Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Late one spring afternoon soon after the ice had gone out of the river, as my aunt and grandmother were walking to work from the Beehive, they looked upstream and perceived in the slant, thinning light of the lowering sun, a single figure profiled above the white water. He was riding a log in the vanguard of the vast log drive that passed” the mill for two weeks each May from the big woods and lakes upriver along the Canadian border. He was steering the log casually with his long pick pole, guiding the bouncing thirty-two-foot length of spruce trunk down the roaring spring rapids as comfortably as a man might lean on an ax handle on the packed smooth dirt of his farm dooryard. He wore a checked red shirt, green wool pants stagged off at the top of his high caulked boots, and a dark, wide-brimmed woodsman’s hat, which he suddenly lifted to the two mill girls on the bank. As he swept off the hat to reveal his dark hair and light eyes, he nodded gravely. Then he set the hat back on his head again and passed around the bend below the mill, out of sight in the setting sun.

  Other ’jacks came down with the drive that evening, and for the next two weeks the paper mill hamlet was a roaring carnival of brawling rivermen, while hundreds of thousands of logs swept past from the huge woods upriver. But no one else rode a log through the white water, much less tipped his hat to my grandmother.

  That fall a spectacular conflagration destroyed both the mill and the Beehive. Fortunately, it broke out during the night, when my grandmother and aunt were at work, but the sight of their tinder-dry tenement bursting into an inferno so impressed my grandmother that throughout her subsequent life at the Farm she kept two brimming buckets of water in every last room in the house in case of fire. Five hours later the entire town was gone. All that remained were the fire-twisted rails of the spur line up which the old rags and linen had come in freight cars, and down which the newsprint and stationery had gone.

  Next my grandmother and Aunt Helen landed in the Kingdom County railroad and lumbering town of Pond in the Sky, where they found work cleaning out passenger coaches on the Grand Trunk Line from Montreal to Portland. And though you might suppose that my grandmother’s aversion to my grandfather’s sashaying habits originated during her transatlantic crossing in the orphan ship, or from her hand-to-mouth odyssey along the Canadian frontier, hitched wrist to wrist to my aunt by a hank of frayed rope, Aunt Helen intimated to me that Gram’s strange antipathy to traveling developed from that job swabbing out spittoons and brushing off sooty seats on the passenger coaches, while ignoring the ribald blan-dishments of the traveling dry goods drummers and cattle and lumber buyers and soldiers who regularly rode the Grand Trunk. There is no doubt that she was more than willing, after two months of these indignities, to answer my Great-Grandfather Gleason Kittredge’s ad in The Kingdom County Monitor for a live-in housekeeper to take care of his home and his ailing wife on the Farm in Lost Nation Township, just south of the Canadian border.

  Yet it was much more than the opportunity to get away from the Grand Trunk riffraff that influenced my grandmother to accept a housekeeping job in a place only slightly less remote and wild-appearing than the sheep farmer’s outpost on Cape Breton. It was the photograph in my great-grandfather’s parlor of the bare-headed young man in a checked shirt and lumberman’s wool pants, looking soberly down into the camera from the top of a twenty-foot-high railway of logs waiting to be broken out into the spring river just north of the Farm—leaning easily and confidently on his peavey exactly the way he had leaned back on his pick pole to steer that log through the white water above the paper mill eight months ago.

  “I know that man,” my grandmother said, pointing at the photograph. “He lifted his hat to me.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” my Great-Grandfather Gleason said. “I wasn’t aware that he’d learned any manners. He certainly hasn’t learned much else. He left school at twelve to go on a log drive, and never went back.”

  “Where is he now?” my grandmother said, staring at the picture.

  “Out West someplace on a surveying crew. Instead of attending college, where he could go free if he wanted.”

  “I’ll take that housekeeping job if my sister can come live here with me,” my grandmother said abruptly.

  “And that,” my great-aunt told me as we turned off the county road and started up into Lost Nation Hollow on our way back from the hospital, “is when Abiah most certainly set her cap for your grandfather.”

