Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  A tall, rugged-looking man of about sixty came in through a door at the front of the room. He too smiled at us.

  “All rise, please, the Superior Court of Kingdom County is now in session,” the bailiff said in a solemn voice. “Judge Forrest Allen presiding, in the case of Kittredge vs. Kittredge.”

  The judge waved his hand. “Sit down, folks,” he said. “Please sit down. We’ll dispense with most of the usual formalities this morning. After all, we’re all friends.”

  Beside me, my grandfather made that rasping sound in his throat, and glared in my grandmother’s direction.

  “Well,” Judge Allen said good-humoredly, “most of us are friends.”

  A suppressed snicker or two broke out from the loafers at the rear of the courtroom. Then it was quiet again. Everyone present was eager to see the forty-year-old running feud between my grandparents come to a head in a public spectacle. I glanced over at my grandmother to see how mortified she looked, but this morning she did not seem discomfited at all. She looked severe and triumphant, as though she had won her case already.

  I realized that the judge was smiling at me. “Hello, young man. You must be Abiah and Austen’s grandson.”

  I nodded.

  “How’s the trout fishing up in the East Branch this year?”

  Thinking that this might be some sort of trick question designed to get me to take sides, I looked at my grandfather. “Tell him,” he said.

  I told the judge that the trout fishing had been good, and he nodded and said he’d have to get up and try it some evening soon, assuming that he’d still be welcome on my grandparents’ property after the hearing. Some of the spectators laughed out loud. But neither my grandfather nor my grandmother cracked a smile.

  So far, all of the judge’s good-natured efforts to break the ice had failed.

  “Now, then, folks,” Judge Allen said in a more businesslike voice, “the matter before the court today is a civil proceeding. This isn’t a criminal case. Nobody’s broken any laws or been accused of breaking any laws. Two people have had a misunderstanding and they’ve come here to iron it out in the fairest way. That’s the long and the short of it. The fact that the two litigants in disagreement are married is interesting, but it isn’t really relevant to the case.”

  I glanced back at my young uncle and two little aunts. All three were rolling their eyes. My entire family knew very well that the fact that the litigants were married, and couldn’t stand each other, had everything to do with this case.

  The judge picked up a sheaf of papers and fanned the air casually with them. He seemed determined to maintain a friendly air. “To put all this in the simplest terms,” he said, “the plaintiff in this case, Mrs. Abiah Kittredge of Lost Nation Township, has requested a permanent injunction to prevent the defendant, Mr. Austen Kittredge, from raising the level of his millpond. Mrs. Kittredge has alleged that raising the pond would flood out her apple orchard. Does that fairly represent your client’s contention, Mr. Barrows?”

  Old Zack shoved himself partway to his feet. “Yes, Your Honor. It does.”

  The judge nodded. “How many apple trees do you have in your orchard, Abiah?”

  “Thirty-six,” my grandmother said. “Here’s the list.”

  She walked up to the judge’s bench and slapped her written list of apple trees down in front of him.

  Judge Allen read through the list, mentioning some of the names aloud. “Tetofsky, Fameuse, Smokehouse . . . I haven’t encountered these fine old varieties since I was a young rapscallion robbing Old Man Quimby’s orchard up on Anderson Hill on my way home from school in the fall.”

  The judge looked at me and winked. I winked back. I liked him very much because he seemed to like both of my grandparents. Surely this amicable man could work things out between them if anyone could.

  “So, Abiah, raising the level of the pond would destroy your old-fashioned apple trees?”

  “It would.”

  The judge looked at my grandfather. “Is this the case, Austen? You intend to flood out your wife’s apple trees, do you?”

  “I intend to conduct my sawmill and lumbering operation without interference,” my grandfather said. “I’m not a rich man. If I’m to proceed with my business and keep my own head above water, I need to enlarge my pond.”

  “Why is that?” the judge said with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

  “Because I’ve got fifty thousand feet of softwood logs jammed in the bend just upriver, and I need to float them free, that’s why. It happens every spring. I’ve tried every other way in the world to get that timber out of there, including dynamite.”

