4

The Green Mountain Whale

In the beginning, my grandfather told me soon after I came to Lost Nation, there was only the river. There were no farms, no sawmills, no towns. Icy and amber-colored, it seeped out of an impenetrable cedar bog high on the northernmost ridge of the height of land dividing the present-day Connecticut and St. Lawrence River watersheds, and ran southwest through hills heavily forested with fir and spruce and white pine. It flowed past the future site of my grandparents’ farm, and wound down through the narrow valley that my ancestor, Sojourner Kittredge, would name Lost Nation Hollow in ironical commemoration of his geographical miscalculation. At the foot of the Hollow it joined the Main Branch of the Kingdom River to run due west for ten miles, to the spot where the county seat of Kingdom Common sits today. There it dropped over a long, steep cataract later known as the High Falls.

Below the falls, the Kingdom passed through a flat where willow trees grew thick on both sides. Then, having already transformed from a lacy network of hidden rills into a swift brook and from a brook into a small river, it metamorphosed in character once again. It broadened out, deepened, slowed to a crawl, and entered a marshy wetlands full of ducks and snapping turtles, muskrats and minks and otters and moose. Leisurely, almost unnoticeably, it twisted north through the swamp another ten miles, to the south bay of Lake Memphremagog, “Beautiful Waters,” in Abenaki, which stretched twenty-five miles into Canada between tall mountains before emptying into yet another river that headed out to the great St. Lawrence.

At one time, according to my grandfather, glaciers crept down into our hills from northern Canada, inching their way south by their own immense weight. That was ten thousand years ago. Then the mile-high mass of ice had retreated, leaving an inland sea extending from the wide valley of the St. Lawrence to the southernmost boundary of what would become Kingdom County. This was a saltwater sea, connected directly to the ocean by a vast tidal arm five hundred miles long, and my grandfather told me that in those ancient times, salmon and seals and occasionally even whales swam all the way up this inlet. The whales passed icebergs hundreds of feet high, broken off from the retreating glacier, and swam between the soaring mountain peaks on each side of Lake Memphremagog, and on up the drowned-out valley of the Kingdom River into the flooded hollows, high over the future site of the Farm in Lost Nation. My grandfather referred to these whales as Green Mountain whales, and said that the original Abenaki Indians who had roamed through these parts had hunted them from kayaks. Still, all this seemed as fantastic to me as Aladdin’s treasure caves and genies in my Arabian Nights storybook.

“There’s one now, Austen,” he said, and pointed to a cloud shaped vaguely like a whale, high overhead in the summery Vermont sky.

I was seven at the time, and we were taking a short break from haying. During the past year, I had learned that my grandfather frequently liked to pull my leg, and could do so with a perfectly expressionless face. I looked at him, and he looked back at me with his pale blue eyes. Then he winked.

I had no idea whether to believe what he said about the glaciers, the inland sea, and the long-ago Green Mountain whales. For all I knew my grandfather was kidding about those, too. With him, it was hard to tell.

 

The East Branch—our branch—of the Upper Kingdom River was by no means wide. By the time I was eight I could easily wing a stone across it from bank to bank. But it was very quick, very cold, and full of colorful, hard-fighting native brook trout. For two or three weeks in the early spring it was strong enough to drive a moderate quantity of logs; and in my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge’s time, when it ran through mile upon mile of dense, uncut forest, its flow was steadier still.

The river is one of my earliest memories from the time I first went to live with my grandparents. For years it was the last sound I heard out of the narrow, slanted window of my upper bedchamber before going to sleep at night, and the first sound I heard when I woke up the next morning. And like the Canadian border just north of our place, and the Boston and Montreal Railroad through the village of Kingdom Common, the river was a tangible geographical link, for both my grandfather and me, to the world beyond Kingdom County.

For my tenth birthday—I had lived in Lost Nation four years by then, and it had become as much my home as anyone else’s, and my grandparents were now as much my parents as my grandparents, though I remained on the best of terms with my father and saw him quite frequently—Gramp got me a Hammond’s World Atlas. I distinctly recall his opening it on the kitchen table and showing me how a chip of wood from his sawmill could ride merrily down the Kingdom River to Lake Memphremagog and thence all the way to the St. Lawrence and Quebec City. Possibly, that hypothetical woodchip might even wind up off the barren coast of Labrador, where my grandfather had gone as a young surveyor and to which he had promised to return, with me, when I turned eighteen.

“There,” he said, planting his blunt, rough forefinger in the middle of the blank white interior of that little-known, boreal wilderness on the two-page map of Canada in the birthday atlas. “Right there, Austen. You and I and a canoe. You’ll see rivers there that’ll make the East Branch look like a meadow brook in August.”

Yet my grandfather liked the East Branch, too. It powered his sawmill; he trapped along its banks in the winter; in the spring and summer he and I fished it together every chance we had; and he still drove logs down it from the big Idaho woods northeast of our farmhouse, to the horseshoe-shaped oxbow bend just above the millpond—where, more often than not, his logs jammed together in the tight U of the curve, in monumental pileups that took days and sometimes weeks to untangle.

The year I turned ten, which also happened to be the year when the first electrical line was run up into Lost Nation Hollow, was an especially bad one for logjams in the oxbow. By the middle of May, my grandfather had fifty thousand feet of thirty-two-foot-long logs hopelessly piled up in the crook of the elbow, and nothing he contrived to do with his pick pole or peavey budged them an inch.

One afternoon when my grandmother’s apple orchard in the meadow adjacent to the jammed-up oxbow was just blossoming out, my grandfather was waiting for me in his lumber truck when I got out of school. A hefty coil of new fence wire lay on the floorboards. On the seat beside my grandfather was a long wooden crate with the words “Granite State Blasting Company” stenciled in black letters on the top. Packed inside the box in sawdust, Gramp informed me, were thirty-six sticks of dynamite. The box sat lengthwise on the seat, and stretched all the way from my grandfather, behind the wheel, to the passenger door of the cab.

“Hop up on top,” my grandfather said. “It’s stable.”

Winter frost was still thawing out of the Hollow road in sheltered places through the woods. It was full of potholes and washouts, and as bumpy as a road can be and still be passable. All the way home I stole glances at the case of dynamite beneath me, though my grandfather assured me that it couldn’t possibly explode until it was lighted or detonated with an electrical current. I was far from persuaded. As we jounced up the Hollow, he told me harrowing stories of his days as a shooter, or dynamite man, on the last big Connecticut River log drives. When we finally pulled into our barnyard, I was so relieved I forgot to ask him, in accordance with our ritual, who lived there. “The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County,” he said, anyway. “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

Although there was still plenty of snow back in the woods, it was a warm and sunny spring afternoon. Bright yellow cowslips were in blossom near the steep limestone bank of the oxbow, where the logs were jammed up. My grandfather seemed very confident as he walked out onto the ledge in a jaunty, lumberjack gait. With him he had three dark red sticks of the Granite State dynamite, which he lighted from his cigar and tossed into the jumble of logs. He hurried back into my grandmother’s orchard as the dynamite went off with three terrific reports, one right after the other. The air was filled with smoke and a gunpowder odor, but the jam didn’t shift a foot.

