Northern Borders (30 page)

“Yes, she is,” Liz said soberly. “You drive very well, by the way.”

“I don't have my license yet.”

“Neither do I,” Liz laughed. “And I've driven all over the country without one. You and I have a lot in common, Austen. We're going to be close compadres, my boy.”

 

Reunion day dawned clear as a bell, a beautiful blue summer morning in the hills of northern Vermont. My grandmother had been up since long before dawn, working in the summer kitchen preparing for the huge midday picnic after the family grave-cleaning. Klee, Freddi, and my grandmother's jovial younger sister from Boston, my Great-Aunt Helen, were helping Gram and laughing at Aunt Helen's irreverent jokes. My grandfather, for his part, had gone to the woods immediately after barn chores, as he did on all family holidays.

Right after breakfast my grandmother sent me down to the Home Place to ask Maiden Rose if one o'clock was a good time for the picnic dinner, and whether she needed any help from my little aunts or me. When I arrived, Rose was transplanting some purple pansies growing in the center of the big millstone that served as her porch step. She was bent down so low she didn't need to stoop to dig up the flowers. I was actually afraid that she might topple over onto the millstone face-first, and offered to help, but she shooed me away.

“One o'clock is fine,” she said. “No, I don't want the nieces here yet. They'd just be in the way. Have you seen Liz this morning? She seems to have sneaked off someplace.”

I hadn't.

“Do you know your lines for the play tonight?”

I said I believed I did.

“I hope so,” Rose said. “It wouldn't do to forget them in front of half the county. Your father never forgot his lines. I could trust him with a substantial part by the time he was your age.”

“Well,” I said.

“What did Liz say about me yesterday evening when you fetched her up from the village?”

“Nothing. We talked about Montana.”

“Your Great-Aunt Maiden Rose knows better than that, Austen. What did she say about me? About the family? Is she going to stay on?”

“I hope so,” I said. “I like her a lot. Maybe it would be nice for you, too.”

My aunt picked up her two canes and straightened up as far as she could. “You don't know much about loneliness, do you, Austen? Not yet. I hope you never have to find out.”

“Are you lonely, Aunt?”

“Yes,” she said without a speck of self-pity, indeed with a certain terrible, grim satisfaction. “Since April Mae Swanson died I've not had an unlonely hour in my life. Oh, I hold no brief for myself. I've been a hard woman, and I know it. But not unlonely. Now I don't even know whether I can drag myself up to clean April's grave this morning.”

“I'll do that for you, Aunt.”

“Don't you touch it!” she said. “Don't you lay a finger on it.”

“I'm sorry you're lonely, Aunt. I'll help you up to the graveyard.”

“You needn't trouble yourself about it,” she said. “You needn't condescend to feel sorry for
me
, boy. I won't have it.”

Then why did you say you were lonely?
I wanted to shout. But I didn't.

“Aunt, would you not be lonely if Liz stayed on in Lost Nation?”

“It wouldn't matter in the least one way or the other.”

Rose returned to her pansies, and I returned to the Farm, uneasy about what my great-aunt had told me. How, I wondered, could she manage to get through another winter, even with my help? I could cut and stack her wood and fill her woodbox morning and night, as I had for two or three years. But in her condition could she even fetch a stick from the woodbox to the stove? Get to the outhouse? I didn't know.

By nine o'clock, family members had begun to arrive. Dad appeared around nine-thirty, and he and I immediately set up the horseshoe stakes behind the barn. Cousin Clarence, armed with his camera, set up a two-o'clock family reunion picture and a two-thirty ball game. From his store, Clarence had brought up boxes of hot dogs, big trays of hamburger, cartons of rolls and potato chips and soda. Cousin Whiskeyjack appeared in a clean pair of denim overalls. Preacher John Wesleyan arrived in his black Sunday suit.

“Where's your grandfather, boy?” Preacher JW demanded.

“Working up in the woods.”

“Aye,” John Wesleyan said. “He may be a blasphemer and he may be a nonbeliever, but he's a hard worker. I'll say that for him. In the end, though, hard work is just another vanity.”

“I'm surprised you're willing to participate in all this frivolity today, Preacher JW,” my Great-Aunt Helen said with a look at me. “Aren't family reunions just another vanity?”

“Nay, nay,” JW said with a good-natured grin. “I like to say grace at the noon and evening meals, ma'am. And I like the vittles!”

