On Kingdom Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

the five-story barn into the water meadow along the river below the hemlock-plank covered bridge. Henry Satterfield had been boarding with her on the mountain for more than a month.
    The aviator’s injuries turned out to be minor—a sprained left arm, now nearly healed, and what Doc Harrison called a very mild concussion that might have caused some slight temporary loss of memory. In other words, a touch of amnesia, which, Doc assured him, would clear up within a few weeks. In the meantime, he prescribed rest. That was fine with Miss Jane, who was greatly enjoying Henry’s company. He turned out to be handy with tools, and besides working on his plane, which the oxen had pulled up the pike to the home place, Henry tuned Miss Jane’s Model A Ford truck, jacked up her sagging front porch, and cleaned and oiled her treadle-operated sewing machine.
    Within twenty-four hours of the stranger’s arrival, the entire Common knew that he had wrecked his yellow biplane on the ice of Lake Memphremagog and was now quartered, along with his machine, in Miss Jane’s barn, having politely refused to impose upon her by accepting her invitation to stay in the
house. He was a little older than Jane had originally surmised, perhaps closer to forty-five than forty. And word quickly spread that Henry was a veteran weathermaker and stunt pilot who had brought rain to drought-afflicted states from Oklahoma to Oregon and put on flying exhibitions from Niagara Falls to Paris, France, though to Miss Jane he modestly confided that he was actually more of a finder than a maker of weather and had never in his life, so far as he knew, truly
caused
it to rain.
    Jane was impressed by his candor and impressed as well by his impeccable manners. Whatever else he might be, Henry Satterfield was a gentleman. It was yes, ma’am this and no, thank you, ma’am that, and, like Miss Jane’s deep regard for whatever was old-fashioned and traditional, Henry Satterfield’s gentlemanliness seemed very genuine, as much a part of his character as, say, his courage aloft and his curiosity. For the aviator was keenly interested, in a decorous and unintrusive way, about everything on the mountain, from Miss Jane’s beloved blockheads and dear people in On Kingdom Mountain to the balancing boulder on the mountaintop. He was interested in the home place, with its spacious kitchen workshop, its curved staircase with the bird’s-eye maple banister, and the native butternut casings around the doors and windows. He was intrigued by the five-story barn, said to be the biggest barn in the county, and by the covered bridge over the river at the foot of her lane.
    Henry loved Miss Jane’s icehouse with its sudden miraculous coldness and the fresh, sharp scent of the blocks of ice she had cut on the river the past winter and the bright yellow sawdust it was packed in. He loved to poke around in her root cellar, filled with the sweet fragrance of binned apples, the earthy odor of potatoes, and the salty tang of smoked hams hanging in nets from the timbered ceiling. He enjoyed reading aloud the motto painted on the pine lintel over the porch door by Venturing Seth Kinneson. “They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind.” Indeed, as Miss Jane told the pilot, the Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons had assisted not just fugitive slaves but French Canadian and Chinese immigrants slipping over the mountain into the United States from Canada and all kinds of wayfarers overtaken by weather, sickness, and injury, even bindlestiffs and tramps off the Grand Trunk Railroad. No one in need had ever been turned away from the home place on Kingdom Mountain. Jane’s great-grandfather, Freethinker Kinneson, had famously remarked that if the horned devil himself came looking for shelter, he would probably feel obliged to take the old gentleman in.
    Most of all, Henry was interested in Miss Jane’s life and times on