On Kingdom Mountain Read online

  “It may or may not be an enjoyable experience. But I will find satisfaction there.”

  “You will lose the case and be out your timber and court costs for bringing a frivolous action when generous compensation was proffered.” So saying, the attorney approached his teed-up golf ball, addressed it with a confident waggle of his club head, and executed a mighty swing. The ball toppled off the white wooden tee and dribbled five feet.

  Miss Jane reached down, picked up the dubbed ball, and, like a housewife tossing spilled salt, flipped it over her left shoulder into the lake. Then she and Henry returned to her Ford.

  9

  IT WOULD BE INCORRECT to give the impression that Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain was a hermit. In fact, she was quite sociable. With the exception of whiskey runners and revenuers who violated her rule of fifteen miles per hour at all times, game wardens, whom she detested on principle, and border officials “whose border didn’t exist and never had,” Jane welcomed all visitors to her mountain. And she loved going into the village several times a week.

  True, Miss Jane’s dealings with many of the villagers, particularly with the town fathers promoting the Connector, were somewhat strained. In Kingdom County in those days a certain tension existed between villagers and country people. It was reflected in the rivalry between town kids—townies—and kids from the surrounding farms and mountain hollows, known as woodchucks. Yet the split ran deeper than that. Jane’s own high school days had been fraught with conflict, and she readily acknowledged that she had greatly contributed to it by striving to be the best at everything, even demanding to pitch for the boys’ baseball nine. Then, of course, there was her shocking valedictory speech. Yet for many years the village had depended on her civic services far more than she depended on the pittance she received for performing them.

  Some years Miss Jane made an adequate income from her carved birds and folk figures. Had she been willing to carve waterfowl decoys for hunters, she would have earned considerably more. But this she absolutely refused to do because, though she loved to hunt ducks herself, she regarded the use of decoys as a most detestable kind of entrapment. She made some pin money from the beautiful sweetgrass baskets and white-ash pack baskets her Memphremagog grandmother, Canada Jane Hubbell, had taught her to weave. Miss Jane’s baskets were so tightly woven they would hold water. She proclaimed that they would outlast their owner and guaranteed her work by promising to replace any basket that didn’t. One day a villager named White, who had bought one of Jane’s baskets for his wife, showed up with its crushed remains, demanding a refund. He was a mean man, known for being cruel to his family and animals alike, and it was obvious to Miss Jane that he had somehow contrived to run over the basket with his buggy or that a horse had stepped on it. Nevertheless, she handed him his two-dollar refund without a word. As he was reaching for his buggy whip to lash up his horse, he said in a surly voice, “You said that no-good basket would outlast me, Jane Kinneson.”

  To which Miss Jane instantly replied, “Mr. White, if you’d died when you should’ve, it would’ve.”

  Miss Jane didn’t need much income. She burned her own wood, ate her own venison, moose, and trout, cultivated a large kitchen garden, cut her ice on the river, compounded her own medicines, walked all over her mountain for exercise, and had no taxes or electric or phone bills to pay. And she did earn a little cash from her various jobs in the village.

  For the most part, these were jobs no one else wanted. First, she was the overseer of the poor, the elected official responsible for disbursing emergency funds to the indigent of the township. Usually the local overseer was, by default, a hard-bitten old farmer or tightfisted shopkeeper. But in Kingdom Common, year in and year out, Jane was “put up for election” and unanimously chosen for the job. She was good at rallying family and neighborhood support for the down-and-out and at helping people find work. Often enough, when she ran out of town funds, she assisted people out of her own pocket. In 1930, the year Henry Satterfield came to Kingdom Mountain, Miss Jane was paid a total of eighty-five dollars for her work as overseer. For a number of years she had coached the girls’ basketball and baseball teams at the Kingdom Common Academy. When old Coach Sanville died, she took the boys’ baseball nine to two state championships. She put on plays, helped with all kinds of fundraisers, and showed movies every Friday night at the town hall. Best of all, she enjoyed her work at the Atheneum, her small free library and bookshop next to the Academy, where, in her capacity as bookwoman extraordinaire, Miss Jane presided over the literary affairs of the village, matching books and readers, helping grammar school children with their homework and highschoolers with their term papers, even sponsoring a series of lectures and symposia. It was one of these events that she planned to surprise Henry with on the evening of their visit to Eben Kinneson’s Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company and Monadnock House.

