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The Farm in Lost Nation

When I was a boy living on my grandparents’ Kingdom County farm, I sometimes amused myself by looking through an ancient family Bible in the farmhouse attic. This ponderous tome was a gloomy-looking affair if one ever existed. It weighed a good fifteen pounds, and it was bound tightly shut by a tarnished metal clasp which snapped open with the report of a pistol and never failed to startle me, alone in the remote, dim attic of my grandparents’ vast old house.

Once this formidable mechanism had been breached, the Bible’s contents were intriguing. Besides the Old and New Testaments, it contained a Kittredge family birth register illuminated in gilt; a death register edged in sable; a table of standard weights and measures from which I gleaned the invaluable information—it must have been invaluable because I still remember it today, some four decades later—that one country furlong is the equivalent of forty rods; a dozen or so remarkably well-preserved wildflowers collected by a distant aunt said to have died at eighteen of a broken heart; and several pages of genealogical charts inscribed with the biblical-sounding names of more ancestors than I’d ever dreamed one boy could lay claim to, beginning with my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather: the first Kittredge to venture up into the trackless mountain fastness that would become Kingdom County.

His name, aptly enough, was Sojourner Kittredge, and he was a Loyalist schoolteacher and part-time log sawyer who fled Connecticut and the American Revolution for Canada in the summer of 1775 with a lone red ox and a high-sided cart containing all his worldly possessions. Two arduous months later, my ancestor stopped for good on the headwaters of a small, fast, icy river, which he promptly named the Kingdom, in honor of his beloved mother empire. Unfortunately, there was one small difficulty with Sojourner’s choice of a homestead. As my grandfather, who disliked all schoolteachers in general and those in our own family in particular, loved to tell me nearly two centuries later, the old Tory had put down stakes here as the result of a minute but fateful miscalculation. Since the Kingdom River drains north, toward the St. Lawrence, though by a circuitous and at times even contradictory route, he erroneously assumed that he had already reached Canada and sanctuary when in fact he’d fetched up instead in northern Vermont.

Not, you understand, that such a trifling technicality as a line on a map mattered a whit to the old expeditionary once he’d made up his mind to stay put. By the time Sojourner finally figured out where he actually was, the Revolution had been over for several years. He’d already established the first grammar school and sawmill in Lost Nation, as he wryly named our township. And by then he did not have the slightest intention of lighting out again for Canada or anyplace else, though for three generations afterward his descendants marched in the Independence Day parades in Kingdom Common wearing bright scarlet coats and carrying the Union Jack.

This is nearly all I know about my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather—except that in 1790 he astonished his neighbors and outraged his heirs by ceding the title to a ten-thousand-acre tract of woodland just south of the Canadian border to the state whose authority to govern any other part of the Kingdom he refused to acknowledge to his dying day. Sojourner’s intention was for Vermont to use the donated property as the site of a college to educate the youth of its white settlers and native Abenakis alike. In exchange, he neither demanded nor received a single shilling. He requested only a written guarantee that every qualified graduate of the Lost Nation Atheneum, as he rather grandiosely called his one-room country school, be entitled to attend the proposed state college free of charge, for as long as the grammar school and college should both exist.

Of course the University of Vermont never did take advantage of my ancestor’s offer. Instead it situated itself one hundred miles across the Green Mountains to the southwest, on the considerably more clement and accessible shores of Lake Champlain. Yet even after the university sold off its Kingdom real estate holdings to pay debts incurred during the Civil War, it continued to honor the agreement between Sojourner Kittredge and the state that he otherwise declined to recognize. All duly prepared graduates of Lost Nation Atheneum were entitled to attend the university at no expense to themselves; and it was partly as a result of this ancient pact that a Kittredge family decision was reached that I would receive the first eight years of my education at the tiny country schoolhouse established one hundred and seventy years ago by my forward-looking ancestor, and live during those years with my Kittredge grandparents on their farm in Lost Nation Hollow, spending some of my school vacations with my father in White River Junction, eighty miles to the south.

Other considerations influenced my father’s decision to send me north to Kingdom County, however. No doubt the first, and most weighty, was that my mother had been dead for nearly a year at the time, and my father had concerns about raising me entirely on his own. As a child and teenager, my mother had waged a protracted and costly battle with tuberculosis, and throughout her brief adult life she continued to have periodic relapses. Several times since marrying my father and having me she had been forced to return to the famous Trudeau Institute at Saranac Lake, where she’d spent much of her youth; and for several months when I was two, she convalesced at a sanatorium in Tucson, Arizona, while my Grandmother Kittredge kept house for my father and took care of me in White River. I don’t remember that my mother ever said much about her illness to me. I’m sure she made every effort not to. But from my grandmother and my two little aunts, Dad’s sisters, I received at a very early age the alarming impression that Mom was much more sickly than she ever revealed. “Your mother is a poor frail soul if one ever existed,” my grandmother told me frequently; and although it was terribly difficult for me to lose her when I was just five years old, I must say that even at that tender age, it came as more of a surprise than an outright shock.

From those early years, I vividly recall two things about my mother. Unlike most of the Kittredges, including my father and both of my grandparents, she laughed easily and frequently. And she loved to read to me, so that one of my very earliest and strongest childhood recollections is of sitting beside her on a rather battered green living room couch and looking at the pictures in the storybooks we went through together by the dozens, especially the marvelous old tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, whose brilliantly-colored illustrations of the most hideous scenes and creatures imaginable I found deeply fascinating.

Because of my mother’s huge medical bills, the opportunity to send me to college free someday must have been unusually appealing to my father. And a further factor in his decision to send me up to my grandparents’ farm in Lost Nation was that as headmaster of the White River Academy, my father, wisely enough, did not want me to be stigmatized, possibly for the next twelve years, as the principal’s son. Also I believe that Dad may have had a secret motivation in sending me north—one he did not mention to anyone.

For many years my grandfather and my father had not, as my little aunts put it, seen eye to eye with each other. Dad had left home at eighteen for the state university and returned only for brief visits. The division had deepened when, to my grandfather’s utter disgust, my father had chosen to become a schoolteacher. But time and distance have a way of softening even the most acrimonious of family feuds; and although I have no real evidence that this was the case, I strongly suspect that I was sent to Kingdom County partly as a peace offering from my father to my grandfather.

What I know for certain is my father decided that to become acclimated to the Farm, as we called my grandparents’ place, and to my grandparents themselves, who to this day remain two of the most unusual people I have ever met, it would be helpful for me to spend the summer before I entered the first grade with them in Lost Nation. We would try a one-month stint at first and see how it went. Dad would then visit me in Lost Nation, and if all was going well, I would stay on at least for the rest of the summer.

And this is how, one sunny June afternoon a few days after my sixth birthday, I came to be waving good-bye to my father from the grimy window of a Boston to Montreal passenger car carrying me north toward the wild border country of Kingdom County and, though I had no way to know it, some of the most memorable years of my life.

 

What do I remember from that long-ago train trip up the Connecticut River to the little-known territory that might well become my new home for the next eight years or more? Fleeting impressions, mainly. Backward-rushing glimpses of the river, with cows and barns spread out at intervals along it. Small villages with tall white church steeples. A few bridges. For some reason I also recall that the seat material was of a fuzzy, worn felt, which set my teeth on edge when I ran my fingernails over it, and made me shiver. What a solemn, daydreaming, standoffish little fellow I must have been, with an entire seat to myself and my suitcases, which to the annoyance of the conductor I had insisted on carrying aboard with me. In one were my clothes. The other contained my favorite storybooks.

Of course I was sad to be leaving home, and somewhat apprehensive about my first solo train ride. But there have been few times in my life when I have not been able to achieve a degree of serenity by immersing myself in a book—in part, no doubt, because my books provided me with a certain tangible connection with my mother even after her death. Shortly after leaving White River I dug a copy of Heidi out of my suitcase-library, and soon I was far off in the Swiss Alps, though whether I was absorbed mainly by the book’s gorgeous color plates of the mountains, or my recollections of the tale as read to me by my mother, or the actual words themselves, I don’t know. I do remember being especially interested in Heidi’s old hermit-grandfather, since not long before her death my mother had confided to me that he had always reminded her of my own grandfather, who could be “rather gruff” himself at times. To which my father had bluntly replied, “Gruff! Good God, the man’s a bona fide misanthrope.” I didn’t know what a misanthrope was, bona fide or otherwise. But it sounded forbidding and I must say that I looked forward to meeting my grandfather for the first time with some trepidation.

As we rolled north on the local passenger train, or Buntliner, as it was called—the entire train consisted of a silver-and-blue engine that looked more like a passenger car than a locomotive, and four silver-and-blue coaches—the hills became steeper and shaggier. The farms began to look shabbier. The spanking white houses and fire-engine red barns gave way to unpainted houses connected by swaybacked sheds and ells to listing barns. In the farm dooryards, lilacs were just coming into blossom though back in White River the lilacs had gone by two weeks ago.

At one riverside town a fearsome-looking old man with long gray hair and black whiskers and a greasy slouch hat got on my coach and sat down in the seat opposite me. When the Buntliner pulled out of the station, he produced a flat, amber-colored glass flask from his lumber jacket pocket and took two or three swigs of a very vile-looking dark liquid. As he wiped off his mouth with the back of the hand holding the flask, he darted a severe look out from under his drooping hat brim straight at me. I looked away fast. But when I glanced back at him a moment later he was still staring at me. And in a single, bonechilling moment, it became irrefutably clear to me that this bewhiskered apparition was in fact my grandfather.

The conductor who’d been annoyed with me for bringing my bags into the car was coming down the aisle checking tickets. “Have you been drinking, mister?” he said to the old man.

