On Kingdom Mountain Read online

  Jane, now working her way through Bleak House again, and thinking how like the opportunistic and detestable Mr. Tulkinghorn her cousin Eben Kinneson Esquire was, slipped a bookmark into her novel and laid it on the coverlet beside her. Though far from short, Bleak House, like Don Quixote, had required almost no editing down. Page after page in her edition was as pristine as the day it rolled off the press. It was a pity, she had thought many times, that the same could not be said of her volumes of Thoreau, the Pronouncer of Concord; Samuel Johnson, the Proclaimer of Litchfield; and so many other pronouncers and proclaimers whose pronouncements and proclamations she had been obliged to blue-pencil over the years. King James and his pernicious Bible were the worst of the lot.

  “About the time I reached the biblical age of adulthood, Henry, twelve or thirteen, I began to realize that very little of the King James Bible made a particle of sense. In particular, I couldn’t swallow the loving, all-powerful father who allowed his only begotten son to be strung up on a cross and tortured to death just to prove a point. And blasted two whole cities—infants, toddlers, and all—from the face of the earth to punish a few bad apples. Not to mention slaying the innocent firstborn son of each Egyptian family. I have always been partial to the Egyptians, you know, given my mother’s first name. No, sir. This madness had to be the work of king James, not a just and magnanimous deity, and must not be allowed to stand. When I turned eighteen, I had a most unfortunate experience with King James the First and his Bible. That is when I decided to revise it and his detestable Jehovah. In my Kingdom Mountain Bible, old Jehovah is a jolly, good-natured fellow. He helps his dear people when he can and doesn’t stand in their way the rest of the time. Sometimes their shenanigans amuse him or make him happy or sad. That’s all right. Every family, you know, should write its own revised Bible.”

  “What did your folks think about you, at the age of eighteen, undertaking to revise the Bible?”

  “My mother died when I was sixteen. My father, the chief justice, was a freethinker. He encouraged me in the endeavor.”

  “They must have been very good parents.”

  “Indeed they were, though not without their own little Kingdom Mountain particularities. Pharaoh’s Daughter was educated at Mount Holyoke and named me after my father’s mother, Jane Kinneson, and her own mother, Canada Jane Hubbell, who left her in the barn in the sweetgrass basket. Also, I believe she had in mind her favorite author, Jane Austen. As for my father, besides being a lawyer and a judge, he was a born teacher. He taught me most of what I know about the mountain. He farmed part-time because he loved the mountain, and he was wonderful with animals and a good hand to raise a crop. But my father had no head at all for the business end of farming. If he raised cabbages and kept them through the winter to capitalize on the spring cabbage market, why, come spring, the bottom would invariably fall out of cabbages. If he switched milk buyers, the new buyer would fail and he’d have to go back to his old creamery, hat in hand. He supported the farm with his income as a lawyer and judge.

  “What’s more, Father, who had so much patience when it came to teaching me the ways of the black bears and blue-backed char, and how to read Caesar and Virgil, had no patience at all for fixing machinery. He took it into his romantical head that all his agricultural difficulties would be solved if he could raise and combine his own grain. That was a most dubious proposition on Kingdom Mountain, with its brief frostfree growing season. Everyone, including my mother, warned him against the project. Nothing would do, however, but he must buy a combine. He found one advertised in the Farmer’s Home Companion, a magazine my mother detested because it put just such ideas as raising his own grain in my father’s head. The thing belonged to a rancher in North Dakota, and had been converted from a ground-driven thresher pulled by thirty-two horses to a steam-powered wonder said to cut, thresh, and winnow thirty acres of grain a day in a single continuous process. He purchased it, had it shipped east by rail at a great expense, and drove it home from the station. If I live to be one hundred, Henry, I’ll never forget the day it arrived, accompanied by a plume of coal black smoke and a great dust cloud. It had four iron wheels, each taller than a man and studded with spikes, and more gauges and levers and gears than a steam locomotive. The wooden threshing blades were eight feet long and four feet high. The boiler was as large as a good-sized culvert. As my father drove it up the lane, he gave a great blast on its steam whistle. But once ensconced on the threshing floor of the barn, it never started again. No matter. My father painted it fire engine red with blue wheels and a canary yellow boiler. He called it the Samuel L. Clemens, in honor of Mark Twain’s typesetting invention that wouldn’t set type. I called it King James’s Jehovah because all it ever caused was trouble.”

