Northern Borders (2 page)

Because of my mother's huge medical bills, the opportunity to send me to college free someday must have been unusually appealing to my father. And a further factor in his decision to send me up to my grandparents' farm in Lost Nation was that as headmaster of the White River Academy, my father, wisely enough, did not want me to be stigmatized, possibly for the next twelve years, as the principal's son. Also I believe that Dad may have had a secret motivation in sending me north—one he did not mention to anyone.

For many years my grandfather and my father had not, as my little aunts put it, seen eye to eye with each other. Dad had left home at eighteen for the state university and returned only for brief visits. The division had deepened when, to my grandfather's utter disgust, my father had chosen to become a schoolteacher. But time and distance have a way of softening even the most acrimonious of family feuds; and although I have no real evidence that this was the
case, I strongly suspect that I was sent to Kingdom County partly as a peace offering from my father to my grandfather.

What I know for certain is my father decided that to become acclimated to the Farm, as we called my grandparents' place, and to my grandparents themselves, who to this day remain two of the most unusual people I have ever met, it would be helpful for me to spend the summer before I entered the first grade with them in Lost Nation. We would try a one-month stint at first and see how it went. Dad would then visit me in Lost Nation, and if all was going well, I would stay on at least for the rest of the summer.

And this is how, one sunny June afternoon a few days after my sixth birthday, I came to be waving good-bye to my father from the grimy window of a Boston to Montreal passenger car carrying me north toward the wild border country of Kingdom County and, though I had no way to know it, some of the most memorable years of my life.

 

What do I remember from that long-ago train trip up the Connecticut River to the little-known territory that might well become my new home for the next eight years or more? Fleeting impressions, mainly. Backward-rushing glimpses of the river, with cows and barns spread out at intervals along it. Small villages with tall white church steeples. A few bridges. For some reason I also recall that the seat material was of a fuzzy, worn felt, which set my teeth on edge when I ran my fingernails over it, and made me shiver. What a solemn, daydreaming, standoffish little fellow I must have been, with an entire seat to myself and my suitcases, which to the annoyance of the conductor I had insisted on carrying aboard with me. In one were my clothes. The other contained my favorite storybooks.

Of course I was sad to be leaving home, and somewhat apprehensive about my first solo train ride. But there have been few times in my life when I have not been able to achieve a degree of serenity by immersing myself in a book—in part, no doubt, because my books provided me with a certain tangible connection with my mother even after her death. Shortly after leaving White River I dug
a copy of
Heidi
out of my suitcase-library, and soon I was far off in the Swiss Alps, though whether I was absorbed mainly by the book's gorgeous color plates of the mountains, or my recollections of the tale as read to me by my mother, or the actual words themselves, I don't know. I do remember being especially interested in Heidi's old hermit-grandfather, since not long before her death my mother had confided to me that he had always reminded her of my own grandfather, who could be “rather gruff” himself at times. To which my father had bluntly replied, “
Gruff!
Good God, the man's a bona fide misanthrope.” I didn't know what a misanthrope was, bona fide or otherwise. But it sounded forbidding and I must say that I looked forward to meeting my grandfather for the first time with some trepidation.

As we rolled north on the local passenger train, or Buntliner, as it was called—the entire train consisted of a silver-and-blue engine that looked more like a passenger car than a locomotive, and four silver-and-blue coaches—the hills became steeper and shaggier. The farms began to look shabbier. The spanking white houses and fire-engine red barns gave way to unpainted houses connected by swaybacked sheds and ells to listing barns. In the farm dooryards, lilacs were just coming into blossom though back in White River the lilacs had gone by two weeks ago.

At one riverside town a fearsome-looking old man with long gray hair and black whiskers and a greasy slouch hat got on my coach and sat down in the seat opposite me. When the Buntliner pulled out of the station, he produced a flat, amber-colored glass flask from his lumber jacket pocket and took two or three swigs of a very vile-looking dark liquid. As he wiped off his mouth with the back of the hand holding the flask, he darted a severe look out from under his drooping hat brim straight at me. I looked away fast. But when I glanced back at him a moment later he was still staring at me. And in a single, bonechilling moment, it became irrefutably clear to me that this bewhiskered apparition was in fact my grandfather.

