Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Out onto the high-drive I tore in the sailorly garb of the Boatswain. “Yare, yare!” I roared, and I did not know then, nor do I now, what under the sun “yare” meant. Arrayed in her gauzy white dress, Freddi, as beautiful Miranda, pleaded with her father to allay the troubled waters. Maiden Rose was magnificent in the role of the exiled old magician, ancient and bent-over though she was. Her dark gown was embellished with silver stars and golden moons and suns. For a magic wand she used Great-Grandpa Gleason’s multicolored glass Walking stick, a family heirloom dating back one hundred years. Cousin Whiskeyjack came slinking up from under the high drive as a backwoods Caliban, all slouch hat and whiskers and ratty old lumber jacket; and to this day, my Little Aunt Klee remains the most acrobatic and winning Ariel I have ever seen.

  As always, though, the premier performance was Rose’s. When her Prospero announced his intention to “retire to Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave,” she paused and stared out over the audience, up toward the dark family burying ground and beyond, as if into some private realm she would soon share with her beloved April. On her face was an expression both tragic and hopeful. And with no warning she lifted my great-grandfather’s colored glass walking stick to her waist and brought it sharply down on the plank floor of the high-drive, showering the air with flying bits of brilliant glass.

  There was a stunned pause. Then one by one the spectators ranged around the dark pasture stood in a prolonged ovation.

  Talking in hushed tones, the crowd began to head for their cars, to remove to the schoolhouse for the corn-roast, sugar-on-snow party, and dance. I tagged along beside Liz.

  “Well, Austen,” she said, “that was very fine. Very fine indeed.”

  The F.B.I. agent and Mr. Roger Whitington were right behind us. “I wouldn’t have believed all this if I hadn’t seen it,” Agent Sanders said quietly to Mr. Whitington. “I’m going back to Boston. These people didn’t rob any banks.”

  Liz laughed and turned around. “Well, sir, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, and now I’ll bid you good night. Unless you’d like me to save you a dance down at the schoolhouse.”

  By the time Liz and I got out in the barnyard the agent was gone, along with many of the relatives and play spectators. It was quiet after all the bustle of the play. I wanted to get right down to the schoolhouse party myself, but Liz glanced through the kitchen window and saw Maiden Rose sitting alone at the table, still dressed in Prospero’s cloak, her long gray hair unpinned and flowing down on her shoulders. “I don’t like to leave Rose alone here like this, Austen. She’s alone enough of the time as is. Let’s get her to come along to the dance with us.”

  I did not at all want to go inside and try to persuade Maiden Rose to come to the schoolhouse party. In a few minutes Cousin Clarence would be tuning up his fiddle while his wife banged away at the old black upright school piano. I wanted to dance with Theresa Dubois, taste the delicious cold sweetness of maple syrup on snow that had been preserved in my grandfather’s icehouse from last winter, eat half a dozen of my grandmother’s donuts. Maybe later I’d sneak up to Cousin Whiskeyjack’s to watch the men drink white mule moonshine.

  “Come,” Liz said.

  At the applewood kitchen table, Maiden Rose was riffling through her long shoebox of old letters from April Mae Swanson. Liz and I sat down at the table, around which Maiden Rose had grilled and drilled three generations of Kittredges, including me, in grammar, arithmetic, spelling. Liz shot a warning glance at me out from under the cowboy hat. She’d spotted April’s return address on the envelopes, too.

  “Sister,” Rose said wearily, “this is not one of your Wild West cafes. I’m obliged to ask you to check your firearm before you join me here.”

  Liz grinned and took her pearl-handled revolver out of her jacket pocket and placed it on a shelf behind the stove.

  “Well, sister,” Rose said, “where did you find your old bauble?” She was looking at Liz’s wedding ring from Hartley Stone.

  Again Liz darted a glance at me. “I and Austen here found it where I lost it, many years ago. Up at Fort Kittredge.”

  “Better by far that it had stayed there. Surely you don’t intend to wear it again?”

  “Of course I intend to wear it. As a token of what Hartley and I once had between us, if nothing else.”

