God's Kingdom (6 page)

“What about forgiving her because she knows not what she does?” Jim kidded her.

“She knows very well what she's doing,” Mom said. “We'll leave it to Jesus to forgive her, sweetie. That's more than I can muster right now.”

“Do you believe in Jesus, Mom?”

“I believe in love,” Mom said. “And, I'm afraid, in its absence.”

*   *   *

In early November, Réjean bought two more milking cows. With some of the earnings from her housekeeping jobs, Madame Dubois purchased a Toulouse laying goose. Once or twice a week Gaëtan brought a hard-boiled goose egg to school to eat with his lard sandwiches and coffee.

With Thanksgiving week came the onset of winter in the Kingdom. As usual, the volunteer fire department flooded the ball diamond on the village green and set up sideboards for a hockey rink. Gaëtan appeared on the ice with a pair of hand-me-down skates and a homemade hockey stick. Once again Jim learned something surprising about his friend. The gangling kid who couldn't connect with a baseball skated like the north wind out of Canada. In the first five minutes of their first pickup game, Gaëtan made a hat trick. He spent the rest of the game drawing out the goalie, then dropping off the puck to teammates for open shots on the net.

On skates, Gaëtan Out-of-the-Woods was indomitable. In brushups with players from neighboring towns who called him a “Black Canuck,” and worse, he'd windmill his arms and fists without much strategy, but no matter how hard you hit him you couldn't knock him down. At some point he'd get his licks in and then you'd be sorry you'd taunted him.

On New Year's Day, when gifts were traditionally exchanged in French Canada, Réjean and Madame presented Gaëtan with a new pair of hockey skates. He and Jim skated up the frozen Lower Kingdom River to the colony of multicolored ice-fishing shanties on the South Bay of Lake Memphremagog. Gaëtan pointed north up the lake between the mountains across the border. “
Chez soi,
” he said. Home.

*   *   *

On the morning of Miss Hark's algebra final, the mercury in the Kinnesons' outdoor thermometer sat at twenty-seven below zero. The air sparkled with ice crystals from the mist over the High Falls in the village. Walking the half mile into town, their skates laced together and slung over their shoulders, Jim and Gaëtan were half frozen by the time they reached the Academy.

There was no way to keep the big granite school warm in weather that cold. Even the basement room, with its monstrous coal-burning furnace, was frigid. Most students took their tests in their winter coats and boots. At lunch, Gaëtan's coffee steamed like a boiling kettle.

Miss Hark's Algebra II test was scheduled from one to three. Mr. Benson's juniors were taking their trig exam in the math room that period, so the algebra test was moved to the science lab. As Jim walked into the room, he felt his breathing tighten at the sight of the exams stacked on the corner of the teacher's desk. The scent of fresh mimeograph ink hung on the air like ether in an operating room. From its pole at the front of the room, Pliny Templeton's skeleton seemed to be grinning out at the students, delighted by their apprehensive expressions. As usual, Gaëtan sat in the back of the room.

At precisely one o'clock, Miss Hark marched up and down the aisles passing out the test papers. With a sinking heart, Jim riffled through the exam. There was an entire page of word problems that might have given Einstein himself pause. The first one began, “A runaway locomotive traveling at 96 mph is hurtling down upon the Academy team bus, stalled on the crossing in Kingdom Common, 3.4 miles away, with the bus door and emergency exit frozen shut.” Across the aisle to Jim's left a single tear slid down Becky Sanville's cheek, whether for her own plight or for that of the doomed students on the bus was impossible to know.

At one fifteen, Gaëtan stood up, walked to the front of the room, and placed his completed test on Miss Hark's desk. Jim noticed that he approached the desk on the far side from Pliny's skeleton.

“What?” she said.

For the first time in four months, Gaëtan spoke in school. “
J'ai finis
,” he said.

“Speak English. This is America.”

Miss Hark picked up Gate's test and glanced at it. “There's only one way you could possibly be finished, Dubois. You got your hands on a copy of the examination ahead of time. Where did you get it? Out of the teachers' room?”

Gaëtan shook his head. “No, madame. Mademoiselle.”

Miss Hark stood up. “Then where is your scratch work? Show me.”

Gaëtan shrugged, then touched his head to indicate that was where he did his figuring. At the same time, he glanced at the skeleton.