The conductor who'd been annoyed with me for bringing my bags into the car was coming down the aisle checking tickets. “Have you been drinking, mister?” he said to the old man.

“No, sir!” he declared.

The conductor knew better. “There's no drinking permitted in the day coaches,” he said. “I've had to speak to you about it before, haven't I?”

“I don't believe so,” said my grandfather in a very loud and very indignant voice.

The conductor gave him a hard look. “Well,” he said, “I mean business. If I catch you drinking, I'll put you off at the next station without a second thought.”

He moved on down the aisle, swaying to the motion of the train like a veteran trick-rider at the circus. There were only five or six other passengers in our coach, including a large woman in a small blue hat and a minister with a white patch of collar showing. After punching their tickets with an odd little silver apparatus, the conductor swayed gracefully back up the aisle, and passed on into the next car.

In the meantime, the whiskery man was shooting me many covert, fierce looks. He knew very well that I'd seen him drinking from the amber flask. I had no idea what was in it, of course, or why drinking was not permitted in the day coaches. But the old fellow now seemed to feel that he owed me some sort of explanation for the very palpable falsehood he'd told the conductor. For without the slightest warning he lunged halfway out of his seat across the aisle toward me and growled, “I suppose you're a-wondering why I ain't drinking when it appears otherwise, be you, be you?”

Not having the faintest idea how to respond to this query, I didn't.

“Aha!” he said, and took another quick pull at his bottle. “Cat's got his tongue, I see.”

He made another start in my direction, seizing the armrest of my seat for support. With his flushed face very close to mine he said, “Speaking of cats, which you wasn't but I was, I've got a cat up home to Lost Nation that weighs twenty pounds. It weighs as much as a wheel of cheese.”

He raised his tangled gray eyebrows as though to better impress me with this disclosure. Then he said, “This cat of mine can kill five full-growed rats in a grain barrel in sixty seconds flat. Do you believe that?”

“Yes,” I said. Although I was not quite sure how we had gotten so rapidly from the matter of his drinking or not drinking to cats, I was very eager to accommodate this rough old cob, if only to forestall another ferocious lunge in my direction. Also, his mentioning Lost Nation Hollow confirmed for me that this was indeed my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge, in what I fervently hoped was some sort of raffish disguise designed to help him assess me unobserved.

“Besides rats,” he continued, “this cat that weighs as much as a cheese cannot abide dogs, other cats, or spying young boys. Neither as a rule can I.”

The topic of the rat-fighting cat had evidently made my traveling companion thirsty. He sneaked another long drink. Then he made as if to offer me one. Before I could decide what to do he whipped the flask back out of sight and chuckled and nodded his head knowingly.

“Now,” he said to the entire passenger car in an altogether different, remarkably businesslike tone, “why ain't I a-drinking? I shall tell you why. I ain't a-drinking for that I ain't a drinker.”

This revelation was received by the rest of the car with stunned disbelief. By now everyone had seen the bottle, which he had all along made a great show of displaying and then hiding. But an explanation was forthcoming.

Giving me a look of the deepest significance, he announced, “Why ain't I a drinker? Because I'm a sipper. Do you understand that?”

I said I did, whereupon he fetched out the bottle again and knocked back two or three of the longest sips in the history of the world.

“Ain't I an awful old whore, though?” he said with a smirk of his whiskers, and both the big woman in the small hat and the minister gasped.

Whereupon the gentleman who was my grandfather tipped me a sly wink and ripped out loudly, “Ain't you and I
both
a pair of old whores, though.”

I readily agreed that we were. This seemed to please him a good deal. So much so, in fact, that he entrusted me with a grave charge. “My boy,” he said, “I want you to watch sharp. Watch sharp, and
notify me immediately if you spot that train fella coming through again.”

