A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Problem was . . .” the sheriff continued, flexing and unflexing his great hands, “I knew I’d have to go away and become successful out of this town first if I was ever going to become successful in it. So that’s what I did. I went in the service and bided my time and saved up every penny I could. I got an honorable discharge and went straight over to the Simmons School of Mortuary Science in Syracuse, New York, and graduated from that school with honors. And then and only then did I come back here to work for C.V., saved up some more, and bided my time. The truth is, I did a whole lot of biding.

  “Now, Jimbo, you know what I used to think whenever a client of Uncle C.V.’s came in that I figured had looked down on me because I was different? Well sir, I’d lay them all out just so, and then I’d think to myself, or maybe even say right out loud, ‘Mr Jones or Mrs. Smith you used to look down on me. Now the tables are turned. Here I am a-looking down on you, naked as a jaybird with a slit in your side. And do you know something, you poor old buzzard? There’s still a difference between us. A great big H of a difference. And would you like to know what that difference is? I shall tell you. You’re dead, Mr. Jones, and I’m not.’”

  I noticed my father’s jaw getting tighter and his lips thinner. He had been flinching visibly during parts of Mason’s story, but he was very still now.

  Mason gave a great sudden high horselaugh. “‘I’m not,’ I’d say. ‘I’m alive, and what’s more, a going places. You’re dead, Mr. Jones, and I’m alive, and overcoming early obstacles and on the rise.’”

  But my father had heard enough of the sheriff’s poor-boy-makes-good story. “Mason, I didn’t come here to do a human interest story. I came to find out why, if you want to be reelected, you and Zack haven’t charged Resolvèd with anything more serious than disturbing the peace. What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Well, editor,” Mason said, “the trouble is, we really don’t know exactly what did happen over at the parsonage the other night. So far, all we know for a fact is that when I got there your minister friend was holding a smoking gun, and poor Cousin R was missing part of his trigger finger.”

  “Poor Cousin R! Poor Cousin R had just fired two loads of buckshot through the Andrews’ front windows.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, editor,” Mason said quickly. “You know I’d love nothing better than to nail R’s A to the courthouse door. But like Zacker told me the other day, we just can’t leap to conclusions on this one. For one thing, there’s that girl staying with your colored man. No doubt she has all kinds of unsavory connections in her background—beginning with that girlie show I closed down.”

  Mason got out a cigar and lit it. It made him look like the quintessential small-town sheriff in the movies: self-satisfied, sly, knowing more than he said yet somehow managing to hint at more than he really knew.

  “Mason,” my father said, “you know that Resolvèd Kinneson fired that shotgun at Walt Andrews and could easily have killed him. You know that he used the train as cover, just the way the bank robbers did. That’s probably where he got the idea. You know that Resolvèd or one of his commission sales cronies called you and disguised his voice and decoyed you to the other end of town just before the highball went through. If you and Zack don’t get to the bottom of all this immediately, I’m going to call the attorney general in Montpelier and urge him to send up a special investigator, or better yet come up himself with one or two smart state policemen, and look into this whole situation. And that isn’t a threat, it’s a promise.”

  Mason leaned forward earnestly. “Believe me, editor, I and Zack want to get to the bottom of this unpleasantness just as bad as you do. If we don’t, there’s apt to be merry old H to pay, come election time. What I’m saying is, it’s more complicated than even you think. If Zack were here now, and frankly I’m sorry he’s not because his little ‘spells’ are getting just a bit tiresome and I for one wouldn’t be all that disappointed if Brother Charlie did decide to run against him this fall and trimmed his wick—but if Zacker were here, he’d agree. The last thing in the world that we need is the distinguished A.G. from Most Peculiar or some other outsider coming up here and airing our dirty laundry for us. We’ve had outsiders enough in the Kingdom this summer to last for the next fifty years. If you ask me, that’s where more than half this problem resides. Outsiders. Can I be frank with you, editor?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. Can you?”

