Read On Kingdom Mountain for Free Online

the mountain, and in her family stories. Evening after evening, as he sat at the applewood kitchen table while she worked on her latest carving project, a tableau of the birds of Kingdom Mountain, she yarned on to him—how Seth had come to the mountain pulling in the yoke with his ox, how Quaker Meeting had discovered Jane’s Indian mother, Pharaoh’s Daughter, in the manger on Christmas morning, how her father had walked all the way from Kingdom Mountain to Tennessee during the Civil War, searching for his missing brother, Pilgrim.
    As for his own past and family, Henry told Miss Jane that he was born and raised in the East Texas town of Beaumont. His father and his grandfather, who had come from North Carolina, that same Captain Cantrell Satterfield who had passed along to Henry the Riddle of Kingdom Mountain, had run a small ranch. His mother, a schoolteacher like Miss Jane and the superintendent of the local Sunday school, was a woman of Creole ancestry.
    It was this revelation, made casually one evening, that the showman was of mixed blood, one-half Scotch-Irish and one-half Creole, that prompted Miss Jane to rise from the supper table, go immediately to the five-story barn, where Henry had been staying with his Burgess-Wright airplane, and personally bring his belongings into the house. Refusing to take no for an answer, she established him in the best upstairs bedroom, where her abolitionist ancestors had hidden fugitive slaves.
    Tongues wagged in the Common. The gossips on Anderson Hill, the straitlaced old churchwomen and some of the meddling old churchmen as well, whispered that Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson had taken up with a man of color. The Duchess, of course, was well aware of the gossip, and she was not happy about it. Say what the Common might, however, it would never be said that a Kingdom Mountain Kinneson extended less than the utmost hospitality to a stranger, particularly a stranger from the South whose ancestors Miss Jane’s own people had fought to help liberate. “They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind.”
    But as the hardwood buds on the mountain that spring turned from a ruddy red to the faintest gold, a problem arose. Presumably as a result of the mild memory loss Henry Satterfield had sustained in the biplane wreck, all he could recall of the Riddle of Kingdom Mountain was the first word: Behold.
    â€œBehold,” the pilot said aloud twenty times a day, raising an index finger as if preparing to declaim the rest. Often it seemed on the tip of his tongue. But that, unfortunately, was as far as he got. Behold what? Henry had no idea.
    At these times a somber expression stole across Henry’s face, an expression Miss Jane did not think could be quite accounted for by his temporary amnesia. One rainy evening she asked him bluntly if something was troubling him. After hesitating, he told her that because she had been so kind to him, he could no longer conceal from her that some months ago his former partner, wingwalker, and betrothed, one Lola Beauregard
Beauclerk—Beauclerk pronounced without the
k
—of Lake Charles, Louisiana, had met with a horrible fate. While walking on the lower wing of the rainmaker’s biplane in a pair of close-fitting black tights, in a cloudless sky above Tulsa, Oklahoma, Miss Lola had been struck by a freakish bolt of lightning and had fallen to her death in the stockyards below. Since then, Henry confided, he had been derailed from time to time by bouts of sorrow.
    Miss Jane, putting the finishing touches on a great blue heron preparing to drive its daggerlike bill through the unsuspecting head of a yellow-bibbed bullfrog, was shocked. All she could think to say was, “Mr. Satterfield, do you like to fish?”
    â€œTo fish? Why, yes, ma’am, I do. When I was a shaver, I liked to fish with my granddaddy, the old captain. He was a neat hand to catch catfish with a long cane pole and a cork