God's Kingdom (19 page)

Soon after sunrise on Memorial Day, Jim and Dad roped Gramp's Old Town to the roof of the family DeSoto and drove up the River Road to Pond Number One.

They carried the canoe to the water's edge. Jim got into the stern seat. Dad set the long-handled boat net, Gramp's pack basket, and a garden spade on the floor of the canoe. Then he gave the stern a push away from shore and Jim dug in his paddle.

There was a hatch of mayflies on the water this morning and the trout were rising to them. The brook trout in Pond Number One weren't large, but they were numerous and colorful, with crimson fins edged as white as Mom's Christmas paperwhites.

The first fish Jim hooked came straight toward the canoe, then jumped a foot out of the water. Before Jim knew what he was going to do, he'd reached out with the boat net and snared the leaping trout in midair. He knew he wouldn't be able to do it again in a hundred tries.

This time of year the Kinneson men, Gramp and Dad and Charlie and Jim, relied mainly on number-twelve, red-and-white Coachman flies that Gramp tied by the dozen over the winter at his kitchen table. Jim fished his flies wet, two or three inches below the surface, just as his Kinneson ancestors had done all the way back to the Hebrides. He believed that Gramp privately considered fishing with floating flies an elitist pursuit. Also, Gramp frowned on the catch-and-release practices of many of the anglers who came to fish in the Kingdom from away. In Gramp's opinion, trout were meant to be eaten, not caught and put back in the water to be caught again. Yet Gramp had taught Jim always to break the necks of his fish before dropping them into his creel so that they didn't suffer needlessly.

As Jim approached the collapsing log-driving dam at the outlet of Pond Number One, where he and Gramp had first seen the ridge runner, he reeled in his line and leaned his fly rod against the middle thwart of the Old Town. Jim studied the dam. “Hold on,” he said aloud, and with several hard thrusts of his paddle, he shot the canoe through the gap in the dam where the sluice gate had been.

Jim caught more trout in the flow between One and Two, then fished his way up along the west side of Two. Today was turning into what Gramp would have called, in the camp journal, a good day on the water. Usually, fly fishing the river and ponds made Jim feel close to his grandfather and to the remote trout waters they both loved. Through his rod and line and the hard-fighting trout, Jim felt connected to the Kingdom itself. This morning he felt as moorless as an empty canoe on a windswept lake. It was hard to imagine that he would ever feel differently.

By the time Jim reached Three the trout had quit rising. The mayfly hatch was over and the sun glared on the water. Toward evening the fish would begin to feed again. “Let's see how the camp wintered over,” Jim said. “Then we'll have a shore lunch.”

*   *   *

The hunting camp with the words “God's Kingdom” carved into the lintel sat where Jim and Gramp had left it last winter. Here on the northeastern slope of Kingdom Mountain the hardwoods were just coming out. Tiny red maple flowerlets littered the path from the shore up to the camp.

Inside, the air smelled of dead stove ashes. Jim swept some dried mouse droppings out the door. Then he penciled into the camp ledger:

Memorial Day, 1955. Opened camp after a good morning on the water. Jim Kinneson.

Gramp had an all-purpose saying: “You'll know what you're looking for when you see it.”

The shelf on the wall behind Gramp's old-man's chair was wide enough. But it wasn't exactly what Jim was looking for.

He closed up the camp. Then he collected a handful of birch bark and hemlock stobs and kindled a driftwood fire on the gravel apron beside the pond in front of the camp. There he cleaned his catch. From the time Gramp had given Jim his first fishing knife, he'd loved to slit open the bladderlike stomachs of their trout and show Gramp what the fish had been feeding on. Today they were crammed with mayflies. A few hellgrammites and minnows. One lone peeper frog no larger than a dime.

Jim looked up the mountainside above the camp, where he and Gramp had gone to hunt deer and partridge and pick wild raspberries and blackberries in season. Partway up the mountain a stand of mature beech trees grew in a long-abandoned log landing. Gramp had taken him there many times to see the claw marks on the smooth gray bark of the trees where black bears had climbed up after beechnuts. In a damp depression nearby, a patch of pink lady slippers came up year after year. The year before Gram died Jim brought her here when the lady slippers were in blossom and offered to transplant a few to her flower garden. Gram had smiled. Then she'd written on her slate, “Let them stay home.” The beech grove was a possibility.

