Northern Borders (3 page)

“Austen Kittredge,” I said.

“The hell!” he shot back. “I may be sipping drunk and I may be piss-whistle drunk but I ain't blind drunk. Austen Kittredge is my neighbor and blooded cousin and you ain't him by about fifty years.”

“I was named for him,” I said with mixed relief and disappointment now that I knew that the mischief-making old devil across the aisle was only a cousin. For clarification I added, “He's my grandfather.”

“You don't have no grandfather,” he said, and fell back against the felt seat dead to the world.

 

It did not take the Boston to Montreal Buntliner long to cover the sixty miles from White River to Kingdom Common. It was still only late afternoon when we pulled into the station and I struggled down the aisle with my two suitcases.

I was hoping that my grandfather's cousin, Mr. WJ Kittredge, would wait with me on the platform. His company, I reasoned, would be better than no company. But I had little hope from him in this regard. Without a word to me, he cut across a long central green toward a large white building at the far end. I could see the dark red top of Miss Irene Proctor's close likeness on the F•U•C•K Book sticking out of his pocket, and I reminded myself to ask my grandfather what under the sun such a book was about and how I could get hold of some—assuming that my grandfather ever showed up.

From where I stood on the platform I could see most of the village. Farther up the street, on the same side of the green as the railroad station, were three large stone buildings. Facing them on the opposite side of the green was a three-story brick building containing several stores on the ground floor. A baseball diamond was laid out on the green, which interested me considerably.

As the short silver train pulled out of the station, gathering speed for the last leg north before the Canadian border, a harsh voice behind me said, “I wouldn't mind being aboard her, would you? Headed north for Labrador.”

I whirled around to see a tall man wearing a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and neatly-creased green work pants. He had short white hair, and when he shifted his gaze from the departing train to me, I was struck by his eyes, which were pale blue and critical-looking. I do not mean that my grandfather's eyes—for this was my real grandfather, I had no doubt—were cold or unkind. But they were the sharpest pair of eyes I had ever seen, the kind that miss nothing at all. And when he spoke to me again I was struck by how harshly his voice grated, and how well it matched those assessing blue eyes.

“Be you Austen?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'm your grandfather.” He picked up my bags as easily as if they were empty. “Get in the truck,” he said.

My grandfather's truck had a rounded, dark green cab and a long flat bed. It rode as rough as a lumber wagon, which is exactly what it turned out to be: a lumber wagon, with trailer wheels, welded onto the cab of a 1934 Ford pickup.

As we drove out of town my grandfather lit a cigar. Then he informed me that, besides lumber, he transported milk to the cheese factory on the edge of the village three times a week. Although his voice was very hard and sharp, he spoke to me without condescension, the way he might speak to another man. And both he and the truck cab smelled very strongly of tobacco and Christmas trees since, as I would discover, he was an inveterate cigar smoker and he also carried with him at all times the aromatic evergreen scent of the timber he worked with, which my grandmother could not wash out of his pants and shirts.

We drove along a fast river, up into a jumble of abrupt, green hills, past woods and dilapidated farm buildings. Some of the farms were abandoned, and my grandfather told me who lived at the others. In two or three instances he added a brief, critical commentary. “They say Ben Currier's a prosperous farmer. I'd be a prosperous man myself if I had half the money Ben Currier owes . . . That man who lives there abuses his horses. I'll tell you one thing. He won't soon do it again whilst I'm driving past.”

I told my grandfather about the whiskery man on the train, and how I'd originally mistaken the fellow for him. He made a rasping sound in his throat, not a laugh exactly, and said that would have been his cousin, all right, Whiskeyjack Kittredge. “He's a poacher and a moonshiner and a general all-purpose outlaw,” my grandfather said. “How did you like him?”

“I liked him all right,” I said. “He told me he's got a rat-fighting cat that weighs twenty pounds. And he peed off the end of the train and reads F•U•C•K Books where someone gets F•U•C•K•D on every page.”