“No, sir!” he declared.

The conductor knew better. “There’s no drinking permitted in the day coaches,” he said. “I’ve had to speak to you about it before, haven’t I?”

“I don’t believe so,” said my grandfather in a very loud and very indignant voice.

The conductor gave him a hard look. “Well,” he said, “I mean business. If I catch you drinking, I’ll put you off at the next station without a second thought.”

He moved on down the aisle, swaying to the motion of the train like a veteran trick-rider at the circus. There were only five or six other passengers in our coach, including a large woman in a small blue hat and a minister with a white patch of collar showing. After punching their tickets with an odd little silver apparatus, the conductor swayed gracefully back up the aisle, and passed on into the next car.

In the meantime, the whiskery man was shooting me many covert, fierce looks. He knew very well that I’d seen him drinking from the amber flask. I had no idea what was in it, of course, or why drinking was not permitted in the day coaches. But the old fellow now seemed to feel that he owed me some sort of explanation for the very palpable falsehood he’d told the conductor. For without the slightest warning he lunged halfway out of his seat across the aisle toward me and growled, “I suppose you’re a-wondering why I ain’t drinking when it appears otherwise, be you, be you?”

Not having the faintest idea how to respond to this query, I didn’t.

“Aha!” he said, and took another quick pull at his bottle. “Cat’s got his tongue, I see.”

He made another start in my direction, seizing the armrest of my seat for support. With his flushed face very close to mine he said, “Speaking of cats, which you wasn’t but I was, I’ve got a cat up home to Lost Nation that weighs twenty pounds. It weighs as much as a wheel of cheese.”

He raised his tangled gray eyebrows as though to better impress me with this disclosure. Then he said, “This cat of mine can kill five full-growed rats in a grain barrel in sixty seconds flat. Do you believe that?”

“Yes,” I said. Although I was not quite sure how we had gotten so rapidly from the matter of his drinking or not drinking to cats, I was very eager to accommodate this rough old cob, if only to forestall another ferocious lunge in my direction. Also, his mentioning Lost Nation Hollow confirmed for me that this was indeed my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge, in what I fervently hoped was some sort of raffish disguise designed to help him assess me unobserved.

“Besides rats,” he continued, “this cat that weighs as much as a cheese cannot abide dogs, other cats, or spying young boys. Neither as a rule can I.”

The topic of the rat-fighting cat had evidently made my traveling companion thirsty. He sneaked another long drink. Then he made as if to offer me one. Before I could decide what to do he whipped the flask back out of sight and chuckled and nodded his head knowingly.

“Now,” he said to the entire passenger car in an altogether different, remarkably businesslike tone, “why ain’t I a-drinking? I shall tell you why. I ain’t a-drinking for that I ain’t a drinker.”

This revelation was received by the rest of the car with stunned disbelief. By now everyone had seen the bottle, which he had all along made a great show of displaying and then hiding. But an explanation was forthcoming.

Giving me a look of the deepest significance, he announced, “Why ain’t I a drinker? Because I’m a sipper. Do you understand that?”

I said I did, whereupon he fetched out the bottle again and knocked back two or three of the longest sips in the history of the world.

“Ain’t I an awful old whore, though?” he said with a smirk of his whiskers, and both the big woman in the small hat and the minister gasped.

Whereupon the gentleman who was my grandfather tipped me a sly wink and ripped out loudly, “Ain’t you and I both a pair of old whores, though.”

I readily agreed that we were. This seemed to please him a good deal. So much so, in fact, that he entrusted me with a grave charge. “My boy,” he said, “I want you to watch sharp. Watch sharp, and notify me immediately if you spot that train fella coming through again.”

So saying he repaired to the far corner of his seat to nurse his bottle, sipping away to beat the band, while I kept an eye out for the conductor, and wondered what an old whore was and, for that matter, what a young whore was, and just what sort of country this Lost Nation that I was traveling to might be.

“What’s in them two valises?” the sipping man barked out suddenly a few minutes later, pointing with the neck of the flask at my suitcases. “Your duds?”

“Yes. And books.”

“Books!” he said in an outraged voice. “What sort of books?”

I shrugged. “Boys’ and girls’ books, I guess.”

“I’ll show you a book that ain’t no boys’ book nor girls’ book, neither,” he said. From the hip pocket of his wool pants he extracted a well-worn paper-covered volume. He tipped my way precariously and flashed me a glimpse of the cover. To my amazement it depicted a smiling young woman, stark naked from the waist up.

“What sort of speller be you?” the man said.

I told him I believed I was a fair speller.

“Well, then. Do you care to know what I call these books?”

He flashed the naked young woman at me again. Good heavens, she had brown eyes and dark auburn hair, the exact color of my Sunday School teacher’s, Miss Irene Proctor’s. Could it possibly be Miss Proctor?

“Yes,” I said with great interest. “What do you call them?”

“I call them F•U•C•K Books,” he said loudly, laying the most precise emphasis on each letter, like a finalist in a championship spelling bee.

Three or four gasps could be heard this time; but all he said was, “Do you know why I call them that?”

“No,” I said, truthfully enough.

“It’s because someone usually always gets F•U•C•K•D on every page,” he roared out for the benefit of the whole Buntliner.

This time a general gasp went up. “See here, there are women on this conveyance,” the minister said.

I, for my part, could hardly wait for another glimpse of the F•U•C•K Book. But the old scholar across the aisle slipped it back into his hip pocket with a sneering chuckle, had another long sip and leaned over to confide to me that he had once “tooken twenty dollars off a seed salesman in a railway car” by winning a bet that he could “hurinate fifty yards at one whack.”

I had never witnessed a grown-up misbehaving publicly before, and was terribly delighted by the spectacle. But the minister had heard enough.

“Here now,” he said. “You, lad. I want you to come back here and sit with me.”

“Don’t you move a muscle, young boy,” the old man said. “Do you see that soft maple over yonder?” He jabbed with the neck of the flask out the window at a tree on the riverbank. “Such a distance as that is mere child’s play for me.”

Abruptly, he stood up, gripping the tops of the seats on either side of the aisle to steady himself. “Who in this coach will lay twenty dollars I can’t make water fifty yards from a dead standstill with no running start?” he demanded. He frowned at the woman in the blue hat. “Are you game, madam?”

“I’m going to ring for the conductor,” the minister said. “This has gone too far.”

“If you tech that cord, preacher, I’ll tear it off the wall and throttle you with it,” my whiskered friend said, and took half a dozen long swinging strides to the rear of the car and out onto the small railed rear platform of the Buntliner.

We all swiveled around in our seats, even the fat woman and the minister. I was afraid that the old man would fall off the rear of the train. But evidently he had performed this operation successfully enough more than once before; for after turning his back and groping around in his pants for a minute, he cut loose a great jetting stream that arched out over a prodigious distance of track behind the speeding train. After fumbling with his pants some more he returned to his seat.

“That’s how I won my bet with that flatlander seed salesman,” he said, and promptly fell asleep.

The old man woke up again just once, shortly after we left St. Johnsbury. Starting bolt upright like a man frightened out of a nightmare, he stared over at me with his eyes all fiery red and said very clearly in a booming official voice: “Now comes the State of Vermont against WJ Kittredge in the Eighth District Court of Kingdom County, on this the twelfth day of June, nineteen hundred and forty-eight.”

Immediately after making this announcement he seemed to come to his senses. “What’s your name, boy?” he demanded.

“Austen Kittredge,” I said.

“The hell!” he shot back. “I may be sipping drunk and I may be piss-whistle drunk but I ain’t blind drunk. Austen Kittredge is my neighbor and blooded cousin and you ain’t him by about fifty years.”

“I was named for him,” I said with mixed relief and disappointment now that I knew that the mischief-making old devil across the aisle was only a cousin. For clarification I added, “He’s my grandfather.”

“You don’t have no grandfather,” he said, and fell back against the felt seat dead to the world.

 

It did not take the Boston to Montreal Buntliner long to cover the sixty miles from White River to Kingdom Common. It was still only late afternoon when we pulled into the station and I struggled down the aisle with my two suitcases.

I was hoping that my grandfather’s cousin, Mr. WJ Kittredge, would wait with me on the platform. His company, I reasoned, would be better than no company. But I had little hope from him in this regard. Without a word to me, he cut across a long central green toward a large white building at the far end. I could see the dark red top of Miss Irene Proctor’s close likeness on the F•U•C•K Book sticking out of his pocket, and I reminded myself to ask my grandfather what under the sun such a book was about and how I could get hold of some—assuming that my grandfather ever showed up.

From where I stood on the platform I could see most of the village. Farther up the street, on the same side of the green as the railroad station, were three large stone buildings. Facing them on the opposite side of the green was a three-story brick building containing several stores on the ground floor. A baseball diamond was laid out on the green, which interested me considerably.

As the short silver train pulled out of the station, gathering speed for the last leg north before the Canadian border, a harsh voice behind me said, “I wouldn’t mind being aboard her, would you? Headed north for Labrador.”

I whirled around to see a tall man wearing a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and neatly-creased green work pants. He had short white hair, and when he shifted his gaze from the departing train to me, I was struck by his eyes, which were pale blue and critical-looking. I do not mean that my grandfather’s eyes—for this was my real grandfather, I had no doubt—were cold or unkind. But they were the sharpest pair of eyes I had ever seen, the kind that miss nothing at all. And when he spoke to me again I was struck by how harshly his voice grated, and how well it matched those assessing blue eyes.

“Be you Austen?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m your grandfather.” He picked up my bags as easily as if they were empty. “Get in the truck,” he said.

