A Stranger in the Kingdom (20 page)

Again Charlie listened. With my good eye, I read his statistics from the Outlaws' first fifteen games of the season, which he'd posted up on his old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind with a round motor on top. He was currently batting .434.

“All
right!
” Charlie said and hung up. “She's coming, buddy! This should work out well for both of us.”

It would work out well for me, at least. I would a hundred times rather be examined by Athena than by Painless Doc Harrison, who had not come by his sobriquet because of any inclination toward or expertise in humane medical methods. I was scared to death of him and enormously grateful to my brother for calling Athena, whatever ulterior motives he might have.

She arrived in the judge's black Lincoln within two or three minutes and began by carefully checking inside my mouth to see if I still had all my teeth. She didn't say “Open wide” or condescend to me in any other way, just very gently tried to wobble my teeth.

She bent back my head to look at my swollen lips and nose. Her dark hair brushed my face and I caught a scent of some faint deansmelling perfume. A thrill shot through me as she carefully pressed the bridge of my nose, checking for broken bones. My face got red and Charlie laughed.

“Relax and enjoy it, buddy. It isn't every young blade that's lucky enough to have the fair and frolicsome Athena Allen hold him in her arms for five minutes.”

“Quit picking on him, Charlie,” Athena said. Then she gave a little jump and scream. “Damn you! Cut that out.”

I suspected that Charlie had given her a pinch on the fanny. He was always doing that when he thought no one was watching, that or putting his hand up her leg or inside her sweater, which to my bafflement seemed to embarrass her and please her at the same time.

“That eye looks pretty bad to me,” Charlie said. “You get any licks in before Frenchy went to town on you?”

I nodded. “One. I made his nose bleed all over.”

“Good. But what in the world possessed you to go in there in the first place?”

“Well, he wanted to fight Nat, but Nat wouldn't go, so I thought—I don't know what I thought, that I ought to stand up for my friend, I guess.”

I desperately wanted to explain to Charlie and Athena why Nat wouldn't fight Frenchy. But I'd given my word to Nat not to breathe a word of what he'd told me.

Charlie reached into his refrigerator and got out two bottles of beer, opened them, and handed one to Athena. She took a long drink. I liked the way that, instead of sipping, she drank like Charlie, taking two or three swallows at a time.

Charlie shook his head. “I appreciate what you were trying to do for your friend, Jimmy, but I can tell you right now that it won't work. What Al Quinn and Justin and those guys were saying on the common Saturday is the truth. Nat's got to fight his own battles.”

“Probably Nat thinks it wouldn't do much good to fight Frenchy,” Athena said as she checked my sore ribs. “It might even make things worse. I imagine he's heard these slurs off and on all his life. It must bother him, but he may actually have come to expect it.”

“His old man almost seems to enjoy a good row,” Charlie said. “But I'm sure you're right about why Nat won't fight. He didn't act afraid when Frenchy braced him over on the common. In fact, I think you'll see that when and if the time comes when Nat's back is to the wall, Frenchy'll rue the day he ever laid eyes on him. In the meantime, Jim, just try to be his friend. Don't fight any more of his battles for him. Old Painless Doc doesn't need business that badly. Right, sweetie?”

Athena took another long swallow of beer. “Charlie's right, Jim. And don't blame Frenchy too much. No doubt Bumper Stevens is putting him up to all of this. My uncle Armand told me that the day Doctor H unwired Bumper's jaw, he came in the hotel and made some pretty nasty threats about getting the Andrews out of town before the summer's over. Uncle Armand said he knows Bumper's a big blowhard, but the more he thought about what Bumper said, the more it bothered him. He actually went over to see Zack Barrows about it, but Zack just laughed and said that Bumper was all talk and wouldn't do anything.”

“I hope not, for Bumper's sake,” Charlie said, laughing. “Reverend Andrews can take care of himself. My only reservation about the fella is that he says he's too busy this summer to play on my town team. Who ever heard of somebody being too busy to play baseball?

