On Kingdom Mountain (20 page)

That evening, hillbilly hoedown music from Lookout Mountain blared from the radio with frenzied intensity. Banjos rang, fiddles screeched as if bowed by demons. Later, preachers from Wheeling and Memphis called down damnation on the transgressors of the drought-parched land. Heat lightning flickered over the Green Mountains, and the forecast called for dangerous electrical storms approaching from the west, to be followed by the lashing tail of the hurricane. The wind roared in the forest on the mountain, and Commoners stumbling home from the hotel barroom that night heard keening voices in the sky. Some swore that the old Kinnesonville church bell tolled out from the ghost town high on the mountain. Henry promised Miss Jane that the next day, come hell or high water, he would
start King James's Jehovah and they would drive it down to the Common, to arrive triumphantly with the rain.

The following morning was hazier than ever. Through the smoke the rising sun turned the entire mountain blood red. By noon the sun had shrunk to the size of a fiery penny. The fire tower on the mountaintop drifted in and out of view. Sometimes it seemed fifty miles away, then for a few moments it hovered directly over the home place. In the early afternoon the entire mountain seemed to come unmoored from its bedrock. It rose majestically, then descended and matter-of-factly reseated itself like a proper mountain. Once during the Civil War the image of a battle being fought by a Vermont regiment in Pennsylvania was imprinted in the sky above Kingdom's summit, and in the Common speechless onlookers had watched loved ones fall. Cannon fire from the transposed battle was heard as far away as Bethlehem, New Hampshire. The balancing boulder had levitated hundreds of feet into the sky and slowly rotated one hundred and eighty degrees so that the devil's visage, now gazing down on the smoky battle, was visible from the village. Then the illusion vanished.

Late that afternoon the sky to the west turned black. The radio reported that torrential thunderstorms were hitting the Adirondacks, just across Lake Champlain from Vermont, with unprecedented fury. Henry told Miss Jane that they would now, for the first time, start King James's Jehovah, which they had pulled out into the barnyard with Ethan and General Ira Allen. As Miss Jane ran for her driving duster, goggles, and motorman's cap, Henry set the bulky radio on top of the combine's grain bin to track the progress of the oncoming storm.

To his chagrin the rainmaker could not seem to activate the machine. “Confound you, sir,” he told it as he threw this gear and depressed that throttle and the storm clouds sailed closer. The water in the boiler bubbled. Coal black smoke poured out
of the tall stack. But the valves stuck, the steam seemed to be blocked, and there were so many levers, gears, wheels, cylinders, switches, and dials that even the mechanically minded aviator, who had repaired superannuated locomotives in Siberia and three-hundred-foot-tall windmills in Tibet, not to mention his own biplane more times than he could count, had no luck at all starting it.

“Wait here, ma'am, if you will, please,” Henry said as he trotted down the lane toward the hemlock-plank bridge. At the foot of the hill he dashed across the water meadow toward his plane. Too late, Miss Jane perceived his design. Despite his promise never to fly into an electrical storm again, he was going aloft to guide in the rain.

“No,” she shouted. “No, Henry!” But the yellow biplane was already bouncing over the pasture and lifting off.

Horrified, Miss Jane watched the Burgess-Wright gain altitude. Henry was flying due west toward the gathering thunderheads. Through the smoky film the receding plane looked nearly colorless.

As he ascended above the Green Mountains, clearing the top of Jay Peak by scant feet, a jag of lightning struck Miss Jane's own mountaintop with a thunderous explosion, igniting the wooden fire tower like a gigantic Roman candle. A yellow sphere of electricity about the size of a basketball raced down the wire antenna from the flaming observation deck of the tower to the combine, which gave a deep coughing roar.

Jane clamored aboard King James's Jehovah. She yanked one lever back, jammed another forward, ratcheted a third sideways. The huge blades clattered into motion, and the machine made a bounding lurch.

Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, decked out in her motoring regalia, clung to the wheel for dear life as Jehovah rumbled through her flower garden, threshing up her pink and white
summer phlox, Delft blue delphiniums, and multicolored zinnias, along with her prize Harison's Yellow rose, which she had kept well watered from the river, morning and evening, all summer.

