Points North, page 6
Madge smiled to herself. There were no rattlesnakes within a hundred miles of Kingdom County.
* * *
WALDEN NORTH. Madge could just make out the faded words hand-painted on the cockeyed arrow-shaped sign at the foot of the hill. Madge had been tempted to take it home and use it for kindling a hundred times over the years. The arrow pointed off down an overgrown trace toward the sisters’ cedar woods along the river where the hippies had squatted years ago. They’d appeared out of nowhere one September morning in a van as bright as the fall foliage. They referred to themselves as Citizens of the Earth. Sister Mary Mae had taken them in hand. She would, she told Madge, “verse them in country things” or know the reason why. Mary Mae insisted that the hippies be allowed to build their yurts, domes, and crooked little A-frames in the cedars where Swale Kinneson had maintained his whiskey still. Soon Walden North resembled nothing so much as a photograph Madge had seen in a National Geographic magazine of a landfill on the outskirts of New Delhi. The hippies were full of enterprises, none of which required much work. To the delight of the local foxes, fisher-cats, and Cooper’s hawks, they undertook to raise free-ranging chickens. The women hippies, who did all the work that got done, raised potatoes and reaped potato bugs. One of them claimed to be a potter. Her consort went to keeping bees but raided all the honey to make mead for the holidays and the bees starved to death. One of the Earth Citizens enrolled in a correspondence course in wainwrighting.
The hippies revered Henry David Thoreau though it was unclear to Madge whether any of them had ever read him. They set out to beautify the roadside ditches of the Kingdom by sowing, hither and yon, the seeds of purple loosestrife, the most aggressive non-native nuisance plant in the Northeast, which soon overran every marshy wetland in the county. Swale Kinneson and at least two of Madge’s husbands would have contrived a way to get hold of their food stamps and welfare checks immediately, but Mary Mae cleaned up and deloused and wormed with tansy tea their otherwise indestructibly healthy children and enrolled them in the Lost Nation School. Mary told Madge that the hippies were perpetuating the American dream and the Vermont tradition of independent-mindedness. Madge replied that they were perpetuating shiftlessness raised to a virtue, in the tradition of Swale Kinneson and Henry David Thoreau. Madge said that there was a reason why Kingdom County farmers had abandoned their land in the first place and anyone foolish enough to want to go back to it without the faintest notion of how to raise a parsnip deserved whatever the stony soil and interminable winters dealt out. Against all her better judgment, Madge gave the hippies rides to town and back and doctored their frostbitten fingers and supplied them with groceries when, at the end of each month, they ran out. On the fifth or sixth summer after they had descended on the sisters like an Egyptian plague Madge had discovered, growing in a clearing on the mountainside above the homeplace, several hundred hardy marijuana plants. Not wishing to lose the farm to the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms bureau, she had promptly ordered the Citizens off the premises. A hippie sea-lawyer who had briefly attended a paralegal program presented the sisters with a document claiming that, after dwelling on disused farmland for three years, and putting it back into agricultural use, the occupiers could claim title to the property in question. Madge and Mary Mae’s second cousin, Sheriff John “Uncle Johnny” Kinneson, said he would come out to Lost Nation and serve an eviction notice but Madge had already escorted the back-to-the-landers off the place at the point of her deer rifle. They had trooped away through the woods in the general direction of Canada, though Madge very much doubted that Canada would have them.
Just south of Kingdom Common, Madge swung onto the entrance ramp of the interstate. An overloaded logging truck hauling a pup, also overloaded, blasted its air horn and swerved out around her. Another eighteen-wheeler was coming up fast behind her. Abruptly, Madge pulled into the passing lane.
Near Windsor a state trooper pulled Madge over. Madge was surprised to see that it was a long-haired hippie trooper. No, it was not. It was a little-girl officer. She looked like Pippi Longstocking on the cover the book Miss Mary Mae read to her scholars. Madge produced her license and registration. “You need to move over and drive in the right-hand lane, ma’am,” the child officer said. “You need to speed up a bit. There’s a minimum forty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate.”
