On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  We are told that Clyde is much missed by this magazine’s dust bowl readers, if not by the bankers of the region. Follow-up reports on his whereabouts will be printed in future issues of True Detective.

  “Well, Miss Jane, I am clearly in the wrong line of work,” Henry chuckled. “Think of the opportunities I’ve missed out on. This Courteous Clyde fellow is one up on me.”

  He closed his magazine, flopped back in the hammock, and pushed his white boater down over his eyes as if preparing to take an afternoon snooze.

  “Are you a betting woman, Miss Jane?”

  “I am not.”

  “No, of course not. But if you were a betting woman—”

  “Which I am not.”

  “Which you are not, but if you were, you could bet your last dime that Courteous Clyde, whoever he may be, would not have left three or four thousand dollars in cash to lie fallow in the Common bank but would have taken it to redistribute from aloft.”

  “Why would anyone who broke into the bank leave the cash?”

  “Well, anyone might leave the cash in order not to draw down the G-men on himself. If they don’t even know what was stolen, you see, they can’t be expected to investigate too zealously.”

  Miss Jane looked at Henry, his hat tipped over his face, and was quite sure that she did see. Just what he had found in the bank vault, if her suspicions were correct, was evidently going to remain a mystery. It seemed clear to her, however, that her friend the judge had been right about Henry Satterfield. There was little doubt in Miss Jane’s mind that for the past three and a half months she had been harboring a professional bank robber on Kingdom Mountain.

  The drought continued. Commoners and farmers had begun to use the word now: drought. The first cutting of hay had been sparse, and at this rate there would not be another. In the meantime the Connector, despite Judge Allen’s ruling that it could not infringe upon Miss Jane’s property, came closer and closer to the mountain. One morning near the end of the month a gigantic steam shovel appeared on a flatbed of the Boston to Montreal freight. That afternoon the machine began widening the cut at the foot of Blue Clay Hill, where the Upper Kingdom River pouring out of Lord Hollow joined the East Branch from Kingdom Mountain. Miss Jane could stand on her porch and watch the progress of the right of way by the dust clouds rising above the oncoming construction. It was evident that the town fathers and Eben fully expected the Supreme Court to decide in their favor, though the case was not scheduled for another month. In accordance with Ira Allen’s recommendation, Miss Jane had hired his son, Forrest, to represent her. She hinted to her dear people in On Kingdom Mountain that if they were willing to lend their assistance, she still had a surprise or two up her sleeve for Montpelier.

  She was contemplating these surprises, with some considerable satisfaction, one morning while touching up the bright red cockade on her pileated-woodpecker door knocker, when she realized that for some time she had been staring at the completed riddle on the slate beside the door.

  The Riddle of Kingdom Mountain: The Trinity

  Behold! on high with the blessed sweet host,

  Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost.

  The soldier stands vigil, where the rood is rove,

  Over the golden trove.

  “I reckon it wasn’t a map in that bank strongbox after all,” Henry Satterfield remarked from the hammock. “It was the rest of that jingle. At least that’s what came to me last night in a dream. I somehow was holding a letter in my hand, written by my granddaddy to your father, thanking him for a certain long-ago service. Then down at the bottom, why, there was the balance of the riddle. Your second sight must be catching, Miss Jane. But I would like to ask you a question. What’s a rood?”

  “I believe that a rood is a rather archaic term for a cross. I’m surprised that you, with your newfound second sight, didn’t divine its meaning.

  “Henry,” she said suddenly, “do you fear ghosts?”

  “Ghosts? No, ma’am. I learned in the war it wasn’t the poor dead I needed to fear but the quick. Particularly when they spoke German and were trying to shoot me and my machine out of the sky.”

  In fact, that was not entirely the case. Ever since he was a boy, growing up with his storytelling granddaddy in the haintinfested bayous of East Texas, Henry had been quite terrified by anything having to do with the supernatural, though he was not about to admit as much to the practical-minded Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson.

  “A very sensible reply, sir. I’m glad you don’t. For I’m afraid that if you’re still interested in helping me, a rather somber task lies before us. Not to put too fine a point on it, I need to make a little transfer.”

