8

Family Reunion

Among the hundreds of old photographs in the albums stashed away in my grandparents’ farmhouse attic, my favorites were a series of formal ensembles from Kittredge family reunions. They covered a span of many decades, dating back to some ancient tintypes of family gatherings in the 1850s. That, according to my little aunts, is when Kittredges started to range out from Lost Nation Hollow to other parts of the country, and the tradition of the annual family reunion first began.

To me, there was also a spooky quality about these photographs. It was always a trifle unsettling to come face to face with the likenesses of my older relatives when they were young. My grandfather at twelve bore an uncanny resemblance to Rob Roy at about the same age in a reunion photo taken thirty years later. And here in several pictures was my father, tall for his age and athletic-looking, his expression studious and rather impatient, as though waiting for that moment when he could leave the Farm for the university. My grandmother, for her part, was instantly recognizable by her tiny stature, black dress, and stem visage. In fact, she looked almost totally unchanged over nearly half a century of reunions; that, at least, was reassuring.

The Kittredge family reunion photographs were usually taken in the dooryard of the Home Place, as my Big Aunt Maiden Rose’s farm a quarter mile down the Hollow from my grandparents’ place was called. Family members arrayed themselves on and in front of the porch, some standing, some leaning against the four wooden porch posts, some sitting in canvas camp chairs. The kids were sprawled on the grass or perched on the porch railing. It was disconcerting to me to note, however, the photographs of some of these same kids laid out in state in coffins in a special section in my grandmother’s Doomsday Book.

Of course the further back toward the turn of the century the reunion photographs went, the fewer people I recognized. At the same time, the pre-twentieth-century reunions were much larger. A typical tintype from 1885 showed one hundred and ten Kittredges and in-laws. By the late 1940s, when I first began appearing in the photographs, we were down to a mere thirty-five.

My little aunts, Klee and Freddi, were as interested in the family reunion photographs as I was. Right up to my early teens, they loved nothing better than to whisk me off to the big, square, multi-windowed cupola atop the farmhouse, where for hours on end they brushed one another’s gorgeous long hair in the sunlight and conducted lengthy genealogical explanations of who was who in the old photographs, always laying the strongest emphasis on the unpleasant secrets of our more unusual Kittredge forebears. In fact, Freddi and Klee seemed hell-bent to divulge every family horror imaginable during our Sunday School lessons in the cupola.

“Here’s your Great-Grandpa Gleason Kittredge again, Austen. Grandpa Gleason was the gentleman firmer of the family. He sat around the house for fifty years in a white shirt and necktie, and carried that swirly-colored glass cane you’ve seen down at the Home Place in the parlor, and never did a tap of work in his life. This was taken about a year before he went mad and tried to blow up the farmhouse and had to be confined in the cedar-pole cage in Maiden Rose’s attic.”

“Here’s our Great-Uncle Cy. Great-Grandpa Gleason’s brother. He taught classics at the state university until he went round the bend. We called him Cyrus the Great, remember, Klee? That’s who he thought he was those last years of his life.”

On they went, in hushed and delighted tones. My grandfather’s first appearance in a reunion photograph—a toddler in one of the odd white dresses children of both sexes wore in those days—reminded my little aunts of yet another family scandal. In fact, it was Freddi and Klee, during one of our Sunday School lessons, who first revealed to me my grandfather’s mysterious origin as a foundling, and the true significance of the ritual in which he informed me that the meanest old bastard in Kingdom County lived on our farm, never failing to enjoin me to remember that I had heard it first from him. According to my little aunts, my grandfather had been discovered as a newborn baby on the farmhouse porch of Maiden Rose’s Home Place in a California orange crate. The crate was lined with an old coat, my aunts said, to which was pinned a note consisting of the following two lines:

 

“Take me in and treat me well

For within this house doth my parent dwell.”

 

Hence the ironical piquancy of my grandfather’s frequent meanest-old-bastard declaration to me; and my little aunts’ conspiratorial intimation that since Maiden Rose had immediately come home from college to care for my foundling grandfather, she might actually be that unnamed parent in the note found with the baby. “It would certainly account for Aunt Rose’s harsh treatment of him,” Klee said.

Nor, during our perusals of the family reunion photographs, did my melodramatic little aunts neglect to point out my Big Aunt Maiden Rose Kittredge’s ex-student at the Lost Nation Atheneum, and dear friend and bosom companion, April Mae Swanson. After losing both parents while she was still in school, April Mae had lived with Maiden Rose on the Home Place for twenty years, until her own early death in 1920. Long before I had the faintest glimmering what the term implied, my aunts gleefully whispered to me that April Mae had also been Maiden Rose’s lover. “If you’re going to be heard from, Austen,” they frequently told me in order to justify such unusual disclosures to an eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old, “you must know all the family history.”

As I entered my teenage years and enrolled at the Kingdom Common Academy, continuing to stay with my grandparents in Lost Nation, I visited my Big Aunt Maiden Rose frequently, helping her get in firewood and shoveling out her dooryard in the winter, though far less from the goodness of my heart than because my grandparents insisted that I do so. After Maiden Rose’s eyesight began to fail in her eighties, I stopped by two or three evenings a week to read aloud to her. She especially liked Shakespeare; and sometimes as I sat under her critical pale blue gaze at the beautiful applewood table in her kitchen, reading the wonderful old plays to her, she’d get out a shoebox of letters April Mae had written to her from Boston, where April had attended college for a year.

In the reunion pictures, April always looked like a student, smallish with a pretty face. She was buried in the Kittredge family graveyard above the Home Place, and each fall when Gramp and I cut balsam boughs to bank the outside foundation of our farmhouse and Maiden Rose’s, we cut an extra load for Rose to weave into a thick evergreen grave-blanket to put over April’s plot for winter.

“Maiden Rose never fully recovered from April Mae’s death,” my little aunts told me. “It was a tragic blow to her, Austen. You must take that into account when she seems bad-tempered to you.”

“Daughters!” my grandmother called sharply up the cupola stairs from the attic below. “You, Cleopatra and Nefertiti! What are you filling Tut’s head with up there?”

“Just a little Sunday School lesson, Mom,” my little aunts would call back down; and as soon as Gram’s footsteps retreated, they’d launch into yet another sensational saga.

“Who’s this?” I asked one afternoon when I was about seven. I pointed at a long-haired, handsome young woman astride one of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose’s matched team of Morgan horses, Henry David and Ralph Waldo. The young woman on the horse was partway up the hillside pasture behind Rose’s place, in the background of a reunion photograph.

“We’ve been waiting for you to ask us about her, Austen.” Freddi said. “That’s Great-Aunt Liz.”

She and Klee exchanged a deeply significant look, then nodded. “The bank robber!” they said almost in unison.

 

Over the next several years, I heard many wonderful stories about my Great-Aunt Liz. Liz was my grandfather’s and Maiden Rose’s younger sister by my Great-Grandfather Gleason’s second wife. She’d been married four times—four times that Klee and Freddi knew of, that is. She was a celebrated practical joker, an expert horsewoman and markswoman, and, since the age of sixteen, when she’d run away from home for the first time, she had conducted a passionate love affair with the American West.

Of all my independent-minded relatives, Aunt Liz was universally agreed upon to be the most so. She had even refused to have her picture taken from the age of four, covering her face or running away from the camera. And from her boldly-curious expression in the single extant snapshot we owned of her as an adult, sitting on the Morgan in the far background of the family reunion assemblage, it seemed that she had no earthly idea that she, too, would appear in that photograph.

