A Stranger in the Kingdom Read online

  On the editorial page I read my father’s scathing open letter to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom the Monitor was among the first papers in New England to attack for his witch hunts and whom, partly as a result of my father’s urging, Vermont’s Ralph Flanders would subsequently be the first to denounce on the floor of the Senate. I read that at long last the United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common had hired a new minister, one Walter Andrews from Montreal, Canada, a former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force. And finally, under the weekly court news on page three, I read that on the same day the ice jam was dynamited, Sheriff Mason White had discovered a moose head buried in my cousin Resolvèd Kinnesons’s manure pile and a side of moose meat in Resolvèd’s woodshed. According to my father’s terse report—“Less is more, James, and don’t you ever forget it”—Sheriff White had confiscated both the meat and the head, and our illustrious relative was slated to be arraigned in court that very afternoon.

  “Maybe this time Judge Alien’ll lock up old Resolvèd and throw away the key,” I said, folding up the paper and then hastily reopening it in case I needed something to wrap up what was left of the two hamburgers and three Cokes I’d consumed an hour earlier.

  My father snorted. “Maybe he will. And maybe the Sox will come through for us and win their first championship since 1918. But I doubt it. Boston will wilt with the heat of July like last week’s lettuce, and Charles will get Resolvèd off scot-free as usual. The fact is that Zack Barrows probably won’t bring the case to trial anyway. With elections coming up in the fall the last thing that dithering old sot wants is another courtroom embarrassment. No doubt he’ll cave in and agree to some eleventh-hour plea bargaining deal concocted by your smart-aleck brother.”

  Now that Dad had gotten onto the subject of Charlie and Zachariah Barrows, whom he frequently referred to in the Monitor as Kingdom County’s nonprosecuting prosecutor, he was off and running. “As you very well know, James, there’s never been any real law and order in Kingdom County. Since your brother hung out his shingle, there’s been less than ever. Charles seems to regard himself as the Green Mountains’ answer to Clarence Darrow, but I’m here to tell you that he’s becoming a very large part of the overall problem. The truth is that he goes out of his way to defend any scalawag who staggers down the road these days just for the very dubious satisfaction of winning another case. All this is killing your mother, by the way, you know how finely tuned she is.”

  In fact, I did not know how finely tuned my mother was, though my father often said this. For years, especially when he was upset with my brother, he invoked this mysterious infirmity of Mom’s and strongly implied that her life was in imminent jeopardy because of Charlie’s wild ways.

  I didn’t want to get into an argument but I felt obligated to put in a word for Charlie. “That’s his job, isn’t it, Dad? Defending outlaws like Resolvèd?”

  “A job is something you get paid for, mister man,” Dad said, and thrust his long arm out the window to signal a turn.

  Ahead on the height of land above the Lamoille River, just in the nick of time for me and my tumultuous stomach, was the Ridge Runner Diner, our traditional halfway coffee stop between Burlington and Kingdom County.

  To this day in northern New England, it’s a myth that truckstop food is always first-rate. Depending on its current management, the Ridge Runner’s burgers and fries might or might not taste more like stale fish, though my father claimed that the coffee, which for a reason I never fathomed he insisted on calling “java,” was reliably fresh and hot. Be that as it may, the place was never crowded.

  The diner itself intrigued me considerably. It was a long trailerlike affair converted over from a superannuated Central Vermont Railway dining car, whose most remarkable feature since its halcyon days as the pride of the CVR rolling stock had never been its bill of fare anyway, but a slightly concave rectangular mirror running the entire length of the wall behind the counter, in which any customer could visit with any other customer without leaning forward or sticking an elbow in his neighbor’s soup. In the mirror’s upper left corner was a star-shaped shatter mark about the size of a fifty-cent piece, which according to a former proprietor had been made by a G-man’s bullet back during Prohibition when the dining car had allegedly done double duty as a mobile speakeasy. Probably this tale was apocryphal. My father, with his ingrained newspaperman’s skepticism of the romantically improbable, always thought so. But to a daydreaming boy brought up on Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain and Dad’s wonderful stories of our own family’s odd history, the curious shatter mark in the curved mirror seemed marvelously emblematic of an exciting bygone era.

