“Well, if you are, I suppose you’ll get there all right. But promise me one thing. If anything happens, anything at all, and you do decide to leave right away, meet me here first. I’ve got over a hundred dollars in the bank that I could get out and—”
“James, I can never take your money. But I will promise you this, that before I depart, when the time to depart comes, I will certainly not go without saying goodbye to you. This I promise. What is that?”
“What’s what?”
“In the bush down the brook. You did not notice?”
I stood up and looked down along the alders. “I don’t see anything.”
“I am sure I see the bush move, James, and a green flash.”
“I think we’d better get out of here, Claire. Resolvèd’s ‘bad leg’ isn’t as bad as you might think.”
We headed quickly out around the alders where she’d seen the movement and along the path to the trace. We were both relieved to arrive there safely.
“I don’t like that quarry much,” I admitted on our way down to the gool. “It gives me the jim-jams, like the cemetery at night. That first morning I met you up there after the big rain? I thought your slip hanging in the tree was a ghost! Pretty silly of me, I guess.”
“By no means,” Claire said solemnly. “It is well-known in the Laurentian Mountains that the terrible loup-garou, the creature with the body of a man and head of a wolf, frequently lies in wait in a tree for children who have strayed from home.”
Abruptly Claire twisted her oval face slightly, made her eyes go crazy, lifted a hand like a claw, and gave an eerie little howl. Effortlessly she had turned into the dreaded loup-garou of the wild northern forest. I jumped back, and she laughed.
“As a young girl visiting my grandmother, I am very much frightd of the loup-garou, and other ghosts besides. It is only right to beware of such things at that age. Then as I grow older I am find that men like the bad man who is come to live with my mother after my father dies and the man with one eye at the Paris Revue and even perhaps the Resolvèd, with his green shirt and Betsy, are more to be frighten of than the Laurentian were-wolf even.”
I walked Claire back down the gool and over the red iron bridge to the parsonage. Nat was sitting out on the porch, in behind the bittersweet vines, and he gave me a start.
“What’s the matter, Kinneson? Did you think I was old Pliny’s ghost?”
“Do not make jokes of James’ ghost, Nathan,” Claire said. “In my grandmother’s mountains there were many of them, all very real indeed.
“I go in now, eh? Thank you, James, for keeping me company this evening and walking home with me. Your father is out, Nathan?”
“He’ll be back any minute,” Nathan said shortly. “There he is now—nope. It’s just that weird bloke across the street.”
Elijah Kinneson, coming from the direction of town, turned into his walk and went fast up his steps and inside his tiny sexton’s cottage.
“Well, then,” Claire said. “We will visit later, eh?”
I told Claire so long, but Nathan continued to sit out for a while, so I sat with him.
“Let me ask you something, Kinneson. Do you really believe in ghosts?”
“Well, to tell you the truth I don’t always. But the funny thing is, I’m afraid of them anyway.”
He laughed. “I know how to break you of that.”
“You do? How?”
“Remember that tale you told me about old Pliny’s bones coming here every year on the date of his suicide?”
“Sure. Everybody in town knows about that.”
“And if you can surprise the bones while they’re walking, grab ’em, and bury ’em, his soul’ll be put to rest? That’s how it goes?”
“That’s right.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Oh, boy. I don’t know, Nat. You really mean it?”
“Why not? If Pliny doesn’t put in an appearance, well then you don’t ever need to be afraid of ghosts again, right? You can write the whole tale off as a lot of crap. If he does show, why not do the old guy a favor and bury what’s left of him? It can’t be that hard just to grab him. If you ask me, those bones ought to be buried anyway. It’s almost sacrilegious to have ’em hanging over there in the science closet like something in a museum. What’s the date when they’re supposed to walk?”
“August fourth. The same day as your dad’s big celebration.”
“What do you say, are you game? At least it’ll give us something to look forward to besides that stupid Old Home Day. Keep me from going crazy in this burg.”
I shrugged. “What the hell. I’m not scared if you’re not.”
