On Kingdom Mountain (2 page)

Jane sat up and put on her long johns and her red-and-black-checked wool pants, two wool shirts, and two pairs of wool stockings. She padded into the kitchen in her stocking feet, tossed some kindling from the woodbox onto the banked coals in the Glenwood, and washed up under the long-handled metal pump at the sink. The sky in the west was still quite dark. She could make out Orion, locally known as the Voyageur du Nord, about to take a long stride over Jay Peak before disappearing. The Voyageur was a promising sign: a clear day ahead for her birthday adventure.

The oatmeal Miss Jane had kept simmering in a double boiler on the back of her Glenwood all night was a little gluey, but oatmeal stayed with a body until dinnertime. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson had eaten her breakfast oatmeal out of the same bowl, white with a blue rim, every morning for nearly fifty years, sitting at the foot of the applewood kitchen table astride the bold yellow line painted down the middle of the floor to represent the international boundary that Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons had ignored for generations. As usual,
she ate with one foot in Canada and one in the United States, though the mountain, as she had reminded her neighbors the night before, belonged to neither country. The yellow line was a Kinneson family joke. The border did not exist when her great-great-grandfather, Venturing Seth Kinneson, first came to Kingdom Mountain, pulling in the yoke with his near ox while the off ox, which had cut its foot on jagged ice on the river, limped along behind. To Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, and to many other residents of the Kingdom in that era, the border still did not exist.

Thinking about her ancestors reminded Miss Jane of her eighteenth birthday. Hurriedly, she reached for her father's GAR canteen and poured a stiff jolt of Who Shot Sam into her coffee. Then she stepped into On Kingdom Mountain to report the results of last night's meeting to her dear people.

Like her beloved blockheads, Jane's dear people, though life-size, had an otherworldly aspect. Their heads were oblong, their features painted rather than carved, and their eyes were Jane's own wide-set gray Kinneson eyes. There they all were: Venturing Seth and his son Freethinker; her grandfather Quaker Meeting; Uncle Pilgrim, with his long staff in the shape of two intertwined serpents; her father, Morgan, as a young man; and Jane's mother, Pharaoh's Daughter, swaddled in a red Hudson's Bay blanket in the sweetgrass basket in which Quaker Meeting had discovered her as an infant in the ox manger of the barn one Christmas morning.

“Well,” Jane announced, “we have met the enemy. I wouldn't say they're ours yet. But they know they have a formidable adversary.”

Jane's parlor off the kitchen, On Kingdom Mountain, was a retreat where she could be entirely frank, with her dear people and with herself. Despite her admirable public presence the night before, Miss Jane had been feeling rather melancholy lately. It was not just the proposed high road that had caused
the Duchess to find herself at sixes and sevens, as she had recently put it to her dear people. She was also troubled by her failure to win first prize in the North American Bird Carving Contest, not to mention the question of her future on the mountain. Though Jane was as healthy as her own oxen, fifty was not forty, much less thirty, and she really had no clear plan for the future.

“Half a century,” Jane mused to her people. It scarcely seemed possible. Time, no doubt, to take stock of one's life. What would she do when she could no longer get by on her remote mountain, with no running water, no electricity, and no children or other close family to help? While Jane blamed only herself and her Kinneson pride for not having a husband and family of her own, her self-indictment was of little consolation this morning.

Then there was the dilemma of the Atheneum. The building, which belonged to the town, was sadly dilapidated. The nails clinching the roof slates in place were rusting out, and several times lately Miss Jane had heard the fingernail-on-a-blackboard screech of a slate pulling loose and skittering down the steep slope, thudding on the grass or shattering to fragments on the long granite steps of the library. The ridgeline sagged from the tremendous weight of the slates over the years. In places the stone foundation had heaved out of true. The Atheneum needed painting, outdoors and in, and the flagstone fireplace needed to be repointed. With the county and the entire country in the depths of the Great Depression, it was unlikely that money would be available for repairs anytime soon. A new highway to bring tourists and jobs was one thing. A library and bookshop was something else.

