A Stranger in the Kingdom (3 page)

I was surprised again when the man ordered a cup of tea for himself in a voice not much different from my father's or mother's. Without ever giving the matter much thought, I'd also assumed that Negroes all talked like Amos 'n' Andy, or Rochester on
The Jack Benny Show
, which we sometimes picked up over the car radio in the gore before a Red Sox game.

“Coca-Cola, chum?” the man said. “Wedge of lemon pie?”

The boy twisted restlessly on his stool, half a turn in each direction. “No,” he said softly.

“No, what?”

The boy sighed. “No, thanks,” he said, and continued to pivot back and forth. After being carsick, it made me dizzy to watch him.

“Just the tea, then, if you please,” the man said to the waitress, and got a Socony road map out of his windbreaker pocket and began to study it.

Abruptly, the boy spun off his stool and slouched over to a squat jukebox by the door. I sipped my ginger ale and looked at the black man in the mirror. He glanced up, caught my eye, and winked. I looked fast at the shatter mark, as though I'd been scrutinizing it the whole time. It occurred to me that my father was probably right about it not being a bullet hole; almost certainly a bullet would have gone completely through the glass. I turned to Dad and started to tell him, then changed my mind. He was staring toward the entrance of the kitchen, his coffee still sitting untouched on the counter in front of him, his long, closely shaved jaw set in a way I understood all too well.

The boy drifted back to the counter. “Nothing but cowboy stuff. Hank Williams, for cripe's sake. I counted eight by Hank Williams.”

The man smiled. “When in Rome, old chap. Why don't you sit down, have a bite and something to drink?”

“I've been sitting all day, and I'm not hungry. Can I go out to the car?”

“May I go out to the car.”

“All right, then, may I?”

“Go ahead. And Nathan, it's only—” It was too late; the boy was already through the door and into the parking lot.

The black man bought a package of Lucky Strikes from the waitress, lit one with a small silver lighter, and continued to study his map as he smoked. Outside, the boy was throwing at the utility pole again. He had an easy, smooth delivery, and I wanted to go out and join him but I wasn't sure what to say when I got there. My father was still staring toward the kitchen.

“You ready?” I said nervously.

“No.”

The waitress brought the black man an ashtray from down the counter. “You folks been on the road long?”

“To my son it seems like a long time. Actually, only since about noon.”

“I know how your boy feels,” the waitress said sympathetically. “I rode clear to Washington once. Washington, D.C.? On a high school trip. We left here before it got light in the morning and didn't pull in there until way long after dark, and I just about thought my fanny was going to fall off from sitting on it the whole time. The apple blossoms, or maybe it was pears, was supposed to be on, only it was a late spring there too and they wasn't yet. Not that most of us kids would have seen them if they had been. Mister, we were hot the whole trip. Hot or hungover from getting hot the night before or getting ready to go out and get hot that night. You know, bunch of” country bumpkins from Vermont—‘Ver-mont! What state's that in?' folks kept asking us—never been off the farm before, most of us.”

The man smoked his cigarette and chatted with the waitress about Washington. He had a relaxed manner, as though he was used to making light conversation with strangers. And though he talked in what Kingdom County natives would call an “educated” way, I began to detect a slight regional burr in his speech, which I supposed might be a mild southern accent. His voice was resonant, like my father's when he was telling a story, and pleasant to listen to like a radio sportscaster's, making me think the cook might be right; he could be some kind of singer or stage performer.

“They took us to where they make the money,” the waitress was saying. “That's what I remember best about good old Washington, D.C. That and getting hot and hungover.”

“Val.”

Bruce had materialized in the kitchen entranceway. He wiped his hands on his dirty apron and jerked his thumb backward. “Out here. You're needed.”

Val, who all of a sudden I liked better, rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and mogged back out to the kitchen. A minute later the black man stubbed out his cigarette butt, paid Bruce at the register, and left.

My father waited until the man and his son had pulled out of the parking lot. Then he stood up and took two long strides to the cash register. As Bruce rang up our slip he tilted his head back toward the kitchen, where the waitress was slamming pans around in the sink.

