A Stranger in the Kingdom (15 page)

Many of those vehicles had out-of-state plates and were occupied by strangers who had come to bet on the day's matches. But every fourth or fifth truck carried fighting roosters in portable pens or slatted crates. There were big flashy Rhode Island Reds, like Resolvèd's Ethan Allen. There were even bigger and gaudier Golden Buff Orpingtons, a variety my mother sometimes raised for eggs. There were White Leghorns with dazzling snowy breasts and wings and ferocious-looking clipped red combs, and numerous other varieties I didn't know the names of, some of which crowed all the way up the lane to my cousins' like bloodthirsty little gladiators.

I had never witnessed a cockfight; like the commission sales barn and the abandoned granite quarry up in the gore, my cousins' place on the ridge was strictly off-limits for me. But I was determined someday to see what went on there on cockfight holidays.

By noon, when my father came home for lunch, parked cars and tracks were strung all the way down the lane to the gool like vehicles at an all-day farm auction. Mom had fixed us sandwiches, which we ate picnic-style on the porch in the warm sunshine, but as the spectators continued to arrive, now parking along the gool itself, Dad grew angrier and angrier—angry with Zack Barrows, mainly, for failing to put a stop to the cockfights, but also with my brother for refusing to run for prosecutor and do it himself.

“I know this is killing you, Ruth,” he was saying, when a large pink car came roaring down the gool from the red iron bridge and slued into the dooryard beside our DeSoto. It was Bumper Stevens in his new Cadillac with the words
KINGDOM COUNTY COMMISSION SALES
emblazoned across the driver's door in powder-blue letters. Frenchy LaMott, Bumper's son, was hunkered inside the open trunk holding his father's mammoth leghorn fighting rooster, the Great White Hope, in a fruit crate.

“Yes, sir, editor,” Bumper called out his window. “I'll pay you two bucks to park my rig here in your dooryard where some Christly foreigner from York State or Canady won't sideswipe her.”

My father stood up. “Get off my property,” he said.

“Make that five,” Bumper said and started to open the car door.

Moving very quickly for a man in his fifties, or anyone else, for that matter, my father was off the porch and across the dooryard before I knew it.

“I'll give you five,” he said, slamming the door shut in Bumper's face. “Five seconds to clear off these premises.”

Bumper cursed fiercely, but in considerably less time than the allotted five seconds, the big pink car was out of our dooryard. As it tore down the road past the collapsing barn, Frenchy hung onto the Great White Hope with one hand and fended the jouncing lid of the car trunk off his head with the other. The bird gave a long derisive-sounding crow.

My father returned to the porch, where he remarked that ten years ago he would have muckled onto Bumper Stevens and thrown him into the biggest snowbank south of Labrador instead of just ordering him off the property.

“I'm glad it's not ten years ago,” my mother ventured with a smile at me, but I wished it was, at thirteen I would have loved to see the old man muckle onto Bumper and clean his clock.

“Walt Andrews is coming out this afternoon,” Dad told us. “He wants to talk over some more local history with me.”

“He seems almost as interested in local history as you are, Charles.”

“He is at that. Now he tells me that he's got some sort of grand idea involving local history for a big church fundraiser. It's still in the planning stages, he says. He wants to sound me out about it before he brings it up in front of the other trustees. I don't have the slightest notion what he's got in mind, except that he confided to me that this shindig, whatever it is, is going to replace the church's annual minstrel show.”

“I've thought for years that the minstrel show was in poor taste,” my mother said. “I doubt that Reverend Andrews is going to have a very easy time replacing it, though. The Ladies' Auxiliary looks forward to that all year long.”

“I don't,” Dad said. “It's worse than in poor taste. If I have to write one more story about Julia Hefner getting up on the Academy stage in blackface and singing ‘Mammie,' I'm going to throw up. Not to mention Bumper Stevens and Mason White making pure fools out of themselves with that idiotic Rastus and Remus routine. Whatever Andrews has up his sleeve has got to be an improvement on that nonsense. What's more, this is the right time for him to make his move. He and his congregation are still in their honeymoon period, and if he wants to make some changes, he'd better strike while the iron's hot. Soon enough the nitpicking's bound to begin. When that happens, look out.”

