The Fall of the Year (14 page)

The Land of the Free Emporium had been open for several months now, and Sam was doing a brisk business, with a finger in every pie in town, as Bumper himself had put it. Besides cutting hair for a quarter a head, Sam was in fact retailing coffins, which he fashioned from knotty planks rejected by the American Heritage furniture mill and sold at half the price of a factory-made casket. For a nominal fee Sam would yank out an abscessed tooth, set a broken wrist, doctor a sick horse or cow. Wednesday evenings he turned the Emporium into a gymnasium and taught judo to us high school boys. For the women of the village he conducted a course in homeopathic medicine and another in Chinese cooking. “Don't stuff men with beefsteak, Aroostook County potatoes,” he harangued them as he stirred his famous moo gew eel kew in the hubcap wok. “They get used to nice lean river eel on rice, like fine. They not like, tell do own cooking, see how they like that.”

What amazed the Common was that Sam's nostrums actually seemed to work. Doc Harrison told Father George and Judge Allen over their regular six
A.M.
coffee at the hotel that Sam Rong was bidding fair to clear his slate of hypochondriacs. Not only was the Chinese doctor's advice medically sound, villagers seemed to go to him, as they did to Louvia the Fortuneteller, to hear the truth about themselves. Despite Sam's reservations about church, he and Father George soon became fast friends. As for Louvia, when her herbal clients from Little Quebec first started to consult Sam for a second opinion, she was consumed by professional jealousy. She flew down off her hill to the Emporium to threaten him with a quadruple hex if he didn't leave town immediately, then wound up staying for the better part of the afternoon to exchange remedies. She went back to visit Sam so often that it was rumored the two were having a fling. Some Commoners doubted this, others swore to it, but no one really knew. In the village in those days, nearly anything was possible.

 

“How you like stamp collection, Frank Bennett? From all over land of free and far beyond. Every week you get mail with stamps from New York, San Fran, L of A, Hong Kong too, maybe.”

It was a Sunday morning in October. Sam and I had been digging ginseng in the clear-cut high on the ridge for about an hour, selecting only the largest plants and only about half of those, when out of the blue Sam asked me about the stamp collection.

“That sounds like a lot of pen pals, Dr. Rong.”

“No pals. You get mail in box at post office. Bring all letters to Sam Rong at Emporium. Sam correspond with pals. You just keep stamps. Don't pick jin-chen so close together, Frank. What I tell you? You be good to jin-chen, jin-chen be good to you.”

For emphasis, Sam waved the shard of china with the painted peacock that he used as a digging tool. “You all set now, start collecting stamps. Later today I give you cash rent post box. This enough jin-chen for now. Hope nobody else horns in on patch, eh?”

“Who'd even know what to look for? Much less where to look?”

“You be surprised who. What Sam tell you many times already? ‘Hope for best, expect worst.' That way you ready for anything. Now you ready start collect stamps.”

Which is how I became an amateur philatelist. Several times a week after school I stopped by the post office and picked up a letter or two or three and delivered them to the Land of the Free Emporium. Sam steamed off the stamps with the same chipped blue enamel kettle he used to boil water for his ginseng-root friendship tea, which we drank in the evening while I read aloud to him from
Bleak House, Oliver Twist
, or
A Christmas Carol
. Some of the stamps were from U.S. and Canadian cities. Others, as bright as butterflies, bore postmarks from Singapore, Borneo, even Australia. The envelopes and letters Sam stowed in the aromatic teakwood box that he referred to as his Chinese bank and kept hidden behind the buckwheat bin to the right of the Emporium's door.

At one of Bumper's farm auctions, Sam bought a Model A Ford in good running order. He equipped it with tire chains and a front-end winch and began driving out from the Common on all-night expeditions once or twice a month. That same fall a succession of Chinese helpers appeared at the Land of the Free. Most of these assistants were young men who stayed only a few days. Occasionally an entire family showed up at the Emporium. Soon it was apparent that Sam was using his store as a way station for aliens being smuggled into the country. One morning when Sam was stocking his shelves, Bumper lettered “The Orient Express” on the driver's-side door of the Model A. Everyone in town, including Sam, had a good laugh.

