On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The wind was gusting out of the north, sweeping down from Canada over Cemetery Ridge, as it had since long before there were any people on the mountain, alive or dead. As they threw the dirt back into the holes, Henry could feel blisters beginning to form on his hands.

  “A harsh and forlorn place, this mountain,” Miss Jane said when they were finished.

  “I’d have liked to see it when it was all cleared to fields and pasture,” Henry said.

  “Perhaps you will.”

  Henry looked at her, but all she said was “Let’s head home.”

  They started down the mountainside, the oxen walking faster now. Kinnesonville looked even emptier, the bog below darker and more forbidding. Back at the home place Miss Jane fed and watered the oxen, then made supper. She and Henry ate at the applewood kitchen table, a plain country supper of sausage, toasted homemade bread, fried potatoes, coffee, and apple pie. Afterward Miss Jane surprised Henry by asking him to join her in On Kingdom Mountain. Most evenings they sat visiting on the porch or in the kitchen.

  From the Currier and Ives safe, Miss Jane removed a cardboard box containing her stereopticon, a wooden device about a foot long. At one end was a binocular eyepiece with thick lenses, and at the other end a rectangular pasteboard card mounted with two identical photographs was placed in a wireframe holder. When viewed through the lenses, the twin photographs formed a single picture in three dimensions.

  From the box, Miss Jane selected a card, which she inserted into the holder. To focus the device, you moved the frame like a trombone slide. As a girl, Jane had loved repairing to the parlor with her folks after a holiday meal and viewing slides of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and other exotic places. She and Henry Satterfield had looked at some of those photographs before, but tonight what came into focus when Henry peered through the eyepiece was the home place. In front, by the gate, was a box-shaped wagon drawn by a white horse wearing a straw hat with two ear holes. On the side of the cart were the words PAMPHILLE THIBEAU PEDDLER. Beside the horse stood a smiling man with a hat like the horse’s. Viewed through the stereopticon, Pamphille Thibeau looked strikingly lifelike. Beyond him the home place gleamed with fresh white paint, against which the family motto on the lintel stood out clearly. Over the gate was a wooden trellis covered with blossoming roses.

  Miss Jane handed Henry another slide. It was a formal tableau of people in old-fashioned suits and long dresses posing in chairs on the lawn in front of the home place. Behind them children of various ages were arranged on the porch steps.

  “The man with the beard sitting in the Boston rocker beside the woman in an identical rocker is my grandfather, Quaker Meeting,” Miss Jane said.

  Quaker Meeting Kinneson looked gravely out of the picture as if he were viewing Henry Satterfield rather than vice versa, and Henry did not quite measure up. The pilot had no difficulty imagining this stern old patriarch facing down the nightriders who had terrorized the Thibeaus on the mountain. Or forbidding his son Pilgrim to marry Pamphille’s daughter Manon.

  For the next hour, while the wind rose, Miss Jane handed Henry one slide after another from the history of her family.

  “County Champions,” she said. Into view came a dozen schoolboy ballplayers wearing baggy homemade uniform pants and shirts and homemade caps with rounded bills that made their faces look like those of grown men. The champions were perched on the railing of the Kinnesonville school porch. Some wore old-fashioned baseball gloves with pockets as thin as pancakes and fingers as thick as sausages. “That’s yours truly,” Miss Jane said, pointing to a pretty, long-legged girl with light hair. “I played first base and batted leadoff, where I could put my fleetness to advantage.”

  “Circus Train,” Miss Jane said. “I snapped this one.” The Barnum & Bailey train sat on the siding by the water tower near the high trestle. “Jumbo, World’s Largest Elephant” stood knee-deep in the big pool below the trestle, spraying his back with cool river water.

  Miss Jane handed Henry a slide of the Kinnesonville church, its toppled steeple miraculously reattached. On the church lawn people were eating at trestle tables. “Church Supper.”

  Next came a photograph of the Kingdom River in the spring, packed with logs from bank to bank. Downriver more logs were flying high into the air. Men in calked boots and checked shirts watched from the bank. “Dynamiting the Jam.” Henry wondered if one of the dynamiters was Died Fightin.

  “Blueberrying” showed a young man and a young woman in berry bushes up to their waists. The girl had long dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She was wearing a white blouse with a high lace collar. Even before Miss Jane named the berry pickers, Henry was sure that this was a picture of pilgrim Kinneson and Manon Thibeau.

