A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Frenchy laughed. “How ’bout I give you two dollars?”

  “How about you go to hell?”

  But Frenchy LaMott did not hear my rejoinder. Frenchy was flying through the air. Then he was sprawled on all fours on the ground at the foot of the ramp and Hook LaMott, all six feet, six inches of him, was shouting angrily at him from the entrance of the slaughterhouse, where he’d come silently up behind us and, with no warning at all, booted Frenchy off the ramp.

  “What da hell you doing, firing off guns ’round here, you crazy French bastard?” Hook yelled.

  Down the ramp Hook came, swinging his great iron homemade prosthetic device menacingly. “Give me dat gun, you wort’less little shit.”

  Frenchy scrambled to his feet. He clapped his hand over the pistol butt. “Come get it, you one-clawed old son-of-a-bitch.”

  Just then Ida called Hook’s name. She and my mother were hurrying down through the bull thistles from the house. “Hook! I got three more day a week work, me. Housekeeper work!”

  Hook looked from Frenchy, standing crouched with his hand on the .22 in a weird parody of a western gunslinger, to his sister Ida. He frowned. “Over there?” he said, pointing across the river toward our farmhouse.

  “No, overstreet in village. Madame K here tell me new preacher fella need a housekeeper three day a week. Well, we need money, us. Frenchy got to have new pair boots soon. Just last night I say three extra Hail Marys for Frenchy boots and today, job pop up! God is good, eh?”

  Hook frowned and rubbed his hook. Or maybe he was rubbing his hand with his hook. It was hard to tell. “What Bumper say?”

  “Bumper don’t have no say. I ain’t Bumper’s nigger servant, excuse me, missus. Bumper ain’t my boss, him. Bumper ain’t nothing to me one way or other no more. You the one I work for, Hook. You got the say-so here.”

  “I don’ know,” Hook said.

  “What you don’t know?”

  “Don’ know if I want you keep house for dat colored fella.”

  “He ain’t no ordinary colored fella, Hook. He a Christly preacher. Speak the best goddamn English in the Kingdom next to Editor K. What more you want, you? Want me to get a job keeping house for the frigging Queen Mother?”

  “I don’ know as I want you traipsing all over da Christly Kingdom keeping up colored preachers’ houses when you got sausage to grind here, by da bald-headed Christ.”

  “Let her go, mon oncle,” Frenchy said in a surly voice. “I grind you frigging sausage for you.”

  “I told you shut you trap!” Hook said, and kicked Frenchy hard in the leg with his steel-toed workshoe.

  Howling in pain, Frenchy drew his pistol and pointed it straight at Hook’s chest. “You had it, you Canuck bastard,” he shouted. “You going to die!”

  Hook laughed and took a step toward him. Frenchy fired, and a jagged splinter ripped off the frame of the shed entrance beyond Hook’s head. Hook laughed again and took another step Frenchy fired past him twice more.

  When, to my total astonishment, my mother stepped quickly between Hook LaMott and Frenchy.

  “Hand me that revolver, Frenchy,” she said. “Someone’s going to get hurt if this keeps up. Give it here, please.”

  My mother’s voice was quiet and businesslike, as though she were removing a sharp instrument from the hands of a young child

  “Hand it here,” she said again. “We’ve had quite enough gunplay for one morning. I’ll give it to your mother and she’ll give it back to you again after everyone’s simmered down.”

  “Give her gun, Frenchy!” Ida screamed. “Give her gun, quick, ’fore you do something can’t be undone.”

  Mom held out her hand. “Give me the gun, please, Frenchy.”

  Miraculously, Frenchy handed the revolver to my mother, who in turn gave it to Ida.

  “I kill you later, Canuck,” Frenchy yelled at Hook. But his uncle just laughed again and went back up the ramp into the shed.

  “Well, then,” Mom said to Ida “Shall I tell Reverend Andrews you’ll be there at nine Monday morning?”