As I grew older, I learned to take some of Freddi and Klee’s tales with a grain of salt. Not that they told me any outright untruths in our Sunday School lessons. But both of my little aunts were inveterate embellishers who knew all about how to make a good story better in the telling. Yet when it came to Aunt Liz and the bank robbery, most of the other grownups I knew would tell me exactly the same story. On May 13, 1941, around noon, a single masked bandit of about Liz’s build, wielding a pearl-handled revolver, had held up the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Bank of Kingdom Common, and gotten away scot-free with slightly over forty-two thousand dollars. My little aunts professed to believe that Liz had buried the loot somewhere on Maiden Rose’s or my grandparents’ farm before going West again the next year, intending to return for it at some point in the future. The fact that she had not done so in almost fifteen years somehow enhanced the story. As for Liz herself, she was already something of a myth, at least in Kingdom County, even before the supposed robbery. Year after year, my fondest hope was that she would someday return to the Hollow in a blaze of glory, so that I could meet this family legend face to face.

After I moved up to Lost Nation to live with my grandparents, I began to make my own appearance in the annual reunion photographs. By the late 1940s the reunions had become peripatetic affairs, stretching out over the entire length of the Hollow, like medieval fairs. They officially began around ten in the morning with the solemn ritual of visiting and cleaning the small family graveyard on the hill above the Home Place, followed by the big noon picnic at my grandparents’. In mid-afternoon, activities shifted to the ball diamond behind Cousin Clarence’s store at the foot of the Hollow, for the family baseball game. We reconvened around seven at the Home Place for Rose’s traditional Elizabethan festival, in which my scholarly great-aunt produced, directed, and starred in an abridged version of a different Shakespeare play each year. The reunions ended with a com roast and sugar-on-snow party and dance at the schoolhouse. Throughout the day, some of the men relatives slipped down to Cousin Whiskeyjack Kittredge’s barn to sample his latest batch of white mule moonshine; and any kids who wanted to were welcome to visit my grandfather, who, characteristically, spent the day working at his sawmill or up in the woods.

The family reunion was always slated for the second Saturday of August. Invitations were sent out by Maiden Rose, who also dispatched a hundred or so special summonses to her ex-students and other interested community members, to attend the Shakespeare play and the party afterward. In the summer of 1957, however, the summer I turned fifteen, the future of the annual family reunion was uncertain. At eighty-four, beset by near blindness and rheumatoid arthritis, Maiden Rose was bowed over almost into a hoop. She now required two canes to walk; and while there was no outright talk about canceling future reunions, there were telling hints.

The play Maiden Rose had selected for presentation that summer was The Tempest. Naturally my great-aunt cast herself in the role of the ancient magician Prospero, and at the auditions in mid-July, Little Aunt Freddi tearfully told Klee and me that when Prospero put aside his book of spells at the end of the play, it would signify the finality of both Maiden Rose’s reign on the Home Place as the dowager empress of the Kittredge family, and of the tradition of the family reunions themselves.

As far as the Elizabethan festival went, I could only hope that Freddi was right. For although I had nothing much against the reunions themselves, I despised being dragooned into acting in those plays. I knew, however, that there was no way of weaseling out of this onerous family obligation, and only prayed that I would not have to act the part of a girl or woman. As the ’57 reunion approached, I was somewhat encouraged to discover that there was only one female part in The Tempest. But at the audition I had a few very bad moments, fearing I might be tapped for Ariel, which I instantly recognized as the sort of sexually ambiguous role that some malign fate would delight in reserving for a boy of fifteen. Two summers ago I’d been forced to prance around as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; as a result, I have looked unkindly on that lark of a play ever since.

Fortunately, Ariel was snapped right up by Klee, whose beauty was still quite boyish. Miranda went to lovely, brown-eyed Freddi; young Ferdinand to Jim Kinneson from Kingdom Common; and the monster Caliban, whose lines Maiden Rose had cut to a few manageable surly rejoinders, to our moonshining Cousin Whiskeyjack. I got off lightly with the Boatswain’s part.

The rehearsals proceeded smoothly. Three or four times a week we convened after supper at the high drive behind Maiden Rose’s hay barn, where the Home Place pastures sloped up sharply on three sides to form a natural amphitheater. Rose’s shortened version of the play took about forty-five minutes to perform; and under her exacting direction, there was no doubt that, as Editor Charles Kinneson invariably put it in his review of her productions in The Kingdom County Monitor, Maiden Rose Kittredge would once again present “the most spirited summer Shakespeare in all Lost Nation Hollow.”

 

A few days before the reunion, I helped Maiden Rose convert the high drive and entryway of the hay barn into a makeshift stage for the play. Also I let her use me as a tailor’s dummy while she put the finishing touches on this year’s costumes, including her own fantastical magician’s cloak. And although nothing I did, then or ever, was quite right so far as my elderly aunt was concerned, we somehow got through that week together without a blowup.

Then on the evening before the big event something happened to put the 1957 reunion in an entirely different light. It was the totally unanticipated and unannounced arrival in Kingdom Common, on the seven-ten p.m. passenger train from Montreal and points west, of my Great-Aunt Liz, the alleged bank robber.

I was the only one at home when she called the Farm to say she’d arrived and needed a ride out to Maiden Rose’s. My grandfather was up at Labrador, my grandmother was blackberrying in the cut-over woods upriver in Idaho, my little aunts, who by then were living in New York, had not arrived yet, and Uncle Rob, having graduated from college at last, was off in Alaska working for a newspaper.

“Who’s this?” Liz demanded, and her voice was very sharp and very good-humored. “You don’t sound at all like my brother Austen.”

“This is Austen’s grandson, Austen.”

“Well, Austen’s grandson, Austen. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Can you drive?”

Of course I could drive. Every farm boy in Kingdom Country could drive long before he turned fifteen.

“Then leave a note on the kitchen table and come fetch me home, Austen’s grandson,” my great-aunt said. “I’d hitchhike, but I’ve got too much baggage. Don’t hurry. I’ll be right here when you arrive, and you won’t mistake me for anyone else. I seem to be the only accused bank robber in town this evening.”

 

Although I’d never done it alone before, I had no trouble driving the truck into the Common. I expected, I suppose, a slender cowgirl, maybe looking boldly curious as she had in the single picture I’d seen of her. But although at fifty-five my Great-Aunt Liz Kittredge looked scarcely forty, it was an older-appearing, stronger-featured, and stockier woman I found waiting for me in the village, with long straight auburn-red hair, long legs like a cowboy, an outdoors complexion, and the same pale blue, assessing eyes of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose and my grandfather. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a fringed leather jacket over a sky-blue western-style shirt and an off-tan-colored cowboy hat. Next to her in the station waiting room were several worn, old-fashioned carpetbags with wooden handles, and two expensive-looking leather saddles. So my first impression of my Great-Aunt Liz was that she was definitely a woman of the West, of open spaces and horses and cowboys.

“Now throw a saddle over your shoulder, and grab two or three of these sorry excuses for valises and let’s get out in the country,” Aunt Liz said. “You’ve heard the old saw: God made the country, man made the city, and the devil made small towns. It’s true, Austen’s grandson, Austen. Let’s vamoose.”

Meeting Aunt Liz was like encountering a fresh gust of wind right off the high plains of Montana, a sage-laden, invigorating blast of the frontier. I was all the more delighted, and a little awe-stricken too, when as we left the station with her luggage I saw the unmistakable pearly-white handle of a revolver sticking out of her jacket pocket.

Something about my great-aunt’s wonderfully assured manner inspired a latent boldness in me. As we headed out into the summer dusk, I surprised myself by saying, “Did you really rob the bank, Aunt Liz?”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “to tell you the honest truth, I considered doing so more than once.”

“So the loot isn’t buried up in the Hollow?”

“Austen,” she said, heaving one of the saddles up into the back of the truck, “you put me in mind of myself at your age. Back before I learned that the best way to find out what I wanted to know was not to ask too many questions. For the time being I’ll tell you just this and no more. I’ve come back to get something I left here a long time ago. Now I’ve got a question for you. How’s Maiden Rose?”

“She’s pretty crippled up,” I said, starting the truck and heading out toward the county road. “But you know Aunt Rose. She’s tough.”

“Yes, she is,” Liz said soberly. “You drive very well, by the way.”

