A Stranger in the Kingdom (30 page)

“Well, Reverend, this Smithfield was the bane of runaway slaves all over the Deep South. Slave owners who wanted to make an example of inveterate runaways would hire Smithfield to track them down. But he didn't just find slaves and return them. He hunted them like animals and murdered them, as examples. His motto was that for the right price he'd harry a runaway back to Africa and exterminate him there. He was so feared by Negroes and so detested by Underground Railroad organizers that they'd conferred the sobriquet ‘Satan' upon him, which he was said to be proud of. And it was well deserved. Smithfield was reported to have murdered more than one hundred fugitive Negroes in cities as distant as Boston and Montreal. The Underground had put a price on his head, but he had his own network of paid spies and informers and nobody could catch him.

“Now my grandfather Charlie—Mad Charlie—was a close friend and later a son-in-law of the abolishionist John Brown. At the time, Brown lived just a hundred miles or so from here, over in upstate New York's Adirondack Mountains. Together they set up the eastem-Ver-mont-to-Montreal leg of the Underground. My cousins' present-day house on the ridge above our place was the final stopover on that route before Canada. Hundreds of fugitive slaves spent a day or two ip that cellar before crossing the border. Anyway, Brown and my grandfather knew all about Satan Smithfield. They had put a price on his head—quietly, of course—but it seems that this maniac was a master of disguises and accents, and no one knew exactly what he looked like in his own incarnation. So Mad Charlie set a trap to kill the slave killer. And he used young Pliny Templeton as bait.

“First, Charlie sent word to Pliny urging him to run away again. This was in 1860, the year after John Brown was hanged for his part in the raid on Harper's Ferry, which my grandfather was in on too, though he was lucky enough to get away.

“Anyway, Pliny split the coop. True to his word, the plantation owner contacted Smithfield and the hunt was on. Pliny had been told to avoid most of the traditional Underground stations, and leave only enough clues for Smithfield to suspect that he was headed here, to Kingdom County. In fact, my grandfather had arranged for Pliny to take the eastern route up Lake Champlain toward Brown's old homestead in the mountains of northern New York, where the plan was for Pliny to lie low until my grandfather came for him.”

As he continued his story, my father walked slowly from Pliny's monument toward the paupers' section under the cedars.

“I'm going to jump ahead, now,” Dad said. “Early one morning in the fall of 1860, while Pliny was still working his way north, a dour-looking Scotsman named Reverend Cluney MacDougal got off a northbound train in Kingdom Common and took a room at the hotel. Within a day or two word had spread that MacDougal was a missionary recently back from the Belgian Congo, with a magic lantern show depicting his work and travels. Of course there was talk, speculation that he might somehow be allied with my grandfather, who had a wide and curious assortment of acquaintances. But if he knew Mad Charlie, who at the time was across the border in Canada on special business related to Smithfield, MacDougal didn't let on In the meantime, the good reverend was invited to display his magic lantern pictures in church the following Sunday afternoon, which he did, to a good-sized and enthusiastic crowd.

“Midway through the show, there was a terrific clatter outside. The front door burst open and my grandfather Charlie charged inside on his Morgan mare and rode straight down the central aisle to the pulpit.

“‘Be you Cluney MacDougal?' he roared out to the missionary without dismounting or identifying himself.

“‘Aye,' said the man. ‘No other.'

“And to the utter astonishment and horror of the assembled congregation, MacDougal produced a gun from under his clergyman's frock coat. But even as he was cocking it, my grandfather pulled out the United States Army government-issue horse pistol he'd confiscated in the raid on Harper's Ferry the previous year and shot the man pointblank in the heart. Then before anyone could stop him, he seized the dead man, threw him across his horse, and galloped out of the church and across the common to the courthouse, where the twelve Negro witnesses he'd brought into the Kingdom the night before from Canada and hidden in the cellar of the house in the gore were waiting in the jury box.

“No doubt the twelve Negroes were as terrified as the rest of the villagers, but my grandfather propped MacDougal's corpse at the defense table and asked each witness in turn to identify it—which they promptly all did. Satan Smithfield, the man who had slaughtered their relatives and fellow fugitives in cold blood for the past twenty years, was finally brought to justice.