My grandfather made that singular, sharp noise in his throat again. “How old did you say you were?”

“Six.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“What does it mean?” I said. “‘F•U•C•K•D on every page'?”

“I'll tell you when you turn twenty-one.”

Then, quickly, as though to indicate that he had said all he intended to on the subject of his bewhiskered cousin with the outlandish name and the arcane reading matter, he informed me that he'd heard I intended to go to work for him that summer, and to stay on and attend the Lost Nation School in the fall if I was satisfied with my situation. I was surprised. This was the first I'd heard about working for my grandfather. A troubling thought crossed my mind. What if, at the end of this probationary period, my grandparents weren't satisfied with me? In point of fact, my grandfather looked as though he might be a hard man to please.

As we turned off the paved road onto a one-lane dirt track my grandfather said, “Do you like fairs?”

“Fairs?”

“Yes. County fairs.”

My father had taken me to the county fair near White River last summer, and I'd loved it. “Yes!” I said enthusiastically.

“Well,” my grandfather said, “I'm not by any means a wealthy man. I can't afford to pay regular wages to a fella. But if you work hard and learn your job and pan out, I'll stake you to a full day at Kingdom Fair come August. How does that sound to you?”

I said it sounded fine, and after that a lull fell over our conversation and we traveled on up the dirt road in silence for a few minutes. It was obvious that this was a much more remote part of Vermont than any I had ever visited. The stream we'd been following was smaller and quicker, the heavily-wooded hills came crowding down close to the narrow valley on both sides. Many of the farms seemed disused. Those still in operation looked even poorer than the farms closer to the village. In the dooryards I began to notice what looked like covered trash barrels with darkish smoke curling out. “Smokers,” my grandfather explained. “Burning softwood to keep the black flies down. It's buggy up here this time of year.”

At the top of a long hill my grandfather jerked his thumb at a weathered building, one entire wall of which seemed to consist of small square windows. “That's where you'll be going to school. If you decide to stay on in the fall.”

The school looked abandoned too, with buttercups and daisies blossoming in the yard; still, there was something both exciting and unsettling to me about the place, which I would forever afterward connect with the idea of school and going to school.

“I went there for a spell myself,” my grandfather said. “I left when I was twelve to go on a log drive. The truth of the matter is, I didn't agree with school and school didn't agree with me.”

My grandfather paused a moment to let this announcement sink in. Then he said, “Your father went there too. I'm sorry to say he turned out to be a schoolteacher.”

My grandfather stated this fact as though my father had committed armed robbery and been caught, tried and convicted, and sent to state prison. But having been warned ahead of time about his views on schoolteachers and my father, I knew better than to pursue the subject.

From the next hilltop I could look off in three directions at mountain ranges. Some of the peaks were still white on top. I could scarcely believe that we were looking at snow in mid-June, but my
grandfather assured me that we were. He showed me Jay Peak and Mount Washington. He pointed to a rugged heap of mountains straight ahead. “Canada,” he said.

Higher up the Hollow we passed an elderly woman out in a hayfield with two horses and a wagon. My grandfather lifted his hand to her and said, “That would be your Big Aunt Rose. She hates to admit it but she's my sister. That's my place up there. The last one up the Hollow.”

Just ahead, in a kind of scooped-out bowl at the base of a high, forested ridge, the dirt track ended in the dooryard of a very large two-story house, weathered to a pearly gray, with a much larger faded red barn linked to it by an ell consisting of a hodgepodge of connected sheds. On a steep slope between the rear of the barn and the edge of the woods were a dozen or so red and white cows, all facing the same way. Across a meadow from the house, just below a small pond where the river had been dammed, slouched a long low building, open on one side, which my grandfather identified to me as his sawmill.

My grandfather stopped his truck in the road and surveyed his buildings critically. Suddenly he looked straight at me and inquired in that perpetually harsh tone if I were afraid of him.

“No,” I said promptly.

I think my answer pleased him. But all he said was, “Do you know who lives there?”

He was pointing at the gray house.

“You do,” I said.

