A Stranger in the Kingdom (45 page)

Don't mistake me. I don't mean to give the impression that we here in the Kingdom are hopelessly intolerant of all strangers. Yet there is some accuracy in what I read in the southern newspapers, that it is too easy for us to be tolerant of the oppressed and of minority races elsewhere. For as a result of geography and chance, we have had astonishingly few outsiders in the Kingdom over the past century and a half, with the exception of French Canadians, many of whom have their own sad tale to tell about what it means to be strangers here; for as most French Canadians can tell you, we are, at the least, innately suspicious of almost anyone who is different from ourselves. This suspicion prevents us from extending to strangers in need the very assistance we pride ourselves most on extending to one another. And without this code of mutual assistance no community could survive.

And yet, the Kingdom
is
still a good, if eminently improvable, place to live and work and raise kids. The fact that it can still be improved may be its greatest strength. It is by no means too late for those of us who have information about Claire LaRiviere's murder to come forward, or for our sheriff and prosecutor to begin a vigorous and honest investigation, or for the people Reverend Walter Andrews led, comforted, and supported to provide him with some of the same comfort and support, so that years hence we will never have to say that a stranger came to our village, and we failed him, and by doing so failed ourselves and what it truly means to live in “God's Kingdom.”

 

Charlie told me that Dad's letter was bound to provoke a barrage of self-justifying and angry rejoinders. But for the most part it didn't. For a week or so Reverend Andrews had a few more visitors at the Mephremagog jail, and the sheriff did make an attempt, however cursory, to interview Ida LaMott and Elijah Kinneson and a few others who had access to the parsonage. The hate mail tapered off. But this is all that happened, and, in the end, Dad said that if anyone needed additional proof of a conspiracy of silence, the almost total silence with which his open letter was greeted provided it.

 

To say that the Affair changed our lives radically seems the feeblest of understatements. Our entire late summer routine had now been usurped by a single ugly event growing uglier by the day. Yet ironically, out of the turmoil came one good thing. As a direct result of Charlie's decision to defend the minister, the estrangement between him and my father that had been deepening all spring and summer as a result of Charlie's refusal to run for the county prosecutor's job was mended. And this was a small miracle for our family, because, though I never doubted for a minute that the differences between my brother and my father were very real, neither did I ever doubt that Dad loved Charlie with a nearly Old Testament (or at least old Scottish) harshness no less profound for its sternness.

But the defense of Reverend Andrews would not be easy, and more, much more, was at stake than in any of my flamboyant brother's other cases, especially after Judge Allen ruled against a change of venue. “We've made this mess ourselves,” the judge privately told my father, “and by God, we'll clean it up ourselves. For once in my life, I'm going to see to it that justice is done here in Kingdom County, however painful it may be for everybody involved. If I'd done this last January, Ordney Gilson's murderers might well be behind bars this minute.”

What, in the meantime, of Reverend Andrews? Dad and Charlie continued to visit him at the Memphremagog jail nearly daily. And though they usually didn't go together, their reports were discouragingly alike. Without giving way to despair (which any good Presbyterian would make every last effort to resist), the minister was becoming more low-spirited with each passing day.

“I'm worried about him,” Dad told us at one of the family war councils we'd begun to hold in our farmhouse kitchen almost nightly. “I don't believe he thinks he's got a chance. He's even quit talking to downcountry reporters—not that I blame him, but these days they're about the only visitors he has.”

“I advised him not to,” Charlie said. “It's never a good idea for a defendant to talk to reporters in a situation like this. But I couldn't agree more about his low spirits. For a born two-fisted fighter, which I for one still think he is, the guy seems too quiet. I can't figure out why he isn't angrier, God knows he has a right to be. One small piece of good news, though, is that he knew the girl was pregnant. She told him so, and he actually called a home for unwed mothers over in Burlington about it. The doctor he wanted to talk to wasn't in, but we've got a record of the call.”

