On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Calling out over the thundering engine, she named each of the major peaks in the northern Green Mountains, from Mansfield in the south to Owl’s Head in Canada. She pointed out the Chain of Ponds on the far side of the mountain and the devil’s visage on the back side of the balancing boulder and the vast, swampy Great Northern Slang, which separated her mountain, on the northwest, from the lake. Henry, noticing man that he was, looked carefully at each sector of the mountain, flying low over the Chain of Ponds and the slang, circling Indian Island in the lake, buzzing down to study the peace cairn and balancing boulder, fixing each landmark firmly in his mind.

  By the time they landed, Miss Jane was beginning to think of herself as something of an old hand when it came to flying. Afterward she went straight into On Kingdom Mountain and informed her dear people that going up in the Burgess-Wright was the most sublime experience of her life. She was so excited that until Henry called her out onto the porch, she did not notice the message on the slate hanging from a nail beside the door above her great pileated woodpecker knocker.

  Mr. Satterfield,

  The town fathers of Kingdom Common, in expectation of a favorable ruling from the higher courts, are holding a gala Independence Day celebration on the green in Kingdom Common on July Fourth, to raise funds for the continuation and completion of the Connector highway. Could we prevail upon you, for a modest consideration, to give airplane rides and possibly a fireworks display that evening to help with this worthwhile effort to bring Kingdom County, at long last, into the twentieth century?

  Thank you very much.

  Yours,

  Eben Kinneson Esquire

  Town Counsel

  “So, Henry,” Miss Jane said, staring at the message, “do you know what this is?”

  “I fear, Miss Jane, that it is the letter you have been expecting. It appears as though, despite the judge’s ruling, your cousin and the town fathers are not about to give up on the high road.”

  “That is no letter but an outright declaration of war,” she said. “I am sorry, in a way, now that your plane is airworthy, that you will not be on hand to see the ultimate defeat of my cousin and his cronies. In the meantime, I thank you for taking me on high. Why for pity’s sake, what is it, Henry? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Henry slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “There she is, Miss Jane.”

  “There who is?”

  “Not who, ma’am. What. There’s the next part of the riddle. On high. You thanked me for taking you on high.”

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well, what?” Henry grinned as mischievously as one of her former pupils.

  “What’s the riddle?”

  “Oh, the riddle. It goes on like this.

  The Riddle of Kingdom Mountain: The Trinity

  Behold! on high with the blessed sweet host,

  Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s part of it. The part my granddaddy told me. He said I’d have to travel to Kingdom Mountain to discover the other part.”

  “Well, that’s not much help,” Miss Jane said. “Never mind, though. It has a promising beginning. I’ll tell you what. I’ll write it on the message slate.”

  Miss Jane erased the message from Eben and wrote in its place the first two lines of the riddle.

  “What can it possibly mean?” she wondered. “Was your grandfather quite sane, Henry?”

  “Some days he was,” Henry said. “Other days he’d fall into a black mood and go around muttering about the war and such, mad as a hatter. My father told me he was haunted by what he’d seen and perhaps done.”

  “A good many were,” Miss Jane said. “Including, I think, my own father. That may be why he never told us what, if anything, he found out about his missing brother Pilgrim. He couldn’t bear to discuss it.”

  The Duchess shook her head sadly. Then she repeated the title and first two lines of the riddle aloud. “I know of no ‘Trinity’ on Kingdom Mountain,” she said.

  “‘Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost,’” Henry said in a musing voice. “’On high.’ Could it possibly have anything to do with your balancing boulder on the mountaintop? That’s on high.”

  “It could, I suppose,” Miss Jane said. “It vexes me to be so puzzled by it. I’ll work on your riddle, and if I solve it, I’ll get in touch with you.”

  “Why, Miss Jane, are you putting me off your mountain so soon? I had hoped to stay on a bit.”

  “You had?” Jane was delighted. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Henry Satterfield. More than welcome. But I supposed that a traveling man like you would be posting on to wherever as soon as you recovered from the wreck.”

