“You handed him a ten outen your shirt pocket.”
“You give him ten dollars, Austen Kittredge.”
“It would have been that, all right. Ten.”
The Snake Man’s eyes were furious as an angry serpent’s. But he said nothing. My grandfather released his grip.
“You want to yell ‘Hey, rube!’ go ahead. Yell away.”
The Snake Man looked at the armed men crowded around his booth. Then he shrugged and shook his head. “Okay, Gramps,” he said. “You win.” He counted nine dollars out into my grandfather’s hand, a five and four ones.
My grandfather gave it to me. “This belongs to you, Austen. Keep better track of it this time.”
But he wasn’t through with the Snake Man yet. He got a dime out of his pocket. “I want to play your game,” he said. “Toss that ball here.”
To my surprise, my grandfather stepped off to the side and threw low and hard, knocking one of the two weighted lower bottles sideways into the other and upsetting all three.
“Remember what I told you about working for a fair one summer?” he said to me. “I learned a thing or two. Pick your prize.”
“I want that crocodile,” I shouted. “Lyle the Pink Crocodile!”
The Snake Man wordlessly took down the stuffed pink crocodile and shoved it at me with Satan, who no longer frightened me in the least.
“Now, gentlemen,” my grandfather told the men behind him, “we’ll bail out my friend.”
I clutched Lyle tightly to my chest as we moved a short distance down the midway to the coin toss glassware booth, diagonally across from the baseball throw. The red, green, and blue ice-cream plates, the decorated tea sets and cut glass pitchers and matched dinnerware sparkled beautifully under the overhead lights.
The barker with the eye patch was busy handing out change and prizes, though most of the coins people threw just bounced off the glassware onto a dirty sheet spread out on the ground below them. Again my grandfather handed me a dollar and told me to play.
The eye-patch man took my dollar and handed me back a dime to toss. I flipped it out toward the glittering array of glass and china, and it landed on the far edge of a turkey platter and slid off onto a plain white crockery tea saucer.
“Winner here,” the barker rasped out as he handed me the saucer. “We got a winner. Play again?”
I looked at my grandfather, who shook his head. “Give the boy his change,” he told the barker.
The eye-patch man spilled the remaining ninety cents he’d hoped to con me into spending into my hand, and started along the counter toward an old woman throwing dimes the way some people play a slot machine, one after another after another.
“Carnival man!” my grandfather called out.
Patch squinted at him with his one eye. “This young fella here gave you a ten,” my grandfather said. “You owe him nine more dollars.”
“Bull!” Patch growled. “He gave me a one.”
“Boys,” my grandfather said, and on cue, his neighbors materialized again.
“I won’t stand for this,” Patch shouted. “I’m going for the sheriff, by Jesus.”
“The sheriff’s tied up just now,” my grandfather said. “He’s escorting a man out of town.”
“Look,” Patch said. “Whatever trouble you had earlier with Snake, it don’t have nothing to do with me and my booth.”
“Why’d you come rushing to his defense with a billy, then?” my grandfather said.
“He yelled ‘Hey, rube!’ damn it. We got to come a-running when a carny hollers ‘Hey, rube!’”
“No, you don’t,” my grandfather said. “You’ve got to fork over the correct change or I’ll invite this man to take target practice on your wares.”
My grandfather jerked his head toward Cousin WJ Kittredge, who was squinting down the barrels of his shotgun to be sure they were clear.
“I’m real scart,” Patch said defiantly.
My grandfather shrugged. WJ inserted two large red shells in the barrels of his gun and snapped it shut. He looked up, just two coal-black eyes between his tangled black beard and slouch hat. Patch’s face turned pale. WJ lifted his shotgun and pulled back one of the hammers and Patch hollered, “All right. All right.”
He gave my grandfather nine dollars, and Cousin Whiskeyjack lowered the shotgun and vanished into the crowd.
My grandfather passed the adjacent booth, the Kewpie doll throw, without stopping. The barker there was a girl I didn’t recognize.
