Boy from the North Country

Two

I set the last dish on the drying rack, water dripping off the clean glass into the sink. Wind rustled in the trees beyond the kitchen window. The house was silent, my mother and Lucy asleep. Shadow fell across the stairs that led to my childhood bedroom, on the second floor, facing east onto the mountains. The room appeared smaller than in memory, as it often did when I returned home. Dim light fell onto the antique dresser and bookshelf arranged against the near wall. It felt inconceivable that the vastness of my childhood imagination and teenage disorientation had fit between these walls. That so much of my inner life had existed within the books and CDs on the shelf. That every dream I could recall from those years had been experienced in this narrow bed, which, I saw, my mother had made for my arrival. It was midnight at the house, five in the morning London time. I needed to crawl beneath the blankets and let my mind go blank.

Lying in bed, eyes closed, arms tossed limply overhead, all I could think of was the illness my mother had concealed from me. We were each supposed to be the person the other trusted most. The last weeks must have been terrifying for her. She had kept it from me.

Did she think a lie by omission was different from any other form of deception? Maybe I wasn't being understanding enough. She must have planned to tell me, then decided it wasn't yet time. She was still looking into treatments, reading medical literature as she staved off exhaustion after a day with clients, emailing speakers she met at a conference in the Berkshires, phoning friends of friends. I drew the covers overhead, trying to sleep. She had waited to tell me until the last possible moment, the surgery there was no practical way for her to manage alone.

But my mother always had her secrets. I stood out of bed, too anxious to sleep. The wooden floorboards creaked as I crossed the darkness. I raised the window and the cool night touched my tired eyes. Fireflies shone and died in the dark. The silhouette of mountains glimmered on the horizon. All families have subjects that are understood to be better not discussed and we were no different. My eyes shifted to the shelf of neatly ordered CDs, settling on the face of the man my mother and I had not discussed for more than ten years. His mess of brown curls and angled chin resembled mine. For years, I had done all I could not to think of that man. It was easier to refuse my thoughts about him when I was abroad, in the life I had made for myself. I had rarely spoken his name since leaving home.

On the shelf were the earmuff headphones and worn portable player I had carried everywhere as a teenager. I felt weary, my defenses weakened by the long day of travel and shock of my mother's illness. I could feel him in the room with me, where I had always felt closest to him. I reached for his CD and set the disc in the groove. Lifting the headphones to my ears, I was drifting back in memory to a spring night I was fifteen and stood sleepless at my bedroom window at four in the morning, headphones over my untamed hair.

I want you, Dylan sang, I want you so bad.

The moon glowed silver in the dark sky and possibility coursed through me. Beyond the window were black mountains and pine trees. Fifteen years old, gazing into the night, I wanted nothing more than to lift myself beyond those hills, climb onto the farmhouse roof and let the music carry me away from everything I knew too well. There was nothing for me in Goshen, just cows and church steeples. I knew that over the mountains and across the river was New York City. I could almost hear heartbroken actors feuding with destiny, music gathering like steam on a café window, a poet in a torn coat pleading with beauty on a street corner.

I glanced at my notebook. Half-formed stanzas scattered across the page, impulses that came to me in the night. I needed to write my way out of Goshen. At school I was ridiculed for being vegetarian, bookish, Jewish. I was a shy kid scribbling poetry into a marble composition book in the last row of class, hoping nobody looked my way. We hadn't had television or internet at the farmhouse most of my childhood, and I'd always been mocked for being unfamiliar with video games, sitcoms, popular films. I didn't fit in with the prevailing ethos in Goshen: masculine, rough-and-tumble. My mother had recently demanded to meet with the school principal after I'd been beaten badly by classmates, only for him to shrug off the incident, explaining that boys are boys. The implication was that I should fight back or stop complaining; the school certainly wasn't going to get involved in a matter as straightforward as three students punching another until he bled from the mouth.

Being bookish didn't help me with most teachers. One had failed me on every paper that year, accusing me of plagiarism because I had used words such as apposite and macabre. She asked how I could know words she didn't, then laughed at me when I said, "From reading."

There was one teacher who was kind to me. She had taken me aside after I handed in my first paper in her English class, and said, "Keep writing, Evan. It will take you somewhere."

Wind swept through the high grass. How strange to think that the written word could change my life, that the symbols I pressed onto the page could make me other than I was. I had never admitted to anyone that my ambition was to become a writer. I had never let anyone read my poetry. My mother had once found several pages in the printer and I'd wanted to die of embarrassment. She said the language was exceptional and I had a natural gift. Of course she said that. I was her son.

I want you, Dylan sang into my headphones, I want you so bad.

I'd been listening to his music since the year before, when my geology teacher told me I looked like him. Until that day I'd never heard of Dylan. After class the teacher sat at his desktop computer and typed Dylan's name into the search bar. I'd leaned over his shoulder and looked at the screen. I could see what he meant about our resemblance. It was uncanny looking at Dylan's image. I knew that face. We had the same smile, a youthful cocksure grin.

"He's a well-known musician," the geology teacher said, "some say a poet. You might like his songs."

That night I'd searched for Dylan's music on my mother's shelves of CDs and old records, well-kept in their original sleeves: jazz, classical, folk, complete operas on eight-track albums. She didn't have anything by Dylan. A few days later I rode my bike to the music store two towns away and bought Blonde on Blonde for fourteen dollars. I'd biked home over the hills with my earmuff headphones clamped over my brown curls, the CD player in my backpack, Dylan's lyrics taking me into another world. I'd never heard anything like his music. Standing at my bedroom window that night, looking at the mountain ridges, I could feel his every word moving through me like a diamond bullet fired straight through my heart. He didn't write anything concrete, just feelings and impressions of everything he lived. He sang about dreamy visions, historical events, something that happened to me yesterday in my own mind. He was unlike any writer I'd encountered. His language was a ladder between heaven and earth. With his folk-song voice and impressionistic lyrics he was singing to me from the Appalachian hills, from nineteenth-century Paris, from a train hurtling through the night. Soon I was biking back to the music store, imbibing more: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, Slow Train Coming, Infidels. Every time I thought I understood Dylan he changed track, slipped into another artistic register. He sang torrid love songs, folk ballads, biblical mysticism, epic poems of intimate emotion, loyalty, betrayal, yearning, where the instrumentals and words came together into a language you'd never heard. I found a book of his lyrics and studied every mesmerizing page. He toyed with words so easily, just as he did with myth and character. The ragman drawing circles up and down the block-who the hell was that? It was me, of course. It was anyone listening to the song.

I wanted to know everything about this man. In the school library I found his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, and read it in two nights. I was thrilled to learn that Dylan came from farmland of his own, a town in rural Minnesota that wasn't so different from Goshen. He'd been called east by the music, taken a freight train across the country to Manhattan and written his way into a life worth living. He was what it meant to be an artist, to transform yourself through song. He'd slept in dime stores and bus stations, written conclusions on the subway walls. He'd turned people against racism and war with his songs. He lived as I dreamt of living, like a bard from ancient times, traveling to distant lands and transforming his experiences into stories for the strangers he met along the way. He was a reclusive poet, an artistic outlaw, and, like me, a Jew. He was never less than an individual.

Coyote howled in the night. The moon cast its silver glow over the hills. I had to flee Goshen as Dylan had fled Minnesota. I had to find that world of art and self-creation that Dylan had made his own. I'd never met an artist of any kind. My mother had taken me to see theater in New York City once a year when I was young. She had read to me...