A Stranger in the Kingdom (29 page)

“This is the house,” I whispered when we reached the edge of the yard. “The minister's still up. You wait here and I'll go ask.”

“No, James. You should not be involved in this. I will go alone.”

Claire squeezed my hand hard and headed up toward the house. I ran along the broken-down fence and slipped in behind an old topless maple tree at the corner of the lot, where I could hide and watch what happened.

Claire walked up the steps and crossed the rickety porch to the door. There she hesitated, a pale form, just visible, looking as evanescent as the ghost that was rumored to parade there once a year. I thought she waved to me once. At least I saw a faint blur that might have been a wave. Then she knocked softly, three times.

After a few seconds the porch light came on and the door opened.

“Hello! What have we here?” Reverend Andrews said.

“You are the preacher?”

Already Claire's voice sounded different, interrogatory and uncertain again, pitched higher than when she talked to me.

“Yes, I'm a minister,” I heard Reverend Andrews say.

“I am—Claire? Claire LaRiviere?”

After a moment's hesitation, Reverend Andrews said in a surprised tone of sudden recognition, “Oh! You're the Canadian girl who's been staying out in that shack with Charles Kinneson's relatives. Well, well. What on earth are you doing out at this time of night, Claire? Are you in some sort of difficulty?”

Claire murmured something I didn't catch, and then to my great relief the minister asked her in, and the porch light went off. At the same time, I thought I heard a noise across the street at Elijah's cottage, but when I looked over his place was as dark as ever.

To avoid having to pass near Charlie's trailer again—despite my reassurances to Claire, the fight between my brother and Athena had disconcerted me terribly—I decided to go home by way of the village and the covered bridge. As usual late at night, the deserted Common looked like a totally different spot from the bustling daytime hub of activity for the county. The hotel and commission sales barn were totally dark. The courthouse and Academy were dark. Except for the single nightlight reflected in the
Monitor's
window, the entire brick business block was dark.

As I approached the covered bridge, I was tempted to keep right on going and cross to the gool on the B and M trestle. But I didn't relish the idea of feeling my way over the ties high above the river in the dark, so, taking a deep breath, I started through the pitch-black portal at a fast walk.

Miraculously, I made it to the other side of the bridge intact The mist was much thicker now. It clung wetly to my face and hands and cut visibility down to almost nothing. I had to feel for the road with my feet, which suddenly went completely out from under me. I was overpowered by the odor of Old Duke wine as I reached into the darkness to break my fall, clutching first a boot and then the cold steel of a gun barrel.

I had tripped over Resolvèd Kinneson, sprawled dead drunk by the side of the road with his beloved Betsy cradled in his arms.

“Just now she's up in Nathan's room, regaling him with the tale of her odyssey to Vermont,” Reverend Andrews said with one of his wry chuckles. “She's already told me the saga half a dozen times in the past couple of weeks. It puts me in mind of a Frenchified version of
The Perils of Pauline.
”

It was early evening, mid-July. The minister and my father were sitting in two kitchen chairs Reverend Andrews had brought onto the veranda for summer porch furniture, looking out through the great tangled bittersweet vine that ran from railing to roof. I sprawled gloomily on the porch steps.

For the past couple of weeks, since Claire had moved in with the Andrewses, Nathan had been more aloof than ever. I didn't know whether he blamed me for getting him entangled in the raid at the Paris Revue tent or was still upset over the episode with Frenchy at the trestle; but for days on end he'd been denned up inside the parsonage, doing what I had no idea. Once or twice we'd gone over to the ball field together and played Twenty-seven Outs, an ingenious and endlessly fascinating game of Nat's devising in which we batted, pitched, and fielded our way through a simulated nine-inning game between my Red Sox and his team, the Brooklyn Dodgers; but for the most part he seemed not to want to hang around with a kid three years younger than he was, or with any other kid for that matter. The fact is that Nat Andrews simply wasn't interested in most of my rural pursuits and had been more or less miserable since the day he arrived in Kingdom County. I'd sensed his dissatisfaction from the minute I first laid eyes on him at the Ridge Runner Diner, and nothing had happened to change his outlook since then.

