On Kingdom Mountain (18 page)

On their way down the mountain, the two friends continued to speak of lofty matters. “One of these evenings, Henry, I must show you my Kingdom Mountain Bible,” the Duchess said. “I have not scrupled, you will discover, to revise a good deal of the New Testament as well as the Old. The four Gospels, as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are pretty well marked up in my Kingdom Mountain Bible. First I eliminated from the conversation of the young schoolteacher—for I have no doubt that he was no nail driver but, with his great love of hearing himself talk, a schoolmaster—all references to Hell, of which there are many in King James's corrupt version. Hell is a
vicious notion put in Jesus's head by his lunatic cousin, John Baptist. John Baptist was a very bad influence, sir. Here comes he, rampaging out of the wilderness in a hair shirt, gobbling locusts, citing wicked old Isaiah, and putting all kinds of grandiose notions in his young relation's head. I have no more use for John Baptist than for Sneaking Saul. Ha! Watch out for that hobblebush, Henry. It tries to trip me up every time I come this way.”

“You mean King Saul, Miss Jane? My mother used to read me the story of King Saul and how the boy David soothed him with his harp.”

“That is a different and altogether more appealing Saul. I mean the tax collector who changed his name to Paul after he was struck by lightning on his way to Damascus and rendered daft. I refuse to call him Paul. Sneaking Saul he was, Sneaking Saul he remains. Once a tax collector, always a tax collector, Mr. Satterfield.”

Partway down the trail, they stopped at a spring bubbling out of the mountainside beneath a tall yellow birch tree growing on top of a pink granite boulder. The upper roots of the birch reached down over the boulder, clasping its sides in an iron embrace. As they drank the icy spring water from their cupped hands, Miss Jane told Henry that she could detect in it the faint wintergreen flavor of yellow birch bark. Sitting at the foot of the boulder, they continued their conversation.

“What are your thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount, Miss Jane?”

“It is unimpeachable as it stands. In my Kingdom Mountain Bible, I only tacked on a few womanly sentiments that no man could be expected to think of. Whatever else he was, Jesus, you know, was very much a man's man. The Bible needs a woman's touch here and there. I added, for instance, ‘Live each day not as if it is your last, but as though it is the last
day of the lives of the people you meet.' And ‘Cherish the miracle that is you.' Also, I thought it a good idea to include ‘To immerse oneself in the natural world is to share a universal thread with every living thing.' Jesus, you see, was far more interested in people than in nature or animals. It was quite wrong of him to curse the poor barren fig tree. And to send those innocent hogs to their death over the cliff! Come to think of it, I doubt he would have been much fazed by the fate of the hammerheaded mule this morning. Every generation should have its own Bible, Henry. Thomas Jefferson was revising the New Testament along somewhat similar lines to mine when he died.”

“I wonder if our friend the high sheriff will come calling about the mule?”

“Not if he knows what's good for him,” she said, smiling.

“You have a wonderful set of teeth, Miss Jane.”

The Duchess, who had taken excellent care of her teeth all her life and was quite vain of them, was pleased and amused.

“And a lovely complexion, Miss Jane.”

In fact, Henry could not help thinking, when he looked at Miss Jane's lovely honey-colored face, of the golden Treasure of Kingdom Mountain.

“I suppose it is the Indian blood in my veins. The tawny part, I mean. My mother, you know, though she had no Indian ways at all, was the last of the full-blooded Memphremagog Abenakis.”

“And, if I may say so, Miss Jane, an excellent pair of gams.”

“Gams, Mr. Satterfield? What under the sun do you mean?”

“Your l-e-g-s, Miss Jane. What a stunning wingwalker you would have been.”

“Why,” she said, turning quite pink and standing up, “they take me where I wish to go, I suppose. You are as bold as Thomas Tubberty. If I didn't know better, Henry, I might suppose that you were sparking me. But now let us direct our l-e-g-s to hie us down to the home place. If the sheriff is imprudent enough to come calling, I wish to be there to greet him accordingly.”

I
T WAS NOT
the sheriff of Kingdom County who showed up at the home place that afternoon, but Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers in Eben's new dark Buick, appearing, through the haze, as spectral as a hearse. In the smoky air the mountaintop seemed to float just above the home place, as it sometimes did on chilly fall mornings when a thick band of fog rising from the river obscured all but the treeless summit. Even Eben found the levitating mountain unsettling. He wondered if the illusion, which was also visible on certain icy winter mornings, might put off prospective investors and skiers.

