A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Just before leaving Memphremagog with the general, Reverend Andrews had met with a delegation from the session, who hoped to reinstate him as minister of the United Church. Dad said he’d listened to them from his hospital bed with a polite but slightly amused expression, then courteously, yet with that same undercurrent of irony so characteristic of the man, told them that even if he were inclined to resume his old job on his own behalf (the clear implication, Dad said, was that he wasn’t), it was obvious to him now that uprooting Nathan and bringing him to Kingdom County had not been the right thing to do. Plainly, Nat had never been happy in Vermont; and although Dad agreed with him, and had never for a moment thought Reverend Andrews would accept the session’s offer, he always said that next to Claire LaRiviere’s death, the saddest consequence of the Kingdom County Affair was that Reverend Andrews’ desire to locate in a place where he and his son could be happy together had been so cruelly thwarted. Probably it was simply too late in their lives to try such an experiment Reverend Andrews told him, in Vermont or anywhere else. But there is no question in my mind that Dad, with his own iron determination to be a good father, nursed a special anger for those individuals who actively or passively made it impossible for his friend Walter Andrews to raise his son in “God’s Kingdom.”

  As for the rest of the congregation and the residents of Kingdom County as a whole, I believe that most of them were secretly more relieved than disappointed that Reverend Andrews decided not to remain. What, after all, could he ever have been to us but a reminder of that terrible summer in our lives and our failure to help him and stand by him when we should have?

  Of course my father wasn’t about to let the matter drop, throughout the fall he continued to unseal that metaphorical globe, unearthing unsavory additional bits and pieces of information every week—though to his endless frustration, Dad never was able to determine beyond the level of rumor who besides Zack contributed to the “private fund” to pay Sigurd Moulton’s legal fees—who, incidentally, after Elijah’s attempt to kill Reverend Andrews, never did appeal the verdict, or return to Kingdom County, either, so far as I know. Dad always said that he strongly suspected the whole idea to import an out-of-town lawyer was not Zack’s, but Mason White’s, but there was no way to prove that, either, especially since White had spent the past month trying to ingratiate himself with both Dad and Charlie now that he saw the handwriting on the wall for Zack. But with the presidential, state, and local elections to cover, in addition to the constant round of village meetings and school events and regular news items, and the time-consuming job of breaking in Julia Hefner on the linotype, my father had been far too busy to devote more than a fraction of his time to the ugly aftermath of the Affair, anyway.

  Over in the village, things had pretty much returned to normal by Election Day. Armand St. Onge hired Ida LaMott to go through the Common Hotel scrubbing every vacant room in preparation for the downcountry deer hunters who would be flocking in at the end of the week. The leaves had all blown off the tall elms on the common, and the town had its customary battened-down fall look. Two candidates for the vacant minister’s job had come to preach and be interviewed on two separate Sundays; but the old-guard Presbyterian faction wanted one, and the ex-Congos wanted the other, so, running true to form, their idea of a good workable compromise was to hire neither.

  Reverend Andrews’ things were still in the parsonage, though he’d written to my father from Ottawa to say he expected to drive down to pick them up some time before the snow flew, and to “clear up one more small matter,” though he didn’t say what this matter was.

  The single most maddening remaining mystery, as far as the Kinneson family was concerned, was Elijah’s motivation. Charlie continued to maintain that the old sexton had acted from a pure bigotry that he’d kept secret until the very end, but Dad said there was far more to it than that, and that though Elijah had, with great subtlety and malevolence, used the racial biases of people like Mason White and Zack Barrows and the many members of the congregation and community who would certainly have come to the defense and support of a white man in a similar predicament, he did not believe that bigotry alone could account for Elijah’s intense personal hatred of Reverend Andrews.

  One turn of events caught me totally by surprise. Elijah had left a will naming my father as his sole heir, and at Welcome’s request, Dad had sold the sexton’s cottage in the village to him and Resolvèd for “a dollar and a consideration”—the consideration, according to my father, that it would be worth nearly anything to get my outlaw cousins out of our backyard, though how they would adjust to village life, and how the village would adjust to them, remained to be seen.

