A Stranger in the Kingdom (2 page)

I resolved at an early age to avoid all arguments, family and otherwise, whenever possible. As I grew older this aversion to controversy sometimes worked to my disadvantage by preventing me from stating a conviction as forcefully as I should have. At the same time, I learned a lesson from the constant disagreements between my father and brother. What they taught me, though I didn't realize it at the time, was that most disputes have at least two arguable sides—a concept I found invaluable years later when I went to work at the
Monitor
myself.

To the surprise of no one who knew him, Charlie had taken a very different professional tack from mine. Nearly thirteen years my senior and inclined from his own boyhood to be ruthlessly competitive, my big brother became a lawyer and a good one. So good, in fact, that by the spring of 1952 when I turned thirteen and Charlie was twenty-five and this story begins, it was widely reported throughout northern Vermont that if he wasn't away playing ball or fishing or hunting, young Attorney Kinneson up in Kingdom County could get you clean off the hook, and without charging you an arm and a leg, either, for anything short of premeditated murder committed at high noon on the village common in the presence of a dozen unimpeachable local witnesses.

For that, even with my brother representing you, it was generally conceded that you might have to pay a modest fine.

Which brings me back to 1952 and the tragedy that changed our lives and that is still referred to throughout Vermont today as the Kingdom County Affair. In the end, it divided our tiny village deeply, against itself and against the world on the other side of the hills, and once and for all wrenched the Kingdom—tucked off between the Green Mountains to the west and the White Mountains to the east, with its back to a vast and sparsely settled section of French Canada—out of the past and into a time when the fixed regulations of my father's universe, not to mention Sir Isaac Newton's, seemed no more incontrovertible than the northern Vermont weather forecasts.

 

Back in Burlington, daffodils and tulips were in bloom and the lawns were as green as they would ever get But as my father and I lumbered north out of the city on the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, listening to the Red Sox' opening game of the season against the Washington Senators, we eased back into an earlier season of the year.

Outside Jericho, roadside brooks were still high and chalky from snow runoff in the foothills of Mt. Mansfield. By the time we reached Underhill, patches of old snow had begun to appear in sheltered gullies and on wooded north slopes. And as we chugged our way slowly higher into the mountains, I spotted half a dozen columns of woodsmoke hanging over bare gray maple orchards where a few farmers were boiling off late runs of sap, though up in Kingdom County sugaring had just gotten into full swing and my mother was getting her best runs from the maples on the ridge above our house

We'd been to Burlington to pick up a new motor for my father's ancient Whitlock printing press, and because it was my thirteenth birthday he'd let me skip school for the day and come with him. Ordinarily I loved to go anywhere with Dad. But loaded down as the old De Soto was, to the very limit of its sagging springs, our maximum speed over the heaved concrete of the winding G.A.R. Highway was thirty miles an hour. By the time we reached Cambridge I felt good and queasy.

“What are you doing over there, getting sick?” my father said suddenly, as reception began to fade. Just as suddenly, that week's issue of the
Monitor
appeared in my lap. “What's the news this week, James?”

What's the News? was a game Dad and I had played since I was six years old and he began training me to be a newspaperman—not, I stress, a journalist: “I never knew a journalist worth the powder to blow his jargon to hell, James. If you work for me, you'll work as a
newspaperman
, and that's the beginning and the end of it”—by making me read several items from each week's
Monitor
aloud to him while he listened with a frown on his face as though someone else had composed them, badly. Even as an incipient teenager I still dreaded this ordeal. Today especially I did not think that reading eight-point type in the jouncing ten-year-old clunker Dad had bought because, one, it had a radio, and two, it was all he could afford, would much improve the condition of my stomach. Nor, as I glanced down over the contents of the front page, did I see any reason to change my long-standing private conviction that except for the gradual alteration from woods to farms and now mainly back to woods again, Kingdom County had managed to remain free of significant news, as I then thought of it, for the past one hundred and fifty years.

My father, on the other hand, staunchly maintained that news in the Kingdom was every bit as interesting as news anywhere if you but knew how to find it and go at it from a fresh angle. Besides which, when the old man said read, you read, and that too was the beginning and the end of it.

