A Stranger in the Kingdom (17 page)

“Let's go home, old son,” he said to Nat. “You've seen enough lowlife for one day.”

So far, the spring of 1952 had been a banner one. After the cockfight episode, my father had issued several ominous threats involving “trips to the woodshed” and “boys who were never too big to muckle onto.” Then my mother had quietly and firmly confined me to our premises on the gool for the rest of the school year. But the river ran smack through the middle of our property, a whole glorious half mile of it, and with Mom to come along with me (she did not fish, but just enjoyed walking on the bank and seeing the birds and whatever else we happened across), I had all the freedom and company I needed.

Mom was not only the main companion, but also the chief confidante of my boyhood on the gool. Charlie, of course, was my idol, but Charlie had been off at college and law school for years, showing up only on vacations, and then spending much of his time with Athena Allen. To my father, I stood in the relationship of pupil to mentor, apprentice to master, novice to expert. The very happiest hours of my early childhood were the ones I spent in the company of my youthful-looking mother.

Ruth Emerson Kinneson was the daughter of a prominent Boston Salvation Army officer, one Captain George Emerson, who along with his wife and fellow soldier in the battle against poverty and infidelism, my grandmother Louisa, departed this earthly vale in the line of duty during the great typhoid epidemic of 1927—the year after my mother was married. My grandfather had been educated at Harvard and came from an old Beacon Hill family, which, my mother rather vainly gave me to understand, had a “slight distant connection” to the celebrated Concord Emersons. He and my grandmother had married late—he was past forty, she in her late thirties. And this is the sum of my knowledge about my maternal grandparents, except that in addition to his professional duties, “the poor captain,” as Mom invariably referred to her father—though whether because he was impoverished, which given his Harvard education and Beacon Hill background I doubt, or in reference to his untimely demise in the typhoid epidemic, or from some oblique association with her own strange situation as the daughter of not one but two Salvation Army officers, I have no idea—the “poor captain” was an elder of the Methodist Church and an amateur botanist of some renown.

“I didn't have the most ordinary of childhoods, Jimmy,” my mother used to say with a smile. “But I had an interesting one.”

Certainly the first part of her statement is true. Growing up with the poor captain and Louisa in the by then rather dilapidated family mansion, my mother divided her time between serving tea to her father's botanical associates and playing the piano for the “unfortunates” who frequented the captain's waterfront mission. What those sad devils must have thought of the blue-eyed beauty who at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen hammered out hymns and doled out soup in the prim matching navy skirt and blazer of the Boston School for Young Methodist Ladies is anyone's guess. But the tall, skinny young Boston Post reporter who stuck his head into the mission one dreary November evening during the second verse of “Shall We Gather by The River” was as close to astounded by her as he ever permitted himself to come.

“I'm Charlie Kinneson and I'm doing a story for the
Post
,” he said a few minutes later as he came through the soup line behind an octogenarian still beating time to “Shall We Gather” with his spoon. “What in the name of Ethan Allen and the First Continental Congress is a good-looking dame like you doing in a joint like this?”

When my mother, who was just seventeen, laughed and brushed a thick strand of her beautiful blond hair away from her face and said she'd wondered exactly the same thing herself a hundred times, my father was smitten. They eloped to Kingdom County six months later, on the day after my mother's valedictory speech at the School for Young Methodist Ladies, arriving at our farm on the gool in the early summer of 1926, and my mother not only fell in love with northern Vermont instantly, but fell in love with it at its loveliest. From the day she arrived she loved the tall woods and quick streams, the jumbled mountains and icy green lakes, the brilliant falls and uncertain springs—even mud season; even the interminable winters.

