A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Dad,” I said, “I really don’t—”

  “Get your trap,” he said. “You don’t have a thing in the world to be ashamed of.”

  But Nat’s reaction was altogether different, as I’d known it would be.

  “Oh, no!” he groaned when I appeared in his room. “Aren’t you the sight for sore eyes! What gets into you, Kinneson? You look as though you got run over by a bloody streetcar.”

  “A French Canadian one,” I said. “Okay, it was a dumb thing to do. Let’s just forget it. How about coming crawdadding with me this morning?”

  “Crawdadding? What do you do with those buggers?”

  “Well, for one thing, you can use them for bait. Trout love crawdads. Mainly, though, we eat ’em, boil ’em right up in a kettle. They’re terrific, just like lobster or better.”

  Nat was sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed. Suddenly he put his finger to his lips and bent forward, cocking his head. Through the round heat grate in the bedroom floor, voices were floating up from the parsonage study, where the church finance committee meeting was getting under way.

  Nat beckoned me to come over and pointed down through the swirled iron filigrees of the grate. Below, besides my father and the minister, I recognized George Quinn, Julia Hefner, and old Prof Chadburn, the Academy headmaster. Dad was sitting at the minister’s desk. Prof sat on a folding wooden chair borrowed from the church Sunday school, and Julia had plopped herself down next to the minister on a worn horsehair couch that set my teeth on edge just to look at it, like the steel wool Mom used to scrub her frying pans.

  “About this idea of yours, Reverend,” George Quinn was saying in his prissy voice. “I’m not saying it’s not a good one, it’s just that we hate to see anything replace the annual church bazaar and minstrel show. They’re traditions, you know, going back forty or fifty years.”

  “Minstrel show?” Reverend Andrews sounded amused.

  “Oh, it’s all in good fun, Walter,” Julia said, giving Reverend Andrews a proprietary little pat on the arm. “With your grand sense of humor, you’d love it.”

  It was hard to tell from our angle, but I thought that Reverend Andrews and Dad exchanged glances quickly.

  “Let the man finish presenting his idea, Julia,” Dad said.

  “Yes, by all means.” Prof Chadburn said. “I must say that from what I’ve heard so far, it sounds most intriguing.”

  “Intriguing” was Prof’s favorite word. If a boy was sent to his office at the Academy for sassing a teacher, he invariably found that boy’s behavior intriguing. In his own Latin classes Prof never failed to introduce a new verb as “intriguing,” and he was equally intrigued by his students’ more comical misapprehensions of, successively, Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil, our winning (or losing) an important baseball game, and any and all of the ideas of his own board or staff.

  “Yes, go ahead, Reverend,” George Quinn said unenthusiastically. “Let’s hear your idea.”

  “Well, as you folks all know, 1952 is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the church. Almost since the week I arrived, I’ve been thinking that we ought to commemorate the event in some appropriate way. At the same time, we need to build up the coffers of our treasury, which are pretty sadly depleted.”

  “In a nutshell, here’s my idea,” Reverend Andrews continued. “What I’d like to propose is that we combine a celebration of the church sesquicentennial with an Old Home Day on the common. We can establish the history of Kingdom County as our theme and focus on the history of the church. We’ll continue the tradition of the church bazaar by holding it right on the common along with game booths and skits, and we’ll culminate the day with a grand historical cavalcade around the common. If the celebration’s a success, and I’ll vouchsafe that with everyone’s united efforts it will be, Old Home Day can become an annual event with a different theme each year.”

  For a few moments the committee was silent. Then Dad said, “I like the idea. In fact, I like it a lot. I move we go ahead with the first annual Old Home Day and Sesquicentennial Celebration.”

  “I second that motion,” Prof said.

  “Discussion,” George said.

  “Oh come on, George,” Dad said. “What is there to discuss?”

  “Change.”

  “Change?” Reverend Andrews said.

