Mason White’s neck and face turned bright red. He began to sputter. The sheriff flailed his long arms but couldn’t seem to spit out his words. Zack continued to roar objections. The Folding Chair Club was hooting like a gang of bad boys at the Saturday matinee in the Academy auditorium. Judge Allen hammered steadily on his desk with the heel of his hand, and Farlow was calling for silence, silence in the courtroom.
At the height of this wonderful commotion, I noticed my father staring past me across the aisle. I turned and looked straight into the amused countenance of the Reverend Andrews. How long the minister had been there I had no idea, but on his face was a broad, unmistakable smile.
By degrees the uproar subsided. The judge’s blows decreased in frequency and volume until at last he was tapping his forefinger at five-second intervals. “Mason,” he said when the room was perfectly silent, “you may step down. Zachariah, sit down and compose yourself. Unfortunately, you don’t have much of a case left.”
Judge Allen pointed at my brother. “You,” he said, crooking his finger. “In my chambers.”
“All rise,” said Farlow Blake in the ensuing hush. But for once he was late on the draw. Before the words were out of his mouth the door had already closed behind the departing judge, and although my brother gave me another jaunty grin over his shoulder just before following, I would not have changed places with him that moment for all the trout in Kingdom County.
“Shag ass,” Resolvèd growled at Welcome. “I got to slide on over to the post office before she closes.”
Despite Resolvèd’s Brooks Brothers suit, which I now recognized as Charlie’s, and freshly pressed white shirt and conservative dark tie and polished shoes, despite his close shave and what was probably the first barbershop haircut of his life, he now looked exactly like himself again as he and his look-alike brother slouched out of the courtroom together.
My father and I walked downstairs with Reverend Andrews. “Give my congratulations to Charles the Younger, if you will,” he told Dad. “Assure him that if I ever need a good advocate, I’ll know where to find one.”
Outside it was noticeably colder. Reverend Andrews lit a Lucky Strike and he and Dad stood on the top step of the courthouse and visited about the arraignment. Resolvèd and Welcome cut across the common toward the post office, taking long swinging strides. The Folding Chair Club came straggling outside, buzzing like a bee tree on a hot afternoon in haying time.
“Yes, sir, editor,” Plug Johnson said. “That Charlie of yours is some old Charlie. Ain’t that so now, boys?”
The boys in the Folding Chair Club unanimously agreed that my brother was some old Charlie.
“Evening, Reverend,” Plug said. “How you like it so far up here in God’s Kingdom?”
Reverend Andrews said he liked the Kingdom very well and expected to like it even better when and if spring ever arrived. The Folding Chair Club laughed heartily. To a man, they took a strong proprietary interest in the local weather and considerable credit for its notorious severity.”
“That’s good,” Plug said. “That’s real good. Just watch the company you keep and you’ll make out fine. I ain’t telling you what to do, Reverend, but if I was you I’d steer clear of that whole Kinneson outfit. One side of that family is outlaws and the other’s mainly radicals and Socialists. Ain’t that right now, editor?”
“If you say so, Plug.”
Laughing mightily at his own witticism, winking at my father and Reverend Andrews, and not neglecting to enjoin me to keep working hard, Plug hobbled down the courthouse steps with his venerable coterie and up the street toward the hotel. In the meantime, Hefty Hefner and Farlow Blake joined us on the steps.
“Reverend Andrews, I believe you look thinner than the last time I saw you,” Hefty said in a tone of mock rebuke. “Are you still batching it over there in that drafty old barn of a parsonage? You hire yourself a housekeeper to start fixing you and your boy three proper meals a day or I’m going to come over and do it myself. We’ve lost enough ministers around here without having one up and starve to death on our hands.”
“Stop bullying the man, Julia,” Farlow said. In his light spring overcoat and stylish fedora he looked more magisterial than ever. He sidled close to my father and checked over his shoulder. “I thought all along there was something fishy about that out-of-town attorney, editor.”
“You were right about his being a most peculiar lawyer,” my father said.
