5

Down the Coat

The Lost Nation Atheneum, founded in 1780 by my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the fleeing Tory, was located three miles south of my grandparents’ place and about the same distance north of the county road leading into the village. An unpainted building with cedar shingles on the sides and roof, it sat at the crest of a steep hill, with a hairpin bend halfway to the bottom, known locally as the Fiddler’s Elbow. Here, surrounded by wooded hills, played-out farms, and miles of trackless mountains, I received the first eight years of my formal education.

The school proper consisted of one large room, with twenty desks. When there were more students than desks, we shared them, two kids to one desk. In the middle of the room stood a tall Round Oak stove whose most distinctive feature was a foot-long crack in its side. Ages ago someone had chunked a frozen log up against the red-hot metal, causing it to split apart like a butternut husk in a sharp fall frost, so that depending on which side of the main aisle we sat on, we could look in at the roaring flames.

Like most other country schools in those days, the Atheneum had two doors, one for boys and one for girls. Two privies squatted just inside the woods on opposite sides of the road one hundred yards or so down the hill, not far above the elbow of that imaginary fiddler. A good, steady spring ran out of a dark granite outcropping in a beech stand just behind the building, which was probably the reason my ancestor had chosen this location. In the schoolyard grew a horse chestnut tree whose leaves turned a deep umber-orange in late September. Mixed hardwoods and softwoods crowded right down to the woodshed at the back of the school.

The best feature of the schoolhouse was its southeast wall, which consisted mainly of three large windows made up of sixteen small panes apiece. Through these poured an enormous flood of light, even in the winter—which was a very good thing because, as I have already mentioned, electricity did not come to Lost Nation Hollow until 1952, when I turned ten, and the school was not electrified until 1955.

Centered over the double doors of the Lost Nation Atheneum was a plaque from Montpelier, the state capital, that said: “Superior School, 1937.” My grandfather said 1937 was probably the last time anyone from Away had ventured up into Lost Nation to inspect the Atheneum, though Kingdom County’s Superintendent of Schools, Prof Newt Chadburn, dropped by once a month or so—to make sure the roof was still on the building, my grandfather said.

During the course of any given school year, the Atheneum’s enrollment varied dramatically. Sometimes I attended school with as many as thirty other pupils. At other times, such as during potato harvesting and maple sugaring, the number of kids in attendance dropped to as few as half a dozen. Of course chores at home were never an excuse for me to stay out of school. Neither was the most severe weather. No day, however bad, was ever deemed too inclement for a Kittredge to attend school. Nor were minor childhood ailments regarded as a valid excuse to stay home. “None of my children has ever been sick a day in their lives,” my grandmother periodically announced in a way that made me strongly suspect that it would not fare well with a grandson who broke that rugged tradition. In fact, I missed only one day of school during my eight years at the Atheneum, and that was to attend the court hearing in Kingdom Common over the matter of my grandfather’s dam and my grandmother’s apple orchard.

How much I learned at the Atheneum is another matter. By the end of my sixth-grade year I’d raced through the entire curriculum, including Vermont history and elementary algebra. For the next two years I was pretty much allowed to read at random in a set of the Harvard Classics donated to the school by my Big Aunt Maiden Rose, who had taught there for fifty years, and to roam around in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, also presented to the school some years ago by my great-aunt. Prof Chadburn was kind enough to lend me books from his own extensive library, and my father, my Uncle Rob Roy, and my little aunts were forever presenting me with favorite books of their own. Certainly there are worse ways to spend one’s seventh- and eighth-grade years than by reading Dickens and Twain and accounts in the celebrated Britannica of the far-flung and exotic places I hoped someday to visit.

But I do not want to make my years at the Lost Nation Atheneum sound idyllic. They were far from it. Even during the late 1940s and on into the 1950s, most of the outlying country schools in Kingdom County still had reputations as very rough places, where the code of behavior among the pupils was quite literally a tooth for a tooth. Our school was no exception. With the prickly outer shells that fell off the horse chestnut tree in late September, we played a primitive and brutal kind of dodge ball. In the winter we fired ice balls at each other, hard and from a close range. We slid down the Fiddler’s Elbow on sheets of cardboard and, when it was crusty, on our own bottoms, sailing off the hairpin bend into a great tangle of barberry bushes with the tiny bright red berries still clinging to their thorny branches. There were quarrels and fist fights and several feuds lasting for years; and all of these activities were presided over by three entrenched bullies: Hermie Hill, Pit Santaw, and Big Bob Thompkins, who lorded over us kids in the schoolyard the way, years later, he was reported to lord over his fellow prisoners in the exercise yard of Windsor State Penitentiary.

True, some of the older students occasionally helped the younger ones with their lessons. Yet at Lost Nation there was much less of this admirable cooperative learning than I have since heard cited as one of the great merits of the one-room school—another being a close-knit family atmosphere. Maybe under the tutelage of my Big Aunt Rose such an atmosphere had existed. But if Hermie, Pit, Big Bob, and the rest of the outfit I went to school with resembled a family in any way at all, they did so only insofar as they fought tooth and nail with each other at every available opportunity.

The Atheneum could be rough on teachers as well. After my Aunt Rose retired in 1945, the school went through a long string of them, and none lasted for more than a year. I personally recall several unsuspecting young women fresh out of school themselves, and barely out of their teens, whose faces have long since blended together in my memory into a generic expression of terror. It was as if Kingdom County’s long-standing reputation as a last New England frontier and a bastion for outlawry had devolved to a few bad schoolboys, who were determined to establish their notoriety by driving Lost Nation teachers “down the road”—as we said—before they had a chance to teach us anything.

Two or three young men brought in by Prof Chadburn and the local school directors fared no better. In the late winter of my sixth-grade year, the year I was eleven, a man imported from New York State was beaten so badly by Hermie Hill and his cronies that he not only lost several teeth but the sight in his left eye as well. His successor, another of those hapless young women, was nailed up inside the girls’ privy late one April afternoon. No one discovered her until we came to school the following morning.

After Miss Fennel spent the night in the privy, the Lost Nation school directors and Prof Chadburn advertised all over the state for a teacher who could keep order. In the meantime Prof himself taught us, an arrangement very much to our liking. Prof was a vigorous man in his early sixties, and a born teacher. Every afternoon after we’d finished our recitations for the day he read to us from his own favorite authors: Charles Dudley Warner, George Peck, Booth Tarkington, Francis Parkman. He had us memorize poetry, which we actually enjoyed. At recess time Prof rolled up his sleeves and played ball with us in the schoolyard. He was a well-set-up man who had “been in the war”—which war was never clear to me at the time, though I now assume it must have been the World War I. No one sassed Prof Chadburn, not even Hermie. Prof “knew jujitsu,” and could pin the biggest boy on his back in five seconds flat.

Prof introduced friendly competition to the classroom. He conducted elaborate spelling and geography bees, with presents for the winners in every grade: boxes of Good ’n Plenties from the five-and-dime in the Common; a slightly scuffed baseball; brand-new quarters and fifty-cent pieces. Sometimes, in order to make time to visit the other eighteen schools in his district, he would let us out for the day at noon. Suddenly school had become fun. We hoped the directors would come up empty-handed in their search for a new teacher so that we could have Prof for the few remaining weeks of the school year.