In the water meadow a dozen seagulls in off Lake Memphremagog to take refuge from the storm froze in terror. Several were summarily clapped up by the combine. The machine jolted across the covered bridge just as Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers approached from the opposite direction in Eben's Roadmaster. The astounded lawyer had no choice but to drive off the road into the pool below the bridge.

Like its stern namesake descending on a coven of idolaters, King James's Jehovah veered west down the Connector right of way, threshing up a hedgerow of young poplar trees. An oncoming dump truck took to the ditch. The combine clapped up a
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
sign and half a dozen freeranging Rhode Island Red chickens pecking in the road in front of the Currier farm. At the junction of the Connector and the road to Lord Hollow, the steam shovel operator took one look at the oncoming juggernaut and drove his shovel over the bank.

A four-horse hitch hauling a wooden road scraper went galloping down the road in front of the combine. More gulls flew along behind, snapping up panicked grasshoppers flushed out of the ditches. Now Eben and the enraged town fathers, drenched to the skin, were overtaking the machine in Miss Jane's Model A, which they had commandeered from her door-yard. A Border collie and two nanny goats from the Kittredge farm joined in the chase. Six first-calf heifers in Ferlin Sanville's pasture stampeded through their fence and were not found until three days later, fifteen miles away, on the main street of Pond in the Sky. Sadie Blackberry, searching futilely with Clarence Davis for any edible wild fruit in the drought,
looked up as King James's Jehovah went by and immortalized herself in the mythology of Kingdom County by remarking, “Don't mind that ruckus, Clarence. That's just Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson in a rainmaking machine.” From nowhere a Morgan horse appeared in the right of way, running hard in front of the combine.

“Whoa up, you blackguard! Whoa, you destroyer of the innocent!” Miss Jane commanded. But the wrathful Jehovah, having long bided its time for just such a campaign, had a mind and will of its own. Preceded by the galloping Morgan, followed by a yapping, bleating, coughing, crowing, shouting procession of dogs, goats, town fathers, construction workers, gulls, and farm boys, not to mention the low high sheriff, who had been lying in wait for speeders at the foot of Blue Clay Hill, the machine was not to be deterred from its mission.

The clerk of the works for the Connector, setting up his surveying instruments on the outskirts of the village, saw something never before seen through the eyepiece of a transit. Then the runaway combine brushed past him, eating up his overalls and leaving him standing in the roadway in his drawers just as the first big raindrops started to fall. Without fanfare King James's Jehovah ate the
WELCOME TO KINGDOM COMMON
sign on the edge of the village. Miss Jane gave out a lusty cheer. The Bronze Age deity himself, King James's I Am That I Am, incinerating Sodom, atomizing Gomorrah, drowning every last one of his own dear creatures save sanctimonious old Noah and his two-by-two menagerie, could scarcely have acted with more purposeful malice than the long-dormant thresher, now bearing down on the commission-sales auction yard, bulling over the pole fence and consuming auctioneer Bumper Stevens's prize fighting rooster, Calvin Coolidge. The ancients on the hotel porch leaped out of their cane-bottomed chairs and ran inside, retreating faster, Editor Kinneson said in that
week's
Monitor
, than the Vermont regiment that turned tail and fled at the first battle of Bull Run. “Perhaps,” the editor wrote, “Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson may be forgiven a brief moment of triumphalism, in view of what is at stake for her, as the avenging ‘Jehovah' smartly executed a left flank maneuver and headed down the ball diamond on the village green, breaking up a practice session of the local nine. She struggled valiantly to prevent the thing from committing manslaughter.”

Jehovah was unstoppable. No one, including the Duchess, had the faintest idea how to halt it. It ate second base and the pitcher's rubber, leveled the mound, toppled the chicken-wire backstop, and continued across the street toward the Congregational church lawn, where the Reverend was changing the weekly message. He got as far as
THE LORD GOD IS AN ANGRY G
before, as if to prove his point, the berserk combine gobbled up the bulletin board. Whistle screaming, it proceeded down U.S. Route 5 straight for the fairgrounds, where the carnival was encamped. Miss Jane could hear the calliope music over the thresher's engine.

Then, just before what would surely have been a catastrophic collision, the runaway machine gave out a final sigh and stopped beside Mr. Foxie Romanoff, who was operating the Ferris wheel, filled with children, in the rain.

