Free The Great Northern Express by Howard Frank Mosher Page A

apprehend his boys, Big and Little, who had reportedly been seen sneaking under the tent flaps. Still, when it came to initiating me into the rites, wholesome and otherwise, of the Northeast Kingdom, he clearly enjoyed playing Virgil to my Dante.
    The following weekend, Prof showed up at Verna’s place on Sunday afternoon. “Mosher,” he bellowed from the bottom of the stairs leading up to our second-floor rental. “Get your Sunday-school-teaching ass down here. It’s time you met the Leonard boys.”

24

The Leonard Boys
    The Leonard boys turned out to be three aging brothers who lived in their falling-down family homestead overlooking the falls on the Black River, a few miles north of Orleans. The lane leading up the hill to their place was lined with beat-up pickups and farm trucks. In the backs of some of the trucks were crates containing live roosters. FISH 4 SAIL read a cardboard sign propped against a watering trough fed by a pipe from a spring. Swimming around and around in the trough were a dozen or so huge fall-run brown trout—lunkers—some over twenty inches long. Prof told me that the Leonard boys netted these fish at the falls and sold them, by the pound, to skunked out-of-state fishermen. A second hand-lettered sign, by the caved-in porch steps, read COCKFIGHT TODAY NO WOMEN NO KIDS NO DOGS . It was 1964, and James Dickey had yet to write
Deliverance
. But sitting on the porch, plucking feathers from a heap of dead roostersnear an open cellar window, was a boy who could have gotten a walk-on role in the dueling-guitars scene of the movie based on Dickey’s novel. Another individual with what appeared to be, and was, a shiny tin nose stood over a makeshift barbecue pit grilling the losers.
    â€œNow, Mosher,” Prof said. “This is not your little-kids Sunday school class. Stay close to me and keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.”
    It was a hot fall afternoon in the Kingdom, but as I followed Prof into the partly collapsed house and down a rickety set of stairs, we were met by a draft of cool, earth-scented air. Milling around on the smooth dirt floor were fifty or sixty men. Along the unmortared granite walls sat stoneware crocks of wine, which, Prof later told me, the Leonards distilled from every berry and wild fruit native to the Kingdom. In the center of the floor was a shallow pit. Around it, in the crepuscular light falling through three small windows, the men formed a tight ring. To see over their heads, we had to stand on the bottom stair. Again Prof cautioned me to stay close to him.
    Two men in slouch hats—Teague and Rolly Leonard, Prof whispered to me—knelt facing each other across the pit. One brother held a tall red rooster, the other the biggest White Leghorn I’d ever seen. Both birds wore three-inch-long razor spurs, shining dully in the dim light. The third brother, Ordney, jostled through the crowd collecting bets. Then, “Fight!” yelled Ordney, and the handlers threw the birds into the pit. As Teague and Rolly jabbed at them, the birds struck out with their spurs. A bloodthirsty roar went up from the bettors as the terrified roosters slashed at each other in a frenzy. Finally, the red bird leaped straight up in the air and came down, spurs first, on the neck of the white. A fine spray of scarlet blood jetted out onto the mob. The battle was over.
    Rolly picked up the Leghorn and flung its limp remains out the window onto the growing pile of the vanquished in the dooryard. “Go fry, goddamn you,” he growled.
    Keep the kids out of the mill?
Maybe Phillis and I should do everything in our power to
get the kids out of the Kingdom
. We were discovering, of course, that
no place
, no matter how idyllic, is without its dark underside. While some flatlanders might refer to the Kingdom as “God’s country,” I could not romanticize this northern fragment of Appalachia if I intended to write about it. The