On Kingdom Mountain (15 page)

“I thought your folks liked the Thibeaus. What about your father driving off those white-sheeted cowards who came to burn them out?”

“Protecting a neighbor and his family from a craven mob was one thing. Countenancing a marriage between their son and a Catholic girl was an altogether different matter. Manon's parents felt the same way about their daughter marrying a Protestant. Both sets of parents honestly believed that if Pilgrim and Manon married outside their faith, they and their
children and all their descendants to come would burn in Hell forever.”

Miss Jane looked at the weathermaker. “In the fall of that year, Manon vanished.”

Jane sat looking silently down the mountainside. Then she said, “Manon, Henry, was the girl I told you about who disappeared in the bog. The Thibeaus didn't place a grave marker for her because they kept hoping she'd show up. But she never did. After she vanished, Pilgrim ran away to war, and we heard nothing of him until his commanding officer reported him missing in Tennessee.”

Henry thought for a few moments, sucking on another clover blossom. “Miss Jane? Where in Tennessee did Pilgrim turn up missing?”

“Near a town called Gatlinburg. It was thought he'd been captured by Will Thomas's Cherokees and taken back up into the mountains of North Carolina. But we never learned his fate for certain. When he came up missing, my grandparents, in their despair, turned against the very doctrines they had cleaved to when Pilgrim and Manon wished to marry. First they withdrew from the Presbyterian church. Then they renounced the religion of their ancestors altogether. Finally they insisted on being buried in the paupers' field with the French Canadians and outcasts and unknowns.”

Miss Jane stood up. “But times change, Mr. Satterfield. And I have a role in all this, too. My role is to rectify what I can by reuniting family and neighbors. And in matters that I can't rectify, at least to bear witness to all that has happened. And to do so without judgment. I thank you, sir, for your help in this matter. And Henry? The gold isn't in those coffins. They're as light as feathers. Go see for yourself so you won't lie awake nights wondering.”

J
UST OUTSIDE THE
cemetery gate, an iron pump stood on a granite millstone. The pipe from the pump ran through the hole in the stone to a well deep under the ground. This well had long been believed to be fed by an underground aquifer of glacial meltwater ten thousand years old. The well water, the coldest and purest in all Kingdom County, was called Easter water because for more than one hundred years people from Kinnesonville and the surrounding farms had gathered here on Easter morning to pump water for washing and drinking. It was thought that the Easter water washed away sins, assuaged guilty consciences, and reconciled grudges between family members and neighbors. How this tradition started no one knew. But for many years Presbyterians, French Canadians, and even a few Kingdom Mountain freethinkers had made their pilgrimage here on Easter Sunday, often in a spring snowstorm, to draw the healing water from deep in the heart of the mountain.

“Just how deep is this miracle well, Miss Jane?” Henry asked. Inclining his ear close to the opening, he dropped a pebble through the hole in the millstone.

“Deep enough, Henry, so that if that's where the raiders dumped the boodle, that's where it will stay till Gabriel blows his trump.”

When Miss Jane filled a blue flower vase from an ancestor's grave with brook water and primed the pump, the pressure pulled back on the handle like a big trout. She loved thinking that the icy water that gushed out of the rusty metal spout
might have come straight from a glacier. She filled the vase and returned to the two coffins, which she and Henry slid, one at a time, down the plank into their new graves. They could not have been much lighter if they were empty, Henry thought, but now he was terribly worried that the gold might be deep in the impenetrable granite core of the mountain, submerged in the well beneath hundreds of feet of glacial water.

Miss Jane picked a few clover blossoms and dropped them onto the coffins. Dipping her fingers into the brimming vase, she sprinkled Easter water over the rough wooden lids. A mourning cloak butterfly, so recently emerged that its blue and yellow wing bands still glistened, landed on one of the coffins and sipped at a droplet.

“Shoo,” Miss Jane said to the butterfly. “It's too late in the day for you to be out and about. Go back to sleep till morning.”

She and Henry began to fill in the graves, though not before the showman fixed a last lingering look on the coffins, as though he'd still like to look inside, just to be sure of what he already knew.

“They'd be much heavier,” Miss Jane said to him again. “Let us get on with the work at hand, shall we?”

