“It’s Mr. Resolvèd Kinneson, Jimmy,” Mom said. “I think he wants to redeem his bottles. Get my purse and pay him, will you, please?”
I went to the door, and sure enough, there was Cousin R with a bransack of bottles he’d picked up along the roadsides over the past week as the receding snow had exposed them. Although Resolvèd was wonderfully shiftless and improvident, neither he nor his brother Welcome was at all lazy or had ever been “on the town,” as the phrase went—meaning neither had ever taken a penny of assistance from that much-maligned precursor of the county welfare commissioner, the overseer of the poor.
As usual Resolvèd looked every bit as rough as a tramp just in off the B and M tracks, though for a wonder he wasn’t drunk yet. In fact, he seemed as invigorated from his springtime pursuit as we were from ours.
“Mom said for me to pay you, Resolvèd. She’s inside sugaring-off.”
“Sugaring-off!” Resolvèd could hardly have sounded more outraged if I’d told him my mother and I were counterfeiting twenty-dollar bills. “It’s way too late on into the spring of the year to sugar-off, bub. All’s you’ll get is Christly blackstrap.”
“Blackstrap” was the discolored, buddy-tasting, very late syrup some farmers sealed up in molasses barrels and shipped south to the R. J. Reynolds Company in North Carolina for flavoring chewing tobacco.
“How many you got today, Resolvèd?”
“What? Bottles? Well, now. Let’s see here. Let’s just have us a little look-see, by God, and tally up.”
Resolvèd spilled maybe thirty bottles out of the bransack onto the porch floor. Some were Coke bottles, or Pepsi, worth a cent apiece at the Red and White Store in the Common. A good half of his haul, however, consisted of nonretumable Old Duke empties, which my mother always scrupulously paid him for anyway, though of course the Red and White wouldn’t redeem them. I counted the correct change into his hand from Mom’s purse. “Yes, sir,” he said, and started down off the porch, making no attempt to bag the bottles back up.
Just then Mom appeared in the doorway with a jar of warm syrup. “Mr. Kinneson!” she called. (She was the only person in the Kingdom who ever called Resolvèd “Mr. Kinneson”.)
“Yes, sir,” he said again without turning around.
“I wonder if you’d do me the favor of taking this syrup home and sampling it for me? It’ll be about the last of the year, I’m afraid.”
Resolvèd came back and took the syrup. He held the jar up to the hazy spring sunshine and frowned suspiciously, as though checking for deadly bacteria.
“I don’t know as I want a lot of blackstrap around cluttering up my place,” he said with his customary graciousness, tucking the jar into his hunting jacket pocket and starting off.
“Resolvèd!” I called after him. “Wait up a minute. You heard anything yet from that letter you wrote?”
“Which letter would that be?” he said, as though he composed several long ones every day.
“That letter you and Charlie wrote, sending away for a mail-order housekeeper.”
He was bent over fumbling with something. I hoped it wasn’t his fly, with Mom standing right there on the porch!
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he snarled.
I heard the pop of a vacuum-sealed lid coming free. Turning his profile toward us, Resolvèd lifted the quart jar of syrup, tilted back his head, and drained off its entire contents in about six swallows, like a man slugging down his first bottle of cold beer after a long hot day in the hayfield. He wiped off his mouth with the ragged sleeve of his hunting jacket.
“Stomach liner,” he said, and tossed the empty Ball jar up to me on the porch. “Add this to your pile, bub. I won’t charge you nothing for it.”
And he was swinging off in his long-legged woodsman’s stride toward the village, no doubt to replenish his supply of Old Duke wine now that his stomach was lined with a quart of maple syrup.
“Boy, Mom!” I said. “You ever see anything like the way old Cousin R just chugged that syrup down? I can’t wait to tell Charlie. ‘Stomach liner’!”
She had a dreamy look on her face and didn’t seem to hear me. “Someday, Jimmy, you’ll write wonderful stories about Mr. Resolvèd Kinneson, and Mr. Welcome too. You know, it isn’t too soon to begin keeping a journal and recording what they say and do in it.”