As we approached the hammer-and-bell, near the Ferris wheel, I saw Patch run up to confer with the shirtless man with the black vest. This looked like trouble.
“What the hell do you want?” the big-bellied man growled at my grandfather. He was already tapping a blackjack against his bare stomach. It made a hard smack each time it sprang forward and hit.
“The boy wants to play,” my grandfather said, and handed him a dollar.
The hammer-and-bell man held out the change, which my grandfather ignored. “Try it, Austen.”
I picked up the sledgehammer, then put it down. I couldn’t even lift it to my waist.
“Let me give you a hand,” my grandfather said, and took the hammer and with an easy-looking swing rang the bell.
“Okay,” the man with the blackjack said. “Here’s your cigar and here’s your change.”
“I gave you a ten,” my grandfather said.
“Did you now, rube?” Before I had any idea that he intended to do it, the blackjack man was yelling, “HEY, RUBE! HEY, RUBE!” at the top of his lungs.
From up and down the midway, for the second time that day, the carnies came swarming with their billy clubs and blackjacks and iron bars. One man was holding a broken bottle. Another palmed a knife. This time my grandfather didn’t need to speak to his neighbors. Instantly they appeared from the shadows, forming a loose phalanx around him, their peaveys and long pick poles and guns at the ready, waiting for the onrushing carnival men, who stopped in their tracks as a shotgun blast rang out over the midway, accompanied by a clangorous gong from the top of the hammer-and-bell.
Beside my grandfather, Cousin WJ Kittredge was drawing another bead on the bell, which now resembled a badly dented hubcap. This time when he fired it flew completely off the post.
“Jesus Christ Almighty, the rubes got guns!” a carny in a dirty white sailor’s hat yelled.
The mountain men stood silently around my grandfather, who was watching the hammer-and-bell man carefully. “You owe me nine dollars,” he said in his harsh voice, not loud. “I want it.”
Without a word the man handed him the money. My grandfather put it in his billfold and moved off with me in tow. The carnies gave way before us.
On down the midway we went, in a euphoric cloud of hazy colored light. We stopped at the rifle shoot, the basketball throw, the booth where you covered a red circle with three silver disks—all places where the barker had responded to the Snake Man’s “Hey, rube!” that morning. At each game my grandfather handed the barker a one and extracted change for a ten. At most of the booths my grandfather played the game after me and won a prize, which he let me pick out. Soon my arms were overflowing with stuffed animals, painted china figurines, framed pictures of baseball players and movie stars, and afterward, while my grandfather went up to the infield to purchase Hannibal, I rode on the big Ferris wheel, wedged into the swinging seat laden with my spoils from the midway. Up and up and up it went, and then stopped, swinging like a cradle, high above the midway in the cool night air.
I hugged Lyle and looked out over the seat bar. The booths below looked small and insignificant, the colored lights glowed eerily through the evening mist creeping up over the fields from the Kingdom River. The music, even the shrieks from the Octopus, sounded far, far away. Horticultural Hall gave off a warm glow, and the cattle barns glimmered like barns early in the morning before daylight when lantern lights have just come on inside. In the distance, beyond the rosy haze of the midway lights reflect
ing off the fog, I could see the fainter lights of the village of Kingdom Common, where not three months ago I’d stood alone on the station platform, waiting for my grandfather to take me up to Lost Nation.
“Hey, rube!” I said. Then I shouted it: “HEY, RUBE!
“HEY, RUBE!” I yelled, as the Ferris wheel started with a jolt and revolved on into the night, and on and on, until I thought it might never stop.
My grandfather did purchase Hannibal Rex. To the mortification of my otherwise triumphant grandmother—it was obvious that once again she was going to walk away from Kingdom Fair with more blue ribbons than my grandfather or anyone else—we brought the elephant home in the back of the lumber truck that very night and quartered him in the upper hay barn. That fall, after I started school, my grandfather used Han for a number of jobs around the Farm: hauling logs down out of Idaho, yanking some recalcitrant stumps out of a high pasture he was reclaiming northwest of the house, and, on more than one occasion just before winter and again in spring mudtime, pulling the lumber truck out of the quagmire our dirt road turned into whenever it rained hard. By degrees, Hannibal went from a wonder to a curiosity to a fixture on the Farm in Lost Nation.