“I was sending a message to the big rigs,” Madge said. “One of them nearly side-swiped me.”
“What’s in the mayonnaise jar?” the trooper asked.
“My sister,” Madge said.
“Your sister’s in the jar?”
“Dead as a doornail.”
Officer Longstocking frowned. Then she grinned. “Just stay in the right-hand lane and don’t hold up traffic, Mrs. Kinneson. I’m sorry about your sister.”
“If you want the truth, we didn’t always see eye to eye,” Madge said, and would have told her more, but the officer was on her way back to the cruiser.
* * *
WELCOME TO THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, read the large green sign.
Madge pursed her lips. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts wasn’t much, nor had she expected it to be. “You aren’t missing a thing,” she said to the Hellmann’s jar.
The International rolled into Concord in the early afternoon. Just ahead was some kind of infernal circular intersection. There were several entrances and exits, and cars were getting on and off it like ants hastening in and out of an anthill. Madge braked to a stop. Behind her horns blared. Don’t give them an inch, Miss Mary’s voice said from the jar. More horns bleated out. The motorist immediately behind her, a large man in a Red Sox cap, shook his fist. “Go Yankees!” Madge shouted back out the window.
Before Madge knew she was going to do it, she jammed the accelerator to the floor and gunned the farm truck into the circle, fully expecting to hear the rending clash of metal and glass breaking. Somehow she got through without wrecking. What would the hippies have said? Good karma on you. “Yes, and good riddance to you,” Madge said aloud, remembering, with remorse, their pitiful exodus into the Great North Woods.
Like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Walden Pond wasn’t anything to write home about. A slight young man in a Boy Scout uniform was giving a tour to a class of fifth-graders. The boys were conducting a rock fight. The teachers and parent chaperones were protesting feebly. Miss Mary Mae would have brought that nonsense to a stop in short order.
“Those boys need to be taken in hand,” Madge said to a harried-looking teacher.
“Lady, you don’t know the half of it,” the teacher said.
A little cabin, scarcely more than a hippie shanty, sat on the slope above the pond. The water didn’t look right for trout, no real inlet or outlet.
“Where is he planted?” Madge asked the Eagle Scout. “Our boy?”
“Actually, he’s buried over in the village cemetery in the family plot.”
“I imagine they were real proud of him,” Madge said. “The family.”
“Well, he wasn’t all that well-known in his own lifetime,” the Scout said.
“That I believe,” Madge said.
The bad boys were threatening to throw the girls into Walden Pond and the girls were dancing around just out of reach and daring them to try it.
“Children,” the guide cried out, “what do you suppose Thoreau meant when he said he came to the woods to live deliberately?”
The children paid no attention to him.
“I think he came here to avoid gainful labor,” Madge said.
“Madam, Henry David wrote much of the first draft of Walden within scant feet of where we are standing.”
“Case closed,” Madge said, and headed back to the rig with her sister’s ashes.
“Well,” she said to the Hellmann’s jar, “what do you think about this place? Does it suit you? The pond? We could slip back in and do it after dark. If you want my opinion, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.”
He brought it alive in his imagination.
“Then he had his work cut out for him. I don’t know about you, Sis, but I’ve had a bellyful of Walden Pond. I’ve got a better idea.”
* * *
There was no need to hurry. Madge left the International in a public parking lot downtown and took Miss Mary Mae on a self-guided walking tour. On a footbridge over a shallow stream from which she would not have cared to drink she met a man, probably a professor, reciting a poem to his wife: “‘By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Here the embattled farmers stood.’” The woman rolled her eyes at Madge.
“Come up to Vermont and I’ll show you some real embattled farmers,” Madge said. The woman laughed. Madge accompanied the professor and his wife to the village cemetery. Several tourists were hanging around the scribbler’s grave and yes, dear Jesus, the professor produced a copy of Walden and began reading aloud. He looked a little like Madge’s second husband of the porch-glider mishap. He too had styled himself a writer. Once he had written a letter to Madge enumerating her pros and cons. Under “pros” he had been able to come up with only one item: “Likes animals.”