“I don’t have my license yet.”

“Neither do I,” Liz laughed. “And I’ve driven all over the country without one. You and I have a lot in common, Austen. We’re going to be close compadres, my boy.”

 

Reunion day dawned clear as a bell, a beautiful blue summer morning in the hills of northern Vermont. My grandmother had been up since long before dawn, working in the summer kitchen preparing for the huge midday picnic after the family grave-cleaning. Klee, Freddi, and my grandmother’s jovial younger sister from Boston, my Great-Aunt Helen, were helping Gram and laughing at Aunt Helen’s irreverent jokes. My grandfather, for his part, had gone to the woods immediately after barn chores, as he did on all family holidays.

Right after breakfast my grandmother sent me down to the Home Place to ask Maiden Rose if one o’clock was a good time for the picnic dinner, and whether she needed any help from my little aunts or me. When I arrived, Rose was transplanting some purple pansies growing in the center of the big millstone that served as her porch step. She was bent down so low she didn’t need to stoop to dig up the flowers. I was actually afraid that she might topple over onto the millstone face-first, and offered to help, but she shooed me away.

“One o’clock is fine,” she said. “No, I don’t want the nieces here yet. They’d just be in the way. Have you seen Liz this morning? She seems to have sneaked off someplace.”

I hadn’t.

“Do you know your lines for the play tonight?”

I said I believed I did.

“I hope so,” Rose said. “It wouldn’t do to forget them in front of half the county. Your father never forgot his lines. I could trust him with a substantial part by the time he was your age.”

“Well,” I said.

“What did Liz say about me yesterday evening when you fetched her up from the village?”

“Nothing. We talked about Montana.”

“Your Great-Aunt Maiden Rose knows better than that, Austen. What did she say about me? About the family? Is she going to stay on?”

“I hope so,” I said. “I like her a lot. Maybe it would be nice for you, too.”

My aunt picked up her two canes and straightened up as far as she could. “You don’t know much about loneliness, do you, Austen? Not yet. I hope you never have to find out.”

“Are you lonely, Aunt?”

“Yes,” she said without a speck of self-pity, indeed with a certain terrible, grim satisfaction. “Since April Mae Swanson died I’ve not had an unlonely hour in my life. Oh, I hold no brief for myself. I’ve been a hard woman, and I know it. But not unlonely. Now I don’t even know whether I can drag myself up to clean April’s grave this morning.”

“I’ll do that for you, Aunt.”

“Don’t you touch it!” she said. “Don’t you lay a finger on it.”

“I’m sorry you’re lonely, Aunt. I’ll help you up to the graveyard.”

“You needn’t trouble yourself about it,” she said. “You needn’t condescend to feel sorry for me, boy. I won’t have it.”

Then why did you say you were lonely? I wanted to shout. But I didn’t.

“Aunt, would you not be lonely if Liz stayed on in Lost Nation?”

“It wouldn’t matter in the least one way or the other.”

Rose returned to her pansies, and I returned to the Farm, uneasy about what my great-aunt had told me. How, I wondered, could she manage to get through another winter, even with my help? I could cut and stack her wood and fill her woodbox morning and night, as I had for two or three years. But in her condition could she even fetch a stick from the woodbox to the stove? Get to the outhouse? I didn’t know.

By nine o’clock, family members had begun to arrive. Dad appeared around nine-thirty, and he and I immediately set up the horseshoe stakes behind the barn. Cousin Clarence, armed with his camera, set up a two-o’clock family reunion picture and a two-thirty ball game. From his store, Clarence had brought up boxes of hot dogs, big trays of hamburger, cartons of rolls and potato chips and soda. Cousin Whiskeyjack appeared in a clean pair of denim overalls. Preacher John Wesleyan arrived in his black Sunday suit.

“Where’s your grandfather, boy?” Preacher JW demanded.

“Working up in the woods.”

“Aye,” John Wesleyan said. “He may be a blasphemer and he may be a nonbeliever, but he’s a hard worker. I’ll say that for him. In the end, though, hard work is just another vanity.”

“I’m surprised you’re willing to participate in all this frivolity today, Preacher JW,” my Great-Aunt Helen said with a look at me. “Aren’t family reunions just another vanity?”

“Nay, nay,” JW said with a good-natured grin. “I like to say grace at the noon and evening meals, ma’am. And I like the vittles!”

Lately John Wesleyan had become so stiff from his own battle with arthritis that my grandfather had to carry his saw and ax both to and from the woods for him, and the work he did there amounted to scarcely anything. More than once JW had confided to me that Gramp was as good-hearted an old devil as any he’d ever met. But then he’d shake his head and chuckle and announce that no man could be saved by good works alone.

What about Cousin Whiskeyjack, Aunt Helen wondered with great innocence, rolling her eyes at me. Did Preacher JW hope for a glorious salvation for his moonshining brother? Not by a long shot, JW said with grim pleasure.

How about Aunt Liz, I asked, trying to go Aunt Helen one better. Did she have a chance at the Great Beyond?

Preacher John Wesleyan’s eyes twinkled. “Liz will take heaven by storm with her pearl-handled revolver,” he said unexpectedly. “Or trick St. Peter into looking the other way whilst she slips past unnoticed. Liz is all right, boy. She’s all right.”

By ten o’clock most of the family had assembled. Armed with trowels and grass clippers and sickles, and with Preacher JW brandishing a great old scythe like the Grim Reaper himself, we all filed up to the Kittredge family graveyard on the knoll above Maiden Rose’s Home Place for the annual reunion-moming grave-cleaning.

To my great relief, Maiden Rose was there ahead of us. Greetings were exchanged in somber tones. “Cousin. Aunt. Brother.”

It was not a large cemetery. In all, there were one hundred and twenty-two stones, most matching the names in the old family Bible in the attic. Here lay almost all the Kittredges who had not died Away, on the other side of the hills, and I could feel their presence, grim and disapproving and eternal. The stones were granite or slate, and some were weathered so faint you could hardly read the inscriptions.

We began with Preacher JW offering up a short prayer asking that our grave-cleaning efforts be blessed, and praying for the souls of the departed. With the entire family working, it took no more than an hour to clean the graveyard and burn up the debris, and for the grown-ups, it was a surprisingly lighthearted task. No doubt the annual grave-cleaning expanded the scope of the reunion by temporarily reuniting us living family members—so few now—with our bygone ancestors. Relatives who hadn’t seen each other for a year chatted pleasantly as they grubbed up encroaching sumac and sapling chokecherries and gray birches, clipped and raked, picked up dead limbs from the row of big maples at the back of the graveyard, where Maiden Rose’s sugar bush began. As we worked, Preacher John Wesleyan led us in a few solemn old hymns: “Rock of Ages,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and so forth; and I thought what a strange sight we would have been for a stranger to come upon, singing together as we moved slowly through the remote little cemetery from the graves to the smoky bonfire, as intent upon our hundred-year-old ritual as ancient Druids.

A few of the more recent graves still had faded evergreen grave blankets on them from the past winter. These we removed and burned, leaving the graveyard once again neatly clipped and cared for, our visible link with the past. I offered to help Maiden Rose trim the grass on April’s grave, but she waved me away with her clippers. She did let me drag away the balsam blanket she’d woven last fall to protect the grave from the fierce winter storms. Then she transplanted her purple pansies into the border. Rose’s name and birthday were inscribed below April’s on the same stone. Only the date of Rose’s death had been left blank. Below their names was the simple legend, “Together at Last.”

While Rose was working on the grave she would someday share with April, no one else ventured close. The ultimate privacy of their love for one another, whatever its exact nature, was respected and honored, like the misanthropy of my grandfather and my grandmother’s unaccountable fixation with all matters Egyptian, and Liz’s wild ways. “Liz is who she is. Maiden Rose is who she is. Old Austen is who he is.” The names were interchangeable, but I must have heard the sentiment expressed a hundred times during my boyhood in the Nation.

