Northern Borders (38 page)

Freddi played a thumping version of Gram's three favorite numbers on the wheezing old parlor pump organ: “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Rock of Ages,” and “The Noon Bazaar at Cairo.” And at the end of the service my good-hearted little aunt slipped the photograph of my eighteen-year-old grandfather, standing on top of the log railway, into the sarcophagus beneath Gram's folded hands. Only then did I see my Great-Aunt Helen swipe at her eyes with her handkerchief.

After the service my grandfather came down to the house and
nailed on the sarcophagus's lid, and then he and Dad and I carried it up to the family graveyard. During the short committal service I stood back on the edge of the gathering with my grandfather, my mind swirling with the images of Egypt inside the tomb-like painted box Gramp had made. Once, when Preacher John Wesleyan paused for breath, and I found myself wiping my eyes with the back of my wrist, my grandfather took hold of my arm and whispered, “Tamarack, Austen. Very water-resistant.”

A minute later he leaned over toward me again and said, seriously, “She's all right. I double-cleated the lid down.”

We lowered the tamarack sarcophagus with the double-cleated lid into the grave and then my grandfather told us to clear out, he'd finish the job himself. On my way down to the house I looked back once and saw him shoveling dirt fast, angry and desolate in the fierce August sun.

 

I sympathized deeply with my father later that day. We all did because it had fallen to him to return Old Josie to her people in New Hampshire. Without my grandmother to bully her and do all of her work for her, Josie had gone completely to smash in the past two days. She'd cried constantly and wrung her apron up to the size of a dish towel, and Dad said that she cried all the way over to Groveton, too. The last thing she said to him was, “Missus was dead right, young Mr. Kittredge. Whatever else I may be, I am no housekeeper.”

No serious consideration was ever given to my leaving the Farm or my grandfather. I don't believe that the possibility was even discussed. It was simply understood by the entire family that I would stay on, and my grandfather and I would look after each other, at least until I graduated from high school.

“You can't predict the future, Tut,” my grandmother had told me many times. How frequently, over the next several weeks, her words would come back to me. It had been taken for granted in our family that my grandfather would die first, before my grandmother. Isn't that what hill farmers with bad tickers nearly always did? My grandmother would then remain at the Farm until she became too
frail to manage alone, at which point she would move in with Aunt Helen or Dad or one of my little aunts. I am sure Gram herself had assumed as much. Then came the cluster flies and her untimely departure, combined with my grandfather's stubborn disinclination to cooperate by dying first. So he and I seemed to have been thrown together on our own resources by default, as it were.

I have mentioned that on that fateful ride to the hospital with my grandmother I felt as though I was in another dimension. It was a sensation I never entirely lost during the coming fall, and I now believe that this is, in fact, exactly what had happened to me. I had entered the dimension of our lives called adulthood, which is often no more than an awareness of those things we were not entirely aware of as children. I had become aware of the inexorableness of death.

“Who lives there, Old Man?” I said to my grandfather late in the afternoon on the day after my grandmother's funeral. We were walking down toward the house from the woods, where once again we were clearing brush off the Canadian Line. Except for the lumber truck, the dooryard was empty now. The last of the family had left that morning.

My grandfather frowned slightly, and said nothing.

“Who lives there?” I said again.

“Who does? You tell me.”

“The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County. I heard it first from you.”

My grandfather's creased face, tanned as dark as the leather tops of his high work boots, remained abstracted; and I believe that at that moment, coming down the ridge toward the empty house, the full force of my grandmother's absence hit him. It was as if, now that my grandmother was gone, being the meanest old bastard in the county was a hollow designation.

Still, my grandfather was not about to give up on life, then or any other time. Nor, for all his fabled misanthropy, did he intend to stop being a grandfather to me. That evening he suddenly looked up from
The Lure of the Labrador Wild
, from which he had just read aloud to me the passage in which the starving explorer Leonidas Hubbard was unable to shoot a goose that might well have saved his
life because he had heedlessly failed to bring a shotgun on his fateful trip.

