Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Oh, yes,” Freddi said happily. “Which accounts for the feud.”

  “You see,” Klee said, “your father is fifteen years older than I am, and I’m the next oldest. So for years and years he had to bear the brunt of your grandparents’ quarreling all by himself.”

  “That’s why he can’t stand an argument of any kind to this day,” Freddi said. “He heard so much arguing growing up.”

  “He tended to side with Gram,” Klee said. “Not that we blame him. Your grandfather can be a regular Tartar when he wants to be.”

  “Grief, Klee, not a Tartar. The old boy isn’t that bad. Don’t make him out to be Attila the Hun. Imagine what it must be like to be lawfully married to a woman with an official paper forbidding you to touch her.”

  “There wasn’t any such paper until years later, Fred. Not until after Uncle Rob nearly killed Mom being born.”

  “At any rate, Austen, your father never said much to your grandfather, but when it came time for him to go to the university—” Here Freddi’s voice began to quaver.

  “Do you want to have a good long cry, Fred?” Klee said savagely. “Go ahead. I’ll wait while you have your bawl.”

  “I’m not going to cry, Klee. It’s just all so sad. You know it is. What happened, Old Mole, is that—”

  “—off he went and didn’t come back for four years!” Klee ended triumphantly.

  “Kittredge pride,” Freddi said.

  “And Kittredge stubbornness,” Klee said in a fatalistic, delighted voice.

  “Hey, you up there, Buddy?” It was Uncle Rob, calling from the foot of the attic stairs. “You’re wanted down here, kid. Your dad’s getting ready to go back down the line.”

  “Ah,” Klee said. “The moment of truth has arrived. Flee while you can, Old Toad. Flee before you become consumed by Kittredge pride and stubbornness, like the rest of us.”

  “That’s silly, Klee. How can you tell him such drivel? He’s just a boy visiting his grandparents.”

  “Fly away, fly away!” Klee cried melodramatically, though I had the distinct impression that she did not want me to leave the Farm, any more than I wanted to.

  Just how I would tell this to my father, however, was more than I knew. I wasn’t at all sure I could tell him, and I dreaded the awful moment when I would have to announce my decision more than I had ever dreaded anything in my life.

  They were waiting for me in the kitchen. Dad, Rob, and my grandmother. “Well, Bud,” Dad said, “what do you say? How do you like it here?”

  “I love it,” I said, “but I miss you.”

  He grinned. “That’s natural. I miss you, too.”

  Everyone was looking at me: my father, Rob, my little aunts, who’d followed me down from the cupola to be on hand for my big decision. Most of all, though, I was aware of my grandmother’s presence. She was standing at the table putting the best silver back in its chest, and she was watching me intently with those sharp, dark, kind, and eternally expectant eyes. Yet if it was my grandmother I was most aware of, it was my father who best understood my predicament and how to make this momentous decision easy for me.

  “Austen, would you like to stay on with your grandparents for a while longer this summer?”

  You bet I would! Staying on for a while. That was the operative phrase. Now when my grandfather returned from Labrador he would find me here. I could atone for my terrible blunder after the grace. But the fact of the matter is that I desperately wanted to stay on at the Farm with my grandparents. I knew I would see Dad frequently in any case.

  After arranging to come back in a couple of weeks, and to have me spend a few days at home with him later in August, Dad left for White River. Soon afterward my little aunts rode back to the village with Uncle Rob. My grandfather appeared for evening chores and seemed neither surprised nor particularly pleased to discover that I was still there. He said nothing to me while I grained the cows, and returned to Labrador again as soon as he finished milking.

  During supper my grandmother sighed frequently, and spoke very little herself. But after the dishes were done and dried and put up, and she’d swept and mopped the floor, she looked at me earnestly and said, “Today was one of the most mortifying days of my life, Tut.”

  “I know, Gram,” I said. “I’m sorry about the grace.”

  “You, Tut, have nothing to be sorry for. Your grace was very fine, very fine indeed. If you weren’t destined to become a great archaeologist, I’d say you were cut out to be a renowned clergyman like Mr. John Wesleyan Kittredge. No, all the blame for today can be laid directly at your grandfather’s doorstep.”