  The Atheneum was housed in an ancient stone cottage, originally belonging to an ancestor of Judge Allen. When the family moved to the large brick residence on Anderson Hill where the widower judge now lived alone, he had donated the building to the village for use as a library. Although Henry had heard much about the library and bookstore, and about Miss Jane’s literary evenings, he had not yet visited the Atheneum and was most curious to see the establishment.

  The event was scheduled for seven and, after a quick supper at the Common Hotel, which Jane insisted on paying for, they arrived half an hour early. The Atheneum was not much larger than Miss Jane’s former one-room school. It was lighted by a glass chandelier, originally designed to hold candles but now electrified. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with dark varnished shelves containing thousands of books. Ranged around the room, seated at library tables and in creaky wooden Morris chairs or standing at the shelves poring over the spines of leather-bound sets of authors Henry had heard about from his schoolteacher mother were a dozen or so wooden figures whom Jane referred to as her scribblers and scrawlers.

  Like Jane’s beloved blockheads and her dear people in On Kingdom Mountain, the scribblers and scrawlers were life-size, with oblong craniums and painted features. One by one, Miss Jane introduced them to the pilot. At a table near the door, bent over an open volume of Pride and Prejudice, sat Jane’s co-namesake and all-time favorite author, Jane Austen. She had light brown hair and, naturally, Miss Jane’s gray eyes, wore a blue gown and a white blouse with lace at the throat and wrists, and was as narrow-waisted as a schoolgirl. Jane Austen had rather sharp features. Henry suspected that she had a sharp tongue as well.

  Standing nearby, tall and handsome, was the young poet Robert Frost. Miss Jane told Henry that on several occasions Mr. Frost had visited Kingdom Mountain to botanize with her for alpine plants. And once he had come to the Atheneum to read his poetry. Henry recognized Mark Twain, who had also visited the Common to lecture when Jane was a small girl. She had gone to hear him with her father, who had taken her up to meet the great humorist after his talk. Morgan Kinneson had told Twain that the evening was so hilarious it was all he could do not to laugh out loud.

  Slouched into a Boston rocker near the fireplace, his vast girth overflowing the flat wooden arms of the chair, a little gray unkempt wig askew on his large, oblong head, sat a great bear of a man. “Mr. Satterfield, may I present the incomparable Proclaimer of Litchfield, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Doctor, my friend Henry Satterfield.” On the lap of the incomparable proclaimer reposed Dr. Johnson’s own dictionary of the English language. It was open to the O section, the first entry of which, “Oats,” was defined as “a grain, which is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” Through this witticism at the expense of her Scottish ancestors Miss Jane had drawn a firm blue line. Later that spring Henry would learn that she had excised hundreds of sentences, paragraphs, and even entire pages from the books lining the walls of the Atheneum, a process she called “editing down the classics,” in accordance with Rule Three of her “Precepts for the Serious Bo
okperson.” There were five precepts in all, and they were posted, in Miss Jane’s fine hand, on the inside of the door.

  Never sell a book for less than you paid for it.

  But it’s perfectly allowable to give books away.

  Nearly every book should be shorter.

  “Of making many books there is no end.” (Thankfully.) Ecclesiastes 12:12.

  There is absolutely no money to be made in selling, lending, reading, teaching, publishing, or writing of books. All are labors of love.

  “Good evening to you, my friend,” Jane greeted a careworn middle-aged scribbler toiling over a mountainous manuscript. “Mr. Satterfield, say how do you do to Mr. Charles Dickens, the most magnanimous and hardest-working novelist of all time.”

  Miss Jane seemed very fond of all her scribblers and scrawlers, even “persnickety old Henry David Thoreau, Pronouncer and Proclaimer nonpareil.” Thoreau, seated on a bench beside a beautiful wooden loon, looked rather somberly at the edition of Walden in his hands, in which Miss Jane had summarily blue-penciled out nearly half of the text, including the entire chapter entitled “Economy.”

