A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Walt’s going to bring Nathan along this afternoon, James,” my father remarked. “Why don’t you take him fishing again?”

  I said I’d be glad to take Nat fishing if he wanted to go, but I doubted if he would. I’d asked him a couple of times the week before and he’d seemed lukewarm about the proposal, at best. I liked Nat fine and so did most of the other kids at the Academy, though no one seemed to understand why he didn’t want to play baseball, we knew from our pickup games at recess that he had a blazing fastball and a wicked curve. But I didn’t feel I could ask because Nathan was a junior, and I was still in eighth grade and reticent around the high school kids, and besides being an inveterate city kid, Nat was evidently somewhat of a loner. I didn’t quite know what to make of him, and I strongly suspected that the puzzlement was mutual.

  Nat did show up with his father that afternoon. He wanted no part at all of fishing, even though I assured him that this time we’d use garden worms instead of flies and go up the bum, as my father called the small stream that ran out of the gore, where no doubt the brook trout would be biting like crazy this time of year.

  For a while we shot baskets out behind the barn, but I was no match for Nat at this and I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it, either; so after a few minutes we went inside the hayloft where it was dim and cool and sat down on an old horse-drawn hayrake and Nat talked in a bored way about this and that, but mainly about how little there was to do in the Kingdom.

  “So what would you be doing this afternoon if you were back in Montreal, Nat?”

  “Don’t I wish I were! Let’s see, what would I be doing? Well, I imagine I’d ride the bus downtown, say down to St. Catherine Street, and take in a horror movie. Dracula or Frankenstein or something along those lines.”

  This intrigued me. Despite my fear of anything having to do with the supernatural, I had a keen interest in horror stories, Poe’s especially, and in spooky movies too, though I hadn’t seen very many. But before I could pursue the subject, Nat brought up something more interesting still.

  “If I couldn’t find a good Dracula or Frankenstein, I’d probably settle for a blue movie, eh? St. Catherine Street’s lined with them from one end to the other.”

  “A blue movie? What’s that? Like Technicolor?”

  Nat laughed. “You are the naive one, Kinneson, meaning no offense. A blue movie is what you’d call a dirty picture. You know, fellows and their girls having sex together.”

  I jumped up. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold on here just a minute. You mean to tell me there are movies, in Montreal, where guys and girls go at it right up there on the screen?”

  Nat laughed so hard he nearly fell off the hayrake. “You could jolly well put it that way, Kinneson. But truth to tell, blue movies are fairly boring too after you’ve seen a dozen or so, and I probably wouldn’t waste my time or money on one more anyway. So assuming I couldn’t find a horror show, I’d probably just walk the streets joshing with the whores. Or maybe I’d go up to the fine arts museum on Sherbrooke Street and visit the Egyptian wing. They’ve got real mummies there, artifacts dating back five thousand years and more. Now that’s something I’d like to go into—archeology. I’d have given about anything to be along on the Carnarvon expedition. Can you imagine how Howard Carter must have felt when he broke through that last seal and realized he was in Tut’s tomb at last? Thrill of a lifetime, eh?”

  I remembered reading about the King Tut expedition in the Boston Globe, and from what I knew about it, I could imagine wanting to be anyplace on earth other than inside that dreadful tomb. “Didn’t all those guys die violent mysterious deaths after they broke in there, Nat?”

  Nat laughed. “That’s a lot of hooey, Kinneson. Now you’re confusing the movie with the reality. No, they didn’t die violent deaths.”

  He was silent for a moment. A gloomy expression had suddenly come across his face. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “I wish we’d never gotten onto the subject.”

  “Of Egypt?”

  “Of Montreal.”

  “You wish you were still there, don’t you, Nat?”

  “What I wish doesn’t make the slightest difference. I’m not there. I’m stuck in an end-of-the line little burg where the nearest thing to an artifact is this bloody piece of farm junk I’m sitting on.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. What Nat said about the Kingdom hurt my feelings, yet I couldn’t help sympathizing with him. I knew how I’d feel if I woke up in the middle of downtown Montreal without a friend to my name or anywhere to fish or hunt.

