Northern Borders (33 page)

 

A heavy layer of fog lay over Lost Nation when my grandfather rousted me out at dawn the next morning. Day after the family reunion or not, there were still chores to do. While Gramp grained and watered his young stock, I cleaned the barn gutters, and fed my grandmother's hens. Then I headed down the Hollow road toward Maiden Rose's to get Liz's pearl-handled revolver. The fog above the small east branch of the Upper Kingdom River was very thick. It felt more like fall than midsummer, and the mist enhanced the silence of the Hollow after the bustle of the reunion the day before. It reminded me of the fairgrounds the day after the fair closed, or Cousin Clarence's empty baseball diamond a few hours after a big game.

Usually Maiden Rose was up and around when I arrived for morning chores. Frequently I encountered her weeding her flowers or patrolling her dooryard or lane, bent over on her two canes like a witch in a fairy tale. Today there was no sign of her, just a wisp of woodsmoke from her kitchen chimney to tell me she was all right and had made her usual morning fire to take the chill off the air and boil her tea kettle.

She was sitting at the applewood table, exactly where Liz and I had left her the night before. She was still wearing her magician's gown, and I had no idea whether she had gone to bed the night before or not. Before her on the table the shoebox of April's letters sat in exactly the same spot. Beside it lay Liz's revolver, the pearly handle gleaming softly in the thin, misty light.

“Sit down, Austen,” Rose said in a voice devoid of everything but a kind of weary determination. “No doubt you've come for that.”

She looked at Liz's revolver, and I nodded.

“So, Austen,” Rose said, her voice still weary yet now also fierce and certain, “no doubt you pity your great-aunt. An old woman scarcely able to creep up to visit a grave. Do you pity me?”

“No, Aunt,” I lied.

She seemed scarcely to hear what I said. “You've never known utter loneliness, Austen. I hope you never will. You can't imagine it.” Suddenly Rose looked straight at me. “Did you ever hear a wild goose that's lost its mate? I have. I've heard it circle and circle in the night, calling in vain. I've seen the survivor of my father's team of Morgans after its harness-mate of twenty years died, heard it nicker for its companion morning and night. The poor dumb beast wasn't even aware of what it missed, only of the missing, the loneliness, the desolation. The utter desolation.”

She was quiet for a moment and so was I. But then in some instinctive moment of understanding beyond my years, I said, “Then how can you blame Liz for going back to her first husband?”

And Maiden Rose looked at me across the table, and nodded grimly, as she had sometimes done when, after an especially trying lesson in grammar or long division, I had finally mastered a hard concept. And in a haunted flat voice devoid of all pity and self-pity, she said, “I don't.”

 

Of course, neither Maiden Rose's nor Liz's story ended with the last Kittredge family reunion. To everyone's astonishment but her own, Rose seemed to undergo a personal renaissance. She auctioned off her farm implements and much of her furniture, rented a small house in the village that had admired yet secretly censured her for fifty years, and dwelt there well on into her eighties. Bent over almost into a full circle, she nonetheless volunteered several afternoons a week at the village library, tutored kids after school in every subject from first-grade reading through high-school Latin and algebra, and wrote a series of scathing broadsides for the American
Shakespeare Society's quarterly publication, roundly denouncing the pernicious theory, then just beginning to come into vogue, that Edward de Vere, the Sixteenth Earl of Oxford, had secretly written the great bard's plays. She visited the Home Place only to tend April's grave. The fields continued to grow back up to brush. The empty house sagged on its foundation. The barn leaned off away from the hillside, the way my great-aunt herself was leaning off toward the earth. She died at ninety, during my last year in college, and was buried beside her beloved companion in the family graveyard overlooking the abandoned old farm. “Together at Last.”

Over the years I have come to admire greatly this unyielding woman, who led a hard, lonely, useful life and accommodated change only enough ultimately to achieve her private triumph over it, through her great, lasting love.

