On Kingdom Mountain (14 page)

“After a few years, Pamphille bought a peddler's wagon and painted it red and yellow,” Miss Jane said. “He traveled the borderlands from farm to farm selling household wares out of that painted wagon. Manon used to go along to translate for him. But the Thibeaus were always regarded as different by some people. They spoke a different language, their main holiday was New Year's rather than Christmas, and they said their
prayers on a string of beads. One night soon after they shifted here from Canada, some Commoners paraded up the mountain in white sheets and burned a cross in front of the cave. Manon raced cross-lots to our place, and my grandfather rode up and confronted the rabble.”

“With a gun?”

Miss Jane shook her head. “He didn't need a gun and wouldn't have brought one under any circumstances. He was a Quaker. He just reined in his horse and ordered the ruffians to leave the mountain straightaway and not return. Then for good measure he named them all by name, sheets or no. He knew well enough who the instigators were. From there it was an easy matter to surmise the names of the riffraff who would follow them. As for the Thibeaus, they hung on for a time. But two of the children perished in an epidemic, another boy was lost in the Civil War, and yet another was killed in a lumbering mishap. Then Pamphille and his wife died. Eventually, the mountain claimed them all.”

“Maybe that's where the treasure is buried,” Henry said. “In the cave.”

Miss Jane shook her head and smiled. “I'm afraid that the only treasure is the mountain itself, Henry. That's a treasure worth preserving. Come up, boys.”

She clicked to the oxen, and they proceeded up the mountainside above the Thibeaus' cave.

 

SALADA TEA
. The black letters painted on the inside of the window stood out sharply. Below them, like an afterthought, were the words
KINNESONVILLE GENERAL STORE AND POST OFFICE.

Miss Jane and Henry stood on the listing porch of the former store in the deserted hamlet. Cupping their hands around their eyes to cut down on the reflection, they peered inside at
the empty shelves. Set into the wall behind the counter were forty wooden cubbyholes where forty families had once received their mail. But Kinnesonville had been tenantless for more than a decade. The store had not been a working store for longer yet. The five or six houses still standing were overrun with bittersweet and wild grapevines. If the high road went through, they would be burned to the ground.

“When my father was a boy, Henry, he came here every Saturday morning to pick up the
Farmers Weekly Companion.
The
Companion
ran pirated installments from Charles Dickens's novels, and the line of people waiting for the next installment often stretched all the way out the door and down to the pike.”

Across the road from the store was the one-room school over which Miss Jane had once presided. Next to it was the Kinnesonville church. The steeple, which had blown off in a hurricane, lay rotting in a wild raspberry patch like the fallen turret of a cursed castle. It was said in the Common that the church bell, long since sold for scrap iron, still tolled to lead lost hunters out of the cedar bog.

“Miss Jane, where did all these folks go?”

“Some moved out west where the farming was better. The more ambitious of the young people flocked to the cities. As for the old folks and the rest, well, Henry, they went where I and thou and the oxen must now go if we're to accomplish our day's work.”

She pointed at the cemetery on the ridge above them. “Walk on, gentlemen,” she said to the steers.

L
IKE MANY ANOTHER
New England cemetery, the Kingdom Mountain graveyard enjoyed one of the finest views for miles around. You could look west over the Green Mountains, stretching from Mount Mansfield and Camels Hump in the south all the way to the tall Canadian peaks in the distant north. Off to the southeast, just visible in the hazy air that had hung over the region for more than two months, the Presidential Range of the White Mountains loomed larger still.
On high
, Henry mused. The riddle specified that the golden trove was
on high.
Unless they went up to the mountaintop, to the peace cairn and the balancing boulder, they couldn't get much higher than they were. Furthermore, if a rood was a cross, a cemetery was a likely place to find one.

Surrounded by its antebellum iron picket fence, the graveyard contained no more than one hundred and fifty stones. None were in any way prepossessing, just gray granite markers two to three feet tall and as unadorned as the lives of the people whose final resting places they marked. Through the middle of the cemetery ran a row of mature sugar maples. Each March and April for many years, Jane had unsentimentally tapped the cemetery maples. In the northwest corner of the graveyard grew several old-fashioned varieties of apple trees. Near the orchard stood an elm with a swinging oriole's nest. Two new graves, which Jane told Henry she'd hired Clarence Davis, the local spruce-gum picker, to dig a week ago, lay waiting under the elm. A pair of robins searched for worms on the fresh mounds of earth beside them.

