On Kingdom Mountain (19 page)

The rainmaker was undaunted. The next morning he returned to the village. At the commission-sales auction barn he bought several large spools of used fence wire, which he transported up the old Canada Pike in the back of Miss Jane's truck, unwinding the spools and joining the lengths of wire end to end as he proceeded. With the help of Jane's oxen, he dragged the last spool up the steep pitch above the tree line and ran the wire to the top of the wooden fire tower. Before descending, he fastened the end of the wire to the railing around the observation deck.

That evening Henry proudly announced that Miss Jane was in for a wonderful surprise. She replied, rather ungraciously, that she had reached a point in her life where she could do quite nicely without surprises, wonderful or otherwise. The high road had been surprise enough to last the rest of her natural life.

“Someone,” Henry said, “has a mite of trouble accepting a gift. Or a compliment, I might add. Someone is afraid that it might indebt her to someone else.”

“Someone else,” Miss Jane said in her best schoolteacherly fashion, “should tend to his own affairs.”

While someone and someone else conducted this dialogue, Henry hitched the mile-long fence-wire antenna to the battery-operated radio. From the console came loud static, then banjo music. A moment later a broadcaster with a southern accent announced the call letters of a station in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Henry spun the big dial and picked up a preacher in Wheeling, West Virginia. Finally he found a man with a resonant voice giving the national weather forecast. And though there was as yet no end in sight to the drought that had settled over the entire Northeast, someone and someone else could not help grinning at each other. When rain did come, they would be the first to know.

“But do you think it will rain, Henry?” Miss Jane said worriedly.

To which he replied, “With respect, ma'am. It always has.”

 

Out of nowhere one evening a shabby little gypsy carnival appeared in the village. Every two or three summers it seemed to materialize on the fairgrounds on the south edge of the Common as suddenly as if it had fallen out of the sky, with a few colorful, ragged tents, a precarious Ferris wheel, a fortune-telling booth, a Wonders of the World exhibit, and an ancient merry-go-round. The carnival was under the management of a longtime friend of Miss Jane's named Mr. Foxie Romanoff.

The following evening Miss Jane and Henry drove into the village to attend the carnival. They had their fortunes told, and Henry bought Jane a cotton-candy cone. They rode the merry-go-round, several of whose wooden animals Miss Jane had replaced for Mr. Romanoff over the years. The gypsy, who was not really a gypsy but a former tailor from Poughkeepsie, New York, who had grown weary of his sedentary profession and traded his needle for life on the open road, escorted them into the Wonders of the World tent and showed them, for twenty-five cents apiece, the mummy of a young woman known as the Bride of Ramses, which he had purchased from a failing Hungarian circus the year before. Inscribed on the lid of the sarcophagus were the words “This is the Beloved Bride of Ramses II, who, when her husband died, chose to join him in the underworld rather than live on alone. All the best stories are about love.”

That evening, when they arrived at the home place, Miss Jane fetched her great Kingdom Mountain Bible out of the strongbox. In the margins of the book of Proverbs, she wrote, in the elegant Palmer handwriting she had taught to two generations of students at the Kinnesonville school:

 

Always dwell in a west-facing house.

Close all gates behind yourself.

Declare yourself to the person you love.

All the best stories are about love.

 

That night Henry called down through the grate, “Tell me, Miss Jane. How did you come to revise the King James Bible in the first place?”

Jane, now working her way through
Bleak House
again, and thinking how like the opportunistic and detestable Mr. Tulkinghorn her cousin Eben Kinneson Esquire was, slipped a bookmark into her novel and laid it on the coverlet beside her. Though far from short,
Bleak House
, like
Don Quixote
, had required almost no editing down. Page after page in her edition was as pristine as the day it rolled off the press. It was a pity, she had thought many times, that the same could not be said of her volumes of Thoreau, the Pronouncer of Concord; Samuel Johnson, the Proclaimer of Litchfield; and so many other pronouncers and proclaimers whose pronouncements and proclamations she had been obliged to blue-pencil over the years. King James and his pernicious Bible were the worst of the lot.