Farlow, who had absolutely no sense of irony, nodded in solemn agreement. After asking Reverend Andrews how he liked God’s Kingdom, he headed up the street with Julia, who was still nattering on about the minister’s diet and threatening to take matters into her own hands if he didn’t hire a housekeeper.
“Talk about baptism into small-town life by fire,” my father said. “You’re getting it, my friend.”
Reverend Andrews grinned. “I take it Julia likes to josh.”
“She likes to mind everybody’s business but her own. She’ll be going through your desk to see how much you’ve been spending for postage stamps if you let her. She’s been a thorn in the side of every minister in this town for the past twenty years. That’s one you want to put in her place right off the bat.”
Reverend Andrews shrugged. “I fancied her to be the mother-hen type, well-meaning enough.”
“Fancy again. She eats ministers up for breakfast, and I’m not fooling. Plug Johnson is a scholar and gentleman compared to—”
The courthouse door opened and Zack Barrows and Mason White stepped out onto the portico. “Well, Charles,” Zack said. “I hope you aren’t going to splash this latest fiasco all over the front page of the paper.”
“What happened up there is news, Zachariah.”
“What happened may be news, but it’s hardly fit to print. One of these times that smart-aleck son of yours is going to go too far. Tell him I said so.”
I knew my father was very angry with Charlie for his latest courtroom shenanigans. But I also knew he would not stand for anyone else, particularly the old prosecutor, criticizing my brother.
“Tell him yourself,” Dad said sharply.
“You there, Reverend,” Mason White said in his incongruously high voice. “What’s so funny?”
Quickly my father said, “Mason, this is Walter Andrews, the new minister. Reverend Andrews, Sheriff Mason White.”
“I know perfectly well who the fella is, editor,” Mason said. “He came waltzing in right after I took the stand upstairs. He was smiling all through my testimony, just the way he is now. All I asked him is what’s so all-fire comical?”
“Come on,” Zack told his toady, who loomed over him like Jeff over Mutt in the comic strip. “Let’s get over to the hotel. I could use a stiff drink, and so could you.”
But Mason was determined to salvage some part of his self-esteem. “I asked this man a question, Zacker. I’m still waiting for an answer.”
“Do you really want me to answer it?” Reverend Andrews said, still smiling.
“Come on,” Zack told Mason, starting down the steps. “This has gone far enough for one afternoon.”
Mason gave the minister a hard stare and then followed the prosecutor. When he reached the sidewalk he turned and called back, “I’ll give you a friendly tip, Reverend. I don’t know about where you come from, but up here in the Kingdom we don’t like being laughed at in our faces. And while I’m on the topic, up here ministers don’t stand around smoking in public, either. Not if they expect to last long.”
Reverend Andrews exhaled a cloud of smoke, still smiling, he nodded. “I appreciate the tip, Sheriff,” he said, and flicked his cigarette butt out into the street. The butt did not come especially close to Mason. Perhaps ten feet away. But it came close enough to be an ambiguous gesture, and Mason stood on the sidewalk for another second or two, staring up at the minister, before turning to follow Zack.
“Not that I blame you much,” my father said “But you just made your first enemy.”
“I don’t completely trust a chap who doesn’t have any enemies. I take it from your editorials that you aren’t reluctant to make a few yourself, eh?”
“I can afford to. You can’t.”
The minister shrugged. After thanking me for taking Nat fishing, and asking if I’d take him again sometime soon, Reverend Andrews gave us his jaunty two-fingered salute and said goodnight.
I’m not sure just how much longer Dad and I waited in front of the courthouse. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe longer. The supper-hour Montreal highball went by, cutting off the hotel and the entire north end of the village from the common. I counted one, two, three, four diesel engines, doing the work a single steam locomotive had accomplished just two years ago. It was too dark now to read the names on the sides of the cars, but I could guess at their contents accurately enough by their shapes, and as usual I felt that nagging restlessness, that urge to go somewhere, to see what lay on the other side of the hills, which would eventually take me away from Kingdom County for a time before I returned, like my father, to settle down at the Monitor.
“‘SHE CAME DOWN FROM BIRMINGHAM ON THE WABASH CANNONBALL . . .’”
