On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Then, just before what would surely have been a catastrophic collision, the runaway machine gave out a final sigh and stopped beside Mr. Foxie Romanoff, who was operating the Ferris wheel, filled with children, in the rain.

  Mr. Romanoff looked up at Miss Jane, covered from head to toe with soot and dust. “What would it set me back,” he said, “to acquire that ride for my show?”

  Miss Jane thought for a moment. “I’ll trade it to you, even steven, for the Bride of Ramses.”

  That’s when they spotted Henry Satterfield, coming on in his plane just ahead of the onrushing storm. The lightning and thunder shook the old Burgess-Wright like a toy. The wings and guy wires were alive with blue electrical current, and the same unearthly violet light played over the aviator’s hands on the controls as he cleared the looming water tower just west of the fairgrounds. Miss Jane could smell ozone in the approaching rain, as well as something singed and sulfurous, as if the electricity in the air had scorched the airship. As it came in over the fairgrounds and landed beside the Ferris wheel, she ran up to the plane carrying the coffin of Ramses’ Bride, stashed it behind the jump seat, and hopped in. Just as she and Henry took off, the deluge struck.

  The Commoners on the bluestone sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block, the pensioners back out on the hotel porch, a few ballplayers scampering across the green with mitts and bats tucked under their arms, looked up and, through the welcome torrent, saw the plane overhead. They could just make out the letters on the bottom wing, HENRY SATTERFIELD’S FLYING CIRCUS RAINMAKING AND PYROTECHNIC SERVICES BEAUMONT TEXAS. The roar of the engine combined with the thunder as the Burgess-Wright banked sharply east out of town over the new right of way, now fast becoming a muddy stream. Henry landed in Jane’s field and rolled into the barnyard, up the high drive, and through the big open sliding door onto the wide wagon ramp between the hay bays. Only then did the rainmaker and the Duchess look at each other. Bedraggled, grimy, scarcely recognizable, they both began to laugh. Once started, neither could stop laughing until they collapsed in each other’s arms. Miss Jane got out her wooden flask of Who Shot Sam, took a long drink, and offered the canteen to Henry. They were still laughing as she told him how the fire tower had been struck and set on fire, how the glowing ball of electricity had run down the fence-wire antenna and activated Jehovah. She described the way the steam shovel had plunged over the bank like some frightened prehistoric creature. Henry told Jane how he’d found the rain and then just gotten back to the village before the storm. Finally, Miss Jane explained that she’d traded King James’s Jehovah for the Bride of Ramses.

  “What on earth for?” Henry said, still laughing.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Miss Jane said. This set them off again.

  “Have another sip of Sam, Mr. Satterfield.”

  “This ’jack is beginning to rise to my head,” he said. “I’d call it potent stuff.”

  More laughter as the rain drummed furiously against the barn, which shook with each thunderclap.

  “Henry,” Jane said, “do you know what we need?”

  “Besides more applejack?”

  “Yes. Besides more applejack, you and I need a good bath. Now tell me. Have you ever gone skinny-dipping in the rain with a duchess?”

  “Why, no,” Henry said, half choking and still laughing, so that his last jolt of Sam started to come back up through his nose, causing him to whoop all the harder. “But I should very much like to.”

  “Why, then,” Miss Jane said, polishing off the applejack and climbing, somewhat unsteadily, out of the airplane, “let us see which of us can reach the river first in that glorious state in which”—and here she began to laugh again, so hard that the gallant aviator had to help her with her dress buttons—“we were created.”

  30

  SOME HOURS LATER, dry, warm, and very much in the state in which they were created, lulled by the steady rainfall and the wind in the trees on the mountain, quite sober now from their plunge into the river, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson and Henry Satterfield lay close together in her bedchamber at the home place. Miss Jane was thinking, sleepily, about the utter unpredictabilities of life, even for a Scottish-Memphremagog woman of a certain age and with second sight. Henry was daydreaming about old treasure and new airplanes.