One warm afternoon in early May, when the maple trees were just putting out and the hills above Lost Nation Hollow were light gold with tiny new leaves, a battered old Ford rattletrap coughed and sputtered its way up the Fiddler’s Elbow. It pulled into the schoolyard and came to a stop with a shudder beside Prof’s Buick Roadmaster. Mr. Francis Dubois, Theresa Dubois’s father and the chairman of the school board, got out. With him was a big, beefy, red-faced woman of about forty—the driver of the rattletrap.

Prof, who liked to tailor his lessons to the cycle of the seasons, happened to be helping us memorize Robert Frost’s short poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” He had just gotten us through the first two lines—“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold”—when Mr. Francis Dubois and the husky woman came through the door. She was wearing a bright green dress decorated with large purple flowers. She walked with a slight limp and carried a thick, green-handled cattle cane. In her other hand she held a very large, black metal lunch box.

“This is Mrs. Earla Armstrong,” Mr. Dubois said to us. “She’s your new teacher.”

He added, “We hired Mrs. Armstrong just this morning, Prof. I didn’t want to let her get away from us so I rode right up with her.”

Mrs. Armstrong slammed her huge lunch box down on the teacher’s desk. “I’ll take the reins from here,” she said in a deep, angry voice. “You two boys can skedaddle.”

Prof looked somewhat discomposed. But he shut up his Robert Frost book, and after a few hasty words of farewell to us, and a brief welcome to Mrs. Armstrong, he drove Mr. Dubois back off down the Hollow in his Buick. Mrs. Armstrong watched them out the window, her hands on her hips, a look of disgust on her face.

“What was that fella reading when I walked in?” she demanded after Prof and Mr. Dubois disappeared around the bend halfway down the hill.

“He was reading us a poem,” somebody said.

She nodded grimly. “I suspected as much. Well, that will be the last poetry recitation in this school for as long as I’m teacher here.”

And it is a fact that not only was that the last poetry read aloud in the Atheneum for the next two years, it was the last time anyone read us anything.

Mrs. Armstrong wrote her name on the chalkboard in large, intimidating capital letters. She turned back to face us. “My name is Armstrong,” she said. “And you’ll find that I have a strong arm.”

She surveyed the class with marked disfavor. Very deliberately, she began to roll up the sleeve of her purple-flowered dress, revealing to us an arm that resembled nothing so much as that Herculean limb depicted on the outside of the red-and-yellow baking soda box in my grandmother’s kitchen cupboard.

“So,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “Reports have it that you young rapscallions up here in the Nation put out your teachers’ eyes. Who proposes to put out my eye this morning?”

She pointed her cow cane straight at beautiful, blond, sweet-tempered Theresa Dubois. “You, girl. What’s your name?”

Theresa told her in a small, terrified voice.

“Speak up! I won’t have mumbling in my classroom.”

“Theresa Dubois, ma’am.”

“Well, Theresa Dubois. Do you propose to put out my eye?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good. Because if you do, you’ll feel the arm. You,” she said, swinging around faster than you would suppose a woman of such bulk could move. The green-handled cane was pointed straight at Johnny Pray, an undergrown little first-grader. “Do you propose to put out my eye?”

Johnny promptly burst into tears. Within seconds he was joined by most of the rest of the first- and second-graders.

“Hush!” Mrs. Armstrong commanded. “There’ll be no bawling in my schoolroom—or you’ll feel the arm.”

The crying subsided into a few stifled sobs.

“Now then,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “Report has it that you hoodlums lock up your teachers in privies. You, Kittredge . . . Where’s Kittredge?”

I was almost too astonished to raise my hand. How had she learned my name?

She peered at me out of her reddish eyes. “You’re the famous reader I’ve been told about,” she said with a sneer. “Don’t look so surprised, boy. Word travels. Reports travel. Do you intend to lock me up in the privy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No, ma’am is right,” she said. “Or you’ll feel the arm. There’ll be no favorites and no famous readers in this classroom from this minute on. My own children wouldn’t be allowed to put on such airs and you won’t, either. Not in my classroom.”

She glared around the room until her gaze came to rest on Hermie Hill. Hermie was guffawing behind his hand over my comeuppance.

To this day I do not know whether Mr. Francis Dubois had warned Mrs. Armstrong about Hermie. Allegedly, he was the boy who had put out the man teacher’s eye, and the ringleader of the kids who locked Miss Fennel in the privy. Obviously Mr. Dubois had boasted to Mrs. Armstrong about my being a famous reader. He may very well also have cautioned Mrs. Armstrong about Hermie. But there is no doubt in my mind that our new teacher must have planned something drastic from the moment she laid eyes on the bully.

Without a word she descended from the teacher’s platform and limped down the aisle to Hermie’s desk.

“Stand up,” she said.

Hermie got to his feet, still snickering. Although Hermie Hill was as tall as most men, Earla Armstrong stood eye to eye with him and outweighed him by more than fifty pounds. Total silence had fallen over the classroom.

Mrs. Armstrong slowly lifted her cane to about shoulder level. “Do you propose to lock me in the privy?” she said.

“No, ma’am,” Hermie said boldly.

“Then why are you laughing?”

“Because,” Hermie sang out loudly for the benefit of the entire class, “I misdoubt you’d fit inside it.”

Instantly Earla Armstrong struck Hermie Hill. But not with the lifted cane. The cane was a ruse to distract his attention. She struck him with her other fist, full in the face, as hard as I had ever seen anyone hit, and this in a place and at a time when fist fights were common occurrences.

Hermie went over backward. Mrs. Armstrong was on him like a cat on a mouse. She grabbed him by the shirt collar and one leg and lugged him to the boys’ door and heaved him bodily out into the schoolyard. “Don’t you ever come back here!” she shouted.

And that was the last Lost Nation Atheneum saw of Hermie Hill, and the way Mrs. Earla Armstrong established order in our school.

 

Who was this woman I was destined to go to school to for the next two years? By degrees, her story filtered down to us. In plainest terms, she was a hardworking widow from the neighboring township of Pond in the Sky, who had taught several terms of school years ago, before she was married. Her husband, Nort Armstrong, had died last year, leaving Earla with an impoverished hill farm and six kids. My Uncle Rob Roy mentioned at a Sunday dinner at the Farm that it was rumored that old Nort had succumbed to husband-beatings, but my grandfather said that more probably Nort just faded out of the picture.

It was evident to all of us from the day Mrs. Armstrong arrived with Mr. Francis Dubois, sailing into the classroom in that bright green dress overrun with big poisonous-looking purple flowers, that the school directors had not hired her for her pedagogical qualifications. It was not just that she had never graduated from high school. Many capable country teachers in those days had never attended high school a day in their lives. Earla Armstrong, however, was profoundly and militantly ignorant. More than once she boasted—with me in mind, I am sure—that she had never read a book through for pleasure in her entire life.

