A Stranger in the Kingdom (8 page)

Apart from the psychological comfort of knowing that your livestock, feed, and equipment were all housed safely under the same set of roofs, the practical advantage of this arrangement of attached buildings was that in deep winter when the mercury often dropped to forty degrees below zero, my ancestors had been able to complete their entire round of chores without once stepping outdoors. The corresponding danger, as Dad frequently pointed out to us, was that if a north-country barn were struck by lightning or caught fire from damp hay or faulty electrical wiring, the house generally burned to the ground along with it.

The best feature of the barn was a wonderful leaping brook trout, a full six feet long, that the deaf and mute Dog Cart Man had painted on its road side during my grandfather's time and refurbished several times since. Although the trout was now weathered to a mere outline of itself on the pearly gray, warped old boards, you could still make out its faint orange and blue spots and its handsome white-and-red fin edgings, and, if you knew it was there, the Royal Coachman wet fly fixed delicately in its hooked lower jaw.

To the right of the china cabinet was door number four. It opened onto a steep twisting staircase leading up to my loft bedroom. Early in my boyhood I had discovered that this staircase had remarkable acoustical properties. So long as the door at the bottom was open the slightest crack, I could hear every word spoken in the kitchen below almost as plainly as if I were still sitting on the woodbox, so that even after I was packed off to bed I felt a part of my folks' conversation. An additional distinction of my bedroom was that it contained one of those Vermont farmhouse anomalies called a sideways or coffin window—a narrow slanted window tucked at a forty-five degree angle between my bedroom roof and the roof of the kitchen below.

Set into the long north wall of the kitchen, at each end of the woodbox, were the fifth and sixth doors. One led nowhere at all. It was a false door painted onto the wall some years ago, at my mother's request, by the Dog Cart Man, exclusively for the purpose of balancing off the opposite door on the south wall. It had a painted black iron latch, painted wood panels, and painted iron hinges, and was my favorite door because it was the most unusual, and the subject of several family jokes.

The door on the other side of the woodbox gave onto a square wooden platform of hemlock boards, about ten feet on a side, from which a clothesline on a pulley ran out to an ancient snow apple tree at the foot of the ridge. On the platform, just to the right of the door, sat a circular iron cistern to which a tin eaves spout conducted rainwater off the back roof. Mom used the soft water from the cistern to wash dishes and to wash her lovely ash-blond hair, which she wore shoulder-length and of which she was secretly quite vain, in a girlish way. Underneath the platform dwelt the biggest hoptoad I have ever seen, which in a rare fillip of humor my father had named Zack, after the county prosecutor.

On the east wall of the kitchen were the last three doors. The first led to the pantry, that was a swinging door. The second led to the cellar—a fine big, dim, good-smelling room cool in summer and never really cold in winter, with an immaculate sandy floor, where Mom stored vegetables and preserves from her huge garden in the meadow across the road. The third door in the east wall led to what we referred to as “the other side of the house,” most of which had been used very little since the deaths of my grandparents, before I was born—the dining room and parlor and old downstairs bedroom, now a bathroom, and the stairs leading up to three bedrooms, my folks' and two vacant ones

This, then, was our kitchen, the hub of the house and the center of our family activities, and the way it looked when I was a boy growing up on the gool.

Reverend Andrews and Nathan arrived promptly at one, and we sat down to eat almost immediately. Our new minister, as it turned out, was very interested in Kingdom County and asked numerous questions about its history. This was right up my father's alley. Throughout the meal Dad held forth on Kingdom lore, to the growing exasperation of my brother, who professed to have no interest in local history at all. Still, Charlie restrained himself until Dad launched into his famous anecdote about Pliny Templeton and the yoke of red oxen.

