The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Sam whirled around and shook the statue again, this time in the direction of the stony-faced businessmen who had come together to betray him. “What Dr. Rong ever do Miss Liberty say not do? Nothing. This land of free. Innocent till proven otherwise. Who here prove otherwise? Where alien? Why cause? Judge got law all backward. Case dismissed!”

  To a rousing cheer from the balcony, Sam marched out of the courtroom, waving Miss Liberty over his head. With me at his heels, he repaired in triumph to the Emporium where, half an hour later, Sheriff Mason White served him with a citation stating that if he could not show cause within ten days why he should be allowed to remain in this country, he would face deportation.

  Appended to the bottom of the document was a note in Judge Allen’s crabbed handwriting imploring Sam to hire a real lawyer and apply for temporary political asylum. The judge himself would call his lawyer son-in-law in Burlington, Editor Kinneson’s son Charlie, who had never lost a case.

  “Double talk,” Sam Rong declared. He wadded the citation up in his fist, tossed it high in the air, caught it in his mouth, and devoured it.

  “So, Frank Bennett. Land of the free not so free after all, eh? Very fine joke on Dr. Rong.”

  It was late in the afternoon, a few days after Sam’s hearing. He and I were high on the ridge east of town, digging ginseng. Far below us, a mile and more away, the pink granite buildings of the town sparkled in the rays of the lowering sun. A few of the hardwood trees on the ridge had started to turn color early. They too shone brightly in the mild September sunshine.

  “Land of the free. Maybe so, maybe no,” Sam Rong said as he dropped a root into his wicker gathering basket. “Hope for best, expect worst. Eh, Frank?”

  Actually, Sam seemed quite pleased to have his worst expectations of the land of the free confirmed. More than once over the years he had confided to me that being proven right was what people longed for above all else on earth, with the possible exception of being in the know about a great scandalous secret. Now Sam had been proven right about America.

  He continued digging with his peacock shard. As always, he was careful to take only every third or fourth root. His face was as placid and ironical as ever, though only three days remained before his scheduled deportation. Judge Allen had set bail at twenty-five dollars—his maximum estimate, the judge had angrily announced, of the total amount Sam had cost the dozen or so businessmen who had turned him in for underselling them.

  “Sam, you should have heard Father G’s homily in church this morning. He shouted at us for twenty minutes. He said if he ever found out who was responsible for turning you in, he’d horsewhip them from one end of the village to the other.”

  “Yes, Father G very good man, very good to Sam, other riffraff. Not bad idea, horsewhip town fathers through village. Too bad I not think to draw on scroll, laugh at over jin-chen tea.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you aren’t mad, Sam. I sure would be.”

  “Call ‘Doctor.’ What good getting mad do?” Then, a moment later: “Well, sure. Sam get angry too, sometimes. Not made of china, you know, like bird on digger here. But. Got plan.”

  Sam stood up. “Come on, Frank. Got plenty jin-chen now. You be good to jin-chen, jin-chen be good to you. Not like land of the free. Sam good to weary refuse, like Miss Liberty says, land of the free sells Sam down river.”

  “What’s your plan, Dr. Rong?”

  “Obey law. Law says go away. Sam go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Don’t worry. Maybe go college, like you. Get another medical degree. Many friends, Frank Bennett, all over country, many customers of Chinese bank. Speaking of money, listen this. Old red-nose auctioneer try give Sam thousand dollars hire shyster lawyer. You imagine? Sam buy Bumper one hundred time over.”

  “I doubt Bumper ever had a friend before. Cronies, maybe.”

  “Ever the best of, eh? Run-out-of-town Chinese doctor has two friend. Red-nose auctioneer, wet-back-of-ear kid named Frank Bennett. How lovely.”

  “Come on, Dr. Rong,” I said, hurrying to keep up. “You’ve got tons of friends. Look at all the people you’ve helped.”

  “Yes, look. Where ton of when government haul Sam into court, ride out of town on rail? Talk sense, Frank. Won’t talk sense, at least listen. One: Be good to jun-chen, jin-chen be good to you. Two: After forty, less you eat, better you feel. Three: More you fish, longer you live. Four: Hope for best, expect worst. Five. Grandfather die, father die—”

  “Son dies,” I said.

