On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Maybe that’s where the treasure is buried,” Henry said. “In the cave.”

  Miss Jane shook her head and smiled. “I’m afraid that the only treasure is the mountain itself, Henry. That’s a treasure worth preserving. Come up, boys.”

  She clicked to the oxen, and they proceeded up the mountainside above the Thibeaus’ cave.

  SALADA TEA. The black letters painted on the inside of the window stood out sharply. Below them, like an afterthought, were the words KINNESONVILLE GENERAL STORE AND POST OFFICE.

  Miss Jane and Henry stood on the listing porch of the former store in the deserted hamlet. Cupping their hands around their eyes to cut down on the reflection, they peered inside at the empty shelves. Set into the wall behind the counter were forty wooden cubbyholes where forty families had once received their mail. But Kinnesonville had been tenantless for more than a decade. The store had not been a working store for longer yet. The five or six houses still standing were overrun with bittersweet and wild grapevines. If the high road went through, they would be burned to the ground.

  “When my father was a boy, Henry, he came here every Saturday morning to pick up the Farmers Weekly Companion. The Companion ran pirated installments from Charles Dickens’s novels, and the line of people waiting for the next installment often stretched all the way out the door and down to the pike.”

  Across the road from the store was the one-room school over which Miss Jane had once presided. Next to it was the Kinnesonville church. The steeple, which had blown off in a hurricane, lay rotting in a wild raspberry patch like the fallen turret of a cursed castle. It was said in the Common that the church bell, long since sold for scrap iron, still tolled to lead lost hunters out of the cedar bog.

  “Miss Jane, where did all these folks go?”

  “Some moved out west where the farming was better. The more ambitious of the young people flocked to the cities. As for the old folks and the rest, well, Henry, they went where I and thou and the oxen must now go if we’re to accomplish our day’s work.”

  She pointed at the cemetery on the ridge above them. “Walk on, gentlemen,” she said to the steers.

  22

  LIKE MANY ANOTHER New England cemetery, the Kingdom Mountain graveyard enjoyed one of the finest views for miles around. You could look west over the Green Mountains, stretching from Mount Mansfield and Camels Hump in the south all the way to the tall Canadian peaks in the distant north. Off to the southeast, just visible in the hazy air that had hung over the region for more than two months, the Presidential Range of the White Mountains loomed larger still. On high, Henry mused. The riddle specified that the golden trove was on high. Unless they went up to the mountaintop, to the peace cairn and the balancing boulder, they couldn’t get much higher than they were. Furthermore, if a rood was a cross, a cemetery was a likely place to find one.

  Surrounded by its antebellum iron picket fence, the graveyard contained no more than one hundred and fifty stones. None were in any way prepossessing, just gray granite markers two to three feet tall and as unadorned as the lives of the people whose final resting places they marked. Through the middle of the cemetery ran a row of mature sugar maples. Each March and April for many years, Jane had unsentimentally tapped the cemetery maples. In the northwest corner of the graveyard grew several old-fashioned varieties of apple trees. Near the orchard stood an elm with a swinging oriole’s nest. Two new graves, which Jane told Henry she’d hired Clarence Davis, the local spruce-gum picker, to dig a week ago, lay waiting under the elm. A pair of robins searched for worms on the fresh mounds of earth beside them.

  Just across the pike from Kingdom Mountain Cemetery was the paupers’ field, where Jane’s grandparents were buried beneath two plain granite markers. Otherwise, the paupers’ graveyard was a place of cedar. It was enclosed with cedar rails. The cedar-pole gate was hinged to upright cedar fence posts. Most of the thirty or so grave markers were made of cedar as well. Some of the crude wooden tablets had fallen over into the grass. Long neglected, they marked the graves of the mountain’s outcasts and unknowns.

  QUAKER MEETING KINNESON, 1805–1864. Below Jane’s grandfather’s dates was the word FATHER. Beside Quaker Meeting’s stone was his wife’s. JANE KINNESON. MOTHER. It had always seemed odd to Miss Jane to see her own name on her grandmother’s gravestone.