Just across the pike from Kingdom Mountain Cemetery was
the paupers' field, where Jane's grandparents were buried beneath two plain granite markers. Otherwise, the paupers' graveyard was a place of cedar. It was enclosed with cedar rails. The cedar-pole gate was hinged to upright cedar fence posts. Most of the thirty or so grave markers were made of cedar as well. Some of the crude wooden tablets had fallen over into the grass. Long neglected, they marked the graves of the mountain's outcasts and unknowns.

QUAKER MEETING KINNESON
, 1805–1864. Below Jane's grandfather's dates was the word
FATHER
. Beside Quaker Meeting's stone was his wife's.
JANE KINNESON. MOTHER
. It had always seemed odd to Miss Jane to see her own name on her grandmother's gravestone.

In order to give his friend some time alone with her ancestors, Henry ambled off to read the inscriptions on the cedar markers.
UNKNOWN DIED ON THE RIVER
. And carved crudely on a fallen tablet,
A CANUCK LUMBERJACK DIED FIGHTIN
. Beneath Died Fightin's marker a woodchuck had tunneled a hole into the hillside. Nearby was the Thibeau plot. The graves of the children were designated by lozenge-shaped wooden markers no larger than breadboards.

The Duchess handed Henry a shovel. “This is just one more job of work on the mountain, Mr. Satterfield,” she said stoically. “Taking care of family.”

Jane set about digging methodically, like a woman spading up her kitchen garden in the fall. Henry, with his white showman's shoes and crimson vest, worked fitfully, in the unconvincing manner of a man not accustomed to physical labor. Yet there was something eager and anticipatory in his expression. Perhaps he merely wanted to get the transfers over with, Miss Jane thought.

Unlike the firmly packed blue clay of the river valley, the soil on the ridge was light glacial till. They were down to the coffins by noon. To Miss Jane's relief, both were intact.

She fetched the oxen and unhitched the stoneboat at the foot of her grandfather's grave. As Henry watched, she pried one end of the casket up at an angle with the iron bar, then wedged an end of the borrowed bridge plank under the raised casket. She wrapped the heavy rope they'd brought with them around the coffin and snubbed it off with a neat half hitch. The other end of the rope she ran over the top of the jutting plank and fastened to the pulling ring of the ox yoke.

Miss Jane clicked to the oxen. “Softly, boys.”

As the animals eased forward, Quaker Meeting's coffin slid up the canted plank. Like a well-balanced seesaw, the plank with the coffin on top tipped down onto the bed of the stone-boat. Jane repeated the process with her grandmother's coffin, then clicked to the oxen and drove them out of the paupers' field and across the road into the cemetery proper, where she glanced up at the hazy sun. “I call this a fair morning's work, Henry. Let's take our nooning.”

They ate on the burnt grass under the lone elm tree beside the new graves. As Miss Jane unpacked the sweetgrass basket, it seemed strange to Henry that she could sit so comfortably beside the last earthly remains of her grandparents and sprinkle salt on her hard-boiled egg and munch homemade baked bean sandwiches laced with maple syrup from the cemetery maples. But they were both hungry in the way people who have done hard work outdoors usually are, and after all, as Jane had remarked, she was just taking care of family.

“Family ties are of considerable consequence in my part of the country as well, Miss Jane,” Henry said. “But with your permission, I wonder if I might make a rather personal inquiry?”

“Permission granted,” Miss Jane said.

“Would you want me to”—Henry paused for the slightest moment—“view the remains? To spare you the pain?”

“Why, Henry Satterfield, whatever can you mean? I know very well whose remains are in those boxes. And I'll assure you that I don't care to view them. Why would you think I might wish to?”

Henry inclined his head toward Miss Jane, bowing slightly. “Why, indeed, Miss Jane,” he said. “Why, indeed, now that I think of it. It was a passing whim. Forgive me.”