“What are you looking at?” Miss Hark said. “Why are you looking at me that way? Are you mocking me?”

“I don't look you. I look him. I don't like.”

“Oh, you don't, don't you? Well, how do you like this?”

Very deliberately, Miss Hark tore Gaëtan's exam in two and dropped it into the wastebasket beside her desk. She stood up, turned to the blackboard, and drew a small circle just above the chalk tray, at about waist height, inches from the dangling skeleton. “Bend over, Monsieur Dubois,” she said. “Nose in the circle.”

Jim jumped to his feet, so angry he was shaking. “He didn't cheat, Miss Hark. I'll go in his place.”

“You'll do no such thing, Kinneson. Sit down this instant. Get back to work. All of you, get back to work.”

Gaëtan, already bent over at the blackboard with his nose in the circle, motioned for Jim to sit down. As terrified as he was of the bones, this was between him and Miss Hark.

“You may resume your seat, Dubois,” Miss Hark said, “when, and only when, you confess to cheating.”

*   *   *

As the afternoon wore on, clouds began to sail in from the northwest. The wind picked up and the classroom windows rattled in their wooden sashes. Stooped over at the blackboard, Gaëtan reached under his tattered jacket and rubbed the small of his back. From time to time he twisted his head and glanced fearfully at the skeleton. Jim thought about going for Prof but didn't. Gaëtan seemed determined to fight this battle himself.

At two twenty-five Gaëtan waved his hand. “Mademoiselle Kin'son,” he said. “
S'il vous plaît.
”

“Are you ready to confess, Dubois?”

“
Je dois aller aux toilettes, Mademoiselle
.”

“Fine. When you admit that you cheated on your examination, you may go to the boys' room. Not until.”

Gaëtan lifted one large brogan, then the other, like a nervous horse. Jim thought of the quart jar of coffee his friend had drunk at lunch. The boy must be in agony.

Across the aisle, Becky gasped. Her hand shot to her mouth. She was staring at Gate, bent over in his too-small suit like a ragged old man. The entire class was staring at Gaëtan. A stream of liquid came pouring out of the frayed cuffs of his trousers, splashing over his square-cut shoes onto the floor of the classroom. On and on it came, more than Jim would have thought possible.

Miss Hark frowned at the class. She looked over her shoulder at the clock. “You still have five minutes. Double-check your—”

Miss Hark made a strangled noise in her throat and lurched to her feet. She pointed at Gaëtan, standing in the spreading pool of his own urine, then at the door. “Go!” she shrieked. “Get out.”

Gaëtan remained bent over at the blackboard. “I do not cheat, me!” he shouted.

“I don't care if you cheated or not. Get out of my class, you stinking Black Frenchman.”

Gaëtan shook his head. “With respect, Mademoiselle. I do not cheat.”

The puddle at Gaëtan's feet crept toward Miss Hark's desk. She started to back away. Just as she bolted for the door, it opened and Prof stepped into the room. “Excuse me, Miss Hark. The hockey game this afternoon's been canceled because of the weather. There's a major blizzard coming in from Canada. I want you boys and girls to bundle up and go straight—Miss Hark? Are you all right?”

“Him!” Miss Hark shrieked, pointing at Gaëtan. Then she rushed past Prof and out the door.

At the blackboard, Gaëtan straightened up and turned to face the class. A dark stain covered the front of his trousers.

“
Pardon,
” Gaëtan said. “
Pardon, monsieur le professeur
.
J'ai
shame.”

Eyes down, Gaëtan walked to the back of the classroom and removed his overcoat from its hook. He threw his new skates over his shoulder, picked up his lunch pail, and left the room.

“This is most unfortunate,” Prof told the class. “I'm sorry you folks had to witness something like this.”

“Prof,” Jim said. “Miss Hark accused Gate of cheating, but he didn't.”

“I know he didn't, son,” Prof said. “You go find your friend and tell him I know he didn't do anything wrong. The rest of you people are dismissed. Leave your tests on your desks. I'll collect them.”

As the students got to their feet, Prof said, “Keep your faces covered up on your way home. It's murderously cold out there.”