  In order to give his friend some time alone with her ancestors, Henry ambled off to read the inscriptions on the cedar markers. UNKNOWN DIED ON THE RIVER. And carved crudely on a fallen tablet, A CANUCK LUMBERJACK DIED FIGHTIN. Beneath Died Fightin’s marker a woodchuck had tunneled a hole into the hillside. Nearby was the Thibeau plot. The graves of the children were designated by lozenge-shaped wooden markers no larger than breadboards.

  The Duchess handed Henry a shovel. “This is just one more job of work on the mountain, Mr. Satterfield,” she said stoically. “Taking care of family.”

  Jane set about digging methodically, like a woman spading up her kitchen garden in the fall. Henry, with his white showman’s shoes and crimson vest, worked fitfully, in the unconvincing manner of a man not accustomed to physical labor. Yet there was something eager and anticipatory in his expression. Perhaps he merely wanted to get the transfers over with, Miss Jane thought.

  Unlike the firmly packed blue clay of the river valley, the soil on the ridge was light glacial till. They were down to the coffins by noon. To Miss Jane’s relief, both were intact.

  She fetched the oxen and unhitched the stoneboat at the foot of her grandfather’s grave. As Henry watched, she pried one end of the casket up at an angle with the iron bar, then wedged an end of the borrowed bridge plank under the raised casket. She wrapped the heavy rope they’d brought with them around the coffin and snubbed it off with a neat half hitch. The other end of the rope she ran over the top of the jutting plank and fastened to the pulling ring of the ox yoke.

  Miss Jane clicked to the oxen. “Softly, boys.”

  As the animals eased forward, Quaker Meeting’s coffin slid up the canted plank. Like a well-balanced seesaw, the plank with the coffin on top tipped down onto the bed of the stone-boat. Jane repeated the process with her grandmother’s coffin, then clicked to the oxen and drove them out of the paupers’ field and across the road into the cemetery proper, where she glanced up at the hazy sun. “I call this a fair morning’s work, Henry. Let’s take our nooning.”

  They ate on the burnt grass under the lone elm tree beside the new graves. As Miss Jane unpacked the sweetgrass basket, it seemed strange to Henry that she could sit so comfortably beside the last earthly remains of her grandparents and sprinkle salt on her hard-boiled egg and munch homemade baked bean sandwiches laced with maple syrup from the cemetery maples. But they were both hungry in the way people who have done hard work outdoors usually are, and after all, as Jane had remarked, she was just taking care of family.

  “Family ties are of considerable consequence in my part of the country as well, Miss Jane,” Henry said. “But with your permission, I wonder if I might make a rather personal inquiry?”

  “Permission granted,” Miss Jane said.

  “Would you want me to”—Henry paused for the slightest moment—“view the remains? To spare you the pain?”

  “Why, Henry Satterfield, whatever can you mean? I know very well whose remains are in those boxes. And I’ll assure you that I don’t care to view them. Why would you think I might wish to?”

  Henry inclined his head toward Miss Jane, bowing slightly. “Why, indeed, Miss Jane,” he said. “Why, indeed, now that I think of it. It was a passing whim. Forgive me.”

  “You’ve done nothing at all to be forgiven for, sir. If you truly thought I wished to verify the remains, it was a kind offer.”

  Suddenly Miss Jane’s gray eyes were amused. “I do believe, Henry, that you suppose my grandfather found that so-called treasure and somehow arranged for it to be buried with him.”

  Henry bowed again in acknowledgment of Miss Jane’s deduction. But she shook her
head and said no, she was certain that if Quaker Meeting had ever stumbled on the loot from the robbery, he’d have returned it to the bank, ill-gotten gains from profiteering on the war or no. “And that’s assuming that the treasure was ever buried on the mountain to start out with,” she added. “Which I’ve always much misdoubted.”

  “Oh,” Henry said very gravely, “I believe it was buried on the mountain, Miss Jane. I do believe it was. That, you see, must be the import of the riddle. However, as far as your grandfather finding the boodle and not returning it, I take your point. That would be very unlikely.”