  “You bet, missus,” Ida said, beaming “You bet I be there. With, how it go? With bells on, eh? You tell that preacher man I be there with Christly bells on. And if Ida LaMott say she do something, you know she do it. Thank you, missus. And thank you for keeping Frenchy from killing old Hook and going jail, then Ida go to poorhouse.”

  “I don’t think he really intended to harm his uncle,” my mother said.

  “Yes, he did,” Ida said. “Some day he going to, too. You mistreat a dog long enough, he turn on you, eh? But not today maybe. Thank you, missus.”

  “Yes, indeed, Mrs. LaMott. Thank you. Good morning.”

  “Good morning, missus. See you later, Jimmy. Come again, you. Come anytime. God is good!”

  “Boy, Mom!” I said over and over again on the way home. “Boy oh boy oh boy. I loved the way you got that gun away from Frenchy. That was terrific. Dad couldn’t have done any better himself.”

  My mother smiled. “Speaking of your father, Jimmy, let’s just keep this little episode at the LaMotts’ a secret between us two, shall we? You know how he worries about me. This might upset him more than would be good for him.”

  “You got it, Mom. Mum’s the word. Say, where did you ever get all those guts? Weren’t you scared Frenchy was going to shoot you?”

  “Oh, no. Your grandfather the poor captain was forever disarming his unfortunate gentlemen at the mission. You’d be amazed at what he’d confiscate just in a month—broken bottles, homemade knives, homemade guns, even. I was the only student at the Boston School for Young Methodist Ladies with a souvenir collection of lethal weapons in her bedroom.”

  I laughed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the events of the morning. “You think Ida’ll really show up at the minister’s, Mom?”

  “Absolutely. If the LaMotts say they’ll do something, why, they will. And that’s the—”

  “—beginning and the end of it,” I said, and we both laughed.

  It had rained hard on the night in late June that Claire LaRiviere arrived on the gool. Then it did not rain again for more than a month. Day after day the filmy dawn mist above the river burned off to reveal the clearest of blue summer skies.

  I spent many afternoons that month haying for Ben Currier, and hated nearly every minute of it; haying is the hottest and hardest farm work there is. Mornings, I worked for Dad at the Monitor, and in the evening I kept Mom company out in the garden or fished with Dad or Charlie, though as the drought continued and the river and burn dropped, the trout fishing got spotty. I had to master some of the finer points of handling a dry fly to get any action at all.

  I saw all of Charlie’s home ballgames, and by mid-July he was batting over .600. Once again he was talking about trying out for Montreal in the Triple A International League and maybe “going all the way to the top”—though not before he won the annual Smash-up Crash-up Derby, for which he’d hired Welcome Kinneson to fix up the old Brink’s armored car for him to enter in the big event. Dad told him bluntly that he ought to forget about the derby and concentrate on getting to the top of his own business, which in case he’d forgotten happened to be practicing law, but Charlie just laughed and said he could practice law anytime, but the derby came just once a year and this year he was determined to win it.

  Then later in July, with the derby just two weeks away, something happened that not only brought Charlie back to his office and responsibilities with a thunderous jolt but became the talk of the county and, for a time, the entire state—while simultaneously bearing out my father’s most vitriolic jeremiads on the lack of law and order in Kingdom County.

  Late one morning while I was at the Monitor cranking out handbills advertising Reverend Andrews’ upcoming Old Home Day, three large men in green Men from Mars masks with foot-long wavering antennae walked into the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Savings Bank of Kingdom Common and heisted $29,348.16 at shotgun-point while the mile-long 11:03 A.M
. Montreal freight lumbered by just outside, effectively cutting off the bank and the robbers from most of the village. They were inside the building for less than three minutes, no shots were fired, no one was hurt, and they escaped in Welcome’s Brink’s car, which they’d stolen earlier that same morning, along with the Men from Mars masks, from my cousin’s junkyard. Later that day the armored car was found abandoned up in the gore near Russia But to the ill-concealed delight of nearly everyone in Kingdom County, there was absolutely no trace of the bandits or their loot.

