Living Together

Hautala Country

H A U T A L A C O U N T R Y Emily was getting supper so I answered the door, turkey feathers in my hair and clinging to the wool of my sweater, turkey manure on my shoes. It was Toivo Hautala, whose dark, death-ridden work had won him a Pulitzer and a National Book Award and was said to have changed American poetry forever. He had been the subject of my MFA thesis: The Last Word: Hautala and the Image of Death. Like the wings of a menacing hawk, his work shadowed my own. Hautala was the reason Emily and I were living in a remote town in northern Minnesota, where I intended, finally, to write the poems that would bring me if not fame at least recognition, and if not that, the sour peace of the resigned. Then there was always the possibility of picking up enough information on the young Hautala for an article or two. The town we were living in, Millberg, was famous for two things: you hear it mentioned on national weather forecasts—on this first day of June, the people up in Millberg, Minnesota, woke up to five inches of snow, and it was Millberg was where Toivo Hautala grew up. I hoped some of Hautala’s inspiration would rub off on me. I was looking for revelation in the exhausted mines and the hills of tailings, the scrub forests, and in the town itself, which in the days of active mining had been moved twice in a frantic 1 3 6 search for ore. (Hautala’s poem, “Lost Homes.”) I had no expectation of meeting Hautala. He left the town when he was sixteen, revisiting it only in his evocative poems. When he wasn’t a poet in residence at Princeton or Berkeley, Hautala lived in New York, checking himself into treatment centers, marrying and divorcing and issuing terse bulletins on the ruinous state of American poetry . Now he stood at our door taking in the feathers. “They told me at the Empty Lake Bar and Grill a poet resided in this house and I came to purge him. This is Hautala country. One poet to every hundred miles. That’s the territorial rule.” Hautala was carrying a bottle of sour mash, offering it as if it were a neighborly gift of homemade preserve. I had met him once before. Eight years ago he gave a reading at the college where I was a student. Along with a dozen other admirers I hung around, waiting while he signed his work. Handing him his book, I had the fatuousness to murmur, “I write poems.” I hungered for fraternity. Hautala paused, pen in midair, and, giving me a withering look, wrote, “God help you,” and signed his name. He was in his sixties now, his blond beard grizzled, the solid chunkiness ebbing and caved, the swagger a kind of slink. The much-mentioned blue eyes were lumpy with buttery yellow ridges. All this I saw much later. At that moment I was so astonished by his presence in our house, and so desperate for a witness to the phenomenon, I called to Emily. It had been the chaos of Hautala’s life that had made me quit my job. His example suggested a safe life was antithetical to poetry. A mediocre life meant mediocre poems. I took a leave of absence 1 3 7 from teaching in a university creative writing program and moved north, leaving behind my colleagues hunched over their computers , their novels building. I had mistakenly imagined this remote town would guarantee incidents, encounters, upshots. We had been in Millberg five months, and until Hautala knocked on our door, the quiescence had been steady. Emily was the first to rally. She introduced herself to Hautala and apologized for the room’s disorder—a pile of third-grade essays , their penciled words hurrying out of the ruled lines, and sheets of orange construction paper on the way to becoming pumpkins. The pumpkins were a change from her school downstate . Holiday myths were discouraged in the city schools, innocence considered life threatening. Halloween was a time to warn children about pins in candy bars and razors in apples. Emily fetched glasses and ice along with a chaste can of decaffeinated Diet Coke for herself. Hautala stared at Emily, at her red hair and her skim-milk skin...