Just before leaving the cemetery, she patted down the fresh dirt on the two graves and repeated, quietly, “Go back to sleep, my dears. No one will disturb you again.”

 

The granite markers of her grandparents' graves were not large, and it was not hard to dig them out of the ground, tip them onto the stoneboat, and move them across the pike to the main cemetery. Then they went back to the paupers' field once more to fill in the empty graves, Miss Jane taking care to shut and fasten the cedar gate behind herself. There were no longer any cattle or horses or sheep on the mountain to wander into the paupers' field. Closing gates behind herself was simply something Jane's father had taught her to do when she was a small girl. It went beyond habit.

The wind was gusting out of the north, sweeping down from Canada over Cemetery Ridge, as it had since long before there were any people on the mountain, alive or dead. As they threw the dirt back into the holes, Henry could feel blisters beginning to form on his hands.

“A harsh and forlorn place, this mountain,” Miss Jane said when they were finished.

“I'd have liked to see it when it was all cleared to fields and pasture,” Henry said.

“Perhaps you will.”

Henry looked at her, but all she said was “Let's head home.”

They started down the mountainside, the oxen walking faster now. Kinnesonville looked even emptier, the bog below darker and more forbidding. Back at the home place Miss Jane fed and watered the oxen, then made supper. She and Henry ate at the applewood kitchen table, a plain country supper of sausage, toasted homemade bread, fried potatoes, coffee, and apple pie. Afterward Miss Jane surprised Henry by asking him to join her in On Kingdom Mountain. Most evenings they sat visiting on the porch or in the kitchen.

From the Currier and Ives safe, Miss Jane removed a cardboard box containing her stereopticon, a wooden device about a foot long. At one end was a binocular eyepiece with thick lenses, and at the other end a rectangular pasteboard card mounted with two identical photographs was placed in a wireframe holder. When viewed through the lenses, the twin photographs formed a single picture in three dimensions.

From the box, Miss Jane selected a card, which she inserted into the holder. To focus the device, you moved the frame like a trombone slide. As a girl, Jane had loved repairing to the parlor with her folks after a holiday meal and viewing slides of the
Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and other exotic places. She and Henry Satterfield had looked at some of those photographs before, but tonight what came into focus when Henry peered through the eyepiece was the home place. In front, by the gate, was a box-shaped wagon drawn by a white horse wearing a straw hat with two ear holes. On the side of the cart were the words
PAMPHILLE THIBEAU PEDDLER.
Beside the horse stood a smiling man with a hat like the horse's. Viewed through the stereopticon, Pamphille Thibeau looked strikingly lifelike. Beyond him the home place gleamed with fresh white paint, against which the family motto on the lintel stood out clearly. Over the gate was a wooden trellis covered with blossoming roses.

Miss Jane handed Henry another slide. It was a formal tableau of people in old-fashioned suits and long dresses posing in chairs on the lawn in front of the home place. Behind them children of various ages were arranged on the porch steps.

“The man with the beard sitting in the Boston rocker beside the woman in an identical rocker is my grandfather, Quaker Meeting,” Miss Jane said.

Quaker Meeting Kinneson looked gravely out of the picture as if he were viewing Henry Satterfield rather than vice versa, and Henry did not quite measure up. The pilot had no difficulty imagining this stern old patriarch facing down the nightriders who had terrorized the Thibeaus on the mountain. Or forbidding his son Pilgrim to marry Pamphille's daughter Manon.

For the next hour, while the wind rose, Miss Jane handed Henry one slide after another from the history of her family.

“County Champions,” she said. Into view came a dozen schoolboy ballplayers wearing baggy homemade uniform pants and shirts and homemade caps with rounded bills that made their faces look like those of grown men. The champions were perched on the railing of the Kinnesonville school porch. Some
wore old-fashioned baseball gloves with pockets as thin as pancakes and fingers as thick as sausages. “That's yours truly,” Miss Jane said, pointing to a pretty, long-legged girl with light hair. “I played first base and batted leadoff, where I could put my fleetness to advantage.”

“Circus Train,” Miss Jane said. “I snapped this one.” The Barnum & Bailey train sat on the siding by the water tower near the high trestle. “Jumbo, World's Largest Elephant” stood knee-deep in the big pool below the trestle, spraying his back with cool river water.

