On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Upon my word, it’s a togue,” she said. “You’ve caught yourself a lake trout, Mistress Jane. Twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds.”

  While she was pleased to have landed such a fine trophy, Jane could not help feeling let down. Surely, her second sight had not brought her out here on the untrustworthy spring ice just to catch a big fish. But she briskly thwacked the trout twice on the head with St. Peter and shrugged back into her jacket. There were worse ways to spend a birthday than fishing. And the afternoon was not over. Any number of things could still happen. She glanced down the lake. Between the gap in the mountains the sky was the color of her lead sinker. A gust of wind blew a few tiny snowflakes up from the ice, sharp as pinpricks on her face. It was definitely time to head back. First, though, she must clean her fish. One of the earliest lessons Miss Jane had learned from her father was to clean her fish where she caught them. Like closing a farm gate behind herself and cutting her winter firewood a year in advance, it went beyond tradition.

  Inside the stomach of the big togue was a brook trout nearly a foot long. Strife, Miss Jane thought. The way of the world. Curious to see what a brook trout found to eat in the wintertime, she cleaned it, too. Its stomach sac was empty save for a coin about the size of a quarter, though how a quarter had found its way into the stomach of a brook trout inside the stomach of a togue was a great puzzle to her.

  She rubbed the coin against her wool hunting jacket and held it up in the fading daylight. To her amazement, it was a twenty-dollar gold piece. Turning the double eagle over between her fingers, she made out the date: 1852.

  Found money signified that a stranger was coming. Always, when she discovered even a lone forgotten dime in the pocket of an old smock, a stranger had shown up on the mountain soon afterward. Perhaps that was why her second sight had directed her to go out on the ice so late in the year. To lead her to the coin that would alert her to the arrival of a stranger who might help her prevent her cousin and the township from ramming that highway onto her mountain. Miss Jane shook her head over her own foolishness. She had no idea who might visit her mountain, and she needed no help in her battle with Eben and the high road. She really should think about acquiring a cat, she thought. An able, strong cat that lived rough and knew enough to appreciate a barn roof over its head and table scraps to eat in exchange for keeping down the mice. She might even invite it into the house of a winter evening, as long as it didn’t jump on her bed. There would be no cats on Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson’s bed, thank you kindly. She pocketed the double eagle, picked up her ox goad, and prepared to head over the ice toward home.

  5

  MISS JANE’S LEGS were stiff and cold from her long day on the ice. She had intended to ride at least partway home on the sledge, but the monstrous lake trout took up most of the space. An antic notion occurred to her. From the shanty she fetched a short length of rope, which she ran through the trout’s mouth and gills. Taking up the free ends like a pair of reins, she sat down astride the fish on the sledge as if it were a horse or pony. “Giddap,” she said, laughing at herself. “Giddap, Ethan and Ira.”

  Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, riding a great silver fish across the ice behind two oxen. What a splendid carving it would make for On Kingdom Mountain. This was more like the adventure she had expected a month ago while reading Dickens.

  She had not been under way for long when she heard the storm hissing toward her over the ice. It struck so hard and suddenly that she nearly lost her seat on the fish. The oxen staggered in the blast of wind, regained their momentum, stumbled again. Snow pellets flew through the air around them, sizzling off the ice, bouncing off the steers and the sledge and Jane’s clothing.

  “Trot,” she called out to her team. “Trot, boys.”

  They moved over the ice. The rime-covered fire tower on the mountain summit disappeared in the oncoming snowstorm. The balancing boulder vanished. And then Miss Jane glimpsed a speck in the sky, headed her way above the frozen lake, and heard, over the wind, a faint buzzing. At first it sounded like the humming of bees in the hollyhocks by her woodshed door on an afternoon in haying time. The buzzing grew louder as the flying object approached, now resembling one of the great winged reptiles that she knew had once terrorized the land. But this creature had a double set of wings and, unlike a bird’s wings, or even a flying lizard’s, they were fixed in place. It was a bright yellow biplane, racing directly up through the notch between the mountains, attempting to outrun the oncoming blizzard.

