A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Hollywood’s a long ways. Why don’t you come back home with me? I know my folks can help you.”

  “I think of that already, James. But I cannot do it. The Resolvèd will certainly know I am there and come searching for me with Duke’s wife Betsy.”

  “No, he won’t. Resolvèd’s an awful piece of work, but he isn’t going to kill you or anyone else.”

  “Then perhaps I should go back there and try once more. After all, there are many dishes to do and there is still the matter of the bus ticket. Etienne LaRiviere did not bring up his daughter to ignore her debts!”

  An idea occurred to me. “Claire, there’s one more thing you could do. You know my older brother Charlie? The guy whose picture Resolvèd sent you, who jumped up on the stage and sort of came to your rescue at the fair? Well, he’s a lawyer and smart as a whip. Plus he wrote that—Well, let’s just say he’d help you. You can bet on it.”

  Claire thought a minute. “Where does this man with the face like a cowboy star live, James? This brother of yours?”

  “You know the bridge you came over to get to our place and Resolvèd’s? Right there on the riverbank in a little green trailer—”

  “You!”

  I spun around. Not ten feet away, standing on the far end of the ledge, up to his ankles in the brook, his shotgun crooked over his arm, was Resolvèd Kinneson!

  “Down to the house,” he said to Claire, and jerked his head in that direction.

  She looked at me significantly, as though she’d known all along that this would happen.

  “You don’t have to go anywhere with him, Claire. Not anywhere.”

  “I believe it is for the best, James.”

  “You don’t have to go.”

  Claire just shrugged again and headed off through the second-growth woods toward Resolvèd’s.

  My cousin remained where he was until she was out of sight. Quite deliberately he shifted the gun so that it was pointed at the ledge between us. “I’m a-going to tell you a thing, young boy,” he said. “One thing, just once. Keep away from my housekeeper.”

  I stared at him and did not reply.

  For a moment Resolvèd stared back. Then he turned and sloshed down the burn and blended into the trees.

  8

  I arrived at Charlie’s trailer at five o’clock on the dot. He was sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with the red-and-yellow-pattemed linoleum top, thumbing through the July issue of Argosy.

  Charlie had recently returned from a fishing trip to Canada with Royce St. Onge, and the trailer reeked of mildew, fish scales, overripe live bait, and wet canvas. Besides the usual clutter, the wadded-up uniform parts slung here and there, the empty quart beer bottles, the batting statistics taped on the refrigerator door, and the girlie calendars on the wall, the room was strewn with fishing and camping gear: damp smelly sleeping bags, drying fly lines strung back and forth from one end of the kitchen to the other, greasy frying pans and tin plates and cups, boxes of leftover cans of corned beef hash and baked beans and evaporated milk, and slung over the top of the refrigerator, a ranksmelling two-man pup tent.

  “It’s Jim Kinneson, the next All-State shortstop to come out of the Common Academy!” Charlie hollered in his great booming voice as I came through the door. “You ready to see the Memphremagog Loggers get whipped within an inch of their worthless lives under the lights tonight?”

  I was ready, all right. I’d never seen a night game before, and I’d been looking forward to going on this trip with Charlie and his Outlaws for days. But there was something else I had to discuss with my brother before I could concentrate on baseball.

  “Charlie? You know that girl from the fair, Saint Catherine? The one that knew you?”

  Charlie covered his head with the magazine. “Your father’s filled me in on the situation, buddy. He wasn’t overjoyed, to say the least. I never in this world believed that anybody would answer that ad I helped Cousin R write. Question is, what the hell are we going to do with her? Is she still at home?”

  Quickly I brought Charlie up to date on the events of the day, how Claire had gone up to Resolvèd’s early that morning and met him and Welcome and Ethan Allen, and my encounter with her and Resolvèd at the quarry.

  My brother didn’t seem particularly distressed by her predicament. “Well, chances are that after two or three days she’ll go back to Quebec or wherever she came from, buddy. In the meantime, you and I have got a baseball game to go to.”

