A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Read Free Book Online Page A

the Common Academy. I would have given a lot to be allowed to accompany them to Memphremagog to see their playoff game. That, however, was out of the question. Both of my parents felt that certain mistakes had been made in rearing my brother, particularly in the latitude he had been given at an early age to pursue various independent interests—older girls, stock cars, hanging around the village with members of the Folding Chair Club—and both Mom and Dad were determined that these mistakes not be repeated with me.
    â€œSee you later, buddy,” Charlie said, punching me lightly in the shoulder. “Happy thirteenth.”
    He jogged across the tracks and down the edge of the common to join his waiting team and I headed over to the
Monitor
for Production Night.
    Â 
    As I burst through the door (in those days it seemed impossible for me to enter a building at anything under a dead run), my father did not even glance up from his typewriter. As usual on Production Night he was pecking out a last-minute story, sitting in his shirtsleeves at right angles to the desk with the typewriter on the side panel and his back to the storefront-sized window with KINGDOM COUNTY MONITOR painted backward on the inside of the glass in chipped and faded black letters.
    Dad pointed with one long typing finger toward the Whitlock at the back of the shop to indicate that the first run of the night was already set up and ready to go. To reach the press, however, I would have to pass close by Cousin Elijah Kinneson, Resolvèd and Welcome’s ex-brother, who had run the linotype at the
Monitor
since the days of my grandfather.
    â€œLate again, boy,” Cousin E said without interrupting his typing. “Where have you been? Scouting ’round the barbershop? Navigating ’round the village? Have you, boy? Eh? Have you?”
    The long-handled overhead light on the linotype glinted fiercely off Elijah’s green visor, and his inky gray fingers flew over the triple bank of red and blue and black keys as he continued to grill me. I’d always found my cousin’s ability to type and talk simultaneously unsettling; but then, nearly everything about Elijah Kinneson unsettled me, from his short-cropped hair, the shade and approximate texture of the grayish lead filings sprinkled over the bottom of Dad’s typecase drawers, to his holey shoes and the livid network of scars on his wrists and ankles where they’d been spattered with hot lead over the years.
    So far as I was concerned Cousin Elijah was a splenetic old factotum who would be doing my father and the
Monitor
an inestimable service to retire and dedicate himself full-time to his duties as sexton and sometime lay preacher of the United Church. Yet as Dad frequently said, to give our cousin his due, he was close to indispensable around the shop. Besides being an expert linotyper who week in and week out produced a paper with about as many typographical errors as Harold Ross’
New Yorker
magazine, he could fix any machine on the premises from his own mind-bogglingly complex Mergenthaler linotype to the archaic hand-cranked addresser, and he had the uncanny ability to remember by volume number, date, page, and column the principal contents of every issue of the paper printed in the past thirty years.
    Except for putting up with my ill-tempered cousin, I liked the hours I spent working for my father at the Monitor. I liked sweeping up around the machinery and ancient cabinets filled with tray upon tray of metal and wooden type. I liked the clean odors of well-oiled gears and printer’s ink and fresh newsprint just off the Great Northern Paper Company boxcars on the mile-long Boston and Montreal freights. I liked running errands that took me to every nook of the village, from Judge Allen’s musty chambers at the courthouse to the telegraph office in the B and M train station, and running off routine job-printing work on the small hand press Best of