A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Ordinarily, I very much looked forward to Athena’s end-of-the-day English class. She was a crackerjack teacher, every kid’s favorite, full of fun and great stories: “Tell us the one about the Great White Whale, Miss Allen!” “Read us how old Huck meets up with the King and the Duke!” And because Athena had learned to fish and hunt with her father the judge long before she was our age, and still regularly fished and hunted with him and with Charlie, she was genuinely interested in our tiresomely predictable compositions about trout and grouse and deer and read them with genuine appreciation.

  But as Charlie had often said, Athena Allen was a “high-toned woman,” and you definitely did not want to get on her wrong side. Not very often—just frequently enough to keep us on our toes—she would lose patience with the whole class and keep us after school for an hour or more, to “hammer the grammar” into our thick young heads (as Charlie said) and to show us that even though she was young and pretty and funny and sympathetic, she was still the boss.

  I must say that those sessions were quite apt to follow close on the heels of Athena’s fights with Charlie. And since I knew from my brother that they had just had a real donnybrook two days ago over Charlie standing her up the past Saturday night to go drinking in Canada with his basketball teammates, I was not surprised that lovely Athena was up on her high horse with us today.

  I hated to be called on at those times, and I especially dreaded having to go to the front of the room. Even under ordinary circumstances this onerous pilgrimage was a real trial by fire in Athena’s class, partly because Nathan Andrews and half a dozen other upperclassmen had a silent study period in the back of the room and so were on hand to witness my humiliation, and partly because when I returned to my seat I was invariably favored by a veritable barrage of kicks, jabs, punches, and missiles from Frenchy LaMott, who sat next to me, and who had the well-earned reputation of the worst boy in town.

  The illegitimate son of Bumper Stevens, the commission sales auctioneer, Frenchy lived with his mother, Ida LaMott, and his two younger half-brothers at his uncle Hook LaMott’s slaughterhouse out on the River Road. He was a good two years older than anyone else in our class and he hated Athena Allen with a passion because, although she was sympathetic to his circumstances and more than willing to give him extra help, she did not believe in social promotion and had flunked him twice already. Frenchy also resented Athena because two years ago her father, the judge, had sent him to the state reform school at Vergennes for several months. Suffice it to say that by the spring of 1952 Frenchy’s single academic goal was to turn sixteen and “do for” Athena Allen once and for all, then quit school in a burst of glorious notoriety, an event to which he looked forward with more relish than any honor student ever anticipated delivering a valedictory.

  But like it or not, I had been chosen to parse those idiotic lines on the board, and parse them I knew I must before any of us left that room. Worse yet, of all the days to be detained, today was one of the worst because this afternoon Resolvèd was slated to be arraigned at the courthouse for the trout-poaching episode Nat and I had witnessed. Of course Charlie would be representing him, and I desperately wanted to be on hand to see the fun.

  Athena was looking out the window of her second-floor classroom, down onto the common. “What is so rare as a day in June?” she said. “I shall tell you, ladies and gentlemen: a day in May. A warm, pleasant day in May, like this day,” she continued. “A very pleasant day. A pleasant day to play baseball. Or go fishing. Or to parse sentences.”

  Something hit the back of my head and bounced off onto the floor beside my desk. With a quick glance at Athena, who was still looking out the window and extolling spring, I bent over and picked up a tightly wadded piece of paper. At first I thought that this missive was a conventional spitball thrown at me by Frenchy. But at the back of the room Nat, who had stayed late to finish some homework, was signaling to me. “Read it,” his lips said silently.

  I unfolded the paper, which just fit into the palm of my hand. On it I saw:

  As quickly as possible, with several furtive glances at the crib sheet, I got up, transposed this marvel to the blackboard, and sat back down again.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, Athena Allen turned away from the window and loomed down upon me. A yard away from my desk she stopped and turned to the blackboard. “Who wrote that, James Kinneson?”

  “I wrote it, Ath—Miss Allen.”

  Ever so softly she said, “You wrote it.”

