The Americans Are Coming Read online

  “It’s good to have you home, Pal.”

  “I wouldn’t miss your wedding for the world,” said Palidin and turned to Nutbeam, held out his hand for shaking and said, “Palidin.”

  Nutbeam shook the hand and smiled, seemed to lose a great portion of his face behind it, and said, “Nutbeam. Welcome home.”

  “Are you doin’ okay?” asked Shirley.

  “I’m doing the very best,” said Palidin and gave Shirley a hug.

  “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “I think it’s the best decision you ever made.”

  “Thanks, Pal.”

  They started walking, Nutbeam holding her left hand and Palidin her right.

  Palidin scanned the fields with their houses and barns. “Everything’s so small,” he thought. “They used to seem big, but now they’re tiny.” When Palidin left Brennen Siding, Stan Tuney’s barn had been the biggest building he’d ever seen. Now, it looked tiny and shabby, needing paint. The fields that once seemed so large, now all together seemed small in comparison with some of the farms he’d seen east and west of Aurora and Newmarket. He also eyed the narrow dirt road and realized he hadn’t seen one since he left home.

  As if reading his thoughts, Nutbeam asked, “Big place, Toronto?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “You must be glad to be back. Are you stayin’?” asked Shirley.

  “Only for the wedding. I have a job. I have to go back.”

  “What’re ya workin’ at?”

  “I work for a newspaper . . . learning to write.”

  “Sounds like a good job,” said Nutbeam. “Not much money in it . . . in Canada.”

  “Dryfly got a job.”

  “Oh yeah? What doing?”

  “He’s workin’ on puttin’ up Bill Wallace’s camp. Bill Wallace is the father of that girl he’s chasin’.”

  “Ha! Can’t he catch her?”

  “Oh, I think he can ketch her all right,” said Nutbeam, “he’s at the club, or out walkin’ with her every spare minute he can find.”

  “Good. He must be happy.”

  “It’ll never come to no good,” said Shirley. “She’s too far away. He should be chasin’ someone handy.”

  “Ya never know,” said Nutbeam.

  As they approached Shirley’s house, one word echoed through Palidin’s mind: Poverty.

  And as if Nutbeam had read his thoughts once again, he said, “I bought the old Graig Allen property. Dry and me are buildin’ a house on it, soon’s he’s done workin’ on the Wallace camp.”

  “Great! Good news!” said Palidin.

  “You could write about it in the T’rono newspaper,” said Shirley, smiling.

  Nutbeam and Palidin both chuckled. “I just might,” said Palidin. “I just might. Don’t tear this old house down, Nutbeam. I’ll need a picture.”

  *

  After unpacking for his three-day visit, Palidin pulled himself away from the many questions Nutbeam and Shirley were asking and went for a walk. He walked through the forest all the way to the big hollow. At the edge of the barren, he removed his clothes, hung them on a spruce tree for a beacon, then ran freely to the boulder that jutted from the barren’s center. He stopped in front of the boulder to read his inscription.

  Probe the atom,

  Ponder the echoes of the wise.

  There lie the secrets to the universe.

  “There’s something wrong with it,” he thought. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wrong. I was so much younger when I wrote that, a boy, and it looks just as it did when I wrote it. The only thing I’ll ever write that will last, and there’s something wrong with it.

  “But why did I write it? Oh yes, echoes, the cycle. The echoes and the cycle, the answer to all my fears and superstitions. I guess they had more substance than just accepting everything as being the work of the devil, or ghosts. You can explain everything with echoes and circles, in the same way you can say that God did it, or the devil did it, or ghosts, or fairies. Put them all inside a man and call it fear. We haunt each other.”

  Palidin sat on the boulder, letting the sun tan his body. It felt good to be back. “My heart’s here,” he thought. “One day I’ll come back to Brennen Siding and retire. I’ll sell my idea for magnetizing hooks and retire.”