“Pliny Templeton founded the Common Academy, which for many years was the only high school in Kingdom County,” my father was saying. “The same school you and James attend today, Nathan. He built it himself, from pink Scotch granite mined up on the ridge above this house. Now granite's an exceptionally heavy stone, so he hauled the blocks for the upper stories up an ingenious series of inclined ramps with a bull wheel powered by a yoke of Red Durham oxen that belonged to my grandfather. The trouble came when the building was nearly completed and the two oxen simply refused to come down. After a week during which every conceivable humane recourse, and some that weren't, had been resorted to by the best drovers in northern Vermont, even my grandfather agreed that the animals would have to be slaughtered and butchered there. Which is exactly what happened.”

My father took a sip of his after-dinner java. “There's no question,” he continued professorially, “about the importance of the ox's role in the civilization of this part of the country. If the West was tamed with the horse and the gun, northern New England was settled with the ox and the two-headed ax. Just last spring I wrote an open letter in the
Monitor
recommending in pretty strong terms that the ox replace that sneaking usurper, the Morgan horse, as the official state animal. The ox is superior to the horse in every way.”

Here was the opening my brother had been waiting for.

“Reverend,” he said, “there aren't two working yokes of oxen left in the Kingdom today. If oxen were really superior to horses, local farmers and loggers would still be working with them. Right, Jimmy?”

“On the contrary, James,” my father said, to the minister's puzzlement, “today, everything is hurry hurry hurry. Hardly anybody cares how well-a job can be done anymore, only how quickly it can be accomplished. Admittedly, the horse is quicker than the ox. Thus its current popularity. But the ox is more patient. The ox, with its cunning cloven hoof, is more surefooted on ice and snow crust. It's much more resistant to every obscure disease that comes down the pike, hardier in the deep cold and immeasurably more intelligent. The truth is that there's really no comparison at all between the two animals.”

“That's right, Jim, there isn't,” my brother said vehemently, and began extolling the myriad virtues of horses—about which he knew no more than my father knew about oxen, since so far as I knew neither of them had ever owned a single representative of either species.

As my mortified mother served dessert, the argument intensified. My brother informed me that “stubborn as an ox” was far from an idle figure of speech. My father countered by letting me know in no uncertain terms that horses in general, and especially that Johnny-come-lately the Morgan horse, were a breed of overrated parvenus. By then they were calling me “mister” and “mister man” and I was about as embarrassed as I could ever remember being.

Nathan, sitting beside me, seemed bored by the debate, he hadn't said two words during the entire meal, and neither had I, for that matter. But I thought that Reverend Andrews looked amused. Probably he felt that it was his obligation as our new family minister to intervene before the quarrel ended in bloodshed, though, because when he finally managed to get a word in edgewise he changed the subject.

“How about that interview I promised you, editor? Now that I've totally disgraced myself by eating enough of this wonderful meal for any three men, I'm braced for the ordeal.”

My father smiled. “I promise not to make it much of an ordeal. What do you say we walk and visit at the same time? It's too nice an afternoon to sit around inside.”

“It's too nice to waste it all talking,” my brother said, giving Nathan a friendly tap on the shoulder. “Come on, buddy, I'll show you something out back of the barn you'll be interested in.”

It was a lovely afternoon, more like mid-May than late April, and along the gool the speckled gray snow was melting fast. I elected to tag along with Dad and Reverend Andrews, in hopes of finding out more about the minister and Nat. My father took no notes as they visited, but I knew he would remember everything the minister said verbatim.

“How long has your family lived in Canada, Reverend?”

The minister got out a Lucky Strike. “Well, my great-great-grandfather came north from Mississippi on the Underground Railroad about 1840 and established himself in Sorel, Quebec, as a bootmaker. His son and grandson were both master cobblers, and my father was an enlisted man in the Canadian infantry during the First World War.”

“Is he still living?”

“No, he was killed in the fighting at Verdun when I was four years old. My mother died when I was eight, and I was packed off by my grandfather to St. Gilbert-on-the-Lake, which is a Presbyterian boarding school just outside Toronto. As you know from my resume, I took undergraduate studies in history at the University of Toronto and received my divinity degree from the Presbyterian seminary affiliated with that university.”

