On Kingdom Mountain (16 page)

Henry was sitting on the edge of his bed, the better to hear the story. He had spent much of the day lying in the porch hammock and speculating where he would have buried the stolen gold if he'd been with his granddaddy, the old captain, and his comrade-in-arms. Under the peace cairn? Beneath the floor of Camp Hard Luck? Was the camp even there in 1864? Listening to Miss Jane's story, Henry shut his eyes and saw double eagles dancing on the inside of his lids.

“I walked around the huge boulder,” Miss Jane continued, “and admired the carved pictures of the caribou and whales and walruses. From here I could look down on the home place and the lane to the river, which was still open and steaming, and then on along the valley to the village. I could see much of northern Vermont and New Hampshire and deep into Canada. I counted thirty-six peaks, all pink on top from the sunrise reflecting off the snow.

“Three deer went over the mountaintop that morning, two small does and a medium-sized buck with a six-point rack, not a deer to impress anyone with. For lunch I ate meatloaf on homemade bread, pickles, and mother's chocolate cake. Afterward I sighted Lady Justice in on the fire tower, which was still covered with rime.

“Then, in the pale November sunshine, I fell asleep. For a moment or two after I woke I didn't know where I was. I must have slept for a good while, because the sun was nearing
Mount Mansfield, far off to the southwest, and it was colder. How could I, the last of the Memphremagog Abenakis, have fallen asleep on stand? I was mortified.

“That's when I saw the deer. It had been there, pawing up moss under the snow below the fire tower, for some time. It was huge, with massive antlers. I never stopped to think what I was going to do next. I drew a bead, and when I clicked back the hammer, the buck heard the noise and bolted. I fired once, levered in another shell, fired a second time. My second shot hit the animal in the back left leg. It collapsed but was up again immediately, plunging down the mountainside out of sight. Henry, I felt terrible. What would my father say when he learned I'd wounded the deer and let it get away? How, for that matter, could I live with myself, knowing that I'd wounded that animal mainly to impress a young man? To persuade him that I was something I wasn't, at least not yet, a hunter capable of bringing home a great trophy. All,
all
was wrong. This whole adventure was wrong, and in it I thought I saw all that was wrong about our living on this mountain. Isolating ourselves in a wilderness that none of us, really, was suited for. Right then I made up my mind that I was not going to let the mountain trap me the way it had trapped my father and his father and grandfather. Deeply ashamed, angry with my family and with myself, sick at heart that the deer might die an agonizing death in some blowdown, I started down the mountain after it. In the hour of remaining light, I was determined to track the animal to its bed and put it out of its misery.”

Henry was somewhat disappointed. This story did not, after all, seem headed toward any revelation about the treasure, though you could never be sure just where Miss Jane's stories were going until they got there and he was, admittedly, eager to hear whether she had succeeded in putting the poor deer out of its misery and winning Ira Allen's heart.

“At first the buck stayed in the trail I'd followed up the mountain that morning. It was easy to track him by the blood in the snow. About halfway down the mountainside, he veered off into what we called the Limberlost, a very wild and forbidding region that had always made me uneasy. Follow him there I must, though. The deer zigged and zagged, around gigantic boulders broken off from the mountaintop eons ago, around barberry thickets, the tiny red berries bright in the slanted light, the animal's blood on the snow brighter still. He crossed several seeps trickling off into Bad Brook. Just at dusk I came into a clearing near three old American chestnut trees that had somehow survived the great blight that left scarcely one chestnut standing from New England to Georgia. The wounded buck stood under one of the chestnuts, with his profile to me. I counted eight points on one side of his rack, nine on the other. I thought again of my father, who at just seventeen had had a huge responsibility: to find his brother, missing in Tennessee. I had a small responsibility: to finish the deer I'd wounded. I raised Lady Justice and did so with a shot straight to the heart, and not long afterward, my father appeared in the clearing. Working quickly, we dressed out the deer and put its liver in Father's pack basket. He never mentioned the wound in the buck's leg.

