A Stranger in the Kingdom (40 page)

“I took the first train south out of the Common and didn't set foot in Kingdom County again for six years. But the truth of the matter is that the Harvard comma wasn't the real reason I left.”

“What was? That you didn't want to go to Dartmouth?”

“No, I'd been looking forward to going to college. The real reason I left home was the girl who lived right here on the Kittredge place.”

My father pointed far out across the twilit countryside at the white dome of Russia, gleaming brightly in the afterglow high up in the gore above our farmhouse. “When I was about seventeen, I used to hike up there on Sunday afternoons with old Charles I's brass pirate's telescope. At a prearranged time, a girl I knew who lived on this farm would come up here and stand on this boulder and wave. I'd look over at her through that spyglass, and that was our date. The Christmas of my senior year at the Academy I secretly bought her a pair of Montgomery Ward binoculars so that she could look back at me.”

I laughed. “Why didn't you just come over and see her?”

“Two reasons, James: my mother and my father. You see, the girl was from a French family. Her parents had come down from Canada knowing no English at all, and without a penny in their pockets, and my folks didn't want me to keep company with her.”

This revelation jolted me. It was like Mom and Dad telling Charlie he couldn't date Athena Allen because her mother had been Armand St. Onge's sister. “Why didn't you see her anyway? Sneak over or something? Were you afraid to?”

“I have to admit I was somewhat afraid of my mother,” my father said with a chuckle. “It's a curious thing, James. Abiah Kinneson was a little bit of a black-eyed silent creature with a Scottish accent thick enough to cut with a Highland broadsword. She didn't come to this country until she was sixteen years old. Then she came alone, on an immigrant ship, not knowing a soul. She went to work in my grandfather Charlie's family as a sort of live-in cook and housekeeper after my grandmother Kinneson got sick. When my grandmother died and that old rip Mad Charlie married the gypsy girl, Replacement Mari, my mother didn't have anyplace to go. I think my father felt sorry for her, and that's why he married her. That was a bad mistake, along the lines of feeling sorry for a fully clawed wildcat.

“But the point I was going to make is that for all the intimidation she inspired in me and others, my mother herself was afraid of anything she didn't understand. She was certainly afraid of the gypsies who used to come through these parts. After my cousins came along, she was scared of them too, and of their mother Replacement Mari. She was terrified of the river, afraid I'd drown in it. And when she found out that I was interested in a French Canadian girl—and a very nice one, I might add, although she couldn't hold a candle to your mother—Mom was scared of her, too, or of the strangeness she represented.”

“Why didn't you just elope, run off together or something?”

Dad shrugged. “That kind of thing simply wasn't done in those days, James. Not much, at any rate. I was just eighteen. I couldn't have supported a wife, much less a family. Anyway, the upshot of the whole episode is that I used the Harvard comma as my excuse and went to Boston, and I'm glad I did, as things turned out, because that's how I got those jobs on the
Post
and the
Globe
and, more important still, met your mother.”

“So why did you ever come home, Dad? After working for those big Boston papers? Why did you come back to Kingdom County?”

“I wanted to work for myself. Dad was ready to retire from the
Monitor
and it was an ideal situation. Besides, there was a notable absence of brook trout fishing in Boston. And finally, as I've told you before, stories in Kingdom County are as good as stories anywhere if you know enough to recognize them—and how to find the stories behind the stories.

“Now, James, a serious crime has been committed, and only a token arrest has been made. No real investigation has taken place, except into the background of the victim of that crime. Incredible as it sounds, Mason White and Zack Barrows are treating Reverend Andrews as the prime suspect in this entire affair. Why?”

I shrugged. “Why?”

“Think about the story I told you.”

I thought, and suddenly the entire point of it came clear to me.

“That Mason White and Zack Barrows are prejudiced!” I nearly shouted. “Just the way my grandmother was prejudiced against that French girl. That's the story behind the story!”

“Right you are,” Dad said, “and you can bet we'll be looking into it.”

On the way back to the car he said, “By the way, James, I wouldn't mention any of this to your mother, especially that part about the French Canadian girl. The last thing in the world I'd want her to think, is that I married her on the rebound from somebody else.”