Next Gramp cut a long pole from a brown ash sapling growing near the river. To one end he lashed half a dozen sticks of dynamite. Standing on the ledge, he ignited a fuse and thrust the business end of the pole deep into the tangled logs. He scrambled back up onto the bank, and I hunkered down behind an apple tree full of fragrant blossoms and put my hands over my ears. A second later a tremendous explosion shook the ground under my feet. Chunks of bark and woodchips rose twenty feet in the air. I was sure the jam had broken apart. But as the acrid smoke began to clear, I saw that the towering pile of logs was exactly where it had been for the past week.

My grandfather nodded grimly. He seemed quite satisfied by this turn of events. “It’s that limestone ledge, Austen,” he said. “That’s what’s hanging the logs. It runs out underwater from the bank halfway across the river and blocks off the channel.”

My grandfather tied all but one of the remaining sticks of dynamite together in a single tight bundle, and hitched the free end of the new coil of wire to a detonating cap attached to the explosives. He wedged the package of dynamite down into a crevice in the riverside ledge, and instructed me to unroll the coil of wire back through the apple trees in the meadow, toward the road, while he went to get his truck. In the meantime, I’d spotted my grandmother, watching us from the farmhouse porch through her opera glasses. Their brass fittings gleamed in the mild spring sunshine, somehow accentuating her disapproval.

My grandfather drove the truck partway down the muddy lane into the apple orchard, shut it off and opened the hood. I handed him the ends of the wire, which he wrapped around the starter coil. “Get inside and start her up,” he told me.

Under my grandfather’s supervision, I’d been driving his farm truck around the barnyard and fields for nearly a year. But it was always a great thrill for me to slide in under the big rubber-coated steering wheel with the smooth wooden knob for a handle. I turned on the key and reached for the starter with my foot, stretching as far as I could. It ground twice, and the engine coughed, turned over, and caught. At the same instant, an immense detonation ripped into the spring afternoon. From the oxbow, chunks of ledge rose higher than the barn cupola and came raining out of the sky all over the blossoming orchard. Several hit in the muddy lane near my grandfather, who paid no more attention to them than to a summer hailstorm. Then I was out of the truck and running through the apple trees behind my grandfather.

Ahead of us, beneath a great cloud of smoke, the jam was moving. In a solid mass, it progressed about thirty feet—only to come to a stop in the lower curve of the bow, just above the millpond. Then in the cleared bend above them, a great slab of the limestone ledge where my grandfather had stood to place the dynamite charges suddenly toppled outward into the river, leaving a sheer rock wall plunging from the top of the bank down into the water.

“Yes, sir,” my grandfather said, an expression which, in the Kingdom County of my youth, could signify anything from an amiable salutation to a sarcastic disclaimer to an acknowledgment of the bleak lot of all farmers and loggers everywhere.

I was astonished by the way that huge chunk of rock had leisurely toppled over into the river. It must have weighed several tons, and it looked as if more of the ledge had been dislodged underwater, where we couldn’t see it. But no matter. Just downstream, the logs were packed tightly from bank to bank again, in a solid, interlocked, immovable mass.

My grandfather got out the last stick of dynamite and tapped it thoughtfully against his palm. Then he stuck the dynamite stick in his back pocket and headed up the lane toward the barn.

 

For the next few days my grandfather was busy with spring work around the farm. There were fences to repair, sap buckets to collect and rinse out, two fields to plow and harrow and plant. As for the logs, I suspected that he was hoping for a big spring rain to bring up the river and move them along into his millpond. But no big rain came and as the middle of May approached, the logs were still snarled up in the lower bend of the oxbow above the mill, where they were as useless to us as though still standing in the woods upriver.

One evening after supper I wandered down to the sawmill dam, where my grandfather was fishing. It was a simple dam, built by Sojourner Kittredge and replaced twice since, at a spot where the river narrowed to less than twenty yards across. Just above, in the small millpond, was an island about the size of our farmhouse kitchen. The troublesome oxbow was situated one hundred feet or so above the island.

My grandfather, who never fished with anything but flies, and used only one fly, a number ten red-and-white Royal Coachman, made a short, precise cast up beside the island. “What I really ought to do, Austen, is raise this so-called pond another three, four feet and flood out the whole shebang, island and oxbow and all. Back this little puddle clear up to the Idaho woods above and float that Christly jam right on out of there.”

My grandfather stripped in line and cast again. He made that distinctive rasping sound in his throat. “That would show them,” he said.

By “them,” of course, he meant my grandmother. But what did she have to do with this? Nothing, so far as I could see—until I happened to glance up at the towering logjam and the blooming apple trees beside it, scenting the entire meadow all the way down to the dam with their spicy pink and white blossoms.

“Wouldn’t that flood out Gram’s orchard?” I asked.

My grandfather frowned. “We’d never have a jam there again, Austen. Our problems would be over.”

My grandmother’s apple orchard was full of rare, old-fashioned varieties whose names were nearly as alluring as their fruit: Duchess of Oldenburg, Snow Apple, Cox Orange Pippin, Red Astrachan, Summer St. Lawrence, and twenty others. Along with her Buff Orpington laying hens, the old-fashioned apples were Gram’s pride and joy. Besides being an important source of her private household income, the early-ripening varieties were blue-ribbon shoo-ins at the fruit and vegetable exhibit at Kingdom Fair.

“What about Gram?” I said again.

My grandfather rounded on me. “Gram!” he said as though referring to some distant interfering relative. “This is between you and me. Not them. Do you understand that?”

I said I did, and he handed me the fly rod. “There’s a pretty fair trout just off the right side of that island, Austen. I can’t seem to interest him tonight. See if you can get him to take a look.”

My grandfather got out a cigar and lit it and watched me cast for the trout. I couldn’t tell whether he approved of my technique or not. After a while he shook his head. “Gram,” he muttered.

 

The next morning was Saturday. Immediately after barn chores and breakfast, my grandfather began work on his new project. According to his calculations, raising the level of the pond just four feet would dislodge the logs. This could be accomplished easily enough by lowering the gate of the dam and decreasing the flow of water through the penstock containing the waterwheel that powered his mill saws. With the additional pressure of the expanded millpond, however, my grandfather would first need to reinforce some of the old dam timbers. Cutting the new timbers was his first order of business.

“Tut, what are you and grandfather sashaying around that dam for?” my grandmother said to me when I went up to the house for a mid-moming snack.

To avoid telling her a direct lie I said, “Gramp says we’re doing some repair work.”

My grandmother looked at me with her sharp black eyes. “He said that? Repair work?”