  “What became of it?” Henry inquired.

  “It’s still out there on the threshing floor, where, I can assure you, it will remain. The thing is beyond repair.”

  “I was just wondering,” Henry said. “For our little weather-making venture. There’s nothing people like better than a rain-making machine. I have built them from the most extraordinary things—a gasoline-powered washing machine, a wrecked Model T Ford, even a windmill. Of course, it is all for show. When the rain at last approaches, I start up my inventions, and everyone is happy. Furthermore, that way I would not have to go up in my plane at all during an electrical storm. Like the storm in which poor Miss Lola Beauregard Beauclerk met her q-u-i-e-t-u-s.”

  “It all sounds rather fraudulent,” Jane said, opening up Bleak House again. “Rainmaking machines and such.”

  “Oh, I have told the town fathers as much. But if they persist, what can one do? Permit me to look at the combine, Miss Jane. I promise I won’t fly into an electrical storm.”

  29

  EARLY THE NEXT morning Miss Jane found her friend sitting on the threshing floor of the barn surrounded by pistons, levers, gauges, and engine parts. Nearby was her big barn lantern, out of kerosene. Evidently the rainmaker had been working on King James’s Jehovah most of the night. As exasperated as she was, something about the man’s unswervable determination appealed to the Duchess. She could see him flying to Siberia, Tibet, China, and India, dining on the frozen remains of a mammoth, encountering a many-armed woman on a tiger, and who knew what else.

  The rainmaker worked straight through the day. At noon Miss Jane brought him cucumber sandwiches and a jug of switchel, cold spring water spiked with a dash of vinegar and a touch of molasses. For supper she cooked him a whole apple pie from the Early Yellow Transparent tree behind her house. He refilled her barn lantern with kerosene so he could toil into the night. Miss Jane remarked that if King James’s Jehovah had taken such pains to get mankind right, instead of cobbling Adam and Eve together in a single day, the world might not be in such a fix.

  “I’ve always said as much myself,” Henry replied, peering through a metal valve at the Duchess as if observing her through a telescope. “There are those who will blame some great agent of evil, as it were. But if more care had been taken with us to start out, why, what toehold could the great enemy of man find?”

  Stop the palaver and get on with the job at hand, soldier, said the captain’s voice, which had been advising Henry more frequently lately. And I don’t mean fiddling with that wheat gin. You should be up on her mountain, looking for the treasure I’ve all but put in your hands.

  It occurred to Henry that the granddaddy, whom his mama had said was wickedness incarnate, was enjoying every moment of this maddening search for the missing gold. He would not put it past Cantrell Satterfield to misdirect him deliberately. What he could not understand was why the old officer had not returned to Vermont to raise it himself. An optimist by nature, Henry believed that with Miss Jane’s help he was quite close to solving the mystery of the riddle. In the meantime, if the town fathers were foolish enough to pay him one hundred dollars for pretending to make it rain, he’d gladly oblige them.

  Henry asked Miss Jane’s permission to bring the r
adio, attached to its antenna, out to the barn so that he could listen for oncoming weather while he worked. The same compulsion to continue in a straight line that had impelled him over some of the most difficult and dangerous territory on earth in his Burgess-Wright drove him to complete his repairs in less than a week. In the grain bin down in the machine’s innards he found an owl feather, a few shards of petrified wood, a snake fang, and a dime-store ring with a scratched glass stone.

  On the sixth night of his labors, Henry and Miss Jane listened to the weather forecast from Chicago. A broad system of thunderstorms was progressing from west to east over the Great Lakes. If they stayed on course, the storms would reach northern New England in thirty-six hours. Moreover, the first hurricane of the season was gathering off the Cayman Islands. This struck Henry as a very good omen, since he had read, in an adventure story from Miss Jane’s Atheneum called Sunken Treasures of the Deep, that the fabled buccaneer Edward Teach had scuttled a treasure ship some leagues north of grand Cayman Isle, and the connection between the pirate, the hurricane, King James’s Jehovah, the hundred-dollar fee for bringing rain, the new red plane, and the gold from the Great Kingdom Common Raid, though extremely tenuous to Miss Jane, was stunningly clear to the rainmaker.

