On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Miss Jane thought for a moment. Then she asked Elisabeth to wait in the conservatory while she fetched something from her Model A. When she returned she was carrying her archaeopteryx, whom she placed in a pink-blossoming bougainvillea vine beside the waterfall. “I carved this gentleman and named him Noah,” Miss Jane said. “I think he fits in perfectly here. Do come and visit me, sister. I’d like you to see my mountain. Come soon. We’ve a great deal to talk about.”

  The sisters embraced with tears in their eyes. Elisabeth promised to visit Miss Jane and also to take her to the cave in Virginia where their father had met Slidell. Then, as the shadow of Mount Royal crept out over the city toward the great river, Henry and Miss Jane headed back to Kingdom Mountain.

  On the way home, Henry found himself thinking again about Miss Jane’s assurance that the recent apparent coincidences on the mountain were in fact consequences. Certainly everything that had come to light that afternoon—the family connection between Jane and Elisabeth, the purpose of that long-ago train ride, the box of love letters now in Miss Jane’s possession—seemed the result of human actions. He now had no doubt that his own presence on the mountain was the result of his grandfather’s participation in the Great Raid. But why hadn’t Cantrell Satterfield returned for the treasure? Or had he? And what had happened to Pilgrim? Why, for that matter, had Miss Jane chained herself to her solitary life on the mountain after vowing as a teenage girl not to do so? Could her motive have something to do with the treasure? Most of all, where was the damnable gold if not in Montreal? Consequences aside, they had resolved few of the great mysteries of Kingdom Mountain today, only learned a new family story that would doubtless raise new mysteries of its own.

  With the lights of the Ford cutting a swath through the woods covering the northernmost extension of the mountains that Morgan Kinneson had followed south to Tennessee in search of his missing brother, Henry said, “Miss Jane? Why did you stay on the mountain? You could have been a high-up professor or an ambassador or whatever you wished to be.”

  “Why, Henry, I have been, and am, exactly what I wished to be. A teacher—a former teacher, to be precise—a bookseller and librarian and a bird carver. Not to mention the custodian and protector of that mountain.”

  Slowing for a pair of eyes beside the road ahead, a raccoon or a skunk, perhaps, which melted into the woods, Henry said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me, Miss Jane. About there being few coincidences on Kingdom Mountain. About the far-reaching consequences of human actions. I was thinking about your decision to stay on the mountain.”

  Miss Jane remained, like her mountain, silent.

  “I hope you know that you can trust me, Miss Jane, never to repeat anything said to me in confidence.”

  Jane reached out and placed her hand over Henry’s on the knob of the steering wheel. Then she said, “It was the day I turned eighteen, my last year of high school. Early in the morning I slipped into my rubber boots and went out to the barn. I fed and watered our six Jersey cows, milked them, then fed the oxen, Seth and Freethinker Kinneson, named for our ancestors. Seth and Freethinker were a matched pair of Red Durhams, like Ethan and Ira Allen. They were yoke mates and brothers and more like members of the family than beasts of burden. They were just four years older than I, and of all the animals on the farm, they were my favorites. I’d grown up with them. I proudly rode to high school in an ox cart in good weather and boarded the animals during the day at the livery stable. Oh, how I loved those steers! In the winter I tapped balls of ice and frozen snow out of their cleft feet with a wooden mallet. I curried them every day. And that morning I gave them each a maple-sugar cube. For there was much to rejoice over. Three days before, I had been given notice that I was to receive the full scholarship awarded by the state university in those days to the first scholar of the graduating class of each high school in Vermont. It had been a hard time for us because my mother had died quite recently and my father was now ill himself, but I would be going to college and I was delighted.

  “I gave Seth and Freethinker each a hug and set the milk cans in the cooling tank in the milk house, then returned to the kitchen and busied myself making breakfast. I put a freshly sliced loaf of salt-rising bread, warm from the Glenwood, on a plate and set it and two lovely soft-boiled eggs in my father’s favorite periwinkle blue egg cup at the head of the applewood table, in front of him.

  “‘I’m not hungry this morning, my girl,’ he said.

  “‘It’s salt-rising bread, Father. Your favorite.’