I nodded.

She reached out and gripped my wrist. “Do you know where your grandfather’s going to be sashaying next if he drowns out my apple trees, Tut?”

I shook my head, thereby inadvertently acknowledging my grandfather’s intention to flood the orchard.

“I shall tell you where,” my grandmother said. “He’ll sashay straight to state prison, that’s where. I’ll send him there, for destroying my property and depriving me of the income from those apples.”

She released my wrist and picked up her brass-bound opera glasses and trained them in on the dam. “Don’t stray out of hailing distance, Tut. I’ll want you to run a letter down to the mailbox shortly.”

My grandmother finished her letter in ten minutes flat. I was far from surprised to see that it was addressed to Mr. Zachariah Barrows, Esquire, in Kingdom Common; old Zack Barrows was my grandmother’s personal attorney and close ally in her ongoing battle for ascendancy over my grandfather.

Our mailbox was located half a mile down the Hollow, next to the one belonging to my Big Aunt Rose, at the mouth of the lane leading up to her place, which was as far as the RFD mail carrier could get up the Hollow road in mud season and bad winter weather. After I returned from posting the letter, I drifted over to the dam again to see how my grandfather was coming. He was still hard at work in his sawmill, cutting out dam braces. Without interrupting his work, he jerked his head down the Hollow in the direction of the mailbox. “Barrows?”

I nodded, and my grandfather continued working and said nothing more.

 

Over the course of the following week, the Farm became a domestic battleground. On Sunday my grandfather moved up to Labrador to sleep and take his meals. Then for the next several days he spent every spare hour reinforcing and repairing his dam. On Wednesday my grandmother wrote again to Attorney Barrows. By then she and my grandfather had ceased speaking to each other entirely, though occasionally one of them would send the other a terse and ominous message through me. I had long ago learned that when the chips were down, neither of my grandparents had the slightest compunction about recruiting me to their own camp. The newfangled notion put forward by various self-declared experts on family harmony that children should not be drawn into the disputes of their elders would have astonished and outraged them both. It was a cardinal precept of child rearing in the Kittredge household that I, like my little aunts, my Uncle Rob, and my father before me, should be indoctrinated in the divine correctness of all of their respective positions, beliefs, and opinions, large and small, and enlisted on the side of Right.

Thursday evening, as my grandmother and I were eating a grim and silent supper, Gramp having returned to Labrador to eat out of cans, as my grandmother put it, I glanced out the window and saw Sheriff Mason White coming up the Hollow road in his patrol car. My grandmother had been expecting him for two days, and I knew why. Before she had a chance to tell me not to, I ran outside and raced up the ridge to warn my grandfather. Beyond doubt, Sheriff White was here with a court order to prevent Gramp from raising the level of the pond and flooding my grandmother’s apple trees.

My grandfather was sitting at the camp table in his red-and-black-checked lumber jacket, smoking a cigar and reading an old National Geographic. He glanced up at me over the reading spectacles he’d selected from the eyeglasses bin at the five-and-dime in Kingdom Common, then returned to his magazine.

“Mason White’s on his way with a court order!” I blurted out. “I saw him coming up the Hollow.”

“That’s all?” my grandfather said. “I thought at the very least you were going to report that the house was afire.”

My grandfather got up and went over to his bunk. He pulled a locker out from underneath it, and got something out of it, I didn’t see what clearly. He stuck whatever it was in his lumber jacket pocket. Then he returned to the table and resumed reading.

In the meantime I looked around the camp. It was growing dusky and my grandfather had already lit the kerosene lamp on the table. The antlers of the deer heads mounted on the back wall shone softly in the lamplight. In other circumstances it would have been pleasant to flop down on the rear seat from an old 1938 Packard that my grandfather used as a camp sofa and get him to tell me about going down the Connecticut with big log drives or going to Labrador and out West with the surveying crews. This evening there was no time for such tales. Even now the gangling apparition of Kingdom County’s chief lawman, Sheriff Mason White, was heaving into sight in the camp dooryard.

The sheriff came up to the open doorway and knocked on the outside wall of the camp. “Evening, Austen,” he said in his high squeaky voice.

“Yes, sir, Mason,” my grandfather said without looking up from his Geographic or inviting the sheriff inside.

“Very nice evening, Austen.”

My grandfather continued reading.

“Evening there, young fella,” the sheriff greeted me.

Following my grandfather’s cue, I said nothing.

Sheriff White shifted his weight. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “maybe it ain’t such an all-fire fine evening after all.”

My grandfather wet his thumb and turned a page. He took a puff of his cigar, and read on.

The sheriff shifted again, before taking an official-looking document out of his coat pocket. “Now, Austen,” he said in a shaky voice, “this ain’t nothing personal. But I have been charged with delivering you this court summons to appear at the courthouse tomorrow morning at ten in the a. of m. for a civil proceeding in the case of”—he glanced at the document, which was shaking in his hand—“in the case of Kittredge vs. Kittredge.”

Sheriff White held the court order through the open camp doorway. When my grandfather did not look up from his magazine, the frightened sheriff set down the paper on the floor and backed two or three steps into the dooryard. “It ain’t nothing personal,” he said again.

“Neither is this,” said my grandfather, and he reached into the side pocket of his lumber jacket, took out the last remaining stick of Granite State Blasting Company dynamite, lit the fuse with his burning cigar, and with a sudden flick of his wrist tossed the lighted dynamite stick end over end out the doorway to Sheriff Mason White.

Sheriff White caught the dynamite stick reflexively. A look of terror came over his face. With the lighted dynamite clutched in his fist, he whirled around in the dooryard twice, like a man on fire. As he came out of the second revolution he heaved the dynamite far into the woods. It flared through the twilight like a skyrocket. Just before it dropped out of sight into the dusky softwoods, an explosion accompanied by a bright orange flash split the quiet.

“Good thundering Jehovah!” Sheriff White roared out. “You Kittredges aren’t only outlaws, you’re lunatics!”

In his confusion he whirled around yet again, then took off at a dead run back down the trail toward the Farm.

My grandfather continued to read for a minute or so. Then he jerked his head toward the shelf behind the camp woodstove, where he kept his provisions. “I could go for a number ten can of peaches, Austen. I’m getting sick of Campbell beans and jelly sandwiches on store bread that pulls apart in your hands.”

I brought him the peaches and he took out his hunting knife and jabbed the point into the top of the can and haggled it open. He impaled a couple of peach halves and ate them off the knife, which he politely drove upright into the tabletop next to the open can for me to use. I ate some peaches with my grandfather, and neither of us spoke for a while. I looked over at the two bunks along the back wall, remembering how I’d awakened here one morning in deer season to find snow on my quilt, blown in through the chinks in the logs. Even before the border-country winter set in in earnest, the wood cookstove didn’t keep the camp very warm. But if Labrador wasn’t always comfortable, it was never less than a comforting place.