Mrs. Armstrong’s teaching techniques were rudimentary. She claimed to believe in the basics. What this meant is that we worked in our books for hours on end while she sat enthroned at her desk, sipping from her gigantic black thermos, which, we quickly surmised, contained something much stronger than coffee. At unpredictable intervals she descended to prowl the aisle with her cattle cane, with which she did not hesitate to thwack us, hard and repeatedly, for real or imagined offenses.

When her cane wasn’t handy, Mrs. Armstrong administered a series of esoteric lesser punishments of obscure nationalistic origin, which she claimed to have learned from watching “the Saturday night wrastling” on television during a stint as a waitress at the notorious Hapwell House in Pond in the Sky. (A bouncer was more like it, Uncle Rob said.) There was the Indian wrist burn, a corrective measure that necessitated her grasping our wrists in both her hands and rubbing them raw and red with a corrosive pipe-wrench motion. A somewhat similar operation known as the Dutch rub involved scouring her clenched fist over the sensitive spot at the crown of our heads for two or three minutes while holding us fast in a headlock and suffusing our olfactory senses with the redolence of sweat, chalkdust, and, if it was past ten o’clock, the sweetish fumes of the gin with which she laced her coffee.

“Now we will take up world geography,” Mrs. Armstrong would rip out on days when she’d had frequent recourse to the black thermos; and we would fall victim to the Chinese armlock, the Hindu neck stretch, and the Borneo thumb splint.

The most painful of these torments was the Hungarian dead finger. I have no idea where Mrs. Armstrong picked this up, but she resorted to the dead finger frequently, and with great effectiveness, particularly on the younger pupils.

“Hungarian dead finger!” she would announce, and start to shake her left wrist and fingers like a southpaw pitcher performing some sort of outlandish warm-up exercise. When her fingers were flapping loose and fast, she gripped the first two digits under her thumb, and tucked in her pinky, leaving her ring finger vibrating at a furious rate. Then she would raise her arm, turn her wrist over and outward, and deliver a vicious crack on the head to the nearest malefactor. The blow was all the more anguishing because of the hard, shiny wedding band she wore on her vibrating dead finger.

All I can say on Mrs. Armstrong’s behalf is that, her additional farm chores at home considered, she was indeed a hard worker; and that although she picked on some of us more than others, she had no favorites. Sooner or later during the course of any given week, we all came in for a dose of her sadistic brand of discipline.

“She keeps good order,” my grandfather said when I complained to him. “You have to give her that.”

His assessment more or less summarized the entire township’s attitude toward Earla Armstrong. She’d been hired to keep order and keep order she did. Hers was a roughshod, Draconian brand of government; it was tyrannical and arbitrary and often cruel. But she kept order and in the Lost Nation of my youth, that, like being a hard worker, excused a great many other shortcomings, including a teacher’s total unfitness to teach anything but fear and hatred. As I look back now on our two years under her tutelage, I believe that we pupils were a sort of Lost Nation ourselves. We were lost in a wilderness of ignorance, with no Moses to lead us out. Only Earla Armstrong.

 

One hot afternoon in the early fall of my eighth-grade year, when both of the doors of the school stood wide open, I happened to look around and see a strange boy standing in the girls’ entranceway. I put up my hand, and finally got Mrs. Armstrong’s attention. “Somebody’s at the door,” I said.

“Somebody’s at the door!” barked Mrs. Armstrong, who had a habit of repeating any announcement that surprised her, however slightly. “What do you mean, somebody’s at the door?”

“Somebody’s at the door,” I said.

The entire class’s attention was now on the strange boy. He was tall and rail-thin, with a lanky shock of coal-black hair over his forehead. Although it was exceptionally hot for September in Kingdom County, he wore a man’s suitcoat with an old-fashioned herringbone pattern. Under the coat he had on a faded blue flannel shirt and a baggy pair of suit pants with dark stripes that looked as though they’d once belonged to an undertaker. On his feet was a pair of shapeless brogans, laced with baling twine, and his pants were held up not with a belt but with a longer hank of twine. He looked to be two or three years older than me, around fifteen or sixteen. He had already started a wispy black mustache.

This was our first close look at Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme: standing in the girls’ entrance of the Lost Nation Atheneum, like a hobo on the Boston and Montreal Railroad tracks in Kingdom Common.

“Well,” Mrs. Armstrong said finally, pointing her cattle cane at the new arrival. “Just what do you think you want?”

The boy hesitated. Then in a heavy French Canadian accent he said, “I come go school, me.”

Mrs. Armstrong sighted at him over her cane like a hunter sighting in a buck deer. “Well now, Frenchy. Where do you propose to come go school, you?”

The boy shrugged. “To school,” he said. “To . . .”

Here his meager English failed him altogether. All he could do was repeat, “To school.”

“Well,” Mrs. Armstrong announced to the class. “He wants to go school.”

She heaved herself to her feet, came lurching off the teacher’s platform, and clumped down the aisle with the assistance of the ever-present cow cane. “Do you know where you’re standing?” she demanded of the boy. She thumped the floor at his feet with the tip of her cane. “You’re standing in the girls’ entryway. What are you, a boy or a girl?”

The boy shrugged again, and said something in a soft voice.

“What?” Mrs. Armstrong yelled. “What did you say to me?”

This time I heard him quite distinctly. He said, “Yes, sister.”

“Sister!” she bellowed. “Who do you think you’re calling sister, mister man? I’ll sister you.”

Mrs. Armstrong gave the strange boy in the herringbone coat a terrific shove in the chest. He backed up, but only a step or two. Mrs. Armstrong gave him another shove, pushing him out through the girls’ door. “You stay right there, sister,” she shouted. “Or go home. Stay there or go home. Until you learn you’re a boy and how to address your teacher.”

Mrs. Armstrong hitched back to her platform, slamming her cane onto the floor with each stiff step. As usual after one of her outbursts, she took a long pull from her black thermos. But even as she rammed the thermos bottle back into that leviathan of a lunch box, the strange boy was watching from the girls’ doorway.

He continued to stand there for the rest of the afternoon. Two or three times Mrs. Armstrong interrupted her recitations to say, to no one in particular, “He can wait until doomsday for all I care. Until he knows he’s a boy.”

Once, just before three-thirty dismissal, I turned around and caught the boy’s eye. And despite his outlandish appearance and the fact that he did not know fifty words of English, I sensed, then and there, the stubbornness about him that would make his subjugation the battle of Earla Armstrong’s teaching career.

 

The next day it rained hard. I slogged the three miles down the Hollow road in my long India rubber coat and rubber barn boots. When I arrived at school, there was the French boy, waiting by the girls’ entranceway. He was dressed just the same as the day before, but today the herringbone jacket was sopping wet and his hair was dripping steadily into his eyes. As I went through the boys’ entrance I quickly pointed at it, then at him.

Mrs. Armstrong was ensconced at her desk, eating a meat sandwich with ketchup on it. I didn’t know if this was her breakfast or just an early snack. No one knew such things about Mrs. Armstrong. Her ways were as different from ours as the ways of the French Canadian boy turned out to be.

“It’s you, is it?” she said. “Early again.”

