God's Kingdom (14 page)

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After supper Gramp sat beside the stove in his rocker, sipping from a tumbler of blackberry brandy. Gramp never drank except at camp. There he'd sip one glass of his own brandy, made from the long blackberries that grew on the slope above the barn on the farm that wasn't. Gramp said that his blackberry toddy at camp was to fortify his heart for the next day's hunt.

“I didn't know there was anything wrong with your heart,” Jim teased him.

“That's because when I come up here I fortify it,” Gramp said. “It's a family tradition.”

Jim, sitting at the cleared table, looking through the camp journal, waited for the story he was sure would follow. He didn't know what the tale would be. Only that there would be one.

“What I mean by ‘family tradition,'” Gramp said, “is that the only place my father and Pliny drank was here at God's Kingdom. Pliny being a clergyman, and a Presbyterian clergyman at that, was expected never to let a drop pass his lips. It would have cost him his jobs, as minister and as headmaster. My dad was all but a teetotaler himself. The great irony being that he, and his father and his, all staunch Presbyterian deacons, operated the largest whiskey distillery in New England. True, they used every penny of their very considerable profits to finance their abolitionist activities. The
Monitor
and the farm were mutual drains on each other, but as destitute as they were from time to time, the Kinnesons never used a penny of income from the distillery for any of their personal expenses. Or touched a dram of the stuff themselves anyplace but here at camp.”

“I'm surprised they drank here knowing how straitlaced those old Presbyterians were.”

Gramp sipped his brandy. “Oh, they didn't actually drink anyplace—even, here—son. They just ‘tasted.' They'd bring three or four stone bottles from the aging warehouse up here to sample and see if it was ready to sell. ‘Will you have a taste, brother? Just a sup to see how it progresses?' ‘Aye, brother, I don't know but what I will. Just a sup.' They'd have their sups and then one of them might say, ‘Not quite, I think.' The other one would nod, and they'd look quite sorrowfully at the stone bottle on the table. Then, very solemnly, my father or Pliny would say, ‘Well, a toast. To universal emancipation.' ‘To universal emancipation, brother.' Over the course of the evening those two old devils would taste and sample and sup and toast their way through two or three quart stone bottles and then walk over to their bunks as gravely and deliberately as two tipsy geese.”

Jim laughed. For a time, as Jim paged through the camp journal, neither he nor Gramp spoke. Then Jim said, “Listen to this.”

June 16, 1868. Caught 17 trout, 12–18 inches, on Green Drake fished dry on Ponds One and Two. P. Templeton.

June 17, 1868. Caught 19 trout, 15–19 inches, on Royal Coachman lead fly, Silver Doctor and Queen of the Waters dropper flies, fished wet. Charles Kinneson II.

Jim said, “It's almost as if Pliny and your father were competing with each other over who could catch the most and biggest trout.”

“They were,” Gramp said. “Competing with each other. There was always a pretty brisk rivalry between them for, I don't know, call it moral ascendancy. Moral in the broadest sense, I mean. If one of them made a garden a hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, the other would immediately spade up a plot one hundred and fifty feet long by seventy-five feet wide. Dr. T, as we schoolkids called him, didn't hunt. I don't imagine that hunting held much allure for someone who'd been hunted himself. When it came to angling, though, you can see for yourself from the camp ledger. He and my father spent entire days up here vying to outfish each other.

“My father never did play baseball. He was just that much older than Pliny, fifteen years, that he never learned. In fact, I think he was a little disdainful of the game. Hidebound old Highlander that he was, he couldn't see the utility of it. Or the utility of any game, for that matter. Also, as a Presbyterian born and bred, Father seemed to be suspicious of any pursuit that smacked of fun for its own sake.

“Both men, of course, were strong Lincoln Republicans and abolitionists. They agreed on that much. Religion was a different story, and of the two of them, my father was much more of a doctrinaire. Pliny was no freethinker, far from it, but he prided himself on never criticizing anyone for their faith or lack thereof, except himself.”

“He must have been a good minister,” Jim said.

Gramp nodded. “He was. But he was an even better teacher. He could teach anybody anything, Jimmy. Solid geometry, English composition, botany. You name it, Dr. T could teach it. Also, he made sure we could find north, and tell the names of the planets and constellations. In the summertime, he taught us how to swim, if we didn't already know how, in the catch basin below the High Falls. And how to cook. He told us a good cook, man or woman, would never be out of a job. He taught us boys to box and he taught us and the girls, as well, to play baseball, and played right alongside of us.