I was commissioned to stay on for a few minutes to make sure the bonfire was completely out. As the rest of the family members moved singly and in pairs and small groups back down the hill, Rose creeping along in the rear on her two canes, solitary in her impenetrable loneliness, a figure on horseback burst out of the woods above the sugar bush. A figure in cowboy boots, a fringed vest, and a western hat. It was Liz, on Henry David, and when she reached the gate of the graveyard, she leaped off the horse, threw the reins over the iron pickets, and began to shout, her eyes blazing.

“Just as I expected. The only grave that hasn’t been properly tended up here is the only one that matters to me. Damn that sister of mine for neglecting it and damn the rest of the family for not having the grit to stand up to her.”

She was pointing at a leaning slate stone near the rear fence of the cemetery. This was the stone of her fourth husband, Foster James, who had died in Lost Nation just before Liz had gone West in 1941, sixteen years ago.

“I ought to get out my pearl-handled sidekick and hurry these so-called family members on their way,” Liz hollered, starting for the saddlebags on Henry David. She was really roaring now, and the departing relatives were looking apprehensively back over their shoulders at her—all but Maiden Rose, who continued down toward the Home Farm, one small step at a time, bent over into a cramped letter “C” on her canes.

Liz came striding up toward me. “Come, Austen,” she said, grabbing a pair of clippers. “You and I will hoe out old Foster’s grave ourselves.”

As she passed me, she winked and said, under her breath, “Diversion.”

Then she was roaring again, which she continued to do until we reached her fourth husband’s grave. What under the sun was going on, I wondered. Foster James’s grave seemed as neatly trimmed as any of the others. But Aunt Liz set to work with the clippers, meticulously cutting and pulling any slip of grass that had escaped the other cleaners, and as she worked, she talked steadily. “Husbands!” she said. “Number one I married at sixteen, shortly after I arrived in Montana the first time. His name was Hartley Stone, which was what his heart was made of, I reckon. And that’s odd, because he was the only one of the bunch I ever really loved, even though he turned out to be a skirt chaser. Off to the cathouses in Butte and Helena every time I turned my back, and then he blamed me because we didn’t have any kids. Wanted sons, he said. Well, mister man, I’ve had four sons since, all big strong capable smart fellas at that, like all the Kittredge men. So I reckon old Stony had that part of it wrong.”

Liz gave a vicious yank on a half-hidden clump of witchgrass rooted in under her fourth husband’s slate marker. “As I was saying, I’d had it with Stony. I put up with his catting longer than I should have but after three years of it, I walked out. I’d accumulated some animals, which I loaded onto a boxcar. I had a pregnant Morgan riding horse, several steers, a couple of hogs, some chickens, a goat, two mated geese, two turkeys. I lugged ’em right back to Vermont with me on that boxcar. Arrived in the middle of the night during a January blizzard.

“‘Sister, I hope you’ve learned your lesson.’ That was how Rose greeted me when I arrived.

“‘What lesson?’ I said.

“‘About men,’ Rose said. Never welcomed me home or spoke any kind word. Just told me she hoped I’d learned my lesson about men, damn her spinster tongue.”

Liz stood up and surveyed her fourth husband’s grave critically. “Well, obviously I hadn’t. I was pretty sure old Hartley Stone would write and beg for me to come back, and for several weeks I swore when he did I wouldn’t, and then I softened and said I would. But the son of a bitch never did write, Austen. I was heartbroken. So I went out and married number two, on the rebound. He was a good-looking and thoroughly good-for-nothing fella from Pond in the Sky. He was the laziest man I ever met. Born lazy and had a relapse, I used to say. One day I told him to make himself useful and take a broom out to the barn and brush down the cobwebs. That was the last I ever saw of him. So far as I know, number two’s still down at the barn, brushing cobwebs.”

Liz chuckled. “Left Vermont again. Worked as a cook at a lumber camp, nurse assistant in a hospital for the insane, housekeeper on a big estate in Connecticut. Drifted West a second time. Had my first two boys and acquired a third husband, in that order. Number three was a harmless-enough fella. Nice guy, actually. But I was leasing a small horse ranch and he was terribly afraid of horses. Finally a horse kicked him in the head and killed him on the spot. Had two more kids by then, and along waltzes husband number four, Mr. Foster James—the great-grandson of Frank James, Jesse’s brother, or so Foster claimed.”

Frank James’s great-grandson—this was almost as good as Liz robbing the bank.

“Was he really Frank James’s great-grandson?” I asked.

“Who knows? He said he was. That’s all I can tell you. That, and that he was a slick, smart customer. A gambler from over in Great Falls, somewhat older than me, with a history of trouble with the law himself. Wore a necktie every day of his life, Austen, just like my father over there, the gentleman farmer.” Liz gestured at Grampa Gleason’s tall pink granite stone on the far side of the family graveyard. “Anyway, I brought Foster East with me the last time I came, sixteen years ago, and I don’t know but what the hoorah over the bank robbery a week later was too much for him. All those F.B.I. agents swarming out here to pester me, every day, every day. Foster just keeled over in the barnyard one afternoon. That was that. That and that Rose insisted we plant him off here in the back away from her precious family like some sort of outcast.

“So,” Liz said as we started back toward the horse, “I guess you could fairly say, Austen, that I have not had good luck with husbands. I truly loved just one of the four and he was that catting son of a bitch I never heard from again. Two are dead. Two are missing and might as well be. No, sir, I haven’t had good luck with men in general, or they with me.”

She stopped by Miss April Swanson’s grave, and chuckled. “Maybe my sister had the right idea. She avoided men altogether and married a woman.”

“Did you know Miss April, Liz?”

“Oh, yes. She was a harmless little fluff of a thing. Rose rode roughshod over her, same as she tried to the rest of us. There was all kinds of talk in the village, of course, about their living arrangements, but I never made any judgments about that and neither so far as I know did the rest of the family. We figured how they lived was their business, long’s they weren’t hurting anyone else, which they weren’t. I’ve already told you who created villages.”

Liz unwound Henry David’s reins from the gate, and glanced briefly out over the hills. She shook her head. “Too many hills and not enough mountains in these parts, Austen. When I was growing up here, I used to feel closed in, hanker after bigger spaces. Narrow valleys, narrow rivers, narrow people, come to think of it. Out West they might shoot you if you cross ’em. They’re much less apt to gossip about you.”

She glanced back once more at Foster James’s grave, shook her head, gave me a wry grin. “Let’s you and me go on a ride together after the picnic dinner, Austen. I’ll meet you at Maiden Rose’s barn at two-thirty sharp.”

 

By the time I returned to my grandparents’ place, the big picnic dinner was ready. Planks from my grandfather’s mill had been set up across sawhorses, and were laden with the traditional reunion fare: potato salad, new potatoes with peas and salt pork, baked beans, mincemeat pies with home-canned venison, Cousin Clarence’s hot dogs and hamburgers. There was food enough to feed a Kittredge family reunion from fifty years ago.

After the picnic came the photography session. This was followed by foot races, games of horseshoes and flies and grounders, and wrestling. Then the venue shifted to Clarence’s baseball diamond. And although I hated to miss the big game, I was greatly looking forward to the horseback ride with Liz. A little before two-thirty, she and I started out on Henry David and Ralph. This time, however, instead of saddlebags, Henry was carrying a good-sized packbasket.

I had no idea where we were headed. Liz led the way, up a grown-up lumbering trace behind the Home Place toward the border. As we rode she continued to talk about the Kittredge family, Kingdom County, the West, and her own life. Her mirthful observations struck me as remarkably generous-minded. I thought that she must be the wisest person I’d ever known. She was opinionated without being censorious, and as curious about herself as about everyone else. “I’m as unpredictable as the old lady who had to hear what she said to find out what she thought,” Liz told me, laughing. Never in my life had I met anyone like her. She stood conventional wisdom on its head at every twist in the old military road.

