Points North, page 5
“The same place you think it’s headed,” Charlie said. “Into one of your stories.”
Two dump trucks on loan from the township of Kingdom Common went back and forth between the demolition site and the county landfill, loaded with plaster and lath, cardboard boxes full of Sunday school tracts, church programs decades old, tattered disused hymnals, cracked flower vases, even a bundle of unsigned handwritten sermons from nobody knew how long ago. Editor Kinneson saved out, to present to the local historical society, a tall black ledger listing the names of chronic Presbyterian backsliders who’d been “churched” for various offenses. He showed Charlie two entries in which, as a young man, their great-great-grandfather, Charles Kinneson II, had been churched for racing his team of driving Morgans to and from Sunday services.
At noon Sister Gloryanne Merryton served a bean-hole bean dinner at the town hall for all comers. Sam and Glory sat on the stage at the head table with the elders and their wives. Sam stood to ask the blessing. He lifted his right hand heavenward and said, “Hearken, o Israel, to the Parable of Good Sam Merryton. Off in the forests of Canady was a end-of-the-line burg in the middle of nowhere. Once this village had a thriving furniture factory and a bustling railroad. It was surrounded by prosperous farms. Had it two active churches and two winning ball teams. Nice Grange hall. Famous Academy. No more. Factory close, railroad shut down, can’t keep the churches open and desperate for a minister. Up comes a rich old retired preacher to scope out the job. Takes one look at the rundown churches, drives right on round the village green and out of town without even stopping. Next a young minister fresh out of seminary comes to town. Whoa, Nellie! Ain’t got no Starbucks, ain’t got no Gold’s Gym, ain’t got no cineplex or five-star restaurant. Back he goes faster than he drive up. But who this old boy poking up the road? I do believe it none other than the Right Reverend Dr. Samuel Merryton. Old slow-walking, slow-talking Sam. He don’t see two rundown churches. He sees one new flourishing church. Where we building the new United Church? Right plumb beside the river is where.”
Sam turned to Gloryanne. “Sis, take us on home with ‘Come Let’s Gather by the River.’ Then we’ll eat.”
* * *
The afternoon sped by. About three o’clock the volunteer fire department reported to Sam that they’d taken in over five hundred dollars at the coin drops they’d set up at the village limits for the building fund. While Sam was counting the take into his carpetbag, Jim Kinneson heard the first faint rumble of thunder. Off to the west the storm Sir Izaak had forecast the day before was making up. Perley Benson donated ten thirty-by-forty-foot rolls of waterproofed tarpaulin to cover the lumber from the dismantled churches.
Jim and Charlie were staking down a tarp over the safe from the former Congo study when Perley and George Quinn sidled up to them.
George cleared his throat. “We just thought it might be best if you fellas were the ones to tell Sam,” he said. “Since you seem to have befriended him and all.”
“Tell him what?” Jim said, but the question wasn’t out of his mouth before he knew and so did Charlie.
“You’re going to stiff him, aren’t you?” Jim said. “You aren’t going to offer him the minister’s job. You aren’t going to offer him anything.”
“We don’t have any choice,” Perley said. “He isn’t ordained. He talks like a darky, looks a little like one, too. Very likely he’s living in sin with that woman he calls his sister. He just isn’t, well, damn it all, he isn’t one of us.”
It was the first time either of the brothers had ever heard Deacon Perley Benson swear.
“And we aren’t going to stiff him,” George Quinn said. “We’re going to pay him for helping us get this far with the new church.”
“We’re prepared to pay him a thousand dollars,” Perley chimed in. “I call that pretty good money for a fly-by-night tent preacher.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Charlie said. “Why don’t you just offer him thirty dollars? In silver.”
Another clap of thunder, much louder this time. The storm was closing in on the village. Elder George Quinn jumped, whether from the nearby lightning or Charlie’s retort was impossible to say. Perley shrugged. “We’ll tell him ourselves in the morning,” he said. “Time to seek cover, boys. Old Izaak was right. We’re about to have us a sockdolager.”