  He rolled up the magazine, went into his batting stance, and hit an imaginary home run. “I intend to go four for four or five for five tonight. Plus I’m going to put one over the centerfield fence into the lake. You’ll love it, let’s get going.”

  We met the rest of Charlie’s team in the Common and headed up old Route Five toward the little Canadian border city of Memphremagog, on the south end of the big lake of the same name. Memphremagog was Kingdom Common’s longtime traditional rival. The two teams were tied for first place in the Northern Vermont Border League, and we had the makings of a convoy tonight. Charlie led the way in his woody. Royce St. Onge and Stub Poulin and I rode with him. The three wild Kittredge brothers from Lord Hollow came next, followed by Pine Benson and Johnny Quinn and several others.

  I rode in front between Charlie and Royce. As we bounced along over the heaved macadam with grass growing up in the middle, Royce and Stub teased my brother mercilessly The story of Claire LaRiviere and how she had come to Kingdom County was all over town by now, and worse yet, it turned out that Stub had been in the Paris Revue tent when Charlie had rescued Claire and she’d called him by name.

  “I’d hate to think what your cousin Athena would do to Charlie if she ever got wind of that tent show business, Royce,” Stub said.

  “She’d divorce him, that’s what she’d do,” Royce said, opening a beer. “Old Athena don’t put up with no two-timers, I’m here to tell you.”

  Stub was notoriously slow on the uptake. “How can she divorce him, Royce? They ain’t even married.”

  “You explain it, Charlie,” Royce said “You’re the lawyer.” And he laughed uproariously.

  “Crack me open a cold one, Royce,” Stub said.

  “Who the hell you think I am, anyway, your nigger waiter?” Royce said.

  “Speaking of which,” Royce said as he opened Stub’s beer, “how you coming on getting your buddy the new preacher to play ball for us, Charlie K?”

  Charlie shrugged. “He says he can’t this summer. He’s too busy.”

  “Poor excuse,” Royce said. “You know what they say about fishing. When you’re too busy to go fishing, you’re too busy. Same’s true about playing baseball. High school boys say he’s quite a ball player, too. Hit the ball a ton, and a curve ball they couldn’t none of them touch.”

  “This ain’t high school ball,” Stub said. “In case you hadn’t noticed. The day that nigger walks onto the field with us is the day I walk off. I don’t want to tell you how to run your business, Charlie, but you and some others in your family is getting the name around these parts of nigger lovers.”

  “That’s right, Stub, you don’t want to tell me how to run my business,” Charlie said. “So don’t.”

  “Don’t get all hot under the collar, now, Charlie,” Royce said. “Stub don’t mean nothing by all that. Hell, until Andrews hit town I doubt Stub’d ever even seen a colored fella. Did you, Stub?”

  “I seen a few,” Stub said. “Enough to know I don’t like ’em.”

  “Why’s that, Stub?” Charlie said.

  “Well, for one thing, you can’t trust them around your women. Christ, once a woman’s been with one, she don’t want nothing more to do with a white man.”

  “To put it politely, Stub, that’s bullshit.”

  “I don’t know,” Royce said. “I ain’t saying what Stub says is true in all cases, Charlie, but did you ever see one in the shower? I did once.

  I think there might be something to it. Another thing. I don’
t know if I should be saying this in front of young Jim here, but when I was over across in France I went with a colored woman once, and hoo boy, was she something!”

  “So why would a Negro man want to go with a white woman, then?” Charlie said.

  “They do, though,” Stub said. “They all do.”

  Charlie laughed. “You guys are so ignorant on this subject you don’t know how ignorant you are. But what if a Negro man did want to go out with a white woman? So Christly what?”

  “You want old Athena dating Andrews, do you?” Stub said.

  “I don’t want old Athena dating anybody except me, but I’ll tell you something right now. If and when the Reverend Walter Andrews ever decides to play for this team, he’s going to—and that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

  The Memphremagog baseball field was over on the northeast side of town, across the bay and behind the big paper mill where most of the Loggers team worked during the day. There was a night shift at the factory, and you could find the factory by following your nose; the stench was terrific.