  Next came two photographs of the south side of Kingdom Mountain, cleared to fields where originally there had been only woods, and woods were once more fast encroaching. Miss Jane showed Henry farmers sitting on chopping blocks with dogs at their feet, hunters standing beside heavy buck deer hanging from dooryard maples, logging horses skidding gigantic tree trunks through snowy evergreen woods, men in suspenders and felt boots holding court around the stove in the Kinnesonville store, their expressions as deliberate as those of Supreme Court justices.

  In one photograph taken on a stormy winter day, people in sheepskin coats and fur hats were lined up in front of the post office and store. The queue stretched along the porch past the window with the salada tea sign and down the steps and out into the snow-filled street. “Waiting for David Copperfield.”

  The last slide, “Armistice Day,” showed the people of Kingdom Mountain marching in a parade through Kinnesonville. The procession was led by a three-piece brass band. Miss Jane said no one dreamed that in less than two weeks the town would be struck by the influenza epidemic that would kill one of every two men, women, and children in the photograph. Through some quirk of light or exposure, the eyes of the marchers looked white and spectral. “I call this ‘Ghosts,’” she said.

  For a time it was quiet in On Kingdom Mountain, as if Miss Jane’s dear people, too, were spellbound by the family photographs.

  Then Jane said, “I thank you, Henry. For your help today.”

  Henry shrugged and started to leave the parlor. But Miss Jane held out the boxes with the stereopticon and slides. “These are for you.”

  “I don’t want a reward, Miss Jane. I was glad to help.”

  Jane tucked the boxes under Henry’s arm. “Show them to your next beautiful young wingwalker,” she teased.

  Henry thanked her and started up the stairs toward his bedchamber.

  “Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said just before he reached the top of the stairs, “the photographs aren’t a present. They’re a legacy. You see, there is no one else here on the mountain to leave them to.”

  Outside, the wind was blowing against the weathered clapboards of the home place. In the graveyard on the mountain it blew harder still, over the granite and cedar markers and the newly dug graves. Yet there were no ghosts on Kingdom Mountain that night. Only stories, some of which, like Pilgrim’s fate and Manon’s, might remain mysteries for all time to come.

  24

  “SPEAKING OF STORIES, Miss Jane, I believe that you were going to finish telling me that deer-hunting yarn you’d started.”

  It was the following evening and they had just settled in for their featherbed chat, which they had both come to look forward to greatly. Almost, Miss Jane thought, like a long-married couple. Or two young lovers in a fairy tale, kept apart by a high wall or, like Pilgrim and Manon Thibeau, by wrongheaded families.

  “Was I?” she called up through the vent. “Where did I leave off?”

  “You and your father were at the camp, and you wanted to shoot a deer to impress your beau, Ira Allen.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Henry, he wasn’t my beau. I was far too strong-minded to declare myself to any beau. But yes, I did want to impress him. As I was telling you, it was still snowing hard when my father and I
turned in for the night. Early the next morning, well before it was light, I woke to the smell of camp coffee and bacon and bread toasted on the camp stove. It had stopped storming, but the snow was a foot deep. Right after breakfast I started out with Lady Justice and six bullets, quite excited, now that I was doing it, to be hunting the mountain on my own. I walked carefully because I couldn’t see what was beneath the snow, up the game trail above Pond Number Three beside that great wooden log chute. Two small deer had gone up the mountainside ahead of me that morning. I followed in their tracks, walking slowly so I wouldn’t perspire and then take a chill on my stand, which Father had cautioned me against. I came out on top of the mountain directly below the balancing boulder. From that close the devil’s visage resembled nothing at all.”

  Henry was sitting on the edge of his bed, the better to hear the story. He had spent much of the day lying in the porch hammock and speculating where he would have buried the stolen gold if he’d been with his granddaddy, the old captain, and his comrade-in-arms. Under the peace cairn? Beneath the floor of Camp Hard Luck? Was the camp even there in 1864? Listening to Miss Jane’s story, Henry shut his eyes and saw double eagles dancing on the inside of his lids.

