Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Sunday had rolled around at last, as all days must, dreaded or otherwise. After chores my grandfather washed up and, as usual on Sunday morning, put on a white shirt and a necktie. The first time this had happened I thought it very strange. Both he and my grandmother had given me to understand that he never attended church. When he pulled on his hip waders I was doubly surprised. I struggled into my Sunday clothes, my grandmother brushed down my cowlick, and we three paraded out to the truck, my grandfather now in full Sunday regalia—and his waders. I could scarcely believe he was going to fish while we attended the service, but that is exactly what he did, then and each Sunday afterward.

  The interior of the tiny Methodist church at the foot of the Hollow was as stark as the beliefs of its congregation. The stovepipe hung from the ceiling on long wires, and ran horizontally all the way from the stove, in the middle of the room, to the rear wall. Besides my grandmother and me, there were never more than a dozen other worshippers in attendance. The presiding minister was Whiskeyjack Kittredge’s old ramrod-straight brother, John Wesleyan (JW) Kittredge, who was a kind of lay clergyman.

  JW’s text on the Sunday of my father’s scheduled arrival was “Spare the Rod,” with many lurid examples of how children whose misdemeanors were allowed to go unchastened turned out very badly indeed. He suggested that the most infamous malefactors in the Bible from Cain to King Herod had all been spoiled as boys, a misfortune to which their subsequent villainy was directly attributable. I had no idea what my grandmother thought of this strange message, but the lay minister frowned in my direction several times during the sermon and once pointed his finger directly at me and shook it menacingly.

  At the end of his tirade, John Wesleyan said we could all say a silent prayer now, and though mainly we should pray for others, particularly our minister, we could all ask for one thing for ourselves. All I could think of to pray for was that I’d never have to attend church again; but this didn’t seem right to do under the circumstances, so I didn’t get in a personal request in time, and the next thing I knew we were singing again.

  The service was longer rather than shorter, and afterward my grandfather, who had just come up from the river, got me aside on the pretext of showing me a one-pound brook trout in his wicker fishing basket and asked me very earnestly, as he always did, if Cousin John Wesleyan had preached against him. I assured him that he had not.

  “Did my name come up at all in the sermon?” my grandfather asked. No, it hadn’t. My grandfather looked at me, then shut his basket lid abruptly. “You report to me when and if it does,” he said. “And that’ll be the last time it happens.”

  On the way back up the Hollow my grandfather asked me whether I’d prefer to attend church again next Sunday or go fishing with him. My grandmother answered for me. “Church,” she said. “That’s what civilized people do on Sunday, Tut.”

  As we approached the farmhouse I waited for my grandfather to initiate our meanest-old-bastard-in-Kingdom-County ritual. When he did not, I nudged him and said, “Who lives there?”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  I poked him again with my elbow. “Who lives there?”

  “Never mind that foolishness now,” he growled, shooting a look at my grandmother.

  “Who does live there?” she said. “What’s Mr. Kittredge been telling you, Tut?”

  “Nothing,” my grandfather said. “It’s nothing to do with you. They’re here, I see.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “The schoolteacher.”

  Parked in the dooryard beside a battered red pickup truck was my father’s Chevy sedan.

  “Do you mean your elder son?” my grandmother said sharply.

  “I mean the schoolteacher,” my grandfather repeated, slamming to a stop.

  Evidently my father had been here for some time because just then I spotted Dad and Uncle Rob—the owner of the pickup—coming up through the meadow from the river with their fly rods. They waved. But although my grandfather had known about my father’s visit all month, he suddenly appeared to be very angry. “No doubt they’ve come to fetch Austen back downcountry,” he said as he got out of the truck. “Well, take him and be damned!”

  Then he stalked off toward the house with his fish basket, without another word. Dad had already entered the dooryard and I was pretty sure he’d heard my grandfather’s remark. All he said, though, was, “Well, Mom, I see things haven’t changed around here since the last time I came up.”

