A Stranger in the Kingdom (5 page)

“Sure you'll grow, buddy. When I was thirteen I grew seven inches in a year.”

“I know, but you were already five-nine, five-ten to start with. I'm still shorter than Mom and she isn't even five feet. I'll be in high school in the fall.”

“You'll grow,” Athena said. “This is
the
spring, Jimmy. I guarantee it.”

“Of course you'll grow,” my father said. “It would be a physical impossibility at your age not to, a contradiction of the irreversible laws of nature.”

“Let's not contradict any of the irreversible laws of nature, Jimmy,” Charlie said.

I knew he was trying to get a rise out of my father, but Dad seemed distracted by other thoughts and said nothing in reply, so I turned my attention to my steak sandwich, thankful that an argument had been avoided.

Charlie continued to hum snatches of Hank Williams' songs during dinner, which reminded me of what the Negro boy had said about my brother's country-singer hero at the Ridge Runner Diner that afternoon, which in turn reminded me of the episode with the cook in the dirty apron. When I repeated Dad's advice to him, Charlie howled and pounded the table and said that was exactly what he would have told the son-of-a-bitch.

“The times are all out of joint down there,” my father said. “I don't know that matters are appreciably better up here in this neck of the woods, come to think of it. As I was telling James this afternoon, there hasn't been any real law in Kingdom County since I can remember.”

“It's a frontier, all right,” Charlie happily agreed. “In more ways than one.”

So far my birthday supper had gone incredibly smoothly. But I knew from long experience that whenever my father and brother got into a conversation, any conversation, discord was never far away.

It reared its head even sooner than I'd expected.

Looking at me, my father said sternly, “If your brother would spend a little less time playing ball and hunting and fishing, he might have time to run for prosecuting attorney this fall and introduce some law and order into the Kingdom.”

“For-get it, buddy,” Charlie said to me, and my heart sank like one of Mel Parnell's curve balls. “As you very well know, I did not, repeat not, come back home to sit in the county prosecutor's office all day taking illiterate depositions from Mason White.”

“I've often wondered why you did come home,” Athena said.

Charlie leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Well, now, sweetie. Use your head. Where else could I put my God-given talents as northern New England's most colorful defense attorney to better use? Where, east of the Mississippi, are there still as many genuine outlaws left in need of defending? Then too, if Zack Barrows gets any older, deafer, or drunker, assuming that's possible, I'll win all my cases against him. I've always wanted to bat a thousand for a year, just to see what it feels like.”

“Your brother already does win all his cases against him, James,” my father said. “That's the trouble.”

“Nope. I hate to contradict your father, Jimmy, but I came out second best in Resolvèd's moose-poaching arraignment just this afternoon. He had to plead nolo and pay a twenty-dollar fine. My fragile ego still hasn't recovered.”

“I think his ego has recovered,” my father said. “Abraham Lincoln couldn't have won that case after Mason White found the moose's head buried in Resolvèd's manure pile. The point is, James, your brother
shouldn't
have won that case. Besides being illegal, shooting that animal was a despicable act.”

“Sure it was,” Charlie said. “But as I told Athena's dad just this afternoon, the poor critter was probably dying of brain worm anyway, which is undoubtedly why it stumbled into Cousin R's dooryard in the first place. All he did was put it out of its misery. Then too, there was always the outside chance that if he ate enough of the moose meat, Resolvèd might contract brain worm himself. Think of the savings that would represent to the county judicial system.”

“Think of the savings to the county judicial system, James, if your brother ran for prosecutor and slapped the old bastard in jail where he belongs.”

Charlie shook his head. “Resolvèd doesn't belong in jail, buddy. Number one, he never hurt anybody, except possibly himself. Number two, he's among the last of that vanishing outlaw breed I mentioned. Recently I've begun to perceive myself as a kind of specialized conservationist preserving a unique threatened species. Like, say, the California condor.”

“Preserving vultures?” Athena said.