“We aren’t what we do, Austen. We’re what we hope to do. We’re our dreams.”

“Be careful what you want, Austen’s grandson, Austen. It’ll probably come true. And be careful whose bed you put your shoes under.”

“Be careful what you do. Be more careful what you say. Careless words hurt a great deal longer than a quick blow.”

“Klee has a sharp tongue sometimes,” I said.

“Yes, and she gets it from Maiden Rose. It was that as much as anything else that drove your grandfather away as a boy, and later drove me away.”

“What makes her so mean? Is it being all crippled up and in pain?”

“Why, Austen. I’m surprised by you, man. Maiden Rose isn’t mean. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”

I looked at Aunt Liz to see if she was kidding. She didn’t seem to be. “But you just said she drove Gramp away when he was a kid, and you, too, later.”

“She did. But that’s not the same as saying she’s mean. Stubborn, yes. Stubborn, and ruthless too, if ruthlessness was called for. Being ruthless is how she kept the family together as long as she did. But Rose was never mean or low . . . There’s Fort Kittredge. We’ll leave the horses here.”

Ranged along the cleared strip through the woods that marked the border, all that was left of the old fort built by our Tory ancestors was a hodgepodge of shacks. Around the turn of the century, the fort had been briefly rebuilt as a tiny hamlet for a granite quarry. But the granite sheds were now just windowless hulks overrun by wild raspberry bushes. The air of desuetude about the place made it spooky, even in broad daylight.

One of the ghost hamlet’s few remaining recognizable structures was a windmill once used to pump up drinking water from a well. Most of the huge wooden blades had been shot to pieces, and even in a high wind, it no longer turned. Nonetheless, it loomed up above the second- and third-growth woods in a way I did not at all care for. Neither, for all her Wild West bravado, did Liz. “That mechanism makes my flesh creep, Austen. Always has. I used to bring my boyfriends up here after dark to scare ’em. Come over here, and watch your footing.”

Lugging the packbasket she’d brought along, Liz thrashed her way through the raspberries to the old well at the foot of the windmill. Together we heaved off the rotting wooden cover, and peered inside. She dropped a stone down and listened for the splash, but there wasn’t any. “She’s dry as a bone, down there, Austen. I won’t get my hopes up yet, but so far so good.”

From her packbasket Liz got out a bucket, a coil of clothesline rope, a short-handled shovel used to remove ashes from a woodstove, an ax and a lantern. She handed me the ax and instructed me to cut her a limber spruce pole about ten feet long. I did, and she began to probe down the mouth of the well with it. “Just as I thought,” she said. “It isn’t all that deep. Eight feet at most. Now, sir. Are you afraid of tight, dark places?”

“No,” I lied, feeling my heart start to beat faster. “Of course not.”

“Good. Some years ago I could have shinnied down there like a monkey, but I’ve added a few pounds since then. I’ll light this lantern and lower it on the rope, and you go down the pole. Don’t worry, it’s stout enough to hold two of you. When you get down there I’ll lower the bucket on another rope. I want you to fill it with leaves and dirt and such for me to pull up.”

I looked doubtfully down the shallow well. “Now don’t fret,” Liz said. “There’s no skeleton down there and it’s too dank for serpents. We’ll attach the rope to your waist and not let you get stuck in the muck. See here, we’ll lower the lantern first, test if the air’s still good. If the lamp goes out, we’ll strike for home and forget this whole harebrained enterprise.”

What had I gotten myself into, I wondered. But the lantern stayed lit, and down the spruce pole I went, into that dark hole, sure that this was where Liz had hidden the loot from the long-ago bank robbery. I was so excited to be helping her recover it that after a minute I forgot to be afraid.

I don’t know how long I dug around in the leaves and clay at the bottom of the old well. Maybe fifteen minutes, though it seemed much longer. As my aunt pulled up bucket after bucket of debris, the footing in the well started to grow mucky. I began to wonder whether we were on a fool’s errand after all.

When I’d nearly given up hope, Liz shouted, “Eureka! Here he is, Austen. We’ve found him. Skin back up that pole, man, and rejoice. We’ve done it.”

Found who? Done what? I certainly hadn’t unearthed any forty-two thousand dollars. Seconds later I was back up in the warm, fresh, green-leaf-scented summery air, and Liz was holding out her hand to show me what she’d discovered. Nestled in her palm was a thin gold ring set with a single tiny diamond. I looked from the ring to my aunt’s radiant face and back to the ring again.

“It’s my wedding band from my first marriage, Austen,” Liz said with the greatest delight. “Don’t you see?”

I saw, all right. But I didn’t understand.

“Look, man,” she said, wedging it onto the ring finger of her left hand. “It’s a tight squeeze but it still fits. Hartley Stone, my first husband, gave me this little ring when we got married. When I left him to come home to Vermont, I was going to leave it on the bedtable for him to find. But at the last minute I said to myself, no you don’t, girl, take it along with you. For as I’ve told you, Austen, I fully expected he’d come East for me in a few weeks or write begging me to come back West to him. Then it ran along a number of months, and there was no word, no word, no word, and I got madder and madder. And more and more heartbroken, too, if you want the truth, because love Stony I did. I made myself half-crazy with worry, but I was too proud to go back to him on my own. Finally one day I couldn’t stand any more. I came up here with another fella who shall remain unnamed and I took off my ring and threw it down this well. That was my mistake. I should have written to Hartley myself, you know. At least told him why I’d left. Well, I lost him. I lost the only man I ever really loved. Don’t you tell anyone, but we never did get divorced. Legally speaking, if he’s alive, we’re still yoked together. I thank you for your assistance, Austen. Now we can go back to the reunion.”

“What about the loot, Aunt Liz? From the bank robbery?”

“What about it?” Liz said. “All we can say, Austen’s grandson, Austen, is that it still hasn’t seemed to have turned up.”

On our way back to Maiden Rose’s, I felt sharply disappointed by the outcome of our expedition; but Liz was as happy as a schoolgirl. It was almost as if she’d reclaimed Hartley Stone himself and her first marriage, along with the thin little ring with the tiny inset diamond.

“It’s going to be a grand evening for Maiden Rose’s play,” Liz said as we approached the Home Place. “That’s curious. We’ve got early visitors, and it isn’t yet five o’clock.”

Below in the dooryard was a dark sedan. As we drew nearer, a tall young stranger in a suit and tie got out of the driver’s side. “Mrs. Kittredge?”

“Good evening, sir. And you are?”

“Agent Jordan Sanders, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Liz shot me a delighted look. “Why, of course,” she said. “I’d be honored to answer your questions. First, though, let me ask you one. You’ve heard of something called the statute of limitations?”

“Sure,” Agent Jordan Sanders said. “I’m quite familiar with it. Only one problem about that, Mrs. Kittredge. It doesn’t apply to federal offenses.”

“Like bank robbery?”

“Like bank robbery,” Agent Sanders said. “Shall we sit in the car?”

“Oh, no,” Liz said. “Let’s go inside the kitchen, have some coffee. My sister will want to hear this, I’m sure. I suppose you haven’t ruled her out as a suspect anyway. And”—Liz shot me another look—“she may just want to recruit you for her play.”

“Can I come in, too?” I said.

“You may not,” Maiden Rose’s harsh voice said from the porch. “Feed and water Henry and Ralph, Austen, and then go straight home. There’s no need for you to hear any of this.”

“So you’ve been out riding all day?” I heard Agent Sanders say as he and Liz headed into the kitchen.

“Yes, sir,” Liz said. Adding loudly, for my benefit I was sure, “Looking for hidden treasure.”

“Any luck?”

“You bet,” Liz said, holding out her left hand. “Look here on my ring finger. Ain’t that just about the prettiest sight you ever saw?”

 

I was terrifically excited about the appearance in Lost Nation of the F.B.I.; but now preparations were in full swing for the play, to be followed by the party at the schoolhouse. Before I knew it, I’d been recruited by my grandmother to pick several bushels of early Golden Bantam from her garden for the corn-roast.

