Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “It—it was in my coat, and, and, and now it’s gone,” Theresa sobbed.

  “I see,” Mrs. Armstrong said, though it was apparent from what she said next that she did not. “Someone has stolen your dollar.”

  She picked up her cattle cane and came to the edge of her platform. “Jim Morgan, stand up. Did you steal Theresa Dubois’s silver dollar?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jim said.

  She looked at him hard. “Remain standing,” she said.

  She surveyed the classroom. “Mary Hill, stand up. Did you steal Theresa Dubois’s silver dollar?”

  Mary Hill was a tall, strapping farm girl of thirteen, Hermie’s sister. She was the least afraid of Mrs. Armstrong of any of us, but she faltered slightly when she said, “N—no, ma’am.”

  “Remain standing, Mary Hill. Austen Kittredge, stand up.”

  All of a sudden I was sick to death of Earla Armstrong and everything about her. I’d had it with her bullying and her ignorance and her school. I had no intention of standing up. I had no intention of submitting to her arbitrary cruelness for one more moment.

  “Nobody stole the dollar,” I said. “It fell out of Theresa’s coat while we were sliding. It’s out there in the snow this minute.”

  “Fell out sliding!” she said. “What do you mean it fell out sliding? Did it sprout wings and fly out of her pocket?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sure. That’s what happened.”

  “Don’t you dare put a smart mouth on with me, Kittredge. You aren’t too old to feel the arm.”

  “Nobody stole the dollar,” I said. “Ask Theresa.”

  Just as she whirled around to confront Theresa, Sis LaFlamme burst through the door. He was covered with snow, and snow had gotten down his coat and boots and on his hair, as though he’d been burrowing in a drift. He ran straight to Theresa’s desk. “Look me,” he yelled. “Look me, I find him.”

  He was holding the silver dollar.

  For once in her life, Mrs. Armstrong looked utterly astonished. But she was not about to bring her inquisition to a close without claiming a victim. She had boiled all morning to see us having fun with Prof, to see him interfere with her prerogatives. No doubt she had drunk her lunch out of her thermos. She had threatened all of vis with her green-handled cow cane. Her entire reputation was at stake.

  Mrs. Armstrong came bulling down off the teacher’s platform, between Sis and Theresa. “Where did you find that coin, LaFlamme?”

  “I find him, me!” Sis said excitedly. “Bas da côte.”

  “The coat?”

  “Oui. Bas”—he hesitated to find the English word—“down da côte.”

  “Down the coat?” she shouted.

  He smiled, nodding rapidly. “Oui. I find him down da côte.”

  Mrs. Armstrong had turned the color of Theresa’s red coat.

  “Down the coat!” she shrieked. “You found the coin down in the pocket of Theresa’s coat. Why you sneaking Canuck thief. I’ll teach you to reach into other people’s coats.”

  Before any of us knew what was going to happen Earla Armstrong lifted her ugly green cow cane and struck Sis LaFlamme in the left temple. The silver dollar seemed to jump out of his hand. It hit the floor and rolled straight for the Round Oak stove in the center of the room. The dollar bounced off a leg of the stove. It made its way directly back to Theresa’s desk and spun drunkenly to rest at her feet. Theresa shied away from it as though it were red-hot. Everyone in the room stared at it, horrified, as though it had been bewitched, like a coin in a fairy tale. But what was happening here in the yellow light of the Lost Nation schoolroom in the winter of 1955 was no fairy tale.

  “Down da côte!” Sis bellowed out in pain and outrage and humiliation.

  He pointed wildly out the window, toward the hill: the côte, where he’d found Theresa’s dollar in the snow. “Down da goddamn côte!”

  Mrs. Armstrong, who understood no French, was completely out of control. “I’ll teach you to swear at me you good-for-nothing Frog.”

  She raised the cane again. But Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme did not intend to be struck a second time. Before she could bring it down he leaped at her. Quick as a mink going for a trout, he wrested the cane out of her hand, broke it in two across his knee and flung the severed halves toward the stove. Then he was on his way out of the schoolroom and across the yard and up the Hollow.