At the time, I couldn’t imagine who except Charlie and maybe Mom herself would want to read about an old drunk and outlaw like Resolvèd. In those days when my mother spoke of my writing “wonderful stories” someday, I automatically assumed she meant newspaper articles for the Monitor, like my father’s articles and open letters. In fact, though it seemed well-understood that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and become a newspaperman when I grew up, Mom had far different ideas when she talked to me about the “wonderful stories” I would write, for in her way, she was as ambitious for me (and Charlie, too) as Dad ever dreamed of being.
We sugared-off the last batch of sap around noon, ate a quick lunch of beans laced with brand-new maple syrup, then gathered up the taps and sap buckets, rinsed them out in the milkhouse, and stored them upside down in the old harness room of the barn. Sugaring was over for another year.
It was still early in the afternoon, and Nat wouldn’t show up to go fishing until five or six o’clock. For a while I batted my old taped baseball off the side of the barn, trying to hit line drives at a knothole just below the faded painting of the brook trout. Then I just hung around the dooryard, until Mom appeared on the porch wearing her pink sun hat, in which (as she well knew) she looked no more than about twenty-five years old, and carrying my great-great-great-grandfather’s pirate spyglass tucked under her arm.
She stood on the top step, peering off toward the west with the spyglass, looking for all the world like a girl I remembered from a traveling road company’s production of The Pirates of Penzance she’d taken me to see in the Common the summer before. “It’s the right type of day, just hazy enough,” she said mysteriously.
“Just hazy enough for what, Mom?”
“For Montreal to be out. Shall we walk up in the gore and see?”
“Sure,” I said. I was willing to do almost anything to break up the monotony of the long afternoon ahead, though I didn’t have much faith that Montreal would be “out” then or any other day, haze or no haze.
Mom had frequently told me how one mild fall day soon after she had come to Kingdom County to live, my father had taken her up the logging trace to the top of the gore, near where “Russia” was now located, and shown her a wonderful and rare sight, a phenomenon unlike any she had ever seen before. Far to the northwest, hanging suspended in the sky high over the intervening peaks of the Green Mountains, was a splendid mirage of the city of Montreal, nearly a hundred miles away but so sharp and clear she had actually seen a train going over the railroad bridge across the St. Lawrence River. I wasn’t skeptical about her seeing the mirage—Dad had seen it several times—only that it would ever recur when I was on hand. But there was always a chance it might be out, and I loved to go to the woods with Mom at any time of the year because she shared my great interest in everything to be found there.
Although Montreal wasn’t out, most of the spring flowers to be found in Kingdom County were, and Mom and I had a great afternoon together. Besides painted and red trillium, wild ginger, hepaticas, trout lilies, white and Canada violets, and golden thread, we discovered a good-sized bed of rare yellow lady slippers, sneaked up on a partridge drumming for a mate on a log (something I have seen only twice in my life since), admired a stand of big beech trees scored all along their trunks for fifty feet up with the claw marks of the black bears that had climbed them in the fall to shake down the beechnuts, then slid back down with their claws dug into the smooth gray bark like firemen sliding down a pole; and returned by the disused granite quarry and the wonderful pictograph painted on the cliff above it by the Dog Cart Man of the gypsy stonecutters who once came to Kingdom County ea
ch summer.
We didn’t get home until nearly five, just in time to have a quick supper before Nathan Andrews showed up to go fly fishing—an event I looked forward to and at the same time, to a degree, dreaded. What would I tell him if the fish refused to strike? Also I still had no earthly idea what the minister’s son was really like. It was going to be an interesting evening!
“A dandy hatch was coming on when I crossed the bridge pool,” Dad told Nat and me that evening as I got my fly rod down from the wooden pegs on the porch. “You guys ought to do something in the meadow pool tonight. With any luck at all, you both ought to hit for the cycle.”
“Hit for the cycle” was my father’s baseball metaphor for catching one or more of each of the species of river trout in Kingdom County, a brook, brown, and rainbow. But I knew even before we started down through the meadow toward the big pool across the road that Nat wasn’t enthusiastic about our venture.
Except to ask if it was snaky in the meadow (it wasn’t), he didn’t say a word as we traipsed along past blooming golden cowslips—marsh marigolds, my city-born mother called them, to Dad’s amusement—past a pair of scolding killdeer, past brilliant red osiers and clumps of willows just putting out fuzzy lime-tinted catkins.
