A Stranger in the Kingdom (10 page)

It was yet another good morning, warmer and hazier than the previous two, and Mom and I spent the first couple of hours gathering sap from the two dozen big maples on the ridge above the farmhouse. As we moved from tree to tree, I wore a wooden yoke that fit snugly down over my shoulders, from whose ends depended two five-gallon pails. My mother poured the sap from the wooden buckets into these pails, and when they were three-quarters full I lugged them down to the house. There we strained the sap through cheesecloth into my grandmother Kinneson's old cream pan, which we used as a boiling-off pan on top of the Home Comfort stove in the kitchen.

One by one, as the kitchen grew hotter and hotter, my mother opened seven of the nine doors to draw off the heat—all except the false door and the door to the “other side of the house,” since she didn't want the moisture from the cooking sap to steam off the wallpaper in the dining room and front parlor. I made myself useful by feeding the firebox of the stove with chunks from the woodshed, adding sap to the cream pan, and dashing a sprinkle of Ruthie the Cow's (named by my brother in honor of my mother) cream onto it whenever it simmered too hard and threatened to come to a rolling boil; running a clean rag mop over the ceiling to sponge off the condensing drops of sap; and chattering like a jay to Mom about this and that the entire time.

About ten o'clock there was a loud knock at the door. The first batch of sap had just completed its magical sudden transformation into syrup, and my mother had moved the cream pan to the side of the stove and was ladling the syrup off into one-quart Ball canning jars. I was sitting on the woodbox reading
Oliver Twist
out loud to Mom, who was inordinately proud of my reading and also of the little stories (mostly hunting and fishing tales about dauntless boys who shot huge bucks and caught enormous wary trout, often nobly releasing them after hour-long battles) I'd begun writing recently but showed only to her.

“It's Mr. Resolvèd Kinneson, Jimmy,” Mom said. “I think he wants to redeem his bottles. Get my purse and pay him, will you, please?”

I went to the door, and sure enough, there was Cousin R with a bransack of bottles he'd picked up along the roadsides over the past week as the receding snow had exposed them. Although Resolvèd was wonderfully shiftless and improvident, neither he nor his brother Welcome was at all lazy or had ever been “on the town,” as the phrase went—meaning neither had ever taken a penny of assistance from that much-maligned precursor of the county welfare commissioner, the overseer of the poor.

As usual Resolvèd looked every bit as rough as a tramp just in off the B and M tracks, though for a wonder he wasn't drunk yet. In fact, he seemed as invigorated from his springtime pursuit as we were from ours.

“Mom said for me to pay you, Resolvèd. She's inside sugaring-off.”

“Sugaring-off!” Resolvèd could hardly have sounded more outraged if I'd told him my mother and I were counterfeiting twenty-dollar bills. “It's way too late on into the spring of the year to sugar-off, bub. All's you'll get is Christly blackstrap.”

“Blackstrap” was the discolored, buddy-tasting, very late syrup some farmers sealed up in molasses barrels and shipped south to the R. J. Reynolds Company in North Carolina for flavoring chewing tobacco.

“How many you got today, Resolvèd?”

“What? Bottles? Well, now. Let's see here. Let's just have us a little look-see, by God, and tally up.”

Resolvèd spilled maybe thirty bottles out of the bransack onto the porch floor. Some were Coke bottles, or Pepsi, worth a cent apiece at the Red and White Store in the Common. A good half of his haul, however, consisted of nonretumable Old Duke empties, which my mother always scrupulously paid him for anyway, though of course the Red and White wouldn't redeem them. I counted the correct change into his hand from Mom's purse. “Yes, sir,” he said, and started down off the porch, making no attempt to bag the bottles back up.

Just then Mom appeared in the doorway with a jar of warm syrup. “Mr. Kinneson!” she called. (She was the only person in the Kingdom who ever called Resolvèd “Mr. Kinneson”.)

“Yes, sir,” he said again without turning around.

“I wonder if you'd do me the favor of taking this syrup home and sampling it for me? It'll be about the last of the year, I'm afraid.”

Resolvèd came back and took the syrup. He held the jar up to the hazy spring sunshine and frowned suspiciously, as though checking for deadly bacteria.

