On Kingdom Mountain Read online

  “I know,” she said to her people. “I’ve been tasting too much of the stuff lately. Well, fine. Sit in righteous judgment, if you’re determined to, with your sanctimonious frowns and disapproving countenances. I have to confide in someone, and it may as well be you. What do you propose I should do? Give in to cousin Eben and his cronies? Sell the mountain? Sell you? Eben would have every last one of you in the burning barrel in a Kingdom Mountain minute. As for my Who Shot Sam, a sup wouldn’t hurt you now and again, either.”

  Miss Jane raised her father’s canvas-bound wooden canteen, which he had carried all the way to Tennessee and back, in an ironical toast to her dear people and drank straight out of the spout. Now that she had exposed her vulnerability to her hard-shelled Kinneson ancestors, she felt a little foolish. You could bet that they would not be caught recriminating with themselves. Not by their relations, not by anyone. Whatever remorse Seth and Freethinker and Quaker Meeting and her father may have had about their own failings, they’d kept their doubts to themselves. Or to themselves and their Maker, King James’s Jehovah. Who, Jane believed, had enough shortcomings of his own to regret, though so far as she knew, he never had. What’s more, if you couldn’t confide in your family, whom could you confide in? At least her dear people were not likely to blab her secrets all over town. At least she could rely on their complete discretion.

  Still, she must not repine nor, to paraphrase the Pronouncer of Concord, further dash the hopes of the morning with more ’jack. It was time to stopple up her father’s canteen and her self-reproaching thoughts and go fishing. Fishing, and seeing what this special day, as heralded by her second sight, might hold would be the perfect way to mark the anniversary of her first half century on Kingdom Mountain.

  3

  ALTHOUGH MISS JANE’S birthday fell on the vernal equinox, a foot of snow still covered the old Canada Pike between the home place and her five-story barn. The temperature this morning was well below freezing, though the wind was beginning to back around into the south. Spring would have to come eventually, even on Kingdom Mountain.

  In the barnyard sat the ox sledge, identical to the pung Venturing Seth and his ox had pulled across the river and up the mountainside a century and a half ago. Standing patiently in front of it were Ethan and General Ira Allen, Miss Jane’s matched pair of red oxen. Tall in her red and green lumber jacket, felt boots, and fleece-lined cap with long earlappers, the Duchess touched their flanks with her white-ash goad and they started up the pike. An hour later they emerged onto the frozen surface of Lake Memphremagog.

  Memphremagog. The vast body of water stretching deep into Quebec between sheer mountains resembled the big wilderness lakes of northern Maine. This was the lake of the Currier and Ives lithograph reproduction on the door of the iron safe in On Kingdom Mountain, the lake of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Snow-Bound,” which every scholar who had attended Miss Jane’s school could still repeat verbatim. In the Memphremagog Abenaki language the name meant “beautiful summer waters.” To the Duchess, the great lake bending north for mile after mile, like a landlocked fjord between the soaring Canadian peaks, was beautiful at any time of the year. Yet it was an exceedingly unpredictable body of water. The mountains served as a natural wind tunnel, and without notice its lovely summer waters, as unruffled as a millpond at sunset, could transform themselves into a maelstrom of five-foot waves. In the winter the ice on the lake was unreliable, two feet thick in one spot, two inches nearby. Had it not been for her moment of second sight a month ago, Miss Jane never would have dreamed of setting foot on Memphremagog this late in the season.

  Just ahead of her, on a point of land jutting out from the foot of Kingdom Mountain between the mouth of the bay and the lake proper, were the abandoned buildings that had once constituted the town poor farm. The main building, a hulking, three-story monstrosity topped by a square cupola, had a bleak and forlorn aspect, like a summer hotel whose glory days lay deep in the past. Just beyond, the polished black ice of the lake stretched north to Indian Island, where her mother’s Memphremagog people had once come to catch salmon. Miss Jane’s ice-fishing shanty sat off the southern tip of the island. To the north lay twenty miles of open water. In all that vast expanse, the fishing shanty was the only sign of human life.