“Now that we know you aren't dead, kiddo, go curl up on the couch in the other room and go to sleep,” Charlie told me. “I'll call old finely tuned Ruthie and explain that you're okay and going to spend the night. This girl”—draping his arm around Athena's shoulder as though she were one of his baseball buddies—“and I have to have a long, serious talk.”

I lay down on the couch in Charlie's tiny living room, and Athena put a blanket over me and tucked it in around my shoulders. Then she and Charlie drank some more beer in the kitchen while I tried to sleep. But my eye throbbed like crazy and my side ached where Frenchy had kicked me.

I looked up at the wall. In the dim light from the kitchen I could just make out the pinups that Charlie had literally papered the inside of his living room with. Even the ceiling was covered with magazine cut-outs of tough-looking gun molls from
True Detective
and sultry-eyed young lovelies from
Argosy
and
Esquire
and calendars advertising automobile parts and farm machinery. Despite my discomfort, I felt a vague but powerful longing for . . . I wasn't sure what.

I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I knew, I heard a thump, like someone tripping, and people laughing softly like laughter in a dream.

“Stop it, Charlie!”

The trailer was totally dark now, but there was enough moonlight coming through the window for me to make out two forms in the doorway to Charlie's tiny bedroom.

“Stop it!” Athena said again in a breathless half-whisper. “Not with Jimmy here. What if he wakes up?”

“He isn't going to wake up. He's dead beat, so to speak. Come on, hon. I need an experienced teacher. One with your impeccable credentials.”

Athena giggled. “You need a bath, preferably a cold one, and a few cups of black coffee. We aren't even officially engaged anymore, remember?”

“We'll be engaged in five minutes, I promise,” Charlie said. “Come on. What is it with you recently?”

“I said, not with Jimmy here. Don't you have any common sense at all?”

“You sound like my father. ‘Grow up.' ‘Run for county attorney.' ‘Use some common sense.' It'll be more fun with Jim there. We'll have to be extra quiet, like the old days.”

“The old days are gone,” Athena said, and I saw the smaller form twist away and out the door, followed closely by my brother, still talking, almost pleading with her now.

Outside a car door slammed, then a second or two later an engine came to life and Athena's car sped off down the county road toward the village—leaving me with more to think about than my fight with Frenchy or the buxom Miss February, smiling coyly down from the wall above me.

Charlie must have forewarned my parents about my battered condition and its causes, because the next morning when I limped home after he fed me a loggers' breakfast of eggs and pancakes and pork chops cooked extra crisp, just the way he loved them, Mom told me to stay away from Frenchy LaMott and the commission sales barn in the future. My father, I think, was secretly proud of my loyalty to Nat, misguided though it was. But all he said was that I ought to use a hay hook on Frenchy the next time I tackled him, because he was probably impervious to anything less lethal.

Dad had a church trustees' meeting at the parsonage that morning, at which Reverend Andrews intended to announce his plans for the big church fundraiser. “What are you going to do today, Ezzard Charles?” he asked me.

Although it hurt, I had to laugh through my swollen lips. I told him I'd planned to take Nat crawfishing this morning but in view of the way I looked I'd rather wait a couple of days before going overstreet.

“Get your crawfish trap,” Dad said. “We'll walk over to the parsonage together.”

“Dad,” I said, “I really don't—”

“Get your trap,” he said. “You don't have a thing in the world to be ashamed of.”

But Nat's reaction was altogether different, as I'd known it would be.

“Oh, no!” he groaned when I appeared in his room. “Aren't you the sight for sore eyes! What gets into you, Kinneson? You look as though you got run over by a bloody streetcar.”

“A French Canadian one,” I said. “Okay, it was a dumb thing to do. Let's just forget it. How about coming crawdadding with me this morning?”

“Crawdadding? What do you do with those buggers?”

“Well, for one thing, you can use them for bait. Trout love crawdads. Mainly, though, we eat 'em, boil 'em right up in a kettle. They're terrific, just like lobster or better.”

