A Stranger in the Kingdom Read online

  Many travelers, coming into these snowy granite hills, would have found Kingdom County a harsh and forbidding place. But despite my edgy emerging adolescent restlessness, which in another year would become a chronic driving urge to visit new places and see new sights at every opportunity, there was a deep and nameless appeal to me in the long stark hiatus between late winter and early spring in the Kingdom, which, like that similar uncompromising interval between late fall and early winter, seemed to reveal our remote corner of Vermont at its truest and best.

  We entered the Common along the short south side of the rectangular central green. The clock on the courthouse tower said 5:15, and it is oddly comforting to me even now, decades later, to reflect that in a few days, when most of the rest of the country leapt automatically forward into daylight saving time, those long black iron hands that had regulated the comings and goings of Commoners for a century and more would not be moved ahead one second Nor would most private households, including ours, adjust their clocks forward to accommodate someone else’s notion of the way time ought to be kept. In Kingdom County in 1952 there was one time, year-round.

  My brother’s old woody station wagon was nosed diagonally in against the east side of the common just across from the courthouse. “Good,” Dad said and stopped beside it.

  “You want to see Charlie?”

  “I want you to see him. Tell him I’ll spring for steak sandwiches over at the hotel as soon as I get this motor unloaded. It’ll be your birthday dinner.”

  “Won’t Mom be waiting supper?”

  “She’ll probably have a cake for you when you get home. Your mother and two or three others have been killing themselves all day getting the parsonage ready for the new minister. I told her not to bother with supper.”

  “What if Charlie can’t come?”

  “He can come. It’s your birthday, James. He’ll come, all right, and that’s—”

  “—the beginning and the end of it,” I said, and hopped out.

  My father almost smiled. Then he and the De Soto rattled off past the Academy and the library, turned west along the Boston and Montreal tracks running down the middle of the street in front of the hotel, swung south again along the brick shopping block, and stopped in front of the Monitor, and I dashed up the granite steps of the courthouse to see my brother.

  During the great November flood of 1927, most of the legal records of Kingdom County floated off the shelves of the storage room in the courthouse basement, out through the smashed windows into the inundated street, and north up the Lower Kingdom River to Lake Memphremagog and Canada. Days later, a few papers were retrieved from debris snagged by the tag alders growing in the swamp north of town. But except for a couple of ancient deeds written in butternut juice, which will last nearly as long as the paper it’s printed on, none of these documents could be deciphered. Last wills and testaments, probate and county court proceedings, real estate transactions large and small—all were washed off into oblivion by that freak fall deluge that laid waste to so many towns and villages throughout Vermont and elsewhere.

  After the flood subsided, the courthouse basement was converted to a three-cell jail. As new documents began to accrae, they were relegated to the third floor of the building, a single dim, musty, low-ceiled, coffinshaped room tucked up under the slate eaves overlooking the common to the west and the American Heritage furniture mill and Boston and Montreal railyard to the east. At the far south end of this dreary garret, partitioned off from the post-1927 deeds and death certificates by four thin sheets of unpainted plywood, was the cubbyhole where my brother conducted his business.

  For not much more than the twenty dollars Charlie shelled out to the county each month for the use of this cubicle he could have rented a spacious room on the first floor of the courthouse next to Sheriff Mason White’s office. But as my brother had often told me, he preferred his lofty quarters for several reasons. First of all, he was much less apt here to be pestered by courthouse loiterers and members of the Folding Chair Club, who routinely poked their hoary heads into the more accessible first-floor offices to say good morning, then remained, unbidden, to pass the time of day for twenty minutes or longer. Here, too, by hitching a metal coat hanger to his portable radio and sticking the end of the hanger out his window, Charlie could occasionally pick up a Red Sox game. The window was also high enough to allow him to look out over the village rooftops when the leaves were off the elms on the common and watch the weather coming in off the Green Mountains, so that he always knew well in advance the best times to go hunting and fishing—avocations my brother pursued with unflagging zeal on two particular kinds of days: fair and foul. Which brings me to Charlie’s principal reason for not moving downstairs, and that is that he simply didn’t need a larger or more conveniently located office because in those days he spent as little time as possible there anyway.