Dad needn't have worried about me spilling the beans. As we clumped up onto the porch with our fishing gear an hour later, Mom met us at the door with a disclosure of her own that eclipsed everything else that had happened that day.

“Reverend Andrews just called with some disturbing news,” she told us. “Right after he spoke with you at the
Monitor
this morning he decided to take Nat back to Montreal to stay with his grandmother until things calm down around here. When he got back, about an hour ago, Claire was gone too. He called to say she still hasn't come back, Charles. He left word for you to get in touch with him right away. At first he thought she'd run away to California, but now he's afraid that something may have happened to her because her belongings are still at the parsonage.”

That evening Mom tried to reassure me that no doubt Claire had just decided to return home and was already back in Quebec. I, for my part, was certain that she would never return to Quebec now that her father was dead. California and Hollywood had always been her destination, and I believed in her and in her determination to get there at all costs.

Lying awake in my loft long into that night, I imagined Claire thumbing her way west in her dress of many colors, across the glossy dog-eared map of the United States in my eighth-grade geography book, over the four small emerald triangles of the Green Mountains, past the sparkling blue curtain of Niagara, where surely Claire would stop and view the falls, as I would have, through the flat cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska toward the half-dozen soaring white-capped pyramids of the Rockies, whose lower slopes were speckled with rushing silver trout rivers and spouting geysers, past the shaggy herd of four bison to the two orange trees and one long tan beach of the Pacific, where finally, with her engaging French accent and eyes that changed color with the weather and her uncanny gift for mimicry, she might win for herself a role in a movie like
Under the Big Top
, and my friends and I would see her at a Saturday matinee in the Academy auditorium. . . .

It was the most improbable of romantic fantasies, which I no doubt conjured up as a stay against harsher likelihoods. Yet never since the moment I had first laid eyes on Claire LaRiviere at the tent show had I seen her as anything other than she wished me to: determined, courageous, sure of her gift and confident in her future, young and pretty and exotic and only temporarily unlucky. As my mother had said, she must have left the Kingdom to get on with her life.

Yet Claire had promised that she would never leave without saying goodbye to me, and she hadn't even left a note for Reverend Andrews or Nathan. Remembering our agreement to meet at the granite quarry where she liked to wash her hair and bathe, I made up my mind before going to sleep to hike up there first thing in the morning just in case she was still waiting for me, though that now seemed like the longest of long shots.

Just before dawn the next morning, while Dad was shaving, I slipped out of my window onto the porch roof and shinnied down a post to the misty dim dooryard. It had turned cooler overnight and the wet, cottony river fog hung over the gool like fog on an October morning; but as I climbed up the trace into the gore, past my cousins' place and on into the tall hardwoods, a pale orange blush spread over the horizon away off in the east behind the dark bulk of the Presidential Range of New Hampshire's White Mountains.

At the juncture where the main branch of the trace forked up to Russia, I veered off onto the path Claire had worn beside the fast little burn that rose in the quarry. Before I'd taken ten steps a sharp rattle cut through the still dawn woods like a machine gun. Although I'd heard it a hundred times before—it was only a blue kingfisher, screaming his startled cry of alarm as he zipped up the brook ahead of me—I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I couldn't have said why I was so spooked. Maybe it was the mist or some residual fear of encountering Resolvèd (though I knew he was in jail) or the inexplicable mysteriousness of Claire's abrupt disappearance. Ordinarily I was perfectly at home in these woods, even after dark.

Fortunately it was just a short distance, no more than a quarter of a mile, up the burn from the fork in the trace to the miniature waterfalls spilling over the smooth granite lip of the quarry, where Claire had come to bathe alone and wash her hair. There were no footprints on the sand beside the pool at the base of the falls, not even a set of heron tracks, so I scrambled up onto the ledge under the yellow birch tree where I'd found Claire that morning back in June when I'd mistaken her slip in the tree for a ghost. In the pale early light, the flooded quarry looked as though no one had been near the place all summer.

“Claire?” I called softly. Then, louder, “Claire! Claire!”

Then repeatedly, insistently, “Claire, Claire, Claire, Claire, Claire!”

My voice echoed off the granite cliffs jutting up over the back side of the quarry, and the mocking, inhuman tone of the reverberating echo unnerved me so much I did not call her name again.