  Election day dawned cold, with a solid gray Canadian sky. Charlie had gone duck hunting with Judge Allen up on the south bay of the big lake—he couldn’t campaign once the polls opened, anyway—and my father pulled in from Dixville just as I finished filling the kitchen woodbox.

  “I’ll tell you something, mister,” he said. “It’s going to snow before this day is over.”

  I thought I’d smelled snow coming when I first stepped into the woodshed that morning—that faint, spent-shotgun-shell scent over the familiar old redolence of dry seasoned maple and cherry and yellow birch.

  “What have you got going on after school today?” Dad said.

  “Same thing I always do. Sweep up over at the Monitor, come home and chop wood, do my homework. Sound exciting?”

  “This boy has his smart mouth on,” my father said. “Well, never mind your chores for one night. Let’s you and me sneak up on the ridge behind the house and see if we can scare up a partridge or two, if it isn’t snowing too hard by then. This’ll be the last chance we’ll have to go for birds before deer hunting starts.

  “Put a couple of Spam sandwiches and a apple in a paper sack for us, will you, Ruth? We probably won’t be back much before dark.”

  The snow held off, and at three o’clock I met Dad at the Monitor and we walked home quickly, past the desolate-looking parsonage, over the red iron bridge above the cold river, along the gool, and into our dooryard—where we were greeted by three clangorous crows from Ethan Allen Kinneson, Resolvèd’s huge old fighting cock, now parading back and forth in front of half a dozen of my mother’s Banty laying hens under the refurbished picture of the brook trout on the side of our barn.

  “Resolvèd brought him down earlier this afternoon,” Mom told us. “He said that now that Ethan’s stopped fighting, and he and Welcome are moving into the village, this would be a better place for him to live.”

  “Great,” my father said. “I always hoped to open a retirement home for superannuated roosters.”

  My mother smiled. “That’s not all the boys brought down this afternoon, Charles. Look what’s in here.”

  We followed Mom into the other side of the house. She opened the parlor door and switched on the old-fashioned overhead light. Gazing solemnly at us from the wall above my mother’s piano was a framed daguerreotype of a fierce-looking, dark-featured young woman in a plain black dress.

  “Welcome said he didn’t have a proper place to hang his mother in the cottage in the village,” Mom said. “He asked if we’d keep Replacement Mari down here.”

  “Mister Baby Johnson!” said my father. “Enough’s enough! Let’s go bird hunting, James.”

  Just as we got ready to leave, Charlie roared into the dooryard in his woody with his limit of ducks: a mallard with a wonderful iridescent green head, a golden-eye, and two male wood ducks as colorful as tropical parrots. Exchanging his camouflaged hat for a red one, he joined us.

  “I would think, James,” my father said, “that Kingdom County’s next prosecuting attorney might want to spend at least some part of Election Day over in the village.”

  “What would I do over there, Jim? I voted this morning as soon as the polls opened, saw my duty as a good citizen, and did it. Now I’ve just got to wait for the outcome like everybody else.”

  During th
e past month or so, my father and brother had gradually reverted to talking to each other via me again, and to arguing ferociously over all kinds of minor matters—politics, the weather, the King’s English. Two nights ago they had haggled into the wee hours over which was the better pastoral poem, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” or Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”!

  The events of the summer just past had brought them closer together for a time; but as I said at the start, Charles Kinneson, Sr., and Charles Kinneson, Jr., were simply too much alike to be easy with each other for very long.

  Now as we walked up the lane past Welcome’s and Resolvèd’s toward the remnants of my great-great-great-grandfather’s apple orchard, it felt ready to snow at any time. My cousins were evidently home. Black, pitchy smoke from the final remains of the barn they’d been burning for the last ten years was pouring from the stovepipe sticking horizontally out of the rear wall of the kitchen.

