A Stranger in the Kingdom (13 page)

On two occasions Forrest Allen had turned down federal judgeships elsewhere in Vermont in order to remain in the Kingdom, where he could hunt and fish to his heart's content; and more than once on certain soft spring days at the peak of the mayfly hatch he had been observed wearing waders in court under his judicial robes in order not to waste precious seconds getting onto his beloved river. There was no doubt, however, that he was highly regarded as a shrewd and fair, if mildly eccentric, judge by everyone who knew him.

“
The County
vs.
Resolvèd Kinneson
,” Judge Allen said in a louder voice.

Zack Barrows, who was deaf as a cedar post, continued to shuffle through the papers on his table. Farlow Blake looked expectantly at the judge, who scowled and nodded. The bailiff stood up. Silent and smooth as a blacksnake, he glided toward the prosecutor's table. Placing his mouth about six inches from Zack's bent white head, he roared in the voice of a Roman stentor: “
THE COUNTY
VS
RESOLVÈD KINNESON.
”

The elderly prosecutor gave a terrific start. But after fumbling through his papers for a good half minute, he stood up and read a deposition to the effect that on the evening of May fourth, High Sheriff Mason White did apprehend Resolvèd Kinneson in the process of removing a gamefish from a gill net strung across the Lower Kingdom River in a section known locally as the old Kinneson meadow pool. According to Sheriff White's statement Resolvèd had fled into a nearby swamp, leaving behind the net and fish and a milkcan half full of water containing a second large fish. The County was charging him with three violations: taking a protected species of fish by illegal means, transporting a live game fish for illegal purposes, and evading an officer of the law.

“Resolvèd, do you understand the charges against you?” Judge Allen said.

“He does,” Charlie said.

“Defendant is requested to answer yes or no in person,” Stenographer Hefner said in an officious tone of voice.

All three men—Charlie, Resolvèd, and the Most Peculiar lawyer—said yes.

My father looked up briefly from an account of the impending nationwide steel strike, then resumed reading.

“Is your client prepared to enter a plea, Charles?”

“Yes, your honor. Not guilty. Zack's indicated that he's planning to request a jail sentence for Resolvèd regardless of how he pleads,” Charlie explained.

“I see,” Judge Allen said, though it was apparent that he did not, entirely.

Charlie stood up. “May I approach the bench, your honor?”

Judge Allen glanced outside at the fading afternoon, scowled again, and nodded curtly. He and Charlie conferred briefly, then Charlie returned to the defense table and sat down. Judge Allen looked at Zack. Then he looked at the Folding Chair Club, who to a man were as attentive as if viewing the aftermath of a serious train wreck. The judge then looked at Charlie and Resolvèd, and finally he looked at the Most Peculiar lawyer, whom he seemed to notice for the first time. Except for the intermittent hissing of the ancient steam radiators along the walls, the courtroom was very still. The overhead globe lights suspended by steel rods from the stamped tin ceiling had not yet been turned on. Outside, the sun had gone under a heavy bank of clouds.

“Zachariah,” Judge Allen said loudly, “would you object to having Sheriff White clarify a few points in his deposition before we put the county to the expense of a jury trial? Charles has assured me that it won't take more than fifteen minutes—so that those of us who pursue the piscatorial arts ourselves, within the strict confines of Vermont's fish and game regulations, of course, won't miss more than the beginning of this evening's hatch.”

Zack looked from the judge to Farlow, who, getting the green light from the bench, approached the prosecutor's table again and bellowed out in a voice loud enough to wake the dead in the United Church cemetery, “JUDGE A WANTS MACE TO ANSWER TWO, THREE QUESTIONS SO'S HE CAN CLEAR THE HANG OUT OF HERE AND GO FISHING.”

None too nimbly, Zack got to his feet again. His left hand continued to shuffle spasmodically through his papers, reminding me of the way a dead partridge continues to jerk for a second or two after you've shot it. People who knew him far better than I did had thought so before and been wrong, but the boozing old prosecutor really did look as though he was on his last legs.

“Just who is going to put these questions to Sheriff White, your honor?”

