A Stranger in the Kingdom (25 page)

In the meantime the crowd was pouring through a gap in the rear of the tent, spilling outside into the midway. Nat and I were swept along with them, fighting to stay on our feet to keep from being trampled. Charlie overtook us, and before we were swept out into the night I looked back onto the stage, which was empty except for the supine barker. Saint Catherine, it seemed, had escaped through the truck.

 

“All rise, please. This court is in session.”

It was two-thirty in the morning. Judge Allen, as he strode into the courtroom for the arraignment of the Paris Revue outfit, looked as angry as I'd ever seen him. Above all, the judge hated to be disturbed when he was at his fishing camp, where he and my father had gone to spend the weekend. Hunkered down in the front row of the gallery above the room, where Charlie had agreed to let us watch the proceedings, Nat and I were still shaking.

My father, who looked as little amused as the judge, sat in his customary spot in the back row nearest the door. (It seemed strange to see him in public in his fishing clothes.) Heaven, Little Piece, and the one-eyed barker stood at the defense table next to my brother as Zack Barrows read Mason's affidavit. They were being charged with lewd and lascivious conduct in a public place, which carried a maximum fine of one hundred dollars and a sentence of up to thirty days. Zack was asking for a fine of fifty dollars apiece for the Misses Fontaine, one hundred dollars for Mr. One-eye Billy Carbonneau, and five days in jail for all three of them.

“Misses Fontaine and Mr. One-eye Billy, how do you plead to these charges?” the judge inquired with ominous irony.

“Innocent, your honor,” said all three.

“Ah,” Judge Allen said, looking back toward my father as though to indicate that he should have expected this, too. “Innocent. Do your clients deny, then, Mr. Kinneson, that they were in that tent last night performing the antics alleged in Sheriff White's affidavit?”

“No, your honor. They were there, all right, along with what looked like about half of the male population of Kingdom County. They don't deny that. What they deny is that they were performing in public. The Paris Revue is a private business, conducted out of the public view, with the full knowledge and blessing of the Kingdom Fair Board of Trustees, I might add. To read from the contract signed on June twentieth, 1952, between the board and Mr. Carbonneau: . . . for the sum of three hundred dollars per night, we hereby grant the Paris Revue Shows, Inc., owned and operated by William Carbonneau, the right to present a private dance exhibition on a leased section of the fairground's midway.'”

“Fine!” roared Zack Barrows, his face as red as a turkey gobbler's. “I shall concede that the contract is in good order. Nevertheless, as the affidavit states, the ‘dancers' of this show were apprehended in the act of performing lewd and lascivious acts that according to Vermont statutes are illegal in any setting, public or private, and are punishable by the fines and incarceration cited in the affidavit.”

“You agree that the Paris Revue Show is a private enterprise?” Charlie said.

“Whatever you say. Public or private. The act itself is illegal.”

“May I see the signed writ of entry authorizing this raid on the agreed-upon private premises?”

“Signed writ of entry?” Zack roared. “What do you mean, ‘signed writ of entry'?”

“Perhaps Judge Allen would prefer to explain,” Charlie said.

When the judge said nothing, Charlie added, “You've agreed, Zack, that the Paris Revue tent was private property. You and I and Sheriff White all know that you can't just barge into someone's private home or business, even if it's a tent, without an entry warrant or search warrant signed by a judge.”

“The judge was off fishing,” Zack shouted. “He wasn't available.”

“It's my understanding,” Charlie said, “that in the absence of a judge, the local justice of the peace has the authority to sign entry warrants. Is that correct, your honor?”

“Yes,” Judge Allen said wearily.

“Well, the justice of the peace wasn't available either,” Zack said. “I looked for him and he wasn't available.”

Judge Allen actually smiled. “This case is dismissed,” he said, and no more than five minutes later he and Dad were on their way back to the lake to fish the early morning rise, and Heaven, Little Piece, and One-eye Billy were on their way back to the fairgrounds and thence to their next engagement.