Out of the pack basket Jim removed a number-fourteen black-iron spider, a loaf of Mom's oatmeal bread wrapped in waxed paper, salt and pepper, a pound of butter swaddled in cheesecloth, flatware, a crock of Mom's just-in-case baked beans—just in case the fishing was slow—a plain white crockery plate and a matching cup with a chipped handle, a tin of loose black tea, and an empty lard pail with a homemade wire bail for boiling water.

The pack basket was nearly two centuries old. Jim's Abenaki great-great-great grandmother had made it with a crooked knife from the inner bark of a white ash tree. When Jim was a little boy, Gramp had carried him on his back, standing in the pack basket, up the step-across brook above the camp. Gramp would hook a trout and pass his fly rod over his shoulder to Jim. Using both hands, Jim would derrick the thrashing little fish out of the water onto the ferns beside the bank.

Today Jim sat on a drift log on the scree beside the pond under a blue Canadian sky in the soft of the year and ate pink-fleshed trout with thick slices of homemade bread and butter washed down with black woodsmen's tea. He looked at the beautiful ash pack basket and wondered if he would have children and grandchildren to carry fishing in it. The pack basket was a link to the past. The future was as opaque as the surface of the ponds on the darkest night of the year.

*   *   *

Below Pond Number Three, the character of the river changed twice before it emptied into the big lake at the Great Earthen Dam. The first mile was fast and riffly, with natural stone-bars perpendicular to the current. In the fall of the year, when the brook trout ran both up and down the Lower Kingdom to spawn on the sand-and-gravel bottoms of the pools below the stone-bars, the fishing in this stretch of the river was superb.

Below the spawning pools, as the river entered the notch between Kingdom and Canada Mountains, it narrowed, deepened, and slowed to a crawl. Finally the current seemed to stop altogether. This was the Dead Water impoundment where Jim and Gramp had seen the river otter take the trout this past winter.

The Dead Water was the single stretch of the entire river that Jim didn't love. Here the Klan had surprised the former slaves of New Canaan at Sunday evening services with their families. Between ninety and one hundred New Canaanites were incinerated alive. A few others jumped out the windows. All but three were hunted down and slaughtered in the nearby forest.

The Great Earthen Dam had been built in 1900, creating the Dead Water and flooding out the charred remains of New Canaan. Jim felt that on the Dead Water in the notch between the mountains, he was in the presence of a great, lingering evil. But today he was determined not to dwell on the past or, for that matter, on the future. Today Jim had business in the present.

By the time Jim glided into the Dead Water, the afternoon sunlight was falling directly on the cliffs of Canada Mountain. Thirty feet to Jim's right, where the mountain plunged into its own upside-down reflection in the river, a thin curtain of water seeped down the face of the escarpment. Sometimes large trout lay in wait where the spring-fed rill washed aquatic life into the river.

Jim shipped his paddle and began false casting. He dropped his Coachman just above the junction of the waterfall and the river. What appeared to be a good fish, either a salmon or a very large trout, swirled at the fly but didn't strike. The Old Town or Jim's profile or the shadow of his leader on the water had spooked it.

Jim rested the fish. Then he picked up his Orvis again. Using his wrist as a fulcrum, the way Gramp had taught him, he began to false cast. When he straightened his arm, the loops of slack line in his lap hissed out through the metal guides of his fly rod. The Coachman ticked off the base of the cliff and the trout struck.

The tip of the Orvis bent to the water as the hooked fish made its first surge downriver. Jim raised the rod above his head, applying as much pressure as he dared. Gramp had liked to say that a bamboo Orvis had backbone. It would bend almost double. Handled properly, it would never snap.

A salmon or a rainbow trout would have jumped by now. Almost certainly this was a big native brook trout. Suddenly it turned and came fast back upriver. Jim reeled as quickly as he could to keep slack out of the line. He maintained the tension on his leader just this side of the breaking point.

The trout made two more runs. Then it was finished. Jim held the landing net a foot below the surface close to the side of the canoe in order not to scare the fish into a last desperate flurry. He eased the played-out trout over the net and lifted it shimmering onto the floor of the Old Town beside the pack basket. It was a hook-jawed male at least twenty inches long. A true record-book brook trout.