Farlow turned to the judge. “JUST WHO—”

He stopped in midsentence and a foolish expression crossed his face.

Charlie looked back at me and grinned.

“I am,” my brother said, pointing to himself for Zack's benefit.

Zack looked relieved. Obviously, he didn't want the hotshot Most Peculiar lawyer grilling his flunky the sheriff.

“All right, Forrest,” he said after a moment's deliberation. “But I'm certain that deposition's in perfectly good order. I helped Sheriff White prepare it myself.”

At the judge's request Mason White went up to the witness stand, where Farlow swore him in with as much pomp as though he were inducting a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the sheriff folded his elongated frame into the witness chair.

Mason White was one of the few men in Kingdom County who were taller than my father and brother. For years in my early boyhood, in fact, I had assumed that his title as high sheriff referred to his stature. It was not just that he was treetop tall. Everything about the man was high: his hips, his neck, his high, narrow hunching shoulders, his forehead, even his voice. And though his long arms and legs were as skinny as fence rails, he was oddly flabby in spots, with a red double chin like a turkey gobbler and a tidy little potbelly over which his holster belt, all a-gleam with ordnance enough for a half-day shootout, was drawn at a rakish angle like some sort of outlandish decorative trass.

Personally, the high sheriff had an ingratiating and at times condescending manner, which he had cultivated during his years as assistant to his uncle C. V. White, the local undertaker, whose business Mason had recently taken over.

To my brother, who referred to Mason as Uriah Heep White, he was a caricature of a caricature. My father, on the other hand, regarded the sheriff as one more blight on the diseased legal system of Kingdom County. And although Mason pandered to me as a means of insinuating himself into the good graces of our family, I was somewhat leery of him myself, partly because he patrolled the village streets and county roads in his long black undertaker's hearse, on whose roof he had mounted a set of blue police flashers.

Adjusting himself in the ordinary-sized witness chair as comfortably as a six-foot eight-inch beanpole in full-dress law enforcement regalia could, Mason smiled out over his bony knees and squeaked, “Yes, sir, Brother Charlie. Just what was it you wished to bring before the court this P. of M.?”

“I'll oversee the county's judicial proceedings today, thank you, Sheriff,” Judge Allen said. “And let me caution you, Charles. These questions of yours had better justify the time and deviation from standard procedure.”

“They'll be worth a limit of good trout, your honor,” my brother said to an appreciative chorus of guffaws from the Folding Chair contingent.

Charlie remained seated while he talked to Mason. He used no notes and did not appear to have a copy of the sheriff's deposition in front of him. He spoke in an amiable, conversational tone of voice, though unlike Zack he never affected a northern New England dialect when questioning witnesses or talking to juries. He did not speak especially loudly but enunciated every word carefully for the deaf prosecutor's benefit.

“What time was it when you went down to the river to look for poachers, Mason? I don't believe your deposition specified, except to mention that it was evening.”

“Well, now, Brother Charlie. I'd say it was getting on toward dusk, or maybe a tad later.”

“Which?”

“Which what?”

“Was it dusk, or later?”

“There wasn't what you could call a whole bunch of daylight left,” Mason admitted. “You don't poach fish at noon, do you?”

“I don't poach them at all,” Charlie said good-naturedly.

Another chuckle rippled through the gallery of old men. But Judge Allen scowled again. At the mention of fish and daylight, he had looked intently out the window. Although it was perceptibly darker than when I'd first come in, once the fishing season was under way Farlow Blake had standing orders from the judge not to switch on the lights until, as the saying went, it was too dark to see under the table—as though leaving them off would somehow retard the onset of night.

“Did you have a light with you, Mason?”

“Yes, indeed, Brother Charlie. I had my long-handled Big Shooter Battery Beam that I always carry with me in the patrol hearse. The subject was standing in the water taking up his net when I arrived. I crept out and when I got about as close as I am to you, I switched on the Big Shooter and played it right full in his face. You never saw such a surprised-looking fella in your life, if I do say so.”

“So you'd call yourself a pretty good shot, Sheriff? I mean with the Big Shooter?”

