest, most memorable characters in contemporary literature.” This new edition features a new introduction by novelist Peter Orner.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684581405

Howard Frank Mosher

HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.

Book preview

Introduction

Peter Orner

I recently reread the book you are holding for the first time in more than twenty years. Isn’t it true that only a few remain with us? Think of all the books that don’t (no matter how we may have appreciated, even loved them at the time), about which we retain nothing. And it’s strange, you can’t really predict which ones will stick. Where the Rivers Flow North—Howard Frank Mosher’s first book (though it was published after he completed his first novel in 1978)—is one of my handful and over the years I’ve often thought about a woman named Bangor who, in her grief, used her lover’s hook to etch a single word on the backside of grave. It’s 1927 or 1928. She’s wearing a red dress. The rain has turned to snow. Up at the camp, a fire . . .

The fact that this image of Bangor in her red dress, holding Noel’s hook, has stayed with me is in itself a testament to this book’s uncanny power. As a fiction writer I can only hope against hope that a single image of my own creation might remain lodged in one reader’s mind for twenty years.

Two decades ago I knew nothing at all about Vermont and had never set foot in the state. I was a Chicagoan living in California. I was in my late twenties. Vermont was as far from my consciousness as Bangladesh. I didn’t know Ethan Allen from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now I live here, though I’m a damn downstater of the sort that many of Mosher’s people would disdain, like those two idiot cousins in First Snow. (At least, thank god, I don’t live in Massachusetts.) I’ve been wondering what drew me to the book back then. I know it couldn’t have been Mosher’s much heralded sense of place. It hardly needs to be said that Mosher is unparalleled at evoking the natural topography of his fictionalized northern Vermont—but why not take a few moments to savor it? Here’s just an example out of many hundreds I could give:

It was a fine clear morning. To the west the abrupt, jagged chain of the Green Mountains stood out distinctly from Owlhead in Canada to Camel’s Hump, one hundred miles to the south. The taller, parallel range of the White Mountains of New Hampshire bulked into the sky to the southeast. A silver thread of spring water dropped out of a short, narrow ravine at the north base of Jesus Saves and fell to the dwindled white water below.

See what I mean? That’s a master class in seeing. The mountains bulking into the sky. The silver thread of water. (Jesus Saves, by the way, is a boulder. See the title story.) How about another?

In the Northeast, over the upper bog, the undersides of the clouds turned a lurid orange, like brightly rusted ore, a phenomenon Coville had seen only a few times and only in Lord’s Bog in winter.

I share Mosher’s reverence for place names. They appear in this book like tiny one-, two-, or three-word poems. Owlhead, Camel’s Hump, Lord’s Bog, Upper Lord’s Hollow, Jay’s Peak, Kingdom Fair . . . Still, as much as I’d have admired this descriptive prose I’m not sure I’d have recognized, then, just how difficult it is to translate what you see in the distance onto the page. Now I know better. Now I look out the window at winter, at the frozen brook, at the bare trees rising, at my neighbor’s mini-Zamboni (every year he floods his backyard to make an ice rink complete with tall stadium lights that stay on all night)—winter exposes in Vermont, summer conceals—and wonder how I might even begin to set down all that I see. This starkness and the stories behind it. I lack the patience. How long, how long must Mosher have stared at his hills, at his mountains? And how much did he listen before he even wrote down a word?

As integral as the land is to these stories, I know that what impacted me most in the ‘90s, and again in 2022, are the connections between Mosher’s characters. It’s his people: Frog Mundy, Forrest Gleason, Whiskeyjack Kinneson, all the other Kinnesons, Henry Coville, an older brother named Waterman, a woman named Burl, Gordon and Ordney (the two idiot cousins), Armand St. Onge, Abigail, Giles Lourdes, Noel Lord, Bangor. When these people fight, when they fall in love, when they grieve—there’s consequence. These stories are grounded in the dailyness of hard work, outside, in usually harsh weather. These characters aren’t, to take an easy potshot (as much at myself as anybody else), texting their angst into a cell phone. Mosher’s people wouldn’t understand how anybody could have such time. They’re too busy working. Just as there are countless examples of Mosher’s majestic, yet grounded, descriptions of the environment and the light, there are also perhaps just as many moments where he talks about work and he does so with the same sort of precision that, in this instance, Noel Lord brings to felling a cedar:

When it was directly over the mountain notch the tree settled slightly and tilted several degrees toward the camp. Noel paused to determine which way it would go. Ordinarily he would have been able to place a stake in the ground and drive it out of sight with the falling tree, but felling a tree from the notched side was the most hazardous and unpredictable operation in the woods. Once, in Maine, he had seen a spruce felled from the wrong side spin off its butt like a top and crush an experienced Penobscot sawyer.