  At three o’clock on a weekday afternoon in late April, we were the Ridge Runner’s only customers. We sat halfway down the counter at the row of cracked leather stools and Dad ordered a cup of java and I ordered a glass of ginger ale to settle my stomach. Out in the kitchen the Sox game was blaring. Ted Williams had just belted a triple, Mel Parnell was pitching like Cy Young, and Boston was ahead 3 to 1, but I couldn’t follow much of the play-by-play between the crackling static and the waitress. She was a mousy little woman with a narrow corrugated forehead that reminded me of the stiff grooved paper separators in the Whitman Samplers my father bought for my mother (who never ate candy) at Easter. As the waitress got our drinks she complained to us steadily in a whiny voice about the late spring.

  Outside, a new green sedan with out-of-state plates pulled into the parking lot. It was towing a canvas-covered trailer. Two people got out, a man about forty and a boy two or three years older than me. Both, to my surprise, were black.

  I had seen black people from a distance before, on our annual trips to Fenway Park and once or twice in Burlington. But I had never seen a Negro, as I then thought of blacks, this close to Kingdom County. I was as curious about the two newcomers, especially the boy, as I was surprised.

  So was the waitress. “Say, Bruce,” she whined back over her shoulder. “Take a gander out here and get a load of this.”

  In the entranceway of the kitchen there appeared a wiry, dissatisfied-looking man about my father’s age, fifty-five or so. He was wiping his hands on the filthiest apron I’d ever seen. Beneath it he wore an equally grimy strap-over undershirt without a shirt. He had not shaved that day or, probably, the day before.

  In the long mirror I saw my father—who got up before the birds and shaved twice and unless he was going fishing or hunting put on a freshly pressed white shirt and a necktie and shined his shoes for two or three minutes on an old issue of the Monitor spread out on the woodbox lid in the kitchen, seven days a week and fifty-two weeks a year—staring at this character with unconcealed displeasure.

  “Yes sir,” Brace said, slurring the expression together for maximum ironic inflection. “Darkies. And it ain’t even Decoration Day yet.”

  “Darkies” was a word I’d previously encountered only in Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” It took me a moment to realize that the cook was referring to the two people in the parking lot. The black man, in the meantime, was checking the ropes fastening the canvas sheet over the sides of the trailer. Although he wasn’t as tall as Charlie or my father, he was a big athletic-looking man with a build like a boxer’s. The boy was pegging gravel at a utility pole across the road. He was nearly as tall as his father but much lankier.

  “Looks to me like they’d be moving up this way,” the waitress said.

  Bruce shook his head. “Don’t you believe it, Val. This country’s way too cold for them people. You think the winters seem long to you. Darkies can’t take the cold a-tall. Not a-tall. They’d be part of a traveling show, no doubt. Minstrel show or some such outfit. See that new automobile? That’s show money. You can lay odds on it. You and I, now, we couldn’t afford a road hog like that.”

  Shaking his head in disgust, Bruce returned to his kitchen. The black man and his son came in and sat down at the counter two stools to my left. The man was dressed, I thought, like a city per
son on vacation in the country. He wore a light tan spring jacket over a blue sport shirt open at the neck, corduroy slacks, and expensive new hiking shoes. Except for the fact that he was black and this was 1952, he could have just stepped off the cover of Charlie’s L. L. Bean spring catalogue. The boy was dressed like any other boy his age. Like me, for that matter, in jeans, scuffed-up Keds, and a sweatshirt loose in the shoulders and short in the wrists. His features were smaller and more delicate than his father’s and his complexion was lighter. Here was a revelation that interested me considerably. Until that instant, I had supposed that all Negroes were exactly the same color!

  I was surprised again when the man ordered a cup of tea for himself in a voice not much different from my father’s or mother’s. Without ever giving the matter much thought, I’d also assumed that Negroes all talked like Amos ’n’ Andy, or Rochester on The Jack Benny Show, which we sometimes picked up over the car radio in the gore before a Red Sox game.

