A Stranger in the Kingdom (34 page)

“To postpone the celebration?” Mom said, disappointed.

“Hell no, Ruth. To spread the word that it's on, rain or shine!”

Soon after the first gray light illuminated the dripping red-and-gray slate roofs of the courthouse and Academy, vehicles began nosing in against the long east and west sides of the village common, their windshield wipers slapping ineffectually in the downpour. A dozen or so town boys were already loitering on the courthouse portico, though the first major event of the celebration, the Grand Cavalcade and Pageant of historical floats, would not start until one o'clock.

“I thought you had connections in high places, reverend,” Julia Hefner said.

“I do,” he said with a grin at me. “It isn't snowing, is it?”

The rain showed no signs at all of letting up, but around nine o'clock my mother dragooned me into lugging umpteen cardboard boxes of secondhand clothes from the church basement, where they had been stored, over to the rummage sale tables on the green. There, under a jury-rigged canvas awning, Mom was immediately caught between two factions of the rummage committee, which my father, in the following week's issue of the
Monitor
, facetiously dubbed “the savers and the chuckers.” The chuckers were all for throwing out stained and torn apparel, worn-out shoes, mismatched mittens, and clothes so laughably out of fashion that no one would ever wear them, much less buy them. These chuckers were disgusted by the frugality of the savers, who in turn were horrified by the prodigality of the chuckers. As Dad pointed out in his write-up, the chuckers and savers had formed ranks along more or less denominational lines, with the Presbyterians, led by Julia Hefner, salvaging what Mrs. Ben Currier and the Congregationalists had relegated to the throwaway boxes.

By ten, when I trudged across the green in the drilling rain with the last box of used babies' clothing, double-breasted jackets, striped suspenders, and ridiculously wide ties, there had already been a blowup. All the chuckers and most of the savers had stalked off in anger, leaving Hefty Hefner and my mother to work the tables alone.

“I don't want you squirreling away prize items for yourself, now, Ruth,” I overheard Julia tell my mother. “On the other hand, we couldn't be blamed for setting aside any especially choice little items we come across. You know as well as I do that the ones that really need these things for their families won't buy here anyway because they're on the town and so live better than you and I do—Why
won't
that dawdling boy of yours step on it! I could have run those boxes over here in half the time he's taken.”

I felt like telling old H.H. to get her boyfriend Zack Barrows to do it if she wasn't satisfied (for according to local scuttlebutt she and Zack had been keeping company at least as long as Fred Hefner had been gone). But my mother tipped me a wink and mouthed the word “story,” meaning someday I'd be able to put Julia in one, and flicked her fingers slightly to signal me to get away from the aborted clothing bazaar while the getting was good.

For the next hour or so I wandered around the common, marveling at the huge crowd that continued to pour into town despite the rain. Men in yellow volunteer fire department raincoats and high black hip boots rushed here and there spreading awnings over food and game booths. Farmers in barn boots and slickers stood quietly in groups of twos and threes, smoking under the dripping elms. Elderly ladies with umbrellas tottered along the edge of the common, and Reverend Andrews, in a long blue Royal Canadian Air Force raincoat, seemed to be everywhere.

“It's us against the weather, folks,” the minister kept saying, clapping people on the back and encouraging everyone to have a good time. And because he kept his spirits high, everyone else's seemed high as well.

Everyone who lived or ever had lived in the Kingdom seemed to be convening on the common that day. By noon cars and trucks were lined all the way up Anderson Hill, and out past the church to U.S. Route 5, and along both sides of the county road east of the village. At Reverend Andrews' request, the Academy and courthouse had been opened up so that people could get in out of the rain; but it was a warm rain and no one wanted to stay inside for long. All over the village there was an air of small kids playing in the rain, a little defiant and silly, laughing, having a good time in an unexpected way, the good time coming from inside themselves and from the spirit of togetherness that Reverend Andrews had inspired in everyone.