  My brother must have seen me get out of Dad’s car and cross the street. As soon as I reached the third-floor landing he appeared in his doorway, hollering my name and exhorting me to hurry, he had something “new and wonderful” to show me.

  Old and wonderful would have been closer to the truth. As I stepped into his office I was momentarily overpowered by the blended aromas of old sweat, old unwashed wool, old chicken manure, old fish scales and Old Duke wine. Tilted back in Charlie’s swivel chair with his rubber barn boots on the desk was my old outlaw cousin, Resolvèd Kinneson.

  I stopped in my tracks. “Sorry. I didn’t know you had somebody with you.”

  “He don’t,” Resolvèd said. He leered at me out from under the limp greasy bill of his feed store cap. “I’m here on family business. Nothing else.”

  Charlie was leaning against the wall with his elbow on the windowsill. He winked at me and motioned with a clipboard at the single straight-back chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Jimmy. You’re in for a real treat this afternoon.”

  Charlie’s office was just large enough to sit down in without stretching your legs. Even so, it was ordinarily as pleasant a spot to drink a soda and shoot the breeze as any I knew in Kingdom Common. On the walls hung old-fashioned prints of men with dogs and guns, photographs of Red Sox players, and topographical maps of the Kingdom quadrangle and the Canadian bush country across the border to the north, all heavily crosshatched with red, blue, and green X’s and O’s designating the probable lairs of big trout and big bucks. The desktop was strewn with trout flies and fly-tying paraphernalia, boxes of shotgun and rifle shells, the second-place trophy from last year’s Smash-up Crash-up Derby, and more outdoor periodicals than the magazine rack in Farlow Blake’s barbershop in the back of the hotel, all presided over by an eight-by-ten framed color photograph of Charlie’s longtime fiancée, Judge Forrest Allen’s daughter Athena, smiling archly out over my brother’s cluttered bailiwick.

  There were no bookshelves in my brother’s office. The flimsy plywood walls wouldn’t have supported them. Piled everywhere, though, in the corners and against the desk and on the windowsill, were books on every conceivable subject that interested Charlie, from turtles to Turgenev—with one notable exception. In my brother’s office there reposed not a single volume of the law of the land. Those he kept in the county’s legal library adjacent to the second-floor courtroom and consulted, as nearly as I could determine, only during the ten or fifteen minutes immediately preceding an upcoming trial.

  Ordinarily at this time of the day and year, I would have settled happily into these comfortable surroundings, cracked open a Coke from Charlie’s beer cooler, and discussed with my brother the Sox’ prospects for a good start or the approaching trout season or some other suitably vernal subject. Not today. Today I had no intention of spending ten seconds longer in the presence of my smirking outlaw cousin, who was one of the few individuals in Kingdom County I unequivocally detested and, to an extent, actually feared.

  I was about to tell Charlie to meet Dad and me at the hotel when he said, “Jim, buddy, you probably aren’t going to
believe this, but Cousin Resolvèd has finally decided to avail himself of my wise counsel and find himself and Brother Welcome a pretty little housekeeper.”

  Resolvèd shifted his boots on a back issue of Field & Stream and gave me a malevolent look.

  “If you don’t mind, Cousin,” Charlie continued, “I’d like to show Jimmy what a splendid letter you dictate.”

  “I don’t give a Frenchman’s fart what you show him,” Resolvèd said. “It’ll be in print for all to read soon enough anyway, and I don’t mean no two-bit once-a-week gossip sheet I wouldn’t use to wipe my ass with, neither.”

  Charlie laughed uproariously at this compliment to our family’s one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old newspaper and handed me the clipboard he’d been holding. Attached, in my brother’s flourishing handwriting, was a letter to the lonely hearts column of a Montreal tabloid called Young Love, True Love. It said:

  Dear Lonely Hearts:

  My name is Resolvèd Kinneson. I be a young man of property, independent means, and respectable family background in search of a female woman companion to share my life and land. Property includes brooks, ponds, extensive views, garden spot and ancestral home built circa 1780. Only lively young women under the age of forty that love good old-fashioned country living and God’s great out-of-doors need apply.