Charlie whooped with delight, yet he seemed perfectly serious when he said, “Preserving a rapidly dwindling, irreplaceable segment of the population that helps make Kingdom County the frontier it is. Look around. Where's Noel Lord? Where's Quebec Bill Bonhomme? Henry Coville? Gone over the hump, as they say. It's a sad thought.”

“They've all been gone for years, James,” my father said. “I'd like to know just one thing before I table this discussion and get back to work. I'd like to know what sort of satisfaction there is in beating a guy like Zack Barrows. Can your brother tell me that?”

“None at all,” Charlie said in that disarmingly candid manner of his that I think he sometimes used in those days as a perverse sort of justification to bull right ahead on a course he knew himself to be wrongheaded. “None at all. Which is just exactly what I like best about beating him, since it gives me more time for the truly important things in life. To wit, hunting, fishing, and playing ball. Besides, if I did run for that job and somehow managed to land it, I'd have to clap half of my hunting and fishing buddies and three-quarters of my ex-clients behind bars within six months. And that, as a distinguished newspaper editor well known to us both would say, is definitely the beginning and the end of it.”

“Not quite,” Athena said from the doorway, where she was getting into her boots. “You want to know the
real
reason he won't run, Mr. Kinneson? The real reason is that the prosecutor's job pays five thousand dollars a year. What excuse would old Hank here have left then not to put an end to the longest engagement in the history of Kingdom County and marry me? Right, Mr. Williams?”

“Nope,” Charlie said, grinning. “The real reason is I'm pretty sure you'd frown on my diet of rare steak every night and pork chops, cooked extra crisp, for breakfast.”

“To each his own,” Athena said with a tight smile, and headed out the door.

“I give up, Jimmy,” Charlie said. “I give up.”

“Happy birthday, James,” my father said in a tone of voice not generally employed for such felicitations. “Don't forget that tonight's Production Night. I want you to do the first run.”

Without another word he paid the bill and walked out.

“I nearly forgot,” Charlie said as we stood up and put on our hunting jackets. “Many happy returns, buddy.”

Out of his jacket pocket my brother handed me a baseball. But not just an ordinary baseball. This was a brand-new official American League baseball, inscribed with the signatures of most of the 1951 Boston Red Sox players. Early that morning my folks had given me my first really good catcher's glove. Now with the baseball my day seemed complete, though when I tried to thank him Charlie just laughed and said he'd take it out of my hide if he caught me batting it around the pasture across from the house or so much as tossing it up in the air and playing catch with it.

Outside, we stood on the long porch of the hotel where the pensioners sat on summer evenings watching the trains go by, and listened to the low steady growl of the High Falls behind the hotel—a sound that is so much a part of the village for a month after iceout that you're aware of it only when you've been away for a time. It was dusk now. Across the tracks a woodcock landed on a single bare patch of ground along the north edge of the snowy common and began making its low intermittent buzz. Charlie nudged me and pointed. After a minute the bird flew high over the village rooftops in a series of widening spirals, then tumbled down through the twilight, whistling rapidly:

“He'd better find himself some cover,” my brother said. “It's going to snow again tonight. Smell it coming?”

I wasn't sure I did but nodded just as a three-note horn bleated out and a souped-up Fairlane flying Confederate colors came racing over the knoll on the east edge of the village. It bounced across the tracks, headed down along the common, and slewed to a stop beside Charlie's wagon. The horn sounded again, this time the opening bars of “Dixie.” Three of the players on Charlie's team piled out, shouting his name: ex-high school standouts, or near-standouts, now mostly in their twenties, who as I look back at them probably would have gladly traded whatever they had—jobs, cars, wives, kids—to have those four glorious years to play over again with what they knew now.

At the time, I was enormously impressed by Charlie's teammates, legendary figures whose names—Stub Poulin, Royce St. Onge, the three Kittredge brothers from Lord Hollow—were embossed with my brother's on a dozen or so Northern Border Town League and five state championship trophies in the lobby case of the Common Academy. I would have given a lot to be allowed to accompany them to Memphremagog to see their playoff game. That, however, was out of the question. Both of my parents felt that certain mistakes had been made in rearing my brother, particularly in the latitude he had been given at an early age to pursue various independent interests—older girls, stock cars, hanging around the village with members of the Folding Chair Club—and both Mom and Dad were determined that these mistakes not be repeated with me.

