Northern Borders (6 page)

One morning following an argument between them over whether I was to be allowed to fish alone, without supervision, in the millpond behind the sawmill dam, my grandmother called me into Egypt. She gestured toward two exotic houseplants: a velvety
purple African violet and an especially unamiable form of primitive vegetation called, by my grandmother, an Egyptian asp vine. The asp vine, it seemed, had of late aggressively latched onto the violet with one of its hairy tentacles, and was bidding fair to strangle the very life out of it. From this belligerent action my grandmother extracted an exemplum. “See, Tut,” she said very earnestly, “even the plants of the earth strive to achieve ascendancy one over the other.” Adding, “It's only a matter of time now before Mr. Kittredge will meet his Waterloo.”

Well! At six I had no idea what to make of this Darwinian demonstration. I was further puzzled to hear my grandparents routinely refer to each other in the third person as “Mr. Kittredge” and “Mrs. Kittredge,” usually with the most sardonic irony. And why did they sleep not only in separate beds but in separate bedchambers? I wondered but didn't know. A more sensible question might be how two such individuals as my grandparents ever got together in the first place, and that I learned only much later. For the time being, since I seemed to get along capitally with them both, I decided not to worry about their feuding. That was the way matters stood between them, and there wasn't a blessed thing I or anyone else could do about it.

 

In Egypt, on a special shelf under the picture of the extinct Sphinx, my grandmother kept a large scrapbook. It contained hundreds of newspaper clippings and photographs, chiefly of local disasters, which she had begun to compile from
The Kingdom County Monitor
soon after coming to Lost Nation and falling afoul of my grandfather. My little aunts had coined a name for this grisly compilation. They called it the Doomsday Book, because it chronicled all of the most violent deaths and accidents, maimings, poisonings, and other human and natural catastrophes recorded in the county over most of the past half century.

Sometimes in the evenings my grandmother ushered me into Egypt and read to me from her Doomsday Book. I was both delighted and horrified by these seminars, from which I acquired a good deal of esoteric local history. I learned, for example, that 1927
was the year of the Great Kingdom Flood, and that 1936 was the summer of the Great Fire that gutted the entire three-story brick business block in Kingdom Common. Much later, in school, I would study the Crash of 1929 and the end of Prohibition. Neither of these signal events in the annals of American history impressed themselves on my imagination so vividly as the articles that my grandmother read to me from the Doomsday Book chronicling the discovery, in 1929, behind Orin Hopper's orchard, of five shallow graves containing his entire family; or the sacking of the nearby railroad town of Pond in the Sky by “a desperate gang of tramps and hoboes off the Canadian National Railroad, estimated at 250 strong,” on the day of F.D.R.'s first inauguration.

In late December of 1941, the front page of the
Monitor
had been printed edged in black. But the infamy of Pearl Harbor was eclipsed for my grandmother and me by the nearly simultaneous advent in Kingdom County of two far more innocuous wayfarers from the Orient: a “Hong Kong Chinaman” and his young daughter, who were picked up trying to slip over the Line from Canada. And it is an odd fact that, along with fire and moving water, my otherwise intrepid grandmother harbored a great fear of “Hong Kong Chinamen” all her life, and never failed to give a small shudder each time she read me the account of the apprehension of the benign-appearing Mr. Wing and his pretty daughter Li, on the border just north of our place.

So my first full month in Lost Nation passed in this happy, strange way. Tomorrow my father was coming for Sunday dinner, to determine how I was getting along and whether I wanted to stay on with my grandparents for the remainder of the summer and the coming year. I knew what my decision would be. Just how to disclose it without hurting anyone's feelings was another matter. For the first time since my visit to my grandparents began, I went to bed worried about what the following day would bring.

 

Sunday had rolled around at last, as all days must, dreaded or otherwise. After chores my grandfather washed up and, as usual on Sunday morning, put on a white shirt and a necktie. The first
time this had happened I thought it very strange. Both he and my grandmother had given me to understand that he never attended church. When he pulled on his hip waders I was doubly surprised. I struggled into my Sunday clothes, my grandmother brushed down my cowlick, and we three paraded out to the truck, my grandfather now in full Sunday regalia—and his waders. I could scarcely believe he was going to fish while we attended the service, but that is exactly what he did, then and each Sunday afterward.