  “Coca-Cola, chum?” the man said. “Wedge of lemon pie?”

  The boy twisted restlessly on his stool, half a turn in each direction. “No,” he said softly.

  “No, what?”

  The boy sighed. “No, thanks,” he said, and continued to pivot back and forth. After being carsick, it made me dizzy to watch him.

  “Just the tea, then, if you please,” the man said to the waitress, and got a Socony road map out of his windbreaker pocket and began to study it.

  Abruptly, the boy spun off his stool and slouched over to a squat jukebox by the door. I sipped my ginger ale and looked at the black man in the mirror. He glanced up, caught my eye, and winked. I looked fast at the shatter mark, as though I’d been scrutinizing it the whole time. It occurred to me that my father was probably right about it not being a bullet hole; almost certainly a bullet would have gone completely through the glass. I turned to Dad and started to tell him, then changed my mind. He was staring toward the entrance of the kitchen, his coffee still sitting untouched on the counter in front of him, his long, closely shaved jaw set in a way I understood all too well.

  The boy drifted back to the counter. “Nothing but cowboy stuff. Hank Williams, for cripe’s sake. I counted eight by Hank Williams.”

  The man smiled. “When in Rome, old chap. Why don’t you sit down, have a bite and something to drink?”

  “I’ve been sitting all day, and I’m not hungry. Can I go out to the car?”

  “May I go out to the car.”

  “All right, then, may I?”

  “Go ahead. And Nathan, it’s only—” It was too late; the boy was already through the door and into the parking lot.

  The black man bought a package of Lucky Strikes from the waitress, lit one with a small silver lighter, and continued to study his map as he smoked. Outside, the boy was throwing at the utility pole again. He had an easy, smooth delivery, and I wanted to go out and join him but I wasn’t sure what to say when I got there. My father was still staring toward the kitchen.

  “You ready?” I said nervously.

  “No.”

  The waitress brought the black man an ashtray from down the counter. “You folks been on the road long?”

  “To my son it seems like a long time. Actually, only since about noon.”

  “I know how your boy feels,” the waitress said sympathetically. “I rode clear to Washington once. Washington, D.C.? On a high school trip. We left here before it got light in the morning and didn’t pull in there until way long after dark, and I just about thought my fanny was going to fall off from sitting on it the whole time. The apple blossoms, or maybe it was pears, was supposed to be on, only it was a late spring there too and they wasn’t yet. Not that most of us kids would have seen them if they had been. Mister, we were hot the whole trip. Hot or hungover from getting hot the night before or getting ready to go out and get hot that night. You know, bunch of” country bumpkins from Vermont—‘Ver-mont! What state’s that in?’ folks kept asking us—never been off the farm before, most of us.”

  The man smoked his cigarette and chatted with the waitress about Washington. He had a relaxed manner, as though he was used to making light conversation with strangers. And though he talked in what Kingdom County natives would call an “educated” way, I began to detect a slight regional burr in his speech, which I supposed might be a mild southern accent. His voice was resonant, like my father’s when he was telling a story, and pleasant to listen to like a radio sportscaster’s, making me think the cook might be right; he could be some kind of singer or stage performer.

  “They took us to where they make the money,” the waitress was saying. “That’s what I remember best about good old Washington, D.C. That and getting hot and hungover.”

  “Val.”

  Bruce had materialized in the kitchen entranceway. He wiped his hands on his dirty apron and jerked his thumb backward. “Out here. You’re needed.”

  Val, who all of a sudden I liked better, rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and mogged back out to the kitchen. A minute later the black man stubbed out his cigarette butt, paid Bruce at the register, and left.

  My father waited until the man and his son had pulled out of the parking lot. Then he stood up and took two long strides to the cash register. As Bruce rang up our slip he tilted his head back toward the kitchen, where the waitress was slamming pans around in the sink.

