A Stranger in the Kingdom (31 page)

And the gray-headed gypsy bet on his animal with any and all, while my friend intoned darkly, “He who casts wager casts his lot wi' the old homed de'il.” But the multitude heeded not this warning, and one after another bet on Capering Cy.

The horses were placed side by side facing west into the crimson afterglow above the mountains. They would run in an elliptical circuit, down the gool and across the covered bridge and back through the village to the starting point. Captain Allen's young nephew Forrest, a boy of considerable mettle, mounted Capering Cy, and the chieftain turned to the girl Mari with the swollen round belly and said something to her in the strange guttural gypsy tongue and instantly she leapt upon the nag's back. Some of the people protested for fear she should fall from the horse while great with child; only my friend Charles Kinneson observed that no sooner did she mount the crippled nag than it pricked up its ears and stood straighter, and stamped its lame foot twice.

“On your mark!” came the cry. “Get set Race!” At which the girl leaned forward slightly and the nag, all bestrewn with wild cucumbers and the vines of the wild bluegrape, sprang from a dead standstill a good six feet through the air. She landed in a thundering gallop with her mane and burred tail streaming She passed Charles Kinneson's place a full five lengths ahead of the celebrated Cy and increased the lead to ten lengths by the time she reached the covered bridge. In the village the people who had remained, the white-headed old people of the church and some of the young women of the church, heard the girl shouting in the gypsy tongue over the thundering hoofs and then the horse appeared in a swirl of dust, dusky-colored in the lowering dusk, with the girl-woman Mari stretched out on its back all low in her wide-belled gypsy trousers and wide-sleeved embroidered gypsy blouse, shouting encouragement in the language only the horse understood and urging it forward with a whisking motion with the flat of her hand. “Like someone sharpening a scythe with a whetstone,” one of the venerable old churchmen said. But another ancient, who had not been to church for years, said afterwards that he heard two voices crying in the outlandish tongue, and those few who believed him said the second voice was the voice of a demon inside the horse itself, which even they knew was foolishness, until the old reprobate said, no, it was the voice of the babe in the womb of the gypsy girl, which likewise everyone knew was foolishness, though a small boy also insisted that he heard the high shrill muffled voice of a second person exhorting the horse as it raced back across the new bridge where the race had begun and over the finish line well before Capering Cy was even within earshot.

The astonished multitude scattered fast. But the gypsy woman wheeled the horse about in the dusk and came charging back at them again, reining hard into the meadow and riding full-tilt into the pool below the bridge and across the river, where the horse seemed to undergo an Ovidian metamorphosis, emerging onto the far bank and back over the bridge again as an entirely different horse, a beautiful strong black pacing mare. Again the woman shouted, this time a great lusty triumphant shout in the Romany tongue, and this time there was no doubt at all that with her shouted a shrill triumphant babe's voice in the same tongue, so although the people knew very well that this must be some gypsy trick of ventriloquism, many of them were horrified and appalled. And the jet-black horse, as black as the girl Mari's hair, pranced high and proud in its victory, and although the people who had bet on Capering Cy, who was just now coming into sight in the twilight, were in an uproar and furious, they had no choice but to acknowledge they had lost their wagers.

Whose misbegotten inspiration the tarring-and-feathering party was has never been entirely clear, though a man named Zeke Stevens, a dealer in cattle and horses himself who had bet and lost heavily on Capering Cy, was said to be in the vanguard of the mob that marched on the gypsy encampment later that night. My friend Charles Kinneson heard the trampling of their feet on the bridge at about half-past-twelve. He was not surprised. He was sitting in his kitchen watching the low fires of the gypsies flicker in the meadow across the gool, with the great U.S. Army horse pistol across his lap that he had brought back from Harper's Ferry and used to shoot the slave-killer Satan Smithfield in the church pulpit, and he knew even before he went into his dooryard and saw the pine-knot torches and dark-lanterns and the glimmer of white hoods, that it was a mob. He met them partway down the gool between the gypsy camp and the bridge.

He did not ask them what they wanted, but shrewdly inquired who was in charge. To which no one replied a word, though the mob was murmuring one to another behind their hoods.