My grandfather’s truck had a rounded, dark green cab and a long flat bed. It rode as rough as a lumber wagon, which is exactly what it turned out to be: a lumber wagon, with trailer wheels, welded onto the cab of a 1934 Ford pickup.

As we drove out of town my grandfather lit a cigar. Then he informed me that, besides lumber, he transported milk to the cheese factory on the edge of the village three times a week. Although his voice was very hard and sharp, he spoke to me without condescension, the way he might speak to another man. And both he and the truck cab smelled very strongly of tobacco and Christmas trees since, as I would discover, he was an inveterate cigar smoker and he also carried with him at all times the aromatic evergreen scent of the timber he worked with, which my grandmother could not wash out of his pants and shirts.

We drove along a fast river, up into a jumble of abrupt, green hills, past woods and dilapidated farm buildings. Some of the farms were abandoned, and my grandfather told me who lived at the others. In two or three instances he added a brief, critical commentary. “They say Ben Currier’s a prosperous farmer. I’d be a prosperous man myself if I had half the money Ben Currier owes . . . That man who lives there abuses his horses. I’ll tell you one thing. He won’t soon do it again whilst I’m driving past.”

I told my grandfather about the whiskery man on the train, and how I’d originally mistaken the fellow for him. He made a rasping sound in his throat, not a laugh exactly, and said that would have been his cousin, all right, Whiskeyjack Kittredge. “He’s a poacher and a moonshiner and a general all-purpose outlaw,” my grandfather said. “How did you like him?”

“I liked him all right,” I said. “He told me he’s got a rat-fighting cat that weighs twenty pounds. And he peed off the end of the train and reads F•U•C•K Books where someone gets F•U•C•K•D on every page.”

My grandfather made that singular, sharp noise in his throat again. “How old did you say you were?”

“Six.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“What does it mean?” I said. “‘F•U•C•K•D on every page’?”

“I’ll tell you when you turn twenty-one.”

Then, quickly, as though to indicate that he had said all he intended to on the subject of his bewhiskered cousin with the outlandish name and the arcane reading matter, he informed me that he’d heard I intended to go to work for him that summer, and to stay on and attend the Lost Nation School in the fall if I was satisfied with my situation. I was surprised. This was the first I’d heard about working for my grandfather. A troubling thought crossed my mind. What if, at the end of this probationary period, my grandparents weren’t satisfied with me? In point of fact, my grandfather looked as though he might be a hard man to please.

As we turned off the paved road onto a one-lane dirt track my grandfather said, “Do you like fairs?”

“Fairs?”

“Yes. County fairs.”

My father had taken me to the county fair near White River last summer, and I’d loved it. “Yes!” I said enthusiastically.

“Well,” my grandfather said, “I’m not by any means a wealthy man. I can’t afford to pay regular wages to a fella. But if you work hard and learn your job and pan out, I’ll stake you to a full day at Kingdom Fair come August. How does that sound to you?”

I said it sounded fine, and after that a lull fell over our conversation and we traveled on up the dirt road in silence for a few minutes. It was obvious that this was a much more remote part of Vermont than any I had ever visited. The stream we’d been following was smaller and quicker, the heavily-wooded hills came crowding down close to the narrow valley on both sides. Many of the farms seemed disused. Those still in operation looked even poorer than the farms closer to the village. In the dooryards I began to notice what looked like covered trash barrels with darkish smoke curling out. “Smokers,” my grandfather explained. “Burning softwood to keep the black flies down. It’s buggy up here this time of year.”

At the top of a long hill my grandfather jerked his thumb at a weathered building, one entire wall of which seemed to consist of small square windows. “That’s where you’ll be going to school. If you decide to stay on in the fall.”

The school looked abandoned too, with buttercups and daisies blossoming in the yard; still, there was something both exciting and unsettling to me about the place, which I would forever afterward connect with the idea of school and going to school.

“I went there for a spell myself,” my grandfather said. “I left when I was twelve to go on a log drive. The truth of the matter is, I didn’t agree with school and school didn’t agree with me.”

My grandfather paused a moment to let this announcement sink in. Then he said, “Your father went there too. I’m sorry to say he turned out to be a schoolteacher.”

My grandfather stated this fact as though my father had committed armed robbery and been caught, tried and convicted, and sent to state prison. But having been warned ahead of time about his views on schoolteachers and my father, I knew better than to pursue the subject.

From the next hilltop I could look off in three directions at mountain ranges. Some of the peaks were still white on top. I could scarcely believe that we were looking at snow in mid-June, but my grandfather assured me that we were. He showed me Jay Peak and Mount Washington. He pointed to a rugged heap of mountains straight ahead. “Canada,” he said.

Higher up the Hollow we passed an elderly woman out in a hayfield with two horses and a wagon. My grandfather lifted his hand to her and said, “That would be your Big Aunt Rose. She hates to admit it but she’s my sister. That’s my place up there. The last one up the Hollow.”

Just ahead, in a kind of scooped-out bowl at the base of a high, forested ridge, the dirt track ended in the dooryard of a very large two-story house, weathered to a pearly gray, with a much larger faded red barn linked to it by an ell consisting of a hodgepodge of connected sheds. On a steep slope between the rear of the barn and the edge of the woods were a dozen or so red and white cows, all facing the same way. Across a meadow from the house, just below a small pond where the river had been dammed, slouched a long low building, open on one side, which my grandfather identified to me as his sawmill.

My grandfather stopped his truck in the road and surveyed his buildings critically. Suddenly he looked straight at me and inquired in that perpetually harsh tone if I were afraid of him.

“No,” I said promptly.

I think my answer pleased him. But all he said was, “Do you know who lives there?”

He was pointing at the gray house.

“You do,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’ll tell you who lives there. The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County, that’s who. Remember that you heard it first from me.”

I did. And I was so delighted by the phrase that, from then on, each time my grandfather and I approached the Farm in his homemade lumber truck, I would, with great innocence, inquire who lived there. Whereupon he would respond, “The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County.”

After which he would look at me with a kind of grim satisfaction and say to my complete puzzlement, “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

 

Although I had never laid eyes on my grandfather until that day, my grandmother and I first met the day I was born, June 8th, 1942. She and my little aunts, Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee, had been visiting our home in White River to assist with what my grandmother was pleased to call my mother’s “laying-in.” I was born at the local hospital around six a.m.—a propitious hour, according to my grandmother, who believed that children born before eight o’clock in the morning would never have a lazy bone in their bodies—and my grandmother first viewed me around seven. My mother was holding me in her arms at the time.

According to my little aunts, no sooner did my grandmother clap eyes on me than she nodded with grave approval and announced, to the absolute astonishment of the attending nurse, “Ah! He looks exactly like the doomed young pharaoh, King Tutankhamen. What have you named him, Sarah?”

“Austen,” my mother replied. “After his father and grandfather.”

My grandmother nodded again. “Austen he’ll be then. But I’ll call him Tut. If he lives, he’ll forever be Tut to me.”

For the next six years, my grandmother visited us regularly twice a year: at Christmas, and on my birthday, as well as during that period of several months when my mother was recuperating in Tucson. I cannot recall a great deal about her from those early times: a dark-haired, dark-eyed, tiny and intense woman, dressed entirely in black, who when she spoke to me at all called me by the name of an Egyptian king, and who seemed always to be watching me with a kind of determined approbation. It was my grandmother who, when I was four or five, coined the phrase “a famous reader” to describe me, and concluded that such a prodigy would someday “be heard from.” But mainly I remember her as that small woman in black, who came to our home punctually twice a year, evidently for the sole purpose of observing me—as she was doing this instant from the porch of the huge, rambling farmhouse while my grandfather and I continued up the lane in his lumber truck.

“There they are,” he said.

“They?” I said.

“Your grandmother. Spying on us with those glasses.”

My grandfather was right. As we drove closer I saw that not only was my grandmother watching us, she was watching through a small pair of binoculars or opera glasses, and I very distinctly recall that tatters of dark gray smoke from the smoker barrel in the dooryard were drifting between her and us, so that she looked a little like a mirage. When we came into the barnyard she lowered the glasses but did not lift her hand or speak, even when I got out of the truck and went shyly up to her, which made her seem more like a mirage than ever.

My grandmother neither hugged nor kissed me. I had not expected her to. But as I climbed up the wooden porch steps she reached out and seized my wrist in her tiny, strong hand, an action she would repeat over and over again in the future. “Welcome home, Tut,” she said. “Come inside for supper.”

 

Before we ate, my grandmother gave me a quick tour of the farmhouse and barn. The current house, she told me, had been built in the early nineteenth century to replace the log-framed home Sojourner had thrown up in the wilderness soon after his flight from the Revolution. Originally, it was a simple eight- or nine-room structure of two stories. Over the decades, as the Kittredge family had grown, extending itself far beyond mere bloodlines, so had the farmhouse. By degrees, it had linked itself to the barn, North Country-fashion, by means of an ell stretching due west more than one hundred and fifty feet. Through this labyrinth of connected sheds you could pass all the way from my grandmother’s kitchen to my grandfather’s milking parlor without once setting foot outdoors. At the same time, the house proper had expanded correspondingly in the opposite direction. I may be forgetting a back upper chamber or two, or some obscure jerry-built shed slung onto the rear of the summer kitchen as an afterthought; but to the best of my recollections, the architectural camelopard known to all Kittredges for the past hundred years simply as the Farm contained—including the subdivisions of the ell and barn—a grand total of thirty-eight distinct rooms. I didn’t visit them all that first evening, but the impression I received was one of vastness.