  “Yes,” said Mason, “I believe I can. Keep this under your hat, but I’m not so very far away from resolving this mess as you may think. There’s just one hitch left, really.”

  Mason leaned so far forward I thought he might fall face first onto Zack’s desk. “Don’t tell anybody, editor, but I am not, I repeat not, entirely satisfied with your colored man’s account of what happened at the parsonage evening before last.”

  “Do you mean Reverend Andrews?”

  “He’s the one.”

  “Refer to him by his name, then. What do you mean by calling him my colored man? That sounds like some kind of slur.”

  “No offense meant, editor. The reverend, then. Mr. Andrews. Call him what you will. My point is, why would a reverend need a handgun in the first place?”

  “The answer to that is painfully clear if you look at the events of the other night!”

  “Maybe. But why? Cousin R is an awful rig and everybody knows it. But all he seemed to want was the girl back again. He’s never tried to kill anybody before, has he? We know him pretty well. But we don’t know the preacher. Who is he, anyway? What was his real reason for coming down here, where there isn’t another of his kind for fifty miles around? Who might he be running from? Or hiding from? Who are his enemies? Who are his friends, for that matter? You’re a newspaperman, editor, you know better than I do what’s going on with the Negro element in the big cities this summer. Unlawful agitations and rioting and such. How do we know that the preacher wasn’t sent here to provoke an incident? How do we know the girl wasn’t sent here to help him? They’re both from Canada, aren’t they? Or claim to be.”

  “Mason, let me get this straight. Are you seriously suggesting that Walt Andrews and Claire LaRiviere are in collusion? That he arranged for her to come here to the Kingdom and take up residence at the parsonage so he could shoot Resolvèd’s finger off and stage a racial episode?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, editor, because I don’t know All I’m saying is that this preacher is a mighty mysterious customer and I’d like to find out a few more things about him before I come to any conclusions.”

  “Is that why you asked him if he sleeps in his study and demanded that he prove his ‘credibility’?”

  “Oh,” Mason said, chuckling. “I see. I see what the story is. He come a-crying to you over that, did he? The truth is, that was Zack’s idea, which I’m sure he’d tell you himself if he wasn’t off having one of his spells this A. of M. No, editor, we just wanted to know a little more about who it is we’re supposed to be protecting here. That’s all. There are just a few more little details we need to check, and then I think we’ll be cleaning up this whole incident. By the end of the week at the latest, editor.”

  Mason laid down his cigar in a big green ashtray. “Editor,” he said, “I want to tell you something, and I hope you won’t think I’m out of line, because all I mean it as is friendly advice. It goes back to what I said about outsiders and strangers. Sooner or later, the new reverend will drift along the way most strangers who come here do. But I and you, now, we’ll very probably be here for a good long while to come, God willing. So I and you, we ought to make every effort to get along with each other. Don’t you think?”

  “I think you can go to hell in a handbasket, Mason.”

  And on that unequivocal note, the interview ended.

  “Falling water is good water to fish, James. Run ahead and ask your mother to wrap up a couple of Spam sandwiches in waxed paper and stick them in a paper bag for us. We’ll peddle a few ads this afternoon
, and then we’ll see what the brook trout are doing up at Red Rocks.”

  We were standing on the iron bridge looking down into the swift clean river, now dropping again after the big rain of a couple of days ago. The water was still higher than usual, but falling fast and clarifying itself by the hour. We could see all the way to the pebbly bottom, even in the deep amber stretch next to the granite abutment.

  It was like my unpredictable father to take part of a day off to go fishing in the middle of what was turning into the biggest story of his career. No doubt he wanted to get away from everything briefly and get a fresh perspective. But also he wanted to fish for brook trout with me just for the sake of fishing. That is how my father was. Always, to him, as to Kinnesons stretching all the way back to Charles I, trout fishing was no mere recreation but a serious avocation. Dad rarely went out of the village at any time in the spring or summer without first stashing his fly rod and hip boots in the trunk of the car, as I still do to this day.