  “As a token of your mistreatment at the hand of that good-for-nothing, you mean.” Rose’s eyes snapped angrily. Despite Prospero’s astrological gown she now looked just exactly like Maiden Rose again.

  “He’s still my husband,” Liz said. “I intend to wear it. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Why?” Maiden Rose said. “Because he was cruel to you. Because he was a faithless drunkard. Have you forgotten? Your memory’s far too short, sister.”

  “Yours is too long. All that happened years ago. Times change.”

  “Times may. People do not.”

  “Maybe not. What difference does it make? I loved him, and still do today. You of all people ought to understand that. You too have loved, sister.”

  “Yes. A pure love fully requited, tenderly repaid a thousand thousand times. My love has endured for fifty years and more, even beyond the grave.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Liz said, and abruptly stood up.

  “Where are you going, sister?” Maiden Rose sounded alarmed.

  “To Hartley,” Liz said. “If he’s alive, I intend to find him. You’ve yourself to thank for helping me make up my mind.”

  “He’ll break your heart again,” Maiden Rose said, rising and holding the table for support. “All your men were weak, miserable. He was the worst. You’re betraying yourself.”

  Now Liz no longer looked angry. She just looked determined, as she must have looked forty years ago, a girl of sixteen, heading West with her cardboard suitcase. “Maybe I am, sister. I’ll admit that I’m doing this against my better judgment. But if I’d relied on that all my life, where would I be? A retired schoolteacher in Lost Nation, maybe. Look here. Come with me. Or join me in the West, whether I find Hartley or no. We’ll make a life for ourselves.”

  Maiden Rose shook her head. “You know I can’t do that. This is beyond stubbornness.”

  “Who are you, Maiden Rose, to read me a lecture on stubbornness? Austen, fetch your grandfather’s truck down here. I want you to take me to the railroad station straightaway.”

  By the time I’d left a note on the table up at my grandparents’ farmhouse saying where I’d be, and gotten back with the truck, Liz was waiting on the porch with her carpetbags. This time she had only one saddle. “The other’s yours, Austen,” she said. “It’s in the harness room. Take good care of it.”

  I was astonished, nearly overcome by her generosity. But she waved off my thanks, already talking, talking, talking, the perpetual commentary on her life and times unfolding as we headed down the Hollow road.

  “You’ll note that I neither said good-bye to my sister nor looked back, not that there’s that much to see,” Liz said. “No, Austen, the Home Place is as empty now as the old wizard’s island in Rose’s play. There’s nothing to detain me any longer, if there ever was. I figure I’ve got just enough vigor left to find that old son of a bitch Hartley, assuming he’s still in the land of the living.”

  I hated to see Liz go. For me this had been by far the most memorable reunion ever. Then we were driving by the lighted schoolhouse where the sugar-on-snow party was going on. I could hear Cousin Clarence’s fiddle and the deep thum-thum-thum of his wife playing chords on the old piano. I caught a glimpse of Theresa Dubois’s bright blond head through the windows; but I felt proud to be with my aunt. There would be other schoolhouse junkets, other dances.

  Liz launched into more stories, and before I knew it we were in the Common, unloading her carpetbags and saddle at the station.

  It was nearly twelve o’clock now. According to Percy Fennel, the old stationmaster, the Midnight Flyer to Montreal and points west was on schedule. There wasn’
t much time for good-byes, even if Liz had believed in them.

  “Where will you look for Hartley, Aunt?” I said as we waited together on the dark platform.

  “The same place I looked for his ring, of course.”

  I was puzzled. “At Fort Kittredge?”

  “No. Where I lost him. Back in Butte. If he ain’t there, I’ll trace him on to the next town. He was a drifter, old Stony, but he had people in Butte. If he’s alive, I’ll run him down.”

