Waiting for Teddy Williams

by Howard Frank Mosher

  16

  PICKUPS WITH BIG, dark, heavy-antlered bucks in their beds cruised slowly around the sere common, displaying their trophies. It was late in the afternoon of the opening Saturday of deer season in Kingdom County. Men, and some women, too, in red-and-black-checked or hunter-orange jackets and pants went in and out of the hardware store and the IGA and the hotel. E.A., who had already gotten his deer with Gypsy several nights before, was talking with the Colonel. But not about hunting.

  All villages hold many secrets, the Colonel was saying, and Kingdom Common was no exception. In the Common, many years before E.A. was born, there had been a murder. The murdered man, Orie Gilson, was a farmer who was mean to his help. Everyone in the village knew that the murderer was his hired man, assisted by a few of his drinking cronies. For more than half a century the Kingdom County Monitor had offered a standing reward of $10,000 for information leading to the killer’s conviction. But no one would talk to the police. To the outside world the murderer’s identity remained a mystery, though the greater mystery was how an entire town could keep such a secret for so long. Sooner or later, you’d think, somebody would talk. A world-class busybody like Old Lady Benton. The Reverend, only slightly less proficient at gossiping and casting blame. Or Judge Charlie K himself, at the time a young defense lawyer just out of law school. But no Commoner had ever breathed a word to anyone beyond the county line, and no arrest was ever made. The reward went unclaimed.

  The Colonel loved to natter on about the village’s other mysteries. What had become of the loot when twenty Confederate soldiers had ridden hell-for-leather out of Canada in 1864 and robbed the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Bank of Kingdom Common of nearly $100,000? Most of the raiders got away, and the money never turned up. How had the Colonel’s sword been broken off, and why hadn’t it been replaced? Some said Noel Lord, as a boy, had cut it off with a hacksaw after the sword severed his hand when he drove his father’s moonshine cart into town and the oxen ran into the statue. But the Colonel wouldn’t say.

  So it wasn’t surprising to E.A. that the knowledge he most wanted—which, like the identity of Gilson’s killer, was surely known to most of the village—was withheld from him. Though as the Colonel himself had told him, while a village could keep a secret from outsiders forever, it could not keep a secret forever from one its own and, WYSOTT Allen or not, E.A. was one of the village’s own. Sooner or later, E.A. told the statue, he would find out.

  “I’m old enough to know his name now. It wouldn’t kill you to tell me.”

  “Looky here, boy. It’s Gypsy who has to tell you. That’s why nobody else will. This matter is between you and your ma. From what you tell me, she’s already given you enough to go on so’s any enterprising boy could easy figure out the rest.”

  “I don’t know anything much about him.”

  “You know a lot. You know when you were born. You know there was a wreck less than a year earlier. Say you knew that Yaz had hit three out of Fenway against the Yankees on a certain day in a certain season but you didn’t know the exact day. What would you do?”

  “Look it up in the record book.”

  “That’s correct. You’d look it up.”

  “I didn’t know there was a record book where you could look up no-good, cowardly sons of bitches,” E.A. said.

  But if the Colonel heard him, he didn’t reply. The wind had picked up and it was beginning to snow.

  “And me standing out here without a cloak to my name,” the Colonel said, which was the end of their conversation.

  “Hello, E.A. You call for this snow, did you?”

  “Hey, Editor K. No, I didn’t have to call for it.”

  “That’s the truth,” the editor said, looking out the window at the thickening flakes. “Snow is about the one commodity there’s no shortage of up here in the Kingdom. You need more baseball stats?”

  “I need some stats, I reckon.”

  “The archives are yours to ransack, son. Let me know if you find anything interesting.”

  “Okey-dokey,” E.A. said, and headed down the steps into the basement.

  The basement of the newspaper office was a catchall for every kind of old-fashioned machinery and memorabilia, including the huge hand press and Linotype that Editor K’s father and grandfather had used. The tall black volumes containing old issues of the paper were ranked on shelves along one wall. They dated well back into the nineteenth century.