  “So we hear,” the judge said dryly. “But what about your wife’s claim? Would the enlarged pond drown out her apple trees?”

  “I suspect it would,” my grandfather said. “What of it? Why should her apples be any more important than my logs?”

  “I didn’t say they were,” the judge said mildly. “Or, for that matter, that they weren’t.”

  Judge Allen frowned slightly. He tapped the list of old-fashioned apple trees with a long finger. Then he said, “Well, I can plainly see that there’s only one way for me to get a complete picture of this situation. That’s to drive up to Lost Nation Hollow and see for myself.”

  He stood up. “This hearing will recess for the time being and reconvene this afternoon at two o’clock sharp at the Kittredge farm. That’s it for this morning, folks.”

  By one-thirty that afternoon, cars and farm trucks lined the Hollow road all the way from our barnyard down to my Big Aunt Rose’s place.

  “Your grandfather has continued to make a spectacle out of this matter,” my grandmother said to me.

  Although I couldn’t see how my grandfather was to blame for it, my grandmother was right about the spectacle. Half of the village seemed to be in Lost Nation Hollow that afternoon.

  Judge Allen arrived in his black Lincoln Continental at one forty-five. He was wearing ordinary clothes and a Red Sox cap, and seemed to be in a holiday mood himself. He sauntered around my grandparents’ place, complimenting my grandfather on his handsome red-and-white Ayrshires, spread out on the hillside behind the house and all facing south toward the river as if they too were curious about the feud between my grandparents. Next Judge Allen admired my grandmother’s Buff Orpington laying hens. He toured my grandfather’s vegetable garden on the north side of the road and my grandmother’s vegetable garden directly across from it. He was especially impressed by my grandmother’s Harrison yellow rose in the dooryard, and the Seven Sisters rosebush beside the back stoop.

  “And I see you have a moss rose, too, Abiah,” the judge said graciously. “My Grandmother Allen had a moss rose up at the home place that was said to be over one hundred years old.”

  “Are you going to permit him to flood my orchard or not?” my grandmother said.

  The judge announced that he was headed for the orchard that minute, and asked my grandmother if she’d do him the honor of accompanying him. Naturally, I tagged along. On the way down through the meadow he asked if she sold the apples commercially. She told him most certainly yes, and the cider she made from them. She pointed out that the enlarged millpond would no doubt flood her vegetable garden and raspberry beds as well as her trees.

  The judge looked up and down the rows of apple trees my grandmother had planted in the meadow over the past forty years. Many she’d ordered from upstate New York and Wisconsin and even Idaho—wherever cold-climate fruit trees were cultivated. The judge shook his head. “That’s a splendid sight, Abiah.”

  Next Judge Allen and my grandfather and I viewed the logjam stuck in the lower bend of the oxbow. We stood on the blasted-away ledge in the inner bend of the bow, where the huge chunk of limestone tilted out into the river. Downstream a hundred yards, black water ran out around the sides of the jam, gurgling like a subterranean river.

  “Can’t you twitch some of those logs free with your horses, Austen?” the judge asked.r />
  “No, I can’t,” my grandfather said. “I wouldn’t put my team anywhere near that death trap.”

  “How much timber did you say was tied up in there?”

  “Fifty thousand feet.”

  “Flooding this meadow is the only way to come at it?”

  “We could wait for the fall rains and hope. In the meantime, I could go bankrupt.”

  The judge nodded thoughtfully, and headed downstream, past the jam and the small pond above the sawmill dam. By now upward of one hundred spectators were gathered around the dam and mill. Greeting people right and left, Judge Allen seemed as much at home here as he’d been in his courtroom that morning. He strolled out onto the walkway of the dam, looked up and down the river, asked me about the best fishing holes. Were the riffles below the spillway good for brook trout? Did any big rainbow or brown trout live year-round in the pond above? He was especially interested in the small island in the middle of the pond. Was it, he wondered, ever under water? How deep was the pond off the island’s head and foot?

