“What significant damage will a narrow corridor of paved roadway do to an area of one hundred and fifty square miles?”
This was the question Miss Jane had been waiting for. Out of her cardboard file came photographs she had taken of the scalped hillsides of East and West Round Hill, the deep ruts filled with muddy water, and the brush-choked spawning pool of the blue-backed trout. The Gate to Canada looked as though a meteor had crashed into it.
“Mountains are silent,” Jane said. “This sector of Kingdom Mountain will be silent for a long time to come.”
The courtroom, too, was silent, as the Duchess of Kingdom Mountain sat back down beside Henry Satterfield and her dear people.
Of course, Eben Kinneson Esquire did a very able job of presenting the township’s case, arguing that that part of Kingdom Mountain lying south of the forty-fifth parallel of latitude designating the border belonged officially to the township of Kingdom Common and always had. He emphasized that the projected Connector had already been rerouted around the spawning grounds of the “so-called blue-backed trout” and that the right of the people of Kingdom County to be “connected” to the rest of the world transcended any supposed right of the mountain, based on suspect, unofficial documents and heathenish notions, to block progress. He argued that Judge Allen’s decision on Miss Jane’s behalf had no basis in evidence or law.
The justices had some tough questions for Eben. One wanted to know if the state could guarantee that the Connector wouldn’t eradicate the Arctic saxifrage, unique windflowers, and blue trout? And wouldn’t the blasting for the highway jeopardize the stability of the balancing boulder on the summit?
“Justice Smythe,” Eben said, “I know of no such guarantees in this world. Every precaution will be taken not to disturb the native flora and fauna and the natural geological configurations on the mountain. Some change is inevitable. Are we worse off today because thunder lizards no longer stalk the land? Which of you would care to discover one browsing in your backyard? Change is a condition of the natural order of things.”
“A tiny pink and blue windflower is hardly a dinosaur,” Justice Dewey said. “How is a concrete highway that will bring noise and fumes and roadside trash and cut hundreds of acres out of the heart of Vermont’s last wilderness part of the natural order of things?”
“It will also bring tourism to an impoverished and isolated corner of New England. It may attract good jobs. It will lead to the salvation of the Kingdom.”
“From what does the Kingdom need to be saved?”
“From economic stagnation,” Eben Kinneson Esquire replied. “Seventy-five percent of our young people leave the area after graduating from high school. There’s no sustainable work for them locally.”
“I don’t understand how the Connector will bring sustainable work,” a justice said. “Do you mean construction work on the new highway itself?”
“Yes. As well as jobs in industries attracted by cheaper transportation as the area continues to be developed.”
“That’s just the issue, isn’t it?” the chief justice said. “Development of the last unspoiled corner of Vermont? Isn’t this a matter of two competing rights, Mr. Kinneson? The right to develop the economy of a depressed area—if, in fact, the Connector will accomplish that—versus the right of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson and the people of Vermont to retain some wilderness?”
“That’s exactly what our recently established national parks are for, Justice Dewey.”
“It looks to me as though the clear-cutting has already ruined some of the wilderness. How could any fish spawn in that mud-choked river? Much less trout?”
“As for the blue-backed brook trout,” Eben continued, “no such subspecies has ever been officially recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They’re blue from eating blue crawfish, a slight regional differentiation in pigmentation.”
“So it’s all right to exterminate them? Because we can’t agree on whether they’re a separate species?”
“They have not been exterminated, Justice Chittenden, nor will they be.”
“How do you respond to Miss Kinneson’s contention that Kingdom Mountain belongs to the Memphremagog Indians and to neither Canada nor the United States?”
“As pointed out, no such provision exists in the ratified Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Everyone knows that Dan’l Webster was a famous practical joker. He got Lord Ashburton drinking my great-grandfather’s applejack, then drew up that spurious document and tricked him into signing it.”
“How do you explain the fact that each Kingdom owner has left the mountain to his heirs in trust for the Memphremagog nation?”
“They felt remorse for Rogers’ near-annihilation of the tribe. Seth Kinneson’s father was one of those Rangers. That was, perhaps, unfortunate. But what’s done is done. The tribe is extinct or nearly so. The dusky Memphremagogs are a moot point.”
“Isn’t your cousin, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, part Memphremagog?”
“I advance no such grand claim on her behalf. For all I know, her mother may have had some native ancestry. Let us admit that Jane Hubbell Kinneson does not much resemble an Indian.”
“You have five minutes left, Mr. Kinneson.”
“The township of Kingdom Common, which indubitably encompasses Kingdom Mountain as far north as the forty-fifth parallel of latitude, designated as the international border between Vermont and Quebec, has offered Miss Kinneson two thousand dollars for the right of way for the Connector. The Connector itself will follow a long-existing road, the Canada Pike. The township has promised to make every effort to preserve and protect the trout and other native animals and plants on the mountain. The Connector will bring much-needed jobs and tourism to Kingdom County and provide its residents with much readier access to the outside world. No winter resort is planned for the slopes of Kingdom Mountain at this time. Thank you.”
“Miss Kinneson, you have five more minutes if you or your attorney would like to make a concluding statement,” Chief Justice Dewey said.