In fact, I was nearly always the first to arrive at the Atheneum. Of course my grandmother packed me off to school a good half hour earlier than necessary, but also I was invariably eager to find out what happened next in whatever book I happened to be reading at school. Yet for more than a year, Mrs. Armstrong had greeted me this way, with sneering, mild incredulity: “It’s you, is it? Early again.”

She scowled at me over her sandwich. “Did you see Mr. Sister?” she said. “Right smack where he was yesterday. He can stand there until the cows come home, Sis can, if he don’t learn he’s a boy.”

I wanted to go back and tell the French boy that he was in the wrong doorway. But with Mrs. Armstrong watching every move I made, I couldn’t figure how to do it. Nor was I at all certain I could make him understand me. I slid into my seat and opened David Copperfield. David had just decided to run away from London, to his Aunt Betsy’s in Dover, and soon I was thousands of miles from Lost Nation Hollow, adrift with my young hero on the merciless high roads of nineteenth-century England.

Although it continued to rain hard, many of the arriving students preferred to wait outside in their rain gear, under the horse chestnut tree, until Mrs. Armstrong went to the vestibule and rang the bell for morning classes. I glanced back and noticed that the strange boy watched carefully as the kids filed in through separate entranceways. Mrs. Armstrong, however, slammed the doors shut behind them with a cruel finality.

In view of the driving rain, I knew that we would not have our usual outdoor nine-thirty recess. But on the pretext of getting a drink from the water bucket in the vestibule, I got up from my seat at about nine o’clock and went to the rear of the room. When I opened the boys’ door, I was not greatly surprised to discover that the French kid was standing in the entranceway.

Instantly I returned to my desk and shot up my hand. Mrs. Armstrong, in the meantime, had rooted a pickle sandwich out of her lunch box. She was preoccupied with that for some minutes and either didn’t see my hand or pretended not to. Finally she snapped out, “What is it now, Kittredge?”

“That new kid’s at the boys’ door,” I said. “The one you call Sis.”

“What of it?”

“You said when he went to the right door you’d let him in.”

“I said no such thing, Mr. District Attorney. I said when he knows he’s a boy.”

A year ago I would have been cowed. At thirteen, I stared at her hatefully, the way I had seen my grandfather stare with his pale blue eyes at his enemies in the village. Mrs. Armstrong returned to her pickle sandwich. When she looked up again I was still staring at her.

“All right, Mr. D. A.,” she told me. “Go tell Sis she can come in. She can sit with you, seeing as how you’ve appointed yourself her attorney. Find out if she can read—you’re the famous reader.”

And she gave one of the little kids standing at her desk, waiting to recite, the Hungarian dead finger on the head and returned to her sandwich.

 

I knew that my grandfather was going to town that afternoon to deliver a load of lumber from his sawmill. Shortly after school let out, he stopped for me on his way home, and we headed back up the Hollow in the driving rain. On the way we passed Sis. He was trotting along on my side of the road in his herringbone coat, hatless in the rain.

“There’s that French kid,” I said. “The kid Old Lady Armstrong calls Sis. Let’s give him a ride.”

My grandfather slammed on the brakes. I opened my door and started to shove over but the boy waved and jumped onto the back of the truck like a kid jumping onto a hay wagon.

My grandfather shook his head. “Dumb Frenchman,” he said. “He doesn’t even know enough to come in out of the rain.”

But it seemed to me that there was in my grandfather’s tone a kind of grudging admiration, as though, being a proud and stubborn man himself, he admired the stubbornness and pride in Sis’s refusal to ride up in the cab with us.

As we approached the long lane leading up to the abandoned Kerwin place, the boy banged with his hand on the top of the cab to let us know he wanted to get off. Instead of stopping, my grandfather veered off the Hollow road and rammed up the lane through deep ruts. In places the lane was under several inches of water from the flooding alder brook beside it. Water splashed high on both sides of the truck, drenching Sis as he clung to the rattling sideboards. My grandfather cursed all the way up the flooded lane, as though he were being forced at gunpoint to deliver the boy at his doorstep.

What was left of the Kerwin buildings sat on a knoll at the foot of the same ridge that curved up behind my grandparents’ farm. At one time a pasture had been cleared on the lower slope of the ridge above the barn for cows or sheep. In the years since the Kerwins had left, more than a decade ago, it had grown back up to cedars and barberry bushes, wild roses and steeplebush. Near the woods someone had recently made an effort to hack away the encroaching brush.

The barn was partly collapsed, and the farmhouse had fallen into its cellar hole. Hunkered down on the knoll, alone in the rain, the ruins looked as desolate as any of twenty or so other abandoned places up and down Lost Nation Hollow. The only sign of habitation was some dark smoke coming out of a piece of stovepipe sticking up through a shed attached to the dilapidated barn.

“Christ, Austen,” my grandfather said, “they’re living in the milk house.”

The boy jumped down and ran to my grandfather’s window to thank him. In the meantime I noticed a woman driving a black-and-white cow down off the overgrown ridge behind the barn. She wore men’s barn boots, a man’s long denim coat, and a plain gray shawl. The cow had a horse collar around its neck and was pulling what looked for all the world like the inverted hood of an antique car. As they drew closer I saw that the old car hood had been converted into a stoneboat and was loaded with rocks. The woman waved and called something to the boy. He grinned. “You come me,” he told us. “See ma mère, by da Jimminy Joe.”

“Yes, sir,” my grandfather said grimly, reaching for the truck door.

My grandfather got out, tall and stem-faced in his mackinaw jacket. I followed him and Sis across the old barnyard through the rain.

The milk house was the same size as ours at home, about twelve feet by eight feet. The air inside was smoky from a small, rusty stove like the one in the office of my grandfather’s sawmill. There were two wooden chairs, a battered wooden table, and two cots. On the table sat a loaf of dark bread and a pot of boiled potatoes. Apart from the potatoes and bread, I saw nothing at all to eat. Some old clothes were drying on a rope strung near the stove.

Overhead, the rain leaked steadily through the rotten wooden shingles of the milk house roof. It hissed on the stovetop and chimney, which was the strangest chimney I’d ever seen. It was constructed from old milk cans with the bottoms hacked off and fitted together like stovepipe joints. Yet the cracked concrete floor of the room had been swept clean, the cots were neatly made and covered with bright quilts, and at the single small window hung a pair of makeshift curtains cut out of feedsack material.

From beyond the doorway leading into the barn, someone coughed. The woman who had been driving the cow appeared. Her wet hair was as gray as her shawl. She looked nearly as old as my grandmother, and she was coughing steadily, a deep, wracking chest cough.

“Ma mère,” Sis said proudly. “Madame LaFlamme.”

“Austen Kittredge,” my grandfather said to Mrs. LaFlamme. “Your neighbor up the road. This young fella is my grandson. He goes to school with your boy.”

“School!” the woman said. “We come States so Louis go school. Me Madame LaFlamme.”

Madame LaFlamme coughed hard. I wondered if it was the smoke from the stove that made her hack that way. It stung my eyes and caused them to water. I didn’t see how people could live inside that smoke-filled milk house.

“Sit, you,” Madame LaFlamme said. “Sit.”