Everyone was scattering for shelter. Sam and Glory hurried up the sidewalk in front of the brick shopping block, Sam carrying the carpetbag laden with change and bills from the coin drop. The couple ducked into the bank to make their deposit. Jim held out his hand. A few raindrops spattered off his palm. Up the street Sam and Glory emerged from the bank and cut across the short north end of the green toward the parsonage. The carpetbag swung at Sam’s side as they sailed along hand in hand, the wind now at their back.
Charlie began to laugh. “Jimmy,” he said. “Did you just see what I saw?”
Jim was still fuming over the church fathers’ decision not to hire Sam. “What did you see?”
“I think I saw a bank withdrawal,” Charlie said. “And I think we just saw the last of Good Sam and Gloryanne Merryton.”
This time there was no discernible interval between the lightning and the crash of thunder. Then Jim was laughing, too, laughing and high-fiving his brother as the sky over the village of Kingdom Common opened up with biblical fury.
* * *
The following evening Editor Jim Kinneson and his brother Judge Charlie Kinneson stood on the riverbank above the church pool, stringing up their fly rods. The river was still slightly colored from yesterday’s thunderstorm, though falling fast now, and clarifying. Long ago the brothers’ father, Editor Charles Kinneson, had taught them that falling water was good fishing water.
“He taught us a lot,” Jim said. “Dad.”
“He and Mom taught us everything,” Charlie said in a rare unironical moment. “Except how to tell the future. What I still can’t figure out is why they skipped town in the middle of the night. If they didn’t clean out the fund.”
Jim opened his fly book and studied the multicolored feathered creations. The book and many of the flies had belonged to their father. Charlie reached over his shoulder and tapped an Adams like the one the big brown trout had hit.
“You think he’ll be back?” Jim said.
“Sam? Not a chance.”
“Not Sam. That trophy brown.”
Charlie shrugged. “I’m not going to make any more predictions,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed. He was looking at the tarpaulin over the safe from the former Congo church. Two corners had been pulled loose, Jim assumed by the wind accompanying the storm the evening before, but instead of staking them down again Charlie removed the canvas covering altogether. The heavy door stood open and except for a single scrap of paper the safe was empty. “Luke 2:7,” Sam had written in his block lettering on the back of the deposit slip from the proceeds of the coin drop the day before. “‘Because there was no room for them in the inn.’”
“Jesus,” Jim said. “He had us from the start, didn’t he?”
“Every last one of us,” Charlie said. “Including you and me. Hook, line, and sinker.”
“Well, hell. What should we do?”
“Same thing Sam would do,” Charlie said. “Go fishing for that big brown trout. Tell you what, bub. You hook him, I’ll land him for you.”
4
Sisters
Auction Day in Lost Nation Hollow dawned cloudless. The sky was a deep Canadian blue, though a few wispy shreds of fog crept up the mountainside above the river. The sisters’ father, Swale Kinneson, had loved to pronounce that mist climbing up the mountain betokened a fair day ahead. Swale Kinneson had a saying for every weather event. If, after two days of rain, the wind began to shift around to the north, that too indicated fair weather in the offing, a good time to make hay. Unfortunately, Swale was allergic to hay dust. He was also allergic to cows, pigs, chickens, silage, tractor exhaust—and therefore tractors—and, in Miss Madge’s opinion, to work. What summer mist and a drying north wind actually meant was a good day for Miss Madge Kinneson and her schoolteacher sister, Miss Mary Mae Kinneson, to make hay. Swale had assured the girls that hay dust would do for him if he set foot inside the barn. “‘Consider the lilies of the field,’” he intoned. “‘They do not toil, neither do they spin.’” When the hale old man died of natural causes in his ninth decade, the sisters planted him in the family plot above the homeplace. They commissioned a granite marker, shot through with flecks of pink quartz that sparkled in the mild northern sunshine, into which, in accordance with Madge’s instructions, the stonecutter had chiseled Swale’s name and dates and the epitaph HE DID NOT TOIL OR SPIN. Mary Mae had been mortified. Mary Mae had been mortified by nearly everything Madge had done over the years. She believed that, long ago, Madge had needed to be taken in hand, like the three generations of scholars Mary Mae had taught at the Lost Nation schoolhouse. Madge, for her part, believed there was nothing wrong with her proper elder sister—there was a year’s difference between them, a year Miss Mary set great store by—that fifteen minutes in the candlelit company of a man’s man, over a bottle of wine, would not rectify.
