On Kingdom Mountain (33 page)

“Maybe Ira will recover.”

“And maybe that rounder from Texas will return with your gold and maybe my brother is still alive in the Southland. No, my girl. You'll do as I say. I want it done by the end of the day. The animal must not suffer.”

At least, Jane thought, she could drive the crows away from Ethan's carcass. If necessary, she would shoot one of the birds and hang it up in a tree as a warning to the others. Once again she stepped outside into the bitter cold. This time she headed up the mountain.

Above the sugar orchard she came out of a thick stand of softwoods into a clearing. Atop the limbless spar of an old pine tree struck by lightning, looking down at the hulking carcass of the dead ox, sat the largest owl she had ever seen. It was gray, and its immense yellow eyes had eerie white spectacles around them. Twenty or more screaming crows were diving and swooping at it. A murder of crows, Jane thought. A murder of crows, mobbing the first great gray owl she had ever seen on Kingdom Mountain. Without hesitation she fired both barrels of Morgan's gun into the air, scattering the crows to the four winds. Unperturbed, the owl continued to watch her, and at that moment Miss Jane knew, as surely as she had ever known anything in her life, exactly what she must do next. It was not an experience of second sight so much as an experience of her imagination. Maybe that's what her second sight had always been.

Just before she headed back down the mountain, the owl lifted off its perch. Spreading its vast wings, banking and rising like Henry's biplane, it soared off over the mountaintop toward its home in the far north. That was where it belonged, Miss
Jane thought, as certainly as she belonged on Kingdom Mountain. Now it was time to go to work.

T
HREE PEOPLE STOOD
beside Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson's applewood kitchen table. Around their feet were chips and shavings from her latest carving project, a very large bird, already recognizable as an owl.

Miss Jane looked a little pale, a little thinner, and a little older, especially around the eyes, but otherwise the same. “Gentlemen,” she said, “let us repair to On Kingdom Mountain.”

The safe with the beautiful Currier and Ives lithograph of Lake Memphremagog on its door was unlocked, the massive iron door partway open. On the top shelf was a folder with a white slip of paper pasted on the upper left corner. Written on it were the words
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JANE HUBBELL KINNESON.

“Ordinarily,” Miss Jane said, now addressing her dear people as well as her two guests, “the reading of a will is preceded by the death of the person who wrote it. That, of course, is in the normal course of events. But when, on Kingdom Mountain, have events ever followed a normal course? I've decided to read you my last will and testament myself, lest it be supposed I did not have the courage to disclose its contents in person.”

Judge Allen interrupted the Duchess. “Jane, this is nonsense. You'll live another thirty years.”

But Eben Kinneson Esquire wondered, What new, entirely unwelcome surprises could his cousin's will contain?

“First,” Jane said, “I'd like you to meet someone who will be joining us for the reading.” She gestured at a tall, elderly figure dressed in a black robe, with snow white hair, a white mustache, and Jane's gray eyes. “Gentlemen, my father, Morgan Kinneson.”

Although the likeness was rather impressionistic, with its oblong head and painted features, Eben drew in his breath sharply, as if the old patriarch, who as a boy had walked to Tennessee in search of his brother, had actually come back to life before their eyes.

“Now,” she continued, her voice slightly harsh, quite cheerful, entirely in command of what she wished to say, “hearken to my last will and testament. ‘I, Jane Hubbell Kinneson, being of extremely sound mind, will to my cousin, Eben Kinneson Esquire of Kingdom Landing, the house I currently dwell in, known as the Kinneson home place, my five-story barn, and the ten acres on which these buildings stand, to hold in trust for the Memphremagog Abenaki nation in perpetuity. I will all of the contents of that house and barn and all of my other moveable possessions, including my blockheads, birds, books, and dear people, to my sister, Elisabeth Choteau Dufours, of Montreal, Canada, to hold in trust on Kingdom Mountain for the Memphremagog Abenaki nation in perpetuity. Signed, Jane Hubbell Kinneson, Kingdom Mountain. Thanksgiving Day, 1930.'”

The room was silent. Outside, a few small flakes of bright, crystalline snow fell. They could hear the wood fire in the Glenwood ticking. Miss Jane looked quite satisfied with herself, quite at peace.