  The night was very dark, and by the summer of 1959, the Hollow was a Lost Nation in more than just its name. Where there had been farms and lantern lights in farmhouse windows eleven years ago, when I’d first come to live with my grandparents, there was now darkness, and the dark bulks of deserted buildings already starting to collapse into cellar holes darker still.

  “So,” I said, “Gram fell in love with him. When she saw him in the picture. Or even back riding the log down the rapids. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  “Oh, my, no,” Aunt Helen said with a short laugh. “Nothing of the sort, Austen. I’m sure falling in love had nothing to do with it. You see, your grandmother mistakenly thought that by lifting his hat, your grandfather was paying tribute to her. That’s why she set her cap for him. Then it was just a matter of outwaiting him. Every time he got back from one of his sashayings, she was there waiting. In the end, she wore him down through sheer persistence.”

  When Aunt Helen and I got back to the Farm that night, I said nothing to Dad and my little aunts about Gram’s plans to come home the next day. Well before sunrise the following morning, I hurried up the ridge to Labrador, where I found my grandfather boiling coffee in a fire-blackened saucepan. As I came through the door he threw in another handful of coffee without speaking. He was already dressed in his work boots and hat.

  I grinned at him. “What do you do, sleep in your hat?”

  “What I do or don’t do here is my concern.”

  “I’m going to tell Gram you’ve been sleeping in your hat.”

  “Tell away.”

  “I guess taking it off at the wrong time fifty years ago got you into a peck of trouble.”

  My grandfather looked at me sharply.

  “I saw Gram last night,” I told him. “She wants you to drive up to the hospital and bring her home.”

  “Does she now?”

  The smell of boiling coffee filled the camp as my grandfather poured us each a scalding mug of the powerful stuff. Camp coffee, we called it. We sat at the plank table and sipped it. From time to time he looked across the table at me, but said nothing. Mainly he stared broodingly at the map of Labrador on the wall with its large blank white spaces labeled “terra incognita.”

  To my surprise, however, my grandfather did not go to the woods that morning. He returned to the farmhouse, put on his town clothes, and told me we were going to Memphremagog.

  Scheduled morning visiting hours at the hospital did not begin until ten o’clock. My grandfather and I arrived before eight, just as Doc Harrison was coming out of Gram’s room. When my grandfather asked how she was, Doc walked a few steps down the hall away from Gram’s door and said bluntly, “Old. She’s old and tired, Austen. Worn down like the rest of us. Only more so from putting up with a devil like you all these years.”

  My grandfather looked at Doc Harrison as though to assess what he had really said. “Evidently she wants to go home. She doesn’t find this as much of a holiday as she expected,” Gramp finally said.

  “If you spring her out of here and cart her up to that so-called farm of yours, I wouldn’t guarantee she’d live a week,” Doc said.

  “And if she stays here?”

  Doc sighed. “Frankly, I can’t guarantee much either way.”

  My grandfather walked past Doc Harrison and on down the hall and into Gram’s room, with me behind him. The first thing I noticed was that the tube was still in the side of her mouth. In the daylight, it made her look helpless, a way I’d never seen her before, though her dark eyes were as alert as ever.

  “Do you want to go
home?” my grandfather said louder than necessary.

  My grandmother started to say something, then lifted her hand and touched the tube.

  “Yes or no?” my grandfather said. “Speak up.”

  “She can’t speak up,” I said. “They’ve got something in her mouth.”

  My grandfather left the room. Almost immediately he returned with a nurse. “This woman can’t talk with that apparatus down her gullet,” he said. “Snake it out.”

  “She needs it, Mr. Kittredge. To eat.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” my grandfather said. “She’s going home. She can eat there the same way she always has.”

  I was half-fearful and half-hoping that Dad and my little aunts would show up and prevent my grandmother from returning to the Farm. They didn’t, though. The nurse wheeled her to the door, clutching Lyle the Pink Crocodile, and my grandfather carried her out to the truck and lifted her up into the cab. She sat by the passenger’s window, grim-faced and silent, still clutching Lyle.

  “I think she sets more store by that reptile fella than she does by me,” my grandfather said as we went around to get in the driver’s door.