On the other hand, she didn't much like the village or anything about it. She served on the Ladies Auxiliary from a sense of community responsibility but she was at least as frustrated with its hypocrisies as my father. She helped out sometimes at the
Monitor
but shared little of my father's keen interest in local, state, and national politics. And though she always admired dad's stories in the
Monitor
and those he told us at home, her own stories to me, and before me to Charlie, were entirely different and had few sharp edges and no “points.” My father's tales were exemplums, allegories, “news” old and new. My mother, for her part, loved to tell about going up into the gore by sleigh to get the Christmas tree with my grandfather that first winter she spent on the gool, going with him on the great snowroller to pack down the roads after a blizzard, and shoveling snow for sleigh ranners onto the covered bridge. Like the books she read me—
Little Men, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Around the World in Eighty Days
—my mother's stories were meant to entertain and delight rather than instruct me.

And, best of all, we almost never got into an argument.

Still, I was more than ready for a change of scenery by the Saturday morning in mid-June after school let out for the summer—the day my restriction was lifted. I grabbed my new catcher's mitt and made straight for the parsonage.

 

At the junction of the east end of the gool and the county road, I struck boldly off onto a detour through the cemetery. On such a splendid morning, with not a cloud over the mountains and the fringe of the gravel path through the cemetery bright with daisies and red and yellow Indian paintbrushes and the village suffused from end to end with the heady fragrance of varnish from the American Heritage furniture mill, even the graveyard seemed a friendly spot. I gave Black Pliny's tall obelisk a smart-alecky salute as I passed it, wondering idly for the hundredth time why under the sun his students had bothered to erect such an imposing monument to him when Pliny's remains did not repose here at all but dangled from the metal pole in the Academy. And I shot an insouciant high sign to the substantial pink granite markers of my ancestors, sparkling almost cheerfully in the June sunshine. Even the so-called pauper's corner off under the north boundary row of cedars looked less forlorn and somber this morning.

“Scat!” said a sharp voice.

Cousin Elijah Kinneson materialized from the cemetery toolshed. In his hand he held a spade, with which he made several jerky sweeping motions in my direction, like an old woman shooing a stray tomcat off her porch. As he did so, the great ring of keys at his belt seemed to jingle angrily.

“Scat,” Elijah said again. “What are you up to, James Kinneson, navigating around here where you don't belong? Go along! I won't have boys navigating and prowling and spying and prying in my cemetery.”

I was never entirely certain what my cranky old cousin the sexton-linotypist meant by accusing me of “prowling and spying and prying,” except that, next to the absolutely unforgivable (and equally obscure) offense of “navigating,” these crimes were among the most heinous any boy could commit. Even in broad daylight, there was a certain ghoulish quality about Elijah, a quality enhanced this morning by the shovel with which he intended to perform heaven knew what gruesome task.

The previous summer he had offered Frenchy LaMott two dollars to assist him in moving the graves of a young woman named Craft and her infant daughter to the cemetery in Memphremagog. According to Frenchy, after they had exhumed the coffins, nothing would do but that Elijah must positively identify their grisly contents. Frenchy said that no sooner were the remains exposed to the air than the wispy hair of both mother and child disintegrated almost instantly, a Poe-like image that haunted me for years to come. Frenchy also said that when he refused to touch the coffins again, Elijah never paid him a cent for reopening the graves, for which Frenchy had vowed to “do for” him someday when he least expected it.

“Scat,” Elijah repeated, and I hurried off along the path to the parsonage.

 

“Cheerio, Jim,” Reverend Andrews said. He smiled in a friendly, ironical way that I didn't quite know what to make of, almost as if he and I shared a good joke. “Your chum's up in his room, reading funny books, no doubt. Kindly pry him away from there if you can. It's too fine a day to stay indoors.”

I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to be shut up in a dim old house on a day like this. I was sure I could coax Nat into playing ball with me.

“First door on the left at the top of the stairs,” Reverend Andrews called after me.

That was the room directly above the minister's study, looking out over the porch roof onto the street and Cousin Elijah's sexton's cottage across the way. The door was partly ajar, and Nat was sitting Indianfashion on his unmade bed, surrounded by old comic books. Loose comic books were strewn across the floor, and cardboard boxes of comics were stacked in the corners and heaped up on the dresser.

Never in my life had I seen so many comics together in one place. There were hundreds of them, representing every genre from fighting-men-at-war to gothic horror to classics.

