“Eben,” the judge said, “there is nothing at all the matter with Jane Kinneson’s powers of reasoning. Her mind is as clear as a bell. Moreover, for what it’s worth, I think it’s a damn good will.”
“Thank you, Ira.” Miss Jane turned back to the figure by the door. “Dear Father, you were deeply suspicious of the world beyond our mountain, and not without reason. That’s where poor Pilgrim disappeared. It’s where the raiders who robbed the First Farmers came from, and where you feared I would go and somehow come to harm. What you wanted most was to protect your heirs from the dangers of that world by binding them to this place.
“Well, that can’t be done. Even if we don’t often venture down the mountain into the world, the world will quickly enough come up the mountain to us. It always has, both its malefactors and its luminaries. That’s the great irony, you see. There’s no hiding from the world. No, sir. Don’t cast your reproving look my way. There will be no recriminations on this day of all days. There will be no more such constraining compacts on Kingdom Mountain.
“People,” Miss Jane continued, and here she seemed to be addressing all of her dear people, as well as Eben Kinneson Esquire and Judge Ira Allen, “my father bequeathed to me a mountain. Well and good. I gave it away. This Appalachian organization is a sensible outfit, not too smug or self-satisfied with their own fine accomplishments. They’ll hold the mountain unchanged, in trust for the future. Anyone who wishes to come here to fish or hunt or just enjoy the seasons and the views may do so.”
Jane reached out and took the sculpture’s wooden hand. “Father, you saw great horrors. You dealt with those horrors as best you knew how. You were a good son and brother, a good husband and father. But when it came to your descendants, you wished to control their future in a way that the future can’t be controlled.”
“So the mountain no longer belongs to the Kinnesons,” Eben Kinneson Esquire said.
“Cousin,” Miss Jane said, “it never did.”
Eben shook his head and left the room.
Judge Allen, too, seemed ready to go, but Miss Jane put her hand on his arm. “Ira,” she said, “I have a favor to ask of you. A few moments ago, when I inquired if you were asking me for a date? I wasn’t entirely jesting. Actually, I wish to ask you for one. I want to ask you to accompany me to the homecoming ball tomorrow night at the Academy. Will you go?”
“With the greatest pleasure in the world,” the judge said, and he bowed in a courtly way that fleetingly reminded Miss Jane of Henry Satterfield.
Epilogue
MISS JANE HUBBELL KINNESON of Kingdom Mountain lived well into her eighties. To her satisfaction, she outlived her cousin Eben by several years. He left his very considerable holdings to her and Elisabeth, and she, in turn, left her portion to Elisabeth’s children, who, along with their mother and father and her longtime fishing partner, Judge Ira Allen, had become the joy of her life.
Miss Jane won two first prizes at the North American Bird Carving Contest, once with her great gray owl, once with the northern shrike impaling the redpoll from her exhibit Birds in Strife. In time she resumed work at her bookshop, which she operated out of the five-story barn, and where, by lantern light, she still occasionally hosted literary evenings, roundly denouncing the Pretender of Avon and the Proclaimer of Concord to two or three bemused Commoners. She and Ira Allen took many book-buying day tours and, obligingly affording the village something to talk about, a few overnight tours as well. They never spoke of marriage. Jane and the judge could scarcely have been more companionable, but the Duchess realized that she was, and probably always had been, too independent-minded for married life.
As for the Kingdom, things have continued to change there since Miss Jane passed on. Commoners who were young in the summer that Henry Satterfield came to the county are now old. Interstate 91, though it bypasses Kingdom Mountain, connects the village with the world on the other side of the hills. The ski resort at Jay Peak, fifteen miles west of the Common, gets more natural snow annually than any other resort east of the Rockies. Under “Vermont” in Miss Jane’s celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you may read the sentence, “To the east of Jay Peak lies a beautiful farming country.” It’s still beautiful, particularly around the spring and fall equinoxes, but the little farms themselves have been amalgamated into agribusinesses, a term Miss Jane would not have cared for at all. The Common, however, with its old-fashioned central green and brick shopping block, looks much the same. Most of the young people leave as soon as they get out of school, returning only to visit. There’s nothing here for them to do.
With its long, harsh winters, big woods, and independent residents, the Kingdom remains something of a place apart from the rest of Vermont and New England. Miss Jane’s mountain will always be an anomaly, running east-west rather than north-south, officially located, according to the letter from Daniel Webster to Freethinker Kinneson, not in Vermont or Quebec or Canada or the U.S. but in the heart of the land of the Memphremagog Abenakis. Miss Jane said it best. The mountain belongs to itself. There is no high road, or any road, beyond the home place, which is now a small museum containing Jane’s Birds of kingdom Mountain and her beloved blockheads and dear people, including Seth and his ox, Quaker Meeting leading his fugitive friends to safety, the young and old Morgans, the infant Pharaoh’s Daughter in her sweetgrass basket, and, of course, Ramses’ Bride and the preserved Confederate soldier, Pilgrim.
No one in the Kingdom, including Miss Jane, ever learned Henry’s fate or, for that matter, that of the twice-purloined and thrice-tainted gold. In the village, where old men still sit yarning on the hotel porch of a summer evening and old friends meet at the post office or the Harvest Festival or the Thanksgiving homecoming ball, it is sometimes reported that, high on the mountain, near the Kingdom Mountain Cemetery, a hunter or fisherman or a solitary hiker, happening along at twilight, will glimpse a tall, stately woman with light hair, dressed all in black, visiting companionably with a slender man in a white suit and hat, a crimson vest, a black four-in-hand tie, and white shoes. Then the apparitions, if that’s what they are, fade off into the dusk and the traveler passes on down the mountain, not quite sure what, if anything, he saw. It is the sort of tale you might hear in any off-the-beaten-track hamlet in New England. Still, as Miss Jane herself liked to say, on Kingdom Mountain, anything is possible.
Sometimes a visitor to the mountain will walk up to the cemetery, past the iron pump of the glacial well, and read the words carved on Miss Jane’s stone. She inscribed them herself a few years before she died. They’re worth seeing.
Jane Hubbell Kinneson
The Duchess of Kingdom Mountain
That which I have learned I leave as my legacy.
Close all gates behind yourself.
Every generation should have its own Bible.
The walls we erect to protect ourselves from early pain often shut us off from later joy.
To immerse oneself in the natural world is to share a universal thread with every living thing.
Always declare yourself to the person you love.
Live each day not as though it is your last, but as though it is the last day of the lives of the people you meet.
All the best stories are about love.
About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.
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On Kingdom Mountain Page 26