  Mrs. Armstrong stood staring after him for a few moments before returning to her desk. Panting hard, she went to her lunch box for the thermos and emptied it in three or four long pulls. Her hands were shaking, but she had a triumphant look on her face.

  “He’ll be charged for this,” she told us. “Don’t think he won’t, the dirty little louse-ridden Frenchman. I’ll have the law on him.”

  Then in a nearly friendly voice she said, “Shut that door, Kittredge. It’s storming out there.”

  She was right. It had started to snow again, and the room was filled with that yellow light and a preternatural stillness. I got up and shut the door. What else was there to do?

  The dollar lay in the aisle by Theresa’s desk all the afternoon. When the kids went up to the front of the room to recite, they stepped gingerly out around it, as if it were a bear trap. Just before we recessed for the day, Theresa picked it up, and on her way down the Fiddler’s Elbow, in a gesture more dramatic than prudent, she suddenly flung it as far as she could into the woods. Very probably it has remained there to this day, buried under the humus of nearly forty autumns.

  There is not much more to tell about the LaFlamme family. I learned from my grandfather that Bumper Stevens charged them five dollars to come out and pick up the bloated Ayrshire steer in his truck. Without telling my grandmother, my grandfather paid Bumper the five dollars himself, but Sis never did return to the Lost Nation Atheneum after the episode with the silver dollar.

  One sub-zero day in early December, on our way down the Hollow, my grandfather and I noticed that there was no smoke coming up from the Kerwin place. We left the lumber truck at the foot of the lane and walked up through the snow to check. The milk house was deserted. Even the feedsack curtains were gone from the window. Later that morning Gramp learned from Bumper that the LaFlammes had returned to Canada.

  In the spring Bumper put some young stock up in the pasture Sis and his mother had started to clear. He never did find another tenant for the place, and over the next few years, it all grew back up to brush. Along with my early boyhood, the days of the self-sufficient family farm were quickly coming to a close in Kingdom County. The old abandoned homesteads were fast reverting to a state of frontier ruggedness again.

  Mrs. Armstrong replaced her cane with a nondescript brown walking stick and blustered her way through the rest of the school year, but the days of her furious rampaging were over. It was as if, along with the thick green cattle cane, Sis LaFlamme had broken her spirit.

  Oddly, though our school days from then on were easier, I think we half-missed the old excitement. At times she just sat at her desk and sipped out of her thermos, letting us do pretty much as we pleased. She did not return to the school after I graduated, and I heard nothing of her again for many years.

  But Earla Armstrong was not yet to depart from my life altogether. In one of those entirely unpredictable and unaccountable quirks of circumstance that nonetheless, in retrospect, seem somehow inevitable, I heard from her once more. The spring I graduated from the University of Vermont—which I attended free, at the courtesy of the State of Vermont and my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge, the shrewd old Tory—my graduation picture appeared in the local paper, along with Theresa’s and, of all persons, Mary Hill’s. A few days later a card came to me in care of my grandparents’ address. It was postmarked Pond in the Sky. The handwriting was so scratchy I had trouble making it out. At first I thought it was from an ex-classmate. The writer wondered if I remembered the good old days at Lost Nation Atheneum, and asked me to stop by and visit when I was in her neck
of the woods. Not until the last line did I realize who it was from. “I still watch the wrastling,” it said. “Fondly, your old teacher, Earla A. Armstrong.”

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Armstrong died soon afterward. In time, I came to regret not visiting her.

  6

  Upland Game

  During the years that I lived with my grandparents in Lost Nation Hollow, a number of itinerant specialists could be counted on to visit Kingdom County each year. I had no idea where most of these exotic wayfarers hailed from. “Away,” most of us called anywhere more than five miles beyond the county line. Or “the other side of the hills.” All I knew for certain is that since we could not go to them, the mind readers and barnstorming four-man baseball teams and one-elephant family circuses came to us. Then as abruptly as they’d arrived, they departed, leaving me with a day of desolation on my hands, and maybe a fifteen-cent souvenir: a tattered poster, an autographed snapshot, a handful of spent shells from the Manchester Arms Company sharpshooter, which still gave off a faint and exciting aroma of gunpowder after six months in a dresser drawer.