  But I was curious.

  “Nat, how long did you live with your grandparents?”

  “Oh, off and on for about ten years. My grandfather died when I was five, not very long after my mother, so Gram and I sort of took care of each other after that. She pretty much let me do as I pleased, the way grandparents do, you know, and I was always good about getting my schoolwork done and helping out around the place. We were . . . well, friends, I suppose, Gram and I. A couple of times Dad tried having me stay with him on an air force base, once in Vancouver and once for a short while in Germany, but I didn’t like it and it wasn’t a good setup, without any mother and all.”

  “What did your grandfather do before he died?”

  “He was a professor at McGill.”

  “McGill?”

  “The University in Montreal. Let’s drop it, shall we, Kinneson? If I think about it much more, I’ll take the next train back.”

  We drifted outside, and Nat took a halfhearted shot at the basket and didn’t bother to retrieve the ball as it bounced back down the ramp. “Say, Kinneson,” he said, “what’s going on up there on that hill? Where all the cars and trucks are parked?”

  “That’s my cousin Resolvèd’s cockfight,” I said. “He has one every Decoration Day. People come up here from all over to bet on the roosters.”

  “You ever go?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  Nat laughed, not in a mean way. “What do you mean, not exactly? Have you been to a cockfight?”

  “Look,” I said, “you want to see what goes on there?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Fine,” I said in my best Huck Finn style. “Follow me, I’ll be glad to show you.”

  Dad often referred to my cousins’ place as the Kingdom’s own Congress of Wonders, and as Nat and I came into their dooryard, it was obvious why. At first sight, it looked like a parody of a roadside animal farm. Two half-wild raccoons growled at us from the top of a Model A Ford sitting on wood blocks. In a makeshift coop converted from the shell of an ancient bread truck were four or five partridges, which Resolvèd snared live in the woods and kept on hand for his prize fighting rooster, Ethan Allen Kinneson, to practice his martial arts on. A feral-looking hog rutted in the beginning (and end) of the most wretched garden I’d ever seen.

  The dooryard contained a number of antiquated farm implements, a quantity of chicken wire, several handleless tools, and a watering trough where half a dozen large rainbow trout hung finning near an inlet pipe that kept a steady flow of icy spring water bubbling in. TROUT 4 SAIL, read a sign propped against the trough.

  At one time a barn had been attached to the house, but my cousins had cannibalized it for firewood over the years until all that remained was the squat silo, itself canting off at an angle that made pictures I’d seen of the Leaning Tower of Pisa seem absolutely plumb. In recent years, Welcome had converted this edifice into an impromptu automobile body shop and observatory, from whose top he watched for flying saucers and other extraterrestrial objects with my great-great-great-grandfather’s pirate’s telescope.

  Besides his body shop in the old silo-observatory, Cousin Welcome maintained a junkyard on the edge of the woods running up into the gore, where for ten or fifteen dollars you could purchase a vehicle that he guaranteed would “run good.” (“I never said how far,” he would tell the dispirited and sometimes enraged teenaged boys who made up most
of his fifteen-dollar-and-under clientele as they trudged back up the lane from the gool, where their crippled clunkers had stalled out for good. “Buy her back from you for five bucks?”) It was from Welcome’s junkyard, too, that many local boys and men purchased their entries for Kingdom County’s annual end-of-July Smash-up Crash-up Derby.

  Welcome’s junkyard covered about five acres. It was an incredible mechanical hodgepodge, not just of old dead cars of all makes and vintages going back to Model Ts, but of dump trucks, logging trucks, tractors, stoves, old-fashioned iceboxes, console radios, a Brink’s armored car, and an operating steam crane on crawler treads with which Welcome moved vehicles around and stacked and unstacked them with unflagging gusto, making of his wrecks the most marvelous pentagons, Druid circles, and fleurs-de-lis, designed to attract visitors from outer space.