“When I asked him how we would ever get the huge deer back down to Camp Hard Luck, he thought for a moment, then said we'd give him an old-fashioned bobsled ride. That's just what we did. We dragged the buck over to the log chute, which was covered with a few inches of snow, and together we hoisted him onto the steep incline and gave him a shove. Down he went, whizzing along at a terrific rate of speed. Half an hour later we retrieved the animal from the frozen pond below. One of the tines on his right antler had snapped off when it hit the ice, so now he had eight points on each side. We
dragged the carcass up to the camp and hung it by the horns from the heavy beam extending out from the roof peak.

“That night it snowed again, Henry. As we built up the fire in the camp stove with the sweet-smelling yellow birch and sugar maple in the woodbox, I asked father point-blank whether, on his trek south, he had found any trace of Pilgrim.

“‘Daughter,' he said, ‘I walked a thousand miles and more in search of my brother. I saw terrible things for a young man of seventeen, or a man of any age, to see. When I returned home, I had no further wish to view the world beyond Vermont. I vowed to myself that I would never leave again, and if I could prevent it, no Kinneson would leave Vermont to sacrifice himself, or herself, for whatever cause, ever again.' My father's way of ensuring this, insofar as he could, was to leave me the mountain in trust for my direct heirs, they to hold it in trust for theirs, and so on, in perpetuity.”

“With respect, I think your father did you no good service with such a stipulation, Miss Jane.”

“I think that you are right, Mr. Satterfield,” Jane said quietly.

For a time neither spoke. Then Henry said, “But what about young Ira Allen? Was he impressed with your great hunting feat?”

“I think he was,” Miss Jane said. “Though perhaps the deer impressed him more than I did. As the seventeenth Earl wrote, the course of true love never did run smooth. Not entirely smooth, at least. Ira was, and is, the least envious person I've ever known. Yet I think that when he first saw that big deer, he was just a little envious of it and of me for shooting it. How could he not be? When it came to hunting I was an amateur who'd had a huge stroke of beginner's luck. Still, I'm glad I finished it. As I've said, Henry, my real mistake with Ira was never declaring myself.
That
is always a mistake.”

F
OR A LONG TIME
that night Henry lay tossing in his upstairs chamber, dwelling on Miss Jane's story and his grandfather's riddle and the treasure. “Behold! on high with the blessed sweet host.” The line ran through his mind like the refrain of some old hymn that he did not care for but could not dislodge from his thoughts. Suddenly he sat up. He stood and, as if in a trance, went to the west dormer window and looked out toward the lake and the mountains beyond. Little Lord Jesus Asleep in the Hay! In the cupola of the abandoned town farm, two miles to the west, was a flickering light. “On high,” he muttered. “The blessed sweet host.” The poorhouse cupola was surely “on high,” looming three stories into the air and commanding a heavenly view far up the lake into Canada. That was it, Henry thought. The treasure lay concealed beneath the floor of the cupola, where, Miss Jane had told him, runaway slaves once hid.

It seemed to Henry, as he hurried into his white suit, that this was the moment he had been born for. Shoes in hand, he tiptoed downstairs and, ever so stealthily, let himself out the door, not failing to give his little salute to the two-headed Memphre Magog beside the door and, opposite him, the Loup-Garou wearing Mambrino's golden helmet. Fetching Miss Jane's big barn lantern and the crowbar they'd used on their excursion to the cemetery, he noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

As the excited weathermaker posted along over the old pike through the dark woods, past cellar holes and barn foundations of Kinnesons long since moldering in their graves, toward the
big lake and the abandoned town farm, he could not stop thinking about ghosts, haunted houses, and specters. Weren't the sites of the hidden treasures he'd been reading about nearly always haunted? The idea of creeping through a dark and empty building rumored to be frequented by the long-dead gave him great pause. A man who had fought the Hun four or five thousand feet above German soil, who had worked as an itinerant bank teller specializing in withdrawals at the end of a fiddle case, and who had flown around the known world putting on aerobatic exhibitions should not be daunted by tales designed to entertain children of a winter's evening. Henry thought of the shining gold coins sacked up under the cupola's floorboards and quickened his pace. Now that he had deciphered the mad old captain's riddle, he could not let someone else, quick or dead, beat him to the boodle.