As for the letters tucked away in the Chinese bank, I suspected that they contained money, sent on some kind of prearranged payment plan by Sam's clients. Sam never said, though, any more than he said where he'd come from himself. He remained as much a mystery as the day he appeared in our village.

 

Over the course of the next year Sam's wares and services continued to expand. From Minnesota seed stock he grew wild rice in the hidden backwaters of the Kingdom River beyond the railroad trestle north of town. Early in the fall, a week before Sam and I picked ginseng, we paddled a canoe out to the rice beds and bent the long wavy stalks over the gunwales and whacked off the ripe kernels with short sticks. Sam sold the wild rice by the pound, unhusked. From it he also made a delicious penny candy, which he scooped out of an old molasses barrel for the kids of the village, who flocked to the Emporium after school to see, on his famous scroll, drawings of undutiful children being swooped off by winged dragons and warlocks with tongs for fingernails. Out of another barrel he sold miscellaneous souvenirs, including a hideous squat green replica of the Statue of Liberty, made in Hong Kong. Inscribed on its plastic base was the legend “Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

To a select group of regular customers Sam extended personal and business loans at half the interest rates of the First Farmers' and Lumberers' Bank. At no interest at all he loaned young people money to go to college or get married or make a down payment on a first home. He insisted only that they pay something on their accounts each month, even just a few dollars if that's all they could afford; he kept track of these transactions in the tall black register book. Day and night he dished out blunt observations, shrewd advice, and witty proverbs to everyone who set foot in the Emporium, chuckling to himself over the incongruity of a Chinese wayfarer from no one knew where dispensing wisdom and irony in the wilds of northern Vermont, the Celestial Kingdom, the far end of the civilized world.

 

One chilly fall evening when Sam and I were drinking friendship tea and laughing over Mr. Micawber's latest sojourn to debtor's prison, an elderly farm woman in a man's slouch hat, a long denim barn coat, and rubber barn boots appeared at the Land of the Free. It was Mattie Kittredge from Lost Nation Hollow. Mattie's husband, John, had died recently. With her was Bumper Stevens, whose cigar smoke tonight was redolent not of thick stacks of well-thumbed hundred-dollar bills, or the selling off of family farms, or crude, sardonic humor and shady dealings, but of something like concern.

“I know my husband ran up a great long feed slip with you,” Mattie told Sam. “I came to inform you that I can't make good on it until Mr. Stevens sells off my cows. Until the auction next month I don't have no cash money at all, only just what I need to get by on.”

“You wait,” Sam said. He opened his black account book to the page with John Kittredge's name at the top. Clicking his tongue mathematically, he did some rapid calculations on his abacus. He nodded to himself, reached into the souvenir barrel by the counter, and pulled out a rose-colored penknife shaped like a fish with the violet letters “U. S. of A.” stamped on it. Sam opened the knife, cut John's page neatly out of the account book, crumpled it into a small ball, put it into his mouth, and swallowed it.

“You owe nothing,” he said. “Very sorry to hear about John.”

Mattie stared at him.

Sam shrugged. “Not that much anyway. John made whopping big payment couple weeks ago. Cleaned up all except few dollars.”

Mattie started to object, but Bumper stepped forward out of a cloud of relieved cigar smoke. “Well, then, Dr. Samuel. We thank you kindly and I'll get Mattie here back on out to the Hollow.”

“I am obliged to you,” Mattie told Sam quietly as Bumper steered her toward the door. Then she stopped. “They say you—they say sometimes you tell folks comforting things. Like a preacher, only better. Would you tell me something?”

“Oh, sure,” Sam said from atop his tall stool behind the counter. “You and John have son?”

“Sons? Yes. We have four sons. And three daughters.”

“All son and daughter alive and well?”

“They be. Thank the Lord.”

“Good. Got grandson?”

Mattie smiled. “Nine. And six granddaughters. One great-granddaughter.”

“Good. Great-granddaughter very good. Now you watch.”

Sam hopped down from his stool. He got out his fine-tip drawing pen and an inkwell. Under a funeral procession on the wall tableau he carefully inscribed several intricate red characters. “What say?” he demanded.

Mattie shrugged. “What does it say?”