“Yes you are,” Nat said with a good-natured laugh. “Me too, a little. Let’s do it anyway. We’ll flip a coin to see who holds the lantern and who grabs him. Deal?”
I thought for a minute. Then I grinned. “Deal,” I said, already thinking how amused Charlie would be when I told him about our plans. Maybe he’d even join us, which would be just fine with me.
Except for the bank robbery, July was a welcome hiatus in an otherwise all-too-eventful summer. After the initial grumbling, plans for the big Old Home Day celebration were coming along swimmingly, as Reverend Andrews put it. Every day and again most evenings, committees met at the church or parsonage to plan the floats, skits, food, and entertainment booths, a big grudge baseball rematch between Charlie’s Outlaws and the Memphremagog Loggers, and a Grand Historical Cavalcade and Pageant. With the exception of the commission sales crowd and Cousin Elijah Kinneson, who flatly refused to participate in the celebration because of the “gaming booths,” everyone in town was excited about Old Home Day, though Castor Oil Quinn and a few of the older people in the church periodically shook their heads and looked at the cloudless sky and perversely predicted rain.
And sure enough, on the evening of August third, as Mom and Dad and I were coming down out of the gore after listening to a Sox game on the car radio, it did begin to rain, first lightly, then a steady drenching downpour.
“Mister Baby Johnson!” Dad said, as we sat in the car in the dooryard, watching the rain stream across the windshield. “Wouldn’t you just know. Well, now we’re going to see what sort of stuff our minister friend is made of.”
As soon as we stepped into the kitchen, the phone rang. It was Reverend Andrews for Dad.
“Well, Walt,” Dad said into the phone, “you did the best you could with this one. We’ll just have to start over again.”
Then the minister talked some more, and finally Dad said “All right, fine,” and hung up.
“That answers my question,” he told us. “It’s supposed to rain hard all night tonight and most of the day tomorrow. He wants us to get on the horn right now and start calling everybody we can think of.”
“To postpone the celebration?” Mom said, disappointed.
“Hell no, Ruth. To spread the word that it’s on, rain or shine!”
11
Soon after the first gray light illuminated the dripping red-and-gray slate roofs of the courthouse and Academy, vehicles began nosing in against the long east and west sides of the village common, their windshield wipers slapping ineffectually in the downpour. A dozen or so town boys were already loitering on the courthouse portico, though the first major event of the celebration, the Grand Cavalcade and Pageant of historical floats, would not start until one o’clock.
“I thought you had connections in high places, reverend,” Julia Hefner said.
“I do,” he said with a grin at me. “It isn’t snowing, is it?”
The rain showed no signs at all of letting up, but around nine o’clock my mother dragooned me into lugging umpteen cardboard boxes of secondhand clothes from the church basement, where they had been stored, over to the rummage sale tables on the green. There, under a jury-rigged canvas awning, Mom was immediately caught between two factions of the rummage committee, which my father, in the following week’s issue of the Monitor, facetiously dubbed �
�the savers and the chuckers.” The chuckers were all for throwing out stained and torn apparel, worn-out shoes, mismatched mittens, and clothes so laughably out of fashion that no one would ever wear them, much less buy them. These chuckers were disgusted by the frugality of the savers, who in turn were horrified by the prodigality of the chuckers. As Dad pointed out in his write-up, the chuckers and savers had formed ranks along more or less denominational lines, with the Presbyterians, led by Julia Hefner, salvaging what Mrs. Ben Currier and the Congregationalists had relegated to the throwaway boxes.
By ten, when I trudged across the green in the drilling rain with the last box of used babies’ clothing, double-breasted jackets, striped suspenders, and ridiculously wide ties, there had already been a blowup. All the chuckers and most of the savers had stalked off in anger, leaving Hefty Hefner and my mother to work the tables alone.