“I asked, who is in charge here?” Charles Kinneson repeated. Again there was no reply.

“Aye,” he said. “I thought as much. Home, dogs, to kennel! I'll send a lead ball through the heart of the first coward amongst you who takes another step this way.”

“Don't be interfering, Charlie Kinneson,” said a voice resembling that of the estimable horsetrader Stevens. “This isn't nothing to do with you.”

BANG! A ball from the purloined Army pistol knocked out Stevens' dark-lantern. BANG! A second ball whistled a foot above the rabble's heads. BANG! A third ball struck the road scant inches from Stevens' boots. The mob gave back fast, turned, and rushed back over the bridge toward the village.

And lo! the next morning in the thin early light before the sunrise, when Charles Kinneson went to the barn with his lantern to discharge his morning chores, the gypsies were gone, leaving only the spent embers of their campfires and three circles of trampled brown grass where their three tents had been pitched. But in the horse stable—where as payment for allowing them to camp in his meadow and supplying them free of charge with eggs and milk and vegetables the gypsies were wont to leave their friend perhaps a horse, or peradventure a spotted cow, and once an endless maze carved from wood which the gypsy chieftain had begun carving years ago and lugged from place to place until abruptly, gypsy-fashion, he had lost interest in it after completing several hundred links—in that stable were two granite monuments. One bore the name of Charles's deceased wife: “Belinda Brown Kinneson, Daughter of the Abolitionist John Brown. Born Mineville, New York, January 4, 1843, Died Kingdom County, Vermont, February 23, 1897.” And upon the other was written. “Replacement Mari Kinneson, Born Bucharest, Romania, November 8, 1886,” with the rest blank.

My friend held the lantern high, and once again read the words on each stone, the one he had bespoken and the other he had not, when in the dimness behind him he heard the same shrill harsh cry that seemed to come from the gypsy woman's belly the evening before, only this time there were no words, Romany or otherwise, only the sharp insistent and unmistakably hungry outcry of a newly born infant. He turned and saw in the lantern light the smoky-eyed gypsy girl, Replacement Mari, reclined on the stable straw like that other Mary from long ago, and holding up to him proudly and even a little defiantly a newborn man-child.

“Aye,” Charles Kinneson said in the determined manner I have come to know so well over the years. “I see.” And he took the babe in his hands and held it aloft and said, “We name this child Elijah, for it has prophesied from the womb, and given utterance to its pure thoughts.” And returning the man-child back to the arms of its mother, he said, pointing at it, “Elijah!”

“Elijah,” she said in her harsh guttural accent. “Elijah.”

And my friend said to the woman, Replacement, “Aye. Elijah.”

And he led her into his house and wed her that very afternoon. And to them the following year was born a second son, Resolvèd, and the year after that a third, Welcome. So ends my historical account of Charles Kinneson and the gypsies.”

More than half a century later, under a clear morning sky, my mother and I walked down the gool by the meadow where the gypsies had set up their tents and my great-stepgrandmother, Replacement Mari, had won the race the night before she gave birth to Elijah; past the faded leaping brook trout on our dilapidated barn; and past the lane leading up to my cousins' place, until we came to the covered bridge. In the bright July sunshine, accompanied by my mother, I wondered how I could ever have been afraid of the place. The trestle downriver where Nat and Frenchy had fought looked just as innocuous—an ordinary wooden railroad trestle like any other.

We crossed the bridge, pausing as usual to read the faded patent medicine ads inscribed on the inside timbers, and followed the River Road to the dooryard of Hook LaMott's slaughterhouse.

Nobody seemed to be home. The house, which was surrounded by Canadian bull thistles as high as Mom's hollyhocks and was still banked with rotting hay bales from the previous winter, had an unoccupied air. So did the long adjacent slaughtering shed and the concrete freezer locker. Even the towering mountain of cow skulls and rotting hides out of which the stygian brook that polluted the river just above the railroad trestle seeped like pus out of a festering wound looked oddly deserted by the purple-headed cowbirds and scrawny cats that usually prowled its perimeter, though it was buzzing with a veritable Egyptian pestilence of bluebottle flies.