  We spent the next few hours riding the steep, twisty back roads of the county from one small store and four-corner filling station and rundown sawmill to the next. The countryside was vibrant with early blue asters and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans and the air was fragrant with second cuttings of hay down and drying, and no sooner were we under way than my father launched into one of his epic monologues, which he sustained between stops all afternoon—a marvelous spoken essay delivered in the same harsh tone he used to address everyone from me to George Aiken and ranging over every conceivable subject that interested him, from major league baseball to the intricacies of selling ads.

  “You can always get something on your ad accounts without pressing your customers unduly hard, James, ff you can’t get two dollars, get one. If you can’t get one, get fifty cents. Get a quarter if you have to, and I often have, but get something, however little, and accept it gladly, because that way your accounts will stay open and your paper will stay afloat.”

  Yet time and again my father kept circling back to his inconclusive interview with Mason White earlier that day, to my brother’s cavalier attitude toward his job, and to his own frustration over a story he couldn’t seem to get a handle on.

  “Let’s go fishing,” he said finally.

  We left the De Soto on a hilltop a quarter of a mile above Whiskeyjack Kittredge’s place and cut down across a brushy pasture to the Upper Kingdom. Here the Kingdom was more brook than river, though easily twice as big as our little burn in the gore. It was about thirty feet across in most spots, and its bed was jumbled with big pink granite boulders breaking up the current into ideal feeding spots for the colorful wild squaretails my father so prized.

  We worked our way slowly upstream through the woods, fishing with a cast of three wet flies, like our Scottish ancestors. My father fished one pool, I fished the next, and he fished the one after that, leapfrogging our way up into the gorge under a metallic blue sky and bright afternoon sun that should have been far too harsh for trout to feed in but for some reason, maybe because the water was falling, wasn’t.

  At thirteen, though I tended to cast too far to manage my flies properly, I considered myself to be a first-rate fisherman. I knew just how to hook a fish by watching for the gold-and-bronze flash as it struck, then hesitating a split second before lifting the tip of my rod and simultaneously drawing back the line with my left hand so that the fish all but hooked itself. Once the trout was on I hardly ever horsed it in too fast anymore, or gave it too much slack. Yet when we fished together, my father consistently caught more brook trout and larger brook trout than I did. How come? I wanted to know.

  “You fish a lot of water I don’t bother with,” he told me. “And you change flies too often.”

  It was true that I did change patterns frequently, partly because I loved to open up my leather-covered fly book, with its soft gray wool dividers, and admire the bright flies with wonderful names inside. My father, on the other hand, stuck with a Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear, a Royal Coachman, and for a lead fly, after the first of August, a red and yellow grasshopper, claiming that the trout would hit these if they would hit anything and that while other fishermen were fiddling with their flies he was catching fish. But there was more than that to my father’s expertise on a trout stream. Unlike Charlie and me, he never seemed to hurry, yet he always knew when he had fished a pool thoroughly enough to attract a fish if one was there. For Charles Kinneson, Sr., read a trout stream the way Cousin Elijah proofread the Monitor. Never to this day have I known a man who knew so much about brook trout and where they lived as my father. He showed me how to dip my hand into the water from time to time in order to discover cool pockets indicating hidden spring holes where trout liked to lie in hot weather, how to fish an otherwise impenetrable alleyway of alders by floating my flies down the leafy corridor on a chip of wood, then flicking them off just above a suspected lair, how to open a fish with a single quick slit of my jackknife and examine its stomach to see what it had been eating, how to keep trout fresh by lining my creel with damp moss and wild mint leaves. Yet Dad refused to fish in the wind, because he said fishing should be fun, not work!