  “Miss Jane,” Henry said, “you saved my skin by directing me to a safe landing on the ice. You nursed me back to health, provided a place for me to rest my head and shelter my machine. I have no pressing engagements. I do have a request to make of you.”

  “Request away, sir.”

  “Present company willing, I’d like to stay on here this summer and help you, in any manner I can, to fend off this high road.”

  Miss Jane, looking out the west window of her kitchen at the mountains, was more touched than she could ever remember being. She did not, truthfully, trust herself to speak at the moment.

  “Besides which,” Henry said, “we just might, if we put our heads together, cipher out the meaning of this infernal riddle.”

  “We might at that,” Miss Jane said. “We just might at that.”

  16

  “HARK!” Miss Jane said.

  “What is it?” Henry mumbled. He’d been dreaming of an all-nude girlie revue he’d seen some years ago in Columbia, South Carolina. In his dream Miss Jane was prancing about the stage with her schoolteacher’s pointer, directing the girls in a sprightly dance. She was attired in a scholarly mortarboard and nothing else, and Henry was unhappy to be wakened from this interesting vision.

  “Quick as ever you moved in your life, Mr. Satterfield,” Miss Jane called up through the hole in her bedroom ceiling, “meet me in the kitchen.”

  Henry’s first thought was that housebreakers might have gained entry. Still half asleep, he hurried into his white trousers and came bounding down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he grabbed the poker hanging on the back of the Glenwood. He was greeted by no housebreakers, but he could hear the rise and fall of racing engines, which seemed to be coming from the east, on the extension of the old pike road. Then, very distinctly, two gunshots. He thought Miss Jane would certainly want Lady Justice. Instead, she snatched up her scrub broom, a homemade straw besom with which she cleaned her porch, swept her dooryard, and brushed down cobwebs in the barn. Clad in her nightgown, tasseled nightcap, and wool hunting jacket, she rushed outside just as a large touring car, riding so low that its rear bumper scraped the ground, came sluing into the dooryard. As the car skidded by sideways, klaxon blaring, Miss Jane belabored its hood and roof and the boxes strapped to its rear luggage racks with the scrub broom.

  Henry thought that he recognized, behind the wheel of the touring car, the pointed features of the low high sheriff of Kingdom County, Little Fred Morse, as white as an apparition beneath his sheriff’s hat.

  “And don’t come back,” Miss Jane shouted, making a home-run swing with her scrub broom and clipping off the ornamental insignia on the hood of the sheriff’s car. The whiskey runners bounced down the lane toward the hemlock-plank covered bridge. “Drunkards!” she cried out. “Scofflaws! Wife beaters!”

  Nor was she finished for the evening. A minute later a Ford with a star on the driver’s door, containing four men in suits and derby hats, came thundering into her dooryard. She served this car the same, tattooing it with the rock-maple handle of her broom. “Private road!” she cried. “Interlopers! Have the law on you!”

  “We are the law, woman, we’re federal revenuers,” the driver shouted as he skidded to a stop at the fork in
the old pike, just past the barn. “Which way did those runners go?”

  “That way,” Miss Jane said, gesturing with her broom toward the bridge. Just as she’d expected, the G-men raced up the other fork, where, some minutes later, Miss Jane and Henry could hear the loud and unavailing whine of their engine as they tried to free the Ford from the burn.

  In view of the low high sheriff Fred Lyle Morse’s long-standing reputation for looking the other way in matters involving the transportation and sale of illegal beverages, Henry Satterfield was surprised, the following Tuesday afternoon, when Little Fred moseyed into the library, where Henry was reading Riders of the Purple Sage next to Miss Jane’s carving of the Pretender of Avon, and asked if they could speak privately. Outside on the library steps, the sheriff inquired if he might rent the biplane for an afternoon and evening, along with Henry’s services as pilot, to look for moonshine stills from the air along the thickly forested terrain on the border east and west of Lake Memphremagog. At the same time, the low high sheriff said, he and his fishing partner, Doc Harrison, would like to pick up a few cases of Dr. Pinkham’s Relieving Bitters in Magog, Quebec, at the head of the lake. Something in the village water supply seemed to be “binding folks up,” the sheriff explained, and the best nostrum for this general malady was Dr. Pinkham’s elixir, available only in Canada. No one, Fred added, wished to be suffering from constipation and thus be unable to enjoy the upcoming Fourth of July celebration.