  Or, rather, she seemed fond of all of her scribblers with two exceptions. At the rear of the library, near the alcove leading to her shop of new and rare books, was a carved fellow with a high, broad forehead, otherwise quite simian-looking, hunched over a workbench on which lay a half-finished pair of ladies’ gloves. “William Shakespeare, Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said contemptuously. “The Pretender of Avon and the subject of my lecture this evening.” Finally, Jane beckoned Henry into the little annex shop, scarcely larger than a walk-in closet, where, enthroned in a gilded armchair, wearing a crimson robe and a gilt crown, sat “the most villainous impostor who ever set pen to paper. King James the First, author of the King James Bible,” which Jane had been assiduously revising for thirty-two years.

  Three people showed up for Jane’s lecture. Sadie Blackberry, the village berry picker, was a tiny woman in a long dress and a Mother Hubbard bonnet, with a dark, nutlike face and bright black eyes like the berries she was named for. A Number One, the fabled Grand Trunk Railroad tramp who had chalked his distinctive signature on the sides of hundreds of North Country eateries, outhouses, barn doors, and boxcars, had spent the last several years in retirement at the Common Hotel, majestically lifting his hand in greeting to the engineers of the passing trains. And Jane introduced to Henry a tall, distinguished-looking man of about her own age as her longtime friend and fishing partner, Judge Ira Allen.

  Miss Jane’s lecture was, as she had promised, a spirited attack on William Shakespeare and his benighted advocates. Her thesis was that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, had authored each of the plays attributed to the Pretender of Avon. Henry was baffled by her presentation, and Judge Allen seemed, from his all-too-polite silence, to be skeptical about her theory. “In conclusion,” the Duchess proclaimed, glaring at Henry and the judge and beaming at Sadie and A Number One, who were busy washing down her homemade lemon scones with cups of hot tea, “do you think it’s even remotely conceivable that this unlettered clown, this low, sneaking, untutored, ill-favored strolling player and glover’s apprentice penned the fabled ‘Sceptred Isle’ piece? No, he did not. Nor any of the thirty-six plays erroneously attributed to him. All were the work of the much-maligned seventeenth Earl.” She pointed an accusing finger at the Pretender of Avon and thundered, “You, sir, are a fraud!”

  Including a ten-minute digression to attack “the Pronouncer of Concord” and “the Proclaimer of Litchfield,” Miss Jane had spoken nonstop for a solid hour. Henry clapped enthusiastically. A Number One emitted a long, appreciative locomotive whistle. Sadie shook her tiny fist in Will Shakespeare’s face. Judge Allen congratulated Miss Jane on a most vigorous argument, checked out The Hound of the Baskervilles, bought a well-used copy of The Country of the Pointed Firs, and went home to read. All in all, for Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain, the tea-and-scones literary evening at the Atheneum had been a pretty successful conclusion to a trying day.

  10

  WHEN HENRY SATTERFIELD, dressed all in white, slender and handsome and smiling amiably, strolled into the Kingdom County courtroom in the Common with Miss Jane a week later, some of the spectators mistook him for her attorney. Henry, for his part, was impressed by Jane’s amazingly confident bearing. Arranging her brief at the plaintiff’s table to the left of the aisle in front of the judge’s bench, nodding familiarly to the spectators and the court clerk, she seemed as much at home here as in her kitchen workshop on Kingdom Mountain.

  Eben Kinneson Esquire sat at the defense table to the right of the aisle. For a weekday morning there was a good crowd of curiosity seekers in the courtroom, many of whom had undoubtedly come to get a good look at the exotic southerner staying with Miss Jane.

  As usual, Jane wore a black homespun dress, high-buttoned black shoes, and her frayed red and green wool hunting jacket fastened with the large safety pin she called her everyday brooch. Her hair was pulled back into a severe schoolteacher’s bun. A cardboard file fastened with black strings lay on the table in front of her. She had also brought along the homemade ash pointer she had used in her capacity as mistress of the Kinnesonville school.