  Ethan looked at the dates inscribed on labels pasted to the spines of the black books. He was born in September, and Gypsy had said that the Kingdom County Accident had taken place a month before he was born. He found the volume for the year of his birth, found August, and then it was simple. Nothing in the August 8 issue, but the headline for the next one, published on the 15th, read TWO LOCAL TEENS KILLED AT M&B CROSSING ON RIVER ROAD. Below was a grainy photograph of a crushed car upside down in the field by the river. The trestle loomed in the background. Under the photograph the article began:

  Recent Academy graduates René DeLabreure and Ferdinand Viens were fatally injured last Tuesday when the car they were riding in was struck by the Montreal-Boston through freight at approximately 4:15 P.M. at the ungated crossing on the River Road just north of Kingdom Common. A third teen, E. W. Williams, the owner of the car, is in critical condition at the North Country Hospital in Memphremagog. One of the engineers said that the wrecked car appeared to be racing the train to the crossing.

  The newspaper story went on to say that the River Road crossing had long been considered extremely hazardous, with two other fatal wrecks there over the years, one in 1938, another in 1957. Recently the sheriff’s department had received reports that high school boys were racing the trains but had not been able to confirm it. Viens, DeLabreure, and Williams had played on the school’s championship baseball team.

  All E.A. could think of, however, was the initials on the water tank. G A and F V. Gypsy Allen and Ferdinand Viens. Son of Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Viens, Sr., County Road, Kingdom Common.

  He was certain of it. Ferdinand Viens, eighteen, of Kingdom Common, had been his father.

  “E.A.? You finding what you need?”

  “I’m okay,” he called up to the editor as he skimmed over issues for October and November of that year and read that the Williams boy had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and been sentenced to ten years in prison.

  He said it again as he came up the steps a few minutes later. “I’m okay”

  E.A. stood by the door in his Red Sox cap, his pale eyes looking straight at the editor. “Where can I find Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Viens Senior, Editor K?”

  “Fern Viens Senior? Well, E.A., Fern and his wife left here years ago. They went back to Canada to live, where Fern’s folks were from. I don’t know where they are now. Or even for certain if they’re still alive. They were an older couple, you know . . .”

  But E.A. was already out the door of the newspaper office and headed across the street to the common.

  “So,” the Colonel said, his voice a little muffled by the snow and wind. “You found what you were looking for.”

  “His name was Ferdinand Viens,” E.A. said through his tears, not understanding why he was crying, since all he knew that he hadn’t known before was a name that meant nothing to him.

  “Who was Fern Viens?” E.A. asked the Colonel.

  “You know who he was. He was one of those fellas killed in that wreck out to the crossing.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t miss my guess, you just read who he was.”

  “Where can I find out about him?”

  “Ask Gypsy—she can tell you. If she will.”

  “Well, she won’t. His initials and hers are up on that tower.”

  The Colonel said nothing. E.A. figured he hadn’t known about the initials, and if there was one thing the Colonel couldn’t bear, it was not knowing some piece of village scuttlebutt.

  E.A. shivered, pulled his yard-sale mackinaw closer, hopp
ed from foot to foot. “The only other thing I know about him, he played ball for the Academy. He played for that state championship team—the one Earl and E.W. Williams who hit the home run up onto Old Lady Benton’s porch played for. That E.W. was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was driving the car.”

  “I know who was driving the car,” the Colonel said.

  “What I’m asking you,” E.A. said, “is where can I find out more about Fern Viens. Besides Gypsy. I’m not going to bother her with this.”

  Across the street from the long east side of the green, dim in the snowstorm, the lights in Prof Benton’s office in the Common Academy blinked on.

  “There is your answer,” the statue said.

  “Where is my answer?”

  “His high school annual, rummy,” the Colonel said. “What would you do without me to cipher out your affairs for you?”

  17

  “ANY CHANCE of enticing you over here to play for us, E.A.?” Prof asked. “We’d love to have you, you know.”

  E.A. shrugged. He and Prof were standing in front of the trophy case in the foyer of the Academy. This was the first time he’d ever set foot in a school in his life, and he felt as if he were six years old and today was his first day of classes.

