The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
time I worked at the Carrier, he was never sick. He took the same vacations
every year: Nova Scotia to fish and sail at the end of July, and Christmas
holidays with his wife’s family in England. He went home for lunch and what
he called “perusal time” from eleven-thirty to two, and then he left for
the evening between six-thirty and seven. When he walked through the
door in the mornings, Art would say to whoever else was around, “Austell
McFarquahar—set your watch by that guy.” In response Austell would
hold an imaginary watch in his left hand and wind it with his right, grin with
boyish self-satisfaction, and say, “Like clockwork.”
Austell used his “perusal time” to gather material for his nature column,
which was his only duty at the paper. He had changed the title of his column
so frequently—“Housatonic Tomfoolery,” “Arboralia,” “Oddments and
Woodments,”“Willow Winds”—that Art had finally eliminated the title bar
altogether, which sent Austell into a funk that lasted nearly five full minutes.
He always refused payment for his column, and several times Art had hinted
to me that the Carrier owed its existence to Austell’s largesse.
He and Art had been grade-school and high-school classmates. After
graduation Art had gotten a copy job at the Hartford Courant and came back
to Lincoln only in semiretirement. Austell, meanwhile, had attended but
never graduated from Yale and eventually moved home to become a full-time
putterer and town legend. His family had lived in Lincoln (Lincoln Common,
he always stressed, though he admitted shamefully that some cousins had
lived in Lincoln Station before moving to San Francisco) for over two hundred
years, and he spoke constantly of the history of Lincoln he was compiling.
The more he talked about the project, the longer it became: a history of a
town comprising every event in the town’s existence fully researched and
retold in precisely the same amount of time the initial event lasted. I stopped
asking him about the project after sitting through an eyelid-fluttering,
multiple-hour explanation of the rationale behind an 1892 Lincoln ordinance
banning the consumption but not the sale of horehound drops. Art
joked that he always carried a couple of smoke bombs in his pockets so he
could create a diversion when Austell had him alone in the office.
We were about halfway into the season that Art called “The Trials of St.
Austell,” by which he really meant the trials of everyone around Austell.
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