Lately John Wesleyan had become so stiff from his own battle with arthritis that my grandfather had to carry his saw and ax both to and from the woods for him, and the work he did there amounted to scarcely anything. More than once JW had confided to me that Gramp was as good-hearted an old devil as any he'd ever met. But then he'd shake his head and chuckle and announce that no man could be saved by good works alone.

What about Cousin Whiskeyjack, Aunt Helen wondered with great innocence, rolling her eyes at me. Did Preacher JW hope for a glorious salvation for his moonshining brother? Not by a long shot, JW said with grim pleasure.

How about Aunt Liz, I asked, trying to go Aunt Helen one better. Did she have a chance at the Great Beyond?

Preacher John Wesleyan's eyes twinkled. “Liz will take heaven by storm with her pearl-handled revolver,” he said unexpectedly. “Or trick St. Peter into looking the other way whilst she slips past unnoticed. Liz is all right, boy. She's all right.”

By ten o'clock most of the family had assembled. Armed with trowels and grass clippers and sickles, and with Preacher JW brandishing a great old scythe like the Grim Reaper himself, we all filed
up to the Kittredge family graveyard on the knoll above Maiden Rose's Home Place for the annual reunion-moming grave-cleaning.

To my great relief, Maiden Rose was there ahead of us. Greetings were exchanged in somber tones. “Cousin. Aunt. Brother.”

It was not a large cemetery. In all, there were one hundred and twenty-two stones, most matching the names in the old family Bible in the attic. Here lay almost all the Kittredges who had not died Away, on the other side of the hills, and I could feel their presence, grim and disapproving and eternal. The stones were granite or slate, and some were weathered so faint you could hardly read the inscriptions.

We began with Preacher JW offering up a short prayer asking that our grave-cleaning efforts be blessed, and praying for the souls of the departed. With the entire family working, it took no more than an hour to clean the graveyard and burn up the debris, and for the grown-ups, it was a surprisingly lighthearted task. No doubt the annual grave-cleaning expanded the scope of the reunion by temporarily reuniting us living family members—so few now—with our bygone ancestors. Relatives who hadn't seen each other for a year chatted pleasantly as they grubbed up encroaching sumac and sapling chokecherries and gray birches, clipped and raked, picked up dead limbs from the row of big maples at the back of the graveyard, where Maiden Rose's sugar bush began. As we worked, Preacher John Wesleyan led us in a few solemn old hymns: “Rock of Ages,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and so forth; and I thought what a strange sight we would have been for a stranger to come upon, singing together as we moved slowly through the remote little cemetery from the graves to the smoky bonfire, as intent upon our hundred-year-old ritual as ancient Druids.

A few of the more recent graves still had faded evergreen grave blankets on them from the past winter. These we removed and burned, leaving the graveyard once again neatly clipped and cared for, our visible link with the past. I offered to help Maiden Rose trim the grass on April's grave, but she waved me away with her clippers. She did let me drag away the balsam blanket she'd woven last fall to protect the grave from the fierce winter storms. Then she transplanted her purple pansies into the border. Rose's name and
birthday were inscribed below April's on the same stone. Only the date of Rose's death had been left blank. Below their names was the simple legend, “Together at Last.”

While Rose was working on the grave she would someday share with April, no one else ventured close. The ultimate privacy of their love for one another, whatever its exact nature, was respected and honored, like the misanthropy of my grandfather and my grandmother's unaccountable fixation with all matters Egyptian, and Liz's wild ways. “Liz is who she is. Maiden Rose is who she is. Old Austen is who he is.” The names were interchangeable, but I must have heard the sentiment expressed a hundred times during my boyhood in the Nation.

I was commissioned to stay on for a few minutes to make sure the bonfire was completely out. As the rest of the family members moved singly and in pairs and small groups back down the hill, Rose creeping along in the rear on her two canes, solitary in her impenetrable loneliness, a figure on horseback burst out of the woods above the sugar bush. A figure in cowboy boots, a fringed vest, and a western hat. It was Liz, on Henry David, and when she reached the gate of the graveyard, she leaped off the horse, threw the reins over the iron pickets, and began to shout, her eyes blazing.

“Just as I expected. The only grave that hasn't been properly tended up here is the only one that matters to me. Damn that sister of mine for neglecting it and damn the rest of the family for not having the grit to stand up to her.”