Of course it was my grandfather who regularly checked on Rose after she moved to the village, and brought her out to visit April's grave. For a foundling and a misanthrope, he had, it seemed to me, as much staying power as any other member of the family, including my grandmother and Maiden Rose herself—though his true origin before appearing in the California orange crate on the stoop of the Home Place remained as much a mystery to me as my grandmother's preoccupation with all matters Egyptian. If, as my little aunts had speculated, Maiden Rose knew more about the orange crate than she'd ever acknowledged, it was a secret she took to her mutual grave with April, where it lies buried with her to this day.

“Who lives here?” my grandfather continued to say to me each time we approached the Farm dooryard.

“Who does?”

“The meanest old bastard in Lost Nation Hollow,” he replied, and his harsh, ironical pleasure in our ritual and in contemplating his status as an interloper in the Kittredge family never dwindled.

Surprisingly enough, Great-Aunt Liz did scout up old Hartley, her first husband and one true love, and yoke back up with him. They bought a small horse ranch in northwestern Montana, where they lived together for fifteen years. I don't think that they were particularly happy. I visited Liz there when I was in college, and though she hadn't changed at all, Hartley seemed as much of a
millstone to her then as ever. He was a small, rail-thin, dissatisfied, sour, sharp-tongued character, who, though he no longer visited the cathouses, drank a pint of cheap blackberry brandy a day, and seemed not to appreciate any of Liz's many wonderful qualities, yet was all too ready to point out her shortcomings. Even so, she continued to wear the ring he'd given her, then and for the rest of her life, and obviously loved him straight through to the bad end Maiden Rose had predicted for him, in the lunatic asylum where he spent the final year of his life in a state of complete dementia.

Liz never visited Lost Nation or Vermont again. Up and down the Hollow, the abandoned farms grew back to puckerbrush. The fields reverted to woods, the woods to something akin to original wilderness. In 1972 the Home Place collapsed under a heavy March snowstorm. The barn where Rose had performed her Shakespeare plays went down the following winter. But Liz didn't want to hear about any of it.

The last time I visited her, on her eightieth birthday in 1982, she was living near two of her sons, in a sort of old-age boarding home in Butte, and a great favorite with everyone there. As she did each year on her birthday, she got out her pearl-handled revolver and put on an impressive marksmanship exhibit.

“So,” I said to her when it was time for me to leave, “I know you don't like questions. Will you answer just one for me?”

“It depends which one, how I feel about it at the moment, and how you put it. If it's about your grandfather's true origin, I simply don't know. If it's about Maiden Rose and April, we both already know the answer, and now let the dead bury their dead. If your question's about me, I might answer it.”

“It's about you. Did you rob the bank?”

“Listen to what you hear, Austen. What did I tell you the evening I first met you?”

“You told me you'd considered it.”

“What did I tell you the next day? About Foster. My fourth husband.”

“Foster James?”

“No other. What did I say about him?”

I wracked my mind. Then it came to me. “That he was Frank
James's great-grandson and that he'd been in some trouble with the law.”

“Exactly. You never asked what the nature of the trouble was, Austen. Listen to what you hear, and ask the right question.”

“What was the nature of the trouble?”

“Why, he'd just gotten out of federal prison, man. Where he'd spent the better part of the past fifteen years. You tell me what for.”

I began to laugh. “Bank robbery,” I said. “But where did he bury the boodle before his heart attack? If not up at Fort Kittredge?”

“What makes you think he didn't bury it there? Say under the windmill?”

I looked at Liz and she smiled and her pale blue eyes flashed triumphantly. “What,” she said, “do you suppose I was out doing that morning of the reunion, before I rode up to the graveyard with full saddlebags and caused that hollering diversion about the condition of Foster's grave? And what did you suppose that old coyote Hartley and I used to support ourselves with on our horse ranch? Recovering the boodle was the whole point of my venturing back to the family reunion, man. By then I figured enough time had gone by so I could get away with it. Listen to what you hear, Austen's grandson, Austen. Listen to what you hear, and then you'll be heard from. Now go catch your plane. And don't say good-bye, and don't look back to wave because I'm going inside, and won't be here anyway.”

And when, contrary to Liz's injunction, I did glance up at the porch, once, quickly, she wasn't.