I don’t remember all that my grandmother said on our tour, but I do recall that on her apron belt she wore a great ring of weighty old iron keys, and that as she walked the keys jingled loudly. In the best parlor she pointed out an elaborate coat of arms made decades ago from the hair of twenty or more family members, and framed in glass, which I found unsettling and fascinating, in equal parts. My bedroom was to be in the small loft-chamber over the kitchen, which was a relief to me. I definitely did not want to be stuck off in one of the remote, isolated second-story rooms far out of earshot from my grandparents.

Supper, which we ate in the kitchen at a plain white table, was a quiet affair. I don’t recall what we ate; noon dinner was the main meal in Kingdom County in those days. I was aware of a certain strained atmosphere, which I attributed to the unaccustomed presence of a boy at the table but in fact, as I would soon discover, had much more to do with the strained relationship of my grandparents in general. I sat next to my grandfather, with my grandmother across from me; and on the rare occasions when they addressed each other at all, they referred to one another as “Mrs. Kittredge” and “Mr. Kittredge” with grim irony detectable even to a small boy.

“Austen, ask Mrs. Kittredge to pass the butter along if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Perhaps Mr. Kittredge would like to put the newspaper down, Tut, until we’re finished eating. It might occur to him that reading at the table is a very bad example to set for a boy.”

At the end of the meal, my grandfather silently rose and left the table with his paper.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Kittredge,” my grandmother said. At the same time she looked at me significantly, just as my grandfather himself had done once or twice during the meal. The true import of these glances would dawn on me only gradually. At the time, I had no way of knowing that each of my grandparents regarded me as a potential ally in their Forty Years’ Domestic War.

“Come, Tut. I want to show you something wonderful,” my grandmother said as soon as the dishes were done. My grandfather had settled into a large wooden rocker by the south kitchen window with the latest issue of the National Geographic. He shot a brief, meaningful look at me over the top of his reading spectacles as my grandmother and I headed down the short hallway connecting the kitchen with the large dining room used only on Sundays and special occasions.

Just before entering the dining room, my grandmother veered off into a small sitting room-bedroom she hadn’t shown me on our tour before supper. It was growing dusky outside, and she lighted a lamp on a sort of worktable by the window. As the wick flared up, the strangest room I had ever laid eyes on came into view. Except for a small bed hardly larger than a child’s trundle bed, and the table with the lamp, it was a perfect museum of a room, full of the most astonishing items.

“Egypt, Tut,” my grandmother said solemnly.

On the wall opposite the doorway was a poster-sized picture of a creature unlike any I had ever seen before: a vast winged individual with the body of a lion and the head of a woman, who seemed, in the protean light of the kerosene lamp, to be staring straight at me.

“That’s the Great Sphinx,” my grandmother said. “You didn’t want to get on his bad side, I’ll assure you. But don’t worry, they’ve been extinct for thousands of years.

“That’s Lord Ra,” my grandmother continued, indicating a foot-high wooden fellow with a jaunty hawk’s head in a flowing yellow and blue headdress. “You can bet he knew what the score was.”

In frames here and there on the walls were black and white photographs—later I learned that my grandmother had cut them out of my grandfather’s National Geographic and Life magazines—of pyramids and temples. Other photographs, my grandmother explained, recorded the celebrated discovery of King Tutankhamen’s—my king’s—tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

“That’s Howard Carter,” my grandmother said, pointing to a man in short pants and a light-colored helmet. “Listen to this, Tut.”

My grandmother stood up on her toes and read the caption beneath the picture aloud: “‘When asked by his excited assistants what he saw when he broke through the final seal and played his electric torch over the contents of the innermost chamber, the intrepid archaeologist exclaimed, “Wonderful things! I see wonderful things!”’”

My grandmother looked at me earnestly, as if to appraise my reaction to Egypt. “I have an important question to ask you, Tut. Would you like someday to be a great archaeologist, like Mr. Howard Carter?”

I nodded.

“Then it’s settled,” said my grandmother with great finality. “You’ll continue with your famous reading and studying, and someday long after I’m gone you’ll be heard from for some discovery like Mr. Carter’s. You too, Tut, will see wonderful things.”

We did not tarry much longer in Egypt that evening. Yet as I stood gazing at the extinct Sphinx and Lord Ra and the marvelous photographs of King Tut’s tomb, it seemed to me that they were all, like my grandmother herself, watching me: quite benignly, yet with a certain note of expectation, too, as if they shared my grandmother’s belief that I would certainly be heard from someday, and become a famous archaeologist—whatever that might be—and see wonderful things.

 

That first month on the Farm with my grandparents was a veritable geography lesson for me. “Idaho,” I discovered, was the big woods upriver, where my grandfather cut timber for his sawmill. For some unaccountable reason my grandparents referred to the outside latrine behind the farmhouse as “South America.” And the morning after I arrived, my grandfather took me to “Labrador,” high up on the wooded ridge behind the house.

We set off immediately after chores, in a warm, fine drizzle, up through the steep cow pasture behind the barn, past my grandfather’s red and white Ayrshire cows, and into the dripping evergreen woods on a narrow path. In spots I could look back through small clearings and catch a glimpse of the farm buildings below, growing smaller and smaller.

I recall how quickly and easily my grandfather seemed to swing along up the trail, despite his raspy breathing. It seemed to me that there was an angry determination in his long strides. Once we stopped and he stooped to part the branches of an evergreen tree containing a neat small nest with four speckled blue eggs. “Thrush,” he said.

The trail grew steeper. It wound up around outcroppings of ledge. Twice my grandfather paused to catch his breath, leaning his long arm against a tree. “Someday this ticker’s going to stop altogether and they’ll come and put me in a pine box,” he announced the second time he stopped. “Don’t be surprised when it happens.”

After this declaration my grandfather lit out for the top of the ridge again with a vengeance. I supposed that he must be figuring that the sooner he got there, the less chance there was that his ticker would stop altogether.

Suddenly the ridge leveled off into a clearing containing a low log building with a stovepipe jutting out of the roof. In the light June rain, the place looked forlorn and empty.

“This is it,” my grandfather said, pointing at the camp. “Labrador.”

I was surprised that Labrador was so close to home, but happy to have arrived. We went inside, where even with the door open it was quite dim. I looked around the large single room. There were two bunks, a wooden table, three or four chairs, and a good-sized black iron cookstove. Three of the four log walls were decorated with old maps and photographs, mostly of men with hunting rifles standing by very big deer hanging from trees; but when I looked at the rear wall I was astonished to see, just under the slanted ceiling, a row of a dozen or so bucks, with huge racks, which appeared to be looking down at us. I had never seen such tall deer before, and for just a moment, before I realized that these were mounted heads, I thought that they were standing outside the rear of the camp looking in at us through holes in the wall.

“Well, Austen,” my grandfather said, “what do you say?”

I had no idea what to say, but I must have looked as impressed as I felt because my grandfather nodded and said, “If you decide to stay on here, we’ll see to it that you shoot one too. I’ll have the head set up on the wall beside these. Would you like that?”

Yes, I would like that, and said so. I would like that more than anything I could think of.

“Your father, the schoolteacher, hasn’t hunted deer with me for ten years,” my grandfather said. “Evidently he’d rather be shut up in a dusty schoolroom showing little sissy boys and girls how to cipher.”

This, I knew for a fact, was totally inaccurate. Whatever my father’s feelings might be about hunting with my grandfather, Dad was an expert woodsman himself. I was beginning to worry about the upshot of the big family dinner planned for next month, when my father would visit the Farm to see how I was getting along. But immediately my grandfather changed the subject, showing me on the blue and green topographical maps of Kingdom County where he had shot each of the mounted deer. He showed me other maps of the far-flung territory along the U.S.-Canadian border, where he had traveled many years ago as a young surveyor, and finally, on a large map of Labrador, he showed me where he had gone surveying when he was twenty-one.

“There,” my grandfather said, placing his thumb on a twisting blue line through the middle of the Labrador map. “Right there, Austen. You and I and a canoe. The summer you turn eighteen. If you decide to stay on here, that is. You and I and a canoe, in Labrador, for an entire summer of fishing and exploring. Just us. No one else.”

I was pleased but perplexed. When my grandfather said that he and I would spend the summer I turned eighteen fishing and exploring in Labrador, I assumed that he meant his camp here on the ridge and its immediate environs. The point, however, seemed to be that he and I would do this fishing and exploring alone together. And although I believed I knew exactly whom he meant by no one else, I was very happy to think that he wanted to take me with him. Still, at the age of six it seemed next to impossible to me that I would ever be eighteen. For the time being, it was enough to have come here on this rainy June morning, to see the deer and see Labrador with my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge.

As we approached the farm buildings at the base of the ridge twenty minutes later, he stopped to point at the house and dooryard. “Who lives there, Austen?”

“The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County,” I said promptly.

He nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

 

Like all hill farmers in Kingdom County during the late 1940s, my grandfather had what seemed to me like an infinite number of skills; and he had several sources of income, all of which were equally uncertain, dependent on the caprices of the weather, the current agricultural market, and the precarious durability of his antiquated second- and third-hand machinery. He kept a dozen Ayrshire dairy cows, which he milked by hand at five in the morning and five in the afternoon; electricity didn’t arrive in Lost Nation until 1952. And though he detested barn chores, which tied him to the farm morning and night, seven days a week, he did like each of his Ayrshires, as he liked nearly all animals.

In addition to his dairy, my grandfather operated a water-powered sawmill situated on the river just across the pasture from his barn. Sawmill work, by contrast with milking, he liked very much. But since the mill was a dangerous place, with its huge whirring log saw and shrieking ripsaw and planer, at six I was not allowed to work there with him.