“How did you rank as a student?”

“I was salutatorian of my undergraduate college and first in my class at divinity school.”

My father, who had passed up a chance to attend Dartmouth and gone directly into the newspaper business instead, was never one to be much impressed by anyone else's academic credentials. “What prompted you to go into the ministry, Reverend?”

Reverend Andrews laughed. “A bargain. I was inclined to pursue a military career, like my father, but my grandfather the bootmaker agreed to educate me on the condition that I promise to become a minister. He didn't have any objection to my enlisting as a chaplain after I got my divinity degree, so we were able to effect a compromise. But the military would have, been my own first choice. I was never so proud as the day I received my RCAF commission. I only regretted that my father wasn't alive to be there.”

“Your résumé mentioned that you served on the front in both France and Korea, and that you were decorated more than once for bravery.”

The minister laughed. “Almost anyone who was that close to the fighting was decorated. The fact is, editor, I liked nearly everything about military life.”

“But you decided to give it up.”

“Yes. After fifteen years of charging all over the globe, I wanted a more stable situation for my son. At the time of my decision, I'd been away from Nathan, with the U.N. force in Korea, for more than a year. His mother died from a cancer when he was just three, and I wanted to know our son as something other than long-distance correspondent. Nathan was living with his widowed grandmother, his mother's mother, in Montreal. I felt he was at the age when he needed a full-time father. Under the circumstances, resigning my commission wasn't all that difficult.”

We were approaching the covered bridge upriver from the B and M railroad trestle. The river was flowing loud and muddy with snow runoff, and I mentioned to Reverend Andrews that the fly-fishing was especially good in this stretch later in the spring, but rather than shout over the noise, my father turned back along the gool the way we'd come.

“Why did you choose to move to the States, Reverend? There must have been opportunities for you to find a church and settle down in Canada.”

“There were, but they all happened to be in or near large cities. I wasn't particularly interested in transplanting my son to yet another city—so here we are, for better or for worse. Which reminds me. There's something I've been meaning to ask you. In church this morning I remarked that half again as many families sat on the left—my right, actually—side of the aisle. Is there some reason for that?”

“Sixteen years ago, Reverend, the old Congregational Church and several other local landmarks burned to the ground in what's since become known as the Great Fire of '36. That's a story in itself, but the upshot of it is that after the smoke cleared, local Congregationalists and Presbyterians decided to unite. Their decision was more the result of economic necessity than interdenominational zeal, since the Congos couldn't afford to rebuild and the Presbyterians had dwindled to the point where they were having difficulties just paying the minister's pittance of a salary. Even so, it took a solid year of haggling back and forth before the two congregations would agree to hold a joint service and share one minister. And then, each faction insisted on maintaining its own board of directors, and by unspoken agreement most of the Congregationalists sat on one side of the aisle and most of the Presbyterians on the other. Of course this arrangement displaced a number of Presbyterians from pews their ancestors had occupied for generations. But it was deemed preferable to full integration. A few years ago the two boards finally merged, with the stipulation that the minister would always be an ordained Presbyterian clergyman, but the seatings have remained the same.”

“You and your family sit with the Congregationalists?”

“We sit where the Kinnesons have always sat.”

“I see.”

Reverend Andrews smoked thoughtfully for a minute. “If you don't mind my presuming to say so, Mr. Kinneson, this tradition strikes me as rather pointless.”

“Oh, it's worse than pointless, it's downright asinine. Every minister for the past fifteen years has tried to put a stop to it.”

“And?”

“Not one of them's gotten to first base. I'm not telling you how to do your job, Reverend, but if I were you I wouldn't waste an hour of my time on that one. In my opinion you'll have much better luck sticking to your youth groups and fund-raising.”

The minister flipped the stub of his cigarette a good ten feet out into the meadow and smiled. “When in Rome,” he said. “Where do you suppose your older son spirited my boy off to?”