Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Zack cleared his throat. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that he’s going to have to be here for this.”

  “I’ll get him,” Freddi said.

  Aunt Helen looked at me, but today I was in no frame of mind for our usual conspiratorial glances. I simply could not accept the fact that a person as fiercely alive as my grandmother, a person whose guidance and good opinion I had depended on daily for eleven years, could be dead.

  Zack Barrows sat down at the kitchen table and began rummaging through his briefcase. At last he produced a long, official-looking, buff-colored envelope containing a typed document. He cleared his throat. “Now, folks,” the lawyer said in his most pompous courtroom manner, “usually, as I’m sure you’re well aware, the reading of the last will and testament comes after the funeral service. In this case, since the will stipulates certain conditions for that service—”

  The door opened and Freddi reappeared, followed immediately by my grandfather.

  “Austen,” Zack said, half-rising.

  Mason held out his hand toward my grandfather. “We want to express our—”

  “Get on with your business,” my grandfather said to Zack. “I don’t have all morning.”

  He ignored Mason’s hand entirely. The last time he and Mason had officially met was up at Labrador some years ago, when my grandfather had tossed him a stick of lighted dynamite.

  Again Zack cleared his throat. Then he read aloud in the farmhouse kitchen that I had never thought of, and never afterward would think of, as belonging to anyone but my grandmother, that Abiah Kittredge, being sound of mind—“very sound of mind,” Zack added—willed all her real estate and other property and assets to her husband, Austen Gleason Kittredge, with the exception of my college spending-money fund and her collection of Egyptian memorabilia. Along with her remains, her Egyptian artifacts were to be disposed of according to the stipulations in a private letter to her husband, to be found in the top drawer of her worktable in Egypt.

  Everyone looked at my grandfather.

  “Are you acquainted with the contents of the letter in question, Austen?” Zack asked.

  Without answering, my grandfather took three or four long strides through the dining room hallway into Egypt, where Old Josie was still sitting next to my grandmother’s bed, crying and fingering her rosary. The room was very dim; someone had drawn the curtains across the single window. At the appearance of my grandfather, Old Josie gave a gasp and rose from her chair, her rosary beads dripping out of her trembling hands.

  Before anyone knew what he was going to do, my grandfather yanked open the curtains. In the flood of morning sunlight my grandmother lay on the daybed, where my aunts had arranged her in her best black dress. Lyle the Crocodile still reposed at her side.

  My grandfather glanced at his deceased wife for a moment. “I can’t say I detect any great change,” he said.

  Someone gave a shocked gasp. At the same time I heard the kitchen door slam as Dad headed out of the house.

  In the cheery sunshine, neither Egypt nor my grandmother struck me as particularly otherworldly. The picture of the extinct Sphinx looked like any other picture of a Sphinx. The carved wooden figure of Lord Ra looked downright ordinary. Everything had a mundane, homespun aspect, including the tiny body of my grandmother, her eyes closed, her hands folded across her still, dark-clad breast.

  My grandfather jerked open the top drawer of the bedside table and got out an envelope. Inside were two sheets of instructions in my grandmother’s close, neat hand. My grandfather took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and scanned the letter rapidly.

  “What’s it say?” Lawyer Barrows asked from the doorway. “Read it to us, Austen.”

  “It says ‘Private, for My Husband Only’ right here across the top. You read vis the will, Barrows. The will said a private letter.”

  My grandfather put the letter back in the envelope, which he stuck in his rear pants pocket. Abruptly, he whipped the curtains closed and said, “Clear out of here now, all of you.”

  “Don’t you want me to transport Mrs. K’s remains into the undertaking parlor, Austen?”

  “No, Mason, I don’t want you to transport Mrs. K’s remains to the undertaking parlor. Or anywhere else. The service will be held here at this house, in Mrs. K’s own parlor, tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock sharp. She’ll be buried in the family plot according to her wishes. You and Zack clear out of here now. You’ve done what you came to do. I’ll handle the rest.”