  Miss Jane could see the aviator plainly now, hands dancing over several levers, desperate to keep his craft aloft. The plane’s wings, just a few feet above the ice, tilted wildly back and forth. The oxen looked up wonderingly as the yellow biplane roared by just over their heads. On the underside of the bottom wing, in large black letters, were the words HENRY SATTERFIELD’S FLYING CIRCUS RAINMAKING AND PYROTECHNIC SERVICES BEAUMONT TEXAS. Near the end of each wing was the word DARE followed by an illustration of a dapper red devil piloting a biplane. The aviator, meanwhile, was jabbing downward with the forefinger of one gloved hand, indicating that he wished to land. Instantly, Miss Jane pointed back in the direction from which the plane had come, away from the treacherous open water north of the island. The pilot lifted his left hand and gave her a short salute, his hand snapping straight out from his forehead an inch or two and remaining there for a moment, like an upraised hatchet, then dropping back to the controls. The plane banked hard to the east, toward Kingdom Mountain, nearly clipping the soaring blue and emerald ice wall above the lake. Somehow the pilot managed to turn his craft away from the dark water just beyond the island. Barely missing Miss Jane and the oxen, wings wobbling and motor coughing, the plane labored back into the teeth of the storm.

  It hit the ice so hard that both wheels broke off. It took a high, crazy bounce, struck the ice again, and skidded sideways. To Miss Jane’s horror, the wind got under it and flipped it up on the bottom left wing at a forty-five-degree angle. It whirled around like a giant top, then turned upside down and, still spinning, vanished in the storm.

  Miss Jane was running beside the oxen. In order to breathe, she had to turn her head away from the snow-laden wind, which blew with a force she had never before felt. It drove snow under her earlappers, between her scarf and lumber jacket, up under her mittens at the wrists, down her felt boots.

  The oxen were indistinct shadows in the snow, and the big togue on the sledge looked like a fish Miss Jane might have sculpted from a block of ice. Then, as suddenly as the storm had struck, the wind and snow let up. The sky lightened and the mountaintop came back into view. It wasn’t a blizzard after all, just a squall. Not far away, standing on the rocky tip of the peninsula jutting out into the frozen bay, holding his limp left arm with his right hand but otherwise appearing unharmed, was the pilot. Nearby, wedged between two table-size plates of shore ice, battered but intact except for its wheels, was the yellow biplane. As she hurried toward it across the ice, a phrase ran through Miss Jane’s mind: “Recalled to life.” Like Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, the aviator had been recalled to life.

  The stranger lifted his left arm with his right hand and repeated his odd, hatchetlike salute, though the movement must have caused him pain, because he winced and immediately lowered his injured arm again to a sling position. A slender man with a dark complexion, dark eyes, and dark wavy hair, he appeared to be about forty. Under his open, fleece-lined leather aviator’s jacket, he wore a white suitcoat, a white shirt with a black four-in-hand necktie, and a crimson vest. His white slacks were still perfectly creased, and he wore the first pair of white shoes Miss Jane had ever seen on a man’s feet. A thin, dark mustache added to his devil-may-care appearance.

  Showing gleaming white teeth, he said in a mild drawl, “Henry Satterfield at your service, ma’am. With thanks for your navigational assistance. I do believe you saved my machine out there. Not to mention my life.”

  He pointed up the lake with the index finger of his left hand, this
time without attempting to lift his arm. Miss Jane looked back over her shoulder and was horrified to see a broad corridor of water stretching from Indian Island nearly all the way back to the peninsula. It occurred to her that she might be the one recalled to life. If she had delayed her return by just five minutes, she and the oxen would surely have gone to the bottom of the lake in the breakup.

  “And this place would be?” Henry Satterfield said, looking around himself with evident interest.

  “This is Kingdom County, Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said. She pointed at the mountain rising above them in the dusk. “That’s Kingdom Mountain, and I’m Jane Hubbell Kinneson.”

  “Why, this is just the place I’ve been looking for,” Henry Satterfield said. He paused and shook his head. “Kingdom Mountain is the very place I’ve been looking for nearly all my life. Do you like riddles, Miss Kinneson?”

