Edson, singer/songwriter Bill Morrissey's debut novel for Alfred A. Knopf, is the name of the fictional town in New Hampshire to which the book's central character, singer/songwriter Henry Corvine, returns to lick his wounds after his divorce and his departure from the music business. In this excerpt, Corvine returns to the club where he'd once held triumphant court for an open-mike night, encountering his erstwhile pupil Pope Johnson and several of the novel's other major characters. Morrissey deftly paints the backstage scene and the ambiance of attitude and conversation in a tight-knit musical community -- something to which the novelist is no stranger himself.

"Mr. Henry?" Pope Johnson said from the couch.

"Mr. Pope." They'd called each other Mister since Pope was a teenager. Henry couldn't remember how it got started. He draped his coat over the tank of compressed gas that powered the taps out front.

"So nice to see y'all out and about at your age with the snow 'n' all," Pope said. "You know, careful of the hips."

"Yeah, and it's nice to see you in men's clothing for a change." That forced a smile out of Pope. Henry also wanted to tell him that "y'all" is plural.

Pope sat on the soft, flat arm of the couch with his guitar across his lap, sipping a beer and smoking a cigarette. He flicked his ash into an overturned hubcap on the floor and said nothing more. Henry had known Pope since he was fourteen -- and he was twenty-five, dating Pope's sister -- and had taught him his first guitar chords and picking patterns. He hadn't seen him for ten or twelve years, and had no idea Pope had become a musician, until he dropped by the Millhouse his first week back from Alaska. Henry walked out to the front room. The bartender, who'd bought out the owner while Henry was en route to Beaufort, filled three mugs of beer and carted them to the far end of the bar. The customers paid and took their beers back to their table; she scooped up the change they'd left and dropped it in her jar. Once she saw Henry, she snatched a glass, dropped in a few cubes, and filled it to the brim with Jack Daniel's. As she handed it to him, she pulled a strand of gray hair out in front of her.

"Henry, do you think I should start coloring this?"

"No way, Heidi. It looks great. It means you're not a kid."

"Is that good?"

"I think so."

"I don't know," she said, tucking the strand away. "I wouldn't mind being a kid again. I sure had a lot more energy where I just waitressed here. I remember listening to you every Sunday. Those were fun times, weren't they? I'd save my break until you got on."

"Well, now you've got Pope Johnson."

"Be nice." She turned his left hand over on the bar and squeezed each fingertip, looking for calluses. "You're still not playing?"

"No." He pulled his hand away and put it in his pocket.

"You really should. It's a different scene now, a lot better than it used to be. More places to play. You could just step in again and take it all over. Put out another record and --"

"I don't think so."

"I've got to get back to work," she said. "I'll talk to you later. Oh, hey! How did those Nicorettes work out?" She had given him several packets to get him through the five-day hunt.

"They worked great, but I'm smoking again now that I'm back in town."

"Well, keep trying."

"Yeah, I know. I'll quit soon enough." Henry had left his menthols in his coat pocket. He returned to the dressing room. Pope was still on the couch with his guitar. Paul Dufresne, a fiddle player from Lowell, sat in a folding chair at the other end of the couch, holding a beer with both hands. He barely looked old enough to drink. He took a deep breath, then forced down two inches of beer. He had only recently started playing the Sunday hoots. Henry tuned out the trio he heard rehearsing a bluegrass standard in the kitchen.

"Nervous?" Pope asked the fiddler, with absolutely no concern in his voice.

"A little bit."

Pope looked over to Henry. "Y'all get your deer this week?" He spoke to Henry in the same flat tone.

"Two partridge, no deer."

"Better than nothing, I reckon."

"You reckon, huh? What part of Oklahoma are you from, Pope?"

Pope pretended Henry hadn't said anything. "To tell you the truth, Mr. Henry, I've decided to move to New York City."

"That's a hell of a place." Henry reached into his coat pocket for the cigarettes.

Pope shrugged and reached for his beer on the floor. "You of all people should know that's where the business is."

"I thought you were getting a lot of gigs."

"I'm still pumping gas, ain't I? Hey, you want a job, I can get you my job."

The dressing room door swung open, and two young women wearing guitars and white scarves hurried in, beaming from the applause. Pope immediately began picking out the chords to Tyler Beckett's hit single, "Avenue C."

Henry thought it was kind of funny, but looked away and lit a cigarette. He wanted to get out of the dressing room.

"Man, it's packed out there tonight," Pope said to him, then turned to Dufresne. "They sound a little frisky out there tonight, don't you think? Y'all got some hot tunes ready for them?"

"I don't know." He took a deep breath to calm himself and drank his beer.

"You're on next, aren't you?" Pope's talk became faster and more staccato.

"After the next act."

"Then I go on," Pope said. "You're just doing solo fiddle, right? That's all you're doing, right?"

"Th-that's all I do."

