A Stranger in the Kingdom (41 page)

The painting was a simple scene of Ben's Jersey cows lining up at the pasture bars across the road from the barn, with the barn itself in the background and the house next to the barn. The Dog Cart Man put up his pipe and gazed at Ben's homestead—as dilapidated a set of buildings, nearly, as our own. In the meantime Ben came out of the barn, where he'd evidently just finished milking. Together the old farmer and the half-dozen dogs and I watched as the Dog Cart Man silently set up his homemade ladder and arranged his paint cans and brushes on the ground beneath it. Then he began to paint like a wildman, slapping on each color at such an alarming clip that he hardly seemed to be paying attention to what he was doing. Ben's wife joined us, and we all watched spellbound. On the side of the Curriers' barn, the pasture across the road reemerged, a lovely lush June-green, then one by one the handsome Jersey cows, then the barn itself and the house, no longer faded but as spanking red and white as the cowbarn and traditional farmhouse on my mother's
Vermont Life
kitchen calendar at home.

“My land!” Mrs. Currier said. “That's how the place must have looked back when your grandfather had it, Benjamin.”

Ben gave a short laugh. “I much misdoubt it. But it's pretty, all right. Too bad it won't last. Three Kingdom winters will weather that picture to the same state of ruination as the building she's painted on and its owner.”

Ben seemed to take considerable satisfaction in contemplating the inevitable weathering of the painting and his own personal ruination as he walked over to the Dog Cart Man's wagon and slipped a five-dollar bill into the White Owl cigar box. The artist looked at neither the cigar box nor his completed painting. He packed up his paints, snapped his fingers to his dogs, and we trotted back toward the village, leaving the Curriers to admire the bright new panoramic picture of the way their farm might once have looked.

The Dog Cart Man stopped again at my brother's trailer, hunched against the dark spruce woods along the river like an overgrown green leafhopper. The Dog Cart Man flicked a finger at the weedy dooryard and the dogs turned in. He went carefully from window to window, looking in at my brother's tiny cramped kitchen and living area, papered with sexy pinups. He looked at me, and for the first time since I'd met him he grinned, a fleeting little brown-toothed mischievous grin gone almost immediately, and before I knew it he was painting again, this time a portrait of a willowy young woman with blond hair, in red high-heeled shoes and an impossibly bright red dress clinging to her shapely thighs. It was Marilyn Monroe, reaching out as though to open the door of Charlie's trailer, and smiling coyly back over her shoulder!

This painting took no more than ten minutes from start to finish, and we were on our way again. For the rest of the day we continued at a nearly frenetic pace from building to building, stopping only once, around noon, when the Dog Cart Man bought two Hershey chocolate bars apiece for himself, me, and each of his dogs.

Late in the afternoon, on the side of Armand St. Onge's hotel, the Dog Cart Man refurbished the black bear climbing a beech tree to shake down beechnuts, then the yoke of Red Durham oxen with gleaming golden balls on the tips of their horns over the big sliding door of the commission sales barn, where Bumper Stevens, to my surprise, gave me a crumpled twenty-dollar bill to put in the White Owl cigar box; and finally the faded black letters that said KINGDOM COUNTY MONITOR on the inside of my father's shop window.

By suppertime he was ready to knock off for the day. We trotted back out to the gool, and although Mom didn't ask him inside to eat with us—she knew he'd never join us—she carried his meal out to him and he ate squatting with his back against the barn under the fresh painting of the brook trout, with his dogs sitting in their comical half-circle waiting for him to finish so they could eat.

Afterward he smoked his pipe for a while, I then took a sheet of newsprint out of the footlocker and folded it into a rectangle and then into a sort of lopsided triangle. From the locker he removed a long pair of gleaming barber's shears. He studied the folded sheet of paper, turning it several times in his hands. Suddenly, so fast I could hardly follow the flashing scissors, he made several cuts and unfolded an uncannily exact replica of a buck deer with a perfect ten-point rack, which he gravely handed to me. He repeated this process several times, cutting out a bear standing on one hind foot, a sitting partridge, a dog resembling his lead dog, a Model T Ford, a modern-looking fire engine, and a steam locomotive with a smoke stack just like the ones that until two years ago had pulled the mile-long Boston and Montreal freights through the Common.