  “What kind of transfer, Miss Jane?”

  Jane thought for a moment. Then she said, “For reasons I shall explain in good time, my grandparents chose not to be buried in the family plot in Kingdom Mountain Cemetery but across the pike in what has long been known as the paupers’ field. It is an arrangement I have never been comfortable with, and less so now that we are being threatened with this high road. I would like to transfer their remains to the family plot.”

  “I Jesus!” Henry exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and nearly tipping out of the hammock.

  “If you’ll agree to help me with the transfer,” Miss Jane said, “I will help you try to solve the riddle. Here.” She reached into her dress pocket and withdrew the double eagle she’d found in the stomach of the trout and now carried as a good-luck token. She said, “I think you know what this is. Never mind just where I found it for the time being. No, I want you to keep it. We’ll call it earnest money. What do you say? Shall we strike hands on our partnership?”

  This may have been the single inducement Miss Jane could have offered Henry to persuade him to assist her in what he could only regard as a most ghoulish task. Somewhat reluctantly, he extended his hand. Yet while Jane could not be sure, she thought Henry held her hand in his for just a moment longer than customary in a purely business transaction. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on her part.

  20

  LATER THAT EVENING the low high sheriff drove out to Miss Jane’s home place, and he and Henry walked down the lane to the hemlock-plank covered bridge. The sheriff spit tobacco over the wooden railing into the river and said, “This little bank matter, Mr. Satterfield, puts a law fella in a pickle. So I need to ask you a question. Did you ever hear tell of a fella name of Clyde?”

  “I have known a few Clydes in my day,” Henry admitted.

  The low high sheriff, the crown of whose sheriffing hat came up to the middle of Henry’s white sport jacket, said, “Have you ever knowed one goes by the name Courteous Clyde? Courteous Clyde of the Clouds?”

  “I read up on him recently,” Henry said. “He sounds like quite the ticket. Showering schoolchildren with silver dollars. Robbing banks with an airplane.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Well, here is how it is. If you can help me keep Courteous Clyde of the Clouds and his ilk away from Kingdom County, I will not prosecute this latest banking transaction in the Common too hard. After all, nothing of value seems to be missing from the vault.”

  “I don’t reckon you’ll be seeing Clyde away off up here in these mountains, Sheriff. No, I think I can safely say you won’t see him again.”

  “Again,” the sheriff said.

  “At all,” Henry corrected himself. “I meant to say you won’t see him at all.”

  After a minute the sheriff said, “Do you like to fish?”

  “I do,” Henry said. “Do you?”

  The sheriff allowed that he liked to fish. Then he said, “If Clyde ever did come here, or was thinking of it, I wonder why? Whatever would draw him clear up to the dead end of nowhere?”

  “Oh, just to relax, to have a little getaway for a few weeks, I imagine. Just until the hay-fever season is over. Then I imagine your Courteous Clyde would be off to bigger and better things.”

  “Well, the judge has a message for Clyde. Should you happen to bump i
nto him.”

  “The judge?” Henry said, feeling a chill race up his back. “Judge Allen?”

  “That would be the one. Judge Allen would like you to get word to Mr. Clyde that if he, or any fella whosoever, was to harm a hair on Miss Jane’s head, or mislead her in any way, or trifle with her heart, or make off with anything belonging to her—them were the judge’s exact words, Mr. Satterfield, to make off with anything belonging to Miss Jane—Clyde would never be able to run so far or fly so fast that Judge Allen wouldn’t find him.”

  Fred Morse looked at Henry. “It wouldn’t do,” he said, “to underestimate the judge. He and Jane go back a long way.”

  “Please tell the judge he has nothing to worry about,” Henry said. “Please tell him that from what I have read about Courteous Clyde, his intentions are always those of a gentleman.”