  “I walked around the huge boulder,” Miss Jane continued, “and admired the carved pictures of the caribou and whales and walruses. From here I could look down on the home place and the lane to the river, which was still open and steaming, and then on along the valley to the village. I could see much of northern Vermont and New Hampshire and deep into Canada. I counted thirty-six peaks, all pink on top from the sunrise reflecting off the snow.

  “Three deer went over the mountaintop that morning, two small does and a medium-sized buck with a six-point rack, not a deer to impress anyone with. For lunch I ate meatloaf on homemade bread, pickles, and mother’s chocolate cake. Afterward I sighted Lady Justice in on the fire tower, which was still covered with rime.

  “Then, in the pale November sunshine, I fell asleep. For a moment or two after I woke I didn’t know where I was. I must have slept for a good while, because the sun was nearing Mount Mansfield, far off to the southwest, and it was colder. How could I, the last of the Memphremagog Abenakis, have fallen asleep on stand? I was mortified.

  “That’s when I saw the deer. It had been there, pawing up moss under the snow below the fire tower, for some time. It was huge, with massive antlers. I never stopped to think what I was going to do next. I drew a bead, and when I clicked back the hammer, the buck heard the noise and bolted. I fired once, levered in another shell, fired a second time. My second shot hit the animal in the back left leg. It collapsed but was up again immediately, plunging down the mountainside out of sight. Henry, I felt terrible. What would my father say when he learned I’d wounded the deer and let it get away? How, for that matter, could I live with myself, knowing that I’d wounded that animal mainly to impress a young man? To persuade him that I was something I wasn’t, at least not yet, a hunter capable of bringing home a great trophy. All, all was wrong. This whole adventure was wrong, and in it I thought I saw all that was wrong about our living on this mountain. Isolating ourselves in a wilderness that none of us, really, was suited for. Right then I made up my mind that I was not going to let the mountain trap me the way it had trapped my father and his father and grandfather. Deeply ashamed, angry with my family and with myself, sick at heart that the deer might die an agonizing death in some blowdown, I started down the mountain after it. In the hour of remaining light, I was determined to track the animal to its bed and put it out of its misery.”

  Henry was somewhat disappointed. This story did not, after all, seem headed toward any revelation about the treasure, though you could never be sure just where Miss Jane’s stories were going until they got there and he was, admittedly, eager to hear whether she had succeeded in putting the poor deer out of its misery and winning Ira Allen’s heart.

  “At first the buck stayed in the trail I’d followed up the mountain that morning. It was easy to track him by the blood in the snow. About halfway down the mountainside, he veered off into what we called the Limberlost, a very wild and forbidding region that had always made me uneasy. Follow him there I must, though. The deer zigged and zagged, around gigantic boulders broken off from the mountaintop eons ago, around barberry thickets, the tiny red berries bright in the slanted light, the animal’s blood on the snow brighter still. He crossed several seeps trickling off into Bad Brook. Just at dusk I came into a clearing near three old American chestnut trees that had somehow survived the great blight that left scarcely one chestnut standing from New England to Georgia. The wounded buck stood under one of the chestnuts, with his profile to me. I counted eight points on one side of his rack, nine on the other. I thought again of my father, who at just seventeen had had a huge responsibility: to find his brother, missing in Tennessee. I had a small responsibility: to finish the deer I’d wounded. I raised Lady Justice and did so with a shot straight to the heart, and not long afterward, my father appeared in the clearing. Working quickly, we dressed out the deer and put its liver in Father’s pack basket. He never mentioned the wound in the buck’s leg.

  “When I asked him how we would ever get the huge deer back down to Camp Hard Luck, he thought for a moment, then said we’d give him an old-fashioned bobsled ride. That’s just what we did. We dragged the buck over to the log chute, which was covered with a few inches of snow, and together we hoisted him onto the steep incline and gave him a shove. Down he went, whizzing along at a terrific rate of speed. Half an hour later we retrieved the animal from the frozen pond below. One of the tines on his right antler had snapped off when it hit the ice, so now he had eight points on each side. We dragged the carcass up to the camp and hung it by the horns from the heavy beam extending out from the roof peak.

  “That night it snowed again, Henry. As we built up the fire in the camp stove with the sweet-smelling yellow birch and sugar maple in the woodbox, I asked father point-blank whether, on his trek south, he had found any trace of Pilgrim.

