Points North, page 11
“Are you still engaged to be engaged?” Jim blurted out.
“Hardly,” Frannie said as though such a notion was absurd. “Écoute-vous, James. I’ve kept close track of you and your antics. Cousin Athena sent me that story you wrote. About the silly young French girl and the boy who for unknown reasons loved her.”
Frannie gave his hand a tug, like a trout. “Come inside,” she said. “I suppose you will remember the first time we came here?”
“I do.”
It was as though they’d never been apart. They came together in each other’s arms and five minutes later they were making love in the sleeping loft, as they had on that long-ago day when they were seventeen.
Afterward, Jim told her, to her great delight, about his lonely-hearts dates.
“‘Shy But Passionate,’ was me,” Frannie said. “Don’t you think I’m shy, James?”
“What about all those guys you were engaged to be engaged to?”
“None of them ever wrote a love story about me. Also, I think you may have just made me pregnant. Now we’ll have to get married and spend the rest of our lives together in this wasteland.”
Jim kissed her and they made love again, slower but just as passionately. “My,” Frannie said when they finished this time, “I can see you are still the incorrigible romantic, James. That’s what I’ve always loved most about you. You haven’t changed at all.”
“Everything changes. It’s the first law of nature. You told me so the day we went our separate ways.”
Frannie thought. Then she smiled and said, “For once in my life—just once—I was wrong. Love never changes. I realized that when I read your story. Come, Mr. Lonely Hearts. I’ll prove it to you.”
8
Dispossessed
For sixty years and more, on Memorial Day weekend, Jim Kinneson and his brother Charlie had made the canoe run together. They put in by the Canadian border, in the Great Northern Bog where the river rose, and paddled down through the bog and the gore to the family hunting and fishing camp on Pond Number Three. After spending the night at the camp, they canoed and fished their way to the mouth of the river where it emptied into the big lake, Memphremagog. It was a thirteen-mile paddle past seven mountains, so they had always called their two-day canoe trek the Seven Mountain Run. Sometimes Charlie jokingly referred to their annual expedition as a “two-rig fish” because they would leave Charlie’s pickup at the trailhead on Monadnock Mountain and carry the Old Town the three miles through the woods to the bog and fish their way down to Jim’s pickup at the mouth of the river. They could have accomplished the trip in one long day. But they preferred to take their time, fishing as they went, and they loved staying over at camp, which went back in the family seven generations to Charles Kinneson I, their great-great-great-great-grandfather.
They left Jim’s beater in a pull-off beside the river’s mouth the evening before and headed east out the county road before dawn the next morning with Gramp’s green Old Town in the bed of Charlie’s rig, turned north in Pond in the Sky, and arrived at the trailhead at sunrise. It was misting a little so they put on their rain jackets and rain pants to hike in through the wet bush to the bog. The light rain wouldn’t hurt the fishing at all. The trout should be feeding hard in the morning rain. Jim’s Nikon, which he used mainly to take pictures for the Monitor, was wrapped in an oilcloth inside his waterproof knapsack. The Nikon was safe from the rain. The rain pants were a little cumbersome but no one wanted to sit in a canoe all day with a wet behind. If the sun popped out later, they could take off their raingear and fold it up and stick it under the bow with the knapsack containing the camera.
Almost no one other than a few stalwart deer hunters in the fall of the year used the game trail over the shoulder of Monadnock. It dead-ended at the edge of the bog, a few hundred feet south of the border. As for the bog and the gore and the river, the brothers had a much better chance of sighting a pine marten or a Canada lynx there than another human being. The Great Northern Bog, which stretched across the border deep into the Quebec forest, was the haunt of three-toed and black-backed woodpeckers, spruce grouse, lemmings, and Canada jays, none of which were found elsewhere in Vermont. In the winter it was visited by gyrfalcons and great gray owls with yellow eyes as deep and unknowable as the boreal heart of the bog.