Miss Jane rose and approached the lectern. “As I said at the outset, mountains are silent. Likewise rivers, ponds, and forests. I must speak for them. Kingdom Mountain has seen a great deal over the past three billion years. It stood watch as my great-grandfather Freethinker”—gesturing to him—“barricaded it and the lake it overlooks, during the War of 1812, against all incursionists, American and British alike. It was the site of Vermont’s northernmost Underground Railroad station. Guided by my grandfather, Quaker Meeting, hundreds of fugitives from the Southland passed over the mountain to Canada and freedom. Once a seal came up the river from Lake Memphremagog and the Saint Lawrence and bided with us for a season. Let the mountain’s last tale not be its own destruction at the hands of those with a shortsighted notion of progress. To a true Kingdom Mountain Kinneson, progress is saving the last of our dwindling wild countryside for future generations so that they may know where they came from and who their ancestors were and, knowing that, have a clearer idea of who they are and who they may yet become. On Kingdom Mountain, the past lives on as part of the present. Indeed, it is the present. Let us do it, and our forebears, the honor of permitting it to be part of the future as well.”
“Mr. Kinneson, you have two more minutes.”
“The Connector will bring thousands of people each year to see the wonders of Kingdom Mountain. A highway pull-off will be built on the west saddle of the mountain, overlooking the balancing boulder to the east and the lake to the west. Sturdy fences will be erected to keep wild animals from wandering into the traffic. Moreover, the township will offer to purchase and preserve Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson’s little wood-carver’s museum and to purchase and reestablish her farm as a working nineteenth-century Vermont homestead, a fascinating slice of living history. A ski slope, should one ever be built, would bring in considerable revenue for our hard-pressed local schools. Its alteration to the mountain would be quite minimal. But that is up to Miss Jane Kinneson and her heirs. Fo
r the time being, the Connector would scarcely change the mountain at all. Let us graciously accept some change in Kingdom County, welcoming what is new and helpful, preserving the best of the past that Miss Jane has so zealously guarded and so passionately evoked for us here today. Thank you, gentlemen.”
“Well, Miss Jane,” Henry said as they loaded Jane’s dear people into her truck a few minutes later, “I believe you have won a great victory today. No one who heard you could doubt the outcome.”
“We can only hope so, Henry.”
“Why, did you see the old judges’ expressions? You had them eating out of your hand from the very start of the proceedings.”
“Perhaps. My father often told me that the law was a unique species of animalcula. That you could never predict how a case would turn out. I fear, sir, that we must hope for the best, expect the worst, and be prepared for anything in between. That, of course, is why I moved my grandparents’ graves.”
THE FAR SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
35
MISS JANE WAS fond of remarking, as her father had before her, that while you could never, under any circumstances, tell a Kingdom Mountain Kinneson what to do, you could ask a Kingdom Mountain Kinneson to do nearly anything. Except, perhaps, to attend church. But while she did not hold with churchgoing, which she considered bad for the soul and tedious besides, Miss Jane believed, with nearly evangelical fervor, in what she was pleased to call “educational book-buying tours.” Once or twice a week she would point the Model A in one direction or another and strike out, stopping at every secondhand book emporium within fifty miles of Kingdom Common. Miss Jane could happily spend the better part of a morning or afternoon in a falling-down barn or a stifling attic crammed with mildewed volumes, searching for long-forgotten titles. She had a particular interest in Civil War–era books, diaries, letters, and maps, over which she pored by the hour. On their return trip from the Supreme Court proceeding in Montpelier, she insisted that they stop at the Blue and Gray Bookshop in Plainfield, a secondhand bookstore specializing in literary memorabilia from the War Between the States. Here, after a long, thorough search, while Henry sat perusing the latest True Detective under a dooryard maple, she came across a locally printed tome called Union Engagements in East Tennessee and the Western Mountains of North Carolina, 1863–1865.
Back at the home place, after unloading Jane’s people from the bed of the truck and replacing them in On Kingdom Mountain, Henry, still decked out in his elegant white suit and shoes, sipping Miss Jane’s delicious switchel and swaying gently in the porch hammock, thumbed idly through Jane’s latest purchase. He knew that before she relegated Union Engagements to the Civil War section of her library, she would study it carefully, tracing her father’s and uncle’s presumed routes through the war-torn southern mountains and wondering aloud whatever had become of Pilgrim. Somewhere in the back of his head he heard his granddaddy laughing sardonically. Henry wondered, Could Captain Cantrell Satterfield have met Pilgrim during the war? It was a most intriguing speculation.
Late that night, after Miss Jane had fallen asleep, Henry rose, tiptoed into On Kingdom Mountain, lighted a lantern, and looked long and searchingly into Pilgrim’s oblong wooden face. Suddenly the door of On Kingdom Mountain swung open, and Henry gave a terrific start.
“Why, Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said. “What are you up to? I thought I was the only one around here foolish enough to consult with my dear people.”
“I think, Miss Jane,” Henry said, “that we need to find out exactly what happened to your uncle Pilgrim.”
