On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  As he approached the peninsula near where he had wrecked his biplane on the ice, the poorhouse towered up before him, its ornate scallops and gingerbread and gables all pale and strange-looking in the thin moonlight. He could hear the waves crashing on the stony beach. The light in the cupola flared, then nearly went out, like a wavering beacon. Someone on high was up to no good, Henry was certain of it. He realized that he had no plan for getting rid of the intruder. Maybe he could frighten off whoever it was with the crowbar. If attacked, he supposed he could use the bar as a weapon, though that would be more his granddaddy’s style than his. Once he had witnessed Captain Cantrell Satterfield, CSA, Retired, harry two little black girls away from his favorite fishing stump with a sugar-cane machete.

  The front steps of the home were granite, but the wooden porch planks had rotted through in places. The door stood partway open, and in the moonlight Henry could see broken bottles strewn over the hallway floor. Only when he was inside the hulking shell did he light his lantern, which cast unsettling shadows on the cracked plaster walls and ceiling of the hallway. Just ahead a circular staircase ascended to the upper floors. Somewhere a loose shutter banged. It occurred to Henry that he had no way to transport the gold back to the home place. He wondered if, for caution’s sake, he should rebury it somewhere on the mountain. It was important that no one other than Miss Jane catch wind of his discovery. Pausing on the second-floor landing, he wondered again what the “Holy Ghost” in the riddle signified. Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost. Could it be the resident apparition, the Lady of the Lake? He took a furtive glimpse out the landing window and was terribly startled to see, peering back at him, a spectral figure dressed all in white and holding a lantern. His realization, a moment later, that he had been frightened by his own reflection did little to allay his terror. On up the creaking steps he fled. The stairs to the cupola rose dark and forbidding ahead of him. After falling in love with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, he had, at Miss Jane’s suggestion, been reading his way through Stevenson’s boys’ adventure tales. Recently he had finished Kidnapped. He thought of David Balfour’s crazed uncle Ebenezer sending David up the crumbling steps of the old tower, ending in thin air.

  Here, now, the grandfather’s voice said. Catch a-holt of yourself. Do you want that loot or don’t you?

  Up, up the narrow steps he went, chivvied on by the relentless captain. The door to the cupola was closed, but when he lifted the latch, it immediately swung open to reveal eight or nine dogs blocking his way. Henry was so flabbergasted he nearly forgot to be afraid. Together, the dogs represented a dozen different mixed breeds: Border collie crossed with spaniel, retriever with boxer, a flop-eared blue hound with the legs of a poodle, a shepherd with the head of a Newfoundland. The room was so brightly lit that spots danced in front of Henry’s eyes, and he thought he must be seeing things.

  A diminutive figure, his back to Henry and dressed in a paint-spattered smock, was painting, by lantern light, a replica of Kingdom County on the floor of the cupola. In the painting, Lake Memphremagog stretched north through the mountains into Canada. Above the gleaming lake loomed Kingdom Mountain and, on the summit, the great balancing rock with the animals carved on its face. To the south, surrounded by green and leafy hills, lay the village of Kingdom Common. But at the far northern end of the lake, a huge glacier, gleaming silver, blue, and crimson in the lowering sun, was advancing on the Kingdom.

  In the Common it was high summer, while on Miss Jane’s mountain fall had arrived and the slopes were a riot of red and orange. Farther north it was spring, with the early blush of small gold leaves covering the mountains. Stretching south from the great glacier at the Canadian end of the lake, the surface of Memphremagog was frozen, and a winter gale was blowing in from the west. Grazing at the foot of the glacier were two benign-looking mastodons.

  At last the painter stood up, turned around, and noticed Henry, standing stock-still in his white suit. He grinned and made a small sideways motion with his hand, and instantly the menagerie of fantastically colored dogs lay down with their heads on their front paws. Still grinning, the man peered up at Henry, who, without quite knowing why, reached into his pants pocket and brought out the old gold double eagle Miss Jane had given him as a good-luck piece. He flipped it end over end to the painter, who caught the coin in his mouth like one of his own dogs, removed it, examined it carefully, and put it in the pocket of his many-colored smock. Nodding rapidly several times, the painter knelt down again and began, with great rapidity, to paint a new scene on the side of Kingdom Mountain. By degrees, in the flickering lantern light in the old cupola, there appeared on the far side of the mountain a tall tree, quite unlike any Henry had ever seen. At the foot of the tree stood a soldier in a gray uniform, pointing a long-barreled pistol up into the thick green branches above. Whatever he was aiming at was invisible. When Henry tiptoed past the dogs and pointed into the foliage, the man shrugged.