“About the time I reached the biblical age of adulthood, Henry, twelve or thirteen, I began to realize that very little of the King James Bible made a particle of sense. In particular, I couldn't swallow the loving, all-powerful father who allowed his only begotten son to be strung up on a cross and tortured to death just to prove a point. And blasted two whole cities—infants, toddlers, and all—from the face of the earth to punish a few bad apples. Not to mention slaying the innocent firstborn son of each Egyptian family. I have always been partial to the Egyptians, you know, given my mother's first name. No, sir. This madness had to be the work of king James, not a just and magnanimous deity, and must not be allowed to stand. When I turned eighteen, I had a most unfortunate experience with
King James the First and his Bible. That is when I decided to revise it and his detestable Jehovah. In my Kingdom Mountain Bible, old Jehovah is a jolly, good-natured fellow. He helps his dear people when he can and doesn't stand in their way the rest of the time. Sometimes their shenanigans amuse him or make him happy or sad. That's all right. Every family, you know, should write its own revised Bible.”

“What did your folks think about you, at the age of eighteen, undertaking to revise the Bible?”

“My mother died when I was sixteen. My father, the chief justice, was a freethinker. He encouraged me in the endeavor.”

“They must have been very good parents.”

“Indeed they were, though not without their own little Kingdom Mountain particularities. Pharaoh's Daughter was educated at Mount Holyoke and named me after my father's mother, Jane Kinneson, and her own mother, Canada Jane Hubbell, who left her in the barn in the sweetgrass basket. Also, I believe she had in mind her favorite author, Jane Austen. As for my father, besides being a lawyer and a judge, he was a born teacher. He taught me most of what I know about the mountain. He farmed part-time because he loved the mountain, and he was wonderful with animals and a good hand to raise a crop. But my father had no head at all for the business end of farming. If he raised cabbages and kept them through the winter to capitalize on the spring cabbage market, why, come spring, the bottom would invariably fall out of cabbages. If he switched milk buyers, the new buyer would fail and he'd have to go back to his old creamery, hat in hand. He supported the farm with his income as a lawyer and judge.

“What's more, Father, who had so much patience when it came to teaching me the ways of the black bears and blue-backed char, and how to read Caesar and Virgil, had no patience at all for fixing machinery. He took it into his romantical head that all his agricultural difficulties would be solved if he
could raise and combine his own grain. That was a most dubious proposition on Kingdom Mountain, with its brief frostfree growing season. Everyone, including my mother, warned him against the project. Nothing would do, however, but he must buy a combine. He found one advertised in the
Farmer's Home Companion
, a magazine my mother detested because it put just such ideas as raising his own grain in my father's head. The thing belonged to a rancher in North Dakota, and had been converted from a ground-driven thresher pulled by thirty-two horses to a steam-powered wonder said to cut, thresh, and winnow thirty acres of grain a day in a single continuous process. He purchased it, had it shipped east by rail at a great expense, and drove it home from the station. If I live to be one hundred, Henry, I'll never forget the day it arrived, accompanied by a plume of coal black smoke and a great dust cloud. It had four iron wheels, each taller than a man and studded with spikes, and more gauges and levers and gears than a steam locomotive. The wooden threshing blades were eight feet long and four feet high. The boiler was as large as a good-sized culvert. As my father drove it up the lane, he gave a great blast on its steam whistle. But once ensconced on the threshing floor of the barn, it never started again. No matter. My father painted it fire engine red with blue wheels and a canary yellow boiler. He called it the Samuel L. Clemens, in honor of Mark Twain's typesetting invention that wouldn't set type. I called it King James's Jehovah because all it ever caused was trouble.”

“What became of it?” Henry inquired.

“It's still out there on the threshing floor, where, I can assure you, it will remain. The thing is beyond repair.”

