Northern Borders (4 page)

I don't remember all that my grandmother said on our tour, but I do recall that on her apron belt she wore a great ring of weighty old iron keys, and that as she walked the keys jingled loudly. In the best parlor she pointed out an elaborate coat of arms made decades ago from the hair of twenty or more family members, and framed in glass, which I found unsettling and fascinating, in equal parts. My bedroom was to be in the small loft-chamber over the kitchen, which was a relief to me. I definitely did not want to be stuck off in one of the remote, isolated second-story rooms far out of earshot from my grandparents.

Supper, which we ate in the kitchen at a plain white table, was a quiet affair. I don't recall what we ate; noon dinner was the main meal in Kingdom County in those days. I was aware of a certain strained atmosphere, which I attributed to the unaccustomed presence of a boy at the table but in fact, as I would soon discover, had much more to do with the strained relationship of my grandparents in general. I sat next to my grandfather, with my grandmother across from me; and on the rare occasions when they addressed each other at all, they referred to one another as “Mrs. Kittredge” and “Mr. Kittredge” with grim irony detectable even to a small boy.

“Austen, ask Mrs. Kittredge to pass the butter along if it isn't too much trouble.”

“Perhaps Mr. Kittredge would like to put the newspaper down, Tut, until we're finished eating. It might occur to him that reading at the table is a very bad example to set for a boy.”

At the end of the meal, my grandfather silently rose and left the table with his paper.

“You're welcome, Mr. Kittredge,” my grandmother said. At the same time she looked at me significantly, just as my grandfather himself had done once or twice during the meal. The true import of these glances would dawn on me only gradually. At the time, I had no way of knowing that each of my grandparents regarded me as a potential ally in their Forty Years' Domestic War.

“Come, Tut. I want to show you something wonderful,” my grandmother said as soon as the dishes were done. My grandfather
had settled into a large wooden rocker by the south kitchen window with the latest issue of the
National Geographic.
He shot a brief, meaningful look at me over the top of his reading spectacles as my grandmother and I headed down the short hallway connecting the kitchen with the large dining room used only on Sundays and special occasions.

Just before entering the dining room, my grandmother veered off into a small sitting room-bedroom she hadn't shown me on our tour before supper. It was growing dusky outside, and she lighted a lamp on a sort of worktable by the window. As the wick flared up, the strangest room I had ever laid eyes on came into view. Except for a small bed hardly larger than a child's trundle bed, and the table with the lamp, it was a perfect museum of a room, full of the most astonishing items.

“Egypt, Tut,” my grandmother said solemnly.

On the wall opposite the doorway was a poster-sized picture of a creature unlike any I had ever seen before: a vast winged individual with the body of a lion and the head of a woman, who seemed, in the protean light of the kerosene lamp, to be staring straight at me.

“That's the Great Sphinx,” my grandmother said. “You didn't want to get on his bad side, I'll assure you. But don't worry, they've been extinct for thousands of years.

“That's Lord Ra,” my grandmother continued, indicating a foot-high wooden fellow with a jaunty hawk's head in a flowing yellow and blue headdress. “You can bet he knew what the score was.”

In frames here and there on the walls were black and white photographs—later I learned that my grandmother had cut them out of my grandfather's
National Geographic
and
Life
magazines—of pyramids and temples. Other photographs, my grandmother explained, recorded the celebrated discovery of King Tutankhamen's—my king's—tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

“That's Howard Carter,” my grandmother said, pointing to a man in short pants and a light-colored helmet. “Listen to this, Tut.”

My grandmother stood up on her toes and read the caption beneath the picture aloud: “‘When asked by his excited assistants what he saw when he broke through the final seal and played his electric torch over the contents of the innermost chamber, the intrepid archaeologist exclaimed, “Wonderful things! I see wonderful things!”'”

My grandmother looked at me earnestly, as if to appraise my reaction to Egypt. “I have an important question to ask you, Tut. Would you like someday to be a great archaeologist, like Mr. Howard Carter?”

