Northern Borders (29 page)

 

“
Take me in and treat me well

For within this house doth my parent dwell.
”

 

Hence the ironical piquancy of my grandfather's frequent meanest-old-bastard declaration to me; and my little aunts' conspiratorial intimation that since Maiden Rose had immediately come home from college to care for my foundling grandfather, she might actually be that unnamed parent in the note found with the baby. “It would certainly account for Aunt Rose's harsh treatment of him,” Klee said.

Nor, during our perusals of the family reunion photographs, did my melodramatic little aunts neglect to point out my Big Aunt Maiden Rose Kittredge's ex-student at the Lost Nation Atheneum, and dear friend and bosom companion, April Mae Swanson. After losing both parents while she was still in school, April Mae had lived with Maiden Rose on the Home Place for twenty years, until her
own early death in 1920. Long before I had the faintest glimmering what the term implied, my aunts gleefully whispered to me that April Mae had also been Maiden Rose's lover. “If you're going to be heard from, Austen,” they frequently told me in order to justify such unusual disclosures to an eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old, “you must know
all
the family history.”

As I entered my teenage years and enrolled at the Kingdom Common Academy, continuing to stay with my grandparents in Lost Nation, I visited my Big Aunt Maiden Rose frequently, helping her get in firewood and shoveling out her dooryard in the winter, though far less from the goodness of my heart than because my grandparents insisted that I do so. After Maiden Rose's eyesight began to fail in her eighties, I stopped by two or three evenings a week to read aloud to her. She especially liked Shakespeare; and sometimes as I sat under her critical pale blue gaze at the beautiful applewood table in her kitchen, reading the wonderful old plays to her, she'd get out a shoebox of letters April Mae had written to her from Boston, where April had attended college for a year.

In the reunion pictures, April always looked like a student, smallish with a pretty face. She was buried in the Kittredge family graveyard above the Home Place, and each fall when Gramp and I cut balsam boughs to bank the outside foundation of our farmhouse and Maiden Rose's, we cut an extra load for Rose to weave into a thick evergreen grave-blanket to put over April's plot for winter.

“Maiden Rose never fully recovered from April Mae's death,” my little aunts told me. “It was a tragic blow to her, Austen. You must take that into account when she seems bad-tempered to you.”

“Daughters!” my grandmother called sharply up the cupola stairs from the attic below. “You, Cleopatra and Nefertiti! What are you filling Tut's head with up there?”

“Just a little Sunday School lesson, Mom,” my little aunts would call back down; and as soon as Gram's footsteps retreated, they'd launch into yet another sensational saga.

“Who's this?” I asked one afternoon when I was about seven. I pointed at a long-haired, handsome young woman astride one of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose's matched team of Morgan horses, Henry David and Ralph Waldo. The young woman on the horse was
partway up the hillside pasture behind Rose's place, in the background of a reunion photograph.

“We've been waiting for you to ask us about her, Austen.” Freddi said. “That's Great-Aunt Liz.”

She and Klee exchanged a deeply significant look, then nodded. “The bank robber!” they said almost in unison.

 

Over the next several years, I heard many wonderful stories about my Great-Aunt Liz. Liz was my grandfather's and Maiden Rose's younger sister by my Great-Grandfather Gleason's second wife. She'd been married four times—four times that Klee and Freddi knew of, that is. She was a celebrated practical joker, an expert horsewoman and markswoman, and, since the age of sixteen, when she'd run away from home for the first time, she had conducted a passionate love affair with the American West.

Of all my independent-minded relatives, Aunt Liz was universally agreed upon to be the most so. She had even refused to have her picture taken from the age of four, covering her face or running away from the camera. And from her boldly-curious expression in the single extant snapshot we owned of her as an adult, sitting on the Morgan in the far background of the family reunion assemblage, it seemed that she had no earthly idea that she, too, would appear in that photograph.

