A Stranger in the Kingdom (46 page)

My mother, on the other hand, was endlessly intrigued by all aspects of Mr. Mentality's performances, and regarded him as the last of a breed and someone I should see while there was still time.

You might suppose that with the terrific uproar over the murder during the past couple of weeks, interest in a magic show many Commoners had already seen three or four times would ran rather low. Not so at all. The “hall,” as everyone in town called the Academy auditorium, was jam-packed by 7:30 that Saturday evening when George Quinn stepped out onto the stage and introduced the astonishing Mr. Mentality: a stooped, solemn-looking man of an indeterminate age in a rusty black cape, with a pointy dark beard, who for the next hour and a half kept us delighted and baffled by various astonishing mnemonic and intuitive feats. He could accurately multiply in his head any two numbers you gave him, up to four digits apiece; instantly name the day of the week in which you were born; and recite verbatim any page of that week's
Saturday Evening Post.
He could tell you numbers you were thinking of in your head, the dates of the coins in your pocket, the names of books you'd checked out of the library, the topic of a conversation you'd had in Farlow Blake's barbershop two days before. (My father had said that for most of these feats Mr. Mentality undoubtedly employed a stalking-horse who acted as advance man and spy as well as in-house confederate—quite possibly a native of Kingdom County—though who this might be even Dad had no idea.)

I kept thinking how much Claire, with her flair for the dramatic, would have loved his performance, his low-keyed panache even on the infrequent occasions when he guessed wrong (shrugging as though to say, “So what? Now you
know
I'm no humbug. A humbug wouldn't ever be wrong, would he?”). Suddenly I realized that this was the first time I'd been able to think about Claire without despair, and I was both relieved and surprised, yet slightly sorry, that as Mom had promised, time had already healed some of my grief. But at the end of the evening, during the question-and-answer period, when that ignorant old smart-aleck Plug Johnson stood up and asked Mr Mentality who “rubbed out the Canuck gal staying at the preacher's,” a question so tasteless and outrageous it shocked the entire room into total silence, the mind reader just shrugged, held out his hands palms up, and said that was up to us to determine, not him—after which he walked off the stage without a backward glance and was never seen or heard of in Kingdom County again. This bad ending put such a damper on the evening that I almost wished Mom and I hadn't come at all, and f think she felt the same way.

Ruth Kinneson was nothing if not resilient, though. And the very next day, when Dad remarked that he'd told Judge Allen we wouldn't be spending our usual end-of-the-summer week's vacation at his fishing camp on Lake Memphremagog, Mom made him call the judge on the spot to reserve the camp for that last week of August before he offered it to someone else. She said that with me going off to high school in the fall, and only four years away from college, there was no telling how many more chances we'd have to be together as a family, and Kingdom County Affair or no, we were going to have our week on the big lake. It was a good and wise decision, and a good week, though of course there was no way to escape from the Affair there, any more than there had been at Mr. Mentality's show—just some easing of the day-to-day tension and a welcome break from our routine at the farmhouse on the gool.

Every morning at dawn, when the huge lake was at its calmest, I'd start the judge's old motorboat and ferry Dad the five miles south from the island to the town dock at Memphremagog. After a brief visit to the jail to see if Reverend Andrews needed anything, he'd drive down to the Common to work and I'd troll a big red-and-white spoon slowly back to the camp, sometimes picking up a smallmouth bass or a landlocked salmon or two, which Mom would cook for our breakfast. I spent the rest of the morning exploring and fishing the nearby bays and coves, and afternoons I swam off the dock, and read on the screened-in camp porch overlooking the lake and high mountains to the west. Evenings Mom and I played parlor games while my father read or returned to town to visit Reverend Andrews at the jail.

On our last night at camp, Mom had a big steak cookout, and Charlie, who'd been busy all week in the Common preparing for the trial, came up to eat with us. I hadn't seen him since our vacation had started, and he looked tired and frustrated when I met him and Dad at the dock. As soon as we got out to the island, my mother went right to work to perk him up.

“How's Vermont's best-looking defense lawyer tonight?” she said, and gave him a big hug.