“How old are you, Austen?” my grandfather demanded when he reached the end of this chapter.

“You know how old I am.”

“You're what, seventeen? In a year you'll be eighteen. That's the summer we'll go to Labrador. You and I and a canoe, with no one to stop us.”

“By then you'll be too old to go.”

“Yes, sir. And you still won't be able to paddle with me or fish with me or keep up with me on the portages.”

“We'll see.”

“We will.” He looked at me sharply. “We'll take a shotgun. Unlike Christly Leonidas Hubbard. And,” he added, with unmistakable irony, “we'll see wonderful things.”

10

From my earliest days in Lost Nation, I thought of my grandfather in connection with deep woods and well-oiled shotguns, bamboo fly rods with bright red guide wrappings, and leather fly books full of marvelous feathered creations that were brighter still: big, battered, old-fashioned wet flies and streamers with exotic names evocative of the North Woods, like Adirondack, Queen of the Waters, Labrador Belle. Also I connected my grandfather with old photographs of men surveying faraway places, and men with trophy bucks and enormous trout. And invariably, when I thought of my grandfather, I thought of maps.

For Austen Kittredge loved maps of all kinds. His hunting camp, Labrador, was full of them. The plank walls were festooned with topographical maps of Kingdom County, maps of the remote stretches of the American-Canadian border he'd helped survey in his youth, maps painstakingly razored out of old travel books of
Africa and Asia and, especially, the Far North, some of which still contained sizable blank white spaces across which were printed the stirring words
terra incognita.

Near the south window of my grandfather's camp hung one such map from his 1914 World Atlas and Geographical Gazetteer, depicting that little-known northernmost peninsula of mainland Canada consisting of Labrador and the Ungava Barrens. Nearly half of the interior of this vast land was still designated as
terra incognita
, though my grandfather had carefully inked onto it the farthest point reached by the 1910 government survey party on which he had worked as a chainman. The official line of demarcation between Labrador and Quebec ran along a natural height of land known as the Snow Chain Mountains, and ended where the partially-completed survey had ended—out of good weather and supplies and funds—on a peak called No Name Mountain. Here the Snow Chain range veered sharply northeast in a configuration known to my grandfather and a few other old Labrador hands as the Great Lost corner.

According to my grandfather, the Great Lost Corner and the surrounding wilderness contained countless unexplored white-water rivers connecting huge lakes frozen nine months of the year. The country was home to numberless caribou, gigantic brook trout as colorful as a subarctic sunset, and, until not so very many years ago, a handful of nomadic Indians with whom Gramp had stayed for a time after the survey ended. This was the place he'd promised to take me when I turned eighteen.

“You and I and a canoe, Austen,” he'd told me a hundred times. “Just you and I and a canoe, for a summer of fishing and exploring. Then we'll see what sort of man I've made out of you. We'll see what sort of fella you are to go down the river with.”

Still, for many years our trip seemed far-off in the misty future, and impossible to imagine in very specific terms—just as growing up and leaving Lost Nation, or the death of either of my grandparents, was impossible to imagine. When my grandmother did die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, my grandfather fell into a prolonged brooding, which not even deer season seemed to jolt him out of; and
for many months afterward he didn't mention our Labrador trip to me at all.

 

One evening in May of 1960, less than a month before my high school graduation, my grandfather and I were listening to the CBC news from Montreal on his old battery-operated Stromberg Carlson radio. The broadcaster had just announced in his precise, British-sounding accent that plans had been set in motion to construct a gigantic hydroelectric dam deep in the interior of Labrador. He went on to report that the dam would create the largest man-made lake in the world, a veritable freshwater inland sea covering millions of square acres of wilderness, some of which had never been mapped or thoroughly explored.

Without a word, my grandfather switched off the radio and disappeared for more than three hours. I knew better than to question him when he returned. I assumed he'd been up at his camp looking at his maps of Labrador, and knew he'd tell me anything he wanted to tell me in his own good time. Over the next few days, he seemed more abstracted and withdrawn than usual. On several occasions, when I asked him a question or made some remark about the weather or school or our work at home, he nearly snapped my head off. At the time, however, I didn't think much about it. Without my grandmother to contend with, Gramp had not been entirely himself for nearly a year. And with graduation coming up, and college just around the corner, I had important considerations of my own.

