A Stranger in the Kingdom (64 page)

The minister looked at Nat. “How are you coming on your room, old man? Have you got it about hoed out?”

“I'm ready,” Nat said.

“What about your funny books, Nat?” I asked. “There must still be four or five big boxes of them up there.”

“You hang onto them for me, Kinneson. There's some good reading up there and you could use even such a small corrupting influence in your life.”

We stood awkwardly together on the porch, while Reverend Andrews made one final check of the house. It was snowing now.

The minister came back outside and locked the door and handed the keys to my father. Turning away from the wind, he lit a cigarette, as he had done on that night I'd first met him in the April sugar snow. He shook hands with me and with my father and Charlie.

“Charles the Younger,” he said, “I thank you. I thank you and your father for your help and for your friendship. I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for you folks. I'd be languishing in state's prison, no doubt.”

“Hell, I can't imagine you languishing for long anywhere, Reverend,” Charlie said. But just the same, I could tell that my brother was moved.

“And again, Charles,” Reverend Andrews said to my father, “thank you once again. I'll never forget how you stood by me.”

“I shouldn't think you'd soon forget anything about this place, Walter. I'm sorry for what happened here. But I want you to know one thing. For all its shortcomings, the Kingdom's a better place for the time you and your son spent here.”

Reverend Andrews did not reply. He put his arm around Nat, and they walked out to the car together.

“Now, you wait,” my father said. “You wait just a minute.”

He took something bulky out from under his overcoat. He handed it through the passenger window to Nat, and I saw then that it was Pliny's
History.

“I can't—” Reverend Andrews started to say.

“Oh yes you can,” my father said. “This belongs to you, my friend.”

Reverend Andrews looked at my father. He leaned across the seat and grinned, and flicked Dad that marvelous two-fingered salute. “Oh, one thing, Charles. If you see Julia Hefner, tell her I made it a point to leave the parsonage as clean as I found it.”

Then the car was moving. It eased out of the driveway and past the vacant lot. The red brake lights of the canvas-covered trailer flicked on as it approached the hotel, and it was out of sight in the snowstorm.

“He'll land on his feet,” my brother said. “As I said once before, there goes one tough hombre. As a matter of fact—”

But whatever else my brother might have been going to say was drowned out by a siren blast. Flashing blue lights appeared in the snow, a long dark vehicle pulled into the dooryard, a long figure unfolded itself from the driver's side, and Mason White's high voice piped out, “What the
H
is going on here? Oh, is that you, editor? Charlie? Just checking up, boys.”

“You don't mean you're still sheriff?” Charlie said.

“Still sheriff?” Mason said. “Why, haven't you heard the news, Charlie K? I and you, we both won our respective races hands-down.”

He reached out his long arm and grabbed my brother's hand and began to pump it.

“It looks, Brother Charlie, like I and you are going to be working hand-in-glove to bring law and order to the Kingdom for the next two years at least. Congratulations!”

 

Even today Kingdom County is isolated enough from the rest of Vermont so that an out-of-state license plate in the village is something of an event. So with my mind still on the story I was banging out for Production Night deadline, I watched with curiosity as the car with white and blue tags cruised slowly into town between the United Church and the south end of the green, swung north, and slowed almost to a full stop in front of the courthouse.

Whoever it was seemed to be looking for something, probably directions. But on this cold gray afternoon in late October there was no one on the street to ask. The car eased over the disused Boston and Montreal tracks, passed between the Common Hotel and the statue of Ethan Allen taking Fort Ticonderoga on the far north end of the green, turned south along the three-story brick shopping block. Directly across from the
Monitor
, it nosed diagonally in against the west side of the green. And there, for perhaps thirty seconds, the driver sat stock-still with his back to me, staring over at the courthouse.

Then his door opened and a ghost got out and came straight across the street toward my office.

Even thirty-six years ago, when I had last seen him, I had not really believed in ghosts, and I certainly did not believe in them now. But for just a split second, I didn't see how the man coming toward me with that same ironical and amused expression I remembered so well could be anything else.

Then he was close enough for me to recognize. He was discernibly taller than his father, and rangier, though I was so astonished by his presence after all these years that not until he actually came into the office did I notice that he was carrying a good-sized box under one arm.

“So, Kinneson. You've followed in your father's footsteps, eh?”

“Editor, reporter, ad manager, janitor,” I said. “Not to mention school board member, Little League coach, church trustee—I'm running out of fingers.”

We shook hands across my desk and he set the box down beside my typewriter and sat down. “Married? Kids?”

“Two boys.”

“Charles and James. Right?”

“Half right. Charles and Lucien. After their grandfathers.”

He nodded, and turned to look out the window with the words KINGDOM COUNTY MONITOR written across it in faded black letters. “I don't know just what I expected. Boutiques, maybe. Gift shops selling maple syrup. This hasn't changed at all.”

I smiled. “It's changed. A lot's changed.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I print the paper on offset now. I have for ten years. And the elm trees. Remember the big elms out there on the green? They're all gone, along with half the farms and nearly all the old-timers.”

He shrugged. “I don't suppose I'd notice their absence. You never did manage to get me interested in your woods and fish and local characters, did you, Kinneson? Lord knows you tried. But I was your inveterate city kid if there ever was one. And I have to confess, I like them all a hell of a lot better in your books, anyway. I was lost up here in these hills. Totally lost.”

I smiled at his reference to my story collections, pleased that he'd read them, amused by his way of letting me know.

“You were interested in the ghost,” I said.

“The ghost?”

“Sure. The footsteps on the parsonage porch. Remember? I was thirteen that summer, you were what, sixteen? We had that crazy plan to wait up and—”

He held up his hand. “I remember. I remember.”

