Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The play Maiden Rose had selected for presentation that summer was The Tempest. Naturally my great-aunt cast herself in the role of the ancient magician Prospero, and at the auditions in mid-July, Little Aunt Freddi tearfully told Klee and me that when Prospero put aside his book of spells at the end of the play, it would signify the finality of both Maiden Rose’s reign on the Home Place as the dowager empress of the Kittredge family, and of the tradition of the family reunions themselves.

  As far as the Elizabethan festival went, I could only hope that Freddi was right. For although I had nothing much against the reunions themselves, I despised being dragooned into acting in those plays. I knew, however, that there was no way of weaseling out of this onerous family obligation, and only prayed that I would not have to act the part of a girl or woman. As the ’57 reunion approached, I was somewhat encouraged to discover that there was only one female part in The Tempest. But at the audition I had a few very bad moments, fearing I might be tapped for Ariel, which I instantly recognized as the sort of sexually ambiguous role that some malign fate would delight in reserving for a boy of fifteen. Two summers ago I’d been forced to prance around as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; as a result, I have looked unkindly on that lark of a play ever since.

  Fortunately, Ariel was snapped right up by Klee, whose beauty was still quite boyish. Miranda went to lovely, brown-eyed Freddi; young Ferdinand to Jim Kinneson from Kingdom Common; and the monster Caliban, whose lines Maiden Rose had cut to a few manageable surly rejoinders, to our moonshining Cousin Whiskeyjack. I got off lightly with the Boatswain’s part.

  The rehearsals proceeded smoothly. Three or four times a week we convened after supper at the high drive behind Maiden Rose’s hay barn, where the Home Place pastures sloped up sharply on three sides to form a natural amphitheater. Rose’s shortened version of the play took about forty-five minutes to perform; and under her exacting direction, there was no doubt that, as Editor Charles Kinneson invariably put it in his review of her productions in The Kingdom County Monitor, Maiden Rose Kittredge would once again present “the most spirited summer Shakespeare in all Lost Nation Hollow.”

  A few days before the reunion, I helped Maiden Rose convert the high drive and entryway of the hay barn into a makeshift stage for the play. Also I let her use me as a tailor’s dummy while she put the finishing touches on this year’s costumes, including her own fantastical magician’s cloak. And although nothing I did, then or ever, was quite right so far as my elderly aunt was concerned, we somehow got through that week together without a blowup.

  Then on the evening before the big event something happened to put the 1957 reunion in an entirely different light. It was the totally unanticipated and unannounced arrival in Kingdom Common, on the seven-ten p.m. passenger train from Montreal and points west, of my Great-Aunt Liz, the alleged bank robber.

  I was the only one at home when she called the Farm to say she’d arrived and needed a ride out to Maiden Rose’s. My grandfather was up at Labrador, my grandmother was blackberrying in the cut-over woods upriver in Idaho, my little aunts, who by then were living in New York, had not arrived yet, and Uncle Rob, having graduated from college at last, was off in Alaska working for a newspaper.

  “Who’s this?” Liz demanded, and her voice was very sharp and very good-humored. “You don’t sound at all like my brother Austen.”

  “This is Austen’s grandson, Austen.”

  “Well, Austen’s grandson, Austen. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Can you drive?”

  Of course I could drive. Every farm boy in Kingdom Country could drive long before he turned fifteen.

  “Then leave a note on the kitchen table and come fetch me home, Austen’s grandson,” my great-aunt said. “I’d hitchhike, but I’ve got too much baggage. Don’t hurry. I’ll be right here when you arrive, and you won’t mistake me for anyone else. I seem to be the only accused bank robber in town this evening.”

  Although I’d never done it alone before, I had no trouble driving the truck into the Common. I expected, I suppose, a slender cowgirl, maybe looking boldly curious as she had in the single picture I’d seen of her. But although at fifty-five my Great-Aunt Liz Kittredge looked scarcely forty, it was an older-appearing, stronger-featured, and stockier woman I found waiting for me in the village, with long straight auburn-red hair, long legs like a cowboy, an outdoors complexion, and the same pale blue, assessing eyes of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose and my grandfather. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a fringed leather jacket over a sky-blue western-style shirt and an off-tan-colored cowboy hat. Next to her in the station waiting room were several worn, old-fashioned carpetbags with wooden handles, and two expensive-looking leather saddles. So my first impression of my Great-Aunt Liz was that she was definitely a woman of the West, of open spaces and horses and cowboys.

