“You like local history, don’t you?” Welcome asked me as we toiled up the steep winding steps of the church steeple. “Do you know that, except for Sundays and funerals and weddings, this bell’s been rung just two times in the past hundred and fifty years? Both times in 1918. Once when the Red Stockings won the World Series and then again a month later on Armistice Day.
“Now here’s my idea, Jimmy. I shall ring this bell myself, tonight, when the reverend’s innocent verdict comes in, as I have no doubt it will. And it’s very possible we’ll have others on hand to celebrate along with us.”
Welcome pointed significantly up at the sky.
Step by step, one hundred and twelve steps in all, my cousin and I labored up into the four diminishing coffins of the United Church’s steeple to the little rope-pull belfry overlooking the town and the lighted courthouse. There Welcome spoke to me earnestly for a short time, making me repeat my instructions twice, to make sure I had them right.
I left my cousin humming a tuneless little song and gazing from time to time at Mother Moon through his telescope, and hurried back down to the common. On the courthouse steps, I met Frenchy LaMott.
“Well, Kinneson, what you think? They going to send me back down to Vergennes, or what?”
“Hell, no, Frenchy. Nobody’s going to send you anywhere.”
“They never frigging believe me, though. Old Andrews going to get the chair, Kinneson. Him or his boy. I never should have come out of Christly woodwork.”
“Tell me something, Frenchy,” I said in a low, confidential voice. “Why did you come out of the woodwork? I mean, really? Was it because Nat saved your life, or did your mom make you, or what?”
Frenchy laughed. “’Member that time I tell you ’bout, when old E-li hire me dig up them coffin over at graveyard? That mother and baby, hair all turn to dust when he open it? Well, he say he pay me two dollar, but old bastard never gave me a frigging cent. ’Member I tell you I do for him some day? Like old Bumper always say, it a goddamn long road that don’t have no bend. That why I tes’fy. Fix E-li good, me!”
Frenchy let fly a great jet of tobacco juice. “Every word I say in there true, too. I don’t give a frig you believe me or not.”
With that, he slunk off toward the common, satisfied that, at last, he had “done for” Elijah Kinneson for welching on the two dollars that day in the cemetery more than a year ago!
On the common, kids raced here and there setting off lady fingers left over from the Old Home Day celebration, but no one seemed to care. Normal order did not quite pertain tonight. I wandered over to the hotel, where Mason and Zack and Sigurd Moulton were eating a late supper. When I went by their table, Zack handed me a small campaign button that said, BARROWS AND WHITE IN ’52. The sheriff reached out and slapped me on the back, glad-handing it as though the jury’s verdict had already come in in their favor and he’d just been reelected by a landslide.
Disgusted, I drifted outside again.
Just as I started back across the common toward the courthouse, I noticed a commotion on the knoll on the east side of town. A crowd was milling around in the street in front of the empty parsonage and talking excitedly.
As I approached, I spotted something unusual on the porch. At first it looked like a man, standing on the railing and clinging to the thick bittersweet vines, dimly illuminated by the porch light.
“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud.
Hanging in the tangled bittersweet vines running from the porch rail to the roof, by a stout noose around its neck, was a body.
No, not a body. A Harvest Figure. But this Harvest Figure was unlike any I had ever seen before. This Harvest Figure was a pumpkinheaded straw effigy of a caricatured black man in a dark suit and a white clerical collar. His face had been crudely outlined in black paint or shoe polish, with grossly distorted lips and a huge nose, and the effigy was grinning hideously.
And that is when someone up the street shouted that the jury had come to a decision, and the crowd around the porch broke and surged toward the courthouse. I ran with them, but as I raced along, I could still see that terrible Harvest Figure before me and the placard pinned to its suit below its white collar.
In huge capital letters it had said, THE WAGES OF SIN.
Now there was a great press and bustle inside the courtroom, and Dad had to kick four downcountry reporters out of our seats. But I remembered my cousin Welcome’s instructions and slipped back down the aisle to the side of the room by the light switch under Farlow’s sign, DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT PERMISSION UPON PAIN OF A COOL ONE-HUNDRED-DOLLAR FINE.
