Points North, page 7
Years slipped by. Almost despite themselves, the boys’ con slipped into something like legitimacy. When a 747 en route from Paris to New York crashed into a blossoming apple orchard near Brattleboro, killing everyone aboard, the brothers raised a million dollars for their pièce de resistance: a memorial wall of white Vermont marble inscribed with the name of each casualty.
They upgraded from Rodeways and Motel Sixes to Comfort Inns and Best Westerns. Downtime, in the late afternoons and early evenings, they watched their favorite movies. Buddy flicks mainly, Lonesome Dove, The Wild Bunch, Road House with Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott. When the Roadmaster’s odometer turned over for the fourth time, they replaced it with a Coupe de Ville right off the assembly line and as red as a Green Mountain sunset.
Now in their late forties, the boys began to take a few working vacations. They spent the better part of a morning at the Wax Museum of the Criminally Insane at Niagara Falls. Lollygagged through Wall Drug, gawked at the fragments of alien spacecrafts in Roswell. They joked about the names of certain towns they passed through. Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse.
“Hit your brake pedal, brother mine!” Two Fingers had almost missed the sign, hanging by a nail from a lone fencepost at a forsaken country crossroads: FRIENDSHIP, INDIANA. Into the de Ville’s trunk it went, on permanent loan from Hoosier Country.
Not that everything was sweetness and light between them. Like an old married couple who’d been through it all together, the brothers looked the other way a lot. And they never did see eye to eye on health care. Two Fingers ran to the local clinics and ER’s on the slightest pretext. The City, on the other hand, didn’t hold with doctoring. “You commence to doctor, brother, next you know they sock you in the hospital. People die in hospitals.”
“They die at home, too,” TF said. “Especially when they refuse to go to the doctor.”
Still, both brothers were shocked when Two Fingers’s PSA count on his annual blood work at the clinic in Kingdom Common came back through the roof, up 20 points from a safe 1.6 the year before. The local doc shipped him to Hanover for a biopsy and Hanover gave him three months at the outside.
“There,” TF said, as though he’d prophesied that this or worse was bound to happen. “I guess we’d best pay a call on Cousin Charles.”
* * *
By the time the documents had been drawn up, signed, and notarized, it was getting on evening. The boys invited their cousins, Attorney Charlie Kinneson and Editor Jim Kinneson, to dinner at the Common Hotel. Over steak sandwiches they finalized a few details. Then the City and TF headed south out of town, with no fixed destination. The City said he was beat, so TF drove.
“Always something to take the joy out of living, brother,” Two Fingers said as they passed the dark fairgrounds.
The City didn’t reply immediately. In fact, he didn’t reply at all.
TF knew even before he reached over and placed his first two fingers on his brother’s massive neck and got nothing.
“Port or starboard?” Two Fingers said anyway as the silhouette of the big sugar maple in the fork of the “Y” came into relief in the headlights.
“Okeydokey.” TF goosed the Caddy into overdrive and locked in on the maple. “Good riding with you,” he told his brother a split second before impact.
* * *
The backhoe cost Charlie and Jim $110 an hour for three hours’ work. The flatbed wrecker set them back another two-fifty. They could have charged the boys’ estate, but they decided that every penny of that should go to Hanover, as the City and Two Fingers had stipulated.
The hoe hit solid ledge three times before it scooped out a hole large enough to accommodate the Caddy and its occupants. Charlie nailed the plank sign to a cedar post, which he drove deep into the raw blue clay with the splitting mall he’d brought along for that purpose. In accordance with Two Fingers’s will, he read aloud the first page of Lonesome Dove.
It was early September. The leaves had just started to turn. The sunlight had mellowed over the past month and a cidery scent hung in the amber-tinted air.
“Season’s changing,” Charlie said to break the silence as he and his brother started back down the mountainside together. “Everything changes.”
“Not quite,” Jim said, nodding back at the sign on the post.
FRIENDSHIP, INDIANA, it still said in faded dark letters. Then, in fresh paint just below, ‘POP. 2.’