  “But what about the casket? You can’t just—”

  Mason faltered as my grandfather continued to stare at him.

  “I’ll handle matters from here on,” my grandfather said. “You boys shove along.”

  The cluster flies were nearly gone, with only a few hapless stragglers left to be swept up and disposed of. But the late-summer heat was as intense as ever. Plainly, it was essential to get my grandmother’s body into the ground as soon as decently possible. Dad put some left-over blocks of ice from the icehouse in maple sugar pans and cream pans and set them on the daybed beside Gram. My grandfather had returned to the sawmill.

  Around noon I went down to the mill to offer to help. “This is tamarack, Austen,” my grandfather said when he finished running a stack of freshly-cut boards through the shrieking planer. “Tamarack makes good durable stable flooring. It made very sound foundation posts for the old log-driving dams. It’s quite the old bitch to work with, but it stands up well to the elements.”

  My grandfather shook his head. “Even so I wish we had six months to let these boards season. I’ll double-cleat them all around with square nails and that’s the best I can do. If they warp, they warp. She’ll have to take her chances.”

  My grandfather allowed me to wait on him off and on for the rest of the day. I brought him a sandwich and kept his water bucket full of fresh cold drinking water from the river. Despite all of my grandparents’ feuding, I felt much less cut off from my grandmother when I was near him. In the middle of the afternoon he told me to go up to the woods and cut a load of cedar and balsam brush. “Just small stuff,” he said. “Nothing bigger than what you’d put in a Christmas wreath.”

  “You want some flowers too? Late-blooming roses?”

  He shook his head. “Just the brush.”

  All afternoon, as the news of my grandmother’s death spread through the county, cars and farm trucks came up the Hollow road and parked in the dooryard and barnyard and people stopped by to deliver food and pay their respects. A few visitors ventured down to the mill but did not stay long. On my grandfather worked, straight through the supper hour into the evening. Old Josie kept an unbroken vigil over my grandmother’s body. Freddi and Dad and Aunt Helen congregated in the kitchen, now overflowing with baked beans and homemade bread and rolls and casseroles and soups and ten different kinds of pies and cakes, and Klee finished her stenciling.

  As the night wore on, the heat was too oppressive to talk much. Every two or three hours Dad emptied the meltwater out of the pans on the daybed and replenished them with fresh blocks of ice. We were all worried about the heat.

  Sometime around midnight I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer and had to go to bed. To my surprise, I fell asleep immediately and didn’t wake up until after eight the next morning.

  Evidently my grandmother’s remains had been moved to the parlor, because the door to Egypt was open and Old Josie was bustling around in the kitchen, trying to make a pot of coffee and getting in everyone’s way. Aunt Helen shot me a glance and mouthed the words “No housekeeper.” What on earth would become of Josie now, I wondered. What would become of my grandfather and me?

  This morning the turmoil of the past twenty-four hours finally seemed to have caught up with me. I’d be fine for a few minutes, until I thought of something my grandmother and I had done together, or some simple chore I’d done for her and now had to do alone, and that would set me off teary-eyed all over again. For a seventeen-year-old, I wasn’t handling thi
s well at all.

  Soon after my grandmother’s clocks struck eleven, my grandfather appeared from the parlor. For the first time I could ever remember, he needed a shave. His short white hair was flecked with sawdust and his pale eyes looked haggard. “You people can go in and see her now if you want,” he said.

  I was exceedingly nervous about what might greet us in the parlor. I held my breath in apprehension as we trooped in.

  What we beheld there remains to this day one of the strangest sights of my life. On two sawhorses sat a large coffin. No. Not a coffin. A sarcophagus. A wooden sarcophagus, in the unmistakable shape of a mummified Egyptian figure. It was painted antique green and blue with the stenciling paint Little Aunt Klee had used for the dining room fleur-de-lys pattern; and inside, on a bed of woven cedar and balsam fir boughs that filled the room with a woodsy fragrance, lay my minuscule grandmother.

