A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “It wasn’t the first thought to cross my mind, to tell you the truth. My first thought was that she needed a roof over her head. Lending a helping hand is one of a minister’s duties, you know. And, gentlemen, though there’s little so rankling to me as a prattling preacher who cites chapter and text from the Bible to win personal arguments, surely you’ll agree that that document holds out more than a few precedents for my decision. It doesn’t seem to me that I should have to apologize for trying to follow its dictates.”

  “You shouldn’t,” my father said.

  “So you’d say you did the right thing then?” George said. “By taking the girl in? And you’re still doing the right thing by keeping her? Even in view of her background and all? We’re just asking, that’s all, Reverend. We need some guidance on this matter. We need to know what you think.”

  “I’d say it was the right thing to do,” Reverend Andrews said. “Especially in view of her background. I’m doing everything I can to find an appropriate alternative for her, if that’s any help.”

  Castor Oil Quinn cleared his throat. “I guess we’ll just have to take your word on that, then. Now, on another matter. The matter of your gun. With all the publicity that this trouble’s been getting, a number of parishioners have approached us this morning. I mean they’ve approached us trustees, expressing—ah, surprise. Surprise that a minister would have a loaded gun in his house in the first place, and then actually fire it off at someone. Now don’t misunderstand me for a minute, Reverend. None of us at all questions your right to protect yourself and your son. But this shooting fracas at the parsonage—we just wondered why you didn’t immediately call the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff had been decoyed out of town, presumably by Resolvèd Kinneson, whose stated intention was to take Claire LaRiviere out of the parsonage—by force, if necessary.”

  “Well, we’re all relieved that nothing happened to the girl. But if I correctly recall, you were asked by a representative of the Ladies Auxiliary as well as by Elijah here to do something about the girl some days ago, and you apparently chose not to.”

  “For heavens sake, man, are we back to her again? I have been trying to do something about the girl. This isn’t as simple as it sounds.”

  “No, it isn’t,” George said. “Well, this, ah, inquiry, it’s mainly our way of finding out what really is going on so that we can properly support and advise you.”

  “Indeed? Well, don’t think I’m not grateful, but I wish I’d been formally invited to your ‘inquiry’ because there are some things I’d have clarified right from the start, and will now, with your indulgence. To begin with, I’ve never in all my life kept a loaded gun in any house I’ve lived in. The revolver, which was unloaded, was in the bottom drawer of my desk. The clip containing the bullets was locked in an upper drawer. Nor did I fire until after I’d been fired at. I did shoot then but not carelessly. I deliberately fired a disabling, rather than a mortal, shot.”

  “I understand, Walter,” George said. “You don’t have to convince me. Probably I would have done exactly what you did.”

  This I doubted. I would have been astonished to learn that old Castor Oil ever had held anything more lethal than a cough syrup prescription in his well-manicured hand in his entire life.

  “It’s just that some people will be sure to wonder why a minister would keep any gun, loaded or not, in his desk,” George continued. “You know how folks are in a small town.”

  “I’m learning fast,” Reverend Andrews said. “Ordinarily, I don’t keep a gun in my desk. But frankly, after some earlier episodes, I thought it advisable.”

  “So you still think you did the right thing, night before last?”

  “I’d say so. What do you think?”

  There was a pause. Then Reverend Andrews said, “Why don’t you take a vote? I’ll wait outside.”

  “The question before us,” George said when the minister had left, “is whether to give Reverend Andrews a vote of confidence. I’m inclined to think we should, but this whole situation still distresses me. All I can say is vote your conscience. A yes means we accord him a vote of confidence. A no means we don’t. Written ballots are best in this case, I believe.”

  I could hear chairs scuffling, paper being ripped for ballots. Beside me in the dark Nat was breathing quicker.

  “One thing before we vote,” my father said. “Regardless of what any of you may think personally about this matter, don’t vote no today. If you do, it’ll indicate that you think Reverend Andrews is guilty of something, which he isn’t, unless it’s being a good minister and a good Christian.”