  “Now throw a saddle over your shoulder, and grab two or three of these sorry excuses for valises and let’s get out in the country,” Aunt Liz said. “You’ve heard the old saw: God made the country, man made the city, and the devil made small towns. It’s true, Austen’s grandson, Austen. Let’s vamoose.”

  Meeting Aunt Liz was like encountering a fresh gust of wind right off the high plains of Montana, a sage-laden, invigorating blast of the frontier. I was all the more delighted, and a little awe-stricken too, when as we left the station with her luggage I saw the unmistakable pearly-white handle of a revolver sticking out of her jacket pocket.

  Something about my great-aunt’s wonderfully assured manner inspired a latent boldness in me. As we headed out into the summer dusk, I surprised myself by saying, “Did you really rob the bank, Aunt Liz?”

  “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “to tell you the honest truth, I considered doing so more than once.”

  “So the loot isn’t buried up in the Hollow?”

  “Austen,” she said, heaving one of the saddles up into the back of the truck, “you put me in mind of myself at your age. Back before I learned that the best way to find out what I wanted to know was not to ask too many questions. For the time being I’ll tell you just this and no more. I’ve come back to get something I left here a long time ago. Now I’ve got a question for you. How’s Maiden Rose?”

  “She’s pretty crippled up,” I said, starting the truck and heading out toward the county road. “But you know Aunt Rose. She’s tough.”

  “Yes, she is,” Liz said soberly. “You drive very well, by the way.”

  “I don’t have my license yet.”

  “Neither do I,” Liz laughed. “And I’ve driven all over the country without one. You and I have a lot in common, Austen. We’re going to be close compadres, my boy.”

  Reunion day dawned clear as a bell, a beautiful blue summer morning in the hills of northern Vermont. My grandmother had been up since long before dawn, working in the summer kitchen preparing for the huge midday picnic after the family grave-cleaning. Klee, Freddi, and my grandmother’s jovial younger sister from Boston, my Great-Aunt Helen, were helping Gram and laughing at Aunt Helen’s irreverent jokes. My grandfather, for his part, had gone to the woods immediately after barn chores, as he did on all family holidays.

  Right after breakfast my grandmother sent me down to the Home Place to ask Maiden Rose if one o’clock was a good time for the picnic dinner, and whether she needed any help from my little aunts or me. When I arrived, Rose was transplanting some purple pansies growing in the center of the big millstone that served as her porch step. She was bent down so low she didn’t need to stoop to dig up the flowers. I was actually afraid that she might topple over onto the millstone face-first, and offered to help, but she shooed me away.

  “One o’clock is fine,” she said. “No, I don’t want the nieces here yet. They’d just be in the way. Have you seen Liz this morning? She seems to have sneaked off someplace.”

  I hadn’t.

  “Do you know your lines for the play tonight?”

  I said I believe
d I did.

  “I hope so,” Rose said. “It wouldn’t do to forget them in front of half the county. Your father never forgot his lines. I could trust him with a substantial part by the time he was your age.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “What did Liz say about me yesterday evening when you fetched her up from the village?”

  “Nothing. We talked about Montana.”

  “Your Great-Aunt Maiden Rose knows better than that, Austen. What did she say about me? About the family? Is she going to stay on?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I like her a lot. Maybe it would be nice for you, too.”

  My aunt picked up her two canes and straightened up as far as she could. “You don’t know much about loneliness, do you, Austen? Not yet. I hope you never have to find out.”

  “Are you lonely, Aunt?”

  “Yes,” she said without a speck of self-pity, indeed with a certain terrible, grim satisfaction. “Since April Mae Swanson died I’ve not had an unlonely hour in my life. Oh, I hold no brief for myself. I’ve been a hard woman, and I know it. But not unlonely. Now I don’t even know whether I can drag myself up to clean April’s grave this morning.”

