Coal comfort

Hollis the Mountain Man's heating problems

by Sally Cragin

In Tritown people lived in the past as much as the present. How can they help it? The past was as real as the 1950s populuxe neon sign announcing "Happy's Coffee & Qwik-Stop," or the turn-of-the-century brick mill that would be perfect for artists' lofts if only artists wanted to live in Tritown. People tended to keep the coiffures and clothing styles of their glorious youth -- Hollis the Mountain Man's grandmother wore a marcel-wave to the day she died, and his great-aunt Winnie (short for Winnepesaukee, though she can't swim) still got what she called "a Dutchboy bob" at the T&T Beauty Salon. (T&T stands for "Theresa and Theresa" -- cousins who decided decades ago that even button-factory assembly-line money wasn't enough and opened a shop so they could play with hair all day.)

As for Hollis, he wore a cap with a brim most of the time and let his mother cut his hair when it snaked out the back. He liked texture in his clothing and wore most of the wool hunting pants and corduroy barn jackets he inherited from his great-uncle Wilton, who also left him the Mountain Lair after perishing (malfunctioning blunderbuss) in an historical reenactment of an obscure chapter of the "Indian Wars."

Hollis had reason to be grateful for his old-fashioned warm clothes, which were as modern as electricity when compared to his heating apparatus.

Up north, over the border, Brother Mason heated his converted barn with a combination of solar cells and propane, but Hollis used what Wilton left him: a coal stove. Delia Ellis Bell the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) was appalled that Hollis still hadn't gotten the old clunker hauled out.

"And replace it with what?" he asked irritably, pulling out his wallet to pay his share of the doughnut and coffee tariff, plus a dollar for $erena, who needed encouragement.

"Gas, oil, electricity, solar cells, a gerbil in a cage," she spluttered. "Something! At least live in the modern age!"

He cocked an eyebrow and lowered his hat brim. "I'll be sure and do that Miss-Dorothy-Hamill-Olympic-Gold-Medallist-1976-haircut."

Delia's mouth dropped open, and she scurried toward Hollis as he brought the check to $erena the waitress who stood at the cash register. "And a Money Buckets scratch ticket," he muttered, handing over some bills and change. "I feel lucky."

"Not me," said $erena, who'd been stood up on a date twice that week by the feckless Hasky Tarbox.

"Tell me about it," said Delia, who had her own troubles. Hollis pocketed his scratch ticket and selected a toothpick from a shotglass reading "Happy Hour." Gingerly, he probed his lower teeth. There was a cavity in there somewhere, and a visit to Dr. Thumbs was overdue, but he just didn't have the funds. Not with the coal delivery due.

Delia was about to make a smart retort, but she needed a ride back to Tarbox Automotive ("Collisions? A specialty"), where she left her car for an oil change. Going out for coffee with her old friend was preferable to sitting on the edge of a battered vinyl-chrome chair in the fragrant concrete-floored front room flipping through religious magazines and listening to Hasky, the Tarbox son, practice his Elvis Presley impersonations while he banged out crushed side panels.

Delia and Hollis walked in silence to his truck. The tension was palpable, until both spoke at once. "Potatohead," Delia hissed, while Hollis muttered, "Busybody."

They climbed into the cab of the truck and bickered all the way back to the Mountain Lair. To an outsider, it might have seemed that Hollis and Delia were a long-married couple, but the truth was that they sounded like the seventh-graders they were when they met, though it had been about a quarter-century since then.

When they first started teasing each other (in Mrs. Traphagan's homeroom), each had a crush on another classmate. Had their respective crushes worked out, to borrow a phrase, four people might have been miserable instead of just two. Hollis and Delia were united in their unhappiness but then drifted apart until years after high school, when Hollis's great-aunt Winnie mentioned to Delia's parents (a local minister at the Allfaith Church United, and his wife, the choir director) that her nephew would be happy to help put together the stable for the Christmas pageant. The Protestant sects in Tritown have been so diminished, that many of them put aside differences to combine doctrines and share parishes. As a result, the faiths at Allfaith included Congregational, Scotch Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist, and grape juice was the order of the day.

When Hollis showed up at the church basement, there was his old pal from seventh grade, surrounded by children wearing bathrobes and towel turbans, trying to wrap a flashlight in some swaddling clothes for the baby Jesus. "The point is," said a flustered Delia, "that Mary has to be able to hit the switch when she takes baby Jesus out of the manger."

"Piece of cake," said Hollis, taping two pieces of foam together. "Put the flashlight in the middle and drape the material around that. Easy access to the switch, plus it looks more, uh, baby-shaped."

"Genius!" said Delia, which pretty much marked the tone of their relationship from then on. Delia was extremely fond of Hollis, but knew when his darker moods emerged, it was best to keep a distance from the Mountain Lair. As for Hollis, he vacillated between a desperate hunger for human company and an utter loathing of it.

As the years rolled by, Delia became convinced part of Hollis's irritability in the winter was not just the lack of sunlight but the extreme discomfort in the Mountain Lair caused by the aforementioned coal stove. It was a top-loader and held about 50 pounds of coal, which were delivered to the barn by truck, and then carted into the kitchen by the bucket. It was a system. It worked.

Hollis drove back down the road to the Mountain Lair in silence. Finally he had an argument in defense of the coal stove. "The ash is great for traction on the road when it's snowing," he said. "Cheaper than kitty litter."

"That's true," Delia said with exaggerated politeness. "And all that coal is good for a fossil-hunt when you're in the mood."

"Hey," cracked Hollis. "If I wanted to look at a fossil, all I'd need is a mirror." Delia burst out laughing and the mood in the truck cab lightened perceptibly.

Hollis slowed down at the turn to Tarbox Automotive and parked in the rutted drive. "You know, even Old Man Tarbox uses my coal ashes to fill in the potholes, when he's in the mood to fix anything," Hollis offered as a final argument. He put the truck in neutral, and left the engine running. Delia looked out the window. Her car was parked outside the garage, which was or wasn't a good sign.

"Wait here," she said to Hollis. "I'll wave if they're done." She slipped off to the garage, while Hollis waited in the truck. Delia was right, he thought. A coal stove was a ridiculous thing to have at the end of the 20th century. If he got a propane stove, it'd do the job just as well. Whenever he began thinking, one half of his brain would invariably take a prosecutorial tack. Yes, he argued. But that's a perfectly good coal stove, still. A little smoky, a little smelly, but still working. It was not the Mountain Man way to throw away something that still had some use in it.

Yet a propane stove would mean no more hoisting buckets. Nothing but filling a tank. The only reason there was no propane there in the first place was because great-uncle Wilton didn't trust liquid fuel. Why should Hollis have paid for Wilton's neuroses? Why should he? He withdrew the Money Buckets ticket and scraped with a thumbnail -- his first purchase would be a replacement heater and -- he won $2.

"Another hour," Delia grumbled as she climbed back into the car. Hollis gave her a quizzical look. "Gawdamn Hasky was rehearsing `All Shook Up,' and `just forgot about it.' Kee-righst!"

Delia banged the dashboard. "Only one thing to do," he said.

"What's that?" she muttered.

Hollis chuckled and threw the truck into gear. He continued down the road to the Mountain Lair drive. "We could perhaps get a bucket of coal for Hasky's Christmas stocking a month early," he said. "I'm sure $erena would be happy to deliver."

Delia's frown shifted to a smirk. "Hollis, it's a good thing you're such a traditionalist with your heating system," she said.

Sally Cragin thinks it's not the heat, but the humility.

---

The Tales From Tritown archive

---