  From a mile south of town, the Flyer hooted, and Liz shook her head. “Human nature is a strange commodity, Austen. Here stand I on a railway platform, excited to be boarding the train and heading West, yet already missing Lost Nation and the Home Place and, yes, missing Maiden Rose, too. Not so much as I’ve missed that sneaking coyote Hartley, though. This time if he goes to catting on me, he’ll deal with my—Damn, Austen!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My revolver’s back on the shelf behind Rose’s stove. I feel downright naked without it. Well, it can’t be helped. Have your grandfather unload it and pack it in excelsior and ship it to me in Butte, general delivery. That’s where I’ll land first. Will you remember to do that straightaway when you get home?”

  I said I would. She held out her hand and we shook hands on the station platform and she clapped me on the back. “Now, Austen. Instead of good-bye, I’ll say visit me out West when you can. I’ve enjoyed our time together, short though it was. Good luck to you.”

  “Good luck to you, Aunt. With your—”

  “First and fifth husband, I reckon we’d call him,” she said as the train pulled in.

  Liz was as good as her word. Once she and her carpetbags were aboard the Flyer, she never looked out the window at me. I watched the train pull out the way, years ago, I’d stood on the platform with my grandfather and watched the departing train that had brought me to Kingdom County for the first time. This time, though, I half-wished I were on it, too, headed West with my aunt to search for Hartley Stone. I hoped she’d find him, and wondered what she’d do with him if she did.

  There was a great deal to think about on the way home, but after the big day I was too tired to concentrate on anything but my driving. The schoolhouse was dark as I approached it. A faint glimmer of lantern light appeared in Maiden Rose’s window. I imagined her poring over April’s letters at the old applewood table and was tempted to stop and reassure her that Gramp and I would help her through the coming winter. But I was tired, and I knew she’d be harsh with me, as she always had been; as she had been with Liz, driving her away from Lord Hollow as she had Gramp. So I continued on up the road to the Farm, where, to my surprise, I found both my grandparents waiting up for me with coffee and cookies left over from the reunion picnic.

  “Well, Tut,” Gram said, “did you get your Aunt Liz off?”

  “Yes. She wants me to visit her when she gets settled in.”

  “Perhaps someday,” my grandmother said. “At fifteen, you don’t need to be sashaying off around the country.”

  “I wonder what Maiden Rose’ll do now? All alone, bent over the way she is.”

  “You can’t predict the future, Tut,” Gram said. “But Rose will get along. She always has.”

  My grandfather looked up from his book, a nineteenth-century account of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to Hudson Bay. “Rose is who she is,” he said. “Like Liz. Times change, but my sisters never will.”

  “For once, Mr. Kittredge, we agree,” my grandmother said. “Well, it’s been a long day and a wonderful reunion—for those of us who troubled ourselves to attend. I’m going to read in Egypt for a few minutes. Then I’m going to bed. Tap on my door and say good night to me before you go up, Tut.”

  The moment my grandmother went into Egypt, I asked my grandfather what it was like to grow up with Maiden Rose. “Well,” he said, “she rode pretty tight herd on me, Austen. At home and at school. There wasn’t much hunting and fishing done, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Liz said Aunt Rose drove you away from school and home.”

  My grandfather thought for a moment. “Rose was harder on me than on the other scholars, and hard enough on them. I never abided school a day in my life and she was part of the reason but only part. The plain truth is that I could have had the easiest teacher in all Vermont and still wanted to be off in the woods. I liked to read, and the other schoolwork wasn’t hard for me, but I belonged in the woods and still do. That’s as certain as the sun coming up in the morning over the White Mountains of New Hampshire and going down at night behind the Green Mountains of Vermont. And on that note, Austen, I’m going to bed myself.”

  A heavy layer of fog lay over Lost Nation when my grandfather rousted me out at dawn the next morning. Day after the family reunion or not, there were still chores to do. While Gramp grained and watered his young stock, I cleaned the barn gutters, and fed my grandmother’s hens. Then I headed down the Hollow road toward Maiden Rose’s to get Liz’s pearl-handled revolver. The fog above the small east branch of the Upper Kingdom River was very thick. It felt more like fall than midsummer, and the mist enhanced the silence of the Hollow after the bustle of the reunion the day before. It reminded me of the fairgrounds the day after the fair closed, or Cousin Clarence’s empty baseball diamond a few hours after a big game.