  “Yes. You see, Reverend, we have to be cautious here. We have to be cautious not to change too much too fast, for fear of losing what we’ve already got.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, I mean the congregation. Membership has been decreasing over the past several years—until recently, at least. Now that we’re on the upswing, we don’t want to risk upsetting the apple cart by doing anything so radical that the congregation won’t go along with it.”

  “What’s radical about a sesquicentennial celebration?”

  “Nothing, really,” Julia chimed in. “But we’ve got the minstrel show committee to consider. There are a lot of people on that committee who’d be mighty upset to learn we’d just ruled out their show for an idea we haven’t ever tried before.”

  “We’re not saying we’re against all change, Reverend,” George said. “You’ve done a heck of a job here already in making changes that were long overdue. The Sunday school enrollment is up nearly two hundred percent. The youth group, the choir, the men’s Bible study club—those are good changes, and we appreciate them. We appreciate you But this Old Home Day—well, I just don’t know if we can move quite that quickly. Besides, the bazaar and the minstrel show are our main annual fundraisers. Without the income from them we’d really be in the hole.”

  “Just out of curiosity, how much do they bring in?”

  George cleared his throat. “If memory serves me correctly, the two fundraisers combined last year brought in a total of six hundred and seventy-eight dollars and seventeen cents.”

  “That’s good,” Reverend Andrews said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that high. With the Old Home Day celebration, I propose to generate a total of between twenty-five hundred and three thousand dollars.”

  Except for my father, who was staring out the window with his Ted Williams expression, the finance committee let out a gasp of surprise. Nat looked at me and grinned, as though the money were already safely ensconced in the church’s account at the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Savings Bank.

  “My word!” George said. “Are you sure? That’s hard to believe, Reverend.”

  “For one thing,” Reverend Andrews said, “we’ll not only incorporate the blooming bazaar right into the celebration, we’ll highlight it and sell two or three times as much as usual. And the historical pageant will give our local thespians more opportunity to display their talents than the minstrel show ever afforded. The game booths alone ought to bring in close to a thousand dollars. I’ve done similar things on military bases, and I’m virtually certain that we can raise twenty-five hundred as an absolute minimum. With a good day, we may well exceed thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  As he spoke, Reverend Andrews lit a cigarette. “Folks, let’s face the facts. The church needs money. The parsonage is falling down around our ears. We need a new furnace, some of the plumbing doesn’t work, the wiring’s bare in places, the sills are rotting out. The church needs repairs as well. I’m told it hasn’t been painted in more than a decade. And it’s humiliating to all of us not to be able to afford to send even five dollars a week to the World Missionary Fund.”

  “Not to mention being unable to pay the minister mileage for home visits, or close to a living wage,” my father said. “Look here. If the Old Home Day doesn’t go over, we’re under no obligation to do it again. But let’s at least try it. I move the question.”

  After a brief pause, George, whose misgivings had evidently been somewhat allayed by Reverend Andrews’ fiscal projections, said, “All in favor of holding an Old Home Day to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the church say aye.”

  My father and Prof said a
ye. After a brief pause, so did Julia Hefner.

  “The ayes have it,” George said, and Nat grinned at me again.

  “I just hope it doesn’t rain that day,” George said on his way out.

  “It won’t,” Dad said. “Walt here has connections.”

  As Dad, Prof, and George left, Julia remained seated. “Walter, if you have another sec, I’d like a word more with you about the bazaar,” she said.

  “Surely,” he said, and stood waiting by his desk.

  Julia crossed her legs; if she had not been forty years old and a widow, I would have said that she actually did this in a coy way. “I’m certain that it will be a great success, actually. I mean Old Home Day. What I really wanted to say, Walt, is a bit more personal. If you’ve absolutely decided that you’re not going to get yourself a housekeeper, I’ve made up my mind to take matters into my own hands. I’m going to have you over to my house for at least one decent meal. I’m considered to be a very capable cook. Maybe a tad too capable for my own waistline at times, though before he died, Fred—he was a great joker, Fred was—always said that most men prefer women with a little flesh on them. Anyway, I’d like to have you come over this Wednesday, say around seven o’clock. Bobby’ll be gone to his cousin’s in Memphremagog all next week and we should have the chance for a quiet little chat and a few brandies together.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Julia,” Reverend Andrews said. He got a small black appointment book out of his back pocket. “That’s a very kind invitation and I’m delighted to accept. What time shall we plan to come?”