*   *   *

Gaëtan's brogans sat side by side on the riverbank. On the dark ice below, Jim made out the diagonal telemarks of Gaëtan's long skating strides. Hurriedly he kicked off his boots and laced up his skates. Jim knew that he could never overtake his friend in an all-out race. He had to hope that Gate would stop to thaw out at one of the fishing shanties on the South Bay.

As Jim skated north up the river, tracing its oxbows through the frozen wetlands south of the lake, the wind buffeted his body like a hockey defenseman checking him at every turn. He had to twist his head aside to breathe. He tried burying his mouth and nose in the fleece collar of his jacket, but when he did, his breath froze to his face. He covered the five miles through the swamp to the bay in thirty minutes. Gaëtan's skate tracks, silvery in the dwindling light of the short winter afternoon, continued past the enclave of fishing shacks toward the big lake and Canada.

The wind funneling through the notch between the mountains struck Jim with frightening force. The peaks of Kingdom and Canada Mountains were obscured by blowing snow. Far to the southwest the sun was a pewter disc. It touched the peak of Mt. Mansfield, then vanished.

Something came hurtling Jim's way, tumbling wildly across the ice. As it rattled past him, he recognized Gaëtan's lunch pail. Jim thought of Gate's wet trousers and socks, frozen stiff by now.

Briefly the gale let up, as if gathering itself for a more fierce assault. Just ahead, at the Great Earthen Dam, the Upper Kingdom River marking the Canadian border flowed into the lake from the east. Suddenly Jim knew where Gaëtan was headed. He was going home.

North of the dam, the lake rarely froze until mid-January. In the last blue light of the day, Jim could see whitecaps angling from shore to shore. He heard the breakers crashing. He was almost out of ice.

Jim skidded sideways, stumbled, regained his balance, and came to a stop. The wind picked up again, and he had to lean into it to stay on his feet as he screamed out Gaëtan's name again and again. He thought of his friend standing at the blackboard in a pool of his own urine. He thought of himself doing nothing to help Gate, even when Miss Hark had called him a “Black Frenchman,” and of Prof's last words to the class.

“It's murderously cold out there,” Prof had told them, and it was. Yet somehow Jim knew, as he started back down the ice with the howling wind at his back, that however treacherous the cold and snow and wind and fathomless dark heart of the lake might be, the greater dangers of this place they called God's Kingdom lay closer to home.

 

4

Haunted

In those years every village in the Kingdom boasted its own haunted house.

—PLINY'S
HISTORY

It was May Day in Kingdom County. This was the time of year when Jim and his close friend and fishing mentor, Prof Chadburn, would toss their fly rods in the back of Prof's Rambler station wagon and head out the county road along the river to fish the rainbow run. They'd spend the entire day on the stream, stopping at noon to cook their catch over an open fire for a shore lunch, fishing on through the afternoon together for the gigantic silver-and-crimson trout that ran up the river to spawn in the spring of the year.

Not today. Today Prof had recruited his prize Latin student and star shortstop on the Academy baseball team to help him empty out Miss Hark Kinneson's former house in the village. This was Saturday. The past Monday, before the students arrived at the Academy, Prof had stepped discreetly into Miss Hark's classroom to tell her that her employment would be terminated with the end of the current school year. He'd discovered the math teacher slumped over with her head on her desk, her eyes wide open and glaring angrily out over what had been her domain for fifty years, as if she'd divined his intention and upstaged him. To his further astonishment, a few days later Prof learned that he had inherited Miss Hark's house, just across the street from the north end of the village green.

Prof may well have been the only Commoner to whom the news that Harkness Kinneson had named him her heir came unexpectedly. The whole town, including Jim, knew that Miss Hark had set her cap for John Chadburn from the day they entered high school together. Unfortunately for the future schoolmistress, by then young Johnny was already in love with the remote trout streams and deep woods of the Kingdom.

Over his long tenure as headmaster at the Academy, Prof had become something of a living legend in God's Kingdom. A burly man with thinning white hair, a neat gray mustache, and noticing blue eyes, he still taught four classes of Latin and coached Jim's baseball team. Malefactors actually enjoyed being sent to his office. After roaring at them for a minute or two, he regaled them with tales of his own juvenile misdemeanors, then sent them back to class laughing. To cover up his bald spot he wore his Academy baseball cap indoors and out, year-round.