At eighty, ten years older than Jim, Charlie was a far cry from the tireless, sure-footed boy who’d run up and down these mountains at twenty but he insisted on carrying the Old Town alone, upside down on his shoulders, as always. For his age, or any age, he was still rugged. He stood mid-thwart with his legs slightly bent beside the canoe and with a hand on each gunnel lifted it to rest on his upper thighs, then jerked it over his head and turned it upside down in one smooth motion, tilting up at a shallow angle with the gunnels now resting on his shoulders and his hands on the gunnels just in front of his head. It was an impressive demonstration. Jim, excellent in the woods himself and a decade younger, wasn’t sure he could still do it. Jim came along behind Charlie with the three packs, one in each hand, one on his back. The trail was steep, worn down by moose and deer traffic to the bare reddish roots of spruce and cedar trees. In places hobblebush, with its large purplish leaves and treacherous roots good for nothing but tripping over and snapping an ankle like kindle-wood, had encroached on the trail. Delicate white Canada mayflowers with raspberry-colored throats were still in blossom here on the back side of the mountain. On the north sides of boulders pockets of snow lay covered with brown hemlock needles.
Charlie stumbled twice. “Look out, Clarence Darrow,” Jim said. “If you break your neck I’ll never get you out of here.”
“Sure you will,” Charlie said.
Despite himself, Jim bit. “How?”
“Same way the old Frenchman did the bull moose he shot,” Charlie said in his most exaggerated Canuck accent. “Make t’ree, four trip.”
Charlie roared over his joke, filling the surrounding woods with his laughter. From somewhere on the ridgeline, a pileated woodpecker hammered on a tree like a mad axeman, as if in response. To this day Jim loved going to the woods with his brother the judge. There was only one Charlie. The question was, which one? The longtime district judge, the shrewdest adjudicator in Vermont, whose motto—his crude Frenchmen jokes notwithstanding—could have come directly off the Statue of Liberty? Or the Kingdom County home boy who fished and hunted when he wanted to, in season and out, and drank beer for breakfast at camp?
Charlie stopped beside an icy rill, a step-across-in-one-step brook, spilling down the mountainside next to the game trail. Reversing the lifting process, he set the canoe down and knelt to drink out of the brook from his cupped hands. Jim too drank from his hands. He loved thinking that he still lived in a place where the running water in a brook was safe to drink although you had to be sure that there wasn’t a beaver dam upstream. You didn’t want to contract the virulent local dysentery known as beaver fever. He was pretty sure the rill was pure. It was too small for beaver works. Yellow and black Canadian swallowtails drifted down the narrow open corridor in the trees above the game trail. Several of the butterflies landed beside a muddy declivity in the trail next to a bower of rare pink lady’s-slippers. The swallowtails were opening and closing their wings, still damp and glistening from the cocoon, and sipping up minerals from the mud. Jim got out the Nikon and took a close-up of the swallowtails drinking. He showed Charlie the image in the viewfinder and Charlie nodded.
“You know what I’d have done to those butterflies when I was about eight?” Charlie said.
“No, and I don’t want to,” Jim said.
“Boys,” Charlie said.
Jim knew all about boys. He and Frannie’d raised two of them. Charlie and Athena’d had one daughter, no sons, but Charlie’d been a second father to Armand and Lucien, set them and their Cousin Freeman Kinneson up in their outfitting business in Montana. Ruthie, Charlie and Athena’s daughter, was an ACLU attorney in Washington.
* * *
“Excuse me, folks. This land is posted. Sorry. It’s for liability reasons.”
The two strangers, middle-aged, were putting up posted signs on the northeast side of the brook. They wore green plastic rain ponchos with Army Corps of Engineers decals on the shoulders. The signs read NO HUNTING, FISHING, TRAPPING, HIKING OR TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW. U. S. ARMY ENGINEERS.
Charlie set down the canoe. “Good morning, gentlemen. What Vermont law actually says, begging your pardon, is that ‘no flowing waters within the boundaries of the State of Vermont can be posted or otherwise closed off or barred to the public.’ Now, the last I checked, yup, this brook is flowing. So we’ll just splash on down it and put in the canoe where it runs into the bog and never set foot on your property at all. Long as we’re in the brook, you won’t have any liability to worry about.”
