A Stranger in the Kingdom (32 page)

Suddenly he grinned. “You want to know what I do here? Come on, I show you.”

Frenchy marched back up the ramp, with me trailing reluctantly along behind. “Here the way we do it, Kinneson. Old Bumper, he takes and brings cows down here from sales barn overstreet. Sometimes one or two, sometimes whole Christly herd. Sometimes he let me drive, too. That if he in a good mood or I just tune his Christly truck engine or he too drunk to drive himself.

“Anyway, big goddamn truck comes tearing in. First I drive cows down ramp out of truck, then I drive'em up ramp into shed. They don't move fast enough, I hit'em with this.” He made a menacing jab in my general direction with the homemade cattle prod with the rusty nail impaled in the end.

“All right. Now say I got to kill a little veal calf, weigh about what you do, Kinneson.”

Frenchy gleefully jabbed an imaginary little veal calf of about my size up the ramp toward imminent doom.

“Now, by God, once I get veal in shed, I grab it by the ear, throw it down, and shoot it with this old peashooter.”

Frenchy drew the .22 pistol from his holster, and fired a real bullet directly into the floor of the shed. I was scared half to death that he might dispatch me next; but to my relief he stuck the gun back in his holster and continued his lecture.

“Veal calf dead as knob on a door, eh? So I grab old dead veal by hind legs and lift it up and tie it on hook and slit it throat and skin with skinning knife. Then I go back and get next one while Hook, he butcher veal up, all with one hand, too, cause that all he got, the old bastard. How you like be that veal on the hook, Kinneson?”

“I guess I wouldn't,” I said in all truthfulness. But I was impressed. An outcast whom I'd feared and hated for years had just revealed to me that he could efficiently slaughter and skin an animal I could only eat, not to mention drive an enormous cattle truck whose engine he had just tuned, all the while enduring the miserable suzerainty of bad-tempered old rips like Bumper Stevens and Hook LaMott, and not without a certain grim sense of humor.

A thought my mother would have been pleased with flashed through my mind. I wondered, as we headed back down the ramp, if all these years
I
might have been prejudiced against Frenchy LaMott.

But he quickly redeemed himself in my opinion. “Say, Kinneson, who that French girl hanging 'round the preacher's place? True what going 'round 'bout her, she that little hoor from girlie show?”

“Nah,” I replied, “that's a damn lie that Fatty Hefner and those old church busybodies are spreading around town. She's just a poor kid from up in Canada with no place else to go.”

“They say she been up at Christly Resolvèd's for a few days letting him and Welcome put the britches to her every goddamn night. Old Bumper tell me. He tell me I ought to get her down under goddamn trestle and put the britches to her myself, me. Just a little French tramp is all, Bumper say. He say he like to get her in commission sales barn some night himself, by Christ.

“Say, Kinneson. You know her, you? I give you a dollar you get her out to trestle for me. Plus when I finish up you can have a go at her.”

“You've got a filthy mind, Frenchy LaMott, and that's a damn lie about her being a tramp! Her father was a famous actor up in Quebec, and she's going to be in the movies someday. You just wait. You don't know what you're talking about.”

Frenchy laughed. “How 'bout I give you two dollars?”

“How about you go to hell?”

But Frenchy LaMott did not hear my rejoinder. Frenchy was flying through the air. Then he was sprawled on all fours on the ground at the foot of the ramp and Hook LaMott, all six feet, six inches of him, was shouting angrily at him from the entrance of the slaughterhouse, where he'd come silently up behind us and, with no warning at all, booted Frenchy off the ramp.

“What da hell you doing, firing off guns 'round here, you crazy French bastard?” Hook yelled.

Down the ramp Hook came, swinging his great iron homemade prosthetic device menacingly. “Give me dat gun, you wort'less little shit.”

Frenchy scrambled to his feet. He clapped his hand over the pistol butt. “Come get it, you one-clawed old son-of-a-bitch.”

Just then Ida called Hook's name. She and my mother were hurrying down through the bull thistles from the house. “Hook! I got three more day a week work, me. Housekeeper work!”

Hook looked from Frenchy, standing crouched with his hand on the .22 in a weird parody of a western gunslinger, to his sister Ida. He frowned. “Over there?” he said, pointing across the river toward our farmhouse.

