On Kingdom Mountain (32 page)

 

Miss Jane was surprised but certainly not alarmed, when Judge Allen dropped her off an hour later in her dooryard, to discover that she had gotten back home before Henry. With the days noticeably briefer, it was too late to leave for Atlantic City that night, and she supposed that he had flown up to Memphremagog to return the barrels to the Ford agency or run some other errand before their trip the next day. As the judge rattled back over the covered bridge and headed down the new right of way toward the Common, she shivered slightly. The sun had already disappeared behind the mountains. A fire in the Glenwood would feel good tonight. In her garden the scattered brown stalks of corn she'd left standing for the raccoons rustled in the sharp fall breeze. She would not be amazed if, on the summit of the mountain, it snowed tonight.

She went into the kitchen, past the faded riddle on the slate. Now that she knew what it meant, she couldn't believe that she hadn't deciphered it sooner. It was so plain to her. Consequences, she thought. There seemed to be no end to them. As she had told Henry, every human action, past, present, and future, had consequences. If she had not invited Henry to come home with her six months ago . . . Shaking her head, she kindled a small fire and made batter for flapjacks, Henry's favorite supper. Before coming to the mountain he'd never tasted real maple syrup. Now he used it on everything you could possibly think of—pancakes, Miss Jane's homemade ice cream, her homemade bread, which, ladled over with maple syrup, he called “poor man's cake.” She looked out the window, down across the water meadow to the river. Dusk was falling. It was already dark under the applewood table. Her father had liked to say that when it was dark under the table, it was time to light the lamps.

Only when full darkness had settled over the mountain did Miss Jane allow herself to consider that Henry might not be coming back, and it was half an hour later when, taking a deep breath, then another, she stepped into On Kingdom Mountain to break the news to her dear people.

She lighted the kerosene lamp on the table beside the horsehair love seat where she had propped up Ramses' bride and Pilgrim. She looked around the parlor at her people, and then, for the first time since the night of the great deluge, when she and Henry had collapsed laughing into each other's arms and later gone swimming in the river, she began to laugh. Her laughter did not last long, perhaps a second or two. But when she saw that the door of the Currier and Ives floor safe was open and the safe was empty, she could not help laughing at her own perfect lack not only of second sight but of the slightest amount of foresight. She realized she should have known from the start, from the moment she found the coin in the fish, that the stranger destined to come to Kingdom Mountain was, in the end, like all strangers, also destined to leave, probably with something that belonged to her. Her gold, her heart, whatever. Yet a part of her, she could not deny, felt a certain relief, for she was already homesick for the mountain she would now never leave. The nature of found money was that you would surely lose it again. Maybe that was the nature of love as well. Like strife, such might be the way of the world. As for Henry, she told her dear people, she was glad to think of him soaring off into the sky, headed south with the geese, in possession of the gold that had been his heart's desire, free as the birds she carved.

Only later, alone once more in her bedchamber, did she give way to her grief, made still more unbearable, if possible, by her realization, correct or otherwise, that she, and she alone, was responsible for all that had happened to her in the half year since her fiftieth birthday.

 

 

 

 

T
O THE ALL-KNOWING
Commoners, it was evident that Henry Satterfield had marked Miss Jane from the start. All the blame fell on the outsider from Away. The Duchess, for her part, seemed to have retreated to her mountain in a state of despair. What advancing age and loneliness and the threat of the Connector and hardscrabble living and feuding with her cousin Eben and the town fathers and King James and his Jehovah had not been able to do, namely, break her spirit, had been accomplished by betrayal in love.

As for the Connector, work on it had temporarily stopped after the flood. But Eben Kinneson Esquire remained confident that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the high road and that construction could begin again in the spring. Even Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain, he told the town fathers, could not simply declare her private independence from Vermont and the United States on the strength of an ancient family document of questionable provenance and authenticity. The fathers, enraged at being tarred and feathered in full view of the townspeople, billed Miss Jane for fifty thousand dollars in unpaid back taxes on her mountain, claiming that the provision supposedly arranged by Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton had never been incorporated into the final treaty and that the mountain had always been part of the township.

