A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Well, he can’t have seen her very often since coming here.”

  “What is it you’re saying? There’s some sort of new evidence that he got the girl pregnant?”

  “No, not really. I don’t know. I don’t want to get into it just yet. I just want to be prepared to show in court that even if he did succumb to the temptation, he didn’t necessarily kill her.”

  “Didn’t necessarily kill her! I can’t and won’t believe that there’s a shred of truth to these trumped-up charges.”

  “Neither can I, sweetheart,” Mom told Charlie.

  Charlie stood up. “Who wants to go for a dip? We aren’t going to have many more warm nights, or days either, for swimming.”

  “Fall’s coming and that’s a fact,” Dad said. “The swamp maples along the river between here and the Common are already starting to turn red.”

  “I think fall’s my very favorite season,” Mom said in a musing voice.

  Charlie laughed. “You say that about every season. ‘Spring’s my favorite, summer’s my favorite, fall’s my very favorite season!’”

  “Well, suppose I do? They can all be my favorite. Right now, fall’s my favorite.”

  “This fall won’t be, Ruthie,” Charlie said, heading inside to change into his swimsuit. “I’ll guarantee it. Win or lose, we’re in for the nastiest trial in the history of Kingdom County and maybe the whole state. This’ll make the Gilson debacle look like a traffic court case. And that, Editor Kinneson, is—”

  “—the beginning and the end of it,” my father grunted without even bothering to rebuke my brother for calling Mom by her first name.

  As Charlie had predicted, it increasingly looked as though in order to prove that Reverend Andrews didn’t commit the murder, my brother would have to prove who did—a job that at best would be difficult, given the slender list of suspects and Judge Allen’s refusal to grant his request for a change of venue, though I must admit that I was secretly pleased by that decision, since it meant that I might be able to see the trial myself.

  One morning in early September I started high school. To my puzzlement, many of my classmates seemed actually to have shrunk over the summer. But I soon realized that contrary to all my expectations I had actually grown, shot up three inches during the past three months.

  For the first few days of school Reverend Andrews’ upcoming murder trial, now formally scheduled to begin on the Friday of Harvest Festival weekend, was all the kids could seem to talk about. In the hall before classes, again at lunch, yet again at soccer practice, they pumped me for all I was worth both because I was Charlie’s brother and because I had been Nathan Andrews’ closest friend. But beyond the generally known facts that Nat was going to school back in Montreal and living with his grandmother, and Reverend Andrews was still in jail in Memphremagog, I knew little more than the rest of the kids.

  Once or twice I went so far as to start a letter to Nat. But what under the sun could I say—“Your dad’s doing fine in jail, wish you were here”? I rationalized my failure to write by falling back upon that oldest and lamest of excuses, telling myself that, what with classes and homework and soccer and daily chores both at the shop and on the gool, I simply didn’t have time.

  16

  Kingdom County’s Harvest Festival traditionally fell on the first weekend in October. It began on Friday, a local school holiday, and was held principally on the village common. There in a final informal celebration of the short northern growing season, farmers and gardeners from the Canadian border all the way south to St. Johnsbury brought every kind of produce that could be raised locally to sell out of the backs of pickups or from makeshift stands and benches set up under the tall yellowing elms.

  In the fall of 1952, for the first time in more than twenty years, my mother would not be taking vegetables to the common on Harvest Friday, though when I got out of school on Thursday afternoon for the long holiday weekend I found two Harvest Figures waiting for me in the dooryard—the pumpkin-headed straw men emblematic of autumn in the Kingdom, and which to this day you will see sprawled in barnyard wheelbarrows, propped nonchalantly against mailboxes, and lounging incongruously on porch roofs, leering out at passers-by with macabre or comical grimaces.

  On Saturday morning the Harvest Figures would be judged by a panel of local dignitaries, who would then present awards in several categories that afternoon.

