Dartmouth College Dartmouth Digital Commons Dartmouth Scholarship Faculty Work 2014 Howard Elman's Farewell Ernest Hebert Dartmouth College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa Part of the Fiction Commons Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation Hebert, Ernest, "Howard Elman's Farewell" (2014). Dartmouth Scholarship. 3953. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/3953 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Work at Dartmouth Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dartmouth Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Dartmouth Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HOWARD ELMAN’S FAREWELL Also by ernest hebert the darby chronicles The Dogs of March A Little More Than Kin Whisper My Name The Passion of Estelle Jordan Live Free or Die Spoonwood Howard Elman’s Farewell fiction Mad Boys The Old American Never Back Down I Love U nonfiction New Hampshire Patterns with Jon Gilbert Fox ernest hebert HOWARD% ELMAN’S Also by ernest hebert FAREWELL the darby chronicles The Dogs of March A Little More Than Kin Whisper My Name The Passion of Estelle Jordan Live Free or Die Spoonwood Howard Elman’s Farewell fiction Mad Boys The Old American Never Back Down I Love U nonfiction New Hampshire Patterns university press of new england with Jon Gilbert Fox hanover and london University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2014 Ernest Hebert All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Eric M. Brooks Typeset in Whitman by Passumpsic Publishing For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon nh 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hebert, Ernest. Howard Elman’s farewell / Ernest Hebert. pages cm isbn 978-1-61168-541-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)— isbn 978-1-61168-590-9 (ebook) 1. Men—New Hampshire—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. I. Title. ps3558.e277h59 2014 813'.54—dc23 2014003075 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS The Voice 1 Re In Car Nation 2 The Centenarian 16 The Last Great Elm 30 Decision 37 The Geek Chorus 46 Driving for Jesus 65 First Snow 81 Auction Barn Surprise 94 Trail of the Tree 108 Hi-Tech Tree House 126 The Master of Mesh 135 The Best Kind of Relations 146 The Honcho of Great Meadow Village Childcare 155 The Awful Answer 163 Talkin’ Tahoka 173 Found Elm 190 Vector Woman 203 The Centenarian’s Tale of War and Woe 215 A Mother’s Will 222 Interstices 228 Storyboard 245 Darby Doomsday 256 Howard Elman’s Farewell 263 Author Notes 273 HOWARD ELMAN’S FAREWELL e Darby Chronicles e Dogs of March A Little More an Kin Whisper My Name e Passion of Estelle Jordan Live Free or Die Spoonwood Howard Elman’s Farewell Guide to the Darby Chronicles <erniehebert.com> N Runs more or less INTERSTATE E Parallel to the W Connecticut 91 River on the S Vermont Side Original site of Cooty’s Cabin Site of former Abare’s Folly Basketville sign Mountain and Jordan shacks Great Meadow Village New Hampshire Vermont DARBY DEPOT Rte. 12 to Keene Site of PLC Project Ike’s Cutter Place Auction Barn Trust Lands Elman Place Grace Pond Dorne Place River Connecticut CENTER DARBY McCurtin Hillary Farm Place Town Trust Lands Hall RIVER DARBY Downed Elm Turner Primeval Forest Tree House Sandbank Jordan Place Latour’s Spoonwood Cabin UPPER DARBY Trust Lands Trust Lands Salmon Ledges Estate and 1-Mile where Birch Cooty’s was born Cabin THE VOICE % right to the end Howard Elman remembered the first words ut- tered by the Voice in his head: Ain’t you smaht! RE IN CAR NATION % darby constable howard elman woke with the mocking words of the Voice still in his head. You are 87 years old and you still have not done that great thing to allow you to pass on into the next realm in peace. Peace! I never cared diddly-squat for peace. And, hey, maybe I’m not 87, only 85. It doesn’t matter. In your long life you have never accomplished a single great thing and you never will because you are too average. What about the Re In Car Nation of the property? That’s not a great thing—it’s just peculiar. “After his wife died Howard Elman succumbed to peculiarity” is what Dot McCurtin is saying about you, Howie. Howard sat up and reached with his feet for his slippers on the floor. Ever since Elenore died Howard no longer slept in their marital bed in just his shorts. He slept