“Tired, Ruthie,” Charlie said. “I still haven't come up with a single lead on another suspect. I'd make a hell of a prosecutor at this rate, wouldn't I?”

“Don't call your mother Ruthie,” my father said.

“You look good, Ruthie,” my brother said. “How old did you say you're going to be on your next birthday? Thirty-nine?”

“Me and Jack Benny,” Mom said, but I could tell she was pleased because she unconsciously brushed back her lovely long hair with her hand and laughed the way she always did when Charlie teased her.

Usually on the last night of our vacation week at the Allens' camp, my mother asked Athena and the judge for supper. But Athena was off taking courses at the state university in Burlington, and as my father had tried to explain to me the night before, with the trial coming up and Charlie representing Reverend Andrews, having my brother and the judge both for a meal would be a conflict of interest. At thirteen, I didn't know the difference between a conflict of interest and the Korean conflict, but Charlie himself had told me that lately when he ran into the judge he would barely grunt at him.

“Sure as hell old Uncle Forrest'll go out of his way to give me a hard time at that trial just to show everybody how impartial he is,” Charlie said as we sat down to eat.

“Just don't
you
go out of your way to give
him
a hard time, mister,” Dad said. “You want to play this one straight the whole way.”

Then Mom declared a moratorium on the topic until supper was over, which was fine with me. After dessert Charlie and Mom walked arm-in-arm around the island while Dad and I played catch in front of the camp, and then we sat out on the screened porch in the split-cane chairs that had been there as long as I could remember and watched the lights of Memphremagog came on far down across the water. Dad smoked a cigar, and its rich fragrance blended with the familiar camp scents of spruce needles and woodsmoke and the camphor-soaked ball of cotton on the screen door to keep the flies away. I thought Dad or Charlie might recite one of William Henry Drummond's marvelous French Canadian dialect poems, “The Voyageur” or maybe “The Habitant,” as they liked to do when we got together at the judge's camp. They did not, though, and Mom didn't tease Dad by suggesting that we all play a parlor game, either. I knew they were all thinking about the Affair.

“All right,” Charlie said in a flat, unhappy, determined tone of voice. “All right. Suppose he
did
sleep with the girl? I'm not saying I think that's what happened. But what if it did? Here's a healthy guy, vigorous and in his prime, with no wife and no girlfriend and no social life with the opposite sex at all. And here's an attractive and lonely and, for all we know to the contrary, rather promiscuous young woman under his roof. So what if he succumbed to the temptation and did sleep with her? That sure as hell doesn't mean he killed her.”

“Temptation is one thing,” Dad said. “Anybody might be tempted. He might even have been tempted when Julia offered him her precious favors back a couple of months ago—she was a handsome enough woman at one time. But the fact is he
didn't
succumb to whatever temptations he may have felt. Besides, he had a much more normal social life than you might think. I wasn't going to mention this, but he once told me he had a close woman friend in Montreal, a teacher at McGill University.”

“Well, he can't have seen her very often since coming here.”

“What is it you're saying? There's some sort of new evidence that he got the girl pregnant?”

“No, not really. I don't know. I don't want to get into it just yet. I just want to be prepared to show in court that even if he
did
succumb to the temptation, he didn't necessarily kill her.”

“Didn't necessarily kill her! I can't and won't believe that there's a shred of truth to these trumped-up charges.”

“Neither can I, sweetheart,” Mom told Charlie.

Charlie stood up. “Who wants to go for a dip? We aren't going to have many more warm nights, or days either, for swimming.”

“Fall's coming and that's a fact,” Dad said. “The swamp maples along the river between here and the Common are already starting to turn red.”

“I think fall's my very favorite season,” Mom said in a musing voice.

Charlie laughed. “You say that about every season. ‘Spring's my favorite, summer's my favorite, fall's my
very
favorite season!'”

“Well, suppose I do? They can
all
be my favorite. Right now, fall's my favorite.”

