Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Who lives here?” my grandfather continued to say to me each time we approached the Farm dooryard.

  “Who does?”

  “The meanest old bastard in Lost Nation Hollow,” he replied, and his harsh, ironical pleasure in our ritual and in contemplating his status as an interloper in the Kittredge family never dwindled.

  Surprisingly enough, Great-Aunt Liz did scout up old Hartley, her first husband and one true love, and yoke back up with him. They bought a small horse ranch in northwestern Montana, where they lived together for fifteen years. I don’t think that they were particularly happy. I visited Liz there when I was in college, and though she hadn’t changed at all, Hartley seemed as much of a millstone to her then as ever. He was a small, rail-thin, dissatisfied, sour, sharp-tongued character, who, though he no longer visited the cathouses, drank a pint of cheap blackberry brandy a day, and seemed not to appreciate any of Liz’s many wonderful qualities, yet was all too ready to point out her shortcomings. Even so, she continued to wear the ring he’d given her, then and for the rest of her life, and obviously loved him straight through to the bad end Maiden Rose had predicted for him, in the lunatic asylum where he spent the final year of his life in a state of complete dementia.

  Liz never visited Lost Nation or Vermont again. Up and down the Hollow, the abandoned farms grew back to puckerbrush. The fields reverted to woods, the woods to something akin to original wilderness. In 1972 the Home Place collapsed under a heavy March snowstorm. The barn where Rose had performed her Shakespeare plays went down the following winter. But Liz didn’t want to hear about any of it.

  The last time I visited her, on her eightieth birthday in 1982, she was living near two of her sons, in a sort of old-age boarding home in Butte, and a great favorite with everyone there. As she did each year on her birthday, she got out her pearl-handled revolver and put on an impressive marksmanship exhibit.

  “So,” I said to her when it was time for me to leave, “I know you don’t like questions. Will you answer just one for me?”

  “It depends which one, how I feel about it at the moment, and how you put it. If it’s about your grandfather’s true origin, I simply don’t know. If it’s about Maiden Rose and April, we both already know the answer, and now let the dead bury their dead. If your question’s about me, I might answer it.”

  “It’s about you. Did you rob the bank?”

  “Listen to what you hear, Austen. What did I tell you the evening I first met you?”

  “You told me you’d considered it.”

  “What did I tell you the next day? About Foster. My fourth husband.”

  “Foster James?”

  “No other. What did I say about him?”

  I wracked my mind. Then it came to me. “That he was Frank James’s great-grandson and that he’d been in some trouble with the law.”

  “Exactly. You never asked what the nature of the trouble was, Austen. Listen to what you hear, and ask the right question.”

  “What was the nature of the trouble?”

  “Why, he’d just gotten out of federal prison, man. Where he’d spent the better part of the past fifteen years. You tell me what for.”

  I began to laugh. “Bank robbery,” I said. “But where did he bury the boodle before his heart attack? If not up at Fort Kittredge?”

  “What makes you think he didn’t bury it there? Say under the windmill?”

  I looked at Liz and she smiled and her pale blue eyes flashed triumphantly. “What,” she said, “do you suppose I was out doing that morning of the reunion, before I rode up to the graveyard with full saddlebags and caused that hollering diversion about the condition of Foster’s grave? And what did you suppose that old coyote Hartley and I used to support ourselves with on our horse ranch? Recovering the boodle was the whole point of my venturing back to the family reunion, man. By then I figured enough time had gone by so I could get away with it. Listen to what you hear, Austen’s grandson, Austen. Listen to what you hear, and then you’ll be heard from. Now go catch your plane. And don’t say good-bye, and don’t look back to wave because I’m going inside, and won’t be here anyway.”

  And when, contrary to Liz’s injunction, I did glance up at the porch, once, quickly, she wasn’t.

  When I first set out to record these recollections of growing up with my grandparents and our extended family in Lost Nation, I wanted to discover for myself what was important enough to me from those times to have stayed fresh and clear in my mind down through the years. What was special about Lost Nation in the late 1940s and 1950s? The answer, of course, is the people who lived there, then and earlier, their lives and loves and secret mysteries, most of which, like my grandfather’s origin, will remain mysteries for all time to come.