We picked our way through the debris to the foot of the wooden ramp slanting up to the shed and peered inside. In spots the floor planks showed through the sawdust, and I could see bloodstains on them. Along one wall ran a conveyer track with hooks hanging down at intervals of several feet. Over the past winter Athena Allen had read
A Tale of Two Cities to
my eighth-grade grammar class, and the slaughtering shed and massive heap of offal outside it reminded me of Dickens' grislier descriptions of Robespierre's Reign of Terror.

“You looking for somebody, you?”

Frenchy LaMott appeared in the doorway. He had a large dirty bandage around his left thumb and a big filthy black toe was sticking out of a hole in one of his engineer boots. He was wielding a lethal-looking stick with a rusty spike jutting out of the end. Strapped to his waist was a .22 revolver.

How did my finely tuned mother and I happen to be standing that morning in the place of all places in the Kingdom that I most dreaded? After Dad and I had gotten home from the minister's the evening before, my folks had spent a long time discussing Julia Hefner's meddling visit to Reverend Andrews. Mom had confirmed our suspicion that in fact Hefty Hefner was operating strictly on her own and had not been commissioned by the Ladies Auxiliary to deliver a message to the minister. But both my parents agreed that he needed a part-time housekeeper as soon as possible. The reverend had declined Claire's offer to become his permanent housekeeper because he felt there were decisions she had to make about her life. He feared that employment would give her the opportunity to postpone these and I'm sure he was right. But that left him with the troublesome Hefty.

“He certainly doesn't want that old moose snooping around over there and giving him the eye,” Dad said. “And he doesn't need a livein housekeeper. Just somebody to come by two or three times a week and do the wash, throw together a few casseroles, swamp out the kitchen. I told him you'd probably know of somebody, Ruth.”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Mom said. “Somebody who's efficient and completely trustworthy and could certainly use the extra income.”

“Who's that?”

“Ida LaMott. Jimmy and I can drop by and see her in the morning.”

“Come on, Mom. Frenchy'll just beat me up. You know what he tried to do to Nat out at the trestle.”

“We'll go about eight-thirty,” my mother said. “As for Frenchy, it's really time for you to see him in his own element, Jimmy. Until you've stood in somebody else's shoes, you can't really judge that person fairly.”

“Frenchy doesn't even own a pair of shoes. He wears engineer boots with holes in them. Besides, I'm not judging him. I just don't want to get pounded up.”

“You won't, I promise. Eight-thirty tomorrow, son. We'll make it a nice little outing.”

How my mother could conceive of a visit to the slaughterhouse as a nice little outing was beyond me. To me, Hook LaMott's gory precincts were horrible and repulsive, partly because of their connection with death, partly because of my fear of Frenchy.

But that day at the LaMotts' I learned something important about my mother, which I had not suspected before. I learned that she possessed not only remarkable resilience and endurance but real physical courage as well.

“Hello, Frenchy,” Mom said as he came down the ramp toward us. “Is your mother home?”

“Up the house,” Frenchy said sullenly, pointing with his stick. “Up there with little dummies making headcheese. Ought to grind dummies right up in Christly grinder along with pig brain. Wouldn't be no great loss.”

I laughed, and Frenchy, inspired by the felicitous thought of grinding up his two half-brothers for headcheese, swaggered down off the blood-encrusted ramp to escort us to the house.

“That's all right, Frenchy, I'll find my way. Jimmy can stay here and help you with your chores.”

“Don't need no help, missus,” Frenchy said, but Mom was already on her way up to the house, and he and I were left standing toe to toe, like Tom Sawyer and the new boy in town, with me feeling very much in the role of the new boy.

So of course I did the stupidest thing possible. “Well, Claude, what kind of work do you do here, anyway?”

“What that you called me?”

“Claude,” I said innocently. “Isn't that your name?”

“Be careful, you,” Frenchy said angrily. “You know my name. You friend ain't here to defend you now, Kinneson. You big brother ain't here, neither. I make you into sausage, you call me that frigging school name again.”

Frenchy underscored this threat by expectorating a solid amber jet of tobacco juice onto the ground by my sneaker, where it glistened and quivered momentarily like something that had crawled out of the offal heap.