“Too late for that now,” Mr. Frenchy LaMott said to Madge as they stood in the sisters’, now Madge’s, kitchen, watching the sun come up over the Quebec mountains off to the northeast.
Mr. Frenchy LaMott ran the commission sales auction barn in the Common. He and Miss Madge Kinneson had been keeping company for twenty years, since Madge’s third husband had gone out to the milking parlor to broom down the cobwebs and never been seen or heard from in Kingdom County again. All three of Madge’s husbands had been worthless. As she frequently reminded Mr. Frenchy LaMott, she had traded downhill each time she remarried. In the dooryard of the homeplace there grew an ancient and lovely maple tree known to the sisters as the marriage tree because Kinneson women had been married under its boughs for several generations. Up and down the hollow it was said that the marriage maple in the Kinneson place dooryard brought, to a matrimonial union, the sweetness of fancy-grade maple syrup, the strength of seasoned timber, and the accommodating give of a strong and stately tree in a howling line storm. None of these benefactions seemed to have taken effect in Madge’s three yoke-ups. Husband Number One had been a serial chaser and card sharp. He’d been shot by an aggrieved husband during a game of Texas Hold’em in the barroom of the Common Hotel, where at the time Madge had been working as a waitress. Number Two had inherited Swale Kinneson’s porch glider, out of which, drunk on blackberry brandy, he’d tumbled and broken his neck. Madge had buried him next to Swale with a marker adorned by his name and the word DITTO. Good-for-Nothing Number Three, Madge claimed, was still sweeping the cobwebs out of the milking-parlor windows though she would not have guessed that it would take him this long to complete the task. In the two decades since his disappearance, she and her close companion Mr. Frenchy LaMott had never mentioned marriage. As Madge frequently declared, she was married out. “Three times and out, Mr. LaMott,” she said. Mr. Frenchy LaMott, for his part, had been in love with Miss Madge since the day, forty-some years ago, he’d seen her throw a drunk up the three steps leading from the barroom to the hotel lobby. It was the first time he’d ever seen a big man thrown up a flight of stairs, and he was smitten.
Later today, while Madge tended to Miss Mary Mae’s final remains, Mr. Frenchy LaMott, in accordance with Mary’s wishes, would auction off most of Mary’s possessions from the homeplace. All but the cherry breakfront containing Miss Mary’s particular friends, a complete set of the Harvard Classics. The breakfront and friends, as well as her half-interest in the house, Mary had left to Madge, along with written instructions for the disposition of her remains. The remains reposed in a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar in the breakfront next to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The proceeds from the auction were to be bequeathed to the Henry David Thoreau Society in Concord, Massachusetts.
The mist off the Lost Nation Branch of the Upper Kingdom River had dissipated. Looking out the south window of the kitchen, Madge half expected to see her schoolteacher sister coming up the lane with half a dozen pan-sized trout on a forked alder stick, fresh-caught for breakfast. Mary had been a neat hand with a bamboo pole and an angleworm. Like her friend Henry David Thoreau.
“You want this sieve to go, Madge?”
“It isn’t a sieve, it’s a colander. Yes, I want it to go.”
“I expect some downcountry dealer would offer a cool thousand for that breakfront. I know a fella runs a dented-in tin-can store with a line of secondhanded paperbacks would probably take those old books off your hands.”
“The breakfront and books stay.”
“There’s a chip on the handle of this sugar bowl.”
“I know about the chip on the handle. Get what you can for it. It’s a gravy boat, not a sugar bowl.”
Miss Mary Mae’s cat No Ears, a mammoth orange tom with a head as large as a cauliflower, came slinking into the kitchen and stretched out on the floor in front of the cold Home Comfort range. The tom rolled over onto his back and began working his front paws in the air and purring. No Ears had accompanied Sister Mary Mae down the hollow every school day and suffered the little girl scholars to dress him up in dolly clothes. The boys coaxed him into chasing a button on a string. No Ears and Miss Mary Mae had been inseparable, though in the way of most cats, he did not seem to miss her now that she was gone. Madge did not care for cats.
