On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “The delay, sir,” Henry replied, “is I can’t for the life of me recall the two lines of your so-called riddle. It was knocked out of my head by that wreck on the ice.”

  That’s your problem, not mine, said the grandfather, who was as cantankerous now that he was dead as he ever had been in his life, though that scarcely seemed possible.

  “Let’s have an understanding,” Henry said. “We’ll leave her out of this.”

  To which the grandfather pointedly, Henry thought, said nothing.

  Henry liked to go into town. While Miss Jane sold and checked out books and held court on literary matters at the Atheneum, he loitered at the feed store and livery stable or sat in the barbershop or out on the hotel porch with the old men, recounting his adventures in the Great War, telling rainmaking stories, talking about the weather. The weather was an increasingly popular topic. It had not rained since the middle of April, and farmers were becoming concerned.

  The men at the feed store and barbershop liked the airman for his unassuming ways and friendliness. He was a good listener and never tired of hearing the sagas of the few remaining Civil War veterans on the hotel porch. He especially loved hearing about the Great Kingdom Common Raid, how the Confederate soldiers had robbed the bank and shot up the town, what routes they had taken into and out of the village, what they had carried the stolen coins in.

  The women of the Common admired Henry, too. When he came to town he wore a white hat of the style once known as a southern planter’s hat, which he courteously tipped to every lady and girl on the street, at the same time bowing slightly. Even the churchwomen from Anderson Hill had to acknowledge that the handsome, mannerly stranger seemed a gentleman born. Children took to him. He could fix a kid’s bicycle, which he called a “wheel” in his mild Texas drawl, fashion a slingshot from a forked black-cherry branch and a strip of inner tubing, play the guessing game with three walnut shells and a dried chickpea. Sometimes he let the kids guess which shell the pea was under, sometimes not.

  Henry cultivated the acquaintance of Sadie Blackberry, who knew where all the edible wild fruit grew and when it ripened, and of Clarence Davis, the spruce-gum gatherer, who roamed the woods carrying a long cedar pole with a sickle blade on the end. For all his fastidiousness, the rainmaker took to roving the woods on Miss Jane’s mountain with Sadie and Clarence. And he befriended the local fish peddler, Canvasback Glodgett, sometimes accompanying him on his excursions up the Lower Kingdom River to Lake Memphremagog, where Canvasback fished from a red rowboat with a long cane pole and a blue and white bobber. He peddled his finny wares through the village in a homemade wheelbarrow, his grating, repetitive calls ringing out from one end of town to the other. “Fish for sale, fish for sale. Fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh. Pickerel and perch, pike and pout, bass and sunnies, but nary a trout. Nary a trout. Pike and pout but nary a trout.” Or, “Dogfish, dogfish, two for a dime. Nobody’s dogfish eats like mine.” And Henry walked along the Grand Trunk tracks, visiting with the now-retired king of the hoboes, A Number One. He even got along with Eben Kinneson Esquire.

  “See if you can talk some sense into the hard head of that cousin of mine, Mr. Satterfield,” Eben said. “No one’s trying to take her beloved mountain away from her. We just want to upgrade the old pike and attract some tourists to this forsaken backwater.”

  He said it, I didn’t, remarked the old captain in Henry’s head. Let’s get this show on the road, boy.

  The rainmaker was quick on his feet. Asked about his political affiliation, he joked that he held no man’s politics against him and would gladly put on air shows for all comers, even Republicans and Democrats. Yet some said he carried a pistol in the side pocket of his white jacket and had “a history.” The pistol part was unfounded. Henry was uneasy around weapons, particularly Miss Jane’s Lady Justice, which she had begun taking on their trips to the village. With an eye on its twin barrels jutting up between them as they sailed down the middle of Main Street, Henry said, “I don’t really hold with guns, Miss Jane.”

  “I do,” she replied.