As I grew older, I learned to take some of Freddi and Klee's tales with a grain of salt. Not that they told me any outright untruths in our Sunday School lessons. But both of my little aunts were inveterate embellishers who knew all about how to make a good story better in the telling. Yet when it came to Aunt Liz and the bank robbery, most of the other grownups I knew would tell me exactly the same story. On May 13, 1941, around noon, a single masked bandit of about Liz's build, wielding a pearl-handled revolver, had held up the First Farmers' and Lumberers' Bank of Kingdom Common, and gotten away scot-free with slightly over forty-two thousand dollars. My little aunts professed to believe that Liz had buried the loot somewhere on Maiden Rose's or my grandparents' farm before going West again the next year, intending to return for it at
some point in the future. The fact that she had not done so in almost fifteen years somehow enhanced the story. As for Liz herself, she was already something of a myth, at least in Kingdom County, even before the supposed robbery. Year after year, my fondest hope was that she would someday return to the Hollow in a blaze of glory, so that I could meet this family legend face to face.

After I moved up to Lost Nation to live with my grandparents, I began to make my own appearance in the annual reunion photographs. By the late 1940s the reunions had become peripatetic affairs, stretching out over the entire length of the Hollow, like medieval fairs. They officially began around ten in the morning with the solemn ritual of visiting and cleaning the small family graveyard on the hill above the Home Place, followed by the big noon picnic at my grandparents'. In mid-afternoon, activities shifted to the ball diamond behind Cousin Clarence's store at the foot of the Hollow, for the family baseball game. We reconvened around seven at the Home Place for Rose's traditional Elizabethan festival, in which my scholarly great-aunt produced, directed, and starred in an abridged version of a different Shakespeare play each year. The reunions ended with a com roast and sugar-on-snow party and dance at the schoolhouse. Throughout the day, some of the men relatives slipped down to Cousin Whiskeyjack Kittredge's barn to sample his latest batch of white mule moonshine; and any kids who wanted to were welcome to visit my grandfather, who, characteristically, spent the day working at his sawmill or up in the woods.

The family reunion was always slated for the second Saturday of August. Invitations were sent out by Maiden Rose, who also dispatched a hundred or so special summonses to her ex-students and other interested community members, to attend the Shakespeare play and the party afterward. In the summer of 1957, however, the summer I turned fifteen, the future of the annual family reunion was uncertain. At eighty-four, beset by near blindness and rheumatoid arthritis, Maiden Rose was bowed over almost into a hoop. She now required two canes to walk; and while there was no outright talk about canceling future reunions, there were telling hints.

The play Maiden Rose had selected for presentation that summer was
The Tempest.
Naturally my great-aunt cast herself in the
role of the ancient magician Prospero, and at the auditions in mid-July, Little Aunt Freddi tearfully told Klee and me that when Prospero put aside his book of spells at the end of the play, it would signify the finality of both Maiden Rose's reign on the Home Place as the dowager empress of the Kittredge family, and of the tradition of the family reunions themselves.

As far as the Elizabethan festival went, I could only hope that Freddi was right. For although I had nothing much against the reunions themselves, I despised being dragooned into acting in those plays. I knew, however, that there was no way of weaseling out of this onerous family obligation, and only prayed that I would not have to act the part of a girl or woman. As the '57 reunion approached, I was somewhat encouraged to discover that there was only one female part in
The Tempest.
But at the audition I had a few very bad moments, fearing I might be tapped for Ariel, which I instantly recognized as the sort of sexually ambiguous role that some malign fate would delight in reserving for a boy of fifteen. Two summers ago I'd been forced to prance around as Puck in
A Midsummer Night's Dream;
as a result, I have looked unkindly on that lark of a play ever since.

Fortunately, Ariel was snapped right up by Klee, whose beauty was still quite boyish. Miranda went to lovely, brown-eyed Freddi; young Ferdinand to Jim Kinneson from Kingdom Common; and the monster Caliban, whose lines Maiden Rose had cut to a few manageable surly rejoinders, to our moonshining Cousin Whiskeyjack. I got off lightly with the Boatswain's part.

