A Stranger in the Kingdom
Page 50
“Of course,” Nat said. “Why wouldn’t I believe it? Moving on, what became of your racist sheriff?”
“Mason White? About the time Charlie ran for attorney general, Mason ran for the state legislature and lost, went back to being a full-time undertaker, then ran again and won. He retired from politics ten years ago, something of a laughingstock and a fairly wealthy man.”
Nat shrugged. “What about your dad?”
“Dad retired in the late sixties, after making sure that everyone knew where he stood on Vietnam. I’ve never known for sure how much he had to do with it, but it was right after a long private meeting he and George Aiken had together that Aiken announced on the Senate floor that we ought to just declare a victory there and get out. Dad thought we were dead wrong in Vietnam from the start. That didn’t make him many friends in these parts, but as he used to tell me, he wasn’t in the newspaper business to make friends.”
I hesitated. Then I said, “You know, every year before he retired, he wrote an editorial on the Affair. That’s how determined he was that we should never forget what happened here or let such a thing happen again.”
“He was a good man,” Nat said quietly.
It was the first completely unironical statement he’d made since he arrived, and I appreciated it.
“So was your father.”
“Yes,” Nat said thoughtfully. “He died there, you know.”
“Died where?”
“In Vietnam. He rejoined the service right after we went back to Canada, and died there in ’66.”
I hadn’t known, and I started to express my condolences, but Nat held up his hand and waved it impatiently, exactly as he’d done years ago to cut off a conversation he didn’t want to pursue. “He fell near the thick of the action, just as he’d have wanted it, no doubt, though I never did learn whether he was toting his Bible or his service revolver at the time—probably both. Unfortunately, we were somewhat estranged at the time. Like a good number of Canadians, I was inclined toward your father’s side of the issue.
“But I didn’t come back to hash over old times, Kinneson. Just to deliver the book. It’s getting late, eh? I’ve got an hour’s drive back to my motel and you’ve got a paper to get out.”
I stared at Pliny’s great book on my desk, and as I did, a wonderful idea came to me.
“Nat, to hell with the paper. You and I have a piece of unfinished business.”
“What do you mean, unfinished business?”
I stood up and put on my hunting jacket. “What I want to do’ll only take an hour—two at most. That’s a short time, compared to thirty-six years.”
“It’s ten degrees colder here than up in Montreal, Kinneson. This is insane. Probably the ground’s frozen already.”
Despite my wool hunting jacket I was cold, too, as we crossed the common and the B and M tracks and sneaked through the dark lumberyard of the American Heritage Mill. Then we were there.
As I’d hoped it would be, the far south window of the Academy locker room was unlocked. The place smelled strongly of liniment and sweat and the victories and defeats of fifty years and more. I led the way out through the gym, into the foyer and the redolence of chalk dust and old books, floor wax and uneasy anticipations. I set down the cardboard box I was carrying and took out my flashlight and ran it briefly across the trophy showcase.
“You shatter any of your big brother’s records?” Nat said.
“Not a one. I turned into a good soccer player and, thanks to your dad, a pretty fair country shortstop. You were the one who would have broken Charlie’s records.”
“We’ll never know,” Nat said. “Up these stairs, right?”
“Up these stairs.”
The door of the science classroom was unlocked, and there was just enough light filtering up from the street lamp below for us to make our way through the lab tables to the closet, which was also unlocked. The place reeked of formaldehyde. For a moment, I felt as though I was ten or eleven again and Charlie was showing me the thing for the first time.
In fact I hadn’t seen it for years, and I wasn’t entirely sure that it was still here. But it was, dangling from its slim pole in the light of the pocket flashlight like a forgotten prop left over from a Halloween party or some long-ago school play.
“I’d forgotten how small it was,” I said. “I’ve always thought of him as a big man.”
Nat grunted. “You were small when you saw him for the first time, so he seemed big.”
I eased the yellowing old bones out of the closet and laid them on a lab table. They glowed softly in the faint light cast up from the street below. The skeleton was as short as a child’s, nearly.
We began disassembling it, stacking the individual bones without particular order inside the cardboard box. We set the skull in last. “There you go, Yorick,” Nat said.
“Look at the poor old guy,” I said. “He was missing half his teeth.”
“Let’s not wax sentimental, Kinneson. No doubt he’s laughing at us with the few he has left.”
We left the building through the locker room exit, stepping out into a bitter wind gusting hard between the dark looming stacks of lumber in the mill yard, and I remembered what Nat’s father had said on the night I first met him outside the parsonage: “Your blooming weather is worse than Korea’s!”
The door to the cemetery toolshed was padlocked, but the hasp was so old and rusty that I easily wrenched it and the lock away from the punky jamb. Inside, we found a shovel leaning in a corner.
In front of Pliny’s tall monument the ground was hard with frost for an inch or so, then nearly as hard with the ubiquitous blue clay of Kingdom County. We took turns with the shovel until we were down about four feet. That was enough. As we filled the hole in, it began to snow lightly; by the time we were finished, the flakes were coming fast.
“Kinneson, we may be a pair of bloody damn fools, but I’m glad we did that,” Nathan said suddenly.
Then we were laughing—two middle-aged men in a snowy cemetery in an end-of-the-line little northern hill town, which was dying fast now like a thousand other hill towns, laughing the way we had laughed on those half-dozen or so other occasions in a long-ago summer when we had done something we thought was sneaky and gotten away with it.
Ten minutes later we shook hands in front of the Monitor, and then he was gone as suddenly as he had appeared, and I was alone on the street in the snow.
As I walked out to the gool from the village, away from the protection of the houses, the wind drove the hard pellets of snow against my face, and I huddled into my jacket as I had on the night of my thirteenth birthday when I’d met Reverend Andrews for the first time. On my right, invisible in the falling snow, was the cemetery where so many of my own ancestors lay buried, and now Pliny Templeton with them.
No ghosts accompanied me home that night, but as I stood on the red iron bridge, listening to the muffled river running below me in the snow, I thought of my great-great-great-grandfather, Charles I, who had come to the Kingdom because he loved to angle for trout.
I thought of my great-great-great-great Abenaki grandfather, Sabattis, coming up the same river in the fall of 1781 and discovering Charles I building a cabin where no man had ever built before, and I thought of Charles’ Indian bride, Memphremagog, and their son James I, who with the wild Irish Fenians had launched his abortive attacks down the river against Canada.
I thought of James’ son, Mad Charlie Kinneson, who had ferried runaway slaves to Canada by canoe and fought with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and finally shot and killed his best friend Pliny Templeton; and I thought of Claire LaRiviere, the daughter of Etienne, coming boldly out from the village across the river to our farmhouse kitchen on a rainy summer night in my youth.
I thought of the Dog Cart Man trotting over the bridge on a summer day and turning down the county road toward Ben Currier’s. I thought how Resolvèd loved to sit under the bridge with his friend Old Duke on a hot summer afternoon, an
d I thought of Frenchy LaMott approaching Nat and me on the trestle half a mile downstream and Nat diving in one long perfect arc into the water and pulling Frenchy out.
All these things occurred to me as I stood on the bridge in the falling snow.
I thought too of my father’s statement in the Monitor and Charlie’s paraphrase of it in his great speech at Reverend Andrews’ trial, that our Kingdom was a good but eminently improvable place, where the past was still part of the present, and for the first time in my life I believed that I fully understood what they had meant.
“We should have taken him brook trout fishing, James,” I heard my father say, his voice harsh and gravelly, as it had been that election night in 1952 after Reverend Andrews and Nat had left town and Mason White had gone back to the village to celebrate his election victory.
“Who, Reverend Andrews?” Charlie said. “Hell, he didn’t care anything about fishing, Jimmy, for brook trout or anything else.”
“Just the same, James, we should have taken him,” Dad said.
They were still arguing as I headed out along the gool toward home, and the last distinct words I heard were “James” and “Jimmy.”
About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.