Claire, on the other hand, was always happy to see me; but she was busy with her new “housekeeping” duties at the parsonage, and had little time on her hands.

Across the street from the parsonage, Elijah Kinneson was out on his porch working on his single hobby, a four-foot peeled and polished pine log on sawhorses, which for as long as I could recall he had been carving into a wooden chain with no beginning and no end. He called this dizzying oddity his “Endless Maze of the Kingdom,” and by the time I was thirteen it was already many hundreds of links long and one of my father's “Seven Man-made and Natural Wonders of the Kingdom”—the others being Pliny Templeton's
Ecclesiastical History
, the Dog Cart Man's pictograph on the cliff above the disused quarry of the gypsies who once came annually to Kingdom County, the leaping brook trout on the side of our bum, and Elijah, Resolvèd, and Welcome themselves—though as nearly as I could see, Elijah's Endless Maze served absolutely no purpose at all. Like my weird cousin himself, it was a conundrum to me.

Carving away with his long shiny knife, Elijah didn't ever seem to glance over at us. But I had no doubt that my cousin had seen every move Dad and I had made since we'd arrived at the parsonage fifteen minutes ago.

Reverend Andrews shook his head. “That bloke across the street's been over twice in the last couple of days to tell me that I ought to send the LaRiviere waif packing. The second time was this afternoon, and I all but sent
him
packing.

“At least I don't have to worry about his brother the outlaw for a while,' Reverend Andrews added. “That's a relief.”

I laughed and looked at my father, who actually smiled. After coming across Resolvèd passed out on the gool the night Claire had gone to stay at the minister's, I'd run right past our house and back across the red iron bridge to Charlie's trailer to report my discovery, Athena was long gone by the time I arrived, but far from being dejected by the outcome of her visit, my irrepressible brother had told me to hop into his woody if I wanted to see something new and wonderful happen. Charlie then proceeded to play what may well have been the crowning practical joke of his career. We'd driven back out to the gool, geehawed my cousin's insensible carcass into the woody, and taken it straight to Painless Doc Harrison's house on Anderson Hill. There Charlie had recruited the doctor, a famous practical joker in his own right, to put Resolvèd out of commission for several weeks by clapping my cousin's entire left leg into a cast. When Resolvèd came to, Painless solemnly told him that he'd fallen off a culvert and broken his leg in four places, and if he didn't lie still in bed for a solid month he'd never walk again.

“Elijah's not the only busybody who's been hectoring me about the girl,” Reverend Andrews was saying to my father. “The reason I asked you to stop by this evening is that I'm under a considerable amount of pressure to ship her out. Julia Hefner dropped by this afternoon and read me a regular lecture on the matter. She began by telling me that it's been bruited about town that Claire was originally with those strip shows at the fair and that she just spelled trouble. “To put it plainly, Reverend,' she said, ‘speaking on behalf of some concerned ladies of the church, we'd very much like you to find another place for her immediately.'”

My father snorted. “That's Julia for you all over again. She and I went to school together. There's no one anywhere who's better at finding a pious reason to do a mean thing than that old biddy. What does she want you to do, kick the poor kid out in the street?”

“Well, I probably shouldn't have done this, but having just heard the same line from our friend the sexton earlier in the day, I was pretty vexed. So I said, fine, which of the concerned ladies of the church would be willing to put Claire up for a few days?”

“That's calling the old bat's bluff. What did she say to that?”

“She asked if I couldn't just put the girl on a bus back to Canada or wherever. I told her I supposed I could. Don't think the thought hasn't crossed my mind more than once. But I can't quite bring myself to do that. Claire doesn't want to go back to Canada, and as I understand it, for very good reasons.

“I told Julia as tactfully as I could that I was at least as uncomfortable about the situation as anyone in town, but I couldn't just wash my hands of the girl. I resisted the temptation to cite the story of Jesus and the fallen woman about to be stoned, by the by. I don't suppose Julia would approve of how He handled that, either. I did make bold to tell her that I didn't for a minute believe that the ladies of the church would want a minister who turned his back on this type of responsibility, though.”