The rehearsals proceeded smoothly. Three or four times a week we convened after supper at the high drive behind Maiden Rose's hay barn, where the Home Place pastures sloped up sharply on three sides to form a natural amphitheater. Rose's shortened version of the play took about forty-five minutes to perform; and under her exacting direction, there was no doubt that, as Editor Charles Kinneson invariably put it in his review of her productions in
The Kingdom County Monitor
, Maiden Rose Kittredge would once again present “the most spirited summer Shakespeare in all Lost Nation Hollow.”

 

A few days before the reunion, I helped Maiden Rose convert the high drive and entryway of the hay barn into a makeshift stage for the play. Also I let her use me as a tailor's dummy while she put the finishing touches on this year's costumes, including her own fantastical magician's cloak. And although nothing I did, then or ever, was quite right so far as my elderly aunt was concerned, we somehow got through that week together without a blowup.

Then on the evening before the big event something happened to put the 1957 reunion in an entirely different light. It was the totally unanticipated and unannounced arrival in Kingdom Common, on the seven-ten p.m. passenger train from Montreal and points west, of my Great-Aunt Liz, the alleged bank robber.

I was the only one at home when she called the Farm to say she'd arrived and needed a ride out to Maiden Rose's. My grandfather was up at Labrador, my grandmother was blackberrying in the cut-over woods upriver in Idaho, my little aunts, who by then were living in New York, had not arrived yet, and Uncle Rob, having graduated from college at last, was off in Alaska working for a newspaper.

“Who's this?” Liz demanded, and her voice was very sharp and very good-humored. “You don't sound at all like my brother Austen.”

“This is Austen's grandson, Austen.”

“Well, Austen's grandson, Austen. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Can you drive?”

Of course I could drive. Every farm boy in Kingdom Country could drive long before he turned fifteen.

“Then leave a note on the kitchen table and come fetch me home, Austen's grandson,” my great-aunt said. “I'd hitchhike, but I've got too much baggage. Don't hurry. I'll be right here when you arrive, and you won't mistake me for anyone else. I seem to be the only accused bank robber in town this evening.”

 

Although I'd never done it alone before, I had no trouble driving the truck into the Common. I expected, I suppose, a slender cowgirl, maybe looking boldly curious as she had in the single picture I'd seen of her. But although at fifty-five my Great-Aunt Liz Kittredge looked scarcely forty, it was an older-appearing, stronger-featured, and stockier woman I found waiting for me in the village, with long straight auburn-red hair, long legs like a cowboy, an outdoors complexion, and the same pale blue, assessing eyes of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose and my grandfather. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a fringed leather jacket over a sky-blue western-style shirt and an off-tan-colored cowboy hat. Next to her in the station waiting room were several worn, old-fashioned carpetbags with wooden handles, and two expensive-looking leather saddles. So my first impression of my Great-Aunt Liz was that she was definitely a woman of the West, of open spaces and horses and cowboys.

“Now throw a saddle over your shoulder, and grab two or three of these sorry excuses for valises and let's get out in the country,” Aunt Liz said. “You've heard the old saw: God made the country, man made the city, and the devil made small towns. It's true, Austen's grandson, Austen. Let's vamoose.”

Meeting Aunt Liz was like encountering a fresh gust of wind right off the high plains of Montana, a sage-laden, invigorating blast of the frontier. I was all the more delighted, and a little awe-stricken too, when as we left the station with her luggage I saw the unmistakable pearly-white handle of a revolver sticking out of her jacket pocket.

Something about my great-aunt's wonderfully assured manner inspired a latent boldness in me. As we headed out into the summer dusk, I surprised myself by saying, “Did you really rob the bank, Aunt Liz?”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “to tell you the honest truth, I considered doing so more than once.”

“So the loot isn't buried up in the Hollow?”

“Austen,” she said, heaving one of the saddles up into the back of the truck, “you put me in mind of myself at your age. Back before I learned that the best way to find out what I wanted to know was not to ask too many questions. For the time being I'll tell you just this and no more. I've come back to get something I left here a long time ago. Now I've got a question for you. How's Maiden Rose?”

“She's pretty crippled up,” I said, starting the truck and heading
out toward the county road. “But you know Aunt Rose. She's tough.”