Northern Borders (23 page)

Mrs. Armstrong stood in the vestibule between the two doors, snapping some of the younger kids in the head with the dead finger as they marched in. Theresa cried all the way by her. “Don't come bawling to me,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “If you're going to slide you must expect to be hurt.” She said this as though getting hurt was not only inevitable, but somehow desirable.

Theresa continued to cry all the way to her seat. Ordinarily she had a very level head, and I was somewhat surprised by her inconsolable grief. A dollar was a great deal of money to all of us in those days, but I think now that it was more the distinction of the award. To win a silver dollar—then to lose it!

“What ails that girl?” Mrs. Armstrong asked the class. “Did somebody pound her up?”

There was no answer.

Very deliberately, Mrs. Armstrong began to roll up her sleeves.

“She lost her dollar,” I said. “Nobody hurt her.”

“Lost her dollar!” Mrs. Armstrong said. “What do you mean, lost her dollar? How did she contrive to do such a heedless thing as that?”

“It—it was in my coat, and, and, and now it's gone,” Theresa sobbed.

“I see,” Mrs. Armstrong said, though it was apparent from what she said next that she did not. “Someone has stolen your dollar.”

She picked up her cattle cane and came to the edge of her platform. “Jim Morgan, stand up. Did you steal Theresa Dubois's silver dollar?”

“No, ma'am,” Jim said.

She looked at him hard. “Remain standing,” she said.

She surveyed the classroom. “Mary Hill, stand up. Did you steal Theresa Dubois's silver dollar?”

Mary Hill was a tall, strapping farm girl of thirteen, Hermie's sister. She was the least afraid of Mrs. Armstrong of any of us, but she faltered slightly when she said, “N—no, ma'am.”

“Remain standing, Mary Hill. Austen Kittredge, stand up.”

All of a sudden I was sick to death of Earla Armstrong and everything about her. I'd had it with her bullying and her ignorance and her school. I had no intention of standing up. I had no intention of submitting to her arbitrary cruelness for one more moment.

“Nobody stole the dollar,” I said. “It fell out of Theresa's coat while we were sliding. It's out there in the snow this minute.”

“Fell out sliding!” she said. “What do you mean it fell out sliding? Did it sprout wings and fly out of her pocket?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sure. That's what happened.”

“Don't you dare put a smart mouth on with me, Kittredge. You aren't too old to feel the arm.”

“Nobody stole the dollar,” I said. “Ask Theresa.”

Just as she whirled around to confront Theresa, Sis LaFlamme burst through the door. He was covered with snow, and snow had gotten down his coat and boots and on his hair, as though he'd been burrowing in a drift. He ran straight to Theresa's desk. “Look me,” he yelled. “Look me, I find him.”

He was holding the silver dollar.

For once in her life, Mrs. Armstrong looked utterly astonished. But she was not about to bring her inquisition to a close without claiming a victim. She had boiled all morning to see us having fun with Prof, to see him interfere with her prerogatives. No doubt she had drunk her lunch out of her thermos. She had threatened all of vis with her green-handled cow cane. Her entire reputation was at stake.

Mrs. Armstrong came bulling down off the teacher's platform, between Sis and Theresa. “Where did you find that coin, LaFlamme?”

“I find him, me!” Sis said excitedly. “
Bas
da
côte.
”

“The
coat?
”

“
Oui. Bas
”—he hesitated to find the English word—“
down
da
côte.
”

“Down the coat?” she shouted.

He smiled, nodding rapidly. “
Oui.
I find him down da
côte.
”

Mrs. Armstrong had turned the color of Theresa's red coat.

“Down the coat!” she shrieked. “You found the coin down in the pocket of Theresa's coat. Why you sneaking Canuck thief. I'll teach you to reach into other people's coats.”

Before any of us knew what was going to happen Earla Armstrong lifted her ugly green cow cane and struck Sis LaFlamme in the left temple. The silver dollar seemed to jump out of his hand. It hit the floor and rolled straight for the Round Oak stove in the center of the room. The dollar bounced off a leg of the stove. It made its way directly back to Theresa's desk and spun drunkenly to rest at her feet. Theresa shied away from it as though it were red-hot. Everyone in the room stared at it, horrified, as though it had been bewitched, like a coin in a fairy tale. But what was happening here in the yellow light of the Lost Nation schoolroom in the winter of 1955 was no fairy tale.