“Sure they would,” Dad said. “Julia may or may not have been officially representing the ladies of the church, Ruth hasn't mentioned any such meeting to me and I tend to doubt it ever took place. But the sad fact is that the vast majority of the entire congregation would agree with her.”

“Perhaps so. Because the next thing she said was that the church ladies believed my first responsibility was to my own congregation. ‘So do I,' I said. ‘You let me know when I begin to neglect them. In the meantime, I'll do all I can to find an appropriate alternative for the LaRiviere girl. That's the best I can do.'”

“Good for you,” Dad said. “I'm glad that at last we've got a minister who isn't afraid to stand up to that old crow. I told you back last spring that she ate preachers for breakfast, and I wasn't fooling. Give her as good as you get, it's the only way to deal with her. Just be sure to cover your flank, because she won't forget this. In the meantime I'm going to help you do whatever's necessary to find a proper home for that girl.”

Reverend Andrews laughed. “That reminds me. Before Julia left she harangued me for a good ten minutes about getting a bona fide housekeeper and threatened to come in afternoons herself to do our wash and straighten up if I don't. It's not that bad an idea, you know, hiring a housekeeper. Claire LaRiviere won't be here forever. At least I hope she won't. I can't begin to do all the cooking and washing and cleaning myself and still do my job, and it's unfair to Nat not to have a better home situation. You wouldn't know of a good reliable woman I could hire three or four days a week?”

“I'll ask Ruth. Anything to spare you Julia's blandishments.”

Reverend Andrews laughed. “Small towns! I could live in one for fifty years and never cease to be amazed.”

My father stood up. “Let's go for a stroll in the cemetery, Reverend. Want to come, James?”

It was a lovely summer evening, cool and still and peaceful, and in the reassuring company of my father and Reverend Andrews, I didn't mind walking through the dusky graveyard in the least. The air was sweet with the scent of new-cut grass and the resinous odor of cedars. As we walked along the narrow gravel paths, my father talked to us about small towns.

“I'll concede that a small town can be as nosy and sometimes as downright cruel as any place on the face of the earth, Walter. You know Ring Lardner's story ‘Haircut'? Read it and weep. But what it all boils down to is this. Small towns can be extremely sympathetic, in a rough-hewn sort of way—if you
belong
—but the Lord help strangers who wander in needing help, from the hobo out on the B and M tracks who freezes his foot in the wintertime and needs emergency medical attention to the residents of the next town down the line.”

We had arrived at Pliny Templeton's tall pink granite monument.

“Speaking of outsiders,” Reverend Andrews said, “I'd like to ask you a question or two about this old fellow. I've been poring over that marvelous
Ecclesiastical History
of his nearly every night since I borrowed it. The more I read, the more intriguing he and your Kingdom both seem. But he doesn't seem to write much about himself in his book. Where did he hail from originally? I'd like to do some sort of skit on him at the sesquicentennial celebration.”

“Tell the story, Dad! Tell the story about Pliny Templeton and Mad Charlie and Satan Smithfield!”

“Mad Charlie! Satan Smithfield!” Reverend Andrews laughed. “They sound like characters straight from Dickens!”

“Pliny Templeton grew up on a Georgia plantation,” Dad began, leaning against the soaring monument of the subject of his story. “He was a genius, I suppose, or the very next thing to one. So far as I know he was a total autodidact, who at thirteen or fourteen had mastered both Greek and Latin and read widely in classical literature and history and the natural sciences and mathematics. My grandfather told my father that Pliny could recite whole skeins from Shakespeare, as well as Virgil and Cicero and Sophocles and Aeschylus. By the time he was sixteen Pliny was tutoring white children from plantations for twenty miles around.”

“How under the sun did such a fellow ever land in Kingdom County?”

“Now we're getting to the story. Despite his favored status on the plantation, Pliny's desire for freedom was an overriding passion. He ran away and was caught and fetched back five different times before he was twenty years old. Once he got all the way to Pennsylvania before they nabbed him. Evidently the plantation owner did everything possible to keep him happy short of emancipating him. But Pliny didn't care about being happy; all he wanted was to be free. So finally the owner lost patience and told him that the next time he went on the lam, he intended to put Satan Smithfield on his trail and wash his hands of him entirely.