When I pointed out a woodcock circling high overhead, Nat shrugged. “We don’t have those at home,” he said.
“What birds have you got?”
“In Montreal, pigeons and gulls, mainly.”
“Sea gulls?”
Nat nodded.
“We get sea gulls. They come down off the big lake, Memphremagog, just before a storm. Hundreds of ’em, sometimes. I’ve always wondered how they know when bad weather’s coming, but they do.”
“Instinct, I suppose. Come on, Kinneson. Let’s get this fly-fishing business over with. I’ve at least two hours of chemistry problems left to do tonight.”
I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask Nat, but his impatient manner and condescending way of calling me by my last name put me off. So we trudged on in silence to the river.
There I simply couldn’t contain my excitement. Over the long pool hovered the largest hatch I’d ever seen: thousands upon thousands of the gigantic pale yellow mayflies I called spinners because of the way they twisted down onto the water.
Better yet, the entire surface was boiling with rising trout, feeding voraciously on everything that floated by. Everything, that is, but the flies I had tied to the end of Nathan Andrews’ leader. Try as he might, with wet flies and dry flies; with big brightly colored traditional patterns and dun-toned sinking nymphs and garish streamers as long as trout fingerlings—flailing upstream and down, leaving several of my flies in the high limbs of a bankside soft maple tree behind us, several more in the jaws of the hungry trout, and one in the visor of my Red Sox baseball cap, Nathan Andrews did not, under my frustrated tutelage, land a single fish.
The sun sank below the long south shoulder of Jay Peak. The light flattened out, dusk was fast approaching. I was fast approaching tears over my ineptitude as a teacher.
But Nat Andrews didn’t seem to care whether he caught a fish or not. He laughed at his own clumsiness and at my feeble pedagogical efforts.
“Shit a goddamn!” a gruff voice behind us said. “What be you boys doing here? A-trying to drive fish down the river?”
I whirled around. Slinking up from the bankside willows with a rusty milkcan in one hand and what looked like a long rolled-up rope hammock in the other, was Cousin Resolvèd Kinneson.
Resolvèd set down the milkcan. He reached out and seized me by the collar of my hunting jacket. “What be you doing here?” he demanded and gave me a good shake, as though to jar loose a reply. “Speak up.”
“I’m trying to teach this boy to fly-fish,” I blurted. “Only he won’t learn.”
Resolvèd gave a terrible coughing snort that sounded like a crocodile laughing, and turned to Nat.
“I be!” he said, and thrust his head forward to get a good look at my friend in the twilight. Resolvèd shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe what he saw. “You say he’s a-fishing?”
I nodded.
“Trout fishing?”
I nodded again.
“Well, Je-sus, that ain’t no way to go about her. Tell him to hand that pole here to me.”
“Resolvèd says he wants your pole,” I told Nat, as though he and my cousin spoke two entirely different languages.
Nat handed him my fly rod. Resolvèd stuck the hammock contraption into the milkcan and stared at the size-twelve Royal Coachman wet fly on the end of Nat’s leader. “What’s this, a Christly bug?” he said, and ripped off the fly’s wings with his three or four remaining side fangs.
From his hunting jacket pocket, Resolvèd removed a lead sinker hefty enough to take any freshwater bait imaginable to the bottom of Lake Memphremagog at its deepest point. He attached this anchor to Nat’s leader about a foot above the denuded fly hook. He scowled at the ground for a moment. With the toe of his rubber barn boot, he overturned a dead limb that had dropped off the soft maple tree behind us. He stooped and came up with a nightcrawler as long as a small snake, which he threaded once through its middle onto the hook. He handed the rod back to Nat. From another pocket he produced a pint bottle of Old Duke with only a swallow or two left in the bottom, which he promptly drained off Closing one eye, he sighted along the neck of the empty bottle at a pinkish granite boulder in the river. “Does he see that rock out there?”
Nat nodded.
“Well, then, goddamn it, tell him to throw in beside it.”
For emphasis Resolvèd hurled the bottle end-over-end out into the river, where it smashed to smithereens on the boulder.