As the sun lowered toward the Green Mountains and Jay Peak, cars began to drive up the Hollow from the county road. They belonged to spectators for Maiden Rose’s play. As they pulled into the Home Place lane, I recognized many people from the village. Zack Barrows, my grandmother’s lawyer, had come with his girlfriend, Julia Hefner. Sheriff Mason White was on hand in full uniform. Judge Allen had driven up with Mr. Roger Whitington, president of the First Farmers’ and Lumberers’ Bank. Prof Newton Chadburn, Kingdom County’s superintendent of schools, and Editor Kinneson of The Kingdom County Monitor, had come in one car with their wives.

The F.B.I. agent had evidently finished with Liz, or vice versa. Laughing and joking, she came outside onto the porch of the Home Place with him, and the instant she clapped eyes on Roger Whitington she smiled her big smile and guided the agent by his suit-jacket elbow over to him. “I presume you two gentlemen have met?” she said. “Roger, it’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you, Liz. I’d heard you were back East.”

“Evidently you weren’t the only one,” Liz said, nodding at Agent Sanders.

I was afraid the bank president and the F.B.I. agent might gang up on my great-aunt, but Mr. Whitington seemed genuinely surprised by the agent’s presence. He was very friendly, and wanted to know all about Liz’s kids. More cars arrived and people began to move around to the natural amphitheater behind Rose’s barn. Everyone seemed to be reminiscing about old times.

“This good-looking young man thinks I was up at Fort Kittredge digging up the bank robbery boodle this afternoon,” Liz told Roger as they headed toward the rear of the barn. “I haven’t entirely disabused him of the notion, but he has yet to pin me down and prove it.”

“Liz is tough to pin down,” Roger Whitington said. “But I don’t think she robbed any banks. Not around here at least.”

“There was a time when you might have pinned me down, in a manner of speaking, Roger,” Liz said. “You were one good-looking boy, I tell you true.”

“And you, Liz, are still one good-looking woman,” Roger said gallantly.

“I don’t understand this place at all,” Agent Sanders said to nobody in particular, shaking his head.

The impromptu stage occupied the entire mouth of Rose’s hay barn, at the top of the high-drive ramp leading up to the big open double doors. It was illuminated by battery-operated tractor lights. The hundred or so spectators ranged themselves around the pasture hillside, in the natural bowl above the barn, sitting in the purple shadows of the high ridge.

An expectant hush fell over the countryside, and the play began with Preacher John Wesleyan’s booming baritone narration. “On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.” From the depths of the empty old hay barn came a crashing of milk cans rolling together to simulate thunder. In a few short moments, the playgoers had been transported from an end-of-the-road Vermont hill farm to Prospero’s magical island. Once again the old Home Place began to ring with poetry, and people from throughout the Kingdom sat rapt on the disused cow pasture, swept up in the age-old themes of love and pride and vengeance and reconciliation. The most spirited summer Shakespeare in Lost Nation Hollow was off and running.

Out onto the high-drive I tore in the sailorly garb of the Boatswain. “Yare, yare!” I roared, and I did not know then, nor do I now, what under the sun “yare” meant. Arrayed in her gauzy white dress, Freddi, as beautiful Miranda, pleaded with her father to allay the troubled waters. Maiden Rose was magnificent in the role of the exiled old magician, ancient and bent-over though she was. Her dark gown was embellished with silver stars and golden moons and suns. For a magic wand she used Great-Grandpa Gleason’s multicolored glass Walking stick, a family heirloom dating back one hundred years. Cousin Whiskeyjack came slinking up from under the high drive as a backwoods Caliban, all slouch hat and whiskers and ratty old lumber jacket; and to this day, my Little Aunt Klee remains the most acrobatic and winning Ariel I have ever seen.

As always, though, the premier performance was Rose’s. When her Prospero announced his intention to “retire to Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave,” she paused and stared out over the audience, up toward the dark family burying ground and beyond, as if into some private realm she would soon share with her beloved April. On her face was an expression both tragic and hopeful. And with no warning she lifted my great-grandfather’s colored glass walking stick to her waist and brought it sharply down on the plank floor of the high-drive, showering the air with flying bits of brilliant glass.

 

There was a stunned pause. Then one by one the spectators ranged around the dark pasture stood in a prolonged ovation.

Talking in hushed tones, the crowd began to head for their cars, to remove to the schoolhouse for the corn-roast, sugar-on-snow party, and dance. I tagged along beside Liz.

“Well, Austen,” she said, “that was very fine. Very fine indeed.”

The F.B.I. agent and Mr. Roger Whitington were right behind us. “I wouldn’t have believed all this if I hadn’t seen it,” Agent Sanders said quietly to Mr. Whitington. “I’m going back to Boston. These people didn’t rob any banks.”

Liz laughed and turned around. “Well, sir, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, and now I’ll bid you good night. Unless you’d like me to save you a dance down at the schoolhouse.”

By the time Liz and I got out in the barnyard the agent was gone, along with many of the relatives and play spectators. It was quiet after all the bustle of the play. I wanted to get right down to the schoolhouse party myself, but Liz glanced through the kitchen window and saw Maiden Rose sitting alone at the table, still dressed in Prospero’s cloak, her long gray hair unpinned and flowing down on her shoulders. “I don’t like to leave Rose alone here like this, Austen. She’s alone enough of the time as is. Let’s get her to come along to the dance with us.”

I did not at all want to go inside and try to persuade Maiden Rose to come to the schoolhouse party. In a few minutes Cousin Clarence would be tuning up his fiddle while his wife banged away at the old black upright school piano. I wanted to dance with Theresa Dubois, taste the delicious cold sweetness of maple syrup on snow that had been preserved in my grandfather’s icehouse from last winter, eat half a dozen of my grandmother’s donuts. Maybe later I’d sneak up to Cousin Whiskeyjack’s to watch the men drink white mule moonshine.

“Come,” Liz said.

At the applewood kitchen table, Maiden Rose was riffling through her long shoebox of old letters from April Mae Swanson. Liz and I sat down at the table, around which Maiden Rose had grilled and drilled three generations of Kittredges, including me, in grammar, arithmetic, spelling. Liz shot a warning glance at me out from under the cowboy hat. She’d spotted April’s return address on the envelopes, too.

“Sister,” Rose said wearily, “this is not one of your Wild West cafes. I’m obliged to ask you to check your firearm before you join me here.”

Liz grinned and took her pearl-handled revolver out of her jacket pocket and placed it on a shelf behind the stove.

“Well, sister,” Rose said, “where did you find your old bauble?” She was looking at Liz’s wedding ring from Hartley Stone.

Again Liz darted a glance at me. “I and Austen here found it where I lost it, many years ago. Up at Fort Kittredge.”

“Better by far that it had stayed there. Surely you don’t intend to wear it again?”

“Of course I intend to wear it. As a token of what Hartley and I once had between us, if nothing else.”

“As a token of your mistreatment at the hand of that good-for-nothing, you mean.” Rose’s eyes snapped angrily. Despite Prospero’s astrological gown she now looked just exactly like Maiden Rose again.

“He’s still my husband,” Liz said. “I intend to wear it. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Why?” Maiden Rose said. “Because he was cruel to you. Because he was a faithless drunkard. Have you forgotten? Your memory’s far too short, sister.”

“Yours is too long. All that happened years ago. Times change.”

“Times may. People do not.”

“Maybe not. What difference does it make? I loved him, and still do today. You of all people ought to understand that. You too have loved, sister.”

“Yes. A pure love fully requited, tenderly repaid a thousand thousand times. My love has endured for fifty years and more, even beyond the grave.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Liz said, and abruptly stood up.

“Where are you going, sister?” Maiden Rose sounded alarmed.

“To Hartley,” Liz said. “If he’s alive, I intend to find him. You’ve yourself to thank for helping me make up my mind.”