He told me that he'd been divorced for several years and had a daughter in college in Toronto. He said he was in sales, something having to do with educational computers. He was on a trip to the Maritimes and on the spur of the moment he'd gotten off the Trans-Canada Highway, thirty miles to the north, to have a quick look at the Common. Yet even then I did not believe that he'd come back entirely on impulse. There was more than mere passing curiosity to this visit, though I had no idea what until he asked me to open the package he'd set on my desk.

Whatever it was, was inside one of those big cardboard express mailers, the kind that fold out into a box. For its size, it was weighty. As I lifted it out and pulled away the tissue paper it was wrapped in, I caught a whiff of the unmistakable scent of very old leather and paper, and then, by God, there it was in my hands, still in good condition after nearly a century, all eleven hundred and fifty-five pages of it, with the title and author's name standing out bright and sharp in tall gilt letters on the leather cover:

 

THE ECCLESIASTICAL, NATURAL,

SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL

HISTORY OF

KINGDOM COUNTY

1781—1900

by

PLINY TEMPLETON, A B., M.A.

 

“It's yours, Kinneson. I don't know how many times I've started to mail it to you, including just yesterday, but then I thought, what the hell, maybe I'll just deliver the thing. Anyway, it belongs to you now. Do with it as you please. I'm delighted to have it off my hands.”

I looked at the book and up at him and back at the book again. I wanted to thank him, but all I could do was gaze at Pliny Templeton's book, as memory after memory swept over me from a time now gone as irrevocably as the magnificent New England elms on the green across the street.

 

“So, how about your hotshot big brother, Kinneson? Did he wind up marrying the good-looking schoolteacher? The judge's daughter with the unusual name and the temper?”

“He did. And never lost a case as county prosecutor. But the funny thing is, Zack Barrows went back into private practice, and they continued to face each other in court off and on for three or four years. Later, Charlie ran for attorney general, and he won that election, too.”

“It changed all of us,” I said. “But yes, Charlie especially. Dad used to say before the Affair that my brother was going to hell in a handbasket. But Mom was fond of saying that there's no great loss without some small gain. Charlie's transformation must have been the small gain. He's a federal judge in Burlington, believe it or not.”

“Of course,” Nat said. “Why wouldn't I believe it? Moving on, what became of your racist sheriff?”

“Mason White? About the time Charlie ran for attorney general, Mason ran for the state legislature and lost, went back to being a full-time undertaker, then ran again and won. He retired from politics ten years ago, something of a laughingstock and a fairly wealthy man.”

Nat shrugged. “What about your dad?”

“Dad retired in the late sixties, after making sure that everyone knew where he stood on Vietnam. I've never known for sure how much he had to do with it, but it was right after a long private meeting he and George Aiken had together that Aiken announced on the Senate floor that we ought to just declare a victory there and get out. Dad thought we were dead wrong in Vietnam from the start. That didn't make him many friends in these parts, but as he used to tell me, he wasn't in the newspaper business to make friends.”

I hesitated. Then I said, “You know, every year before he retired, he wrote an editorial on the Affair. That's how determined he was that we should never forget what happened here or let such a thing happen again.”

“He was a good man,” Nat said quietly.

It was the first completely unironical statement he'd made since he arrived, and I appreciated it.

“So was your father.”

“Yes,” Nat said thoughtfully. “He died there, you know.”

“Died where?”

“In Vietnam. He rejoined the service right after we went back to Canada, and died there in '66.”

I hadn't known, and I started to express my condolences, but Nat held up his hand and waved it impatiently, exactly as he'd done years ago to cut off a conversation he didn't want to pursue. “He fell near the thick of the action, just as he'd have wanted it, no doubt, though I never did learn whether he was toting his Bible or his service revolver at the time—probably both. Unfortunately, we were somewhat estranged at the time. Like a good number of Canadians, I was inclined toward your father's side of the issue.

“But I didn't come back to hash over old times, Kinneson. Just to deliver the book. It's getting late, eh? I've got an hour's drive back to my motel and you've got a paper to get out.”

I stared at Pliny's great book on my desk, and as I did, a wonderful idea came to me.

“Nat, to hell with the paper. You and I have a piece of unfinished business.”

“What do you mean, unfinished business?”

I stood up and put on my hunting jacket. “What I want to do'll only take an hour—two at most. That's a short time, compared to thirty-six years.”

 

“It's ten degrees colder here than up in Montreal, Kinneson. This is insane. Probably the ground's frozen already.”

Despite my wool hunting jacket I was cold, too, as we crossed the common and the B and M tracks and sneaked through the dark lumberyard of the American Heritage Mill. Then we were there.

As I'd hoped it would be, the far south window of the Academy locker room was unlocked. The place smelled strongly of liniment and sweat and the victories and defeats of fifty years and more. I led the way out through the gym, into the foyer and the redolence of chalk dust and old books, floor wax and uneasy anticipations. I set down the cardboard box I was carrying and took out my flashlight and ran it briefly across the trophy showcase.

“You shatter any of your big brother's records?” Nat said.

“Not a one. I turned into a good soccer player and, thanks to your dad, a pretty fair country shortstop. You were the one who would have broken Charlie's records.”

“We'll never know,” Nat said. “Up these stairs, right?”

“Up these stairs.”

The door of the science classroom was unlocked, and there was just enough light filtering up from the street lamp below for us to make our way through the lab tables to the closet, which was also unlocked. The place reeked of formaldehyde. For a moment, I felt as though I was ten or eleven again and Charlie was showing me the thing for the first time.

In fact I hadn't seen it for years, and I wasn't entirely sure that it was still here. But it was, dangling from its slim pole in the light of the pocket flashlight like a forgotten prop left over from a Halloween party or some long-ago school play.