  My mother was the only person in our family with artistic ability, and in the fall of 1952 her figures were especially wonderful, a roly-poly old farmer in overalls and a battered straw hat, sitting in a chair and watching his wife-toiling over my grandfather James’ wooden cider press. In the farmer’s crooked arm was a half-full glass gallon of hard cider, and carved on his pumpkin face was an obviously tipsy smile, while Mrs. Pumpkin-head looked on with pursed lips. On a cardboard placard around the straw woman’s neck my mother had carefully stenciled the words NEW ENGLAND GOTHIC.

  At the time, I wondered how Mom could fool with Harvest Figures on the eve of the biggest murder trial in the history of the county. Now I realize that she wanted to make our fall as normal as possible, but such sweet and familiar acts just served to underscore the bizarre twist our otherwise happy lives had taken.

  Harvest Friday dawned crisp and clear, with a coverlet of October mist over the river, and the hardwood ridges around the village as beautifully red and gold as I could ever remember. As my folks and I started out to the village the sun rose above Lord Hollow, blood-red and magnified to ten times its normal size, and for the first time that fall I remembered that tomorrow was opening day of partridge season. Ordinarily, Dad and Charlie and I would be planning to slip up into the brilliantly colored hills with our shotguns. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow, no doubt, we would still be at the trial, and neither Dad nor I mentioned a word about bird hunting, or even paused to assess the river for fall fly fishing as we crossed the red iron bridge. We passed the empty parsonage without a word and turned silently south past the Academy, toward the courthouse, where a small crowd had already gathered on the sidewalk.

  “Hit ’em hard, Editor K,” Plug Johnson called out. “Give ’em hell!”

  But Mom and Dad and I went immediately to the small side door on the ground level, which Charlie opened just wide enough for us to squeeze through, then shut quickly behind us.

  “What’s the news?” my father said immediately.

  “As Farlow would say, bad and good,” Charlie told us as we started upstairs to the courtroom. He was wearing the gray Brooks Brothers suit that he had lent to Resolvèd for our cousin’s poaching trial last spring. His wing-tip shoes were polished, his white shirt was starched stiff, and he wore a conservative dark necktie, and although his sharp black eyes looked very tired, he also looked more determined than I had ever seen him.

  We stopped on the landing at the head of the stairs. “There’s still no doubt in my rhind that there’s only one way I’m ever going to convince a jury that Walt Andrews didn’t murder that girl, and that is to find out who did. That’s the bad news.”

  “So what’s the good news?” Dad said.

  Charlie ruffled the back of my head and shook his own. “The good news, I’m afraid, is that Vermont has outlawed the death penalty.”

  Except for Athena Allen, who was sitting directly behind the defense table, the courtroom was still empty when we walked in. Sure enough, Farlow Blake had left three sheets of paper with KINNESON printed on them taped to the backs of three chairs beside Athena.

  Soon after we were seated the tall steam radiators under the windows clanked on. Julia Hefner bustled in with her stenographer’s notebook. Farlow Blake appeared with a great glass pitcher of ice water and began filling the glasses at the defense and prosecutor’s tables and on the judge’s bench. Mason White, dressed in a brand-new flashy seersucker suit, appeared with Zachariah Barrows and an ordinary-looking middle-aged man in a plain gray suit and matching gray tie, whom I didn’t recognize. As they sat down together at the prosecutor
’s table, I noticed that Charlie was staring hard at the stranger and grinning. It was not a pleasant grin, but reminded me of the way my brother had grinned at the French Canadian ringer who had tried to bean him in the big grudge game back on Old Home Day.

  Instead of his shiny old bottle-green jacket, Zack too was wearing a new suit, a pin-striped affair, with what must have been the last red zinnia from his flower garden in the lapel. And although his nose was as crimson as the bright fall flower, when he nodded over at Charlie and said good morning he sounded sober and alert. His white hair was cut neatly and carefully parted in the middle. Projecting from his left ear was a large flesh-colored button.

  “Mister Baby Johnson, James!” my father said in a low voice. “The old codger’s gotten himself a hearing aid!”

  “Well, Zachariah,” Charlie said, “are you ready to do battle this morning in the best interests of the county and the law of the land?”