  I scarcely knew how to respond to this assertion. Fortunately, though, neither my grandmother nor my grandfather ever seemed to expect much response from me at such times. And after spending the remainder of the evening reading with my grandmother in the kitchen, I went up to bed feeling that the day had been pretty successful despite all the turmoil.

  Still, I lay awake for a time, turning over in my mind some of the ineluctable mysteries of the dynasty that Sojourner Kittredge, my forward-looking ancestor, had founded in Lost Nation so many years ago. Even at six, I sensed that there must be more to my father and grandfather not seeing eye to eye than Aunt Klee and Aunt Freddi had told me. Nor was I any closer to understanding why my grandparents themselves didn’t see eye to eye. How had Uncle Rob nearly killed my grandmother, and what was this mysterious paper in my grandmother’s possession? And why was my grandfather so insistent on reminding me that he was the meanest old bastard in Kingdom County and that I had heard this first from him?

  Although I was not very sleepy, I was dog-tired. I shut my eyes and imagined that I was descending into a dark Egyptian tomb, down and down, until I fell into a restless sleep. But the unpredictable events of that unpredictable day were still not quite over.

  Sometime later, I had no way of knowing exactly when, the kitchen door slammed. I heard someone walking beneath me, and the sink pump working. Then the steps retreated toward the dining room.

  “Tut,” my grandmother called up the steps of my loft a minute later. “That was your grandfather, back from Labrador. We’re all here where we belong now. You can go to sleep.”

  So I did, knowing with a certainty that would remain with me for many years that the Farm at the end of Lost Nation was where I too belonged, and that for as much time to come as I could now foresee, my grandparents, for all their singularities, would be at the center of everything for me.

  2

  Hannibal Rex

  The end of my first summer in Lost Nation was fast approaching, and I was becoming happily ensconced in my new life with my grandparents. For a six-year-old who had led a rather sheltered town existence until now, every day on the Farm seemed to hold several fresh surprises; and my grandparents themselves continued to be endless sources of fascination for me, with their ongoing rivalry and strange ways of incorporating me into it.

  Recently everything they did around the Farm in their spare time seemed calculated to prepare for Kingdom Fair, which fell on Labor Day weekend, just before I would start school. They spent hours out in their respective gardens, earmarking the choicest vegetables for their individual displays at the horticultural exhibit. Never one to put away her work for the day and retire before eleven or midnight, my grandmother was now working nearly round-the-clock, putting up preserves for the canned produce competition, dispatching me on forays for blueberries and long blackberries to go into jams and jellies, baking pie shells for the pastry displays sponsored by the local Grange.

  My grandfather was busy on fronts of his own. Now instead of reading in the big kitchen rocker after supper or taking me fishing, he washed and groomed the four Ayrshire milkers he’d selected to show at the cattle exhibit, selected some beautiful maple and fir boards for the lumber display, and circled his work horses around and around the barnyard, pulling a small buckboard wagon in preparation for the two-horse hitch driving competition.

  My grandmo
ther had a summer kitchen off the regular year-round kitchen. This was a large, unfinished room with a dry sink, a long wooden counter, and an old-fashioned kerosene range where she did much of the cooking in the summertime in order to keep the regular kitchen cool to eat in. The walls of the summer kitchen were emblazoned with blue ribbons from forty years of my grandmother’s triumphs at the fair. My grandfather’s ribbons hung over the milking stanchions in the barn.

  It is hard to convey exactly how determined each one of my grandparents was to win the greatest number of ribbons. Suffice it to say that never since then have I witnessed such single-minded rivalry between two people. For weeks it infected the entire household.