  Prof grinned. “Well,” he said, “you can’t blame me for trying.”

  As Prof led E.A. upstairs to the library, the scents of chalk dust and sweeping compound and generations of unwilling kids packed close together caused Ethan to stop and catch his breath.

  Prof told him where the yearbooks were and asked him to turn off the library lights when he was finished and check in at the office before he left. Then E.A. was alone in the long room full of musty-smelling books. He had no trouble finding the yearbooks. Gypsy Lee’s was there with the others. E.A. had been afraid that through some terrible quirk it would be missing. He took it down, opened it, and found Gypsy’s picture. She didn’t look any different then than she did now. Long red hair, straight small nose, cat’s eyes. Gypsy Allen, class salutatorian. Nickname, Gypsy Lee. Hobbies, singing and baseball. Baseball? As far as E.A. knew, Gypsy had never had the slightest interest in baseball until he came along. Gran was the baseball fanatic in the Allen family. Gran and the Colonel. He flipped through the pages. René DeLabreure. The other boy who’d been killed.

  Ferdinand Viens.

  Fern was a slight, serious-looking, dark-haired boy. He appeared to be scarcely older than E.A. himself. Looking at him was more like looking at a picture of a dead brother. How could someone so young, so frail-looking, have been his father? Hobbies, baseball, 1, 2, 3, 4. Nickname, Lefty. So Fern Viens had been a southpaw.

  E.A. realized that Gypsy’s listed hobby had nothing to do with sports. It was meant as a joke. Fern Viens was a baseball player, and he was her hobby.

  Suddenly E.A. dropped the yearbook. His eyes swam. He made himself pick up the book again and open it to Fern’s page. Just across from his dead father’s picture was a photograph that could not have astonished him more had it appeared on a major-league baseball card.

  “Edward ‘Teddy’ Williams,” the caption read. “Baseball, 1, 2, 3, 4.”

  There was no doubt at all in E.A.’s mind, as he stared at the photograph of the young man with the buzz cut, pale eyes, and arrogant expression, that “Teddy” Williams, the driver of the car his boy-father Fern Viens had been riding in when he’d been killed at the crossing, was the drifter who’d been teaching him baseball.

  18

  IT WAS MAY DAY in Kingdom County. Ethan was headed up Allen Mountain to collect wildflowers for a May basket for Gypsy. He hiked along the Canada Post Road past brushy, overgrown fields and cut-over woodlots. Near the edges of old clearings in the woods were spring beauties, hepaticas, deep purple violets, tiny yellow woods violets, and white violets with blue centers. Gypsy loved wildflowers of all kinds and had written many songs about them.

  As part of E.A.’s homeschooling, Gypsy had taught him all about the history of the Canada Post Road. It was built shortly after the American Revolution by the Colonel and his brother, General Ira Allen, principally to smuggle cattle back and forth over the Canadian border. In the 1840s and ’50s the road was traveled by fugitive slaves en route to Canada from the Allen homestead, Vermont’s northernmost station on the Underground Railroad, run by Ethan’s great-great-grandpa, Emancipator Allen, until he was hanged with John Brown at Harpers Ferry. This setback did not prevent Emancipator’s son, Patrick, from leading the Irish Fenians on their ill-fated raid in 1872 to annex Quebec. Later, during Prohibition, Outlaw Allen ran whiskey down the Post Road from Quebec in large Packards, Buicks, and Cadillacs. The night before the Volstead Act was repealed, Outlaw had been killed at a fork in the road high on the mountain by federal revenuers lying in wait for him.

  As E.A. approached the scene of Outlaw Allen’s demise, he noted that the right fork, which led due north to the Canadian border, had been flooded by a new beaver dam across a small tributary of Allen Mountain Brook. He took the left fork, toward the mountaintop and Long Tom.