And what of the daredevil Henry Satterfield of Beaumont, Texas, who stole Miss Jane's heart and stole away into the clouds with the Kingdom Mountain Treasure? While the
Duchess never said one hard word about him, in the Common talk became gossip, gossip rumor, rumor myth. In time that myth would become legend. The low high sheriff, Little Fred Morse, read in the October issue of
True Detective
that Courteous Clyde had been sighted in Tonawanda, in western New York State, buzzing in low over the New York Central rail yards. Other reports had Clyde making an emergency landing on a commercial cauliflower farm near Bakersfield, California, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, preparing to cross the Atlantic alone in a new red Gee Bee Racer.

One report was unsettling, at least to Miss Jane, because it had a certain bizarre credibility. On the early evening of the last day of the Harvest Festival, an hour or so after Henry tarred and feathered the dignitaries of the Common, a low-flying yellow biplane was spotted by Ben Currier's two teenage boys, inveterate poachers at sixteen and fifteen, gill-netting the fall run of brown trout coming up into the East Branch of the Kingdom River past the old town farm. Without mentioning what they were doing at the time, the brothers claimed that the plane was coming from the old Canada Pike and Miss Jane's mountain, heading southwesterly out over the lake and flying quite low, with the wings wobbling, as if very heavily loaded. They said the pilot did not appear to notice them and, though he was alone in the plane, his mouth was going “like a whip-poorwill's ass in black-fly time,” and they saw him shake his fist as if in the middle of a heated argument. It was a misty evening, and the boys lost sight of the biplane about halfway across the lake. A minute later they spotted it again, this time headed back in their direction, as though for some reason the pilot had decided to return to wherever he'd taken off from. Almost immediately, the dense fog on the lake closed in and the boys lost the plane once more, though they could hear it, still coming their way, the engine sounding as though it was laboring. Then it passed out of earshot, lost in the enveloping fog. Had Henry Satterfield, if it was Henry, changed his mind and decided to return for Miss Jane? Or was the gold too heavy a cargo for the old Burgess-Wright? A search turned up nothing. If the plane had gone down in the three hundred feet of water off the foot of the mountain, no one would ever know. Though the Currier boys swore to the truth of their tale forever afterward, they were both notorious storytellers as well as accomplished poachers, and in time no one, including probably the brothers themselves, knew what they had claimed to see.

 

No place on earth is as fickle as a small town, and soon enough cruel tongues in the Common proclaimed that the Duchess was certain that the rainmaker would return later in the fall to marry her. It was confidently retailed throughout the village that one stormy October midnight, Miss Jane held a black wedding at the old church in Kinnesonville, walking into the roofless chapel all overgrown with woodbine and wild cucumber vines and inhabited by mice, bats, and snakes, and marching down the aisle carrying a life-size wooden sculpture of Henry Satterfield, dressed all in white, as she was. At the altar in the pitch-black darkness inside the ruined house of worship, she said all of the sacramental words, answering for both herself and her betrothed. Then she carried the sculpture home over her shoulder and from that night forward slept with it in her own bed as she would with her beloved.

The facts, of course, were entirely different. There was no wedding, black or otherwise. And though she was indeed carving a new figure, it was not Henry Satterfield. As she announced to her emerging sculpture, and to her dear people in On Kingdom Mountain, King James's psalmist had been right about one thing, at least. There was a season for all things, and,
while it had lasted a full spring and summer, her season of foolishness was thankfully over.

M
ISS JANE WOKE
to the bellowing of General Ira Allen, alone in the barn, and the harsh calling of crows from above her sugar orchard. It was mid-November on Kingdom Mountain. The leaves had been down for a month, and though there had been no significant snowfall yet, just very cold weather, the air this morning had the smell of an oncoming storm.