If Charlie was any the worse for his session with Judge Allen, you wouldn’t have guessed it from his unsubdued appearance, singing at the top of his lungs and laughing and jabbing me out of my reverie of faraway places with a thumb in the ribs.
“Well?” Dad said.
“Well, what? You want the whole number? ‘From the wide Atlantic Ocean to the far . . .’”
“What did he say?”
“Old Uncle Forrest? About what you’d expect. It was a cheap trick. ‘Cheap, Charles.’ I compromised the integrity of his court. And my profession. And my family. And if I ever do anything remotely like it again, he’ll personally haul me up in front of the state Law Review Board.”
“Is that all?”
“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t. When he finally finished raking me over the coals, he tried to persuade me to run for county prosecutor.”
“And?”
“And, right this minute, I’m going over to the hotel for a cold one. You guys want to come along?”
To my surprise, my father agreed. Just as we walked into the hotel, we met Resolvèd and Welcome coming out, and at Charlie’s suggestion Dad took his picture standing with his arms draped over the shoulders of my two cousins under the fourteen-point buck’s rack mounted just over the inside of the door.
“Well, bub,” Resolvèd started to say to Charlie after the photo session. “How much I—”
“Cousin,” my brother said, holding up his hand, “at long last you and I are even. You don’t owe me anything. I don’t owe you anything. We’ll leave it there. Okay?”
I think Charlie said this at least as much for my father’s benefit as for Resolvèd’s. Maybe something Judge Allen told him had actually given him pause. Or maybe he was just tired of defending our cousin for nothing. I don’t know. But neither he nor Dad mentioned anything else that evening about the arraignment.
Later that week I was surprised again when my father ran the shot of my brother and cousins, standing under the deer head, in the paper, along with the arraignment story and two open letters. The first was to Zack Barrows, strongly recommending that he resign immediately and devote himself to his prizewinning perennial garden. The second was to my brother, urging Charlie to ran for Zack’s job before the attorney general in Montpelier came up and took matters into his own hands.
But the biggest surprise of all was when my father came home the night after the issue appeared and said that Resolvèd was so pleased with the way the picture turned out that he dropped by the Monitor and cadged two free extra copies, without insulting anyone once—not even his ex-brother, Elijah!
4
COCK FIGHTS TODAY, the sign said. NO WOMEN NO DOGS NO KIDS.
It was Memorial Day, garden-planting time in Kingdom County. All morning my mother and I had worked together in the large plot across the road in the meadow, where over the centuries ton upon ton of rich alluvial soil had been deposited by the flooding and receding river.
And all morning, as we planted peas and potatoes, early sweet com, and the tomato sets Mom had started weeks ago on the kitchen windowsills, cars and pickups and battered three-quarter-ton farm trucks had jounced past us along the gool and turned off onto the lane by Welcome’s hand-lettered sign announcing my cousins’ traditional Decoration Day cockfights.
Many of those vehicles had out-of-state plates and were occupied by strangers who had come to bet on the day’s matches. But every fourth or fifth truck carried fighting roosters in portable pens or slatted crates. There were big flashy Rhode Island Reds, like Resolvèd’s Ethan Allen. There were even bigger and gaudier Golden Buff Orpingtons, a variety my mother sometimes raised for eggs. There were White Leghorns with dazzling snowy breasts and wings and ferocious-looking clipped red combs, and numerous other varieties I didn’t know the names of, some of which crowed all the way up the lane to my cousins’ like bloodthirsty little gladiators.
I had never witnessed a cockfight; like the commission sales barn and the abandoned granite quarry up in the gore, my cousins’ place on the ridge was strictly off-limits for me. But I was determined someday to see what went on there on cockfight holidays.
By noon, when my father came home for lunch, parked cars and tracks were strung all the way down the lane to the gool like vehicles at an all-day farm auction. Mom had fixed us sandwiches, which we ate picnic-style on the porch in the warm sunshine, but as the spectators continued to arrive, now parking along the gool itself, Dad grew angrier and angrier—angry with Zack Barrows, mainly, for failing to put a stop to the cockfights, but also with my brother for refusing to run for prosecutor and do it himself.