So saying he repaired to the far corner of his seat to nurse his bottle, sipping away to beat the band, while I kept an eye out for the conductor, and wondered what an old whore was and, for that matter, what a young whore was, and just what sort of country this Lost Nation that I was traveling to might be.

“What's in them two valises?” the sipping man barked out suddenly a few minutes later, pointing with the neck of the flask at my suitcases. “Your duds?”

“Yes. And books.”

“Books!” he said in an outraged voice. “What sort of books?”

I shrugged. “Boys' and girls' books, I guess.”

“I'll show you a book that ain't no boys' book nor girls' book, neither,” he said. From the hip pocket of his wool pants he extracted a well-worn paper-covered volume. He tipped my way precariously and flashed me a glimpse of the cover. To my amazement it depicted a smiling young woman, stark naked from the waist up.

“What sort of speller be you?” the man said.

I told him I believed I was a fair speller.

“Well, then. Do you care to know what I call these books?”

He flashed the naked young woman at me again. Good heavens, she had brown eyes and dark auburn hair, the exact color of my Sunday School teacher's, Miss Irene Proctor's. Could it possibly be Miss Proctor?

“Yes,” I said with great interest. “What do you call them?”

“I call them F•U•C•K Books,” he said loudly, laying the most precise emphasis on each letter, like a finalist in a championship spelling bee.

Three or four gasps could be heard this time; but all he said was, “Do you know why I call them that?”

“No,” I said, truthfully enough.

“It's because someone usually always gets F•U•C•K•D on every page,” he roared out for the benefit of the whole Buntliner.

This time a general gasp went up. “See here, there are women on this conveyance,” the minister said.

I, for my part, could hardly wait for another glimpse of the
F•U•C•K Book. But the old scholar across the aisle slipped it back into his hip pocket with a sneering chuckle, had another long sip and leaned over to confide to me that he had once “tooken twenty dollars off a seed salesman in a railway car” by winning a bet that he could “hurinate fifty yards at one whack.”

I had never witnessed a grown-up misbehaving publicly before, and was terribly delighted by the spectacle. But the minister had heard enough.

“Here now,” he said. “You, lad. I want you to come back here and sit with me.”

“Don't you move a muscle, young boy,” the old man said. “Do you see that soft maple over yonder?” He jabbed with the neck of the flask out the window at a tree on the riverbank. “Such a distance as that is mere child's play for me.”

Abruptly, he stood up, gripping the tops of the seats on either side of the aisle to steady himself. “Who in this coach will lay twenty dollars I can't make water fifty yards from a dead standstill with no running start?” he demanded. He frowned at the woman in the blue hat. “Are you game, madam?”

“I'm going to ring for the conductor,” the minister said. “This has gone too far.”

“If you tech that cord, preacher, I'll tear it off the wall and throttle you with it,” my whiskered friend said, and took half a dozen long swinging strides to the rear of the car and out onto the small railed rear platform of the Buntliner.

We all swiveled around in our seats, even the fat woman and the minister. I was afraid that the old man would fall off the rear of the train. But evidently he had performed this operation successfully enough more than once before; for after turning his back and groping around in his pants for a minute, he cut loose a great jetting stream that arched out over a prodigious distance of track behind the speeding train. After fumbling with his pants some more he returned to his seat.

“That's how I won my bet with that flatlander seed salesman,” he said, and promptly fell asleep.

The old man woke up again just once, shortly after we left St. Johnsbury. Starting bolt upright like a man frightened out of a
nightmare, he stared over at me with his eyes all fiery red and said very clearly in a booming official voice: “Now comes the State of Vermont against WJ Kittredge in the Eighth District Court of Kingdom County, on this the twelfth day of June, nineteen hundred and forty-eight.”

Immediately after making this announcement he seemed to come to his senses. “What's your name, boy?” he demanded.