Obviously, my friend had either forgotten her promise to meet me here, or had left town in too great a hurry to keep it; the watery quarry, with its opaque jade surface, was as deserted as the village cemetery which it had supplied with monuments for a century.

There is no place anywhere more forlorn than a disused quarry—how Claire could come here to bathe I had no idea—and all I wanted now was to get away from the place. But just before leaving, I picked up a loose fragment of granite and shied it across the pit at the cliffs. It struck with the sharp flinty crack of rock on rock, and ricocheted back into the green water with a good, satisfying splash, followed instantly by a terrifying string of long loud coughing croaks and the specter of two huge black ravens rising up from the wooded ledges on the back side of the quarry.

If I'd been able to, no doubt I'd have turned tail and sprinted down that mountainside faster than ever I pounded home from third on a ninth-inning squeeze play. But I was so scared all I could do was stare at those two hideous creatures now climbing the dawn updrafts along the face of the cliff.

I laughed all the way down the ridge, at my timidity and silliness and earlier fear for Claire, who was undoubtedly already well along on her odyssey west, telling some puzzled potato chip salesman or logtruck driver her odd history and the story of her sojourn in Kingdom County; yet even with these calming reassurances I was very relieved to see the familiar sight of my cousin Welcome out in his pasture junkyard in the sunrise, hoisting a 1938 or '39 Chevy onto his automobile abacus with his huffing steam crane.

And when I jogged into our dooryard, something entirely new and wonderful, as Charlie liked to say, made me forget all about my spooky morning excursion and the ravens and Welcome and even Claire LaRiviere and her whereabouts.

Standing on a homemade spruce-pole ladder propped against the road side of our barn and refurbishing the faded picture of the leaping brook trout was the deaf and mute Dog Cart Man, with his dogs sitting perfectly still in a tight semicircle nearby, watching every move he made.

The painter worked at an incredible rate of speed. Before my eyes the trout took shape and size and color, its fantastic pinks and oranges as bright as the sunrise, its fin edgings white as milk. It was a splendid creation, arching high over the sparkling blue meadow pool, with more vitality than any gaudy outdoor magazine illustrations I'd ever seen.

Just as she'd promised me earlier that summer, Mom said I could accompany the Dog Cart Man on his rounds that day if I'd like to. “But don't pester him when he's painting, Jimmy. And for heaven's sake, if any of the town boys start to pick on him, make them stop right away.”

Mom packed us a lunch big enough for an overnight outing for the whole family, which the Dog Cart Man wedged into his big wagon between the spruce-pole ladder, a dozen or so cans of paint, a metal footlocker, and a White Owl cigar box. Then we set out together toward the red iron bridge.

It was yet another fine summer day, and as we jogged along beside the dogs (I soon learned that the Dog Cart Man never walked anywhere), I studied him out of the corner of my eye. He was tall, thin, and spare, with long stringy arms, and he wore a brown cotton smock, baggy gray gabardine pants and shapeless brown shoes laced with baling twine.

Instead of a cap he wore a faded beret that might once have been blue or green, and from beret to shoes he was spattered with paint of every color so that at a little distance he resembled a trotting painter's palette.

His most remarkable features were his hands, which were long and thin and artistic-looking, and his eyes, which were brown and watchful and at the same time slightly bemused, as though even when he was looking at you he was thinking of his next painting or the painting he had just completed.

Just on the other side of the bridge, the Dog Cart Man swung silently east out the county road and the dogs turned silently with him. We passed Charlie's trailer and the logged-off hillside across from it and continued out to Ben Currier's place, where we turned abruptly into the barnyard. Leaving his dogs hitched to the cart, the painter opened his steel locker and took out a marvelous meerschaum pipe with a massive and beautiful bowl swirled with blue and yellow and pink like an old-fashioned agate shooting marble. He stuffed the pipe with ropy tobacco from a little sack that stank like Resolvèd Kinneson's unlimed privy, and puffed away for a few minutes, studying the faded painting on the side of Ben's barn from several different angles, his pupils getting larger and larger and larger. When I mentioned the pipe later to my father, he laughed and said that the Dog Cart Man didn't smoke real tobacco at all, but hemp leaves, or marijuana, which he both planted and picked in his travels, like a Bohemian Johnny Appleseed.