  “Surely you hadn’t expected them to,” my grandmother said, taking hold of my father’s wrist and looking up at him with pleasure.

  Uncle Rob laughed and asked me how I’d liked church. “Did that old mossback JW Kittredge denounce your grandfather from the pulpit again?”

  “No,” I said. “I think he denounced me.”

  Rob and my father both laughed.

  “Hi, Buddy,” Dad said. “Tell me one good thing about your month.”

  “I went to Labrador with Gramp and saw Gram’s Sphinx,” I said. “It’s extinct now.”

  Although I wasn’t sure why, Dad smiled and Uncle Rob laughed hard. On the way inside, they jostled each other and joked about who could pin whom. My grandfather stood with his back to us at the sink, cleaning his trout; but I heard him declare that he could by God pin them both with one hand tied behind his back. “A schoolteacher and a kid!” he said to the trout he was cleaning.

  Just then Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee, who’d come up from the village with Rob, appeared from the dining room, where they’d been setting the table for the big Sunday dinner. After hugging me, they went over to the sink to admire Gramp’s fish. Klee had heard what he’d said about Dad and Rob, and she put her arm around him and said in her best Bogart imitation, “Lay off my brothers, old man. They just might have to take you out back and shoot you.”

  Gramp grunted. Although he paid little attention to my little aunts, his daughters, referring to them mainly as the flibbertigibbets, Klee and Freddi were the only members of the family who could get away with teasing him. I was excited about seeing Dad’s pretty young sisters, known as my little aunts to distinguish them from several great or big aunts.

  Freddi and Klee had visited us in White River several times a year, and like Uncle Rob, they always made a great fuss over me. Freddi called me Old Toad and Mole and Ratty after the animals in The Wind in the Willows and Klee talked to me in a mock tough-guy accent, like a character from the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels she was forever reading. I thought the world of both of them and of Uncle Rob as well.

  Freddi’s and Klee’s real names were Nefertiti and Cleopatra. My grandmother had named them after the fabled Egyptian queens, and as far as I was concerned they were every bit as beautiful. Klee was small and slender, with ivory skin, my grandmother’s dark hair, my grandfather’s pale blue eyes, and a sharp tongue inherited from both of them—though she never spoke sharply to me. Freddi was tall and statuesque, with a reputation for being overly sensitive. She had lovely huge brown eyes, long, honey-colored hair and a tawny, golden complexion. At twenty-one and nineteen, Klee and Freddi were attending the state university on full scholarships, courtesy of our old ancestor Sojourner. During the summer they worked on the assembly line varnishing chairs at the American Heritage mill in Kingdom Common, where they boarded with a local family.

  Besides reading to me from The Wind in the Willows and my other favorite storybooks, my little aunts loved to whisk me off to the cupola atop the old farmhouse for what they were pleased to call Sunday School lessons. In fact, these lessons consisted of the wildest tales of spirit rappings, the sorrowful wanderings over the face of the earth of the dispossessed Russian princess Anastasia, the dreadful curse of King Tut’s tomb and, best of all, the many tragic secrets and hidden scandals from our own family history.

  In addition to being beautiful, high-strung, and full of the most fanciful tales, both Freddi and Klee were terribly independent-minded. No doubt they could have h
ad nearly any boyfriends they’d wanted in all northern Vermont; but for some years they had sustained tumultuous off-again on-again relationships with, respectively, Pooch and Artie Pike, two hard-drinking local roughnecks Uncle Rob had ironically dubbed the Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers, like some sort of circus aerial act. My little aunts were also given to all kinds of theatrical demonstrations, particularly in front of me, whom they esteemed very highly as a most appreciative and sympathetic one-boy audience. In much the same way that my grandfather harked back to Sojourner Kittredge’s geographical misapprehension to explain all of the subsequent blunders and misfortunes of the Kittredge family right up to the present, Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee loved to conclude their horror tales in the cupola by sadly extending their hands, which were stained red from the chair varnish at the mill, and announcing, to my great delight and their own, “Behold, Austen! Look at these poor mitts. These tell the whole story”—as though, somehow, the red stain on their hands proved all of their most fatalistic theses and notions about the Kittredge family.