  “We?”

  “Nathan and I.”

  “Nathan?” Julia said. “Oh, Nathan! Actually, Reverend, I was thinking more of a kind of business meeting over dinner, just between you and me. With Bobby gone, off visiting his cousin, I’m afraid Nathan would be bored stiff.”

  “Well, frankly, Julia, since coming here to Kingdom Common, I’ve tried to include Nathan in my own social schedule whenever possible,” the minister said smoothly. “The fact is I don’t really like to leave him alone at mealtime. Would you rather I come another night? Sometime when Bobby’s going to be around?”

  “No,” Julia said in a petulant voice. “No, that’s perfectly all right. Whatever you say. If Nathan gets bored after supper, he can always come back home again.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” Reverend Andrews said as he escorted Julia out toward the porch. “We’ll be looking forward to Wednesday night, then.”

  Nat slapped his forehead. “This is bloody great. Now I’ve got to chaperon my old man.”

  “They said you could leave after supper, Nat.”

  “Don’t you know anything at all, Kinneson? My father doesn’t want to be alone with that old walrus. Not that I blame him. She’d probably jump him the minute I left. Damn! Let’s get the hell out of here for a while. Even crawdadding would be better than sitting around this warped burg.”

  “So where have you been catching these delicacies?” Nat inquired as we headed north out of town on the River Road with my bait trap and feed sack.

  “You know that big pool out past LaMott’s slaughterhouse, under the railroad trestle? It’s crawling with them. Charlie and I used to go there a lot together. I’m not allowed to go alone.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I explained to Nathan that in warm weather railroad tramps sometimes jungled up on the sandbar below the trestle. Several times a summer we could see the reflections of their fires from our farmhouse on the gool. Like the entourage of gypsies who had come to town in my great-grandfather’s time, these roving men were reputed to be an untrustworthy lot. Every boy I knew had strict orders to steer clear of them.

  “Yes, but why?”

  “I guess if they caught you out there alone, they might do something bad to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know what,” I said, though I did, or half knew.

  “Did you ever personally know anybody the tramps did something bad to?”

  “No. Well, yes. Sort of. Al Quinn. He was bullpout fishing off the trestle once and a tramp stepped out from beneath and whipped out his thing and showed it to him. Al said it was about as long as old Mason White’s nightstick. It made him pretty sick to look at it but for a minute he couldn’t not look.”

  “I shouldn’t think it the most appetizing sight in the world myself,” Nat said. “What did Al do?”

  “He hightailed it home. What would any kid do? But I’ve been out there plenty of times with Charlie and other friends, and I’ve never seen any tramps myself.”

  “I hope we see one,” Nat said. “It would break up the monotony.”

  Except for a single neat set of raccoon tracks on the sandbar beneath the trestle, there was only an ancient pile of blackened logs left over from a bonfire to indicate that anyone had been there before us. The smell of decaying fish hung on the air. From up at LaMott’s slaughterhouse I heard the whine of a meat saw. Otherwise it was quiet.

  The trestle pool was deep and well over my head in the middle. It was a choice spot to catch big crawdads, though I suspect that their unusual size and abundance was accounted for by the fact that the small brook that trickled through the slaughterhouse dump emptied into the river just upstream, bringing who knew what rich nutrients to the local crustacean population.

  Catching them was simple. We baited the minnow trap with a couple of half-rotten bullpout heads we found on the bank and tossed it out into the pool on a rope. After letting it sit on the bottom for ten minutes or so, we hauled it up with a dozen or so scrabbling crawdads inside. They had shiny bluish claws and were handsome, in their way, though Nat didn’t seem much impressed by them.