“Say very good news, very comforting.” Sam returned to his stool and reached again for his abacus. He dropped one green ring down the slender red pole. “Grandfather die,” he said. He dropped another ring onto the abacus. “Father die.” Adding a third ring, he said cheerfully, “Son die. Proverb say, ‘Grandfather die, father die, son die.'”

“By the Jesus, now,” Bumper muttered. “What the—?”

Mattie frowned. “The grandfather dies, the father dies, the son dies. That would be comforting to an old woman who has just lost her husband of fifty-two years?”

“Oh sure, most comforting,” Sam said. “What other order you want them to die in? Other proverb say, ‘Old must die, young may.' You and John most fortunate, eh? No young die in family yet.”

For perhaps five full seconds, Mattie Kittredge looked at Sam, who looked back at her, his eyes as humorous and wise as those of the snapping turtles he kept for soup in the watering trough in front of the Emporium. Then she nodded once, and headed out the door with Bumper.

For his part, Dr. Rong never seemed to look any older. No one had the slightest idea how old Sam was. He could have been forty, he might have been sixty. It was rumored that he had a large family in Mandalay, a beautiful occidental mistress in Toronto, a string of high-toned whorehouses in Vancouver and Mexico City. But no one knew. When it came to Sam E. Rong, everything was speculation.

 

“Now then, Mr. Frank. This that I'm about to tell you, assuming I do tell you, ain't for public consumption. Do I make myself plain?”

I nodded. It was late summer again, with my first year of college fast approaching. I'd been walking back to the Big House late in the evening after visiting Sam when, out of the dark entryway of the commission-sales barn, Bumper's raspy, peremptory voice had summoned me inside. We now sat facing each other across the auctioneer's cluttered desk under a single flyspecked overhead light bulb.

While Bumper fired up a fresh cigar, I looked around. His office was crowded with piled-up wooden sap buckets, horse hames and harnesses, ox yokes tipped with brass ornaments, crates overflowing with lightning rod balls, fence insulators, cutter-bar teeth—the miscellaneous detritus of a hundred farm auctions and a hundred played-out farms. On the wall behind his desk, at a rakish slant, the auctioneer had tacked a lucky playing card, a smudged ace of diamonds. Above it was last year's calendar adorned with a photograph of a leggy young woman with long blond hair perched naked on the hood of a powder-blue Ford convertible with the top down. A few short years before, here in Bumper's tiny principality within the mostly self-contained universe of the village, Sam Rong had parlayed his good poker hands into the Land of the Free Emporium. And somehow, reflecting on those card games, from which Sam had long ago been politely banned, I knew that the confidential disclosure Bumper was all but threatening me with involved not only our mutual friend but trouble as well. For trouble, and serious trouble at that, was the unmistakable odor of the cigar smoke enveloping us in a thick blue haze that night.

“Yes, sir,” Bumper said, meaning that he was ready to get down to business. “Now this is good sound information, Frank. Who or where I heard it from is immaterial. And who or where you heard it from is to stay here in this office between I and you and”—he jabbed the orange tip of his cigar at the calendar girl—“Miss Fairlane there. Do you understand that?”

I nodded again.

“According to reliable reports, Frank, some of our selectmen come together in secret last week to hash over a close associate of yours and mine. An associate with these initials.” Bumper took the nub of a pencil from behind his ear and scrawled something on a grimy yellow slip of paper, which he shoved across the desk. The yellow slip was a receipt for a piglet with a ruptured belly. On the bottom Bumper had written the letters S.E.R.

“Sam E. Rong,” I said.

“Did I say so?”

I grinned. “No.”

“Did I tell you this close associate's initials?”

“No.”

“And you would swear in a court of law I did not?”

“Yes,” I said.

Bumper nodded. “Now, then, it seems these town fathers, these fine upstanding citizens and leading tradesmen and pious churchmen, was a tad riled that this gentleman in question, who might or might not be a foreign gentlemen with these initials”—Bumper reached across the desk and tapped the yellow sales slip—“that this gentleman is cutting into their custom and slicing into their profits. By underselling them. By extending out too much credit. By charging low interest. And in certain cases by forgiving some debts altogether.”