 

It rained hard all the rest of that day. I took a long nap in the afternoon and spent most of the evening reading and visiting with my mother in the kitchen. Like Charlie before me, I had always been quicker to confide certain thornier kinds of problems to Mom than to Dad, yet I could hardly confess that I'd actually been inside the girlie tent when it was raided. When I told her that Nat and I had ran into Charlie and attended the arraignment, she listened attentively, then said that the fair people were much more to be sympathized with than condemned. To my surprise, she was glad that Charlie had gotten them off the hook.

The driving summer rainstorm continued, and we left the porch light on for my father, who was covering a late meeting in the village. Just before I went up to bed in my loft chamber, Mom said, “I hope the Dog Cart Man's warm and dry tonight, Jimmy.”

I could barely remember the Dog Cart Man, though I had a fairly distinct recollection of his mongrel companions. It had been at least seven years, maybe eight or nine, since he'd come to the Kingdom but voicing concern for his well-being had become a family ritual on stormy nights.

“What's he look like?” I asked. “The Dog Cart Man, I mean.”

“Well, he looks like the Pied Piper, I guess, all spattered with paint of every imaginable color. He doesn't talk at all, of course, and can't hear, either. I suppose that's why he learned how to paint. Painting's his special way of making himself understood.”

My mother was an accomplished amateur watercolorist herself, but when I asked if the Dog Cart Man's murals were as good as her nature scenes and portraits of Charlie and me when we were little kids, she laughed a little self-deprecatory, pleased laugh and said oh, my yes, he was a
real
painter.

“I'll never forget the first time I saw him, Jimmy. It was the summer your dad and I were married, and everything about Kingdom County was fresh and marvelous to me. One morning he just appeared in the dooryard. At first I actually thought he was a hobo. I was going to take him coffee and sandwiches. But your grandfather explained that he was a painter and was getting ready to paint a picture for us.

“For a long time, he stood and stared at that faded old mural of the trout on the barn. Then before you could say Jack Robinson he began to paint, very fast, just slapping those amazingly bright colors up on the side of the barn. It didn't take him an hour from start to finish!

“Of course, I was terribly fascinated. I'd never seen anything remotely like him or his dogs, and I would have given a great deal to tag along with him for a day or two. I'll tell you what, Jimmy. If he comes again, and I'm pretty sure he will, I hope you'll spend some time with him. He's the last of a kind, you know—sort of like Cousin Resolvèd and Cousin Welcome. When he's gone, his like won't be seen again in these parts or anywhere else. And if you get to know all these folks now, someday you'll be able to write wonderful stories about them that won't be like the stories anyone else is writing. So we'll keep our eyes peeled and hope he shows up soon.”

My own concerns on that rainy night in 1952 kept returning to the fair and the tent show and the scared girl on the stage. Something about her rain-colored eyes and the frightened way she'd looked at the audience haunted me. I hoped she was all right and safely away from One-eye and his rough bunch, but other thoughts kept crowding into my mind, too, fantasies of rescuing her from her plight myself and spiriting her off to some sequestered spot to console and . . . I was not sure what.

After being up nearly all night the night before, I should have been exhausted. But for some reason, maybe because of my nap that day, I wasn't. For a long time I lay awake listening to the rain on the metal. roof just outside my coffin window, and hoping it would blow over in time for Charlie's ballgame the following evening in Memphremagog, which he'd promised to take me to see.

When I finally drifted off to sleep, however, I did not dream of Saint Catherine but of the lunatic miller from Nat's comic book. In my nightmare the miller was chasing me and I jumped onto the Dog Cart Man's cart and he whipped up his dogs and off we sped along the River Road. The madman gained on us steadily, and when I turned to look at him, all white and floury, he bore a terrible resemblance to Frenchy LaMott. The dogs hitched to the cart howled like a ravening pack of wolves, and suddenly I was awake and someone was pounding on the kitchen door.

It was pitch dark. The rain had stopped but the river was up and roaring. The knocking continued. Wearing just my pajama bottoms, I trotted down the loft stairs into the kitchen and opened the door.

Standing on the top step of the porch, drenched from head to toe, was Saint Catherine from the Paris Revue girlie show.

 

“This is the home of Monsieur Kinneson?” she said in a strong French Canadian accent.