  Miss Jane unwrapped another sandwich and handed it to the aviator, then folded up the brown butcher paper to use again. “So, Mr. Satterfield. No doubt you will remember this day in later life. Picnicking with your peculiar Vermont friend in Kingdom Mountain Cemetery whilst moving two graves.”

  “My friend, yes. But peculiar? Far from it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jane said. “I was a peculiar child, a peculiar, if capable, teacher, and I am a peculiar friend. You and I both know it.”

  Miss Jane seemed so proud of being a peculiar friend that Henry caught himself on the verge of acquiescing. Then, despite himself, his eyes swiveled back to the coffins. He must and would find away to look inside them, even if he had to play grave robber and return under cover of darkness to re-exhume them.

  Miss Jane handed him one of her famous cartwheel molasses cookies. “This puts me in mind of the day I got the receipt for these cookies, Mr. Satterfield. It was a very warm afternoon in the spring of the year back when I was keeping the Kinnesonville school. I happened to glance out the window, and for a moment I thought that a caravan from The Arabian Nights was winding down the valley. It was the Barnum & Bailey circus train, en route to Montreal. One hundred cars painted bright yellow and blue and red. When it stopped to take on water at the Kingdom Mountain tank, I let the entire school out. They were doing some minor repairs to the locomotive as we arrived, and it was such an unseasonably warm day that the circus master directed that the elephants be allowed to cool off in the river. Twenty performing elephants of all sizes were led out of the cars and into the big pool below the trestle. The circus master was very accommodating to the children. He pointed out Jumbo, the world’s largest elephant. And he had one of the cooks give each of my scholars a huge molasses cookie. Those circus cookies were the best I ever ate. Before the train departed, I got the receipt.”

  “Well, Miss Jane,” Henry said, lolling out with his sleek dark head propped on his fist and his elbow resting on the grass, “it just goes to prove what the old judge said.”

  “What might that be?” Miss Jane inquired.

  “That if you but wait long enough, the world and everyone in it worth knowing will travel to Kingdom Mountain.”

  Henry plucked a clover blossom and held it on his tongue to extract the sweetness. “Miss Jane,” he said, “I’m truly sorry that the new highway’s coming. Regardless of the higher court’s decision, I am quite determined to help you stop it.”

  Miss Jane nodded, but her eyes had the abstracted expression that sometimes came into them just before one of her Kingdom Mountain moments.

  “What do you see?” Henry said.

  “I don’t really see anything. It’s more of an idea taking shape in my head. I just had the idea that years from now you might come here with a new wingwalker, a beautiful young woman who would like to hear a story.”

  “What story would I tell her?” Henry said. “How I moved some graves with Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson?”

  Miss Jane smiled and shook her head. “A young woman, Mr. Satterfield, would like to hear a love story. Hark now. I’ll tell you one. When my uncle Pilgrim was home for the summer holidays from his medical studies at Harvard, he fell deeply in love with Manon Thibeau, the eldest daughter from the family I spoke of who dwelt in the cave. Manon was by all reports a beautiful woman and as much in love with Pilgrim as he was with her. But now enter my grandparents, Quaker Meeting and Jane Kinneson, who were appalled by the idea of a son of theirs courting a French Canadian girl. From the start they opposed the match.”

  “I thought your folks liked the Thibeaus. What about your father driving off those white-sheeted cowards who came to burn them out?”

  “Protecting a neighbor and his family from a craven mob was one thing. Countenancing a marriage between their son and a Catholic girl was an altogether different matter. Manon’s parents felt the same way about their daughter marrying a Protestant. Both sets of parents honestly believed that if Pilgrim and Manon married outside their faith, they and their children and all their descendants to come would burn in Hell forever.”

  Miss Jane looked at the weathermaker. “In the fall of that year, Manon vanished.”

  Jane sat looking silently down the mountainside. Then she said, “Manon, Henry, was the girl I told you about who disappeared in the bog. The Thibeaus didn’t place a grave marker for her because they kept hoping she’d show up. But she never did. After she vanished, Pilgrim ran away to war, and we heard nothing of him until his commanding officer reported him missing in Tennessee.”