When we finished the peaches, my grandfather poured some kerosene on a few sticks of kindling in the stove and lit a small fire to take the chill off the evening. The wood flared up fast, reminding me of the lighted dynamite stick soaring through the dusk. I caught a whiff of that distinctive evergreen redolence my grandfather carried with him everywhere, imbued in his woolen pants and jacket, and remembered the first time I smelled that wonderful scent, on our way from the village to Lost Nation when I was just six years old. That seemed a long time ago now.

It occurred to me that I should get back to the house before my grandmother started to worry about me.

“So you’re not going to the court tomorrow?” I said, getting up.

“Certainly I’m going to court,” my grandfather said. “We’re all going to court. You, too. Blowing up a two-bit sheriff is one thing, Austen. But a man can’t be ignoring a summons to court. Tell them we’ll be leaving shortly after nine o’clock.

“Kittredge vs. Kittredge,” he called after me as I headed out the door. “That should be a court to remember.”

 

I had next to no hope that my grandmother would allow me to miss school the next day to attend the court hearing, but for once she let me off the hook. Like my grandfather, she seemed to believe that witnessing this ultimate confrontation between them was actually more important than my precious education. I was delighted to hear her tell me that I could come with them.

We left at nine sharp in my grandfather’s truck. I rode in the middle. My grandmother wore her most funereal black dress and a plain black hat with a tiny gold crocodile stickpin. My grandfather wore a clean red flannel shirt, neatly-creased khaki pants, and his steel-toed work boots. As always, he was freshly shaven and his short white hair was neatly brushed.

It was a fine day in late May. Under the clear northern Vermont sky, the hills were as green as any hills in the world. In another week it would be haying time in Kingdom County.

On the way down the Hollow neither one of my grandparents mentioned the impending hearing. My grandmother sat silently with her hands folded in her lap and a determined look on her face, which could have been carved from granite. My grandfather mentioned that a traveling circus was coming to town soon, and that he would take me to see it. “How would you like to go off to work for the circus, Austen?” he said. “Or a traveling fair?”

I said I would.

My grandmother gave a long sigh, and I heard her mutter the word sashaying. But I envied my grandfather his sashaying days, and yearned to see for myself someday what lay on the far side of the hills and mountains.

My grandfather slowed down to a crawl about halfway to the village so that I could get a good look at the crew running the new electrical line up to the Hollow. I knew that my grandparents disagreed over the power line, as they did about nearly everything else. Gramp was looking forward to having electricity in the sawmill, where he now had to rely on our water-powered paddle wheel to operate his machinery. But my grandmother had stated flatly that she would never have electricity in the house; too many Vermont farmhouses had caught fire from faulty wiring over the years, and she did not intend to run that risk.

We arrived in the village at nine-fifty by the courthouse clock. The following Monday was Memorial Day, and flags were already waving from house porches and in front of the stores. But the main excitement this morning seemed to be the hearing. A dozen or so curiosity-seekers were already standing on the long stone steps in front of the courthouse.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Kittredge,” said Bumper Stevens, the commission sales auctioneer. “Who’s that young fella with you? Your attorney?”

“He’s as much attorney as I’ll ever require.”

Now that we’d reached the courthouse, I was afraid that they wouldn’t let me in. But my grandparents marched right through the big front door as though they owned the place, and up a set of wide wooden stairs with me at their heels.

The courtroom was about the size of our double haymow at home. It had tall windows on three sides and smelled like a church. My grandmother sat with Lawyer Barrows at a shiny table below the judge’s bench. My grandfather and I sat in two wooden chairs on the opposite side of the central aisle, about three rows back. A minute later I saw my Uncle Rob and my little aunts, Freddi and Klee, who were just out of college for the summer, come in and sit in the back of the room, opposite the curiosity-seekers, who by now numbered twenty or so. They waved to me and I lifted my hand.

The courtroom was very still. On the front wall, a large clock with a very white face and very black hands said nine fifty-five. At the table down in front, my grandmother and old Zack were conferring intently over a paper my grandmother had produced from her pocketbook.

My grandfather nudged me. “What sort of wood are the tables and benches up front made out of, Austen?”

“Rock maple,” I said.

My grandfather gave me a curt nod. “What’s the floor made of?”

“Red oak.”

This time my grandfather didn’t even bother to nod; it was enough that I knew.

A minute or two before ten, a man in a suit and tie came in and filled a water glass on the judge’s bench. He nodded pleasantly to Zack and my grandmother, and to my grandfather. “That’s the bailiff,” my grandfather said. “He keeps order in—There’s the old judge now.”

A tall, rugged-looking man of about sixty came in through a door at the front of the room. He too smiled at us.

“All rise, please, the Superior Court of Kingdom County is now in session,” the bailiff said in a solemn voice. “Judge Forrest Allen presiding, in the case of Kittredge vs. Kittredge.”

The judge waved his hand. “Sit down, folks,” he said. “Please sit down. We’ll dispense with most of the usual formalities this morning. After all, we’re all friends.”

Beside me, my grandfather made that rasping sound in his throat, and glared in my grandmother’s direction.

“Well,” Judge Allen said good-humoredly, “most of us are friends.”

A suppressed snicker or two broke out from the loafers at the rear of the courtroom. Then it was quiet again. Everyone present was eager to see the forty-year-old running feud between my grandparents come to a head in a public spectacle. I glanced over at my grandmother to see how mortified she looked, but this morning she did not seem discomfited at all. She looked severe and triumphant, as though she had won her case already.

I realized that the judge was smiling at me. “Hello, young man. You must be Abiah and Austen’s grandson.”

I nodded.

“How’s the trout fishing up in the East Branch this year?”

Thinking that this might be some sort of trick question designed to get me to take sides, I looked at my grandfather. “Tell him,” he said.

I told the judge that the trout fishing had been good, and he nodded and said he’d have to get up and try it some evening soon, assuming that he’d still be welcome on my grandparents’ property after the hearing. Some of the spectators laughed out loud. But neither my grandfather nor my grandmother cracked a smile.

So far, all of the judge’s good-natured efforts to break the ice had failed.

“Now, then, folks,” Judge Allen said in a more businesslike voice, “the matter before the court today is a civil proceeding. This isn’t a criminal case. Nobody’s broken any laws or been accused of breaking any laws. Two people have had a misunderstanding and they’ve come here to iron it out in the fairest way. That’s the long and the short of it. The fact that the two litigants in disagreement are married is interesting, but it isn’t really relevant to the case.”

I glanced back at my young uncle and two little aunts. All three were rolling their eyes. My entire family knew very well that the fact that the litigants were married, and couldn’t stand each other, had everything to do with this case.

