On Kingdom Mountain (11 page)

“Miss Jane?” Henry said. “Do you recall whether that Canadian church had a picture or a stained glass window of the heavenly host? The seraphim and cherubim and such?”

“I catch your drift, Henry. You think your grandfather participated in the Great Raid and hid the stolen gold in Our Lady of Memphremagog.”

“It seems possible. The riddle says ‘on high with the blessed sweet host.'”

Miss Jane frowned. “I don't recall any frescoes or stained glass depictions of seraphim. But host, you know, could also mean the Communion wafers. They would have been distributed from the chancel box on the dais at the front of the church.”

“He wouldn't have hidden it in the box with the crackers,
would he? They'd have found it there when they dumped more crackers in.”

Miss Jane thought. “Not in the box. But possibly under it. There would be a space under the dais, you see, between the floor of the chancel and the floor of the nave. If your grandfather had a way to pry up the boards, it's possible he could have left the gold under the raised chancel floor. There's just one problem, Henry.”

“What's that?”

“Thirty years ago, Our Lady of Memphremagog burned to the ground, discarded crutches and stained glass windows and confessional booth where your grandfather hid and all. If the gold is there, it has who knows how many tons of rubble on top of it. What's more, the church was believed to be cursed. That's why it burned, they said. God was angry with the priests who had swindled folks into paying for cures they couldn't perform.”

But already Henry's head was full of magnetos and wires and batteries and the ringing of alarm clocks. Miss Jane's alarm clock, to be precise, which, along with her scrub broom, he appropriated the following day for the invention she would jokingly call the Auricus Satterfieldicus. With this machine, and with the full approval of his granddaddy, whose commentary Henry continued to hear in his head periodically, he confidently planned to locate, on the site of Our Lady of Memphremagog, the one hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar double eagles stolen from the First Farmers Bank, ten percent of which he had decided to give Miss Jane for helping him locate its hiding place. It was, Henry congratulated himself, a very generous disposition and would certainly defray the fee of an attorney to argue her case against the high road in the Vermont Supreme Court, probably with ample left over for her declining years. For whatever else might or might not be said
about him, Henry was determined that no one would count a lack of generosity among his shortcomings.

 

Nothing in his newly found profession of treasure hunting was simple. So Henry was thinking, that Friday about midnight, as he combed through the ruins of the old lakeside shrine with his ridiculous Auricus Satterfieldicus. The luminous dial of the homemade gold detector glowed brightly, but the thin red needle that he had appropriated, unknown to Miss Jane, from the speedometer of her Model A, stubbornly refused to budge. He knew that the Auricus worked. During its maiden operation in the home-place dooryard, he had located several horseshoe nails, a .54 caliber slug from Lady Justice, and a set of false teeth made of tin, which Miss Jane believed had belonged to her great-grandfather. So far, however, all he had found at Our Lady of Memphremagog was the melted base of a brass candlestick and a large round penny coined in 1843 by the Bank of Upper Canada.

In fact, Henry had had the devil's own time just locating the site of the cursed church, though it was only about a mile from the recently cut hayfield where he, Doc Harrison, and Sheriff Fred Morse had landed earlier that afternoon. The wind was now moaning through the tops of the churchyard cedars in a way that the pilot did not find at all comforting, and the waves slapping against the nearby rocky shore somehow reminded him of the chants for the many dead whose obsequies had been held on the very spot he was sifting through. Nearby stood a manure-caked wheelbarrow he had optimistically appropriated from a farmer's barnyard on the way to the shrine.

Keep at her, boy
, the granddaddy's voice said with an unpleasant chuckle Henry remembered all too well.
Rome weren't built in a day.

