Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Yes, sir,” my grandfather said, an expression which, in the Kingdom County of my youth, could signify anything from an amiable salutation to a sarcastic disclaimer to an acknowledgment of the bleak lot of all farmers and loggers everywhere.

  I was astonished by the way that huge chunk of rock had leisurely toppled over into the river. It must have weighed several tons, and it looked as if more of the ledge had been dislodged underwater, where we couldn’t see it. But no matter. Just downstream, the logs were packed tightly from bank to bank again, in a solid, interlocked, immovable mass.

  My grandfather got out the last stick of dynamite and tapped it thoughtfully against his palm. Then he stuck the dynamite stick in his back pocket and headed up the lane toward the barn.

  For the next few days my grandfather was busy with spring work around the farm. There were fences to repair, sap buckets to collect and rinse out, two fields to plow and harrow and plant. As for the logs, I suspected that he was hoping for a big spring rain to bring up the river and move them along into his millpond. But no big rain came and as the middle of May approached, the logs were still snarled up in the lower bend of the oxbow above the mill, where they were as useless to us as though still standing in the woods upriver.

  One evening after supper I wandered down to the sawmill dam, where my grandfather was fishing. It was a simple dam, built by Sojourner Kittredge and replaced twice since, at a spot where the river narrowed to less than twenty yards across. Just above, in the small millpond, was an island about the size of our farmhouse kitchen. The troublesome oxbow was situated one hundred feet or so above the island.

  My grandfather, who never fished with anything but flies, and used only one fly, a number ten red-and-white Royal Coachman, made a short, precise cast up beside the island. “What I really ought to do, Austen, is raise this so-called pond another three, four feet and flood out the whole shebang, island and oxbow and all. Back this little puddle clear up to the Idaho woods above and float that Christly jam right on out of there.”

  My grandfather stripped in line and cast again. He made that distinctive rasping sound in his throat. “That would show them,” he said.

  By “them,” of course, he meant my grandmother. But what did she have to do with this? Nothing, so far as I could see—until I happened to glance up at the towering logjam and the blooming apple trees beside it, scenting the entire meadow all the way down to the dam with their spicy pink and white blossoms.

  “Wouldn’t that flood out Gram’s orchard?” I asked.

  My grandfather frowned. “We’d never have a jam there again, Austen. Our problems would be over.”

  My grandmother’s apple orchard was full of rare, old-fashioned varieties whose names were nearly as alluring as their fruit: Duchess of Oldenburg, Snow Apple, Cox Orange Pippin, Red Astrachan, Summer St. Lawrence, and twenty others. Along with her Buff Orpington laying hens, the old-fashioned apples were Gram’s pride and joy. Besides being an important source of her private household income, the early-ripening varieties were blue-ribbon shoo-ins at the fruit and vegetable exhibit at Kingdom Fair.

  “What about Gram?” I said again.

  My grandfather rounded on me. “Gram!” he said as though referring to some distant interfering relative. “This is between you and me. Not them. Do you understand that?”

  I said I did, and he handed me the fly rod. “There’s a pretty fair trout just off the right side of that island, Austen. I can’t seem to interest him tonight. See if you can get him to take a look.”

  My grandfather got out a cigar and lit it and watched me cast for the trout. I couldn’t tell whether he approved of my technique or not. After a while he shook his head. “Gram,” he muttered.

  The next morning was Saturday. Immediately after barn chores and breakfast, my grandfather began work on his new project. According to his calculations, raising the level of the pond just four feet would dislodge the logs. This could be accomplished easily enough by lowering the gate of the dam and decreasing the flow of water through the penstock containing the waterwheel that powered his mill saws. With the additional pressure of the expanded millpond, however, my grandfather would first need to reinforce some of the old dam timbers. Cutting the new timbers was his first order of business.

  “Tut, what are you and grandfather sashaying around that dam for?” my grandmother said to me when I went up to the house for a mid-moming snack.

