A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “A partridge,” I said.

  “Yes? Well, I am thinking he will want me to kill this part-ridge and cook it. Fine, I am willing. But no, he closes the door of the room. He shows the part-ridge to the great red he-chicken, Ethan, on the table. Then he releases her and she begins to fly like mad with the red chicken pursuing. All the while the brother is reading his flying-platter magazine and paying no attention.

  “I duck! The part-ridge, she is hit the wall, the roof, the window. Once she knocks off the reading brother’s black hat. Twice the he-chicken catches her. Both times she escapes. Blood! There is blood over everything.

  “At last I can endure no more. I run to the door and open it. The brown bird flies for the opening. BANC! Before I know it, the Resolvèd has shoot the poor bird dead. Next he points his Betsy at me. His mouth is going, he is very angry, but I have no idea what he is saying because my ears are singing so.”

  Claire paused. “This is when I make up my mind, James.”

  “You mean to leave?”

  She shook her head. “No. This is when I make up my mind that the farm of the Resolvèd does not much resemble the farm of Ma and Pa Kettle.”

  “You could safely say so,” I said. “What happened next?”

  “The Resolvèd continues to drink until his friend Old Duke is gone. Then he begins to clean Betsy again, and look at me, sideways from under his cap and say by and by we will see who is boss of his house and who opens doors without his consent and who does not. But at last he goes to sleep with his head in a dish of chicken feed on the table.

  “As soon as the Resolvèd is sleeping, the brother gets five dollars out of his purse and hands it to me and tells me to go home to Canady. He says be sure to write him a letter if I see any flying platters or green mens. Very good! I take the money and thank him and walk here to the village, already with my mind made up to work as the housekeeper of your brother, the true Monsieur Kin’son of the picture. After all, he has help me once, perhaps he will help again. And I do not think the Resolvèd will dare harm me there.”

  Arriving at the trailer about nine o’clock and finding the place dark and empty, Claire had gone inside and decided to make herself immediately useful, while awaiting my brother’s return, by cleaning up the kitchen.

  In the meantime, as I would learn later, Athena Allen was waiting up at home for her father the judge, who had been off with my father on an all-day fishing trip to the Upper Connecticut River. Judge Allen arrived around nine and remarked that when he and Dad had passed Charlie’s trailer, the kitchen light had been on but Charlie’s woody was gone. This gave Athena an inspiration.

  After the trout had been put away and the judge had drunk his bourbon nightcap and gone to bed, Athena slipped into the lavender baby-doll nightie Charlie had bought her in Montreal a year ago, threw the judge’s red wool hunting jacket over her shoulders, and drove over to Charlie’s trailer in her father’s Continental, intending to treat my brother to an intimate little two-person surprise party when he returned from his ballgame.

  When she arrived, she discovered to her amazement a good-looking young woman washing my brother’s breakfast dishes. Apparently Claire was equally surprised by the sight of a beautiful woman whom she had never laid eyes on before, clad only in the filmiest and most provocative nightwear, standing open-mouthed in the trailer door.

  “Who are you?” they’d said simultaneously.

  Athena never did identify herself. But finally Claire had said, “I am Claire LaRiviere. Monsieur Kin’son’s new housekeeper. From Quebec City, in Canada.”

  Athena nodded slowly. After a pretty long pause, she said, “So you’re the young woman from the fair?”

  Claire had said yes and had begun to try to explain everything, but by then Athena had started her acts of destruction. She was in the first flush of her outrage, not hurrying, but smiling and saying “I see” and hurling clothes and fishing gear and guns and magazines out the door. Working unhurriedly and thoroughly, telling Claire to sit down and take a break while at the same time, picking up the nearest kitchen chair and tossing it through the screen door. Telling Claire if she wanted to be useful she could warm up the two leftover pork chops in the pan on the stove, only to be sure to get them crisp. And all the time Claire was wanting to explain but she was too frightened to think of the English words. Finally Athena tried to pick up Charlie’s squat old refrigerator but she couldn’t budge it, so she opened it up and began methodically throwing beer and meat and vegetables and eggs and other perishables out the door. At this point Claire fled to the dooryard because she’d made up her mind that the woman in the lavender lace nightie was as crazy as Resolvèd.

