On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  And what of the daredevil Henry Satterfield of Beaumont, Texas, who stole Miss Jane’s heart and stole away into the clouds with the Kingdom Mountain Treasure? While the Duchess never said one hard word about him, in the Common talk became gossip, gossip rumor, rumor myth. In time that myth would become legend. The low high sheriff, Little Fred Morse, read in the October issue of True Detective that Courteous Clyde had been sighted in Tonawanda, in western New York State, buzzing in low over the New York Central rail yards. Other reports had Clyde making an emergency landing on a commercial cauliflower farm near Bakersfield, California, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, preparing to cross the Atlantic alone in a new red Gee Bee Racer.

  One report was unsettling, at least to Miss Jane, because it had a certain bizarre credibility. On the early evening of the last day of the Harvest Festival, an hour or so after Henry tarred and feathered the dignitaries of the Common, a low-flying yellow biplane was spotted by Ben Currier’s two teenage boys, inveterate poachers at sixteen and fifteen, gill-netting the fall run of brown trout coming up into the East Branch of the Kingdom River past the old town farm. Without mentioning what they were doing at the time, the brothers claimed that the plane was coming from the old Canada Pike and Miss Jane’s mountain, heading southwesterly out over the lake and flying quite low, with the wings wobbling, as if very heavily loaded. They said the pilot did not appear to notice them and, though he was alone in the plane, his mouth was going “like a whip-poorwill’s ass in black-fly time,” and they saw him shake his fist as if in the middle of a heated argument. It was a misty evening, and the boys lost sight of the biplane about halfway across the lake. A minute later they spotted it again, this time headed back in their direction, as though for some reason the pilot had decided to return to wherever he’d taken off from. Almost immediately, the dense fog on the lake closed in and the boys lost the plane once more, though they could hear it, still coming their way, the engine sounding as though it was laboring. Then it passed out of earshot, lost in the enveloping fog. Had Henry Satterfield, if it was Henry, changed his mind and decided to return for Miss Jane? Or was the gold too heavy a cargo for the old Burgess-Wright? A search turned up nothing. If the plane had gone down in the three hundred feet of water off the foot of the mountain, no one would ever know. Though the Currier boys swore to the truth of their tale forever afterward, they were both notorious storytellers as well as accomplished poachers, and in time no one, including probably the brothers themselves, knew what they had claimed to see.

  No place on earth is as fickle as a small town, and soon enough cruel tongues in the Common proclaimed that the Duchess was certain that the rainmaker would return later in the fall to marry her. It was confidently retailed throughout the village that one stormy October midnight, Miss Jane held a black wedding at the old church in Kinnesonville, walking into the roofless chapel all overgrown with woodbine and wild cucumber vines and inhabited by mice, bats, and snakes, and marching down the aisle carrying a life-size wooden sculpture of Henry Satterfield, dressed all in white, as she was. At the altar in the pitch-black darkness inside the ruined house of worship, she said all of the sacramental words, answering for both herself and her betrothed. Then she carried the sculpture home over her shoulder and from that night forward slept with it in her own bed as she would with her beloved.

  The facts, of course, were entirely different. There was no wedding, black or otherwise. And though she was indeed carving a new figure, it was not Henry Satterfield. As she announced to her emerging sculpture, and to her dear people in On Kingdom Mountain, King James’s psalmist had been right about one thing, at least. There was a season for all things, and, while it had lasted a full spring and summer, her season of foolishness was thankfully over.

  44

  MISS JANE WOKE to the bellowing of General Ira Allen, alone in the barn, and the harsh calling of crows from above her sugar orchard. It was mid-November on Kingdom Mountain. The leaves had been down for a month, and though there had been no significant snowfall yet, just very cold weather, the air this morning had the smell of an oncoming storm.