  By the end of that fall, it would seem to me that I had spent half of 1952 waiting for important decisions I had no control over, in courtrooms and elsewhere. But the wait in the Sunday school closet with both the minister’s and my father’s credibility at stake was one of the hardest.

  “Seven yes’s and one no,” George Quinn announced, and a moment later I heard the door open.

  “Reverend Andrews, it isn’t unanimous but seven out of the eight members of the session have accorded you a vote of confidence. I’m glad of it, sir. I’m glad the air has been cleared. I want you to know that we’re behind you all the way.”

  “That’s good,” Reverend Andrews said, his voice equable and resonant and faintly amused. “Even the one dissenting vote, now that I think of it. As I’ve mentioned before, if I didn’t have at least one enemy, you wouldn’t be able to trust me, would you, now? Gentlemen, good morning to you.”

  13

  My father prided himself on never locking the Monitor during the day, but just before leaving for the session meeting he’d told me to hold down the fort until he got back, and when I dashed in breathlessly a minute or so after he arrived, he wasn’t happy.

  Fortunately for me, Reverend Andrews was already sitting in the single chair in front of Dad’s desk.

  Dad handed me a slip of paper from his notepad. It had two dates written on it: August 6, 1900, and August 13, 1900.

  “Reverend Andrews wants to borrow these issues of the Monitor, James. Go downstairs and get them, and whatever you do, don’t mix up the order of the back issues or Elijah’ll have your head, and mine too.”

  “Didn’t I see you and Nathan having a little Sunday school class a short while ago?” Reverend Andrews said to me with a wink.

  So he had seen us hiding in the Sunday school closet, when he opened the door. It was all I could do not to crack up as I rummaged through the stacks of old yellow Monitors in the basement.

  Upstairs I heard my father say, “Walter, I must admit, I’m surprised that you can still be so interested in local history at a time like this.”

  The minister laughed. “What should I do, abandon all hope and start knitting a big red A?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s evident to me, and has been since Julia Hefner’s first visit to the parsonage to try to bully me into sending that girl packing, that half the people in this town think I’m having an illicit affair with her. No one’s quite come right out and said so. But that’s what they’re thinking.”

  “Well,” my father said, “it’s understandable that you might feel resentful. In the past month you’ve put on the biggest and most successful shindig this town has seen in fifty years, which, by the way, George Quinn just told me brought in a little over four thousand dollars. You’ve had your household turned upside down by a slightly unbalanced teenage girl, been shot at by a local drunk and would-be kidnapper, and raked over the coals by your governing board for having the temerity to defend yourself.”

  “Resolvèd doesn’t bother me much, Charles. If you look at this from his point of view, it’s not hard to see why he’s so upset. He honestly believes he has a proprietary right to the girl. He may even be in love with her, in his own strange way. After all, Resolvèd’s human. He probably thought he’d waked up in heaven when she walked through his door. Now she’s left him for reasons he can’t possib
ly understand, and he’s lashing out at me as the person he supposes must be responsible.

  “What I want to talk to you about, though, is something else that bothers me. Your local sheriff dropped by rather late last night—to do a bit more investigating, he said.”

  “He ought to have. It’s high time.”

  “Wait and hear what he wanted. It was around eleven o’clock. I was sitting in the study reading Pliny’s History when he came up onto the porch and knocked. He was dressed in his uniform, and he asked if we could talk. I said of course, and he suggested that we visit on the porch. I was somewhat surprised, as it was quite cool last evening, blit as you’ll see, he had his reasons.

  “At first White sirred me to a fare-thee-well. At the same time he grilled me like a grand inquisitor. He told me he was getting ready to make his final report to Zack Barrows so that Barrows could decide on a sentencing recommendation for Resolvèd. He said he needed some additional background information, including my exact age, education, and service dates. He claimed this was standard information, and asked to see my service discharge papers. I said I wasn’t at all sure I had them here, that they were probably still in Montreal at my mother-in-law’s. That was true enough, but frankly, I was hoping to brush him off. I jokingly told him to read his hometown newspaper, that all this ‘background information’ and more besides was in the interview you conducted with me the week I arrived. He persevered, though, and said he needed some sort of official document to help me prove my credibility.