“See you later, buddy,” Charlie said, punching me lightly in the shoulder. “Happy thirteenth.”

He jogged across the tracks and down the edge of the common to join his waiting team and I headed over to the
Monitor
for Production Night.

 

As I burst through the door (in those days it seemed impossible for me to enter a building at anything under a dead run), my father did not even glance up from his typewriter. As usual on Production Night he was pecking out a last-minute story, sitting in his shirtsleeves at right angles to the desk with the typewriter on the side panel and his back to the storefront-sized window with KINGDOM COUNTY MONITOR painted backward on the inside of the glass in chipped and faded black letters.

Dad pointed with one long typing finger toward the Whitlock at the back of the shop to indicate that the first run of the night was already set up and ready to go. To reach the press, however, I would have to pass close by Cousin Elijah Kinneson, Resolvèd and Welcome's ex-brother, who had run the linotype at the
Monitor
since the days of my grandfather.

“Late again, boy,” Cousin E said without interrupting his typing. “Where have you been? Scouting 'round the barbershop? Navigating 'round the village? Have you, boy? Eh? Have you?”

The long-handled overhead light on the linotype glinted fiercely off Elijah's green visor, and his inky gray fingers flew over the triple bank of red and blue and black keys as he continued to grill me. I'd always found my cousin's ability to type and talk simultaneously unsettling; but then, nearly everything about Elijah Kinneson unsettled me, from his short-cropped hair, the shade and approximate texture of the grayish lead filings sprinkled over the bottom of Dad's typecase drawers, to his holey shoes and the livid network of scars on his wrists and ankles where they'd been spattered with hot lead over the years.

So far as I was concerned Cousin Elijah was a splenetic old factotum who would be doing my father and the
Monitor
an inestimable service to retire and dedicate himself full-time to his duties as sexton and sometime lay preacher of the United Church. Yet as Dad frequently said, to give our cousin his due, he was close to indispensable around the shop. Besides being an expert linotyper who week in and week out produced a paper with about as many typographical errors as Harold Ross'
New Yorker
magazine, he could fix any machine on the premises from his own mind-bogglingly complex Mergenthaler linotype to the archaic hand-cranked addresser, and he had the uncanny ability to remember by volume number, date, page, and column the principal contents of every issue of the paper printed in the past thirty years.

Except for putting up with my ill-tempered cousin, I liked the hours I spent working for my father at the Monitor. I liked sweeping up around the machinery and ancient cabinets filled with tray upon tray of metal and wooden type. I liked the clean odors of well-oiled gears and printer's ink and fresh newsprint just off the Great Northern Paper Company boxcars on the mile-long Boston and Montreal freights. I liked running errands that took me to every nook of the village, from Judge Allen's musty chambers at the courthouse to the telegraph office in the B and M train station, and running off routine job-printing work on the small hand press Best of all, I liked Production Night, when I got to feed the nine-ton Whitlock.

The Whitlock could print four pages of our eight-page paper at the rapid clip of twelve hundred takes an hour. Then the run was turned over and printed on the opposite side. To print the entire twenty-four-hundred-issue paper required four separate runs of two hours each. I generally took the first shift, then my father took over for a two-hour stint, and Elijah completed the last two runs, usually finishing up well after midnight.

Stashing my autographed birthday baseball on a shelf above the machine, I sat on a high stool and fed one pristine white sheet after another into the inked rollers. Although I could see Elijah jawing from time to time at my father, I couldn't hear him over the clash and nimble of the press. Until quite recently I had liked to pretend that the gigantic Whitlock was the pirate ship of my great-great-great-grandfather, a Scottish freebooter, with me at the helm like a latter-day Jim Hawkins. Now, with the increased self-awareness of adolescence, I was happy just to glance out at the street from time to time and to be seen and (I supposed) admired, not without strong sentiments of envy, by any town boys who happened to look in at me.