  Stenciled in bright gold lettering on the side of the sarcophagus was the word “Egypt.” But there was more, much more. The sarcophagus itself was commodious enough for a large man, and inside it, propped on the fragrant evergreen boughs all around my grandmother, were her most treasured Egyptian artifacts. There for everyone to view were the hawk-headed carved wooden figure of Lord Ra, the framed picture of the extinct Sphinx, Lyle the Pink Crocodile, her stereopticon and Egyptian slides, and her treasured old copies of Life and the National Geographic, open to the articles on the discovery of King Tut’s tomb; and my grandmother was covered from her folded hands downward with the quilt of the Four Colorful Ramses guarding the Temple of Abu Simbel.

  At her feet, crouching in the interwoven cedar and balsam boughs, were the mummified remains of the rat-fighting cat Lynx Kittredge, whom my grandmother had renamed Pharaoh, its fierce yellow eyes staring out over the room as though defying us to so much as smile. Which, of course, no one dreamed of doing. Even my Great-Aunt Helen was awe-stricken by my grandfather’s handiwork. This, we all realized, was exactly the way my grandmother should be laid to rest. Here, indeed, was Egypt.

  At the service that afternoon, while my grandfather finished digging the grave in the family cemetery above Maiden Rose’s place, our ancient lay-preacher cousin, John Wesleyan Kittredge, read my grandmother’s favorite passages from the Bible: Joseph’s run-in with Potiphar’s wife; the discovery of the infant Moses in the bullrushes by Pharaoh’s daughter; the great plagues and afflictions visited on the venerable and undeserving population of Egypt, no doubt as a result of some sort of black magic practiced by that same meddling Israelite. Otherwise, the service was conventional enough, as my grandmother’s own firm religious convictions were conventional enough apart from all matters in the Bible touching upon her unimpeachable Egyptians.

  Freddi played a thumping version of Gram’s three favorite numbers on the wheezing old parlor pump organ: “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Rock of Ages,” and “The Noon Bazaar at Cairo.” And at the end of the service my good-hearted little aunt slipped the photograph of my eighteen-year-old grandfather, standing on top of the log railway, into the sarcophagus beneath Gram’s folded hands. Only then did I see my Great-Aunt Helen swipe at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  After the service my grandfather came down to the house and nailed on the sarcophagus’s lid, and then he and Dad and I carried it up to the family graveyard. During the short committal service I stood back on the edge of the gathering with my grandfather, my mind swirling with the images of Egypt inside the tomb-like painted box Gramp had made. Once, when Preacher John Wesleyan paused for breath, and I found myself wiping my eyes with the back of my wrist, my grandfather took hold of my arm and whispered, “Tamarack, Austen. Very water-resistant.”

  A minute later he leaned over toward me again and said, seriously, “She’s all right. I double-cleated the lid down.”

  We lowered the tamarack sarcophagus with the double-cleated lid into the grave and then my grandfather told us to clear out, he’d finish the job himself. On my way down to the house I looked back once and saw him shoveling dirt fast, angry and desolate in the fierce August sun.

  I sympathized deeply with my father later that day. We all did because it had fallen to him to return Old Josie to her people in New Hampshire. Without my grandmother to bully her and do all of her work for her, Josie had gone completely to smash in the past two days. She’d cried constantly and wrung her apron up to the size of a dish towel, and Dad said that she cried all the way over to Groveton, too. The last thing she said to him was, “Missus was dead right, young Mr. Kittredge. Whatever else I may be, I am no housekeeper.”

  No serious consideration was ever given to my leaving the Farm or my grandfather. I don’t believe that the possibility was even discussed. It was simply understood by the entire family that I would stay on, and my grandfather and I would look after each other, at least until I graduated from high school.

  “You can’t predict the future, Tut,” my grandmother had told me many times. How frequently, over the next several weeks, her words would come back to me. It had been taken for granted in our family that my grandfather would die first, before my grandmother. Isn’t that what hill farmers with bad tickers nearly always did? My grandmother would then remain at the Farm until she became too frail to manage alone, at which point she would move in with Aunt Helen or Dad or one of my little aunts. I am sure Gram herself had assumed as much. Then came the cluster flies and her untimely departure, combined with my grandfather’s stubborn disinclination to cooperate by dying first. So he and I seemed to have been thrown together on our own resources by default, as it were.