  “It’s not here, sir,” a voice behind him said. Whirling around, Henry came face to face with an apparition in a white gown, a long trailing white nightcap, and a hunting jacket. It could only be the ghostly Lady of the Lake, come to fetch him to her watery demesne.

  “Henry!” Miss Jane said from under the nightcap. “What ails you? You look as if you’d seen your old captain himself. I said the gold isn’t here. Hand me that bar. I’ll show you.”

  Carefully, in order not to spoil the newly painted scene, Miss Jane pried up a floor plank. Except for a few old rags, the space below, where fugitive slaves were rumored to have been hidden, was empty.

  “It’s got to be here somewhere,” Henry said, holding his lantern down near the hidey-hole while Miss Jane stared at the painter’s representation of the butternut-clad soldier pointing his pistol into the branches of the strange tree. Then she replaced the plank, tipped her nightcap to the artist, and said, “Come, Henry. Our friend has work to do.”

  All Henry could do, however, was to shake his head wonderingly, as though he still thought that the treasure must be hidden “on high” in the cupola. The artist, for his part, continued to paint under the watchful eyes of his silent dogs.

  Over the next several days, the mysterious dog-cart man, as he came to be known from the small red wagon pulled by his mongrels and containing his paint cans, brushes, and a bedroll, did great works in Kingdom County. Although the artist was deaf and mute and could not say where he had come from or why, he painted as though his very life depended upon putting his bright and primitive and entirely arresting scenes, which mixed past, present, and even perhaps the future, up on the sides of local farmhouses and machine sheds and little general stores smelling of cheese and harness leather and kerosene and gossip. On the outside of Miss Jane’s hemlock-plank covered bridge, below the patent medicine advertisements, he painted a trout like no trout ever painted before, with a blue back and a broad band on its side consisting of an entire rainbow of lavender, pink, orange, yellow, and green. In the corner of its jaw was a beautiful red and white Duchess of Kingdom Mountain wet fly like those Miss Jane tied during long winter evenings and sold on commission at the five-and-dime in the village. On the brick wall of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank he painted a tableau of the Kingdom Common Raid, with a few gleaming double eagles spilling out of the bulging linen tow sacks slung over the backs of the raiders’ galloping horses. Eben Kinneson Esquire hired the dog-cart man to paint, on the south side of his great Monadnock House resort, a snowy slope with a few brightly dressed skiers whizzing down it and, above an alpine-looking lodge, a brand-new highway. On Miss Jane’s barn he depicted Venturing Seth coming across the frozen river, pulling with his ox; Freethinker, guiding a family of fugitive slaves over the mountaintop; and Quaker Meeting discovering Jane’s infant mother, Pharaoh’s Daughter, in the sweetgrass basket in the ox manger. While his dogs watched patiently, heads on their paws, ranged in a semicircle, the dogcart man added a blue-clad soldier, presumably Pilgrim, shackled and rail-thin, being le
d through the woods by a Confederate soldier. Where they were going, and why, was a mystery.

  “He’s prophesying the past, Mr. Satterfield,” Eben Kinneson Esquire told Henry when he saw the tableau on the barn. “Only on Kingdom Mountain!”

  Most intriguing of all was the painting the dog-cart man made on the huge sliding door at the top of Miss Jane’s high drive leading to the hayloft. It was an autumn scene in Kingdom County, and the people of the village were gathered at the annual Harvest Festival on the fairgrounds. Miss Jane, unmistakable in her black dress and shoes, was standing on the racetrack in front of the grandstand, waving at Henry, who swooped low over the grounds in his yellow biplane, his left hand cocked in a jaunty salute. Viewed from the home-place porch, it seemed quite evident that the plane was landing and that Henry was waving hello to a very happy Miss Jane. Yet if you viewed the same scene from the covered bridge, it appeared that the plane was taking off, Henry’s salute was a farewell wave, and the expression on Miss Jane’s face was stricken. Just how the dog-cart man achieved this dual effect was impossible to say. It had taken him no more than twenty minutes to complete. Ultimately, all of the artist’s paintings had a mysterious quality. You could unravel only so much meaning from them. Like Miss Jane and her anarchistic east-west-running Canadian granite mountain, they were what they were. No one, least of all their silent creator, could explain what they signified.

