Northern Borders (21 page)

“There's that French kid,” I said. “The kid Old Lady Armstrong calls Sis. Let's give him a ride.”

My grandfather slammed on the brakes. I opened my door and started to shove over but the boy waved and jumped onto the back of the truck like a kid jumping onto a hay wagon.

My grandfather shook his head. “Dumb Frenchman,” he said. “He doesn't even know enough to come in out of the rain.”

But it seemed to me that there was in my grandfather's tone a kind of grudging admiration, as though, being a proud and stubborn man himself, he admired the stubbornness and pride in Sis's refusal to ride up in the cab with us.

As we approached the long lane leading up to the abandoned Kerwin place, the boy banged with his hand on the top of the cab to let us know he wanted to get off. Instead of stopping, my grandfather veered off the Hollow road and rammed up the lane through deep ruts. In places the lane was under several inches of water from the flooding alder brook beside it. Water splashed high on both sides
of the truck, drenching Sis as he clung to the rattling sideboards. My grandfather cursed all the way up the flooded lane, as though he were being forced at gunpoint to deliver the boy at his doorstep.

What was left of the Kerwin buildings sat on a knoll at the foot of the same ridge that curved up behind my grandparents' farm. At one time a pasture had been cleared on the lower slope of the ridge above the barn for cows or sheep. In the years since the Kerwins had left, more than a decade ago, it had grown back up to cedars and barberry bushes, wild roses and steeplebush. Near the woods someone had recently made an effort to hack away the encroaching brush.

The barn was partly collapsed, and the farmhouse had fallen into its cellar hole. Hunkered down on the knoll, alone in the rain, the ruins looked as desolate as any of twenty or so other abandoned places up and down Lost Nation Hollow. The only sign of habitation was some dark smoke coming out of a piece of stovepipe sticking up through a shed attached to the dilapidated barn.

“Christ, Austen,” my grandfather said, “they're living in the milk house.”

The boy jumped down and ran to my grandfather's window to thank him. In the meantime I noticed a woman driving a black-and-white cow down off the overgrown ridge behind the barn. She wore men's barn boots, a man's long denim coat, and a plain gray shawl. The cow had a horse collar around its neck and was pulling what looked for all the world like the inverted hood of an antique car. As they drew closer I saw that the old car hood had been converted into a stoneboat and was loaded with rocks. The woman waved and called something to the boy. He grinned. “You come me,” he told us. “See
ma mère
, by da Jimminy Joe.”

“Yes, sir,” my grandfather said grimly, reaching for the truck door.

My grandfather got out, tall and stem-faced in his mackinaw jacket. I followed him and Sis across the old barnyard through the rain.

The milk house was the same size as ours at home, about twelve feet by eight feet. The air inside was smoky from a small, rusty stove like the one in the office of my grandfather's sawmill. There were
two wooden chairs, a battered wooden table, and two cots. On the table sat a loaf of dark bread and a pot of boiled potatoes. Apart from the potatoes and bread, I saw nothing at all to eat. Some old clothes were drying on a rope strung near the stove.

Overhead, the rain leaked steadily through the rotten wooden shingles of the milk house roof. It hissed on the stovetop and chimney, which was the strangest chimney I'd ever seen. It was constructed from old milk cans with the bottoms hacked off and fitted together like stovepipe joints. Yet the cracked concrete floor of the room had been swept clean, the cots were neatly made and covered with bright quilts, and at the single small window hung a pair of makeshift curtains cut out of feedsack material.

From beyond the doorway leading into the barn, someone coughed. The woman who had been driving the cow appeared. Her wet hair was as gray as her shawl. She looked nearly as old as my grandmother, and she was coughing steadily, a deep, wracking chest cough.

“
Ma mère
,” Sis said proudly. “Madame LaFlamme.”

“Austen Kittredge,” my grandfather said to Mrs. LaFlamme. “Your neighbor up the road. This young fella is my grandson. He goes to school with your boy.”

“School!” the woman said. “We come States so Louis go school. Me Madame LaFlamme.”

Madame LaFlamme coughed hard. I wondered if it was the smoke from the stove that made her hack that way. It stung my eyes and caused them to water. I didn't see how people could live inside that smoke-filled milk house.