“The whole proceeding took less than ten minutes. As soon as it was over my grandfather hauled the body unceremoniously back downstairs and over to the cemetery, where he buried it himself—right here.”

Dad pointed to a small worn wooden marker at our feet. There was just enough light left to read the epitaph Mad Charlie had carved on it:

 

Here lies Satan Smithfield

For whom no bell will knell.

His cursed remains beneath your feet

His soul in deepest Hell.

 

“My Lord!” Reverend Andrews exclaimed. “This Reverend MacDougal was actually Smithfield?”

“You bet he was,” Dad said. “Pliny Templeton arrived here a week later. With my grandfathers help he attended Middlebury College, then returned to the Common and built the Academy and stayed on and taught here for forty years.”

“I'm beginning to understand why your grandfather was called Mad Charlie,” Reverend Andrews said. “But at least Pliny's story had a happy ending.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. At the end, there was a schism between Pliny and my grandfather. A schism that has a direct bearing on some of the trouble in the church that's lingered on to this day.”

“Schism is a strong word, Charles. What was Pliny's part in this?”

“Well, from the days of Charles I, our place of worship was a Reformed Presbyterian Church. After Pliny built the Academy, the school was operated under the church's auspices as a private Presbyterian institution, with the same board of trustees as the church itself. As you know, in those days Reformed Presbyterians disavowed all worldly authority, including that of the United States government. But as the decades went by and Pliny continued to teach in the school, and to write and lecture, he drifted away from strict RP dogma. He still considered himself a Presbyterian. But he made it known that he saw no harm in taking an oath to serve in the military or testify in court or hold public office. He served several terms in the Vermont State Legislature himself, and with distinction. As he put it, he saw no contradiction between being a good Presbyterian and being a good citizen. Naturally, he didn't condone drinking or gambling, but he eventually went so far as to propose introducing dancing lessons and a piano at the Academy, to which my grandfather and the other RPs strenuously objected.

“Finally, in 1900, when Pliny and my grandfather were both old men, Pliny declared himself a United Presbyterian and tried to disaffiliate the Academy from the church, partly in order to get that piano into his school. A number of the trustees supported him. An equal number didn't. They met to vote in closed session and Pliny cast the decisive ballot to break from the church. Afterwards, my grandfather came over to the parsonage and there was a terrible row between the two old friends. The upshot of it was that poor Pliny Templeton shot himself that very evening, after which my grandfather went totally insane and spent the last two years of his life in the state lunatic asylum at Waterbury.”

“Good heavens!” Reverend Andrews said. “I had no idea. What about his family? Pliny's, I mean. Whatever became of them?”

“He never had one, or a wife either. My grandfather, though, was like a brother to him. Which, I suppose, explains his despair when the old man repudiated him at the end.”

Reverend Andrews shook his head. He got out one of his patented Luckies, lit it, and looked off across the village—as peaceful-looking in the July twilight as a Currier and Ives lithograph. He smoked quietly for a moment. “So your grandfather just cut himself off completely from his lifelong friend, whom he'd brought up out of slavery and had formally educated and established as headmaster? Just like that? Over a piano? A minor point of doctrine?”

“Nobody thought it was a minor point of doctrine at the time, Walter. Those were life-and-death issues, the dancing and the piano, with the integrity of Reformed Presbyterianism and the secession of the Academy at stake. The fact is that to this day a number of older mossbacks in the church, beginning with your esteemed sexton and my linotype operator, Elijah Kinneson, still consider themselves to be Reformed Presbyterians.”

Reverend Andrews took a long drag on his cigarette, and exhaled the smoke slowly. “So what do you think we need to bring everybody together, Charles?”

“A miracle,” my father said grimly. “You've got your work cut out for you, Reverend. Good luck with the Old Home Day. It's a start, at least.”

On the way back to the parsonage through the twilit cemetery, Reverend Andrews paused at the Kinneson family plot. He looked around at the dim outlines of the gravestones: Charles Is, Charles' son James, and my great-grandfather Charlie's flanked by the smaller stones of my great-grandmother, John Brown's daughter, and my great-step-grandmother.