  It took me a while, but eventually I managed to explain to Claire that Athena Allen wasn’t crazy, only jealous over Charlie. She had undoubtedly gotten the wrong impression when she’d walked into the trailer and discovered a pretty girl who announced out of the blue that she was Charlie’s new housekeeper.

  “Oh!” Claire said, putting her hand to her mouth. “This woman, this Athena. She and your brother, they are lovers?”

  “You could say that,” I said, thinking of the night I’d stayed over at Charlie’s after my fight with Frenchy. “Some of the time, anyway.”

  “Then I understand. The Athena is very passionate, very jealous! Oh, James! I believe I am fortunate she does not take a knife and slit my throat. You did not inform me your brother had a lover! Now surely I must leave Vermont. I would rather ran the risk of meeting the Resolvèd again than this fierce lover of your brother’s. Did you see her eyes? Never have I seen such a fine anger. Will she kill him now?”

  I laughed and told Claire not to worry, that Charlie and Athena had had fights before, plenty of them, and everything could be explained. In the meantime, we desperately needed to find somewhere for her to stay. Once again I suggested my folks’ place. But she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Look, Claire, if you won’t stay with us, why not stay with—” With whom? Who would help this engaging girl I had half-fallen in love with myself?

  Suddenly I had an inspiration. Ministers were supposed to help people. And Reverend Andrews had lots of room at the parsonage. What’s more, he needed a housekeeper, if only to get Hefty Hefner off his back. And when and if Resolvèd did find out where Claire was, he wouldn’t dare go near the parsonage after what Reverend Andrews had done to Bumper Stevens on the day of the cockfight. Also, I could see her there as often as I wanted.

  It seemed like the perfect solution.

  “I’ve got it!” I said excitedly. “There’s this minister in the village. He’s really nice, and his son’s my best friend. I’m about positive you can stay there.”

  Claire thought for a moment. Then she reached out and grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Good! The matter is settled. You will tell me how to get there.”

  “I’ll do better than that, Claire. I’ll take you there myself.”

  I was quite sure that Resolvèd would never harm Claire when he was sober, but it occurred to me that even now my outlaw cousin might be out hunting for her with his bosom friends and fellow troublemakers Old Duke and Betsy. Moreover, as we approached the village I began to have misgivings about my proposal. Despite my earlier assurances to Claire, I didn’t really know Reverend Andrews well enough to be sure he’d take her in.

  As we started up the knoll on the east end of town, another doubt crossed my mind. “Claire? There’s something I forgot to tell you. The minister we’re going to see? He’s a Negro.”

  “A Negro? You mean a colored man?”

  “Yes. Like I said, he’s a really nice man. Everybody likes him a lot. Well, the cattle auctioneer doesn’t, but he doesn’t count, he’s just an old drunk. Everybody else does. Nobody even thinks of him as being a Negro, actually. I just wanted you to know ahead of time so you wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I do not care about that, James. I see many black mens, black womens, too, in Quebec. Just so I can remain there a little.”


  We walked faster. Moving lights appeared, illuminating the mist ahead like a will-o’-the-wisp. We dodged into the ditch and the local milk truck rumbled by. Sheepishly, my heart still pounding, I helped Claire back onto the shoulder.

  At the top of the knoll, across the road from the parsonage, Elijah Kinneson’s cottage squatted darkly in the fog. For all I knew the sour old sexton might be out navigating around in the nearby cemetery. It was a well-known fact, at least to us local boys, that my weird cousin often went walking about the village and surrounding countryside alone at night, for heaven knew what strange, private purposes.

  I wasn’t surprised to see a light in Reverend Andrews’ study window. I knew that the minister habitually stayed up until all hours reading or writing his sermons or doing research for the upcoming Old Home Day celebration. Nathan’s room above the study was dark.

  “This is the house,” I whispered when we reached the edge of the yard. “The minister’s still up. You wait here and I’ll go ask.”