  The sheriff seemed satisfied. His hat nodded up and down. Then as if to seal the matter, he spit into the river just below a leaning soft maple, the first tree on the mountain to turn red in the fall. A blue-backed char about sixteen inches long came up to investigate and, so fast Henry could not quite follow the motion, the low high sheriff drew his long-barreled .45 sheriffing pistol and shot off the trout’s head. “That’s how I like to fish,” he explained as he started down the bank. “They don’t suffer that way. I don’t like to think of them flopping around on the end of a sharp hook, suffering.” His voice sounded far away in Henry’s roaring ears.

  Fred labored back up the bank in his high-heeled cowboy boots, holding the mostly headless fish by its blue-tinged tail. “I like to eat them, too,” he said. Then he added, “It’s that consarned water.”

  “Did you get wet? Fill your boot?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “No. It’s that hard water over in the village. Folks are getting bound up again. I’d like to hire you to take I and Doc back up to Canady this Friday. For another batch of Dr. P.”

  “I believe that can be arranged,” Henry said.

  “I thought it could be,” the sheriff said amiably. “Keep in mind what the judge said, if you will. Keep in mind that I like to fish. And how.”

  “Oh,” Henry said, “I’ll never forget it.”

  21

  HENRY SATTERFIELD SEEMED out of sorts or, as Miss Jane put it, at sixes and sevens, after ambling down from the outhouse past the drought-stricken hollyhocks and golden glow early the next morning and seeing, in Jane’s barnyard, her yoke of red oxen hitched to a sledge. On its flat bed were two longhandled spades, an iron bar, a coil of stout rope, and Pharaoh’s Daughter’s sweetgrass basket. Though the temperature was already over seventy, and Henry had been looking forward to this day for reasons of his own, yet another chill ran through him.

  After breakfast they headed west out the pike road behind the thumping sledge. Miss Jane wore a long dark dress, high black rubber barn boots, and, despite the warm weather, her red and green wool lumber jacket, fastened at the top, where it was missing a button, with the oversized safety pin. She walked as straight and tall as any woman in Kingdom County and briskly, too, so that Henry, who had no great love for walking if he could ride or, better yet, fly, had to hurry to keep up with her and the oxen.

  The pike road hooked up the mountainside through Jane’s former sheep pasturage. Ahead was the original homestead of Venturing Seth Kinneson. Here, in 1775, he had thrown up a one-room log house in the wilderness where he had lived for a few years with his family before building the home place. Under the poplars marking the site of his first pitch, a red rose bush was blooming. Perhaps Seth’s wife, Huswife, had brought it with her from Massachusetts.

  They continued along the overgrown road behind the oxen, passing cellar holes and barn foundations. In the disused fields between the abandoned farmsteads, buttercups and daisies were giving way to steeplebush and meadowsweet. Already, high summer had arrived on Kingdom Mountain, though the prolonged drought had imparted to the foliage the parched and withered look of early fall, and the trees and shrubs were powdered with a compound of dust and fine ash from forest fires to the north.

  A mile west of the home place the lane ran through the northeast edge of the cedar bog near the two cut-over hills forming the Gate to Canada. In a spongy region more water than dry land they crossed a plank bridge over Kingdom Mountain Burn. Downstream from the bridge the quick highland brook slowed to a creeping flow, winding darkly under cedars and hemlocks and losing itself a dozen times over in slangs and beaver backwaters before entering the river at the spawning pool. The bog water was tea-colored and icy cold. The backs and sides of the blue-backed char that lived here were dark as well. In the winter Miss Jane cut cedar fence posts and rails in the bog and skidded them out over the ice with Ethan and General Ira Allen. Some of the biggest bucks in Kingdom County bedded down in the bog by day, emerging to feed in the abandoned fields on the mountain after dark. To Henry Satterfield the bog was a forbidding place. Miss Jane had told him stories of unexplained disappearances and the loup-garou that had dwelt here since time out of mind, the monstrous werewolf that devoured wayfarers overtaken by darkness. She had carved a dozen of these creatures and sold them to folk-art collectors the world over.

  “This was my wild young uncle’s favorite place in the Kingdom,” Jane said as they stood on the bridge and looked out at the bog. “Pilgrim Kinneson was as much at home here as the moose and bobcats.”

  “What did Pilgrim do that was wild?” Henry prompted.