  It had been a fall of dramatic changes in the Kingdom. First, the ruling had come down from the Supreme Court and, just as Eben Kinneson Esquire had predicted to the town fathers, it was not good news for Miss Jane. Unable to find any reference to the Kinnesons or the Memphremagog Abenakis in the ratified Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the justices had ruled unanimously in favor of the township. They found that Kingdom Mountain lay partly in the town of Kingdom Common and that the old Canada Pike Road over the mountain had never been officially abandoned. Therefore the Connector could legally follow the pike road up to the Canadian border running through Miss Jane’s home place. What happened from that point on was up to the province of Quebec, but Eben and the town fathers had effectively won their case. Characteristically, Miss Jane was particularly offended by the legalistic language of the finding, which, to her outrage, stated that “the demurrer of the Town of Kingdom Common is sustained as to all particulars and the injunction against said township and the Connector is dissolved.”

  That fall the first electric wires were strung out the county road along the right of way of the Connector, though Miss Jane did not choose to become wired up. Then Eben Kinneson Esquire sold his paper mill in the Landing to the Brown Company, which was planning a huge expansion in Vermont. More small farms had gone under, and the human landscape of the county had begun to change as well, with the deaths of some of Jane’s closest friends in the village. In early October Sadie Blackberry and Clarence Davis died within a week of each other, played out like the little hill farms and four-corner sawmills and riverside mill towns of Kingdom County. Later that month A Number One slipped up to the Ford agency in Memphremagog, siphoned the radiator fluid from several cars on the lot into an empty fifth of Wild Turkey, drank it off, and died on the spot. A week later Canvasback Glodgett fell into the bay and drowned. Without the fishmonger’s cry ringing through the streets, the village seemed as empty as a desert. “Fish for sale. Fresh fresh fresh. Pickerel and pout, pickerel and pout, pickerel and pout but nary a trout.” The dog-cart man moved on, perhaps heading south for the winter. Whether he would return was as unknowable as the fate of the departed rainmaker.

  Then Jane’s twenty-five-year-old ox Ethan Allen died. She found him in his stall, where he had expired in his sleep. General Ira was inconsolable, moaning steadily, throwing his head around looking for his brother and lifelong yoke mate, refusing to eat, and, generally, breaking Miss Jane’s heart all over again.

  “Did you hear the crows?” she asked her new figure when she came into the kitchen. “They’ve found that poor steer’s carcass up on the mountain, no doubt.”

  He stood at the foot of the applewood table, one foot on each side of the yellow line representing the border that no Kingdom Mountain Kinneson had ever acknowledged, looking at her expectantly. Miss Jane knew what he wanted her to do. She knew she should put him away in On Kingdom Mountain with her other dear people.

  Outside it was just getting light. Over the crows she could hear General Ira, alone and bereft in his stall, bellowing. She took a drink of Who Shot Sam.

  She put on her red and green lumber jacket and felt boots and wool cap and mittens. She slipped a lump of maple sugar into her jacket pocket, then headed out to the barn, hoping to entice General Ira into eating something. The dawn sky was pink behind the mountaintop, where Jane was still surprised to look up and not see the fire tower. The crows were cawing. She could make out ten or a dozen of them circling over the softwoods above the sugar orchard, where, two days before, she and General Ira had taken Ethan.

  Ira refused to eat the maple sugar. Back in the kitchen Jane took another long drink of Sam. She sat at the applewood table, her head in her hands.

  “Why not return to teaching now, my girl?” the figure said kindly. “Where you belong. You never should have left the Kinnesonville schoolhouse.”

  Miss Jane could not bear to tell h
im there were no longer any children on the mountain to teach, that the schoolhouse was an empty shell.

  “Did you hear the crows?” she asked him again.

  “No,” he said. “I heard the grieving ox. Seth Kinneson, your great-great-grandfather, came to Kingdom Mountain in early April of 1775. He had a yoke of Red Durham oxen and a pung on runners. His wife and boy of five, Freethinker, rode in the pung. At the foot of the mountain the off ox cut its hoof badly on the river ice. To spare the poor animal, Grandpa Seth stepped into the yoke himself to pull with the near ox. He couldn’t bear, you see, to see the off ox suffer. Now, Jane. You promised me never to let an animal suffer on this mountain. I promised the same to Quaker Meeting. He to Freethinker. He to Seth.”