I helped Seth McCormick set up his pony-ride ring on the north end of the common, near the statue of Ethan Allen taking Fort Ti. Then for the rest of the morning, as the crowd continued to swell, I filled in at various food and game booths. (Nathan showed up briefly about noon to help Welcome Kinneson in the barbecue pit.) Two booths down from the baseball throw, where I was working at the time, Athena Allen's kissing booth was doing a booming business. Athena was wearing a green blouse and a red skirt and had done her hair in gypsy ringlets and hung a great gold hoop from her right ear. Although she was sopping wet, every male in the Kingdom from sixteen to eighty seemed to want to give her a kiss—though I noticed that when Julia Hefner spelled Athena around noon so she could help her father the judge set up tables on the hotel porch for the barbecue, business at the Bower of Romance fell off considerably.

The cavalcade started promptly at one, despite an even fiercer spate of rain just before it, which Reverend Andrews said was doubtlessly the clearing shower. The minister narrated the procession from the bandstand. There were floats representing my great-great-great-grandfather's trip up across the White Mountains with the Revere church bell, my great-great-grandfather James' ill-conceived attacks on Canada with the Irish Fenians in 1856 and 1860, and my great-grandfather Mad Charlie's secret meetings with John Brown. There were floats with elaborate tableaux depicting the history of agriculture and maple sugaring in Kingdom County and floats on fishing and hunting in the Kingdom, not to mention the Sunday School float, which I had just barely been able to talk my way out of participating in on the basis of being a teenager now, in which Caster Oil Quinn, dressed in black clerical robes, enacted the part of Headmaster Pliny Templeton teaching a class of students at the Academy with a McCuffey's Reader in one hand and a Civil War sword in the other.

“In those days,” Reverend Andrews quipped, “they learned or else.”

There were the obligatory dozen or so antique cars brought out for every parade in Kingdom County that I can ever remember, the village's two ancient hook-and-ladders with hand pumpers, earnest 4-H and Grange floats, and floats with contradancers and square dancers skidding around through their intricate maneuvers like drunks at a barn dance.

“First place was awarded to a motorized pantomime entitled The Whiskey Runners,'” my father wrote in that week's
Monitor
, “in which High Sheriff Mason White, dressed in official regalia and piloting his redoubtable patrol hearse, chased a '29 Ford driven by Auctioneer Bumper Stevens twice around the common. In keeping with a long-established local tradition, no arrests were made.”

And then, miraculously, as Reverend Andrews was handing out the prizes, long after almost everyone had given up hope, a dome of blue sky opened up over the bandstand and a minute later the sun came out, and everyone cheered, though whether for the break in the weather or just from their collective good spirits, I couldn't say. It reminded me of Reverend Andrews' first Sunday in church, Easter Sunday, when the entire congregation had stood up and applauded him.

As the clouds continued to sail away and the blue expanded, a dozen of us boys made a bucket brigade on the baseball field and with pails and brooms and snow shovels and three truckloads of sawdust, we began to get the infield in playing shape for the big game between Charlie's Outlaws and Memphremagog, which was slated to start at four o'clock.

 

During the rain an ineffable goodwill had spread over the crowd. People ate even more, laughed even more, were even more convivial than they would have been on a sunny day, shaking hands with strangers they turned out to have gone to school with, renewing old acquaintances with neglected friends. And the storm was a great equalizer. The class differences so insidiously entrenched in any small town seemed to melt away with the rain. Bobby Hefner was seen hobnobbing with Frenchy LaMott George Quinn and Bumper Stevens teamed up in the horseshoe championship doubles match against Zack Barrows and my father. And when the sun came out the goodwill metamorphosed into a festive euphoria unlike any I have ever experienced since, with the big ballgame still to come.

Kingdom Common's baseball diamond was probably the best in northern Vermont. The infield, which drained faster after a rain than any other in the area, was laid out at the south end of the green, with the left field foul post located directly across the street from the
Monitor.
Once I had seen Charlie wallop a home run through the plate-glass window of Quinn's Drugstore, a good four hundred and fifty feet from home plate. But it was a rare event for even the strongest local hitters to put a ball in the street, much less up against the brick block.