Madge walked back downtown and locked Miss Mary in the rig and found an eatery in an old stage tavern. She wondered if the farmers had forgathered here for a few short ones after putting the Red Coats to rout at the bridge. If she knew farmers, likely they had.
Outside the tavern it was dusk. In another fifteen minutes it would be good dark. Of course there was no such thing as a hardware store in downtown Concord, but Madge figured she could make do with the short-handled spade and an empty feed sack from the toolbox behind the cab of the International. She stashed the shovel and the Hellmann’s jar inside the sack and returned to the cemetery with them. It was a clear but moonless night. Now the trick would be to leave no footprint. The Walden North crowd had been big for leaving no footprint on the land nor had they. There was no space for a footprint in the junk they’d left behind after embarking on their exile to Canada.
Madge spread out the burlap sack and began spading wedges of grass and soil onto it. She got down about three feet and decided that was deep enough. She unscrewed the lid of the Hellmann’s jar and made the transfer. Over time Miss Mary would sift down the rest of the way and commingle with what little was left of the slacker.
“You folks enjoy yourselves now,” Madge said.
She replaced the dirt and fitted the wedges of grass back on top. She doubted that anyone would suspect that the grave had been tampered with. A night bird, Mary Mae would have known what kind, called. Twenty minutes later Madge was headed home.
* * *
She pulled off at the first rest area in Vermont and caught forty winks on the seat of the rig. In Bellows Falls she stopped at an all-night diner converted from a railway dining car. The Common at dawn resembled a ghost town. Soon enough it would be one.
Madge turned off onto the Lost Nation road and headed up the Hollow along the brook. This morning there was no mist. No Ears was stretched out on the porch railing in the early sun. Mr. Frenchy LaMott sat on the top step smoking a cigarette. He lifted his hand and Madge waved back. She shut off the engine and the International ticked into silence.
“A dealer from Burlington offered me twenty-five hundred for the breakfront,” Frenchy said. “Three thousand if I’d throw in the storybooks.”
“They aren’t storybooks, they’re classics, and I wouldn’t part with them for the world,” Madge said. “I’d sooner let the breakfront go than the books. You know I don’t countenance smoking on the premises, Mr. LaMott. I’ll thank you to put out that cigarette.”
Mr. Frenchy LaMott dropped the cigarette on the swept dirt yard and ground it out with his heel. “What do you intend to do with them?” he said. “The classics?”
What a question, Madge thought. Exactly the sort of question a scheming Frenchman would ask. Still, Frenchy’d given her yet another inspiration.
“I’m going to read them,” she said, meaning it as much as she’d ever meant anything in her life. “What else do you suppose I’d do with them?”
5
Friendship Indiana
Two Fingers Kinneson lost a game of chicken to a muskrat trap when he was six years old. In exchange for the three digits sheared off by the steel jaws of the Victor number-four, the village conferred upon him his name, TF for short, and it stuck. He and his brother, the City of St. Louis, who’d come into this world at a cool twenty-two pounds and continued that trajectory, were carnival roustabouts and small-time con men. They’d grown up on a run-down Vermont farm, scions of the moonshining, deer-jacking, whiskey-running branch of the ubiquitous Kinnesons of Kingdom County. From their earliest boyhood TF and the City were inseparable. They shot out-of-season deer together, dropped out of third grade together at the ages of twelve and fourteen, and the next summer went larruping off on the northern New England fair circuit with the Suggs Bros. Midway Extravaganza and Menagerie of Human Wonderments.
The boys started out working set-up and take-down. Soon they were operating kiddie rides, manning the Kewpie-doll booth and hammer-and-bell. It was Two Fingers who came up with the Sonny Boy Fund.
“Wait up, mister. I see this billfold drop out of your pocket at the baseball throw.”
The mark’s hand shot to his hip pocket, the one Two Fingers had just lifted the wallet from. On the sucker’s face, panic, then relief as TF handed it back to him.
That’s when Two Fingers would produce the cut-off plastic milk jug with a crumpled one and a few sorry dimes and quarters on the bottom, and give it a sad shake. SONNY BOY FUND, he’d scrawled on the side of the jug with a Magic Marker.