  Strangely enough, it is Rose’s plays, so hateful to me at the time, that I seem to remember most frequently and clearly from the annual Kittredge family reunions. Not, heaven knows, that there wasn’t drama enough in the ongoing saga of the family itself, and high and low comedy and tragedy and noble sacrifice as well. But somehow it all seemed to be encapsulated in the most spirited summer Shakespeare in Lost Nation Hollow.

  Here Rose is again, now raging as Lear, now boasting as Falstaff, now agonizing over the bitter ironies of human existence as Hamlet. And once again I see her as Prospero, shattering the swirly-colored glass walking stick, while a hundred people sit silent as ghosts in the natural amphitheater, spellbound by the magical make-believe world fleetingly created despite all of the hardship and loss and despair on that remote, soon-to-be-abandoned farm in northern Vermont, which held its own secret dramas of the heart, overseen by the ever-changing yet unchanged granite hills and the graveyard, where for nearly two centuries Kittredges had been laid to rest in the final family reunion, together at last.

  9

  The Season of the Cluster Flies

  In August of my seventeenth year, at the height of the prolonged drought and unprecedented heat wave in Kingdom County that we would later come to call the season of the cluster flies, my Grandmother Kittredge suffered a heart attack. As heart attacks go, it did not seem to be a very severe one. But there was no doubt in Gram’s mind, or mine, or that of my Great-Aunt Helen, Gram’s younger sister visiting from Boston, about what was happening.

  I ran for the phone to call the local ambulance in Kingdom Common. Old Josie, my grandmother’s new housekeeper, ran out of the kitchen wringing her apron and calling upon the divine intervention of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Aunt Helen started to run to the door to call for my grandfather, who had just left for the woods and might still be within hailing distance. But my stricken grandmother called for my great-aunt to come back inside instantly and unlace her corset stays so that she could breathe easier while sustaining the attack.

  There was, however, a problem. The strings of my grandmother’s corset turned out to be bound so tightly that Aunt Helen, who I doubt ever wore a corset in her life, couldn’t get them unfastened.

  “Austen!” my great-aunt cried. “Quick! Fetch your grandmother’s sewing shears.”

  The sewing shears were in Egypt, and I hoped against hope I could locate them there. I had never been good at locating things my grandmother and my various great and little aunts sent me to fetch, beginning with my grandfather, and I was desperately afraid that before I could lay my hand on the shears, my grandmother would expire.

  Fortunately, I immediately spotted the shiny handles sticking out of Gram’s sewing basket. When I rushed back into the kitchen with them, my grandmother calmly reminded me not to run with a pair of scissors in my hand, then in the same steady voice enjoined my frantic aunt not to destroy the corset by cutting the strings.

  “There’s no need to spoil a perfectly serviceable corset, Helen,” Gram said. “Take your time and unlace the strings properly.”

  Unlace the strings properly! For all we knew to the contrary, my thrifty-minded grandmother was expending her last breath to issue this measured edict.

  Abiah K
ittredge was no easy woman to defy. But this might very well be a matter of life and death, and for once, my Great-Aunt Helen was not about to cave in to her strong-willed older sister.

  “Don’t move a muscle, Ab,” Aunt Helen said. “You haven’t any need for a corset in the first place and you know it.”

  Whereupon, with great resoluteness, my aunt cut away the back of my grandmother’s black blouse and slit the corset strings with half a dozen rapid snips while Gram shook her head in dismay.

  Later my great-aunt claimed that what my grandmother actually said just before the fateful action with the sewing shears was, “Helen, there’s no need to spoil an eight-dollar corset.” Regardless, the corset strings were cut; my grandmother did seem able to breathe easier; and the ambulance arrived as quickly as could be expected, considering that we lived fifteen miles from the village over winding steep roads, the last five miles of which still consisted of a one-lane dirt trace no better in 1959 than in 1948, when I’d first come to Lost Nation to live with my grandparents.

  “Helen, you stay here and keep an eye on her,” my grandmother said as the two attendants carried her out of the house on a stretcher. She meant Old Josie, who continued to wring her apron and invoke the assistance of the Holy Family on behalf of my grandmother. So while my great-aunt baby-sat Josie, I rode to the hospital in the back of the speeding ambulance with Gram and the volunteer fireman from the village who was administering oxygen to her.