  Very truly yours,

  Resolvèd Kinneson, Esq.

  I handed the clipboard back to Charlie and looked at my cousin. Resolvèd was about fifty, but looked a good ten years older. To the extent that he could be said to resemble anyone at all, he reminded me of the woodcut of old Pap Finn sprawled drunk with the town hogs in my illustrated boyhood edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To support himself Resolvèd jacked white-tailed deer, held illegal cockfights, and poached big trout, which he kept alive in his barnyard watering trough and sold by the pound, like lobsters, to skunked out-of-state fishermen. His landed estate with its “brooks, ponds, extensive views” consisted of a dozen or so played-out acres of disused sheep pasturage on the ridge above our place. His “ancestral home,” where he lived with his look-alike brother Welcome, had been the original homestead of my great-great-great-grandfather and had been going downhill steadily since the day a century and a half ago when our ancestor consigned it to the use of his flock of merino sheep and moved down off the ridge into our present house on the gool.

  “Don’t seal that up, bub,” Resolvèd told Charlie, who had just finished addressing an envelope to Young Love, True Love.

  Now came a ritual I’d heard about many times but never before been fortunate enough to witness.

  Resolvèd, rising somewhat unsteadily to his feet: “How much I owe you, bub?”

  Charlie: “Not a cent, Cousin. This was entirely my pleasure.”

  Resolvèd: “Well, Je-sus! You can’t get ahead doing business that-away, Charlie Kinneson.” (Takes letter.) Then, grimly, as though issuing a thinly veiled threat: “I’ll make it up to you, bub. Count on it.”

  And with a final sneer in my direction he clumped out the door.

  No doubt it would be gratifying to report that Resolvèd did from time to time reimburse my brother for Charlie’s untold hours of legal and quasi-legal services on his behalf, if not in cold cash, which all Kinnesons have always been notoriously short of, then with presents of produce from his garden spot or freshly killed game, perhaps left discreetly outside Charlie’s office door or on the steps of his trailer by the river. It would be gratifying but inaccurate. For to the best of my knowledge Cousin R never paid Charlie one thin dime or brought him anything, either, except more trouble.

  No matter. My brother couldn’t have been more delighted by a fee in four figures. Collapsing into his chair, he howled with delight.

  “Well, ‘bub,’” he said when he could finally talk again, “what do you think of our cousin’s elegant epistolary style? I can’t wait to see if he gets a reply.”

  “You mean you’re really going to let him go ahead and mail that?”

  “Absolutely. It’s a model of the genre, Jimmy. I don’t know what genre, but it’s definitely a model. Give me one good reason why he shouldn’t mail it. No woman in her right mind could possibly take that letter seriously.”

  This made sense, and even if it hadn’t I probably wouldn’t have argued with my big brother. I couldn’t have cared less how many ridiculous letters our cousin wrote so long as he left me alone. Resolvèd had a way of suddenly materializing in the woods when I was out alone hunting or fishing that I found extremely disconcerting. I’d be looking up in a black spruce tree for a grouse, say, and suddenly there he’d be standing beside it where a second ago there hadn’t been anyone. Or I’d catch a hint of that gamy redolence he carried with himself everywhere and look up from threading a worm on a number-ten trout hook and see him five feet away, already fishing the pool I’d intended to fish. So I told Charlie Dad had invited us to dinner at the hotel to celebrate my birthday, and Charlie said great, he had just time enough for a steak sandwich and a cold one before leaving for his town team basketball playoff game that night in Memphremagog, up on the Canadian border.

  Just as my brother reached for the overhead light string, Resolvèd stuck his head back inside the door.

  “Say, bub,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a two-cent stamp laying loose around here somewhere? Post office’s closed up tight as Tilly’s twat and I want this in the letter box tonight.”

