“Don’t ever be in a hurry in the woods. Take one step and look around. That way you’ll always have seen something, whether you get anything or not.”
Again it is October of my sixth year. It is late afternoon, and my grandfather and I are sitting on his homemade deer-stand platform, fifteen feet up in a butternut tree on the Canadian Line a mile west of Labrador. Although deer season is still a month away, and I am still several years away from the time when I will be ready to handle a rifle myself, my grandfather wants me to see a deer from the stand. He wants me to have that experience with him. So we sit waiting, as the fall evening fast descends, hoping that one will appear to feed on the grass in the Vista. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a great homed owl flies into the butternut tree and alights on a nearby branch. He cranes his head down at the fallen butternuts below, no doubt looking for mice, then spots us. In total silence he swoops off the limb and into the woods. No deer comes that evening, but over the years that moment when my grandfather and I and the huge owl all sat silently in the tree together will become a nearly mystical memory for me.
Four years pass. By now I have seen plenty of deer from my grandfather’s stand in the butternut tree, and other remarkable things as well. Together my grandfather and I sat on the platform and watched a bobcat stalk a porcupine. We’ve seen a flock of angry crows mob a barred owl, sitting imperturbable in the top of a big black spruce as they dive-bomb it. We’ve watched a full-grown bull moose saunter unconcerned straight down the middle of the Line.
Today is a chilly November dawn in deer season, my first season to hunt from the stand alone. I know that my grandfather and Cousin Clarence and Rob Roy and my father are hunting along the ridge somewhere to the south of where I am waiting. Cousins WJ and JW are hunting the ridge to the west. All of them are trying to push a buck my way, though if one crosses their sights they will of course shoot it themselves.
Shortly after dawn I hear the short bark of Rob’s .30-30, once, from the big beaver swamp behind Maiden Rose’s Home Place, and I am quite certain that he has killed his deer. My grandfather has taught me that a single shot in deer season usually means a clean kill. A couple of hours later, I hear three louder shots—probably Cousin WJ’s .30-06. This is a maybe. Maybe he got his deer on the second or third shot, maybe not. Near noon, another single shot. This sounds like my father’s .278, from a couple of miles to the west. So I know that regardless of whether I get my deer today, by evening there will very probably be at least two bucks hanging from the beam extending out from the woodshed attached to the side of Labrador. I sit in the stand all afternoon, hearing one more shot, another .30-30 from far off in the mountains. No deer comes out onto the Line. At dusk my grandfather appears to walk back to the camp with me, where three big deer are hanging from the beam.
The following November I shoot my first buck from the stand, a six-pointer. Back at Labrador, I eat some of the liver, broiled over hardwood coals in the camp stove, and don’t like it but don’t say so. From now on I will shoot a deer each fall during my boyhood in Lost Nation including a ten-pointer weighing two hundred and thirty pounds, which Cousin Clarence will photograph with me standing beside it. Clarence tacks the snapshot up on the camp wall beside a couple of dozen others of my grandfather and Rob and Dad and my other uncles and cousins, with their trophy deer, where the snapshot remains to this day.
Much of December on the Farm in Lost Nation was devoted to Christmas. Although my grandmother accused my grandfather of not keeping Christmas at all, this was not precisely the case. Always, Gramp cut the Christmas tree, taking me along with him. He picked a big, handsome, blue-green balsam fir, which he’d usually selected two or three years earlier, pruning it carefully and keeping it clear of other encroaching trees and brush. At six, seven, and eight years old, I rode the tree home, like a horse, while my grandfather skidded it along over the snow. When I was too big to ride the Christmas tree I helped my grandfather pull it.
My grandmother put the tall fir in the best parlor. Without electricity, we had no Christmas lights, and Gram wouldn’t dream of using candles because of the fire hazard. Instead we trimmed the tree with gold and silver tinsel and lovely colored glass balls, some as large as baseballs and more than one hundred years old.