  I have mentioned that on that fateful ride to the hospital with my grandmother I felt as though I was in another dimension. It was a sensation I never entirely lost during the coming fall, and I now believe that this is, in fact, exactly what had happened to me. I had entered the dimension of our lives called adulthood, which is often no more than an awareness of those things we were not entirely aware of as children. I had become aware of the inexorableness of death.

  “Who lives there, Old Man?” I said to my grandfather late in the afternoon on the day after my grandmother’s funeral. We were walking down toward the house from the woods, where once again we were clearing brush off the Canadian Line. Except for the lumber truck, the dooryard was empty now. The last of the family had left that morning.

  My grandfather frowned slightly, and said nothing.

  “Who lives there?” I said again.

  “Who does? You tell me.”

  “The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County. I heard it first from you.”

  My grandfather’s creased face, tanned as dark as the leather tops of his high work boots, remained abstracted; and I believe that at that moment, coming down the ridge toward the empty house, the full force of my grandmother’s absence hit him. It was as if, now that my grandmother was gone, being the meanest old bastard in the county was a hollow designation.

  Still, my grandfather was not about to give up on life, then or any other time. Nor, for all his fabled misanthropy, did he intend to stop being a grandfather to me. That evening he suddenly looked up from The Lure of the Labrador Wild, from which he had just read aloud to me the passage in which the starving explorer Leonidas Hubbard was unable to shoot a goose that might well have saved his life because he had heedlessly failed to bring a shotgun on his fateful trip.

  “How old are you, Austen?” my grandfather demanded when he reached the end of this chapter.

  “You know how old I am.”

  “You’re what, seventeen? In a year you’ll be eighteen. That’s the summer we’ll go to Labrador. You and I and a canoe, with no one to stop us.”

  “By then you’ll be too old to go.”

  “Yes, sir. And you still won’t be able to paddle with me or fish with me or keep up with me on the portages.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “We will.” He looked at me sharply. “We’ll take a shotgun. Unlike Christly Leonidas Hubbard. And,” he added, with unmistakable irony, �
�we’ll see wonderful things.”

  10

  Northern Borders

  From my earliest days in Lost Nation, I thought of my grandfather in connection with deep woods and well-oiled shotguns, bamboo fly rods with bright red guide wrappings, and leather fly books full of marvelous feathered creations that were brighter still: big, battered, old-fashioned wet flies and streamers with exotic names evocative of the North Woods, like Adirondack, Queen of the Waters, Labrador Belle. Also I connected my grandfather with old photographs of men surveying faraway places, and men with trophy bucks and enormous trout. And invariably, when I thought of my grandfather, I thought of maps.

  For Austen Kittredge loved maps of all kinds. His hunting camp, Labrador, was full of them. The plank walls were festooned with topographical maps of Kingdom County, maps of the remote stretches of the American-Canadian border he’d helped survey in his youth, maps painstakingly razored out of old travel books of Africa and Asia and, especially, the Far North, some of which still contained sizable blank white spaces across which were printed the stirring words terra incognita.

  Near the south window of my grandfather’s camp hung one such map from his 1914 World Atlas and Geographical Gazetteer, depicting that little-known northernmost peninsula of mainland Canada consisting of Labrador and the Ungava Barrens. Nearly half of the interior of this vast land was still designated as terra incognita, though my grandfather had carefully inked onto it the farthest point reached by the 1910 government survey party on which he had worked as a chainman. The official line of demarcation between Labrador and Quebec ran along a natural height of land known as the Snow Chain Mountains, and ended where the partially-completed survey had ended—out of good weather and supplies and funds—on a peak called No Name Mountain. Here the Snow Chain range veered sharply northeast in a configuration known to my grandfather and a few other old Labrador hands as the Great Lost corner.