Mr. Frenchy LaMott looked at No Ears, unsheathing his front claws and retracting them in time to his purring. “I could put that customer to work,” Frenchy said. “Keeping down the rats at the commission barn. What would you take for him?”
“Nothing. He belongs here on the place.”
“I thought you didn’t like cats.”
“I don’t.”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars for him.”
“You’d soon give me a hundred to take him back.”
Frenchy shrugged. “What’s this, a scales? Is it an antique? What’s it worth?”
“It’s a steelyard, for the love of Pete. I have no idea what it’s worth. It’s worth whatever you can get for it.”
“I haven’t said a thing right since I arrived this morning,” Mr. Frenchy LaMott said to No Ears, now basking on the windowsill in the early sunlight.
Madge pretended not to hear. She was looking at the Currier and Ives reproduction over the kitchen counter: GOOD COUNTRY LIVING. It depicted a winter country scene, probably Christmas morning, with horse-drawn sleighs arriving in the snowy dooryard of a handsome light-yellow farmhouse. Madge had little use for Currier and Ives. Why didn’t they show the same dooryard at hog-killing time when you could hear the doomed pigs screaming in terror all the way down the hollow to Miss Mary Mae’s former schoolhouse? Or during the diphtheria epidemic that had killed seven of the sisters’ great-aunts and uncles, some still not out of their cradles? The front door had been marked in black paint with a foot-high “Q” and nailed shut. Neighbors passed covered dishes in through the same bay window the bodies of the small aunts and uncles were passed out of. Why hadn’t Currier and Ives commissioned a scene in which Mary Mae, having dragged their drunken father home from the Common Hotel on a hand-drawn sledge, came upon the hired man about to have his way with eleven-year-old Madge and brained him with a bed warmer? Or Swale butchering Madge’s starving riding pony because it was all they had left to eat during the interminable winter of ’48? Madge, and Mary Mae too, when she’d been among the quick, could have told Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives a thing or two about good country living.
“I’ve got a catalogue out in the rig that tells how much those old prints are fetching these days,” Mr. Frenchy LaMott said. “We’ll get top dollar for it.”
“I’m sure the Henry David Thoreau Society will be grateful,” Madge said.
“You’re getting her half of the house, right?”
“Such as it is.”
“Some rich downcountry lawyer’d pay a pretty penny for a house with this view.”
“What was it my father used to say? ‘You can’t eat the view.’ The cat and the breakfront and Mary Mae’s friends had all better be here when I get back.”
Miss Madge got her red-and-green-checked Johnson wool hunting jacket from the peg behind the woodshed door and handed the jar with Mary Mae inside to Frenchy while she shrugged into the jacket.
“You take care now, Madge. I’m not sure what you’re fixing to do down there is strictly legal.”
“Let me worry about that, Mr. LaMott.”
“I wish you’d wait until tomorrow and let me drive you.”
“This is between Sis and me, thank you kindly.”
Miss Madge set the Hellmann’s jar beside her on the bench seat of the ’43 International farm truck and pressed the foot starter on the floor. It didn’t catch.
“Let up and try again,” Frenchy called. Madge let up on the starter. After a few seconds she pressed down on the starter again. This time the truck came to life. Madge waved out the window without glancing back, pulled out of the dooryard, and here, heading up the lane from the plank bridge over the brook, came an SUV towing a trailer. The first auction-goer of the day, three hours early to have a good look at the items for sale. Out-of-state plates, Connecticut Madge thought. A middle-aged couple, dealers no doubt. The car stopped and the driver waved Madge down. “We’re looking for the Kinneson auction,” the man said. “The signs seemed to be pointing this way.”
“Jesus,” the woman said. “Ask her if this is where they filmed that chain saw movie.”
“House on top of the rise just ahead,” Madge said. “Look out, though. There’s a den of timber rattlers under the porch steps.”
“There are rattlesnakes up here?” the man said.
“Just watch where you put your foot,” Madge said.
She drove off down the mountainside. A minute later the car and trailer from Connecticut sped past her, heading south.