  Half an hour later, Miss Jane led Ethan and General Ira Allen into a stand of softwoods on the island, out of the wind. In honor of her French Canadian neighbors, Jane had painted her fishing shanty in splashy pastel colors, sunshine yellow and tangerine, with a cotton-candy pink door and lilac trim around the single window. A coal black stovepipe jutted out of the shiny tin roof. Everything inside the shanty seemed in order, so she began chopping fishing holes in the ice around it with her double-headed felling ax.

  A reef extended into the narrows of the lake from the tip of Indian Island. Beyond it the mountainsides hemming in the narrows plunged down far underwater. When Jane thought of the hundreds of feet of dark, frigid water just below the ice, the bottoms of her feet tingled. She set out half a dozen tip-ups with flags made from strips of old red flannel and baited the hooks with live river minnows she’d brought along in a bucket. Then she went inside and kindled a fire in the small potbelly stove. The kindling came from a bag of wood scraps from her carving projects.

  An apple crate sat near the stove for a chair. Beside it was a short club Miss Jane called St. Peter. On the floor of the shanty, along the walls, lay four granite obelisks, each four feet long, with the words UNITED STATES inscribed on one side and CANADA on the other. Miss Jane had borrowed them from the strip cleared through the woods on her mountain to mark the border she did not acknowledge. Their purpose was to weigh down the shanty so that it didn’t blow away in the gales that came tearing out of Canada over the frozen lake.

  Just as the Duchess started to brew tea in an empty lard can on the potbelly stove, she glanced out the window and saw a red flag snap up. “School’s in session,” she said, and went outside and pulled in a fat yellow jack perch. It weighed about half a pound and had bright orange fins, an emerald back, and dark vertical stripes on its sides. “Go to fish heaven,” she said kindly to the flopping perch, and tunked it on the head with St. Peter. Then she yanked in another one.

  “A fine scholar,” she said, jerking a third fish out onto the ice and smiling at her habit, increasing of late, of talking out loud to herself. Maybe she needed a cat to keep her company, she thought, as she dispatched the flopping perch to fish heaven. But Miss Jane had never looked into the soulless green eyes of a cat without seeing Satan looking back out at her, and she was wary of inviting the devil into her home at this stage of her life.

  After a few minutes the perch stopped biting as abruptly as they’d started. “School’s out for recess,” Jane said. “They’ll be back after dinner.”

  As the sun climbed higher, the Duchess shed her lumber jacket and fleece-lined cap. Her long hair, in which there was still very little gray, and of which, truth to tell, she was quite vain, fell down her back. Miss Jane was still as slender as a schoolgirl from a lifetime of constant activity and, except for a touch of arthritis in her hands, remarkably healthy. Yet she had to admit that she was lonesome sometimes. Maybe she should get a cat after all.

  At noon she fed Ethan and General Ira Allen the hay she’d brought in a burlap bag on the sledge. She gave them a bucket of water apiece, then got out her pocketknife and skinned and filleted the perch. She shook up the snowy fillets in a brown paper bag with flour and cornmeal and fried them in sizzling butter in a black frying pan on the stove, then sat on the apple crate in the sun streaming through the open doorway and feasted on crispy perch and her own cold baked beans and salt-rising bread, all washed down with black tea. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson enjoyed her vittles. She might take most of her meals alone, but she ate well. Into her tea, from time to time, she poured a short jolt of applejack from her father’s canteen. Thinking of her father reminded her of the iceboat he helped her build when she was a girl. The boat, w
hich had a big blue and red sail and two iron runners, could attain speeds of well over sixty miles an hour. One winter afternoon, near where the Grand Trunk tracks cut close to the west side of the frozen bay, she and her father had challenged the Montreal Flyer to a race. When they passed the locomotive, the engineer gave them a long congratulatory whistle. That had been a great moment in Jane’s girlhood.

  She sipped her fortified tea and looked across the narrows at the soaring cliffs of Kingdom Mountain’s west side. In places, springs seeping out of the escarpment had frozen to a glittering aquamarine. Once, fishing from a rowboat near the base of the mountain, Jane had asked her father if he could scale those cliffs. He had glanced up at them and said, “A person can do what he has to do.”

