Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The conductor who’d been annoyed with me for bringing my bags into the car was coming down the aisle checking tickets. “Have you been drinking, mister?” he said to the old man.

  “No, sir!” he declared.

  The conductor knew better. “There’s no drinking permitted in the day coaches,” he said. “I’ve had to speak to you about it before, haven’t I?”

  “I don’t believe so,” said my grandfather in a very loud and very indignant voice.

  The conductor gave him a hard look. “Well,” he said, “I mean business. If I catch you drinking, I’ll put you off at the next station without a second thought.”

  He moved on down the aisle, swaying to the motion of the train like a veteran trick-rider at the circus. There were only five or six other passengers in our coach, including a large woman in a small blue hat and a minister with a white patch of collar showing. After punching their tickets with an odd little silver apparatus, the conductor swayed gracefully back up the aisle, and passed on into the next car.

  In the meantime, the whiskery man was shooting me many covert, fierce looks. He knew very well that I’d seen him drinking from the amber flask. I had no idea what was in it, of course, or why drinking was not permitted in the day coaches. But the old fellow now seemed to feel that he owed me some sort of explanation for the very palpable falsehood he’d told the conductor. For without the slightest warning he lunged halfway out of his seat across the aisle toward me and growled, “I suppose you’re a-wondering why I ain’t drinking when it appears otherwise, be you, be you?”

  Not having the faintest idea how to respond to this query, I didn’t.

  “Aha!” he said, and took another quick pull at his bottle. “Cat’s got his tongue, I see.”

  He made another start in my direction, seizing the armrest of my seat for support. With his flushed face very close to mine he said, “Speaking of cats, which you wasn’t but I was, I’ve got a cat up home to Lost Nation that weighs twenty pounds. It weighs as much as a wheel of cheese.”

  He raised his tangled gray eyebrows as though to better impress me with this disclosure. Then he said, “This cat of mine can kill five full-growed rats in a grain barrel in sixty seconds flat. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes,” I said. Although I was not quite sure how we had gotten so rapidly from the matter of his drinking or not drinking to cats, I was very eager to accommodate this rough old cob, if only to forestall another ferocious lunge in my direction. Also, his mentioning Lost Nation Hollow confirmed for me that this was indeed my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge, in what I fervently hoped was some sort of raffish disguise designed to help him assess me unobserved.

  “Besides rats,” he continued, “this cat that weighs as much as a cheese cannot abide dogs, other cats, or spying young boys. Neither as a rule can I.”

  The topic of the rat-fighting cat had evidently made my traveling companion thirsty. He sneaked another long drink. Then he made as if to offer me one. Before I could decide what to do he whipped the flask back out of sight and chuckled and nodded his head knowingly.

  “Now,” he said to the entire passenger car in an altogether different, remarkably businesslike tone, “why ain’t I a-drinking? I shall tell you why. I ain’t a-drinking for that I ain’t a drinker.”

  This revelation was received by the rest of the car with stunned disbelief. By now everyone had seen the bottle, which he had all along made a great show of displaying and then hiding. But an explanation was forthcoming.

  Giving me a look of the deepest significance, he announced, “Why ain’t I a drinker? Because I’m a sipper. Do you understand that?”

  I said I did, whereupon he fetched out the bottle again and knocked back two or three of the longest sips in the history of the world.

  “Ain’t I an awful old whore, though?” he said with a smirk of his whiskers, and both the big woman in the small hat and the minister gasped.

  Whereupon the gentleman who was my grandfather tipped me a sly wink and ripped out loudly, “Ain’t you and I both a pair of old whores, though.”

  I readily agreed that we were. This seemed to please him a good deal. So much so, in fact, that he entrusted me with a grave charge. “My boy,” he said, “I want you to watch sharp. Watch sharp, and notify me immediately if you spot that train fella coming through again.”