  Of course, the man had his detractors. From the start, some were suspicious of him, among them the town fathers. President George Quinn of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank said mark his words, this Satterfield fellow wanted something, though just what George wasn’t sure. The Reverend hinted that Henry was not everything he appeared to be, with his dusky complexion and dark eyes and devilish little mustache. Julia Hefner, the church organist and Judge Allen’s court stenographer, a grass widow who, according to local scuttlebutt, was Eben Kinneson Esquire’s longtime paramour, went the Reverend one better. Julia claimed that in Henry’s promenades through the village from barbershop to hotel to post office to feed store, he took care to walk well out around the church at the south end of the village green. She shared this observation with Miss Jane at the library one afternoon. “Why, Julia,” the Duchess said, “don’t you know that church is the very place you’re most apt to find the devil in Kingdom Common? And in the front pew, if not playing the organ.”

  One afternoon Judge Allen stopped at the Atheneum to pick up a book Miss Jane had recently ordered for him, a new novel by a young southern writer she and the judge much admired named Faulkner.

  After paying for the book, he sat down in the Morris chair beside the Pretender of Avon, stretched out his long legs toward the fireplace, and said, “Jane, this is none of my concern. Tell me to tend to my own affairs if you’ve a mind to. I won’t be offended. But you know how highly I regard you.”

  “I believe we’ve been over this ground before, Ira,” Jane said.

  The judge held up his hand. “I’m not appealing my case. It’s just that I don’t want to see you getting mixed up in something you can’t get out of.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, such as harboring or abetting. That kind of thing.”

  “Ira, have you read the inscription on my front door lintel? ‘They lived in a house at the end of the road . . .’”

  “‘And were friends to mankind.’ I know. But that’s no mandate from your ancestors to turn Kingdom Mountain into a hideout for a one-man Hole-in-the-Wall gang.”

  “Is that what you think Henry Satterfield is? Or do you object to my befriending a man of color?”

  “I didn’t know that he was a man of color. At the risk of offending you further, I don’t know precisely what he is, and I’m not sure I want to find out. His heritage has nothing to do with it. The point, Jane, is that I know who you are.”

  “Who am I?” Miss Jane said.

  “Well, you’re a former schoolteacher, a sterling bookwoman, an artist, and a damn glamorous woman. Moreover, you’re loyal to a fault. Loyal to your family, your mountain, and your new friend. Not to mention just about the most pigheaded creature I’ve ever known.”

  “Point taken. But surely you don’t want me to turn Mr. S. out of house and home?”

  “Believe me, Mr. S. can take care of himself. As for what I want, it isn’t going to happen, and we both know it. Mainly, I want you to be careful. That’s all. Just be careful with all this.”

  “I have a question for you, Ira. Henry thinks it quite probable that the Vermont Supreme Court will overturn your ruling on the high road. Is that likely?”

  “I’m sure Henry would know.”

  “Come, sir. Cynicism and envy don’t become you.”

  “To answer your question, if I were you I’d engage a good lawyer. My son, Forrest, has just set himself up in practice in Burlington. He’d work hard for you.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  It was a still afternoon in the village. The 4:15 from Boston was not due at the railway station for half an hour. Today was varnishing day at the furniture factory, and the pervasive sweet scents of varnish and orange shellac seemed to enhance the quiet. It occurred to Miss Jane that for all the pettiness of the village, she loved her work at the Atheneum nearly as much as her life on the mountain and w
ould be lost without it.

  “Would you like to go fly-fishing tomorrow evening?” the judge asked. “That stretch from your covered bridge to the foot of Blue Clay Hill should be good this time of year.”

  “You’re on,” Jane said, relieved to be back on familiar footing with her old friend. “You can take the bend pool behind the old cedar still, Ira. I hooked a big one there last week, but I lost him.”

  The judge nodded. He stood up and walked to the door with his book. “Jane?”

  “Aye?”

  “I don’t dislike Henry Satterfield at all. I just don’t entirely trust him.”

