God's Kingdom (18 page)

Peabody jerked his head up at the sign on the factory roof, just coming into resolution in the dawn: “2 Days Without an Accident.”

“That up there is a lie, Jim. It wasn't any accident. I and you both know it. It was a warning not to vote for the union.”

“I guess it worked,” Jim said.

“I reckon so,” the Scout said. “Some places it might have backfired. Not up here.”

The Scout frowned. “Like you say, Jim, fear is a powerful force.”

“I didn't say that. You did.” Jim said.

“Who said it doesn't matter,” the Scout said. “It's true.”

“Charlie said if he were county prosecutor, he'd have Rip Kinneson up in front of a judge faster than that saw took off Ti's hand.”

“Hard to prove intent, Jim.”

“I know what Rip's intent was. So do you. Listen, Mr. Peabody. What happened was my fault. I'm the one that asked Ti to help us put up those posters. And brought him down to the mill floor to match boards for Rip.”

Jim thought the Scout might tell him not to be too hard on himself, but Peabody didn't. The southbound was pulling into the station. The door opened and the porter put down the step and reached for the Scout's carpetbag.

“Jim,” Peabody said from the doorway, “I have been shot out of Matewan, rode out of Butte on a rail, and blowed up in Wheeling, West Virginia. But this is the one place I've been that I can honestly say don't deserve a union.”

The train was rolling again. In less than a week Jim would be back in school, and he was glad of it. He'd had enough experience in the real world for one summer. The 6:50 mill whistle blew, summoning the workers to their jobs. Jim headed across the tracks toward the factory to change the sign on the roof. Today was Day 3 without an accident.

 

10

Memorial Day

Of all the splendid game fish of God's Kingdom, commend me to the native brook trout. This tropically colored denizen of our purest and coldest ponds, lakes, and rivers is abundant, hard-fighting, and sublimely delicious. It was adopted by Charles Kinneson I as the emblem for the family escutcheon, replacing the Highland stag rampant, in 1768. Moreover, the copper fish atop the weather vanes on both the Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches in Kingdom Common are unmistakably—with their square tails, elegant proportions, and small, neat heads—eastern brook trout.

—PLINY'S
HISTORY

Evenings in those years Jim loved to take his homework over to Gramp's side of the house and spread it out on the bird's-eye maple kitchen table Gramp had made Gram for a wedding present. While Jim studied, at the other end of the table Gramp would tie his brightly colored brook-trout flies—flies with exotic names like Parmachene Belle, Queen of the Waters, and Royal Coachman—or read in his Morris chair beside the Home Comfort wood-burning range. Sometimes, Jim would read one of his stories aloud to Gramp, as he'd read his very first stories about fishing and hunting and baseball to both of his grandparents before Gram died.

Gram passed away of pneumonia when Jim was eight. Gramp kept her ashes on the kitchen table in a large blue Dr. Bitters bottle that had once held a highly alcoholic patent medicine of that name. He referred to Gram's ashes as Our Lady of the Lake. “Just move Our Lady of the Lake onto the counter under her critters, Jim,” Gramp said as Jim arranged his homework on the maple table. Gram's critters were the animals in the reproduction Gramp had given her many years ago of her favorite painting, Edward Hicks's
The Peaceable Kingdom.

Because he'd loved Gram, Jim treasured her ashes in the Dr. Bitters bottle. He didn't find them macabre at all. When it came to the painting, he had mixed feelings. In it, several stylized animals—a lion, a tiger, a leopard, a bull, a wolf, and three sheep among them—stood or lay close together while a trio of otherworldly appearing children looked on. In the background, men resembling Pilgrims were conferring with several Indians. Printed neatly in the lower right corner of the painting was the verse from Isaiah that had inspired it. “The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them.”

Jim and Gram had been great pals. From birth she had been mute, and around her neck on a leather thong she wore a slate, like the desk slates children of her and Gramp's generation did sums and practiced making letters on. With a piece of chalk from her dress or apron pocket, she'd draw on the slate, in several deft, swift strokes, a tall stick lady and a little stick boy, holding hands. Above the lady and the little boy she printed the words “Gram” and “Jim.” Then, below the figures, “Great pals.”

