A Stranger in the Kingdom Read Online Free Page B

Lowell Mountain and looked abruptly out over the entire thousand-square-mile expanse of Kingdom County, I sensed something of what my father meant about coming home. Heading down the mountainside toward the village of Kingdom Common, we might have been entering a much earlier part of the century as well as an earlier season. Rickety old horse-drawn hay loaders, some abandoned not many years ago, sat out in hedgerows between stony pastures. Most of the farmhouses still had faded brown Christmas wreaths hanging on their doors, a tradition meant to ameliorate the grueling dreariness of our seven-month winters, though by this time of year they seemed only to call attention to the fact that it was already late April with warm weather still weeks away. The houses themselves had long ago faded to the same toneless gray as their attached barns, and the few farmers and loggers we passed looked as old and weathered as their buildings.
    Three or four of the barns were decorated with faded murals of pastoral scenes: cows lining up at pasture bars at milking time; hefty work horses pulling loaded hay wagons; a yoke of oxen hauling logs out of an evergreen woods. They’d been painted in a rather primitive style by an itinerant artist known to me only as the Dog Cart Man, a deaf and mute individual of an indeterminable age, who at unpredictable intervals during my youth appeared in Kingdom County with an American Flyer child’s wagon containing his paints and brushes and pulled by a motley pack of half a dozen or so mongrel dogs harnessed together with an incredible assortment of kite string, bailing twine, fish line, leather straps, and clothesline rope. Yet even these cheery murals, depicting impossibly idyllic scenes in an unimaginably distant summery season, seemed only to heighten by contrast the austerity of the time of year and the rugged terrain.
    Many travelers, coming into these snowy granite hills, would have found Kingdom County a harsh and forbidding place. But despite my edgy emerging adolescent restlessness, which in another year would become a chronic driving urge to visit new places and see new sights at every opportunity, there was a deep and nameless appeal to me in the long stark hiatus between late winter and early spring in the Kingdom, which, like that similar uncompromising interval between late fall and early winter, seemed to reveal our remote corner of Vermont at its truest and best.
    We entered the Common along the short south side of the rectangular central green. The clock on the courthouse tower said 5:15, and it is oddly comforting to me even now, decades later, to reflect that in a few days, when most of the rest of the country leapt automatically forward into daylight saving time, those long black iron hands that had regulated the comings and goings of Commoners for a century and more would not be moved ahead one second Nor would most private households, including ours, adjust their clocks forward to accommodate someone else’s notion of the way time ought to be kept. In Kingdom County in 1952 there was one time, year-round.
    My brother’s old woody station wagon was nosed diagonally in against the east side of the common just across from the courthouse. “Good,” Dad said and stopped beside it.
    â€œYou want to see Charlie?”
    â€œI want you to see him. Tell him I’ll spring for steak sandwiches over at the hotel as soon as I get this motor unloaded. It’ll be your birthday dinner.”
    â€œWon’t Mom be waiting supper?”
    â€œShe’ll probably have a cake for you when you get home. Your mother and two or three others have been killing themselves all day getting the parsonage ready for the new minister. I told her not to bother with supper.”
    â€œWhat if Charlie can’t come?”
    â€œHe can come. It’s your birthday, James. He’ll come, all right, and that’s—”
    â€œâ€”the beginning and the end of it,” I