“So, what are you up to, Kinneson?”

“I thought you might want to play some ball on the common, Nat.”

“Maybe later this afternoon.”

“We can't then. At one o'clock, Charlie's town team has it for the rest of the day.”

Nat shrugged.

I went over to see what he was reading. It turned out to be a coverless old issue of
Beyond the Grave.

“Great stuff, eh?” Nat said, flipping it to me and flopping across his bed as though he intended to stay there for the rest of the summer.

I loved comics of all kinds, partly because they had always been strictly proscribed in my Presbyterian household. This one was so horrifying that it brought out goose bumps on my arms To the best of my recollection, it chronicled a murderous rampage through Merry Olde England of the walking corpse of a mad miller, well-dusted with his own poisonous flour.

“Your father lets you read these?”

“Sure. Why shouldn't he?”

“I don't know. I'm not allowed to. Doesn't it give you the creeps?”

Nat groaned and stuck his head under a caseless pillow.

“There's just one thing, Nathan.”

“I know. Baseball.”

“Yeah, but what I was going to say was I wouldn't read these alone in this house after dark if I was you.”

“I don't imagine you would,” he said in a muffled voice with his head still under the pillow.

“What I mean is, with the ghost here and all.”

Nat sat up, still holding the pillow to his head. “What ghost?”

“Old Pliny Templeton's,” I said casually. “You know. The guy that built this house and the Academy? The fella whose bones are up in the science room closet, hanging from the pole? Once a year he comes back here, or his bones do anyway, to sort of check up on things. You can't see him, but you can hear his footsteps on the porch. They say that if you could ever grab him on that night and wrestle him down and bury the bones, his soul would be put to rest.”

Nat threw the pillow at me. “Come on, Kinneson. You don't believe that bloody crap. Have you ever heard these footsteps?”

“I haven't,” I admitted. “But I know somebody who has. Last summer Bumper Stevens said he'd give Frenchy LaMott five dollars if he'd stay here in the parsonage alone all night. It was August fourth, I think. That's the night old Pliny committed suicide, when he's supposed to come back.”

Nat looked at me skeptically. “And?”

“And if you knew Frenchy, you'd know he's crazy enough to do almost anything for a dare, especially if there's money involved. Bumper and Plug Johnson and that bunch are always bribing him into trying dumb stuff. Like going over the High Falls behind the hotel in a truck inner tube when the water's high in the spring. Or fighting some big rugged farm boy in the auction ring over at the commission sales barn. Stupid stuff like that. Anyway, nobody was living here in the house then, so Frenchy sneaked in and hid in the study and he heard those footsteps off and on all night. At first he figured it was Bumper and Plug scaring him, because he looked out the window and saw shadows on the porch. Even Frenchy knows ghosts don't throw a shadow. And once he heard old Bumper say in that low raspy voice of his, ‘This'll roust him out, boys.' Then a big loud Canadian salute firecracker went off right under the window. But way later on, after Bumper and the others got drunk and went home, Frenchy swore he heard footsteps again, tramping up and down right outside the study.”

“And you believe him?”

“Yes, I do. You would too if you'd lived in the Kingdom all your life.”

“No, I wouldn't. That's the last thing I'd believe. Especially from this Frenchy character.”

“Well, Nat, I don't want to argue with you, but if you'd lived here as long as me, you'd know one thing. Those LaMotts are a rough bunch, but there's one thing about a LaMott that everybody who lives in Kingdom County knows, they always tell the truth. A LaMott won't lie, no matter what.”

“And that's the beginning and the end of it, right?” Nat said in that bored way of his, as though he couldn't even quite muster the energy to make fun of me. “Well, I'll be listening this coming August fourth. But I doubt I'll hear anything.”

An idea occurred to me. “You mind if I come over and listen with you? I've always wanted—”

“Are you chaps going to spend all morning jabbering up there?” Reverend Andrews called from the foot of the stairs. “I've got a meeting at the newspaper office with Jim's father. I'm taking off.”