PICKUPS WITH BIG, dark, heavy-antlered bucks in their beds cruised slowly around the sere common, displaying their trophies. It was late in the afternoon of the opening Saturday of deer season in Kingdom County. Men, and some women, too, in red-and-black-checked or hunter-orange jackets and pants went in and out of the hardware store and the IGA and the hotel. E.A., who had already gotten his deer with Gypsy several nights before, was talking with the Colonel. But not about hunting.
All villages hold many secrets, the Colonel was saying, and Kingdom Common was no exception. In the Common, many years before E.A. was born, there had been a murder. The murdered man, Orie Gilson, was a farmer who was mean to his help. Everyone in the village knew that the murderer was his hired man, assisted by a few of his drinking cronies. For more than half a century the Kingdom County Monitor had offered a standing reward of $10,000 for information leading to the killer’s conviction. But no one would talk to the police. To the outside world the murderer’s identity remained a mystery, though the greater mystery was how an entire town could keep such a secret for so long. Sooner or later, you’d think, somebody would talk. A world-class busybody like Old Lady Benton. The Reverend, only slightly less proficient at gossiping and casting blame. Or Judge Charlie K himself, at the time a young defense lawyer just out of law school. But no Commoner had ever breathed a word to anyone beyond the county line, and no arrest was ever made. The reward went unclaimed.
The Colonel loved to natter on about the village’s other mysteries. What had become of the loot when twenty Confederate soldiers had ridden hell-for-leather out of Canada in 1864 and robbed the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Bank of Kingdom Common of nearly $100,000? Most of the raiders got away, and the money never turned up. How had the Colonel’s sword been broken off, and why hadn’t it been replaced? Some said Noel Lord, as a boy, had cut it off with a hacksaw after the sword severed his hand when he drove his father’s moonshine cart into town and the oxen ran into the statue. But the Colonel wouldn’t say.
So it wasn’t surprising to E.A. that the knowledge he most wanted—which, like the identity of Gilson’s killer, was surely known to most of the village—was withheld from him. Though as the Colonel himself had told him, while a village could keep a secret from outsiders forever, it could not keep a secret forever from one its own and, WYSOTT Allen or not, E.A. was one of the village’s own. Sooner or later, E.A. told the statue, he would find out.
“I’m old enough to know his name now. It wouldn’t kill you to tell me.”
“Looky here, boy. It’s Gypsy who has to tell you. That’s why nobody else will. This matter is between you and your ma. From what you tell me, she’s already given you enough to go on so’s any enterprising boy could easy figure out the rest.”
“I don’t know anything much about him.”
“You know a lot. You know when you were born. You know there was a wreck less than a year earlier. Say you knew that Yaz had hit three out of Fenway against the Yankees on a certain day in a certain season but you didn’t know the exact day. What would you do?”
“Look it up in the record book.”
“That’s correct. You’d look it up.”
“I didn’t know there was a record book where you could look up no-good, cowardly sons of bitches,” E.A. said.
But if the Colonel heard him, he didn’t reply. The wind had picked up and it was beginning to snow.
“And me standing out here without a cloak to my name,” the Colonel said, which was the end of their conversation.
“Hello, E.A. You call for this snow, did you?”
“Hey, Editor K. No, I didn’t have to call for it.”
“That’s the truth,” the editor said, looking out the window at the thickening flakes. “Snow is about the one commodity there’s no shortage of up here in the Kingdom. You need more baseball stats?”
“I need some stats, I reckon.”
“The archives are yours to ransack, son. Let me know if you find anything interesting.”
“Okey-dokey,” E.A. said, and headed down the steps into the basement.
The basement of the newspaper office was a catchall for every kind of old-fashioned machinery and memorabilia, including the huge hand press and Linotype that Editor K’s father and grandfather had used. The tall black volumes containing old issues of the paper were ranked on shelves along one wall. They dated well back into the nineteenth century.
Ethan looked at the dates inscribed on labels pasted to the spines of the black books. He was born in September, and Gypsy had said that the Kingdom County Accident had taken place a month before he was born. He found the volume for the year of his birth, found August, and then it was simple. Nothing in the August 8 issue, but the headline for the next one, published on the 15th, read TWO LOCAL TEENS KILLED AT M&B CROSSING ON RIVER ROAD. Below was a grainy photograph of a crushed car upside down in the field by the river. The trestle loomed in the background. Under the photograph the article began:
Recent Academy graduates René DeLabreure and Ferdinand Viens were fatally injured last Tuesday when the car they were riding in was struck by the Montreal-Boston through freight at approximately 4:15 P.M. at the ungated crossing on the River Road just north of Kingdom Common. A third teen, E. W. Williams, the owner of the car, is in critical condition at the North Country Hospital in Memphremagog. One of the engineers said that the wrecked car appeared to be racing the train to the crossing.
The newspaper story went on to say that the River Road crossing had long been considered extremely hazardous, with two other fatal wrecks there over the years, one in 1938, another in 1957. Recently the sheriff’s department had received reports that high school boys were racing the trains but had not been able to confirm it. Viens, DeLabreure, and Williams had played on the school’s championship baseball team.
All E.A. could think of, however, was the initials on the water tank. G A and F V. Gypsy Allen and Ferdinand Viens. Son of Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Viens, Sr., County Road, Kingdom Common.
He was certain of it. Ferdinand Viens, eighteen, of Kingdom Common, had been his father.
“E.A.? You finding what you need?”
“I’m okay,” he called up to the editor as he skimmed over issues for October and November of that year and read that the Williams boy had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and been sentenced to ten years in prison.
He said it again as he came up the steps a few minutes later. “I’m okay”
E.A. stood by the door in his Red Sox cap, his pale eyes looking straight at the editor. “Where can I find Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Viens Senior, Editor K?”
“Fern Viens Senior? Well, E.A., Fern and his wife left here years ago. They went back to Canada to live, where Fern’s folks were from. I don’t know where they are now. Or even for certain if they’re still alive. They were an older couple, you know . . .”
But E.A. was already out the door of the newspaper office and headed across the street to the common.
“So,” the Colonel said, his voice a little muffled by the snow and wind. “You found what you were looking for.”
“His name was Ferdinand Viens,” E.A. said through his tears, not understanding why he was crying, since all he knew that he hadn’t known before was a name that meant nothing to him.
“Who was Fern Viens?” E.A. asked the Colonel.
“You know who he was. He was one of those fellas killed in that wreck out to the crossing.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t miss my guess, you just read who he was.”
“Where can I find out about him?”
“Ask Gypsy—she can tell you. If she will.”
“Well, she won’t. His initials and hers are up on that tower.”
The Colonel said nothing. E.A. figured he hadn’t known about the initials, and if there was one thing the Colonel couldn’t bear, it was not knowing some piece of village scuttlebutt.
E.A. shivered, pulled his yard-sale mackinaw closer, hopped from foot to foot. “The only other thing I know about him, he played ball for the Academy. He played for that state championship team—the one Earl and E.W. Williams who hit the home run up onto Old Lady Benton’s porch played for. That E.W. was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was driving the car.”
“I know who was driving the car,” the Colonel said.
“What I’m asking you,” E.A. said, “is where can I find out more about Fern Viens. Besides Gypsy. I’m not going to bother her with this.”
Across the street from the long east side of the green, dim in the snowstorm, the lights in Prof Benton’s office in the Common Academy blinked on.
“There is your answer,” the statue said.
“Where is my answer?”
“His high school annual, rummy,” the Colonel said. “What would you do without me to cipher out your affairs for you?”