  Rob Roy had just graduated from high school and was as wild as a yellow bumblebee, as my little aunts put it. They called him the anointed because as the baby of the Kittredge family he could do no wrong in the eyes of either of my grandparents. He worked in the mill too, and did some stringing evenings and weekends for The Kingdom County Monitor. Rob aspired to be an outdoor columnist for a newspaper large enough to send him to Alaska and Africa, and claimed to be doing field research for a treatise-in-progress called Angling and Shooting in Eastern North America—which Freddi and Klee said was no more than an excuse to spend every spare minute of his time hunting and fishing and riding the roads drinking Budweiser beer with the like-minded Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers.

  “Well, buddy,” my father said to me, “what do you think? You like it up here in Siberia?”

  Suddenly I was overcome by tongue-tied shyness. I’d never been away from home for more than a night or two before. Now I was about to betray my father altogether by announcing that I wanted to defect from our home in White River and remain with my grandparents.

  I think Dad understood my dilemma. He gave me an affectionate hug and suggested that we take a quick tour of the Farm before dinner. This was just the ticket to get us back on our old confidential footing, and a minute later we were joking together.

  We visited the chickens and the barn and walked down through the pasture to the river where Gramp and I fished together evenings after supper. Then my grandmother was ringing the dinner bell. It was time to eat.

  Like most countrywomen of her generation, my grandmother was an excellent cook. Her fried chicken and mashed potatoes with chicken gravy, fresh peas, homebaked bread and homemade butter were never less than superb; but today every eye was on my father and grandfather, who were separated from each other only by me.

  My grandmother sat at the foot of the long dining room table, at the opposite end from my grandfather. For a moment the room was totally silent. Then she said, “Go ahead, Tut.”

  This was my cue to say Sunday grace, which I detested, the more so because, instead of bowing his head, my grandfather watched me the entire time. He knew that I was squirming and he delighted in my mortification. For a panicky moment I drew a complete blank.

  “‘Our Father,’” Aunt Freddi prompted softly, “‘bless this . . .’”

  In one great gulp, the words barely distinguishable from each other, I gasped: “Our-Father-bless-this-food-to-our-use-and-us-to-thy-service-amen.”

  “Amen,” said my grandmother and father and little aunts.

  But before the word was out of their mouths, and before I had the faintest notion that I was going to do it, I’d finally thought of the one personal request Preacher John Wesleyan Kittredge said I could make if I wanted to, and blurted out: “And help Dad and Gramp see eye to eye!”

  “Amen!” Uncle Rob said, and burst out laughing.

  “Brother!” my father said.

  “Amen!” Little Aunt Klee said out of the side of her mouth.

  “Je-sus!” my grandfather said. “Did they put you up to saying that?” He pointed his fork at my grandmother.

  Even Freddi was smiling behind her napkin.

  But my grandfather was genuinely mad. He was mad at them, meaning my grandmother, since he imagined that she had been responsible for my pathetic little supplication for family harmony.

  “Pass the chicken down this way,” he growled at her. “Some of us around here work for a living and don’t have time to spend all day praying and jabbering.”

  “Austen works,” Little Aunt Klee said, nodding at my father, her eyes shining with mischief.

  “Austen!” my grandfather said indignantly, as though he’d never heard my father’s name, though it was his and mine as well. “Austen’s a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers don’t know what it is to put in a day’s work.”

  “Stop inciting trouble, Klee,” my grandmother said sharply, to which my little aunt replied, in a crisp offended voice, “Very well,” and got up from the table, as straight and regal as her haughty Egyptian namesake, and disappeared into the kitchen not to return.

  Across the table from me Rob mouthed a word or two, I couldn’t tell what. Freddi leaned over and whispered, “Don’t worry, Old Toad. Klee does this at every family dinner.”