Jane poured another finger of the beautiful amber-colored Who Shot Sam into her empty coffee cup and tossed it off neat. She believed she could taste, in her hundred-proof homemade twenty-apple applejack, the distinct flavor of each of the
varieties she and her father had grafted to the Northern Spy in the dooryard—Duchess of Oldenburg, Westfield Seek No Further, Red Astrachan, Wealthy, Cortland, Alexander, and all of her other favorites.

“I know,” she said to her people. “I've been tasting too much of the stuff lately. Well, fine. Sit in righteous judgment, if you're determined to, with your sanctimonious frowns and disapproving countenances. I have to confide in someone, and it may as well be you. What do you propose I should do? Give in to cousin Eben and his cronies? Sell the mountain? Sell you? Eben would have every last one of you in the burning barrel in a Kingdom Mountain minute. As for my Who Shot Sam, a sup wouldn't hurt you now and again, either.”

Miss Jane raised her father's canvas-bound wooden canteen, which he had carried all the way to Tennessee and back, in an ironical toast to her dear people and drank straight out of the spout. Now that she had exposed her vulnerability to her hard-shelled Kinneson ancestors, she felt a little foolish. You could bet that
they
would not be caught recriminating with themselves. Not by their relations, not by anyone. Whatever remorse Seth and Freethinker and Quaker Meeting and her father may have had about their own failings, they'd kept their doubts to themselves. Or to themselves and their Maker, King James's Jehovah. Who, Jane believed, had enough shortcomings of his own to regret, though so far as she knew, he never had. What's more, if you couldn't confide in your family, whom could you confide in? At least her dear people were not likely to blab her secrets all over town. At least she could rely on their complete discretion.

Still, she must not repine nor, to paraphrase the Pronouncer of Concord, further dash the hopes of the morning with more 'jack. It was time to stopple up her father's canteen and her self-reproaching thoughts and go fishing. Fishing, and seeing
what this special day, as heralded by her second sight, might hold would be the perfect way to mark the anniversary of her first half century on Kingdom Mountain.

A
LTHOUGH MISS JANE'S
birthday fell on the vernal equinox, a foot of snow still covered the old Canada Pike between the home place and her five-story barn. The temperature this morning was well below freezing, though the wind was beginning to back around into the south. Spring would have to come eventually, even on Kingdom Mountain.

In the barnyard sat the ox sledge, identical to the pung Venturing Seth and his ox had pulled across the river and up the mountainside a century and a half ago. Standing patiently in front of it were Ethan and General Ira Allen, Miss Jane's matched pair of red oxen. Tall in her red and green lumber jacket, felt boots, and fleece-lined cap with long earlappers, the Duchess touched their flanks with her white-ash goad and they started up the pike. An hour later they emerged onto the frozen surface of Lake Memphremagog.

Memphremagog. The vast body of water stretching deep into Quebec between sheer mountains resembled the big wilderness lakes of northern Maine. This was the lake of the Currier and Ives lithograph reproduction on the door of the iron safe in On Kingdom Mountain, the lake of John Greenleaf Whittier's poem “Snow-Bound,” which every scholar who had attended Miss Jane's school could still repeat verbatim. In the Memphremagog Abenaki language the name meant “beautiful
summer waters.” To the Duchess, the great lake bending north for mile after mile, like a landlocked fjord between the soaring Canadian peaks, was beautiful at any time of the year. Yet it was an exceedingly unpredictable body of water. The mountains served as a natural wind tunnel, and without notice its lovely summer waters, as unruffled as a millpond at sunset, could transform themselves into a maelstrom of five-foot waves. In the winter the ice on the lake was unreliable, two feet thick in one spot, two inches nearby. Had it not been for her moment of second sight a month ago, Miss Jane never would have dreamed of setting foot on Memphremagog this late in the season.

Just ahead of her, on a point of land jutting out from the foot of Kingdom Mountain between the mouth of the bay and the lake proper, were the abandoned buildings that had once constituted the town poor farm. The main building, a hulking, three-story monstrosity topped by a square cupola, had a bleak and forlorn aspect, like a summer hotel whose glory days lay deep in the past. Just beyond, the polished black ice of the lake stretched north to Indian Island, where her mother's Memphremagog people had once come to catch salmon. Miss Jane's ice-fishing shanty sat off the southern tip of the island. To the north lay twenty miles of open water. In all that vast expanse, the fishing shanty was the only sign of human life.