  While Henry was not entirely certain what the doctor and the sheriff wished him to do, he had no scruples about helping alleviate the unfortunate symptoms in the villagers. The pilot duly made plans to meet Doc and Sheriff Morse the next Friday afternoon at two o’clock at Miss Jane’s water meadow.

  That night he and Jane conducted a rather long featherbed chat, which Henry initiated by mentioning that his grandfather, the captain, had told him a fascinating tale about his long-ago military service as a border raider. “It seems,” Henry said, “that the old rip, who, come to think of it, was then still a young rip, once hid out at a church. He didn’t tell me just where the church was located, or which border he was raiding on at the time, but I think we could guess. He did say that the church was near a good-sized body of water. And that when he sneaked into the building and hid in a little closet, the rising sun coming through the colored glass windows shone on a whole wall of crutches and canes and iron leg braces and back braces and collars and every other device designed to outfit the halt. He spent the rest of the day, until nightfall, holed up in that closet, napping and hiding. Evidently it was a holy day, because about midmorning along hitched a whole passel of the crippled and lame and otherwise afflicted. The front door of the church was open, and he could see them scrabbling up the big stone steps on their hands and knees, praying and chanting. And when they got to the top step they flung away their walking sticks and braces and were cured. But my granddaddy said that cured or no, they had to be helped to hobble away by their families and friends or carried off on litters, and one fella sang out that he would skip all the way home like the risen Lazarus or know the reason why, and he made one feeble little hop like a sick jackrabbit and went plunging down the church steps and broke his neck, which my granddaddy said was just about the most comical spectacle he’d ever witnessed.”

  “Your granddaddy had a singular sense of humor,” Miss Jane said dryly. “However, Henry, I believe I know precisely where that church was. It was called Our Lady of Memphremagog and it was in Canada, just over the border from Vermont. People went there from all over the world to be healed.”

  “Miss Jane?” Henry said. “Do you recall whether that Canadian church had a picture or a stained glass window of the heavenly host? The seraphim and cherubim and such?”

  “I catch your drift, Henry. You think your grandfather participated in the Great Raid and hid the stolen gold in Our Lady of Memphremagog.”

  “It seems possible. The riddle says ‘on high with the blessed sweet host.’”

  Miss Jane frowned. “I don’t recall any frescoes or stained glass depictions of seraphim. But host, you know, could also mean the Communion wafers. They would have been distributed from the chancel box on the dais at the front of the church.”

  “He wouldn’t have hidden it in the box with the crackers, would he? They’d have found it there when they dumped more crackers in.”

  Miss Jane thought. “Not in the box. But possibly under it. There would be a space under the dais, you see, between the floor of the chancel and the floor of the nave. If your grandfather had a way to pry up the boards, it’s possible he could have left the gold under the raised chancel floor. There’s just one problem, Henry.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Thirty years ago, Our Lady of Memphremagog burned to the ground, discarded crutches and stained glass windows and confessional booth where your grandfather hid and all. If the gold is there, it has who knows how many tons of rubble on top of it. What’s more, the church was believed to be cursed. That’s why it burned, they said. God was angry with the priests who had swindled folks into paying for cures they couldn’t perform.”