The judge picked up a sheaf of papers and fanned the air casually with them. He seemed determined to maintain a friendly air. “To put all this in the simplest terms,” he said, “the plaintiff in this case, Mrs. Abiah Kittredge of Lost Nation Township, has requested a permanent injunction to prevent the defendant, Mr. Austen Kittredge, from raising the level of his millpond. Mrs. Kittredge has alleged that raising the pond would flood out her apple orchard. Does that fairly represent your client’s contention, Mr. Barrows?”

Old Zack shoved himself partway to his feet. “Yes, Your Honor. It does.”

The judge nodded. “How many apple trees do you have in your orchard, Abiah?”

“Thirty-six,” my grandmother said. “Here’s the list.”

She walked up to the judge’s bench and slapped her written list of apple trees down in front of him.

Judge Allen read through the list, mentioning some of the names aloud. “Tetofsky, Fameuse, Smokehouse . . . I haven’t encountered these fine old varieties since I was a young rapscallion robbing Old Man Quimby’s orchard up on Anderson Hill on my way home from school in the fall.”

The judge looked at me and winked. I winked back. I liked him very much because he seemed to like both of my grandparents. Surely this amicable man could work things out between them if anyone could.

“So, Abiah, raising the level of the pond would destroy your old-fashioned apple trees?”

“It would.”

The judge looked at my grandfather. “Is this the case, Austen? You intend to flood out your wife’s apple trees, do you?”

“I intend to conduct my sawmill and lumbering operation without interference,” my grandfather said. “I’m not a rich man. If I’m to proceed with my business and keep my own head above water, I need to enlarge my pond.”

“Why is that?” the judge said with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

“Because I’ve got fifty thousand feet of softwood logs jammed in the bend just upriver, and I need to float them free, that’s why. It happens every spring. I’ve tried every other way in the world to get that timber out of there, including dynamite.”

“So we hear,” the judge said dryly. “But what about your wife’s claim? Would the enlarged pond drown out her apple trees?”

“I suspect it would,” my grandfather said. “What of it? Why should her apples be any more important than my logs?”

“I didn’t say they were,” the judge said mildly. “Or, for that matter, that they weren’t.”

Judge Allen frowned slightly. He tapped the list of old-fashioned apple trees with a long finger. Then he said, “Well, I can plainly see that there’s only one way for me to get a complete picture of this situation. That’s to drive up to Lost Nation Hollow and see for myself.”

He stood up. “This hearing will recess for the time being and reconvene this afternoon at two o’clock sharp at the Kittredge farm. That’s it for this morning, folks.”

 

By one-thirty that afternoon, cars and farm trucks lined the Hollow road all the way from our barnyard down to my Big Aunt Rose’s place.

“Your grandfather has continued to make a spectacle out of this matter,” my grandmother said to me.

Although I couldn’t see how my grandfather was to blame for it, my grandmother was right about the spectacle. Half of the village seemed to be in Lost Nation Hollow that afternoon.

Judge Allen arrived in his black Lincoln Continental at one forty-five. He was wearing ordinary clothes and a Red Sox cap, and seemed to be in a holiday mood himself. He sauntered around my grandparents’ place, complimenting my grandfather on his handsome red-and-white Ayrshires, spread out on the hillside behind the house and all facing south toward the river as if they too were curious about the feud between my grandparents. Next Judge Allen admired my grandmother’s Buff Orpington laying hens. He toured my grandfather’s vegetable garden on the north side of the road and my grandmother’s vegetable garden directly across from it. He was especially impressed by my grandmother’s Harrison yellow rose in the dooryard, and the Seven Sisters rosebush beside the back stoop.

“And I see you have a moss rose, too, Abiah,” the judge said graciously. “My Grandmother Allen had a moss rose up at the home place that was said to be over one hundred years old.”

“Are you going to permit him to flood my orchard or not?” my grandmother said.

The judge announced that he was headed for the orchard that minute, and asked my grandmother if she’d do him the honor of accompanying him. Naturally, I tagged along. On the way down through the meadow he asked if she sold the apples commercially. She told him most certainly yes, and the cider she made from them. She pointed out that the enlarged millpond would no doubt flood her vegetable garden and raspberry beds as well as her trees.

The judge looked up and down the rows of apple trees my grandmother had planted in the meadow over the past forty years. Many she’d ordered from upstate New York and Wisconsin and even Idaho—wherever cold-climate fruit trees were cultivated. The judge shook his head. “That’s a splendid sight, Abiah.”

Next Judge Allen and my grandfather and I viewed the logjam stuck in the lower bend of the oxbow. We stood on the blasted-away ledge in the inner bend of the bow, where the huge chunk of limestone tilted out into the river. Downstream a hundred yards, black water ran out around the sides of the jam, gurgling like a subterranean river.

“Can’t you twitch some of those logs free with your horses, Austen?” the judge asked.

“No, I can’t,” my grandfather said. “I wouldn’t put my team anywhere near that death trap.”

“How much timber did you say was tied up in there?”

“Fifty thousand feet.”

“Flooding this meadow is the only way to come at it?”

“We could wait for the fall rains and hope. In the meantime, I could go bankrupt.”

The judge nodded thoughtfully, and headed downstream, past the jam and the small pond above the sawmill dam. By now upward of one hundred spectators were gathered around the dam and mill. Greeting people right and left, Judge Allen seemed as much at home here as he’d been in his courtroom that morning. He strolled out onto the walkway of the dam, looked up and down the river, asked me about the best fishing holes. Were the riffles below the spillway good for brook trout? Did any big rainbow or brown trout live year-round in the pond above? He was especially interested in the small island in the middle of the pond. Was it, he wondered, ever under water? How deep was the pond off the island’s head and foot?

The crowd along the bank continued to swell. Of course Bumper Stevens was there, and old Plug Johnson and his Folding Chair Club, who had all been at the hearing earlier, and Rob Roy and my two little aunts. Only Sheriff White was conspicuously absent.

Finally the judge cleared his throat and announced loudly enough for the entire crowd to hear, “Austen, I’ll give you and Abiah a detailed written ruling in a day or two. But I know that this is a pressing matter to both of you so I don’t intend to make you wait any longer for my decision. I’ve decided to let you raise your millpond.”

A murmur ran through the crowd. Obviously, this wasn’t what they’d anticipated at all.

“For how long?” my grandfather said suspiciously. “Two days? Three? It may take a month to get that mess all out of there, even with the extra water to help do it. It may take two months. I don’t know.”

“For as long as you deem necessary,” the judge said. “Forever, if you want. That’s entirely up to you.”

A gasp went up from the crowd now. Knowing Judge Forrest Allen, they’d been expecting some sort of Solomon-like ruling, Kingdom County style: some brilliantly original compromise—permission for my grandfather to raise the pond level temporarily, say, long enough to float free at least some of the logs, without permanently harming my grandmother’s apple trees.

There had to be a catch. But where? The judge’s expression and voice were as amiable as always, his manner all the more magisterial in its casualness.

“All right,” my grandfather said. “How high then? How high can I raise the water?”