“I don’t want you squirreling away prize items for yourself, now, Ruth,” I overheard Julia tell my mother. “On the other hand, we couldn’t be blamed for setting aside any especially choice little items we come across. You know as well as I do that the ones that really need these things for their families won’t buy here anyway because they’re on the town and so live better than you and I do—Why won’t that dawdling boy of yours step on it! I could have run those boxes over here in half the time he’s taken.”
I felt like telling old H.H. to get her boyfriend Zack Barrows to do it if she wasn’t satisfied (for according to local scuttlebutt she and Zack had been keeping company at least as long as Fred Hefner had been gone). But my mother tipped me a wink and mouthed the word “story,” meaning someday I’d be able to put Julia in one, and flicked her fingers slightly to signal me to get away from the aborted clothing bazaar while the getting was good.
For the next hour or so I wandered around the common, marveling at the huge crowd that continued to pour into town despite the rain. Men in yellow volunteer fire department raincoats and high black hip boots rushed here and there spreading awnings over food and game booths. Farmers in barn boots and slickers stood quietly in groups of twos and threes, smoking under the dripping elms. Elderly ladies with umbrellas tottered along the edge of the common, and Reverend Andrews, in a long blue Royal Canadian Air Force raincoat, seemed to be everywhere.
“It’s us against the weather, folks,” the minister kept saying, clapping people on the back and encouraging everyone to have a good time. And because he kept his spirits high, everyone else’s seemed high as well.
Everyone who lived or ever had lived in the Kingdom seemed to be convening on the common that day. By noon cars and trucks were lined all the way up Anderson Hill, and out past the church to U.S. Route 5, and along both sides of the county road east of the village. At Reverend Andrews’ request, the Academy and courthouse had been opened up so that people could get in out of the rain; but it was a warm rain and no one wanted to stay inside for long. All over the village there was an air of small kids playing in the rain, a little defiant and silly, laughing, having a good time in an unexpected way, the good time coming from inside themselves and from the spirit of togetherness that Reverend Andrews had inspired in everyone.
I helped Seth McCormick set up his pony-ride ring on the north end of the common, near the statue of Ethan Allen taking Fort Ti. Then for the rest of the morning, as the crowd continued to swell, I filled in at various food and game booths. (Nathan showed up briefly about noon to help Welcome Kinneson in the barbecue pit.) Two booths down from the baseball throw, where I was working at the time, Athena Allen’s kissing booth was doing a booming business. Athena was wearing a green blouse and a red skirt and had done her hair in gypsy ringlets and hung a great gold hoop from her right ear. Although she was sopping wet, every male in the Kingdom from sixteen to eighty seemed to want to give her a kiss—though I noticed that when Julia Hefner spelled Athena around noon so she could help her father the judge set up tables on the hotel porch for the barbecue, business at the Bower of Romance fell off considerably.
The cavalcade started promptly at one, despite an even fiercer spate of rain just before it, which Reverend Andrews said was doubtlessly the clearing shower. The minister narrated the procession from the bandstand. There were floats representing my great-great-great-grandfather’s trip up across the White Mountains with the Revere church bell, my great-great-grandfather James’ ill-conceived attacks on Canada with the Irish Fenians in 1856 and 1860, and my great-grandfather Mad Charlie’s secret meetings with John Brown. There were floats with elaborate tableaux depicting the history of agriculture and maple sugaring in Kingdom County and floats on fishing and hunting in the Kingdom, not to mention the Sunday School float, which I had just barely been able to talk my way out of participating in on the basis of being a teenager now, in which Caster Oil Quinn, dressed in black clerical robes, enacted the part of Headmaster Pliny Templeton teaching a class of students at the Academy with a McCuffey’s Reader in one hand and a Civil War sword in the other.
“In those days,” Reverend Andrews quipped, “they learned or else.”
There were the obligatory dozen or so antique cars brought out for every parade in Kingdom County that I can ever remember, the village’s two ancient hook-and-ladders with hand pumpers, earnest 4-H and Grange floats, and floats with contradancers and square dancers skidding around through their intricate maneuvers like drunks at a barn dance.