At dusk, the Dog Cart Man and his dogs retreated into the hayloft for the night. All in all, it had been one of the best days I could remember, and just before I went up to bed myself, Mom said I could go with my new friend again in the morning.

We spent most of the next day in the Academy auditorium, where the Dog Cart Man refurbished the mural of the entire village on the stage backdrop—the church, the Academy, the Common with its gorgeous wine-glass elms, the brick shopping block, the hotel and commission sales barn, and the cemetery, with Jay Peak and the Green Mountains in the background.

Around three in the afternoon, we returned to the gool by way of the covered bridge, stopping briefly to touch up the signs over each end that said CROSS AT A WALK. Then we struck off up into the gore, and turned onto the old trace leading to the granite quarry.

Somewhat guiltily, I thought of Claire for the first time since the previous morning, but instead of following the burn all the way up to the falls where I'd called her name in the mist until the echo scared me, we cut off the trace and out around the deep pit. In the bright afternoon sunlight, it no longer looked eerie to me—just empty and forlorn. On the back side of the quarry, the Dog Cart Man unhitched his dogs, handed me four buckets of paint, and hoisted the homemade ladder to his shoulder. In single file we pushed our way through a tangle of blackberry canes, to the faded pictograph he'd painted long ago on the granite face of the cliff above the quarry of the gypsy stonecutters who had once come regularly to Kingdom County. Over the years it had faded almost beyond recognition, and at this time of year it was obscured by the leafy summer foliage of second-growth hardwoods.

As we approached the cliff, something let out a cough. Up from the pit flapped one of the ravens I'd seen two days ago. But if the Dog Cart Man noticed it, he paid no attention.

He propped his ladder against a slanted defile, and climbed up to a shelf just below the faded picture of the gypsies and motioned for me to hand him the paint cans. He pulled the ladder up behind him, got out his pipe, and began to smoke and study the painting.

It was actually more discernible from a distance. Up close, I could just make out the faint tracery of the gypsy figures. The Dog Cart Man smoked a bowlful of the evil-smelling hemp, staring at the painting and the woods and the sky, and all at once he was painting fast.

As the dogs and I watched from the foot of the cliff, the old gypsy stonecutters took shape again, four men in vivid blue pantaloons with wide crimson sashes and billowing green and yellow shirts, hauling a block of granite out of a pit of opaque, green water below. It was wonderful to watch the painter at work, and he worked so fast that the painted figures taking form above me seemed themselves to be working and sweating in the great heat.

I was so absorbed by the wonderful tableau that I jumped when the lead dog, a spaniel-hound cross with floppy ears and long legs, tugged at my pants cuff.

“What do you want?” I said.

The dog released my cuff and ran into the blackberry patch nearby, then returned and tugged at my pants again.

This time I followed it.

I bulled my way through the briers, trampling on the tough thorny canes. The dog was thrashing somewhere out of sight ahead. I was pretty sure it scented a partridge and braced myself for the sudden roaring whir of wings; I expected it to flush thundering out from under my feet at any moment.

Abruptly, I came out of the blackberry cane patch by a pin cherry tree growing on the very brink of the quarry. The spaniel-hound ran to the very edge and wagged its tail and looked back at me. I snapped my fingers. “Come back here, boy.”

The dog looked at me inquiringly.

I crept closer and peered over the edge. Fifteen or so feet below me was a ledge, and below the ledge the surface of the flooded quarry. As I started to turn away, something on the ledge gave an odd sort of jerking heave. I grasped the slender trunk of the pin cherry and leaned far out over the edge and peered down again.

An enormous raven was standing on something long and bright, sprawled on the ledge below. Except for the torn bright garment I would not have recognized it because it had no face where its face should have been, the ravens had seen to that. I yelled. I reeled back, tripped over the dog, and fell crashing into the blackberry bushes. I was on my feet, screaming for help and plunging back through the bushes, heedless of the raking thorns on my arms and hands and face, shrieking Claire's name at the Dog Cart Man on the shelf above me, who, oblivious to my screaming and to all the sounds of the world worked rapidly on under the hot afternoon sun beating down on him and his painting and the dogs, on me and the quarry and the shattered body of Claire LaRiviere on the ledge in the quarry.

