Northern Borders (12 page)

I hugged Lyle and looked out over the seat bar. The booths below looked small and insignificant, the colored lights glowed eerily through the evening mist creeping up over the fields from the Kingdom River. The music, even the shrieks from the Octopus,
sounded far, far away. Horticultural Hall gave off a warm glow, and the cattle barns glimmered like barns early in the morning before daylight when lantern lights have just come on inside. In the distance, beyond the rosy haze of the midway lights reflecting off the fog, I could see the fainter lights of the village of Kingdom Common, where not three months ago I'd stood alone on the station platform, waiting for my grandfather to take me up to Lost Nation.

“Hey, rube!” I said. Then I shouted it: “H
EY, RUBE!

“H
EY, RUBE!
” I yelled, as the Ferris wheel started with a jolt and revolved on into the night, and on and on, until I thought it might never stop.

My grandfather did purchase Hannibal Rex. To the mortification of my otherwise triumphant grandmother—it was obvious that once again she was going to walk away from Kingdom Fair with more blue ribbons than my grandfather or anyone else—we brought the elephant home in the back of the lumber truck that very night and quartered him in the upper hay barn. That fall, after I started school, my grandfather used Han for a number of jobs around the Farm: hauling logs down out of Idaho, yanking some recalcitrant stumps out of a high pasture he was reclaiming northwest of the house, and, on more than one occasion just before winter and again in spring mudtime, pulling the lumber truck out of the quagmire our dirt road turned into whenever it rained hard. By degrees, Hannibal went from a wonder to a curiosity to a fixture on the Farm in Lost Nation.

I rode him off and on, and sometimes kids from the village came up to see him with their folks, but my grandfather discouraged this. As for the newspaper reporters who wanted to photograph him, he summarily put the first two who showed up off our premises. Apparently word spread because they were the last reporters we saw.

Sometimes one or two of the mountain people who'd helped my grandfather earn the money to bail Hannibal out and save his life came by to see him, usually just appearing in the dooryard as though they'd dropped out of the sky. These men my grandfather was always happy enough to see. I thought that Show and Mrs.
Twist might appear someday themselves and try to buy the elephant back, but my grandfather told me he wouldn't return Han to Show to be abused with that hook for any amount of money in the world. The showman never did contact us, and neither did his Albany lawyer.

My grandmother, for her part, rarely alluded to Hannibal at all. Most of the time she simply ignored his presence as if he didn't exist. She did cut the article about Hermie Hill's hospitalization out of the local paper and paste it in her Doomsday Book; and on especially cold winter nights, when the temperature fell to forty and forty-five below, she'd look up from her sewing and say to me, “You and your grandfather had better check on that animal before you go to bed, Tut.”

And we always did.

The times I remember best with Hannibal were three or four frigid nights in deep winter when my grandfather hitched him to a flat-bed sleigh and he and Han and I took hay up to the deer yarded in the deep evergreen woods of Idaho. After unloading the sled, we'd wait on the edge of the trees under the cold starlight, with Hannibal's breath billowing up through the branches like steam from an open spot on the river. First singly, then in pairs and small family groups, the winter-thin deer came out of the woods to feed, unafraid of us or of Hannibal. Those were fine times for my grandfather and me, and I think Hannibal enjoyed them too.

But besides being a prodigious hayburner, Hannibal Rex was an old elephant when my grandfather acquired him. The long border-country winter was tough on him, even after Gramp moved him from the hayloft to a stall at the far end of the milking parlor, which was much warmer.

One afternoon the following spring, a few days after we'd turned Hannibal in with the cows in the upper pasture, he vanished. My grandfather followed his tracks into the Idaho woods and found him lying on his side, big as a gray granite outcropping, near where he'd helped us take hay to the deer the previous winter. Apparently he'd gone off to die there alone, peaceably, the way old elephants are said to do. I cried some, but my grandfather shook his head and reminded me that Han's last year was a good one, semi-retired on a
Vermont hill farm with a man and a boy who understood elephants. He rented Bumper Stevens's bulldozer for half a day and buried him there, overlooking half the county. That summer he put up a cedar marker that said: “Here Lies Hannibal Rex, the Third Largest Elephant in Captivity. He Was a Good Elephant.” The marker is there to this day, though the inscription has faded to illegibility during the forty-five summers and winters since.

