“Somebody’s at the door!” barked Mrs. Armstrong, who had a habit of repeating any announcement that surprised her, however slightly. “What do you mean, somebody’s at the door?”
“Somebody’s at the door,” I said.
The entire class’s attention was now on the strange boy. He was tall and rail-thin, with a lanky shock of coal-black hair over his forehead. Although it was exceptionally hot for September in Kingdom County, he wore a man’s suitcoat with an old-fashioned herringbone pattern. Under the coat he had on a faded blue flannel shirt and a baggy pair of suit pants with dark stripes that looked as though they’d once belonged to an undertaker. On his feet was a pair of shapeless brogans, laced with baling twine, and his pants were held up not with a belt but with a longer hank of twine. He looked to be two or three years older than me, around fifteen or sixteen. He had already started a wispy black mustache.
This was our first close look at Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme: standing in the girls’ entrance of the Lost Nation Atheneum, like a hobo on the Boston and Montreal Railroad tracks in Kingdom Common.
“Well,” Mrs. Armstrong said finally, pointing her cattle cane at the new arrival. “Just what do you think you want?”
The boy hesitated. Then in a heavy French Canadian accent he said, “I come go school, me.”
Mrs. Armstrong sighted at him over her cane like a hunter sighting in a buck deer. “Well now, Frenchy. Where do you propose to come go school, you?”
The boy shrugged. “To school,” he said. “To . . .”
Here his meager English failed him altogether. All he could do was repeat, “To school.”
“Well,” Mrs. Armstrong announced to the class. “He wants to go school.”
She heaved herself to her feet, came lurching off the teacher’s platform, and clumped down the aisle with the assistance of the ever-present cow cane. “Do you know where you’re standing?” she demanded of the boy. She thumped the floor at his feet with the tip of her cane. “You’re standing in the girls’ entryway. What are you, a boy or a girl?”
The boy shrugged again, and said something in a soft voice.
“What?” Mrs. Armstrong yelled. “What did you say to me?”
This time I heard him quite distinctly. He said, “Yes, sister.”
“Sister!” she bellowed. “Who do you think you’re calling sister, mister man? I’ll sister you.”
Mrs. Armstrong gave the strange boy in the herringbone coat a terrific shove in the chest. He backed up, but only a step or two. Mrs. Armstrong gave him another shove, pushing him out through the girls’ door. “You stay right there, sister,” she shouted. “Or go home. Stay there or go home. Until you learn you’re a boy and how to address your teacher.”
Mrs. Armstrong hitched back to her platform, slamming her cane onto the floor with each stiff step. As usual after one of her outbursts, she took a long pull from her black thermos. But even as she rammed the thermos bottle back into that leviathan of a lunch box, the strange boy was watching from the girls’ doorway.
He continued to stand there for the rest of the afternoon. Two or three times Mrs. Armstrong interrupted her recitations to say, to no one in particular, “He can wait until doomsday for all I care. Until he knows he’s a boy.”
Once, just before three-thirty dismissal, I turned around and caught the boy’s eye. And despite his outlandish appearance and the fact that he did not know fifty words of English, I sensed, then and there, the stubbornness about him that would make his subjugation the battle of Earla Armstrong’s teaching career.
The next day it rained hard. I slogged the three miles down the Hollow road in my long India rubber coat and rubber barn boots. When I arrived at school, there was the French boy, waiting by the girls’ entranceway. He was dressed just the same as the day before, but today the herringbone jacket was sopping wet and his hair was dripping steadily into his eyes. As I went through the boys’ entrance I quickly pointed at it, then at him.
Mrs. Armstrong was ensconced at her desk, eating a meat sandwich with ketchup on it. I didn’t know if this was her breakfast or just an early snack. No one knew such things about Mrs. Armstrong. Her ways were as different from ours as the ways of the French Canadian boy turned out to be.
“It’s you, is it?” she said. “Early again.”