So I read. I read that yet another farm out on the county road had been auctioned off for back taxes. I read that two Canadian lumberjacks hired to blast open an ice jam in the Kingdom River just above the Lord Hollow Bridge had “unceremoniously blown up the north abutment of the bridge as well and hightailed it back to Quebec without waiting to receive their pay.”

On the editorial page I read my father's scathing open letter to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom the
Monitor
was among the first papers in New England to attack for his witch hunts and whom, partly as a result of my father's urging, Vermont's Ralph Flanders would subsequently be the first to denounce on the floor of the Senate. I read that at long last the United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common had hired a new minister, one Walter Andrews from Montreal, Canada, a former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force. And finally, under the weekly court news on page three, I read that on the same day the ice jam was dynamited, Sheriff Mason White had discovered a moose head buried in my cousin Resolvèd Kinnesons's manure pile and a side of moose meat in Resolvèd's woodshed. According to my father's terse report—“Less is more, James, and don't you ever forget it”—Sheriff White had confiscated both the meat and the head, and our illustrious relative was slated to be arraigned in court that very afternoon.

“Maybe this time Judge Alien'll lock up old Resolvèd and throw away the key,” I said, folding up the paper and then hastily reopening it in case I needed something to wrap up what was left of the two hamburgers and three Cokes I'd consumed an hour earlier.

My father snorted. “Maybe he will. And maybe the Sox will come through for us and win their first championship since 1918. But I doubt it. Boston will wilt with the heat of July like last week's lettuce, and Charles will get Resolvèd off scot-free as usual. The fact is that Zack Barrows probably won't bring the case to trial anyway. With elections coming up in the fall the last thing that dithering old sot wants is another courtroom embarrassment. No doubt he'll cave in and agree to some eleventh-hour plea bargaining deal concocted by your smart-aleck brother.”

Now that Dad had gotten onto the subject of Charlie and Zachariah Barrows, whom he frequently referred to in the Monitor as Kingdom County's nonprosecuting prosecutor, he was off and running. “As you very well know, James, there's never been any real law and order in Kingdom County. Since your brother hung out his shingle, there's been less than ever. Charles seems to regard himself as the Green Mountains' answer to Clarence Darrow, but I'm here to tell you that he's becoming a very large part of the overall problem. The truth is that he goes out of his way to defend any scalawag who staggers down the road these days just for the very dubious satisfaction of winning another case. All this is killing your mother, by the way, you know how finely tuned she is.”

In fact, I did not know how finely tuned my mother was, though my father often said this. For years, especially when he was upset with my brother, he invoked this mysterious infirmity of Mom's and strongly implied that her life was in imminent jeopardy because of Charlie's wild ways.

I didn't want to get into an argument but I felt obligated to put in a word for Charlie. “That's his job, isn't it, Dad? Defending outlaws like Resolvèd?”

“A job is something you get paid for, mister man,” Dad said, and thrust his long arm out the window to signal a turn.

Ahead on the height of land above the Lamoille River, just in the nick of time for me and my tumultuous stomach, was the Ridge Runner Diner, our traditional halfway coffee stop between Burlington and Kingdom County.

 

To this day in northern New England, it's a myth that truckstop food is always first-rate. Depending on its current management, the Ridge Runner's burgers and fries might or might not taste more like stale fish, though my father claimed that the coffee, which for a reason I never fathomed he insisted on calling “java,” was reliably fresh and hot. Be that as it may, the place was never crowded.

The diner itself intrigued me considerably. It was a long trailerlike affair converted over from a superannuated Central Vermont Railway dining car, whose most remarkable feature since its halcyon days as the pride of the CVR rolling stock had never been its bill of fare anyway, but a slightly concave rectangular mirror running the entire length of the wall behind the counter, in which any customer could visit with any other customer without leaning forward or sticking an elbow in his neighbor's soup. In the mirror's upper left corner was a star-shaped shatter mark about the size of a fifty-cent piece, which according to a former proprietor had been made by a G-man's bullet back during Prohibition when the dining car had allegedly done double duty as a mobile speakeasy. Probably this tale was apocryphal. My father, with his ingrained newspaperman's skepticism of the romantically improbable, always thought so. But to a daydreaming boy brought up on Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain and Dad's wonderful stories of our own family's odd history, the curious shatter mark in the curved mirror seemed marvelously emblematic of an exciting bygone era.