“It’s a awful slow way to pay for little Bubba’s treatments but—” TF’s voice would falter and the hook was set. The Sonny Boy Fund worked about 80 percent of the time.
The City, for his part, was something of a savant. He was mechanically inclined and could repair any ride on the midway. He could run the shell game and guess your age within a year and your weight within a pound. Barked ballyhoo for the girlie show, dealt backjack to the lot lice behind the Suggs Bros. camper after hours. At fifteen he began driving the 18-wheel generator truck that powered the rides from fair to field day to dairy festival, with TF up front in the rig with him to read the road signs.
Out on the highway the brothers came upon many a late-night wreck. Against the express instructions of the Suggs Bros.—in fact there was only one Suggs, who traveled in the camper truck with the three elderly gals from the girlie show—TF and the City usually stopped to offer what assistance they could, which often wasn’t much, especially when alcohol, speed, and teenagers were involved. A year or so later they might come upon a makeshift roadside memorial at the site of a crash they’d witnessed the last time through. Fading white crosses, garlands of plastic flowers from the local Dollar Tree. Hand-lettered epitaphs on scarred bridge abutments and trees, like the cardboard placard on the huge sugar maple in the fork of the “Y” just south of the Kingdom County fairgrounds: WE WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU TROY AND BRANDY. THE CLASS OF ’92.
Two Fingers shook his head as he read the sign aloud. “It ain’t much, is it?”
“They deserve better if I do say so,” the City replied, braking for the junction. “Port or starboard?”
“Starboard.”
“Okeydokey.”
“I misdoubt money would be any object,” Two Fingers said.
“I misdoubt it would be.”
“Well, then,” TF said a minute later, and it was settled.
* * *
“Don’t count on your jobs being here when you come crawling back broke two months from now,” the Suggs brother said. “You two jump ship now, you’re down the road for good.”
“We’ll finish out the Vermont circuit,” TF said. “We wouldn’t want to leave you short-handed.”
The boys, whose word was golden, worked out the season. They told Suggs so long on the last night of the state fair in Rutland. They’d been with him for nineteen years. “Crazy bastards,” he said by way of farewell, knowing he’d never be able to replace them.
The day after parting company with the carnival, the brothers picked up a local penny saver and bought, from a recently widowed octogenarian in Manchester who didn’t drive, a twelve-year-old Buick Roadmaster with 28,000 easy miles on the odometer. The City, who now estimated his own weight at between 428 and 429 pounds, removed the springs and installed reinforced struts all around. At a pawn shop in Vergennes they picked up a used CB with a police-band scanner. A Radio Shack in Winooski gave them a discount on a GPS and a magnetic blue light for the Buick’s roof.
“I reckon we’re as ready as we’re going to be,” TF said.
Wedged in behind the Roadmaster’s steering wheel, with the electronically operated front seat set all the way back, the City nodded. “I reckon we are.”
Two Fingers made a gesture like a wagon master giving the signal to start up over Donner’s Pass. “Forward, ho,” he said, and they power-glided off into the night on the next leg of the road trip that had become their life.
* * *
With the scanner, the GPS, and the flashing blue light, the brothers were frequently the first players to arrive at the scene of an accident. Often they reached a wreck even before the ambulance-chasing shysters.
For starters, they’d returned to their stomping grounds in Kingdom County to practice. “I’m not telling you what to do, sir, but word is your boy, young Troy, was the best ballplayer ever to come out of the Academy. What I and my brother here was thinking, we could take and mount a nice orange basketball hoop from the Wal·Mark on that wicked old maple tree. Light her up with one of them mercury yard lights. Maybe display Troy’s uniform top and the prom dress Brandy was wearing that night under glass.…”
Of course everyone knew that at the time of the wreck Brandy hadn’t been wearing her prom dress, or one stitch else, but that was a technicality.
Bingo. It was as easy as A Apple Pie.
* * *
Two Fingers discovered in himself a genuine artistic flair. The City, who’d never said much to anyone but his brother, was a born listener. Together they were unstoppable.