My grandfather shook his head and said we had to get home to chores. Then he said something in French. I knew he was uncomfortable, standing in this smoky milk house converted into a French Canadian kitchen-bedroom, trying to talk with two persons who spoke less English than he did French.

Madame LaFlamme was not about to let go of us so easily, however. She began talking in French to my grandfather with great volubility. I thought I heard her mention the words Canada and farm, and the name Stevens. My grandfather nodded once or twice. When she finally stopped, he said something in French to the boy, who nodded vigorously. Then we left.

I was very curious to learn what Madame LaFlamme had told my grandfather. Where in Canada were they from? Where was Sis’s father? And what had my grandfather told Sis? I knew better than to ask, though. I realized that my grandfather was concerned for these people; but at thirteen, I also knew him well enough to realize that his concern would very probably take the form of anger.

“How old do you think that boy is?” he finally asked me.

I shrugged. “Fifteen?”

“He’s nineteen,” my grandfather said. “Nineteen Christly years old. If he hasn’t gotten his schooling by now, I guess he isn’t about to get it. I told him to come up and see me about a job. He might better help me get up next winter’s woodpile and earn a little money before they run out of potatoes and starve.”

Immediately after we arrived home, my grandfather went striding into the barn to start chores, as angry as I’d seen him in a long time.

I said nothing to my grandmother about our visit to the LaFlammes, but after supper my grandfather brought up the subject himself. As nearly as he’d been able to determine from Mrs. LaFlamme’s rapid-fire French, she and her son had moved down to the Kingdom from somewhere not far across the border about a month ago, with the assistance of Bumper Stevens. I knew the low-down on Bumper from previous conversations between my grandparents. He was a local cattle and livestock dealer, who ran the commission sales auction barn in Kingdom Common. Over the past fifteen or so years, Bumper had bought a number of abandoned farms along the border, mostly overgrown and run-down old places he’d picked up for a song, and then placed French Canadian tenants on them. Sometimes, according to my grandfather, Bumper would sell a place outright to a Canadian family, for a small down payment, and hold the mortgage himself. Then he’d extend further credit to the family to buy cows and used machinery from his own auction barn. For Bumper, at least, these arrangements usually turned out to be lucrative. The immigrant family would reclaim the land for farming or grazing, and improve the buildings. Some who were willing to live for years on next to nothing, and maybe hold a full-time second job at the furniture mill in the Common while they built up their farms, eventually paid off their mortgages. The prosperous Ben Currier family down on the county road had gotten started in Vermont just this way. So had Francis Dubois’s family here in Lost Nation. Other Canadians imported by Bumper Stevens had been unable to meet their payments after a few years. In these instances, Bumper had not hesitated to foreclose, though rarely until the farms had been cleared and put back into operation, after which he could resell them at a tidy profit. Throughout Kingdom County, Bumper Stevens was both grudgingly admired as a shrewd businessman and widely distrusted as a man whose success derived from sharp practice.

As far as the LaFlammes went, my grandfather said that Madame LaFlamme’s husband had died two years ago. Since then they had been living with relatives. Sis was the youngest of eight children, seven of whom were grown-up girls, married or working on their own in Canada. He and his mother were trying to clear the place with the help of the lone, dried-up, black-and-white cow Bumper had supplied them with.

“What are they living on, Mr. Kittredge?” my grandmother said. “What are they eating?”

My grandfather snorted. “Spuds! Bumper sent a fella up there this past summer to put in a plot of potatoes and lure just such a brainless outfit as them down over the Line. They’re living on potatoes.”

“Potatoes!”

“Yes, damn them. Potatoes and black bread. How even a couple of dumb Frenchies believe they can get through the winter on black bread and a few sacks of potatoes is beyond me. The old woman seems to have contracted consumption. I doubt she’ll make it to December.”

“It isn’t those poor French people you should be inveighing against, it’s that double-dealing devil Stevens.”

“Stevens is a hard man, Mrs. Kittredge. I don’t deny it. But he’s fair.”

“Stevens is not fair. He’s the devil’s own agent in Kingdom County. What do you propose to do to help those folks?”

“Nothing,” my grandfather said flatly, looking at me. “Nothing at all. If I run onto a dying animal out in the woods, I don’t prolong its suffering. I won’t prolong theirs.”

I wanted to tell my grandmother that my grandfather had already offered Sis LaFlamme work, but I thought better of it.

“I intend to assist that family,” my grandmother said. “One way or another.”

“Assist away,” said my grandfather angrily. “Assistance or no assistance, they won’t last until Christmas. 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.”

 

Somehow the LaFlammes hung on at the old Kerwin place that fall. And somehow Sis continued to attend school. He did not come every day. But three or four times a week he’d show up, often late in the morning or early in the afternoon, and when he did, he always went at his lessons the way he and his mother went at clearing that old farm of rocks and brush: energetically, cheerfully, with the eternal hope of the absolutely hopeless.

The first day Mrs. Armstrong admitted Sis to the school he wrote his name in bold letters on his desk slate: LOUIS-HIPPOLYTE LAFLAMME. “Look,” he told me proudly. “Look here, by da Jimminy Joe.”

I believe that Sis could in fact read and write a little French. But English might as well have been Greek to him. He never did get a handle on it. Of course Mrs. Armstrong made him recite at her desk with the little kids, above whom he towered in his herringbone coat like a golem. “By da Jimminy Joe” was his favorite exclamation and Mrs. Armstrong took it up and hectored him with it mercilessly, as she hectored him about his mispronunciations and fantastical ragamuffin appearance. But Sis wasn’t much perturbed. He stayed at it, plugging away harder than any of us.

For my part, I now had a project apart from my reading. I spent an hour tutoring Sis in the morning and another in the afternoon, and discovered that he was quick with numbers, if not with their English names. Perhaps when it came to reading he had what today would be called a learning disability. I don’t know. He had a quick memory and memorized the first four reading books in the school word for word within a few weeks. But he was saying the words from rote, not reading. He was good at some of our schoolyard games, especially those that involved running. Sis never did learn to hit a baseball, though. We used to pitch to him by the hour just to watch his comic attempts to make contact.

He was unfailingly good-natured. “How’s the bearded lady today?” Mrs. Armstrong would greet him, and he would nod and smile and say très bon, by da Jimminy Joe. Each time he handed in a paper with his name written in those big letters at the top, LOUIS-HIPPOLYTE LAFLAMME, she’d cross it out and write SIS in its place. He smiled gamely through it all.

Sis had some spirit. One morning a week after he started at the Lost Nation Atheneum he inadvertently called Mrs. Armstrong “Sister” again—a habit he’d no doubt picked up in Canada, at the parochial school where he’d received his early education. Without warning she struck him in the arm with her cow cane. Instantly he jumped up and stepped toward her, his black eyes flashing. He said something in French, and for a moment I thought and hoped that he might knock her down. He was the one student in the school who I believe could have: a lean, hard, strong young man, toughened by years of working outdoors. Somehow he got hold of himself. And although Mrs. Armstrong had looked momentarily alarmed, she steamed right ahead with her bullying.