I nodded.

“Then it's settled,” said my grandmother with great finality. “You'll continue with your famous reading and studying, and someday long after I'm gone you'll be heard from for some discovery like Mr. Carter's. You too, Tut, will see wonderful things.”

We did not tarry much longer in Egypt that evening. Yet as I stood gazing at the extinct Sphinx and Lord Ra and the marvelous photographs of King Tut's tomb, it seemed to me that they were all, like my grandmother herself, watching me: quite benignly, yet with a certain note of expectation, too, as if they shared my grandmother's belief that I would certainly be heard from someday, and become a famous archaeologist—whatever that might be—and see wonderful things.

 

That first month on the Farm with my grandparents was a veritable geography lesson for me. “Idaho,” I discovered, was the big woods upriver, where my grandfather cut timber for his sawmill. For some unaccountable reason my grandparents referred to the outside latrine behind the farmhouse as “South America.” And the morning after I arrived, my grandfather took me to “Labrador,” high up on the wooded ridge behind the house.

We set off immediately after chores, in a warm, fine drizzle, up through the steep cow pasture behind the barn, past my grandfather's red and white Ayrshire cows, and into the dripping evergreen woods on a narrow path. In spots I could look back through small clearings and catch a glimpse of the farm buildings below, growing smaller and smaller.

I recall how quickly and easily my grandfather seemed to swing along up the trail, despite his raspy breathing. It seemed to me that there was an angry determination in his long strides. Once we stopped and he stooped to part the branches of an evergreen tree
containing a neat small nest with four speckled blue eggs. “Thrush,” he said.

The trail grew steeper. It wound up around outcroppings of ledge. Twice my grandfather paused to catch his breath, leaning his long arm against a tree. “Someday this ticker's going to stop altogether and they'll come and put me in a pine box,” he announced the second time he stopped. “Don't be surprised when it happens.”

After this declaration my grandfather lit out for the top of the ridge again with a vengeance. I supposed that he must be figuring that the sooner he got there, the less chance there was that his ticker would stop altogether.

Suddenly the ridge leveled off into a clearing containing a low log building with a stovepipe jutting out of the roof. In the light June rain, the place looked forlorn and empty.

“This is it,” my grandfather said, pointing at the camp. “Labrador.”

I was surprised that Labrador was so close to home, but happy to have arrived. We went inside, where even with the door open it was quite dim. I looked around the large single room. There were two bunks, a wooden table, three or four chairs, and a good-sized black iron cookstove. Three of the four log walls were decorated with old maps and photographs, mostly of men with hunting rifles standing by very big deer hanging from trees; but when I looked at the rear wall I was astonished to see, just under the slanted ceiling, a row of a dozen or so bucks, with huge racks, which appeared to be looking down at us. I had never seen such tall deer before, and for just a moment, before I realized that these were mounted heads, I thought that they were standing outside the rear of the camp looking in at us through holes in the wall.

“Well, Austen,” my grandfather said, “what do you say?”

I had no idea what to say, but I must have looked as impressed as I felt because my grandfather nodded and said, “If you decide to stay on here, we'll see to it that you shoot one too. I'll have the head set up on the wall beside these. Would you like that?”

Yes, I would like that, and said so. I would like that more than anything I could think of.

“Your father, the schoolteacher, hasn't hunted deer with me for ten years,” my grandfather said. “Evidently he'd rather be shut up
in a dusty schoolroom showing little sissy boys and girls how to cipher.”

This, I knew for a fact, was totally inaccurate. Whatever my father's feelings might be about hunting with my grandfather, Dad was an expert woodsman himself. I was beginning to worry about the upshot of the big family dinner planned for next month, when my father would visit the Farm to see how I was getting along. But immediately my grandfather changed the subject, showing me on the blue and green topographical maps of Kingdom County where he had shot each of the mounted deer. He showed me other maps of the far-flung territory along the U.S.-Canadian border, where he had traveled many years ago as a young surveyor, and finally, on a large map of Labrador, he showed me where he had gone surveying when he was twenty-one.