The interior of the tiny Methodist church at the foot of the Hollow was as stark as the beliefs of its congregation. The stovepipe hung from the ceiling on long wires, and ran horizontally all the way from the stove, in the middle of the room, to the rear wall. Besides my grandmother and me, there were never more than a dozen other worshippers in attendance. The presiding minister was Whiskeyjack Kittredge's old ramrod-straight brother, John Wesleyan (JW) Kittredge, who was a kind of lay clergyman.

JW's text on the Sunday of my father's scheduled arrival was “Spare the Rod,” with many lurid examples of how children whose misdemeanors were allowed to go unchastened turned out very badly indeed. He suggested that the most infamous malefactors in the Bible from Cain to King Herod had all been spoiled as boys, a misfortune to which their subsequent villainy was directly attributable. I had no idea what my grandmother thought of this strange message, but the lay minister frowned in my direction several times during the sermon and once pointed his finger directly at me and shook it menacingly.

At the end of his tirade, John Wesleyan said we could all say a silent prayer now, and though mainly we should pray for others, particularly our minister, we could all ask for one thing for ourselves. All I could think of to pray for was that I'd never have to attend church again; but this didn't seem right to do under the circumstances, so I didn't get in a personal request in time, and the next thing I knew we were singing again.

The service was longer rather than shorter, and afterward my grandfather, who had just come up from the river, got me aside on the pretext of showing me a one-pound brook trout in his wicker fishing basket and asked me very earnestly, as he always did, if
Cousin John Wesleyan had preached against him. I assured him that he had not.

“Did my name come up at all in the sermon?” my grandfather asked. No, it hadn't. My grandfather looked at me, then shut his basket lid abruptly. “You report to me when and if it does,” he said. “And that'll be the last time it happens.”

On the way back up the Hollow my grandfather asked me whether I'd prefer to attend church again next Sunday or go fishing with him. My grandmother answered for me. “Church,” she said. “That's what civilized people do on Sunday, Tut.”

As we approached the farmhouse I waited for my grandfather to initiate our meanest-old-bastard-in-Kingdom-County ritual. When he did not, I nudged him and said, “Who lives there?”

“What's that?” he said.

I poked him again with my elbow. “Who lives there?”

“Never mind that foolishness now,” he growled, shooting a look at my grandmother.

“Who does live there?” she said. “What's Mr. Kittredge been telling you, Tut?”

“Nothing,” my grandfather said. “It's nothing to do with you. They're here, I see.”

“Who's here?”

“The schoolteacher.”

Parked in the dooryard beside a battered red pickup truck was my father's Chevy sedan.

“Do you mean your elder son?” my grandmother said sharply.

“I mean the schoolteacher,” my grandfather repeated, slamming to a stop.

Evidently my father had been here for some time because just then I spotted Dad and Uncle Rob—the owner of the pickup—coming up through the meadow from the river with their fly rods. They waved. But although my grandfather had known about my father's visit all month, he suddenly appeared to be very angry. “No doubt they've come to fetch Austen back downcountry,” he said as he got out of the truck. “Well, take him and be damned!”

Then he stalked off toward the house with his fish basket, without another word. Dad had already entered the dooryard and I was pretty sure he'd heard my grandfather's remark. All he said, though,
was, “Well, Mom, I see things haven't changed around here since the last time I came up.”

“Surely you hadn't expected them to,” my grandmother said, taking hold of my father's wrist and looking up at him with pleasure.

Uncle Rob laughed and asked me how I'd liked church. “Did that old mossback JW Kittredge denounce your grandfather from the pulpit again?”

“No,” I said. “I think he denounced me.”

Rob and my father both laughed.

“Hi, Buddy,” Dad said. “Tell me one good thing about your month.”

“I went to Labrador with Gramp and saw Gram's Sphinx,” I said. “It's extinct now.”