In fact, I was nearly always the first to arrive at the Atheneum. Of course my grandmother packed me off to school a good half hour earlier than necessary, but also I was invariably eager to find out what happened next in whatever book I happened to be reading at school. Yet for more than a year, Mrs. Armstrong had greeted me this way, with sneering, mild incredulity: “It’s you, is it? Early again.”
She scowled at me over her sandwich. “Did you see Mr. Sister?” she said. “Right smack where he was yesterday. He can stand there until the cows come home, Sis can, if he don’t learn he’s a boy.”
I wanted to go back and tell the French boy that he was in the wrong doorway. But with Mrs. Armstrong watching every move I made, I couldn’t figure how to do it. Nor was I at all certain I could make him understand me. I slid into my seat and opened David Copperfield. David had just decided to run away from London, to his Aunt Betsy’s in Dover, and soon I was thousands of miles from Lost Nation Hollow, adrift with my young hero on the merciless high roads of nineteenth-century England.
Although it continued to rain hard, many of the arriving students preferred to wait outside in their rain gear, under the horse chestnut tree, until Mrs. Armstrong went to the vestibule and rang the bell for morning classes. I glanced back and noticed that the strange boy watched carefully as the kids filed in through separate entranceways. Mrs. Armstrong, however, slammed the doors shut behind them with a cruel finality.
In view of the driving rain, I knew that we would not have our usual outdoor nine-thirty recess. But on the pretext of getting a drink from the water bucket in the vestibule, I got up from my seat at about nine o’clock and went to the rear of the room. When I opened the boys’ door, I was not greatly surprised to discover that the French kid was standing in the entranceway.
Instantly I returned to my desk and shot up my hand. Mrs. Armstrong, in the meantime, had rooted a pickle sandwich out of her lunch box. She was preoccupied with that for some minutes and either didn’t see my hand or pretended not to. Finally she snapped out, “What is it now, Kittredge?”
“That new kid’s at the boys’ door,” I said. “The one you call Sis.”
“What of it?”
“You said when he went to the right door you’d let him in.”
“I said no such thing, Mr. District Attorney. I said when he knows he’s a boy.”
A year ago I would have been cowed. At thirteen, I stared at her hatefully, the way I had seen my grandfather stare with his pale blue eyes at his enemies in the village. Mrs. Armstrong returned to her pickle sandwich. When she looked up again I was still staring at her.
“All right, Mr. D. A.,” she told me. “Go tell Sis she can come in. She can sit with you, seeing as how you’ve appointed yourself her attorney. Find out if she can read—you’re the famous reader.”
And she gave one of the little kids standing at her desk, waiting to recite, the Hungarian dead finger on the head and returned to her sandwich.
I knew that my grandfather was going to town that afternoon to deliver a load of lumber from his sawmill. Shortly after school let out, he stopped for me on his way home, and we headed back up the Hollow in the driving rain. On the way we passed Sis. He was trotting along on my side of the road in his herringbone coat, hatless in the rain.
“There’s that French kid,” I said. “The kid Old Lady Armstrong calls Sis. Let’s give him a ride.”
My grandfather slammed on the brakes. I opened my door and started to shove over but the boy waved and jumped onto the back of the truck like a kid jumping onto a hay wagon.
My grandfather shook his head. “Dumb Frenchman,” he said. “He doesn’t even know enough to come in out of the
rain.”
But it seemed to me that there was in my grandfather’s tone a kind of grudging admiration, as though, being a proud and stubborn man himself, he admired the stubbornness and pride in Sis’s refusal to ride up in the cab with us.
As we approached the long lane leading up to the abandoned Kerwin place, the boy banged with his hand on the top of the cab to let us know he wanted to get off. Instead of stopping, my grandfather veered off the Hollow road and rammed up the lane through deep ruts. In places the lane was under several inches of water from the flooding alder brook beside it. Water splashed high on both sides of the truck, drenching Sis as he clung to the rattling sideboards. My grandfather cursed all the way up the flooded lane, as though he were being forced at gunpoint to deliver the boy at his doorstep.