“Your
sister?
” Eben said. “What sister? You have carved yourself an imaginary sister? Like your imaginary father here? And what about the mountain? What becomes of it?”

Jane looked out the parlor window. “I imagine he'll be just where he has been for another few billion years.”

In the Thanksgiving snow flurry, the summit of the mountain was indistinct. Through the small flakes, Miss Jane could see that the hardwoods on its lower slopes were already reddening slightly with next spring's buds. Soon the mountain would be white. Then gold with tiny new leaves, then, for a few short months, deep green.

“But what do you intend to do with it, Miss Jane?” Judge Allen said. “All that land?”

“I gave it away, Ira. Lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Gave it away? To whom?”

“An outfit called the Appalachian Land Trust, out of Asheville, North Carolina. My sister, Elisabeth Dufours, has conducted satisfactory dealings with them in the past. They have pledged to take the battle over the high road to the United States Supreme Court. And they will win that battle and keep the mountain just as it is forever.”

“Cousin,” Eben said, “how can you possibly give away what isn't yours to give? According to your father's will, the mountain lies in trust for your heirs in perpetuity.”

“Not so,” Jane said. “It lay in trust only for my
direct
heirs. Who, fortunately for them, no doubt, never existed.”

“I maintain that the mountain was not yours to sell or to give away,” Eben said.

“That was indeed my father's design, Eben. That, sir”—now addressing her new sculpture of Morgan, standing by the doorway—“was your plan. To assure yourself that I would hold on to the mountain at all costs and pass it along to my children intact, you left it to my heirs, in trust with me, and to their heirs, in trust with them. But you did not take into consideration the possibility that I might not have progeny. I had so many suitors”—cutting her eyes ever so briefly at Judge Allen—“that it probably never crossed your mind that I might not marry, thus invalidating the stipulation of the will.

“You will remember,” she continued, still speaking to her
carved father, “that I was too independent-minded and too proud and half again too picky to entertain those suitors. And there was one more consideration. I genuinely did not wish to defy your wishes, you whom I loved and respected above anyone else in the world. But nor did I wish to make, with any unborn children and grandchildren of my own, any such binding compact as you had decreed. A wild mountain off in the middle of nowhere, belonging to neither the United States nor Canada, from which they could, at best, scratch a wretched living, seemed far more burden than legacy. I have no direct heirs, so the will wasn't binding. Blame me if you will, dear father. What's done is done.”

Morgan gazed out over the crowded room as if marveling at how strangely his plans had turned out.

Miss Jane looked fondly at her wooden father, then at his much younger image. “All the way to Tennessee,” she said. “All the way to Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains you walked. And then you came back, and here you stayed and here you wished me to stay, on our beloved mountain.”

“Judge Allen,” Eben said, “I implore you to order competency testing for my cousin. I'm sure you'll find—”

The judge sighed and held up his hand.

“Jane,” he said, “do you know what day it is? The day of the week and date of the month?”

“Aye. It's Thanksgiving Day.”

“How about the date of your birthday?”

Jane gave the judge an arch look.

“I have to ask you these questions to satisfy Eben that you haven't gone round the bend,” the judge explained. “When were you born?”

“Long enough ago that you should know better than to ask me such a question, Ira. I was born the same year you were born.”

The judge laughed. “What's your phone number, Jane?”

“Why, Ira Allen, are you asking me for a date? My goodness. I've never had a phone in my life and never intend to have one.”

“Eben,” the judge said, “there is nothing at all the matter with Jane Kinneson's powers of reasoning. Her mind is as clear as a bell. Moreover, for what it's worth, I think it's a damn good will.”

“Thank you, Ira.” Miss Jane turned back to the figure by the door. “Dear Father, you were deeply suspicious of the world beyond our mountain, and not without reason. That's where poor Pilgrim disappeared. It's where the raiders who robbed the First Farmers came from, and where you feared I would go and somehow come to harm. What you wanted most was to protect your heirs from the dangers of that world by binding them to this place.

“Well, that can't be done. Even if we don't often venture down the mountain into the world, the world will quickly enough come up the mountain to us. It always has, both its malefactors and its luminaries. That's the great irony, you see. There's no hiding from the world. No, sir. Don't cast your reproving look my way. There will be no recriminations on this day of all days. There will be no more such constraining compacts on Kingdom Mountain.