  Of all the itinerants, the sharpshooter was my favorite. Actually, he was an ammunition salesman, a drummer of rifle and shotgun shells, who, as a sideline, put on marksmanship exhibitions at county fairs and rod and gun club suppers and sometimes, on an impromptu basis, out behind the general stores and four-corner filling stations where he sold the company’s line. He was a small man of forty-five or fifty, with pale eyes narrowed at the corners from driving into ten thousand suns and squinting over a shotgun barrel at a million clay pigeons. He was slightly hard of hearing, and when he spoke, which wasn’t often, it was usually to complain about the weather in what I believed was a mild southern accent. His suit looked as though he’d driven two weeks straight in it, and unlike the other showmen who visited Kingdom County, there was no hoopla about him at all. In fact, he didn’t seem to care whether he shot or not, and it was this odd quality, his apparent indifference toward his talent, that appealed to me and annoyed my Uncle Rob, who, by the time he was twenty-one, was considered to be one of the two or three best shots in our neck of the woods himself.

  “He’s here,” Rob said, pulling in behind a dusty gray Pontiac in front of Cousin Clarence Kittredge’s general store at the foot of the Hollow.

  It was a warm and hazy Saturday morning in early October, and Rob and I had already been out doing a little road hunting in the new Hudson Hornet he’d bought the previous summer with money he’d earned working in the furniture mill in the Common. I was enormously proud to be out riding the roads and hunting with my young uncle. And here, out of the blue, was the Manchester sharpshooter. It was almost too good to be true.

  The shooter and Clarence were standing across from one another at the store counter. Clarence was thumbing through an ammunition catalog. The shooter was reading a Socony road map and frowning.

  “New line of 16s, I see,” Clarence said.

  The shooter nodded without looking up from his map.

  “Good shell?”

  “Fairly accurate upland game shell,” the shooter said.

  “Wouldn’t care to pop a few out back for the boys here?”

  The sharpshooter gave Rob and me a quick, aggrieved look. He reached in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and got out a half-full pint bottle of Southern Comfort and unscrewed the cap and took a sip. The whiskey was the color of standing water in a cedar bog. As it went down, the shooter winced. “I got to be up in Memphremagog by eleven o’clock,” he said. “I might snap off a round or two first if it ain’t too cold.”

  He went out to his Pontiac and unlocked the trunk. It was neat as a pin and contained several cartons of ammunition, a battered leather suitcase with straps and buckles, and three long canvas cases wrapped in a wool overcoat. He handed me two of the cases and took the third himself. It was as warm as a morning in June, but I noticed that he was shivering in his suit jacket. When he shut the trunk lid, the Pontiac shuddered all over, and so did he.

  “Big old gas hog,” Rob said.

  The shooter gave a dyspeptic grin, as though pleased to hear his car disparaged. “She’s a guzzler,” he agreed. “Bums gas and oil like they was both going out of style. Throw a rod clean through her block one of these days. Brakes ain’t the best. Heater’s shot. Trade her in five seconds flat if the right deal come along. Lug them around back for me, will you, bub?”

  We went around behind the store to Clarence’s garden beside the local cow-pasture baseball diamond. Half a dozen men and boys from the store followed us. We laid the cases down on the bench where Clarence sat to shell peas and husk com.

  “Unzip that shorter one,” the shooter told me.

  Inside was a light single-shot .22.

  “All right for a kid starting out,” the shooter said.

  He stooped over and picked up a Coca-Cola bottle cap. He walked out around the brown cornstalks and frosted Kentucky Wonder pole beans and jammed the bottle cap into a rotten fence post at the base of Tatro’s hill. He came back to the bench, put a shell in the .22, and fired without seeming to take aim.

  I ran to get the bottle cap. One side was ripped flat, like a penny flattened by a locomotive on the Boston and Montreal tracks. I ran back to the shooter, who looked at the cap and scowled as though he’d missed it entirely.

  “You ought to go on Broadway,” my uncle said.

  “Kid gun,” the shooter said, shoving the .22 back in its case. “All right for gray squirrels and such.”

