On Kingdom Mountain (29 page)

“I didn't see him flying in,” Henry said.

“Her,” Miss Jane corrected him. “The workers are females, Henry. And you rarely do see them arrive. One of their most charming ways is that they seem just to materialize. My father used to tell me that all the best gifts in life arrive by surprise,” she continued. “Like my mother, Pharaoh's Daughter, who just appeared in the barn one Christmas morning.”

“Miss Jane,” Henry said as they continued up the mountain after the bee, “I am interested in your mother. She had a most unusual name.”

“If she had been a boy, my grandparents would have named him Moses. I suppose that her mother, the itinerant basket weaver Canada Jane Hubbell, wished her to have advantages not available to her, and therefore left her in the sweetgrass basket, like the infant Moses, for my grandparents to raise.”

“You mentioned that she had no Indian ways.”

“None at all, Henry. My father said I inherited all of the Indian ways from Canada Jane and her people.”

“Were your father and Pharaoh's Daughter raised as brother and sister?”

“Well, that was a rather delicate point. Of course, Pharaoh's Daughter was my father's stepsister—I've lost sight of our bee, Henry. Let us pause and see if we can lure it back. They were of an age, and inseparable as children, the greatest chums in the world, I judge. Then he went off to war and she to Mount Holyoke College. After the war, Pharaoh's Daughter married my father, and they were very happy together. They had me rather late in life. I think my arrival was a great surprise to them both. As I told you, they had their own little Kingdom Mountain particularities, but I know this much. Neither of them would have stood still for a minute for Eben's ridiculous high road. Here's our honeybee, right on schedule. I don't think their nest can be far from here.”

“Miss Jane, I don't mean to pry, but I have to ask. Do you think your mother knew about Slidell? And Elisabeth?”

“I expect that she did, Henry. My parents were lifelong friends as well as man and wife, and they had few secrets from each other.”

“Do you believe he divulged to her what he discovered when he went south to find Pilgrim?”

“I don't know,” Jane said, capping the Mason jar and starting up the steep, wooded slope. “If so, I'm sure neither of them ever told anyone else.”

Through gaps in the trees above them, Henry could see patches of gray cliffs and, high above them, the devil's visage on the north face of the balancing boulder. This was not a place he would care to visit alone after dark. There was something forbidding about the far side of the mountain. Jane's determined bearing as she set off up the steep slope under the trees made Henry wonder if she might sense it herself.

The flume roaring through the nearby gorge made Henry dizzy. Miss Jane showed Henry where, over the millennia, sand and pebbles had scoured out a deep pool she called Satan's cauldron. Upstream was a black rock shaped like a foot. Satan's boot.

Here in the deep woods the derelict log chute had an eerie look. Miss Jane said that because of the great speed of the logs hurtling down the chute, and the friction they created, the lumbermen had sprinkled sand on the boards to keep them from catching on fire. The man charged with sending down the logs was called a kedger. In Jane's grandfather's time Jean “Kedger Jack” Riendeau had somehow tumbled onto the chute. As he hurtled down the mountainside, his clothes caught fire. Kedger Jack hit the pond at an estimated one hundred miles an hour and was killed on impact.

With this inspiring image in mind, Henry followed Miss Jane higher into the Limberlost. They came to fresh blowdowns where the tail of the recent hurricane had roared through. The few trees still standing were mostly hemlocks, though here and there grew a few lone beeches. Miss Jane pointed out where black bears had climbed them to eat the beechnuts in the fall, then slid back down the trunks like great sooty firemen coming down a pole, grooving the smooth gray bark with their claws. She remarked that very probably the honey tree they were searching for would turn out to be a basswood.

“Look for that linden, Henry,” Jane said, peering into the thick green canopy overhead.

“Say what, ma'am?”

“Linden tree. A basswood. Bees dearly love an old basswood tree. So do I, for that matter. It's my favorite wood to carve.”

Sure enough, a few yards away stood a soaring hardwood tree that Miss Jane identified as a basswood. That's not where they found the bees, though. They were nesting in the tallest of the last three remaining American chestnuts on the mountain, beneath which Miss Jane had shot the great ridge runner.