  26

  THE DROUGHT THAT SUMMER was the worst anyone could remember. After normal rainfall in early April, not a drop of rain fell during the next three months. The clover and timothy grass, even the tough redtop, which flourished where no other grass would grow, turned brown and died back before it was half a foot high. The red and orange Indian paintbrush and white daisies and blue roadside chicory, the black-eyed Susans and butter yellow cinquefoil, withered without ever blossoming. One by one, wells ran dry. Strong pasture springs that had never failed in one hundred years slowed to trickles, then gave out altogether.

  For the first time since Seth Kinneson had arrived on the mountain, much of Kingdom Mountain Burn dried up. Miss Jane’s char congregated in the few pools left, their bluish backs jutting out of the water. She and Henry drove them into a net and transported them to the river in milk cans. There was a constant eye-watering film in the air, day and night, from Canadian forest fires to the north, and the woods of the borderlands were tinder dry. In mid-July Miss Jane had begun manning the wooden fire tower on the mountaintop, watching for smoke. Occasionally Henry would go with her, but the fearless aviator was uncomfortable with heights when not in his plane. Climbing the rickety steps made him dizzy. As he clung to the shaky rail of the observation deck, his eyes smarting from the smoke, the sun as red and flat through the haze as an overheated stove lid, it was all the rainmaker could do to glance down at the balancing boulder and the peace cairn. Through the haze and smoke he and Miss Jane couldn’t make out the steam shovel and horse-drawn earthmovers and scrapers working in the valley below, though they could hear the rumble of the machinery and, from time to time, the boom of dynamite where the construction workers were widening the old road. What did Eben and the town fathers know about their pending appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court that Miss Jane didn’t? It was inconceivable to her that they would be allowed to set one foot on her property without her permission, much less push a road over her mountain.

  The new highway had become an end in itself, as absurd as its name. What earthly good would it do anyone, this Connector connecting nothing to nothing? Even if the high court were to rule in the township’s favor, the concrete two-laner seemed without purpose. No new road was coming down from Canada to join it. The Great Northern Slang would continue to be an impenetrable barrier to any highway north of Jane’s mountain. Yet the work on the right of way proceeded apace, and the clearing along the county road continued all that month. As often happens in small towns and, it is rumored, perhaps elsewhere as well, everyone seemed keen on this ill-advised, costly, and pointless project, confusing it with progress. By late July the right of way had reached the riverbank just across the covered bridge from Jane’s property. It was time, she told Henry, to take measures. It was time to put “Eben and his boys” on notice.

  One still summer morning Miss Jane invited Henry to accompany her and Lady J to the fire tower, where she announced that she planned to sight in her rifle in case, in the ensuing battle she now felt was inevitable, they had to “fall back” to a defensive position atop the tower. In preparation for this exercise she had spent the past two days cutting out life-size cardboard figures of construction workers, the town fathers, and Eben Kinneson Esquire. The previous evening she had tacked these effigies to the row of swamp maples and black willows along her side of the river just below the covered bridge.

  Henry had not been looking forward to this latest escapade. What if Miss Jane missed the silhouette of Eben and plugged, instead, the mild-mannered clerk of the works for the right of way? As they climbed up the shaky steps of what Jane had taken to calling her “little redoubt” on the mountaintop, the smoke from the forest fires to the north was so thick that they could barely make out the spectral figures of the derby-hatted workmen and their horses and mules across the river, not to mention the rather childish outlines tacked to the maples and willows on Miss Jane’s side. She estimated that as the crow flew, the paper targets were about a mile away and that over that distance a bullet fired from Lady Justice would drop six feet.