Suddenly, Miss Jane's wind-up alarm clock, attached to the
end of the broomstick, set up a dreadful clanging. Despite the thrill of knowing he had found the boodle his grandfather had hidden here more than half a century before, Henry jumped half a foot. But this was no time for faint-heartedness. Fetching the garden spade he had brought along for just this purpose, he began to delve into the cindery debris. A foot or so into the scree of burnt bricks and mortar, the handle of the shovel snapped off just above the head. Mindless of his neatly creased white pants, Henry dropped to his knees, like those hopeful petitioners who long ago had crawled up the great stone steps of the church to be made whole. The shovel head scraped against something hard. Wild calculations ran through Henry's head. If he could shovel the gold into the wooden barrow and trundle it back to the plane before Doc and the low high sheriff rendezvoused there with the Dr. Pinkham elixir, he could get out of these forsaken mountains scot-free. He could always send Miss Jane her commission. The shovel head rang on something metallic. An image of a brass-bound treasure chest bursting with coins appeared to Henry.
Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost.
Of course. That was it. The gold itself was the Holy Ghost.

Out of the rubble Henry wrestled a round enameled metal basin. God Jesus, he thought. Could it be a collection plate? Had he come all the way from Texas to root in the ruins of a country chapel and unearth a collection plate? His grandfather, the captain, certified as a bona fide lunatic at the end, spent his last months on earth toiling feverishly to discover the alchemical formula for turning gold into base metals, on the assumption that he could then reverse the process and, like King Midas, transform all that he touched, or at least all that was metallic, to gold. Could the entire riddle be the insane old officer's idea of a joke? The cumbrous thing he had unearthed had a cover, also enameled. He tossed the basin and cover aside and ran the Auricus over the charred bricks again. Nothing.
The collection plate was the sum and substance of his night's work. Plus the one hundred dollars and fuel for the plane that the sheriff had promised him. Still, if the artifact was a collection plate, perhaps it had some historical value. Knocking the dirt and ashes off the cover and basin, he decided to take them back to the home place and present them to Miss Jane.

Doc Harrison and the low high sheriff, who stood four feet ten inches in his cowboy boots and who wore at all times a .45 Colt pistol whose barrel extended well below his knees, were in a very jolly frame of mind, having already sampled Dr. Pinkham's finest and found it good. Although it was a moonless night, the stars were out, and Henry had no difficulty tracing the long sheen of the lake below back to Kingdom Mountain and setting the biplane gently down in Miss Jane's water meadow, where the glass gallon jugs of Dr. Pinkham's relieving compound were transferred to the rear seat and trunk of the sheriff's touring car. Roof light flashing, siren wailing, Doc and Little Fred roared off over the covered bridge on their errand of mercy. Henry, for his part, gravely presented his artifact from the defunct church to Miss Jane, who washed it off under the pump in the soapstone sink, then began to laugh.

“Mr. Satterfield,” she said, “do you know what this is?”

“I thought it might be an old collection plate.”

“This, sir, is a genuine porcelain enameled chamber pot. An old-fashioned thunder mug that the priest kept handy to use between confessions or healings.”

Still chuckling, she said, “Never mind, it's still a grand find. Look. We'll call it the golden helmet of Mambrino, after the headpiece of the good gentleman from La Mancha. We'll let the Loup-Garou wear it as a crown.

“Here,” she said, clapping the old thundermug upside down on the head of her carved wolfman beside the door. “I dub you Sir Chamberpot Blockhead of the North Woods.” She continued to smile quite gleefully over her tea and later in bed as she
read
Don Quixote
, which she so loved and admired that she had not “edited down” or blue-penciled out a single word of it. As for Henry Satterfield, even after Miss Jane had read him the wonderful passage on Mambrino's helmet, he was deeply chagrined by his misadventure at the site of the sacred shrine of Our Lady of Memphremagog, and more determined than ever to find the Treasure of Kingdom Mountain.