  I nodded, sure that she did.

  Oddly, neither Dad nor my little aunts protested much when my grandfather and I appeared at the Farm with my grandmother. For her own part, Gram seemed greatly relieved to be home and to see for herself that the cluster flies were gone. Old Josie went around wringing her apron and thanking Jesus, Joseph, and Mary for my grandmother’s deliverance. Freddi cried and wanted to hug everybody. Klee tried to get Gram to drink a tall glass of a vile-tasting homeopathic cure-all called Tiger’s Milk, but my grandmother was not about to be prayed over by Old Josie, squeezed half to death by Freddi, or physicked by Klee. She instructed my grandfather to carry her into Egypt, and there she spent the next few days subsisting on tea and a little toast, and dozing or sleeping much of the time.

  During Gram’s waking moments she was perfectly alert but even more silent than usual. A tense quietude had settled over the entire house. All of us, including Gram herself, seemed to be holding our breaths to see whether she would regain her strength. During those days I divided my time between working up on the Canadian Line with my grandfather, who now that he had fetched my grandmother home from the hospital seemed to feel he had fulfilled all his responsibilities to her, and reading to Gram or just sitting with her in Egypt.

  “I’m going back to White River in the morning, Austen,” my father told me one night. “With school starting next week, I have to begin getting ready. Can you hold down the fort here for a while?”

  I assured him that I could.

  In the meantime, Gram seemed to stay about the same. She ate very little and slept a great deal, as though to make up for all those years of sleeping only four or five hours a night.

  Evening after evening, I sat by her daybed, reading aloud her beloved passages on the Egyptians in the Book of Genesis and in Herodotus’s History of the Ancient World, and the catastrophic articles from the Doomsday Book, as well as the dog-eared old magazine articles on the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. “‘What do you see?’ Carter’s awe-stricken assistant asked as the eternally hopeful archaeologist played his electric torch on the innermost chamber of Tutankhamen’s final resting place.

  “Carter paused for a long moment. Then in hushed tones he replied, ‘Wonderful things: I see wonderful things.’”

  As I read on into those hot late-summer nights in the farmhouse at the end of Lost Nation Hollow, the great Sphinx and hawk-headed Lord Ra looked on in the yellow-white lantern light as though they too were deeply attentive to the marvels of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Except for Lyle the Pink Crocodile, reposing incongruously next to my grandmother on the counterpane she’d quilted of the Four Colorful Ramses guarding the temple of Abu Simbel, we might have been thousands of miles away, reading by lantern light in the antechamber to a pharaoh’s burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings.

  “How many books have you read this summer, Tut?” my grandmother said suddenly one night in a clear, sharp voice. It was very late, well after midnight. I had just finished reading the old Life article on Howard Carter again. I’d supposed that my grandmother had at last fallen asleep, and when she spoke, I started.

  “Well, well,” she said before I could reply. “Never mind. The exact number isn’t important. You still like to read and study, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “I’m glad you do. Very glad. No one can ever take a book you’ve read away from you. And you’re going to be heard from, you know. Like Mr. Howard Carter. You’ll see great sights and you’ll be heard from.”

  My grandmother reached out and took my wrist, the way she had on the day I first arrived at the Farm with my grandfather and again on the afternoon when she first saw the huge snow owl and on our way to the hospital with the rescue unit and so many other times over the past eleven years. “Your grandmother is going on a long sojourn herself, Tut.”

  “Where, Gram?” I said, alarmed. “Where are you going?”

  “To Egypt,” she said in a strong and steady voice. “See it?”

  With her free hand she made a short, encompassing gesture, and I too saw Egypt. I saw Egypt everywhere I looked in Gram’s sitting room.

  With great effort, gripping my wrist as fiercely as hawk-headed Ra ever gripped a sacrificial victim, my grandmother rose partway off her pillows and extended her free hand toward the opposite wall. “I see them!” she exclaimed.

  “See what, Gram? What do you see?”

  My grandmother lay back, her face triumphant and composed. “Wonderful things,” she said. “I see wonderful things, Tut.”