“Talk, talk, talk,” he said. “And she don't much care who to, neither. She ought to learn when to keep her frigging mouth shut.”

“You ought to shave and wash your hands and put on a clean apron and a shirt,” my father said. “Expect a visit from the state health inspector.”

And he walked out without his change, leaving his cup of java untouched on the counter behind him.

 

As you travel north in Vermont toward Kingdom County and the Canadian border, you will notice that even small streams are often designated as rivers on bridge signs and road maps. Half an hour later, when my father and I crossed the Gihon River, which you can easily throw a fly across at its widest point, he automatically assessed the water on his side as I did on mine—as we had done and would do hundreds of times crossing scores of different streams together.

“James,” he said, “I wouldn't go brook trout fishing with that son-of-a-bitch back there if he and I were the last two men on the face of the earth.”

Ever since I could remember, my father's acid character test was whether he would or wouldn't go brook trout fishing with a person. Not just fishing. Not even trout fishing.
Brook trout fishing.

He applied this unique standard to neighbors, colleagues in the newspaper business, politicians, authors, and baseball players. Once in a blue moon someone actually measured up to it, though I'd noticed that most of the select few (F.D.R., Samuel Johnson, Ty Cobb) had been dead for years. And in point of fact, I'd rarely known Dad to fish with anyone but his own two sons and his one close friend, Judge Forrest Allen.

“Well,” he said, “to hell with that ignorant bastard. If I were ten years younger I probably would have muckled onto him right there in his place of business and thrown him into the biggest snowbank south of Labrador. He can count himself lucky.”

This was a common threat of my father when I was growing up. Once or twice a week he informed me with great earnestness that if he were ten years younger he would certainly “muckle onto” someone and throw him into the biggest snowbank south of Labrador. Quite often it was Joseph McCarthy, whom my father had a particular desire to muckle onto, though Sheriff Mason White and the nonprosecutor Zack Barrows were also high on the list of likely candidates. In fact, I have to confess that for a number of years I was somewhat unclear in my mind as to exactly what Dad meant by “muckling on.” Yet I had no doubt at all that muckling was a most dire form of corporal retribution, with very grave consequences indeed for the mucklee.

“To hell with him,” my father repeated. “As your grandfather used to say, James, coming home is always the best part of going away. Which, I am here to tell you, Thomas Clayton Wolfe's overquoted dictum on the subject notwithstanding, you most certainly
can
do if that's where your work happens to be.”

As we came through the snowy woods on top of Lowell Mountain and looked abruptly out over the entire thousand-square-mile expanse of Kingdom County, I sensed something of what my father meant about coming home. Heading down the mountainside toward the village of Kingdom Common, we might have been entering a much earlier part of the century as well as an earlier season. Rickety old horse-drawn hay loaders, some abandoned not many years ago, sat out in hedgerows between stony pastures. Most of the farmhouses still had faded brown Christmas wreaths hanging on their doors, a tradition meant to ameliorate the grueling dreariness of our seven-month winters, though by this time of year they seemed only to call attention to the fact that it was already late April with warm weather still weeks away. The houses themselves had long ago faded to the same toneless gray as their attached barns, and the few farmers and loggers we passed looked as old and weathered as their buildings.

Three or four of the barns were decorated with faded murals of pastoral scenes: cows lining up at pasture bars at milking time; hefty work horses pulling loaded hay wagons; a yoke of oxen hauling logs out of an evergreen woods. They'd been painted in a rather primitive style by an itinerant artist known to me only as the Dog Cart Man, a deaf and mute individual of an indeterminable age, who at unpredictable intervals during my youth appeared in Kingdom County with an American Flyer child's wagon containing his paints and brushes and pulled by a motley pack of half a dozen or so mongrel dogs harnessed together with an incredible assortment of kite string, bailing twine, fish line, leather straps, and clothesline rope. Yet even these cheery murals, depicting impossibly idyllic scenes in an unimaginably distant summery season, seemed only to heighten by contrast the austerity of the time of year and the rugged terrain.