  “‘Perhaps later. Is the wind still out of the south?’

  “I nodded.

  “‘Mud time,’ my father said. ‘So many people die in mud time, Jane. It’s the natural course of things. Mud time, death, then spring.’

  “‘Tell me a story,’ I said, quickly. ‘Tell me the story of Grandpa Seth pulling in the yoke with the ox.’

  “‘I’ve told you that story a hundred times. But not this morning. This morning, Jane, I must have your promise. You must promise me, as I promised my father.’

  “‘They will never leave this farm, Father,’ I said. ‘I give you my word.’

  “‘Can you give me your word that you won’t leave yourself?’ Father said. ‘And that Seth and Freethinker and the dairy cows won’t be auctioned off to someone who might abuse them? The animals are mine to do with as I please. On this matter, daughter, you’ll do as I say. We’ll start with the oxen. Fetch them around.’

  “You see, Henry, my father had gotten it into his head that after he was gone, with me away at school, Seth and Freethinker might be sold to someone who would mistreat them. His father made him promise never to let an animal leave the home place. His father promised the same thing to his father. Father wanted me to shoot the oxen before I left for school.”

  “Shoot them? Why, that’s crazy, Miss Jane!”

  “Aye. So I said again, ‘I swear to you, Father, that the oxen won’t ever leave this farm. I’ll care for them myself.’

  “‘And how will you do that, my girl? Aren’t you off to college? Lead the oxen into the dooryard, if you please.’

  “‘What could I do, Henry? The brass balls on the tips of Seth’s and Freethinker’s horns glowed in the spring sunrise as I brought them out into the muddy barnyard. Their coats gleamed a deep, rich red. Then I had an idea. I would lead the oxen behind the barn, out of sight of the house, take Lady Justice, and shoot twice in the air. I’d tell father that they were dead. Then, when night came, I’d drive them into the village and sell them to Stevens, the auctioneer. He’d see to it that they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

  “Just then the kitchen door opened. My father stepped onto the porch, pale and gaunt. He was wearing his black judge’s robe and carrying Lady Justice.

  “‘Damn it, father,’ I shouted. That was the first and last time I ever swore in my father’s presence. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll take care of them. Behind the barn. Give me the gun.’

  “‘No,’ he said. ‘Do it here, my girl, in the barnyard. Where I can see that it’s handled properly. Otherwise, I shall tend to it myself.’

  “‘You don’t have the right to make me do this,’ I shouted.

  “‘I promised my father,’ he said. ‘He his.’

  “Henry, I would have given anything, including the mountain, had my father come to his senses and told me to put the oxen back in their stalls where they belonged. He handed me the rifle he had carried all the way from northern Vermont to Tennessee and said, in his stern, calm voice, ‘They will never leave this mountain to be abused by another owner, Jane. Do it now. Do it now or I shall do it myself in accordance with the promise I made my father.’

  “‘I promise you that I won’t let them leave,’ I cried. ‘I give you my word, Father.’

  “‘Can you give me your word that you won’t leave the mountain yourself? You, who are college-bound?’

  “Oh, Henry! Just eighteen. Just accepted at the university with a guarantee of t
hat scholarship. I looked at my father, standing in his judge’s gown on the porch, and then at Seth and Freethinker, waiting placid and trusting in the barnyard. And I cried out, ‘I won’t go to college. I swear to you that I will never leave the mountain.’

  “‘Will you swear with your hand on the Bible?’

  “‘Yes,’ I cried. ‘Anything. If you wish to imprison me here, fine.’

  “‘I don’t wish to imprison you, my girl,’ he said as I followed him into the kitchen. ‘I want you to have heirs to inherit the mountain from you. Just as you’ll inherit it from me.’

  “So I swore, and for better or for worse, I stayed on Kingdom Mountain, attending the county normal school, where I trained to become a teacher. That very night, the night ofmy eighteenth birthday, I started my great life’s task, to revise that pernicious book upon which I had been compelled to vow away my future. The oxen lived out their natural days, and so too did my father, and so will I. But I will tell you this much, Henry. If I decide, for whatever reason, that I wish to leave the mountain, I intend to do so.”

