Free The Great Northern Express by Howard Frank Mosher Page B

abusive sex shows at the fair and the barbaric cockfights at the Leonard brothers’ were as much a part of the Kingdom’s traditions and culture as the colorfully dressed, comical straw harvest figures in old-fashioned overalls and sunhats that began to appear on farmhouse porches in early October.
    But what about those vivid, Grandma Moses–style primitive paintings that we’d noticed on the sides of barns and covered bridges on our first day in the Kingdom? Who had created these pastoral Vermont landscapes, these scenes of mountains and rivers and lakes and deer and trout and cows lining up at the pasture bars at milking time? Prof told us they’d been painted some twenty years back by a shadowy figure known as the Dog Cart Man. He would appear in the Kingdom now and then in the summer with half a dozen mongrels harnessed, with bits of leather, rope, and baling twine, to a fire engine–red American Flyer wagon. The wagon, Prof said, contained a bedroll, a few cooking utensils, and several gallons of paint in primary colors. For a couple of dollars, a meal, or a corner of a hayloft to bunk in for the night, the Dog Cart Man would paint any rural scene you pleased on the side of your barn or shed, even your house. My favorite was a leaping trout that adorned the Irasburg General Store. But Prof, who knew everything there was to know about local history and who, drunk, sober, or in between, wasalways happy to share that lore, told me that some years earlier, an impoverished local widow with twelve kids and a five-cow hill farm had sold her eight-year-old son to the Dog Cart Man for fifteen dollars. That night, Prof claimed, the painter attempted to molest the child, whereupon the boy grabbed a rusty old pistol out of the dog cart and shot him through the heart.
    Seeing Franklin Roosevelt Beaufort this morning on Beale Street had reminded me that, well into the 1960s, the Kingdom still had plenty of local “characters.” Clarence the bottle picker. Joe Canada, the spruce-gum picker, who roamed the woods with a sickle blade attached to a long pole, slicing fresh pitch off spruce trees to sell for chewing gum. A nameless hermit lived in a hemlock-bark shack in the woods northeast of town, and we’d see the occasional tramp up from the railyard for a handout or a bindlestiff working his way from farm to farm in haying time. There seemed to be an unspoken but well-understood code for dealing with these individualists on the fringe of northern New England society. Up to a point, kids were allowed to tease them. Name-calling might be permissible. Rock throwing or setting your dog on a village character—never.
    One evening, out for a walk after supper, Phillis and I wandered into Joe Souliere’s commission sales barn, behind the village hotel, during the weekly cattle auction. We climbed up to the top of the small grandstand and sat down to watch the proceedings.
    â€œYes! Here’s a pretty little bull calf, boys,” Joe chanted into his hand-held microphone as a young Angus was led into the wooden-sided ring. “This gentleman is out of the Kittredge herd up on Guay Hill, he’s a good bull, boys, start you a prize herd. Yes! Who’ll begin the bidding at twenty dollars? Twenty, twenty, thirty, twenty—thirty? Thirty-five? Forty, do I have forty? I haveforty over there. Yes! Fifty dollars, boys? Fifty? Fifty in gold, boys, for this beautiful little bull?”
    A fly landed on my nose. I reached up and swatted it away.
    â€œSold!” Joe barked into the microphone. “For fifty sponda-loons to the schoolteacher from New York State.”
    Phillis couldn’t stop laughing, the farmers and village hangers-on in the grandstand around us laughed, but Joe said, “Any motion of the head or hand’s a bid, ain’t that right, now, boys?”
    The schoolteacher from New York had, it seemed, been taken to school. That’s how Phillis and I acquired a