The Third Hill North of Town (44 page)

Dr. Edgar Reilly was forced to retire at age eighty-two from the Bangor State Mental Hospital, because he himself was exhibiting signs of dementia. The hospital staff members who had been most closely linked to Julianna—Helen Gable, Jeptha Morgan, and Connor Lipkin—were all long gone by then, but Edgar had begun to address all his nurses and orderlies by the names of their vanished predecessors. By the time he was released from his responsibilities, his desk drawers were crammed to overflowing with M&M’s and lemon drops, and he was whistling the tune of
I’m a Little Teapot
nearly nonstop each and every day. Edgar died of a heart attack on the same afternoon he was scheduled to be admitted to a nursing home; the paramedics found him on his sofa, surrounded by hundreds of Tootsie Roll wrappers and the collected works of Carl Jung. It took six strong men, grunting and cursing, to carry his substantial body from the house.

 

 

 

At the top of the third hill north of town, a purple Volkswagen Beetle with Maine license plates sat by itself on the side of the gravel road, basking in the hot sun. The Beetle was bug-spattered and muddy from a long journey; its windows were open and its backseat was littered with Pepsi cans and empty wrappers from various fast-food restaurants. Next to the gravel road were rows and rows of knee-high cornstalks, blanketing the hill and reaching down into the valleys on either side: an entire army of corn, standing at rigid attention and awaiting inspection.

In the middle of the cornfield, right at the crest of the hill, stood Elijah Hunter, watching Jon Tate wander around the cornfield, looking for the boarded-up well that had once been the last trace of the Larson farmstead.

“I guess they filled it in,” Jon called out. “But it was right around here.”

Elijah nodded. “That’s what I remember, too,” he called back. “Or maybe a little behind you.”

Jon walked back toward him and Elijah watched him come. The half century that had passed since the last time they had visited this hilltop had been kind to Jon; he was turning seventy in another month but he might have passed for a man in his mid-fifties. He was still slender and handsome, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair; his face was relatively unlined and he moved easily across the field. The only sounds on the hill were of the breeze moving through the corn, and the hum and chirp of insects.

Jon stopped in front of him and sighed. “Pretty weird, huh?”

Elijah smiled. “Which part do you mean?”

Jon grinned back. “All of it.” He looked around the field. “Fifty years ago it was a war zone up here, and a long time before that, Julianna’s whole family got wiped out on this exact spot. Now it just looks like a great place for a picnic, and we’re the only ones left alive who know what happened here. Us and your folks.” He turned back to Elijah and raised his eyebrows. “And then there’s us: Two retired old geezers on a road trip, paying our respects to the lady who almost got us both killed—oh, and by the way, she had schizophrenia, and her son blew up two cars with grenades.”

Elijah laughed. “Yeah, okay, it’s a little weird.”

He squatted and put his arms around his knees, and his face slowly sobered as he studied the field. The memories of that long-ago night on the hilltop were still vivid; he knew if he closed his eyes it would be waiting for him, ready to play itself out like a movie in his head.

Jon knelt beside him. “So if the well was over there, then . . .”

“Then this is about where Julianna died,” Elijah finished. He put a hand on the dark Missouri soil, dug his fingers into the earth. “Yeah. I guess it probably would be.”

Jon was right about the strangeness of everything; Elijah felt a surprising ache of sadness as he remembered the feel of Julianna’s hand in his and the sound of her voice.

Since that frantic weekend in 1962, five decades had passed, and the boys they had been were just as dead as Julianna. Elijah and Jon had both lived full, busy lives: For Elijah there had been college, two tours in Vietnam, law school, a successful law practice, marriage and kids, grandkids, and now a great-grandkid; for Jon there had been marriage to Becky, kids, college, divorce, grad school, remarriage, a college teaching job, more kids, and now grandkids, as well. Their friendship had never faltered through any of it; they still lived in separate towns in Maine but they saw each other all the time; Jon’s kids worshipped Elijah and Elijah’s kids adored Jon; Jon was also a second son to Samuel and Mary Hunter, who were now in their nineties but healthy and happy, and still very much in love. Mary kept herself busy by terrorizing the staff at an assisted living facility in Elijah’s hometown, and Sam spent his days playing cribbage with ex-Sheriff Red Kiley, who lived next door to them in the same facility. Elijah and Jon went to visit the elder Hunters often, separately and together, and never left without a kiss on the lips from Mary and a bear hug from Sam.

In short, Elijah had a very good life, and he knew it. But until that moment he had not realized how much he still missed Julianna Dapper.

He brushed the dirt from his hand and looked up to find Jon watching him.

“What?” Jon asked.

Elijah shrugged. “I was just thinking about what our lives might have been like without Julianna. I’d probably still be wetting my pants every time I had to leave my house, and we never would have met. And you’d probably be . . .”

“. . . I’d probably still be on the run from the law.” Jon paused, considering all the years that had passed since he had gotten into an Edsel on a rainy day in June, when he was nineteen, and far from home, and hating his life.

He studied Elijah Hunter’s well-known and much-loved face, remembering the first time they’d met. Elijah was mostly bald now, with a fringe of short white hair above his ears, but his eyes were the same, brown and sensitive, and his smile was the same, too, warm and generous. There was no denying the deep wrinkles around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, though; he was starting to look like a grandfather, and a man with a far longer road behind him than the one he still had to travel.

“She took us on one hell of a ride, didn’t she?” Jon asked quietly, unable to keep from grieving a little bit for everything that had been lost to time, and all the loss still to come. “Do you think she’s waiting for us someplace?”