I could feel my heart going faster as the attorneys came in. Sporting his election button, Zack Barrows was smiling and shaking hands with everyone near him. Reverend Andrews came in between Pine Benson and another deputy and sat down at the defense table. Across the common, high in the belfry tower, I thought I saw a reflected glimmer off Welcome’s telescope.
The jury appeared and a sigh like a long retreating wave went through the room.
“All rise,” Farlow said as Judge Allen entered the room.
“Mr. foreman, have you reached a verdict?” Judge Allen asked.
Yves St. Pierre stood up. In his hand was a folded piece of paper. “Yes, your honor.”
“Will you please hand your verdict to the court bailiff.”
Farlow took the piece of paper from Yves St. Pierre and walked to the bench and handed it to Judge Allen, who read it carefully, looked up at the jury, read it again, then said, “Mr Blake, please carry this verdict to the court clerk, to be read aloud.”
I inched my hand toward the light switch.
“Reverend Andrews, will you please stand while the verdict is read,” Judge Allen said.
Julia Hefner took the verdict from Farlow and stood up. In her hand, the paper shook slightly. She cleared her throat.
“The jury finds the defendant, Walter”—here her voice gave out momentarily, and she cleared her throat again. “The jury finds the defendant, Walter Andrews, not guilty of the charge of murder in the first degree.”
In the joyous shock of that moment, I momentarily forgot what I was supposed to do!
At the defense table Reverend Andrews turned and shook hands with my brother and stood up and turned around to hug his son.
And across the aisle, from his seat behind the prosecutor’s table, Elijah Kinneson sprang to his feet, with his long gleaming carving knife held high over his head in both hands.
“The wages of sin is death!” he shrieked.
Bang! Down came Judge Allen’s gavel. “Sheriff White, secure that man immediately and remove him from the courtroom!”
The judge was too late. Fast as a striking snake, the knife held high above his head in both his hands, my mad cousin leapt across the aisle toward the minister. He moved so quickly that I saw only the blurred motion of his hurtling body and the dull metallic flash of his carving knife. The knife disappeared into the minister’s side, appeared again bright red now, and vanished into Elijah’s own throat. A jet of blood flew out over the first rows of spectators as Charlie and Mason White wrestled the madman to the floor. Reverend Andrews slumped forward onto the defense table. Dr. Harrison was bending over him, Judge Allen was pounding for order, and then, as though to block out the horrible scene Welcome’s instructions came back to me:
One by land
Two by sea
Three means Reverend A is free.
Without thinking what I was doing, I reached for the lights and flicked them off and back on once, twice, three times. Later people would tell me that they had no recollection of this. But not two seconds afterwards a long glad peal rang out over the town from the steeple, followed by another and another and another, peal upon clangorous peal, while below in the courtroom, pandemonium reigned.
It has always seemed to me incongruously appropriate, an irony of the kind that Reverend Andrews himself would enjoy, that it was Mason White, in his patrol car-hearse, who rushed the bleeding mini
ster across the common to Dr. Harrison’s office, actually driving straight through the baseball diamond from the first base side toward left field, while Cousin Welcome, still ensconced in the belfry, continued furiously to toll out the happy tidings on the great Revere bell.
“Get that maniac out of the steeple!” I recall my father roaring to Pine Benson—though later Welcome said that when he saw the raging crowd on the common he thought it was a torchlight victory procession or a welcoming party to greet the arriving Martians, and rang the bell all the harder.
The crowd shifted in a quick erratic surge from the courthouse to the common to the brick shopping block, now lighted from the Monitor all the way up to Quinn’s Drugstore at the north end of the block and packed with horrified spectators, some sobbing, some still and waxen in the eery light, waiting for word of Reverend Andrews from Dr. Harrison’s office.
My mother and father and Athena and Judge Allen and I waited in stunned silence in the Monitor, and it was Charlie, his suit spattered with blood, who jostled his way down Painless Doc’s steps, up which he and my father and Judge Allen and Mason White had rushed the minister on a stretcher half an hour ago, and into the shop with the good news.
