On Kingdom Mountain (6 page)

They passed the horseshoe-shaped lake, where a guest in a tweed jacket was fly-casting at one end. Ahead a golfer, tall and thin, with straight black hair parted in the middle, was crossing the road. He wore a knit sweater and spiked golfing shoes and carried a golfing bag. Miss Jane gave a blast on her klaxon, and Eben Kinneson Esquire scowled at the Model A. Then he continued walking toward the green near the pond.

Miss Jane left the Ford running in the middle of the road and approached the green with Henry in tow. On the hillside above them Eben's resort gleamed in the late-afternoon sunshine. “Golf links,” Miss Jane said. “And a private fishing pond. Remark upon all this opulence, Mr. Satterfield. Thoreau, ordinarily the most insufferable of pronouncers and proclaimers, was on one occasion half right. Not necessarily the mass of men, but many rich men, lead lives of desperation. Not so very quietly, either.

“Hello, Eben,” she said. “I scarcely recognized you in your fancy footwear. I can remember when you went to school barefoot. This is my friend Mr. Henry Satterfield, of Beaumont, Texas. Mr. Satterfield is a renowned aviator and meteorologist.”

“I know who and what Mr. Satterfield is,” Eben said with the air of a man who knows everything about everybody.

Eben stepped up to his ball and stroked it briskly past the pin, off the green, and into some cattails beside the lake. He frowned in the direction of the errant golf ball as if it had personally offended him.

“The aim of this game, cousin,” Miss Jane said, “as invented by our Scottish ancestors, is to knock the ball into the cup, not the horse pond.”

“That is no horse pond but my private speckled trout lake.”

“Char,” Miss Jane corrected him. “Which brings me to my purpose. Your cutters came onto my land without permission and felled several hundred trees and laid waste to the spawning pool where my blue-backed char have perpetuated their kind since time out of mind. I hold you and you alone accountable.”

“You have been offered generous restitution, cousin, for the small amount of land appropriated by the township for the right of way for the Connector. However, I will recommend that the highway be rerouted, away from your trout pool and up the pike road.”

“There will be no highway on my mountain, period. What's more, I want you to pay me a thousand dollars for the stolen timber. It will cost at least that much to replant the Gate to Canada with seedlings. Also, I expect you to fill in those ruts, which will turn into little mud-choked rivers every time it rains. Pull the slash out of the burn and the river, dump gravel and sand into the pool where it's been washed out, put some crib dams on the brook, and replace my butternut fishing tree.”

“Why, that's absurd. All that would cost many thousands of dollars,” Eben said as he headed toward the driving tee of the next hole. “I am a very conservation-minded man, cousin. But I did not rise to become owner of the Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company by throwing away money. I hear, by the way, that in confronting my crew, you weren't content to rely entirely on verbal persuasion.”

“Your crew is fortunate not to be in the morgue. I shall see you in court, cousin.”

For the first time since Miss Jane and Henry had arrived at the golf course, Eben Kinneson Esquire smiled. “Court, cousin Jane, is my bailiwick. You will indeed see me there if you persist with this nonsense. Meeting me in court will not be an enjoyable experience, I assure you.”

“It may or may not be an enjoyable experience. But I will find satisfaction there.”

“You will lose the case and be out your timber and court costs for bringing a frivolous action when generous compensation was proffered.” So saying, the attorney approached his teed-up golf ball, addressed it with a confident waggle of his club head, and executed a mighty swing. The ball toppled off the white wooden tee and dribbled five feet.

Miss Jane reached down, picked up the dubbed ball, and, like a housewife tossing spilled salt, flipped it over her left shoulder into the lake. Then she and Henry returned to her Ford.

I
T WOULD BE INCORRECT
to give the impression that Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain was a hermit. In fact, she was quite sociable. With the exception of whiskey runners and revenuers who violated her rule of fifteen miles per hour at all times, game wardens, whom she detested on principle, and border officials “whose border didn't exist and never had,” Jane welcomed all visitors to her mountain. And she loved going into the village several times a week.