“No, overstreet in village. Madame K here tell me new preacher fella need a housekeeper three day a week. Well, we need money, us. Frenchy got to have new pair boots soon. Just last night I say three extra Hail Marys for Frenchy boots and today, job pop up! God is good, eh?”

Hook frowned and rubbed his hook. Or maybe he was rubbing his hand with his hook. It was hard to tell. “What Bumper say?”

“Bumper don't have no say. I ain't Bumper's nigger servant, excuse me, missus. Bumper ain't my boss, him. Bumper ain't nothing to me one way or other no more. You the one I work for, Hook. You got the say-so here.”

“I don' know,” Hook said.

“What you don't know?”

“Don' know if I want you keep house for dat colored fella.”

“He ain't no ordinary colored fella, Hook. He a Christly preacher. Speak the best goddamn English in the Kingdom next to Editor K. What more you want, you? Want me to get a job keeping house for the frigging Queen Mother?”

“I don' know as I want you traipsing all over da Christly Kingdom keeping up colored preachers' houses when you got sausage to grind here, by da bald-headed Christ.”

“Let her go,
mon oncle
,” Frenchy said in a surly voice. “I grind you frigging sausage for you.”

“I told you shut you trap!” Hook said, and kicked Frenchy hard in the leg with his steel-toed workshoe.

Howling in pain, Frenchy drew his pistol and pointed it straight at Hook's chest. “You had it, you Canuck bastard,” he shouted. “You going to die!”

Hook laughed and took a step toward him. Frenchy fired, and a jagged splinter ripped off the frame of the shed entrance beyond Hook's head. Hook laughed again and took another step Frenchy fired past him twice more.

When, to my total astonishment, my mother stepped quickly between Hook LaMott and Frenchy.

“Hand me that revolver, Frenchy,” she said. “Someone's going to get hurt if this keeps up. Give it here, please.”

My mother's voice was quiet and businesslike, as though she were removing a sharp instrument from the hands of a young child

“Hand it here,” she said again. “We've had quite enough gunplay for one morning. I'll give it to your mother and she'll give it back to you again after everyone's simmered down.”

“Give her gun, Frenchy!” Ida screamed. “Give her gun, quick, 'fore you do something can't be undone.”

Mom held out her hand. “Give me the gun, please, Frenchy.”

Miraculously, Frenchy handed the revolver to my mother, who in turn gave it to Ida.

“I kill you later, Canuck,” Frenchy yelled at Hook. But his uncle just laughed again and went back up the ramp into the shed.

“Well, then,” Mom said to Ida “Shall I tell Reverend Andrews you'll be there at nine Monday morning?”

“You bet, missus,” Ida said, beaming “You bet I be there. With, how it go? With bells on, eh? You tell that preacher man I be there with Christly bells on. And if Ida LaMott say she do something, you know she do it. Thank you, missus. And thank you for keeping Frenchy from killing old Hook and going jail, then Ida go to poorhouse.”

“I don't think he really intended to harm his uncle,” my mother said.

“Yes, he did,” Ida said. “Some day he going to, too. You mistreat a dog long enough, he turn on you, eh? But not today maybe. Thank you, missus.”

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. LaMott. Thank you. Good morning.”

“Good morning, missus. See you later, Jimmy. Come again, you. Come anytime. God is good!”

 

“Boy, Mom!” I said over and over again on the way home. “Boy oh boy oh boy. I loved the way you got that gun away from Frenchy. That was terrific. Dad couldn't have done any better himself.”

My mother smiled. “Speaking of your father, Jimmy, let's just keep this little episode at the LaMotts' a secret between us two, shall we? You know how he worries about me. This might upset him more than would be good for him.”

“You got it, Mom. Mum's the word. Say, where did you ever get all those guts? Weren't you scared Frenchy was going to shoot you?”

“Oh, no. Your grandfather the poor captain was forever disarming his unfortunate gentlemen at the mission. You'd be amazed at what he'd confiscate just in a month—broken bottles, homemade knives, homemade guns, even. I was the only student at the Boston School for Young Methodist Ladies with a souvenir collection of lethal weapons in her bedroom.”

I laughed, but I couldn't stop thinking about the events of the morning. “You think Ida'll really show up at the minister's, Mom?”

“Absolutely. If the LaMotts say they'll do something, why, they will. And that's the—”

“—beginning and the end of it,” I said, and we both laughed.