  “That’s when I got my back up. I told him I didn’t need to prove anything at all, and that I’d never heard of the victim of a crime being investigated more zealously than the perpetrator. White said that he was just trying to establish that a crime had been committed in the first place. Then he said that anyone who wanted to create a local race incident for publicity purposes could have arranged a confrontation such as the one at the parsonage. I was dumbfounded. But it got worse. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘we are just trying to help you. But we have to know one thing. Do you ever, or have you ever, slept in your study?’

  “I wasn’t sure whom White meant by ‘we.’ Himself and the prosecutor, maybe. But I understood the ‘boy’ all too well. That was the final straw. I told him that where I slept was my own business and that I hadn’t gotten much sleep at all lately because I’d been too busy standing vigil night and day to protect my home. White said that if by protecting my home I meant getting involved in a shoot-out in a settled area, he’d think I might have exercised better judgment. That’s when I told him to clear off the premises straightaway, before I lost my temper.

  “‘I just hope you do lose your temper and lay a finger on me, boy,’ White said, ‘because that’s all the excuse I’d need to bring you in for assaulting an elected peacekeeper.’ I don’t know what made me look out then toward that hearse he drives around in, but when I did I spotted a man, standing in the shadows by it. Of course, I can’t be positive, but I believe White intended to goad me into punching him right there on my front porch, so he could hail in his deputy as a witness. At any rate, I didn’t bite, though I must say I was sorely tempted. If I hadn’t spotted that deputy, I might be languishing in jail this very moment.”

  Listening closely to the conversation upstairs had slowed considerably my search for the articles from 1900 that Reverend Andrews wanted.

  “James!” my father called down the stairs. “Haven’t you located those back issues yet?”

  I had just found the second article and I ran up into the shop with both.

  “I thought you’d found out everything you wanted to find out about Pliny Templeton when you researched his life for the pageant,” my father said to Reverend Andrews. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Well, there’s still the matter of his alleged suicide. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, about the man suggests to me that he was the sort of person to throw up his hands in despair and kill himself. Especially over a mere matter of doctrine. The use of a piano, for heaven’s sake. I simply can’t believe that a man of his wisdom and resilience would put a bullet in his head because of a little spat over a piano.”

  “Well, it’s odd you should say that, because as you’ll see from these articles, my father felt the same way. Dad and I didn’t always agree, to say the least, but he was a shrewd newspaperman, and the whole business of Pliny’s suicide bothered him until the day he died. I could never quite understand why, to tell you the trath. It’s always seemed plain enough to me.”

  “Pliny was a battler, wasn’t he?”

  “Sure was a battler. But the business over the piano wasn’t just a little spat, Walter. Trouble had been building for a couple of years, and as I’ve told you, it finally attained the proportions of a schism, with some of Pliny’s closest friends, including my own grandfather, on the opposite side of the issue. The lines were drawn. Reformed Presbyterians were actually yanking their kids out of his school, you know. They say he was suffering from melancholia as a result of the dispute.”

  “I still can’t picture Pliny Templeton putting a bullet through his head.”

  “Well, the way I see it, Pliny was an idealist. In my admittedly limited experience in that area, when an idealist comes up against a hard reality that contradicts the ideals he’s believed in all his life, sometimes he can’t cope with the discrepancy. No doubt that’s what happened in Pliny’s case.”

  “I suppose so,” Reverend Andrews said. “But I’d still like to study these newspaper articles describing his death. This won’t make Elijah Kinneson very happy, I fancy.”

  “To hell with Elijah,” my father said. “He’s probably the guy who cast the one vote against you over at the church this morning. But don’t take it personally. Elijah wouldn’t like anybody who replaced him in the pulpit. I don’t think he’s ever forgiven you for getting the job. The man’s something of a fanatic and always has been, but it isn’t him you’ve got to worry about. It sounds as though your biggest concern is that self-serving ass Mason White and his sidekick the nonprosecuting prosecutor. I can’t imagine what they’ve got up their sleeves, Walt, but I damn well intend to find out.”