  It was neither question nor statement. I cannot in fact say what it was. But its implications were dreadful.

  “Yes, Miss Allen.”

  “Then, James, let us parse. What, pray, is the subject?”

  “The subject?”

  “Yes. The subject.”

  At that moment I could not have told the good woman what subject we were studying, much less the subject of that involuted sentence. She might as well have asked me to render the thing into Greek.

  Dazed as I was, I vaguely recollected that the subject of a sentence was quite apt to come first. Looking hurriedly at the lines on the board, I said, “‘Plunged.’”

  From nearby came a nasty snicker.

  “Who was that?” demanded Athena.

  “Me,” said Frenchy LaMott. “What you going to do about it?”

  Athena’s eyes blazed angrily. I wouldn’t have changed places with Frenchy at that moment for anything in the world. Then, to my amazement, Athena burst into laughter. “Frenchy,” she said, “you may not know much grammar, but you get an A-plus for honesty.

  “Class,” she announced, “just this once, we will celebrate Mr. LaMott’s honesty with an undeserved dismissal. Enjoy your afternoon in May.”

  “Working hard, James?”

  I was on my way up the courthouse steps two at a time, hoping to catch at least the tail end of Resolvèd’s poaching arraignment, when Plug Johnson, self-appointed president of the Folding Chair Club, hailed me from the top step.

  Plug was standing near the main door of the courthouse with half a dozen other pensioners retired from the B and M Railroad and American Heritage Mill. There was no way for me to get by them without stopping.

  Although none of these savants was noted for an altruistic concern for local youth, except to predict grimly that most of us would come to no good end because we did not know the meaning of the word “work” (all members of the Folding Chair Club having apparently gone to work full-time at the age of eight or nine), they indulged me in a patronizing and badgering sort of way because they liked and admired my brother. Also, as the local editor’s son I was regarded as a potential pump for news and information, though I was under the strictest injunction from both my parents never to mention a word of anything I heard at the Monitor or at home to these nosy old gossips.

  Besides, next to reassuring themselves that everyone else was working hard, the Folding Chair boys, as the half-dozen charter members of the club referred to themselves (though their cumulative age totaled upward of five hundred), were in fact much more interested in manufacturing and dispensing news than in acquiring it.

  “Heard the latest, James?”

  “No, Mr. Johnson. What’s that?”

  “You mean to say you ain’t heard about the hotshot lawyer in town this afternoon?”

  “You mean Charlie?”

  “No, I don’t mean Charlie. I mean that slick downcountry lawyer name of Moulton Charlie’s imported up here to help him defend Cousin Resolvèd. Tall fella? Pale as a trout’s belly in January? Distinguished-looking? Pulled up in front of the courthouse in a taxicab about an hour ago. You ain’t heard about him, James?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’ll know about him shortly, then,” Plug said. “Ain’t that right now, boys?”

  The boys duly agreed that it was right.

  “Best defense lawyer in Vermont, is all Moulton is. You ask Farlow upstairs—he’ll tell you all about him. And James.”

  “Yes, Mr. Johnson?” />
  “Don’t overdo, now.”

  “I won’t, Mr. Johnson. Aren’t you coming inside to watch the hotshot lawyer?”

  “Court’s recessed until three forty-five, James. I guess old Charlie’s meeting with him right now.”

  I was puzzled by Plug’s news. This was the first I’d heard of Charlie bringing in an out-of-town lawyer. Charlie was the hotshot, wasn’t he? It seemed out of character for my brash big brother to resort to outside help, especially in a run-of-the-mill poaching case. By now I was really curious to see my cousin arraigned. But just inside the door I paused. Something about the name Moulton rang a bell.

  Then it came to me. Moulton was the Montpelier prosecutor who had handled the infamous Ordney Gilson lynching case, which also happened to be Charlie’s first important case and the making of my brother’s own reputation.