  “No, James. You should not be involved in this. I will go alone.”

  Claire squeezed my hand hard and headed up toward the house. I ran along the broken-down fence and slipped in behind an old topless maple tree at the corner of the lot, where I could hide and watch what happened.

  Claire walked up the steps and crossed the rickety porch to the door. There she hesitated, a pale form, just visible, looking as evanescent as the ghost that was rumored to parade there once a year. I thought she waved to me once. At least I saw a faint blur that might have been a wave. Then she knocked softly, three times.

  After a few seconds the porch light came on and the door opened.

  “Hello! What have we here?” Reverend Andrews said.

  “You are the preacher?”

  Already Claire’s voice sounded different, interrogatory and uncertain again, pitched higher than when she talked to me.

  “Yes, I’m a minister,” I heard Reverend Andrews say.

  “I am—Claire? Claire LaRiviere?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Reverend Andrews said in a surprised tone of sudden recognition, “Oh! You’re the Canadian girl who’s been staying out in that shack with Charles Kinneson’s relatives. Well, well. What on earth are you doing out at this time of night, Claire? Are you in some sort of difficulty?”

  Claire murmured something I didn’t catch, and then to my great relief the minister asked her in, and the porch light went off. At the same time, I thought I heard a noise across the street at Elijah’s cottage, but when I looked over his place was as dark as ever.

  To avoid having to pass near Charlie’s trailer again—despite my reassurances to Claire, the fight between my brother and Athena had disconcerted me terribly—I decided to go home by way of the village and the covered bridge. As usual late at night, the deserted Common looked like a totally different spot from the bustling daytime hub of activity for the county. The hotel and commission sales barn were totally dark. The courthouse and Academy were dark. Except for the single nightlight reflected in the Monitor’s window, the entire brick business block was dark.

  As I approached the covered bridge, I was tempted to keep right on going and cross to the gool on the B and M trestle. But I didn’t relish the idea of feeling my way over the ties high above the river in the dark, so, taking a deep breath, I started through the pitch-black portal at a fast walk.

  Miraculously, I made it to the other side of the bridge intact The mist was much thicker now. It clung wetly to my face and hands and cut visibility down to almost nothing. I had to feel for the road with my feet, which suddenly went completely out from under me. I was overpowered by the odor of Old Duke wine as I reached into the darkness to break my fall, clutching first a boot and then the cold steel of a gun barrel.

  I had tripped over Resolvèd Kinneson, sprawled dead drunk by the side of the road with his beloved Betsy cradled in his arms.

  9

  “Just now she’s up in Nathan’s room, regaling him with the tale of her odyssey to Vermont,” Reverend Andrews said with one of his wry chuckles. “She’s already told me the saga half a dozen times in the past couple of weeks. It puts me in mind of a Frenchified version of The Perils of Pauline.”

  It was early evening, mid-July. The minister and my father were sitting in two kitchen chairs Reverend Andrews had brought onto the veranda for summer porch furniture, looking out through the great tangled bittersweet vine that ran from railing to roof. I sprawled gloomily on the porch steps.

  For the past couple of weeks, since Claire had moved in with the Andrewses, Nathan had been more aloof than ever. I didn’t know whether he blamed me for getting him entangled in the raid at the Paris Revue tent or was still upset over the episode with Frenchy at the trestle; but for days on end he’d been denned up inside the parsonage, doing what I had no idea. Once or twice we’d gone over to the ball field together and played Twenty-seven Outs, an ingenious and endlessly fascinating game of Nat’s devising in which we batted, pitched, and fielded our way through a simulated nine-inning game between my Red Sox and his team, the Brooklyn Dodgers; but for the most part he seemed not to want to hang around with a kid three years younger than he was, or with any other kid for that matter. The fact is that Nat Andrews simply wasn’t interested in most of my rural pursuits and had been more or less miserable since the day he arrived in Kingdom County. I’d sensed his dissatisfaction from the minute I first laid eyes on him at the Ridge Runner Diner, and nothing had happened to change his outlook since then.

  Claire, on the other hand, was always happy to see me; but she was busy with her new “housekeeping” duties at the parsonage, and had little time on her hands.