He shook his head. “I'll tell you who lives there. The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County, that's who. Remember that you heard it first from me.”

I did. And I was so delighted by the phrase that, from then on, each time my grandfather and I approached the Farm in his homemade lumber truck, I would, with great innocence, inquire who lived there. Whereupon he would respond, “The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County.”

After which he would look at me with a kind of grim satisfaction and say to my complete puzzlement, “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

 

Although I had never laid eyes on my grandfather until that day, my grandmother and I first met the day I was born, June 8th, 1942. She and my little aunts, Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee, had been visiting our home in White River to assist with what my grandmother was pleased to call my mother's “laying-in.” I was born at the local hospital around six a.m.—a propitious hour, according to my grandmother, who believed that children born before eight o'clock in the morning would never have a lazy bone in their bodies—and my grandmother first viewed me around seven. My mother was holding me in her arms at the time.

According to my little aunts, no sooner did my grandmother clap eyes on me than she nodded with grave approval and announced, to the absolute astonishment of the attending nurse, “Ah! He looks exactly like the doomed young pharaoh, King Tutankhamen. What have you named him, Sarah?”

“Austen,” my mother replied. “After his father and grandfather.”

My grandmother nodded again. “Austen he'll be then. But I'll call him Tut. If he lives, he'll forever be Tut to me.”

For the next six years, my grandmother visited us regularly twice a year: at Christmas, and on my birthday, as well as during that period of several months when my mother was recuperating in Tucson. I cannot recall a great deal about her from those early times: a dark-haired, dark-eyed, tiny and intense woman, dressed entirely in black, who when she spoke to me at all called me by the name of an Egyptian king, and who seemed always to be watching me with a kind of determined approbation. It was my grandmother who, when I was four or five, coined the phrase “a famous reader” to describe me, and concluded that such a prodigy would someday “be heard from.” But mainly I remember her as that small woman in black, who came to our home punctually twice a year, evidently for the sole purpose of observing me—as she was doing this instant from the porch of the huge, rambling farmhouse while my grandfather and I continued up the lane in his lumber truck.

“There they are,” he said.

“They?” I said.

“Your grandmother. Spying on us with those glasses.”

My grandfather was right. As we drove closer I saw that not only was my grandmother watching us, she was watching through a small pair of binoculars or opera glasses, and I very distinctly recall that tatters of dark gray smoke from the smoker barrel in the dooryard were drifting between her and us, so that she looked a little like a mirage. When we came into the barnyard she lowered the glasses but did not lift her hand or speak, even when I got out of the truck and went shyly up to her, which made her seem more like a mirage than ever.

My grandmother neither hugged nor kissed me. I had not expected her to. But as I climbed up the wooden porch steps she reached out and seized my wrist in her tiny, strong hand, an action she would repeat over and over again in the future. “Welcome home, Tut,” she said. “Come inside for supper.”

 

Before we ate, my grandmother gave me a quick tour of the farmhouse and barn. The current house, she told me, had been built in the early nineteenth century to replace the log-framed home Sojourner had thrown up in the wilderness soon after his flight from the Revolution. Originally, it was a simple eight- or nine-room structure of two stories. Over the decades, as the Kittredge family had grown, extending itself far beyond mere bloodlines, so had the farmhouse. By degrees, it had linked itself to the barn, North Country-fashion, by means of an ell stretching due west more than one hundred and fifty feet. Through this labyrinth of connected sheds you could pass all the way from my grandmother's kitchen to my grandfather's milking parlor without once setting foot outdoors. At the same time, the house proper had expanded correspondingly in the opposite direction. I may be forgetting a back upper chamber or two, or some obscure jerry-built shed slung onto the rear of the summer kitchen as an afterthought; but to the best of my recollections, the architectural camelopard known to all Kittredges for the past hundred years simply as the Farm contained—including the subdivisions of the ell and barn—a grand total of thirty-eight distinct
rooms. I didn't visit them all that first evening, but the impression I received was one of vastness.