  To the degree that it resembled anything at all, Long Tom resembled a culvert pipe the length of a football field and large enough to drive a small car through. In fact, Tom was the world’s biggest cannon, capable of firing a rocket-assisted shell halfway around the earth. This invention was the masterwork and crowning life achievement of Dr. Budweiser “Buddy” Allen, Gran’s scientist brother. Perched on the mountaintop above a sheer drop of more than a thousand feet to Lake Memphremagog, Long Tom had a spooky, derelict look. The cannon was pointed almost due south toward its last target, the White House, which Dr. Budweiser had been preparing to shell “to wake up the president,” just before being assassinated (Gran claimed) by the CIA. The epitaph on his stone in the family graveyard read: DR. BUDWEISER ALLEN. THOUGH IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER HE WAS MAD AS A HATTER BUT HE HAD A SMART BRAIN. Gypsy had composed it when she was in junior high school.

  E.A. set down his May basket and climbed up inside Long Tom, where he lay back in the dim coolness and looked out at the sky. Inside Tom, E.A. could close his eyes and imagine being shot out of the mouth of the cannon—not like one of Great-Uncle Buddy’s gigantic shells with a smiley face and the message “Hello Mr. President, from the Green Mountain State” embossed on its fin, but like a clown he’d seen shot out of a pretend cannon at the Cole Bros. Circus. He imagined that it was night and he was zooming high above New England, and that he’d never learned what he found out in the Academy library, that none of it had ever happened. On he flew. Far below was Fenway Park, with the looming Green Monster, over which he would someday hit another shot heard round the world. He sped over Yankee Stadium, the dny pinstriped players racing perpetually around the bases like mechanical players in an old-fashioned toy baseball game. West to Comiskey Park and to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, on to the Kingdome in Seattle. Someday he’d play in all of them.

  “Hey in there.”

  E.A. started up so fast he bumped his head. He crawdadded out of the cannon and dropped to the ground. There was the drifter, in his usual garb, standing near the edge of the cliff above the lake.

  “Who you hiding from?” Teddy said. Then, “Whoa. Whoa, there, Ethan. What the—”

  E.A.’s feet had scarcely hit the ground before he started charging. Teddy held him off at arm’s length as E.A. windmilled his fists, trying to reach him, pound him, silently socking the big man in the side, the shoulder, with short punches, the way Teddy had taught him, the way he’d fought Orton and Norton, as though he meant to drive the drifter right over the edge of the cliff.

  “Ethan, hold on. Hold up here. What’s wrong?”

  Teddy was too big for him. Too powerful. E.A. didn’t know a man could be that strong, even as Teddy was trying to be gentle, move him back from the dropoff.

  “It’s you, you son of a bitch,” the boy said, not loud, still trying to swing. Teddy had him by the wrists.

  “What’d I do?” Teddy said. “What you think I�
�ve done?”

  “You know what you did,” E.A. said, struggling. “You killed my father.”

  They stood facing each other, Teddy ready to grab him again if necessary.

  “Going to college,” E.A. said through his tears. “Wanting to teach me baseball because we were friends. Lies! You were never in college. You were in prison, that’s where you were. For killing my pa.”

  “Whoa, Ethan. Who put that idea in your head?”

  “Tell me you weren’t in prison. Let me hear you say it.”

  “I can’t tell you I wasn’t in prison. I was. But I never killed your father.”

  “I read it. Right in the Monitor.”

  Teddy said nothing.

  “You lied to me,” E.A. said. “You lied to me about everything. Probably lying when you said I could do something with my baseball. Get somewhere with it.”

  “Ethan, I didn’t ever go to college a day in my life. And you’re right, I was in prison. Eight years, and I’m still on parole. But I’ll tell you two things straight out. No matter what you heard, I never killed your father. And I’ll never lie to you again about anything.”

  “That’s the truth,” E.A. said. “Because I’m going home now. And I don’t want to see you around the place. Ever.”

  “Ethan. Did you ever pretend something was so when it wasn’t? That’s what I did about going to college. I shouldn’t have. But I’m not lying about your father.”

  Teddy started down the Canada Post Road.

  “How do I know whether to believe you or not?” Ethan called after him.

  Teddy said something E.A. didn’t catch.