“He’s going to be all right!” he said. “Thank God, he’s going to be all right. The knife went between two ribs and just missed a lung. He’s awake and Nat’s with him.”
Suddenly a great cheer went up from the crowd outside the shop, apparently the news about Reverend Andrews had just reached them. But I was still too stunned by all of the events of the past two days and the past summer to do anything but stare at the rest of my rejoicing family.
“Charlie,” I started to say. “Charlie—”
The room began to spin slowly. The shop floor tipped, the great Whitlock printing press and Elijah’s massive linotype loomed over me. Then I collapsed onto the deacon’s bench by the door, and everything went black.
“James. James!”
Far away yet quite distinctly, I heard Claire LaRiviere calling my name. I was back at the quarry, trying to locate her in the thick summer mist, and she was calling to me from deep in the opaque green water; but when I opened my eyes, Mom and Charlie were anxiously bending over me.
Then I was sitting up and crying, and Mom was hugging me and she and Charlie were both assuring me that the minister was going to be fine, just fine—not knowing, having no way to know, that I was not crying for Reverend Andrews, but for Claire LaRiviere, whose voice, except in dreams, we would never hear again.
“Doc says he’s got the constitution of a prize fighter,” Dad said an hour or so later as he hung up the phone and sat down at the kitchen table. He and Mom and Charlie and Judge Allen and Athena were working on their second potful of coffee and a fresh batch of sandwiches, and I was perched on the woodbox, finishing my third Coke. Nat had ridden up to the Memphremagog hospital in the ambulance with his dad, and Doc Harrison had just called to say that Reverend Andrews was resting comfortably.
“I doubt he’ll be going too many rounds for the next few days, Jimmy,” Charlie said, winking at me.
“Don’t bet on it, James,” Dad said. “If I’ve ever met a guy who enjoyed a good battle, it’s that fella. Just before they loaded him into the ambulance tonight, he told me he might have missed his calling, that sitting through the trial made him regret that he hadn’t taken up the law. He said the action appealed to him.”
“You’d think by now he’d have had enough action to last a lifetime,” Judge Allen said dryly.
The judge put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “But I want you folks to know that whether Walt Andrews missed his calling or not, this young man didn’t. That was a first-rate defense, Charles. A first-rate defense.”
It was Judge Allen’s highest accolade, and we all knew it.
The judge turned to his daughter. “And you, my dear, although this is strictly off the record, your eloquent testimonial for Frenchy LaMott came at exactly the right time.”
“What about Cousin Elijah?” I said. “Is he—did he—?”
“Let’s put it this way, buddy,” Charlie said, “Cousin Elijah’s navigating days are over, thank heavens. The guy turned out to be totally insane, didn’t he? Like father, like son, I guess. In the end, he was the most prejudiced one of all.
“Uncle Forrest,” Charlie said, “let me ask you something now that the trial’s over. Didn’t you know from the start that there was a good deal of prejudice involved in this case? How could you not see it?”
“I did see it,” Judge Allen said. “Some of it anyway. But I honestly didn’t think it was relevant to the murder charges.”
“So you thought that Reverend Andrews was guilty?”
“It was never my job to determine whether Reverend Andrews was innocent or guilty. That’s the jury’s job. I just couldn’t believe that we couldn’t find twelve impartial people here in the Kingdom to get to the bottom of things. As bad as the whole Affair’s made the Kingdom look, we would have looked a hell of a lot worse if we’d let somebody else clean up our mess for us. Besides, I had faith in Yves St. Pierre to do a good, fair job as foreman of the jury. I’ve known Yves since he was Jimmy’s age, and I knew he’d keep those folks from getting off the track. As for conjecturing ahead of time about Reverend Andrews’ guilt or innocence, I try never to think along those lines during a trial. A judge has to keep his mind open as long as possible. I’m sure you understand that, son. When you get to be a judge, you’ll understand it even better.”