  A breeze suddenly came up and swept across his naked body, cool and titillating. He leaned back and lay on the boulder, staring straight up. Looking up, he could not see the grassy barren or the trees on the horizon; he saw only the sky, the sun and a black bird circling far above, far enough away that he could not identify for certain what kind of bird it was, far enough away that he could barely hear its mournful call. It circled higher and higher and got smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared into the azure.

  “Circling me like it must have circled Bonzie,” thought Palidin. “The cycle. Everything works in cycles – the salmon, the bees, the birds, the Earth, the universe . . . magnets and echoes.”

  Palidin thought he could hear someone walking, splush, splush, splush, on the barren. He listened to see if he could identify it as being a man or an animal. It would be very embarrassing for him to be caught naked by someone like Dan Brennen or Bert Todder . . . or anyone.

  And then a child’s voice called out, “Whoop! Over here!” He sat up and searched the barren for a long breathless moment. He heard the call of the bird once again.

  There was nobody there.

  Afterword

  David Adams Richards

  I met Herb Curtis in a bar in Fredericton, one September evening in the mid-eighties. I was sitting with a mutual friend, Bruce Wallace. Herb approached, sat down, and asked me, cautiously, if I wouldn’t mind taking a look at a novel he had written.

  “Sure,” I said.

  There were some connections between us. Bruce Wallace was one, but I knew Herb’s older brother Wayne Curtis, who is also a writer. Wayne and Herb were Miramichi boys, and I had heard from reliable sources that both were great fishermen (which I later found to be absolutely true).

  I waited for the novel, but for some reason it did not come to hand. I was Writer in Residence at UNB at the time, and though I read many manuscripts during my time there, I kept wondering about Curtis’s, and if he had ever managed to finish it. After a while, other things took up my time.

  A year or so later I met Herb Curtis’s sister Daphne on the street. She asked me if I would be willing to take a look at Herb’s novel. Once again, I said I would, and she delivered the manuscript to my door the next day. So that night, I sat in the big chair in the living room of our house on Saint John Street in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and began to read.

  As I read, I experienced a very rare sensation. The feeling was almost ethereal – one of true wonder and delight at the grand level of human pathos, punctuated with moments of side-splitting hilarity – both ribald and tender, and a cast of characters equal in depth, control, and dimension to any great published work in Canada. The Americans Are Coming was reminiscent in its physicality of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  I realized something as I read: The Americans Are Coming put to rest forever the idea of humourless writing in this country – something I knew to be entirely false anyway. But this book was in many ways creating a different kind of humour. It was humour so physically rooted in the world in which it found itself that the humour could not exist outside it – and yet the world and the humour combined to create a universal framework to delight anyone – anyone anywhere with mind enough to read and think. Or more importantly, feel.

  What was “new” was that there was no hint or trace of apology – no worry that Upper Canada or the sophisticated professors who taught Canadian literature at universities might look askance at it, thinking it vulgar or plain (which professors at times are too quick to do. That some did, there is no doubt). Herb Curtis had created a humour truly his own – and was very fittingly unconcerned about such nonsense.

  I knew whe
n I was reading The Americans Are Coming that I was reading a comic masterpiece. I realized that the book was written in Fredericton by an outsider, yet could never have been written by a Frederictonion or a boy from Ottawa, either.

  There were similarities to other great books. Curtis had at his fingertips the subtle and inexhaustible charm of telling a story. This was a book on the cutting edge of humour. Brave in direction and tone, Curtis took chances with his art, which he created with a sweet sorrow. There was a feeling of loss, and sadness at this loss. There is an understanding in The Americans Are Coming that the treasured human beings we love and delight in – the most charming moments – will not last . . . and that the important duty of the book is to catch those moments as if in a bottle for a little bit, and thereby expose our love of humanity and our duty to other human beings.

