Katherine Sarah—Katie—rises less frequently in Dale’s thoughts, but I see a wonderful person there, at least equal in her compassionate way to Mab’s fierce intelligence. Katie was a feminine definition of empathy and connection, a gestalt humanist, the likes of which I never encountered in Elm Haven, either in the girl-children there or in their mothers. Where Mab delighted her father with precocity in language and precision in logic, Katie was quiet as a child—observing, feeling, preparing to give of herself. Dale did not ignore this trait in his youngest daughter—he loved both of his children and admired Katie’s empathy beyond words—but where Mab’s strengths might reflect (and thus confirm) his own, Katie’s human beauties were most like her mother’s. It might be this sharp fact that made him think more of Mab in his exile than—more painfully—of Katie. I won’t speculate further here. I understood very little of being a son and nothing at all about being a father of girls.

Before we return to Dale’s chivalric rush to save Ms. Staffney from the black dogs, we should discuss the book he is writing—the Elm-Haven-in-summer book—and the issue of his writing in general.

Dale was not a good writer. Trust me on this. I was a better writer at age nine than my friend is in his fifty-second year. The reason is, at least partially, I suspect, that he was not born to the craft, not driven to the task by the non-negotiable flames of internal fires, but, rather, made a conscious decision to become a writer at the end of that summer of 1960, the summer in which I died. Added to that is the simple fact that in training to be an academic, Dale was crippled by the need to write in academese. It is not a language formed by any human tongue, and few, if any, academics survive the degradation of it to move on to actual prose. Finally, there is the choice of Dale’s fiction—“mountain man” stories. This was a conscious choice on his part—an attempt to retain his professorial status by not slumming in such genres as mystery or science fiction or, god forbid, horror—but, again, a cool one, a cerebral one, and not one forged by desire. Patterning his style on the work of the limited genre’s masters—Vardis Fisher, for one—Dale wrote about the few white men in the West of the 1830s and the Native American tribes (his professor self made it almost impossible to be politically incorrect enough to think “Indians”—even though his mountain man characters did so frequently enough—much less frame some obscenity like “savages”).

Hemingway once wrote that a true writer had to “work from the inside out, not from the outside in.” The difference, he explained, between art and photography, between Cézanne and mere documentation. All of Dale Stewart’s so-called Jim Bridger books, as I have said before, were written from the outside in.

Clare had confronted him with this fact more than once and Dale had demurred rather than defend himself, but he was hurt. He thought of his books as a contribution to literature, sort of. She would not allow him that illusion, just as, in the end, she allowed him none of the illusions one needs for survival.

This Elm Haven book that Dale is so enthused about—the book that makes him willing to stay at The Jolly Corner despite its discomforts and psychic uneasiness—is, at least, different from the mountain man books. But it is also, in its own exuberant way, a lie. It is all sunlight and summer days, swimming holes and dirt-clod fights, bicycle freedoms and idealized friendships. Dale had sworn, in his own mental preparation to write this book, to be “true to the secrets and silences of childhood,” but in his actual writing of it, the secrets have become smug and the silences far too loud.

Dale Stewart’s work lacked irony without even the protective camouflage of the postmodernist abandonment of irony. Dale the man might have been ironic at times—this time seeking protective camouflage—about the whole idea of writing mountain man tales, but the tales themselves were almost never leavened by irony or self-judgment. A work completely devoid of irony has no more hope of becoming literature than does the most sincere piece of Christian apologetics or Marxist polemic. As Oscar Wilde once said, “All bad poetry is sincere.” Dale’s writing, in both the mountain man entertainments and his Elm-Haven-summer-of-1960 manuscript, was overwhelmingly sincere.

Of course, this is just my opinion. And I hope that I would not have become a literary critic (or its idiot sibling, a reviewer of books) had I lived. Certainly my pedantic and opinionated side would have gravitated to that vocation, but all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert:

Books aren’t made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there on the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

I was eight when I jotted down that quote, but even then, the part I enjoyed the most was the delightful “Continue this comparison.” And even then, I understood at once that the pissing jackals were critics.

It was only a little after 10:00P.M. when Dale drove into Elm Haven, but from the darkened and abandoned feel of the little town, it might as well have been 3:00A.M. on Walpurgis Nacht.

The fastest way from Oak Hill to Elm Haven was the old way—Oak Hill Road, which ran north and south, crossing 150A just east of the Elm Haven city limits. Dale drove quickly down Main, noting but ignoring the dark storefronts, the empty lots, and the lack of streetlights, then turned north up Second Avenue to the schoolyard.

He saw Michelle Staffney and the dogs almost at once. The schoolyard, once the near-majestic tableaux of the huge Old Central School on its low hill, surrounded by ancient playgrounds and sentinel elms, was now just this flat and treeless patch of weeds poking through dirty snow, the field littered with some sad plastic playground equipment, an empty parking lot, and some town storage sheds.

Michelle was at the top of the slide. The five dogs—the lead dog looking impossibly large in the headlights, as if it could easily leap to the top of the slide without exertion—stood around the slide like points on a five-sided star.

Dale stoppped the car sideways in the asphalt street, headlights cutting white cones from the old schoolyard’s darkness, and hesitated. The dogs did not turn toward the light or acknowledge the Land Cruiser’s presence. Michelle Staffney’s face was white and her eyes wide as she raised one hand more in appeal than greeting.

Dale drove off the pavement, across the low ditch that had been much deeper when he had crossed it every day on his walk across Depot Street to the school, and accelerated across the snowy field toward the slide.

The five black dogs did not move. Their gaze stayed locked on the middle-aged woman at the top of the ladder.

Dale felt panic and tasted bile. For an instant he was sure that the five dogs were going to attack Michelle before he closed the last ten yards, then drag her down and off into the deeper snow and higher weeds behind the steel storage shed.

The dogs did not move. In a surge of absolute, senseless hatred, Dale gunned the throttle and slewed to run down the largest dog, the one he thought of as the original black dog, even though it was four times too large to have been so.

The dog whirled and ran an instant before Dale had to decide whether to brake wildly or actually run down a defenseless animal, probably someone’s pet. The other four dogs also turned and loped into the darkness, each of them running in a different direction and all five blending into the night in seconds.