  As Labor Day and the fair drew nearer, a special anticipation hung in the air all up and down Lost Nation Hollow and throughout Kingdom County. One day on our way into the village to deliver our milk to the cheese factory, my grandfather and I spotted many bright red-and-yellow posters on the sides of barns and sheds, in store windows, plastered to roadside trees and telephone poles. They depicted a performing elephant rearing up on its massive hind legs with its trunk raised majestically. Of course I had seen pictures of elephants before, but compared to the Elephant Child in my Kipling storybook, or even the gigantic beasts in the caravan of elephants in The Arabian Nights, the elephant on the posters was huge almost beyond belief, dwarfing the midway Ferris wheel sketched in the background. Covering its back was a vast tapestry of many brilliant colors. Its headdress glittered with rubies and emeralds, and its alabaster tusks were long and curved, and as lethal-looking as twin ivory scimitars. “See Hannibal Rex, King of the Big Top, the Third Largest Elephant in Captivity,” the posters announced.

  Even now, I vividly remember the thrill of that gaudy scene repeated a hundred times all over the county. I hoped my grandfather hadn’t forgotten the promise he’d made to stake me to a day at the fair, but was too shy to remind him of it.

  Fair day arrived at last. Lately my greatest fear had been that it would rain, but today was cloudless. My grandfather had put the high sideboards on his truck and taken his four show cows and two horses into the fairgrounds the evening before. Uncle Rob had carted in my grandmother’s displays.

  While my grandfather and I did barn chores, my grandmother packed our lunches since like most farm families at the time, they deemed it wasteful to purchase lunch at the fair. Immediately after breakfast we headed down the hollow in the mist.

  The fairgrounds weren’t crowded this early on opening day. Except for the carousel, most of the midway rides and game booths weren’t set up yet. But the freshly painted dairy barns sparkled white in the sunshine, the stalls had been draped with colored bunting and decorated with cedar boughs and wildflowers in sap pails, and as the farmers moved quietly along the aisles with hay and grain and wheelbarrows carrying out manure, there was an anticipatory, festive air about the scene that reminded me of Christmas.

  In the lower end of the Ayrshire barn, a boy of eight or nine was helping his father milk cows. He had a peashooter, and every once in a while he’d ping a pea in our direction. One drilled me in the forehead and smarted like a bee sting. “Who’s that?” I asked my grandfather.

  He waited until the man and kid went outside for sawdust. Then he said, “That’s Preston T. Hill and his boy Hermie from down on the county road. Preston’s the town poundkeeper. He rounds up stray animals and such. His boy’s a young pissant if you want the truth. You let me know if he hits my cows with that peashooter. I’ll kick his ass over the grandstand.”

  “Elephant’s coming! Elephant! Elephant!”

  Hermie Hill was rushing past the open end of the barn, shouting as he ran. Several other boys came charging along behind him. They were chasing a boxy, round-shouldered old truck with slatted openings in the sides. In faded letters on the back were the words “Hannibal Rex, King of the Big Top.” Without a moment’s hesitation I joined the gang of boys running behind the truck as it coughed and bounced its way across the racetrack toward the infield in front of the grandstand. Through the slats I caught a glimpse of something gray and enormous. As the battered vehicle jolted and rocked along with its enormous weight, I was breathless with anticipation.

  The truck lurched to a halt and a spry, undersized, unshaven man in a dirty blue T-shirt and jeans, scuffed red cowboy boots, and a wide-brimmed big-game hunter’s hat jumped out with a scowl on his face. He made a short dash toward the gaggle of us kids behind the truck, then pulled up short and stamped one red boot. “Scat!” he yelled.

  Just the way you would to a cat.

  “Scat!” he shouted again. “No kids yet. This elephant’s a man-killer until he’s been fed and watered. No elephant rides until noon.”

  The little man in the big hat could have devised no more enticing come-on for us. We’d stopped in our tracks when he’d rushed at us. Now we surged forward again, determined to see this man-killing elephant, this Hannibal Rex, the third largest elephant in captivity.

  In the meantime, out of the passenger side of the cab stepped the skinniest, slinkiest woman I’d ever seen. She wore a spangled blue costume, like a cowgirl, and appeared to be much younger than the man in the big-game hat and boots. She stretched out her arms as though they’d been riding all night and she’d gotten very stiff. Then suddenly she was standing on one leg with the other leg folded flat up against her back, like a stork’s leg. She reached up over her shoulder and scratched the ankle of the lifted foot.