By three-thirty the newly painted green bleachers along the first and third base lines were packed. Hundreds of additional spectators stood behind the backstop and along both outfield foul lines, and more fans were strung all the way around the fenced-off outfield. I had been accorded the honor of serving as water boy for the Outlaws. My job was to keep two sap buckets appropriated from my mother's sugaring operation full of cold water from the outside faucet on the church and, more importantly, to replenish as often as necessary a third pail just behind the Outlaws' bench from a mammoth keg of beer in the back of Charlie's woody.

It had turned into a grand afternoon for baseball, with a good fresh breeze to dry the grass and base paths after the long rain. As usual in Kingdom County fair weather was coming in from the northwest, but twice during the Outlaws' warm-ups Charlie fungoed towering fly balls directly into the teeth of the wind and clean over the street onto the sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block. Each time the huge crowd responded with an ovation.

“Play ball!” barked my father, who was umpiring behind the plate, and the big grudge game, the highlight of the celebration and the highlight of my summer to date, was underway.

I knew by the end of the first inning that it was going to be a contest. Our pitcher, Big Harlan Kittredge, was in top form. Over the first three innings, four or five Memphremagog batters managed to topple weak grounders that Royce and Stub scooped up and tossed over to Pine Benson. But nobody hit a ball out of the infield.

The Outlaws couldn't seem to do much better at the plate themselves. Memphremagog had one of the best pitchers I'd ever seen, a fireballing young Frenchman with long stringy black hair who Charlie said was a ringer brought in from the Canadian Semi-pro League to beat us in front of our home crowd. The ringer didn't seem to have much of a curve, but he threw so hard that the ball kept popping out of their catcher's glove and dribbling into the dirt in the batter's box. Even Charlie couldn't seem to connect. Except for one tremendous foul fly ball that bounced off the cab of Royce's pickup truck parked just south of the
Monitor
, he didn't get his bat on the ball once in his first two trips to the plate.

After my brother's second strikeout my father took off his face mask and shook his head. “Why does he try to pull everything, James? Of course he's going to strike out if he does that against a speedball pitcher.”

“That's Charlie for you, Dad. Just wait until he gets hold of one. Then you'll see something. Ted Williams doesn't go with the pitches, either.”

“Ted doesn't need to go with the pitches.”

The game was still scoreless after six innings. The huge throng of spectators had grown quieter and quieter, and by midway through the seventh inning they were so absorbed in the pitching duel between Harlan and the Canadian ringer that only a smattering of people stood up to stretch, a ritual that Kingdom Common fans scrupulously prided themselves on observing.

In the top of the ninth, the Memphremagog crowd came to life, stomping and cheering like madmen. But Big Harlan, who was throwing as well as I'd ever seen him, struck out the Loggers' lead-off man on three consecutive fastballs. That quieted their rooters and sent ours into a frenzy.

The Canadian pitcher was up next. He menaced with his bat and gave Harlan a snaggletoothed grin.

“You'd better start swinging right now if you want to hit this one, Jacques,” Charlie said in his needling catcher's voice.

Harlan double-pumped, triple-pumped, pumped yet again. His long arm swung back and up and came whipping down past his cap like a big striking snake, and the Canadian stepped into the pitch and lined it into the gap in deepest right-center, far over the snow fence, for a home run.

As the Frenchman rounded the bases to a tremendous ovation, I noticed that Big Harlan was holding his pitching arm. Harlan threw just one pitch to the next batter. It hit the dirt several feet in front of the plate, and that was that. He was through for the rest of the day, and everyone knew it. And everyone knew as well that with Carter Pike—Harlan's only backup pitcher—out of town, the Outlaws were in serious trouble.

As Harlan left the field and Charlie conferred excitedly with Royce St. Onge and Stub at home plate, Reverend Andrews walked over from the third-base bleachers. “Maybe I can help you chaps out,” he said. “I used to pitch some in college. If you don't have any objection, I'd be willing to try my hand at it again.”

Charlie just smiled like the cat that swallowed the canary and tossed him the baseball; but as the minister headed out toward the mound Stub Poulin, true to his word, stalked off the field without a word.