  We shook the crawdads out into my burlap sack, which I’d soaked in the river first to keep them from drying out. Then we heaved the trap back out in the pool and waited for another batch to come swarming in. It was plenty warm enough to go swimming but neither of us wanted to swim near that polluted brook, so we sprawled on the sand in the sunshine, visiting in a desultory way about this and that.

  I mentioned that older boys from town were rumored to come here late at night with wild girls who allowed themselves to be undressed. Nat laughed and said I wouldn’t know what to do if a girl ever did let me undress her. I told him he might be surprised, and he said there was no might about it, he’d be astonished. I asked him if he’d ever had a girlfriend. He said he’d known a few girls he liked, but that was in school back in Montreal.

  “Maybe you’ll get a girlfriend here, too, Nat.”

  “Maybe the moon’s made of green cheese. You don’t think for a minute that a local girl would go out with me, do you?”

  “Why not?” I knew what he meant, but I really didn’t see why not. Since I had stopped consciously thinking of Nat as a Negro weeks ago, I assumed the same was true for most of his classmates at the Academy.

  “You know very well why not,” he said quietly and flopped back onto the sand and shut his eyes, exactly the way he flopped onto his bed at home whenever he was disgruntled.

  That was when an idea occurred to me.

  “Nat,” I said in a low conspiratorial voice, “how would you like to see three or four naked girls?”

  Nat laughed. “Assembled your own private harem, have you, Kinneson?”

  “Come on, be serious.”

  “You be serious.”

  “I am,” I said. “Every year at Kingdom Fair they have these girlie shows, where the girls strip right down to their birthday suits. They’ve got tents, see, way down at the far end of the midway, with names like Club California and Paris Revue. The girls do stripteases inside the tents.”

  Nat propped himself up on his elbow and looked at me.

  “Now, I don’t know about this next for sure, because I’ve never seen it myself. But Frenchy LaMott told Justin LaBounty and Justin told me that way late at night, after the rest of the midway’s all shut down, they take down the ropes on the stage inside those tents
and anybody who wants to can pay five dollars and go right at it with the girls.”

  Nat grinned. “You have it on good authority, all right. Third-hand, by way of Frenchy LaMott.”

  “Laugh if you want to, but I told you the LaMotts never lie, and they don’t. Anyway, here’s my idea. The fair’s this week. On Friday, you tell your dad you’re staying over with me the next night, and I’ll tell my folks I’m staying over with you. Saturday evening we’ll go to the fair and slide on down to the midway and hang around until it shuts down. Then we’ll sneak in one of those shows under the tent and see for ourselves. It’ll work out great. Dad’s spending that weekend up at Judge Allen’s fishing camp with the judge, and Mom always lets me do about what I want when he isn’t around to worry about her worrying about me.”

  Nat sat up straight. “I’ve heard rumors of such goings-on on St. Catherine Street up home, but I never really believed it, even there. What you’re describing sounds more like Sodom and Gomorrah. Not that it doesn’t fit right in with everything else I know about your town, come to think of it.”

  “Lay off the Kingdom, will you, Nat? Why did you come here, if you think it’s such a dump?”

  “I didn’t have any choice, remember?”

  “Didn’t you want to be with your father?”

  Nat didn’t reply immediately. “Yes,” he said finally. “I did, and I still do. He’s pretty strict with me, and he expects a lot. Sometimes I get the idea he expects me to be about perfect. He was pretty mad, in his own way, about that cockfight business. He even threatened to send me back up to my grandmother and my Montreal school if I ever pulled anything like that again, though I don’t think he really meant it. And he was a little mad at me at first when I decided not to play baseball, too.”

  “Why don’t you play baseball, Nat? You’re the best player in school. Charlie told me you’re the best player he’s seen in the Common in years.”

  Nat shrugged. “I don’t know why I don’t play,” he said. “I guess it just doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to you and some of the other boys—to get back to my father, I’ve told him I can’t be perfect, and he even agreed and said probably every minister’s son has felt the same way. Then he said he and I both live in a glass house, so to speak. He wants me to be a sterling representative of our race, something he’s always been big on. But I still think he expects a lot.”