More laughter.

Judge Allen was unamused. “Charles Kinneson, I'm serving notice to you to get to your point, if you have one, right this instant, or I'll slap you with a cool hundred-dollar fine, payable on the spot.”

Although I'd never heard of Judge Allen's actually slapping anyone with such a fine, this warning was invariably effective.

“Where's the flashlight now, Mason?”

“That particular light? Well sir, that particular light would no doubt be somewhere at the bottom of the river between here and Memphremagog, on account of when I got out in the water to where he was standing, the subject knocked it out of my hand and took off for the puckerbrush.
After
I positively identified him. Which, frankly, I could have done with no light at all on the darkest night of the year. He's as rank as a pile of old burning tires, Charlie, and everybody knows it.”

The Folding Chair Club laughed out loud, but Judge Allen said in a voice like river ice breaking up in the spring, “Sheriff, I won't have defendants or anyone else in this courtroom demeaned by such gratuitous aspersions. Watch your remarks, sir.”

My father, who had the unusual faculty of hearing and remembering long skeins of courtroom dialogue while simultaneously reading the newspaper, interrupted his perusal of the
Globe
long enough to write in his notebook, “See what I mean, James?”—which I supposed to be a reference to the general lack of law and order in the Kingdom.

Mason began to apologize profusely. The judge cut him off and told my brother to get on with matters.

“What did you do after the subject took to the puckerbrush?” Charlie said.

“Well, I picked up the gill net with the fish still caught in it, and I confiscated that fish and the net and the milkcan with the other fish in it.”

“How big were the fish?”

“How big? Oh, about ye big.” Mason spread his great splay-fingered hands apart about twenty-five inches. Judge Allen leaned forward slightly, looking interested in the afternoon's proceedings for the first time.

“Those were dandies, all right,” my brother said. “What kind were they?”

“What kind?”

“Yes. Several different species of fish come up the Lower Kingdom in the spring to spawn, Sheriff. Suckers. Wall-eyed pike. Bullpout. Salmon. Trout. What kind were these two babies?”

“They were trout, Charlie. Gamefish, protected by the State of Vermont. We're prepared to produce them for the upcoming trial. They're home in the wife's Frigidaire this minute.”

“What kind of trout were they? Your deposition, otherwise unimpeachable except for the minor omissions of the time of day and the Big Shooter Battery Beam, didn't specify.”

No outdoorsman, Mason shrugged. “What the Sam Hill difference does it make? A trout's a trout, isn't it? They're all gamefish. They were trout-trout.”

Charlie looked back at me and grinned again, but Judge Alien was by now really irritated. “A trout is not just a trout, Mason. There are several species of trout native to this area, and to a trout fisherman it makes a considerable difference.” The judge glanced back at my father, now sketching a fish on the notepad on which he seemed to write everything but notes, and said, “To some trout fishermen, it makes a big difference. I strongly suspect that these in question were spawning rainbow trout. But for the purposes of this court all trout are gamefish and in this state it happens to be against the law to take gamefish of any kind with a net unless they have been hooked by rod and line and duly played into one and
don't
you lay a finger on that light switch, Mr. Blake, or I'll fine you a cool hundred dollars, payable on the spot.”

Farlow, who'd been gliding along the wall toward the switch, jumped as though he'd brushed up against a weed-chopper electric fence.

Charlie must have sensed that a summary adjournment was at hand Quickly he said, “Mason, you said a trout's a trout. Is a subject a subject?”

Zack stood up at this point. “See here, your honor. These questions are preposterous. Young Kinneson is leading Sheriff White clear 'round Robin Hood's barn. He's laying snares for the sheriff and I won't have it. We'll go to jury and take our chances there.”

“If that's an objection, it's sustained. Charles, this is a court arraignment, not a seminar on the taxonomy of fish. You have sixty seconds by my watch to make your point, assuming you have one, before I conclude these proceedings for what little's left of the day.”

“Thank you, your honor. That's all I need.”

Charlie turned around and whispered something to the Most Peculiar lawyer, who nodded.