Although I wasn't sure why, Dad smiled and Uncle Rob laughed hard. On the way inside, they jostled each other and joked about who could pin whom. My grandfather stood with his back to us at the sink, cleaning his trout; but I heard him declare that he could by God pin them both with one hand tied behind his back. “A schoolteacher and a kid!” he said to the trout he was cleaning.

Just then Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee, who'd come up from the village with Rob, appeared from the dining room, where they'd been setting the table for the big Sunday dinner. After hugging me, they went over to the sink to admire Gramp's fish. Klee had heard what he'd said about Dad and Rob, and she put her arm around him and said in her best Bogart imitation, “Lay off my brothers, old man. They just might have to take you out back and shoot you.”

Gramp grunted. Although he paid little attention to my little aunts, his daughters, referring to them mainly as the flibbertigibbets, Klee and Freddi were the only members of the family who could get away with teasing him. I was excited about seeing Dad's pretty young sisters, known as my little aunts to distinguish them from several great or big aunts.

Freddi and Klee had visited us in White River several times a year, and like Uncle Rob, they always made a great fuss over me. Freddi called me Old Toad and Mole and Ratty after the animals in
The Wind in the Willows
and Klee talked to me in a mock tough-guy
accent, like a character from the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels she was forever reading. I thought the world of both of them and of Uncle Rob as well.

Freddi's and Klee's real names were Nefertiti and Cleopatra. My grandmother had named them after the fabled Egyptian queens, and as far as I was concerned they were every bit as beautiful. Klee was small and slender, with ivory skin, my grandmother's dark hair, my grandfather's pale blue eyes, and a sharp tongue inherited from both of them—though she never spoke sharply to me. Freddi was tall and statuesque, with a reputation for being overly sensitive. She had lovely huge brown eyes, long, honey-colored hair and a tawny, golden complexion. At twenty-one and nineteen, Klee and Freddi were attending the state university on full scholarships, courtesy of our old ancestor Sojourner. During the summer they worked on the assembly line varnishing chairs at the American Heritage mill in Kingdom Common, where they boarded with a local family.

Besides reading to me from
The Wind in the Willows
and my other favorite storybooks, my little aunts loved to whisk me off to the cupola atop the old farmhouse for what they were pleased to call Sunday School lessons. In fact, these lessons consisted of the wildest tales of spirit rappings, the sorrowful wanderings over the face of the earth of the dispossessed Russian princess Anastasia, the dreadful curse of King Tut's tomb and, best of all, the many tragic secrets and hidden scandals from our own family history.

In addition to being beautiful, high-strung, and full of the most fanciful tales, both Freddi and Klee were terribly independent-minded. No doubt they could have had nearly any boyfriends they'd wanted in all northern Vermont; but for some years they had sustained tumultuous off-again on-again relationships with, respectively, Pooch and Artie Pike, two hard-drinking local roughnecks Uncle Rob had ironically dubbed the Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers, like some sort of circus aerial act. My little aunts were also given to all kinds of theatrical demonstrations, particularly in front of me, whom they esteemed very highly as a most appreciative and sympathetic one-boy audience. In much the same way that my grandfather harked back to Sojourner Kittredge's geographical misapprehension to explain all of the subsequent blunders and misfortunes of the Kittredge family right up to the present, Little Aunt
Freddi and Little Aunt Klee loved to conclude their horror tales in the cupola by sadly extending their hands, which were stained red from the chair varnish at the mill, and announcing, to my great delight and their own, “Behold, Austen! Look at these poor mitts. These tell the whole story”—as though, somehow, the red stain on their hands proved all of their most fatalistic theses and notions about the Kittredge family.

Rob Roy had just graduated from high school and was as wild as a yellow bumblebee, as my little aunts put it. They called him the anointed because as the baby of the Kittredge family he could do no wrong in the eyes of either of my grandparents. He worked in the mill too, and did some stringing evenings and weekends for
The Kingdom County Monitor.
Rob aspired to be an outdoor columnist for a newspaper large enough to send him to Alaska and Africa, and claimed to be doing field research for a treatise-in-progress called
Angling and Shooting in Eastern North America
—which Freddi and Klee said was no more than an excuse to spend every spare minute of his time hunting and fishing and riding the roads drinking Budweiser beer with the like-minded Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers.