Northern Borders (5 page)

My grandfather had a number of distinguishing idiosyncrasies. He smoked nothing but White Owl cigars, and when he was in the barn and the sawmill, where he never lighted a match for fear of fire, he simply chewed his White Owls down to the end, spitting out the shredded tobacco. He averaged about forty-five minutes per cigar, and I never ceased to marvel at the mysterious process by which a fresh unlighted cigar in his mouth vanished by degrees into what seemed like thin air.

His highest form of praise was to say that a man was “a good fella to go down the river with.” No doubt this locution derived from his early days on the big log drives; and while on rare occasions he might mention to me that one of his neighbors fell into this category, he far more frequently informed me that such and such a man—quite often a relative—was decidedly
not
a fella he would go down the river with. From his days on the log drives he also retained the lifelong habit of carrying his paper money buttoned in his shirt
pocket, instead of inside a wallet in his hip pocket, where it might get wet.

My grandfather had a number of sayings. When he was absolutely sure of something, he liked to say that it was “as certain as the sun coming up over the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the morning and setting behind the Green Mountains of Vermont at night.” If a tool did not work properly, my grandfather often wished it “up Mike's ass.” After one of the horrendous runs of bad luck endemic to operating a hill farm, he would announce with harsh irony bordering on genuine satisfaction, “Well, Austen, we can't have good luck all the time.” And when everything went completely to smash, he might say, in reference to old Sojourner Kittredge's original geographical miscalculation, “That's what I'd expect in a township settled by mistake to start out with. Everything else has just followed suit.”

He kept Ayrshire cows, he told me, because like Holsteins they gave a large quantity of milk, but with a fairly high butter-fat content, like Jersey milk. In fact, I believe that my grandfather favored Ayrshires primarily because most other farmers in the Kingdom preferred Jerseys or Holsteins; regardless of his rationale, however, his preferences and dislikes in all matters great and small were fixed and intense.

“I like a basswood tree, Austen,” he said to me one noon a week or so after my arrival on the Farm, while we were eating our dinner up in the Idaho woods under a big basswood. “A partly hollow basswood tree like this one makes the best bee tree in the world. A maple is a serviceable tree, and beeches are good for bears to climb up for the nuts, and lovely to look at. But I'll tell you something and don't you forget it. I hate a gray birch above any other tree in the woods. Gray birches are good for absolutely nothing. I wish every gray birch in Vermont were up Mike's ass.”

My grandfather never wished animals up Mike's ass. Besides his cows, his pigs, and his two all-purpose Morgan horses, which actually belonged to my Big Aunt Maiden Rose, he had a partially tamed raven, which he called out of the evergreen woods across the river and fed corn to each morning and evening. To my delight he had taught this bird to announce, in the most strident tones imaginable,
“I hate school”—following which the saucy raven, as my grandmother liked to call it, never failed to give two short, derisive croaks. My grandfather also had a semi-trained raccoon named Fred, who hibernated in the hayloft; and a huge pet skunk, which shared the same saucer used by the barn cats.

In the evenings my grandfather read for hours on end. Besides a vast collection of westerns that included every tale Zane Grey had ever written, he had amassed an impressive collection of popular travel and adventure nonfiction by or about such indefatigable globe-trotters as Osa and Martin Johnson, Richard Halliburton, Clyde Beatty, Frank Buck, and the famous African ivory hunter Frederick Courtney-Selous—not to mention anyone and everyone who had ever ventured up into his beloved Far North and survived to write about it.

Also my grandfather enjoyed reading biographies of historical figures who had played a part in the settling and establishment of Vermont, and debunking them at every turn. Besides being a militant autodidact, he was a bold, iconoclastic, muckraking historical revisionist before his time, who loved to look up from his books and inform me, out of the blue, that Ethan Allen was nothing more than a “land-grabbing, rum-guzzling scoundrel,” Robert Rogers and his Rangers “cold-blooded murderers.”