  At the hairpin bend partway down the Fiddler’s Elbow, where years ago Theresa Dubois had lost her silver dollar in a snowbank, my grandmother grasped my wrist.

  With her other hand she lifted the oxygen mask. “Tell the driver to slow down, Tut. There’s no need to kill us all.”

  The ambulance driver, a man with dark jowls and a put-upon expression, cranked his head around for a fraction of a second. “What’d she say?”

  “Step on it,” I told him. “She said step on it.”

  He nodded and slued the ambulance out of the switchback at the foot of the Elbow. On the flats approaching the Currier farm I looked over his shoulder at the speedometer. The red needle was vibrating just under one hundred. Out the window, Ben Currier came chugging down his roadside hayfield on his ancient green Allis-Chalmers tractor. As we went screaming past him he started to lift one gloved hand, then dropped it to the tractor steering wheel again, as though unsure about the protocol of waving to an ambulance carrying one of his neighbors to the hospital.

  Now we were shrieking along the edge of the central green in Kingdom Common; now racing up U.S. Route Five toward Memphremagog at a flat one hundred and ten miles per hour. Shimmering heat mirages danced on the highway ahead of us, imparting an air of unreality to the morning and the ambulance ride. How could any of this be happening to my indomitable grandmother? I felt as though I’d stumbled into another dimension, one from which I might never return.

  In a matter of minutes we skidded up to the emergency entrance of the Hospital of Mary, Blessed Queen of the Border Country: the hospital my Little Aunt Klee had selected for my grandmother a year ago, after Gram had sustained a gall bladder attack. But today my grandmother was having none of the Blessed Border Queen. Looking out of the ambulance window and seeing the serene, blue-robed plaster statue over the emergency door, arms extended in benign welcome, she brushed the oxygen mask aside again and said distinctly, “County.” Meaning that she was to be taken to the county hospital on the other side of town.

  And that is pretty much the way the relentlessly hot and arid summer of 1959 had gone for the Kittredge family.

  Back in June, when my grandmother’s gall bladder threatened to act up again, my Little Aunt Klee arrived from New York where she and Freddi were pursuing their Off-Broadway acting careers by working as counter girls in various Off-Broadway cafeterias. Immediately the entire household had been thrown into the state of tumultuous disarray that inevitably accompanied Klee’s visits. In 1959, besides a nearly round-the-clock regimen of papering and painting several remote upper bedchambers that no one had slept in regularly for twenty-five or thirty years, Klee fought tooth and nail to get Gram to allow electricity to be installed at the house as a labor-saving device to prevent her from working herself into the ground, as Klee put it. Of course my grandmother refused even to consider such an innovation. In the first place, she had worked herself into the ground all her life and was not about to stop now. Moreover, she harbored a deep fear of burning up in her bed in a fire caused by faulty wiring, and had not one good word to say about either electricity or any electrical appliances. In desperation my little aunt paid for the wiring herself, but my grandmother had the last word after all by refusing to allow anyone to use it after it was hooked up.

  My grandfather, in the meantime, was retreating further each week into the isolation of his work in the woods. Once again this summer he and I were cutting brush off the clearing marking the American-Canadian Line along the northern border of Kingdom County. After Klee’s arrival he stayed overnight in Labrador more often than not.

  Not that Gram didn’t have plenty of help at home if only she could be persuaded to avail herself of it. My Great-Aunt Helen, whose husband had died the previous year, had more or less moved in that summer. Dad faithfully drove up from White River Junction once a week, and of course there was always Old Josie.

  Old Josie, for the record, was the most recent of a succession of housekeepers hired by Dad and my two little aunts since Gram’s first gall bladder trouble. I remember them now as a featureless string of widowed and maiden women in their fifties and sixties, smelling faintly of sweat and strong yellow soap, with names as drab and sad as their personal histories: Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Gray, Mrs. Quick—here was a misnomer if one ever existed—and Old Josie, whose last name I don’t believe I ever did know. They were supposed to prevent my grandmother from working herself into the ground, but didn’t, for the simple reason that she refused to allow them to do a tap of housework.