  “‘Daughter,’ he said, ‘I walked a thousand miles and more in search of my brother. I saw terrible things for a young man of seventeen, or a man of any age, to see. When I returned home, I had no further wish to view the world beyond Vermont. I vowed to myself that I would never leave again, and if I could prevent it, no Kinneson would leave Vermont to sacrifice himself, or herself, for whatever cause, ever again.’ My father’s way of ensuring this, insofar as he could, was to leave me the mountain in trust for my direct heirs, they to hold it in trust for theirs, and so on, in perpetuity.”

  “With respect, I think your father did you no good service with such a stipulation, Miss Jane.”

  “I think that you are right, Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said quietly.

  For a time neither spoke. Then Henry said, “But what about young Ira Allen? Was he impressed with your great hunting feat?”

  “I think he was,” Miss Jane said. “Though perhaps the deer impressed him more than I did. As the seventeenth Earl wrote, the course of true love never did run smooth. Not entirely smooth, at least. Ira was, and is, the least envious person I’ve ever known. Yet I think that when he first saw that big deer, he was just a little envious of it and of me for shooting it. How could he not be? When it came to hunting I was an amateur who’d had a huge stroke of beginner’s luck. Still, I’m glad I finished it. As I’ve said, Henry, my real mistake with Ira was never declaring myself. That is always a mistake.”

  25

  FOR A LONG TIME that night Henry lay tossing in his upstairs chamber, dwelling on Miss Jane’s story and his grandfather’s riddle and the treasure. “Behold! on high with the blessed sweet host.” The line ran through his mind like the refrain of some old hymn that he did not care for but could not dislodge from his thoughts. Suddenly he sat up. He stood and, as if in a trance, went to the west dormer window and looked out toward the lake and the mountains beyond. Little Lord Jesus Asleep in the Hay! In the cupola of the abandoned town fa
rm, two miles to the west, was a flickering light. “On high,” he muttered. “The blessed sweet host.” The poorhouse cupola was surely “on high,” looming three stories into the air and commanding a heavenly view far up the lake into Canada. That was it, Henry thought. The treasure lay concealed beneath the floor of the cupola, where, Miss Jane had told him, runaway slaves once hid.

  It seemed to Henry, as he hurried into his white suit, that this was the moment he had been born for. Shoes in hand, he tiptoed downstairs and, ever so stealthily, let himself out the door, not failing to give his little salute to the two-headed Memphre Magog beside the door and, opposite him, the Loup-Garou wearing Mambrino’s golden helmet. Fetching Miss Jane’s big barn lantern and the crowbar they’d used on their excursion to the cemetery, he noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

  As the excited weathermaker posted along over the old pike through the dark woods, past cellar holes and barn foundations of Kinnesons long since moldering in their graves, toward the big lake and the abandoned town farm, he could not stop thinking about ghosts, haunted houses, and specters. Weren’t the sites of the hidden treasures he’d been reading about nearly always haunted? The idea of creeping through a dark and empty building rumored to be frequented by the long-dead gave him great pause. A man who had fought the Hun four or five thousand feet above German soil, who had worked as an itinerant bank teller specializing in withdrawals at the end of a fiddle case, and who had flown around the known world putting on aerobatic exhibitions should not be daunted by tales designed to entertain children of a winter’s evening. Henry thought of the shining gold coins sacked up under the cupola’s floorboards and quickened his pace. Now that he had deciphered the mad old captain’s riddle, he could not let someone else, quick or dead, beat him to the boodle.

  From high on the mountain something howled. A wildcat, maybe. Or a poor hare taken by a fox or an owl. Henry recalled the frightful story Miss Jane had told him about Rogers’ Rangers, returning from their retaliatory raid on her ancestors, surprised on the lakeshore very near where Henry now found himself. Three of Rogers’ men had been slaughtered and their heads used as makeshift bowling balls. A sensible man would go back to the home place and return for the treasure the next day, in the bright and reassuring morning sunshine, with Miss Jane. What if, so far from discovering the gold, he encountered the dreaded Lady of the Lake who was said to flit through the forlorn premises of the old manse and lure young men to a watery death? Though Henry’s heart was no longer in this enterprise, his white shoes, just visible in the darkness, carried him swiftly along, closer and closer to the poor farm. What did Miss Jane love to cite? Alia jacta est. Yes. The die was cast.