  “I do,” she said. “And Jane will do nicely, thank you.”

  Henry Satterfield bowed slightly. “Very well, then, Miss Jane. I have a riddle for you. Only I must tell you at the outset that I don’t have an idea in the world what it might mean. It’s called the Riddle of Kingdom Mountain. My grandfather, Captain Cantrell Satterfield, told it to me. It goes like this.”

  At that instant Henry Satterfield’s left arm dropped limply to his side. His right hand moved slowly to his temple, which, Miss Jane now noticed, appeared to be bruised. Then, before he could recite his grandfather’s riddle, and before Miss Jane could reach out and break his fall, he collapsed onto the ice-strewn shore.

  6

  IT WAS LATE APRIL in Kingdom County. All of the ice had gone out of the lake, and mud season had come and gone. Miss Jane had turned Ethan and General Ira Allen out of the five-story barn into the water meadow along the river below the hemlock-plank covered bridge. Henry Satterfield had been boarding with her on the mountain for more than a month.

  The aviator’s injuries turned out to be minor—a sprained left arm, now nearly healed, and what Doc Harrison called a very mild concussion that might have caused some slight temporary loss of memory. In other words, a touch of amnesia, which, Doc assured him, would clear up within a few weeks. In the meantime, he prescribed rest. That was fine with Miss Jane, who was greatly enjoying Henry’s company. He turned out to be handy with tools, and besides working on his plane, which the oxen had pulled up the pike to the home place, Henry tuned Miss Jane’s Model A Ford truck, jacked up her sagging front porch, and cleaned and oiled her treadle-operated sewing machine.

  Within twenty-four hours of the stranger’s arrival, the entire Common knew that he had wrecked his yellow biplane on the ice of Lake Memphremagog and was now quartered, along with his machine, in Miss Jane’s barn, having politely refused to impose upon her by accepting her invitation to stay in the house. He was a little older than Jane had originally surmised, perhaps closer to forty-five than forty. And word quickly spread that Henry was a veteran weathermaker and stunt pilot who had brought rain to drought-afflicted states from Oklahoma to Oregon and put on flying exhibitions from Niagara Falls to Paris, France, though to Miss Jane he modestly confided that he was actually more of a finder than a maker of weather and had never in his life, so far as he knew, truly caused it to rain.

  Jane was impressed by his candor and impressed as well by his impeccable manners. Whatever else he might be, Henry Satterfield was a gentleman. It was yes, ma’am this and no, thank you, ma’am that, and, like Miss Jane’s deep regard for whatever was old-fashioned and traditional, Henry Satterfield’s gentlemanliness seemed very genuine, as much a part of his character as, say, his courage aloft and his curiosity. For the aviator was keenly interested, in a decorous and unintrusive way, about everything on the mountain, from Miss Jane’s beloved blockheads and dear people in On Kingdom Mountain to the balancing boulder on the mountaintop. He was interested in the home place, with its spacious kitchen workshop, its curved staircase with the bird’s-eye maple banister, and the native butternut casings around the doors and windows. He was intrigued by the five-story barn, said to be the biggest barn in the county, and by the covered bridge over the river at the foot of her lane.

  Henry loved Miss Jane’s icehouse with its sudden miraculous coldness and the fresh, sharp scent of the blocks of ice she had cut on the river the past winter and the bright yellow sawdust it was packed in. He loved to poke around in her root cellar, filled with the sweet fragrance of binned apples, the earthy odor of potatoes, and the salty tang of smoked hams hanging in nets from the timbered ceiling. He enjoyed reading aloud the motto painted on the pine lintel over the porch door by Venturing Seth Kinneson. “They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind.” Indeed, as Miss Jane told the pilot, the Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons had assisted not just fugitive slaves but French Canadian and Chinese immigrants slipping over the mountain into the United States from Canada and all kinds of wayfarers overtaken by weather, sickness, and injury, even bindlestiffs and tramps off the Grand Trunk Railroad. No one in need had ever been turned away from the home place on Kingdom Mountain. Jane’s great-grandfather, Freethinker Kinneson, had famously remarked that if the horned devil himself came looking for shelter, he would probably feel obliged to take the old gentleman in.