  “Some day, James, those crazy sons-of-bitches are going to burn themselves out of house and home,” my father said. “Tell your brother what we’ve got hanging down in the parlor.”

  When I then told Charlie how we’d inherited Replacement Mari’s portrait, he laughed his great booming laugh and said he’d seen the daguerreotype hanging in a cluttered upper chamber at our cousins’.

  “Sheepsnose,” my father said, changing the subject. He was looking at an ancient gnarled apple tree with a few oddly tapered bluish pearlike apples still clinging to its twisted branches. “Summer St. Lawrence. Alexander. Smokehouse. Over there by the stone wall is the last Scarlet Pippin I know of in these parts. This, James, is a Wolf River, you can make a small pie out of a single apple, they’re so big. Next fall, when I’ve got more time, I intend to write a column or two on old-fashioned apples while there’re still a few of them around to write about.”

  “Here we go again, Jimmy,” Charlie said. “More local history.”

  As we stopped to load our shotguns, my brother said, “What about Replacement Mari, anyway? Mad Charlie’s second wife, the gypsy? Was she crazy too?”

  “If she wasn’t to start out with, she got to be that way in a big hurry after her husband was carried off to the lunatic asylum,” Dad said. “Living up here with those three little boys and bringing them up to hate the great majority of humankind the way she did. Of course, none of it ever took with Welcome. He was an anomaly from the start. Your grandmother wouldn’t speak to Mari, you know. Mother always claimed to have second sight, and though she never said what she saw when she looked at Replacement Mari Kinneson, I don’t think it was a pretty sight.”

  “The summer of 1952, maybe,” Charlie said.

  “I doubt that, James,” my father said. “I still lay only about half of all that’s happened this summer to Elijah and Resolvèd’s door.”

  Walking three abreast about thirty feet apart, we skirted the quarry and crossed a brushy pasture overran with dead goldenrod, purple asters, faded pink steeplebush. Forty-four minutes later we came out at Russia, on the height of land where, in the spring and early summer, we had driven in my father’s De Soto to hear the Red Sox games. Charlie had three of his limit of four partridges and I’d shot one, in a beech grove halfway up the slope. My father had watched us shoot without comment.

  Now he looked out across the bleak gray countryside, at the far hill where the French Canadian girl had sat on the big boulder and, as a young man, Dad had looked over at her on Sunday afternoons through Charles I’s pirate spyglass while she looked back at him with the Montgomery Ward binoculars he’d bought her.

  “Everywhere I go this fall, James, I get the sense of a pervasive relief that the trouble’s over at last and now we can go about our business as usual. Well, dammit we can’t go about business as usual. We won’t ever go about business as usual again until we know the truth, and not just what happened, but why. Take it out and look at it so it won’t happen again. Why didn’t more folks come to the defense of Walter Andrews? He was a good and decent man, never anything else. Was it fear that motivated them? The kind of fear that caused my mother and father to forbid me to keep company with that French girl? If it was fear, fear of what, exactly? Of Negroes? Of outsiders, strangers? Of change? I won’t stop until I’m satisfied that I understand this entire Affair.”

  “Nobody’s without some responsibility for what happened,” Charlie said. “A hundred times a day I think if I hadn’t written that idiotic letter for Resolvèd, the whole mess would never have happened.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Dad said. “It was here all the time, I think, waiting to happen. It’s everyplace.”

  I had wandered over to the edge of the clearing and was looking off down at the gool. “What’s that down there?” I said.

  “Down where, buddy?” Charlie said.

  “There. Welcome’s silo. It looks like smoke.”

  Charlie and Dad walked over and peered down where I was pointing. There was no question about it. An ominous twist of coal-black smoke was rising up from the tilted silo beside my cousins’ place.

  “Jesum Crow!” I shouted. “Cousin W’s silo is on fire!”