“I know this is killing you, Ruth,” he was saying, when a large pink car came roaring down the gool from the red iron bridge and slued into the dooryard beside our DeSoto. It was Bumper Stevens in his new Cadillac with the words KINGDOM COUNTY COMMISSION SALES emblazoned across the driver’s door in powder-blue letters. Frenchy LaMott, Bumper’s son, was hunkered inside the open trunk holding his father’s mammoth leghorn fighting rooster, the Great White Hope, in a fruit crate.
“Yes, sir, editor,” Bumper called out his window. “I’ll pay you two bucks to park my rig here in your dooryard where some Christly foreigner from York State or Canady won’t sideswipe her.”
My father stood up. “Get off my property,” he said.
“Make that five,” Bumper said and started to open the car door.
Moving very quickly for a man in his fifties, or anyone else, for that matter, my father was off the porch and across the dooryard before I knew it.
“I’ll give you five,” he said, slamming the door shut in Bumper’s face. “Five seconds to clear off these premises.”
Bumper cursed fiercely, but in considerably less time than the allotted five seconds, the big pink car was out of our dooryard. As it tore down the road past the collapsing barn, Frenchy hung onto the Great White Hope with one hand and fended the jouncing lid of the car trunk off his head with the other. The bird gave a long derisive-sounding crow.
My father returned to the porch, where he remarked that ten years ago he would have muckled onto Bumper Stevens and thrown him into the biggest snowbank south of Labrador instead of just ordering him off the property.
“I’m glad it’s not ten years ago,” my mother ventured with a smile at me, but I wished it was, at thirteen I would have loved to see the old man muckle onto Bumper and clean his clock.
“Walt Andrews is coming out this afternoon,” Dad told us. “He wants to talk over some more local history with me.”
“He seems almost as interested in local history as you are, Charles.”
“He is at that. Now he tells me that he’s got some sort of grand idea involving local history for a big church fundraiser. It’s still in the planning stages, he says. He wants to sound me out about it before he br
ings it up in front of the other trustees. I don’t have the slightest notion what he’s got in mind, except that he confided to me that this shindig, whatever it is, is going to replace the church’s annual minstrel show.”
“I’ve thought for years that the minstrel show was in poor taste,” my mother said. “I doubt that Reverend Andrews is going to have a very easy time replacing it, though. The Ladies’ Auxiliary looks forward to that all year long.”
“I don’t,” Dad said. “It’s worse than in poor taste. If I have to write one more story about Julia Hefner getting up on the Academy stage in blackface and singing ‘Mammie,’ I’m going to throw up. Not to mention Bumper Stevens and Mason White making pure fools out of themselves with that idiotic Rastus and Remus routine. Whatever Andrews has up his sleeve has got to be an improvement on that nonsense. What’s more, this is the right time for him to make his move. He and his congregation are still in their honeymoon period, and if he wants to make some changes, he’d better strike while the iron’s hot. Soon enough the nitpicking’s bound to begin. When that happens, look out.”
“Reverend Andrews strikes me as the type of man who doesn’t back down easily,” Mom said.
“Good. The trustees wanted a go-getter. Now they’ve got one. But Andrews is pretty quick on his feet. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see him stay here for two or three years, say until Nathan graduates from the Academy, get this hidebound outfit halfway shaped up, then move on before they really start to make life miserable for him.”
At thirteen, I had less than no interest in church politics. But even I knew that Reverend Andrews was doing a first-rate job of getting the church back on its feet again. His sermons continued to be mercifully concise and to the point and, in my father’s assessment, both literate and thoughtful. He got out and visited elderly people and shut-ins, whose stories about old times, like my father’s, he seemed to relish. Earlier in the month old Coach Whitcomb, who had taught at the Academy for forty years, had sustained a mild stroke while playing a trophy-sized rainbow trout below the High Falls behind the hotel, and Reverend Andrews had volunteered to coach the school’s baseball team, even though Nat wasn’t playing on it. And though he needn’t have troubled himself on my account, the new minister had already reestablished the defunct Sunday school and choir.
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 11