In the spring my grandfather tapped eleven hundred maple trees. He raised a few pigs and a steer for beef, and cut all his own firewood as well as ten cords for his sister, my Big Aunt Rose. In the fall and winter he worked in the woods cutting timber for his mill, sometimes with the help of his two elderly cousins, Preacher John Wesleyan Kittredge, the part-time minister of the small Methodist church at the junction of the Lost Nation Hollow road and the county road, and WJ Whiskeyjack Kittredge, my sipping acquaintance from the train.

Except for light barn chores, much of the work I did for my grandfather that first month consisted of tagging around the Farm after him and listening to his stories. I had arrived at the peak of haying time, and as we hayed together in the hot afternoons—my job was to drive the horses, which was a joke, because they plodded up and down the windrows of raked hay entirely at my grandfather’s voice commands—he told me story after story about his life and travels.

The spring he was twelve, my grandfather had run away from home and school to join the annual Connecticut River log drive, all the way from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, a total of nearly four hundred miles. Later he had worked in Manitoba, driving a twelve-horse grain combine, and as a chainman on a survey crew establishing the American-Canadian Line between Montana and Saskatchewan, where he had learned the basic techniques of surveying and mapping. Over the next half dozen years he surveyed sections of the Line from Maine to the Yukon; and during the summer of 1909, he’d journeyed to the Far North to survey the Ungava-Labrador boundary, where, to my immense admiration, he had stayed on for a year to live with a nomadic group of Barren Grounds Indians.

Eventually my grandfather had come home to Kingdom County and married my grandmother, an event that coincided with the end of his traveling or, as she liked to put it, his “sashaying about the countryside.” He kept his hand in the surveying profession by doing local jobs for farmers and timber companies. But it was generally agreed in the Kittredge family that much of my grandfather’s misanthropy dated from the time of his marriage and was accounted for, at least in part, by his resentment over giving up his sashaying about the countryside to become a homebody.

My grandfather had a number of distinguishing idiosyncrasies. He smoked nothing but White Owl cigars, and when he was in the barn and the sawmill, where he never lighted a match for fear of fire, he simply chewed his White Owls down to the end, spitting out the shredded tobacco. He averaged about forty-five minutes per cigar, and I never ceased to marvel at the mysterious process by which a fresh unlighted cigar in his mouth vanished by degrees into what seemed like thin air.

His highest form of praise was to say that a man was “a good fella to go down the river with.” No doubt this locution derived from his early days on the big log drives; and while on rare occasions he might mention to me that one of his neighbors fell into this category, he far more frequently informed me that such and such a man—quite often a relative—was decidedly not a fella he would go down the river with. From his days on the log drives he also retained the lifelong habit of carrying his paper money buttoned in his shirt pocket, instead of inside a wallet in his hip pocket, where it might get wet.

My grandfather had a number of sayings. When he was absolutely sure of something, he liked to say that it was “as certain as the sun coming up over the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the morning and setting behind the Green Mountains of Vermont at night.” If a tool did not work properly, my grandfather often wished it “up Mike’s ass.” After one of the horrendous runs of bad luck endemic to operating a hill farm, he would announce with harsh irony bordering on genuine satisfaction, “Well, Austen, we can’t have good luck all the time.” And when everything went completely to smash, he might say, in reference to old Sojourner Kittredge’s original geographical miscalculation, “That’s what I’d expect in a township settled by mistake to start out with. Everything else has just followed suit.”

He kept Ayrshire cows, he told me, because like Holsteins they gave a large quantity of milk, but with a fairly high butter-fat content, like Jersey milk. In fact, I believe that my grandfather favored Ayrshires primarily because most other farmers in the Kingdom preferred Jerseys or Holsteins; regardless of his rationale, however, his preferences and dislikes in all matters great and small were fixed and intense.

“I like a basswood tree, Austen,” he said to me one noon a week or so after my arrival on the Farm, while we were eating our dinner up in the Idaho woods under a big basswood. “A partly hollow basswood tree like this one makes the best bee tree in the world. A maple is a serviceable tree, and beeches are good for bears to climb up for the nuts, and lovely to look at. But I’ll tell you something and don’t you forget it. I hate a gray birch above any other tree in the woods. Gray birches are good for absolutely nothing. I wish every gray birch in Vermont were up Mike’s ass.”

My grandfather never wished animals up Mike’s ass. Besides his cows, his pigs, and his two all-purpose Morgan horses, which actually belonged to my Big Aunt Maiden Rose, he had a partially tamed raven, which he called out of the evergreen woods across the river and fed corn to each morning and evening. To my delight he had taught this bird to announce, in the most strident tones imaginable, “I hate school”—following which the saucy raven, as my grandmother liked to call it, never failed to give two short, derisive croaks. My grandfather also had a semi-trained raccoon named Fred, who hibernated in the hayloft; and a huge pet skunk, which shared the same saucer used by the barn cats.

In the evenings my grandfather read for hours on end. Besides a vast collection of westerns that included every tale Zane Grey had ever written, he had amassed an impressive collection of popular travel and adventure nonfiction by or about such indefatigable globe-trotters as Osa and Martin Johnson, Richard Halliburton, Clyde Beatty, Frank Buck, and the famous African ivory hunter Frederick Courtney-Selous—not to mention anyone and everyone who had ever ventured up into his beloved Far North and survived to write about it.

Also my grandfather enjoyed reading biographies of historical figures who had played a part in the settling and establishment of Vermont, and debunking them at every turn. Besides being a militant autodidact, he was a bold, iconoclastic, muckraking historical revisionist before his time, who loved to look up from his books and inform me, out of the blue, that Ethan Allen was nothing more than a “land-grabbing, rum-guzzling scoundrel,” Robert Rogers and his Rangers “cold-blooded murderers.”

He read each issue of the National Geographic cover to cover; and despite my grandmother’s muttered injunctions against sashaying, or perhaps in part because of them, he read many Geographic articles aloud to us, looking up at me each time my grandmother shook her head and sighed loudly over the pernicious folly of such gallivanters.

 

As for my grandmother, when I think back to my first weeks on the Farm, I connect her in my mind first with Egypt and then with relentless work. With the exception of my morning and evening barn chores, I did not work for my grandfather so much as I kept him company and provided an audience for him. My grandmother and I were good companions too; but for her, from the outset, I worked, and worked pretty hard.

Feeding and watering her laying hens on my way in from barn chores was simple. Gathering the eggs each afternoon was actually fun. But weeding my grandmother’s mammoth garden was not only tiresome but nerve-wracking to boot. My grandfather also kept a large garden, immediately across the lane from hers. And though he didn’t make me work in his, he and my grandmother competed with each other fiercely to grow the earliest and biggest tomatoes, squash, ears of corn, pumpkins, potatoes, and twenty other varieties of vegetables. Moreover, as I would soon learn, they each entered all of the same categories in the horticultural contests at Kingdom Fair, where each year they vied for the most blue ribbons.

Drying the dishes and putting them away was less onerous than weeding, but I didn’t much like doing it. By far the worst household chore, though, was winding my grandmother’s clocks. It would not be accurate to say that my grandmother kept a clock in every room in the house. My loft chamber over the kitchen had none. Neither, come to think of it, did her sitting room, Egypt. Some rooms, however, had two, including the dining room and the long upstairs hallway; and the best downstairs parlor was adorned with three timepieces. I don’t believe that I ever counted, but at the time that I moved to the Farm, my grandmother must have had at least twenty working seven-day clocks; and it immediately fell to me to wind the infernal things with her great set of keys, first under her supervision, and then alone.

These clocks kept their own time and struck when they were so moved. For many days, until I was accustomed to them, I was unfailingly startled by their sudden, unpredictable banging and clanging, their shrill and brassy tolling of some vague approximation of the actual time. My grandmother’s clocks were nothing special, you understand, though a number of them were embellished with painted scenes of an old-fashioned, bucolic nature. She had acquired them from here and there, one at a time over the years. None was particularly valuable. In fact, the ritual of winding the clocks seemed far more important to her than the time they kept. Years later I would come to the conclusion that, for my grandmother, the clocks did not mark regular daily time anyway, so much as the minute, inexorable progress from some antediluvian event known only to her—the erection of Tutankhamen’s pyramid, perhaps—toward some equally private, and quite possibly apocalyptic, event in the future. This much was certain: she rarely heard their dreadful cacophony without scowling briefly toward my grandfather, if he was within scowling range, as though all that chaotic hammering somehow signified that the poor man was doomed to a final and unspeakable retribution for his youthful transgressions as a sashayer, or heaven knew what other offenses, real or imagined, during their years together in Lost Nation.

 

People seemed to read more in those days than they do today; and my grandmother herself read for an hour or two each day. She read the Bible carefully, yet with a critical eye, particularly for those passages dealing with the alleged treacheries of the Egyptians, which she discounted as sheer propaganda. What about the evil pharaoh who enslaved the Children of Israel, I wondered? Well, my grandmother acknowledged that there might be one bad apple in every barrel. But she had little good to say about Moses, Aaron, or Joseph, who, she confided to me some years later, she had always suspected of casting eyes upon Potiphar’s wife instead of the other way around. What other harm was reported of poor Mrs. Potiphar? “None, Tut. None.” Yet my grandmother was a very sincere churchgoer, whose severely charitable works extended to everyone in Lost Nation, though her unwavering belief in an inclusive and egalitarian afterlife transcended any single religious doctrine. As far as she was concerned everyone—Egyptians, Hebrews, Christians, you name it—was eligible for advancement, so to speak. Everyone, that is, but my grandfather for whom she seemed to have slim hopes in that regard.

“When I fell afoul of Mr. Kittredge,” she frequently stated, in reference to their nuptials. “Well, never mind, Tut. The time will come when he’ll meet his Waterloo.”