  San Rong nodded. “Remember.”

  A few minutes later we came into the village in the early fall dusk. Outside the Land of the Free Sam handed me his ginseng basket. “You wait here.”

  He was inside the Emporium no more than a minute, returning with his tall black account book and a manila envelope. The envelope he gave to me. Then he held out his hand, pale as ivory in the mountain twilight, dry as old parchment. “So long, Frank. Good luck at college.”

  “I’m not leaving until tomorrow, Sam. I’ll stop here before I go.”

  “You leaving tomorrow, I leaving tonight.”

  “Where are your things?”

  “What thing? Came here with no thing. Leave same way.”

  “Leave for where? This doesn’t make sense, Dr. Rong.”

  “No sense at all,” Sam agreed. “Like great American pastimes. Like sending back refuse.”

  “Where’s your money? How can you go away without any money?”

  “Very much money in here.” Sam tapped his black book. “All written down, very safe. Say so long to Bump Steve, Frank. I leave him Emporium, deed and key inside envelope. Good joke, eh? What old auctioneer do with Chinese pagoda? Drive him crazy. You get Orient Express, jin-chen patch. Paper inside envelope tells where to send roots. Bye now.”

  Sam headed down the dirt lane of Little Quebec, past the mill and the railyard, toward U.S. Route 5. He did not look back. Soon all I could make out was his white coat. Then he vanished.

  “There.”

  Even before I whirled around I knew who had spoken. “There,” Bumper said again, and he headed back up the lane toward the commission-sales barn, leaving me standing by myself in front of the Emporium in a tobacco-laden shroud of loneliness.

  Bumper never reopened the Land of the Free Emporium, looming up on the edge of Little Quebec, its gaudy colors fading, its sloping roofs and eaves rotting, as anomalous in our tiny Vermont village as a dairy barn in a Chinese rice paddy. The spring after Sam disappeared, Bumper sold most of its contents at auction and began storing hay and farm equipment in the building. Canadian bull thistles and wild cucumber vines ran rampant in Sam’s old vegetable beds. Scavenging there, Louvia the Fortuneteller turned up a few hexagonal coins with holes in the middle that Sam had lost or perhaps planted for good luck.

  Each fall for the next four years I visited the secret place under the butternut and basswood trees high on the ridge above the village to harvest the roots of the shy and aristocratic ginseng plants, which I dried and mailed to the Hong Kong wholesaler whose address Sam had left me. With the proceeds I paid for my college textbooks and bought gas for the Orient Express, which held up until my last semester at the university.

  As for Dr. Rong, even as he became absorbed into the mythology of the Common, rumors of his whereabouts floated back to us. Julia Hefner, visiting her son in San Francisco, was positive that she spotted him wearing a motorman’s hat and driving a cable car. Bumper’s once and future ring man, Little Shad Shadow, swore that Sam was keeping books for an opium den in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where Shad had a half-brother in an asylum. Even Father George confided to me that on a sightseeing trip to New York City with his Catholic Youth Organization he had spotted Sam drinking tea and disputing with a Wonder Rabbi in an automat on East Fortieth Street; but then Father George had to chase after his charges and haul them out of a peepshow down the block, and by the time he had the kids rounded up, the rabbi, Dr. Rong, and the automat its
elf all seemed to have disappeared. For my part, I heard nothing at all from my friend until the summer I returned to Kingdom Common to work for Father George, when the postcard arrived directing me to send the Chinese bank to the address on Staten Island.

  In White River Junction I changed trains for Hartford. Later I drifted into a restless sleep, full of dreams about the girl with the morning-glory eyes whom I’d met in Little Quebec with Louvia. At dawn I arrived at Grand Central Station, its ornate dome echoing with blaring announcements of the arrivals and departures of trains whose very names—the Empire State Express, the Twentieth Century Limited—made me want to chuck everything—plans for the future, teakwood box, and all—and hop aboard. But no. I had come here to see an old friend, and half an hour later I was riding the ferry to Staten Island.