Miss Jane handed Henry a slide of the Kinnesonville church, its toppled steeple miraculously reattached. On the church lawn people were eating at trestle tables. “Church Supper.”

Next came a photograph of the Kingdom River in the spring, packed with logs from bank to bank. Downriver more logs were flying high into the air. Men in calked boots and checked shirts watched from the bank. “Dynamiting the Jam.” Henry wondered if one of the dynamiters was Died Fightin.

“Blueberrying” showed a young man and a young woman in berry bushes up to their waists. The girl had long dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She was wearing a white blouse with a high lace collar. Even before Miss Jane named the berry pickers, Henry was sure that this was a picture of pilgrim Kinneson and Manon Thibeau.

Next came two photographs of the south side of Kingdom Mountain, cleared to fields where originally there had been only woods, and woods were once more fast encroaching. Miss Jane showed Henry farmers sitting on chopping blocks with dogs at their feet, hunters standing beside heavy buck deer hanging from dooryard maples, logging horses skidding gigantic tree trunks through snowy evergreen woods, men in suspenders and felt boots holding court around the stove in the Kinnesonville store, their expressions as deliberate as those of Supreme Court justices.

In one photograph taken on a stormy winter day, people in sheepskin coats and fur hats were lined up in front of the post office and store. The queue stretched along the porch past the window with the salada tea sign and down the steps and out into the snow-filled street. “Waiting for
David Copperfield.
”

The last slide, “Armistice Day,” showed the people of Kingdom Mountain marching in a parade through Kinnesonville. The procession was led by a three-piece brass band. Miss Jane said no one dreamed that in less than two weeks the town would be struck by the influenza epidemic that would kill one of every two men, women, and children in the photograph. Through some quirk of light or exposure, the eyes of the marchers looked white and spectral. “I call this ‘Ghosts,'” she said.

For a time it was quiet in On Kingdom Mountain, as if Miss Jane's dear people, too, were spellbound by the family photographs.

Then Jane said, “I thank you, Henry. For your help today.”

Henry shrugged and started to leave the parlor. But Miss Jane held out the boxes with the stereopticon and slides. “These are for you.”

“I don't want a reward, Miss Jane. I was glad to help.”

Jane tucked the boxes under Henry's arm. “Show them to your next beautiful young wingwalker,” she teased.

Henry thanked her and started up the stairs toward his bedchamber.

“Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said just before he reached the top of the stairs, “the photographs aren't a present. They're a legacy. You see, there is no one else here on the mountain to leave them to.”

Outside, the wind was blowing against the weathered clapboards of the home place. In the graveyard on the mountain it blew harder still, over the granite and cedar markers and
the newly dug graves. Yet there were no ghosts on Kingdom Mountain that night. Only stories, some of which, like Pilgrim's fate and Manon's, might remain mysteries for all time to come.

“S
PEAKING OF STORIES
, Miss Jane, I believe that you were going to finish telling me that deer-hunting yarn you'd started.”

It was the following evening and they had just settled in for their featherbed chat, which they had both come to look forward to greatly. Almost, Miss Jane thought, like a long-married couple. Or two young lovers in a fairy tale, kept apart by a high wall or, like Pilgrim and Manon Thibeau, by wrongheaded families.

“Was I?” she called up through the vent. “Where did I leave off?”

“You and your father were at the camp, and you wanted to shoot a deer to impress your beau, Ira Allen.”

“For goodness' sake, Henry, he wasn't my beau. I was far too strong-minded to declare myself to any beau. But yes, I did want to impress him. As I was telling you, it was still snowing hard when my father and I turned in for the night. Early the next morning, well before it was light, I woke to the smell of camp coffee and bacon and bread toasted on the camp stove. It had stopped storming, but the snow was a foot deep. Right after breakfast I started out with Lady Justice and six bullets, quite excited, now that I was doing it, to be hunting the mountain on my own. I walked carefully because I couldn't see what
was beneath the snow, up the game trail above Pond Number Three beside that great wooden log chute. Two small deer had gone up the mountainside ahead of me that morning. I followed in their tracks, walking slowly so I wouldn't perspire and then take a chill on my stand, which Father had cautioned me against. I came out on top of the mountain directly below the balancing boulder. From that close the devil's visage resembled nothing at all.”