Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Liz gave a vicious yank on a half-hidden clump of witchgrass rooted in under her fourth husband’s slate marker. “As I was saying, I’d had it with Stony. I put up with his catting longer than I should have but after three years of it, I walked out. I’d accumulated some animals, which I loaded onto a boxcar. I had a pregnant Morgan riding horse, several steers, a couple of hogs, some chickens, a goat, two mated geese, two turkeys. I lugged ’em right back to Vermont with me on that boxcar. Arrived in the middle of the night during a January blizzard.

  “‘Sister, I hope you’ve learned your lesson.’ That was how Rose greeted me when I arrived.

  “‘What lesson?’ I said.

  “‘About men,’ Rose said. Never welcomed me home or spoke any kind word. Just told me she hoped I’d learned my lesson about men, damn her spinster tongue.”

  Liz stood up and surveyed her fourth husband’s grave critically. “Well, obviously I hadn’t. I was pretty sure old Hartley Stone would write and beg for me to come back, and for several weeks I swore when he did I wouldn’t, and then I softened and said I would. But the son of a bitch never did write, Austen. I was heartbroken. So I went out and married number two, on the rebound. He was a good-looking and thoroughly good-for-nothing fella from Pond in the Sky. He was the laziest man I ever met. Born lazy and had a relapse, I used to say. One day I told him to make himself useful and take a broom out to the barn and brush down the cobwebs. That was the last I ever saw of him. So far as I know, number two’s still down at the barn, brushing cobwebs.”

  Liz chuckled. “Left Vermont again. Worked as a cook at a lumber camp, nurse assistant in a hospital for the insane, housekeeper on a big estate in Connecticut. Drifted West a second time. Had my first two boys and acquired a third husband, in that order. Number three was a harmless-enough fella. Nice guy, actually. But I was leasing a small horse ranch and he was terribly afraid of horses. Finally a horse kicked him in the head and killed him on the spot. Had two more kids by then, and along waltzes husband number four, Mr. Foster James—the great-grandson of Frank James, Jesse’s brother, or so Foster claimed.”

  Frank James’s great-grandson—this was almost as good as Liz robbing the bank.

  “Was he really Frank James’s great-grandson?” I asked.

  “Who knows? He said he was. That’s all I can tell you. That, and that he was a slick, smart customer. A gambler from over in Great Falls, somewhat older than me, with a history of trouble with the law himself. Wore a necktie every day of his life, Austen, just like my father over there, the gentleman farmer.” Liz gestured at Grampa Gleason’s tall pink granite stone on the far side of the family graveyard. “Anyway, I brought Foster East with me the last time I came, sixteen years ago, and I don’t know but what the hoorah over the bank robbery a week later was too much for him. All those F.B.I. agents swarming out here to pester me, every day, every day. Foster just keeled over in the barnyard one afternoon. That was that. That and that Rose insisted we plant him off here in the back away from her precious family like some sort of outcast.

  “So,” Liz said as we started back toward the horse, “I guess you could fairly say, Austen, that I have not had good luck with husbands. I truly loved just one of the four and he was that catting son of a bitch I never heard from again. Two are dead. Two are missing and might as well be. No, sir, I haven’t had good luck with men in general, or they with me.”

  She stopped by Miss April Swanson’s grave, and chuckled. “Maybe my sister had the right idea. She avoided men altogether and married a woman.”

  “Did you know Miss April, Liz?”

  “Oh, yes. She was a harmless little fluff of a thing. Rose rode roughshod over her, same as she tried to the rest of us. There was all kinds of talk in the village, of course, about their living arrangements, but I never made any judgments about that and neither so far as I know did the rest of the family. We figured how they lived was their business, long’s they weren’t hurting anyone else, which they weren’t. I’ve already told you who created villages.”

  Liz unwound Henry David’s reins from the gate, and glanced briefly out over the hills. She shook her head. “Too many hills and not enough mountains in these parts, Austen. When I was growing up here, I used to feel closed in, hanker after bigger spaces. Narrow valleys, narrow rivers, narrow people, come to think of it. Out West they might shoot you if you cross ’em. They’re much less apt to gossip about you.”