  “And you’re jealous of him.”

  “Point taken,” the judge said. Ira Allen was the great-great-grandson of the Vermont hero-outlaw Ethan Allen, and in Miss Jane’s opinion he looked uncannily like the statue of his fabled ancestor on the village green. Jane liked and admired him a great deal and did not understand why she had twice spurned his marriage proposals. In the privacy of On Kingdom Mountain, she had wondered aloud to her dear people if she might be afraid to become intimate with a man as smart as herself.

  “To go back to the Supreme Court, Jane. They won’t let you represent yourself down there. Montpelier isn’t Kingdom County, you know.”

  “That’s the truth. And Kingdom County isn’t Montpelier yet, either, thank heavens. I’ll meet you at the covered bridge tomorrow evening at six o’clock.”

  14

  “I’VE BEEN WONDERING, Henry,” Miss Jane called up through the vent in her ceiling late one evening in June, in what she had come to think of, quite boldly, as one of their now nightly “featherbed chats.”

  “What have you been wondering about, Miss Jane?” Henry called back down.

  “Has any more of your grandfather’s riddle come back to you?”

  “No, ma’am, it surely hasn’t. Just the ‘behold’ part.”

  “I imagine the rest will pop into your head when you least expect it,” Miss Jane said. “In the meantime, I hear that you’ve been making inquiries round town about the Great Raid.”

  “I have made some inquiries, Miss Jane. I can’t help but think that my grandfather, the old captain, knew something about the raid himself, you know. More than once he hinted that if I could ever solve the riddle, it would make me as rich as Croesus.”

  “Would you like to hear a story, Henry? About my own father and the Great Raid on the bank?”

  Miss Jane, who had ears like an owl, heard Henry closing his detective magazine. His bare feet hit the floor, and she knew he was sitting on the edge of his bed in order not to miss a word. “Many Commoners, at the time of the raid, believed that my father, who had just returned from his trek south to search for his missing brother, gave sanctuary to the fleeing bandits. From there the tale acquired a life of its own. Soon the Common was saying that my father found the treasure that the raiders supposedly buried on the mountain.”

  “From what you’ve told me of your father, Miss Jane, I reckon that if he had, he’d have given it back to the bank.”

  “Not necessarily. While my father was honest to a fault, he believed that the gold was already tainted at the time it was stolen.”

  “How so?”

  “Most of it was earned by local farmers who, having paid a substitute to go to war in their stead, profiteered from the conflict by selling oats and hay to Grant’s army at exorbitant rates. I too believe that the money was tainted. That’s partly why I’ve never searched very hard for the so-called Treasure of Kingdom Mountain.”

  “Where would you search, supposing you were inclined to?” Henry said, his voice light, agreeable, conversational. “Up under the balancing boulder on the mountaintop?”

  “No,” Miss Jane said. “I’d look where it came from.”

  “Where it came from,” Henry said. It was not quite a question and Miss Jane knew he was trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  “Aye,” she said. “When my father died, he left something in a large deposit box at the bank. I know exactly which one. It’s the lowermost box on the far left side of the vault, a box nearly as large as my Currier and Ives safe. He established a small fund whose interest would pay the annual rent on this box. In his will he left instructions that it was not to be opened until the one hundredth anniversary of his death. It is assumed by many that the deposit box contains the stolen gold, which my father had, in good conscience, returned to the bank, at the same time assuring himself that, as tainted lucre, it would never be spent. It’s just the sort of thing he would have done.”

  “Because it was ill-gotten gains?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Miss Jane, may I make one more inquiry?”

  “Certainly. I will answer it or not as I see fit.”

  “Fair enough. Do you believe the treasure is in the deposit box of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank?”

  “I do not.”

  “Might I ask, then, what you do believe is in the deposit box?”

  “A map.”

  “A map, Miss Jane? You mean a treasure map?”