  Around six o’clock, up at the Red Rocks, where the Kingdom was no more than a shallow stream running over a long chute of dark maroon granite exposed by the glacier, we cleaned our fish. Dad looked as immaculate as when we’d started out, though as usual I had stepped in over each boot and fallen down in the alders more times than I could count. We scrubbed our hands thoroughly in the coarse white sand and gravel, cut up the bank through tall fir woods and down through the summery mixed hard- and softwoods, thick with hobblebush and moose maple, my father walking faster at fifty-five than I could comfortably keep up with at thirteen, and out into the Kittredges’ disused browning hayfields toward the car. There we unpacked the supper Mom had put up and ate it sitting at the base of a great granite boulder, dropped on the hilltop ten thousand years ago by the ice sheet—a marvelous vantage spot overlooking most of Kingdom County and a hundred miles of the Green Mountains, all the way from deep into Canada to Camel’s Hump in central Vermont.

  Instead of Spam sandwiches, supper turned out to be roast pork sandwiches on homemade bread, two slabs of Mom’s no-egg wonder chocolate cake, and two long-keeping apples she’d saved through the previous winter and spring. It was as pretty a spot as any in the county, as pretty as any I have ever seen anywhere, and for a time we ate in silence, enjoying our food and the sweeping vista, enjoying just being together after our great afternoon of fishing.

  I suspected that my father was still thinking about the trouble in the Common, though. I could almost feel him brooding over it as the sun gently lowered itself behind the Canadian peaks far to the north and the sky turned a fiery summer orange all the way up and down the long jagged chain of mountains.

  “James,” Dad announced suddenly when we’d gotten to the apples, “a newspaperman runs up against situations like this off and on throughout his career. No matter how many ways you come at this kind of story, it resembles nothing so much as a seamless globe with all the information you need sealed inside where you can’t get at it. The longer and harder you work without turning up a lead, the more important the story becomes to you. Finally your entire career as a newspaperman seems to depend on finding some sort of seam in that globe.”

  “What,” I said, “does a newspaperman do?”

  “It’s very simple. He looks for the story behind the story.”

  I didn’t understand. “How can he do that until he finds a seam?”

  “I’ll tell you how. A newspaperman has to remember what his job is and what it isn’t. A newspaperman’s job is not to solve crimes. His job is to write exactly what’s happening. Or, as in this sort of case, exactly what isn’t happening.”

  Dad looked off at the mountains. “Did I ever tell you why I left Kingdom County when I was eighteen?”

  I said no. I knew that Dad had worked for several years in Boston before he met my mother. But I didn’t k
now why he’d gone there.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s time I did. When I was a boy, there wasn’t a moment when I wasn’t positive that I knew more than my father did about everything under the sun. Whatever Dad said, I disagreed with him. One morning at breakfast when I was eighteen and just a month or so away from leaving for Dartmouth College, we got into a terrible argument. It was over the use of the so-called Harvard comma, of all things—the last comma in a parallel series of items in a sentence. For instance: “The deer leaped the fence and ran through two fields, a patch of woods, and a river.’ The Harvard comma in that sentence comes after ‘woods,’ and the debate was over whether it was grammatically necessary or not. Dad said it was, I said it wasn’t. And my father was so sure he was right that he had the temerity to smile down into his oatmeal!

  “Well, James, that smile was too much for my pride. I marched upstairs and packed a valise, put the clips I’d saved from stories I’d begun printing in the Monitor inside a big envelope and packed that too, and came back down and left without a word.

  “I took the first train south out of the Common and didn’t set foot in Kingdom County again for six years. But the truth of the matter is that the Harvard comma wasn’t the real reason I left.”

  “What was? That you didn’t want to go to Dartmouth?”

  “No, I’d been looking forward to going to college. The real reason I left home was the girl who lived right here on the Kittredge place.”

  My father pointed far out across the twilit countryside at the white dome of Russia, gleaming brightly in the afterglow high up in the gore above our farmhouse. “When I was about seventeen, I used to hike up there on Sunday afternoons with old Charles I’s brass pirate’s telescope. At a prearranged time, a girl I knew who lived on this farm would come up here and stand on this boulder and wave. I’d look over at her through that spyglass, and that was our date. The Christmas of my senior year at the Academy I secretly bought her a pair of Montgomery Ward binoculars so that she could look back at me.”