  A faded red and yellow bus with a snub nose delivered me to the address on Liberty Street, a long narrow market with a scarlet dragon emblazoned across the display window. Streaming out of the dragon’s mouth was a flaming jet of Chinese characters and below them, in English, the words “Land of the Free Emporium #2 Dr. Sam E. Rong Prop.” Several clerks were filling sidewalk bins in front of the store with Chinese vegetables and popeyed fish on ice. Another assistant was cranking down a green awning with red and yellow stripes. Another was preparing to wash the display window. Yet another was hosing off the sidewalk. Inside the window two pretty girls were hanging a young roast pig on an iron hook beside four glazed ducks dangling by their plucked necks. I stepped inside, past a clerk running accounts on a red abacus. The air was full of the scents of dried cuttlefish, freshly washed vegetables, tea, ginger, and twenty different spices I hadn’t smelled in four years. Tacked to the walls just above eye level was a scroll on which someone, I was sure I knew who, had begun to draw a tableau of a Chinese coastal city, including a soaring temple in the background shaped startlingly like the Empire State Building and, in the nearby harbor, the colossal statue of a young Chinese woman with a paper lantern held over her head and an unmistakably ironical smile on her face.

  No one paid any attention to me as I walked, past barrels of Chinese candy and shelves lined with porcelain Buddhas and mandarins and watercolor prints of pagodas with hanging gardens, to a high desk at the back of the store. On a stool behind the desk sat Dr. Rong, reading a thick book with a battered red cover. A blue kettle simmered on a hotplate on the desk. Beside it was a teapot decorated with pink and purple periwinkle blossoms. Sam sat perfectly immobile, as still as the porcelain mandarins for sale in his shop. His jacket gleamed as white as ever.

  “Pickwick Paper,” Sam said by way of greeting, holding up the spine of the red book so I could see its title. “Funny as a crutch, Frank Bennett. You want a job sweeping floor? Shooting rats?”

  Already laughing, I set the lacquered teakwood box down on Sam’s desk. “I’ve brought you your Chinese bank, Sam.”

  “How many times I tell you, call Doctor. Dr. Rong. So. Pull up stool. We brew friendship tea anyway.”

  I sat down on a tall stool across the desk from Sam and smiled happily at my old friend, who looked just the same as he had four years before. He slid open the lid of the teakwood box, rummaged under the stacks of envelopes, and fished out two or three roots, which he broke into small pieces. He dropped the broken roots into the periwinkle teapot and covered them with boiling water from the blue kettle. Immediately the unmistakable pungency of jin-chen tea, of friendship, drifted out of the steaming pot into the room. Sam reached into a cubbyhole under the desk and brought out two handleless periwinkle teacups.

  “Let steep now,” he said. He riffled through the envelopes in the box. “Four year ago, Frank Bennett, when I leave Celestial Kingdom, I take address of all banking clients in black account book. Didn’t need envelopes in Chinese bank. Then lately I get thinking. What if envelopes up at the end-of-earth Kingdom fall into wrong hands instead of Rong’s hands? Cause much bad trouble for clients, eh? Same kind trouble Sam had in Kingdom. Many very respectable Chinese-Americans run out of country. Still. You could have mailed. U.S. mail one thing in land of the free Sam more less trusts.”

  “I wanted to see you, Dr. Rong.”

  “So look. What I tell you long time ago? What I write on scroll? ‘World change, human bean stay same.’ Eh? Eh, Frank Bennett? Ha! Here come first ones already. Early today.”

  I turned around on my stool to see what Sam was scowling at. In front of the Land of the Free #2 a Gray Line bus was disgorging tourists. Wielding cameras and guidebooks, they came pouring into the shop and began to mill here, there, and everywhere, sniffing the dried octopus, pinching the Chinese cabbage, holding eggshell porcelain teacups up to the light.

  “Hey!” Dr. Rong shouted. “You break, you buy. Or go to prison. You want go prison this morning?”

  He winked at me and chuckled gleefully over the idea of sending a busload of retired Iowa schoolteachers to jail. Then he filled the two periwinkle cups, and together he and I sipped the hot beverage, flavored like the Vermont woods in the fall, like ancient Chinese villages, like ironical conversation and laughter and friendship.

  “Dr. Rong,” I said. “I want to ask you a question.”