What was left of the Kerwin buildings sat on a knoll at the foot of the same ridge that curved up behind my grandparents’ farm. At one time a pasture had been cleared on the lower slope of the ridge above the barn for cows or sheep. In the years since the Kerwins had left, more than a decade ago, it had grown back up to cedars and barberry bushes, wild roses and steeplebush. Near the woods someone had recently made an effort to hack away the encroaching brush.
The barn was partly collapsed, and the farmhouse had fallen into its cellar hole. Hunkered down on the knoll, alone in the rain, the ruins looked as desolate as any of twenty or so other abandoned places up and down Lost Nation Hollow. The only sign of habitation was some dark smoke coming out of a piece of stovepipe sticking up through a shed attached to the dilapidated barn.
“Christ, Austen,” my grandfather said, “they’re living in the milk house.”
The boy jumped down and ran to my grandfather’s window to thank him. In the meantime I noticed a woman driving a black-and-white cow down off the overgrown ridge behind the barn. She wore men’s barn boots, a man’s long denim coat, and a plain gray shawl. The cow had a horse collar around its neck and was pulling what looked for all the world like the inverted hood of an antique car. As they drew closer I saw that the old car hood had been converted into a stoneboat and was loaded with rocks. The woman waved and called something to the boy. He grinned. “You come me,” he told us. “See ma mère, by da Jimminy Joe.”
“Yes, sir,” my grandfather said grimly, reaching for the truck door.
My grandfather got out, tall and stem-faced in his mackinaw jacket. I followed him and Sis across the old barnyard through the rain.
The milk house was the same size as ours at home, about twelve feet by eight feet. The air inside was smoky from a small, rusty stove like the one in the office of my grandfather’s sawmill. There were two wooden chairs, a battered wooden table, and two cots. On the table sat a loaf of dark bread and a pot of boiled potatoes. Apart from the potatoes and bread, I saw nothing at all to eat. Some old clothes were drying on a rope strung near the stove.
Overhead, the rain leaked steadily through the rotten wooden shingles of the milk house roof. It hissed on the stovetop and chimney, which was the strangest chimney I’d ever seen. It was constructed from old milk cans with the bottoms hacked off and fitted together like stovepipe joints. Yet the cracked concrete floor of the room had been swept clean, the cots were neatly made and covered with bright quilts, and at the single small window hung a pair of makeshift curtains cut out of feedsack material.
From beyond the doorway leading into the barn, someone coughed. The woman who had been driving the cow appeared. Her wet hair was as gray as her shawl. She looked nearly as old as my grandmother, and she was coughing steadily, a deep, wracking chest cough.
“Ma mère,” Sis said proudly. “Madame LaFlamme.”
“Austen Kittredge,” my grandfather said to Mrs. LaFlamme. “Your neighbor up the road. This young fella is my grandson. He goes to school with your boy.”
“School!” the woman said. “We come States so Louis go school. Me Madame LaFlamme.”
Madame LaFlamme coughed hard. I wondered if it was the smoke from the stove that made her hack that way. It stung my eyes and caused them to water. I didn’t see how people could live inside that smoke-filled milk house.
“Sit, you,” Madame LaFlamme said. “Sit.”
My grandfather shook his head and said we had to get home to chores. Then he said something in French. I knew he was uncomfortable, standing in this smoky milk house converted into a French Canadian kitchen-bedroom, trying to talk with two persons who spoke less English than he did French.
Madame LaFlamme was not about to let go of us so easily, however. She began talking in French to my grandfather with great volubility. I thought I heard her mention the words Canada and farm, and the name Stevens. My grandfather nodded once or twice. When she finally stopped, he said something in French to the boy, who nodded vigorously. Then we left.
I was very curious to learn what Madame LaFlamme had told my grandfather. Where in Canada were they from? Where was Sis’s father? And what had my grandfather told Sis? I knew better than to ask, though. I realized that my grandfather was concerned for these people; but at thirteen, I also knew him well enough to realize that his concern would very probably take the form of anger.
“How old do you think that boy is?” he finally asked me.
I shrugged. “Fifteen?”