  Henry thought for a few moments, sucking on another clover blossom. “Miss Jane? Where in Tennessee did Pilgrim turn up missing?”

  “Near a town called Gatlinburg. It was thought he’d been captured by Will Thomas’s Cherokees and taken back up into the mountains of North Carolina. But we never learned his fate for certain. When he came up missing, my grandparents, in their despair, turned against the very doctrines they had cleaved to when Pilgrim and Manon wished to marry. First they withdrew from the Presbyterian church. Then they renounced the religion of their ancestors altogether. Finally they insisted on being buried in the paupers’ field with the French Canadians and outcasts and unknowns.”

  Miss Jane stood up. “But times change, Mr. Satterfield. And I have a role in all this, too. My role is to rectify what I can by reuniting family and neighbors. And in matters that I can’t rectify, at least to bear witness to all that has happened. And to do so without judgment. I thank you, sir, for your help in this matter. And Henry? The gold isn’t in those coffins. They’re as light as feathers. Go see for yourself so you won’t lie awake nights wondering.”

  23

  JUST OUTSIDE THE cemetery gate, an iron pump stood on a granite millstone. The pipe from the pump ran through the hole in the stone to a well deep under the ground. This well had long been believed to be fed by an underground aquifer of glacial meltwater ten thousand years old. The well water, the coldest and purest in all Kingdom County, was called Easter water because for more than one hundred years people from Kinnesonville and the surrounding farms had gathered here on Easter morning to pump water for washing and drinking. It was thought that the Easter water washed away sins, assuaged guilty consciences, and reconciled grudges between family members and neighbors. How this tradition started no one knew. But for many years Presbyterians, French Canadians, and even a few Kingdom Mountain freethinkers had made their pilgrimage here on Easter Sunday, often in a spring snowstorm, to draw the healing water from deep in the heart of the mountain.

  “Just how deep is this miracle well, Miss Jane?” Henry asked. Inclining his ear close to the opening, he dropped a pebble through the hole in the millstone.

  “Deep enough, Henry, so that if that’s where the raiders dumped the boodle, that’s where it will stay till Gabriel blows his trump.”

  When Miss Jane filled a blue flower vase from an ancestor’s grave with brook water and primed the pump, the pressure pulled back on the handle like a big trout. She loved thinking that the icy water that gushed out of the rusty metal spout might have come straight from a glacier. She filled the vase and returned to the two coffins, which she and Henry slid, one at a time, down the plank into their new graves. They could not have been much lighter if they were empty, Henry thought, but now he was terribly worried that the gold might be deep in the impenetrable granite core of the mountain, submerged in the well bene
ath hundreds of feet of glacial water.

  Miss Jane picked a few clover blossoms and dropped them onto the coffins. Dipping her fingers into the brimming vase, she sprinkled Easter water over the rough wooden lids. A mourning cloak butterfly, so recently emerged that its blue and yellow wing bands still glistened, landed on one of the coffins and sipped at a droplet.

  “Shoo,” Miss Jane said to the butterfly. “It’s too late in the day for you to be out and about. Go back to sleep till morning.”

  She and Henry began to fill in the graves, though not before the showman fixed a last lingering look on the coffins, as though he’d still like to look inside, just to be sure of what he already knew.

  “They’d be much heavier,” Miss Jane said to him again. “Let us get on with the work at hand, shall we?”

  Just before leaving the cemetery, she patted down the fresh dirt on the two graves and repeated, quietly, “Go back to sleep, my dears. No one will disturb you again.”

  The granite markers of her grandparents’ graves were not large, and it was not hard to dig them out of the ground, tip them onto the stoneboat, and move them across the pike to the main cemetery. Then they went back to the paupers’ field once more to fill in the empty graves, Miss Jane taking care to shut and fasten the cedar gate behind herself. There were no longer any cattle or horses or sheep on the mountain to wander into the paupers’ field. Closing gates behind herself was simply something Jane’s father had taught her to do when she was a small girl. It went beyond habit.