Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [67]
There was a small staff at the inn, and I came to enjoy their company. Megan, the clerk and manager, lived down the road from the cabin with her husband and three children. Martha was the second clerk. She was a cute blonde, hardworking and determined, raising two children on her own. Not long after I arrived, she married a young man from Guatemala who had been part of a Spanish-speaking crew that was clearing brush along rural power lines in the area. The workers had stayed at the inn, and a romance developed between Martha and one of the handsome young men. Four months elapsed between their meeting and the wedding, held in the inn’s side yard on a lovely summer day. And there was Kenny, the overnight clerk. He was twenty-two years old, with light brown hair and fine sparse whiskers that were not quite a beard. He had a long face and fine nose, and he reminded me of the boys seen in Civil War daguerreotypes who had enlisted on both sides by exaggerating their ages. Kenny always had a book in his hand, and I soon learned that he was an insatiable and organized reader.
The first time I met him he was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress. A seventeenth-century English allegory of Christian life struck me as an unusual choice. I asked about it and learned he was working his way through a reading list that he had taken from a book titled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It was a peculiar litany of recommended reading, smelling of arcane discernment and fusty British tastes. So far, he had read The Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, The Unfortunate Traveller, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Thousand and One Nights, The Golden Ass, Aithiopika, Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Metamorphoses and Aesop’s Fables. He had also knocked off Jane Eyre, Oroonoko, Little Women and Justine, to mention just a few.
I don’t think I could have found a single professor at my college who had read as many esoteric classics. I told him what I was reading—a novel of New England by Russell Banks. I thought he would recognize the setting and characters. He made a note and said he would get a copy. Over the summer, I came to learn that he had attended the high school in Bethel, where, he said, the teachers had not taken much of an interest in him or his hunger for reading. He was living in a mobile home in nearby Albany, the town where he had grown up, with an elderly couple who had taken him in. He had left home in high school over a dispute with his father. “We didn’t see eye to eye,” he told me in typical understatement. His father was a woodcutter, and his mother and father lived apart. He was active in the Albany Congregational Church and helped serve the church’s monthly public suppers.
We spent many nights near the inn’s front desk talking about books. One night I told him I was also working my way through Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. He was interested in the book’s argument, and I explained that Fiedler, the towering literary critic, had traced the history of the novel to Clarissa by Samuel Richardson in the mid-eighteenth century. “Is that the same Richardson who wrote Pamela?” Ken asked me. I said that it was. “I read it last year,” he said. “Good book.”
This small group at the inn welcomed me, and when I returned there at night after a day’s work at the cabin and felt the need for company, I made my way out to the desk, poured a cup of coffee from the pot that was always there and found a willing partner in conversation.
My plan was to have the cabin habitable by the middle of July—a new deadline—and then