“Best of all, Jim, he was a born storyteller. We pupils used to beg for certain favorites in order to derail him from the lesson of the day. ‘Getting Old Temp going,' we called it. ‘Tell us how you arm wrestled John Brown for a chance to work on the Underground Railroad, Dr. T. Tell how you picked up Charles Kinneson's sword and helped beat back Pickett's charge at Gettysburg with it. And how you escaped from Andersonville.'

“
Crack
! Down would come his schoolmastering cane, Jack Regulator, on the edge of the teacher's dais. ‘I'll tell you to get out your McGuffeys, miscreants, and be quick about it. Otherwise, you'll have a taste of Jack.' ‘Old Dr. Bluster,' we called him, behind his back. He never did have the heart to cane us. And yes, sooner rather than later he'd tell us his wonderful old stories. We'd gotten Old Temp going again.”

“But he never did tell you about his life as a slave, before coming north?” Jim said.

“Nope,” Gramp said. “He never did. It was as if his life didn't begin until the day he stepped across the Mason-Dixon Line.”

Gramp finished his brandy. “Well,” he said. “If we're going to accomplish anything tomorrow, we'd best hit the hay tonight.”

Jim filled the firebox in the Glenwood and shut down the stovepipe draft for the night. Then he went up to the loft.

Gramp blew out the wicks in the kerosene lamps and made his way across the uneven floor of the camp to his bunk. A few minutes later they were both asleep.

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The next day was colder yet. The thermometer on the privy door read forty-two below zero. For breakfast Gramp fried eggs in the grease left over from last night's steak, cut up home fries, and made buckwheat cakes laced with maple syrup. They drank camp coffee, and topped off with stewed prunes from the Canada plum tree behind the farmhouse. After breakfast Jim did the dishes while Gramp tidied up the camp and scattered bread crumbs on the snow outside for the chickadees.

“It's warmed up to thirty,” Gramp said. “Thirty below, that is. I call that good winter weather, Jim. Let's go scout up some grouse for a game supper tonight.”

They headed up the slope behind the camp on their snowshoes, climbing side by side through the leafless hardwoods, moving slowly so they wouldn't sweat and then take a chill. A large, dark bird flushed from below a sugar maple tree. Jim started to raise his shotgun, then saw the flash of red on the bird's head. It was a pileated woodpecker, the bird Gramp called Lord God because of its regal crimson cockade. Gramp pointed at the base of the maple tree, where the woodpecker had hammered out an oblong cavity a foot high and several inches wide, searching for insects that bored their way into the tree. A heap of fresh wood chips lay on the snow.

“It's good luck to see a Lord God bird, Jim.”

“Why?”

“It means the woods are healthy. If somebody waltzes in here and clear-cuts the mountainside, the pileated woodpeckers are going to pack their bags and move north to Canada.”

Jim gestured across the river. “At least they won't have far to go.”

A few minutes later Gramp shot a grouse out of a popple tree it was budding. Another one rocketed out of the deep snow ahead. Jim hurried his shot and missed. A few minutes later he got two grouse budding a yellow birch.

Halfway up the mountainside they crossed the faint trace through the trees, now mostly grown up, where the Canada Post Road had once run up to the border. Gramp chuckled. “A good many loads of Canadian booze traveled along this old woods road during Prohibition, Jim. I was all for the smugglers. It was Prohibition that finally did in the family distillery. The runners would bring booze into Vermont on the train sometimes, too, in milk cans or hidden under pulpwood or logs. And a lot of it came down the lake by motor launch.”

Jim loved hunting up the mountain with Gramp at this time of the year. In the summer the leaves were too thick for them to see much. Climbing the mountain with Gramp in the winter when you could see off to the south and east for miles was like traveling back into history.

From the Balancing Boulder on top of the mountain, high above the tree line, he and Gramp could look out 360 degrees, at the entire Kingdom. Far below on the frozen Dead Water a black dot was inching its way across the ice.

“Bog lemming,” Gramp said. “I haven't seen more than three or four in my life.”

Suddenly Gramp pointed at the cliff face of Canada Mountain, across the notch.

A very large white bird had launched itself off a ledge and was plummeting, wings folded, toward the frozen impoundment below. At the last moment it leveled out of its free fall and swooped up the lemming in its talons, then swiftly ascended to its ledge a thousand feet above the ice.