“Yes,” I said, barely able to believe that she was standing at our kitchen door.

“I am Claire. Claire LaRiviere?”

At first I thought she might not be sure of her own name. Then from the way she was looking at me it dawned on me that she expected me to know why she was there.

Unfortunately, I did not.

“Well,” I said, “come in. Come in out of the wet, Claire.”

Claire LaRiviere came inside and went immediately to the stove while I grabbed some kindling out of the woodbox and began to build the fire back up. As soon as it caught, I perched on the woodbox lid and stared at our strange guest with open curiosity.

She looked a little older than she had looked at the fair. She had long hair, too wet to tell what color. Her rain-colored eyes had huge craters beneath them. A coffee-colored stain shaped uncannily like the state of Maine ran over the right shoulder and down the front of her colorful dress, which was badly tom and splashed with bluish mud all along the fringe, so that I knew she had been walking the back roads of Kingdom County. Where the dress was tom, material had been gathered into huge safety-pins. Despite the mud I could see that it was a very elegant, old-fashioned dress with lacework on the front and sleeves and hem. On her feet she wore sneakers that might once have been white. Clutched to her chest she held a black handbag as large as my camping knapsack. Her face was small and oval-shaped, her chattering teeth were small, and although she was taller than me by inches, she was slender nearly to the point of emaciation. Only her eyes were large, pretematurally so, and they looked terrifically tired and somewhat confused yet oddly determined as she examined her surroundings with a peculiar slow, exhausted intensity.

“Here at last,” she said.

“Would you like some coffee?”

She shook her head emphatically, shaking more water into the puddle forming around her sneakers. “No coffee, thank you. Coffee is make me shake. You have tea?”

I nodded. I filled the tea kettle and set it on the stove just as my father padded into the kitchen in his slippers and bathrobe.

“Can't you be a little quiet—” He never finished the sentence. “Mister Baby Johnson! Who in thunder is this, James?”

“It's Claire LaRiviere,” I said, as though I'd known her for years.

“This is my father,” I said to Claire. “Mr. Kinneson.”

A puzzled frown appeared on the girl's oval face. “He is not Monsieur Kinneson,” she said.

My father looked at me. “Well, if I'm not, then I've been strangely mistaken for the past half century or so. The question is, James, who is this young woman and where is she from?”

The girl continued to frown at my father. “You resemble the photo of Monsieur Kinneson perhaps a little. But most certainly you are not Monsieur Kinneson.”

To judge from the expression on his face, my father did not seem pleased to be informed by a perfect stranger standing in his kitchen in the middle of the night that he was not who he had thought he was.

“Do you know this girl, James?”

“Well, not really,” I said, unwilling to admit where I had seen her before.

“I will show you the photo,” Claire LaRiviere said.

She set the huge black handbag on the table. Very deliberately, she began to remove the contents. “It will be right here, of course.”

One by one the drenched girl took out several Hershey wrappers, an empty Good & Plenty box, a crumpled box of Dots, a broad pink comb with several missing teeth, three or four colored ticket stubs, and a timetable like the one on the counter at the railroad station in the Common—the detritus, I suddenly realized, of some kind of journey.

In the meantime, my father pulled the belt of his bathrobe tighter around his waist; no doubt he was ill at ease to be caught out of his suitcoat and tie, even in his own kitchen at one fifteen in the morning.

“Who is the little boy who greets me at the door?” Claire asked him out of the blue, without turning to look at me on the woodbox.

“That's my son James.”

“And Monsieur Kinneson? Where is he?”

Now my father, the two-fisted newspaperman who with good reason prided himself on getting a line on the shiftiest politician within five minutes of meeting him; who did not hesitate to tender detailed and ungentle advice in the form of open letters in the
Monitor
to governors, senators, managers of professional baseball teams, and even presidents; whose letters and columns were frequently reprinted by papers as far away from Kingdom County as Idaho and Louisiana; who had already served once and would twice serve again as president of the American Association of Independent Weekly Newspapers—my father, the reporter's reporter and editor's editor, was totally at a loss when it came to dealing with almost any crisis on the home front that could not be remedied by fixing someone a cup of java.