Free The Great Northern Express by Howard Frank Mosher

where, with a final crescendo, it splintered into kindling.
    â€œI got my piano, Howard,” Jim told me the next morning before school. “But it seems to have undergone a transformation. There’s a nest of some kind inside it.”
    I accompanied him downstairs to the music room, where I was amazed to see the battered old roadhouse piano from the former schoolteacher’s carriage shed. Evidently, after dropping me off at my apartment, Prof and his boys had returned toBarton, purchased this old wreck, and, under cover of darkness, brought it to the school. Jim listened gravely as I told him what I guessed had happened.
    When I finished, he nodded and tinkled a couple of the remaining upper-register ivories. “I’m reminded,” he said, “of what my great-grandfather said to Mark Twain after hearing him speak in Burlington.”
    â€œWhich was?”
    â€œMr. Clemens, that was the funniest talk I’ve ever heard. It was so funny, it was all I could do to keep from laughing.”

23

The Dickens of Beale Street
    â€œMy name is Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort,” the gray-haired, deep-voiced black man said as he bent over the toy computer keyboard. Pecking away at the brightly painted letter keys, he rumbled on: “I was born during the Great Depression in the Mississippi Delta. Over by Greenwood, yeah. My parents were poor but honest sharecroppers. When I was six years old, my daddy left home. Oh, yeah. That summer I began work in the cotton fields ’longside my mama …”
    It was five in the morning, and I was sipping very hot, very strong coffee in a café on Memphis’s Beale Street. Down the block someone was picking out, over and over, the first few bars of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Otherwise, on this summery dawn, the blues capital of the upper Delta was as quiet as it ever would be.
    Inside the café Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort was hard atwork on his memoir. He wore a long winter overcoat and a Russian commissar’s fur hat. He’d left his shopping cart, piled with several bulging black plastic bags, out on the empty sidewalk. Franklin was treetop tall and as lean and rugged-looking as a power forward for the Memphis Grizzlies. He must have been a morning regular at the café, because the waitress had greeted him warmly and brought him a steaming cup of that delicious, ardent coffee, which he acknowledged with an abstracted nod.
    Franklin looked up at me and frowned. Then he looked back at the pretend keyboard and began to peck again. “The memoir of Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort,” he said. “By F. R. Beaufort. I was born to poor but honest sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta country. Oh, yeah. When I was six, my daddy left home …”
    Once again, going to work in the cotton fields with his mother was as far as Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort got. He paused, sipped his coffee, resumed work. “The memoir of Franklin …”
    A couple of construction workers in yellow hard hats came into the café. “Morning, Franklin,” one of them said. “How’s the memoir coming?”
    â€œComing just
fine
,” Franklin said, quite fiercely, and leaned in toward his keyboard. “My name is Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort. Yeah. I was born in the Mississippi Delta to honest sharecroppers …”
    How Charles Dickens would have loved F. R. Beaufort, I thought. How Dickens would have loved the Northeast Kingdom in 1964. How many novels would he have been able to get out of it—a dozen? Two dozen? He’d have shoehorned the Dantean scene of the girlie show at the fair right into
Oliver Twist
.
    Prof, for his part, purported to be chagrined and outraged by the live-sex exhibition. He said that since he’d last patronized agirlie revue, as a “young blade,” they’d degenerated into something much uglier, and the only reason he’d gone (in disguise) was to