Writing in chalk on the slate was how Gram communicated. She wrote each letter in reverse, working across the slate from her right to her left. Though she seemed to be writing backwards, the letters and words always appeared in the correct order.

Since Gram could not read to Jim, she selected books for him to read to her, as she had with Dad and Charlie. As a small boy, Jim had loved reading aloud to Gram. Robert Louis Stevenson. Mark Twain. Louisa May Alcott's
Little Men
. Jules Verne's
Mysterious Island
. And, of course, Jim's and Gram's favorite, Charles Dickens. Jim and Gram loved anything by Charles Dickens. There was no other writer like him and no story like
David Copperfield,
at least until Jim read
Great Expectations
. Dickens didn't
write
for his readers so much as
converse
with them. He wrote as though each of his readers was his very best friend, to whom he could freely tell absolutely anything. When Jim lay down to go to sleep, he could still hear, in his head, Dickens's magic sentences.

Jim was sure that Dickens would have had a field day with the Kinneson clan of God's Kingdom. He was just as glad that the great novelist hadn't gotten to some of his early ancestors first. His constant concern, as a boy, was that some other writer, looking for good stories to tell, would come sashaying up to the Kingdom and beat him to the punch.
Pliny's Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County
alone would be a treasure trove of material. Gramp told Jim not to worry. Even if a writer from away wrote the stories of the Kingdom, they'd be written from “the outside looking in.” Jim, a Kingdom County Kinneson himself, already wrote from the inside looking out.

When it came to books, Gram had what she called a guilty pleasure: she loved to read murder mysteries. She'd read all of Agatha Christie's many times over, and adored Daphne du Maurier and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Also, the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane.

From the time Jim started school, Gram took him on the train to the Saturday matinees at the old Paramount Theater in Memphremagog, particularly when a new mystery was playing. He cherished those afternoons with his grandmother at the Paramount, with its shabby elegance, the worn plush seats, faded velvet stage curtains, and roped-off balcony. He loved the cartoons, the previews of coming attractions, even the newsreels with their strident announcers and portentous images of mushroom test clouds, hordes of Red Chinese, plug-ugly strikebreakers with billy clubs and revolvers. Willie Mays making a catch that couldn't be made. Joe DiMaggio's picture-perfect swing, and Jackie Robinson stealing second. There was no television reception in the mountains of God's Kingdom during Jim's high-school years. The sports clips on the newsreels at the Paramount were the closest he'd come to seeing a major-league game.

When the killer made his first appearance on the screen, Gram would nudge Jim with her elbow. She always spotted the culprit long before anyone else. There was one mystery, however, that Gram had been unable to unravel. That was “Mad Charlie” Kinneson's motive for shooting his bosom friend, the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton, in their advanced years. No one in the family believed that “the trouble,” as the murder was referred to on those rare occasions when it was mentioned at all, could be entirely explained by a disagreement over a piano. Mossbacked old dogmatist that he was, it was inconceivable that Charles would murder his adoptive brother over an obscure point of church doctrine. Why, then? Even Gram, the “Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle of Kingdom County,” as Dad sometimes called her, was stymied.

Like Jim's great-great-great-grandmother Molly Molasses, Charles I's wife, Gram had Indian ancestry. Plenty of Indian ancestry, to judge from her appearance, and from Dad's and Charlie's, as well. She had long, dark, straight hair; a dark complexion; and wide-set oval eyes as opaque as the big lake on the darkest night of the year. Dad and Charlie probably got their height from Gram, too. As Gramp liked to say, at just an inch under six feet, she stood as tall and straight as a princess.

Gram had some Indian ways, as well. She knew all of the names and uses of the wildwood plants of the Kingdom, from ginseng to pennyroyal. She could catch trout with her hands by reaching up under cut banks or submerged boulders, tickling their bellies, then sliding her fingers into their gills and yanking the fish out of the river. By putting her hands out of sight behind her back and taking one slow step at a time, she could walk right up to a curious young buck deer.

