By Elizabeth Edwardsen, Associated Press writer
PARSONSFIELD, Maine (AP) – As a wood-burning stove keeps the Maine chill at bay, Carolyn Chute rocks in an old, oak chair and talks about America’s poor.
It’s a subject Chute knows well. Before selling her first novel, “The Beans of Egypts, Maine,” Chute lived the hard life of rural poverty.
And while her literary success has brought some comforts and fame, Chute hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to receive welfare or hold low-paying jobs.
Her newest book, “Merry Men,” continues the saga of Egypt, Maine, a fictional town where farm equipment and old cars sit outside homes and where yuppies moving to the country stir resentment.
Egypt shares the fate of countless small towns buffeted by recession: The mill shuts down; a home is lost to taxes; the hospital withholds care to those who can’t pay; people lose their rural birthright, their land.
“It’s the thing that I lay awake about, morning, noon and night. I just think of this all the time, how our culture is creating masses and masses of useless people, landless people,” Chute said recently.
“What we’ve created now is a different kind of poverty. They can’t grow their own food, they can’t make their own tools, they can’t make their own clothes, they can’t do anything.”
This new rural poverty and the people it breeds are portrayed in “Merry Men,” Chute’s most ambitious and most political book yet. Seething with class animus, it creates the specter of a nightmarish future of life dominated by giant corporations and spoiled by modern education.
Like her earlier books – “The Beans of Egypt, Maine” was followed by “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts” – “Merry Men” develops more from its vivid characters than from a plot. The principal figures include:
* Lloyd Barrington, who grows from an overweight 8 3/4-year-old poetry-scrawling boy who sneaks out at night to plant saplings around Egypt to a college-educated misfit and hometown Robin Hood, stealing from yuppies to help his desperately poor neighbors.
* Anneka DiBias, a horse-riding anti-hunting activist who creates the board game “The Minimum Wage Game,” in which no one wins.
* Forest Johnson, the rods commissioner who fires workers only to hire them back at a lower wage.
Watching over it all from a row of vibrantly painted rocking chairs at Moody’s Variety & Lunch are the “wise men,” a Greek chorus of town elders who furnish opinionated observations on the inhabitants and happenings of Egypt, Maine.
There’s a similar row of brightly colored rockers in the home Chute shares with her husband, Michael, and four little dogs. As Chute discusses her work, her life and her hopes for America, the dogs – two Scottish terriers, a Cairn terrier and a Scottie-cocker spaniel mix – perch on the rockers. Michael sits nearby, sipping coffee and watching his wife alternate between giggles and passionate discourse.
Chute became something of a literary folk hero when “The Beans of Egypt, Maine” won critical and popular acclaim, prompting some to call her a Down East William Faulkner.
But she fiercely guards against allowing her fame to interrupt her work. She has a phone but keeps it unplugged until she needs it. A polite sign in her driveway asks admirers to communicate by mail.
A tall woman with a long mass of brown hair held in place with a kerchief, Chute looks at least a decade younger than her 46 years as she remembers when she wasn’t nearly so popular.
“I used to sit in Gorham and wish for company. I even had a party once and nobody showed up,” she said. “Now, it’s like you’ve got to fight them off. And that’s sad. I wish I could get some of the people who write to me to write to each other.”
It troubles her that some people are more interested in her life than her work.
“They like to read about, ‘Poor woman writes book.’ They like to read about my outhouse,” she said.
Her life story, recounted by interviewers from around the world, would make captivating fiction.
A grandmother at 37, Chute grew up in a working-class home outside Portland, leaving high school early for marriage and motherhood, After a divorce, she she began to put herself through college but says President Reagan’s spending cuts forced her to drop out.
She first spotted her husband, Michael, a dark-eyed man with a long bear and Maine accent who can’t read or write, at a turkey shoot. She first spoke to him in a bar a few months later.
Times were hard in the early years of the Chutes’ marriage. They often shared a small house in Gorham with her daughter and her family. They lived on food stamps. They felt the contempt of neighbors. They lost their baby son. And through it all, Chute wrote and re-wrote her first novel.
Had she not written that first book, Chute said she probably would still be on welfare. “I’m not highly marketable.”
Chute recently traveled to the West Coat, where a movie of “Beans,” as she calls her first novel, is nearing completion. She worried all the way there, fearing that the characters she lovingly had created wouldn’t be treated well. But she was pleasantly surprised.
“I almost cried. I did cry when I watched it the first time. They did treat them with dignity. I was just thrilled,” she said.
Chute’s fans already are clamoring for the next installment of life below the poverty line in Egypt, Maine, but she says such suggestions are premature.
Still, she readily admits that she and Michael, who tends a cemetery in warmer weather, are almost out of money. She owns her home but doesn’t have much money with which to live.
She thinks about writing a children’s book. She hopes to put out a new version of “Beans” that includes refinements and essays on writing. And she expects that after she’s cleaned her house, planted a garden and organized a few years’ worth of family snapshots, she will begin some new character sketches.
As it is, she uproots herself each fall, leaving Michael’s hometown because of raccoon hunting nearby. “It’s blood lust. It’s like rape – gang rape. It’s like lynching,” she says of the hunting. And she fears the sounds of hunting in the night would aggravate a heart condition, with potentially fatal consequences.
“I don’t really want to die yet,” she says. “I’ve got some business to take care of.”