The judge shrugged. “As high as you please. Five feet, ten feet. Twenty feet if you want to.”

Now the crowd sucked in their breath in a sharp high whistle. Raising the level of the pond so much as two feet would flood out my grandmother’s orchard, not to mention her garden and raspberries. People were beginning to exclaim out loud to each other when the judge lifted his hand.

He waited for the crowd to fall silent. Then he pointed up at the island above the dam and said, “Raise your pond as high as the Tower of Babel if you’ve a mind to, Austen—on one side, and one side only, of that island. Which side is up to you.”

For about five seconds, the only noise was the low hush of the pond water dropping through the open gate in the dam. Then a sigh ran through the crowd, a collective suspiration of deep satisfaction, like the sigh of a circus crowd when the flying trapeze artist makes a death-defying catch. Judge Allen hadn’t disappointed anyone after all. As even I could now see, raising the level of the pond on one side of the island, and not the other, was an absolutely impossible feat.

Someone laughed. Then two or three others. Seconds later all the men were laughing and hooting and shaking hands with the judge and with each other, until my grandfather barked out in his sharp voice, “Hold on here, now. You fellas look as though you could use a job to keep you out of trouble. I’ll supply every manjack of you that shows up here with a pick and shovel tomorrow forenoon at six o’clock all the white mule whiskey you can drink. Until then go on back to whatever job you don’t have in the village. I want these premises cleared in five minutes.”

Now the murmuring of the crowd grew even louder. But my grandfather ripped out in a voice that meant business, “Get moving, boys. Shove!”

As the people dispersed, he jerked his head for me to follow him into the sawmill. He went straight to his office, unlocked a tall wall locker, and got out the cases containing his surveying tools: the same collapsible transit and measuring chains and metal pins that he had used years ago in Labrador and along the Canadian-American Line out West. He handed me a bundle of pins and a sixty-foot surveying chain, and went back outside with the transit, through the thinning crowd headed for their vehicles. I was half-running to keep up with him, though as yet I had no idea what under the sun he intended to do.

 

It was evening on the river. From where my grandfather and I stood, placidly fishing off the mill dam, we could see the line of survey stakes we’d set late that afternoon, marching across the closed-off neck of land at the mouth of the oxbow: the place where, for years, my grandfather had counted on the river cutting a new, straight channel some spring.

The fishing was slow. We figured that the commotion along the bank earlier in the day had put the trout down. After a while, when the bugs started to get thick, my grandfather went up to Labrador for the night and I went inside the house to read.

As the mountain dusk settled over the Farm at the end of Lost Nation Hollow, and my grandmother went about her after-supper tasks in the kitchen, she seemed more solemn and thoughtful than triumphant. Although I have no doubt at all that she equated normal human weariness with sloth—never once do I recall that she ever admitted to being tired—her dark face and eyes showed the strain of the strenuous day now coming to a close. Soon after sweeping and mopping the floor, she went into Egypt and sat quietly at her sewing table, looking at the black-and-white pictures of the pyramids and the Great Sphinx in her old magazines.

After a while I joined her there.

“Gram,” I said, “would you like to go to Egypt sometime?”

“This is Egypt,” she said. “Here.”

She made a small gesture with her hands, turning the palms up in her lap to encompass the room with its artifacts.

“I mean the real Egypt. You know. See the Nile, visit the pyramids?”

I thought of the trip my grandfather and I had planned to Labrador, in the Far North, and that gave me an idea. “Maybe we could go together,” I said.

My grandmother did not answer immediately. She sat quietly, abstracted by her own thoughts, her hands folded on her lap. Her jet-black hair shone in the lantern light. On the table next to the lantern, the Egyptian god with a hawk’s head stared at me more severely than usual, as if he suspected that I was allied with my grandfather. My grandmother reached out and touched the hawk-god, Lord Ra, as you might touch a sleeping cat or dog, and for just a moment, her features looked entirely otherworldly to me.

“Provisions have been made,” she said in a somber voice, more to the hawk than to me, “for going to Egypt.”

She paused, then said, “For afterward.”

A chill came over me, I did not quite know why. “For afterward?”

She nodded. “There will be a journey, Austen. There will be a destination. It’s all been carefully arranged.”

Without warning my grandmother reached out and seized my wrist. “When the time comes, I don’t want my wishes thwarted. However outlandish they may seem to the family. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said, though I did not, entirely. Yet it was clear that my grandmother was charging me with something of enormous importance, compared to which my grandfather’s plans for the following day were insignificant to her.

Throughout the house the twenty clocks began to strike. I was so used to them that I barely heard the cacophony of chimes, bells, bongs, and cuckoos. But my grandmother listened attentively as always, though this time with a new intensity in her expression, as though the clocks now marked her own inexorable progress toward the beginning of that chilling journey that I was somehow to safeguard when the dreadful time came.

“Bedtime, Austen,” she said when the last faint peal from the most remote second-story chamber faded into the silence of the big, dark, empty farmhouse.

 

I woke up the next morning, Saturday, not to clocks chiming but to an irregular clinking sound coming through my open bedroom window. It was just getting light. I jumped into my pants and did not stop to button my shirt before running downstairs, past my grandmother at the stove, out the kitchen door and across the barnyard.

The cows were already out in the pasture so I knew that Gramp must have come down from Labrador to milk them in the dark before dawn. I raced down through the orchard to the river above the millpond. There I found my grandfather, a lone, stark figure against the pale eastern sky, raising his pickax and lowering it, striking a stone every three or four blows—at the lower end of the row of survey pins we’d set the afternoon before.

There was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind that he intended to cut a new channel for the river, and eliminate the troublesome oxbow forever.

 

“What’s the old devil up to now?” Bumper Stevens said. He was selling cold drinks and hot dogs out of a food stand converted from a horse trailer, which he hauled around to horse pulls, fairs, and farm auctions.

“Goddamn old fool,” said Plug Johnson, who was safely out of my grandfather’s earshot. “I reckon he’s digging Ab’s grave.”

“More likely he’s digging his own,” Bumper said. “Whether he knows it or not.”

It was nine o’clock, and by now my grandfather had about thirty men helping him cut the channel. My grandmother, in the meantime, was watching through her opera glasses from the kitchen window, with a grim and resigned expression, as though she had made up her mind to let my grandfather make a fool out of himself if he was determined to. Uncle Rob had driven out from the village with my two little aunts, and when I went up to the house for a snack they were all standing around my grandmother at the window, drinking coffee.

“Your grandfather has made a Roman circus out of these proceedings,” my grandmother said to me.

“Oh, Mom, don’t be so melodramatic,” Little Aunt Klee said. “Why not just a plain circus? Why does it have to be a Roman circus?”

“I wonder if Artie and Pooch Pike will be up?” Little Aunt Freddi said.