She was pointing at a leaning slate stone near the rear fence of the cemetery. This was the stone of her fourth husband, Foster James, who had died in Lost Nation just before Liz had gone West in 1941, sixteen years ago.

“I ought to get out my pearl-handled sidekick and hurry these so-called family members on their way,” Liz hollered, starting for the saddlebags on Henry David. She was really roaring now, and the departing relatives were looking apprehensively back over their shoulders at her—all but Maiden Rose, who continued down toward the Home Farm, one small step at a time, bent over into a cramped letter “C” on her canes.

Liz came striding up toward me. “Come, Austen,” she said,
grabbing a pair of clippers. “You and I will hoe out old Foster's grave ourselves.”

As she passed me, she winked and said, under her breath, “Diversion.”

Then she was roaring again, which she continued to do until we reached her fourth husband's grave. What under the sun was going on, I wondered. Foster James's grave seemed as neatly trimmed as any of the others. But Aunt Liz set to work with the clippers, meticulously cutting and pulling any slip of grass that had escaped the other cleaners, and as she worked, she talked steadily. “Husbands!” she said. “Number one I married at sixteen, shortly after I arrived in Montana the first time. His name was Hartley Stone, which was what his heart was made of, I reckon. And that's odd, because he was the only one of the bunch I ever really loved, even though he turned out to be a skirt chaser. Off to the cathouses in Butte and Helena every time I turned my back, and then he blamed me because we didn't have any kids. Wanted sons, he said. Well, mister man, I've had four sons since, all big strong capable smart fellas at that, like all the Kittredge men. So I reckon old Stony had that part of it wrong.”

Liz gave a vicious yank on a half-hidden clump of witchgrass rooted in under her fourth husband's slate marker. “As I was saying, I'd had it with Stony. I put up with his catting longer than I should have but after three years of it, I walked out. I'd accumulated some animals, which I loaded onto a boxcar. I had a pregnant Morgan riding horse, several steers, a couple of hogs, some chickens, a goat, two mated geese, two turkeys. I lugged 'em right back to Vermont with me on that boxcar. Arrived in the middle of the night during a January blizzard.

“‘Sister, I hope you've learned your lesson.' That was how Rose greeted me when I arrived.

“‘What lesson?' I said.

“‘About men,' Rose said. Never welcomed me home or spoke any kind word. Just told me she hoped I'd learned my lesson about men, damn her spinster tongue.”

Liz stood up and surveyed her fourth husband's grave critically. “Well, obviously I hadn't. I was pretty sure old Hartley Stone would
write and beg for me to come back, and for several weeks I swore when he did I wouldn't, and then I softened and said I would. But the son of a bitch never did write, Austen. I was heartbroken. So I went out and married number two, on the rebound. He was a good-looking and thoroughly good-for-nothing fella from Pond in the Sky. He was the laziest man I ever met. Born lazy and had a relapse, I used to say. One day I told him to make himself useful and take a broom out to the barn and brush down the cobwebs. That was the last I ever saw of him. So far as I know, number two's still down at the barn, brushing cobwebs.”

Liz chuckled. “Left Vermont again. Worked as a cook at a lumber camp, nurse assistant in a hospital for the insane, housekeeper on a big estate in Connecticut. Drifted West a second time. Had my first two boys and acquired a third husband, in that order. Number three was a harmless-enough fella. Nice guy, actually. But I was leasing a small horse ranch and he was terribly afraid of horses. Finally a horse kicked him in the head and killed him on the spot. Had two more kids by then, and along waltzes husband number four, Mr. Foster James—the great-grandson of Frank James, Jesse's brother, or so Foster claimed.”

Frank James's great-grandson—this was almost as good as Liz robbing the bank.

“Was he really Frank James's great-grandson?” I asked.

“Who knows? He said he was. That's all I can tell you. That, and that he was a slick, smart customer. A gambler from over in Great Falls, somewhat older than me, with a history of trouble with the law himself. Wore a necktie every day of his life, Austen, just like my father over there, the gentleman farmer.” Liz gestured at Grampa Gleason's tall pink granite stone on the far side of the family graveyard. “Anyway, I brought Foster East with me the last time I came, sixteen years ago, and I don't know but what the hoorah over the bank robbery a week later was too much for him. All those F.B.I. agents swarming out here to pester me, every day, every day. Foster just keeled over in the barnyard one afternoon. That was that. That and that Rose insisted we plant him off here in the back away from her precious family like some sort of outcast.