  My grandmother sighed. She looked down the table at my grandfather and said, “Mr. Kittredge, your son is not a schoolteacher. He’s a headmaster. What’s more, he’s the headmaster of one of the finest schools in New England.”

  My grandfather had paid no attention to Klee’s outraged departure. Very deliberately, he put down his fork. Staring straight at my grandmother, he said: “Saying a headmaster isn’t a schoolteacher is like saying a trout isn’t a fish. A fish may be a trout. But all trout are still fish and all headmasters are still schoolteachers. That’s as certain as the sun coming up over the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the morning and setting behind the Green Mountains of Vermont at night.”

  My grandmother, who had not served herself a morsel yet, glared back at my grandfather. “That,” she said, “is one of the most peculiar declarations I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s peculiar,” my grandfather said, pointing a long arm toward my grandmother’s sitting room-bedroom, Egypt. “That, by God, is peculiar.”

  My father set down his drumstick. “Okay, I can’t stand any more of this,” he said, and took his plate out to the kitchen. He was immediately followed by Little Aunt Freddi, who burst into tears on her way out of the room.

  Rob kicked me under the table. This time I caught what he mouthed at me. “Three down.”

  “Now even you must be satisfied, Mr. Kittredge,” my grandmother said. “You’ve driven three of your four children away from their Sunday dinner.”

  “By Jesus Christ, I haven’t driven anybody anywhere!” my grandfather barked out. “The next time you hear from me, I’ll be in Labrador.”

  And he, too, was up and gone.

  My grandmother nodded grimly. “Once a sashayer, always a sashayer,” she said. “His Waterloo looms nearer, Tut.”

  Across the table Uncle Rob was holding up four fingers.

  At exactly the same time, as though to immortalize this awful moment in my memory, the dining room clock began to strike twelve, in a wild, frenetic manner, followed at irregular intervals by all of the other clocks in the house both near and far.

  Rob grinned. “Well, Buddy,” he said, helping me to another piece of chicken, “dig in.”

  When I looked up from my plate again, I just caught out of the tail of my eye the dark swish of my grandmother’s skirt, retreating into Egypt.

  “That’s five,” Rob said cheerfully. “Welcome to the Kittredge family, kiddo. Hope you like chicken.”

  After dinner, Rob and Dad and I played flies and grounders in the cut hayfield beside the house while the women washed those few dishes that needed washing. Then while m
y father visited with my grandmother in Egypt, Little Aunt Klee and Little Aunt Freddi spirited me up to the cupola for a Sunday School lesson. They had just finished washing their hair with the soft rainwater from the big cistern outside the kitchen door, and they wanted to dry it in the sunshine and breeze coming in the cupola windows. Aunt Klee appeared to have gotten over her peeve and Freddi was as enthusiastic as ever. In fact, it seemed to me that with the exception of my grandfather, off in Labrador, nobody in the family acted as though anything much out of the ordinary had happened.

  No sooner were we ensconced in the cupola than Klee and Freddi confirmed my impression that such domestic brush-ups were not at all unusual. “That was a wonderful grace that you said, Old Mole,” Freddi said. “I’m sure it made all of us Kittredges stop and think how much we really love each other.”

  It occurred to me that if Freddi was right about the effect of my prayer, the Kittredges had a strange way of showing their affection; but I said nothing.

  “That’s how nearly all our Sunday dinners break up,” Klee said with a certain note of pride. “Should the Sunday School lesson today deal with Dad and poor Austen, Freddi?”

  “Mother certainly wouldn’t want it to,” Freddi said. “On the other hand, if Mole’s going to be heard from, won’t he need to know?”

  Klee nodded. “The sooner the better, I think. Listen closely, now, Austen. The reason your grandfather and your father don’t see eye to eye has nothing at all to do with the fact that your father is a schoolteacher. It’s that secretly, way down deep, he and your grandfather are too much alike.”

  “In other words, proud,” Freddi said.

  “Yes,” Klee agreed. “They are both very, very proud.”

  “And very, very stubborn,” Klee said.