  The following day, while Henry fine-tuned the combine, the dog-cart man painted its name, King James’s Jehovah, on the collecting bin. How he knew the name was a mystery. When Miss Jane, in her capacity as overseer of the town poor, asked him to sign a relief voucher, the painter shrugged and made an X.

  That evening, hillbilly hoedown music from Lookout Mountain blared from the radio with frenzied intensity. Banjos rang, fiddles screeched as if bowed by demons. Later, preachers from Wheeling and Memphis called down damnation on the transgressors of the drought-parched land. Heat lightning flickered over the Green Mountains, and the forecast called for dangerous electrical storms approaching from the west, to be followed by the lashing tail of the hurricane. The wind roared in the forest on the mountain, and Commoners stumbling home from the hotel barroom that night heard keening voices in the sky. Some swore that the old Kinnesonville church bell tolled out from the ghost town high on the mountain. Henry promised Miss Jane that the next day, come hell or high water, he would start King James’s Jehovah and they would drive it down to the Common, to arrive triumphantly with the rain.

  The following morning was hazier than ever. Through the smoke the rising sun turned the entire mountain blood red. By noon the sun had shrunk to the size of a fiery penny. The fire tower on the mountaintop drifted in and out of view. Sometimes it seemed fifty miles away, then for a few moments it hovered directly over the home place. In the early afternoon the entire mountain seemed to come unmoored from its bedrock. It rose majestically, then descended and matter-of-factly reseated itself like a proper mountain. Once during the Civil War the image of a battle being fought by a Vermont regiment in Pennsylvania was imprinted in the sky above Kingdom’s summit, and in the Common speechless onlookers had watched loved ones fall. Cannon fire from the transposed battle was heard as far away as Bethlehem, New Hampshire. The balancing boulder had levitated hundreds of feet into the sky and slowly rotated one hundred and eighty degrees so that the devil’s visage, now gazing down on the smoky battle, was visible from the village. Then the illusion vanished.

  Late that afternoon the sky to the west turned black. The radio reported that torrential thunderstorms were hitting the Adirondacks, just across Lake Champlain from Vermont, with unprecedented fury. Henry told Miss Jane that they would now, for the first time, start King James’s Jehovah, which they had pulled out into the barnyard with Ethan and General Ira Allen. As Miss Jane ran for her driving duster, goggles, and motorman’s cap, Henry set the bulky radio on top of the combine’s grain bin to track the progress of the oncoming storm.

  To his chagrin the rainmaker could not seem to activate the machine. “Confound you, sir,” he told it as he threw this gear and depressed that throttle and the storm clouds sailed closer. The water in the boiler bubbled. Coal black smoke poured out of the tall stack. But the valves stuck, the steam seemed to be blocked, and there were so many levers, gears, wheels, cylinders, switches, and dials that even the mechanically minded aviator, who had repaired superannuated locomotives in Siberia and three-hundred-foot-tall windmills in Tibet, not to mention his own biplane more times than he could count, had no luck at all starting it.

  “Wait here, ma’am, if you will, please,” Henry said as he trotted down the lane toward the hemlock-plank bridge. At the foot of the hill he dashed across the water meadow toward his plane. Too late, Miss Jane perceived his design. Despite his promise never to fly into an electrical storm again, he was going aloft to guide in the rain.

  “No,” she shouted. “No, Henry!” But the yellow biplane was already bouncing over the pasture and lifting off.

  Horrified, Miss Jane watched the Burgess-Wright gain altitude. Henry was flying due west toward the gathering thunderheads. Through the smoky film the receding plane looked nearly colorless.

  As he ascended above the Green Mountains, clearing the top of Jay Peak by scant feet, a jag of lightning struck Miss Jane’s own mountaintop with a thunderous explosion, igniting the wooden fire tower like a gigantic Roman candle. A yellow sphere of electricity about the size of a basketball raced down the wire antenna from the flaming observation deck of the tower to the combine, which gave a deep coughing roar.

  Jane clamored aboard King James’s Jehovah. She yanked one lever back, jammed another forward, ratcheted a third sideways. The huge blades clattered into motion, and the machine made a bounding lurch.

  Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, decked out in her motoring regalia, clung to the wheel for dear life as Jehovah rumbled through her flower garden, threshing up her pink and white summer phlox, Delft blue delphiniums, and multicolored zinnias, along with her prize Harison’s Yellow rose, which she had kept well watered from the river, morning and evening, all summer.