  To avoid telling her a direct lie I said, “Gramp says we’re doing some repair work.”

  My grandmother looked at me with her sharp black eyes. “He said that? Repair work?”

  I nodded.

  She reached out and gripped my wrist. “Do you know where your grandfather’s going to be sashaying next if he drowns out my apple trees, Tut?”

  I shook my head, thereby inadvertently acknowledging my grandfather’s intention to flood the orchard.

  “I shall tell you where,” my grandmother said. “He’ll sashay straight to state prison, that’s where. I’ll send him there, for destroying my property and depriving me of the income from those apples.”

  She released my wrist and picked up her brass-bound opera glasses and trained them in on the dam. “Don’t stray out of hailing distance, Tut. I’ll want you to run a letter down to the mailbox shortly.”

  My grandmother finished her letter in ten minutes flat. I was far from surprised to see that it was addressed to Mr. Zachariah Barrows, Esquire, in Kingdom Common; old Zack Barrows was my grandmother’s personal attorney and close ally in her ongoing battle for ascendancy over my grandfather.

  Our mailbox was located half a mile down the Hollow, next to the one belonging to my Big Aunt Rose, at the mouth of the lane leading up to her place, which was as far as the RFD mail carrier could get up the Hollow road in mud season and bad winter weather. After I returned from posting the letter, I drifted over to the dam again to see how my grandfather was coming. He was still hard at work in his sawmill, cutting out dam braces. Without interrupting his work, he jerked his head down the Hollow in the direction of the mailbox. “Barrows?”

  I nodded, and my grandfather continued working and said nothing more.

  Over the course of the following week, the Farm became a domestic battleground. On Sunday my grandfather moved up to Labrador to sleep and take his meals. Then for the next several days he spent every spare hour reinforcing and repairing his dam. On Wednesday my grandmother wrote again to Attorney Barrows. By then she and my grandfather had ceased speaking to each other entirely, though occasionally one of them would send the other a terse and ominous message through me. I had long ago learned that when the chips were down, neither of my grandparents had the slightest compunction about recruiting me to their own camp. The newfangled notion put forward by various self-declared experts on family harmony that children should not be drawn into the disputes of their elders would have astonished and outraged them both. It was a cardinal precept of child rearing in the Kittredge household that I, like my little aunts, my Uncle Rob, and my father before me, should be indoctrinated in the divine correctness of all of their respective positions, beliefs, and opinions, large and small, and enlisted on the side of Right.

  Thursday evening, as my grandmother and I were eating a grim and silent supper, Gramp having returned to Labrador to eat out of cans, as my grandmother put it, I glanced out the window and saw Sheriff Mason White coming up the Hollow road in his patrol car. My grandmother had been expecting him for two days, and I knew why. Before she had a chance to tell me not to, I ran outside and raced up the ridge to warn my grandfather. Beyond doubt, Sheriff White was here with a court order to prevent Gramp from raising the level of the pond and flooding my grandmother’s apple trees.

  My grandfather was sitting at the camp table in his red-and-black-checked lumber jacket, smoking a cigar and reading an old National Geographic. He glanced up at me over the reading spectacles he’d selected from the eyeglasses bin at the five-and-dime in Kingdom Common, then returned to h
is magazine.

  “Mason White’s on his way with a court order!” I blurted out. “I saw him coming up the Hollow.”

  “That’s all?” my grandfather said. “I thought at the very least you were going to report that the house was afire.”

  My grandfather got up and went over to his bunk. He pulled a locker out from underneath it, and got something out of it, I didn’t see what clearly. He stuck whatever it was in his lumber jacket pocket. Then he returned to the table and resumed reading.

  In the meantime I looked around the camp. It was growing dusky and my grandfather had already lit the kerosene lamp on the table. The antlers of the deer heads mounted on the back wall shone softly in the lamplight. In other circumstances it would have been pleasant to flop down on the rear seat from an old 1938 Packard that my grandfather used as a camp sofa and get him to tell me about going down the Connecticut with big log drives or going to Labrador and out West with the surveying crews. This evening there was no time for such tales. Even now the gangling apparition of Kingdom County’s chief lawman, Sheriff Mason White, was heaving into sight in the camp dooryard.