“This fall won't be, Ruthie,” Charlie said, heading inside to change into his swimsuit. “I'll guarantee it. Win or lose, we're in for the nastiest trial in the history of Kingdom County and maybe the whole state. This'll make the Gilson debacle look like a traffic court case. And that, Editor Kinneson, is—”

“—the beginning and the end of it,” my father grunted without even bothering to rebuke my brother for calling Mom by her first name.

 

As Charlie had predicted, it increasingly looked as though in order to prove that Reverend Andrews didn't commit the murder, my brother would have to prove who did—a job that at best would be difficult, given the slender list of suspects and Judge Allen's refusal to grant his request for a change of venue, though I must admit that I was secretly pleased by that decision, since it meant that I might be able to see the trial myself.

One morning in early September I started high school. To my puzzlement, many of my classmates seemed actually to have shrunk over the summer. But I soon realized that contrary to all my expectations I had actually grown, shot up three inches during the past three months.

For the first few days of school Reverend Andrews' upcoming murder trial, now formally scheduled to begin on the Friday of Harvest Festival weekend, was all the kids could seem to talk about. In the hall before classes, again at lunch, yet again at soccer practice, they pumped me for all I was worth both because I was Charlie's brother and because I had been Nathan Andrews' closest friend. But beyond the generally known facts that Nat was going to school back in Montreal and living with his grandmother, and Reverend Andrews was still in jail in Memphremagog, I knew little more than the rest of the kids.

Once or twice I went so far as to start a letter to Nat. But what under the sun could I say—“Your dad's doing fine in jail, wish you were here”? I rationalized my failure to write by falling back upon that oldest and lamest of excuses, telling myself that, what with classes and homework and soccer and daily chores both at the shop and on the gool, I simply didn't have time.

Kingdom County's Harvest Festival traditionally fell on the first weekend in October. It began on Friday, a local school holiday, and was held principally on the village common. There in a final informal celebration of the short northern growing season, farmers and gardeners from the Canadian border all the way south to St. Johnsbury brought every kind of produce that could be raised locally to sell out of the backs of pickups or from makeshift stands and benches set up under the tall yellowing elms.

In the fall of 1952, for the first time in more than twenty years, my mother would not be taking vegetables to the common on Harvest Friday, though when I got out of school on Thursday afternoon for the long holiday weekend I found two Harvest Figures waiting for me in the dooryard—the pumpkin-headed straw men emblematic of autumn in the Kingdom, and which to this day you will see sprawled in barnyard wheelbarrows, propped nonchalantly against mailboxes, and lounging incongruously on porch roofs, leering out at passers-by with macabre or comical grimaces.

On Saturday morning the Harvest Figures would be judged by a panel of local dignitaries, who would then present awards in several categories that afternoon.

My mother was the only person in our family with artistic ability, and in the fall of 1952 her figures were especially wonderful, a roly-poly old farmer in overalls and a battered straw hat, sitting in a chair and watching his wife-toiling over my grandfather James' wooden cider press. In the farmer's crooked arm was a half-full glass gallon of hard cider, and carved on his pumpkin face was an obviously tipsy smile, while Mrs. Pumpkin-head looked on with pursed lips. On a cardboard placard around the straw woman's neck my mother had carefully stenciled the words
NEW ENGLAND GOTHIC
.

At the time, I wondered how Mom could fool with Harvest Figures on the eve of the biggest murder trial in the history of the county. Now I realize that she wanted to make our fall as normal as possible, but such sweet and familiar acts just served to underscore the bizarre twist our otherwise happy lives had taken.

Harvest Friday dawned crisp and clear, with a coverlet of October mist over the river, and the hardwood ridges around the village as beautifully red and gold as I could ever remember. As my folks and I started out to the village the sun rose above Lord Hollow, blood-red and magnified to ten times its normal size, and for the first time that fall I remembered that tomorrow was opening day of partridge season. Ordinarily, Dad and Charlie and I would be planning to slip up into the brilliantly colored hills with our shotguns. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow, no doubt, we would still be at the trial, and neither Dad nor I mentioned a word about bird hunting, or even paused to assess the river for fall fly fishing as we crossed the red iron bridge. We passed the empty parsonage without a word and turned silently south past the Academy, toward the courthouse, where a small crowd had already gathered on the sidewalk.