I rode him off and on, and sometimes kids from the village came up to see him with their folks, but my grandfather discouraged this. As for the newspaper reporters who wanted to photograph him, he summarily put the first two who showed up off our premises. Apparently word spread because they were the last reporters we saw.
Sometimes one or two of the mountain people who’d helped my grandfather earn the money to bail Hannibal out and save his life came by to see him, usually just appearing in the dooryard as though they’d dropped out of the sky. These men my grandfather was always happy enough to see. I thought that Show and Mrs. Twist might appear someday themselves and try to buy the elephant back, but my grandfather told me he wouldn’t return Han to Show to be abused with that hook for any amount of money in the world. The showman never did contact us, and neither did his Albany lawyer.
My grandmother, for her part, rarely alluded to Hannibal at all. Most of the time she simply ignored his presence as if he didn’t exist. She did cut the article about Hermie Hill’s hospitalization out of the local paper and paste it in her Doomsday Book; and on especially cold winter nights, when the temperature fell to forty and forty-five below, she’d look up from her sewing and say to me, “You and your grandfather had better check on that animal before you go to bed, Tut.”
And we always did.
The times I remember best with Hannibal were three or four frigid nights in deep winter when my grandfather hitched him to a flat-bed sleigh and he and Han and I took hay up to the deer yarded in the deep evergreen woods of Idaho. After unloading the sled, we’d wait on the edge of the trees under the cold starlight, with Hannibal’s breath billowing up through the branches like steam from an open spot on the river. First singly, then in pairs and small family groups, the winter-thin deer came out of the woods to feed, unafraid of us or of Hannibal. Those were fine times for my grandfather and me, and I think Hannibal enjoyed them too.
But besides being a prodigious hayburner, Hannibal Rex was an old elephant when my grandfather acquired him. The long border-country winter was tough on him, even after Gramp moved him from the hayloft to a stall at the far end of the milking parlor, which was much warmer.
One afternoon the following spring, a few days after we’d turned Hannibal in with the cows in the upper pasture, he vanished. My grandfather followed his tracks into the Idaho woods and found him lying on his side, big as a gray granite outcropping, near where he’d helped us take hay to the deer the previous winter. Apparently he’d gone off to die there alone, peaceably, the way old elephants are said to do. I cried some, but my grandfather shook his head and reminded me that Han’s last year was a good one, semi-retired on a Vermont hill farm with a man and a boy who understood elephants. He rented Bumper Stevens’s bulldozer for half a day and buried him there, overlooking half the county. That summer he put up a cedar marker that said: “Here Lies Hannibal Rex, the Third Largest Elephant in Captivity. He Was a Good Elephant.” The marker is there to this day, though the inscription has faded to illegibility during the forty-five summers and winters since.
3
The Snow Owl
Early on during my first winter in Lost Nation, I discovered that just getting by from one day to the next at that time of year was a nearly full-time job for everyone in the Hollow. Three times a day, starting in mid-October, I brought in several armloads of wood apiece for the kitchen and parlor stoves. Each morning before school, and again as soon as I got home, I helped my grandfather with his barnwork. On Saturdays I worked with him in the woods or swept up at his one-man sawmill by the river. Of course I continued to help my grandmother, too: drying and putting away the supper dishes, winding the clocks, shoveling a path through the snow to her birdfeeder in the pin cherry tree behind the summer kitchen.
As I grew older, my tasks increased. At eight I was helping Gramp clean out the gutters in the milking parlor and feeding and watering Gram’s laying hens. And by the winter I was nine, I was tailing a saw on weekends for my grandfather, and I had full charge of my grandmother’s chickens, a job that included collecting each day’s eggs on my way in from afternoon barn chores.