“I was just wondering,” Henry said. “For our little weather-making venture. There's nothing people like better than a rain-making machine. I have built them from the most extraordinary things—a gasoline-powered washing machine, a wrecked Model T Ford, even a windmill. Of course, it is all for show.
When the rain at last approaches, I start up my inventions, and everyone is happy. Furthermore, that way I would not have to go up in my plane at all during an electrical storm. Like the storm in which poor Miss Lola Beauregard Beauclerk met her q-u-i-e-t-u-s.”

“It all sounds rather fraudulent,” Jane said, opening up
Bleak House
again. “Rainmaking machines and such.”

“Oh, I have told the town fathers as much. But if they persist, what can one do? Permit me to look at the combine, Miss Jane. I promise I won't fly into an electrical storm.”

E
ARLY THE NEXT
morning Miss Jane found her friend sitting on the threshing floor of the barn surrounded by pistons, levers, gauges, and engine parts. Nearby was her big barn lantern, out of kerosene. Evidently the rainmaker had been working on King James's Jehovah most of the night. As exasperated as she was, something about the man's unswervable determination appealed to the Duchess. She could see him flying to Siberia, Tibet, China, and India, dining on the frozen remains of a mammoth, encountering a many-armed woman on a tiger, and who knew what else.

The rainmaker worked straight through the day. At noon Miss Jane brought him cucumber sandwiches and a jug of switchel, cold spring water spiked with a dash of vinegar and a touch of molasses. For supper she cooked him a whole apple pie from the Early Yellow Transparent tree behind her house. He refilled her barn lantern with kerosene so he could toil into the night. Miss Jane remarked that if King James's Jehovah had
taken such pains to get mankind right, instead of cobbling Adam and Eve together in a single day, the world might not be in such a fix.

“I've always said as much myself,” Henry replied, peering through a metal valve at the Duchess as if observing her through a telescope. “There are those who will blame some great agent of evil, as it were. But if more care had been taken with us to start out, why, what toehold could the great enemy of man find?”

Stop the palaver and get on with the job at hand, soldier
, said the captain's voice, which had been advising Henry more frequently lately.
And I don't mean fiddling with that wheat gin. You should be up on her mountain, looking for the treasure I've all but put in your hands.

It occurred to Henry that the granddaddy, whom his mama had said was wickedness incarnate, was enjoying every moment of this maddening search for the missing gold. He would not put it past Cantrell Satterfield to misdirect him deliberately. What he could not understand was why the old officer had not returned to Vermont to raise it himself. An optimist by nature, Henry believed that with Miss Jane's help he was quite close to solving the mystery of the riddle. In the meantime, if the town fathers were foolish enough to pay him one hundred dollars for pretending to make it rain, he'd gladly oblige them.

Henry asked Miss Jane's permission to bring the radio, attached to its antenna, out to the barn so that he could listen for oncoming weather while he worked. The same compulsion to continue in a straight line that had impelled him over some of the most difficult and dangerous territory on earth in his Burgess-Wright drove him to complete his repairs in less than a week. In the grain bin down in the machine's innards he found an owl feather, a few shards of petrified wood, a snake fang, and a dime-store ring with a scratched glass stone.

On the sixth night of his labors, Henry and Miss Jane listened to the weather forecast from Chicago. A broad system of thunderstorms was progressing from west to east over the Great Lakes. If they stayed on course, the storms would reach northern New England in thirty-six hours. Moreover, the first hurricane of the season was gathering off the Cayman Islands. This struck Henry as a very good omen, since he had read, in an adventure story from Miss Jane's Atheneum called
Sunken Treasures of the Deep
, that the fabled buccaneer Edward Teach had scuttled a treasure ship some leagues north of grand Cayman Isle, and the connection between the pirate, the hurricane, King James's Jehovah, the hundred-dollar fee for bringing rain, the new red plane, and the gold from the Great Kingdom Common Raid, though extremely tenuous to Miss Jane, was stunningly clear to the rainmaker.

 

The following day, while Henry fine-tuned the combine, the dog-cart man painted its name, King James's Jehovah, on the collecting bin. How he knew the name was a mystery. When Miss Jane, in her capacity as overseer of the town poor, asked him to sign a relief voucher, the painter shrugged and made an
X.