“Great Snowy?” Jim said.

“Gyrfalcon,” Gramp said. “Right down from the tundra. It must be a very tough winter up north, Jim. I don't know anyone else who's ever seen one here in the Kingdom.”

Jim grinned. “Is it good luck? To see one?”

“Not for the lemming it wasn't,” Gramp said. “Let's head back to camp before we freeze solid up here. I wouldn't be surprised if the temperature hits fifty below tonight.”

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On the way down the mountain Gramp shot a snowshoe hare turned white for winter. Back at the camp Jim dressed out the partridges and hare, careful not to slice into the rabbit's gallbladder and spoil the meat. Then he cut half a dozen holes in the ice on Three. Gramp brought down the tip-ups in a pail and baited their hooks with strips of pork rind. Almost immediately one of the red-cloth flags snapped up and Jim reeled in a thrashing foot-long brook trout. In less than an hour they had six trout from twelve to about fifteen inches. In the winter months the bellies of the fish were pale, but their backs were a beautiful forest green and their sides were sprinkled with red speckles ringed with powdery-blue halos. Inside, the winter trout were as orange as salmon.

“I didn't know there was an ice-fishing season for brookies,” Jim said. “What's the limit?”

“How many can you eat?” Gramp said. “That's the limit.”

While Jim refilled the woodbox, Gramp peeled and cut up into the game stew four more of Mom's big potatoes, half a dozen carrots, several onions, and a yellow turnip. He fried the brook trout in butter in the camp skillet and they feasted on rabbit-and-partridge stew and freshly caught trout and Mom's homemade bread warmed in the overhead warming oven of the Glenwood. For dessert they split one of Mom's maple-sugar pies.

Jim heated water on the stove and did the dishes. Gramp made the day's entry in the camp ledger. “Be sure to mention the gyrfalcon,” Jim said.

“You think I'd forget to do that?” Gramp said. “Pliny Templeton was pretty sure they came down here once in a great while. He wanted in the worst way to see one for his
History
.”

Gramp closed the ledger. “What do you know about the trouble in the family, Jim?”

Jim turned quickly away from the wooden sink, the damp dish towel still in his hand, to face Gramp. In that era in God's Kingdom, certain family secrets—suicides, children born out of wedlock, mental illnesses—were rarely discussed.

“I know Charles II, your father, shot Pliny. That's how Pliny's skeleton got the two holes in its skull. Pliny wanted to introduce a music program at the Academy. Your dad, being a strict old-school Presbyterian, and president of the school board, opposed the idea. Pliny brought in a piano and that was the final straw.”

Gramp nodded. “That's the gist of it. My father went right off the deep end and murdered his best friend and adoptive brother. He spent the last years of his life chained to his bed at the state insane asylum. I was in my third year at the university when the murder took place. I had to drop out of school and come home to run the paper and the distillery and the farm. It was a terrible stain on the family. We've never really lived it down. I've tried to shield your dad from it, and you and Charlie, too, by not talking about it. Lately, I've come to think that was a mistake. It happened. It happened and you, especially, need to know as much about it as I can tell you.”

Gramp pointed at his rocker. “Sit down, Jim.”

“I don't want to take your chair,” Jim said.

“Go ahead. That'll be your chair someday.”

Jim sat down in Gramp's chair. Then Gramp began his story. “After my older sister, Mary, went to live in New Canaan with the stonecutters, and then died with everyone else in the Great Fire of '82, my father was said never to be the same. He kept the distillery going—by then the proceeds were paying for the schools Pliny was setting up in the South for emancipated Negroes—and the newspaper. He editorialized tirelessly against the so-called wars with the western Indians, and against the Spanish-American War. He said we had every bit as much right to claim the Philippine Islands as we did the moon and the sun. And he was never anything less than a kind and even indulgent father to me. My father continued to be active in the governance of the church and school and to hunt and fish. But as I came into my teens I could see him changing. He'd run on for hours about riding with John Brown at Harper's Ferry. I believe he felt somehow guilty about getting away scot-free and leaving Brown to his fate there. And he'd hash over Pickett's charge, and his and Pliny's imprisonment at Andersonville, and Charles I's massacring those Abenaki fishers, and the federal troops annihilating his father James I's ragtag little band of secessionists. More and more my father had the look of a haunted man.