From high on the mountain something howled. A wildcat, maybe. Or a poor hare taken by a fox or an owl. Henry recalled the frightful story Miss Jane had told him about Rogers' Rangers, returning from their retaliatory raid on her ancestors, surprised on the lakeshore very near where Henry now found himself. Three of Rogers' men had been slaughtered and their heads used as makeshift bowling balls. A sensible man would go back to the home place and return for the treasure the next day, in the bright and reassuring morning sunshine, with Miss Jane. What if, so far from discovering the gold, he encountered the dreaded Lady of the Lake who was said to flit through the forlorn premises of the old manse and lure young men to a watery death? Though Henry's heart was no longer in this enterprise, his white shoes, just visible in the darkness, carried him swiftly along, closer and closer to the poor farm. What did Miss Jane love to cite?
Alia jacta est.
Yes. The die was cast.

As he approached the peninsula near where he had wrecked his biplane on the ice, the poorhouse towered up before him, its ornate scallops and gingerbread and gables all pale and
strange-looking in the thin moonlight. He could hear the waves crashing on the stony beach. The light in the cupola flared, then nearly went out, like a wavering beacon. Someone
on high
was up to no good, Henry was certain of it. He realized that he had no plan for getting rid of the intruder. Maybe he could frighten off whoever it was with the crowbar. If attacked, he supposed he could use the bar as a weapon, though that would be more his granddaddy's style than his. Once he had witnessed Captain Cantrell Satterfield, CSA, Retired, harry two little black girls away from his favorite fishing stump with a sugar-cane machete.

The front steps of the home were granite, but the wooden porch planks had rotted through in places. The door stood partway open, and in the moonlight Henry could see broken bottles strewn over the hallway floor. Only when he was inside the hulking shell did he light his lantern, which cast unsettling shadows on the cracked plaster walls and ceiling of the hallway. Just ahead a circular staircase ascended to the upper floors. Somewhere a loose shutter banged. It occurred to Henry that he had no way to transport the gold back to the home place. He wondered if, for caution's sake, he should rebury it somewhere on the mountain. It was important that no one other than Miss Jane catch wind of his discovery. Pausing on the second-floor landing, he wondered again what the “Holy Ghost” in the riddle signified.
Nor Father, nor Son, but Holy Ghost.
Could it be the resident apparition, the Lady of the Lake? He took a furtive glimpse out the landing window and was terribly startled to see, peering back at him, a spectral figure dressed all in white and holding a lantern. His realization, a moment later, that he had been frightened by his own reflection did little to allay his terror. On up the creaking steps he fled. The stairs to the cupola rose dark and forbidding ahead of him. After falling in love with Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
, he
had, at Miss Jane's suggestion, been reading his way through Stevenson's boys' adventure tales. Recently he had finished
Kidnapped.
He thought of David Balfour's crazed uncle Ebenezer sending David up the crumbling steps of the old tower, ending in thin air.

Here, now
, the grandfather's voice said.
Catch a-holt of yourself. Do you want that loot or don't you?

Up, up the narrow steps he went, chivvied on by the relentless captain. The door to the cupola was closed, but when he lifted the latch, it immediately swung open to reveal eight or nine dogs blocking his way. Henry was so flabbergasted he nearly forgot to be afraid. Together, the dogs represented a dozen different mixed breeds: Border collie crossed with spaniel, retriever with boxer, a flop-eared blue hound with the legs of a poodle, a shepherd with the head of a Newfoundland. The room was so brightly lit that spots danced in front of Henry's eyes, and he thought he must be seeing things.

A diminutive figure, his back to Henry and dressed in a paint-spattered smock, was painting, by lantern light, a replica of Kingdom County on the floor of the cupola. In the painting, Lake Memphremagog stretched north through the mountains into Canada. Above the gleaming lake loomed Kingdom Mountain and, on the summit, the great balancing rock with the animals carved on its face. To the south, surrounded by green and leafy hills, lay the village of Kingdom Common. But at the far northern end of the lake, a huge glacier, gleaming silver, blue, and crimson in the lowering sun, was advancing on the Kingdom.