“First place was awarded to a motorized pantomime entitled The Whiskey Runners,’” my father wrote in that week’s Monitor, “in which High Sheriff Mason White, dressed in official regalia and piloting his redoubtable patrol hearse, chased a ’29 Ford driven by Auctioneer Bumper Stevens twice around the common. In keeping with a long-established local tradition, no arrests were made.”
And then, miraculously, as Reverend Andrews was handing out the prizes, long after almost everyone had given up hope, a dome of blue sky opened up over the bandstand and a minute later the sun came out, and everyone cheered, though whether for the break in the weather or just from their collective good spirits, I couldn’t say. It reminded me of Reverend Andrews’ first Sunday in church, Easter Sunday, when the entire congregation had stood up and applauded him.
As the clouds continued to sail away and the blue expanded, a dozen of us boys made a bucket brigade on the baseball field and with pails and brooms and snow shovels and three truckloads of sawdust, we began to get the infield in playing shape for the big game between Charlie’s Outlaws and Memphremagog, which was slated to start at four o’clock.
During the rain an ineffable goodwill had spread over the crowd. People ate even more, laughed even more, were even more convivial than they would have been on a sunny day, shaking hands with strangers they turned out to have gone to school with, renewing old acquaintances with neglected friends. And the storm was a great equalizer. The class differences so insidiously entrenched in any small town seemed to melt away with the rain. Bobby Hefner was seen hobnobbing with Frenchy LaMott George Quinn and Bumper Stevens teamed up in the horseshoe championship doubles match against Zack Barrows and my father. And when the sun came out the goodwill metamorphosed into a festive euphoria unlike any I have ever experienced since, with the big ballgame still to come.
Kingdom Common’s baseball diamond was probably the best in northern Vermont. The infield, which drained faster after a rain than any other in the area, was laid out at the south end of the green, with the left field foul post located directly across the street from the Monitor. Once I had seen Charlie wallop a home run through the plate-glass window of Quinn’s Drugstore, a good four hundred and fifty feet from home plate. But it was a rare event for even the strongest local hitters to put a ball in the street, much less up against the brick block.
By three-thirty the newly painted green bleachers along the first and third base lines were packed. Hundreds of additional spectators stood behind the backstop and along both outfield foul lines, and more fans were strung all the way around the fenced-off outfield. I had been accor
ded the honor of serving as water boy for the Outlaws. My job was to keep two sap buckets appropriated from my mother’s sugaring operation full of cold water from the outside faucet on the church and, more importantly, to replenish as often as necessary a third pail just behind the Outlaws’ bench from a mammoth keg of beer in the back of Charlie’s woody.
It had turned into a grand afternoon for baseball, with a good fresh breeze to dry the grass and base paths after the long rain. As usual in Kingdom County fair weather was coming in from the northwest, but twice during the Outlaws’ warm-ups Charlie fungoed towering fly balls directly into the teeth of the wind and clean over the street onto the sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block. Each time the huge crowd responded with an ovation.
“Play ball!” barked my father, who was umpiring behind the plate, and the big grudge game, the highlight of the celebration and the highlight of my summer to date, was underway.
I knew by the end of the first inning that it was going to be a contest. Our pitcher, Big Harlan Kittredge, was in top form. Over the first three innings, four or five Memphremagog batters managed to topple weak grounders that Royce and Stub scooped up and tossed over to Pine Benson. But nobody hit a ball out of the infield.
The Outlaws couldn’t seem to do much better at the plate themselves. Memphremagog had one of the best pitchers I’d ever seen, a fireballing young Frenchman with long stringy black hair who Charlie said was a ringer brought in from the Canadian Semi-pro League to beat us in front of our home crowd. The ringer didn’t seem to have much of a curve, but he threw so hard that the ball kept popping out of their catcher’s glove and dribbling into the dirt in the batter’s box. Even Charlie couldn’t seem to connect. Except for one tremendous foul fly ball that bounced off the cab of Royce’s pickup truck parked just south of the Monitor, he didn’t get his bat on the ball once in his first two trips to the plate.
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 26