Miss Jane and Henry met the visitors in the barnyard, Jane carrying Lady Justice. “We'd like a word in private with Mr. Satterfield, cousin,” Eben Kinneson Esquire said.

“Mr. Satterfield had nothing to do with my little skirmish with the mule this morning, cousin,” Miss Jane replied. “That was entirely my doing.”

“We did not come out here about a dead mule,” Eben said. “We wish to consult with Mr. Satterfield on a purely professional matter.”

“Oh, Miss Jane is no stranger to my profession,” Henry said, slightly bemused. “Consult away, gentlemen.”

“It's this confounded drought, Mr. Satterfield,” George Quinn said. “Last night the Reverend here had a dream.”

“A very foreboding dream,” Prof Chadburn said. “Tell them, Reverend.”

“I was fishing in the Kingdom River,” the Reverend said, though it was well known that he was no fisherman, “when seven kine, fat-fleshed and well-favored, came up out of the pool below the High Falls behind the hotel. And seven other kine came after them, poor and ill-favored and lean-fleshed. And the lean and ill-favored kine did devour the seven fat kine.”

Miss Jane had always regarded the Reverend as a pompous moron. Now she was sure of it.

“Horsefeathers,” she said. “It was that half an angel food cake you packed away for a midnight snack, Reverend. You might better have flung it out the window to your ill-favored kine.”

“I should think that you, Miss Jane, of all people, would appreciate a prophetic dream,” the Reverend said in an injured tone. “The point is, if the drought is to end we need intervention. That's why we've come to consult with Mr. Satterfield. You are a rainmaker, are you not?”

“Oh,” Henry said with a dismissive wave, “I don't make rain so much as I follow it. I don't reckon that I ever slap
made
it rain in my life. Sometimes I have seen wet weather coming and nudged it along, so to speak. Coaxed the clouds this way and that and maybe encouraged an electrical storm to follow my plane. Rainmaking is an uncertain and hazardous enterprise, I'm afraid. Like many another human enterprise.”

George Quinn said, “More of our farmers are going under every day, Mr. Satterfield. The whole county is a blasted dust bowl. We would very much appreciate it if you could nudge some rain our way. We would be prepared to compensate you for whatever hazards may be involved.”

“Sir,” Eben Kinneson Esquire said, “if you can nudge or cajole or inveigle or conjure some rain our way, we will take that rain any way it comes. We are prepared to make it worth your while. For an all-day and all-night soaker, we would be willing to pay you one hundred dollars.”

 

That evening after supper, having completed the final figure in her water-bird sequence—a fine individualistic bittern, its neck and head extended straight up as if getting ready to let out its distinctive pumping gurgle—Miss Jane started carving a new bird, she did not say what. While she worked, Henry told her about a new red Gee Bee Racer plane he'd had his eye on for some time. “True, it would not have quite the maneuverability of my old Burgess-Wright,” he was saying. “Singlewing craft never do, of course. But it would more than make up for that in speed. Nor would I need to replace poor Miss Lola. Wingwalking would be out of the question with the singlewing. I wonder if I might take a quick gander at your revised family Bible, Miss Jane. The one you mentioned to me this morning?”

“Certainly,” Jane said, though she couldn't imagine what her Bible might have to do with the new plane. From the Currier and Ives strongbox she fetched her huge black King James Bible, which she had been revising since the age of eighteen.

Opening it to the book of Genesis, Henry read the word “Horsefeathers” beside the story in which King James's Jehovah changes Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. “Just the sort of tale a despot would make up,” Miss Jane had neatly penned in the gilt-edged margin of the page. “God did no such thing.”

“Horsefeathers” was Miss Jane's most dismissive pronouncement. It adorned the margins of Genesis, punctuated the wild outcries of the Old Testament prophets, and accompanied the mainly crossed-out text of Paul's stern letters.

Henry, who had wished to reread the story of the Great
Flood for clues as to how he might engender enough rain to earn one hundred dollars toward the down payment for his cherry red Racer, was keenly interested in Miss Jane's Kingdom Mountain Bible. “Horsefeathers,” he read again beside the entirely excised story of Noah. “How, pray, Mr. King James the First, would all the animals have fit into the ark?”