He read each issue of the
National Geographic
cover to cover; and despite my grandmother's muttered injunctions against sashaying, or perhaps in part because of them, he read many
Geographic
articles aloud to us, looking up at me each time my grandmother shook her head and sighed loudly over the pernicious folly of such gallivanters.

 

As for my grandmother, when I think back to my first weeks on the Farm, I connect her in my mind first with Egypt and then with relentless work. With the exception of my morning and evening barn chores, I did not work for my grandfather so much as I kept him company and provided an audience for him. My grandmother and I were good companions too; but for her, from the outset, I worked, and worked pretty hard.

Feeding and watering her laying hens on my way in from barn chores was simple. Gathering the eggs each afternoon was actually fun. But weeding my grandmother's mammoth garden was not only tiresome but nerve-wracking to boot. My grandfather also kept a large garden, immediately across the lane from hers. And though he didn't make me work in his, he and my grandmother competed with each other fiercely to grow the earliest and biggest tomatoes, squash, ears of corn, pumpkins, potatoes, and twenty other varieties of vegetables. Moreover, as I would soon learn, they each entered all of the same categories in the horticultural contests at Kingdom Fair, where each year they vied for the most blue ribbons.

Drying the dishes and putting them away was less onerous than weeding, but I didn't much like doing it. By far the worst household chore, though, was winding my grandmother's clocks. It would not be accurate to say that my grandmother kept a clock in every room in the house. My loft chamber over the kitchen had none. Neither, come to think of it, did her sitting room, Egypt. Some rooms, however, had two, including the dining room and the long upstairs hallway; and the best downstairs parlor was adorned with three timepieces. I don't believe that I ever counted, but at the time that I moved to the Farm, my grandmother must have had at least twenty working seven-day clocks; and it immediately fell to me to wind the infernal things with her great set of keys, first under her supervision, and then alone.

These clocks kept their own time and struck when they were so moved. For many days, until I was accustomed to them, I was unfailingly startled by their sudden, unpredictable banging and clanging, their shrill and brassy tolling of some vague approximation of the actual time. My grandmother's clocks were nothing special, you understand, though a number of them were embellished with painted scenes of an old-fashioned, bucolic nature. She had acquired them from here and there, one at a time over the years. None was particularly valuable. In fact, the ritual of winding the clocks seemed far more important to her than the time they kept. Years later I would come to the conclusion that, for my grandmother, the clocks did not mark regular daily time anyway, so much as the minute, inexorable progress from some antediluvian event known only to
her—the erection of Tutankhamen's pyramid, perhaps—toward some equally private, and quite possibly apocalyptic, event in the future. This much was certain: she rarely heard their dreadful cacophony without scowling briefly toward my grandfather, if he was within scowling range, as though all that chaotic hammering somehow signified that the poor man was doomed to a final and unspeakable retribution for his youthful transgressions as a sashayer, or heaven knew what other offenses, real or imagined, during their years together in Lost Nation.

 

People seemed to read more in those days than they do today; and my grandmother herself read for an hour or two each day. She read the Bible carefully, yet with a critical eye, particularly for those passages dealing with the alleged treacheries of the Egyptians, which she discounted as sheer propaganda. What about the evil pharaoh who enslaved the Children of Israel, I wondered? Well, my grandmother acknowledged that there might be one bad apple in every barrel. But she had little good to say about Moses, Aaron, or Joseph, who, she confided to me some years later, she had always suspected of casting eyes upon Potiphar's wife instead of the other way around. What other harm was reported of poor Mrs. Potiphar? “None, Tut. None.” Yet my grandmother was a very sincere churchgoer, whose severely charitable works extended to everyone in Lost Nation, though her unwavering belief in an inclusive and egalitarian afterlife transcended any single religious doctrine. As far as she was concerned everyone—Egyptians, Hebrews, Christians, you name it—was eligible for advancement, so to speak. Everyone, that is, but my grandfather for whom she seemed to have slim hopes in that regard.

“When I fell afoul of Mr. Kittredge,” she frequently stated, in reference to their nuptials. “Well, never mind, Tut. The time will come when he'll meet his Waterloo.”