And we’re not just talking about loggers and woodsmen and farmers. Here’s Mosher on strippers who work in a carnival traveling through the area:

Inside the tent we sat down on one of the rough wooden benches. There was no band, just the same music that was being piped outside. The two women came out looking bored and took off their clothes like they were tired and getting ready for bed.

In this world, you make your living how you make your living. And up in Kingdom County nobody knows anybody who doesn’t have to work for that living.

I hesitate to use the term realism to place Mosher stories because this genre classification tends to send a certain message. Oh, yes, I get it. Realism. Like a report from the field, right? The writer takes down what the writer sees and calls it a day . . . Yet, I’ll say that if this is realism it is every much as imaginative—and fantastical—as daily life can be. For Mosher, reality isn’t a much-maligned grind, but rather fertile territory for the unexpected possibility.

When Henry Coville, just before his death, in Kingdom County Come, has a brief conversation with his dead father in an abandoned beaver lodge, I don’t read it as illusory but rather as an example of the wonder of this life. We speak to our dead, don’t we? And don’t they speak back to us?

You can’t fight the government, Coville’s father says. You can’t fight for it and you can’t fight against it. Even from beyond the grave, our fathers are still giving advice . . .

His father waited, grave and attentive, though not looking directly at him but out through the opening and on into some private distance, as though, Coville thought, into that bourne beyond which—and then he realized that his father had not returned but that he had come to the place where his father had been waiting, that it was himself, not his father, who had made the journey, was making the journey.

In other stories, the mundane and the remarkable strike against each other to create a kind of narrative combustion. A stranger picked up on the road changes everything for a young farmer, if only for a couple of days (Alabama Jones). A woman is nearly busted by a revenue agent for operating an illegal still only to marry that same agent years later (Burl). Long after the last panther has disappeared from Vermont a new panther appears, a myth brought back to life to challenge a pig-headed old man in his final hours (Where the Rivers Flow North). Although Mosher himself sometimes described his work as magical realism, I prefer to think of it as the everyday extraordinary. Live in a place long enough, love it long enough, and you start to experience it on all kinds of levels, many of which are unseeable at first or second or even a third glance. Again, what’s brought to my mind when I revisit Mosher’s work is staying power, one writer’s tenacious insistence that this place, his adopted home, would grant him stories if only he waited them out and concentrated with the required intensity.

Mosher and his wife, Phillis, came to the Northeast Kingdom from Syracuse in the late ‘60s to pursue high school teaching jobs. They remained there for good. And though Mosher worked for a former whiskey runner and did his time as a logger, it took him years to be considered a Vermonter by his neighbors. (Don’t I know it.) And yet many of Mosher’s characters are heading in the opposite direction, or at least trying to. They’re doing their best to shake Vermont, not embrace it. Even when they leave Kingdom County, they carry it with them. I think of Noel, who leaves for Maine after his legendary father’s death and makes his mark as a crew boss in his own right. Eventually, he hungers to, once again, see the camp where he grew up, the dam, the cedars his grandfather planted. Or the unnamed dying husband in The Peacock, who leaves to pursue a professional basketball career only to return to Vermont after he’s cut from the team, having no money and no place else to go but the little house in Kingdom County where he was born. It pulls you back, Vermont does, and in spite of all the hardship these people endure, and all the complaining they do (about the gossip, the school board, taxes, the rapacious Vermont Power Company), this, for better or worse, is their place and they know it in their bones. For all the darkness in these stories, and there’s considerable darkness, including the three suicides, there’s also a great deal of love. To a certain extent, all the stories in this book are, one way or another, love stories, and none is more memorable, as I’ve suggested, than the title novella. Rereading this past month, I was as yanked into Bangor and Noel’s story as I was the first time I read it. It’s not a conventional love story, far from it—none of these are—but who wants to read a conventional love story?

Still, it must be said that reading the story again I couldn’t help but be repelled by certain aspects, most notably the fact that Bangor, like a caricature of a Native American in an old Western, speaks of herself in the third person. I was repelled by it as I’m repelled, in some ways, by the wizened character of Sam Fathers in Faulkner’s The Bear, an obvious influence on Where the Rivers Flow North. Even so, at the same time, I’m moved by their presence in the respective stories as well. Bangor is, as I suggested earlier, an unforgettable presence. This isn’t to excuse Bangor’s characterization or to minimize another reader’s reaction. I will say, though, that if Bangor is a stereotype of a Native American woman, then Noel Lord is certainly a cliché of an ancient, crusty, flannel underwear-wearing, laconic New England backwoodsman. What can I say? I came to believe that these two caricatures—she calls him Mister, he calls her his housekeeper—love each other. And there’s no question that Bangor not only gives as good as she gets, she’s the beating heart of the story. She’s funny, she’s knowing. She’s the reasonable one. Bangor’s instincts, if they were only followed, would have saved the day, or at least allowed them both to live with each other a little longer.