  But already Henry’s head was full of magnetos and wires and batteries and the ringing of alarm clocks. Miss Jane’s alarm clock, to be precise, which, along with her scrub broom, he appropriated the following day for the invention she would jokingly call the Auricus Satterfieldicus. With this machine, and with the full approval of his granddaddy, whose commentary Henry continued to hear in his head periodically, he confidently planned to locate, on the site of Our Lady of Memphremagog, the one hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar double eagles stolen from the First Farmers Bank, ten percent of which he had decided to give Miss Jane for helping him locate its hiding place. It was, Henry congratulated himself, a very generous disposition and would certainly defray the fee of an attorney to argue her case against the high road in the Vermont Supreme Court, probably with ample left over for her declining years. For whatever else might or might not be said about him, Henry was determined that no one would count a lack of generosity among his shortcomings.

  Nothing in his newly found profession of treasure hunting was simple. So Henry was thinking, that Friday about midnight, as he combed through the ruins of the old lakeside shrine with his ridiculous Auricus Satterfieldicus. The luminous dial of the homemade gold detector glowed brightly, but the thin red needle that he had appropriated, unknown to Miss Jane, from the speedometer of her Model A, stubbornly refused to budge. He knew that the Auricus worked. During its maiden operation in the home-place dooryard, he had located several horseshoe nails, a .54 caliber slug from Lady Justice, and a set of false teeth made of tin, which Miss Jane believed had belonged to her great-grandfather. So far, however, all he had found at Our Lady of Memphremagog was the melted base of a brass candlestick and a large round penny coined in 1843 by the Bank of Upper Canada.

  In fact, Henry had had the devil’s own time just locating the site of the cursed church, though it was only about a mile from the recently cut hayfield where he, Doc Harrison, and Sheriff Fred Morse had landed earlier that afternoon. The wind was now moaning through the tops of the churchyard cedars in a way that the pilot did not find at all comforting, and the waves slapping against the nearby rocky shore somehow reminded him of the chants for the many dead whose obsequies had been held on the very spot he was sifting through. Nearby stood a manure-caked wheelbarrow he had optimistically appropriated from a farmer’s barnyard on the way to the shrine.

  Keep at her, boy, the granddaddy’s voice said with an unpleasant chuckle Henry remembered all too well. Rome weren’t built in a day.

  Suddenly, Miss Jane’s wind-up alarm clock, attached to the end of the broomstick, set up a dreadful clanging. Despite the thrill of knowing he had found the boodle his grandfather had hidden here more than half a century before, Henry jumped half a foot. But this was no time for faint-heartedness. Fetching the garden spade he had brought along for just this purpose, he began to delve into
the cindery debris. A foot or so into the scree of burnt bricks and mortar, the handle of the shovel snapped off just above the head. Mindless of his neatly creased white pants, Henry dropped to his knees, like those hopeful petitioners who long ago had crawled up the great stone steps of the church to be made whole. The shovel head scraped against something hard. Wild calculations ran through Henry’s head. If he could shovel the gold into the wooden barrow and trundle it back to the plane before Doc and the low high sheriff rendezvoused there with the Dr. Pinkham elixir, he could get out of these forsaken mountains scot-free. He could always send Miss Jane her commission. The shovel head rang on something metallic. An image of a brass-bound treasure chest bursting with coins appeared to Henry. Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost. Of course. That was it. The gold itself was the Holy Ghost.

  Out of the rubble Henry wrestled a round enameled metal basin. God Jesus, he thought. Could it be a collection plate? Had he come all the way from Texas to root in the ruins of a country chapel and unearth a collection plate? His grandfather, the captain, certified as a bona fide lunatic at the end, spent his last months on earth toiling feverishly to discover the alchemical formula for turning gold into base metals, on the assumption that he could then reverse the process and, like King Midas, transform all that he touched, or at least all that was metallic, to gold. Could the entire riddle be the insane old officer’s idea of a joke? The cumbrous thing he had unearthed had a cover, also enameled. He tossed the basin and cover aside and ran the Auricus over the charred bricks again. Nothing. The collection plate was the sum and substance of his night’s work. Plus the one hundred dollars and fuel for the plane that the sheriff had promised him. Still, if the artifact was a collection plate, perhaps it had some historical value. Knocking the dirt and ashes off the cover and basin, he decided to take them back to the home place and present them to Miss Jane.