“He’ll break your heart again,” Maiden Rose said, rising and holding the table for support. “All your men were weak, miserable. He was the worst. You’re betraying yourself.”

Now Liz no longer looked angry. She just looked determined, as she must have looked forty years ago, a girl of sixteen, heading West with her cardboard suitcase. “Maybe I am, sister. I’ll admit that I’m doing this against my better judgment. But if I’d relied on that all my life, where would I be? A retired schoolteacher in Lost Nation, maybe. Look here. Come with me. Or join me in the West, whether I find Hartley or no. We’ll make a life for ourselves.”

Maiden Rose shook her head. “You know I can’t do that. This is beyond stubbornness.”

“Who are you, Maiden Rose, to read me a lecture on stubbornness? Austen, fetch your grandfather’s truck down here. I want you to take me to the railroad station straightaway.”

 

By the time I’d left a note on the table up at my grandparents’ farmhouse saying where I’d be, and gotten back with the truck, Liz was waiting on the porch with her carpetbags. This time she had only one saddle. “The other’s yours, Austen,” she said. “It’s in the harness room. Take good care of it.”

I was astonished, nearly overcome by her generosity. But she waved off my thanks, already talking, talking, talking, the perpetual commentary on her life and times unfolding as we headed down the Hollow road.

“You’ll note that I neither said good-bye to my sister nor looked back, not that there’s that much to see,” Liz said. “No, Austen, the Home Place is as empty now as the old wizard’s island in Rose’s play. There’s nothing to detain me any longer, if there ever was. I figure I’ve got just enough vigor left to find that old son of a bitch Hartley, assuming he’s still in the land of the living.”

I hated to see Liz go. For me this had been by far the most memorable reunion ever. Then we were driving by the lighted schoolhouse where the sugar-on-snow party was going on. I could hear Cousin Clarence’s fiddle and the deep thum-thum-thum of his wife playing chords on the old piano. I caught a glimpse of Theresa Dubois’s bright blond head through the windows; but I felt proud to be with my aunt. There would be other schoolhouse junkets, other dances.

Liz launched into more stories, and before I knew it we were in the Common, unloading her carpetbags and saddle at the station.

It was nearly twelve o’clock now. According to Percy Fennel, the old stationmaster, the Midnight Flyer to Montreal and points west was on schedule. There wasn’t much time for good-byes, even if Liz had believed in them.

“Where will you look for Hartley, Aunt?” I said as we waited together on the dark platform.

“The same place I looked for his ring, of course.”

I was puzzled. “At Fort Kittredge?”

“No. Where I lost him. Back in Butte. If he ain’t there, I’ll trace him on to the next town. He was a drifter, old Stony, but he had people in Butte. If he’s alive, I’ll run him down.”

From a mile south of town, the Flyer hooted, and Liz shook her head. “Human nature is a strange commodity, Austen. Here stand I on a railway platform, excited to be boarding the train and heading West, yet already missing Lost Nation and the Home Place and, yes, missing Maiden Rose, too. Not so much as I’ve missed that sneaking coyote Hartley, though. This time if he goes to catting on me, he’ll deal with my—Damn, Austen!”

“What’s wrong?”

“My revolver’s back on the shelf behind Rose’s stove. I feel downright naked without it. Well, it can’t be helped. Have your grandfather unload it and pack it in excelsior and ship it to me in Butte, general delivery. That’s where I’ll land first. Will you remember to do that straightaway when you get home?”

I said I would. She held out her hand and we shook hands on the station platform and she clapped me on the back. “Now, Austen. Instead of good-bye, I’ll say visit me out West when you can. I’ve enjoyed our time together, short though it was. Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you, Aunt. With your—”

“First and fifth husband, I reckon we’d call him,” she said as the train pulled in.

Liz was as good as her word. Once she and her carpetbags were aboard the Flyer, she never looked out the window at me. I watched the train pull out the way, years ago, I’d stood on the platform with my grandfather and watched the departing train that had brought me to Kingdom County for the first time. This time, though, I half-wished I were on it, too, headed West with my aunt to search for Hartley Stone. I hoped she’d find him, and wondered what she’d do with him if she did.

There was a great deal to think about on the way home, but after the big day I was too tired to concentrate on anything but my driving. The schoolhouse was dark as I approached it. A faint glimmer of lantern light appeared in Maiden Rose’s window. I imagined her poring over April’s letters at the old applewood table and was tempted to stop and reassure her that Gramp and I would help her through the coming winter. But I was tired, and I knew she’d be harsh with me, as she always had been; as she had been with Liz, driving her away from Lord Hollow as she had Gramp. So I continued on up the road to the Farm, where, to my surprise, I found both my grandparents waiting up for me with coffee and cookies left over from the reunion picnic.

“Well, Tut,” Gram said, “did you get your Aunt Liz off?”

“Yes. She wants me to visit her when she gets settled in.”

“Perhaps someday,” my grandmother said. “At fifteen, you don’t need to be sashaying off around the country.”

“I wonder what Maiden Rose’ll do now? All alone, bent over the way she is.”

“You can’t predict the future, Tut,” Gram said. “But Rose will get along. She always has.”

My grandfather looked up from his book, a nineteenth-century account of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to Hudson Bay. “Rose is who she is,” he said. “Like Liz. Times change, but my sisters never will.”

“For once, Mr. Kittredge, we agree,” my grandmother said. “Well, it’s been a long day and a wonderful reunion—for those of us who troubled ourselves to attend. I’m going to read in Egypt for a few minutes. Then I’m going to bed. Tap on my door and say good night to me before you go up, Tut.”

The moment my grandmother went into Egypt, I asked my grandfather what it was like to grow up with Maiden Rose. “Well,” he said, “she rode pretty tight herd on me, Austen. At home and at school. There wasn’t much hunting and fishing done, I’ll tell you that.”

“Liz said Aunt Rose drove you away from school and home.”

My grandfather thought for a moment. “Rose was harder on me than on the other scholars, and hard enough on them. I never abided school a day in my life and she was part of the reason but only part. The plain truth is that I could have had the easiest teacher in all Vermont and still wanted to be off in the woods. I liked to read, and the other schoolwork wasn’t hard for me, but I belonged in the woods and still do. That’s as certain as the sun coming up in the morning over the White Mountains of New Hampshire and going down at night behind the Green Mountains of Vermont. And on that note, Austen, I’m going to bed myself.”

 

A heavy layer of fog lay over Lost Nation when my grandfather rousted me out at dawn the next morning. Day after the family reunion or not, there were still chores to do. While Gramp grained and watered his young stock, I cleaned the barn gutters, and fed my grandmother’s hens. Then I headed down the Hollow road toward Maiden Rose’s to get Liz’s pearl-handled revolver. The fog above the small east branch of the Upper Kingdom River was very thick. It felt more like fall than midsummer, and the mist enhanced the silence of the Hollow after the bustle of the reunion the day before. It reminded me of the fairgrounds the day after the fair closed, or Cousin Clarence’s empty baseball diamond a few hours after a big game.

Usually Maiden Rose was up and around when I arrived for morning chores. Frequently I encountered her weeding her flowers or patrolling her dooryard or lane, bent over on her two canes like a witch in a fairy tale. Today there was no sign of her, just a wisp of woodsmoke from her kitchen chimney to tell me she was all right and had made her usual morning fire to take the chill off the air and boil her tea kettle.

She was sitting at the applewood table, exactly where Liz and I had left her the night before. She was still wearing her magician’s gown, and I had no idea whether she had gone to bed the night before or not. Before her on the table the shoebox of April’s letters sat in exactly the same spot. Beside it lay Liz’s revolver, the pearly handle gleaming softly in the thin, misty light.

“Sit down, Austen,” Rose said in a voice devoid of everything but a kind of weary determination. “No doubt you’ve come for that.”

She looked at Liz’s revolver, and I nodded.