  Something told Miss Jane that this featherbed chat had gone on quite long enough. “My grandfather, Henry, had a little rhyme, perhaps inspired by his unusual name, which he passed on to my father.

  Quaker meeting hath begun.

  No more talking, no more fun.

  He who shows his teeth or tongue,

  He shall pay a forfeit.”

  “What does it mean, Miss Jane?”

  “It means that it is time to go to sleep. Very probably, the map in the vault, if a map it be, was my father’s idea of a great joke on everyone obsessed with the treasure in particular and money in general. Good night, Henry.”

  In keeping with the little rhyme of Miss Jane’s grandfather, Henry said good night and nothing more. But his expression suggested that he did not, for a Kingdom Mountain moment, believe that the treasure map in the deposit box of the bank vault was any kind of prank. It was a long time before Henry Satterfield of Beaumont, Texas, fell asleep that night. And when at last he did, he slept fitfully, dreaming of gold and hand-drawn maps and bank vaults dark as midnight. Below in her own bedchamber, Miss Jane lay awake herself, thinking that she had no better idea who Henry Satterfield truly was than she had the day he crashed on the ice at the foot of her mountain. But at last she too drifted off to sleep, dreaming that she and Henry were flying away in his biplane, faster by far than she had ever traveled before, though where they might be headed, and for what possible purpose, she could not imagine.

  HENRY

  15

  “I BELIEVE THAT my Burgess-Wright is as airworthy as she’s going to be,” Henry announced the next morning. “She is, you know, a lady of a certain age. But I think she is ready to be put to the test.”

  “And then I suppose you’ll be on your way, Henry. Well, as a lady of a certain age myself, I must say that I have very much enjoyed your company.”

  “Let us discuss that after I try out the plane,” Henry said. “I have no pressing engagements this summer, Miss Jane. And no wingwalker yet, either.”

  “You are a brave man to go up again after your terrible mishaps,” she said.

  It was another fine, dry morning on the mountain, a good day for flying, Henry said. And Jane could see that despite his sorrowful memories of Miss Lola, he was very happy to be going aloft once more. Although she, too, was excited about the maiden flight of the repaired plane, she was terrified that the machine might fail Henry again. Also, she dreaded the moment when he would fly off into the blue and leave her alone on her mountain.

  Under Jane’s supervision, Ethan and General Ira Allen pulled the yellow biplane out of the barn and down the lane to the water meadow. While she and the oxen watched from the edge of the field, with Miss Jane holding her breath longer than she would have thought possible, Henry, now wearing his leather aviator’s hat and flying goggles, spun his propeller, leaped out of its way and into the front seat of the plane, and went bouncing off d
own the pasture. The plane lifted off the ground, its long wings wobbling, climbed up a few hundred feet, circled the home place twice, and made a bumpy but safe landing.

  Henry had warned Miss Jane not to get close to the spinning propeller, but the moment it made its last revolution she ran up to the cockpit. To her own astonishment she heard herself say, “Now it’s my turn, Mr. Satterfield. Let’s go again, together.” She strapped herself into the rear seat behind the rainmaker and, heart pounding, was both petrified and thrilled when, moments later, they jounced off down the hayfield. There was an utterly unbelievable moment when she realized that they were off the ground. Like Daedalus and his overreaching son, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain was defying gravity.

  From the start, Jane loved everything about flying. The stomach-flipping jolts and dips, the rushing fields below, the intensifying whine of the engine in her ears as they banked up and up until they could look down on the mountain, the fire tower, the big lake, and the range of jagged peaks beyond. Whoever would have guessed that Miss Jane, born just fifteen years after the Civil War ended, would one day behold her mountain from a flying machine a thousand feet up in the firmament? At first she felt dizzy when the great roaring Burgess-Wright with its twenty-foot-long double wings dived down toward the tilting mountainside below. “Look off at the horizon,” Henry called back to her. She did, and the trees righted themselves and Jane felt a keen joy in being alive. She had been born, it seemed to her, to fly.