“Reverend Andrews strikes me as the type of man who doesn't back down easily,” Mom said.

“Good. The trustees wanted a go-getter. Now they've got one. But Andrews is pretty quick on his feet. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see him stay here for two or three years, say until Nathan graduates from the Academy, get this hidebound outfit halfway shaped up, then move on before they really start to make life miserable for him.”

At thirteen, I had less than no interest in church politics. But even I knew that Reverend Andrews was doing a first-rate job of getting the church back on its feet again. His sermons continued to be mercifully concise and to the point and, in my father's assessment, both literate and thoughtful. He got out and visited elderly people and shut-ins, whose stories about old times, like my father's, he seemed to relish. Earlier in the month old Coach Whitcomb, who had taught at the Academy for forty years, had sustained a mild stroke while playing a trophy-sized rainbow trout below the High Falls behind the hotel, and Reverend Andrews had volunteered to coach the school's baseball team, even though Nat wasn't playing on it. And though he needn't have troubled himself on my account, the new minister had already reestablished the defunct Sunday school and choir.

“Walt's going to bring Nathan along this afternoon, James,” my father remarked. “Why don't you take him fishing again?”

I said I'd be glad to take Nat fishing if he wanted to go, but I doubted if he would. I'd asked him a couple of times the week before and he'd seemed lukewarm about the proposal, at best. I liked Nat fine and so did most of the other kids at the Academy, though no one seemed to understand why he didn't want to play baseball, we knew from our pickup games at recess that he had a blazing fastball and a wicked curve. But I didn't feel I could ask because Nathan was a junior, and I was still in eighth grade and reticent around the high school kids, and besides being an inveterate city kid, Nat was evidently somewhat of a loner. I didn't quite know what to make of him, and I strongly suspected that the puzzlement was mutual.

Nat did show up with his father that afternoon. He wanted no part at all of fishing, even though I assured him that this time we'd use garden worms instead of flies and go up the bum, as my father called the small stream that ran out of the gore, where no doubt the brook trout would be biting like crazy this time of year.

For a while we shot baskets out behind the barn, but I was no match for Nat at this and I could tell that his heart wasn't in it, either; so after a few minutes we went inside the hayloft where it was dim and cool and sat down on an old horse-drawn hayrake and Nat talked in a bored way about this and that, but mainly about how little there was to do in the Kingdom.

“So what would you be doing this afternoon if you were back in Montreal, Nat?”

“Don't I wish I were! Let's see, what would I be doing? Well, I imagine I'd ride the bus downtown, say down to St. Catherine Street, and take in a horror movie. Dracula or Frankenstein or something along those lines.”

This intrigued me. Despite my fear of anything having to do with the supernatural, I had a keen interest in horror stories, Poe's especially, and in spooky movies too, though I hadn't seen very many. But before I could pursue the subject, Nat brought up something more interesting still.

“If I couldn't find a good Dracula or Frankenstein, I'd probably settle for a blue movie, eh? St. Catherine Street's lined with them from one end to the other.”

“A blue movie? What's that? Like Technicolor?”

Nat laughed. “You are the naive one, Kinneson, meaning no offense. A blue movie is what you'd call a dirty picture. You know, fellows and their girls having sex together.”

I jumped up. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold on here just a minute. You mean to tell me there are movies, in Montreal, where guys and girls go at it right up there on the screen?”

Nat laughed so hard he nearly fell off the hayrake. “You could jolly well put it that way, Kinneson. But truth to tell, blue movies are fairly boring too after you've seen a dozen or so, and I probably wouldn't waste my time or money on one more anyway. So assuming I couldn't find a horror show, I'd probably just walk the streets joshing with the whores. Or maybe I'd go up to the fine arts museum on Sherbrooke Street and visit the Egyptian wing. They've got real mummies there, artifacts dating back five thousand years and more. Now that's something I'd like to go into—archeology. I'd have given about anything to be along on the Carnarvon expedition. Can you imagine how Howard Carter must have felt when he broke through that last seal and realized he was in Tut's tomb at last? Thrill of a lifetime, eh?”

I remembered reading about the King Tut expedition in the Boston
Globe
, and from what I knew about it, I could imagine wanting to be anyplace on earth other than inside that dreadful tomb. “Didn't all those guys die violent mysterious deaths after they broke in there, Nat?”

