Novel examines life in rural Maine

COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING, by Able Jones, The Mayfly Press, Augusta, 163 pages, $9.95 paper.

Subtitled “A Maine Entertainment,” “Country Living, Country Dying” is an amusing mystery and social satire set in the fictional Maine town of Bosky Dells, described as “… a town that locked up at night, unlocked in the morning, on a regular basis. Cardboard signs on strings flipped to “closed” and then to “open,” but everyone knew the hours to get mail, buy meat, have coffee, see what was happening. Small goods and small money changed hands. Various commodities (beer, potato chips, people, stray dogs) entered the town, got churned around in some way or other and left it again as returnable empties, as trash to the dump, as tourists, as philosophers.”

The everyday routine is dramatically upset just as the town is preparing for the annual Halloween celebration when the badly decomposed body of a woman is unearthed at the town dump. Buzz Noble, the dump manager, who has a back hoe he calls “Earth Angel,” comes upon the body.

The main character is Adele True, who runs a small gift shop called “About Thyme”; and at the opening of the story, she’s expecting a rare visit from her cousin Glinda who has lived away from Maine for many years. Glinda was a wild girl when growing up in Bosky Dells and could hardly wait to leave her hometown, which she later describes as “a God-forsaken weirdo place” where every boy in town smelled of motor oil and barn disinfectant.

Next door to Adele lives the Rev. Kildare, a retired and incapacitated Episcopal priest, and his effeminate companion “Snooky” Montgomery, a good friend of Adele’s, who is known around town for his fancy cooking, tips for which he gets from his Julia Child videos.

Another town character is Harold Mosby, a mute, who lives in his ’73 Chevy. The town agrees to buy Harold a nice new sleeping bag so he’ll be warm in the winter. Harold loves to taste snowflakes on his tongue and his favorite book is “Cherry Ames, Girl Detective.”

There’s a traffic jam at the dump after news of the body spreads by Saturday night, and by Monday morning, it’s all anybody in town is talking about. As the author writes, “The phones had been busy all of Sunday and today since dawn. The scanners had been on all night. Four women, the officers of the Ladies Auxiliary, were calling each other back and forth, trying to decide if a Benefit Supper was in order, and if so, who had the jello list, and how soon could they get things organized?”

As the mystery unravels, so do the layers of life in Bosky Dells. Anyone who has lived in a small town in Maine (and perhaps anywhere) will be able to identify with what the author calls “the nuances of the drama.” All the interwoven relationships, the backbiting, the family histories, the unrelenting gossip. Everyone in town owns a scanner; they have to. There’s essentially no privacy and there are always people like Glinda True who are struggling to get out. Of course, the natives come first. As the author writes, “People who came from away, then died, and were buried somewhere else, were soon forgotten. While those who were born in town could go away forever and someone would still remember them at Christmas or in some speech or in another family member’s eulogy. `Yes, she was the second cousin of Wilbur Dean, who left Bosky Dells in 1952. Wilburn was born here, if you recall.”‘

Along the way we meet an outlandish group of minor characters all of whom seem to have nicknames, like “Puck” Diddles, who’s a native, a selectman, who sells vinyl siding. There’s a cat named “Fido” and a dog named “Pussums.”

Essentially, though, “Country Living, Country Dying” is the sad story of Adele True, a single woman who has hardly ever left the town, who is unattractive and loses the love of her life. “I might have been something,” Adele says, “But I was a good person instead.”

“Life, reality, rural Maine, even romance…” is what the novel is all about, too. While clever puns and literary jokes abound, there is a good deal of wisdom and insightful observation in this witty tale.

About Adele’s life, for instance: “Was Adele fated to live in an odd body with mouse-colored hair and a flat chest, go to business school, have to drop out, take care of Gram, mother Glinda, fall in mad wild love with a refugee on some kind of lam who happened to own a few albums of opera and have an eye for nice jewelry to give teen-aged girls on their birthdays? Or is this just the arc of one’s life? … like fireworks — everything gets lit, catches the spark, goes up, seems to hang in the air for a moment, all potential, and then splash, zing, explode, zow itself against the darkness.”

As Able Jones says, “Life was full of strangeness. You just couldn’t worry about it all the time.”

Able Jones, incidentally, is a pseudonym for two authors — Alice Bloom, English professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, and Joan Fairbanks, her friend and also English and history teacher at the Windsor School in Windsor. Bloom has lived in Mount Vernon for 20 years where she also runs an arts and crafts shop (similar to Adele True’s?) when not teaching and writing. Fairbanks was born in Augusta, but raised in Forestdale (Bosky Dells?), Vt. Fairbanks admits that many of the chargers in “Country Living” are composites of relatives or people who lived in her Vermont town. Fairbanks was a student at Farmington when she met Alice Bloom, who was a teacher. The talented team of Able Jones is now at work on a sequel.

Sanford Phippen is a writer who teaches English at Orono High School.