Nat was sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed. Suddenly he put his finger to his lips and bent forward, cocking his head. Through the round heat grate in the bedroom floor, voices were floating up from the parsonage study, where the church finance committee meeting was getting under way.

Nat beckoned me to come over and pointed down through the swirled iron filigrees of the grate. Below, besides my father and the minister, I recognized George Quinn, Julia Hefner, and old Prof Chadburn, the Academy headmaster. Dad was sitting at the minister's desk. Prof sat on a folding wooden chair borrowed from the church Sunday school, and Julia had plopped herself down next to the minister on a worn horsehair couch that set my teeth on edge just to look at it, like the steel wool Mom used to scrub her frying pans.

“About this idea of yours, Reverend,” George Quinn was saying in his prissy voice. “I'm not saying it's not a good one, it's just that we hate to see anything replace the annual church bazaar and minstrel show. They're traditions, you know, going back forty or fifty years.”

“Minstrel show?” Reverend Andrews sounded amused.

“Oh, it's all in good fun, Walter,” Julia said, giving Reverend Andrews a proprietary little pat on the arm. “With your grand sense of humor, you'd love it.”

It was hard to tell from our angle, but I thought that Reverend Andrews and Dad exchanged glances quickly.

“Let the man finish presenting his idea, Julia,” Dad said.

“Yes, by all means.” Prof Chadburn said. “I must say that from what I've heard so far, it sounds most intriguing.”

“Intriguing” was Prof's favorite word. If a boy was sent to his office at the Academy for sassing a teacher, he invariably found that boy's behavior intriguing. In his own Latin classes Prof never failed to introduce a new verb as “intriguing,” and he was equally intrigued by his students' more comical misapprehensions of, successively, Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil, our winning (or losing) an important baseball game, and any and all of the ideas of his own board or staff.

“Yes, go ahead, Reverend,” George Quinn said unenthusiastically. “Let's hear your idea.”

“Well, as you folks all know, 1952 is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the church. Almost since the week I arrived, I've been thinking that we ought to commemorate the event in some appropriate way. At the same time, we need to build up the coffers of our treasury, which are pretty sadly depleted.”

“In a nutshell, here's my idea,” Reverend Andrews continued. “What I'd like to propose is that we combine a celebration of the church sesquicentennial with an Old Home Day on the common. We can establish the history of Kingdom County as our theme and focus on the history of the church. We'll continue the tradition of the church bazaar by holding it right on the common along with game booths and skits, and we'll culminate the day with a grand historical cavalcade around the common. If the celebration's a success, and I'll vouchsafe that with everyone's united efforts it will be, Old Home Day can become an annual event with a different theme each year.”

For a few moments the committee was silent. Then Dad said, “I like the idea. In fact, I like it a lot. I move we go ahead with the first annual Old Home Day and Sesquicentennial Celebration.”

“I second that motion,” Prof said.

“Discussion,” George said.

“Oh come on, George,” Dad said. “What is there to discuss?”

“Change.”

“Change?” Reverend Andrews said.

“Yes. You see, Reverend, we have to be cautious here. We have to be cautious not to change too much too fast, for fear of losing what we've already got.”

“How's that?”

“Well, I mean the congregation. Membership has been decreasing over the past several years—until recently, at least. Now that we're on the upswing, we don't want to risk upsetting the apple cart by doing anything so radical that the congregation won't go along with it.”

“What's radical about a sesquicentennial celebration?”

“Nothing, really,” Julia chimed in. “But we've got the minstrel show committee to consider. There are a lot of people on that committee who'd be mighty upset to learn we'd just ruled out their show for an idea we haven't ever tried before.”

“We're not saying we're against all change, Reverend,” George said. “You've done a heck of a job here already in making changes that were long overdue. The Sunday school enrollment is up nearly two hundred percent. The youth group, the choir, the men's Bible study club—those are good changes, and we appreciate them. We appreciate you But this Old Home Day—well, I just don't know if we can move quite that quickly. Besides, the bazaar and the minstrel show are our main annual fundraisers. Without the income from them we'd really be in the hole.”