Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The first day Mrs. Armstrong admitted Sis to the school he wrote his name in bold letters on his desk slate: LOUIS-HIPPOLYTE LAFLAMME. “Look,” he told me proudly. “Look here, by da Jimminy Joe.”

  I believe that Sis could in fact read and write a little French. But English might as well have been Greek to him. He never did get a handle on it. Of course Mrs. Armstrong made him recite at her desk with the little kids, above whom he towered in his herringbone coat like a golem. “By da Jimminy Joe” was his favorite exclamation and Mrs. Armstrong took it up and hectored him with it mercilessly, as she hectored him about his mispronunciations and fantastical ragamuffin appearance. But Sis wasn’t much perturbed. He stayed at it, plugging away harder than any of us.

  For my part, I now had a project apart from my reading. I spent an hour tutoring Sis in the morning and another in the afternoon, and discovered that he was quick with numbers, if not with their English names. Perhaps when it came to reading he had what today would be called a learning disability. I don’t know. He had a quick memory and memorized the first four reading books in the school word for word within a few weeks. But he was saying the words from rote, not reading. He was good at some of our schoolyard games, especially those that involved running. Sis never did learn to hit a baseball, though. We used to pitch to him by the hour just to watch his comic attempts to make contact.

  He was unfailingly good-natured. “How’s the bearded lady today?” Mrs. Armstrong would greet him, and he would nod and smile and say très bon, by da Jimminy Joe. Each time he handed in a paper with his name written in those big letters at the top, LOUIS-HIPPOLYTE LAFLAMME, she’d cross it out and write SIS in its place. He smiled gamely through it all.

  Sis had some spirit. One morning a week after he started at the Lost Nation Atheneum he inadvertently called Mrs. Armstrong “Sister” again—a habit he’d no doubt picked up in Canada, at the parochial school where he’d received his early education. Without warning she struck him in the arm with her cow cane. Instantly he jumped up and stepped toward her, his black eyes flashing. He said something in French, and for a moment I thought and hoped that he might knock her down. He was the one student in the school who I believe could have: a lean, hard, strong young man, toughened by years of working outdoors. Somehow he got hold of himself. And although Mrs. Armstrong had looked momentarily alarmed, she steamed right ahead with her bullying.

  At thirteen, I was much more confident than I’d been even a year ago. In the absence of Hermie Hill, I’d begun to emerge as a schoolyard leader and spokesman for some of the other students. The next time Prof Chadburn dropped by, I got him aside and complained to him about Mrs. Armstrong’s treatment of Sis. He nodded sympathetically. “I know, Austen. I’ve spoken to her about it. I will again. But she keeps good order, and remember, that’s why she’s here.”

  “She isn’t teaching us a damn thing, Prof, and you and I both know it,” I said hotly. “You ought to send her down the road.”

  “It isn’t that simple, son. When you’re a little older, you’ll understand.” He went over to his Buick and got out a copy of John Burroughs’s Winter Sunshine and handed it to me. Prof Chadburn was a good man and a great teacher. But he was not going to rock the boat at Lost Nation Atheneum now that he finally had a teacher who could keep order. If Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme fell by the wayside, well, that was unfortunate.

  Despite my grandfather’s vow to my grandmother that he would do nothing to prolong the misery of the LaFlammes, he did hire Sis to help him get up our woodpile and sugaring wood for the following year. Immediately it became apparent that Sis knew how to handle a bucksaw. My grandfather said he was as good with it as most men. I don’t know how much Gramp paid him. But he’d promised to give the LaFlammes a steer to butcher for the winter once cold weather set in, and I had the idea that this was to be the main part of Sis’s remuneration. My grandmother presented Sis with an old mackinaw that had belonged to my Uncle Rob Roy, and a pair of winter boots Rob had outgrown. She gave Mrs. LaFlamme two laying hens from our flock of Buff Orpingtons.

  By mid-November Sis had bucked up all the wood we’d need for the following year. Just as he’d promised, my grandfather trucked a yearling Ayrshire steer down to the Kerwin place. He helped Sis and Madame LaFlamme stake it out on a chain behind the collapsing barn. Later that month he would come down and help them butcher it. The LaFlammes could keep half of the beef to eat through the winter, and sell half for cash to pay their rent to Bumper. Madame LaFlamme was so grateful she wept, which set off a terrible coughing spell.