  She glanced back once more at Foster James’s grave, shook her head, gave me a wry grin. “Let’s you and me go on a ride together after the picnic dinner, Austen. I’ll meet you at Maiden Rose’s barn at two-thirty sharp.”

  By the time I returned to my grandparents’ place, the big picnic dinner was ready. Planks from my grandfather’s mill had been set up across sawhorses, and were laden with the traditional reunion fare: potato salad, new potatoes with peas and salt pork, baked beans, mincemeat pies with home-canned venison, Cousin Clarence’s hot dogs and hamburgers. There was food enough to feed a Kittredge family reunion from fifty years ago.

  After the picnic came the photography session. This was followed by foot races, games of horseshoes and flies and grounders, and wrestling. Then the venue shifted to Clarence’s baseball diamond. And although I hated to miss the big game, I was greatly looking forward to the horseback ride with Liz. A little before two-thirty, she and I started out on Henry David and Ralph. This time, however, instead of saddlebags, Henry was carrying a good-sized packbasket.

  I had no idea where we were headed. Liz led the way, up a grown-up lumbering trace behind the Home Place toward the border. As we rode she continued to talk about the Kittredge family, Kingdom County, the West, and her own life. Her mirthful observations struck me as remarkably generous-minded. I thought that she must be the wisest person I’d ever known. She was opinionated without being censorious, and as curious about herself as about everyone else. “I’m as unpredictable as the old lady who had to hear what she said to find out what she thought,” Liz told me, laughing. Never in my life had I met anyone like her. She stood conventional wisdom on its head at every twist in the old military road.

  “We aren’t what we do, Austen. We’re what we hope to do. We’re our dreams.”

  “Be careful what you want, Austen’s grandson, Austen. It’ll probably come true. And be careful whose bed you put your shoes under.”

  “Be careful what you do. Be more careful what you say. Careless words hurt a great deal longer than a quick blow.”

  “Klee has a sharp tongue sometimes,” I said.

  “Yes, and she gets it from Maiden Rose. It was that as much as anything else that drove your grandfather away as a boy, and later drove me away.”

  “What makes her so mean? Is it being all crippled up and in pain?”

  “Why, Austen. I’m surprised by you, man. Maiden Rose isn’t mean. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”

  I looked at Aunt Liz to see if she was kidding. She didn’t seem to be. “But you just said she drove Gramp away when he was a kid, and you, too, later.”

  “She did. But that’s not the same as saying she’s mean. Stubborn, yes. Stubborn, and ruthless too, if ruthlessness was called for. Being ruthless is how she kept the family together as long as she did. But Rose was never mean or low . . . There’s Fort Kittredge. We’ll leave the horses here.”

  Ranged along the cleared strip through the woods that marked the border, all that was left of the old fort built by our Tory ancestors was a hodgepodge of shacks. Around the turn of the century, the fort had been briefly rebuilt as a tiny hamlet for a granite quarry. But the granite sheds were now just windowless hulks overrun by wild raspberry bushes. The air of desuetude about the place made it spooky, even in broad daylight.

  One of the ghost hamlet’s few remaining recognizable structures was a windmill once used to pump up drinking water from a well. Most of the huge wooden blades had been shot to pieces, and even in a high wind, it no longer turned. Nonetheless, it loomed up above the
second- and third-growth woods in a way I did not at all care for. Neither, for all her Wild West bravado, did Liz. “That mechanism makes my flesh creep, Austen. Always has. I used to bring my boyfriends up here after dark to scare ’em. Come over here, and watch your footing.”

  Lugging the packbasket she’d brought along, Liz thrashed her way through the raspberries to the old well at the foot of the windmill. Together we heaved off the rotting wooden cover, and peered inside. She dropped a stone down and listened for the splash, but there wasn’t any. “She’s dry as a bone, down there, Austen. I won’t get my hopes up yet, but so far so good.”

  From her packbasket Liz got out a bucket, a coil of clothesline rope, a short-handled shovel used to remove ashes from a woodstove, an ax and a lantern. She handed me the ax and instructed me to cut her a limber spruce pole about ten feet long. I did, and she began to probe down the mouth of the well with it. “Just as I thought,” she said. “It isn’t all that deep. Eight feet at most. Now, sir. Are you afraid of tight, dark places?”