“People,” Miss Jane continued, and here she seemed to be addressing all of her dear people, as well as Eben Kinneson Esquire and Judge Ira Allen, “my father bequeathed to me a mountain. Well and good. I gave it away. This Appalachian organization is a sensible outfit, not too smug or self-satisfied with their own fine accomplishments. They'll hold the mountain unchanged, in trust for the future. Anyone who wishes to come here to fish or hunt or just enjoy the seasons and the views may do so.”

Jane reached out and took the sculpture's wooden hand. “Father, you saw great horrors. You dealt with those horrors as best you knew how. You were a good son and brother, a good husband and father. But when it came to your descendants, you wished to control their future in a way that the future can't be controlled.”

“So the mountain no longer belongs to the Kinnesons,” Eben Kinneson Esquire said.

“Cousin,” Miss Jane said, “it never did.”

Eben shook his head and left the room.

Judge Allen, too, seemed ready to go, but Miss Jane put her hand on his arm. “Ira,” she said, “I have a favor to ask of you. A few moments ago, when I inquired if you were asking me for a date? I wasn't entirely jesting. Actually, I wish to ask you for one. I want to ask you to accompany me to the homecoming ball tomorrow night at the Academy. Will you go?”

“With the greatest pleasure in the world,” the judge said, and he bowed in a courtly way that fleetingly reminded Miss Jane of Henry Satterfield.

M
ISS JANE HUBBELL KINNESON
of Kingdom Mountain lived well into her eighties. To her satisfaction, she outlived her cousin Eben by several years. He left his very considerable holdings to her and Elisabeth, and she, in turn, left her portion to Elisabeth's children, who, along with their mother and father and her longtime fishing partner, Judge Ira Allen, had become the joy of her life.

Miss Jane won two first prizes at the North American Bird
Carving Contest, once with her great gray owl, once with the northern shrike impaling the redpoll from her exhibit Birds in Strife. In time she resumed work at her bookshop, which she operated out of the five-story barn, and where, by lantern light, she still occasionally hosted literary evenings, roundly denouncing the Pretender of Avon and the Proclaimer of Concord to two or three bemused Commoners. She and Ira Allen took many book-buying day tours and, obligingly affording the village something to talk about, a few overnight tours as well. They never spoke of marriage. Jane and the judge could scarcely have been more companionable, but the Duchess realized that she was, and probably always had been, too independent-minded for married life.

As for the Kingdom, things have continued to change there since Miss Jane passed on. Commoners who were young in the summer that Henry Satterfield came to the county are now old. Interstate 91, though it bypasses Kingdom Mountain, connects the village with the world on the other side of the hills. The ski resort at Jay Peak, fifteen miles west of the Common, gets more natural snow annually than any other resort east of the Rockies. Under “Vermont” in Miss Jane's celebrated 1911 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, you may read the sentence, “To the east of Jay Peak lies a beautiful farming country.” It's still beautiful, particularly around the spring and fall equinoxes, but the little farms themselves have been amalgamated into agribusinesses, a term Miss Jane would not have cared for at all. The Common, however, with its old-fashioned central green and brick shopping block, looks much the same. Most of the young people leave as soon as they get out of school, returning only to visit. There's nothing here for them to do.

With its long, harsh winters, big woods, and independent residents, the Kingdom remains something of a place apart
from the rest of Vermont and New England. Miss Jane's mountain will always be an anomaly, running east-west rather than north-south, officially located, according to the letter from Daniel Webster to Freethinker Kinneson, not in Vermont or Quebec or Canada or the U.S. but in the heart of the land of the Memphremagog Abenakis. Miss Jane said it best. The mountain belongs to itself. There is no high road, or any road, beyond the home place, which is now a small museum containing Jane's Birds of kingdom Mountain and her beloved blockheads and dear people, including Seth and his ox, Quaker Meeting leading his fugitive friends to safety, the young and old Morgans, the infant Pharaoh's Daughter in her sweetgrass basket, and, of course, Ramses' Bride and the preserved Confederate soldier, Pilgrim.