 

When I first set out to record these recollections of growing up with my grandparents and our extended family in Lost Nation, I wanted to discover for myself what was important enough to me from those times to have stayed fresh and clear in my mind down through the years. What was special about Lost Nation in the late 1940s and 1950s? The answer, of course, is the people who lived there, then and earlier, their lives and loves and secret mysteries, most of which, like my grandfather's origin, will remain mysteries for all time to come.

Strangely enough, it is Rose's plays, so hateful to me at the time,
that I seem to remember most frequently and clearly from the annual Kittredge family reunions. Not, heaven knows, that there wasn't drama enough in the ongoing saga of the family itself, and high and low comedy and tragedy and noble sacrifice as well. But somehow it all seemed to be encapsulated in the most spirited summer Shakespeare in Lost Nation Hollow.

Here Rose is again, now raging as Lear, now boasting as Falstaff, now agonizing over the bitter ironies of human existence as Hamlet. And once again I see her as Prospero, shattering the swirly-colored glass walking stick, while a hundred people sit silent as ghosts in the natural amphitheater, spellbound by the magical make-believe world fleetingly created despite all of the hardship and loss and despair on that remote, soon-to-be-abandoned farm in northern Vermont, which held its own secret dramas of the heart, overseen by the ever-changing yet unchanged granite hills and the graveyard, where for nearly two centuries Kittredges had been laid to rest in the final family reunion, together at last.

9

In August of my seventeenth year, at the height of the prolonged drought and unprecedented heat wave in Kingdom County that we would later come to call the season of the cluster flies, my Grandmother Kittredge suffered a heart attack. As heart attacks go, it did not seem to be a very severe one. But there was no doubt in Gram's mind, or mine, or that of my Great-Aunt Helen, Gram's younger sister visiting from Boston, about what was happening.

I ran for the phone to call the local ambulance in Kingdom Common. Old Josie, my grandmother's new housekeeper, ran out of the kitchen wringing her apron and calling upon the divine intervention of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Aunt Helen started to run to the door to call for my grandfather, who had just left for the woods and might still be within hailing distance. But my stricken grandmother called for my great-aunt to come back inside instantly and unlace her
corset stays so that she could breathe easier while sustaining the attack.

There was, however, a problem. The strings of my grandmother's corset turned out to be bound so tightly that Aunt Helen, who I doubt ever wore a corset in her life, couldn't get them unfastened.

“Austen!” my great-aunt cried. “Quick! Fetch your grandmother's sewing shears.”

The sewing shears were in Egypt, and I hoped against hope I could locate them there. I had never been good at locating things my grandmother and my various great and little aunts sent me to fetch, beginning with my grandfather, and I was desperately afraid that before I could lay my hand on the shears, my grandmother would expire.

Fortunately, I immediately spotted the shiny handles sticking out of Gram's sewing basket. When I rushed back into the kitchen with them, my grandmother calmly reminded me not to run with a pair of scissors in my hand, then in the same steady voice enjoined my frantic aunt not to destroy the corset by cutting the strings.

“There's no need to spoil a perfectly serviceable corset, Helen,” Gram said. “Take your time and unlace the strings properly.”

Unlace the strings properly! For all we knew to the contrary, my thrifty-minded grandmother was expending her last breath to issue this measured edict.

Abiah Kittredge was no easy woman to defy. But this might very well be a matter of life and death, and for once, my Great-Aunt Helen was not about to cave in to her strong-willed older sister.

“Don't move a muscle, Ab,” Aunt Helen said. “You haven't any need for a corset in the first place and you know it.”

Whereupon, with great resoluteness, my aunt cut away the back of my grandmother's black blouse and slit the corset strings with half a dozen rapid snips while Gram shook her head in dismay.

Later my great-aunt claimed that what my grandmother actually said just before the fateful action with the sewing shears was, “Helen, there's no need to spoil an
eight-dollar
corset.” Regardless, the corset strings were cut; my grandmother did seem able to breathe easier; and the ambulance arrived as quickly as could be
expected, considering that we lived fifteen miles from the village over winding steep roads, the last five miles of which still consisted of a one-lane dirt trace no better in 1959 than in 1948, when I'd first come to Lost Nation to live with my grandparents.