  “My boy,” Zack said, “I’ve forgotten more about the law of the land than you’ll ever know.”

  “What good does it do you, then?” Charlie shot back.

  Zack laughed, and the stranger looked over and smiled a little tightlipped smile. But I didn’t understand how the lawyers could joke this way before a murder trial. Within an hour they would be at one another’s throats, and somehow their banter seemed callous, when a man’s fate was hanging in the balance.

  At eight o’clock on the dot, Farlow threw open the courtroom doors. Spectators began filing in, filling first the downstairs chairs, then trooping upstairs to the gallery where, a little more than three months ago, Nat and I had hidden to watch the arraignment of the Paris Revue entourage. Still, there were not enough seats to hold the huge crowd, and people lined up two and three deep along the walls. They were quiet, even the out-of-town reporters, and acted more like spectators coming into a courtroom just before a jury was to return a crucial verdict. There was no jostling for position. Like me, most of the people did not quite seem to believe that any of this could be happening in Kingdom County.

  No one was turned away. The courtroom had been built for a maximum of three hundred people, but now held half again that number. Yet except for a few coughs and the shuffling of a few feet, it was as still as when my father and mother and I had first entered it.

  At eight-fifteen Farlow ushered in thirty-six potential jurors, who sat in a reserved section near the front of the room across the aisle from us.

  Reverend Andrews was already halfway to the defense table when I saw him. He was dressed in the same dark suit and dark tie he had preached in, taller by inches than the two deputies he walked between, looking dignified and even aloof, although his wrists were handcuffed. He paused at the end of the defense table and remained standing while Pine Benson unlocked the cuffs. Totally ignoring Pine fiddling nervously with the cuffs, he looked from right to left and then unhurriedly up to the gallery, taking in the entire room in one long appraising glance—a man so entirely accustomed to being at ease with large groups of people that for a moment I actually thought he was going to say something to them. He looked at the jurors. He looked back at our side of the room and noticed me, and as soon as his hands were free he gave me his small two-fingered salute.

  Suddenly the buzzer over the judge’s chambers went off.

  “All rise,” Farlow Blake said loudly, and Judge Forrest Allen strode in from his chambers, looking neither right nor left.

  “Be seated, please,” Farlow said after the judge had sat down. “Those that have a place to sit down at, that is. The rest may remain standing.”

  And on that nearly comic note began the ultimate adjudication of the Kingdom County Affair. All I could think of, however, was the last thing my brother had said to us on the landing outside the courtroom door: that the only good news that morning was that Vermont had no death penalty.

  Judge Allen began the empaneling by asking if any of the jurors were in any way personally acquainted with Reverend Andrews; several put up their hands and were automatically excused. By the time the judge had finished his general questions, including one asking whether anyone had any doubt about his or her ability to render an impartial decision in a case involving a Negro defendant (no hands went up in response to this query), only nineteen of the original thirty-six prospective jurors remained.

  Now it was Zack’s turn to weed out the field. He used only two of his six peremptory challenges. After a whispered consultation with the middle-aged stranger beside him, he disqualified a retired history professor from the state university and a yard foreman at the American Heritage Mill with a reputation as a labor union advocate. Now the pool had been reduced to less than half of its original size.

  The first person Charlie questioned was a young attendant at the Memphremagog Socony station, a man named Rip Coleman. “Have you ever been in the service, Mr. Coleman?” Charlie asked.

  Rip Coleman said yes, he’d gotten back from a tour of duty as a marine in Korea just three months ago. After a brief pause, my brother inquired if there had been any Negroes in his company.

  “More than enough,” Rip Coleman said.

  A murmur ran through the room as Charlie immediately challenged for cause and Judge Allen upheld his challenge. But when my brother asked another veteran, an older man who’d served in World War II, if he’d formed any opinions about Negroes or other minority races in the service, the stranger at the prosecutor’s table leaned over and whispered something to Zack, who quickly got to his feet to object.

  “That question is redundant, your honor. You’ve already made that inquiry, and no one felt that the defendant’s color would be in any way a problem.”