  Twenty-five miles long by eight to ten miles wide, Kingdom Mountain was an anomaly. Unlike the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, its long axis ran east-west rather than north-south. Technically, it did not belong to the Appalachian chain at all but had been formed from the same pink Laurentian granite that made up the Canadian Shield north of the St. Lawrence River. The glaciologist Louis Agassiz, who visited Kingdom Mountain on two occasions, was the first scientist to perceive that it actually belonged one hundred miles to the north, in Canada. It was, Jane thought, a mountain worth fighting for, worth preserving from Eben Kinneson Esquire’s road and all roads. On its mile-high summit, above the tree line, perched two boulders that she could see from the fishing shanty. One, flat on top, was called table rock. The other sat atop table rock and was almost perfectly round. Known as the balancing boulder, it was thought to be the largest freestanding boulder in New England, a great glacial erratic decorated on its south side with carvings of caribou, mammoths, whales, and walruses. Whether the Arctic animals had been inscribed before or after the glacier deposited the boulder on Jane’s mountaintop was impossible to say. Weathered into the northeast side of the boulder was the outline of a satanic face, known locally as the devil’s visage.

  Far below the devil’s visage, on the lower northeastern slopes of the mountain, lay three glacial tarns called the Chain of Ponds. Like the Upper East Branch of the Kingdom River and the swift, cold burns that ran off the mountain, the Chain of Ponds contained a unique species of blue-backed trout, or char, otherwise found only in a lake on Baffin Island. Beyond the Chain of Ponds a huge, wild bog known as the Great Northern Slang stretched deep into Quebec.

  At the south foot of table rock on Kingdom Mountain was a pile of stones known as the peace cairn. It consisted of thousands of rocks and pebbles, many not native to northern Vermont, plus shells, bits of bone, even petrified wood, brought to the mountaintop over the centuries by Miss Jane’s Memphremagog Abenaki ancestors. If any criminal or adversary of the Memphremagogs managed to reach the peace cairn, he would be granted sanctuary from retribution. More recently, Jane’s grandfather, Quaker Meeting Kinneson, and her father and uncle, Morgan and Pilgrim, had conducted hundreds of fugitive slaves over the mountaintop to Canada. Then there was the legend of the Kingdom Mountain Treasure, which had long since taken on its own life. It was confidently reported in the Common, and wherever else storytellers came together throughout the county, that the Confederate raiders had buried the gold somewhere on Jane’s mountain, intending to return for it after the war but, inexplicably, never doing so.

  What Jane knew for certain was that the mountain had sheltered and provided sustenance for several generations of Kinnesons and that it created its own weather and seasons, quite sharply different from the weather and seasons elsewhere in the county. It nurtured its own species of trout and, on its summit, several boreal plants and lichens found nowhere else within a thousand miles. Looking up at the peak from the frozen lake, Miss Jane also knew why Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers were so keen on their high road. As soon as the new highway was completed, they planned to purchase the mountain from her for a song and transform it into northern New England’s first ski resort—a winter spa, as she thought of it—for ne’er-do-wells from Away with more money than they knew what to do with. The road would pave the way.

  “Over my dead body,” she said aloud. This the Duchess of Kingdom Mountain meant as much as she had ever meant anything in her life.

  4

  IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON Miss Jane rummaged through her bag of kindling and found a piece of basswood about six inches long. She moved her apple crate outside into the sunshine, got out her pocketknife, and began to carve, the shavings curling away onto the ice beside her boots. Her jackknife moved in quick, sure strokes. In her hands the stick of wood was swiftly becoming a fish.

  Jackson, dunderhead that he was, had once said that he saw the animal he wanted to carve in the wood before he began carving. Santiago had grandly pronounced that his animals came straight from his carving hand. Miss Jane believed that her carvings resided first in her head or, in the case of her dear people, her heart. What you loved you always created from the heart. In the North American Bird Carving Contest, held each summer in Montreal, she had never placed higher than third, behind Jackson and Santiago or Santiago and Jackson. She was quite certain that this coming summer would yield a very different outcome. For this year’s contest she had in mind a true marvel, something neither of her two chief rivals would ever think of in the first place.

  The little fish Miss Jane was carving had a dorsal fin, a notched tail, and a couple of shallow slashes on each side of its head for gills. She took a small box from her outer shirt pocket. Inside, on cotton batting, were two treble hooks on screw eyes and a single eye hook. She twisted the three-pronged hooks into the bottom of the wooden fish, front and back, and inserted the eye hook under the fish’s jaw.