3

Early on during my first winter in Lost Nation, I discovered that just getting by from one day to the next at that time of year was a nearly full-time job for everyone in the Hollow. Three times a day, starting in mid-October, I brought in several armloads of wood apiece for the kitchen and parlor stoves. Each morning before school, and again as soon as I got home, I helped my grandfather with his barnwork. On Saturdays I worked with him in the woods or swept up at his one-man sawmill by the river. Of course I continued to help my grandmother, too: drying and putting away the supper dishes, winding the clocks, shoveling a path through the snow to her birdfeeder in the pin cherry tree behind the summer kitchen.

As I grew older, my tasks increased. At eight I was helping Gramp clean out the gutters in the milking parlor and feeding and watering Gram's laying hens. And by the winter I was nine, I was
tailing a saw on weekends for my grandfather, and I had full charge of my grandmother's chickens, a job that included collecting each day's eggs on my way in from afternoon barn chores.

Not counting One Eye Jack, her rooster, my grandmother kept twenty Buff Orpington laying hens. They were large birds of an unusual color between orange and cinnamon, and they were quartered in a henhouse converted from an old grain room at the far end of the long ell connecting the farmhouse and the barn. All up and down Lost Nation Hollow, my grandmother's Orpingtons had a reputation as famous layers; and three times a week, when my grandfather trucked his milk out to the cheese factory, he took along several cartons of fresh eggs to sell at Cousin Clarence Kittredge's general store at the junction of the Hollow and the county road.

As anyone who has ever kept them can tell you, chickens are notoriously foolish and dirty creatures. So I will state at the outset that neither my grandfather nor I had any use at all for the Buff Orpingtons, especially after our annual hoeing out and whitewashing of their premises. Yet the flock of laying hens was of great importance to my grandmother, who, since my first week on the farm, had set aside a portion of her egg money each month to defray the future costs of my college books and other incidental expenses.

Even in the dead of winter the Orpingtons were remarkably steady layers, a fact my grandmother attributed to their daily outdoor feeding and exercise in a barnyard pen adjacent to the henhouse. But in March of the year I turned nine, in the middle of a long stretch of unseasonably frigid weather, even for Kingdom County, there was a sharp decline in the productivity of her twenty laying hens, from an average of sixteen or eighteen eggs a day to fewer than a dozen.

At first my grandmother blamed the drop-off on the cold spell. But on the afternoon that I reported to her that the best nest in the henhouse had turned up empty again for the third day in a row, she told me to go back out and count the chickens themselves.

It was nearly five o'clock and already quite dark inside the henhouse. The chickens were lined up asleep on their roosting pole
and easy to count, even by lantern light. I counted twice, carefully, and came up with only eighteen both times.

To make sure that I hadn't overlooked any, I checked outside in the exercise pen. Nothing. Sometimes in the summertime a wayward hen fluttered up through a chute in the ceiling dating back to the era when the henhouse had been a grain room, and established a hidden brood nest in the haymow overhead. Not in the winter, though. In the winter the laying hens never strayed far from the vigilant single eye of Jack the rooster, venturing outside the henhouse only with him, and then just to eat and peck around in the snowy pen for a few minutes each day.

When I reported to my grandmother that two chickens were missing, she frowned and gave a long audible sigh. “Those hens are your ticket to college, Tut,” she said. “You can't go to college without the wherewithal to buy your books.”

My grandmother threw her black shawl over her shoulders, took the lantern, and went out through the ell to the henhouse to count for herself. But to her dismay and my secret satisfaction, she came up with the same result I had: eighteen, plus the rooster.

There was no longer any doubt about it. Somehow, two of her prize laying hens seemed to have vanished into thin air. The rest were laying erratically at best. And from my grandmother's grim silence during supper and throughout the evening, you might have supposed that my entire college education was in imminent jeopardy.