True, Miss Jane's dealings with many of the villagers, particularly with the town fathers promoting the Connector, were somewhat strained. In Kingdom County in those days a certain tension existed between villagers and country people. It was reflected in the rivalry between town kids—townies—and kids from the surrounding farms and mountain hollows, known as
woodchucks. Yet the split ran deeper than that. Jane's own high school days had been fraught with conflict, and she readily acknowledged that she had greatly contributed to it by striving to be the best at everything, even demanding to pitch for the boys' baseball nine. Then, of course, there was her shocking valedictory speech. Yet for many years the village had depended on her civic services far more than she depended on the pittance she received for performing them.

Some years Miss Jane made an adequate income from her carved birds and folk figures. Had she been willing to carve waterfowl decoys for hunters, she would have earned considerably more. But this she absolutely refused to do because, though she loved to hunt ducks herself, she regarded the use of decoys as a most detestable kind of entrapment. She made some pin money from the beautiful sweetgrass baskets and white-ash pack baskets her Memphremagog grandmother, Canada Jane Hubbell, had taught her to weave. Miss Jane's baskets were so tightly woven they would hold water. She proclaimed that they would outlast their owner and guaranteed her work by promising to replace any basket that didn't. One day a villager named White, who had bought one of Jane's baskets for his wife, showed up with its crushed remains, demanding a refund. He was a mean man, known for being cruel to his family and animals alike, and it was obvious to Miss Jane that he had somehow contrived to run over the basket with his buggy or that a horse had stepped on it. Nevertheless, she handed him his two-dollar refund without a word. As he was reaching for his buggy whip to lash up his horse, he said in a surly voice, “You said that no-good basket would outlast me, Jane Kinneson.”

To which Miss Jane instantly replied, “Mr. White, if you'd died when you should've, it would've.”

Miss Jane didn't need much income. She burned her own
wood, ate her own venison, moose, and trout, cultivated a large kitchen garden, cut her ice on the river, compounded her own medicines, walked all over her mountain for exercise, and had no taxes or electric or phone bills to pay. And she did earn a little cash from her various jobs in the village.

For the most part, these were jobs no one else wanted. First, she was the overseer of the poor, the elected official responsible for disbursing emergency funds to the indigent of the township. Usually the local overseer was, by default, a hard-bitten old farmer or tightfisted shopkeeper. But in Kingdom Common, year in and year out, Jane was “put up for election” and unanimously chosen for the job. She was good at rallying family and neighborhood support for the down-and-out and at helping people find work. Often enough, when she ran out of town funds, she assisted people out of her own pocket. In 1930, the year Henry Satterfield came to Kingdom Mountain, Miss Jane was paid a total of eighty-five dollars for her work as overseer. For a number of years she had coached the girls' basketball and baseball teams at the Kingdom Common Academy. When old Coach Sanville died, she took the boys' baseball nine to two state championships. She put on plays, helped with all kinds of fundraisers, and showed movies every Friday night at the town hall. Best of all, she enjoyed her work at the Atheneum, her small free library and bookshop next to the Academy, where, in her capacity as bookwoman extraordinaire, Miss Jane presided over the literary affairs of the village, matching books and readers, helping grammar school children with their homework and highschoolers with their term papers, even sponsoring a series of lectures and symposia. It was one of these events that she planned to surprise Henry with on the evening of their visit to Eben Kinneson's Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company and Monadnock House.

The Atheneum was housed in an ancient stone cottage,
originally belonging to an ancestor of Judge Allen. When the family moved to the large brick residence on Anderson Hill where the widower judge now lived alone, he had donated the building to the village for use as a library. Although Henry had heard much about the library and bookstore, and about Miss Jane's literary evenings, he had not yet visited the Atheneum and was most curious to see the establishment.

The event was scheduled for seven and, after a quick supper at the Common Hotel, which Jane insisted on paying for, they arrived half an hour early. The Atheneum was not much larger than Miss Jane's former one-room school. It was lighted by a glass chandelier, originally designed to hold candles but now electrified. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with dark varnished shelves containing thousands of books. Ranged around the room, seated at library tables and in creaky wooden Morris chairs or standing at the shelves poring over the spines of leather-bound sets of authors Henry had heard about from his schoolteacher mother were a dozen or so wooden figures whom Jane referred to as her scribblers and scrawlers.