Elijah read the shift in Jon’s mood and reached out with a gentleness that had always been his, putting a hand on the other man’s shoulder. He didn’t say what he was thinking, though; it was too hard to put into words. Yet if their time with Julianna Dapper had taught him anything, it was that the world was an arbitrary and ridiculous place, where all things were possible. Coincidence and human stupidity held sway much of the time, but not always: There was love, too, of course, and companionship, and now and then even a measure of grace.

At least for those who were wise enough to have faith in the ridiculous.

 

The very last thing that passed through Julianna Dapper’s mind before she died, oddly enough, was a memory of two boys, running side by side down an alley in a small, nameless Midwestern town. It was early morning, and there was a stripe of green grass in the middle of the alley, and a puddle of water that shimmered in the sunlight as the boys skirted it and came back together on the other side. Julianna was standing next to a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle in a gas station parking lot, and she was waiting for her friends to come back to her. She could hear the sound of their shoes on the gravel and see the glint of perspiration on their skin; she could smell freshly cut grass from a nearby lawn. She watched the boys run together, and she thought how beautiful they were—like a pair of mismatched colts, one black, one white—and she wished the alley were longer so she could keep on watching them for a while. But even as she wished this they were at her side again, and talking about stopping someplace for breakfast soon, and wondering how much farther it was to Pawnee.

“Not far,” she told them, thinking what a fine thing it was to have such good company on the road home. “We’ll be there before you know it!”

As last images go, it was a good one.

Please turn the page for a very special
Q&A with Noah Bly!

 

 

 

 

 

 

My grandmother, Nellie Nixson, was born and raised in Pawnee, Missouri, a tiny little town in northern Missouri that burned to the ground sometime around the Great Depression. When I was a kid, she used to take my family and me around the area where Pawnee stood, showing us where her house was, where the blacksmith’s shop was, etc., but everywhere she pointed there was nothing left to see but cornfields and weeds. This made a big impression on me, knowing that a thriving little community had come and gone without leaving a trace behind, and I always wondered what this must have been like for Grandma looking at all that nothingness through the lens of her childhood memories. The book is completely fictional, of course—save for the actual name of the town and the fact that it was destroyed in a fire—but I like to think my grandmother would have been tickled to see Pawnee briefly resurrected, even if only on paper.

 

 

I think it can be seen as a more modern take on Don Quixote: a crazy person on a quest, aided by sane friends—kind of a “rogues on the road” sort of thing. The cross-country journey and the oddball friendship between Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate both remind me somewhat of Huckleberry Finn, too, though the similarities didn’t dawn on me until I was most of the way through my first draft.

 

 

Lots and lots of stuff on Wikipedia, mainly about 1962 and 1923, but also about everything in between, too. What the inside of an Edsel looked like, the eccentricities of a 1957 Volkswagen Bug, how a German potato masher worked, etc. I also had to harass, relentlessly, a couple of older cops (mostly Sergeant Jeff Yates of the Bettendorf, Iowa, Police Department—a man of seemingly infinite patience) about small-town sheriffs and deputies in the 1960s and what their job was like, the equipment they used, the kind of guns they trained on—you name it, I asked about it. Fortunately, neither time period I was writing about was in the far distant past, so I was able to find most of what I needed without much trouble.

 

 

Three times. The first two were intentional—just poking around the cornfields to get the feel of the landscape—but the third was a bizarre coincidence. I went to a high school reunion one summer weekend last year in my hometown, which is thirteen miles or so away from where Pawnee was, and ended up visiting a classmate’s farm for dinner and having drinks with some old friends. It turned out that the farm we’d been invited to was located smack in the middle of where Pawnee used to stand. Pawnee has been gone for seventy-five years or more, and there are only a handful of people left alive who even know it was ever there, so it seemed pretty weird to find myself, by complete chance, sitting on a back porch looking out at the same remote hills and fields I’d been writing about for the past three years, and only a few hundred yards from where my grandmother grew up. The book is largely about coincidences just like this one, though, so I guess maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

 

 

For this book I found myself napping a lot. Sad but true. I’d write for a bit, get stuck on something, then have myself a fifteen-minute nap to recharge my imagination. In general, though, I try to write a page a day. Sometimes I’m lucky if I get a usable sentence, other days I dash off two or three pages in a couple of hours. There doesn’t seem to be any real pattern to it, other than sitting down to write each day. If I don’t write every day, I lose the momentum of whatever story I’m trying to tell.

 

 

Oh, God, there are so many. I’m a big fantasy and science fiction fan, so I love Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Guy Kay, Steven Erikson—just to name a few people I wish I could write like. I also love Michael Cunningham, Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon, E. B. White, Chaim Potok, and John Irving, but if I had to pick my overall favorite author I’d probably have to say it’s Charles Dickens. The man had so much talent—and so much heart—it’s unbelievable.
David Copperfield
is an absolute masterpiece, cover to cover. Another one of the main books that made me want to be a writer is a collection of essays by E. B. White called
One Man’s Meat
. The writing in those essays is nothing short of gorgeous—gorgeous without being showy, witty without being overly clever, sweet without being cloying, sad without being sentimental, wise without being pompous and all-knowing. I can remember reading those essays for the first time and thinking: “Jesus, I want to do that.” I’ve never even gotten close, of course, but maybe someday . . .

 

 

 

 

 

The suggested questions are included
to enhance your group’s reading of
Noah Bly’s
The Third Hill North of Town
!