  “Talk, talk, talk,” he said. “And she don’t much care who to, neither. She ought to learn when to keep her frigging mouth shut.”

  “You ought to shave and wash your hands and put on a clean apron and a shirt,” my father said. “Expect a visit from the state health inspector.”

  And he walked out without his change, leaving his cup of java untouched on the counter behind him.

  As you travel north in Vermont toward Kingdom County and the Canadian border, you will notice that even small streams are often designated as rivers on bridge signs and road maps. Half an hour later, when my father and I crossed the Gihon River, which you can easily throw a fly across at its widest point, he automatically assessed the water on his side as I did on mine—as we had done and would do hundreds of times crossing scores of different streams together.

  “James,” he said, “I wouldn’t go brook trout fishing with that son-of-a-bitch back there if he and I were the last two men on the face of the earth.”

  Ever since I could remember, my father’s acid character test was whether he would or wouldn’t go brook trout fishing with a person. Not just fishing. Not even trout fishing. Brook trout fishing.

  He applied this unique standard to neighbors, colleagues in the newspaper business, politicians, authors, and baseball players. Once in a blue moon someone actually measured up to it, though I’d noticed that most of the select few (F.D.R., Samuel Johnson, Ty Cobb) had been dead for years. And in point of fact, I’d rarely known Dad to fish with anyone but his own two sons and his one close friend, Judge Forrest Allen.

  “Well,” he said, “to hell with that ignorant bastard. If I were ten years younger I probably would have muckled onto him right there in his place of business and thrown him into the biggest snowbank south of Labrador. He can count himself lucky.”

  This was a common threat of my father when I was growing up. Once or twice a week he informed me with great earnestness that if he were ten years younger he would certainly “muckle onto” someone and throw him into the biggest snowbank south of Labrador. Quite often it was Joseph McCarthy, whom my father had a particular desire to muckle onto, though Sheriff Mason White and the nonprosecutor Zack Barrows were also high on the list of likely candidates. In fact, I have to confess that for a number of years I was somewhat unclear in my mind as to exactly what Dad meant by “muckling on.” Yet I had no doubt at all that muckling was a most dire form of corporal retribution, with very grave consequences indeed for the mucklee.

  “To hell with him,” my father repeated. “As your grandfather used to say, James, coming home is always the best part of going away. Wh
ich, I am here to tell you, Thomas Clayton Wolfe’s overquoted dictum on the subject notwithstanding, you most certainly can do if that’s where your work happens to be.”

  As we came through the snowy woods on top of Lowell Mountain and looked abruptly out over the entire thousand-square-mile expanse of Kingdom County, I sensed something of what my father meant about coming home. Heading down the mountainside toward the village of Kingdom Common, we might have been entering a much earlier part of the century as well as an earlier season. Rickety old horse-drawn hay loaders, some abandoned not many years ago, sat out in hedgerows between stony pastures. Most of the farmhouses still had faded brown Christmas wreaths hanging on their doors, a tradition meant to ameliorate the grueling dreariness of our seven-month winters, though by this time of year they seemed only to call attention to the fact that it was already late April with warm weather still weeks away. The houses themselves had long ago faded to the same toneless gray as their attached barns, and the few farmers and loggers we passed looked as old and weathered as their buildings.

  Three or four of the barns were decorated with faded murals of pastoral scenes: cows lining up at pasture bars at milking time; hefty work horses pulling loaded hay wagons; a yoke of oxen hauling logs out of an evergreen woods. They’d been painted in a rather primitive style by an itinerant artist known to me only as the Dog Cart Man, a deaf and mute individual of an indeterminable age, who at unpredictable intervals during my youth appeared in Kingdom County with an American Flyer child’s wagon containing his paints and brushes and pulled by a motley pack of half a dozen or so mongrel dogs harnessed together with an incredible assortment of kite string, bailing twine, fish line, leather straps, and clothesline rope. Yet even these cheery murals, depicting impossibly idyllic scenes in an unimaginably distant summery season, seemed only to heighten by contrast the austerity of the time of year and the rugged terrain.