  Like several other restaurants in Kingdom County in 1952, when the stop signs all said ARRÊT as well as STOP and a third of the farm families still spoke French at home, the dining room of Armand St. Onge’s Common Hotel could just as easily have been fifty miles across the line in Quebec. Hand-lettered bilingual notices taped on the walls between mounted deer heads and lunker trout read HOMEMADE CANADIAN COOKING and CHECK YOUR FIREARMS AT THE BAR. Conversations in French were commonplace. Vinegar cruets for french fries sat next to the salt and pepper shakers on every table, and interspersed on the jukebox between country and western numbers were fiddle reels and jigs from north of the border.

  Except for Armand, a couple of loggers from Lord Hollow, and my father, who was never late for anything, the dining room was empty when Charlie and I arrived. The half-dozen railroad and mill pensioners who boarded at the hotel had already eaten, and the annual onslaught of downcountry fishermen up for the spring rainbow trout run wouldn’t arrive until the weekend.

  “Bon soir, Har-man,” Charlie hollered in his corniest Jacques-the-Voyageur dialect. “Ow har da steak san-weesh tonight, mon ami?”

  Armand, who after fifty years in the States spoke English with only the faintest wisp of an accent, grinned at my brother. “They’re fine, Charlie. The same as every night.”

  We ordered steak sandwiches and Dad and Charlie ordered a beer before their meal. I asked for a Coke. While we were waiting, Charlie’s girlfriend Athena Allen, who also happened to be my eighth-grade grammar teacher and Armand’s niece, came in.

  “It’s the judge’s black-eyed daughter!” Charlie shouted, pounding his beer mug on the table. “Come on over and have a cold one with us, sweetie.”

  Athena sat down next to Charlie but declined his offer of a beer, since in those days schoolteachers couldn’t be seen drinking in public. In the meantime one of the Lord Hollow loggers had punched “Your Cheatin’ Heart” on the jukebox. Charlie belted out a stanza or two right along with the record, out-twanging Hank Williams himself and pretending to go all to smash at the end, after which he announced in his booming voice that there were only two truly great Americans left and both had the same last name, Williams, and their first names were Hank and Ted.

  “Yes,” Athena said, winking at me, “ever since the Red Sox passed up their golden opportunity to sign Charlie on a few years ago, he’s wanted to be a cowboy singer when he grows up.”

  My father snorted and I laughed out loud Athena was referring to a misadventure from my brother’s youth that would have made anyone I knew but Charlie wince with e
mbarrassment, though characteristically enough, he seemed actually proud of it. When Charlie was sixteen and made the Northern Border League high school all-star team for the first time, he decided that the Red Sox had struggled along without his services long enough and that it was high time to take Fenway Park by storm. “Gone to catch for Sox,” the note my folks discovered one morning on the kitchen table read. It was signed “Your loving son, Charles.”

  Shrewdly, and with admirable self-restraint, my father waited three full days before embarking from Kingdom Common on the B and M Flyer to retrieve his loving son—whom he found wearing a white cap and selling Cracker Jacks in Fenway’s centerfield bleachers.

  Athena winked at me again and I winked back. Athena Allen was an extraordinary beauty by local or any other standards. For years I’d been half in love with her myself, and I couldn’t understand why Charlie hadn’t married her already, though recently I’d overheard my mother telling Dad that Charlie was “somewhat at sixes and sevens” these days. “He can’t quite get his own consent to marry Athena or run for the prosecutor’s job or make any other really important decision,” Mom had said. “He still hasn’t completely recovered from being turned down by the Army, you know. Give him a year or two, and see what happens.”

  Charlie’s mysterious inability to get into the service was a sore point in our family. Although there was no way to prove it, my brother couldn’t believe that the military had turned him down because of an inner-ear problem and strongly suspected that it was on account of my father’s prominent activities as a member of Henry Wallace’s Progressive party. As a Vermont delegate to the party’s nominating convention in Philadelphia four years ago, dad had called national attention to himself by cosponsoring the so-called Vermont Resolution, which would have put the Progressives on record as not giving blanket approval to any nation’s foreign policy—especially Russia’s. Unfortunately for both Dad and the party, when he stood up to introduce the resolution it was shouted down, and Dad, ironically enough, was branded by conservative papers and politicians throughout New England and beyond as a Communist sympathizer.