  “Oh, not so very much. He took a few char and deer out of season. My father told me that Pilgrim was a very neat hand with a gill net. And with a jacklight and a musket, too. I suppose he brought a little whiskey over the border. That was before he went off to war.”

  “Miss Jane? Has anyone ever truly disappeared in the bog?”

  Jane hesitated. Then she said, “I know of just one who did. A girl. A young woman, actually. It was early winter, and the ice under the snow was uncertain. It was supposed that she drowned, but no one really knew. They never found the body.”

  Miss Jane shook her head. “Hand me that iron bar from the stoneboat if you will, please, Henry. We need to borrow a plank from the bridge.”

  She inserted the end of the bar under one of the twelve-foot-long planks and pried it up. The wood was damp and punky, and the square-headed nails pulled out easily. She pried up the middle and far end of the plank, and together she and Henry slid it onto the ox sledge.

  As they emerged from the cedars into a scrub field, Miss Jane pointed to the top of a lone tamarack tree on the edge of the bog. On its topmost spire perched a red-tailed hawk. Beneath the tamarack was a barberry bush. Suddenly the hawk tilted its head forward and dived, talons extended. A snow-shoe hare, brown for the summer, bounded out of the bush. It screamed once, then hung limp as a cloth as the red-tail silently carried it out of sight into the bog.

  Jane bent over and picked up a tuft of brown hair near the barberry. “In the winter Monsieur Lapin would be white and camouflaged by a foot of snow. The hawk never would have spied him.”

  “Bad luck for the rabbit,” Henry said.

  “Good luck for the hawk,” Jane said. “Strife, Mr. Satterfield. It’s the way of the world. Gee up, steers.”

  As they headed up the mountain under a bluebird blue summer sky, Henry said, “I noticed you called the rabbit Monsieur Lapin. It reminded me of growing up in East Texas. Visiting my Creole grandma and grandpa over in Louisiana.”

  “That’s what my family’s neighbors, the Thibeaus, called the rabbits they snared. My father told me that for the first few years after coming here from Canada, the Thibeaus subsisted on rabbits. Rabbits and partridges and char. Whatever they could catch or snare.”

  Miss Jane pointed at a shallow cave in the mountainside. “That’s where they wintered over the first year. With a cow and a logging horse and a few chickens and five children. Pamphille Thibeau worked on the far side of the mountain, cutting logs for my grandfather’s sawmill. Oh, they lived a hardscrabble life, Henry. Dad
and Pilgrim were attending the Kinnesonville school at the time. On the first day of the term all five of the Thibeau children showed up at the schoolhouse knowing not a word of English among them. But they all turned out to be very able scholars. Manon, the oldest girl, was just Pilgrim’s age.”

  The pike road wound up past the Thibeaus’ cave, which ran back into the cliff about fifteen feet. Actually, it was less a cave than a shelter roofed by a rock overhang.

  “After a few years, Pamphille bought a peddler’s wagon and painted it red and yellow,” Miss Jane said. “He traveled the borderlands from farm to farm selling household wares out of that painted wagon. Manon used to go along to translate for him. But the Thibeaus were always regarded as different by some people. They spoke a different language, their main holiday was New Year’s rather than Christmas, and they said their prayers on a string of beads. One night soon after they shifted here from Canada, some Commoners paraded up the mountain in white sheets and burned a cross in front of the cave. Manon raced cross-lots to our place, and my grandfather rode up and confronted the rabble.”

  “With a gun?”

  Miss Jane shook her head. “He didn’t need a gun and wouldn’t have brought one under any circumstances. He was a Quaker. He just reined in his horse and ordered the ruffians to leave the mountain straightaway and not return. Then for good measure he named them all by name, sheets or no. He knew well enough who the instigators were. From there it was an easy matter to surmise the names of the riffraff who would follow them. As for the Thibeaus, they hung on for a time. But two of the children perished in an epidemic, another boy was lost in the Civil War, and yet another was killed in a lumbering mishap. Then Pamphille and his wife died. Eventually, the mountain claimed them all.”