Jim thought of the mounted fish in the hotel barroom. Over the decades, their fins and tails had frayed and split. Their colors had faded. It was hard to tell the brook trout from the browns and rainbows.

The trophy fish was hooked lightly and there was no sign of blood. Jim reached into the net and removed the Coachman from the cartilage in the corner of the trout's mouth. He lifted the net with the trout in it over the side of the Old Town and turned the fish back out into the Dead Water. Briefly, it hung motionless, fanning its gills. Then it flicked its square tail and was gone, and at exactly that moment, Jim knew what he'd spent the day looking for.

*   *   *

Gramp had told Jim that their Abenaki ancestors were afraid of the big lake. The steep mountains on each side created a thirty-mile-long wind tunnel, so that on the calmest of days, when Memphremagog lay between the peaks as innocent as a mill pond, it could transform itself in scant minutes into a maelstrom. More than once, Jim and Gramp had seen it happen. For this reason, the Indians who came to the lake to fish in spawning season canoed it only in the early morning and near dusk, when the wind usually fell. Even then, they tended to stay close to shore, tracing its contours and rarely crossing open water.

This early evening in late May, dyed crimson by the reflection of the sunset, the lake was as unruffled as stained glass. A cathedral stillness enveloped its waters. A film of mist, pink in the sunset, hung over the Île d'Illusion as Jim approached it in the Old Town, and the island seemed to hover above the water in the mist, much as it had hung in the smoke from the forest fire three quarters of a century ago when Gramp and his father approached the crescent of beach where a silent child stood surrounded by wild animals.

The bow of the Old Town scraped on the pebbles. Jim stepped into the ankle-deep water and pulled the canoe out of the water. From the bottom of the pack basket in the bow he removed a rectangular cardboard box somewhat larger than a shoebox. “Jim, you'll know what to do with these,” Gramp had written on the cover. Jim carried it and the short-handled garden spade up the slope through the woods to a small clearing overlooking the beach below. The floor of the woods was carpeted with caribou moss. Red-capped British soldiers grew on a decaying fallen tree. Elsewhere on the island, a few
habitant
French-Indian farmers grew potatoes and carrots in the sandy soil, and kept a small dairy herd and a maple orchard. Here at its southeast corner, the Île d'Illusion was still heavily wooded.

Twice he hit roots snaking out from the surrounding spruce and cedar trees. He'd have needed an ax to slice through them. On his third attempt, he got down three feet through the duff and hard soil. That was deep enough.

From the rectangular box, lined with crumpled back issues of the
Monitor,
he removed the blue Dr. Bitters bottle, heavier now than it had been when he'd transferred Our Lady of the Lake from Gramp's kitchen table to the counter below Gram's critters. He cradled the bottle in the bottom of the hole in the forest floor and sifted a cushiony layer of moss onto it and filled it in. He thought about saying something but didn't. From Gramp, Jim had learned everything he knew about storytelling. From Gram he had learned the eloquence of silence.

The sun had dropped behind the Canadian peaks to the west. The lake was a deep blue in the gathering dusk. Jim looked over the top of the Great Earthen Dam and up through the gap between Kingdom and Canada Mountains. He thought of the burned-out shells of the houses and the church, deep under the Dead Water impoundment. He thought of the hooded Klansmen galloping up the Canada Post Road. And he thought of the little girl who would become his grandmother, standing in the smoke with her kingdom of peaceable critters.

As he paddled back across the narrow strait between the Île d'Illusion and the mainland, Jim was more aware than ever that he dwelt in no peaceable kingdom. Yet out of the atrocities, out of the murders and hatred that made not a particle of sense, had come the almost accidental meeting of Gramp and Gram, his Lady of the Lake, and their love for each other and for their family.

In the twilight the dam was an indistinct hulk, but Jim could make out Dad's DeSoto sitting on the gravel road beside the spur track. Dad was leaning against the front fender and smoking his pipe. He lifted his hand as the Old Town glided toward the shore and Jim lifted his hand in acknowledgement after a hard, good day on the water.

 

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