“Sit, you,” Madame LaFlamme said. “Sit.”

My grandfather shook his head and said we had to get home to chores. Then he said something in French. I knew he was uncomfortable, standing in this smoky milk house converted into a French Canadian kitchen-bedroom, trying to talk with two persons who spoke less English than he did French.

Madame LaFlamme was not about to let go of us so easily, however. She began talking in French to my grandfather with great volubility. I thought I heard her mention the words Canada and farm, and the name Stevens. My grandfather nodded once or twice. When
she finally stopped, he said something in French to the boy, who nodded vigorously. Then we left.

I was very curious to learn what Madame LaFlamme had told my grandfather. Where in Canada were they from? Where was Sis's father? And what had my grandfather told Sis? I knew better than to ask, though. I realized that my grandfather was concerned for these people; but at thirteen, I also knew him well enough to realize that his concern would very probably take the form of anger.

“How old do you think that boy is?” he finally asked me.

I shrugged. “Fifteen?”

“He's nineteen,” my grandfather said. “Nineteen Christly years old. If he hasn't gotten his schooling by now, I guess he isn't about to get it. I told him to come up and see me about a job. He might better help me get up next winter's woodpile and earn a little money before they run out of potatoes and starve.”

Immediately after we arrived home, my grandfather went striding into the barn to start chores, as angry as I'd seen him in a long time.

I said nothing to my grandmother about our visit to the LaFlammes, but after supper my grandfather brought up the subject himself. As nearly as he'd been able to determine from Mrs. LaFlamme's rapid-fire French, she and her son had moved down to the Kingdom from somewhere not far across the border about a month ago, with the assistance of Bumper Stevens. I knew the low-down on Bumper from previous conversations between my grandparents. He was a local cattle and livestock dealer, who ran the commission sales auction barn in Kingdom Common. Over the past fifteen or so years, Bumper had bought a number of abandoned farms along the border, mostly overgrown and run-down old places he'd picked up for a song, and then placed French Canadian tenants on them. Sometimes, according to my grandfather, Bumper would sell a place outright to a Canadian family, for a small down payment, and hold the mortgage himself. Then he'd extend further credit to the family to buy cows and used machinery from his own auction barn. For Bumper, at least, these arrangements usually turned out to be lucrative. The immigrant family would reclaim the land for farming or grazing, and improve the buildings. Some who were willing to live for years on next to nothing, and maybe hold a
full-time second job at the furniture mill in the Common while they built up their farms, eventually paid off their mortgages. The prosperous Ben Currier family down on the county road had gotten started in Vermont just this way. So had Francis Dubois's family here in Lost Nation. Other Canadians imported by Bumper Stevens had been unable to meet their payments after a few years. In these instances, Bumper had not hesitated to foreclose, though rarely until the farms had been cleared and put back into operation, after which he could resell them at a tidy profit. Throughout Kingdom County, Bumper Stevens was both grudgingly admired as a shrewd businessman and widely distrusted as a man whose success derived from sharp practice.

As far as the LaFlammes went, my grandfather said that Madame LaFlamme's husband had died two years ago. Since then they had been living with relatives. Sis was the youngest of eight children, seven of whom were grown-up girls, married or working on their own in Canada. He and his mother were trying to clear the place with the help of the lone, dried-up, black-and-white cow Bumper had supplied them with.

“What are they living on, Mr. Kittredge?” my grandmother said. “What are they eating?”

My grandfather snorted. “Spuds! Bumper sent a fella up there this past summer to put in a plot of potatoes and lure just such a brainless outfit as them down over the Line. They're living on potatoes.”

“Potatoes!”

“Yes, damn them. Potatoes and black bread. How even a couple of dumb Frenchies believe they can get through the winter on black bread and a few sacks of potatoes is beyond me. The old woman seems to have contracted consumption. I doubt she'll make it to December.”

“It isn't those poor French people you should be inveighing against, it's that double-dealing devil Stevens.”

“Stevens is a hard man, Mrs. Kittredge. I don't deny it. But he's fair.”