  Under ordinary circumstances, it was a half-hour walk up the road through the gore to Russia and a fifteen-minute walk back down. But I’m sure that I made it to Welcome’s that November afternoon in under ten minutes. As I pounded into his cluttered dooryard, flames were shooting out of the top of the silo. Welcome was standing near the watering trough, rubbing his hands like a man warming himself at a campfire. Resolvèd was leaning against the shell of the old Model A nearby, sipping on a bottle of Old Duke.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” Welcome said. “How’s high school going?”

  “Jesus!” I shouted. “Jesus, Welcome! Your silo’s on fire!”

  “We know that,” he said. “Quite a little blaze, isn’t she? I imagine,” he continued, looking up at the leaden sky and tipping me a cunning wink, “that she’s visible to those on high.”

  “On high?”

  “Saucering over the firmament.”

  “Aren’t you afraid your house’ll catch on fire?”

  “No, goddamn it!” Resolvèd said angrily. “We’re afraid she won’t!”

  I was flabbergasted, but far greater surprises were yet to come. For just as my brother and father came into the dooryard, the entire wooden framework of the silo collapsed. Inside, enveloped in flames, stood the tallest automobile totem of Welcome’s illustrious career. It was a good thirty cars in height, nearly as tall as the silo itself had been. On the tiptop, spouting flames from its crushed roof, was the white armored Brink’s vehicle used as the getaway vehicle in last summer’s bank robbery!

  “‘Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,’” Welcome began to recite. “Do you know that one, Jimmy?”

  “Mister,” said my father. He shook his head. “Mister Baby Johnson!”

  “Stand away, boys,” Welcome said cheerily.

  “TIM-BER!” roared Resolvèd.

  No sooner was the warning out of his mouth than the fiery column of cars toppled over, the Brink’s car first, crashing through the roof of my cousins’ house and burying itself in the cellar where Resolvèd had held his cockfights and Welcome had kept his homemade wine, where Mad Charlie had hidden runaway slaves and his father James had stored arms and powder for the Fenian invasions of Canada.

  “What the frig you crazy outlaws doing now?” said a familiar voice behind us.

  Spinning around, I found myself staring at Frenchy LaMott.

  “Pay attention, Frenchy,” Welcome said sternly. “You’re witnessing the end of an era.”

  “End of something, all right,” Frenchy agreed.

  To me he said, “Say, Kin’son, who you think I see out front of Christly minister’s house short while ago? Your color friend from Montreal and his father, that who, packing stuff in trailer. You want to see ’em before they go, best shag you ass right down. Look like they in pretty big hurry to get going, by Christ!”


  “‘I traveled mainly by night, guiding myself by the stars and by some instinct that told me where north and sanctuary lay. I kept mainly to the thick woods, leaving just enough of a trail to lure the murderer Satan Smithfield to his just fate at the hands of the man who would turn out to be my great friend and mentor, Charles Kinneson. . . .’”

  Reverend Andrews paused, but his resonant voice still seemed to hang on the frigid air of the parsonage study, like his breath, which I could see with each word. The house seemed even colder than the outdoors. Nat and I stood by the window where, in midsummer, Resolvèd had looked in and seen my friend and Claire on the couch where Charlie sat now. My father stood near the desk. Except for the couch, a chair, the desk and Pliny’s great Ecclesiastical History open on it, the room was bare.

  “So,” Reverend Andrews said to us, “even then as a young man, he was never anything but a survivor. Pliny, I mean. Then and always. I felt it the first time I heard his story. And I simply couldn’t comprehend why a man so positive in everything he did, so affirmative about life, a man who had educated himself in the classics, escaped out of slavery, built a wonderful school and written a wonderful book, and served with distinction in your state legislature—how such a man could possibly succumb to despair over a piano and a small-town dispute between two local religious factions and take his life with his own hands. It ran counter to everything I knew about him.”

  “But it was exactly that schism you referred to that caused Pliny’s suicide,” my father said. “Because the schism caused the falling-out between best friends. As for my grandfather, with the help of his gypsy wife, he was already more than half-crazy. Hell, he’d been half-crazy most of his life. Pliny’s suicide just drove him the rest of the way over the brink.”