Honeymooned

For folks in Tritown, New Year starts with a . . .

by Sally Cragin

Illustration by Lennie Peterson

As the first day of the New Year dawns, Hollis the Mountain Man wakes with a start. Sometimes Trick and Treat, the Mountain Lair cats, position themselves on his chest, forcing the air out of his lungs, but on this day they're at the foot of the bed. Still, Hollis is warmer than usual. He opens one eye and surveys his domain. His tweed jacket is draped over great-uncle Wilton's wooden rocking chair, and his dress shoes are tucked underneath. He sees a wee chipmunk gnawing on a ground nut and realizes it's the label on a growler of Wachusett Brewing Company's Nut Brown Ale.* The bottle stands upright in a pool of fabric on the floor. Bright green, with magenta trim. It reminds him of something familiar . . .

Hasky Tarbox and $erena the Waitress's wedding! Oh hell, did he miss it? Delia's going to kill him. Then Hollis sits up in bed and notices a tangle of red curls on the pillow. Nancy Levesque (who's actually a Leblanc) snuggles into his shoulder and throws a freckled arm across his chest.

"You better let me drive, honey, you've had a few," she whispers sleepily. Hollis looks at her, and then at the clock. He's usually up at this hour. But the cats are sleeping, and the pellet stove is still pulsing small rays of warmth. Completely forgetting that his mother expects him over for New Year's dinner, and that Delia had said something about needing help putting together a set of Christmas bookshelves, he gingerly wriggles back beneath the covers. If Nancy Levesque came with the New Year, who needs Y2K?

THOUSANDS OF MILES away, on the island of Barbados, Hasky Tarbox and $erena the Waitress Tarbox are giggling under the covers like a pair of newlyweds, which is indeed what they are. Gentle sea breezes blow through the slats of the louvered blinds, while the lapping of the tide can be heard -- (oh, heck, readers, you can imagine this as well as I can).

"OmiGahd, Hasky," $erena laughs. "I'm so glad we eloped. Between that weird scene at the Testimonial and Randy Levesque wanting to fight the cousins, I didn't think we were gonna survive the wedding!"

Hasky chuckles and pulls her closer. The past month had been difficult, but not so stressful as the months she was at the DeLoverly School of Esthetology all the way in Providence, and he'd had to drive various customers' cars to visit.

At least they'd pulled off the wedding scene without too much fuss, and Judge Cronin had been delighted to "serve the papers," as he put it, at the courthouse instead of All Faiths. And $erena is happy with a couple of polaroids instead of a puffy white album and a set of plane tickets instead of feeding the faces of their nearest and dearest and those not so near and dear.

"Think there's snow back home?" asks $erena, reaching for Hasky's hand.

"Count on it," says Hasky, the designated shoveller at the Tarbox estate.

BACK IN TRITOWN, another snow indeed has fallen. Despite Lorencz the Hermit's dire prognostications, the wall of ice has yet to loom over the top of Mt. Magoonamitichusimaug (an amalgam of French, English, and Algonquin that means "my idiot friend who lives by the bog -- he likes it"). There's a light dusting, such as you'd find in a long-shuttered room. Delia Ellis Bell is sorting through her 1998 correspondence, prepatory to filing it away. She finds Hollis the Mountain Man's 1998 New Year's resolutions:

1) to catalogue his tires by manufacturer, age, and condition

2) to install that 8- track he pulled out of his 1975 Dodge

3) to sort the contents of the box labeled "String: Too Short To Use"

4) to care more about what people think of him

5) to either remove or repair the porch floor

Delia laughs and puts the list to one side. In the preceding year Hollis had replaced his old clunker of a coal stove with a pellet model, gotten a part-time job as a driver for Tri'd 'n` Tru Chips, and hammered a couple of fresh planks onto his porch floor. She considers calling him up to find out what his 1999 resolutions might be, but something prevents her from calling.

The other day, she'd been driving down the Post Road toward Hollis's Mountain Lair, when a sporty green car had passed her little yellow Winksta, heading north to Cow Hampshire. Unusual to pass a car on the road at midday, but the driver's striking red hair had been visible through the windscreen. Delia had pondered this for a while, before remembering Hasky and $erena's testimonial. There was some woman sitting at Hollis's table for a long time, she recalled. And then she went on to reflect on the strange but oddly satisfactory aftermath to the much-awaited wedding of Hasky and $erena.

She'd heard the details from Judge Cronin's intermittently discreet secretary. A week before the wedding, Hasky and $erena had stopped by the office on the way to the airport. Leaving poor $erena's cousins with a paid-for hall and no bride and groom. Virtually overnight, Big Theresa and Little Terry, of the T `n' T Beauty Salon, had transformed the wedding dinner into Tritown's first-ever, all-ages Singles' Night, charged three bucks at the door, and given out haircuts and makeovers for door prizes.

She'd seen Hollis that evening, but what with Whitey and his brother Phil N. Leblanc (of Leblanc Brothers Salvage) whirling her around the dance floor, there was scarcely a moment to talk. Oh well, surely he'd be at Happy's Coffee & Qwik-Stop (30 kinds of doughnuts, 20 kinds of lottery tickets, one kind of coffee). He knew she needed help with her Christmas bookshelf.

EVERY TRUE Tritownie's dream is to own a muscle car and live in a brewery. Three local fellas have managed the latter admirably. Wachusett Brewing Company* based in Westminster was founded by three Worcester Polytech students, Ned LaFortune of Westminster, Kevin Buckler of Ashburnham, and Peter Quinn of Worcester. "They built the equipment themselves out of old dairy tanks, and built a bottling line by buying old machines and dismantling and rebuilding them," explains tour director Ed LaFortune (Ned's father). "It's really a homegrown brewery."

The brewers have eight varieties on tap, including Country Nut Brown Ale, India Pale Ale, and Black Shack Porter as well as various seasonal suds like Summer Breeze, Quinn's Irish Ale, and October- and Winterfest. You won't find the beer outside of Massachusetts, but it's well-represented in Worcester County, as well as Boston, the Cape, and the Berkshires.

In 1997, WBC produced 4000 barrels, and last year upped that to 5500, an output that represents "maybe less than an hour at the Anheuser-Busch factory," says LaFortune. But great care is taken with every aspect of production -- from the label, which depicts Mount Wachusett and a barn (the LaFortune family farm), to the brewing, all of which you can observe on a tour (and tasting!), any Saturday at 1 and 3 p.m. Call (978) 874-9965 for details, and see whether Hollis the Mountain Man and Nancy Levesque are having a date.

Sally Cragin edits Button, New England's tiniest magazine of poetry, fiction, and gracious living.

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