  Over the next several days, countless conjectures about the identity of the bank robbers were advanced on the sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block, in the post office and stores, in the courthouse offices, and in farm kitchens and dooryards and barns throughout the county. Gradually two very different theories emerged. The first, which at the time my father and Charlie both seemed to think quite probable, was that like three or four other bank robberies in remote towns along the Canadian-Vermont border over the past couple of years, the hit on the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ was very likely the handiwork of Montreal pros. It had all the earmarks of the other recent jobs, from the stolen local getaway car abandoned on an unwatched back road near the border to the use of shotguns—though the Martian masks were a new and inspired twist.

  The second (and more generally favored) theory about the robbery was that the three wild Kittredge boys from Lord Hollow—Harlan, Hiram, and Hen—had pulled off the heist, shrewdly timing it to coincide with both payroll day at the American Heritage Furniture Mill and the arrival of the B and M freight. Proponents of this theory held that after abandoning the Brink’s car at Russia, the Kittredge boys had cut cross-country over two mountains and through a big cedar swamp to their father’s place, where they promptly buried the money for disbursement at a more fit season.

  Unfortunately for Sheriff White and the five or six solemn and embarrassed FBI. agents who swarmed out over the countryside along the border for the next week or so, every shred of evidence against the Kittredge boys turned out to be highly circumstantial, a point my brother stressed repeatedly during the federal inquest that occupied every minute of his working time during the rest of that month True, Charlie conceded, old Whiskeyjack Kittredge had marched into the Farmers’ and Lumberers’ the previous week and requested a loan of five hundred dollars to erect a cedar-oil still at the junction of the Lord Hollow brook and the Upper Kingdom River, and when asked about his credit said it must be A-number-one because he had never borrowed a cent from anyone before in all his life. True, when he’d been turned down flat he had sung out in the presence of eight customers, two tellers, the lending officer, and the bank vice president that he intended to have his loan one way or another. Yet that was no proof that he had put his boys up to robbing the bank.

  Nor, Charlie was quick to point out, was the Kittredge boys’ long record of bar fights, motor vehicle violations, moonshining, whiskey-running, and infractions perpetrated against the wild four-footed, winged and finny populations of Kingdom County any indication that they would go so far as to hold up a bank at gunpoint. And of course the reputation of Big Harlan Kittredge as a man who, for a modest commission, would burn down your barn for the insurance was only that—a reputation, based on rumor. After all, Charlie had already gotten him off the hook for just such a charge back in March.

  So in the absence of witnesses who could identify the bandits, and since no trace of the stolen money ever did come to light (though Big Harlan and his younger brother Hen motored south to attend Hank Williams’ funeral the following January and stopped in New York City on the way home, where they were reported to have spent thousands of dollars on booze and girls during a monumental twenty-eight day binge), the United States attorney who convened the inquest in St. Johnsbury that July simply didn’t have a case he could take to a jury. Once again, as with the Ordney Gilson trial, Charlie’s name was bruited about the state in the newspapers, and Kingdom County was reconfirmed in the eyes of the rest of Vermont as a place where any type of law at all was a joke—an anomalous fragment of a wild and wooly frontier generally associated with territory twenty-five hundred miles further west a century ago. And once again, Attorney Charlie Kinneson was something of an outlaw-hero in the eyes of almost the entire Kingdom.

  The goings-on did preclude Charlie from any involvement in the smash-up derby, a fact that made him pretty ornery for a few days, but he vowed to win big the following summer, and I, for one, had no doubt that he would.

  Now that the misunderstanding of Claire’s nocturnal visit to my brother’s trailer had been cleared up, Charlie and Athena Allen were on good terms again. They were even talking about getting married in the fall, though Athena said she wouldn’t live in a trailer, especially one papered with cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield and smelling like a baseball clubhouse, and Charlie would have to get a place in the village first.

  As for Claire, after Ida LaMott came to work at the parsonage, she began taking long afternoon walks out into the countryside. One day when she passed our place I trailed along behind her, partly out of curiosity to find out where she went on these solitary excursions and partly to have an opportunity to see her alone and warn her about Frenchy’s designs.