  Cousin W’s masterwork was a totem of car shells twenty vehicles high, resembling a surpassingly outlandish multicolored windmill tower. Sticking out of the top of this structure was the point of an old white pine, which Welcome had used to steady his automobile abacus. In a high wind, the whole shebang whipped back and forth with fearsome groans and clatters of protesting metal that could be heard as far away as the village common. My cousin’s car totem was one of the wonders of Kingdom County and something to see—from a distance.

  As we came into the dooryard, Welcome was grilling the day’s losers over a blazing fire in the old sunken vat once used to keep cans of milk cool. Stuck in his slouch hat was a small American flag in honor of Decoration Day. The neck of an Old Duke bottle protruded from his hunting jacket pocket. At his feet was a great heap of dead roosters of every color, which Frenchy LaMott was plucking and cleaning.

  “So where is everybody?” Nat asked me.

  “Down cellar. They have the fights in the house cellar.”

  I was afraid Welcome would send us packing, but instead he beckoned us forward. “Hurry up, boys,” he called. “You’re just in time for the finale.”

  As we approached the old slab of concrete, Frenchy ripped the innards out of a limp, gray-speckled bird and threw them in the direction of the two raccoons, who scrambled down off the Model A, snarling ferociously. “I thought that sign said no kids,” Frenchy said.

  “Family,” Welcome said, meaning that I was related and so exempt from the no-kids rule. To me he said, “You’re just in time. Ethan Allen’s about to be put up against Bumper’s Great White for the championship.”

  Frenchy, in the meantime, had been staring at Nathan. “Say, preacher boy. Old Bumper says your daddy ain’t going to last out the summer. Bumper says he don’t like the idea of your daddy preaching in that church.”

  “Why not?” Nathan did not seem angry, just curious.

  “You know why not,” Frenchy said. “You know damn well why not. You’d better tell your daddy to watch his step.”

  “Bumper Stevens ain’t been in that church since the night he got blind drunk and mistaken it for the hotel and went in to order more beer and tripped over the pulpit and knocked himself out cold, Frenchy,” Welcome said. “He don’t have no say what goes on over there. Now shut up and finish plucking them roosters.”

  Welcome shoved the first mess of roasting chickens to the far end of the grill where they wouldn’t burn and said, “I got to get down to that finale now. You two boys go along the side of the house to the cellar window past the kitchen. You can look in there and view the proceedings. Don’t say I sent you if you get caught.”

  Nathan and I started around the corner of the house, which listed off toward the east, where for years my cousins had banked up the foundation with dirt and the sills had rotted away. The kitchen door hung partway off its hinges, revealing a room unlike any I have ever seen since. Everywhere, on the table and counters, kitchen shelves and windowsills, were stacks of dishes encrusted with the unidentifiable remains of long-forgotten meals. Even the wood stove was piled high with plates and saucers. Stuffed into a gaping hole in the floor were burlap sacks overflowing with bottles and Campbell’s bean cans. Flyspecked calendars with faded pictures of cowgirls and bathing beauties sporting heavily waved hairstyles were tacked askew on the walls. A rank odor resembling that of rotten potatoes drifted out the door, though in the south window sat three of the biggest and reddest geraniums I’d ever seen, which Welcome had somehow managed to conjure into bloom under conditions that should have wilted the hardiest houseplant within a week.

  “Right out of Better Homes and Gardens,” Nat said.

  He put his finger to his lips and pointed to the cellar window just ahead of us. He dropped to his hands and knees. So did I, and we crawled forward through the debris of broken planks and tarpaper with which my cousins covered the opening during cold weather. Motioning for me to stay where I was, Nat rose to a crouch, sprinted past the window, flattened himself on his belly and looked back around into the cellar. Very cautiously, with my heart beating fast, I eased into position and peered into the cellar from my side.

  A rush of cool air hit my face. I caught the scent of damp earth, cigarette smoke, and the sweaty press of hard-drinking men crowded together in a small area.