I read the novella as a story foretold, a legend, and legends, it seems to me, are often full of tropes. The two of them make up a kind of mythology that is connected to the old stories of the head of the Kingdom River, the old stories that are still being told out on the porch of the hotel in Kingdom Common. Bangor and Noel are the last survivors until their luck runs out in the form of the Kingdom River Dam project, and they (or rather Noel because Bangor knows better) hatch a plan to escape to Oregon. Even the first time I read it, I knew they’d never make it out west. But I root for these two. Here they are living their lives, up at the camp, working, just the two of them.

Below is a quote from the book:

In the winter, while he ran his trapline, Bangor made snowshoes from the cured deerskin. Working mostly by touch, she steamed splints of white ash to bend into frames and cut the deerskin into strips to interweave between them. Along with feeding the winter birds that lived in the pines, making snowshoes was all her occupation from November to April. In the spring, after ice out, when the clay hardened on the log trace, they went to the Common to sell his furs and her snowshoes and replenish their staples. All summer he ran the cedar still. In the fall he would shoot another deer. For twenty years their lives had been regulated to the variegated cycle of the seasons.

And after Bangor, while she and Noel are having lunch at the hotel in Kingdom Common, is insulted by a crane operator called New York Money—did I cheer for Noel when he shoves a glass bottle into New York Money’s mouth? Absolutely, I did. Doubly so when Bangor throws the crane operator’s friend straight through a plate glass window. So, if these two characters, desperados in this scene, are stereotypes, at the very least they aren’t static. Nobody is static in this collection. Nobody’s got the time. Even grief itself isn’t without motion, without effort, because it, too, takes a lot work.

Peter Orner, a three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, is the author of six books, including Esther Stories, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His essay collection Am I Alone Here? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin, will be out in October 2022. The recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright to Namibia, Orner directs the creative writing program at Dartmouth College.

Alabama Jones

I should have known better than to stop when I saw her standing by the side of the road in a dress as red as the maple tree she was waiting under. I should have taken just one look at that short red dress and gunned Frog La-Mundy’s log truck on by as fast as she would go. But it was four o’clock on a bright October day and I was headed home with nothing but chips and dust in my rig and cold beer frosting my insides and Kingdom Fair to go to that night and the next. I shifted down.

First she was standing under the trees as still as a deer watching you go by from the woods edge of a meadow at dawn. Then she was running on the gravel shoulder alongside the road with her bare legs moving as brown and fast and slim as a deer’s, it seemed, and jumping onto the running board and up into the cab before I had any more than shifted into first gear. Before I could even reach out and swing open that heavy door for her she was inside the cab, talking.

I don’t believe it. Now that I am here I still don’t believe it. It’s like a color postcard, I reckon, like my brother used to send us. No, not a color postcard but a round card with little films pressed onto it that you put into a machine to look at. One was of a palace in India with water in front, and one was mountains, the Alps, I believe, and one of the Empire Building in New York City, so high it made you dizzy if you looked at it too long. And one like this. Underneath, it said ‘Autumn in the White Mountains.’ Since this morning I have been saying it put me in mind of a color postcard when that was not it at all. Because a postcard is flat. But when I looked into that picture machine at ‘Autumn in the White Mountains’ it was like looking at these trees and hills through a pair of field glasses, with every tree standing out separate. With every leaf standing out separate even.

She was different from what I had expected. Without actually thinking of the words, I had just naturally expected that she would be hard and quiet and maybe resentful of me, that had a truck to ride in. I had expected her to have suspicious eyes, too, but when I looked at them they were only blue, pale blue, and her hair was black and straight and long. She had an arch of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and she was about my age, twenty or

Reviews for Where the Rivers Flow North

[eduscapes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Recommend reading this collection of Howard Frank Mosher stories set in rural northern Vermont near the Canadian border. Six stories in rugged New England hills early in the twentieth century tell of challenged lives struggling to live in logged-off and worn-out lands. Mosher's novella is crowning tale contrasting romantic and often humorous themes with darker, tragic elements. The author's blended attention to outdoor settings, activities, along with his distinctive character development delivers a lasting and powerful narrative. One of my favorites; the movie adaptation is also excellent. (lj)