“Look, we aren’t trying to pick a fight,” the other man said. “But you’re standing on federal land right now. If you’ll just walk back up out again, we certainly wouldn’t press charges. Otherwise, we’ll have to leave it up to the local judge.”
Charlie picked up the canoe again and stepped into the brook. Jim was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.
“Why don’t you come down and stop us?” Charlie said. “No need to bother the judge. I’m sure he has more important matters to deal with. We’ll settle up right here.”
In his younger days Charlie was always inviting someone or other to step outside and “settle up.” So far as Jim knew, his brother hadn’t been constrained to settle up with anyone in the grand old Kingdom County tradition for a number of years. Jim wanted to unlimber his fly rod and get out on the water. This had gone far enough.
“I’m Jim Kinneson, editor of the local newspaper,” he said. “This is my brother, Charlie Kinneson, who happens to be the local judge. If you have a complaint, contact the state’s attorney. But Charlie’s right about the brook. You can’t post running water.”
One of the strangers shook his head and said to his partner, “I told you we shouldn’t come up here without a deputy sheriff.” He mumbled something about the movie Deliverance. Charlie laughed. “Tell the judge,” he called back. “Me and this other man here have an appointment with some native eastern brook trout.”
Jim laughed. The “me and this other man here” was a long-standing private joke between the brothers. When Jim was ten or eleven, Charlie, home on break from law school, loved to take him over to the barroom of the Common Hotel for a soda pop. They’d sit at a table overlooking the village green and Charlie’d rap his knuckles on the table and call out to Armand St. Onge, “Monsieur Barkeep. Bring me and this other man here two cold ones if you please.” A minute later, Armand would appear with a bottle of beer for Charlie and a Nehi or Coke for Jim. Jim had loved being called a man by his big brother, who treated him more like a fishing partner or best friend than a kid. For as long as he could remember, that’s what he and Charlie had been. Best friends and fishing partners.
“I thought I was gong to have a Friar Tuck–Little John situation on my hands back there,” Jim said.
“Cut me a quarterstaff,” Charlie roared. “Ironwood, preferably.”
Twenty minutes later the brook was deepening and the banks were becoming aldery. They were nearing the bog.
“Can they legally keep us from fishing?” Jim said.
“They can try,” Charlie said. “I wouldn’t want to prevent me from fishing the place my great-great-great-great-grandfather discovered two hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Times have changed since then.”
“You can say that again,” Charlie said.
“I suppose they’d say they were just doing their job,” Jim said.
“So are we,” Charlie said. “Our job as Kinnesons is to keep them from keeping us from doing our jobs.”
Jim laughed. On a knoll ahead sat a partly collapsed log building overlooking the bog and the mountains encircling it. The bog had been created about ten thousand years ago by the glacier, which had sheared off the mountains overlooking it and carved out a great watery bowl of boreal sedges and wildflowers, beaver runs, flows, marshy verges, and mixed stands of hardwood and soft interspersed by kettle ponds and backwaters leading nowhere. The bog was a beautiful and treacherous place.
Nailed to the lintel log over the missing door of the partially caved-in cabin was a board into which long ago someone had carved the words CAMP NO. 7. In the early days of lumbering in the bog and the gore both the logging camps and the mountains were commonly referred to by numbers. Monadnock Mountain was Number 7, so too the logging camp at its base.
“Picture?” Charlie said.
Jim set down the packs and got out his Nikon. The mizzling rain had moved along to the east and sunshine was trying to break through, hazy in the mist rising from the bog. The light was perfect. Jim could get the camp in the foreground with the smoking bog and two more peaks, Six and Five, in the background.