“So, Austen,” Rose said, her voice still weary yet now also fierce and certain, “no doubt you pity your great-aunt. An old woman scarcely able to creep up to visit a grave. Do you pity me?”

“No, Aunt,” I lied.

She seemed scarcely to hear what I said. “You’ve never known utter loneliness, Austen. I hope you never will. You can’t imagine it.” Suddenly Rose looked straight at me. “Did you ever hear a wild goose that’s lost its mate? I have. I’ve heard it circle and circle in the night, calling in vain. I’ve seen the survivor of my father’s team of Morgans after its harness-mate of twenty years died, heard it nicker for its companion morning and night. The poor dumb beast wasn’t even aware of what it missed, only of the missing, the loneliness, the desolation. The utter desolation.”

She was quiet for a moment and so was I. But then in some instinctive moment of understanding beyond my years, I said, “Then how can you blame Liz for going back to her first husband?”

And Maiden Rose looked at me across the table, and nodded grimly, as she had sometimes done when, after an especially trying lesson in grammar or long division, I had finally mastered a hard concept. And in a haunted flat voice devoid of all pity and self-pity, she said, “I don’t.”

 

Of course, neither Maiden Rose’s nor Liz’s story ended with the last Kittredge family reunion. To everyone’s astonishment but her own, Rose seemed to undergo a personal renaissance. She auctioned off her farm implements and much of her furniture, rented a small house in the village that had admired yet secretly censured her for fifty years, and dwelt there well on into her eighties. Bent over almost into a full circle, she nonetheless volunteered several afternoons a week at the village library, tutored kids after school in every subject from first-grade reading through high-school Latin and algebra, and wrote a series of scathing broadsides for the American Shakespeare Society’s quarterly publication, roundly denouncing the pernicious theory, then just beginning to come into vogue, that Edward de Vere, the Sixteenth Earl of Oxford, had secretly written the great bard’s plays. She visited the Home Place only to tend April’s grave. The fields continued to grow back up to brush. The empty house sagged on its foundation. The barn leaned off away from the hillside, the way my great-aunt herself was leaning off toward the earth. She died at ninety, during my last year in college, and was buried beside her beloved companion in the family graveyard overlooking the abandoned old farm. “Together at Last.”

Over the years I have come to admire greatly this unyielding woman, who led a hard, lonely, useful life and accommodated change only enough ultimately to achieve her private triumph over it, through her great, lasting love.

Of course it was my grandfather who regularly checked on Rose after she moved to the village, and brought her out to visit April’s grave. For a foundling and a misanthrope, he had, it seemed to me, as much staying power as any other member of the family, including my grandmother and Maiden Rose herself—though his true origin before appearing in the California orange crate on the stoop of the Home Place remained as much a mystery to me as my grandmother’s preoccupation with all matters Egyptian. If, as my little aunts had speculated, Maiden Rose knew more about the orange crate than she’d ever acknowledged, it was a secret she took to her mutual grave with April, where it lies buried with her to this day.

“Who lives here?” my grandfather continued to say to me each time we approached the Farm dooryard.

“Who does?”

“The meanest old bastard in Lost Nation Hollow,” he replied, and his harsh, ironical pleasure in our ritual and in contemplating his status as an interloper in the Kittredge family never dwindled.

Surprisingly enough, Great-Aunt Liz did scout up old Hartley, her first husband and one true love, and yoke back up with him. They bought a small horse ranch in northwestern Montana, where they lived together for fifteen years. I don’t think that they were particularly happy. I visited Liz there when I was in college, and though she hadn’t changed at all, Hartley seemed as much of a millstone to her then as ever. He was a small, rail-thin, dissatisfied, sour, sharp-tongued character, who, though he no longer visited the cathouses, drank a pint of cheap blackberry brandy a day, and seemed not to appreciate any of Liz’s many wonderful qualities, yet was all too ready to point out her shortcomings. Even so, she continued to wear the ring he’d given her, then and for the rest of her life, and obviously loved him straight through to the bad end Maiden Rose had predicted for him, in the lunatic asylum where he spent the final year of his life in a state of complete dementia.

Liz never visited Lost Nation or Vermont again. Up and down the Hollow, the abandoned farms grew back to puckerbrush. The fields reverted to woods, the woods to something akin to original wilderness. In 1972 the Home Place collapsed under a heavy March snowstorm. The barn where Rose had performed her Shakespeare plays went down the following winter. But Liz didn’t want to hear about any of it.

The last time I visited her, on her eightieth birthday in 1982, she was living near two of her sons, in a sort of old-age boarding home in Butte, and a great favorite with everyone there. As she did each year on her birthday, she got out her pearl-handled revolver and put on an impressive marksmanship exhibit.

“So,” I said to her when it was time for me to leave, “I know you don’t like questions. Will you answer just one for me?”

“It depends which one, how I feel about it at the moment, and how you put it. If it’s about your grandfather’s true origin, I simply don’t know. If it’s about Maiden Rose and April, we both already know the answer, and now let the dead bury their dead. If your question’s about me, I might answer it.”

“It’s about you. Did you rob the bank?”

“Listen to what you hear, Austen. What did I tell you the evening I first met you?”

“You told me you’d considered it.”

“What did I tell you the next day? About Foster. My fourth husband.”

“Foster James?”

“No other. What did I say about him?”

I wracked my mind. Then it came to me. “That he was Frank James’s great-grandson and that he’d been in some trouble with the law.”

“Exactly. You never asked what the nature of the trouble was, Austen. Listen to what you hear, and ask the right question.”

“What was the nature of the trouble?”

“Why, he’d just gotten out of federal prison, man. Where he’d spent the better part of the past fifteen years. You tell me what for.”

I began to laugh. “Bank robbery,” I said. “But where did he bury the boodle before his heart attack? If not up at Fort Kittredge?”

“What makes you think he didn’t bury it there? Say under the windmill?”

I looked at Liz and she smiled and her pale blue eyes flashed triumphantly. “What,” she said, “do you suppose I was out doing that morning of the reunion, before I rode up to the graveyard with full saddlebags and caused that hollering diversion about the condition of Foster’s grave? And what did you suppose that old coyote Hartley and I used to support ourselves with on our horse ranch? Recovering the boodle was the whole point of my venturing back to the family reunion, man. By then I figured enough time had gone by so I could get away with it. Listen to what you hear, Austen’s grandson, Austen. Listen to what you hear, and then you’ll be heard from. Now go catch your plane. And don’t say good-bye, and don’t look back to wave because I’m going inside, and won’t be here anyway.”

And when, contrary to Liz’s injunction, I did glance up at the porch, once, quickly, she wasn’t.

 

When I first set out to record these recollections of growing up with my grandparents and our extended family in Lost Nation, I wanted to discover for myself what was important enough to me from those times to have stayed fresh and clear in my mind down through the years. What was special about Lost Nation in the late 1940s and 1950s? The answer, of course, is the people who lived there, then and earlier, their lives and loves and secret mysteries, most of which, like my grandfather’s origin, will remain mysteries for all time to come.

Strangely enough, it is Rose’s plays, so hateful to me at the time, that I seem to remember most frequently and clearly from the annual Kittredge family reunions. Not, heaven knows, that there wasn’t drama enough in the ongoing saga of the family itself, and high and low comedy and tragedy and noble sacrifice as well. But somehow it all seemed to be encapsulated in the most spirited summer Shakespeare in Lost Nation Hollow.

Here Rose is again, now raging as Lear, now boasting as Falstaff, now agonizing over the bitter ironies of human existence as Hamlet. And once again I see her as Prospero, shattering the swirly-colored glass walking stick, while a hundred people sit silent as ghosts in the natural amphitheater, spellbound by the magical make-believe world fleetingly created despite all of the hardship and loss and despair on that remote, soon-to-be-abandoned farm in northern Vermont, which held its own secret dramas of the heart, overseen by the ever-changing yet unchanged granite hills and the graveyard, where for nearly two centuries Kittredges had been laid to rest in the final family reunion, together at last.