“I don't know as I want a lot of blackstrap around cluttering up my place,” he said with his customary graciousness, tucking the jar into his hunting jacket pocket and starting off.

“Resolvèd!” I called after him. “Wait up a minute. You heard anything yet from that letter you wrote?”

“Which letter would that be?” he said, as though he composed several long ones every day.

“That letter you and Charlie wrote, sending away for a mail-order housekeeper.”

He was bent over fumbling with something. I hoped it wasn't his fly, with Mom standing right there on the porch!

“That's for me to know and you to find out,” he snarled.

I heard the pop of a vacuum-sealed lid coming free. Turning his profile toward us, Resolvèd lifted the quart jar of syrup, tilted back his head, and drained off its entire contents in about six swallows, like a man slugging down his first bottle of cold beer after a long hot day in the hayfield. He wiped off his mouth with the ragged sleeve of his hunting jacket.

“Stomach liner,” he said, and tossed the empty Ball jar up to me on the porch. “Add this to your pile, bub. I won't charge you nothing for it.”

And he was swinging off in his long-legged woodsman's stride toward the village, no doubt to replenish his supply of Old Duke wine now that his stomach was lined with a quart of maple syrup.

“Boy, Mom!” I said. “You ever see anything like the way old Cousin R just chugged that syrup down? I can't wait to tell Charlie. ‘Stomach liner'!”

She had a dreamy look on her face and didn't seem to hear me. “Someday, Jimmy, you'll write wonderful stories about Mr. Resolvèd Kinneson, and Mr. Welcome too. You know, it isn't too soon to begin keeping a journal and recording what they say and do in it.”

At the time, I couldn't imagine who except Charlie and maybe Mom herself would want to read about an old drunk and outlaw like Resolvèd. In those days when my mother spoke of my writing “wonderful stories” someday, I automatically assumed she meant newspaper articles for the
Monitor
, like my father's articles and open letters. In fact, though it seemed well-understood that I would follow in my father's footsteps and become a newspaperman when I grew up, Mom had far different ideas when she talked to me about the “wonderful stories” I would write, for in her way, she was as ambitious for me (and Charlie, too) as Dad ever dreamed of being.

We sugared-off the last batch of sap around noon, ate a quick lunch of beans laced with brand-new maple syrup, then gathered up the taps and sap buckets, rinsed them out in the milkhouse, and stored them upside down in the old harness room of the barn. Sugaring was over for another year.

It was still early in the afternoon, and Nat wouldn't show up to go fishing until five or six o'clock. For a while I batted my old taped baseball off the side of the barn, trying to hit line drives at a knothole just below the faded painting of the brook trout. Then I just hung around the dooryard, until Mom appeared on the porch wearing her pink sun hat, in which (as she well knew) she looked no more than about twenty-five years old, and carrying my great-great-great-grandfather's pirate spyglass tucked under her arm.

She stood on the top step, peering off toward the west with the spyglass, looking for all the world like a girl I remembered from a traveling road company's production of
The Pirates of Penzance
she'd taken me to see in the Common the summer before. “It's the right type of day, just hazy enough,” she said mysteriously.

“Just hazy enough for what, Mom?”

“For Montreal to be out. Shall we walk up in the gore and see?”

“Sure,” I said. I was willing to do almost anything to break up the monotony of the long afternoon ahead, though I didn't have much faith that Montreal would be “out” then or any other day, haze or no haze.

Mom had frequently told me how one mild fall day soon after she had come to Kingdom County to live, my father had taken her up the logging trace to the top of the gore, near where “Russia” was now located, and shown her a wonderful and rare sight, a phenomenon unlike any she had ever seen before. Far to the northwest, hanging suspended in the sky high over the intervening peaks of the Green Mountains, was a splendid mirage of the city of Montreal, nearly a hundred miles away but so sharp and clear she had actually seen a train going over the railroad bridge across the St. Lawrence River. I wasn't skeptical about her seeing the mirage—Dad had seen it several times—only that it would ever recur when I was on hand. But there was always a chance it might be out, and I loved to go to the woods with Mom at any time of the year because she shared my great interest in everything to be found there.