  So saying he repaired to the far corner of his seat to nurse his bottle, sipping away to beat the band, while I kept an eye out for the conductor, and wondered what an old whore was and, for that matter, what a young whore was, and just what sort of country this Lost Nation that I was traveling to might be.

  “What’s in them two valises?” the sipping man barked out suddenly a few minutes later, pointing with the neck of the flask at my suitcases. “Your duds?”

  “Yes. And books.”

  “Books!” he said in an outraged voice. “What sort of books?”

  I shrugged. “Boys’ and girls’ books, I guess.”

  “I’ll show you a book that ain’t no boys’ book nor girls’ book, neither,” he said. From the hip pocket of his wool pants he extracted a well-worn paper-covered volume. He tipped my way precariously and flashed me a glimpse of the cover. To my amazement it depicted a smiling young woman, stark naked from the waist up.

  “What sort of speller be you?” the man said.

  I told him I believed I was a fair speller.

  “Well, then. Do you care to know what I call these books?”

  He flashed the naked young woman at me again. Good heavens, she had brown eyes and dark auburn hair, the exact color of my Sunday School teacher’s, Miss Irene Proctor’s. Could it possibly be Miss Proctor?

  “Yes,” I said with great interest. “What do you call them?”

  “I call them F•U•C•K Books,” he said loudly, laying the most precise emphasis on each letter, like a finalist in a championship spelling bee.

  Three or four gasps could be heard this time; but all he said was, “Do you know why I call them that?”

  “No,” I said, truthfully enough.

  “It’s because someone usually always gets F•U•C•K•D on every page,” he roared out for the benefit of the whole Buntliner.

  This time a general gasp went up. “See here, there are women on this conveyance,” the minister said.

  I, for my part, could hardly wait for another glimpse of the F•U•C•K Book. But the old scholar across the aisle slipped it back into his hip pocket with a sneering chuckle, had another long sip and leaned over to confide to me that he had once “tooken twenty dollars off a seed salesman in a railway car” by winning a bet that he could “hurinate fifty yards at one whack.”

  I had never witnessed a grown-up misbehaving publicly before, and was terribly delighted by the spectacle. But the minister had heard enough.

  “Here now,” he said. “You, lad. I want you to come back here and sit with me.”

  “Don’t you move a muscle, young boy,” the old man said. “Do you see that soft maple over yonder?” He jabbed with the neck of the flask out the window at a tree on the riverbank. “Such a distance as that is mere child’s play for me.”

  Abruptly, he stood up, gripping the tops of the seats on either side of the aisle to steady himself. “Who in this coach will lay twenty dollars I can’t make water fifty yards from a dead standstill with no running start?” he demanded. He frowned at the woman in the blue hat. “Are you game, madam?”

  “I’m going to ring for the conductor,” the minister said. “This has gone too far.”

  “If you tech that cord, preacher, I’ll tear it off the wall and throttle you with it,” my whiskered friend said, and took half a dozen long swinging strides to the rear of the car and out onto the small railed rear platform of the Buntliner.

  We all swiveled around in our seats, even the fat woman and the minister. I was afraid that the old man would fall off the rear of the train. But evidently he had performed this operation successfully enough more
than once before; for after turning his back and groping around in his pants for a minute, he cut loose a great jetting stream that arched out over a prodigious distance of track behind the speeding train. After fumbling with his pants some more he returned to his seat.

  “That’s how I won my bet with that flatlander seed salesman,” he said, and promptly fell asleep.

  The old man woke up again just once, shortly after we left St. Johnsbury. Starting bolt upright like a man frightened out of a nightmare, he stared over at me with his eyes all fiery red and said very clearly in a booming official voice: “Now comes the State of Vermont against WJ Kittredge in the Eighth District Court of Kingdom County, on this the twelfth day of June, nineteen hundred and forty-eight.”

  Immediately after making this announcement he seemed to come to his senses. “What’s your name, boy?” he demanded.

  “Austen Kittredge,” I said.

