On Kingdom Mountain (34 page)

No one in the Kingdom, including Miss Jane, ever learned Henry's fate or, for that matter, that of the twice-purloined and thrice-tainted gold. In the village, where old men still sit yarning on the hotel porch of a summer evening and old friends meet at the post office or the Harvest Festival or the Thanksgiving homecoming ball, it is sometimes reported that, high on the mountain, near the Kingdom Mountain Cemetery, a hunter or fisherman or a solitary hiker, happening along at twilight, will glimpse a tall, stately woman with light hair, dressed all in black, visiting companionably with a slender man in a white suit and hat, a crimson vest, a black four-in-hand tie, and white shoes. Then the apparitions, if that's what they are, fade off into the dusk and the traveler passes on down the mountain, not quite sure what, if anything, he saw. It is the sort of tale you might hear in any off-the-beaten-track hamlet in New England. Still, as Miss Jane herself liked to say, on Kingdom Mountain, anything is possible.

Sometimes a visitor to the mountain will walk up to the cemetery, past the iron pump of the glacial well, and read the
words carved on Miss Jane's stone. She inscribed them herself a few years before she died. They're worth seeing.

 

Jane Hubbell Kinneson

The Duchess of Kingdom Mountain

That which I have learned I leave as my legacy.

Close all gates behind yourself.

Every generation should have its own Bible.

The walls we erect to protect ourselves from early pain often shut us off from later joy.

To immerse oneself in the natural world is to share a universal thread with every living thing.

Always declare yourself to the person you love.

Live each day not as though it is your last, but as though it is the last day of the lives of the people you meet.

All the best stories are about love.

H
OWARD
F
RANK
M
OSHER
is the author of ten books, including
Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account,
and
A Stranger in the Kingdom,
which, along with
Disappearances,
was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.