  “Well, Henry,” Jane said, feeling oddly as if she were still talking to him through the grate in the ceiling, “I believe that you and I find ourselves on a different footing than earlier in the day.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We are indeed on a different footing. We are on a—a sublime footing. Tonight has been the most sublime night of my life.”

  “Why, Henry, I quite concur. Yet to one who is, perhaps, not unfamiliar with the matchless favors of Miss Lola Beauregard Beauclerk—”

  “Miss Jane,” Henry interrupted, “please. Do not mention that unfortunate woman in the same breath with yourself. Not to speak ill of the dead, but the favors of Miss Lola Beauregard Beauclerk were, to your charms, as dross is to purest gold.”

  What most surprised the Duchess was the depth of her own passions. How would she explain this new development to her dear people? Surely they would know, from the moment she stepped into On Kingdom Mountain tomorrow morning, that she and Henry Satterfield were indeed on a different footing. Fine. She would deal with them when the time came. For now, she intended to savor every moment in the arms of her aviator. As usual, she thought, the Nazarene know-it-all had gotten it only half right. Sufficient unto the day were the evils thereof, true enough. But he should not have stopped there. Sufficient, too, were the sublimities. Miss Jane was certain of it.

  The next morning the tail of the hurricane curved around and lambasted the county, bringing with it more rain and high winds. By noon the river was lapping at the floor of the covered bridge. The pasture where Henry and Miss Jane had landed the previous evening was under two feet of water by midafternoon. Just before dusk an empty blue rowboat came bobbing down on the current. It was an eerie sight, though what it signified neither of them could say.

  Before joining Henry in her bedchamber that night, Miss Jane stepped into On Kingdom Mountain, where she had ensconced the Bride of Ramses on her mother’s horsehair love seat. “I want you to hear this from me, not anyone else,” she announced to her dear people. “Some of you may be scandalized to learn that Mr. Henry Satterfield and I are keeping company. This is our business and none of you need to concern yourselves with it. I hope you aren’t too disappointed in me.” None of Jane’s people seemed disappointed or even particularly surprised. They had seen much life, and were, perhaps, beyond surprise. They just looked back at Jane with her own level gray eyes. What she had told them was, after all, the way of the world.

  “In the meantime, there has been an addition to your number,” Miss Jane continued. “I mean, of course, the Bride of Ramses. Please make her welcome.”

  The following morning the rain abated but did not stop. Throughout the county, pasture seeps had turned into freshets. Hillside rills had become cataracts, the boggy little brooks feeding the Upper Kingdom were torrents. The steam shovel working the cut at the foot of Blue Clay Hill had vanished. In Kingdom Common the village green was a miniature lake. The statue of Ethan Allen stood waist-high in water. The roar from the High Falls behind the commission-sales barn could be heard inside homes on Anderson Hill, and the railroad tracks north of town had been torn up by the flood.

  In the middle of the afternoon Eben, George Quinn, and Prof Chadburn made their way back out to Kingdom Mountain in Prof’s old Model T, with chains on the tires. They stood in the rain on the far side of the rampaging river holding up a board on which they’d painted, in large black letters, MAKE IT STOP.

  “I can’t,” Henry shouted from Miss Jane’s flooded barnyard. His words blew away on the wind, but he held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. The Common had wanted rain. Rain they had gotten. The great hurricane of 1930, Hurricane Ada, was remembered throughout norther
n New England until it was eclipsed by the big blow of 1938. In the Kingdom, Ada would forever afterward be known as Hurricane Jane.

  The rain continued for three days and nights. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had begun. On the morning of the fourth day the sun came out. The sky was an innocent azure. As the water receded from Miss Jane’s lower pasture, the grass turned from brown to emerald between dawn and sunset. The stiff-legged carcasses of construction horses and mules hung bloating in the trees along the Kingdom River beside the county road, and for weeks afterward were found in woods a quarter mile away from the river. The missing steam shovel was discovered on its side behind Ben Currier’s barn.