 

Fleeting, jumbled, indistinct nightmare images remain: woods flying by me, the silvery falls spilling over the lip of the quarry, riffles and pools I would never fish again. Welcome Kinneson looking up and waving at me from his steam crane, a jarring spill on the gravel at the junction of the gool and the gore that cut the heels of my hands to bloody shreds. Somehow I was on the porch at home, where my mother sat in her sun hat snapping green beans, and then I was in my mother's arms and pieces of beans were raining down on us both and I was crying and shouting something about Claire, an accident, ravens.

Finally my mother managed to understand what had happened. Her hand shot to her mouth as though to keep herself from crying out. Then we were inside the house and she was on the phone to my father, and then she was hugging me again.

“That poor, poor waif,” Mom said over and over again. “Oh, Jimmy. That poor little girl. . . .”

Within minutes, Sheriff White and Doc Harrison and Zack Barrows and Deputy Pine Benson and Reverend Andrews and my father were standing on the porch and I was trying to tell them how I had found the body.

“On the back side, the
woods
side, you say, Jimbo?” Sheriff White kept asking me. “You say it was on the
back
side of that old hole up there? You'd best come along and show us where.”

Mason reached for my arm, but Reverend Andrews told him that there was no need for me to go back up there now, they'd locate the body all right.

Mason whirled around and pointed at the minister. “Reverend, I'm going to tell you something. I don't know how they work things where you come from, but up here the preachers stick to preaching and leave the elected officials to take care of enforcing the law. In case you didn't know it, you're in enough hot water as it is.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“For God's sake, gentlemen, let's not start quarreling between ourselves,” my father said. “There's a dead girl up on that mountain.”

The last thing I heard as they went down off the porch was Doc Harrison saying in his dry sardonic voice, “Leave your siren off this time, will you, Mason? She isn't going to get any deader than she already is, you know.”

How I got up to my bedchamber I have no idea. I cried my eyes out there and pounded my pillow furiously, overwhelmed by grief and my first encounter with a great indifferent universal injustice, which, if I had suspected its existence at all, had never before touched my life. My mother sat beside me, trying to comfort me, trying to explain that with all her problems, poor Claire was better off out of a life that had never shown her a day's kindness since the death of her father. But to me at thirteen, any life seemed better than no life, and I was inconsolable.

Besides being infatuated with Claire from the moment I'd set eyes on her, standing scared half out of her wits on the tailgate of a truck in a tent show, I had genuinely liked her. The contrast between the affectionate, engaging and good-natured girl I had known and the faceless, crumpled heap of bones on the ledge in the quarry was terrible. I cried for a long, long time, before falling into an exhausted broken sleep in which I dreamed of Claire's body, floating down through the green water of the quarry, her long hair trailing above her, while Resolvèd stood sneering on the brink above, under the pin cherry tree, with his smoking shotgun crooked in his arm, and the woods behind him ringing from the shot.

It was pitch dark and the phone was ringing. It rang for a long time before my father answered it, so I knew it must be very late.

“Mister Baby Johnson!” he said.

I got out of bed and tiptoed to the head of the stairs.

Dad listened another moment, then said he'd be right over.

“Charles? Who is it?” My mother had come into the kitchen too now.

“You'd better sit down, Ruth,” Dad said. “That was Perry Harrison with some very bad news. The LaRiviere girl didn't just wander up into the woods and stumble into that quarry the way we thought. According to Harrison, she was shot and thrown in.”

 

Often and often my father had said and written in the
Monitor
that there was little or no law in the Kingdom. Yet so far as I knew, nothing like Claire's murder had ever happened here before. With the possible exception of the Ordney Gilson lynching, to find anything as brutal in the annals of local lawlessness you would have to go back at least as far as the shooting of the slave catcher, Satan Smithfield, in the pulpits of the church by my great-grandfather Mad Charlie Kinneson, nearly one hundred years ago. And even that shooting, as horrible as it was, had been regarded by my ancestor and most of his New England contemporaries more as an act of war than a crime. Dad said there had never even been an official inquiry.