“What does that prove?” I said.

“Not a whole hell of a lot, to tell you the truth. It just makes Zack's contention that the minister murdered her to keep her pregnancy from coming to light seem a little shakier. Why would he kill her after calling the home in Burlington? Or call Burlington if he intended to kill her?”

“He wouldn't,” Mom said. “And he didn't. And you, Charlie Kinneson, Esquire, are going to prove beyond any doubt that he didn't. I'm positive of it. What upsets me most right now is thinking of poor Reverend Andrews sitting alone up there in that jail cell all day with only you and your dad and a few curiosity-seekers for visitors. Why, even most of his own congregation's stopped visiting him now that the novelty's worn off. Worst of all, he's got no family nearby to help him.”

“Nat's not all that far away,” I said. “He's family.”

“Nat's the last one he wants around, Jimmy,” Charlie said. “Above anything, he doesn't want Nat involved and I don't blame him.”

“He's been rereading Pliny Templeton's
Ecclesiastical History
to keep from going crazy,” Dad said “Though how he can concentrate on it I have no idea—Mister Baby Johnson! That's another thing. He asked me to stop in at the parsonage this morning before I came up and bring along his notes on Templeton and those two newspaper clippings on Templeton's death. I went through his desk from top to bottom, but Mason White had evidently beaten me to it. The papers weren't there, and neither was much of anything else. White's apparently confiscated everything in the desk for ‘evidence.'”

Charlie frowned. “I don't think White's got those Templeton notes or the clippings. I've seen a list of all the evidence the prosecution's going to use. There's no mention of the Templeton papers. Check the desk again.”

“They aren't there, I tell you. I don't need to check again. White took them, whether he intended to use them or not.”

“What else does Reverend Andrews do all day in jail?” I said quickly, to avert an argument. “I mean besides reading old Pliny's
History
? It must be terribly boring for him.”

“It is,” Mom said. “It's high time you and I went to see him, Jimmy. We'll drive up in the morning.”

I knew that my father was not happy about my mother's driving our rattletrap De Soto up to Memphremagog, even though it was just ten miles away and she was a very capable driver, and he was even less happy about our venturing into the jail in that rough little Canadian-border paper mill town. But with one exception, which had it not reflected the deeper problems of the adults of the Kingdom would actually have been amusing, the trip went as well as anyone could expect such a trip to go under the circumstances.

Reverend Andrews' cell was in the police station on the main street of town, overlooking Lake Memphremagog. The chief just waved us on down the corridor. As we had hoped, Reverend Andrews seemed very glad to see us, though we had to stand outside his cell and talk through the bars. I was relieved to see that he was wearing his suit pants and dress shoes and a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up; I'd been worried that he might have on a striped uniform. Mom had brought him a carton of Luckies, and he thanked her and assured us with a grin that his “help” at the jail were all very attentive, and the view from his high barred window was capital.

He winked at me. “How's next year's starting shortstop?”

Remembering how Reverend Andrews had found my baseball position for me, I had to blink back tears. How, I wondered, could he possibly concern himself with
my
trivial hopes and dreams at such a time? Yet I believe that it was in a large degree just this kind of unselfishness that made him an effective minister. And there was no trace of irony in his voice when he asked Mom how my father and Charlie were holding up through this whole mess. There was that touch of greatness about the man, that capacity to transcend his own circumstances, however grim, that I suppose he had cultivated as a chaplain in World War II and Korea. Yet I could tell by looking at his eyes, which were grave and unamused and worried, that he was undergoing a terrible ordeal.

“Have you been in touch with Nat, Jim?” he asked after we had settled down.

This caught me completely off guard. I stammered something about a letter and a phone call, until Mom rescued me and told Reverend Andrews that Nat and I had talked on the phone, and she'd talked to Nat, and her impression was that things were fine in Montreal. “I want you to know something, though, Reverend,” she said. “If the time ever comes when, for whatever reason, you need Nat here in Kingdom County, he'll stay with us and be part of our family for as long as he wants to.”