“Down da
côte!
” Sis bellowed out in pain and outrage and humiliation.

He pointed wildly out the window, toward the hill: the
côte
, where he'd found Theresa's dollar in the snow. “Down da goddamn
côte!
”

Mrs. Armstrong, who understood no French, was completely out
of control. “I'll teach you to swear at me you good-for-nothing Frog.”

She raised the cane again. But Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme did not intend to be struck a second time. Before she could bring it down he leaped at her. Quick as a mink going for a trout, he wrested the cane out of her hand, broke it in two across his knee and flung the severed halves toward the stove. Then he was on his way out of the schoolroom and across the yard and up the Hollow.

Mrs. Armstrong stood staring after him for a few moments before returning to her desk. Panting hard, she went to her lunch box for the thermos and emptied it in three or four long pulls. Her hands were shaking, but she had a triumphant look on her face.

“He'll be charged for this,” she told us. “Don't think he won't, the dirty little louse-ridden Frenchman. I'll have the law on him.”

Then in a nearly friendly voice she said, “Shut that door, Kittredge. It's storming out there.”

She was right. It had started to snow again, and the room was filled with that yellow light and a preternatural stillness. I got up and shut the door. What else was there to do?

The dollar lay in the aisle by Theresa's desk all the afternoon. When the kids went up to the front of the room to recite, they stepped gingerly out around it, as if it were a bear trap. Just before we recessed for the day, Theresa picked it up, and on her way down the Fiddler's Elbow, in a gesture more dramatic than prudent, she suddenly flung it as far as she could into the woods. Very probably it has remained there to this day, buried under the humus of nearly forty autumns.

There is not much more to tell about the LaFlamme family. I learned from my grandfather that Bumper Stevens charged them five dollars to come out and pick up the bloated Ayrshire steer in his truck. Without telling my grandmother, my grandfather paid Bumper the five dollars himself, but Sis never did return to the Lost Nation Atheneum after the episode with the silver dollar.

One sub-zero day in early December, on our way down the Hollow, my grandfather and I noticed that there was no smoke coming up from the Kerwin place. We left the lumber truck at the foot of the lane and walked up through the snow to check. The milk house was deserted. Even the feedsack curtains were gone from the window. Later that morning Gramp learned from Bumper that the LaFlammes had returned to Canada.

In the spring Bumper put some young stock up in the pasture Sis and his mother had started to clear. He never did find another tenant for the place, and over the next few years, it all grew back up to brush. Along with my early boyhood, the days of the self-sufficient family farm were quickly coming to a close in Kingdom County. The old abandoned homesteads were fast reverting to a state of frontier ruggedness again.

Mrs. Armstrong replaced her cane with a nondescript brown walking stick and blustered her way through the rest of the school year, but the days of her furious rampaging were over. It was as if, along with the thick green cattle cane, Sis LaFlamme had broken her spirit.

Oddly, though our school days from then on were easier, I think we half-missed the old excitement. At times she just sat at her desk and sipped out of her thermos, letting us do pretty much as we pleased. She did not return to the school after I graduated, and I heard nothing of her again for many years.

But Earla Armstrong was not yet to depart from my life altogether. In one of those entirely unpredictable and unaccountable quirks of circumstance that nonetheless, in retrospect, seem somehow inevitable, I heard from her once more. The spring I graduated from the University of Vermont—which I attended free, at the courtesy of the State of Vermont and my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge, the shrewd old Tory—my graduation picture appeared in the local paper, along with Theresa's and, of all persons, Mary Hill's. A few days later a card came to me in care of my grandparents' address. It was postmarked Pond in the Sky. The handwriting was so scratchy I had trouble making it out. At first I thought it was from an ex-classmate. The writer wondered if I remembered the good old days at Lost Nation Atheneum, and
asked me to stop by and visit when I was in her neck of the woods. Not until the last line did I realize who it was from. “I still watch the wrastling,” it said. “Fondly, your old teacher, Earla A. Armstrong.”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Armstrong died soon afterward. In time, I came to regret not visiting her.