  Miss Jane jacked a .54 caliber shell into the chamber of her father’s rifle and rested the stock on the observation deck railing. Had he not been holding on to that same railing for dear life, Henry would have clapped both hands to his ears. As it was, he let go with one hand and covered one ear when she touched off her first round. Across the river, a hammerheaded construction mule—an intemperate animal named Sal who, the evening before, had tripped across the bridge while Henry was bathing in the river and had chased him, buck-naked except for his white hat, all the way up to the home place—dropped down stone dead. Now we’re talking, Henry’s grand-daddy said in the rainmaker’s head. There was a panicked flurry as the construction workers dived for cover behind their road scrapers and dump wagons. Miss Jane squinted at the willow, just downriver from the bridge, to which she had affixed Eben’s likeness. A large splinter had flown off the tree trunk beside the cardboard figure. “I failed to adjust for windage,” she said.

  “Right in the breadbasket,” she announced as her second shot ripped squarely through the midriff of the paper attorney. “Let them reflect on that before they cross the Rubicon. We will pick them off like the Visigoths they are, Henry. Via alta delendo est!”

  She fired again.

  “Miss Jane, you have shot and, I fear, killed a mule.”

  “Aye. It’s that evil-tempered animal with the white patch on its forehead that harried you home last night. Forgive me, Henry. But the sight of you posting up the pike in your birthday suit with that misbegotten creature at your heels and you clapping your hat over yourself like Adam with his fig leaf was so comical I laughed out loud. Step up, now. Try your hand at this good sport.”

  “I’ll pass, thank you just the same,” Henry said, as she politely held out Lady J stock first.

  Miss Jane shrugged. In the scant time it took her to jack the shells into the chamber, aim, and fire, she hit two more of the cutout figures. The construction crew were sprinting back down the right of way across the river. “Go it!” the Duchess chuckled.

  “Miss Jane, I beg you, desist,” Henry cried out. “For God’s sake, ask yourself the question my mother taught me to ask myself when I was a shaver. Ask yourself what Jesus and his chosen twelve would do in this fix, and do accordingly.”

  “What Jesus would do?” Miss Jane said, astonished. “I have no earthly idea what Jesus would do. Jesus had no property to defend. Nor, so far as I know, a .54 caliber sharpshooter’s rifle with a shotgun barrel attached below for close work. No, Henry. The question is not what t
he outspoken young Nazarene would do but what I must do. As for the twelve fawning slackers, his so-called disciples, I neither know nor care. I don’t give a fig for a single one of them.”

  “But Miss Jane,” Henry protested, “Jesus believed in turning the other cheek.”

  The Duchess coolly blew away the last curling puff of smoke emerging from the upper barrel of Lady Justice. “I do not,” she said. “If I turn the other cheek, it will be to lay it lovingly on the curly maple stock of Lady J and blast the high-road Goths off the face of the earth. But what do you say, Mr. Satterfield? What would the horned red devil do in my situation? How would he advise me, practical-minded old fellow that he is?”

  “He would offer you some way out of this pickle, no doubt. And it would be a poor bargain on your side. My granddaddy, the captain, learned that. He was a dreadfully tormented man. Come, now. Let us descend. You have sent your message, as intended.”

  On their way down the mountain, the two friends continued to speak of lofty matters. “One of these evenings, Henry, I must show you my Kingdom Mountain Bible,” the Duchess said. “I have not scrupled, you will discover, to revise a good deal of the New Testament as well as the Old. The four Gospels, as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are pretty well marked up in my Kingdom Mountain Bible. First I eliminated from the conversation of the young schoolteacher—for I have no doubt that he was no nail driver but, with his great love of hearing himself talk, a schoolmaster—all references to Hell, of which there are many in King James’s corrupt version. Hell is a vicious notion put in Jesus’s head by his lunatic cousin, John Baptist. John Baptist was a very bad influence, sir. Here comes he, rampaging out of the wilderness in a hair shirt, gobbling locusts, citing wicked old Isaiah, and putting all kinds of grandiose notions in his young relation’s head. I have no more use for John Baptist than for Sneaking Saul. Ha! Watch out for that hobblebush, Henry. It tries to trip me up every time I come this way.”