  “Including Rip Coleman, who’s just been disqualified from sitting on this jury for making a blatantly prejudiced remark!” Charlie said angrily.

  “All he said was—militarily speaking, I presume—that—” Zack started to say.

  “All he said was that there were more than enough Negroes in his company!” Charlie said loudly. “That’s pure bigotry, Zack, and you know it.”

  The judge brought down his gavel hard. “Gentlemen, race is not to be an issue in this case.”

  “I wholeheartedly agree that it shouldn’t be, your honor,” Charlie said. “But the reality of the matter is that in some cases it is. To refresh your memory, I’d like to ask Mrs. Hefner to read Rip Coleman’s—”

  “My memory does not need refreshing, thank you, Mr. Kinneson. Matters of race, creed, and color are not, never have been, and never will be an issue in any courtroom I preside over. I will settle this issue once and for all, now and forever. Once more, is there anyone left on this panel of prospective jurors who has any doubts at all about his or her ability to arrive at a fair and impartial verdict based on the evidence of this case and the evidence alone? If so, I’ll excuse you without further question.”

  The judge waited. Finally, a man from Pond in the Sky, a logger of Portuguese descent, stood up and left the room. It was, I suppose, a courageous thing to do, although at the time I did not know his reason. Later that week my father interviewed him, and to everyone’s considerable surprise, the logger said that his grandfather had always claimed to be part black, and he thought that he might be prejudiced on behalf of Reverend Andrews!

  “Your honor,” Charlie said, after he’d gone, “I would still like to question some individual jurors on this delicate matter. This case is too important—”

  “Come forward, sir!” the judge barked. “Mr. Barrows, you may approach the bench also.”

  For the next two or three minutes, Charlie and Zack and Judge Allen conferred in low, heated voices. I looked inquiringly at my father, who wrote on his pad, “Judge A trying to keep nasty business from becoming even nastier. Issue here is murder.”

  Meanwhile, Charlie made one final impassioned whispered plea. But the judge just shook his head, his silvery hair looking as icy as February hoarfrost on Jay Peak, and motioned impatiently for the attorneys to return to their tables. Although
I didn’t completely understand what was happening, it seemed to me that, while trying to be totally fair himself, the judge had tied my brother’s hands—or one of them, anyway—behind his back. Maybe race wasn’t an issue in the murder itself; but what about potential jurors, who despite what they themselves might think, could be prejudiced? Did the judge just expect that they would all admit biases that they might not even recognize? Or did he expect them to suspend these biases during the trial? It seemed to me that Forrest Allen was being downright wrongheaded.

  One thing was clear, though. However discouraged he might be with Reverend Andrews’ case, Charlie was going to do everything within his power to make sure that the man received a fair trial.

  The final jury of twelve members and two alternates was composed of three farmers, three housewives, an independent lumberman, two mill workers, a Northern Vermont Telephone Company installer, a young woman teacher from Pond in the Sky, a sales clerk from the IGA in Memphremagog, a retired Boston and Montreal Railroad engineer, and a traveling licensed practical nurse who gave physical exams at the Academy once a year and had a reputation as a no-nonsense individual who could summon in Painless Doc Harrison and have him yank out your appendix if you so much as batted an eyelash at her. Of the jurors, I knew only the traveling nurse and the telephone installer, a man in his thirties named Yves St. Pierre, who was an expert deer hunter and frequently had his picture in the Monitor with a big buck.

  The trial began at exactly ten o’clock with the opening statement of the prosecution. Ordinarily, Zack would have spent a good half minute fussing with his papers. This morning, he appeared neither hungover nor confused as he stepped forward to address the jury. In the same orotund style with which he had declaimed the Gettysburg Address each Fourth of July for the past forty years from the base of the statue of Ethan Allen, he boomed out, “Your honor, officers of the court, my young brother-at-the-bar, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. It is a signal privilege to speak before you on this glorious morning in the ‘season of mists and yellow fruitfulness,’ as the immortal Bard put it.”