  “I’ll do that for you, Aunt.”

  “Don’t you touch it!” she said. “Don’t you lay a finger on it.”

  “I’m sorry you’re lonely, Aunt. I’ll help you up to the graveyard.”

  “You needn’t trouble yourself about it,” she said. “You needn’t condescend to feel sorry for me, boy. I won’t have it.”

  Then why did you say you were lonely? I wanted to shout. But I didn’t.

  “Aunt, would you not be lonely if Liz stayed on in Lost Nation?”

  “It wouldn’t matter in the least one way or the other.”

  Rose returned to her pansies, and I returned to the Farm, uneasy about what my great-aunt had told me. How, I wondered, could she manage to get through another winter, even with my help? I could cut and stack her wood and fill her woodbox morning and night, as I had for two or three years. But in her condition could she even fetch a stick from the woodbox to the stove? Get to the outhouse? I didn’t know.

  By nine o’clock, family members had begun to arrive. Dad appeared around nine-thirty, and he and I immediately set up the horseshoe stakes behind the barn. Cousin Clarence, armed with his camera, set up a two-o’clock family reunion picture and a two-thirty ball game. From his store, Clarence had brought up boxes of hot dogs, big trays of hamburger, cartons of rolls and potato chips and soda. Cousin Whiskeyjack appeared in a clean pair of denim overalls. Preacher John Wesleyan arrived in his black Sunday suit.

  “Where’s your grandfather, boy?” Preacher JW demanded.

  “Working up in the woods.”

  “Aye,” John Wesleyan said. “He may be a blasphemer and he may be a nonbeliever, but he’s a hard worker. I’ll say that for him. In the end, though, hard work is just another vanity.”

  “I’m surprised you’re willing to participate in all this frivolity today, Preacher JW,” my Great-Aunt Helen said with a look at me. “Aren’t family reunions just another vanity?”

  “Nay, nay,” JW said with a good-natured grin. “I like to say grace at the noon and evening meals, ma’am. And I like the vittles!”

  Lately John Wesleyan had become so stiff from his own battle with arthritis that my grandfather had to carry his saw and ax both to and from the woods for him, and the work he did there amounted to scarcely anything. More than once JW had confided to me that Gramp was as good-hearted an old devil as any he’d ever met. But then he’d shake his head and chuckle and announce that no man could be saved by good works alone.

  What about Cousin Whiskeyjack, Aunt Helen wondered with great innocence, rolling her eyes at me. Did Preacher JW hope for a glorious salvation for his moonshining brother? Not by a long shot, JW said with grim pleasure.

  How about Aunt Liz, I asked, trying to go Aunt Helen one better. Did she have a chance at the Great Beyond?

  Preacher John Wesleyan’s eyes twinkled. “Liz will take heaven by storm with her pearl-handled revolver,” he said unexpectedly. “Or trick St. Peter into looking the other way whilst she slips past unnoticed. Liz is all right, boy. She’s all right.”

  By ten o’clock most of the family had assembled. Armed with trowels and grass clippers and sickles, and with Preacher JW brandishing a great old scythe like the Grim Reaper himself, we all filed up to the Kittredge family graveyard on the knoll above Maiden Rose’s Home Place for the annual reunion-moming grave-cleaning.

  To my great relief, Maiden Rose was there ahead of us. Greetings were exchanged in somber tones. “Cousin. Aunt. Brother.”

  It was not a large cemetery. In all, there were one hundred and twenty-two stones, most matching the names in the old family Bible in the attic. Here lay almost all the Kittredges who had not died Away, on the other side of the hills, and I could feel their presence, grim and disapproving and eternal. The stones were granite or slate, and some were weathered so faint you could hardly read the inscriptions.