With the exception of my grandfather, the whole family convened at the Farm on Christmas Eve, including my strict old Big Aunt Maiden Rose, the ex-schoolteacher; my grandmother’s younger sister from Boston, my Great Aunt Helen, who made fun of everyone and everything; my father and little aunts; Rob Roy—even my old cousins, Whiskeyjack and John Wesleyan. Gramp, for his part, repaired to Labrador immediately after Christmas Eve evening chores. His absence hung over me like a snow cloud as we opened our presents Christmas morning and ate our festive meal at noon; but after dinner I was allowed to take a big plateful of turkey and trimmings up to the camp, and to keep Christmas there with him for the rest of the day.
“You and your grandfather are as like as two peas in a pod,” my grandmother said with a sigh. And it is true that I would much rather be off at Labrador with Gramp than socializing with the family below.
“What’s this?” he invariably demanded when I handed him the heaping platter, which he set aside on a shelf. Then he’d fry us a big slab of venison smothered with onions, lace it with plenty of salt and pepper, and we’d eat the deer steak together at the camp table with the greatest satisfaction in the world.
When we finished the venison my grandfather got down the pint of cherry brandy he kept on a shelf below his maps of Labrador and the Far North and poured himself a generous Christmas cordial in his tin tea mug.
“Well,” he said, “what are the rest of them up to down below, Austen?”
“Eating, mainly. After breakfast we exchanged Christmas presents.”
“I never exchanged presents with anybody in my life,” my grandfather said. He fixed his pale blue eyes on me. “Do you think I did?”
I did not, and said so, though I knew that my grandfather was in no way an ungenerous man. It was just that one of his many peculiarities was his inability to receive a gift of any kind.
“Have they been talking about me? Hashing over my shortcomings?”
“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t dare.”
He frowned and looked somewhat disappointed.
“Last night we read Christmas stories out of the Bible,” I ventured.
My grandfather snorted and poured himself another jolt of brandy. “I’ll read them something if they aren’t cleared out of the house by morning. And it won’t be a Christmas story.”
My grandfather turned down the lantern on the table, and blew it out. He got into his lined sheep coat, opened the camp door and we stepped out into the cold December dusk. “Chore time,” he said.
Then he looked at me in the fading light of the holiday afternoon, and in a voice so harshly ironic it was nearly cheery, he said, “Merry Christmas, Austen.”
8
Family Reunion
Among the hundreds of old photographs in the albums stashed away in my grandparents’ farmhouse attic, my favorites were a series of formal ensembles from Kittredge family reunions. They covered a span of many decades, dating back to some ancient tintypes of family gatherings in the 1850s. That, according to my little aunts, is when Kittredges started to range out from Lost Nation Hollow to other parts of the country, and the tradition of the annual family reunion first began.
To me, there was also a spooky quality about these photographs. It was always a trifle unsettling to come face to face with the likenesses of my older relatives when they were young. My grandfather at twelve bore an uncanny resemblance to Rob Roy at about the same age in a reunion photo taken thirty years later. And here in several pictures was my father, tall for his age and athletic-looking, his expression studious and rather impatient, as though waiting for that moment when he could leave the Farm for the university. My grandmother, for her part, was instantly recognizable by her tiny stature, black dress, and st
em visage. In fact, she looked almost totally unchanged over nearly half a century of reunions; that, at least, was reassuring.
The Kittredge family reunion photographs were usually taken in the dooryard of the Home Place, as my Big Aunt Maiden Rose’s farm a quarter mile down the Hollow from my grandparents’ place was called. Family members arrayed themselves on and in front of the porch, some standing, some leaning against the four wooden porch posts, some sitting in canvas camp chairs. The kids were sprawled on the grass or perched on the porch railing. It was disconcerting to me to note, however, the photographs of some of these same kids laid out in state in coffins in a special section in my grandmother’s Doomsday Book.
Of course the further back toward the turn of the century the reunion photographs went, the fewer people I recognized. At the same time, the pre-twentieth-century reunions were much larger. A typical tintype from 1885 showed one hundred and ten Kittredges and in-laws. By the late 1940s, when I first began appearing in the photographs, we were down to a mere thirty-five.