  All I could see at first was a single naked lightbulb hanging from the cellar ceiling. By degrees, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I made out a ring of shadowy figures. Above them, on all four sides, rose the gigantic unmortared granite boulders my great-great-great-grandfather had somehow levered into place with the intention of using this redoubt as an ammunition and powder magazine for his projected invasion of Canada.

  The hundred or so men crowded below us were squatting around a shallow pit directly under the lightbulb in the center of the floor. The pit was about as large as a batter’s box and strewn with sawdust. Kneeling on opposite sides of it and facing one another like two troglodytes were Bumper Stevens and my cousin Resolvèd. Each man was holding his rooster by the tail feathers and the birds were lunging at each other across the pit. Just to one side sat a water bucket with a long-handled dipper.

  At first I thought the championship fight had already started, but after a minute I realized this was some sort of preliminary exercise to the serious bloodletting, since the birds were allowed to come only within a foot or so of each other, then were drawn back. Welcome, in the meantime, was elbowing his way through the crowd, recording bets on a pad and collecting money.

  Bumper and Resolvèd stood up and held their birds out over the pit. Both roosters let out shrill war cries. They slashed the air with their spurred feet and the light from the overhead bulb glinted fiercely off the honed steel rowels of the spurs.

  “Yes sir, gentlemen,” Welcome announced. “All wagers should be in, the championship bout of the day is about to commence. Be them birds ready?”

  “You bet your hairy ass!” Bumper Stevens roared.

  “Hold your water,” Resolvèd said. “Which regulations is it to be here, Albany or Boston?”

  “Albany, by the Jesus,” Bumper growled.

  The crowd murmured approval.

  “I don’t know about Albany,” Resolvèd said. “Ethan Allen’s six years old. He’s won what, four fights already today? He’s tired. Besides, I intend to put him out to pasture with two, three good-looking young hens after this bout.”

  “I and the Great White shall put him out to pasture for you,” Bumper said. “We’ll put him six foot under your Christly pasture.”

  “Old Ethan’s going to a bar-b-que, Cousin R,” yelled a stumblebum in a dirty white cowboy hat.

  “I ain’t just determined on no Albany regulations, Bumper,” Resolvèd said. “This was to be Ethan’s last go-round before retirement.”

  “It will be,” Bumper said. “I guarantee it.”

  “Albany rules, brother,” Welcome said briskly. “These good folk didn’t journey clear up here into God’s Kingdom to watch no sparring match. Ready?”

  “Ready!” Bumper hollered.

  Resolvèd said nothing.

  “Commence,” said Welcome, and t
he men tossed their birds into the ring.

  What happened next was not pretty. Before they hit the sawdust the two roosters were locked together. They spun over and over in a whirling blur of red and white feathers. They landed, disengaged momentarily, leapt high, and came together again.

  “Break,” Welcome said when the birds parted for the second time.

  Resolvèd and Bumper snatched up their roosters. The leghorn seemed to be unhurt, but Ethan Allen had been raked along the neck. How badly I couldn’t tell, because of the bird’s dark red plumage, but blood was dripping steadily off Ethan into the sawdust.

  Resolvèd stretched the red rooster’s neck out between his fingers and ran his tongue over the wound. He turned his head aside, spat, and repeated the process, like a man giving first aid to a snakebite victim. I was amazed. This was the first humane act I’d ever seen my outlaw cousin perform.

  Resolvèd reached for the water dipper. “Open your trap,” he said to Ethan, not ungently.

  Incredibly, Ethan Allen gaped his beak wide as a hungry nestling. Cousin R sipped from the dipper, tilted his head sideways, and allowed a few drops of water to trickle out of the corner of his mouth and down the rooster’s throat.

  Across the pit, Bumper Stevens flapped the leghorn’s wings up and down to ventilate its body. Someone handed him a bottle of beer, which he drank in three or four gulps, pouring the last small swallow directly down his rooster’s throat. Exultingly, he roared, “We got you now, poacher boy. I and Great White have got your ass in a rhinestone sling, by the cockfighting Jesus Christ.”