Half an hour later, Miss Jane led Ethan and General Ira Allen into a stand of softwoods on the island, out of the wind. In honor of her French Canadian neighbors, Jane had painted her fishing shanty in splashy pastel colors, sunshine yellow and tangerine, with a cotton-candy pink door and lilac trim around the single window. A coal black stovepipe jutted out of the shiny tin roof. Everything inside the shanty seemed in order, so she began chopping fishing holes in the ice around it with her double-headed felling ax.

A reef extended into the narrows of the lake from the tip of
Indian Island. Beyond it the mountainsides hemming in the narrows plunged down far underwater. When Jane thought of the hundreds of feet of dark, frigid water just below the ice, the bottoms of her feet tingled. She set out half a dozen tip-ups with flags made from strips of old red flannel and baited the hooks with live river minnows she'd brought along in a bucket. Then she went inside and kindled a fire in the small potbelly stove. The kindling came from a bag of wood scraps from her carving projects.

An apple crate sat near the stove for a chair. Beside it was a short club Miss Jane called St. Peter. On the floor of the shanty, along the walls, lay four granite obelisks, each four feet long, with the words
UNITED STATES
inscribed on one side and
CANADA
on the other. Miss Jane had borrowed them from the strip cleared through the woods on her mountain to mark the border she did not acknowledge. Their purpose was to weigh down the shanty so that it didn't blow away in the gales that came tearing out of Canada over the frozen lake.

Just as the Duchess started to brew tea in an empty lard can on the potbelly stove, she glanced out the window and saw a red flag snap up. “School's in session,” she said, and went outside and pulled in a fat yellow jack perch. It weighed about half a pound and had bright orange fins, an emerald back, and dark vertical stripes on its sides. “Go to fish heaven,” she said kindly to the flopping perch, and tunked it on the head with St. Peter. Then she yanked in another one.

“A fine scholar,” she said, jerking a third fish out onto the ice and smiling at her habit, increasing of late, of talking out loud to herself. Maybe she needed a cat to keep her company, she thought, as she dispatched the flopping perch to fish heaven. But Miss Jane had never looked into the soulless green eyes of a cat without seeing Satan looking back out at her, and she was wary of inviting the devil into her home at this stage of her life.

After a few minutes the perch stopped biting as abruptly as
they'd started. “School's out for recess,” Jane said. “They'll be back after dinner.”

As the sun climbed higher, the Duchess shed her lumber jacket and fleece-lined cap. Her long hair, in which there was still very little gray, and of which, truth to tell, she was quite vain, fell down her back. Miss Jane was still as slender as a schoolgirl from a lifetime of constant activity and, except for a touch of arthritis in her hands, remarkably healthy. Yet she had to admit that she was lonesome sometimes. Maybe she should get a cat after all.

At noon she fed Ethan and General Ira Allen the hay she'd brought in a burlap bag on the sledge. She gave them a bucket of water apiece, then got out her pocketknife and skinned and filleted the perch. She shook up the snowy fillets in a brown paper bag with flour and cornmeal and fried them in sizzling butter in a black frying pan on the stove, then sat on the apple crate in the sun streaming through the open doorway and feasted on crispy perch and her own cold baked beans and salt-rising bread, all washed down with black tea. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson enjoyed her vittles. She might take most of her meals alone, but she ate well. Into her tea, from time to time, she poured a short jolt of applejack from her father's canteen. Thinking of her father reminded her of the iceboat he helped her build when she was a girl. The boat, which had a big blue and red sail and two iron runners, could attain speeds of well over sixty miles an hour. One winter afternoon, near where the Grand Trunk tracks cut close to the west side of the frozen bay, she and her father had challenged the Montreal Flyer to a race. When they passed the locomotive, the engineer gave them a long congratulatory whistle. That had been a great moment in Jane's girlhood.

She sipped her fortified tea and looked across the narrows at the soaring cliffs of Kingdom Mountain's west side. In places,
springs seeping out of the escarpment had frozen to a glittering aquamarine. Once, fishing from a rowboat near the base of the mountain, Jane had asked her father if he could scale those cliffs. He had glanced up at them and said, “A person can do what he has to do.”