The limbs of the bee tree were longer on the east side of the trunk, indicating that the prevailing winds were from the west. High overhead, two major horizontal branches jutted out opposite each other at right angles to the trunk. Ten feet below them another large branch appeared to have broken off long ago. Perhaps the missing branch had been struck by lightning. Where it had once grown, a long, dark cavity bisected the trunk. A steady squadron of bees flew in and out of the fissure.

“Well, Henry,” Miss Jane announced, “the hollow tree ought to come down anyway. We'll cut it.”

They collected some damp wood from old chestnut stumps and a few handfuls of last year's fallen leaves and built a smudge fire under the tree to calm the bees. Miss Jane notched the chestnut tree with her ax so it would fall up the mountainside, away from the bee cavity. Then they fell to with Freethinker's crosscut saw. The maple handles were worn to a glassy smoothness from generations of use, and Miss Jane had kept the teeth filed sharp and shiny. Smoke from the fire curled up through the leaves of the towering old chestnut. Agitated bees zoomed past their heads. “Cower not, Henry,” cried Miss Jane. “The bees won't harm us if we don't harm them.”

How, Henry wondered, were the bees to know that he and Miss Jane posed no danger? Two gigantic marauders who were choking them with thick black smoke in order to level their home and pillage their larder?

The straight-grained chestnut wood cut easily, and the two sawyers made quick progress. In a quarter of an hour they were halfway through the trunk. As they worked, the smoke stung their eyes. They stopped once to add more wet wood and leaves to the fire.

“Soon you'll have a fine new home,” Miss Jane called up to the bees. “Be patient a short while longer, my friends.”

Henry shot a wary look at the crease high in the tree trunk. It looked large enough for a good-sized bear to come out of. An enraged bear, he thought, was all they needed. An entire battalion of bees now hovered just outside the opening. Miss Jane chuckled. “Saw on, Henry. All we need fear is our own trepidation. The bees can scent it.”

If so, thought Henry, he was a goner. But at just that moment the massive chestnut gave out a long creak and started to sway. As they scurried out of the way, it toppled, crashing down through the smaller trees around it, hitting the ground with a tremendous metallic clang, as if the trunk were petrified and had landed on a boulder. The bees were now buzzing all around the opening, but as Miss Jane approached with her hand-held smoker and gave them several friendly puffs of smoke, they rose as one and alighted on a low branch of a nearby striped maple tree, from which they depended in a great inverted, humming cone.

The Duchess, carrying the hive, stepped boldly up to the cone of bees. “I am Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson,” she told them. “Come, friends, dwell with me on my side of the mountain. No thieving, flyblown bruins with rooting black snouts will pilfer your honey. I'll leave plenty to tide you over for the
winter. You'll meet my swarms and make powerful new alliances.”

The bees hummed louder, as if they were considering Miss Jane's proposal. Then out of the throbbing heart of the swarm crawled a pale-colored individual, larger than the others.

Miss Jane held out the thatch-roofed hive, and soon enough the pale queen walked inside on her six legs at a stately pace, followed by her subjects. For better or for worse, the bees from the far side of the mountain had cast their lot with the Duchess.

Now it was time to gather the honey. Miss Jane stepped up to the fallen chestnut with her double-bladed ax. Just below the bee hole, she dealt the trunk a powerful blow. It shattered apart, laying bare comb upon comb of dark wild honey. That wasn't all, though. Inside the hollow tree, encased in honey and beeswax, were the perfectly preserved remains of a butternut-clad soldier, still holding his rifle. The soldier had a ragged dark beard and long dark hair. His gray eyes were wide open and he was or, rather, had been at the time of his death, very young, no more than twenty or twenty-one. Spilling out of eight large white linen sacks wedged into the hollow beside him, covering parts of his uniform like the bejeweled armor of some ancient and fabulously rich emperor, were hundreds upon hundreds of honey-coated gold coins.

Henry was beside himself with glee. He was fairly capering at the sight of the long-lost treasure, dancing a jig on the forest floor, whooping and throwing his white hat high into the air.