Nat laughed. “That's a lot of hooey, Kinneson. Now you're confusing the movie with the reality. No, they didn't die violent deaths.”

He was silent for a moment. A gloomy expression had suddenly come across his face. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “I wish we'd never gotten onto the subject.”

“Of Egypt?”

“Of Montreal.”

“You wish you were still there, don't you, Nat?”

“What I wish doesn't make the slightest difference. I'm not there. I'm stuck in an end-of-the line little burg where the nearest thing to an artifact is this bloody piece of farm junk I'm sitting on.”

I didn't know how to respond. What Nat said about the Kingdom hurt my feelings, yet I couldn't help sympathizing with him. I knew how I'd feel if I woke up in the middle of downtown Montreal without a friend to my name or anywhere to fish or hunt.

But I was curious.

“Nat, how long did you live with your grandparents?”

“Oh, off and on for about ten years. My grandfather died when I was five, not very long after my mother, so Gram and I sort of took care of each other after that. She pretty much let me do as I pleased, the way grandparents do, you know, and I was always good about getting my schoolwork done and helping out around the place. We were . . . well, friends, I suppose, Gram and I. A couple of times Dad tried having me stay with him on an air force base, once in Vancouver and once for a short while in Germany, but I didn't like it and it wasn't a good setup, without any mother and all.”

“What did your grandfather do before he died?”

“He was a professor at McGill.”

“McGill?”

“The University in Montreal. Let's drop it, shall we, Kinneson? If I think about it much more, I'll take the next train back.”

We drifted outside, and Nat took a halfhearted shot at the basket and didn't bother to retrieve the ball as it bounced back down the ramp. “Say, Kinneson,” he said, “what's going on up there on that hill? Where all the cars and trucks are parked?”

“That's my cousin Resolvèd's cockfight,” I said. “He has one every Decoration Day. People come up here from all over to bet on the roosters.”

“You ever go?”

“Well, not exactly.”

Nat laughed, not in a mean way. “What do you mean, not exactly? Have you been to a cockfight?”

“Look,” I said, “you want to see what goes on there?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn't mind.”

“Fine,” I said in my best Huck Finn style. “Follow me, I'll be glad to show you.”

 

Dad often referred to my cousins' place as the Kingdom's own Congress of Wonders, and as Nat and I came into their dooryard, it was obvious why. At first sight, it looked like a parody of a roadside animal farm. Two half-wild raccoons growled at us from the top of a Model A Ford sitting on wood blocks. In a makeshift coop converted from the shell of an ancient bread truck were four or five partridges, which Resolvèd snared live in the woods and kept on hand for his prize fighting rooster, Ethan Allen Kinneson, to practice his martial arts on. A feral-looking hog rutted in the beginning (and end) of the most wretched garden I'd ever seen.

The dooryard contained a number of antiquated farm implements, a quantity of chicken wire, several handleless tools, and a watering trough where half a dozen large rainbow trout hung finning near an inlet pipe that kept a steady flow of icy spring water bubbling in. TROUT 4 SAIL, read a sign propped against the trough.

At one time a barn had been attached to the house, but my cousins had cannibalized it for firewood over the years until all that remained was the squat silo, itself canting off at an angle that made pictures I'd seen of the Leaning Tower of Pisa seem absolutely plumb. In recent years, Welcome had converted this edifice into an impromptu automobile body shop and observatory, from whose top he watched for flying saucers and other extraterrestrial objects with my great-great-great-grandfather's pirate's telescope.

Besides his body shop in the old silo-observatory, Cousin Welcome maintained a junkyard on the edge of the woods running up into the gore, where for ten or fifteen dollars you could purchase a vehicle that he guaranteed would “run good.” (“I never said how far,” he would tell the dispirited and sometimes enraged teenaged boys who made up most of his fifteen-dollar-and-under clientele as they trudged back up the lane from the gool, where their crippled clunkers had stalled out for good. “Buy her back from you for five bucks?”) It was from Welcome's junkyard, too, that many local boys and men purchased their entries for Kingdom County's annual end-of-July Smash-up Crash-up Derby.