At three o'clock on a weekday afternoon in late April, we were the Ridge Runner's only customers. We sat halfway down the counter at the row of cracked leather stools and Dad ordered a cup of java and I ordered a glass of ginger ale to settle my stomach. Out in the kitchen the Sox game was blaring. Ted Williams had just belted a triple, Mel Parnell was pitching like Cy Young, and Boston was ahead 3 to 1, but I couldn't follow much of the play-by-play between the crackling static and the waitress. She was a mousy little woman with a narrow corrugated forehead that reminded me of the stiff grooved paper separators in the Whitman Samplers my father bought for my mother (who never ate candy) at Easter. As the waitress got our drinks she complained to us steadily in a whiny voice about the late spring.

Outside, a new green sedan with out-of-state plates pulled into the parking lot. It was towing a canvas-covered trailer. Two people got out, a man about forty and a boy two or three years older than me. Both, to my surprise, were black.

I had seen black people from a distance before, on our annual trips to Fenway Park and once or twice in Burlington. But I had never seen a Negro, as I then thought of blacks, this close to Kingdom County. I was as curious about the two newcomers, especially the boy, as I was surprised.

So was the waitress. “Say, Bruce,” she whined back over her shoulder. “Take a gander out here and get a load of this.”

In the entranceway of the kitchen there appeared a wiry, dissatisfied-looking man about my father's age, fifty-five or so. He was wiping his hands on the filthiest apron I'd ever seen. Beneath it he wore an equally grimy strap-over undershirt without a shirt. He had not shaved that day or, probably, the day before.

In the long mirror I saw my father—who got up before the birds and shaved twice and unless he was going fishing or hunting put on a freshly pressed white shirt and a necktie and shined his shoes for two or three minutes on an old issue of the
Monitor
spread out on the woodbox lid in the kitchen, seven days a week and fifty-two weeks a year—staring at this character with unconcealed displeasure.

“Yes sir,” Brace said, slurring the expression together for maximum ironic inflection. “Darkies. And it ain't even Decoration Day yet.”

“Darkies” was a word I'd previously encountered only in Stephen Foster's “Old Folks at Home.” It took me a moment to realize that the cook was referring to the two people in the parking lot. The black man, in the meantime, was checking the ropes fastening the canvas sheet over the sides of the trailer. Although he wasn't as tall as Charlie or my father, he was a big athletic-looking man with a build like a boxer's. The boy was pegging gravel at a utility pole across the road. He was nearly as tall as his father but much lankier.

“Looks to me like they'd be moving up this way,” the waitress said.

Bruce shook his head. “Don't you believe it, Val. This country's way too cold for them people. You think the winters seem long to
you
. Darkies can't take the cold a-tall. Not a-tall. They'd be part of a traveling show, no doubt. Minstrel show or some such outfit. See that new automobile? That's show money. You can lay odds on it. You and I, now, we couldn't afford a road hog like that.”

Shaking his head in disgust, Bruce returned to his kitchen. The black man and his son came in and sat down at the counter two stools to my left. The man was dressed, I thought, like a city person on vacation in the country. He wore a light tan spring jacket over a blue sport shirt open at the neck, corduroy slacks, and expensive new hiking shoes. Except for the fact that he was black and this was 1952, he could have just stepped off the cover of Charlie's L. L. Bean spring catalogue. The boy was dressed like any other boy his age. Like me, for that matter, in jeans, scuffed-up Keds, and a sweatshirt loose in the shoulders and short in the wrists. His features were smaller and more delicate than his father's and his complexion was lighter. Here was a revelation that interested me considerably. Until that instant, I had supposed that all Negroes were exactly the same color!