I had no idea what my grandmother meant by this assurance. But it sounded like a very dire fate indeed, and for some years in my early boyhood, I pitied my grandfather his apparently inevitable appointment with Waterloo, and hoped it would not transpire for a long time to come.

Before straying too far from the subject of reading, I should report that one rainy afternoon about two weeks after my arrival at the Farm I discovered a great literary treasure in the far regions of the attic. In a corner under the high, dusty west window overlooking a hundred miles of mountains, I came upon crate after crate of books: more than I could begin to read in an entire summer of rainy afternoons. Besides a complete set of Dickens—this was a spare, there was a set in better condition downstairs in the parlor bookcase—and a pirated edition of Poe’s tales with which, at about the age of nine, I would begin scaring the living daylights out of myself, there were boxes stacked full of my grandfather’s back issues of the National Geographic, no doubt spirited away to this lofty redoubt by my grandmother lest their very presence in the house below reactivate in the old man that evil urge to go sashaying. There were trunkfuls of my father’s and my Uncle Rob Roy’s boyhood books, including a couple of dozen dog-eared volumes chronicling the spectacular feats of a veritable young Edison named Tom Swift, given to inventing, totally from scratch and at the drop of a hat, every conceivable machine from futuristic racing cars to airplanes—spelled “aeroplanes.” Another set of books recorded the glorious saga of one Baseball Joe’s meteoric career on the diamond, from some prep school whose name I have blissfully long since forgotten through Yale and the New York Giants. There were the less fascinating—to me—but undoubtedly better written stories of Anne of Green Gables and Louisa May Alcott’s tireless little women, only recently relegated to the attic by my little aunts, Freddi and Klee; an old Encyclopedia Britannica; the immense family Bible containing the genealogy I mentioned earlier; several random volumes of the legislative proceedings of Vermont spanning the period 1874–1886; and a badly-worn copy of Bulfinch’s Greek and Roman Myths, with some illustrations of mostly unpleasant moments in the lives of ancient mortals, gods, and goddesses. I conducted a pretty vigorous impromptu search for one or two of WJ Kittredge’s F•U•C•K Books; but I cannot say that I was much surprised not to find any represented in my grandparents’ attic library.

I don’t know how long I stayed up there on that first visit. Maybe forty-five minutes. I recall bringing a very old children’s book back downstairs with me and asking my grandmother to read it to me that evening. It was an ancient cloth picture book entitled, unpromisingly enough, Cautionary Tales for the Young. One illustration in particular leaps into my mind. It depicted two boys in a forest clearing, squaring off with doubled fists. At least I think they were boys, though all of the children in the book had, besides oddly oversized heads, an androgynous aspect sharply at variance with their features, which were those of case-hardened forty-year-old men. In the background, evidently as yet undetected by the children, were two gigantic bull moose with their great antlers hopelessly intertangled in combat. Obviously, the poor animals were fated to die a terrible death, but the creator of this cheery woodland tableau wasted little sympathy for them. The caption below read: “Boys given to QUARRELING should TAKE NOTE of the fate of TWO DOOMED MOOSE and MEND their ways.” My grandmother read this aloud to me in her precise way, then gave me a long look to see if the lesson had sunk in.

My grandfather, however, glanced over at the illustration and inquired whether I believed I could “hold my own in a go-round with the pair of ’maphrodites” in the picture. I assured him that I believed I could, which seemed to satisfy him. But the fact is that I was not much given to quarreling with other boys, that summer or later, for the simple reason that there were no other boys, or girls either, to quarrel with within three miles of my grandparents’ place.

When it came to quarreling, my grandparents themselves walked away with the cake. Never in my life have I known two people to disagree on so many issues, large and small, day in and day out. Of course our entire family, along with everyone in Lost Nation and half of all Kingdom County, knew about Ab and Austen Kittredges’ Forty Years’ War—which, like most wars, had caught up neighbors and other family members alike, and had resulted in deep rifts and alienations, such as my father’s defection from the Farm at the age of eighteen. But I think that very few persons knew how implicit constant rivalry was to the very existence of my grandmother and grandfather.

One morning following an argument between them over whether I was to be allowed to fish alone, without supervision, in the millpond behind the sawmill dam, my grandmother called me into Egypt. She gestured toward two exotic houseplants: a velvety purple African violet and an especially unamiable form of primitive vegetation called, by my grandmother, an Egyptian asp vine. The asp vine, it seemed, had of late aggressively latched onto the violet with one of its hairy tentacles, and was bidding fair to strangle the very life out of it. From this belligerent action my grandmother extracted an exemplum. “See, Tut,” she said very earnestly, “even the plants of the earth strive to achieve ascendancy one over the other.” Adding, “It’s only a matter of time now before Mr. Kittredge will meet his Waterloo.”

Well! At six I had no idea what to make of this Darwinian demonstration. I was further puzzled to hear my grandparents routinely refer to each other in the third person as “Mr. Kittredge” and “Mrs. Kittredge,” usually with the most sardonic irony. And why did they sleep not only in separate beds but in separate bedchambers? I wondered but didn’t know. A more sensible question might be how two such individuals as my grandparents ever got together in the first place, and that I learned only much later. For the time being, since I seemed to get along capitally with them both, I decided not to worry about their feuding. That was the way matters stood between them, and there wasn’t a blessed thing I or anyone else could do about it.

 

In Egypt, on a special shelf under the picture of the extinct Sphinx, my grandmother kept a large scrapbook. It contained hundreds of newspaper clippings and photographs, chiefly of local disasters, which she had begun to compile from The Kingdom County Monitor soon after coming to Lost Nation and falling afoul of my grandfather. My little aunts had coined a name for this grisly compilation. They called it the Doomsday Book, because it chronicled all of the most violent deaths and accidents, maimings, poisonings, and other human and natural catastrophes recorded in the county over most of the past half century.

Sometimes in the evenings my grandmother ushered me into Egypt and read to me from her Doomsday Book. I was both delighted and horrified by these seminars, from which I acquired a good deal of esoteric local history. I learned, for example, that 1927 was the year of the Great Kingdom Flood, and that 1936 was the summer of the Great Fire that gutted the entire three-story brick business block in Kingdom Common. Much later, in school, I would study the Crash of 1929 and the end of Prohibition. Neither of these signal events in the annals of American history impressed themselves on my imagination so vividly as the articles that my grandmother read to me from the Doomsday Book chronicling the discovery, in 1929, behind Orin Hopper’s orchard, of five shallow graves containing his entire family; or the sacking of the nearby railroad town of Pond in the Sky by “a desperate gang of tramps and hoboes off the Canadian National Railroad, estimated at 250 strong,” on the day of F.D.R.’s first inauguration.

In late December of 1941, the front page of the Monitor had been printed edged in black. But the infamy of Pearl Harbor was eclipsed for my grandmother and me by the nearly simultaneous advent in Kingdom County of two far more innocuous wayfarers from the Orient: a “Hong Kong Chinaman” and his young daughter, who were picked up trying to slip over the Line from Canada. And it is an odd fact that, along with fire and moving water, my otherwise intrepid grandmother harbored a great fear of “Hong Kong Chinamen” all her life, and never failed to give a small shudder each time she read me the account of the apprehension of the benign-appearing Mr. Wing and his pretty daughter Li, on the border just north of our place.

So my first full month in Lost Nation passed in this happy, strange way. Tomorrow my father was coming for Sunday dinner, to determine how I was getting along and whether I wanted to stay on with my grandparents for the remainder of the summer and the coming year. I knew what my decision would be. Just how to disclose it without hurting anyone’s feelings was another matter. For the first time since my visit to my grandparents began, I went to bed worried about what the following day would bring.

 

Sunday had rolled around at last, as all days must, dreaded or otherwise. After chores my grandfather washed up and, as usual on Sunday morning, put on a white shirt and a necktie. The first time this had happened I thought it very strange. Both he and my grandmother had given me to understand that he never attended church. When he pulled on his hip waders I was doubly surprised. I struggled into my Sunday clothes, my grandmother brushed down my cowlick, and we three paraded out to the truck, my grandfather now in full Sunday regalia—and his waders. I could scarcely believe he was going to fish while we attended the service, but that is exactly what he did, then and each Sunday afterward.

The interior of the tiny Methodist church at the foot of the Hollow was as stark as the beliefs of its congregation. The stovepipe hung from the ceiling on long wires, and ran horizontally all the way from the stove, in the middle of the room, to the rear wall. Besides my grandmother and me, there were never more than a dozen other worshippers in attendance. The presiding minister was Whiskeyjack Kittredge’s old ramrod-straight brother, John Wesleyan (JW) Kittredge, who was a kind of lay clergyman.

JW’s text on the Sunday of my father’s scheduled arrival was “Spare the Rod,” with many lurid examples of how children whose misdemeanors were allowed to go unchastened turned out very badly indeed. He suggested that the most infamous malefactors in the Bible from Cain to King Herod had all been spoiled as boys, a misfortune to which their subsequent villainy was directly attributable. I had no idea what my grandmother thought of this strange message, but the lay minister frowned in my direction several times during the sermon and once pointed his finger directly at me and shook it menacingly.

At the end of his tirade, John Wesleyan said we could all say a silent prayer now, and though mainly we should pray for others, particularly our minister, we could all ask for one thing for ourselves. All I could think of to pray for was that I’d never have to attend church again; but this didn’t seem right to do under the circumstances, so I didn’t get in a personal request in time, and the next thing I knew we were singing again.