  “The hell!” he shot back. “I may be sipping drunk and I may be piss-whistle drunk but I ain’t blind drunk. Austen Kittredge is my neighbor and blooded cousin and you ain’t him by about fifty years.”

  “I was named for him,” I said with mixed relief and disappointment now that I knew that the mischief-making old devil across the aisle was only a cousin. For clarification I added, “He’s my grandfather.”

  “You don’t have no grandfather,” he said, and fell back against the felt seat dead to the world.

  It did not take the Boston to Montreal Buntliner long to cover the sixty miles from White River to Kingdom Common. It was still only late afternoon when we pulled into the station and I struggled down the aisle with my two suitcases.

  I was hoping that my grandfather’s cousin, Mr. WJ Kittredge, would wait with me on the platform. His company, I reasoned, would be better than no company. But I had little hope from him in this regard. Without a word to me, he cut across a long central green toward a large white building at the far end. I could see the dark red top of Miss Irene Proctor’s close likeness on the F•U•C•K Book sticking out of his pocket, and I reminded myself to ask my grandfather what under the sun such a book was about and how I could get hold of some—assuming that my grandfather ever showed up.

  From where I stood on the platform I could see most of the village. Farther up the street, on the same side of the green as the railroad station, were three large stone buildings. Facing them on the opposite side of the green was a three-story brick building containing several stores on the ground floor. A baseball diamond was laid out on the green, which interested me considerably.

  As the short silver train pulled out of the station, gathering speed for the last leg north before the Canadian border, a harsh voice behind me said, “I wouldn’t mind being aboard her, would you? Headed north for Labrador.”

  I whirled around to see a tall man wearing a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and neatly-creased green work pants. He had short white hair, and when he shifted his gaze from the departing train to me, I was struck by his eyes, which were pale blue and critical-looking. I do not mean that my grandfather’s eyes—for this was my real grandfather, I had no doubt—were cold or unkind. But they were the sharpest pair of eyes I had ever seen, the kind that miss nothing at all. And when he spoke to me again I was struck by how harshly his voice grated, and how well it matched those assessing blue eyes.

  “Be you Austen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m your grandfather.” He picked up my bags as easily as if they were empty. “Get in the truck,” he said.

  My grandfather’s truck had a rounded, dark green cab and a long flat bed. It rode as rough as a lumber wagon, which is exactly what it turned out to be: a lumber wagon, with trailer wheels, welded onto the cab of a 1934 Ford pickup.

  As we drove out of town my grandfather lit a cigar. Then he informed me that, besides lumber, he transported milk to the cheese factory on the edge of the village three times a week. Although his voice was very hard and sharp, he spoke to me without condescension, the way he might speak to another man. And both he and the truck cab smelled very strongly of tobacco and Christmas trees since, as I would discover, he was an inveterate cigar smoker and he also carried with him at all times the aromatic evergreen scent of the timber he worked with, which my grandmother could not wash out of his pants and shirts.

  We drove along a fast river, up into a jumble of abrupt, green hills, past woods and dilapidated farm buildings. Some of the farms were abandoned, and my grandfather told me who lived at the others. In two or three instances he added a brief, critical commentary. “They say Ben Currier’s a prosperous farmer. I’d be a prosperous man myself if I had half the money Ben Currier owes . . . That man who lives there abuses his horses. I’ll tell you one thing. He won’t soon do it again whilst I’m driving past.”

  I told my grandfather about the whiskery man on the train, and how I’d originally mistaken the fellow for him. He made a rasping sound in his throat, not a laugh exactly, and said that would have been his cousin, all right, Whiskeyjack Kittredge. “He’s a poacher and a moonshiner and a general all-purpose outlaw,” my grandfather said. “How did you like him?”

  “I liked him all right,” I said. “He told me he’s got a rat-fighting cat that weighs twenty pounds. And he peed off the end of the train and reads F•U•C•K Books where someone gets F•U•C•K•D on every page.”