“That's very, very kind of you, Ruth. But please understand that it's imperative that Nat not be mixed up in all this. I'd never forgive myself if I let that happen. I've come to think that it was a bad enough mistake to bring him here in the first—Oh, no! Will you look at those blooming little urchins! They've been at that for the past three days.”

Reverend Andrews was laughing. He pointed at the window, where I caught just the briefest flash of a kid's face, popping into and fast out of sight. Then I saw it again! Only this was a different kid, a redhead. What in blazes was going on?

Still chuckling, Reverend Andrews explained. And as he did, his eyes briefly assumed that wonderful amused expression, his voice that mellifluous delight in an irony, any irony, that I'd sensed the first time I saw and heard him, back in the Ridge Runner Diner. “What we've got here is a prime example of old-fashioned North American smalltown entrepreneurship, folks, in the tradition of Tom Sawyer. It seems that the local police chiefs son is a bright young chap of about twelve years of age, who's been operating a sort of sociological peephole show out behind the jail. What he's doing is selling glimpses of me, for a dime a shot, to younger kids who've apparently never seen a Negro. At least not in jail! He boosts them up outside my window and holds them there until they're satisfied—though most are too scared to take full advantage of the opportunity—Where are you off to, Jim?”

I was already halfway down the corridor.

“I'm going to kick their damn asses into the lake!” I shouted.

“Hold up, chum!” Reverend Andrews called. “That's not the ticket. Let 'em have their fun. It's a diversion to me, and at this point any diversion is welcome.”

I don't think it really was a diversion, though, and apparently Mom didn't think so, either, because on our way out she marched into the chief's office and told him he should be ashamed to let such a disgraceful circus go on outside his jail and if he didn't put a stop to what his boy was doing, she would.

The chief was a big, tired-looking man of about fifty. “Judas Priest, missus, how do you expect me to do that?” he said. “Put a twenty-four-hour guard outside that window? How would
you
stop it?”

“Just let me get my hands on that son of yours for five minutes,” my mother said, “and I'll show you.”

“Oh, Judas,” the chief said, and stood up and started heavily for the door.

The last thing we saw as we drove out of the police station parking lot was the chief, lumbering down the sidewalk behind a gaggle of kids, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it the way mine would have been.

 

I have mentioned that in many ways it was my mother who helped us all pull through that terrible summer intact. Besides that visit to the jail, which I believe was critically important, if not for the minister then for us, and perhaps for me in particular, she did everything in her power to preserve as many of our ordinary routines as possible during those weeks before Reverend Andrews's murder trial. Two such instances in particular come to my mind.

The early fifties saw the tail end of what to me was a wonderfully fascinating type of entertainment in rural northern New England. Here and there in outlying corners of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, the very last remnants of the myriad itinerant one- or two-night performers who once toured the entire country still occasionally turned up. I am not thinking of vaudeville performers or chautauqua lecturers so much as, say, the little one-elephant circuses, the family carnivals with half a dozen or so rides and games, the four- or five-man barnstorming baseball teams, and best of all, an individual called “Mr. Mentality,” who came to town every three or four years when I was a boy and who was a mind reader.

Although my father printed up twenty or so big four-color posters advertising Mr. Mentality's amazing one-man performance to be held on the Saturday night after Mom and I visited the minister in jail, such excursions into the realm of the extrasensory not only brought out the skeptic in him but, I believe, disconcerted him—as anything that was not entirely accessible to strict journalistic scrutiny and reducible to logic and Newtonian physics tended to disconcert him. Mom said that once, years ago, he had sat through a single performance of Mr. Mentality's show with the objective of demystifying the mind reader's act in an open letter in the
Monitor.
When he could not entirely, for at the very least the traveling clairvoyant was a sort of specialized genius, Dad lost all interest in him and wrote him off as a shrewd purveyor of parlor games for pay.