  As for the one hundred dollars that the town fathers had promised Henry Satterfield to nudge the rain toward Kingdom County, nothing more was mentioned about it by either party, though the glares that the rainmaker and Miss Jane received in the village from the Reverend, Eben, and George Quinn spoke volumes. In the meantime the Supreme Court had scheduled the appeal in the case of Jane Hubbell Kinneson v. Township of Kingdom Common for the last Tuesday in August, now less than four weeks away.

  31

  AS MUCH AS Miss Jane enjoyed making love with Henry Satterfield, and he with her, they were of the age when most couples, whether long married or recently engaged, enjoy one another’s quiet companionship as much as what the Duchess and the rainmaker both thought of as their more sublime moments together. Over the succeeding days, they came to greatly look forward, both before and after their romantic interludes, to their now somewhat more intimate featherbed chats—long, wonderfully unpredictable conversations about everything under the sun from Henry’s dream of the brand-new red Gee Bee Racer to Miss Jane’s ongoing investigation into the disappearance of her uncle Pilgrim.

  One night, as Jane was explicating the Kinneson family genealogy to Henry and lamenting, once again, the sad gap in the family tree left by the vanishing of Pilgrim, Henry mentioned that during his days as companion to and later keeper of his granddaddy, the old man, a devout churchgoer, had taken up door-to-door Bible selling. At the same time he had dabbled a bit in drawing up family genealogies. For five dollars he could show nearly any trusting widow from Georgia to North Carolina who happened to let drop the name of a long-deceased or, better yet long-lost, second or third cousin exactly how, through that long-deceased or long-lost cousin, she and her descendants were related to Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, or very nearly any other celebrated personage back to George Washington. Under the grandfather’s tutelage Henry himself had become adept at genealogical work. It was plumb amazing, he said, how many descendants Jeff Davis had scattered around the Southland.

  “Why, Henry,” Jane said. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Imposing on those poor women in such a way.”

  “I am ashamed of myself, Miss Jane. If it was to do over again, I would never dream of it.”

  “Didn’t your mama, the Sunday school teacher, and your daddy, the gentleman farmer, teach you that it was wrong to take advantage of the bereft?”

  “They did. But I fell in with the old captain and his cronies, who were all bad to tell lies and drink whiskey and loaf away their days. Fortunately, I saw the error of my ways.”

  “Is that when you went into the rainmaking profession?”

  “Not immediately. After I got out of the RCAF, I took up banking for a time. I worked as a kind of itinerant teller. I didn’t stay long at any one bank. Then I turned to stunt flying. One day not long after the fateful plunge into the Tulsa stockyards of Miss Lola Beauregard Beauclerk—”

  “Beauclerk pronounced without the k,” interjected Miss Jane, who of late had entertained some private doubts about the fate and indeed perhaps the existence of Miss Lola. Moreover, Jane was certain that she knew precisely what kind of itinerant teller Henry Satterfield had been during his abbreviated stint as a banker.

  “How did you happen to come to Kingdom County?” she said. “I’ve often wondered.”

  “It was very strange. A week or so after the tragedy in Tulsa, I was looking at an aviation map of New England. I’d surely examined that same map twenty times before. But suddenly there it was, right before my eyes. ‘Kingdom Mountain.’ The mountain of my granddaddy’s riddle. That very afternoon I was on my way north and you know the rest. It was the luckiest day of my life.”

  “And of mine, too, Henry,” Jane said.

  There ensued an especially sublime interlude, after which Miss Jane repeated sleepily, “And of mine, too.”

  32

  IN THE VILLAGE, small wheels were revolving within great wheels. Eben Kinneson Esquire had assured the town fathers that the Supreme Court would reverse Judge Allen’s ruling in favor of Miss Jane and her mountain. After the debacle of the flood, however, which the fathers blamed squarely on Jane and her guest the rainmaker, they decided, in a secret meeting, to assail her on two new fronts.

  Every Friday night in those days Miss Jane operated the projector at the weekly picture show at the town hall, a rambling, cracker-box-shaped affair with heaving floors, a small stage with a screen on it, and a balcony where the kids had sat until about ten years ago, when it was deemed unsafe and roped off. The coal furnace in the basement was unreliable, and the previous winter a water pipe in the lobby had sprung a slow leak. It was so cold inside the hall that a glazing of blue-green ice formed on the wall behind the ticket counter and remained there until spring. Miss Jane called it the Great Devonian Glacier.