  “Maybe Ira will recover.”

  “And maybe that rounder from Texas will return with your gold and maybe my brother is still alive in the Southland. No, my girl. You’ll do as I say. I want it done by the end of the day. The animal must not suffer.”

  At least, Jane thought, she could drive the crows away from Ethan’s carcass. If necessary, she would shoot one of the birds and hang it up in a tree as a warning to the others. Once again she stepped outside into the bitter cold. This time she headed up the mountain.

  Above the sugar orchard she came out of a thick stand of softwoods into a clearing. Atop the limbless spar of an old pine tree struck by lightning, looking down at the hulking carcass of the dead ox, sat the largest owl she had ever seen. It was gray, and its immense yellow eyes had eerie white spectacles around them. Twenty or more screaming crows were diving and swooping at it. A murder of crows, Jane thought. A murder of crows, mobbing the first great gray owl she had ever seen on Kingdom Mountain. Without hesitation she fired both barrels of Morgan’s gun into the air, scattering the crows to the four winds. Unperturbed, the owl continued to watch her, and at that moment Miss Jane knew, as surely as she had ever known anything in her life, exactly what she must do next. It was not an experience of second sight so much as an experience of her imagination. Maybe that’s what her second sight had always been.

  Just before she headed back down the mountain, the owl lifted off its perch. Spreading its vast wings, banking and rising like Henry’s biplane, it soared off over the mountaintop toward its home in the far north. That was where it belonged, Miss Jane thought, as certainly as she belonged on Kingdom Mountain. Now it was time to go to work.

  45

  THREE PEOPLE STOOD beside Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson’s applewood kitchen table. Around their feet were chips and shavings from her latest carving project, a very large bird, already recognizable as an owl.

  Miss Jane looked a little pale, a little thinner, and a little older, especially around the eyes, but otherwise the same. “Gentlemen,” she said, “let us repair to On Kingdom Mountain.”

  The safe with the beautiful Currier and Ives lithograph of Lake Memphremagog on its door was unlocked, the massive iron door partway open. On the top shelf was a folder with a white slip of paper pasted on the upper left corner. Written on it were the words LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JANE HUBBELL KINNESON.

  “Ordinarily,” Miss Jane said, now addressing her dear people as well as her two guests, “the reading of a will is preceded by the death of the person who wrote it. That, of course, is in the normal course of events. But when, on Kingdom Mountain, have events ever followed a normal course? I’ve decided to read you my last will and testament myself, lest it be supposed I did not have the courage to disclose its contents in person.”

  Judge Allen interrupted the Duchess. “Jane, this is nonsense. You’ll live another thirty years.”

  But Eben Kinneson Esquire wondered, What new, entirely unwelcome surprises could his cousin’s will contain?

  “First,” Jane said, “I’d like you to meet someone who will be joining us for the reading.” She gestured at a tall, elderly figure dressed in a black robe, with snow white hair, a white mustache, and Jane’s gray eyes. “Gentlemen, my father, Morgan Kinneson.”

  Although the likeness was rather impressionistic, with its oblong head and painted features, Eben drew in his breath sharply, as if the old patriarch, who as a boy had walked to Tennessee in search of his brother, had actually come back to life before their eyes.

  “Now,” she continued, her voice slightly harsh, quite cheerful, entirely in command of what she wished to say, “hearken to my last will and testament. ‘I, Jane Hubbell Kinneson, being of extremely sound mind, will to my cousin, Eben Kinneson Esquire of Kingdom Landing, the house I currently dwell in, known as the Kinneson home place, my five-story barn, and the ten acres on which these buildings stand, to hold in trust for the Memphremagog Abenaki nation in perpetuity. I will all of the contents of that house and barn and all of my other moveable possessions, including my blockheads, birds, books, and dear people, to my sister, Elisabeth Choteau Dufours, of Montreal, Canada, to hold in trust on Kingdom Mountain for the Memphremagog Abenaki nation in perpetuity. Signed, Jane Hubbell Kinneson, Kingdom Mountain. Thanksgiving Day, 1930.’”