  This is no mean feat, and this novel is no mean book. It is a sprawling labyrinth of characters whose triumphs and losses we cheer and mourn – just as we cherish their hopes and dreams, and the great Miramichi River that flows through it all, without which the loves and losses would be less fluid, and much less meaningful.

  For this great work of humour, there is one other distinction. It is this: although to my mind its is hands-down one of the two funniest books ever written in Canada, it did not win the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour (as a writer, Herb Curtis has come close to equalling himself in other books, and is certainly funnier than Leacock). This would be a disgrace, except for the fact that the book that won the Leacock Medal that year is perhaps not so remembered now – and will never be read and cherished as this book is. But it is not a minor slight. It is a major one – and one which Atlantic writers have often faced (at times, within their own writing community).

  Curtis’s book is as significant a work of art as most –and I think grander than many in one serious regard. That is in the myth that surrounds, entertains, and boggles the minds of the characters – the Myth of the Dungarvon is a palpable source of regeneration and wonder, through all the young love, youthful awakening, and subsequent heartache of girls and boys; the comic yet tragic sorrow of Buck and Shirley Ramsey; the hilarity, common purpose, and ethereal dreams of Shadrack and Dryfly; and the pure, splendid humanity of the men and women who come to the river to fish.

  And something of it may be felt in this beautiful moment on a dark night, overlooking the river.

  During their lives, Shadrack and Dryfly might travel to Vancouver and NewYork, Toronto and Nashville, England and Italy, but it is easy to believe that their hearts will always remain on the Dungarvon, the Renous, and the Miramichi. At the age of seventy, it is likely that at times they will still speak a little too fast or a little too slow, repeat the word “and” too much, and speak with a Miramichi accent, softly, as the river people do, referring to themselves as “Dungarvon boys.”

  *

  I met Herb a few times. We ran into each other at parties and functions now and again. We did not get to know each other well before I left for Toronto. I see him occasionally, on the river. But I will tell you what I told his sister, Daphne, a week after she had given me the manuscript. I whispered to her that The Americans Are Coming was a great novel.

  A comic masterpiece.

  I believe this, twenty years later.

  David Adams Richards

  Bartibog Bridge

  Miramichi

  June 2008

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Born in Keenan Siding, New Brunswick, on the banks of the Miramichi River, Herb Curtis grew up immersed in a culture where tall tales grow taller than trees. He went to school until grade eight, but read ravenously, especially enjoying Dickens and Twain, whose protagonists were boys.

  Curtis came from a family of five children, all of whom dabbled in the arts. His home was alive with music. Among the family’s musical instruments were a piano, an organ, a violin, an accordion, harmonicas, and even a guitar, which Herb learned to play as a child.

  His father, a farmer, lumberman, and outfitter, also ran a store, where people gathered and exchanged gossip. Herb had a front-row seat for observing how gossip and lies build upon each other until they become entities in and of themselves – sometimes taking on the proportion of legend. Undoubtedly, the ability to spin a good yarn was a form of social currency. Embellishment was part of that tradition, for there is always room to improve the telling of a tale. His fictional Brennen Siding is infused with the linguistic cadences of the back woods of the Miramichi region; the oral tradition feels very, very close at hand when one reads Curtis’s prose. We are with him in the store, silently drinking ginger ale and peeling an orange.

  In Keenan Siding, like Brennen Siding, the river was a shared domain: a gathering place, escape, source of food and entertainment, and life force. Curtis’s deep association with the Miramichi and her tributaries has infiltrated his sense of place so fully that it spills over into the fictional world of Brennen Siding. The people who populate his realm are at home on their river and with one another in The Americans Are Coming, the first book in his Brennen Siding trilogy.

  At eighteen, Curtis moved to Fredericton, where he became a bartender and later an actor and standup comic. He has performed more than three hundred times in eastern Canada. He began writing The Americans Are Coming, his first novel, in his late thirties. During his most productive years as a writer, Iris Young, his late wife, was his primary reader and source of encouragement.