  To a medley of clinking, clanking, and hissing from the steam radiators, Judge Ira Allen entered the courtroom. He began the proceedings in genial fashion by announcing that, next to an old-fashioned wood stove, steam was the most even and comfortable heat going, if the loudest. “You, sir,” he said, pointing at a talkative radiator in the far back corner. “Are you quite finished? May we proceed?” The radiator behind his bench let out a derisive hiss. “Who asked you?” the judge said, to chuckles from everyone but Miss Jane and Eben Kinneson Esquire.

  The large wooden blades of the propeller fans suspended from the stamped tin ceiling whirred around and around. A freight train rumbled through the village. The yard locomotive shifting cars at the American Heritage furniture mill behind the courthouse hooted. Couplings slammed together. Then the mill whistle shrieked out for the 9:30 break. The judge smiled and shook his head. He liked to say that his was a working courtroom in a working town, and that was just the way he liked it. Ira Allen had been born and brought up in Kingdom County and had deep family roots there. Jane had told Henry earlier that morning that she and the judge had vied for the honor of valedictorian at the Kingdom Common Academy. She, of course, had won.

  Eventually the freight passed, the yard engine finished making up the local, the radiators subsided into a steady, whispering conspiracy, and the judge called the court to order. He looked at Eben over the top of his reading spectacles. “Where are your clients, sir?”

  “I’m representing myself, Your Honor.”

  “Isn’t the new road, the Connector, a town road? Where are the selectmen of the town of Kingdom Common?”

  “Your Honor, my clients are exceedingly busy men. Their time is very valuable, so they have asked me to represent them today and to convey their regrets that they could not be here.”

  “Just how valuable is the selectmen’s time, Eben?”

  “How valuable?”

  “Yes. How valuable per day do you estimate the selectmen’s time to be?”

  “I should hazard, Your Honor, that their combined time is worth a cool hundred dollars a day.”

  “Well, Eben, that is very impressive. Please thank the selectmen for conveying their regrets that they could not come to court this morning, as summoned, to explain why I should not grant Miss Jane’s request for an immediate injunction to prevent the Connector from infringing on her property. And please convey the following message to them. That, notwithstanding their exceedingly busy schedule, they will appear in person at these proceedings and that, furthermore, I am fining them one hundred dollars per day for each day they miss, starting today, up to the end of this workweek, at which time I will issue a summary ruling in favor of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain.”

 
Here Judge Allen was interrupted by a veritable ovation of clattering from all of the radiators at once. But he was not quite finished. “Also, kindly inform your clients that I am an avid fisherman myself,” he said. “An avid speckled trout fisherman.”

  “Char,” Miss Jane said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Technically, Ira, there’s no such fish as a speckled trout. They’re char. Therefore, you are a char fisherman.”

  “This has not been a banner morning in my life,” Judge Allen said. “I am about to go trout—char—fishing myself. These proceedings will be renewed afresh tomorrow. Let us all hope that we will get off to a more promising start.”

  11

  “TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO,” Miss Jane began her testimony the next morning, “Kingdom County was a boreal fastness of soaring mountains, free-running rivers, and dense coniferous forests.”

  She was standing at the front of the courtroom, gesturing with her schoolteacher’s pointer at some crude mountains she’d sketched on a portable blackboard. For all her great gifts as a sculptor, the Duchess couldn’t draw a lick, a fact that somehow endeared her to Henry Satterfield, who again sat beside her at the plaintiff’s table in his gleaming white suit, newly whitewashed shoes, and crimson vest.

  The three selectmen of Kingdom Common, President George Quinn of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank, Prof Chadburn, headmaster of the Kingdom Common Academy, and the Reverend, from the Congregational church, sat with Eben Kinneson Esquire at the defense table.

  At the blackboard Miss Jane stood as straight as the tree her white-ash pointer had come from. As always, she wore black, with no jewelry or makeup. But this morning her light hair cascaded down her back. She certainly didn’t look like a spinster schoolteacher, but rather, Henry thought admiringly, like an exceedingly attractive middle-aged woman. And the rainmaker, watching with courteous, unobtrusive interest, was sure that Miss Jane knew it. Showman that he was, Henry Satterfield was quite vain of his own appearance, and he sensed, perhaps, an opportunity here. Exactly what kind of opportunity, however, even he could not have said.