  My grandfather waved off their thanks and said Sis had earned the animal and then some. But as we drove back home together he shook his head and told me that all the dumb Frenchman jokes he’d ever heard must have been made up with the LaFlammes in mind, and reiterated his conviction that they would not make it through until Christmas.

  Everything came to a head on the day before Thanksgiving. It was a gray morning, very cold, with a yellowish cast in the sky over the Canadian mountains to the north that usually meant a storm was approaching. As usual on Wednesdays, my grandfather took me to school on his way to the cheese factory with his milk. The day before, he had shot two big snow geese and hung them in the woodshed. One was for our Thanksgiving meal and the other he intended to drop off for the LaFlammes on his way back from the village. Of course he did not tell my grandmother this.

  Oddly enough, Sis was waiting for us that morning at the foot of his lane. I thought he wanted a ride to school. But he began to wave his arms frantically, and he was shouting even before we stopped. Gesticulating wildly, he shouted something about the red-and-white he-cow my grandfather had given him, the chain he’d staked it with. Shouting mal, mal, he pointed up the lane and jumped onto the back of the truck, as he had that rainy afternoon two months ago when we first took him home from school. My grandfather cursed viciously as we jounced up the lane in the lumber truck. He had already begun to figure out what had happened though I was still in the dark. Mal was the word Sis used to describe his mother’s condition. Had Mrs. LaFlamme somehow been accidentally trampled by the steer? I imagined the worst.

  We skidded to a stop in the dooryard, which hadn’t changed since the last time we’d been here. There were the sunken-in house and barn, the milk house with dark smoke coming out of its jury-rigged chimney. Descending the knoll above the house were Sis’s mother and the angular black-and-white cow, just where we’d first seen them, dragging the makeshift stoneboat.

  On the stoneboat was something reddish-colored, with patches of white. Even before I jumped out of the truck, I recognized it. It was the Ayrshire steer my grandfather had given Sis, and it was as dead as a doornail.

  The steer’s head was twisted off at an unnatural angle to its body, and one of its horns had dug a little groove partway down the hillside behind the stoneboat. As we drew near, Madame LaFlamme broke into a torrent of French. Although I did not understand a word, I gathered that somehow the steer had broken its neck.

  Sis and his mother wanted my grandfather to butcher the animal on the spot, but as he angrily pointed out, it had already started to bloat. The meat was spoiled, he said. All he could do was send Bumper Stevens up with his rending truck. The dead steer was good only for dog food.

  “By da Jimminy Joe!” Sis kept exclaiming. “By da Jimminy Joe!”

  “By the Jimminy Joe, what do you people intend to eat this winter?” my grandfather said. “How are you going to pay your rent? This is a fine morning’s work. Go get in the truck, Austen. We have to get you to school.”

  My grandfather was so mad he flung the snow goose by its big webbed feet up toward the milk house and took off without another word.

  On our way down the lane it started to snow. The flakes were huge at first and there were not too many. Sis and his mother stood by the dead and bloating steer, watching us out of sight in the lightly-falling snow.

  All the way down the road to school my grandfather cursed the LaFlammes. He interr
upted himself only to tell me that the steer had not, as I’d supposed, pulled up its stake and bolted, then tripped on the chain. Oh, no. It was worse than that. Sis had decided the previous day to double the length of the chain in order to give the steer more grazing room. At some point during the night, after eating its fill, the animal had evidently assumed that it was free. It had begun to run and been snubbed up short by the tightened chain, no doubt breaking its neck instantly. Within an hour or so, it had started to bloat from the fresh grass in its stomach.

  “Do you see what I mean now?” my grandfather said as I got out in the schoolyard. “About prolonging their misery? I hope they have a pleasant Thanksgiving. They can eat tainted beef and rotten potatoes.”

  “What about the goose?” I said.

  “I doubt they know enough to pluck it,” my grandfather said. “I’ve never encountered such a misbegotten outfit in all my born days, Austen. I hope you and your grandmother are satisfied at last.”