COME ONE COME ALL

TO THE INDEPENDENCE DAY GALA

ON THE GREEN IN KINGDOM COMMON

FOR A PICNIC & AEROPLANE RIDES

A HISTORICAL PAGEANT

AND A PARADE

TO BE FOLLOWED BY FIREWORKS AT DUSK

TO BENEFIT THE CONNECTOR

BETWEEN KINGDOM COMMON AND CANADA

 

The flyers had been printed up by Editor Kinneson at the
Kingdom County Monitor
office, in accordance with Eben Kinneson Esquire's directions. And although no one, least of all Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, could have imagined that she and Henry Satterfield would be distributing them by air from the Burgess-Wright, here they were, just a week before the gala, dropping several thousand of the small yellow leaflets on all of the towns within a twenty-mile radius of the Common. Jane still had no idea what Henry had planned and why he was willing to help Eben and the fathers with their fundraiser.
Their featherbed chats notwithstanding, they both kept their own counsel about certain matters. All the rainmaker would say, usually from the hammock he had slung in the shade of the Virginia creeper at the west end of Jane's porch, and often with a significant glance at the incomplete riddle on the slate beside the door, is that they had bigger catfish to fry, and the gala in the Common could be used to this end.

The celebration was all the talk in the village. Besides the biplane rides, there would be an early-afternoon baseball game between the town club, the Kingdom Common Outlaws, and their archrivals from Pond in the Sky, a late-afternoon barbecue, the historical pageant, and, at dusk, just before Henry's pyrotechnics, a reenactment of the Great Kingdom Common Raid.

The drought had held through June, though the oracular old Civil War soldiers on the hotel porch were confidently predicting rain for the Fourth, and indeed seemed to be hoping for it, both to be proven right and to confirm their own deep belief in the unwelcome but inevitable irony that lay at the bottom of all things in this world. To their disappointment, the big day dawned clear. The Common began filling up with celebrants by midmorning. Henry Satterfield's airplane rides started at noon. A landing strip had been cleared on the village green, and everyone, it seemed, wanted to go aloft, from President George Quinn of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank of Kingdom Common to Canvasback Glodgett, the fish peddler.

The ball game was a great success, with the Outlaws defeating Pond in the Sky 3–2, on Editor Kinneson's ninth-inning home run off the bandstand in deep center field. The smoke from the barbecue mingled with the haze that had hung over the county for weeks, so the picnickers on the green had a rather illusory look, as did the participants in the historical pageant that followed. First came the village's brass marching band, blaring out a spirited version of “The Star-Spangled
Banner.” At the heels of the band, a contingent of men dressed in buckskins and carrying flintlock muskets represented Robert Rogers' Rangers, who had come through the Kingdom in 1759 after their bloody raid on Miss Jane's Memphremagog ancestors across the border. Close behind were several of the Outlaws wearing feathered headdresses and war paint and enacting the role of the Memphremagogs who had overtaken Rogers on the shore of the big lake and killed several of his men. There were settlers carrying felling axes; Revolutionary soldiers, including Judge Allen in the incarnation of his famous ancestor, whose statue gazed on benignly from the north end of the common; lumberers and river drivers in red shirts and black slouch hats; a squadron of Civil War veterans in blue; doughboys from the Great War with round helmets and gas masks; even a few modern-day whiskey runners and G-men in shiny black coupes. A Number One tagged along in an engineer's cap, giving out a heartfelt train whistle from time to time. Sadie Blackberry stood waving in the bandstand.

As the procession completed its second circuit, shots rang out east of the village. Two horsemen in gray uniforms came galloping into town, past the hotel, firing rifles into the air. Bank President Quinn, decked out in a swallow-tailed frock coat and a stovepipe hat, who had just locked the proceeds from the gala fundraiser in the bank vault for the night, was taken captive and forced at gunpoint to reenter the bank. The brass band played “Dixie” as one of the raiders stood guard outside the bank while the other rushed inside with flour sacks. Moments later he emerged with the bags bulging and remounted; firing their guns, the two horsemen rode back out of town toward Kingdom Mountain.

In the meantime, unnoticed by most of the spectators, Henry Satterfield had taken off in his biplane. As the raiders galloped away, Henry swooped after them in the Burgess-Wright, just over the treetops, with Miss Jane in the passenger seat firing
blanks at the robbers from Lady Justice. The horsemen turned around and, with the plane low overhead, allowed themselves to be herded back into town, hands over their heads. They returned the laden flour sacks to George Quinn just as the biplane landed on the green at dusk to a terrific ovation. Then Henry and Jane and the raiders and President George Quinn shook hands all around.