6

During the years that I lived with my grandparents in Lost Nation Hollow, a number of itinerant specialists could be counted on to visit Kingdom County each year. I had no idea where most of these exotic wayfarers hailed from. “Away,” most of us called anywhere more than five miles beyond the county line. Or “the other side of the hills.” All I knew for certain is that since we could not go to them, the mind readers and barnstorming four-man baseball teams and one-elephant family circuses came to us. Then as abruptly as they'd arrived, they departed, leaving me with a day of desolation on my hands, and maybe a fifteen-cent souvenir: a tattered poster, an autographed snapshot, a handful of spent shells from the Manchester Arms Company sharpshooter, which still gave off a faint and exciting aroma of gunpowder after six months in a dresser drawer.

Of all the itinerants, the sharpshooter was my favorite. Actually,
he was an ammunition salesman, a drummer of rifle and shotgun shells, who, as a sideline, put on marksmanship exhibitions at county fairs and rod and gun club suppers and sometimes, on an impromptu basis, out behind the general stores and four-corner filling stations where he sold the company's line. He was a small man of forty-five or fifty, with pale eyes narrowed at the corners from driving into ten thousand suns and squinting over a shotgun barrel at a million clay pigeons. He was slightly hard of hearing, and when he spoke, which wasn't often, it was usually to complain about the weather in what I believed was a mild southern accent. His suit looked as though he'd driven two weeks straight in it, and unlike the other showmen who visited Kingdom County, there was no hoopla about him at all. In fact, he didn't seem to care whether he shot or not, and it was this odd quality, his apparent indifference toward his talent, that appealed to me and annoyed my Uncle Rob, who, by the time he was twenty-one, was considered to be one of the two or three best shots in our neck of the woods himself.

“He's here,” Rob said, pulling in behind a dusty gray Pontiac in front of Cousin Clarence Kittredge's general store at the foot of the Hollow.

It was a warm and hazy Saturday morning in early October, and Rob and I had already been out doing a little road hunting in the new Hudson Hornet he'd bought the previous summer with money he'd earned working in the furniture mill in the Common. I was enormously proud to be out riding the roads and hunting with my young uncle. And here, out of the blue, was the Manchester sharpshooter. It was almost too good to be true.

The shooter and Clarence were standing across from one another at the store counter. Clarence was thumbing through an ammunition catalog. The shooter was reading a Socony road map and frowning.

“New line of 16s, I see,” Clarence said.

The shooter nodded without looking up from his map.

“Good shell?”

“Fairly accurate upland game shell,” the shooter said.

“Wouldn't care to pop a few out back for the boys here?”

The sharpshooter gave Rob and me a quick, aggrieved look. He
reached in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and got out a half-full pint bottle of Southern Comfort and unscrewed the cap and took a sip. The whiskey was the color of standing water in a cedar bog. As it went down, the shooter winced. “I got to be up in Memphremagog by eleven o'clock,” he said. “I might snap off a round or two first if it ain't too cold.”

He went out to his Pontiac and unlocked the trunk. It was neat as a pin and contained several cartons of ammunition, a battered leather suitcase with straps and buckles, and three long canvas cases wrapped in a wool overcoat. He handed me two of the cases and took the third himself. It was as warm as a morning in June, but I noticed that he was shivering in his suit jacket. When he shut the trunk lid, the Pontiac shuddered all over, and so did he.

“Big old gas hog,” Rob said.

The shooter gave a dyspeptic grin, as though pleased to hear his car disparaged. “She's a guzzler,” he agreed. “Bums gas and oil like they was both going out of style. Throw a rod clean through her block one of these days. Brakes ain't the best. Heater's shot. Trade her in five seconds flat if the right deal come along. Lug them around back for me, will you, bub?”

We went around behind the store to Clarence's garden beside the local cow-pasture baseball diamond. Half a dozen men and boys from the store followed us. We laid the cases down on the bench where Clarence sat to shell peas and husk com.