Mr. Romanoff looked up at Miss Jane, covered from head to toe with soot and dust. “What would it set me back,” he said, “to acquire that ride for my show?”

Miss Jane thought for a moment. “I'll trade it to you, even steven, for the Bride of Ramses.”

That's when they spotted Henry Satterfield, coming on in his plane just ahead of the onrushing storm. The lightning and thunder shook the old Burgess-Wright like a toy. The wings and guy wires were alive with blue electrical current, and the same unearthly violet light played over the aviator's hands on the controls as he cleared the looming water tower just west of
the fairgrounds. Miss Jane could smell ozone in the approaching rain, as well as something singed and sulfurous, as if the electricity in the air had scorched the airship. As it came in over the fairgrounds and landed beside the Ferris wheel, she ran up to the plane carrying the coffin of Ramses' Bride, stashed it behind the jump seat, and hopped in. Just as she and Henry took off, the deluge struck.

The Commoners on the bluestone sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block, the pensioners back out on the hotel porch, a few ballplayers scampering across the green with mitts and bats tucked under their arms, looked up and, through the welcome torrent, saw the plane overhead. They could just make out the letters on the bottom wing,
HENRY SATTERFIELD'S FLYING CIRCUS RAINMAKING AND PYROTECHNIC SERVICES BEAUMONT TEXAS
. The roar of the engine combined with the thunder as the Burgess-Wright banked sharply east out of town over the new right of way, now fast becoming a muddy stream. Henry landed in Jane's field and rolled into the barnyard, up the high drive, and through the big open sliding door onto the wide wagon ramp between the hay bays. Only then did the rainmaker and the Duchess look at each other. Bedraggled, grimy, scarcely recognizable, they both began to laugh. Once started, neither could stop laughing until they collapsed in each other's arms. Miss Jane got out her wooden flask of Who Shot Sam, took a long drink, and offered the canteen to Henry. They were still laughing as she told him how the fire tower had been struck and set on fire, how the glowing ball of electricity had run down the fence-wire antenna and activated Jehovah. She described the way the steam shovel had plunged over the bank like some frightened prehistoric creature. Henry told Jane how he'd found the rain and then just gotten back to the village before the storm. Finally, Miss Jane explained that she'd traded King James's Jehovah for the Bride of Ramses.

“What on earth for?” Henry said, still laughing.

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Miss Jane said. This set them off again.

“Have another sip of Sam, Mr. Satterfield.”

“This 'jack is beginning to rise to my head,” he said. “I'd call it potent stuff.”

More laughter as the rain drummed furiously against the barn, which shook with each thunderclap.

“Henry,” Jane said, “do you know what we need?”

“Besides more applejack?”

“Yes. Besides more applejack, you and I need a good bath. Now tell me. Have you ever gone skinny-dipping in the rain with a duchess?”

“Why, no,” Henry said, half choking and still laughing, so that his last jolt of Sam started to come back up through his nose, causing him to whoop all the harder. “But I should very much like to.”

“Why, then,” Miss Jane said, polishing off the applejack and climbing, somewhat unsteadily, out of the airplane, “let us see which of us can reach the river first in that glorious state in which”—and here she began to laugh again, so hard that the gallant aviator had to help her with her dress buttons—“we were created.”

S
OME HOURS LATER
, dry, warm, and very much in the state in which they were created, lulled by the steady rainfall and the wind in the trees on the mountain, quite sober now from their plunge into the river, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson and
Henry Satterfield lay close together in her bedchamber at the home place. Miss Jane was thinking, sleepily, about the utter unpredictabilities of life, even for a Scottish-Memphremagog woman of a certain age and with second sight. Henry was daydreaming about old treasure and new airplanes.

“Well, Henry,” Jane said, feeling oddly as if she were still talking to him through the grate in the ceiling, “I believe that you and I find ourselves on a different footing than earlier in the day.”

“Yes,” he said. “We are indeed on a different footing. We are on a—a sublime footing. Tonight has been the most sublime night of my life.”

“Why, Henry, I quite concur. Yet to one who is, perhaps, not unfamiliar with the matchless favors of Miss Lola Beauregard Beauclerk—”