6
Kingdom of Heaven
Sheriff John “Uncle Johnny” Kinneson sat in his office on the ground floor of the courthouse studying his recently purchased Rand McNally Road Atlas. He had just finished tracing out, with three different-colored Magic Markers, three feasible escape routes from Kingdom Common to Skagway, Alaska. Later that year the sheriff would turn seventy-five. That was the day he’d appointed to load his hunting and fishing gear in the built-in toolbox in the bed of his pickup and hit for the Land of the Midnight Sun. A trim, quiet-spoken man, slight of build, with calm gray eyes and white hair parted neatly in the middle, who shaved twice daily and showered and put on a fresh dress shirt and a suit and tie and buffed his dress shoes seven days a week except when he was going fishing, Johnny’d been enamored with Alaska ever since, as an eighth-grader at the Kingdom Common Academy, he’d memorized “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and promised himself that someday he’d go there.
A lifelong bachelor, Uncle Johnny had long since reached the age when he could have retired on his monthly sheriff’s pension and Social Security check. His needs were modest. He was in excellent health and still as good in the woods as any man in the Kingdom. There was just one problem. Although Johnny had not officially run for reelection in more than a decade, the voters of Kingdom County kept writing him in for the job by an overwhelming margin. This year would be different. This year he would steal a march on the electorate. Come Johnny’s birthday in late September, he’d make a break for it and never look back. See if he didn’t, with the Rand McNally open on the seat beside him, colorful as the fall foliage he was leaving behind.
“Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.” Someone was tapping on the frosted glass of the open office door. There stood Cousin Bear Kinneson in his pink-and-blue flowered housedress and size fourteen square-toed brogans. “Morning, deer,” Bear said to the twelve-point buck’s head mounted on the wall behind Johnny’s desk. Below it was the five-pound brook trout Johnny’d caught in Pond Number Three up by the Canadian border. “Morning, trout,” Bear greeted the trophy fish. Then, as if just noticing John, “Morning, shurf.”
“Bear,” Johnny said. “How many times have I requested that you not call me that?”
Bear clapped his hand, big as a catcher’s mitt, to his forehead. “Sorry, shurf. It’s just that I can’t say sheriff. If I could, I wouldn’t say shurf.”
“You just did,” Johnny said. “Say sheriff.”
Bear’s eyes, dark as a bruin’s, danced with merriment. Nothing delighted him more than the paradoxes of his own nature. Though he had no feminine mannerisms—Hattie Kittredge, his longtime lady friend and accompanist on the piano when he played out at local dances, could and frequently did testify that Bear “weren’t no woman”—he had worn flowered housedresses that he bought off the rack at Benson’s Dry Goods forever. A fixture in the village for decades, he had no fixed residence. Sometimes Johnny let him stay overnight as a guest of the county in an empty jail cell. Or he might hole up for a week or two in someone’s hunting camp, always leaving the floor swept, the woodbox full, the privy limed.
Most interesting of all, though he couldn’t read a note of music, Bear was a musical savant, who could pick up any instrument and play it by ear. He was a three-time North American Old-Time Fiddling Champion. To keep himself in White Owl Cigars, which he smoked two at a time, he played out at Kingdom roadhouses and social functions. Also Bear tuned pianos, sometimes quartering himself in the parlors or guest bedrooms of a customer for weeks on end. Once he spent an entire winter with Editor Jim and Dr. Frannie Kinneson, neither of whom could say no to anyone. In the summertime he played his violin for the town band, which performed on the village green on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
Other than his modest wardrobe of housedresses, Bear’s handmade violin was his single worldly possession. He’d fashioned it himself from native woods. Its sounding board was sugar maple with beautiful oval bird’s eyes speckling the grain from a tree Bear had cut himself in the full of the moon in January and seasoned in the open air for a year. The music it brought forth was as sweet as first-run maple syrup. The neck was local white pine, and when Bear played “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “The Lovesick Blues,” crooning along in his gravely voice in perfect pitch, you’d swear you could hear the zephyrs in the lofty tops of the original pine forest singing backup for him. He’d worked from no pattern, borrowing tools from a local cabinetmaker, reinventing an instrument invented six hundred years ago. Bear had never made another violin or would again.
“We going to ride the roads today, shurf?” Bear said. “I and you?”
Johnny sighed. “I do not ‘ride the roads,’ cousin. Drunks who swill beer out of quart bottles in paper bags between their legs ride the roads. I do perimeter checks. To answer your question, yes. We may do a little reconnaissance work later this forenoon. I thought we might have a bite of breakfast over at the hotel first.”