Many travelers, coming into these snowy granite hills, would have found Kingdom County a harsh and forbidding place. But despite my edgy emerging adolescent restlessness, which in another year would become a chronic driving urge to visit new places and see new sights at every opportunity, there was a deep and nameless appeal to me in the long stark hiatus between late winter and early spring in the Kingdom, which, like that similar uncompromising interval between late fall and early winter, seemed to reveal our remote corner of Vermont at its truest and best.

We entered the Common along the short south side of the rectangular central green. The clock on the courthouse tower said 5:15, and it is oddly comforting to me even now, decades later, to reflect that in a few days, when most of the rest of the country leapt automatically forward into daylight saving time, those long black iron hands that had regulated the comings and goings of Commoners for a century and more would not be moved ahead one second Nor would most private households, including ours, adjust their clocks forward to accommodate someone else's notion of the way time ought to be kept. In Kingdom County in 1952 there was one time, year-round.

My brother's old woody station wagon was nosed diagonally in against the east side of the common just across from the courthouse. “Good,” Dad said and stopped beside it.

“You want to see Charlie?”

“I want you to see him. Tell him I'll spring for steak sandwiches over at the hotel as soon as I get this motor unloaded. It'll be your birthday dinner.”

“Won't Mom be waiting supper?”

“She'll probably have a cake for you when you get home. Your mother and two or three others have been killing themselves all day getting the parsonage ready for the new minister. I told her not to bother with supper.”

“What if Charlie can't come?”

“He can come. It's your birthday, James. He'll come, all right, and that's—”

“—the beginning and the end of it,” I said, and hopped out.

My father almost smiled. Then he and the De Soto rattled off past the Academy and the library, turned west along the Boston and Montreal tracks running down the middle of the street in front of the hotel, swung south again along the brick shopping block, and stopped in front of the
Monitor
, and I dashed up the granite steps of the courthouse to see my brother.

 

During the great November flood of 1927, most of the legal records of Kingdom County floated off the shelves of the storage room in the courthouse basement, out through the smashed windows into the inundated street, and north up the Lower Kingdom River to Lake Memphremagog and Canada. Days later, a few papers were retrieved from debris snagged by the tag alders growing in the swamp north of town. But except for a couple of ancient deeds written in butternut juice, which will last nearly as long as the paper it's printed on, none of these documents could be deciphered. Last wills and testaments, probate and county court proceedings, real estate transactions large and small—all were washed off into oblivion by that freak fall deluge that laid waste to so many towns and villages throughout Vermont and elsewhere.

After the flood subsided, the courthouse basement was converted to a three-cell jail. As new documents began to accrae, they were relegated to the third floor of the building, a single dim, musty, low-ceiled, coffinshaped room tucked up under the slate eaves overlooking the common to the west and the American Heritage furniture mill and Boston and Montreal railyard to the east. At the far south end of this dreary garret, partitioned off from the post-1927 deeds and death certificates by four thin sheets of unpainted plywood, was the cubbyhole where my brother conducted his business.

For not much more than the twenty dollars Charlie shelled out to the county each month for the use of this cubicle he could have rented a spacious room on the first floor of the courthouse next to Sheriff Mason White's office. But as my brother had often told me, he preferred his lofty quarters for several reasons. First of all, he was much less apt here to be pestered by courthouse loiterers and members of the Folding Chair Club, who routinely poked their hoary heads into the more accessible first-floor offices to say good morning, then remained, unbidden, to pass the time of day for twenty minutes or longer. Here, too, by hitching a metal coat hanger to his portable radio and sticking the end of the hanger out his window, Charlie could occasionally pick up a Red Sox game. The window was also high enough to allow him to look out over the village rooftops when the leaves were off the elms on the common and watch the weather coming in off the Green Mountains, so that he always knew well in advance the best times to go hunting and fishing—avocations my brother pursued with unflagging zeal on two particular kinds of days: fair and foul. Which brings me to Charlie's principal reason for not moving downstairs, and that is that he simply didn't need a larger or more conveniently located office because in those days he spent as little time as possible there anyway.