It had been a fall of dramatic changes in the Kingdom. First, the ruling had come down from the Supreme Court and, just as Eben Kinneson Esquire had predicted to the town fathers, it was not good news for Miss Jane. Unable to find any reference to the Kinnesons or the Memphremagog Abenakis in the ratified Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the justices had ruled unanimously in favor of the township. They found that Kingdom Mountain lay partly in the town of Kingdom Common and that the old Canada Pike Road over the mountain had never been officially abandoned. Therefore the Connector could legally follow the pike road up to the Canadian border running through Miss Jane's home place. What happened from that point on was up to the province of Quebec, but Eben and the town fathers had effectively won their case. Characteristically, Miss Jane was particularly offended by the legalistic language of the finding, which, to her outrage, stated that “the demurrer of the Town of Kingdom Common is sustained as to all particulars and the injunction against said township and the Connector is dissolved.”

That fall the first electric wires were strung out the county road along the right of way of the Connector, though Miss Jane did not choose to become wired up. Then Eben Kinneson Esquire sold his paper mill in the Landing to the Brown Company, which was planning a huge expansion in Vermont. More small farms had gone under, and the human landscape of the county had begun to change as well, with the deaths of some of Jane's closest friends in the village. In early October Sadie Blackberry and Clarence Davis died within a week of each other, played out like the little hill farms and four-corner sawmills and riverside mill towns of Kingdom County. Later that month A Number One slipped up to the Ford agency in Memphremagog, siphoned the radiator fluid from several cars on the lot into an empty fifth of Wild Turkey, drank it off, and died on the spot. A week later Canvasback Glodgett fell into the bay and drowned. Without the fishmonger's cry ringing through the streets, the village seemed as empty as a desert. “Fish for sale. Fresh fresh fresh. Pickerel and pout, pickerel and pout, pickerel and pout but nary a trout.” The dog-cart man moved on, perhaps heading south for the winter. Whether he would return was as unknowable as the fate of the departed rainmaker.

Then Jane's twenty-five-year-old ox Ethan Allen died. She found him in his stall, where he had expired in his sleep. General Ira was inconsolable, moaning steadily, throwing his head around looking for his brother and lifelong yoke mate, refusing to eat, and, generally, breaking Miss Jane's heart all over again.

“Did you hear the crows?” she asked her new figure when she came into the kitchen. “They've found that poor steer's carcass up on the mountain, no doubt.”

He stood at the foot of the applewood table, one foot on each side of the yellow line representing the border that no Kingdom Mountain Kinneson had ever acknowledged, looking at her expectantly. Miss Jane knew what he wanted her to do. She knew she should put him away in On Kingdom Mountain with her other dear people.

Outside it was just getting light. Over the crows she could hear General Ira, alone and bereft in his stall, bellowing. She took a drink of Who Shot Sam.

She put on her red and green lumber jacket and felt boots and wool cap and mittens. She slipped a lump of maple sugar into her jacket pocket, then headed out to the barn, hoping to entice General Ira into eating something. The dawn sky was pink behind the mountaintop, where Jane was still surprised to look up and not see the fire tower. The crows were cawing. She could make out ten or a dozen of them circling over the softwoods above the sugar orchard, where, two days before, she and General Ira had taken Ethan.

Ira refused to eat the maple sugar. Back in the kitchen Jane took another long drink of Sam. She sat at the applewood table, her head in her hands.

“Why not return to teaching now, my girl?” the figure said kindly. “Where you belong. You never should have left the Kinnesonville schoolhouse.”

Miss Jane could not bear to tell him there were no longer any children on the mountain to teach, that the schoolhouse was an empty shell.

“Did you hear the crows?” she asked him again.

“No,” he said. “I heard the grieving ox. Seth Kinneson, your great-great-grandfather, came to Kingdom Mountain in early April of 1775. He had a yoke of Red Durham oxen and a pung on runners. His wife and boy of five, Freethinker, rode in the pung. At the foot of the mountain the off ox cut its hoof badly on the river ice. To spare the poor animal, Grandpa Seth stepped into the yoke himself to pull with the near ox. He couldn't bear, you see, to see the off ox suffer. Now, Jane. You
promised me never to let an animal suffer on this mountain. I promised the same to Quaker Meeting. He to Freethinker. He to Seth.”