Not counting One Eye Jack, her rooster, my grandmother kept twenty Buff Orpington laying hens. They were large birds of an unusual color between orange and cinnamon, and they were quartered in a henhouse converted from an old grain room at the far end of the long ell connecting the farmhouse and the barn. All up and down Lost Nation Hollow, my grandmother’s Orpingtons had a reputation as famous layers; and three times a week, when my grandfather trucked his milk out to the cheese factory, he took along several cartons of fresh eggs to sell at Cousin Clarence Kittredge’s general store at the junction of the Hollow and the county road.
As anyone who has ever kept them can tell you, chickens are notoriously foolish and dirty creatures. So I will state at the outset that neither my grandfather nor I had any use at all for the Buff Orpingtons, especially after our annual hoeing out and whitewashing of their premises. Yet the flock of laying hens was of great importance to my grandmother, who, since my first week on the farm, had set aside a portion of her egg money each month to defray the future costs of my college books and other incidental expenses.
Even in the dead of winter the Orpingtons were remarkably steady layers, a fact my grandmother attributed to their daily outdoor feeding and exercise in a barnyard pen adjacent to the henhouse. But in March of the year I turned nine, in the middle of a long stretch of unseasonably frigid weather, even for Kingdom County, there was a sharp decline in the productivity of her twenty laying hens, from an average of sixteen or eighteen eggs a day to fewer than a dozen.
At first my grandmother blamed the drop-off on the cold spell. But on the afternoon that I reported to her that the best nest in the henhouse had turned up empty again for the third day in a row, she told me to go back out and count the chickens themselves.
It was nearly five o’clock and already quite dark inside the henhouse. The chickens were lined up asleep on their roosting pole and easy to count, even by lantern light. I counted twice, carefully, and came up with only eighteen both times.
To make sure that I hadn’t overlooked any, I checked outside in the exercise pen. Nothing. Sometimes in the summertime a wayward hen fluttered up through a chute in the ceiling dating back to the era when the henhouse had been a grain room, and established a hidden brood nest in the haymow overhead. Not in the winter, though. In the winter the laying hens never strayed far from the vigilant single eye of Jack the rooster, venturing outside the henhouse only with him, and then just to eat and peck around in the snowy pen for a few minutes each day.
When I reported to my grandmother that two chickens were missing, she frowned and gave a long audible sigh. “Those hens are your ticket to college, Tut,” she said. “You can’t go to coll
ege without the wherewithal to buy your books.”
My grandmother threw her black shawl over her shoulders, took the lantern, and went out through the ell to the henhouse to count for herself. But to her dismay and my secret satisfaction, she came up with the same result I had: eighteen, plus the rooster.
There was no longer any doubt about it. Somehow, two of her prize laying hens seemed to have vanished into thin air. The rest were laying erratically at best. And from my grandmother’s grim silence during supper and throughout the evening, you might have supposed that my entire college education was in imminent jeopardy.
The following morning before school, the most probable culprit in the case of the missing chickens came to light. Just as I was bringing in my last armload of stove wood, a white weasel with a black tip on its tail ran out into the kitchen from under the cupboard beneath the sink. It stopped no more than four feet away from my grandmother, who was standing at the stove stirring a double boiler of oatmeal. The weasel stood up on its short hind legs and looked around at its surroundings with the fearless curiosity of a tame cat.
I was so surprised that I nearly dropped the wood. Now the weasel seemed to be staring at my grandmother, and she was staring directly back at it. Both the weasel’s eyes and my grandmother’s were as shiny and round and black as the side buttons of my grandmother’s black shoes, though Gram’s eyes were somewhat bigger. Only when she set down the oatmeal ladle and reached for her broom did the creature drop onto all fours again and slink back under the sink.
“There’s the sneak thief that’s been carrying off my hens,” my grandmother said. “Go tell your grandfather a winter weasel has taken up residence under my sink. I want him to come in here and dispatch it straightaway.”
I dumped the wood in the woodbox with a clatter and took off through the connected woodshed, toolshed, henhouse, and horse stable to the cow barn. I found my grandfather in the milk house, slamming milkcans into his wheelbarrow and cursing under his breath.
Northern Borders Page 9