  Even today the Ordney Gilson case is well remembered in Vermont. Back in January, just after Charlie graduated from law school, a well-to-do farmer known locally as Ornery Ordney Gilson went out to his barn to milk at his usual ungodly time of 3:30 A.M. A few hours later he was found bound in a bizarre way, with his wrists tied to his ankles beneath his thighs, and hanging by the heels from an elm on the village green—frozen stiff as a side of beef.

  Somehow, what had apparently started out as a weird practical joke had turned into a murder.

  The subsequent investigation revealed what everyone in the Kingdom knew anyway, that Ordney Gilson had a reputation as a hard man to work for. Over the years he had gone through more than a dozen hired men, and just that past Christmas Eve he had lost yet another employee. The man, Sheriff White’s brother Titman White, who drifted from farm to farm and was considered throughout the Kingdom to be shiftless and a little softheaded, had evidently come to the barn that evening drunk. As he was wheeling two forty-quart milkcans down a short ramp to the milkhouse, he tripped and lost the entire load. According to Titman (so-called because he was the runt of the White litter), Gilson had flown into a towering rage and kicked him, “just the way the miserable son-of-a-bitch kicked his cows.”

  Titman quit on the spot, moved out of the hired man’s trailer across the road, and spent the next several days telling his story to anyone and everyone in the Common who’d listen, particularly the crowd that hung around Bumper Stevens’ commission sales barn.

  During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Gilson received several anonymous threatening notes and telephone calls. His wife was worried. He apparently was not. Not, at least, until the early morning of January 1st when he found himself trussed up like a New Year’s turkey and dangling from an elm tree in thirty-degree-below-zero weather on the village green.

  Titman White had an alibi for his whereabouts on New Year’s Eve and early the following morning, he had been at a party at the commission sales barn, with ten or twelve other local roughnecks, all of whom confirmed his story. But Sheriff White, who had no love for his brother, had been able to prove that the rope Gilson had been tied up with had come from the overhead hayforks in Gilson’s own barn, where Titman had worked for several months prior to the Christmas Eve blow-up. Murder charges were brought against Titman, who promptly engaged Charlie to defend him.

  Technically, the trial should have been held in the Kingdom County Courthouse with Judge Allen presiding and Zack Barrows acting as prosecutor. But Zack had just gotten out of the Memphremagog hospital for his chronic drinking and was convalescing at home; and because of the tremendous publicity the case was receiving, Judge Allen ordered a change of venue to Montpelier, where one Sigurd Moulton served as prosecutor before a judge and jury from that area.

  The trial was covered by every major paper in New England, and by the end of the first day two things were obvious to everyone. First, that in all probability Titman White had, at the very least, had a hand in Ordney Gilson’s murder. Second, that he could not possibly have acted alone.

  In a brilliant and melodramatic defense, Charlie paraded Farmer Gilson’s myriad enemies through the witness box one after another, demonstrating that he was a hated man, the very antithesis of a good Vermont neighbor. Nor did my brother put Titman himself on the stand for Moulton to grill and confuse, though the prosecutor, who had never before lost a case, ruthlessly cross-examined each of Charlie’s other witnesses.

  The courtroom battle raged for two weeks. Then in his summary speech Charlie stunned everyone by requesting that the judge issue a little-used “directed verdict” of innocent to the jury, on the basis that not a shred of real evidence existed to link White with the murder. Astonishingly, the judge complied—-a decision which, however reluctantly, two courts of appeal and the Vermont Supreme Court ultimately upheld. White and his accomplices, whoever they were, went scot-free, and virtually overnight Charlie earned a reputation as a no-holds-barred, silver-tongued advocate who could win big cases.

  Still, why would my brother need this Moulton, of all people, to help him in the most routine of poaching cases?

  As I bounded upstairs toward the courtroom, which occupied most of the second floor of the building, I caught a spicy whiff of bay rum after-shave lotion and clove-scented hair tonic. Farlow Blake, Kingdom County’s part-time bailiff and full-time barber, and a veritable walking barbershop of aromatic suffusions himself, buttonholed me on the landing. “Greetings, young James,” he said in his portentous courtroom tones. “Big doings this P. of M. Very big doings.”