  “No,” I lied, feeling my heart start to beat faster. “Of course not.”

  “Good. Some years ago I could have shinnied down there like a monkey, but I’ve added a few pounds since then. I’ll light this lantern and lower it on the rope, and you go down the pole. Don’t worry, it’s stout enough to hold two of you. When you get down there I’ll lower the bucket on another rope. I want you to fill it with leaves and dirt and such for me to pull up.”

  I looked doubtfully down the shallow well. “Now don’t fret,” Liz said. “There’s no skeleton down there and it’s too dank for serpents. We’ll attach the rope to your waist and not let you get stuck in the muck. See here, we’ll lower the lantern first, test if the air’s still good. If the lamp goes out, we’ll strike for home and forget this whole harebrained enterprise.”

  What had I gotten myself into, I wondered. But the lantern stayed lit, and down the spruce pole I went, into that dark hole, sure that this was where Liz had hidden the loot from the long-ago bank robbery. I was so excited to be helping her recover it that after a minute I forgot to be afraid.

  I don’t know how long I dug around in the leaves and clay at the bottom of the old well. Maybe fifteen minutes, though it seemed much longer. As my aunt pulled up bucket after bucket of debris, the footing in the well started to grow mucky. I began to wonder whether we were on a fool’s errand after all.

  When I’d nearly given up hope, Liz shouted, “Eureka! Here he is, Austen. We’ve found him. Skin back up that pole, man, and rejoice. We’ve done it.”

  Found who? Done what? I certainly hadn’t unearthed any forty-two thousand dollars. Seconds later I was back up in the warm, fresh, green-leaf-scented summery air, and Liz was holding out her hand to show me what she’d discovered. Nestled in her palm was a thin gold ring set with a single tiny diamond. I looked from the ring to my aunt’s radiant face and back to the ring again.

  “It’s my wedding band from my first marriage, Austen,” Liz said with the greatest delight. “Don’t you see?”

  I saw, all right. But I didn’t understand.

  “Look, man,” she said, wedging it onto the ring finger of her left hand. “It’s a tight squeeze but it still fits. Hartley Stone, my first husband, gave me this little ring when we got married. When I left him to come home to Vermont, I was going to leave it on the bedtable for him to find. But at the last minute I said to myself, no you don’t, girl, take it along with you. For as I’ve told you, Austen, I fully expected he’d come East for me in a few weeks or write begging me to come back West to him. Then it ran along a number of months, and there was no word, no word, no word, and I got madder and madder. And more and more heartbroken, too, if you want the truth, because love Stony I did. I made myself half-crazy with worry, but I was too proud to go back to him on my own. Finally one day I couldn’t stand any more. I came up here with another fella who shall remain unnamed and I took off my ring and threw it down this well. That was my mistake. I should have written to Hartley myself, you know. At least told him why I’d left. Well, I lost him. I lost the only man I ever really loved. Don’t you tell anyone, but we never did get divorced. Legally speaking, if he’s alive, we’re still yoked together. I thank you for your assistance, Austen. Now we can go back to the reunion.”

  “What about the loot, Aunt Liz? From the bank robbery?”

  “What about it?” Liz said. “All we can say, Austen’s grandson, Austen, is that it still hasn’t seemed to have turned up.”

  On our way back to Maiden Rose’s, I felt sharply disappointed by the outcome of our expedition; but Liz was as happy as a schoolgirl. It was almost as if she’d reclaimed Hartley Stone himself and her first marriage, along with the thin little ring with the tiny inset diamond.

  “It’s going to be a grand evening for Maiden Rose’s play,” Liz said as we approached the Home Place. “That’s curious. We’ve got early visitors, and it isn’t yet five o’clock.”

  Below in the dooryard was a dark sedan. As we drew nearer, a tall young stranger in a suit and tie got out of the driver’s side. “Mrs. Kittredge?”

  “Good evening, sir. And you are?”

  “Agent Jordan Sanders, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Liz shot me a delighted look. “Why, of course,” she said. “I’d be honored to answer your questions. First, though, let me ask you one. You’ve heard of something called the statute of limitations?”

  “Sure,” Agent Jordan Sanders said. “I’m quite familiar with it. Only one problem about that, Mrs. Kittredge. It doesn’t apply to federal offenses.”