Judge Allen looked at my father. “The fickleness of a small town, eh? A day or two ago people were crying for the man’s blood, most of them. Tonight they’re celebrating his acquittal.”
He shook his head sadly. “I think I’ll be going up to the big lake for a few days, Charles. I shall leave at dawn, as a matter of fact. I want to catch a few more fish before the season’s over. Any chance I can persuade you to come along?”
“It’s tempting, Forrest. But I’ve got a paper to get out here. The story isn’t over yet, by a long shot. For one thing, I intend to find out just exactly what it was about Pliny Templeton that Elijah wanted to prevent Walt Andrews from unearthing enough to try to kill him right there in the courtroom. I’ve never seen anything like that stabbing in all my born days. It makes Satan Smithfield’s shooting look like a day at the county fair. Then too, I have to ferret out who kicked into that ‘private fund’ Zack Barrows said paid Sigurd Moulton’s retainer.”
“You still think Zack had help raising that money?” Charlie said.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Moulton’s services can’t come cheap. And don’t forget the silent conspiracy. Elijah killed the girl and framed Reverend Andrews, and Zack and Mason jumped at the chance to prosecute him and win a big case. But I don’t think any of it could have happened without a tacit agreement on the part of a very substantial number of local citizens not to come to Walt’s defense. Very probably, some of those same citizens helped underwrite Moulton’s fee.”
Judge Allen nodded in agreement. “Well, Charles, I’ll save a few fish in the lake for you.”
He stood up, bent over and kissed the top of Athena’s head. Then he started for the door, a big, courtly man as solid-looking as the granite courthouse he presided over.
Suddenly he turned back and pointed at Charlie like a man swinging his shotgun up to a flock of incoming ducks. “Speaking of saving . . . you, young man, had better start saving your pennies. You owe the court ninety dollars and something. Don’t forget it.”
Then he paused. “Pay for it out of your first prosecutor’s check,” he said as he went through the door.
“Don’t tell me your brother’s running,” my father said to me, just as I started up the stairs for bed.
Charlie shrugged. “As your father said, Jimmy, there still seem to be a number of unanswered questions about this whole affair. I haven’t quite decided whether I’m going to run or not, but I’m sure as hell going to get to the bottom of all this one way or
another.”
“So am I, mister,” Dad said. “I’ll tell you something, though. There will probably always be some unanswered questions about this situation. Nonetheless, James, I’m glad about your brother’s decision. Your mother’s glad, too. His lack of direction over the past year or so has been killing her.”
I nodded, but as I climbed the stairs, all I wanted was to be on the Montreal Express, barrelling out of Kingdom County and on my way to a life that I could control—where the people I loved didn’t die violent deaths and all things were fair.
21
Election Day, 1952.
Shortly after midnight, my father had driven over to Dixville, New Hampshire, across the upper Connecticut River from Vermont and Kingdom County, to be on hand for the nation’s traditional first presidential returns. In that Republican stronghold, the results were predictable: Eisenhower 22, Stevenson 0. Dad was back by breakfast to announce that in Kingdom Common, anyway, Adlai would get at least one vote.
Locally, the really important races were for county attorney and sheriff. How Zack Barrows had the temerity to run for prosecutor again I have no idea, but he did just that. Even though Charlie had to conduct a write-in campaign, my father predicted that Zack would be lucky to get fifty votes. In the sheriff race, Pine Benson was running against Mason White, and while Charlie didn’t think White could possibly win, Dad said he would wait until the results were in to make his prediction.
A few downcountry reporters had checked into the hotel the night before to cover the race between Charlie and Zack and write the final follow-up stories on the Affair, but for the most part, talk about the tragic events of the summer had died down.
A few days after the stabbing, a close friend of Reverend Andrews, a RCAF general, had personally flown the minister from the county’s small airstrip in Memphremagog to Ottawa, where he’d spent another two weeks recuperating in a military hospital, then promptly reenlisted in the Air Force. Nat was back at his grandmother’s, going to school once more in Montreal, and I had neither heard from him nor, I am ashamed to say, written since he’d left on the day after the stabbing.
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 47
