The Monsters of Templeton Read online

  The Monsters of Templeton

  Lauren Groff

  For my parents, Gerald and Jeannine Groff

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  1. Homecoming

  2. Marmaduke Temple

  3. Vivienne, Bright and Beautiful

  4. The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Speak

  5. Secrets of a Tiny Town

  6. The Wolf at the Door

  7. Remarkable Prettybones

  8. Queen and Crane

  9. Sarah Franklin Temple Upton, from Her Journal, Abridged

  10. Leavings: Or, What Is Left Behind

  11. Hetty Averell

  12. Cowboy Faces

  13. The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Speak Again

  14. Davey Shipman (aka Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Hawkeye, etc.)

  15. Vivienne’s Superhero Side

  16. Cinnamon and Charlotte

  17. An Interruption

  18. Cinnamon and Charlotte, Part Two

  19. One Sees by the Light There Is

  20. Noname

  21. Fame in Failure

  22. Primus Dwyer: Or, The Great Buffoon

  23. Richard Temple

  24. What Happens When the String Is Pulled

  25. Storm

  26. Après Storm

  27. Shadows and Fragments

  28. Sagamore (Chingachgook, Big Snake)

  29. Camp We-no-kow-to-hawk-naw

  30. Elizabeth Franklin Temple

  31. Rising from the Deep; The Sun; One Breath Beyond

  32. Ordering the Threads

  33. Teratology: Or, of Monsters in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

  34. On Leaving

  35. The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Yet Again

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  An Interview with Lauren Groff

  About the Author

  Also by Lauren Groff

  Copyright

  Endnotes

  Epigraph

  “Ah, my friend, ’tis true!” cried old Natty

  Bumppo, slapping his knee. “A man cannot know

  hisself if he don’t know where he come from.”

  —JACOB FRANKLIN TEMPLE,

  The Pilgrims of Templeton

  Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are

  terrible round about…By his neesings a light

  doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the

  morning…He maketh a path to shine after him;

  one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth

  there is not his like, who is made without fear.

  He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over

  all the children of pride.

  —THE KING JAMES BIBLE,

  Job 41: 14, 18, 32–34

  This is a story of creation.

  —MARMADUKE TEMPLE,

  Tales of the American Wilderness, 1797

  Author’s Note

  An interesting fiction…however paradoxical the assertion may appear…addresses our love of truth—not the mere love of facts expressed by true names and dates, but the love of that higher truth, the truth of nature and of principles, which is a primitive law of the human mind.

  —JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, from Early

  Critical Essays, 1820–1822

  ONE WINTER WHEN I was an adult and very far from my hometown, I’d awaken every night, heartsore, haunted by my dreams of my calm little lake. I missed my village the way I’d miss a person. This book came from that long, dark winter; I wanted to write a love story for Cooperstown.

  I began as a diligent student, reading many books about the town’s history and as much of James Fenimore Cooper’s work as I could stomach, because one cannot write about Cooperstown without writing about Fenimore Cooper. But a curious thing happened: the more I knew, the more the facts drifted from their moorings. They began shaping themselves into stories in my head, taking over. Dates switched, babies were born who never actually existed, historical figures grew new personalities and began to do frightening things. I slowly began to notice that I wasn’t writing about Cooperstown anymore, but rather a slantwise version of the original.

  I panicked; luckily James Fenimore Cooper was there to save me. In his novel The Pioneers he wrote about Cooperstown, too, and his facts also went a little awry, so he decided to rechristen his town Templeton, New York. I relaxed and followed his lead.

  That’s about the time his characters knocked on the door and joined the party. In walked Marmaduke Temple and Natty Bumppo. In walked Chingachgook and Chief Uncas and Cora Munro. Remarkable Pettibones even made an appearance, though she changed her last name to the funnier Prettybones in the intervening centuries. Their arrival made sense: I had grown up with these characters almost as if they were real people, and they formed the myth of my town in my head. They belonged very firmly in my Templeton.

  In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies. I ended up with a different sort of story about my town than the one I had begun. This story saw history as malleable and tried for a different kind of truth about my little village on the lake, one filled with all the mystery and magic that I was surrounded by in my childhood. Myths like Abner Doubleday and the monster in the lake and Leatherstocking and all the many things that go bump in the night are things that we natives, by nature of belonging to the town, have come to feel are true pieces of our story. My Templeton is to Cooperstown as a shadow is to the tree that spawned it; an outline that takes texture from the ground it falls on.

  Of course, all characters from the book are, for the most part, invented, and characteristics shared with real living inhabitants of Cooperstown are accidental, unless I have told the models otherwise. People from history have been modified beyond all recognition. I only hope that the town itself, a place I love with all my heart, has not been.

  1

  Homecoming

  THE DAY I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass. It was one of those strange purple dawns that color July there, when the bowl made by the hills fills with a thick fog and even the songbirds sing timorously, unsure of day or night.