barefoot but otherwise fully clothed in his forest-green work outfit on the couch in the parlor under a “Darby Old Home Day” quilt Elenore had made. He never liked the idea of “going to bed.” It seemed to him more like “going to bedlam,” the bed- lam of regrets, or maybe the bedlam of egrets, those weird birds that Charlene, his eldest living daughter, talked about in her emails. Feet in slippers, he stood, put his hands on his hips and bent back- wards to loosen his spine. He used to tell Elenore that he envied her ability to sleep soundly ten hours a night, but actually he didn’t; actually, he liked being a light sleeper. Dreamland was an entertainment medium, better than tv. There’s more to it than that, Howie. You figure that the day you fall into a deep sleep that will be The End. And just what is that end? He tried to put himself in line with Elenore’s hybrid Catholic think- ing, that there was a heaven, a hell, a purgatory, and a limbo, which was some kind of waiting room for the souls of dead babies. Soul? What’s a soul? A flat fish. No, that’s spelled different. Constable Elman grabbed his cap from the end table and put it on his tender, bald head. The cap, like his matching trousers and shirt, was the same deep green as his grandson Birch Latour’s Dartmouth green. On the peak of the cap, in white, were the words Darby Police. He owned half a dozen such hats that he had specially made and that he’d paid for himself after he was elected town constable as a joke, the year Darby had voted to turn the town’s law enforcement over to the state police. The unpaid constable position was purely honorary, though in theory the constable had real powers. Or so said Birch, his favorite grandson, who this year had moved back to Darby with Missy Mendelson, his best friend from his rather bizarre childhood. Missy had a baby; her husband was another Darby playmate, Bez Woodward, a computer whiz and drone pilot fighting in a far-off war he was not allowed to discuss. Birch and Missy had started a computer business Howard didn’t know much about. Howard stoked the fire in the woodstove, started coffee, put on his black and red wool coat, and, as was his daily habit, stepped outside to admire his property. He would come back in when his slippered feet whined about the cold. It was a gray November dawn, no bird calls, no lament from wind dying in the tops of the trees. He cranked up his hearing aid to listen to the occasional car that drove Center Darby Road; maybe he’d have luck and hear honking geese flying south, too. He hoped for kindly late fall weather. He and some volunteers were moving Cooty Patterson and his cabin today. “Rain or shine” said the flyer on the bulletin board of Darby’s condemned town hall. Howard carefully negotiated the concrete blocks that served as steps to the front door and walked to the middle of the gravel driveway so he could please his eye with a view of his property. Quite a sight. I’m proud. 3 Pride is a sin. Yeah, maybe for a Catholic. For me it’s the branch sticking out of the cliff that I’m holding on to. After Elenore’s long, lingering, exhausting, sole-wrenching—or soul- wrenching—death you brooded for a year, and then you embarked on a project that sucked up your time, energy, and . and . I know, I know, sucked up my good sense. So what? So it’s more than peculiar. You rebuilt the property to resemble what it looked like decades ago, before the fire that destroyed your house. But you didn’t build it right. I didn’t have the money. No foundation, no floors, just plywood over a two-by-four frame, win- dows salvaged from a tear down, the place no more than a stage set. A shell, a mere shell. Like you, old man. Like you! Hardest part was matching the purple asphalt shingles for the sid- ing on the house that burned. The fire that you set, Howie, that you set! I had my reasons. The Voice left him and he was just thinking now, like any ordinary octogenarian. He had bought derelict cars from Donald Jordan’s junk- yard and placed them on the property so they would be visible up slope from the prospect of the Cutter house. Howard’s poet son Freddy (who had legally changed his name to F. Latour) had dubbed the property “Howard Elman’s Re In Car Nation.” Howard knew his son was being sarcastic, and he had retaliated by spitting words in his own sarcastic tone that he knew would rub snow in F.