At thirteen, I was much more confident than I’d been even a year ago. In the absence of Hermie Hill, I’d begun to emerge as a schoolyard leader and spokesman for some of the other students. The next time Prof Chadburn dropped by, I got him aside and complained to him about Mrs. Armstrong’s treatment of Sis. He nodded sympathetically. “I know, Austen. I’ve spoken to her about it. I will again. But she keeps good order, and remember, that’s why she’s here.”

“She isn’t teaching us a damn thing, Prof, and you and I both know it,” I said hotly. “You ought to send her down the road.”

“It isn’t that simple, son. When you’re a little older, you’ll understand.” He went over to his Buick and got out a copy of John Burroughs’s Winter Sunshine and handed it to me. Prof Chadburn was a good man and a great teacher. But he was not going to rock the boat at Lost Nation Atheneum now that he finally had a teacher who could keep order. If Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme fell by the wayside, well, that was unfortunate.

Despite my grandfather’s vow to my grandmother that he would do nothing to prolong the misery of the LaFlammes, he did hire Sis to help him get up our woodpile and sugaring wood for the following year. Immediately it became apparent that Sis knew how to handle a bucksaw. My grandfather said he was as good with it as most men. I don’t know how much Gramp paid him. But he’d promised to give the LaFlammes a steer to butcher for the winter once cold weather set in, and I had the idea that this was to be the main part of Sis’s remuneration. My grandmother presented Sis with an old mackinaw that had belonged to my Uncle Rob Roy, and a pair of winter boots Rob had outgrown. She gave Mrs. LaFlamme two laying hens from our flock of Buff Orpingtons.

By mid-November Sis had bucked up all the wood we’d need for the following year. Just as he’d promised, my grandfather trucked a yearling Ayrshire steer down to the Kerwin place. He helped Sis and Madame LaFlamme stake it out on a chain behind the collapsing barn. Later that month he would come down and help them butcher it. The LaFlammes could keep half of the beef to eat through the winter, and sell half for cash to pay their rent to Bumper. Madame LaFlamme was so grateful she wept, which set off a terrible coughing spell.

My grandfather waved off their thanks and said Sis had earned the animal and then some. But as we drove back home together he shook his head and told me that all the dumb Frenchman jokes he’d ever heard must have been made up with the LaFlammes in mind, and reiterated his conviction that they would not make it through until Christmas.

 

Everything came to a head on the day before Thanksgiving. It was a gray morning, very cold, with a yellowish cast in the sky over the Canadian mountains to the north that usually meant a storm was approaching. As usual on Wednesdays, my grandfather took me to school on his way to the cheese factory with his milk. The day before, he had shot two big snow geese and hung them in the woodshed. One was for our Thanksgiving meal and the other he intended to drop off for the LaFlammes on his way back from the village. Of course he did not tell my grandmother this.

Oddly enough, Sis was waiting for us that morning at the foot of his lane. I thought he wanted a ride to school. But he began to wave his arms frantically, and he was shouting even before we stopped. Gesticulating wildly, he shouted something about the red-and-white he-cow my grandfather had given him, the chain he’d staked it with. Shouting mal, mal, he pointed up the lane and jumped onto the back of the truck, as he had that rainy afternoon two months ago when we first took him home from school. My grandfather cursed viciously as we jounced up the lane in the lumber truck. He had already begun to figure out what had happened though I was still in the dark. Mal was the word Sis used to describe his mother’s condition. Had Mrs. LaFlamme somehow been accidentally trampled by the steer? I imagined the worst.

We skidded to a stop in the dooryard, which hadn’t changed since the last time we’d been here. There were the sunken-in house and barn, the milk house with dark smoke coming out of its jury-rigged chimney. Descending the knoll above the house were Sis’s mother and the angular black-and-white cow, just where we’d first seen them, dragging the makeshift stoneboat.

On the stoneboat was something reddish-colored, with patches of white. Even before I jumped out of the truck, I recognized it. It was the Ayrshire steer my grandfather had given Sis, and it was as dead as a doornail.

The steer’s head was twisted off at an unnatural angle to its body, and one of its horns had dug a little groove partway down the hillside behind the stoneboat. As we drew near, Madame LaFlamme broke into a torrent of French. Although I did not understand a word, I gathered that somehow the steer had broken its neck.

Sis and his mother wanted my grandfather to butcher the animal on the spot, but as he angrily pointed out, it had already started to bloat. The meat was spoiled, he said. All he could do was send Bumper Stevens up with his rending truck. The dead steer was good only for dog food.

“By da Jimminy Joe!” Sis kept exclaiming. “By da Jimminy Joe!”

“By the Jimminy Joe, what do you people intend to eat this winter?” my grandfather said. “How are you going to pay your rent? This is a fine morning’s work. Go get in the truck, Austen. We have to get you to school.”

My grandfather was so mad he flung the snow goose by its big webbed feet up toward the milk house and took off without another word.

On our way down the lane it started to snow. The flakes were huge at first and there were not too many. Sis and his mother stood by the dead and bloating steer, watching us out of sight in the lightly-falling snow.

All the way down the road to school my grandfather cursed the LaFlammes. He interrupted himself only to tell me that the steer had not, as I’d supposed, pulled up its stake and bolted, then tripped on the chain. Oh, no. It was worse than that. Sis had decided the previous day to double the length of the chain in order to give the steer more grazing room. At some point during the night, after eating its fill, the animal had evidently assumed that it was free. It had begun to run and been snubbed up short by the tightened chain, no doubt breaking its neck instantly. Within an hour or so, it had started to bloat from the fresh grass in its stomach.

“Do you see what I mean now?” my grandfather said as I got out in the schoolyard. “About prolonging their misery? I hope they have a pleasant Thanksgiving. They can eat tainted beef and rotten potatoes.”

“What about the goose?” I said.

“I doubt they know enough to pluck it,” my grandfather said. “I’ve never encountered such a misbegotten outfit in all my born days, Austen. I hope you and your grandmother are satisfied at last.”

By now I was mad that my grandfather seemed to be mad at me. I hadn’t told him to help the LaFlammes, or not to help them for that matter. Fortunately, Prof Chadburn’s big black Roadmaster Buick was parked under the horse chestnut tree beside Mrs. Armstrong’s old junker. This meant that Prof was here for his monthly visit, a couple of days early because of the Thanksgiving holiday, and we would have a good morning. In the excitement of Prof’s appearance and the impending snowstorm, I’d forgotten all about the LaFlammes by the time I was inside the school building.

Prof was going over Mrs. Armstrong’s attendance and midterm pupil progress reports, which I believe he all but had to write for her. When he finished those, he listened to the little kids recite. I was engrossed in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Each time I looked up from my book, it was snowing harder. The yellow cast I’d noticed in the sky that morning seemed to have seeped into the school. The classroom was illuminated by an eerie yellow snow-light in which the black-printed letters of my pages stood out sharp and dark. Surrounded by falling snow, the schoolhouse seemed unusually quiet. The only sounds were the scratching of chalk on our desk slates, the low hiss of the woodstove, and the reciting kids.

At recess we tried to slide down the Fiddler’s Elbow on our cardboard sleds. It was snowing too hard, however, to keep a good trail packed down, so two or three other boys and I helped Prof put on his tire chains. Then we pestered him for a geography bee.