 

It had rained hard on the night in late June that Claire LaRiviere arrived on the gool. Then it did not rain again for more than a month. Day after day the filmy dawn mist above the river burned off to reveal the clearest of blue summer skies.

I spent many afternoons that month haying for Ben Currier, and hated nearly every minute of it; haying is the hottest and hardest farm work there is. Mornings, I worked for Dad at the
Monitor
, and in the evening I kept Mom company out in the garden or fished with Dad or Charlie, though as the drought continued and the river and burn dropped, the trout fishing got spotty. I had to master some of the finer points of handling a dry fly to get any action at all.

I saw all of Charlie's home ballgames, and by mid-July he was batting over .600. Once again he was talking about trying out for Montreal in the Triple A International League and maybe “going all the way to the top”—though not before he won the annual Smash-up Crash-up Derby, for which he'd hired Welcome Kinneson to fix up the old Brink's armored car for him to enter in the big event. Dad told him bluntly that he ought to forget about the derby and concentrate on getting to the top of his own business, which in case he'd forgotten happened to be practicing law, but Charlie just laughed and said he could practice law anytime, but the derby came just once a year and this year he was determined to win it.

Then later in July, with the derby just two weeks away, something happened that not only brought Charlie back to his office and responsibilities with a thunderous jolt but became the talk of the county and, for a time, the entire state—while simultaneously bearing out my father's most vitriolic jeremiads on the lack of law and order in Kingdom County.

Late one morning while I was at the
Monitor
cranking out handbills advertising Reverend Andrews' upcoming Old Home Day, three large men in green Men from Mars masks with foot-long wavering antennae walked into the First Farmers' and Lumberers' Savings Bank of Kingdom Common and heisted $29,348.16 at shotgun-point while the mile-long 11:03
A.M.
Montreal freight lumbered by just outside, effectively cutting off the bank and the robbers from most of the village. They were inside the building for less than three minutes, no shots were fired, no one was hurt, and they escaped in Welcome's Brink's car, which they'd stolen earlier that same morning, along with the Men from Mars masks, from my cousin's junkyard. Later that day the armored car was found abandoned up in the gore near Russia But to the ill-concealed delight of nearly everyone in Kingdom County, there was absolutely no trace of the bandits or their loot.

Over the next several days, countless conjectures about the identity of the bank robbers were advanced on the sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block, in the post office and stores, in the courthouse offices, and in farm kitchens and dooryards and barns throughout the county. Gradually two very different theories emerged. The first, which at the time my father and Charlie both seemed to think quite probable, was that like three or four other bank robberies in remote towns along the Canadian-Vermont border over the past couple of years, the hit on the First Farmers' and Lumberers' was very likely the handiwork of Montreal pros. It had all the earmarks of the other recent jobs, from the stolen local getaway car abandoned on an unwatched back road near the border to the use of shotguns—though the Martian masks were a new and inspired twist.

The second (and more generally favored) theory about the robbery was that the three wild Kittredge boys from Lord Hollow—Harlan, Hiram, and Hen—had pulled off the heist, shrewdly timing it to coincide with both payroll day at the American Heritage Furniture Mill and the arrival of the B and M freight. Proponents of this theory held that after abandoning the Brink's car at Russia, the Kittredge boys had cut cross-country over two mountains and through a big cedar swamp to their father's place, where they promptly buried the money for disbursement at a more fit season.

Unfortunately for Sheriff White and the five or six solemn and embarrassed FBI. agents who swarmed out over the countryside along the border for the next week or so, every shred of evidence against the Kittredge boys turned out to be highly circumstantial, a point my brother stressed repeatedly during the federal inquest that occupied every minute of his working time during the rest of that month True, Charlie conceded, old Whiskeyjack Kittredge had marched into the Farmers' and Lumberers' the previous week and requested a loan of five hundred dollars to erect a cedar-oil still at the junction of the Lord Hollow brook and the Upper Kingdom River, and when asked about his credit said it must be A-number-one because he had never borrowed a cent from anyone before in all his life. True, when he'd been turned down flat he had sung out in the presence of eight customers, two tellers, the lending officer, and the bank vice president that he intended to have his loan one way or another. Yet that was no proof that he had put his boys up to robbing the bank.