  We began with Preacher JW offering up a short prayer asking that our grave-cleaning efforts be blessed, and praying for the souls of the departed. With the entire family working, it took no more than an hour to clean the graveyard and burn up the debris, and for the grown-ups, it was a surprisingly lighthearted task. No doubt the annual grave-cleaning expanded the scope of the reunion by temporarily reuniting us living family members—so few now—with our bygone ancestors. Relatives who hadn’t seen each other for a year chatted pleasantly as they grubbed up encroaching sumac and sapling chokecherries and gray birches, clipped and raked, picked up dead limbs from the row of big maples at the back of the graveyard, where Maiden Rose’s sugar bush began. As we worked, Preacher John Wesleyan led us in a few solemn old hymns: “Rock of Ages,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and so forth; and I thought what a strange sight we would have been for a stranger to come upon, singing together as we moved slowly through the remote little cemetery from the graves to the smoky bonfire, as intent upon our hundred-year-old ritual as ancient Druids.

  A few of the more recent graves still had faded evergreen grave blankets on them from the past winter. These we removed and burned, leaving the graveyard once again neatly clipped and cared for, our visible link with the past. I offered to help Maiden Rose trim the grass on April’s grave, but she waved me away with her clippers. She did let me drag away the balsam blanket she’d woven last fall to protect the grave from the fierce winter storms. Then she transplanted her purple pansies into the border. Rose’s name and birthday were inscribed below April’s on the same stone. Only the date of Rose’s death had been left blank. Below their names was the simple legend, “Together at Last.”

  While Rose was working on the grave she would someday share with April, no one else ventured close. The ultimate privacy of their love for one another, whatever its exact nature, was respected and honored, like the misanthropy of my grandfather and my grandmother’s unaccountable fixation with all matters Egyptian, and Liz’s wild ways. “Liz is who she is. Maiden Rose is who she is. Old Austen is who he is.” The names were interchangeable, but I must have heard the sentiment expressed a hundred times during my boyhood in the Nation.

  I was commissioned to stay on for a few minutes to make sure the bonfire was completely out. As the rest of the family members moved singly and in pairs and small groups back down the hill, Rose creeping along in the rear on her two canes, solitary in her impenetrable loneliness, a figure on horseback burst out of the woods above the sugar bush. A figure in cowboy boots, a fringed vest, and a western hat. It was Liz, on Henry David, and when she reached the gate of the graveyard, she leaped off the horse, threw the reins over the iron pickets, and began to shout, her eyes blazing.

  “Just as I expected. The only grave that hasn’t been properly tended up here is the only one that matters to me. Damn that sister of mine for neglecting it and damn the rest of the family for not having the grit to stand up to
her.”

  She was pointing at a leaning slate stone near the rear fence of the cemetery. This was the stone of her fourth husband, Foster James, who had died in Lost Nation just before Liz had gone West in 1941, sixteen years ago.

  “I ought to get out my pearl-handled sidekick and hurry these so-called family members on their way,” Liz hollered, starting for the saddlebags on Henry David. She was really roaring now, and the departing relatives were looking apprehensively back over their shoulders at her—all but Maiden Rose, who continued down toward the Home Farm, one small step at a time, bent over into a cramped letter “C” on her canes.

  Liz came striding up toward me. “Come, Austen,” she said, grabbing a pair of clippers. “You and I will hoe out old Foster’s grave ourselves.”

  As she passed me, she winked and said, under her breath, “Diversion.”

  Then she was roaring again, which she continued to do until we reached her fourth husband’s grave. What under the sun was going on, I wondered. Foster James’s grave seemed as neatly trimmed as any of the others. But Aunt Liz set to work with the clippers, meticulously cutting and pulling any slip of grass that had escaped the other cleaners, and as she worked, she talked steadily. “Husbands!” she said. “Number one I married at sixteen, shortly after I arrived in Montana the first time. His name was Hartley Stone, which was what his heart was made of, I reckon. And that’s odd, because he was the only one of the bunch I ever really loved, even though he turned out to be a skirt chaser. Off to the cathouses in Butte and Helena every time I turned my back, and then he blamed me because we didn’t have any kids. Wanted sons, he said. Well, mister man, I’ve had four sons since, all big strong capable smart fellas at that, like all the Kittredge men. So I reckon old Stony had that part of it wrong.”