  Farlow gave me a canny wink. Moving like a blocking back in slow motion, he expertly steered me into a corner of the landing where he could impart his news in secrecy, though we were the only two persons within sight or earshot. Popping a wintergreen breath sweetener into his mouth and offering one to me (it was such small acts of thoughtfulness that made Farlow a universally popular man in Kingdom County; Charlie said he was the only bailiff in Vermont and probably all New England who could serve you a court summons and make you feel like a recipient of a Nobel Prize), he said in a near-whisper: “Brother Charlie’s hailed in a ringer. Best lawyer in Vermont, James, name of Moulton. Just resigned from being prosecutor down to Most Peculiar to set up his own firm.”

  “Most Peculiar” was Farlow’s standard way of referring to Montpelier, the capital of all Vermont except possibly Kingdom County.

  “Why would Charlie do that?” I asked in a foolish near-whisper.

  “I’ll tell you why, James, if you won’t breathe a word to another soul. Honor bright, now? Not a word?”

  Having received my solemn pledge, Farlow said, “Because for the past two days, old Zack’s been telling it all round town that he’s got Resolvèd dead to rights on this latest fish poaching business and for once Cousin R’s going straight to jail. No extenuating circumstances. No plea bargaining. No nothing, James. They say Zachariah intends to show the voting public that he can still win a case, no matter what Dad K writes in the Monitor about him. They say that’s why Brother Charlie’s hailed in this ringer from Most Peculiar to help him—tall, pale, distinguished-looking fella they say never’s lost a case in open court except once before—and that one to Charlie!”

  Perhaps I should point out here that although Farlow Blake’s principal responsibilities as courtroom officer consisted of announcing “All rise” when Judge Forrest Allen came out of his chambers and “Please be seated” after the judge sat down, he was also widely acknowledged to be unsurpassed at the subtle arts of swearing in witnesses, pampering bored juries in civil-suit cases by entertaining them with the latest magazines, newspapers, barbershop gossip, and Frenchman jokes, and maintaining the courtroom in spick and span condition. Yet in addition to being a sort of informal personification of the dignity and orderliness of the court, Farlow was a receptacle of all kinds of behind-the-scene information (much of which he had gleaned in his less glamorous capacity as town barber and some of which had actually been known to be accurate), which he dispensed in a conspiratorial and oracular manner to absolutely everyone who walked through the courthouse door, while simulta
neously giving the impression of selecting his confidants only after enormous deliberation.

  Like a good veteran newspaperman, Farlow never revealed his sources, attributing all of his inside lore to a mysterious entity known only as “they say.” Depending on the circumstances, “they say” could be anyone from Judge Allen to Sir William Blackstone, whose venerable tomes Farlow studied in slack times at the barbershop with all the assiduity of an apprentice attorney preparing for his bar exams. In this instance, however, I strongly suspected that “they say” was Charlie himself, since during my school lunch hour that day when I’d gone over to the Monitor to ran an errand for Dad I’d seen my brother and Farlow coming back from the hotel cheek and jowl together, with my brother laughing and doing all the talking.

  Farlow checked quickly over his shoulder to make sure the coast was clear. “When I—when Zack got wind of what Charlie was up to, he was so mad he didn’t know whether he was afoot or on horseback. They say he swore not to budge one inch this time, Most Peculiar lawyer or no. Catch you later, James, here come the Folding Chair boys. Dad K’s sitting in the press area.”

  Farlow glided toward the head of the stairs to waylay Plug Johnson and his cronies. I went inside the courtroom and sat down beside my father in what he called the press area, the back row of chairs nearest the door, where he could get up and leave whenever he felt like it without attracting undue attention to himself.

  Dad looked up briefly from the northern New England edition of the Boston Globe. He nodded once, as though greeting a junior colleague, and returned to a front-page story headlined, NO PROGRESS AT KOREAN PEACE TALKS.