“Blood ties!” Reverend Andrews said “Who's related to whom. That's such an interesting part of the history of small towns. Just one more question, Charles. How on earth are those cousins of yours, Elijah, Resolvèd, and Welcome, related to the rest of your clan?”

My father walked over to Mad Charlie's plot and touched the stone of my great-stepgrandmother. “When he was well on into his seventies, my grandfather married a gypsy girl after his first wife died. This is her stone. Elijah, Resolvèd, and Welcome were her sons. That's yet another story, Reverend. Read the chapter in Pliny's
History
called ‘Strangers in the Kingdom.' It's all there—and Pliny himself does a much better job with that tale than I could.”

 

From Pliny Templeton's
Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County
, the chapter “Strangers in the Kingdom”:

 

“The gypsies are coming! The gypsies are coming!”

Often and often over the years have I heard this exclamation, halfthrilled, half-frightened, echoing across white picket fences from dooryard to dooryard, over the elm-strewn common and even up and down the hallways and through the classrooms of my academy. No matter then the importance of the task at hand or the lesson under consideration! The sternest headmaster could hardly in good conscience deny young scholars the pleasure of crowding to the windows to witness the gypsies' wild tintinnabulation as they swirled into the town like so many bright autumn leaves, beating on pots and pans and hawking mirrors and glass jewelry, their under-fed and half-tamed nags tied to gaily painted carts, on their way to their traditional tenting ground in Charles Kinneson's meadow on Kingdom gool. There they pitched three tents, one green, one blue, one red, and the women conducted a lively week-long bartering-fair (besides certain racier nighttime entertainments connected with the Romany tribe since time immemorial), while on high in the quarry in Kingdom Gore the men cut out and carved fine pink “Scotch” granite tombstones for Kingdom residents who had died over the past twelve months.

Now it came to pass not many years ago, on an unusually warm evening for September in the Kingdom, in high fall foliage time when the hills were solid banks of reds and oranges and yellows, the gypsies and certain men from the village convened on the east end of the gool by the new iron bridge. There the head gypsy, a vigorous gray-headed man in his late middle years, had by prearrangement with the townsmen agreed to race one of his wild plugs against the pride of Kingdom horseflesh: a full-blooded Morgan stallion named Capering Cy, owned by Captain Jehoshophat Allen. After viewing Capering Cy, the gypsy chieftain gave a harsh laugh and told his youngest daughter, Mari, to fetch one of the gypsy nags, any one she could catch.

This Mari was a limber-limbed raven-haired smoky-eyed girl in her mid-teens, manifestly swollen in the belly, though I have it on sound authority that her premature rotundity did not prevent her from discharging with particular gusto her dancing in the gypsy tents (dancing of neither the ballroom or ballet variety). In fact, some venerable and hoary members of the church congregation who had caught wind of this entertainment had made up a party and visited my friend Charles Kinneson just the previous evening in order to object to his allowing the dancing on his property, but my friend refused to see them, having been afflicted with depressed spirits since the death that past winter of his wife, the former Belinda Brown, daughter of the Abolitionist John Brown.

Yet when Charles learned from a gypsy lad whom the wench Mari had sent up to his house to borrow a carrot and some alum, that a race was to be held, he bestirred himself and went onto the porch to watch. No sooner had he stepped out, he informed me later, than he saw the gypsy girl catch a prancing young black mare and lead her into a willow brake by the river, from which she emerged some minutes later with a broken-winded sway-backed swag-bellied mud-smeared hobbling ancient nag, all bedecked with wild cucumber vine and woodbine and docks and vetch, which the girl half-led and half-hauled down the gool to the starting point for the race. By now dusk was fast approaching, and a hundred or more townspeople had gathered by the bridge to watch and to lay bets on the outcome.

“Gentlemen, I would na cast wager wi' this gypsy mon,” cried my friend to the assemblage. “The wages of all wagers is trouble.” And indeed, Charles knew for whom, since even as the townsfolk were laughing and jeering at the spavined old nag hobbling up the gool with rheumy eyes and a drooling frothing mouth, he had seen the wench force the last of the carrot laced with alum between its long teeth.