Although Montreal wasn't out, most of the spring flowers to be found in Kingdom County were, and Mom and I had a great afternoon together. Besides painted and red trillium, wild ginger, hepaticas, trout lilies, white and Canada violets, and golden thread, we discovered a good-sized bed of rare yellow lady slippers, sneaked up on a partridge drumming for a mate on a log (something I have seen only twice in my life since), admired a stand of big beech trees scored all along their trunks for fifty feet up with the claw marks of the black bears that had climbed them in the fall to shake down the beechnuts, then slid back down with their claws dug into the smooth gray bark like firemen sliding down a pole; and returned by the disused granite quarry and the wonderful pictograph painted on the cliff above it by the Dog Cart Man of the gypsy stonecutters who once came to Kingdom County each summer.

We didn't get home until nearly five, just in time to have a quick supper before Nathan Andrews showed up to go fly fishing—an event I looked forward to and at the same time, to a degree, dreaded. What would I tell him if the fish refused to strike? Also I still had no earthly idea what the minister's son was really like. It was going to be an interesting evening!

 

“A dandy hatch was coming on when I crossed the bridge pool,” Dad told Nat and me that evening as I got my fly rod down from the wooden pegs on the porch. “You guys ought to do something in the meadow pool tonight. With any luck at all, you both ought to hit for the cycle.”

“Hit for the cycle” was my father's baseball metaphor for catching one or more of each of the species of river trout in Kingdom County, a brook, brown, and rainbow. But I knew even before we started down through the meadow toward the big pool across the road that Nat wasn't enthusiastic about our venture.

Except to ask if it was snaky in the meadow (it wasn't), he didn't say a word as we traipsed along past blooming golden cowslips—marsh marigolds, my city-born mother called them, to Dad's amusement—past a pair of scolding killdeer, past brilliant red osiers and clumps of willows just putting out fuzzy lime-tinted catkins.

When I pointed out a woodcock circling high overhead, Nat shrugged. “We don't have those at home,” he said.

“What birds have you got?”

“In Montreal, pigeons and gulls, mainly.”

“Sea gulls?”

Nat nodded.

“We get sea gulls. They come down off the big lake, Memphremagog, just before a storm. Hundreds of 'em, sometimes. I've always wondered how they know when bad weather's coming, but they do.”

“Instinct, I suppose. Come on, Kinneson. Let's get this fly-fishing business over with. I've at least two hours of chemistry problems left to do tonight.”

I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask Nat, but his impatient manner and condescending way of calling me by my last name put me off. So we trudged on in silence to the river.

There I simply couldn't contain my excitement. Over the long pool hovered the largest hatch I'd ever seen: thousands upon thousands of the gigantic pale yellow mayflies I called spinners because of the way they twisted down onto the water.

Better yet, the entire surface was boiling with rising trout, feeding voraciously on everything that floated by. Everything, that is, but the flies I had tied to the end of Nathan Andrews' leader. Try as he might, with wet flies and dry flies; with big brightly colored traditional patterns and dun-toned sinking nymphs and garish streamers as long as trout fingerlings—flailing upstream and down, leaving several of my flies in the high limbs of a bankside soft maple tree behind us, several more in the jaws of the hungry trout, and one in the visor of my Red Sox baseball cap, Nathan Andrews did not, under my frustrated tutelage, land a single fish.

The sun sank below the long south shoulder of Jay Peak. The light flattened out, dusk was fast approaching. I was fast approaching tears over my ineptitude as a teacher.

But Nat Andrews didn't seem to care whether he caught a fish or not. He laughed at his own clumsiness and at my feeble pedagogical efforts.

“Shit a goddamn!” a gruff voice behind us said. “What be you boys doing here? A-trying to drive fish down the river?”

I whirled around. Slinking up from the bankside willows with a rusty milkcan in one hand and what looked like a long rolled-up rope hammock in the other, was Cousin Resolvèd Kinneson.

Resolvèd set down the milkcan. He reached out and seized me by the collar of my hunting jacket. “What be you doing here?” he demanded and gave me a good shake, as though to jar loose a reply. “Speak up.”

“I'm trying to teach this boy to fly-fish,” I blurted. “Only he won't learn.”

Resolvèd gave a terrible coughing snort that sounded like a crocodile laughing, and turned to Nat.