“Why nothing could be simpler, Miss Jane,” the pilot said. “As my mama told me when I asked her that very question, there were far fewer animals in Noah's day than in ours.”

“On the contrary, Henry, there were far
more,
” Miss Jane replied. “We've exterminated half the species on earth since then.”

Henry turned to the New Testament. Jesus, he thought, would know how to make it rain. Searching for some kind of incantation, he read in Miss Jane's bold handwriting, beside the passage in which Jesus says “I have no mother or brothers or sisters,” “For shame. Mary is your mother. James and John your brothers. It's wrong, young man, to renounce your family. Family is everything.”

“I wonder.”

“You wonder what, Henry?”

“I wonder if Jesus mought be hinting here that
all
men and women are brothers and sisters?”

“If so, he picked a very poor way to say it,” the Duchess said. “To deny his mother after everything she did for him! Don't you see? If we deny our family, we deny ourselves.”

“Maybe he was just multiplying it, like his loaves and fishes. But what are you carving now, Miss Jane? Who is that tall gentleman?”

“It's an archaeopteryx,” Miss Jane replied. “Half bird, half lizard. They discovered the petrified remains of one in Mongolia not long ago. I intend to enter him in the North American Bird Carving Contest in Montreal next month. Here, I'll tell
you what. We'll call my archaeopteryx Noah. The Noah of Kingdom Mountain. Then we'll ask him in person how King James's Jehovah made all that rain. It was a cruel and unusual punishment, if I do say so.”

 

During the next several days, while Henry pored over Miss Jane's family Bible for a clue to how to bring rain, she worked very rapidly to finish her Noah of Kingdom Mountain. Her strokes were short and sure as she tapped her beechwood mallet on the brass-bound wooden handles of her Sheffield chisels. She defined Noah's eyes and beak with a U-shaped veiner. Periodically, she stopped to remove the rough burr on the inside of her knives with a Kingdom Mountain slipstone lubricated with sewing machine oil. On the wall above her tool bench, her hook-nosed skew knives and concave fluters gleamed in the lamplight. The kitchen was fragrant with the scents of sawdust, resin, oil, varnish, and paint. Her beloved blockheads, Memphre Magog and Loup-Garou, seemed to watch attentively as the clear white basswood chips fell about Jane's high-buttoned shoes and the Noah of Kingdom Mountain took shape.

At first Noah looked like a Gila monster with wings. Then, with her crooked knife, Jane sculpted out his sweeping cockade, which she painted a fiery red. She gave him a sharp yellow bill bristling with reptilian teeth, and piercing green eyes.

“My father used to tell me that every stranger who traveled to Kingdom Mountain should be welcomed as if he were Jesus in disguise. We'll welcome our good Noah thusly and see what he advises us to do about the rain.”

Thumbing through the newly arrived Sears, Roebuck catalog, Henry shook his head over Miss Jane's latest wonderment. At the same time he had an idea for one of his own. He would need to borrow Jane's Model A truck for an hour or two the next morning, he said.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
Henry drove into Kingdom Common. At the foot of Blue Clay Hill he passed the steam shovel, a coal-fired steam bulldozer, and a large construction crew of men, mules, and horses, widening the county road for the new highway. In the drought the road was so dusty that Henry couldn't see fifty feet ahead. He crept along in the Model A, glad to be driving himself and not riding with Miss Jane. At the post office he filled out a money order, enclosing an extra two dollars for return postage. Five mornings later he returned to the Common to pick up the item he had ordered, and that evening after supper, when Miss Jane walked into the kitchen from a fly-fishing excursion with Judge Allen, she saw, sitting beside the soapstone sink, a brand-new battery-operated Sears radio with an auxiliary shortwave band. Kneeling next to it, nearly beside himself with exasperation, was the rainmaker.

“It's a present for you, Miss Jane. And a means for hearing when weather's on the way,” Henry said. “The trouble is, I can't bring in a single station. Only this infernal crackling static.”

“Why, Henry Satterfield,” she said, “don't you know that—” She sat down at the table and began to laugh and, to Henry's amazement, continued laughing until tears came to her eyes. “Don't you know,” Miss Jane said, wiping her eyes and gasping for breath, “that there's no radio reception in Kingdom County? We're all shut in by mountains and—” She began to laugh again until it occurred to her that she might be hurting Henry's feelings. “I'm sorry, Henry. The radio was a most kind thought. But I'm afraid we'll never hear a blessed word out of it.”