  By now I was mad that my grandfather seemed to be mad at me. I hadn’t told him to help the LaFlammes, or not to help them for that matter. Fortunately, Prof Chadburn’s big black Roadmaster Buick was parked under the horse chestnut tree beside Mrs. Armstrong’s old junker. This meant that Prof was here for his monthly visit, a couple of days early because of the Thanksgiving holiday, and we would have a good morning. In the excitement of Prof’s appearance and the impending snowstorm, I’d forgotten all about the LaFlammes by the time I was inside the school building.

  Prof was going over Mrs. Armstrong’s attendance and midterm pupil progress reports, which I believe he all but had to write for her. When he finished those, he listened to the little kids recite. I was engrossed in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Each time I looked up from my book, it was snowing harder. The yellow cast I’d noticed in the sky that morning seemed to have seeped into the school. The classroom was illuminated by an eerie yellow snow-light in which the black-printed letters of my pages stood out sharp and dark. Surrounded by falling snow, the schoolhouse seemed unusually quiet. The only sounds were the scratching of chalk on our desk slates, the low hiss of the woodstove, and the reciting kids.

  At recess we tried to slide down the Fiddler’s Elbow on our cardboard sleds. It was snowing too hard, however, to keep a good trail packed down, so two or three other boys and I helped Prof put on his tire chains. Then we pestered him for a geography bee.

  Geography bees were exciting events for us; and because it was the day before a holiday, Prof announced that this morning he would offer something special for a grand prize. From his vest pocket he produced a silver dollar: a big, heavy cartwheel, which he’d polished to a brilliant shine.

  We divided into two teams and lined up on each side of the room and Prof began asking us questions out of his head. For the little kids the questions were easy at first. How many states in the Union? Name the five oceans. For us older students, the questions were much tougher, partly because Prof shared the delight of the little shavers in seeing us sit down first. Winnowing out the chaff, he called this process, and stumped me on my first try with the capital of Outer Mongolia.

  “You’re such a famous reader, Kittredge,” Mrs. Armstrong piped up from her desk. “Evidently you’d best read up on your geography.”

  Prof grinned at me wickedly and spun the silver dollar in his fingers like a magician.

  Finally only two students remained standing: Theresa Dubois and a sixth-grade girl named Craft, with a large head inclined slightly to one side. As Theresa and the Craft girl were dueling it out, the boys’ door opened and a tall snow figure came in. It was Sis LaFlamme, and he was covered with snow from head to foot, so that he had to broom himself off in the vestibule and then stand by the stove, steaming, to warm up.

  I was astonished. I couldn’t believe that Sis would come to school after the tragedy of the Ayrshire steer. I had doubted that we’d ever see him set foot in Lost Nation Atheneum again. Yet here he was, standing by the stove in that weird yellow snow-light coming through the big schoolhouse windows, in my uncle’s cast-off mackinaw that my grandmother had given him.

  A minute later he slid in next to me and grinned and shrugged. It was the most eloquent shrug I’d ever seen. Life goes on, I supposed he was saying. Life goes on, by the Jimminy Joe. His sheer hope in the infinite promise of the day at hand was phenomenal, like his hope each time he picked up the Fifth Grade Reader or our splintered old Adirondack baseball bat. Dead steer or no dead steer, there wasn’t an ounce of quit to Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme.

  Prof was holding up the bright silver dollar, revolving it slowly in the dull saffron light. “The capital of New Zealand,” he said.

  “Wellington,” Theresa said promptly.

  Prof spun the gleaming dollar high into the air, deftly picked it out of its arc, and plunked it down on Theresa’s desk. Then I saw him slip the Craft girl something on the side, a fifty-cent piece, I think.

  “Lunch time,” he said. “Right, Mrs. A?”

  Mrs. Armstrong consulted her watch and frowned. “We can take our nooning, I suppose.”

  We ate inside at our desks, and by the time we finished, the snow had let up somewhat. We wanted Prof to stay on, go sliding with us that noon and while away the afternoon. We would get him going on the war; get him to tell us about driving army mules. But while the storm had abated and he had a chance, he wanted to make his way back down the Fiddler’s Elbow to the county road. So in a way you could say it was the weather that was to blame for what happened later that afternoon, because if Prof had stayed on with us, the day would have turned out differently. Sooner or later, though, I suppose that something bad would have happened anyway. It would be impossible to throw two persons like Earla Armstrong and Sis LaFlamme together for very long and not have something bad happen.