For these reasons, what happened a couple of weeks later hit me like a thunderbolt. It began with an early-morning phone call from the railway freight agent in Kingdom Common, to say that a long wooden crate had just arrived for my grandfather.

“How long?” I asked.

“Long,” he said. “Bring your truck.”

Characteristically, my grandfather refused to tell me what he'd ordered. Something for his sawmill, I supposed. The planer had been acting up recently. Possibly he was replacing it.

In fact, the mystery crate turned out to have come from
Oldtown, Maine, and to contain a brand-new eighteen-foot Oldtown canoe, painted a rich forest-green.

“The canoe's mine,” my grandfather informed me when I brought it home from school in the back of the truck. “The trip's your graduation present.”

I looked at him, my face as blank as those empty white spaces on his map of Labrador. “What trip?”

“Our trip north,” my grandfather said. “You and I and that canoe, Austen. Just like I've always told you. We'll leave the day after you graduate.”

Over the next several days my grandfather assembled what seemed like a ton of camping equipment. A collapsible sheet-metal stove arrived from someplace in Wisconsin. From L. L. Bean came a two-man waterproofed canvas tent, two lightweight insulated sleeping bags, a pair of Maine Guide hiking boots for each of us and two pairs of bear paw snowshoes for crossing the Snow Chain Mountains. My grandfather made several trips to the hardware store in the Common for towing line, a Coleman lantern, a new bucksaw and ax. And he bought boxes, more boxes, and more boxes still of rifle and shotgun shells. “Leonidas Hubbard died of starvation up in that territory for want of a shotgun, Austen. You can bet no such thing is going to happen to us.”

As our departure date drew nearer, I grew more and more excited by the prospect of a summer with my grandfather in some of the last unexplored terrain on the face of the earth. Yet I must admit that I felt more than a twinge of apprehension, both of the desolate land itself and of the responsibility of seeing that no harm came to us while we were there. Not that Gramp was by any stretch of the imagination over the hill. At seventy-two, he was still about as tough as any man in Kingdom County, which is to say as tough as anyone anywhere. Yet since the CBC announcement about the dam, he'd seemed not only more abstracted than usual, but strangely agitated as well. Not himself—in a way I could not quite put my finger on but strongly sensed whenever I was in his presence.

Graduation took place in mid-June. Nearly all I can recall from the event itself is that Theresa Dubois had beaten me out for top class honors by a couple of percentage points, thereby earning the
privilege of delivering the valedictory address, during which I all but heard my grandmother tell me sternly, “To win is all, Tut.”

Yet it occurred to me that Gram's displeasure with my class standing would have been very mild compared to her horror over my impending excursion with Gramp to the Far North. Talk about sashaying!

“You can't predict the future, Tut.” Never had Gram's observation seemed truer; and never, if I'd had a hundred years to try, could I have guessed exactly how unpredictable the summer of 1960 would turn out to be.

 

“Nobody lives forever,” my grandfather declared as we pulled out of Sept-Îles, Quebec, on the weekly bush train north. “But they say living in the bush adds twenty years to your life.”

We'd driven the five hundred miles from Kingdom County to Sept-Îles in twenty-four hours, arriving just in time to load our canoe and gear on the train for the day-long trip to Schefferville, a tiny mining outpost three hundred miles to the north, and our jumping-off place for the Labrador bush. Our plan, as my grandfather had finally divulged to me on the drive up, was to canoe the major river systems and lakes destined to be flooded by the great dam, exploring and mapping the countryside as we proceeded. If all went well, we'd arrive at the Great Corner and No Name Mountain in late August. A week before Labor Day, a bush pilot whom we'd hire in Schefferville before heading into the interior would pick us up on No Name Lake, up in the Barrens.