  “Small towns!” Reverend Andrews said. “Their ways are more mysterious than the armed services’!”

  He looked at me and winked again. “Good to see you boys taking such an interest in the church, Jim. It isn’t really so boring after all, is it?”

  “Dad,” I said after Reverend Andrews had left with the newspapers, “what’s going on around here? I mean with these secret meetings and the sheriff threatening Reverend Andrews and everything?”

  “You overheard that, did you?” my father said. He stood up, straightened his tie, and put on his suit jacket. “I’m not sure, but I certainly intend to find out. Come on, James. You and I have business with Kingdom County’s chief elected peacekeepers.”

  Although it was nearly noon when we arrived at the courthouse, Zack Barrows was nowhere to be found Not that this was so very unusual—Dad had told me that two or three days a week the old boozer didn’t bother to show up until after lunch. But Mason White was sitting at Zack’s desk in the prosecutor’s big sunny first-floor office, drinking coffee and reading the Boston paper.

  “Tell me something, Mason,” Dad said, cutting off the sheriff’s effusive greetings, “why did you want to run for office in the first place?”

  Tipping back in Zack’s swivel chair and splaying his long fingers out on the edge of the desk, Mason chuckled. “Well now, editor, if you’d been raised out to Lord Hollow, you’d have wanted to get your A out—pardon my French, Jimbo—and ran for something, too. I don’t mean this personally, now, but you and your boys, Brother Charlie and young Jimbo here, you never had anything to prove to anybody. You and your boys grew up speaking good English and contributing to the community. Out in the Hollow, it weren’t like that. Oh no, it was not! It was root, hog, or starve, with maybe a country cowboy song or two throwed into it to make us proud of being poor. Now, I, for one,
was never all that proud of being poor. Not one little bit. Do you know what ‘poor eyes’ are, Jimbo? Well, I shall tell you. Poor eyes are all washed-out, drained-out, lived-out-looking eyes, like the eyes on a real old sick person getting ready to die. My brothers had poor eyes. My sisters had poor eyes, too. There was no hope in them a-tall. The only one in my family that didn’t have poor eyes was Uncle C. V. White. You probably don’t remember him, Jimbo, he was a little before your time, but Uncle C.V. ran the undertaking parlor here in town for years. He drove a big new Buick automobile and he never ventured out to the Hollow except to fetch in a client, and then only if you was prepared to pay him cash on the barrel head when he made the pickup. Now there was a man I admired. I can’t say I liked him—he never had any more human feeling than one of his own clients. But I did greatly admire him. And his Buick automobiles. A brand-new shiny one every year. How old would you be, Jimbo?”

  Mason asked this question so suddenly that he caught me off guard. “Twelve,” I said. “No, thirteen.”

  He nodded. “Thirteen years old. When I was thirteen years old, I moved into an unheated back chamber off Uncle C.V.’s basement workroom over to the undertaking parlor. That’s when I began working for old C.V. after school in exchange for my room and board. Five years I did that. Five years I filled in at funerals when the bereaved family was shorthanded and needed an extra bearer, and rode out with Uncle C.V. to fetch in clients, and helped Cousin Elijah dig graves over to the churchyard. Five years.”

  Mason looked out the window onto the common, reflecting with evident satisfaction on the sacrifice of those five years. I didn’t see what any of this had to do with his running for sheriff. And why in heaven’s name was he addressing me? I hadn’t asked him any questions.

  “Now, truthfully, Jimbo, most folks back in those days didn’t think much about Mason White one way or the other, but even without having to think about it, folks knew old Mason was different. They knew he was one of those poor Whites from Lord Hollow. And Mason knew he was different too and never doubted that he was going to be successful eventually. So he lugged corpses and dug graves and stood in at funerals and bided his time.