  In the water meadow a dozen seagulls in off Lake Memphremagog to take refuge from the storm froze in terror. Several were summarily clapped up by the combine. The machine jolted across the covered bridge just as Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers approached from the opposite direction in Eben’s Roadmaster. The astounded lawyer had no choice but to drive off the road into the pool below the bridge.

  Like its stern namesake descending on a coven of idolaters, King James’s Jehovah veered west down the Connector right of way, threshing up a hedgerow of young poplar trees. An oncoming dump truck took to the ditch. The combine clapped up a YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK sign and half a dozen freeranging Rhode Island Red chickens pecking in the road in front of the Currier farm. At the junction of the Connector and the road to Lord Hollow, the steam shovel operator took one look at the oncoming juggernaut and drove his shovel over the bank.

  A four-horse hitch hauling a wooden road scraper went galloping down the road in front of the combine. More gulls flew along behind, snapping up panicked grasshoppers flushed out of the ditches. Now Eben and the enraged town fathers, drenched to the skin, were overtaking the machine in Miss Jane’s Model A, which they had commandeered from her door-yard. A Border collie and two nanny goats from the Kittredge farm joined in the chase. Six first-calf heifers in Ferlin Sanville’s pasture stampeded through their fence and were not found until three days later, fifteen miles away, on the main street of Pond in the Sky. Sadie Blackberry, searching futilely with Clarence Davis for any edible wild fruit in the drought, looked up as King James’s Jehovah went by and immortalized herself in the mythology of Kingdom County by remarking, “Don’t mind that ruckus, Clarence. That’s just Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson in a rainmaking machine.” From nowhere a Morgan horse appeared in the right of way, running hard in front of the combine.

  “Whoa up, you blackguard! Whoa, you destroyer of the innocent!” Miss Jane commanded. But the wrathful Jehovah, having long bided its time for just such a campaign, had a mind and will of its own. Preceded by the ga
lloping Morgan, followed by a yapping, bleating, coughing, crowing, shouting procession of dogs, goats, town fathers, construction workers, gulls, and farm boys, not to mention the low high sheriff, who had been lying in wait for speeders at the foot of Blue Clay Hill, the machine was not to be deterred from its mission.

  The clerk of the works for the Connector, setting up his surveying instruments on the outskirts of the village, saw something never before seen through the eyepiece of a transit. Then the runaway combine brushed past him, eating up his overalls and leaving him standing in the roadway in his drawers just as the first big raindrops started to fall. Without fanfare King James’s Jehovah ate the WELCOME TO KINGDOM COMMON sign on the edge of the village. Miss Jane gave out a lusty cheer. The Bronze Age deity himself, King James’s I Am That I Am, incinerating Sodom, atomizing Gomorrah, drowning every last one of his own dear creatures save sanctimonious old Noah and his two-by-two menagerie, could scarcely have acted with more purposeful malice than the long-dormant thresher, now bearing down on the commission-sales auction yard, bulling over the pole fence and consuming auctioneer Bumper Stevens’s prize fighting rooster, Calvin Coolidge. The ancients on the hotel porch leaped out of their cane-bottomed chairs and ran inside, retreating faster, Editor Kinneson said in that week’s Monitor, than the Vermont regiment that turned tail and fled at the first battle of Bull Run. “Perhaps,” the editor wrote, “Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson may be forgiven a brief moment of triumphalism, in view of what is at stake for her, as the avenging ‘Jehovah’ smartly executed a left flank maneuver and headed down the ball diamond on the village green, breaking up a practice session of the local nine. She struggled valiantly to prevent the thing from committing manslaughter.”

  Jehovah was unstoppable. No one, including the Duchess, had the faintest idea how to halt it. It ate second base and the pitcher’s rubber, leveled the mound, toppled the chicken-wire backstop, and continued across the street toward the Congregational church lawn, where the Reverend was changing the weekly message. He got as far as THE LORD GOD IS AN ANGRY G before, as if to prove his point, the berserk combine gobbled up the bulletin board. Whistle screaming, it proceeded down U.S. Route 5 straight for the fairgrounds, where the carnival was encamped. Miss Jane could hear the calliope music over the thresher’s engine.