  The crowd along the bank continued to swell. Of course Bumper Stevens was there, and old Plug Johnson and his Folding Chair Club, who had all been at the hearing earlier, and Rob Roy and my two little aunts. Only Sheriff White was conspicuously absent.

  Finally the judge cleared his throat and announced loudly enough for the entire crowd to hear, “Austen, I’ll give you and Abiah a detailed written ruling in a day or two. But I know that this is a pressing matter to both of you so I don’t intend to make you wait any longer for my decision. I’ve decided to let you raise your millpond.”

  A murmur ran through the crowd. Obviously, this wasn’t what they’d anticipated at all.

  “For how long?” my grandfather said suspiciously. “Two days? Three? It may take a month to get that mess all out of there, even with the extra water to help do it. It may take two months. I don’t know.”

  “For as long as you deem necessary,” the judge said. “Forever, if you want. That’s entirely up to you.”

  A gasp went up from the crowd now. Knowing Judge Forrest Allen, they’d been expecting some sort of Solomon-like ruling, Kingdom County style: some brilliantly original compromise—permission for my grandfather to raise the pond level temporarily, say, long enough to float free at least some of the logs, without permanently harming my grandmother’s apple trees.

  There had to be a catch. But where? The judge’s expression and voice were as amiable as always, his manner all the more magisterial in its casualness.

  “All right,” my grandfather said. “How high then? How high can I raise the water?”

  The judge shrugged. “As high as you please. Five feet, ten feet. Twenty feet if you want to.”

  Now the crowd sucked in their breath in a sharp high whistle. Raising the level of the pond so much as two feet would flood out my grandmother’s orchard, not to mention her garden and raspberries. People were beginning to exclaim out loud to each other when the judge lifted his hand.

  He waited for the crowd to fall silent. Then he pointed up at the island above the dam and said, “Raise your pond as high as the Tower of Babel if you’ve a mind to, Austen—on one side, and one side only, of that island. Which side is up to you.”

  For about five seconds, the only noise was the low hush of the pond water dropping through the open gate in the dam. Then a sigh ran through the crowd, a collective suspiration of deep satisfaction, like the sigh of a circus crowd when the flying trapeze artist makes a death-defying catch. Judge Allen hadn’t disappointed anyone after all. As even I could now see, raising the level of the pond on one side of the island, and not the other, was an absolutely impossible feat.

  Someone laughed. Then two or three others. Seconds later all the men were laughing and hooting and shaking hands with the judge and with each other, until my grandfather barked out in his sharp voice, “Hold on here, now. You fellas look as though you could use a job to keep you out of trouble. I’ll supply every manjack of you that shows up here with a pick and shovel tomorrow forenoon at six o’clock all the white mule whiskey you can drink. Until then go on back to whatever job you don’t have in the village. I want these premises cleared in five minutes.”

  Now the murmuring of the crowd grew even louder. But my grandfather ripped out in a voice that meant business, “Get moving, boys. Shove!”

  As the people dispersed, he jerked his head for me to follow him into the sawmill. He went straight to his office, unlocked a tall wall locker, and got out the cases containing his surveying tools: the same collapsible transit and measuring chains and metal pins that he had used years ago in Labrador and along the Canadian-American Line out West. He handed me a bundle of pins and a sixty-foot surveying chain, and went back outside with the transit, through the thinning crowd headed for their vehicles. I was half-running to keep up with him, though as yet I had no idea what under the sun he intended to do.

  It was evening on the river. From where my grandfather and I stood, placidly fishing off the mill dam, we could see the line of survey stakes we’d set late that afternoon, marching across the closed-off neck of land at the mouth of the oxbow: the place where, for years, my grandfather had counted on the river cutting a new, straight channel some spring.

  The fishing was slow. We figured that the commotion along the bank earlier in the day had put the trout down. After a while, when the bugs started to get thick, my grandfather went up to Labrador for the night and I went inside the house to read.