  Henry, thinking of the black-robed old chief justice, Jane’s father, standing on the porch with Lady Justice, was less sure of this than she. But he nodded and said quietly, “Thank you, Miss Jane, for telling me the story. You may rest assured that it will go no further.”

  Later still, just before they crossed the hemlock-plank bridge over the river, Henry heard Miss Jane murmur, “Well, Father? What shall we do with our old mountain, eh? What do you think?”

  She paused, then said, “Yes. I think so, too.”

  “You think what?” Henry said. He had been doing some careful thinking himself and, despite the old grandfather’s mean laughter and the implication that Elisabeth had discovered and spent the gold, he was inclined to believe that Cantrell Satterfield had never taken it to Montreal at all. The grandfather was merely having sport with him, as usual. The gold had to be somewhere on Miss Jane’s mountain. It simply had to be. The question was where.

  “I think we’re home,” Miss Jane said. “As my father always said, the best part of leaving Kingdom Mountain is coming back to it again.”

  A few minutes later, comforted by the familiar scents of wood shavings and paint and varnish, Miss Jane got the Kingdom Mountain Bible out of the Currier and Ives safe in On Kingdom Mountain and opened it to the book of Proverbs. At the end of the sentence “All the best stories are about love,” she added an exclamation point.

  “Isn’t it strange, Henry?” she said, closing the great book. “How, looking for one thing, we so often discover another?”

  “It is, Miss Jane. What discovery were you thinking of?”

  “We went to Montreal hoping to find out what happened to Pilgrim. Instead, I found a dear sister.”

  “And I came to Kingdom Mountain hoping to solve a riddle and found, instead, a dear friend. It goes to show, I reckon. In both cases.”

  “Goes to show what?”

  “That, as you wrote in your great Bible, all the best stories are about love. Shall we put your proverb to the test?”

  “Let us do so,” Miss Jane said. “Let us do so indeed.”

  38

  EARLY ON IN HIS sojourn in Vermont, Henry Satterfield realized that Miss Jane loved not only most birds but nearly all of the wild animals on her mountain. More than once she had told Henry that it was great good luck to have almost any woodland or meadow creature show up at the home place, with the exception of usurping cowbirds, whining mourning doves, and shambling moose, which, she was certain, competed with her beloved white-tailed deer for feed. Soon after their return from Montreal a colony of striped garter snakes, some as big around as Miss Jane’s hoe handle and fully as long, quartered themselves in the back stone foundation of the house. Henry, having grown up in a region where poisonous serpents abounded, was deathly afraid of all snakes and hinted that these lithe intruders might have spared him their visit. But the Duchess was delighted by her good fortune. She would no more kill a snake than a songbird.

  Miss Jane deemed red squirrels in the house partitions auspicious. Every evening Henry could hear them rolling last year’s butternuts around in the walls as if they were playing at tenpins. The brown summer weasel in the woodpile augured equally well. Weasels, Miss Jane assured Henry, were the best mousers in all the world. A family of swifts took up housekeeping in the disused chimney of Henry’s former bedchamber upstairs. More good fortune. Under the eaves of the kitchen dwelt several extended families of bats, and in June a saucy raven with a glittering yellow eye had soared down from the mountaintop cliffs and plucked up half of Jane’s sweet corn as soon as it sprouted. Instead of chasing him off, she taught the raven to warn her when Eben Kinneson Esquire came driving up the lane. “Here’s the shyster, here’s the shyster.”

  But nothing, so far as Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson was concerned, betokened so much felicity as a swarm of honeybees.

  Like many Appalachian mountain folk, from Georgia north to Quebec, Miss Jane maintained an apiary. Her Kingdom Mountain honey came in several flavors. From the hives near her buckwheat patch she obtained a rich honey that was sweeter than most. Her clover fields yielded a light and delicate honey as pale as fancy-grade maple syrup. But Jane’s favorite was the dark, syrupy, delicious wild honey that she procured on her occasional beelining expeditions. Every few summers she went “a-lining bees,” an adventure that Henry Satterfield might well have enjoyed for the opportunity it afforded to explore new territory on the mountain where he might stumble across the treasure. However, as a small boy, he had been severely set upon by yellow jackets and ever since he had been terrified of every member of the stinging tribe.