  Instead of continuing along the gool and crossing back over the river by way of the covered bridge, she headed up the twisty woods road into the gore. For a minute I actually thought she might be returning to Resolvèd’s place. But she passed his lane with a single apprehensive glance toward the dilapidated old house and kept climbing up the mountain.

  About halfway to the top, she ducked off the gore road and struck out along the burn toward the abandoned quarry. I was surprised to see that there was a pretty well beaten path here. Apparently she’d been coming this way regularly.

  If Claire was going skinny-dipping, I didn’t want to startle her when she was in the water. So as soon as she reached the quarry, where I’d discovered her the first morning she went to Resolvèd’s, I hurried out of the woods and called her name.

  “Nathan?”

  “No, Claire, it’s Jimmy Kinneson. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Oh, by no means. You did not scare me, James.”

  Claire waded out into the brook and began to wash her hair in the little falls that dropped over the lip of the quarry.

  When she was through we sat together under the yellow birch tree at the corner of the granite ledge above the pool.

  “So, James. You are having a pleasant summer holiday from school?”

  “Yeah, it’s been okay. How about you? You doing all right over at the Andrews’?”

  “Oh, yes, I like it there very much, though of course now that Monsieur Andrews has hire Madame LaMott to keep house for him, there is really very little for me to do.”

  “That reminds me of something, Claire. You know Frenchy LaMott? Ida’s boy? You’ve got to watch out for him. The other day he offered to pay me two dollars to get you down under the old railroad trestle out of town, where he could . . . you know, attack you. If I were you I wouldn’t go out on any more walks alone.”

  “Bah! This Frenchy. Who is he that I should fear him? A dirty butcher’s boy. He is the least of my worries. If he attempts an offense, he will wish he never heard the name Claire LaRiviere, daughter of Etienne.”

  Claire looked off down over the tops of the trees along the burn. In the summertime from here, when the leaves were thick, you could just make out the top of the courthouse clock tower and the white church steeple. But the hills beyond and the varied greens of the farms and woodlots running up their sides stood out sharply under the clear blue sky.

  “Your Kingdom is very beautiful, James, do you not agree? It is every bit as beautiful as the small farm of my Laurentian grandmother. And you and your mother and father and your brother, the first Monsieur Kin’son of the photograph, and Monsieur Andrew and Nathan too, you have all been very good to me. Do you know what I wish? I wish I could stay here
forever.”

  “Well, Claire, maybe you can. Maybe you can stay right here and go to school in the fall.”

  “It would be a fine thing to think so, James. But that is out of the question. Surely the Resolvèd will not be in bed with the sick leg much longer. When the leg is well again, he will come looking for me and there is bound to be trouble—trouble Monsieur Andrew and Nathan must not be involve in. I must tell you that Monsieur Andrews, he is very good to me, like a father, but it is clear that he too wishes me to leave. Why else would he hire Madame LaMott to be housekeeper when I am already doing a satisfactory job?

  “Also, there is the matter of Holly-wood and the movies. Do not imagine that I have forgotten that. After Etienne LaRiviere is get sick I am, promise him that I will someday be a famous star in the movies and put to good use all he taught me when we work together in the streets of Quebec. I will never break that promise to Etienne.

  “Look, James. Here in my purse I have ten dollars. When I have twenty more, I will repay the Resolvèd for the bus fare he sends me and then I will save the sixty necessary for the ticket to Holly-wood, and be on my way. I do not expect it to be easy. But Etienne LaRiviere is train me well, and with hard work and a bit of luck, I will be a star yet. I am certain of it!”

  “Claire, I wasn’t going to tell you this. But my brother Charlie, he’s already paid Resolvèd for that bus ticket, and Resolvèd took the money, too, to keep himself in Old Duke while his leg’s in the cast. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Then I will repay Monsieur Charlie Kin’son!”

  “You don’t have to do that, either. Charlie wouldn’t take your money if you tried to give it to him He feels sort of responsible for your being here, see, ’cause he helped Resolvèd write that letter to the magazine in the first place.”

  “Is not his fault, James. I will repay him soon. Then I will go to Holly-wood if I must walk there. I am determined!”