  We got our cardboard sheets off the top of the wood in the woodshed. Except for Theresa and her little sister, Carrie, none of us had sleds. Theresa and Carrie had a Flexible Flyer, a real factory-made sled, varnished slick and shiny with the sled’s name painted on it in bright red letters, and the ironwork a fresh, gleaming black. The first couple of times down the hill were slow. We followed Prof’s dented chain treads in snow that was already six inches deep. But the Fiddler’s Elbow was so steep that by the third time down we had a bobsled ride. Of course we had little control over our cardboard toboggans. Three or four of us would crowd onto one sheet and off we’d go, rarely making it to the elbow halfway down the hill since there was nothing to hold on to but each other. To make the turn itself, you had to lean right, hard. I invariably fell off at the bend, if not before.

  Sis slid, too. Nineteen years old, mustache and all, with a dead steer in his dooryard and no apparent way to get through the winter, he got a square of cardboard and slid downhill, whooping and hollering like the rest of us, happy as a clam. “Bas da côte, by da Jimminy Joel” he’d shout, and launch himself down the slope on his cardboard, usually falling off after a few yards. But he kept trying, each time yelling “Bas da côte!”—down the hill.

  The sky was still hurricane yellow. I remember how Theresa’s blood-red coat stood out against that storm sky as she stood on top of the hill, getting ready to go down once more before noon recess ended. She could not have been more luminous in full, sparkling sunshine. She was beautiful, and I believe that Sis thought so too since I saw him watching her as well. She waved to us and then she was on her way down the steep pitch on her wonderful Flexible Flyer, her little sister sitting between her knees.

  When they reached the elbow they leaned hard and squealed, like two girls on a fair ride. They almost made it around the bend. Then the left runner caught in Prof’s chain track, and the girls tipped too far in the opposite direction, overcompensating, and were pitched out laughing and squealing. Usually tipping over was the best part of sliding for all of us, including the girls. Pretty and smart as they were, the Dubois sisters were rugged country kids, who worked as hard at home as most of us boys. So I
was surprised to see that when Theresa stood up, all snowy and red-cheeked, there was a look of horror on her face. Her hands were in her coat pockets. She yanked them out and pulled off her mittens, plunged her hands into her pockets again, brought them out empty, and burst into tears.

  “My dollar’s gone,” she wailed. “My silver dollar’s gone!”

  Up the hill, Mrs. Armstrong appeared in the vestibule, ringing her long-handled bell to summon us in from recess. Theresa and Carrie and I pawed frantically in the snow beside the road. But there was no time to search for the dollar. We knew that Mrs. Armstrong would be in an especially bad mood after Prof’s visit and we did not dare risk her wrath. All the way up the hill, Theresa wailed like a calf for its mother. Carrie cried because Theresa was crying, and I was almost mad enough to cry myself. I was furiously mad at Mrs. Armstrong for making me afraid to be late and at myself for being afraid.

  Mrs. Armstrong stood in the vestibule between the two doors, snapping some of the younger kids in the head with the dead finger as they marched in. Theresa cried all the way by her. “Don’t come bawling to me,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “If you’re going to slide you must expect to be hurt.” She said this as though getting hurt was not only inevitable, but somehow desirable.

  Theresa continued to cry all the way to her seat. Ordinarily she had a very level head, and I was somewhat surprised by her inconsolable grief. A dollar was a great deal of money to all of us in those days, but I think now that it was more the distinction of the award. To win a silver dollar—then to lose it!

  “What ails that girl?” Mrs. Armstrong asked the class. “Did somebody pound her up?”

  There was no answer.

  Very deliberately, Mrs. Armstrong began to roll up her sleeves.

  “She lost her dollar,” I said. “Nobody hurt her.”

  “Lost her dollar!” Mrs. Armstrong said. “What do you mean, lost her dollar? How did she contrive to do such a heedless thing as that?”