  Since the village could not afford to rent talkies, Miss Jane had dragooned Judge Allen into playing the piano for the silent comedies and cowboy pictures and melodramas. It was an ancient instrument, with several ivories missing, formerly used in a dancehall in Pond in the Sky. At some point it had been stored in a barn and still had wisps of straw inside. Judge Allen, who had worked his way through Harvard Law School playing the piano in Boston speakeasies, was an accomplished amateur musician, but nothing he did could make the town-hall piano sound like anything other than a demented Victrola. The melodramas were the worst. The judge hammered out ominous low off-key chords when the villain appeared, and the audience would hiss like a hall full of vipers. Ira once confided to Jane that he could never quite get it into his head that they weren’t hissing at him. “Jim Dandy to the res-cue!” the moviegoers roared as the words appeared on the screen. Or “Along came Sam. Slow-walking Sam. Slow-talking Sam.” “Fortissimo, sir,” Jane cried out to the judge from the projection booth, cranking the projector handle for all she was worth.

  The year Miss Jane turned fifty and Henry Satterfield came to Kingdom Mountain, a gang of high-spirited junior high boys had established themselves as the bane of the Kingdom Common Academy. They began referring to themselves as the Dalton/James Boys, and in an odd way the village was proud of them, since they enhanced the Kingdom’s reputation as a last frontier. Twice during the past school year the Academy trustees had sent a delegation to Jane’s mountain to beg the Duchess to take over as the seventh- and eighth-grade English and social studies teacher and rein in these scalawags. Wisely, Miss Jane said no, thank you, and the bad boys continued their reign of terror. Emboldened by their own reputation, they began to act up at the Friday-night picture shows, engaging in onesided dialogues with the silent-film actors, raining popcorn down from the closed-off balcony onto the patrons sitting below, and singing falsetto and off-key. Judge Allen, who had been an infantry major in the Great War, said he would forsake the piano for once and go up to the off-limits balcony and sit with the boys. That, he assured Jane, would end their insurrection. Over her dead body, said she. Jane Hubbell Kinneson had never had to call in reinforcements before, and she didn’t intend to now. On the Friday evening after the flood, armed with her redoubtable scrub broom, she descended from the projection booth just before the movies began, as the Dalton/James Boys were stomping and catcalling and chanting “Start the show,” and laid about right and left as vigorously as Friar Tuck with his quarterstaff. But the boys were as agil
e as young bobcats, and very nearly as feral, and they dodged and ducked and dived under the cracked wooden seats. Miss Jane could make no headway with them at all.

  Then came the letter from the town fathers suggesting that the Duchess had more than fulfilled her civic duties over the years, and it might be time to graciously step aside for a younger projectionist. Their true purpose, of course, was to hector her into agreeing to the high road. They hinted that if she wished to sit down and talk with them about the Connector, they might assign the low high sheriff to police duty at the town-hall movies, thereby enabling her to stay on.

  “Be at this coming Friday’s show,” Miss Jane tersely replied by return mail.

  Word immediately spread throughout the Common that something momentous was going to happen at the town hall the following Friday evening. A huge crowd turned out for The Perils of Pauline, and the Dalton/James Boys rose to the occasion. There were screeching catcalls, squealing pig calls, boys jumping out of their seats to pepper the villain and hero alike with spitwads, boys spilling out of the balcony, pelting up and down the aisles, and generally holding Bartholomew Fair while the patrons tried in vain to watch the movie. “Here now,” George Quinn said to them once. Judge Allen would undoubtedly have intervened, but he was in Burlington, where his first grandchild had just been born. Julia Hefner, the church organist, was filling in for him on the piano. When Black Bart appeared on the screen, twirling his oily mustachios, the Dalton/James Boys erupted, cheering, stomping, clapping, and exhorting the villain as he roped Pauline to the railroad tracks. That’s when the frame froze on the screen.