  The sheriff came up to the open doorway and knocked on the outside wall of the camp. “Evening, Austen,” he said in his high squeaky voice.

  “Yes, sir, Mason,” my grandfather said without looking up from his Geographic or inviting the sheriff inside.

  “Very nice evening, Austen.”

  My grandfather continued reading.

  “Evening there, young fella,” the sheriff greeted me.

  Following my grandfather’s cue, I said nothing.

  Sheriff White shifted his weight. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “maybe it ain’t such an all-fire fine evening after all.”

  My grandfather wet his thumb and turned a page. He took a puff of his cigar, and read on.

  The sheriff shifted again, before taking an official-looking document out of his coat pocket. “Now, Austen,” he said in a shaky voice, “this ain’t nothing personal. But I have been charged with delivering you this court summons to appear at the courthouse tomorrow morning at ten in the a. of m. for a civil proceeding in the case of”—he glanced at the document, which was shaking in his hand—“in the case of Kittredge vs. Kittredge.”

  Sheriff White held the court order through the open camp doorway. When my grandfather did not look up from his magazine, the frightened sheriff set down the paper on the floor and backed two or three steps into the dooryard. “It ain’t nothing personal,” he said again.

  “Neither is this,” said my grandfather, and he reached into the side pocket of his lumber jacket, took out the last remaining stick of Granite State Blasting Company dynamite, lit the fuse with his burning cigar, and with a sudden flick of his wrist tossed the lighted dynamite stick end over end out the doorway to Sheriff Mason White.

  Sheriff White caught the dynamite stick reflexively. A look of terror came over his face. With the lighted dynamite clutched in his fist, he whirled around in the dooryard twice, like a man on fire. As he came out of the second revolution he heaved the dynamite far into the woods. It flared through the twilight like a skyrocket. Just before it dropped out of sight into the dusky softwoods, an explosion accompanied by a bright orange flash split the quiet.

  “Good thundering Jehovah!” Sheriff White roared out. “You Kittredges aren’t only outlaws, you’re lunatics!”

  In his confusion he whirled around yet again, then took off at a dead run back down the trail toward the Farm.

  My grandfather continued to read for a minute or so. Then he jerked his head toward the shelf behind the camp woodstove, where he kept his provisions. “I could go for a number ten can of peaches, Austen. I’m getting sick of Campbell beans and jelly sandwiches on store bread that pulls apart in your hands.”

  I brought him the peaches and he took out his hunting knife and jabbed the point into the top of the can and haggled it open. He impaled a couple of peach halves and ate them off the knife, which he politely drove upright into the tabletop next to the open can for me to use. I ate some peaches with my grandfather, and neither of us spoke for a while. I looked over at the two bunks along the back wall, remembering how I’d awakened here one morning in deer season to find snow on my quilt, blown in through the chinks in the logs. Even before the border-country winter set in in earnest, the wood cookstove didn’t keep the camp very warm. But if Labrador wasn’t always comfortable, it was never less than a comforting place.

  When we finished the peaches, my grandfather poured some kerosene on a few sticks of kindling in the stove and lit a small fire to take the chill off the evening. The wood flared up fast, reminding me of the lighted dynamite stick soaring through the dusk. I caught a whiff of that distinctive evergreen redolence my grandfather carried with him everywhere, imbued in his woolen pants and jacket, and remembered the first time I smelled that wonderful scent, on our way from the village to Lost Nation when I was just six years old. That seemed a long time ago now.

  It occurred to me that I should get back to the house before my grandmother started to worry about me.

  “So you’re not going to the court tomorrow?” I said, getting up.