  The room was silent. Outside, a few small flakes of bright, crystalline snow fell. They could hear the wood fire in the Glenwood ticking. Miss Jane looked quite satisfied with herself, quite at peace.

  “Your sister?” Eben said. “What sister? You have carved yourself an imaginary sister? Like your imaginary father here? And what about the mountain? What becomes of it?”

  Jane looked out the parlor window. “I imagine he’ll be just where he has been for another few billion years.”

  In the Thanksgiving snow flurry, the summit of the mountain was indistinct. Through the small flakes, Miss Jane could see that the hardwoods on its lower slopes were already reddening slightly with next spring’s buds. Soon the mountain would be white. Then gold with tiny new leaves, then, for a few short months, deep green.

  “But what do you intend to do with it, Miss Jane?” Judge Allen said. “All that land?”

  “I gave it away, Ira. Lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Gave it away? To whom?”

  “An outfit called the Appalachian Land Trust, out of Asheville, North Carolina. My sister, Elisabeth Dufours, has conducted satisfactory dealings with them in the past. They have pledged to take the battle over the high road to the United States Supreme Court. And they will win that battle and keep the mountain just as it is forever.”

  “Cousin,” Eben said, “how can you possibly give away what isn’t yours to give? According to your father’s will, the mountain lies in trust for your heirs in perpetuity.”

  “Not so,” Jane said. “It lay in trust only for my direct heirs. Who, fortunately for them, no doubt, never existed.”

  “I maintain that the mountain was not yours to sell or to give away,” Eben said.

  “That was indeed my father’s design, Eben. That, sir”—now addressing her new sculpture of Morgan, standing by the doorway—“was your plan. To assure yourself that I would hold on to the mountain at all costs and pass it along to my children intact, you left it to my heirs, in trust with me, and to their heirs, in trust with them. But you did not take into consideration the possibility that I might not have progeny. I had so many suitors”—cutting her eyes ever so briefly at Judge Allen—“that it probably never crossed your mind that I might not marry, thus invalidating the stipulation of the will.

  “You will remember,” she continued, still speaking to her carved father, “that I was too independent-minded and too proud and half again too picky to entertain those suitors. And there was one more consideration. I genuinely did not wish to defy your wishes, you whom I loved and respected above anyone else in the world. But nor did I wish to make, with any unborn children and grandchildren of my own, any such binding compact as you had decreed. A wild mountain off in the middle of nowhere, belonging to neither the United States nor Canada, from which they could, at best, scratch a wretched living, seemed far more burden than legacy. I have no direct heirs, so the will wasn’t binding. Blame me if you will, dear father. Wh
at’s done is done.”

  Morgan gazed out over the crowded room as if marveling at how strangely his plans had turned out.

  Miss Jane looked fondly at her wooden father, then at his much younger image. “All the way to Tennessee,” she said. “All the way to Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains you walked. And then you came back, and here you stayed and here you wished me to stay, on our beloved mountain.”

  “Judge Allen,” Eben said, “I implore you to order competency testing for my cousin. I’m sure you’ll find—”

  The judge sighed and held up his hand.

  “Jane,” he said, “do you know what day it is? The day of the week and date of the month?”

  “Aye. It’s Thanksgiving Day.”

  “How about the date of your birthday?”

  Jane gave the judge an arch look.

  “I have to ask you these questions to satisfy Eben that you haven’t gone round the bend,” the judge explained. “When were you born?”

  “Long enough ago that you should know better than to ask me such a question, Ira. I was born the same year you were born.”

  The judge laughed. “What’s your phone number, Jane?”

  “Why, Ira Allen, are you asking me for a date? My goodness. I’ve never had a phone in my life and never intend to have one.”