  “There aren’t any gray squirrels up here,” Rob said. “Too cold.”

  “I believe it,” said the shooter, and turned up his jacket collar against a warm south breeze. “Man dear, it’s chilly.”

  He unzipped the second case I’d brought around and got out a .30–30 rifle. It was a bolt-action deer-hunting rifle, the kind my grandfather and Uncle Rob used. A couple of men moved up closer.

  “You got a fifty-cent piece on you?” the shooter asked Cousin Clarence.

  Clarence reached under his apron for his black change purse. He unsnapped it and stared inside for some time. Finally he removed a half dollar.

  “I believe,” he said slowly, “that it is unlawful to destroy a coin of the realm.”

  “Trade you Mr. G. Washington’s picture for her,” the shooter said, going for his back pocket.

  “That isn’t necessary,” Clarence said in a dignified voice. “Heave it up?”

  “Not too high. Wouldn’t want to miss and pick off some hunter up top the hill.”

  Two or three of the men chuckled at the thought of picking off a hunter.

  “I thought you never missed,” Rob said.

  “You say?”

  “I said, I thought you don’t miss.”

  “Miss quite frequently,” the shooter said.

  He slid a shell into the gun and rammed home the bolt. “Heave her.”

  Clarence threw the fifty-cent piece out and up. It spun over and over, flashing against the red sumac and yellow popples on the hillside. The shooter fired, and the coin vanished in thin air.

  “Yes, sir,” Clarence said with a note of finality.

  “Anybody,” said my Uncle Rob, “can learn to do that. There’s a trick to it, just like shooting a woodcock. You wait until it’s at the top of its arc, then you’ve got a stationary target. All it takes is practice.”

  “There you have her,” said the shooter and shoved the rifle back into its case like a man hanging an old saw up on a nail. “Practice is the main thing, all right.”

  He took another sip of Southern Comfort. Then he unzipped the third case and slid out the loveliest gun I’d ever seen. It was a sixteen-gauge pump-action shotgun with a rich dark stock and a barrel the color of Lake Memphremagog on an overcast day in duck season, engraved with two pheasants flushing out of a wheat field.

  The shooter looked at Clarence. “You got any spoiled hens’ eggs on hand?”

  “I do not. I don’t pass spoiled eggs off on my customers.
You want eggs from my store, you’ll have to settle for grade-A fresh.”

  The shooter considered. “All righty. I’ll purchase half a dozen grade-A fresh hens’ eggs.”

  Clarence went inside. A minute later he came back with a half carton of brown eggs. The shooter gave him a dollar and Clarence handed him back sixty cents.

  “It’s on the company,” the shooter explained to the men and boys. By now there was a gallery of fifteen or so, lounging against the back wall of the store, hunkered down on the edge of the harvested garden. Among the men I recognized some who were crack shots themselves.

  The shooter put six shells into the gun.

  “How many eggs?” Clarence said.

  “Try three. Three grade-A eggs. Fling them out away. They spatter.”

  Three brown eggs sailed over the garden at intervals of less than a second. The shooter fired three times. Before the third egg left Clarence’s hand, the first two had burst in midair into small, yellow omelettes. The third egg burst, raining yolk and white and fragments of brown shell onto a heap of dead pea vines. I scrambled for the ejected shells, smoking on the ground at the shooter’s feet.

  Uncle Rob was already haranguing the onlookers, patiently, yet with an argumentative edge to his voice. “What he is, boys, is fast. I don’t say he isn’t accurate; he’s accurate enough for trap and trick shooting. But mainly he’s fast. Out in the woods, fast isn’t all that important. Accuracy is what counts in the woods.”

  “I never was much of a hand to hunt in the woods,” the shooter said to no one in particular. “Sun never seems to get down between the trees and warm things up good.”

  He shivered at the thought of the sun not warming things up in the woods. He extended the gun, barrel first, toward my uncle. “Care to try her?”

  Rob jumped out of the way like an infielder avoiding a sliding runner. “Watch where you point that thing, mister. It’s still loaded.”

  “Safe’s on,” the shooter said. “Go ahead.”