“Stevens is not fair. He's the devil's own agent in Kingdom County. What do you propose to do to help those folks?”

“Nothing,” my grandfather said flatly, looking at me. “Nothing
at all. If I run onto a dying animal out in the woods, I don't prolong its suffering. I won't prolong theirs.”

I wanted to tell my grandmother that my grandfather had already offered Sis LaFlamme work, but I thought better of it.

“I intend to assist that family,” my grandmother said. “One way or another.”

“Assist away,” said my grandfather angrily. “Assistance or no assistance, they won't last until Christmas. That's as certain as the sun coming up over the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the morning and setting behind the Green Mountains of Vermont at night.”

 

Somehow the LaFlammes hung on at the old Kerwin place that fall. And somehow Sis continued to attend school. He did not come every day. But three or four times a week he'd show up, often late in the morning or early in the afternoon, and when he did, he always went at his lessons the way he and his mother went at clearing that old farm of rocks and brush: energetically, cheerfully, with the eternal hope of the absolutely hopeless.

The first day Mrs. Armstrong admitted Sis to the school he wrote his name in bold letters on his desk slate: LOUIS-HIPPOLYTE LAFLAMME. “Look,” he told me proudly. “Look here, by da Jimminy Joe.”

I believe that Sis could in fact read and write a little French. But English might as well have been Greek to him. He never did get a handle on it. Of course Mrs. Armstrong made him recite at her desk with the little kids, above whom he towered in his herringbone coat like a golem. “By da Jimminy Joe” was his favorite exclamation and Mrs. Armstrong took it up and hectored him with it mercilessly, as she hectored him about his mispronunciations and fantastical ragamuffin appearance. But Sis wasn't much perturbed. He stayed at it, plugging away harder than any of us.

For my part, I now had a project apart from my reading. I spent an hour tutoring Sis in the morning and another in the afternoon, and discovered that he was quick with numbers, if not with their English names. Perhaps when it came to reading he had what today
would be called a learning disability. I don't know. He had a quick memory and memorized the first four reading books in the school word for word within a few weeks. But he was saying the words from rote, not reading. He was good at some of our schoolyard games, especially those that involved running. Sis never did learn to hit a baseball, though. We used to pitch to him by the hour just to watch his comic attempts to make contact.

He was unfailingly good-natured. “How's the bearded lady today?” Mrs. Armstrong would greet him, and he would nod and smile and say
très bon
, by da Jimminy Joe. Each time he handed in a paper with his name written in those big letters at the top, LOUIS-HIPPOLYTE LAFLAMME, she'd cross it out and write SIS in its place. He smiled gamely through it all.

Sis had some spirit. One morning a week after he started at the Lost Nation Atheneum he inadvertently called Mrs. Armstrong “Sister” again—a habit he'd no doubt picked up in Canada, at the parochial school where he'd received his early education. Without warning she struck him in the arm with her cow cane. Instantly he jumped up and stepped toward her, his black eyes flashing. He said something in French, and for a moment I thought and hoped that he might knock her down. He was the one student in the school who I believe could have: a lean, hard, strong young man, toughened by years of working outdoors. Somehow he got hold of himself. And although Mrs. Armstrong had looked momentarily alarmed, she steamed right ahead with her bullying.

At thirteen, I was much more confident than I'd been even a year ago. In the absence of Hermie Hill, I'd begun to emerge as a schoolyard leader and spokesman for some of the other students. The next time Prof Chadburn dropped by, I got him aside and complained to him about Mrs. Armstrong's treatment of Sis. He nodded sympathetically. “I know, Austen. I've spoken to her about it. I will again. But she keeps good order, and remember, that's why she's here.”

“She isn't teaching us a damn thing, Prof, and you and I both know it,” I said hotly. “You ought to send her down the road.”

“It isn't that simple, son. When you're a little older, you'll understand.” He went over to his Buick and got out a copy of John
Burroughs's
Winter Sunshine
and handed it to me. Prof Chadburn was a good man and a great teacher. But he was not going to rock the boat at Lost Nation Atheneum now that he finally had a teacher who could keep order. If Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme fell by the wayside, well, that was unfortunate.