Uncle Rob snorted. “Not if they know there are picks and shovels involved, they won’t be. Picks and shovels haven’t ever been the strong suit of the Marvelous Wonderful Pike Brothers.”

“If that isn’t a case of the pot and the kettle,” Freddi said as I went back out the door.

At the upper edge of the pond, Cousin Whiskeyjack Kittredge had set a gigantic hogshead of his white mule moonshine up on sawhorses, and was doling out free drinks in empty Coke bottles. Meanwhile my grandfather had the men divided into two crews. One was working their way up from the bottom of the row of survey pins toward the middle; the other had begun digging at the midway point of the neck of land and was working toward the top. The ground was sandy at first. Then they hit hard blue clay that had to be broken up with pickaxes. Furthermore, the two crews seemed to be engaged in a race. I overheard someone remark that in addition to the free moonshine dispensed by Cousin Whiskeyjack, each member of the winning crew would receive a quart of white mule to take home. I noticed, however, that my grandfather drank nothing at all, though I knew that he occasionally liked a small glass of brandy in the evening at Labrador.

By early afternoon the canalers were roaring and laughing and falling all over each other. Bumper Stevens and Plug Johnson were going back and forth from one crew to the other, asking to be notified when the diggers hit China, and inquiring just where they expected to hook up with the Erie Canal. My little aunts were as delighted as I was by all the excitement, and Rob said the scene begged for the brush of a Brueghel or the pen of Boccaccio, and hailed my grandfather as another Disraeli.

Only my grandmother seemed unmoved by the extraordinary events of the day. Except for watching the spectacle impassively through her opera glasses for a minute or two every now and then, she simply went about her household routines as usual until, about two o’clock, she suddenly decided to post me on the edge of a row of recently-grafted young apple trees with the strictest instructions to notify her if any of my grandfather’s intoxicants came within fifty feet of her sacred plantation; and I really believed, now that Gram knew how to shoot Gramp’s shotgun, that she would not hesitate to use it to defend her orchard if necessary.

As the day wore on it became apparent that the new channel would be completed by nightfall. It was only four feet across, and about three feet deep. But my grandfather assured me that the rerouted river rushing through would immediately enlarge its own bed. He looked off toward the west, where for the past half hour or so a bank of purple thunderheads had been building above Jay Peak. “Let’s hope that storm misses us, Austen. I don’t know if these stumblebums are quite drunk enough yet to work right through it.”

Soon the entire sky had darkened. On the slope behind the house our Ayrshires were huddled around a big elm tree. I didn’t wait to be told to run up and drive them into the barn. Every summer in Kingdom County farmers had cows killed by lightning. I could smell the rain coming as I trotted down the hill behind the Ayrshires, and they flared their nostrils and tossed their homs like western cattle about to stampede as they came into the barnyard. My grandmother was out shooing her laying hens into their house. As the cows ran past her she looked up with that same worn expression I’d noticed the night before. By the time I got the cows in their stanchions and joined my grandmother and little aunts on the porch, the first big spattering raindrops were hitting the barnyard.

A sudden gust of wind swooped in from the west, bearing the powerful fresh aroma of a summer thunderstorm. On the edge of the woods across the river the poplar leaves turned up their white undersides in the onrushing wind. A few onlookers ran for their vehicles, but my grandfather’s diggers toiled on, oblivious to the impending deluge. A vivid yellow jag of lightning flashed directly overhead. It was followed instantly by an ear-splitting explosion. Then the mountain storm struck Upper Lost Nation Hollow with a furious intensity. Sheets of lightning raced down the sky from zenith to horizon. Off to the west jagged tongues of fire leaped from peak to peak, illuminating the northern Green Mountain range all the way from Mount Mansfield deep into Canada.

Still the men dug feverishly on, as though their lives depended on it. Not even my Cousin Whiskeyjack’s white mule could possibly have accounted for their frenzy. Rob said it was sheer curiosity to see what would happen when they connected the two ditches and broke through to the river at the top end. Despite the blinding rain, now pouring out of the sky with tropical prodigality, I could see my grandfather each time the lightning flashed, his pick rising and falling steadily, at the head of the upper crew. They were less than twenty feet from the top bend in the oxbow.

As usual during a hard storm, the rain came through the farmhouse roof in a dozen different places, and my little aunts and I had to run from room to room, under my grandmother’s direction, with various domestic vessels to catch the leaks: roasting pans, chamber pots, ancient porcelain washbasins, soup tureens and gravy boats from Gram’s best china.

By five o’clock the rain had stopped. The sky was a deep, washed turquoise as I ran down through the sopping orchard grass to see how much progress the diggers had made. The two ditches had been linked in the middle, and there was just a single barrier of earth, six or eight feet in width, separating the top of the uppermost section from the river.

I was standing a few feet back from the new channel, in the wedge of meadow looped by the oxbow, when I heard a new sound. To the degree that this noise resembled any other natural noise at all, it sounded something like the big hard wind that had immediately preceded the thunderstorm being sucked whooshing back to the mountains it had come from.

At the same time, I was astonished to see the towering logjam start to rearrange itself. The water around the logs seemed to be running out of the bend into the millpond, and no more water was flowing into the oxbow. Yet the current had not yet broken through that last earthen barrier between the river and the new channel, where my grandfather and his inebriated crew were still toiling like madmen. I could not imagine where the river had gone.

Then the backward-whooshing sound was replaced by a grumbling gurgle. The throng of men in the ditch had ceased working and were looking up with an inquisitive, listening expression on their faces. Days later, after all the excitement had quieted down and my grandfather could look back dispassionately on what happened next, he said that never before in his life had he seen a gang of men go from falling-down drunk to stone-cold sober in so short a time. One moment they were listening, with that odd, faraway expression on their flushed faces, and the hard blue clay under their boots barely moist. The next thing they knew they were ankle-deep, calf-deep, knee-deep in a churning quagmire.

“Jump, boys!” my grandfather shouted. “Jump for dry land and the devil take the shovels. Quick, for your lives. The water’s coming up below us.”

He leaped out of the ditch like a man of twenty, and snatched two or three of the slower men to safety. The others came clambering out of the rushing, waist-deep water in a mad general scramble. The earth barrier was still intact, but my grandfather was right; somehow the river was cutting under it and coming up from beneath the ditch.

The grumbling sound intensified and the remaining few feet of earth between the channel and the river collapsed inward upon itself. My grandfather yanked me backward just as the grassy bank I’d been standing on gave way into the new riverbed. In seconds the narrow ditch had become a thirty-foot-wide river, whose banks continued to shear off into the brown water in chunks that must have weighed a ton apiece. Downstream, the small pond above the mill had become part of the raging river.

“Good Christ, Austen!” my grandfather shouted. “There goes my waterwheel.”