  “Why, friend Satterfield, the wicked bees that assailed you as a child were no Kingdom Mountain honeybees,” Miss Jane declared. “Kingdom bees are noble creatures. Their ancestors were brought here by Seth’s wife, Huswife Kinneson, in a thatch-roofed hive. For all we know, they might be the descendants of those regal bees Samson discovered nesting in the dead lion. No Kinneson, I assure you, was ever afraid of a little bee. Nor was young Samson. Nor need you be.”

  Henry refrained from reminding Miss Jane that young Samson had also blithely squared off against an entire regiment of Philistines with no other weapon than the jawbone of a donkey. He had once watched his grandfather sell a family Bible to a burly moonshiner in Tupelo, Mississippi, whose genealogy, for an extra three dollars, the captain obligingly traced back to Samson. He didn’t tell Miss Jane this, either. When the Duchess of Kingdom Mountain said it was time to go beelining, a-beelining they would go.

  “A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay,” Jane announced as they headed out on their latest mission one very fine morning. Why she repeated this old saw Henry had no idea. It wasn’t May, it was early September. And they wouldn’t be looking for a swarm but for one individual bee to line back to its tree, which Miss Jane would then, in entirely good conscience, cut down and plunder of its contents.

  Nor did Henry understand why they had to traipse all the way around to the far side of the mountain to locate a bee tree. There were bees by the hundreds in the multicolored hollyhocks right beside the high drive of the five-story barn, and the golden glow growing eight feet tall around Jane’s immaculate outhouse was abuzz with them. But she was not interested in harvesting honey from dooryard bees, which probably lived in her hives behind the barn. Nothing would do but she must venture off to the back side of the mountain and find the dark, precious honey manufactured by wildwood bees. She and Henry would make an overnight trip of the outing and stay at her hunting and fishing camp, Camp Hard Luck, in order to combine their honey foraging with some wilderness fly-fishing. It would all, Miss Jane assured him, be most romantic.

  In the sweetgrass basket she brought a pint Mason jar containing a solution of maple syrup, crushed tansy buds, and dooryard honey; a chipped blue tea saucer wrapped in a clean white dishtowel; and a small tin smoker, resembling a miniature bellows, in which a handful of burning
leaves and a few strips of cloth soaked in kerosene would produce a stream of thick smoke to pacify the bees. On a flat-bottomed hand sled pulled by a long handle, they brought Miss Jane’s two-headed felling ax; Freethinker Kinneson’s crosscut saw; an empty beehive with a thatched roof, similar to the hive in which the estimable Huswife Kinneson had conveyed the first honeybees to Kingdom Mountain; two fly rods; Lady Justice; and the brass-bound spyglass that had come down in the family from Seth Kinneson’s seafaring Massachusetts father. As fearless as Samson himself, Miss Jane brought no net, bee veil, or gauntlets to ward off stings.

  They followed the eastern extension of the Canada Pike past several abandoned farms grown up to barberry, thorn apple, and poplar, out to the blueberry barrens on the remote lower east slopes of the mountain. They continued along the edge of the barrens toward the Chain of Ponds, where the East Branch of the Kingdom River rose. Once again, Henry was impressed by the sheer immensity of Kingdom Mountain and the astonishing variety of its terrain: bogs, a subarctic climate at the summit, vast forests, disused farmland, several brooks, even a cold, rushing river and a unique species of char.

  Miss Jane led the way to a leanto hidden in the evergreens near the outlet of Pond Number One. Inside, under a sheet of green canvas, was a boat about sixteen feet long and curved up at both ends like a canoe but fitted for oars. The sides were constructed of thin cedar planks beveled along the edges to fit together so that nowhere were they more than half an inch thick. This elegant craft was Miss Jane’s Kingdom Mountain guide boat, patterned on the fabled Adirondack guide boats of the past century. In her day, she told Henry, she had probably brought more fish over its upswept sides than any other Vermont angler had caught in a lifetime. This was not a boast. It was simply what Miss Jane believed to be a statement of fact. She had built the boat with an ax and a North Woods crooked knife, and, like her birds and dear people, it had been a labor of love.