  Then she let out her breath quite easily, though her fingers remained as firm as ever on my wrist until, some time later, I detached them myself and went up to Labrador, crying the entire way, to notify my grandfather that my grandmother had departed on her long sojourn at last.

  My grandfather could hardly have been surprised by the sad news I had to report, yet it seemed to make him very angry.

  “What do you expect me to do about it?” he said. “I can’t bring her back.”

  He did return to the house with me, but instead of looking in on my grandmother, he went directly to his sawmill. A few minutes later I heard the whine of the big log saw starting up, though dawn was still hours away.

  “Grief, Austen!” Freddi said through a shuddering sob. “Does he know?”

  I nodded.

  Aunt Helen went back into the sitting room with Old Josie, who had resolutely refused to leave my grandmother’s remains, to get the body ready to be viewed. My aunts had called Dad in White River, and he was on his way up. Unfortunately Uncle Rob was off in the wilds of Alaska that summer and couldn’t be reached by phone.

  Klee, in the meantime, continued to work on an elaborate stencil pattern of fleur-de-lys around the top border of the dining room wallpaper. “Your grandmother never left a job unfinished once she started it, Austen,” she told me from the top of her stepladder. “I’m sure she won’t rest comfortably until this job is finished.”

  I was in a daze. The full impact of my grandmother’s death had not hit me yet. I still couldn’t seem to accept the fact that she was gone. Teary-eyed and out of touch with my surroundings, I wandered here and there around the Farm. Everywhere I went I was aware of both her absence and her strong lingering presence. Several times a desperate intimation of ultimate finality swept over me, a certainty that my life and the lives of the rest of the family had come to a kind of close along with my grandmother’s. Each time the desolation passed and again I’d just feel detached from the morning and the Farm and myself. My wrist still tingled from my grandmother’s grip, or at least I imagined that it did. I was only vaguely aware of my grandfather’s screaming log saw.

  Dad arrived about seven o’clock. He glanced toward the sawmill, where my grandfather was now operating the higher-pitched ripsaw, and looked at me questioningly. I shrugge
d.

  Little Aunt Freddi was most helpful to me. While Dad called Lawyer Zack Barrows, in accordance with some private instructions Gram had evidently given him, I confided to Freddi my sense that Gram was still here, yet not here. Freddi listened sympathetically and said that I would always have that sense, and I always have, though along with the death of my mother, the loss of my grandmother when I was seventeen years old remains to this day the most difficult memory of my youth.

  About ten o’clock Lawyer Barrows appeared in the shiny bottle-green suit jacket he’d worn to court the day my grandmother hauled my grandfather up in front of Judge Allen to prevent him from flooding her orchard. With Zack was his crony Sheriff Mason White, who was also the local undertaker. They drove up in Mason’s hearse.

  Dad and Freddi and my Great-Aunt Helen watched from the kitchen as the old lawyer and the sheriff solemnly approached the house, not without a few wary looks over their shoulder in the direction of my grandfather’s sawmill. Zack was carrying a large briefcase.

  “No doubt Mom’s laughing up her sleeve at all this,” Freddi said, “wherever she is.”

  “Wherever she is, Mom is not laughing,” Klee called in from the dining room, where she was still working on the stenciling. “The dead, you know, always act entirely in character.”

  “We’re terribly sorry about your loss, folks,” Zack said after shaking hands all around. “Terribly sorry.”

  “Yes,” Mason White said in his most unctuous undertaker’s tones. He put a comforting hand on Freddi’s shoulder. “We want to express our deepest condolences.”

  Freddi pulled away from the undertaker’s hand. “We know very well why you’re here, Mason. There’s no need for you at all. Mom wants to be buried here at home in the family plot.”

  Mason gave a sad and knowing little smile, as though well-accustomed to the vagaries of the suddenly bereaved.

  “How’s Mr. Kittredge taking it?” Lawyer Barrows said.

  “Fine,” Dad said. “Can’t you hear him?” He jerked his head toward the mill, where my grandfather was hard at it with the rip saw.