  Across the street from the parsonage, Elijah Kinneson was out on his porch working on his single hobby, a four-foot peeled and polished pine log on sawhorses, which for as long as I could recall he had been carving into a wooden chain with no beginning and no end. He called this dizzying oddity his “Endless Maze of the Kingdom,” and by the time I was thirteen it was already many hundreds of links long and one of my father’s “Seven Man-made and Natural Wonders of the Kingdom”—the others being Pliny Templeton’s Ecclesiastical History, the Dog Cart Man’s pictograph on the cliff above the disused quarry of the gypsies who once came annually to Kingdom County, the leaping brook trout on the side of our bum, and Elijah, Resolvèd, and Welcome themselves—though as nearly as I could see, Elijah’s Endless Maze served absolutely no purpose at all. Like my weird cousin himself, it was a conundrum to me.

  Carving away with his long shiny knife, Elijah didn’t ever seem to glance over at us. But I had no doubt that my cousin had seen every move Dad and I had made since we’d arrived at the parsonage fifteen minutes ago.

  Reverend Andrews shook his head. “That bloke across the street’s been over twice in the last couple of days to tell me that I ought to send the LaRiviere waif packing. The second time was this afternoon, and I all but sent him packing.

  “At least I don’t have to worry about his brother the outlaw for a while,’ Reverend Andrews added. “That’s a relief.”

  I laughed and looked at my father, who actually smiled. After coming across Resolvèd passed out on the gool the night Claire had gone to stay at the minister’s, I’d run right past our house and back across the red iron bridge to Charlie’s trailer to report my discovery, Athena was long gone by the time I arrived, but far from being dejected by the outcome of her visit, my irrepressible brother had told me to hop into his woody if I wanted to see something new and wonderful happen. Charlie then proceeded to play what may well have been the crowning practical joke of his career. We’d driven back out to the gool, geehawed my cousin’s insensible carcass into the woody, and taken it straight to Painless Doc Harrison’s house on Anderson Hill. There Charlie had recruited the doctor, a famous practical joker in his own right, to put Resolvèd out of commission for several weeks by clapping my cousin’s entire left leg into a cast. When Resolvèd came to, Painless solemnly told
him that he’d fallen off a culvert and broken his leg in four places, and if he didn’t lie still in bed for a solid month he’d never walk again.

  “Elijah’s not the only busybody who’s been hectoring me about the girl,” Reverend Andrews was saying to my father. “The reason I asked you to stop by this evening is that I’m under a considerable amount of pressure to ship her out. Julia Hefner dropped by this afternoon and read me a regular lecture on the matter. She began by telling me that it’s been bruited about town that Claire was originally with those strip shows at the fair and that she just spelled trouble. “To put it plainly, Reverend,’ she said, ‘speaking on behalf of some concerned ladies of the church, we’d very much like you to find another place for her immediately.’”

  My father snorted. “That’s Julia for you all over again. She and I went to school together. There’s no one anywhere who’s better at finding a pious reason to do a mean thing than that old biddy. What does she want you to do, kick the poor kid out in the street?”

  “Well, I probably shouldn’t have done this, but having just heard the same line from our friend the sexton earlier in the day, I was pretty vexed. So I said, fine, which of the concerned ladies of the church would be willing to put Claire up for a few days?”

  “That’s calling the old bat’s bluff. What did she say to that?”

  “She asked if I couldn’t just put the girl on a bus back to Canada or wherever. I told her I supposed I could. Don’t think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind more than once. But I can’t quite bring myself to do that. Claire doesn’t want to go back to Canada, and as I understand it, for very good reasons.

  “I told Julia as tactfully as I could that I was at least as uncomfortable about the situation as anyone in town, but I couldn’t just wash my hands of the girl. I resisted the temptation to cite the story of Jesus and the fallen woman about to be stoned, by the by. I don’t suppose Julia would approve of how He handled that, either. I did make bold to tell her that I didn’t for a minute believe that the ladies of the church would want a minister who turned his back on this type of responsibility, though.”