Bear frowned like a magistrate deliberating over an important decision from the bench. “I could go for a bite of breakfast,” he said. His eyes danced. His cousin the sheriff always bought him breakfast at the hotel after he’d spent a night at the jail. Often Uncle Johnny underwrote Bear’s prodigious lunches and suppers as well.
The sheriff’s phone rang. It was Cousin Orwell Kinneson from Lost Nation Hollow, for Bear. After a minute Bear said, “Alrighty, Cousin. Can do. I imagine Uncle Johnny will run me out after breakfast.” Orwell said something. “Alrighty, I won’t call you cousin, Cousin.”
Bear handed the phone back to Johnny to hang up. “He wants me to come out to the Nation and tune an old schoolhouse piano, shurf. And not call him cousin. You believe in the kingdom of heaven, do you, Johnny?”
Bear flashed the sheriff a conspiratorial grin. No one relished the savant’s non sequiturs more than he did himself.
“I’ll tell you when I get to Skagway,” Johnny said. “How about you, Bear? You believe in heaven?”
“Yes sir, shurf. When Hattie and I are taking the house on home with ‘The Orange Blossom Special’ at the end of the evening, or maybe ‘Oh, Them Golden Slippers,’ and they’re clapping and stomping so the building shakes, you bet I believe in heaven. Right in the here and now in Kingdom County.”
Uncle Johnny had no idea where the kingdom of heaven might be, assuming that such an entity existed at all. He was reasonably sure of this much. Wherever it was located, it was nowhere within hailing distance of the wild northeastern corner of Vermont where he had been elected to enforce some semblance of law and order for the last fifty years.
* * *
Orwell Kinneson was the tightest man in Kingdom County. His wife, Eula, a hard-bitten countrywoman in her own right, boasted that when it came to driving a bargain, there was no give to Orwell at all. In the early 1950s he’d inherited the family farm from his parents: a ramshackle house and barn, 160 steep and stony acres, a couple dozen black-and-white milkers. Fortunately for Orwell and Mrs. Orwell, as the farmer’s wife was generally referred to, the place was unencumbered by a mortgage. In a serious sit-down talk shortly after they were pronounced man and wife, Orwell gave Mrs. O to understand that the trick to keeping their heads above water was to avoid all debt whatsoever. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, the miser told his wife with a searching look at her face as if he were trying to detect in it a latent tendency toward generosity that he’d missed during their courtship. Orville needn’t have worried. In this respect he was preaching to the choir. As he would presently discover, Mrs. Orwell was as stingy as he was.
Even so it was widely held in the omniscient Common that it was Mrs. O’s idea to lend just enough to their struggling neighbors to enable them to keep their farms afloat for a few more years. When inevitably their places went under anyway, Orwell swooped down like a chicken hawk and scooped them up for back taxes. Soon the couple owned most of the Hollow from the covered bridge just off the county road all the way north to the Canadian border.
In the early 1960s Orwell was the first farmer in the Kingdom to erect a blue Harvestore silo. The loafers in the Common, the feed store hangers-on, and the gang of quasi-vigilantes known as the Green Mountain Boys who, in warm weather, armed with their deer rifles, camped out on the Canadian border in folding chairs and protected the Kingdom against stray day-hikers wandering over the line from Quebec, told Cousin Bear that Orwell’s soaring Harvestore was a missile silo. In it was a nuclear weapon to defend the Kingdom from outsiders. Cousin Bear nodded gravely. Then he crinkled up his small, black eyes and exchanged significant glances with Uncle Johnny, making fun of the ne’er-do-wells while they made fun of him.
When, in the ’70s, Orwell switched from buckets to gravity-flow pipeline in his maple sugar orchard, many of the Commoners who drove out to his place to buy syrup each spring didn’t know what the fluorescent-green tubing strung from tree to tree was for. In the ’90s he bought a massive hay baler that spit out quarter-ton bales shrink-wrapped in white plastic. Wheat did poorly in the boreal mountains of northeastern Vermont. Therefore, in addition to hay and corn, Orwell raised buckwheat and rye, thus eliminating the huge grain bills of most Kingdom farmers. His personal habits were irreproachable. He claimed never to have taken a drink or smoked a cigarette in his life. Six feet tall and built like the wrestlers Mrs. O loved to watch on Monday Night SmackDown, Orwell was as strong as an ox. By the turn of the millennium he was milking one thousand Holsteins and referring to his farm as an agribusiness. In 2012 he installed the first robotic milking system in the Kingdom. When it came to his farm, the best was good enough and he paid for it, as he never tired of reminding his debtors, in green cash money.