“You've done nothing at all to be forgiven for, sir. If you truly thought I wished to verify the remains, it was a kind offer.”

Suddenly Miss Jane's gray eyes were amused. “I do believe, Henry, that you suppose my grandfather found that so-called treasure and somehow arranged for it to be buried with him.”

Henry bowed again in acknowledgment of Miss Jane's deduction. But she shook her head and said no, she was certain that if Quaker Meeting had ever stumbled on the loot from the robbery, he'd have returned it to the bank, ill-gotten gains from profiteering on the war or no. “And that's assuming that the treasure was ever buried on the mountain to start out with,” she added. “Which I've always much misdoubted.”

“Oh,” Henry said very gravely, “I believe it was buried on the mountain, Miss Jane. I do believe it was. That, you see, must be the import of the riddle. However, as far as your grandfather finding the boodle and not returning it, I take your point. That would be very unlikely.”

Miss Jane unwrapped another sandwich and handed it to the aviator, then folded up the brown butcher paper to use again. “So, Mr. Satterfield. No doubt you will remember this day in later life. Picnicking with your peculiar Vermont friend in Kingdom Mountain Cemetery whilst moving two graves.”

“My friend, yes. But peculiar? Far from it.”

“Oh, yes,” Jane said. “I was a peculiar child, a peculiar, if capable, teacher, and I am a peculiar friend. You and I both know it.”

Miss Jane seemed so proud of being a peculiar friend that Henry caught himself on the verge of acquiescing. Then, despite himself, his eyes swiveled back to the coffins. He must and would find away to look inside them, even if he had to play grave robber and return under cover of darkness to re-exhume them.

Miss Jane handed him one of her famous cartwheel molasses cookies. “This puts me in mind of the day I got the receipt for these cookies, Mr. Satterfield. It was a very warm afternoon in the spring of the year back when I was keeping the Kinnesonville school. I happened to glance out the window, and for a moment I thought that a caravan from
The Arabian Nights
was winding down the valley. It was the Barnum & Bailey circus train, en route to Montreal. One hundred cars painted bright yellow and blue and red. When it stopped to take on water at the Kingdom Mountain tank, I let the entire school out. They were doing some minor repairs to the locomotive as we arrived, and it was such an unseasonably warm day that the circus master directed that the elephants be allowed to cool off in the river. Twenty performing elephants of all sizes were led out of the cars and into the big pool below the trestle. The circus master was very accommodating to the children. He pointed out Jumbo, the world's largest elephant. And he had one of the cooks give each of my scholars a huge molasses cookie. Those circus cookies were the best I ever ate. Before the train departed, I got the receipt.”

“Well, Miss Jane,” Henry said, lolling out with his sleek dark head propped on his fist and his elbow resting on the grass, “it just goes to prove what the old judge said.”

“What might that be?” Miss Jane inquired.

“That if you but wait long enough, the world and everyone in it worth knowing will travel to Kingdom Mountain.”

Henry plucked a clover blossom and held it on his tongue to
extract the sweetness. “Miss Jane,” he said, “I'm truly sorry that the new highway's coming. Regardless of the higher court's decision, I am quite determined to help you stop it.”

Miss Jane nodded, but her eyes had the abstracted expression that sometimes came into them just before one of her Kingdom Mountain moments.

“What do you see?” Henry said.

“I don't really see anything. It's more of an idea taking shape in my head. I just had the idea that years from now you might come here with a new wingwalker, a beautiful young woman who would like to hear a story.”

“What story would I tell her?” Henry said. “How I moved some graves with Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson?”

Miss Jane smiled and shook her head. “A young woman, Mr. Satterfield, would like to hear a love story. Hark now. I'll tell you one. When my uncle Pilgrim was home for the summer holidays from his medical studies at Harvard, he fell deeply in love with Manon Thibeau, the eldest daughter from the family I spoke of who dwelt in the cave. Manon was by all reports a beautiful woman and as much in love with Pilgrim as he was with her. But now enter my grandparents, Quaker Meeting and Jane Kinneson, who were appalled by the idea of a son of theirs courting a French Canadian girl. From the start they opposed the match.”