My little aunts, Klee and Freddi, were as interested in the family reunion photographs as I was. Right up to my early teens, they loved nothing better than to whisk me off to the big, square, multi-windowed cupola atop the farmhouse, where for hours on end they brushed one another’s gorgeous long hair in the sunlight and conducted lengthy genealogical explanations of who was who in the old photographs, always laying the strongest emphasis on the unpleasant secrets of our more unusual Kittredge forebears. In fact, Freddi and Klee seemed hell-bent to divulge every family horror imaginable during our Sunday School lessons in the cupola.
“Here’s your Great-Grandpa Gleason Kittredge again, Austen. Grandpa Gleason was the gentleman firmer of the family. He sat around the house for fifty years in a white shirt and necktie, and carried that swirly-colored glass cane you’ve seen down at the Home Place in the parlor, and never did a tap of work in his life. This was taken about a year before he went mad and tried to blow up the farmhouse and had to be confined in the cedar-pole cage in Maiden Rose’s attic.”
“Here’s our Great-Uncle Cy. Great-Grandpa Gleason’s brother. He taught classics at the state university until he went round the bend. We called him Cyrus the Great, remember, Klee? That’s who he thought he was those last years of his life.”
On they went, in hushed and delighted tones. My grandfather’s first appearance in a reunion photograph—a toddler in one of the odd white dresses children of both sexes wore in those days—reminded my little aunts of yet another family scandal. In fact, it was Freddi and Klee, during one of our Sunday School lessons, who first revealed to me my grandfather’s mysterious origin as a foundling, and the true significance of the ritual in which he informed me that the meanest old bastard in Kingdom County lived on our farm, never failing to enjoin me to remember that I had heard it first from him. According to my little aunts, my grandfather had been discovered as a newborn baby on the farmhouse porch of Maiden Rose’s Home Place in a California orange crate. The crate was lined with an old coat, my aunts said, to which was pinned a note consisting of the following two lines:
“Take me in and treat me well
For within this house doth my parent dwell.”
Hence the ironical piquancy of my grandfather’s frequent meanest-old-bastard declaration to me; and my little aunts’ conspiratorial intimation that since Maiden Rose had immediately come home from college to care for my foundling grandfather, she might actually be that unnamed parent in the note found with the baby. “It would certainly account for Aunt Rose’s harsh treatment of him,” Klee said.
Nor, during our perusals of the family reunion photographs, did my melodramatic little aunts neglect to point out my Big Aunt Maiden Rose Kittredge’s ex-student at the Lost Nation Atheneum, and dear friend and bosom companion, April Mae Swanson. After losing both parents while she was still in school, April Mae had lived with Maiden Rose on the Home Place for twenty years, until her own early death in 1920. Long before I had the faintest glimmering what the term implied, my aunts gleefully whispered to me that April Mae had also been Maiden Rose’s lover. “If you’re going to be heard from, Austen,” they frequently told me in order to justify such unusual disclosures to an eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old, “you must know all the family history.”
As I entered my teenage years and enrolled at the Kingdom Common Academy, continuing to stay with my grandparents in Lost Nation, I visited my Big Aunt Maiden Rose frequently, helping her get in firewood and shoveling out her dooryard in the winter, though far less from the goodness of my heart than because my grandparents insisted that I do so. After Maiden Rose’s eyesight began to fail in her eighties, I stopped by two or three evenings a week to read aloud to her. She especially liked Shakespeare; and sometimes as I sat under her critical pale blue gaze at the beautiful applewood table in her kitchen, reading the wonderful old plays to her, she’d get out a shoebox of letters April Mae had written to her from Boston, where April had attended college for a year.
In the reunion pictures, April always looked like a student, smallish with a pretty face. She was buried in the Kittredge family graveyard above the Home Place, and each fall when Gramp and I cut balsam boughs to bank the outside foundation of our farmhouse and Maiden Rose’s, we cut an extra load for Rose to weave into a thick evergreen grave-blanket to put over April’s plot for winter.
“Maiden Rose never fully recovered from April Mae’s death,” my little aunts told me. “It was a tragic blow to her, Austen. You must take that into account when she seems bad-tempered to you.”