Nat threw in. Instantly his bait sank. A minute went by, during which all three of us watched the line intently. Another minute. Then the line began to move downstream.
“Tell him to wait.”
Nat lifted the rod tip slightly
“I said, tell him to wait!” Resolvèd shouted.
“Wait!” I shouted. “He says to wait.”
The line, just barely visible in the twilight, continued to cut down and across the current.
“Now!” Resolvèd roared. “Heave her!”
“Heave her!” I roared.
Nat reared back on my rod with both hands. A silvery, shimmering arc flew up out of the sawmill pool toward our heads.
“Good Christ!” Resolvèd shouted and ducked like a man who’d been shot at.
Dangling from a low branch of the soft maple tree eight or ten feet off the ground above us was a thrashing rainbow trout about a foot long.
“Treed!” Resolvèd said with some satisfaction, and picking up the milkcan with the hammock rolled up in it, he continued downstream and faded into the dusk.
Nat seemed amused by the whole episode. While I cleaned his trout, he asked me how Resolvèd and I were related. He didn’t see, he said, how anyone as young as me could be cousin to a “bloody ancient codger” like Resolvèd.
“Well,” I said, as I slit open the trout’s stomach sac to see what he’d been eating, “Resolvèd isn’t really our cousin. We just call him that. What he is, is sort of an uncle to my father, I think.”
“Sort of an uncle?”
“Sort of a half-uncle, actually. Or a step-uncle. Let’s see. If I’ve got this right, his father was my father’s grandfather, old Mad Charlie. Mad Charlie had a second wife, a gypsy woman, and she was Resolvèd’s mother. Dad could tell you all about it.”
“Mad Charlie!” Nat shook his head. “No wonder your cousin’s an outlaw. Is he really an outlaw?”
“You bet he is. And a cockfighter and a moonshiner and the biggest poacher in Kingdom County. Last month he shot a moose through his kitchen window and got caught and fined fifty dollars, and I guess if my brother hadn’t paid the fine for him he’d be in jail this minute.”
Nat laughed. “I’d never get used to this ‘Kingdom’ of yours, Kinneson, if I lived here a hundred years. Wha
t a place! Let’s say we head home, eh? I’ll never get to that chemistry at this rate.”
It was getting too late to fish, anyway. The spring peeper frogs along the edge of the river were singing like a thousand jingling sleigh bells, and it was almost pitch dark.
Just as we started up through the meadow, a blinding swatch of light illuminated a stretch of river several hundred yards downstream. In it I could see a dark figure bent over something in the water.
“Stop right there, Resolvèd Kinneson!” a high-pitched voice commanded. “You’re under—”
The figure in the river straightened up fast. A dark arm shot out toward the source of the beam. The light swept crazily across the night sky, looped over and over, and vanished. From downriver we heard loud splashings, grunts, curses.
Seconds later someone went crashing up through the bankside alders into the meadow.
Just downriver, Sheriff White—for that was undoubtedly who the high voice belonged to—now lightless, wallowed noisily back to the opposite shore.
“I saw you, poacher boy,” he shouted. “I saw you and I’ve got your net and your trout. You’re under arrest for poaching and for assaulting an elected officer of the law.
“Go ahead and run,” the sheriff hollered. “Run to the woods, run to the hills, run to Charlie Kinneson. Run all the way to the Supreme Court, damn you. You’re as good as behind bars already.”
But as Nat and I stole back up toward the farmhouse on the gool, trying to suppress our laughter, I was certain that I heard low chuckling near us in the puckerbrush.
Plunged in the battery smoke
Right through the line they broke.
I stared at the stern block letters on the blackboard. Unhelpfully, the letters stared back at me.
“We’re waiting for you to diagram and parse that sentence, James Kinneson. We’ll wait as long as we have to.”
Of that I had absolutely no doubt at all. Although school had officially ended for the day five minutes ago, not a student in Athena Allen’s eighth-grade grammar class had budged one inch. Every set of eyes was on the poetic jewel on the blackboard, which I had been selected to diagram and parse. Parse! I had no earthly idea what the quotation even meant, much less how to break it down into its component parts of speech by means of arcane lines more suitable to a geometry exercise.
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 8