  The field was a poor excuse for a ball diamond, with a gravelly infield and a few clumps of brown grass here and there in the cindery outfield, where the local high school team played soccer in the fall. I sat on the third base line behind the Outlaws’ dugout. The Loggers drifted onto the field and took batting practice and then infield. Afterwards the Outlaws took batting practice, and when Charlie came up he pounded one ball after another deep over the outfield fence. The last ball Charlie hit knocked out a light on the center field light pole, which the Memphremagog manager tried to get him to pay for. Charlie laughed and some sharp words were exchanged, much to the amusement of the rest of the Outlaws.

  In the first inning, Charlie hit a home run so far over the fence it landed in the bay. As he trotted around third, he winked at me, on my feet and clapping like crazy.

  In the Loggers’ half of the inning, my brother threw out two base runners with perfect pegs. One tried to steal second and Stub Poulin didn’t move his glove three inches to slap on the tag. Charlie caught the other runner napping off first base and nailed him with a bullet.

  Stub led off in the third inning with a single. Big Harlan Kittredge was up next, and the Loggers’ pitcher reared back and threw the first pitch straight at Harlan’s head. Batting helmets were unknown in those days, and Harlan got down in the dirt just in time. But when it happened again on the very next pitch, Big Harlan charged the mound so fast he was halfway there before I realized what he was doing. I think he got at least one good lick in, because the next thing I knew the pitcher was sitting on the pitching rubber and holding his glove over his head. But then the Memphremagog catcher ran out and gave Harlan a rabbit punch in the back of the neck, and all hell broke loose as both benches cleared, and the umpire called the game on the spot.

  “Can I ask you something, Charlie?” I said an hour later, after we’d dropped Stub and Royce off in the Common. “Remember what you said to Dad back on Easter Sunday? That there wasn’t that much prejudice in Kingdom County? What about Stub, what he said about not playing for the Outlaws anymore if Reverend Andrews played? Isn’t he prejudiced?”

  “You bet he is, buddy. So’s Bumper Stevens, so’s Frenchy LaMott, so’s that flaming asshole Mason White.”

  “Well, old Mason did tell me that some of the nicest folks he ever met were colored people.”

  “Bull. Nine out of ten bigots will tell you the same thing.”

  “How about Royce? He doesn’t seem to dislike Reverend Andrews, but what about that business about seeing Negroes in the shower and all?”

  “That’s just ignorance on Royce’s part. Which of course defines all prejudice. Ignorance and fear of what’s strange and different.”

  I shook my head. “I guess I just don’t understand. Stub’s prejudiced, Bumper and Mason are prejudiced, Frenchy’s prejudiced, even Royce is prejudiced. They can’t all be exceptions to the rule, can they? I’m not trying to start an argument, Charlie, but wouldn’t you say Dad’s right, that there’s as much prejudice here as anywhere else?”

  “Look, Jimmy, prejudice exists in Kingdom County the same as it does everywhere else, including Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. And I have to admit that I’ve been surprised by the extent of it here, and by its casualness. I’ve heard all those mindless slurs for as long as I can remember; but truth to tell, I never paid much attention to them until recently. It’s funny, but you never really see your hometown all that clearly until you go away and come back.”

  “So how come you hang around with these guys, then, Charlie?”

  “Not hanging around with ’em isn’t any solution. That would be prejudiced on my part. I don’t have to agree with them to be friends with them, and I don’t have to give up my friendship with them to be friends with Walt Andrews. Understand?”

  I wasn’t at all sure that I did, but I didn’t say so. Another question had been bothering me. “So just how much prejudice is there up in the Kingdom, do you suppose?”

  Charlie frowned. “Maybe it’s time we asked ourselves that question.”

  “But what’s the answer?”

  For once my brother seemed to be stymied. “I don’t know,” he said seriously. “Time will tell, I guess.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no. There’s trouble ahead at the pass!”

  Every light was on inside Charlie’s trailer, and in the bright headlights of the woody, Claire LaRiviere was sitting in her dress of many colors in the dooryard on an enormous pile of bedding and chairs and clothes, tents and sleeping bags, fishing and hunting gear, beer bottles and broken china, and magazines and books. Off to the side sat Judge Allen’s black Lincoln Continental.