Geography bees were exciting events for us; and because it was the day before a holiday, Prof announced that this morning he would offer something special for a grand prize. From his vest pocket he produced a silver dollar: a big, heavy cartwheel, which he’d polished to a brilliant shine.

We divided into two teams and lined up on each side of the room and Prof began asking us questions out of his head. For the little kids the questions were easy at first. How many states in the Union? Name the five oceans. For us older students, the questions were much tougher, partly because Prof shared the delight of the little shavers in seeing us sit down first. Winnowing out the chaff, he called this process, and stumped me on my first try with the capital of Outer Mongolia.

“You’re such a famous reader, Kittredge,” Mrs. Armstrong piped up from her desk. “Evidently you’d best read up on your geography.”

Prof grinned at me wickedly and spun the silver dollar in his fingers like a magician.

Finally only two students remained standing: Theresa Dubois and a sixth-grade girl named Craft, with a large head inclined slightly to one side. As Theresa and the Craft girl were dueling it out, the boys’ door opened and a tall snow figure came in. It was Sis LaFlamme, and he was covered with snow from head to foot, so that he had to broom himself off in the vestibule and then stand by the stove, steaming, to warm up.

I was astonished. I couldn’t believe that Sis would come to school after the tragedy of the Ayrshire steer. I had doubted that we’d ever see him set foot in Lost Nation Atheneum again. Yet here he was, standing by the stove in that weird yellow snow-light coming through the big schoolhouse windows, in my uncle’s cast-off mackinaw that my grandmother had given him.

A minute later he slid in next to me and grinned and shrugged. It was the most eloquent shrug I’d ever seen. Life goes on, I supposed he was saying. Life goes on, by the Jimminy Joe. His sheer hope in the infinite promise of the day at hand was phenomenal, like his hope each time he picked up the Fifth Grade Reader or our splintered old Adirondack baseball bat. Dead steer or no dead steer, there wasn’t an ounce of quit to Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme.

Prof was holding up the bright silver dollar, revolving it slowly in the dull saffron light. “The capital of New Zealand,” he said.

“Wellington,” Theresa said promptly.

Prof spun the gleaming dollar high into the air, deftly picked it out of its arc, and plunked it down on Theresa’s desk. Then I saw him slip the Craft girl something on the side, a fifty-cent piece, I think.

“Lunch time,” he said. “Right, Mrs. A?”

Mrs. Armstrong consulted her watch and frowned. “We can take our nooning, I suppose.”

We ate inside at our desks, and by the time we finished, the snow had let up somewhat. We wanted Prof to stay on, go sliding with us that noon and while away the afternoon. We would get him going on the war; get him to tell us about driving army mules. But while the storm had abated and he had a chance, he wanted to make his way back down the Fiddler’s Elbow to the county road. So in a way you could say it was the weather that was to blame for what happened later that afternoon, because if Prof had stayed on with us, the day would have turned out differently. Sooner or later, though, I suppose that something bad would have happened anyway. It would be impossible to throw two persons like Earla Armstrong and Sis LaFlamme together for very long and not have something bad happen.

We got our cardboard sheets off the top of the wood in the woodshed. Except for Theresa and her little sister, Carrie, none of us had sleds. Theresa and Carrie had a Flexible Flyer, a real factory-made sled, varnished slick and shiny with the sled’s name painted on it in bright red letters, and the ironwork a fresh, gleaming black. The first couple of times down the hill were slow. We followed Prof’s dented chain treads in snow that was already six inches deep. But the Fiddler’s Elbow was so steep that by the third time down we had a bobsled ride. Of course we had little control over our cardboard toboggans. Three or four of us would crowd onto one sheet and off we’d go, rarely making it to the elbow halfway down the hill since there was nothing to hold on to but each other. To make the turn itself, you had to lean right, hard. I invariably fell off at the bend, if not before.

Sis slid, too. Nineteen years old, mustache and all, with a dead steer in his dooryard and no apparent way to get through the winter, he got a square of cardboard and slid downhill, whooping and hollering like the rest of us, happy as a clam. “Bas da côte, by da Jimminy Joel” he’d shout, and launch himself down the slope on his cardboard, usually falling off after a few yards. But he kept trying, each time yelling “Bas da côte!”—down the hill.

The sky was still hurricane yellow. I remember how Theresa’s blood-red coat stood out against that storm sky as she stood on top of the hill, getting ready to go down once more before noon recess ended. She could not have been more luminous in full, sparkling sunshine. She was beautiful, and I believe that Sis thought so too since I saw him watching her as well. She waved to us and then she was on her way down the steep pitch on her wonderful Flexible Flyer, her little sister sitting between her knees.

When they reached the elbow they leaned hard and squealed, like two girls on a fair ride. They almost made it around the bend. Then the left runner caught in Prof’s chain track, and the girls tipped too far in the opposite direction, overcompensating, and were pitched out laughing and squealing. Usually tipping over was the best part of sliding for all of us, including the girls. Pretty and smart as they were, the Dubois sisters were rugged country kids, who worked as hard at home as most of us boys. So I was surprised to see that when Theresa stood up, all snowy and red-cheeked, there was a look of horror on her face. Her hands were in her coat pockets. She yanked them out and pulled off her mittens, plunged her hands into her pockets again, brought them out empty, and burst into tears.

“My dollar’s gone,” she wailed. “My silver dollar’s gone!”

Up the hill, Mrs. Armstrong appeared in the vestibule, ringing her long-handled bell to summon us in from recess. Theresa and Carrie and I pawed frantically in the snow beside the road. But there was no time to search for the dollar. We knew that Mrs. Armstrong would be in an especially bad mood after Prof’s visit and we did not dare risk her wrath. All the way up the hill, Theresa wailed like a calf for its mother. Carrie cried because Theresa was crying, and I was almost mad enough to cry myself. I was furiously mad at Mrs. Armstrong for making me afraid to be late and at myself for being afraid.

Mrs. Armstrong stood in the vestibule between the two doors, snapping some of the younger kids in the head with the dead finger as they marched in. Theresa cried all the way by her. “Don’t come bawling to me,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “If you’re going to slide you must expect to be hurt.” She said this as though getting hurt was not only inevitable, but somehow desirable.

Theresa continued to cry all the way to her seat. Ordinarily she had a very level head, and I was somewhat surprised by her inconsolable grief. A dollar was a great deal of money to all of us in those days, but I think now that it was more the distinction of the award. To win a silver dollar—then to lose it!

“What ails that girl?” Mrs. Armstrong asked the class. “Did somebody pound her up?”

There was no answer.

Very deliberately, Mrs. Armstrong began to roll up her sleeves.

“She lost her dollar,” I said. “Nobody hurt her.”

“Lost her dollar!” Mrs. Armstrong said. “What do you mean, lost her dollar? How did she contrive to do such a heedless thing as that?”

“It—it was in my coat, and, and, and now it’s gone,” Theresa sobbed.

“I see,” Mrs. Armstrong said, though it was apparent from what she said next that she did not. “Someone has stolen your dollar.”