“He’s nineteen,” my grandfather said. “Nineteen Christly years old. If he hasn’t gotten his schooling by now, I guess he isn’t about to get it. I told him to come up and see me about a job. He might better help me get up next winter’s woodpile and earn a little money before they run out of potatoes and starve.”
Immediately after we arrived home, my grandfather went striding into the barn to start chores, as angry as I’d seen him in a long time.
I said nothing to my grandmother about our visit to the LaFlammes, but after supper my grandfather brought up the subject himself. As nearly as he’d been able to determine from Mrs. LaFlamme’s rapid-fire French, she and her son had moved down to the Kingdom from somewhere not far across the border about a month ago, with the assistance of Bumper Stevens. I knew the low-down on Bumper from previous conversations between my grandparents. He was a local cattle and livestock dealer, who ran the commission sales auction barn in Kingdom Common. Over the past fifteen or so years, Bumper had bought a number of abandoned farms along the border, mostly overgrown and run-down old places he’d picked up for a song, and then placed French Canadian tenants on them. Sometimes, according to my grandfather, Bumper would sell a place outright to a Canadian family, for a small down payment, and hold the mortgage himself. Then he’d extend further credit to the family to buy cows and used machinery from his own auction barn. For Bumper, at least, these arrangements usually turned out to be lucrative. The immigrant family would reclaim the land for farming or grazing, and improve the buildings. Some who were willing to live for years on next to nothing, and maybe hold a full-time second job at the furniture mill in the Common while they built up their farms, eventually paid off their mortgages. The prosperous Ben Currier family down on the county road had gotten started in Vermont just this way. So had Francis Dubois’s family here in Lost Nation. Other Canadians imported by Bumper Stevens had been unable to meet their payments after a few years. In these instances, Bumper had not hesitated to foreclose, though rarely until the farms had been cleared and put back into operation, after which he could resell them at a tidy profit. Throughout Kingdom County, Bumper Stevens was both grudgingly admired as a shrewd businessman and widely distrusted as a man whose success derived from sharp practice.
As far as the LaFlammes went, my grandfather said that Madame LaFlamme’s husband had died two years ago. Since then they had been living with relatives. Sis was the youngest of eight children, seven of whom were grown-up girls, married or working on their own in Canada. He and his mother were trying to clear the place with the help of the lone, dried-up, black-and-white cow Bumper had supplied them with.
“What are they living on, Mr. Kittredge?” my grandmother said. “What are they ea
ting?”
My grandfather snorted. “Spuds! Bumper sent a fella up there this past summer to put in a plot of potatoes and lure just such a brainless outfit as them down over the Line. They’re living on potatoes.”
“Potatoes!”
“Yes, damn them. Potatoes and black bread. How even a couple of dumb Frenchies believe they can get through the winter on black bread and a few sacks of potatoes is beyond me. The old woman seems to have contracted consumption. I doubt she’ll make it to December.”
“It isn’t those poor French people you should be inveighing against, it’s that double-dealing devil Stevens.”
“Stevens is a hard man, Mrs. Kittredge. I don’t deny it. But he’s fair.”
“Stevens is not fair. He’s the devil’s own agent in Kingdom County. What do you propose to do to help those folks?”
“Nothing,” my grandfather said flatly, looking at me. “Nothing at all. If I run onto a dying animal out in the woods, I don’t prolong its suffering. I won’t prolong theirs.”
I wanted to tell my grandmother that my grandfather had already offered Sis LaFlamme work, but I thought better of it.
“I intend to assist that family,” my grandmother said. “One way or another.”
“Assist away,” said my grandfather angrily. “Assistance or no assistance, they won’t last until Christmas. That’s as certain as the sun coming up over the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the morning and setting behind the Green Mountains of Vermont at night.”
Somehow the LaFlammes hung on at the old Kerwin place that fall. And somehow Sis continued to attend school. He did not come every day. But three or four times a week he’d show up, often late in the morning or early in the afternoon, and when he did, he always went at his lessons the way he and his mother went at clearing that old farm of rocks and brush: energetically, cheerfully, with the eternal hope of the absolutely hopeless.
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