“Daughters!” my grandmother called sharply up the cupola stairs from the attic below. “You, Cleopatra and Nefertiti! What are you filling Tut’s head with up there?”
“Just a little Sunday School lesson, Mom,” my little aunts would call back down; and as soon as Gram’s footsteps retreated, they’d launch into yet another sensational saga.
“Who’s this?” I asked one afternoon when I was about seven. I pointed at a long-haired, handsome young woman astride one of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose’s matched team of Morgan horses, Henry David and Ralph Waldo. The young woman on the horse was partway up the hillside pasture behind Rose’s place, in the background of a reunion photograph.
“We’ve been waiting for you to ask us about her, Austen.” Freddi said. “That’s Great-Aunt Liz.”
She and Klee exchanged a deeply significant look, then nodded. “The bank robber!” they said almost in unison.
Over the next several years, I heard many wonderful stories about my Great-Aunt Liz. Liz was my grandfather’s and Maiden Rose’s younger sister by my Great-Grandfather Gleason’s second wife. She’d been married four times—four times that Klee and Freddi knew of, that is. She was a celebrated practical joker, an expert horsewoman and markswoman, and, since the age of sixteen, when she’d run away from home for the first time, she had conducted a passionate love affair with the American West.
Of all my independent-minded relatives, Aunt Liz was universally agreed upon to be the most so. She had even refused to have her picture taken from the age of four, covering her face or running away from the camera. And from her boldly-curious expression in the single extant snapshot we owned of her as an adult, sitting on the Morgan in the far background of the family reunion assemblage, it seemed that she had no earthly idea that she, too, would appear in that photograph.
As I grew older, I learned to take some of Freddi and Klee’s tales with a grain of salt. Not that they told me any outright untruths in our Sunday School lessons. But both of my little aunts were inveterate embellishers who knew all about how to make a good story better in the telling. Yet when it came to Aunt Liz and the bank robbery, most of the other grownups I knew would tell me exactly the same story. On May 13, 1941, around noon, a single masked bandit of about Liz’s build, wielding a pearl-handled revolver, had held up the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Bank of Kingdom Common, and gotten away scot-free with slightly over forty-two thousand dollars. My littl
e aunts professed to believe that Liz had buried the loot somewhere on Maiden Rose’s or my grandparents’ farm before going West again the next year, intending to return for it at some point in the future. The fact that she had not done so in almost fifteen years somehow enhanced the story. As for Liz herself, she was already something of a myth, at least in Kingdom County, even before the supposed robbery. Year after year, my fondest hope was that she would someday return to the Hollow in a blaze of glory, so that I could meet this family legend face to face.
After I moved up to Lost Nation to live with my grandparents, I began to make my own appearance in the annual reunion photographs. By the late 1940s the reunions had become peripatetic affairs, stretching out over the entire length of the Hollow, like medieval fairs. They officially began around ten in the morning with the solemn ritual of visiting and cleaning the small family graveyard on the hill above the Home Place, followed by the big noon picnic at my grandparents’. In mid-afternoon, activities shifted to the ball diamond behind Cousin Clarence’s store at the foot of the Hollow, for the family baseball game. We reconvened around seven at the Home Place for Rose’s traditional Elizabethan festival, in which my scholarly great-aunt produced, directed, and starred in an abridged version of a different Shakespeare play each year. The reunions ended with a com roast and sugar-on-snow party and dance at the schoolhouse. Throughout the day, some of the men relatives slipped down to Cousin Whiskeyjack Kittredge’s barn to sample his latest batch of white mule moonshine; and any kids who wanted to were welcome to visit my grandfather, who, characteristically, spent the day working at his sawmill or up in the woods.
The family reunion was always slated for the second Saturday of August. Invitations were sent out by Maiden Rose, who also dispatched a hundred or so special summonses to her ex-students and other interested community members, to attend the Shakespeare play and the party afterward. In the summer of 1957, however, the summer I turned fifteen, the future of the annual family reunion was uncertain. At eighty-four, beset by near blindness and rheumatoid arthritis, Maiden Rose was bowed over almost into a hoop. She now required two canes to walk; and while there was no outright talk about canceling future reunions, there were telling hints.
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