She picked up her cattle cane and came to the edge of her platform. “Jim Morgan, stand up. Did you steal Theresa Dubois’s silver dollar?”

“No, ma’am,” Jim said.

She looked at him hard. “Remain standing,” she said.

She surveyed the classroom. “Mary Hill, stand up. Did you steal Theresa Dubois’s silver dollar?”

Mary Hill was a tall, strapping farm girl of thirteen, Hermie’s sister. She was the least afraid of Mrs. Armstrong of any of us, but she faltered slightly when she said, “N—no, ma’am.”

“Remain standing, Mary Hill. Austen Kittredge, stand up.”

All of a sudden I was sick to death of Earla Armstrong and everything about her. I’d had it with her bullying and her ignorance and her school. I had no intention of standing up. I had no intention of submitting to her arbitrary cruelness for one more moment.

“Nobody stole the dollar,” I said. “It fell out of Theresa’s coat while we were sliding. It’s out there in the snow this minute.”

“Fell out sliding!” she said. “What do you mean it fell out sliding? Did it sprout wings and fly out of her pocket?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sure. That’s what happened.”

“Don’t you dare put a smart mouth on with me, Kittredge. You aren’t too old to feel the arm.”

“Nobody stole the dollar,” I said. “Ask Theresa.”

Just as she whirled around to confront Theresa, Sis LaFlamme burst through the door. He was covered with snow, and snow had gotten down his coat and boots and on his hair, as though he’d been burrowing in a drift. He ran straight to Theresa’s desk. “Look me,” he yelled. “Look me, I find him.”

He was holding the silver dollar.

For once in her life, Mrs. Armstrong looked utterly astonished. But she was not about to bring her inquisition to a close without claiming a victim. She had boiled all morning to see us having fun with Prof, to see him interfere with her prerogatives. No doubt she had drunk her lunch out of her thermos. She had threatened all of vis with her green-handled cow cane. Her entire reputation was at stake.

Mrs. Armstrong came bulling down off the teacher’s platform, between Sis and Theresa. “Where did you find that coin, LaFlamme?”

“I find him, me!” Sis said excitedly. “Bas da côte.”

“The coat?”

“Oui. Bas”—he hesitated to find the English word—“down da côte.”

“Down the coat?” she shouted.

He smiled, nodding rapidly. “Oui. I find him down da côte.”

Mrs. Armstrong had turned the color of Theresa’s red coat.

“Down the coat!” she shrieked. “You found the coin down in the pocket of Theresa’s coat. Why you sneaking Canuck thief. I’ll teach you to reach into other people’s coats.”

Before any of us knew what was going to happen Earla Armstrong lifted her ugly green cow cane and struck Sis LaFlamme in the left temple. The silver dollar seemed to jump out of his hand. It hit the floor and rolled straight for the Round Oak stove in the center of the room. The dollar bounced off a leg of the stove. It made its way directly back to Theresa’s desk and spun drunkenly to rest at her feet. Theresa shied away from it as though it were red-hot. Everyone in the room stared at it, horrified, as though it had been bewitched, like a coin in a fairy tale. But what was happening here in the yellow light of the Lost Nation schoolroom in the winter of 1955 was no fairy tale.

“Down da côte!” Sis bellowed out in pain and outrage and humiliation.

He pointed wildly out the window, toward the hill: the côte, where he’d found Theresa’s dollar in the snow. “Down da goddamn côte!”

Mrs. Armstrong, who understood no French, was completely out of control. “I’ll teach you to swear at me you good-for-nothing Frog.”

She raised the cane again. But Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme did not intend to be struck a second time. Before she could bring it down he leaped at her. Quick as a mink going for a trout, he wrested the cane out of her hand, broke it in two across his knee and flung the severed halves toward the stove. Then he was on his way out of the schoolroom and across the yard and up the Hollow.

Mrs. Armstrong stood staring after him for a few moments before returning to her desk. Panting hard, she went to her lunch box for the thermos and emptied it in three or four long pulls. Her hands were shaking, but she had a triumphant look on her face.

“He’ll be charged for this,” she told us. “Don’t think he won’t, the dirty little louse-ridden Frenchman. I’ll have the law on him.”

Then in a nearly friendly voice she said, “Shut that door, Kittredge. It’s storming out there.”

She was right. It had started to snow again, and the room was filled with that yellow light and a preternatural stillness. I got up and shut the door. What else was there to do?

The dollar lay in the aisle by Theresa’s desk all the afternoon. When the kids went up to the front of the room to recite, they stepped gingerly out around it, as if it were a bear trap. Just before we recessed for the day, Theresa picked it up, and on her way down the Fiddler’s Elbow, in a gesture more dramatic than prudent, she suddenly flung it as far as she could into the woods. Very probably it has remained there to this day, buried under the humus of nearly forty autumns.

There is not much more to tell about the LaFlamme family. I learned from my grandfather that Bumper Stevens charged them five dollars to come out and pick up the bloated Ayrshire steer in his truck. Without telling my grandmother, my grandfather paid Bumper the five dollars himself, but Sis never did return to the Lost Nation Atheneum after the episode with the silver dollar.

One sub-zero day in early December, on our way down the Hollow, my grandfather and I noticed that there was no smoke coming up from the Kerwin place. We left the lumber truck at the foot of the lane and walked up through the snow to check. The milk house was deserted. Even the feedsack curtains were gone from the window. Later that morning Gramp learned from Bumper that the LaFlammes had returned to Canada.

In the spring Bumper put some young stock up in the pasture Sis and his mother had started to clear. He never did find another tenant for the place, and over the next few years, it all grew back up to brush. Along with my early boyhood, the days of the self-sufficient family farm were quickly coming to a close in Kingdom County. The old abandoned homesteads were fast reverting to a state of frontier ruggedness again.

Mrs. Armstrong replaced her cane with a nondescript brown walking stick and blustered her way through the rest of the school year, but the days of her furious rampaging were over. It was as if, along with the thick green cattle cane, Sis LaFlamme had broken her spirit.

Oddly, though our school days from then on were easier, I think we half-missed the old excitement. At times she just sat at her desk and sipped out of her thermos, letting us do pretty much as we pleased. She did not return to the school after I graduated, and I heard nothing of her again for many years.

But Earla Armstrong was not yet to depart from my life altogether. In one of those entirely unpredictable and unaccountable quirks of circumstance that nonetheless, in retrospect, seem somehow inevitable, I heard from her once more. The spring I graduated from the University of Vermont—which I attended free, at the courtesy of the State of Vermont and my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge, the shrewd old Tory—my graduation picture appeared in the local paper, along with Theresa’s and, of all persons, Mary Hill’s. A few days later a card came to me in care of my grandparents’ address. It was postmarked Pond in the Sky. The handwriting was so scratchy I had trouble making it out. At first I thought it was from an ex-classmate. The writer wondered if I remembered the good old days at Lost Nation Atheneum, and asked me to stop by and visit when I was in her neck of the woods. Not until the last line did I realize who it was from. “I still watch the wrastling,” it said. “Fondly, your old teacher, Earla A. Armstrong.”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Armstrong died soon afterward. In time, I came to regret not visiting her.