“I’ve been trying to do just that for the past thirty years. Come back to bed, Henry. We’ll study more on the matter in the morning.”
For many years the Duchess had advertised regularly in genealogical newsletters, historical society bulletins, and local papers in such far-flung places as Asheville, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee, for information about her lost uncle Pilgrim. Family was everything to the Duchess, especially now that she was the very last of the Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons and, for that matter, of the Memphremagog Abenakis. Even her beloved mountain, for all of its natural marvels, perhaps meant most to her as the place where her ancestors had lived their hard, worthwhile lives, helping all who came there, preserving the wild country intact for their heirs and theirs. As she had told the Montpelier justices, it was Kingdom Mountain that enabled her family history to live on into the present.
The next morning at breakfast, she confided to Henry that it was all but unendurable to her to reflect that if Pilgrim did live through the war, she might have family in the South whom she didn’t even know about.
“Your father was what, just seventeen when he went to look for Pilgrim?” Henry said skeptically.
“He turned eighteen on the way,” Miss Jane said. “He was no boy, Henry. Not by the time he started to Tennessee. He was a young man who had been conducting Underground Railroad passengers over the mountain to Canada since he was ten.”
As had often happened on Kingdom Mountain, help arrived from an unexpected quarter and in an entirely unpredictable way. That afternoon the dog-cart man showed up with his wagon and bright paints and mongrels and went to work painting a beautiful tree of life, bearing an array of ripe apples, pears, peaches, oranges, and tropical fruit, on Miss Jane’s front door. Henry, in the meantime, decided to make friends with the painter’s dogs, lying with their heads on their paws, watching their master as reverently as if he were another Michelangelo. When the pilot offered them a few bites of venison steak left over from supper the night before, they ignored him until their master signaled that it was all right to accept the scraps. What interested Henry most about the dogs was that never once had he heard one of them bark. Like their owner, they made no sound at all, though they wagged their tails, ran and played with each other, and behaved like any other happy-go-lucky country mutts.
After finishing the tree, the tiny artist carried Jane’s homemade spruce-pole ladder to the east wall of the barn, facing the house. For minute after minute he surveyed the weathered boards, as if summoning up an image of what he wanted to paint. Finally he climbed the ladder and began, with astonishing rapidity, to paint a picture of a middle-aged man and a little girl riding in a train carriage over a great railway bridge into a snowy city framed in the background by a high hill or a low mountain. The man and the girl both had light hair and gray eyes, and they wore dark clothes, as if headed for a funeral. “What does it mean?” Henry asked Miss Jane.
“It means that he wants to help us in our search for Pilgrim,” she said. She gestured at the epigraph on the lintel above her door. “That works both ways, you know. Though he lives in no house, at the end of the road or elsewhere, the dog-cart man, too, is a friend to mankind. Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons have no monopoly on generosity, Henry.”
Henry remained mystified about what the painting on the barn might signify, but that evening after supper, there came into Miss Jane’s eyes the faraway expression that sometimes preceded a Kingdom Mountain moment. “When I was very small, Henry, I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, my father took me on a train ride. It was in the wintertime. We went over a great railway bridge into a city very much like the one in the dog-cart man’s painting, and we took a horse-drawn sleigh through snowy streets to a large house where there were calling hours for someone who had died. While my father paid his respects to the deceased, a beautiful young woman picked an orange from a tree growing inside the house and gave it to me. That’s all I can remember. For years I’ve assumed the city was Boston, but just now I had a different thought. I don’t know if it was a moment of second sight or not, but it suddenly occurred to me, while thinking about the painting, that perhaps I’ve been looking for information about Pilgrim all these years in the wrong direction.”
“How so, Miss Jane?”
“I think, Henry, that we should turn our attention northward. Toward Montreal.”
The word was hardly out of Miss Jane’s mouth before an electr
ic thrill ran up Henry’s back. He could scarcely have been more excited had he just stumbled onto the Comstock Lode. Montreal had been the jumping-off point for his grandfather’s strike against the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank of Kingdom Common as well as the city to which the captain had fled after the Great Raid. Montreal, with its churches and cathedrals and basilicas and King James’s Jehovah alone knew what other earthly emblems of the heavenly host, was where the treasure was undoubtedly hidden. True, it was a good-sized city, large enough to cast a red glow on the sky above the mountains visible on some nights from Miss Jane’s porch, one hundred miles away. But Henry had little doubt that with her second sight and her great determination, she would be able to locate the large house with the orange tree growing inside it and, thence, the fortune hidden by Cantrell Satterfield. If they happened to learn something about Pilgrim’s fate as well, so much the better. On the spot, the magnanimous Texan made up his mind that if—no, when—they found the gold, Miss Jane would have not ten percent but twenty. She had more than earned it. You are a prince of a man, Mr. Satterfield, he heard her saying to him, with tears of gratitude in her eyes as he presented her with a flour sack bulging with twenty-dollar gold pieces. And he would merely bow slightly and say, “Not at all, Miss Jane. But you are a true duchess.” It was a moment he looked forward to almost as much as the actual discovery of the treasure.
On Kingdom Mountain Page 19