  “Certainly I’m going to court,” my grandfather said. “We’re all going to court. You, too. Blowing up a two-bit sheriff is one thing, Austen. But a man can’t be ignoring a summons to court. Tell them we’ll be leaving shortly after nine o’clock.

  “Kittredge vs. Kittredge,” he called after me as I headed out the door. “That should be a court to remember.”

  I had next to no hope that my grandmother would allow me to miss school the next day to attend the court hearing, but for once she let me off the hook. Like my grandfather, she seemed to believe that witnessing this ultimate confrontation between them was actually more important than my precious education. I was delighted to hear her tell me that I could come with them.

  We left at nine sharp in my grandfather’s truck. I rode in the middle. My grandmother wore her most funereal black dress and a plain black hat with a tiny gold crocodile stickpin. My grandfather wore a clean red flannel shirt, neatly-creased khaki pants, and his steel-toed work boots. As always, he was freshly shaven and his short white hair was neatly brushed.

  It was a fine day in late May. Under the clear northern Vermont sky, the hills were as green as any hills in the world. In another week it would be haying time in Kingdom County.

  On the way down the Hollow neither one of my grandparents mentioned the impending hearing. My grandmother sat silently with her hands folded in her lap and a determined look on her face, which could have been carved from granite. My grandfather mentioned that a traveling circus was coming to town soon, and that he would take me to see it. “How would you like to go off to work for the circus, Austen?” he said. “Or a traveling fair?”

  I said I would.

  My grandmother gave a long sigh, and I heard her mutter the word sashaying. But I envied my grandfather his sashaying days, and yearned to see for myself someday what lay on the far side of the hills and mountains.

  My grandfather slowed down to a crawl about halfway to the village so that I could get a good look at the crew running the new electrical line up to the Hollow. I knew that my grandparents disagreed over the power line, as they did about nearly everything else. Gramp was looking forward to having electricity in the sawmill, where he now had to rely on our water-powered paddle wheel to operate his machinery. But my grandmother had stated flatly that she would never have electricity in the house; too many Vermont farmhouses had caught fire from faulty wiring over the years, and she did not intend to run that risk.

  We arrived in the village at nine-fifty by the courthouse clock. The following Monday was Memorial Day, and flags were already waving from house porches and in front of the stores. But the main excitement this morning seemed to be the hearing. A dozen or so curiosity-seekers were already standing on the long stone steps in front of the courthouse.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Kittr
edge,” said Bumper Stevens, the commission sales auctioneer. “Who’s that young fella with you? Your attorney?”

  “He’s as much attorney as I’ll ever require.”

  Now that we’d reached the courthouse, I was afraid that they wouldn’t let me in. But my grandparents marched right through the big front door as though they owned the place, and up a set of wide wooden stairs with me at their heels.

  The courtroom was about the size of our double haymow at home. It had tall windows on three sides and smelled like a church. My grandmother sat with Lawyer Barrows at a shiny table below the judge’s bench. My grandfather and I sat in two wooden chairs on the opposite side of the central aisle, about three rows back. A minute later I saw my Uncle Rob and my little aunts, Freddi and Klee, who were just out of college for the summer, come in and sit in the back of the room, opposite the curiosity-seekers, who by now numbered twenty or so. They waved to me and I lifted my hand.

  The courtroom was very still. On the front wall, a large clock with a very white face and very black hands said nine fifty-five. At the table down in front, my grandmother and old Zack were conferring intently over a paper my grandmother had produced from her pocketbook.

  My grandfather nudged me. “What sort of wood are the tables and benches up front made out of, Austen?”

  “Rock maple,” I said.

  My grandfather gave me a curt nod. “What’s the floor made of?”

  “Red oak.”

  This time my grandfather didn’t even bother to nod; it was enough that I knew.

  A minute or two before ten, a man in a suit and tie came in and filled a water glass on the judge’s bench. He nodded pleasantly to Zack and my grandmother, and to my grandfather. “That’s the bailiff,” my grandfather said. “He keeps order in—There’s the old judge now.”