“There,” my grandfather said, placing his thumb on a twisting blue line through the middle of the Labrador map. “Right there, Austen. You and I and a canoe. The summer you turn eighteen. If you decide to stay on here, that is. You and I and a canoe, in Labrador, for an entire summer of fishing and exploring. Just us. No one else.”

I was pleased but perplexed. When my grandfather said that he and I would spend the summer I turned eighteen fishing and exploring in Labrador, I assumed that he meant his camp here on the ridge and its immediate environs. The point, however, seemed to be that he and I would do this fishing and exploring alone together. And although I believed I knew exactly whom he meant by no one else, I was very happy to think that he wanted to take me with him. Still, at the age of six it seemed next to impossible to me that I would ever be eighteen. For the time being, it was enough to have come here on this rainy June morning, to see the deer and see Labrador with my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge.

As we approached the farm buildings at the base of the ridge twenty minutes later, he stopped to point at the house and dooryard. “Who lives there, Austen?”

“The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County,” I said promptly.

He nodded. “That's right,” he said. “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

 

Like all hill farmers in Kingdom County during the late 1940s, my grandfather had what seemed to me like an infinite number of skills; and he had several sources of income, all of which were equally uncertain, dependent on the caprices of the weather, the current agricultural market, and the precarious durability of his antiquated second- and third-hand machinery. He kept a dozen Ayrshire dairy cows, which he milked by hand at five in the morning and five in the afternoon; electricity didn't arrive in Lost Nation until 1952. And though he detested barn chores, which tied him to the farm morning and night, seven days a week, he did like each of his Ayrshires, as he liked nearly all animals.

In addition to his dairy, my grandfather operated a water-powered sawmill situated on the river just across the pasture from his barn. Sawmill work, by contrast with milking, he liked very much. But since the mill was a dangerous place, with its huge whirring log saw and shrieking ripsaw and planer, at six I was not allowed to work there with him.

In the spring my grandfather tapped eleven hundred maple trees. He raised a few pigs and a steer for beef, and cut all his own firewood as well as ten cords for his sister, my Big Aunt Rose. In the fall and winter he worked in the woods cutting timber for his mill, sometimes with the help of his two elderly cousins, Preacher John Wesleyan Kittredge, the part-time minister of the small Methodist church at the junction of the Lost Nation Hollow road and the county road, and WJ Whiskeyjack Kittredge, my sipping acquaintance from the train.

Except for light barn chores, much of the work I did for my grandfather that first month consisted of tagging around the Farm after him and listening to his stories. I had arrived at the peak of haying time, and as we hayed together in the hot afternoons—my job was to drive the horses, which was a joke, because they plodded up and down the windrows of raked hay entirely at my grandfather's voice commands—he told me story after story about his life and travels.

The spring he was twelve, my grandfather had run away from
home and school to join the annual Connecticut River log drive, all the way from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, a total of nearly four hundred miles. Later he had worked in Manitoba, driving a twelve-horse grain combine, and as a chainman on a survey crew establishing the American-Canadian Line between Montana and Saskatchewan, where he had learned the basic techniques of surveying and mapping. Over the next half dozen years he surveyed sections of the Line from Maine to the Yukon; and during the summer of 1909, he'd journeyed to the Far North to survey the Ungava-Labrador boundary, where, to my immense admiration, he had stayed on for a year to live with a nomadic group of Barren Grounds Indians.

Eventually my grandfather had come home to Kingdom County and married my grandmother, an event that coincided with the end of his traveling or, as she liked to put it, his “sashaying about the countryside.” He kept his hand in the surveying profession by doing local jobs for farmers and timber companies. But it was generally agreed in the Kittredge family that much of my grandfather's misanthropy dated from the time of his marriage and was accounted for, at least in part, by his resentment over giving up his sashaying about the countryside to become a homebody.