  “So ask.”

  “I’m enrolled to start seminary this coming fall. But recently—I don’t know.”

  “Do what heart tells,” Sam said immediately. “Now I ask you a question. Why Sam E. Rong set up Emporium Two here this rundown warehouse? Why I sit up on high stool like Ury Heep, porcelain fortuneteller in old broken-down carnival?”

  “Because you’re on the tour bus line here?”

  “Not on any bus line at all till I open shop. No. Tell you what. You and I change place. You sit behind desk. Then you know why I come here. Get good laugh besides.”

  From Dr. Rong’s stool behind the desk I could see everything that went on in the Land of the Free #2 and on the sidewalk in front. But Sam shook his head. “You looking in wrong direction, Frank, as usual. Look out side window.”

  I peered out the narrow window to my right. At first I saw only the alleyway, strewn with broken wooden crates, and beyond, a section of bleak cityscape. Then, looming up in a space between two distant rooftops, as sudden and surprising as Dr. Rong’s own appearance in Kingdom Common eight years ago, was the crowned head and torch of the Statue of Liberty, magnified by the smog and morning haze.

  “So. What think?”

  Perched high on Sam’s stool in this place far from home, listening to the gabble of the early-morning tourists and staring out at the miragelike statue, I had no idea what to think, about the Land of the Free #2 or exactly why I had come to Staten Island or, for that matter, what my heart told me about my future.

  “I don’t know, Dr. Rong,” I admitted.

  “No,” Sam agreed, laughing. “I not know, either. Life full of mysteries, eh? All we can say.”

  Sam returned to his seat. He poured us more hot tea. “Catch up on news now. How old judge? How Bumper? Louvia find coins I hide in garden? Talk, Frank. Gossip. Enjoy tea. Sam Rong, Frank Bennett, Mr. Charles Dickens. Best of friends, eh? That one thing we know for sure.”

  I nodded and smiled and lifted my thin teacup in agreement. Sipping the jin-chen tea and inhaling the strong and enduring scent of friendship, which now seemed to fill every corner of the Land of the Free #2 and the entire neighborhood and all Staten Island, I had no notion where my own life might lead me, now or later. But I was glad beyond words to have made this trip to see my old friend Sam E. Rong, whoever he might be. For now, that was enough.

  6

  Night School

  All citizens of the Kingdom Republic will enjoy complete personal freedom so long as their actions and beliefs do not encroach on the freedom of other Republic citizens.

  —The Kingdom Republic Constitution, as quoted in Father George, “A Short History”

  AT SIXTY-EIGHT, with chronic angina, Father George needed more help in the parish than I could give him that summer. From time to time a priest from Mem
phremagog or Pond in the Sky would come to Kingdom Common to celebrate Sunday mass when Father George simply didn’t feel up to doing it himself. At other times he seemed much the same as ever. But as the summer wore on, it was evident that the job was becoming too much for him.

  One of my duties that summer was to drive Father George to his doctor appointments and, two or three times a week, out into the country for short rides. While returning from one of these excursions one afternoon, soon after I’d visited Sam Rong in Staten Island, he asked me to pull up beside the baseball infield at the south end of the common. We got out and walked over to the unpainted bleachers along the third-base line, where Father George sat down. Although it was a hot day, I had brought his lap blanket from the car. I arranged the blanket over his legs and sat down beside him.

  Father George leaned over and pulled up a few blades of grass. He tossed them into the air to see which way the breeze was blowing, in or out, an old power hitter’s habit. It was something the greatest scholar and third baseman in the history of Kingdom County had done a thousand times while kneeling in the on-deck circle or waiting at third for the surprise bunt, the smashing line drive, the soaring, windblown foul fly ball. But today the grass fell straight back to the field; there was no wind at all.

  As we looked out over the diamond in the late-afternoon sunlight, I suddenly began to laugh. I’d remembered an evening here on the ball field, one of many, when I was twelve or thirteen. I was crouched at home plate with my twenty-eight-inch Adirondack while Father George, then in his fifties, stood out on the mound beside a gallon pail of baseballs and threw me one pitch after another, trying to teach me how to hit a curve ball.