  The fog was still deep when Dr. Cluny found the monster on his morning row. I imagine how it went: the slide of the scull’s knife across the lake, the oar heads casting rings on the water, the red bow light pulsing into the dark. Then, sudden, looming over the doctor’s shoulder, an island where there had never before been an island, the vast belly of the dead beast. Gliding backward, the old doctor couldn’t see it. He neared; the bow-ball of his boat pushed into the rubbery flesh like a finger into a balloon; the pressure of boat versus skin reached a tensile limit without piercing anything; the boat checked its bow-ward motion, and jerked to stern. The doctor turned, but he was prepared only for the possible, and didn’t at first know what was before him. When he saw the large and terrible eye still milking over with death, the good doctor blinked. And then he fainted.

  When Dr. Cluny came to, the dawn had thinned, the water was shot with bars of light, and he found himself rowing around and around the bellied-up beast, weeping. In his mouth there was the sweet burn of horehound candy, the exact savor of his long-ago childhood. Only when a seagull landed upon the flat chin of the leviathan and bent to steal a taste did Dr. Cluny return to himself; only then did he skid back over the water to the awakening town, shouting his news.

  “Mirac
le,” he called. “Miracle. Come, quick, see.”

  AT THAT PRECISE moment, I was idling in the park across the street from Averell Cottage, my childhood home. For at least an hour, I had been standing in the depression that the town flooded in winter to make a skating rink, gathering what courage I could. The fog veiled my grand, awkward house, with its original cottage from 1793, one wing from Victorian 1890, and another from the tasteless 1970s, turning the whole into something more coherent, almost beautiful. In my delirium, I thought I could see my mother inside with a few lifetimes of family antiques and the gentle ghost that lived in my childhood room, all traced like bones on an X-ray, delicate as chalk.

  I felt the world around me creak and strain, snapping apart, fiber by fiber, like a rope pulled too tautly.

  Back near Buffalo I had had a glimpse of myself in a rest-stop bathroom, and was horrified to find myself transformed into a stranger in rumpled, dirty clothing, my once-pretty face bloated and red with crying jags. I was drawn, thin, welted with the bites of a thousand Alaskan blackflies. My hair, shorn in April, was now growing out in weird brown tufts. I looked like some little chick, starving, molting, kicked out of the nest for late-discovered freakishness.

  As the night thinned around me, I leaned over and retched. And I still hadn’t moved when, down Lake Street, there came a muffled trampling sound. I knew before I saw them that the sounds were from the Running Buds, a small, dear band of middle-aged men who jog around the streets of Templeton every morning, in all weather, in ice, in rain, in this fine-pelted fog. When the Buds came nearer, I could hear gentle talking, some spitting, some wheezing over their footsteps. They moved out of the dark and into the glow of the single streetlamp on Lake Street, and seeing me in the park in my little depression, seeing, perhaps, something familiar about me but not quite recognizing who I was at that distance, all six of them raised their hands in my direction. I waved back and watched their thick bodies disappear down the street.

  I FOUND MY feet crossing the street, heading up the driveway, passing through the garage doorway, and I opened the door to the mudroom to the smells of straw and dust and bitter orange, the smells of home. I almost turned around, returned to the car, waited for day. I hadn’t seen my mother in more than a year: I couldn’t afford the trip home, and, for the first time since I’d left, she hadn’t offered to pay. Instead, though, I came in as silently as I could, hoping to have a few good hours of sleep before awakening her. I placed my shoes beside her white nursing clogs, and went through the mudroom, then the kitchen.

  But although I had expected Vi to be sleeping, she was sitting at the kitchen table with the Freeman’s Journal spread before her, her profile reflected in the great plate glass door that looked out over the two-acre lawn, the lake, the hills. She must have had a night shift, because her feet were in an enamel bowl filled with hot water, her eyes closed, her face hanging above her tea as if she were trying to steam her features off. They were slipping that way, anyhow: at forty-six, my mother had the worn, pouchy skin of a woman who had done far too many drugs at far too young an age. Her shoulders were slumped, and the zipper in the back of her skirt was open, revealing a swatch of red cotton underwear and a muffin-top of flesh above it.

  From my position in the kitchen door, my mother looked old. If I weren’t already holding the pieces together with both squeezed hands, this sight would have broken my heart.

  I must have moved or swallowed, because Vi turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes narrowed, she blinked and heaved a sigh, and passed a hand over her face. “Goddamn flashbacks,” she muttered.

  I snorted.

  She looked at me again, her forehead creasing. “No. You’re not a flashback, Willie. Are you?”

  “Not this time. Apparently,” I said, coming over to her and kissing her on the part in her hair. She smelled antiseptic from the hospital, but, deeper, there was her own smell, something birdlike, like warm and dusty wings. She squeezed my hand, flushing.