It was true. The force of the pent-up water unleashed down the new channel and on through the little pond had torn the paddle wheel that ran my grandfather’s saws loose from its moorings. I could see the thing bobbing downriver on the furious brown flood. Part of the dam was missing as well. The section where Judge Allen had stood the day before, along with a large section of the sawmill foundation, had vanished. The unsupported corner of the building now hung out into midair over the boiling penstock.

As the gigantic waterwheel approached the first bend below the mill, bobbing slowly just above the surface, I happened to glance up toward the farmhouse. My grandmother stood on the porch, her opera glasses trained downriver on the fleeing wheel, her black-clad figure diminutive and apocalyptic in the unearthly lavender light that had settled over Lost Nation in the wake of the thunderstorm. But my grandfather just nodded and made that low sardonic sound in his throat that was as close as I ever heard him come to laughing.

“It can float clear to Labrador for all I care,” he said.

That is when Uncle Rob Roy called to us. He was standing beside the bend in the oxbow, fifty or sixty feet away, and waving excitedly. At first I thought he just wanted us to see that the water had all emptied out of the marooned oxbow, and the logjam was hung high and dry. Then another man ran up beside him and shouted something about a fish. For all I knew they had discovered a record trout stranded in the old riverbed. Whatever it was, I wanted to see it before it got away.

By the time my grandfather and I arrived at the bend, half a dozen men were gathered around Uncle Rob, near the mammoth chunk of limestone Gramp had blasted loose from the ledge earlier that spring. Imbedded in the rock wall of the curve exposed by the draining water, where the chunk of ledge had toppled into the river, were the whitish bones of a gigantic fish, eighteen or twenty feet long. At first I could hardly believe my own eyes. This must be some optical trick, I thought, some illusion. A petrified tree trunk, maybe, shaped something like a fish. But as I stood gazing at this wondrous sight, I realized that it was no illusion. This was indeed the skeleton of a fish, huge beyond any fish I’d ever seen. What’s more, it was in perfect condition. It looked as though it had been swimming upstream when somehow it had been instantly frozen in time.

“Look at the Christly shark!” Bumper Stevens yelled.

“It’s not a shark, it’s a whale,” Uncle Rob shouted. “It’s a fossilized whale, thousands of years old. From when this was all an inland sea. Good God, boys, look at the thing. There isn’t a bone missing.”

Uncle Rob was right. As I examined this marvel more closely, I noted that every bone stood out distinctly, etched in the exposed wall of the bend. I was speechless, and could only stare at the great creature. It was longer than my grandfather’s farm truck, longer than the farmhouse porch, and perfect in every detail. Even the delicate white bones of its fin-like flukes were clearly etched into the limestone wall, and its long, streamlined skull, though it bore little resemblance to a human skull, looked remarkably intelligent, giving it an aspect both familiar and alien.

“It’s a whale, Dad!” Uncle Rob shouted to my grandfather.

My grandfather frowned. “I can see that,” he said. “What do you want me to do? Harpoon it?”

My grandfather looked at me. “I told you these customers used to venture up into this neck of the woods, Austen.”

By this time twenty-five or thirty men were crowded around the drained oxbow, gaping at the exposed remains of the whale. I had a nearly overpowering desire to run for my grandmother, to show her this wonder as if I’d discovered it myself. But even in the first flush of my terrific excitement, I sensed that like my grandfather, Abiah Kittredge was not one to be impressed by the old bones of a whale, especially during a major public standoff with her husband.

“By the water-walking Jesus, now, Austen,” Bumper Stevens said to my grandfather, “you can charge city fellas a dollar a throw to come here and have a gander at this gentleman. He’s a better draw than your old paddle wheel any day of the week. You’re going to make big money up here, mister man.”

“I imagine it would put up quite a little tussle on a number twelve dry fly,” my grandfather said. “How’d you like to hook into one of these Green Mountain whales some evening, Austen?”

I allowed as how I would. Yet as more and more people crowded around the oxbow to look at the Green Mountain whale, an unaccountable sadness came over me. In the aftermath of all the excitement—the river rerouting itself, the waterwheel floating away, the discovery of the whale—I felt strangely let down. Suddenly the whale looked lonely and vulnerable to me. It looked tragically out of place, trapped in the rocky bank of our little northern river, hundreds of miles from the sea. And I believe that something about it bothered my grandfather too, because so far from trying to make a profit from the whale, he donated it a few days later to the local historical society. They hired a geology professor from the state university to come up to the Farm with a group of students and remove it intact to their small museum on the second floor of the village library; and there it remained, encased in a custom-built twenty-foot glass cabinet. The last reference my grandfather made to it was the day it was taken into the village; he remarked to me that he’d seen far bigger whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on his way to Labrador, and I would too, when I turned eighteen and he took me there.

My grandmother displayed what to me was an equally unfathomable indifference toward both the whale and its ultimate removal. As far as she seemed to be concerned, it could stay or go. I don’t even recall that she ever troubled herself to walk down through the orchard to view it. Her precious fruit trees had been preserved from harm, my grandfather had sustained a sort of preliminary Waterloo when his paddle wheel washed away, and she was satisfied. Once more, she had emerged victorious in a major battle in their famous Forty Years’ War.

A few weeks later, the new power line from the village reached our farm. This was an exciting event since my grandfather would now be able to run his saws with electricity, though for some years afterward my grandmother continued not to allow electricity in the farmhouse. I personally missed the big waterwheel; but there is no doubt that the advent of electrical power in the other houses and barns up and down the Hollow made life easier in a hundred ways, at the same time that it marked a milestone in the closing of the lingering frontier era of Lost Nation.

“You can’t predict the future, Tut,” my grandmother told me many times, “but times change. That much we can count on.”

At the time, of course, I had no idea of the changes that lay ahead, for Lost Nation or myself. On the day we discovered the whale, after the crowd had all left, and my grandfather had finished his barn chores and gone back up to Labrador, my grandmother read me the story of the great flood from Genesis, then repaired to Egypt to commune with her beloved relics. I sat out in the kitchen, reading until I was sleepy. But once again, I did not fall asleep immediately that night.

Outside the slanted window of my bedroom I could hear the river running hard from the afternoon cloudburst, rushing through its new channel, bypassing the oxbow and the fossilized whale. I thought of the great waterwheel, by this time undoubtedly broken into a hundred pieces and riding north on the swollen river for Lake Memphremagog and the St. Lawrence. Semi-awake and drifting like the fragments of that wheel, drifting into and out of sleep to the sound of the river, I saw myself fishing a vast Labrador river with my grandfather, as he had promised we would when I turned eighteen.

Yet the reality that I would ever be eighteen, like the reality that my grandparents would ever grow older and die, or that I would not live on the Farm with them forever, was impossible for me to grasp. I fell asleep dreaming of seals and silvery salmon, and a lone Green Mountain whale, swimming through the sunny June sky over Lost Nation Hollow, with the river and fields and my grandparents’ house and barn lying unchanged and unchangeable beneath its swiftly passing shadow.