  Usually Maiden Rose was up and around when I arrived for morning chores. Frequently I encountered her weeding her flowers or patrolling her dooryard or lane, bent over on her two canes like a witch in a fairy tale. Today there was no sign of her, just a wisp of woodsmoke from her kitchen chimney to tell me she was all right and had made her usual morning fire to take the chill off the air and boil her tea kettle.

  She was sitting at the applewood table, exactly where Liz and I had left her the night before. She was still wearing her magician’s gown, and I had no idea whether she had gone to bed the night before or not. Before her on the table the shoebox of April’s letters sat in exactly the same spot. Beside it lay Liz’s revolver, the pearly handle gleaming softly in the thin, misty light.

  “Sit down, Austen,” Rose said in a voice devoid of everything but a kind of weary determination. “No doubt you’ve come for that.”

  She looked at Liz’s revolver, and I nodded.

  “So, Austen,” Rose said, her voice still weary yet now also fierce and certain, “no doubt you pity your great-aunt. An old woman scarcely able to creep up to visit a grave. Do you pity me?”

  “No, Aunt,” I lied.

  She seemed scarcely to hear what I said. “You’ve never known utter loneliness, Austen. I hope you never will. You can’t imagine it.” Suddenly Rose looked straight at me. “Did you ever hear a wild goose that’s lost its mate? I have. I’ve heard it circle and circle in the night, calling in vain. I’ve seen the survivor of my father’s team of Morgans after its harness-mate of twenty years died, heard it nicker for its companion morning and night. The poor dumb beast wasn’t even aware of what it missed, only of the missing, the loneliness, the desolation. The utter desolation.”

  She was quiet for a moment and so was I. But then in some instinctive moment of understanding beyond my years, I said, “Then how can you blame Liz for going back to her first husband?”

  And Maiden Rose looked at me across the table, and nodded grimly, as she had sometimes done when, after an especially trying lesson in grammar or long division, I had finally mastered a hard concept. And in a haunted flat voice devoid of all pity and self-pity, she said, “I don’t.”

  Of course, neither Maiden Rose’s nor Liz’s story ended with the last Kittredge family reunion. To everyone’s astonishment but her own, Rose seemed to undergo a personal renaissance. She auctioned off her farm implements and much of her furniture, rented a small house in the village that had admired yet secretly censured her for fifty years, and dwelt there well on into her eighties. Bent over almost into a full circle, she nonetheless volunteered several afternoons a week at the village library, tutored kids after school in every s
ubject from first-grade reading through high-school Latin and algebra, and wrote a series of scathing broadsides for the American Shakespeare Society’s quarterly publication, roundly denouncing the pernicious theory, then just beginning to come into vogue, that Edward de Vere, the Sixteenth Earl of Oxford, had secretly written the great bard’s plays. She visited the Home Place only to tend April’s grave. The fields continued to grow back up to brush. The empty house sagged on its foundation. The barn leaned off away from the hillside, the way my great-aunt herself was leaning off toward the earth. She died at ninety, during my last year in college, and was buried beside her beloved companion in the family graveyard overlooking the abandoned old farm. “Together at Last.”

  Over the years I have come to admire greatly this unyielding woman, who led a hard, lonely, useful life and accommodated change only enough ultimately to achieve her private triumph over it, through her great, lasting love.

  Of course it was my grandfather who regularly checked on Rose after she moved to the village, and brought her out to visit April’s grave. For a foundling and a misanthrope, he had, it seemed to me, as much staying power as any other member of the family, including my grandmother and Maiden Rose herself—though his true origin before appearing in the California orange crate on the stoop of the Home Place remained as much a mystery to me as my grandmother’s preoccupation with all matters Egyptian. If, as my little aunts had speculated, Maiden Rose knew more about the orange crate than she’d ever acknowledged, it was a secret she took to her mutual grave with April, where it lies buried with her to this day.