  “Whatever else she may be or may not be, Old Josie is no housekeeper,” my grandmother had said with a heavy sigh several times a week since Josie’s arrival. “She is thoroughly incompetent.”

  How Gram knew this was beyond me, though, since she continued to insist on doing every last stroke of housework herself. Yet in the end, I have no doubt that, more than any other factor, it was the onslaught of the cluster flies that resulted in her heart attack.

  First singly, next by the dozens, finally in vast legions, a veritable plague of them came swarming out of the walls of the old house, starting in early August, soon after Little Aunt Klee’s return to New York. Slightly smaller than an ordinary housefly and slightly darker, they began to emerge about eight o’clock in the morning. By noon you could hear their maddening buzz from any place in the house. They congregated by the thousands on the inside windowsills and along the wide baseboards; even after my grandmother had swept up the last invaders of the day, around six in the evening, we could hear their incessant humming from somewhere deep within the walls of the farmhouse, like an alarm clock someone had forgotten to shut off in some faraway upper chamber.

  To repel this scourge, my grandmother resorted to every conceivable stratagem. She stopped up the cracks in the window casings and along the baseboards with pliable felt weather stripping, which proved to be no deterrent to the flies at all. From the hardware store in the Common she purchased a bright green, pump-handled bug sprayer, which Aunt Helen promptly dubbed the Bomb. The Bomb held three full quarts of a popular DDT solution. Armed with this virulent infusion, my grandmother saturated the windowsills and baseboards with the dispassionate ruthlessness of a veteran crop duster. She retraced her path of destruction with broom and dustpan, sweeping up thousands of victims, whose tiny corpses she consigned to the outside burning barrel. Yet invariably, by the time she completed bombing the farthest-back bedroom, fresh reinforcements of cluster flies were overrunning the kitchen. For weeks on end the entire house reeked of the sweetish, lethal odor of DDT, but t
he flies kept coming, numberless as the hordes of Genghis Khan.

  Not that my grandmother was ever less than a formidable adversary, her gall bladder troubles notwithstanding. Some years earlier she had waged war with glorious results against an army of shiny black carpenter ants that had filed in endless procession out of the woodshed, across the kitchen floor, and under the door of Egypt, only to disappear there beneath the floorboards. Equipped with a treacherous homemade decoction of rose water laced with arsenic, which the Borgias themselves might have coveted, my grandmother quickly thinned down the ranks of the ants to a few stunned survivors.

  Over the decade that I had lived with her and my grandfather, Gram had also put to rout a dynasty of white-footed field mice, several swarms of irascible blue hornets, and an untidy colony of little brown bats, not to mention half a dozen wintering red squirrels that had taken up residence in the attic some years ago.

  No matter. Unimpressed, the cluster flies just kept coming. I suppose it was ironical, if you could only look at it that way. Here was my grandmother, unvanquished by the Depression and its interminable aftermath in Kingdom County, unvanquished by the border country’s notorious seven-month winters, unvanquished by the ongoing ordeals of alternately nurturing and chivvying her family through every imaginable vicissitude of rural life and by forty years of unabated rivalry with the meanest old bastard in Kingdom County, about to be brought to her knees at last by a swarm of little flies.

  “To win is all, Tut,” my grandmother had told me many times. Now she seemed on the brink of losing one of the great battles of her life.

  Apparently the cluster flies had been there in the walls of the farmhouse all along, biding their time like seventeen-year locusts. It was as though they had been waiting, like the instruments of some malevolent and unfathomable design, until my grandmother was at her weakest, worn down by the years and by her troublesome gall bladder, by Little Aunt Klee’s recent visit, by Old Josie, the housekeeper whom she refused to allow to keep house, by the unprecedented three-month hot spell in which the fields turned brown in June, the river dwindled to a small stream by July, and the spring that supplied water to both the house and barn was now threatening to run dry for the first time since Sojourner Kittredge discovered it in the summer of 1775. Only then did the flies issue forth, rarely flying anywhere at all but rather reclining on their backs with their legs in the air and buzzing like swarming bees until we imagined that we could hear them not only all day but all night as well, whether we actually did or not.