I had no idea what my grandmother meant by this assurance. But it sounded like a very dire fate indeed, and for some years in my early boyhood, I pitied my grandfather his apparently inevitable appointment with Waterloo, and hoped it would not transpire for a long time to come.

Before straying too far from the subject of reading, I should report that one rainy afternoon about two weeks after my arrival at the Farm I discovered a great literary treasure in the far regions of the attic. In a corner under the high, dusty west window overlooking a hundred miles of mountains, I came upon crate after crate of books: more than I could begin to read in an entire summer of rainy afternoons. Besides a complete set of Dickens—this was a spare, there was a set in better condition downstairs in the parlor bookcase—and a pirated edition of Poe's tales with which, at about the age of nine, I would begin scaring the living daylights out of myself, there were boxes stacked full of my grandfather's back issues of the
National Geographic
, no doubt spirited away to this lofty redoubt by my grandmother lest their very presence in the house below reactivate in the old man that evil urge to go sashaying. There were trunkfuls of my father's and my Uncle Rob Roy's boyhood books, including a couple of dozen dog-eared volumes chronicling the spectacular feats of a veritable young Edison named Tom Swift, given to inventing, totally from scratch and at the drop of a hat, every conceivable machine from futuristic racing cars to airplanes—spelled “aeroplanes.” Another set of books recorded the glorious saga of one Baseball Joe's meteoric career on the diamond, from some prep school whose name I have blissfully long since forgotten through Yale and the New York Giants. There were the less fascinating—to me—but undoubtedly better written stories of Anne of Green Gables and Louisa May Alcott's tireless little women, only recently relegated to the attic by my little aunts, Freddi and Klee; an old Encyclopedia Britannica; the immense family Bible containing the genealogy I mentioned earlier; several random volumes of the legislative proceedings of Vermont spanning the period 1874–1886; and a badly-worn copy of Bulfinch's
Greek and Roman Myths
, with some illustrations of mostly unpleasant moments in the lives of ancient mortals, gods, and goddesses. I conducted a pretty vigorous impromptu search for one or two of WJ Kittredge's F•U•C•K Books; but I cannot say that I was much surprised not to find any represented in my grandparents' attic library.

I don't know how long I stayed up there on that first visit. Maybe forty-five minutes. I recall bringing a very old children's book back downstairs with me and asking my grandmother to read it to me
that evening. It was an ancient cloth picture book entitled, unpromisingly enough,
Cautionary Tales for the Young.
One illustration in particular leaps into my mind. It depicted two boys in a forest clearing, squaring off with doubled fists. At least I think they were boys, though all of the children in the book had, besides oddly oversized heads, an androgynous aspect sharply at variance with their features, which were those of case-hardened forty-year-old men. In the background, evidently as yet undetected by the children, were two gigantic bull moose with their great antlers hopelessly intertangled in combat. Obviously, the poor animals were fated to die a terrible death, but the creator of this cheery woodland tableau wasted little sympathy for them. The caption below read: “Boys given to
QUARRELING
should
TAKE NOTE
of the fate of
TWO DOOMED MOOSE
and
MEND
their ways.” My grandmother read this aloud to me in her precise way, then gave me a long look to see if the lesson had sunk in.

My grandfather, however, glanced over at the illustration and inquired whether I believed I could “hold my own in a go-round with the pair of 'maphrodites” in the picture. I assured him that I believed I could, which seemed to satisfy him. But the fact is that I was not much given to quarreling with other boys, that summer or later, for the simple reason that there were no other boys, or girls either, to quarrel with within three miles of my grandparents' place.

When it came to quarreling, my grandparents themselves walked away with the cake. Never in my life have I known two people to disagree on so many issues, large and small, day in and day out. Of course our entire family, along with everyone in Lost Nation and half of all Kingdom County, knew about Ab and Austen Kittredges' Forty Years' War—which, like most wars, had caught up neighbors and other family members alike, and had resulted in deep rifts and alienations, such as my father's defection from the Farm at the age of eighteen. But I think that very few persons knew how implicit constant rivalry was to the very existence of my grandmother and grandfather.