Of course, there was a story about Camp Number Seven. Gramp had told it to Charlie and Jim when as young boys they first began coming to the Great Northern Bog to fish and hunt, to blueberry on the slopes above its fringes in August and cranberry along its waterways in October. According to Gramp, the fabled walking boss on the annual Upper Kingdom log drive, Noël Lord, had in his employ a riverboy who habitually overslept the cookie’s 4:30 A.M. wakeup triangle. Finally Noël’d had a bellyful of the tardy jack. He stepped into the camp, shook the sleeper awake, jerked him upright in his bunk, then tossed a quarter stick of dynamite onto the red-hot lid of the camp stove. Noël emerged from the camp with the riverboy flying out the door behind him seconds before the entire stove blew out the back wall of the camp. Jim had tried to pry the quarter stick of dynamite anecdote into more than one of his stories but maddeningly had never found a way to make it fit. Anecdotes that didn’t fit into a story organically stood out as conspicuously as a black eye. He made a mental note to somehow use the tale in his current book-in-progress. At seventy, if he wanted to shoehorn in a logging anecdote, he by God would.
“Hey, bubba. You writing in your head again?”
Jim had taken the picture half a minute ago. He grinned.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Charlie said. “We’ve got miles to go before we sleep, Frère Jacques. Hop in the bow. Otherwise—boom boom. Le T.N.T.”
* * *
As usual when they made their annual Seven Mountain Run, the brothers began by paddling north a few hundred yards in the narrow winding channel through the bog to the border. The international border was designated by a thirty-foot-wide cleared strip through the forest, with Canadian granite obelisks set every several hundred yards. Here on one of the wildest and most remote stretches of the boundary between Canada and the United States the once-cleared strip had grown back up and blended into the surrounding woods. The granite obelisks as well were long gone. French Canadian and Yankee farmers along the Line had found them useful for porch steps, cellar foundations, stone walls. There had been no border when Jim and Charlie’s Abenaki great-great-great-great-grandmother, Charles I’s wife Molly Molasses, came here in her birch canoe to fish and hunt and berry. The border was just an idea, a bad one in the opinion of the Clan Kinneson and their neighbors in Vermont and Quebec. They’d always shopped across it, gone to church and school across it, married across it like Jim and Frannie. Mainly, they’d ignored it.
The Old Town glided through the narrow channel of running water in the bog. Twice they had to put out and drag it over beaver dams. The extensive beaver works and downed tamaracks and cedars prevented most canoeists from exploring the bog. It was too much trouble to get past them. Jim and Charlie expected to get their feet wet.
Here in the far reaches of the Great Northern Bog the brothers’ Memphremagog ancestors had tried to retreat from Charles Kinneson and Rogers Rangers. A few escaped, including Molly, who would later marry Charles I. Most were hunted down and slaughtered. Here, too, Charles’s son James I and a handful of secessionists, pursued by federal troops in 1812, simply vanished into the unbroken northern swampland and forest. “Rebel Jim” and fewer than one hundred Kingdom loggers, river drivers, hardscrabble farmers, trappers, and smugglers had maintained the independence of the Kingdom Republic from Vermont and the Union for the next thirty years over the issue of slavery, which they had outlawed in the Kingdom from the start. When the insurrectionists lured the federal militia deep into the morass and ambushed them, wearing kilts and screeching “Remember Culloden,” the Continental Army “went back to Boston faster than they’d come up,” according to the account of the battle in Pliny Templeton’s great Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County. In 1864, after stealing $100,000 from the Bank of Kingdom Common in the northernmost action of the Civil War, Captain Bennett Young, CSA, and his twenty Confederate raiders had retreated back into Canada on the old Canada Post Road along the edge of the bog. During Prohibition, Charlie and Jim’s grandfather, James Kinneson II, had run Canadian booze down the Post Road. The bog was nothing if not a repository of Kingdom and Kinneson history. Fugitive slaves by the hundreds passed through it, with the help of Rebel Jim and his son, Charles II. Some stopped there, establishing the granite quarry at the foot of Canada Mountain until they were burned out by the Vermont Ku Klux Klan.
It was still early in the morning but the emerging sun was burning the mist off the surface of the water. Jim sat in the bow. Charlie, thirty pounds heavier and built like an NFL wide receiver, paddled from the stern. Around a bend a moose stood up to its belly, watching them motionlessly from the sedges beside the channel. Jim pointed with his paddle. “L’original,” Charlie said, which is what the early French explorers who came to North America had named these ungainly-looking but perfectly adapted North Woods members of the deer family.