  My grandfather made that singular, sharp noise in his throat again. “How old did you say you were?”

  “Six.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “What does it mean?” I said. “‘F•U•C•K•D on every page’?”

  “I’ll tell you when you turn twenty-one.”

  Then, quickly, as though to indicate that he had said all he intended to on the subject of his bewhiskered cousin with the outlandish name and the arcane reading matter, he informed me that he’d heard I intended to go to work for him that summer, and to stay on and attend the Lost Nation School in the fall if I was satisfied with my situation. I was surprised. This was the first I’d heard about working for my grandfather. A troubling thought crossed my mind. What if, at the end of this probationary period, my grandparents weren’t satisfied with me? In point of fact, my grandfather looked as though he might be a hard man to please.

  As we turned off the paved road onto a one-lane dirt track my grandfather said, “Do you like fairs?”

  “Fairs?”

  “Yes. County fairs.”

  My father had taken me to the county fair near White River last summer, and I’d loved it. “Yes!” I said enthusiastically.

  “Well,” my grandfather said, “I’m not by any means a wealthy man. I can’t afford to pay regular wages to a fella. But if you work hard and learn your job and pan out, I’ll stake you to a full day at Kingdom Fair come August. How does that sound to you?”

  I said it sounded fine, and after that a lull fell over our conversation and we traveled on up the dirt road in silence for a few minutes. It was obvious that this was a much more remote part of Vermont than any I had ever visited. The stream we’d been following was smaller and quicker, the heavily-wooded hills came crowding down close to the narrow valley on both sides. Many of the farms seemed disused. Those still in operation looked even poorer than the farms closer to the village. In the dooryards I began to notice what looked like covered trash barrels with darkish smoke curling out. “Smokers,” my grandfather explained. “Burning softwood to keep the black flies down. It’s buggy up here this time of year.”

  At the top of a long hill my grandfather jerked his thumb at a weathered building, one entire wall of which seemed to consist of small square windows. “That’s where you’ll be going to school. If you decide to stay on in the fall.”

  The school looked abandoned too, with buttercups and daisies blossoming in the yard; still, there was something both exciting and unsettling to me about the place, which I would forever afterward connect with the idea of school and going to school.

  “I went there f
or a spell myself,” my grandfather said. “I left when I was twelve to go on a log drive. The truth of the matter is, I didn’t agree with school and school didn’t agree with me.”

  My grandfather paused a moment to let this announcement sink in. Then he said, “Your father went there too. I’m sorry to say he turned out to be a schoolteacher.”

  My grandfather stated this fact as though my father had committed armed robbery and been caught, tried and convicted, and sent to state prison. But having been warned ahead of time about his views on schoolteachers and my father, I knew better than to pursue the subject.

  From the next hilltop I could look off in three directions at mountain ranges. Some of the peaks were still white on top. I could scarcely believe that we were looking at snow in mid-June, but my grandfather assured me that we were. He showed me Jay Peak and Mount Washington. He pointed to a rugged heap of mountains straight ahead. “Canada,” he said.

  Higher up the Hollow we passed an elderly woman out in a hayfield with two horses and a wagon. My grandfather lifted his hand to her and said, “That would be your Big Aunt Rose. She hates to admit it but she’s my sister. That’s my place up there. The last one up the Hollow.”

  Just ahead, in a kind of scooped-out bowl at the base of a high, forested ridge, the dirt track ended in the dooryard of a very large two-story house, weathered to a pearly gray, with a much larger faded red barn linked to it by an ell consisting of a hodgepodge of connected sheds. On a steep slope between the rear of the barn and the edge of the woods were a dozen or so red and white cows, all facing the same way. Across a meadow from the house, just below a small pond where the river had been dammed, slouched a long low building, open on one side, which my grandfather identified to me as his sawmill.

  My grandfather stopped his truck in the road and surveyed his buildings critically. Suddenly he looked straight at me and inquired in that perpetually harsh tone if I were afraid of him.