The service was longer rather than shorter, and afterward my grandfather, who had just come up from the river, got me aside on the pretext of showing me a one-pound brook trout in his wicker fishing basket and asked me very earnestly, as he always did, if Cousin John Wesleyan had preached against him. I assured him that he had not.

“Did my name come up at all in the sermon?” my grandfather asked. No, it hadn’t. My grandfather looked at me, then shut his basket lid abruptly. “You report to me when and if it does,” he said. “And that’ll be the last time it happens.”

On the way back up the Hollow my grandfather asked me whether I’d prefer to attend church again next Sunday or go fishing with him. My grandmother answered for me. “Church,” she said. “That’s what civilized people do on Sunday, Tut.”

As we approached the farmhouse I waited for my grandfather to initiate our meanest-old-bastard-in-Kingdom-County ritual. When he did not, I nudged him and said, “Who lives there?”

“What’s that?” he said.

I poked him again with my elbow. “Who lives there?”

“Never mind that foolishness now,” he growled, shooting a look at my grandmother.

“Who does live there?” she said. “What’s Mr. Kittredge been telling you, Tut?”

“Nothing,” my grandfather said. “It’s nothing to do with you. They’re here, I see.”

“Who’s here?”

“The schoolteacher.”

Parked in the dooryard beside a battered red pickup truck was my father’s Chevy sedan.

“Do you mean your elder son?” my grandmother said sharply.

“I mean the schoolteacher,” my grandfather repeated, slamming to a stop.

Evidently my father had been here for some time because just then I spotted Dad and Uncle Rob—the owner of the pickup—coming up through the meadow from the river with their fly rods. They waved. But although my grandfather had known about my father’s visit all month, he suddenly appeared to be very angry. “No doubt they’ve come to fetch Austen back downcountry,” he said as he got out of the truck. “Well, take him and be damned!”

Then he stalked off toward the house with his fish basket, without another word. Dad had already entered the dooryard and I was pretty sure he’d heard my grandfather’s remark. All he said, though, was, “Well, Mom, I see things haven’t changed around here since the last time I came up.”

“Surely you hadn’t expected them to,” my grandmother said, taking hold of my father’s wrist and looking up at him with pleasure.

Uncle Rob laughed and asked me how I’d liked church. “Did that old mossback JW Kittredge denounce your grandfather from the pulpit again?”

“No,” I said. “I think he denounced me.”

Rob and my father both laughed.

“Hi, Buddy,” Dad said. “Tell me one good thing about your month.”

“I went to Labrador with Gramp and saw Gram’s Sphinx,” I said. “It’s extinct now.”

Although I wasn’t sure why, Dad smiled and Uncle Rob laughed hard. On the way inside, they jostled each other and joked about who could pin whom. My grandfather stood with his back to us at the sink, cleaning his trout; but I heard him declare that he could by God pin them both with one hand tied behind his back. “A schoolteacher and a kid!” he said to the trout he was cleaning.

Just then Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee, who’d come up from the village with Rob, appeared from the dining room, where they’d been setting the table for the big Sunday dinner. After hugging me, they went over to the sink to admire Gramp’s fish. Klee had heard what he’d said about Dad and Rob, and she put her arm around him and said in her best Bogart imitation, “Lay off my brothers, old man. They just might have to take you out back and shoot you.”

Gramp grunted. Although he paid little attention to my little aunts, his daughters, referring to them mainly as the flibbertigibbets, Klee and Freddi were the only members of the family who could get away with teasing him. I was excited about seeing Dad’s pretty young sisters, known as my little aunts to distinguish them from several great or big aunts.

Freddi and Klee had visited us in White River several times a year, and like Uncle Rob, they always made a great fuss over me. Freddi called me Old Toad and Mole and Ratty after the animals in The Wind in the Willows and Klee talked to me in a mock tough-guy accent, like a character from the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels she was forever reading. I thought the world of both of them and of Uncle Rob as well.

Freddi’s and Klee’s real names were Nefertiti and Cleopatra. My grandmother had named them after the fabled Egyptian queens, and as far as I was concerned they were every bit as beautiful. Klee was small and slender, with ivory skin, my grandmother’s dark hair, my grandfather’s pale blue eyes, and a sharp tongue inherited from both of them—though she never spoke sharply to me. Freddi was tall and statuesque, with a reputation for being overly sensitive. She had lovely huge brown eyes, long, honey-colored hair and a tawny, golden complexion. At twenty-one and nineteen, Klee and Freddi were attending the state university on full scholarships, courtesy of our old ancestor Sojourner. During the summer they worked on the assembly line varnishing chairs at the American Heritage mill in Kingdom Common, where they boarded with a local family.

Besides reading to me from The Wind in the Willows and my other favorite storybooks, my little aunts loved to whisk me off to the cupola atop the old farmhouse for what they were pleased to call Sunday School lessons. In fact, these lessons consisted of the wildest tales of spirit rappings, the sorrowful wanderings over the face of the earth of the dispossessed Russian princess Anastasia, the dreadful curse of King Tut’s tomb and, best of all, the many tragic secrets and hidden scandals from our own family history.

In addition to being beautiful, high-strung, and full of the most fanciful tales, both Freddi and Klee were terribly independent-minded. No doubt they could have had nearly any boyfriends they’d wanted in all northern Vermont; but for some years they had sustained tumultuous off-again on-again relationships with, respectively, Pooch and Artie Pike, two hard-drinking local roughnecks Uncle Rob had ironically dubbed the Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers, like some sort of circus aerial act. My little aunts were also given to all kinds of theatrical demonstrations, particularly in front of me, whom they esteemed very highly as a most appreciative and sympathetic one-boy audience. In much the same way that my grandfather harked back to Sojourner Kittredge’s geographical misapprehension to explain all of the subsequent blunders and misfortunes of the Kittredge family right up to the present, Little Aunt Freddi and Little Aunt Klee loved to conclude their horror tales in the cupola by sadly extending their hands, which were stained red from the chair varnish at the mill, and announcing, to my great delight and their own, “Behold, Austen! Look at these poor mitts. These tell the whole story”—as though, somehow, the red stain on their hands proved all of their most fatalistic theses and notions about the Kittredge family.

Rob Roy had just graduated from high school and was as wild as a yellow bumblebee, as my little aunts put it. They called him the anointed because as the baby of the Kittredge family he could do no wrong in the eyes of either of my grandparents. He worked in the mill too, and did some stringing evenings and weekends for The Kingdom County Monitor. Rob aspired to be an outdoor columnist for a newspaper large enough to send him to Alaska and Africa, and claimed to be doing field research for a treatise-in-progress called Angling and Shooting in Eastern North America—which Freddi and Klee said was no more than an excuse to spend every spare minute of his time hunting and fishing and riding the roads drinking Budweiser beer with the like-minded Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers.

“Well, buddy,” my father said to me, “what do you think? You like it up here in Siberia?”

Suddenly I was overcome by tongue-tied shyness. I’d never been away from home for more than a night or two before. Now I was about to betray my father altogether by announcing that I wanted to defect from our home in White River and remain with my grandparents.

I think Dad understood my dilemma. He gave me an affectionate hug and suggested that we take a quick tour of the Farm before dinner. This was just the ticket to get us back on our old confidential footing, and a minute later we were joking together.

We visited the chickens and the barn and walked down through the pasture to the river where Gramp and I fished together evenings after supper. Then my grandmother was ringing the dinner bell. It was time to eat.

Like most countrywomen of her generation, my grandmother was an excellent cook. Her fried chicken and mashed potatoes with chicken gravy, fresh peas, homebaked bread and homemade butter were never less than superb; but today every eye was on my father and grandfather, who were separated from each other only by me.

My grandmother sat at the foot of the long dining room table, at the opposite end from my grandfather. For a moment the room was totally silent. Then she said, “Go ahead, Tut.”

This was my cue to say Sunday grace, which I detested, the more so because, instead of bowing his head, my grandfather watched me the entire time. He knew that I was squirming and he delighted in my mortification. For a panicky moment I drew a complete blank.

“‘Our Father,’” Aunt Freddi prompted softly, “‘bless this . . .’”

In one great gulp, the words barely distinguishable from each other, I gasped: “Our-Father-bless-this-food-to-our-use-and-us-to-thy-service-amen.”

“Amen,” said my grandmother and father and little aunts.

But before the word was out of their mouths, and before I had the faintest notion that I was going to do it, I’d finally thought of the one personal request Preacher John Wesleyan Kittredge said I could make if I wanted to, and blurted out: “And help Dad and Gramp see eye to eye!”

“Amen!” Uncle Rob said, and burst out laughing.

“Brother!” my father said.

“Amen!” Little Aunt Klee said out of the side of her mouth.

“Je-sus!” my grandfather said. “Did they put you up to saying that?” He pointed his fork at my grandmother.

Even Freddi was smiling behind her napkin.

But my grandfather was genuinely mad. He was mad at them, meaning my grandmother, since he imagined that she had been responsible for my pathetic little supplication for family harmony.

“Pass the chicken down this way,” he growled at her. “Some of us around here work for a living and don’t have time to spend all day praying and jabbering.”

“Austen works,” Little Aunt Klee said, nodding at my father, her eyes shining with mischief.

“Austen!” my grandfather said indignantly, as though he’d never heard my father’s name, though it was his and mine as well. “Austen’s a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers don’t know what it is to put in a day’s work.”

“Stop inciting trouble, Klee,” my grandmother said sharply, to which my little aunt replied, in a crisp offended voice, “Very well,” and got up from the table, as straight and regal as her haughty Egyptian namesake, and disappeared into the kitchen not to return.

Across the table from me Rob mouthed a word or two, I couldn’t tell what. Freddi leaned over and whispered, “Don’t worry, Old Toad. Klee does this at every family dinner.”