  Jane took her felling ax and a short metal casting rod from the shanty out toward the middle of the narrows and chopped another hole through the ice. She tied the carved fish onto the thin wire leader of her line and attached a bell-shaped, two-ounce lead sinker a foot above it. Slowly she lowered the weighted lure into the dark water, where it swayed slightly with the deep pulse of the lake.

  Jane’s father once told her that before his brother Pilgrim went off to war, he had caught, in Lake Memphremagog, a sturgeon weighing one hundred pounds, a great bewhiskered denizen that had probably worked its way up into the lake from the St. Lawrence River. Miss Jane wasn’t sure what might be attracted to her lure, suspended hundreds of feet below in the black and silent depths. Although nothing extraordinary had happened yet, she had little doubt that between now and sundown something important was going to take place. Late one snowy afternoon a month ago she’d been reading A Tale of Two Cities, perhaps for the tenth time, when for no discernible reason she had experienced what, over the years, she had come to think of as a Kingdom Mountain moment. An image had come to her, fleeting, unbidden, vivid. In her mind she pictured the colorful fishing shanty, the frozen lake, herself on the ice. Somehow she knew that it was the twenty-first of March, the spring solstice. How she had divined this she had no idea. She simply had. Then the moment passed and she was back with Mr. Dickens, far away and long ago, in the best and worst of times.

  As the day wore on, another school of perch cruised by. Miss Jane set her metal rod down on the ice and took a few minutes to pull up half a dozen fish to take home for supper. It was colder now. She put her lumber jacket back on. Occasionally, the spring ice on the lake gave out a tremendous booming roar as a great crack zigzagged through it. What if it started to break up before she and her oxen got safely back to shore? She put this thought out of her head as unworthy of the vision that had brought her here. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson believed that when she could no longer trust her second sight, she could no longer trust herself. It was part and parcel of who she was. Yet she knew she should not tarry on the uncertain ice much longer. As she cleared freezing slush away from her line with her tea mug, the blue shadow of Owl’s Head across the narrows crept toward her, and the sun angled closer to the mountains in the southwest. Time to go.

/>   Laying her casting rod on the ice again, she fetched the oxen and hitched them to the runnered shanty. They easily pulled it off the ice into the copse of spruce trees on the island, where it would be out of sight of summer boaters. Then she gathered her tip-ups and the bucket of perch and set them on the sledge. “That big fish will be down there for you to catch next winter,” she said as she started to reel in her lure.

  Abruptly, it stopped. It didn’t feel like a snag. There was nothing in the middle of three hundred feet of water to get snagged on. Up through the line came a vibration, a heavy, thrilling weight. “Ah,” Miss Jane said.

  The word was scarcely out of her mouth before the line was screeching off her reel. “The song we like to hear,” Miss Jane told her oxen. “The song of the singing reel.”

  The fish was headed straight down the lake toward the former poor farm. Soon he would stop to turn the lure in his mouth. When the fish paused for a second or two, Miss Jane lifted the tip of the rod sharply, feeling immense resistance.

  She struck again, and the reel shrieked like a bagpipe as the hooked fish headed into the unplumbed heart of the narrows between the mountains, where Memphremagog was rumored to be bottomless. When at last he stopped, Miss Jane began to reel in fast. The dancing rod tip bent out of sight in the water, but the line held and now the fish was coming her way.

  Miss Jane was famous throughout the Kingdom for being able to identify each of the ten varieties of game fish in Lake Memphremagog by the way they struck and fought. For once she was stymied. This fish fought too long for a great northern pike, yet it seemed too big for a rainbow trout or landlocked salmon.

  At last the mystery fish was swimming in tight circles just below the ice. Each time Jane drew it to the hole it stopped, dead weight. Suddenly, she began to chuckle. The opening, she realized, was too small. Holding her rod above her head in one hand and gripping the shaft of the felling ax just below its two-bitted head with the other, she enlarged the hole in the ice, careful not to cut her line in the process. Then she shrugged out of her coat. Still holding the rod high with her left hand, she lay down and reached into the icy lake water all the way up to her shoulder. Soon she began lifting the thrashing fish up through the hole by its bright red gills. It was a lovely dark silver color. And it was gigantic.