“Sir, please, desist!” Miss Jane cried. “These antics are beyond unseemly in the presence of the dead. The Confederate dead, I might add.”

“Who in thunder is he?” Henry said when he regained some control over himself.

Miss Jane had been staring at the soldier's tattered uniform jacket bedizened with coins. Gently, she turned him on his side
and pointed at a small hole, about the size of a quarter, in the back of his tunic. Then she showed Henry, in the front of the soldier's jacket, what he hadn't seen before. Just below his breast pocket was a second hole, filled with honey and beeswax and somewhat obscured by double eagles, but considerably larger than the hole in his back. Whoever the soldier standing vigil over the Treasure of kingdom Mountain might be, he appeared to have been murdered.

T
HAT NIGHT AT
Camp Hard Luck, in the camp journal recording the blue-backed char and great-racked deer and fabled bears that she and her Kinneson forebears had taken on the far side of the mountain, Miss Jane wrote, “Found a swarm of bees, the Treasure of Kingdom Mountain, and one (1) preserved Rebel soldier in hollow American chestnut tree below devil's visage.” Then, from Pharaoh's Daughter's sweetgrass basket, she handed Henry a folded sheet of stationery. He unfolded it and read the following letter written in faded brown ink.

 

September 5, 1864

My dear Slidell,

A most astonishing event has transpired here on the mountain, an event that I plan to divulge to no other living soul. Last month, soon after I returned to Vermont from my long trek south, during which I was fortunate enough to meet you in the cave in Virginia, our local bank was robbed by Confederate raiders. They rode out of Canada, hoping to augment the
Rebel treasury and, at the same time, spread panic throughout the North and, possibly, divert Union troops away from the fighting to New England. It is believed that the raiders made away with nearly one hundred thousand dollars in gold! It was a most brazen action, carried out in broad daylight by only two men. At any rate, the day of the robbery, when I went to the barn to milk in the evening, I heard moaning from the haymow above. There, to my great amazement, I discovered a young man, a Rebel captain, lying wounded in his gray uniform. Oh, Slidell! Here was a dilemma. However, bearing in mind my grandfather's motto on the lintel of our door, “They lived in a house at the end of the road
and were friends to mankind,
” which I well remember telling you of in Virginia, I felt obliged to hide and care for this Rebel, with the help of my dear young wife, Pharaoh's Daughter, and to nurse him back to health, then send him on his way back to Canada. What a traitor I felt, until
he happened to let drop that he had done the same for an injured Yankee soldier, hiding in the mountains in North Carolina, named Pilgrim
, who had told him about the wealthy little bank in Vermont and, without dreaming what he was doing, put the idea of the robbery in his head. The last the captain had seen of my brother, he was headed up into the high peaks of Carolina to live with and doctor the mountain people of that region! You know from my earlier letters the outcome of my search in those mountains for my brother. The wounded Reb then told me a tale stranger yet, which I did not, and do not, know whether to credit. He was a wild, ranting fellow, and his injury, which, I believe, will leave him with a ball in his leg to remind him of Vermont, made him no less so. He said that as he and his partner were headed over the mountain, the other man suddenly drew his pistol, threw down on him, and fired, wounding him in the leg, then rode off over the summit to Canada with the gold.

To cut a long tale short, in a week's time he was well enough to return to Canada and, thence, I suppose, to the South. What became of the gold from the robbery I don't pretend to
know, and though I am grateful to him for helping my brother, if that story be true, I never did trust the fellow, who was all full of talk about the end of times and final judgments and I don't know what. Yet I do not feel that, in befriending him, I transgressed. My great-grandfather's motto on the lintel particularly stipulates that we are to help
mankind
, which I take to mean
all mankind.
Whoever the man was, I am glad I helped him, and nearly as glad that he is gone. I remain, with warm, best wishes, your dear friend in Vermont,

 

Morgan Kinneson

 

“The wounded soldier,” Henry said, “was my grandfather, Captain Cantrell Satterfield. He always walked with a limp. But what about Pilgrim, Miss Jane? Your father's letter mentions another letter telling about his search for Pilgrim.”

“It's not in the box Elisabeth gave me,” Jane said. “I fear it's lost.”