Self-sufficient and driven though he was, and even with Mrs. O keeping the books, Orwell Kinneson could not do all of the work necessary to keep his agribusiness going himself. What he needed most was good help. Trouble was, with the advent, over the course of his lifetime, first of mechanized, then high-tech, farming, the long-standing Vermont tradition of the cantankerous but indispensable hired man who could tinker a comatose tractor back to life, gentle a calf just separated from its mother, doctor a heifer with mastitis, and elevate nonstop grousing to an art form had nearly disappeared. By the time he installed robots to milk his cows, Orwell had already gone through most of the couple of dozen part-time hired men left in the county. While he claimed that he never asked more of a hand than he expected from himself, he prided himself on extracting work from his help by toiling alongside of them and making them keep up with him. He’d worked half to death any number of hapless day laborers sent out by the unemployment and probation and parole offices in St. Johnsbury and Memphremagog, both of which had stopped making referrals to him. Most of the other megafarms in the Kingdom were importing Mexican workers. Orwell had nothing against Mexicans but, like the Green Mountain Boys from the Common, distrusted on general principles anyone not born in the Kingdom. Recently he’d written a definite letter to The Monitor recommending that a high electrified fence be built around the county in order to “keep out anyone not from around here.” On a few occasions he’d reluctantly asked his cousin, Bear Kinneson, to help him during haying or maple sugaring. Bear’d declined. The fact was, each of the two Kinneson cousins regarded the other as an embarrassment to the family name.
* * *
From his dancehall work and piano tuning, Cousin Bear earned enough to keep himself in White Owl Cigars and housedresses to play out in, violin strings, and candy and, occasionally, cut flowers from the I.G.A. for Hattie. Hattie lived with her ancient mother in an apartment in the brick shopping block over The Monitor in the Common and worked out during the day as a housekeeper. She and Bear had kept company since their childhood. She was a cousin of Mrs. Orwell’s but Orwell and Mrs. O wouldn’t acknowledge her, any more than Orwell acknowledged his cousin Bear. In the Kingdom, failing to assist family members in need was unforgivable. Orwell and Mrs. O couldn’t have cared less.
Lately Bear had been saving his pennies from his piano-tuning work and odd jobs to buy Hattie Mae a piano of her own. In an account in the Kingdom Common Bank that Uncle Johnny had helped him open, he’d saved nearly five hundred dollars over the past year. He figured that he was getting close to what a serviceable used instrument would cost.
As for Orwell, recently he’d purchased the disused schoolhouse at the foot of the Fiddler’s Elbow in Lost Nation Hollow. Along with the schoolhouse and the acre it sat on, Orwell’d acquired a beat-up old school piano. Would Bear be interested in taking a gander at it? Though he wanted no truck with his cousin the miser, Bear was intrigued by the challenge of resurrecting the old instrument.
On their way across the covered bridge leading up to the Hollow, Bear announced to Uncle Johnny, without looking at the speedometer, that Johnny’s patrol truck was traveling between sixteen and seventeen miles an hour and the right rear tire was a millimeter out of round. He could tell from the pitch of the tires on the wooden floor of the bridge. Uncle Johnny glanced at the speedometer. Sixteen miles per hour.
Some years ago Johnny’d introduced Bear to a friend of his, a professor of music theory at Harvard who summered in the Kingdom with his family. The professor had heard Bear play at a box supper. He was so impressed by Bear’s repertoire that he invited the savant to visit Cambridge for a few days that fall. One evening they heard the college orchestra play a medley of classical pieces including Brahm’s lullaby. After the concert Bear played the entire first chair violin’s part back to the director from memory. According to the professor, Bear altered only one bar of the score, in the director’s estimation improving it slightly. Upon Bear’s return to the Kingdom Johnny asked him how he liked Harvard. The fiddler gave the question some thought, then said he liked it fine and could probably have spent another entire week on campus and still not learned all they had to teach him. Bear laughed and his eyes sparkled. Whether he was poking fun of Harvard or himself or all of the ironies in the history of mankind was impossible to know. Bear had attended, on the campus, a seminar in ancient classical literature. One evening over steak sandwiches and home fries at the Common Hotel he’d repeated the professor’s lecture verbatim to Uncle Johnny. “Yes, sir,” Johnny’d said when Bear finished.