My grandmother sighed. She looked down the table at my grandfather and said, “Mr. Kittredge, your son is not a schoolteacher. He’s a headmaster. What’s more, he’s the headmaster of one of the finest schools in New England.”

My grandfather had paid no attention to Klee’s outraged departure. Very deliberately, he put down his fork. Staring straight at my grandmother, he said: “Saying a headmaster isn’t a schoolteacher is like saying a trout isn’t a fish. A fish may be a trout. But all trout are still fish and all headmasters are still schoolteachers. That’s as certain as the sun coming up over the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the morning and setting behind the Green Mountains of Vermont at night.”

My grandmother, who had not served herself a morsel yet, glared back at my grandfather. “That,” she said, “is one of the most peculiar declarations I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“I’ll tell you what’s peculiar,” my grandfather said, pointing a long arm toward my grandmother’s sitting room-bedroom, Egypt. “That, by God, is peculiar.”

My father set down his drumstick. “Okay, I can’t stand any more of this,” he said, and took his plate out to the kitchen. He was immediately followed by Little Aunt Freddi, who burst into tears on her way out of the room.

Rob kicked me under the table. This time I caught what he mouthed at me. “Three down.”

“Now even you must be satisfied, Mr. Kittredge,” my grandmother said. “You’ve driven three of your four children away from their Sunday dinner.”

“By Jesus Christ, I haven’t driven anybody anywhere!” my grandfather barked out. “The next time you hear from me, I’ll be in Labrador.”

And he, too, was up and gone.

My grandmother nodded grimly. “Once a sashayer, always a sashayer,” she said. “His Waterloo looms nearer, Tut.”

Across the table Uncle Rob was holding up four fingers.

At exactly the same time, as though to immortalize this awful moment in my memory, the dining room clock began to strike twelve, in a wild, frenetic manner, followed at irregular intervals by all of the other clocks in the house both near and far.

Rob grinned. “Well, Buddy,” he said, helping me to another piece of chicken, “dig in.”

When I looked up from my plate again, I just caught out of the tail of my eye the dark swish of my grandmother’s skirt, retreating into Egypt.

“That’s five,” Rob said cheerfully. “Welcome to the Kittredge family, kiddo. Hope you like chicken.”

 

After dinner, Rob and Dad and I played flies and grounders in the cut hayfield beside the house while the women washed those few dishes that needed washing. Then while my father visited with my grandmother in Egypt, Little Aunt Klee and Little Aunt Freddi spirited me up to the cupola for a Sunday School lesson. They had just finished washing their hair with the soft rainwater from the big cistern outside the kitchen door, and they wanted to dry it in the sunshine and breeze coming in the cupola windows. Aunt Klee appeared to have gotten over her peeve and Freddi was as enthusiastic as ever. In fact, it seemed to me that with the exception of my grandfather, off in Labrador, nobody in the family acted as though anything much out of the ordinary had happened.

No sooner were we ensconced in the cupola than Klee and Freddi confirmed my impression that such domestic brush-ups were not at all unusual. “That was a wonderful grace that you said, Old Mole,” Freddi said. “I’m sure it made all of us Kittredges stop and think how much we really love each other.”

It occurred to me that if Freddi was right about the effect of my prayer, the Kittredges had a strange way of showing their affection; but I said nothing.

“That’s how nearly all our Sunday dinners break up,” Klee said with a certain note of pride. “Should the Sunday School lesson today deal with Dad and poor Austen, Freddi?”

“Mother certainly wouldn’t want it to,” Freddi said. “On the other hand, if Mole’s going to be heard from, won’t he need to know?”

Klee nodded. “The sooner the better, I think. Listen closely, now, Austen. The reason your grandfather and your father don’t see eye to eye has nothing at all to do with the fact that your father is a schoolteacher. It’s that secretly, way down deep, he and your grandfather are too much alike.”

“In other words, proud,” Freddi said.

“Yes,” Klee agreed. “They are both very, very proud.”

“And very, very stubborn,” Klee said.

“Oh, yes,” Freddi said happily. “Which accounts for the feud.”

“You see,” Klee said, “your father is fifteen years older than I am, and I’m the next oldest. So for years and years he had to bear the brunt of your grandparents’ quarreling all by himself.”

“That’s why he can’t stand an argument of any kind to this day,” Freddi said. “He heard so much arguing growing up.”

“He tended to side with Gram,” Klee said. “Not that we blame him. Your grandfather can be a regular Tartar when he wants to be.”

“Grief, Klee, not a Tartar. The old boy isn’t that bad. Don’t make him out to be Attila the Hun. Imagine what it must be like to be lawfully married to a woman with an official paper forbidding you to touch her.”

“There wasn’t any such paper until years later, Fred. Not until after Uncle Rob nearly killed Mom being born.”

“At any rate, Austen, your father never said much to your grandfather, but when it came time for him to go to the university—” Here Freddi’s voice began to quaver.

“Do you want to have a good long cry, Fred?” Klee said savagely. “Go ahead. I’ll wait while you have your bawl.”

“I’m not going to cry, Klee. It’s just all so sad. You know it is. What happened, Old Mole, is that—”

“—off he went and didn’t come back for four years!” Klee ended triumphantly.

“Kittredge pride,” Freddi said.

“And Kittredge stubbornness,” Klee said in a fatalistic, delighted voice.

“Hey, you up there, Buddy?” It was Uncle Rob, calling from the foot of the attic stairs. “You’re wanted down here, kid. Your dad’s getting ready to go back down the line.”

“Ah,” Klee said. “The moment of truth has arrived. Flee while you can, Old Toad. Flee before you become consumed by Kittredge pride and stubbornness, like the rest of us.”

“That’s silly, Klee. How can you tell him such drivel? He’s just a boy visiting his grandparents.”

“Fly away, fly away!” Klee cried melodramatically, though I had the distinct impression that she did not want me to leave the Farm, any more than I wanted to.

Just how I would tell this to my father, however, was more than I knew. I wasn’t at all sure I could tell him, and I dreaded the awful moment when I would have to announce my decision more than I had ever dreaded anything in my life.

 

They were waiting for me in the kitchen. Dad, Rob, and my grandmother. “Well, Bud,” Dad said, “what do you say? How do you like it here?”

“I love it,” I said, “but I miss you.”

He grinned. “That’s natural. I miss you, too.”

Everyone was looking at me: my father, Rob, my little aunts, who’d followed me down from the cupola to be on hand for my big decision. Most of all, though, I was aware of my grandmother’s presence. She was standing at the table putting the best silver back in its chest, and she was watching me intently with those sharp, dark, kind, and eternally expectant eyes. Yet if it was my grandmother I was most aware of, it was my father who best understood my predicament and how to make this momentous decision easy for me.

“Austen, would you like to stay on with your grandparents for a while longer this summer?”

You bet I would! Staying on for a while. That was the operative phrase. Now when my grandfather returned from Labrador he would find me here. I could atone for my terrible blunder after the grace. But the fact of the matter is that I desperately wanted to stay on at the Farm with my grandparents. I knew I would see Dad frequently in any case.

After arranging to come back in a couple of weeks, and to have me spend a few days at home with him later in August, Dad left for White River. Soon afterward my little aunts rode back to the village with Uncle Rob. My grandfather appeared for evening chores and seemed neither surprised nor particularly pleased to discover that I was still there. He said nothing to me while I grained the cows, and returned to Labrador again as soon as he finished milking.

During supper my grandmother sighed frequently, and spoke very little herself. But after the dishes were done and dried and put up, and she’d swept and mopped the floor, she looked at me earnestly and said, “Today was one of the most mortifying days of my life, Tut.”

“I know, Gram,” I said. “I’m sorry about the grace.”

“You, Tut, have nothing to be sorry for. Your grace was very fine, very fine indeed. If you weren’t destined to become a great archaeologist, I’d say you were cut out to be a renowned clergyman like Mr. John Wesleyan Kittredge. No, all the blame for today can be laid directly at your grandfather’s doorstep.”

I scarcely knew how to respond to this assertion. Fortunately, though, neither my grandmother nor my grandfather ever seemed to expect much response from me at such times. And after spending the remainder of the evening reading with my grandmother in the kitchen, I went up to bed feeling that the day had been pretty successful despite all the turmoil.

Still, I lay awake for a time, turning over in my mind some of the ineluctable mysteries of the dynasty that Sojourner Kittredge, my forward-looking ancestor, had founded in Lost Nation so many years ago. Even at six, I sensed that there must be more to my father and grandfather not seeing eye to eye than Aunt Klee and Aunt Freddi had told me. Nor was I any closer to understanding why my grandparents themselves didn’t see eye to eye. How had Uncle Rob nearly killed my grandmother, and what was this mysterious paper in my grandmother’s possession? And why was my grandfather so insistent on reminding me that he was the meanest old bastard in Kingdom County and that I had heard this first from him?

Although I was not very sleepy, I was dog-tired. I shut my eyes and imagined that I was descending into a dark Egyptian tomb, down and down, until I fell into a restless sleep. But the unpredictable events of that unpredictable day were still not quite over.

Sometime later, I had no way of knowing exactly when, the kitchen door slammed. I heard someone walking beneath me, and the sink pump working. Then the steps retreated toward the dining room.

“Tut,” my grandmother called up the steps of my loft a minute later. “That was your grandfather, back from Labrador. We’re all here where we belong now. You can go to sleep.”

So I did, knowing with a certainty that would remain with me for many years that the Farm at the end of Lost Nation was where I too belonged, and that for as much time to come as I could now foresee, my grandparents, for all their singularities, would be at the center of everything for me.