Gram had been an orphan. Gramp's parents, Charles II and Eliza Kittredge Kinneson, had adopted her after the St. Francis Orphanage across the border in Quebec had burned in the Great Forest Fire of '82. Of all of Gramp's stories, Jim's favorite was how, after the fire, Gramp and his father had discovered Gram on the Île d'Illusion. Gramp, just five, had ridden up the lake with his father in the bateau, looking for survivors, hoping against hope that somehow Gramp's grown sister, Mary Queen of Scots, had escaped from the fire, when out of the lingering yellowish smoke, standing on the shore of the island beside an unpainted skiff, they'd spotted a child, a little girl surrounded by a dozen or so Jersey cows. No, not cows. Deer. Deer watching Gramp and his father through the smoke. A little apart, a half-grown black bear stood up on its hind legs, like a circus bear, to get a better look at them. There was a family of foxes, a bobcat, and two wolves, all of which had evidently swum over to the island to retreat from the flames. Around the child's neck on a thong was a slate on which someone had written, “
Je m'appelle Jeannette St. Francis. Je ne parle pas
.” The animals showed no signs of hostility. Except for the soot on her face and hair and hands, Jeannette seemed unharmed by the fire. There were no oars in the skiff.

Charles II picked up the child and returned to the bateau and set her down on the bow seat next to Gramp. The two children looked at each other for a moment as Gramp's father tied the skiff by its painter to the iron ring bolted into the stern of the bateau. Then he began to row back down the lake through the smoke. Gramp reached out and took Jeannette St. Francis by the hand. The children were still holding hands when Gramp's father put into shore across the water meadow from the Kinneson farmhouse. “Home, Jeannette,” he said.

“From that day forward, we were inseparable,” Gramp liked to tell Jim. Then he'd glance at the blue Dr. Bitters bottle and smile, more to himself, Jim thought, than to him, and say, “We still are.”

*   *   *

It was the spring of Jim's junior year at the Academy, and Gramp had been feeling poorly all winter. Doc Harrison wasn't able to put his finger on just why. Old age, Gramp told Jim. Plain and fancy old age. No more, no less.

“Watch out for April,” Gramp liked to say. April was the month when, having come through another Kingdom winter, elderly Commoners sometimes got caught leaning the wrong way like napping base runners. Sometimes they leaned so far in the wrong direction that they toppled right over into their graves.

April in God's Kingdom seemed to be an unlucky month in other ways, as well. April was when Jim's Abenaki ancestors had been massacred by Charles I and his Rangers. It was April when Charles's son, James Kinneson, and twenty of his fellow secessionists fought to the last man against more than three hundred federal troops dispatched to the Kingdom to put down their insurrection. And in the drought-stricken April of 1882 the village of New Canaan, established by fugitive slaves brought north by Gramp's father and Pliny Templeton, had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan.

To Jim's huge relief, Gramp survived April. But he didn't fish the rainbow run on the river with Jim and Prof, and he missed several of Jim's home baseball games. As May approached, it seemed doubtful that Gramp would be up to making their annual Memorial Weekend fishing trip to the wilderness ponds on the border.

“Limber up your fly rod, son,” Gramp said one evening when the peeper frogs along the river were singing their hearts out. “I won't be running any footraces soon. But come Decoration Day, you and I'll be hitting out together. That record-book brook trout is still up there waiting for you to catch it.”

For as long as Jim could remember, Gramp had promised him that if he caught a brook trout twenty inches long or longer, Gramp would have it mounted for him. Jim wasn't sure that there were any twenty-inch brook trout left in God's Kingdom to catch. But a trophy fish would be a bonus. What mattered was that he and Gramp would be going fishing together again.

*   *   *

Gramp had liked to say that the day for their trip picked them more than they picked it. On the Friday before the long holiday weekend it rained steadily all morning and on into the afternoon. That evening the wind backed into the northwest and the sky cleared. Gramp would have predicted a Canadian high, three or four days of sunny weather with falling water in the ponds and river. Falling water in the soft of the year, as Gramp called the days in late May when the hillsides and mountains of God's Kingdom were pale gold with newly opened hardwood leaves, was the best time to go brook-trout fishing.