 

The following morning before school, the most probable culprit in the case of the missing chickens came to light. Just as I was bringing in my last armload of stove wood, a white weasel with a black tip on its tail ran out into the kitchen from under the cupboard beneath the sink. It stopped no more than four feet away from my grandmother, who was standing at the stove stirring a double boiler of oatmeal. The weasel stood up on its short hind legs and looked around at its surroundings with the fearless curiosity of a tame cat.

I was so surprised that I nearly dropped the wood. Now the
weasel seemed to be staring at my grandmother, and she was staring directly back at it. Both the weasel's eyes and my grandmother's were as shiny and round and black as the side buttons of my grandmother's black shoes, though Gram's eyes were somewhat bigger. Only when she set down the oatmeal ladle and reached for her broom did the creature drop onto all fours again and slink back under the sink.

“There's the sneak thief that's been carrying off my hens,” my grandmother said. “Go tell your grandfather a winter weasel has taken up residence under my sink. I want him to come in here and dispatch it straightaway.”

I dumped the wood in the woodbox with a clatter and took off through the connected woodshed, toolshed, henhouse, and horse stable to the cow barn. I found my grandfather in the milk house, slamming milkcans into his wheelbarrow and cursing under his breath.

“Guess what just came out from under the sink into Gram's kitchen,” I shouted.

My grandfather straightened up to his full height and looked at me critically with his pale blue eyes and said in his harsh voice, “A winter weasel, no doubt.”

For the second time that morning I was astonished. How had my grandfather possibly guessed this? For a moment it occurred to me that he might have caught a weasel and released it under the kitchen sink to frighten my grandmother.

Then he explained. “Sometimes in the winter your wild white weasels will venture into farmhouses for mice.”

“Gram and the weasel stared at each other for quite a long while,” I said.

My grandfather made a rasping noise in his throat, like his big log saw striking a knot in the butt-end of a hemlock log. “I imagine they did,” he said.

“For its size,” he continued, “your white winter weasel is probably the fiercest customer in these parts. It's totally fearless.”

“Gram wants you to come in and dispatch it.”

My grandfather picked up the handles of his wheelbarrow. “Open that outside door and shut it tight after me, Austen,” he said. “It's thirty below out there if it's a degree under freezing.”

 

The wind had blown hard the night before, and on our way down the Hollow to school that morning, my grandfather's lumber truck bucked through one high snowdrift after another. Each time the truck shuddered through another drift, my grandfather cursed, and his white breath hung in the unheated cab between us like smoke from his fiery expletives. Above the dozen remaining occupied farmhouses in the Hollow, woodsmoke rose eight or ten feet, then flattened out into tattered horizontal ribbons, unable to climb higher in the overarching cold.

The schoolroom never warmed up that day. We huddled as close to the tall, cracked stove as we could get, scalding our faces and freezing our backs. The boys' felt boots steamed faintly, giving off a powerful barn odor as we shivered and burned our way through the day's lessons. It was hard for me to concentrate. All day long I wondered what my grandfather would do about the thieving weasel.

When Gramp picked me up after school that afternoon, he informed me that the weasel was dead. He had trapped it in a number-four muskrat trap, and nailed the carcass up on the inside of the woodshed door. As soon as we got home I ran out in the shed to see it. It looked much smaller than it had that morning, standing on its hind legs and staring defiantly at my grandmother. Now I supposed that the chickens would begin to lay again.

But that afternoon only three eggs appeared in the henhouse nesting boxes and yet another chicken was missing.

 

That night the northern wind brought more snow and cold down out of Canada. The temperature fell to forty-five degrees below zero. The millrace at the foot of my grandfather's sawmill dam froze solid for the first time since I'd moved up to Lost Nation. My grandmother had to keep a steady trickle of water running out of the kitchen faucet to prevent the line from the spring from freezing.

Again I wondered if the terrible cold could possibly be keeping the chickens from laying. Perhaps so. Yet when a fourth hen turned up missing later that week, and then a fifth, the remaining chickens began to panic. Day and night they huddled together on their roost,
as close to One Eye Jack as they could get. My grandfather kept the muskrat trap set and baited under the sink, but there was no sign of a second weasel.