Like Jane's beloved blockheads and her dear people in On Kingdom Mountain, the scribblers and scrawlers were life-size, with oblong craniums and painted features. One by one, Miss Jane introduced them to the pilot. At a table near the door, bent over an open volume of
Pride and Prejudice
, sat Jane's co-namesake and all-time favorite author, Jane Austen. She had light brown hair and, naturally, Miss Jane's gray eyes, wore a blue gown and a white blouse with lace at the throat and wrists, and was as narrow-waisted as a schoolgirl. Jane Austen had rather sharp features. Henry suspected that she had a sharp tongue as well.

Standing nearby, tall and handsome, was the young poet Robert Frost. Miss Jane told Henry that on several occasions Mr. Frost had visited Kingdom Mountain to botanize with her
for alpine plants. And once he had come to the Atheneum to read his poetry. Henry recognized Mark Twain, who had also visited the Common to lecture when Jane was a small girl. She had gone to hear him with her father, who had taken her up to meet the great humorist after his talk. Morgan Kinneson had told Twain that the evening was so hilarious it was all he could do not to laugh out loud.

Slouched into a Boston rocker near the fireplace, his vast girth overflowing the flat wooden arms of the chair, a little gray unkempt wig askew on his large, oblong head, sat a great bear of a man. “Mr. Satterfield, may I present the incomparable Proclaimer of Litchfield, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Doctor, my friend Henry Satterfield.” On the lap of the incomparable proclaimer reposed Dr. Johnson's own dictionary of the English language. It was open to the
O
section, the first entry of which, “Oats,” was defined as “a grain, which is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” Through this witticism at the expense of her Scottish ancestors Miss Jane had drawn a firm blue line. Later that spring Henry would learn that she had excised hundreds of sentences, paragraphs, and even entire pages from the books lining the walls of the Atheneum, a process she called “editing down the classics,” in accordance with Rule Three of her “Precepts for the Serious Bookperson.” There were five precepts in all, and they were posted, in Miss Jane's fine hand, on the inside of the door.

1. Never sell a book for less than you paid for it.
   
2. But it's perfectly allowable to give books away.
   
3. Nearly every book should be shorter.
   
4. “Of making many books there is no end.” (Thankfully.) Ecclesiastes 12:12.
   
5. There is absolutely no money to be made in selling, lending, reading, teaching, publishing, or writing of books. All are labors of love.
   

“Good evening to you, my friend,” Jane greeted a careworn middle-aged scribbler toiling over a mountainous manuscript. “Mr. Satterfield, say how do you do to Mr. Charles Dickens, the most magnanimous and hardest-working novelist of all time.”

Miss Jane seemed very fond of all her scribblers and scrawlers, even “persnickety old Henry David Thoreau, Pronouncer and Proclaimer nonpareil.” Thoreau, seated on a bench beside a beautiful wooden loon, looked rather somberly at the edition of
Walden
in his hands, in which Miss Jane had summarily blue-penciled out nearly half of the text, including the entire chapter entitled “Economy.”

Or, rather, she seemed fond of all of her scribblers with two exceptions. At the rear of the library, near the alcove leading to her shop of new and rare books, was a carved fellow with a high, broad forehead, otherwise quite simian-looking, hunched over a workbench on which lay a half-finished pair of ladies' gloves. “William Shakespeare, Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said contemptuously. “The Pretender of Avon and the subject of my lecture this evening.” Finally, Jane beckoned Henry into the little annex shop, scarcely larger than a walk-in closet, where, enthroned in a gilded armchair, wearing a crimson robe and a gilt crown, sat “the most villainous impostor who ever set pen to paper. King James the First, author of the King James Bible,” which Jane had been assiduously revising for thirty-two years.

Three people showed up for Jane's lecture. Sadie Blackberry, the village berry picker, was a tiny woman in a long dress and a Mother Hubbard bonnet, with a dark, nutlike face and bright black eyes like the berries she was named for. A Number One, the fabled Grand Trunk Railroad tramp who had chalked his distinctive signature on the sides of hundreds of North Country eateries, outhouses, barn doors, and boxcars, had spent the last several years in retirement at the Common Hotel, majestically lifting his hand in greeting to the engineers of the passing trains. And Jane introduced to Henry a tall, distinguished-looking man of about her own age as her longtime friend and fishing partner, Judge Ira Allen.