  As the mountain dusk settled over the Farm at the end of Lost Nation Hollow, and my grandmother went about her after-supper tasks in the kitchen, she seemed more solemn and thoughtful than triumphant. Although I have no doubt at all that she equated normal human weariness with sloth—never once do I recall that she ever admitted to being tired—her dark face and eyes showed the strain of the strenuous day now coming to a close. Soon after sweeping and mopping the floor, she went into Egypt and sat quietly at her sewing table, looking at the black-and-white pictures of the pyramids and the Great Sphinx in her old magazines.

  After a while I joined her there.

  “Gram,” I said, “would you like to go to Egypt sometime?”

  “This is Egypt,” she said. “Here.”

  She made a small gesture with her hands, turning the palms up in her lap to encompass the room with its artifacts.

  “I mean the real Egypt. You know. See the Nile, visit the pyramids?”

  I thought of the trip my grandfather and I had planned to Labrador, in the Far North, and that gave me an idea. “Maybe we could go together,” I said.

  My grandmother did not answer immediately. She sat quietly, abstracted by her own thoughts, her hands folded on her lap. Her jet-black hair shone in the lantern light. On the table next to the lantern, the Egyptian god with a hawk’s head stared at me more severely than usual, as if he suspected that I was allied with my grandfather. My grandmother reached out and touched the hawk-god, Lord Ra, as you might touch a sleeping cat or dog, and for just a moment, her features looked entirely otherworldly to me.

  “Provisions have been made,” she said in a somber voice, more to the hawk than to me, “for going to Egypt.”

  She paused, then said, “For afterward.”

  A chill came over me, I did not quite know why. “For afterward?”

  She nodded. “There will be a journey, Austen. There will be a destination. It’s all been carefully arranged.”

  Without warning my grandmother reached out and seized my wrist. “When the time comes, I don’t want my wishes thwarted. However outlandish they may seem to the family. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I did not, entirely. Yet it was clear that my grandmother was charging me with something of enormous importance, compared to which my grandfather’s plans for the following day were insignificant to her.

  Throughout the house the twenty clocks began to strike. I was so used to them that I barely heard the cacophony of chimes, bells, bongs, and cu
ckoos. But my grandmother listened attentively as always, though this time with a new intensity in her expression, as though the clocks now marked her own inexorable progress toward the beginning of that chilling journey that I was somehow to safeguard when the dreadful time came.

  “Bedtime, Austen,” she said when the last faint peal from the most remote second-story chamber faded into the silence of the big, dark, empty farmhouse.

  I woke up the next morning, Saturday, not to clocks chiming but to an irregular clinking sound coming through my open bedroom window. It was just getting light. I jumped into my pants and did not stop to button my shirt before running downstairs, past my grandmother at the stove, out the kitchen door and across the barnyard.

  The cows were already out in the pasture so I knew that Gramp must have come down from Labrador to milk them in the dark before dawn. I raced down through the orchard to the river above the millpond. There I found my grandfather, a lone, stark figure against the pale eastern sky, raising his pickax and lowering it, striking a stone every three or four blows—at the lower end of the row of survey pins we’d set the afternoon before.

  There was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind that he intended to cut a new channel for the river, and eliminate the troublesome oxbow forever.

  “What’s the old devil up to now?” Bumper Stevens said. He was selling cold drinks and hot dogs out of a food stand converted from a horse trailer, which he hauled around to horse pulls, fairs, and farm auctions.

  “Goddamn old fool,” said Plug Johnson, who was safely out of my grandfather’s earshot. “I reckon he’s digging Ab’s grave.”

  “More likely he’s digging his own,” Bumper said. “Whether he knows it or not.”

  It was nine o’clock, and by now my grandfather had about thirty men helping him cut the channel. My grandmother, in the meantime, was watching through her opera glasses from the kitchen window, with a grim and resigned expression, as though she had made up her mind to let my grandfather make a fool out of himself if he was determined to. Uncle Rob had driven out from the village with my two little aunts, and when I went up to the house for a snack they were all standing around my grandmother at the window, drinking coffee.