  Most of all, Henry was interested in Miss Jane’s life and times on the mountain, and in her family stories. Evening after evening, as he sat at the applewood kitchen table while she worked on her latest carving project, a tableau of the birds of Kingdom Mountain, she yarned on to him—how Seth had come to the mountain pulling in the yoke with his ox, how Quaker Meeting had discovered Jane’s Indian mother, Pharaoh’s Daughter, in the manger on Christmas morning, how her father had walked all the way from Kingdom Mountain to Tennessee during the Civil War, searching for his missing brother, Pilgrim.

  As for his own past and family, Henry told Miss Jane that he was born and raised in the East Texas town of Beaumont. His father and his grandfather, who had come from North Carolina, that same Captain Cantrell Satterfield who had passed along to Henry the Riddle of Kingdom Mountain, had run a small ranch. His mother, a schoolteacher like Miss Jane and the superintendent of the local Sunday school, was a woman of Creole ancestry.

  It was this revelation, made casually one evening, that the showman was of mixed blood, one-half Scotch-Irish and one-half Creole, that prompted Miss Jane to rise from the supper table, go immediately to the five-story barn, where Henry had been staying with his Burgess-Wright airplane, and personally bring his belongings into the house. Refusing to take no for an answer, she established him in the best upstairs bedroom, where her abolitionist ancestors had hidden fugitive slaves.

  Tongues wagged in the Common. The gossips on Anderson Hill, the straitlaced old churchwomen and some of the meddling old churchmen as well, whispered that Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson had taken up with a man of color. The Duchess, of course, was well aware of the gossip, and she was not happy about it. Say what the Common might, however, it would never be said that a Kingdom Mountain Kinneson extended less than the utmost hospitality to a stranger, particularly a stranger from the South whose ancestors Miss Jane’s own people had fought to help liberate. “They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind.”

  But as the hardwood buds on the mountain that spring turned from a ruddy red to the faintest gold, a problem arose. Presumably as a result of the mild memory loss Henry Satterfield had sustained in the biplane wreck, all he could recall of the Riddle of Kingdom Mountain was the first word: Behold.

  “Behold,” the pilot said aloud twenty times a day, raising an index finger as if preparing to declaim the rest. Often it seemed on the tip of his tongue. But that, unfortunately, was as far as he got. Behold what? Henry had no idea.

  At these times a somber expression stole across Henry’s face, an expression Miss Jane did not think could be quite accounted for by his temporary amnesia. One rainy evening she asked him bluntly if something was troubling him. After hesitating, he told her that bec
ause she had been so kind to him, he could no longer conceal from her that some months ago his former partner, wingwalker, and betrothed, one Lola Beauregard Beauclerk—Beauclerk pronounced without the k—of Lake Charles, Louisiana, had met with a horrible fate. While walking on the lower wing of the rainmaker’s biplane in a pair of close-fitting black tights, in a cloudless sky above Tulsa, Oklahoma, Miss Lola had been struck by a freakish bolt of lightning and had fallen to her death in the stockyards below. Since then, Henry confided, he had been derailed from time to time by bouts of sorrow.

  Miss Jane, putting the finishing touches on a great blue heron preparing to drive its daggerlike bill through the unsuspecting head of a yellow-bibbed bullfrog, was shocked. All she could think to say was, “Mr. Satterfield, do you like to fish?”

  “To fish? Why, yes, ma’am, I do. When I was a shaver, I liked to fish with my granddaddy, the old captain. He was a neat hand to catch catfish with a long cane pole and a cork bob, if I do say so.”

  “Well, then. If this rain keeps up, let’s you and I destroy some blue-backed char tomorrow morning.”

  “That sounds very agreeable to me. But what, if I might inquire, is a blue-backed char?”

  “It’s the prettiest fish in all creation,” Jane said. “You’ll see tomorrow. You will behold my beautiful blue-backed char. Perhaps they’ll put you in mind of your granddaddy’s riddle.”