  Curtis is an avid fly fisherman and fishing guide. He has been recognized by the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the New Brunswick Salmon Council, and the Miramichi Salmon Association for his outstanding contribution to raising public awareness of Atlantic salmon conservation. He maintains a foothold in the Miramichi, returning often to fish and ruminate on the banks of his muse, the River.

  An Interview with the Author

  When you were growing up, what shaped you most as a writer?

  When I was young, I went to a one-room school (Keenan School) until grade six. There were maybe fifteen children in total. Think about it: six grades in the same small classroom. It was actually a very good place to learn, and I was happy there, getting A-plusses in just about everything, especially English and literature.

  Then, in grade seven, smack in the middle of the difficult puberty years, I was sent to the big school in Blackville. I found myself one of one hundred and eighty kids in grade seven alone. I was scared in that big school; I felt like an alien. The teachers were strict. I felt bullied and picked on and lost my confidence and self-esteem. I went from being an A-plus student in grade six to failing, and I had to repeat grade seven. The moment I began to adjust – finally learning, understanding, and socializing – I became severely ill with a ruptured appendix and nearly died. That set me back another year. So there I was in a class with kids half my size.

  Thanks to my aunt Lillian and my brother Winston – both of whom had pretty good collections of books – I found myself reading a lot: Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, Canadian and American stuff; anything I could get my hands on. At sixteen, I read a book I liked and learned from the blurb on the back cover that the author was only nineteen years old. I said to myself, “Maybe I can do that. Maybe I can become an author.” So I started writing a novel – a terrible novel, as it turned out, but it was good practice.

  On reflection, reading got me started as a writer. Until I heard of guys like David Adams Richards and Ray Fraser, as far as I knew I was the only writer on the Miramichi at that time.

  How has music informed your writing?

  Music means a lot to me. I learned to strum and finger pick a guitar at an early age, and when I was sixteen, I formed a folk group of fifteen or sixteen teenagers and we’d rehearse and do shows in halls up and down the river.

  I also got into acting. I never became good at it, but I believe it’s one of the best means of getting an education for a young person. I also sang a lot. I was once told that
to be a good writer, one must also be able to sing. I don’t know who told me that, but I believe it’s true.

  How did the world in The Americans Are Coming evolve?

  Every time I sat to write The Americans Are Coming, my mind went to Brennen Siding. I pictured that little settlement on the banks of the Dungarvon. I became the characters as soon as they appeared, whenever they appeared.

  I write alone. Even if a cat enters the room, it snaps me out of my dreams and schemes.

  What is the process of writing like for you?

  When I write, I enter my office sometime between three and four every morning – and right away I become the narrative voice of whatever book I’m working on. The voice is not necessarily my own, but the voice of my creation – a voice that fits the time and space of the book. The narrative voice, in a sense, is an omnipresent character, a god looking down from above, watching every move, every development; listening to every word spoken, hearing even the thoughts of the characters involved.

  I endeavour never to allow the narrative voice to opine, influence, or condescend. If there’s tragedy, I give an account of it, but it is my nature to seek out the humorous side of things. Pathos, poignancy, pity, and sympathy are not to be avoided, but they are not a tad more significant than fun and frivolity, the so-called lighter side of life. I will not refrain from walking a character down a path to peril, even death, but I’m a believer in polarity – everything has an opposite. Where there is tragedy, there is also comedy. I write the story in my chosen narrative voice and leave the tears and laughter to the reader.

  I think it’s important to read and reread what I write. When I do this, I’m usually searching for the rhythm or the lack of rhythm in a piece. If the rhythm is off, I endeavour to fix it. My late wife, Iris Young, was a talented actress and broadcaster and a great reader. Every few days or so, she used to read my work aloud to me. I would just sit, listen, and take notes. If she stumbled or hesitated unnecessarily, I knew there was something wrong with my work. The next morning, before continuing any further, I’d fix those wrongs. Every writer should have an Iris Young in his life.