  “You look horrible. What in the world are you doing home?” she said.

  “Oh, boy.” I sighed, and had to look away, at the thinning curls of fog on the lake. When I looked back, the smile had fallen off her face.

  “What. The heck. Are you. Doing home?” she said, again, still squeezing, but harder with each word until the bones in my hand were crushing one another.

  “Jesus,” I gasped.

  “Well,” she said, “if you’re in trouble, you’d better be praying.” It was only then that I saw the crude cross of raw iron that hung heavily between her breasts, as if my mother had gone to the Farmers’ Museum up the road and blacksmithed her own crucifix out of two hobnails. I nudged the cross with my free hand and frowned.

  “Vi?” I said. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve become a Jesus freak. You’re a hippie, for God’s sake. Remember? Organized religion equals bad?”

  She released my hand, and tugged the cross away. “That,” she said, “is none of your business.” For a long moment, though, Vi couldn’t look at me.

  “Vi,” I said, “be serious. What’s going on?”

  My mother sighed and said, “People change, Willie.”

  “You don’t,” I said.

  “You should be glad I do,” she said. She dropped her eyes, not yet remembering that I was standing there in her house when I should have been under the twenty-four-hour dazzle of an Alaskan tundra. I should have been blowing lichen off definitive proof that human culture existed there over thirty-five thousand years ago, some incisor embedded deep in the ground, some tool still glistening with seal grease, intact from the deep freezer of the steppe. I should have been under the aegis of Dr. Primus Dwyer, PhD, Barton P. Thrasher Professor in the Sciences at Stanford University, where in a few short months I was supposed to finish my PhD dissertation, and graduate, heading toward a life of impossible luminescence.

  When I told my mother in my sophomore year that I wanted to focus my furious ambitions in archaeology, she looked bitterly disappointed for a moment. “Oh, Willie,” she’d said then. “There is nothing left in this world for you to discover, honey. Why look backward when you can look forward?” I talked for hours then, of the intensity of wonder when you blew away the dust and found an ancient skull in your hand, when you held the flint knives and saw the chisel marks made by long-dead hands. Like so many people who have long ago burnt through all of their own passion, my mother recognized mine, and longed for it. Archaeology would take me into the great world, into deserts and tundras, as far away from Templeton as I believed she had always wanted me to be. By now, her ego and a good portion of what inheritance she had left were invested in this dream: me as intrepid explorer of bone and potsherds, tunneling into the vastness of prehistory. Now, in the lightening dawn, she looked at me. A motorboat was speeding across the lake at top throttle, and its whine rose even to us, set two acres back on glowing, overgrown lawn.

  “Oh, Willie,” said my mother now. “Are you in trouble,” and it was a statement, not a question.

  “Vi?” I said. “I messed up big-time.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Why else would you find yourself in Templeton? You can hardly stand to come back once a year for Christmas.”

  “Goddamn it, Vi,” I said, and I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and rested my head on the table.

  My mother looked at me and then sighed. “Willie,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so tired. Tell me now what happened so I can get some sleep, and we’ll deal with it later.” I looked at her, then had to look down at the table. I traced designs in the waxy residue of its surface. And then I told her one version of the story, vastly abridged.

  “Well, Vi,” I said. “It looks like I’m pregnant. And it’s maybe Dr. Primus Dwyer’s.”

  My mother held her fingers over her mouth. “Oh, heaven help us,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But, Vi, there’s more.” I said it in one exhale, in a great whoosh. I told her that I also tried to run over his wife with a bush plane
, and she was the dean of students, and it was probable that charges of attempted manslaughter would prevent me from returning to Stanford again. I held my breath and waited for the knuckled sting of the back of her hand. Despite Vi’s hippie mores, it was not uncommon in my childhood for us to get to this point in our battles, panting and narrow-eyed, stalemated across the table. And once or twice, for my greatest sins, she did send her hand across to settle it all with a smack.

  But she didn’t hit me now, and it was so silent I could hear the two-hundred-year-old grandfather clock in the dining room as the pendulum clicked, clicked, clicked. When I looked up, Vi was shaking her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said, pushing her tea farther from her with one finger. “I raised you to be exceptional, and here you are, a fuckup. Like your stupid fuckup mother.” Her face wobbled and grew red.

  I tried to touch her arm, but she snatched it away, as if mere contact with me could burn her. “I’m going to take a few pills,” she said, standing. “I’m going to sleep for as long as I can sleep. And when I wake up, we’re dealing with this.” She moved heavily to the door. With her back still toward me, she paused. “And oh, Willie, your hair. You had such beautiful hair,” she said and moved away. I could hear her footsteps on every creaking floorboard in the old house, up the grand front stairway, far away over the hall and into the master bedroom.