"Hope ya got a lot of fast ones. This is kind of a fast-song crowd, don't ya think?"

Henry went out to listen to the music. He'd seen that kind of psych job done before, and done better. He thought Pope was being a bully simply because he could be. The Dufresne kid was nervous enough, and certainly no threat. He was so new at performing he couldn't even see what Pope was doing to him. Henry felt better outside the dressing room. He'd had his fill of scenes like that years before.

Caroline saw Henry getting his drink freshened at the bar and turned to Larry. "Has Henry ever paid for a drink in here?"

"Not in years."

"I guess he practically used to live here, right?"

"He owned this town a few years ago," Larry said, standing up and catching Henry's eye. "Or at least this bar."

"He used to own the bar?"

"Not literally."

"Caroline!" Suzie Martello pulled out a chair and sat down. She had a blue watch cap pulled down to her eyebrows. Her eyes were the same faded blue-gray as her sister's.

"Hi!" Caroline said, glancing at her watch. "Did you close up early because of the storm?"

"No, no, no. Debbie works Sundays now. I told you that, didn't I?"

"I don't remember."

"Caroline, are you drunk?"

"A little."

"Well, slow down a little so I can catch up." Suzie grabbed the beer out of her hand and finished it. "God, this place is crowded tonight!"

Henry zigzagged his way through the tables and sat next to Caroline. "Are we still on for tomorrow?" he asked Larry.

"I've got a new opening I want to try out," Larry said. Before leaving for the second shift, he played chess with Henry several afternoons a week.

Suzie Martello left after two beers, explaining that she had to open the store at five the next morning. By the time Pope stepped onstage, Caroline had drunk herself into a giggly state. She put her hand on Henry's shoulder and said, with the beginning of a slur, "Henry, Henry, when did you own this bar?"

"When did I what?"

"I told her you used to own this bar," Larry said, pantomiming playing a guitar behind Caroline's back.

Henry looked puzzled for a second, then broke into a wide grin. "Oh, that was a long time ago," he told her.

"Is that why you still get free drinks?" she asked.

"I suppose it is."

"It must be fun to own a bar."

Henry thought for a second. "It's a lot of work," he said, then he saw Rachel and her boyfriend walk in. He finished his drink in two quick gulps, said good night, and walked home.

Rachel had either turned off the hall light or it had burned out after she left, and the hall got darker the closer Henry came to his door at the end. He pulled his keys out of his pocket and bent forward, as if he were bowing, until his nose almost bumped the doorknob. He sucked hard on his cigarette to give himself enough light to find the keyhole.

Inside, once the overhead light was off and the lamp and the space heater were on, he hit the playback button on his phone machine. There were only two messages.

"Henry, this is Aaron. Dick just came in and said the snow has moved the deer down to the lower levels. There are tracks everywhere on Firespin, leading down to the orchard. If you come back up, there's a good chance. Dick didn't get a shot off but saw three just out of range, and I glassed one from the cabin down by the bridge. Give me a call if you can make it."

For over twenty years, during black powder season, Aaron had hosted a deer and bird hunt at his cabin in the White Mountains. And this was the last hunt. Aaron was sixty-one and dying of lung cancer. Too weak to hunt anymore, he had to content himself with his binoculars and his perch by the wood stove in front of the large picture windows that looked west down the fields and orchard toward Mount Carlisle.

Henry rewound the machine and played Aaron's message again, thinking of going back up. Like a filter, new snow changed everything in the woods, and sounds that might be missed before would now be clear. He imagined his iron sights framing a buck in the cold, failing light of evening and decided he'd try again.

He played the second message.

"Hey, Corvine, you bug. Your wife -- excuse me, ex-wife -- gave me this new number."

Henry recognized the voice.

"Listen," Tyler Beckett said, a little softer. "I didn't even know about you and Kitty splitting up until last month, when I ran into Reynolds at the Bottom Line. But then again, I've had kind of a busy year. But you should've called me. I hope you're okay. Man, why on earth did you move back to Edson?" Then her voice got stronger again. "Listen, I have some business to discuss with you. It's very important. Call me tomorrow, okay? I'm at home. Off the road. Finally."

Henry rewound the machine and sat down on the bed, too tired to call. What sort of business? he wondered. It was typical of Tyler to be vague about that, about anything, and the familiarity of it made him smile. They hadn't talked in over a year, and he liked hearing her voice again. The last time, she called him in Laconia to say she'd just signed the deal with Seneca Records, a major label that had bought up the tiny independent Henry had been with. Her CD came out several months later, and Henry guessed that she'd spent the better part of the year promoting it on the road. He loved the advance cassette she had sent him the previous winter, but it wasn't until he heard his drunken skipper singing along with "Avenue C" on the jukebox, in the Dancing Leprechaun Topless Bar and Laundramat, that he realized how famous she had become.