  “Like bank robbery?”

  “Like bank robbery,” Agent Sanders said. “Shall we sit in the car?”

  “Oh, no,” Liz said. “Let’s go inside the kitchen, have some coffee. My sister will want to hear this, I’m sure. I suppose you haven’t ruled her out as a suspect anyway. And”—Liz shot me another look—“she may just want to recruit you for her play.”

  “Can I come in, too?” I said.

  “You may not,” Maiden Rose’s harsh voice said from the porch. “Feed and water Henry and Ralph, Austen, and then go straight home. There’s no need for you to hear any of this.”

  “So you’ve been out riding all day?” I heard Agent Sanders say as he and Liz headed into the kitchen.

  “Yes, sir,” Liz said. Adding loudly, for my benefit I was sure, “Looking for hidden treasure.”

  “Any luck?”

  “You bet,” Liz said, holding out her left hand. “Look here on my ring finger. Ain’t that just about the prettiest sight you ever saw?”

  I was terrifically excited about the appearance in Lost Nation of the F.B.I.; but now preparations were in full swing for the play, to be followed by the party at the schoolhouse. Before I knew it, I’d been recruited by my grandmother to pick several bushels of early Golden Bantam from her garden for the corn-roast.

  As the sun lowered toward the Green Mountains and Jay Peak, cars began to drive up the Hollow from the county road. They belonged to spectators for Maiden Rose’s play. As they pulled into the Home Place lane, I recognized many people from the village. Zack Barrows, my grandmother’s lawyer, had come with his girlfriend, Julia Hefner. Sheriff Mason White was on hand in full uniform. Judge Allen had driven up with Mr. Roger Whitington, president of the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Bank. Prof Newton Chadburn, Kingdom County’s superintendent of schools, and Editor Kinneson of The Kingdom County Monitor, had come in one car with their wives.

  The F.B.I. agent had evidently finished with Liz, or vice versa. Laughing and joking, she came outside onto the porch of the Home Place with him, and the instant she clapped eyes on Roger Whitington she smiled her big smile and guided the agent by his suit-jacket elbow over to him. “I presume you two gentlemen have met?” she said. “Roger, it’s good to see you again.”

  “It’s good to see you, Liz. I’d heard you were back East.”

  “Evid
ently you weren’t the only one,” Liz said, nodding at Agent Sanders.

  I was afraid the bank president and the F.B.I. agent might gang up on my great-aunt, but Mr. Whitington seemed genuinely surprised by the agent’s presence. He was very friendly, and wanted to know all about Liz’s kids. More cars arrived and people began to move around to the natural amphitheater behind Rose’s barn. Everyone seemed to be reminiscing about old times.

  “This good-looking young man thinks I was up at Fort Kittredge digging up the bank robbery boodle this afternoon,” Liz told Roger as they headed toward the rear of the barn. “I haven’t entirely disabused him of the notion, but he has yet to pin me down and prove it.”

  “Liz is tough to pin down,” Roger Whitington said. “But I don’t think she robbed any banks. Not around here at least.”

  “There was a time when you might have pinned me down, in a manner of speaking, Roger,” Liz said. “You were one good-looking boy, I tell you true.”

  “And you, Liz, are still one good-looking woman,” Roger said gallantly.

  “I don’t understand this place at all,” Agent Sanders said to nobody in particular, shaking his head.

  The impromptu stage occupied the entire mouth of Rose’s hay barn, at the top of the high-drive ramp leading up to the big open double doors. It was illuminated by battery-operated tractor lights. The hundred or so spectators ranged themselves around the pasture hillside, in the natural bowl above the barn, sitting in the purple shadows of the high ridge.

  An expectant hush fell over the countryside, and the play began with Preacher John Wesleyan’s booming baritone narration. “On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.” From the depths of the empty old hay barn came a crashing of milk cans rolling together to simulate thunder. In a few short moments, the playgoers had been transported from an end-of-the-road Vermont hill farm to Prospero’s magical island. Once again the old Home Place began to ring with poetry, and people from throughout the Kingdom sat rapt on the disused cow pasture, swept up in the age-old themes of love and pride and vengeance and reconciliation. The most spirited summer Shakespeare in Lost Nation Hollow was off and running.