  “Double-Jointed Woman, Freaks of the World Show,” the man said to us over his shoulder. “Also the wife, name of Mrs. Twist. Step back away now. I’m about to let Hannibal out of this truck. He’s a rogue, he’s a man-killer and a child-killer, back, back, back. You, rube!” He whirled and pointed straight at me. “Fetch me a bale of hay. Hannibal ain’t quite so apt to tromp you to mush if you hay him a little now and then. Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

  I ran for the cow barn, tremendously proud to be singled out to fetch hay for Hannibal. My grandfather was still milking, and Mr. Preston T. Hill was talking vehemently to him about school taxes. Gramp listened to me without comment, then finished his milking unhurriedly while I shifted from foot to foot and Mr. Hill ran on about taxes. Finally my grandfather picked up a hay bale and headed out of the barn toward the infield, with Mr. Hill and me beside him.

  We arrived just as the elephant man was unchaining the massive rear door of the truck. It dropped down onto the grass with a resounding thump, converting itself into a makeshift ramp. Out of the dim interior of the truck drifted a nearly overpowering odor of old straw and manure and a musty, ineffable presence of elephant.

  Hannibal looked leviathan as he backed out of the truck down the ramp. Until that moment, the largest animals I’d ever seen were our team of workhorses. Hannibal would have made half a dozen of them. I simply could not believe how big he was. He was taller than our milk house at home, and nearly as wide. At six, I could scarcely have been more incredulous if the showman had produced a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  Hannibal felt cautiously, almost daintily, for the ground with each hind foot, then lumbered around to face us as the elephant man jabbed at his legs with a long pole ending in a sharp hook.

  Mrs. Twist was now sitting on the grass with her back against the front truck tire and her legs crossed behind her head.

  “Christ Jesus!” Mr. Preston T. Hill said to her. “Who the hang are you?”

  “Freaks of the World Show,” she said.

  “Freaks is right,” Mr. Hill said.

  “Stand back, he’s a rogue, he’s a child-killer and a baby-killer!” the elephant man said, feinting another dash at us boys.

  “Oh, pipe down, Show,” Mrs. Twist said in a bored voice. “Han never hurt nobody in his life.”

  “Yes, he did too,” the little man she’d called Show shouted.

  “You there, rube,” he said to my grandfather, “break that bale open and scatter it out here for Hannibal. Same as you would for a cow.”

  My grandfather se
t the hay bale down. “What did you call me?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Show said. He was in perpetual motion. Now he was driving an iron stake into the ground, now fastening the elephant’s leg chain to it, now jabbing at the animal again with his hook.

  “He could yank that stake clean out of the ground with one quick jerk. Be on the rampage seconds later,” Show said to my grandfather. “Annihilate half the midway crowd, the way he done down in Arkansas a few years back.” He brandished his hook. “This keeps him in line, you better believe.”

  “Did you call me rube?” my grandfather said.

  “No, I was talking to them infernal kids,” Show said. “Hannibal don’t take to kids at all. He killed a young scamp was teasing at him with a water pistol over in Albany two years ago this past June.”

  My grandfather gave Show a skeptical look. Then he cut the baling twine and spread out the hay for Hannibal. “That’ll be fifty cents,” he said.

  “Put it on my tab,” Show said. “I don’t have fifty cents or five cents and won’t until after I commence giving rides this afternoon. I coasted in here with the fuel needle on empty the last five miles.”

  “That’s the Jesus truth, mister,” Mrs. Twist said, her legs comfortably folded behind her back. “That’s the plain sad Jesus truth. Show don’t have one thin dime to his name and neither do I.”

  “Yah!” Hermie Hill called out suddenly. “I ain’t a-scart your stupid old elephant.” He whipped out his peashooter and zinged one at Hannibal. It bounced off his massive shoulder. If the elephant noticed at all, he gave no sign of it. But Show saw what Hermie had done.

  He made a sprint at Hermie, who ran around the truck, laughing. “Hannibal made boy-soup out of a young fella in Macon for doing less than that!” Show yelled. “All he done was poke Han with a little stick. Boy looked like smashed shortcake afterward.”

  “Hear him, won’t you?” Mrs. Twist said amiably.