  Charlie didn’t even bother to shut off his headlights before leaping out of the woody.

  “WHAT IN THE HELL—”

  Claire scrambled down off the pile and rashed headlong into my brother’s arms. “Monsieur Kin’son!” she yelped. “Oh, Monsieur Kin’son, I am so glad you arrive at last. A crazy woman is destroy your house!”

  At that exact moment a kitchen chair flew through the trailer’s screen door. It was followed immediately by Athena Allen, dressed in the sheerest and briefest lavender-colored nightgown. In her arms was a stack of outdoor and girlie magazines, which she flung in Charlie’s direction.

  “Athena!” Charlie yelled. “What’s going—”

  Athena vanished inside the trailer again. Claire gave another shriek and clung to Charlie’s neck like a frightened puppet. He couldn’t shake her off to save his life. Athena reappeared, staggering under the weight of a cardboard box containing Charlie’s country and western albums, which she slammed down on top of the pile of household furnishings.

  Athena smiled at my brother, who was still trying to disengage himself from Claire. “Hello, Charlie,” she said. “How’d you guys do tonight? Did you win?”

  Athena did not appear to be especially upset. She didn’t raise her voice at all, but went briskly back inside, reemerging seconds later with Charlie’s two-foot-high MVP trophy from last winter’s basketball playoffs, which she casually hurled over the top of the trailer and out into the dark river.

  “Monsieur Kin’son wants a cute little housekeeper, Jimmy, so we’ll give him one,” my ex-grammar teacher said with another sweet smile. She was quite calm, quite serene as she stepped back inside, administering en route a kick to the screen door and knocking it completely off its hinges into the bull thistles beside the stoop.

  Charlie finally managed to disentangle Claire’s arms from around his neck and was holding her off by the wrists when Athena next appeared in the trailer doorway. This time she was carrying a volume of considerable size and weight. I realized with horror that it was Charlie’s treasured scrapbook chronicling his athletic accomplishments from his most recent town team exploits all the way back through his glory years at Dartmouth to his heyday as a three-sport star at the Academy.

  “KINGDOM COMMON TAKES THIRD CONSECUTIVE STATE
HARDBALL TITLE: KINNESON WALLOPS WINNING HOME RUN,” Athena read in her most pleasant school-marm style, and hurled the scrapbook galley west.

  Precious, irreplaceable clippings and photographs dating back more than a decade rained down all over the dooryard. Claire shrieked.

  “Jim, get this girl the hell out of here,” Charlie roared. “Take her home. Take her anyplace—but get her out of here.”

  I grabbed Claire’s hand and we took off together, out of the dooryard and back down the county road toward the red iron bridge. The last thing I heard from the trailer was shattering glass and then Athena’s voice, quite calm and reasonable, saying, “. . . and two leftover pork chops in a number-ten hying pan, fried crisp just the way Monsieur Kin’son prefers them. We’re through, you two-timing son-of-a-bitch!”

  When the misunderstanding was finally straightened out, to the degree that it ever was straightened out that summer, this is what we discovered had happened. While Charlie and I were in Memphremagog Claire had run into an unexpected problem at Resolvèd’s, which she explained to me after we sought temporary refuge under the red iron bridge downriver from Charlie’s trailer.

  Claire said that soon after supper Resolvèd had actually proposed to her. When she recovered from her astonishment and told him that marriage was definitely out of the question for her, citing her plan to go to Hollywood and try for a part in the movies, he had flown into a towering rage.

  “You are familiar with the great red he-chicken, James?”

  “Ethan Allen? Sure.”

  “Very well. As you know, this Ethan dwells in the house with the Resolvèd and the brother. Tonight when the Resolvèd becomes angry with me because I will not agree to marry him, he gets out his shotgun, Betsy, and tells me he will show me something very entertaining. He goes out and a moment later he returns. Under his arm he is holding a wild brown bird. I have heard my father’s mother from the Laurentian Mountains call this bird ‘chicken of the woods.’ I do not know what you call it here in Ver-mont.”