God's Kingdom (7 page)

As the old Rambler rattled onto the one-lane red iron bridge over the river, Prof slowed to a crawl. He looked out his window and Jim looked out his at the river below. Jim thought he saw the dark outline of a trout shoot up through the current into the shadow of the bridge abutment. Hanging in the deep green bridge pool, the fish looked nearly as long as Jim's arm.

“Well, son,” Prof said as they continued into the village, “I don't need to tell you how little I look forward to this business today. Or how much I appreciate your help.”

Jim nodded. But as they pulled up to the curb in front of Miss Hark's place, he was quite sure that Prof didn't dread the day ahead as much as he did. Not only had the recently deceased math teacher been directly responsible for the terrible fate of his friend Gaëtan Dubois on the big lake, her village house was widely rumored to be haunted. Never once in his nearly sixteen years had Jim set foot inside the place, and as foolish as he knew this was, he'd fervently hoped never to have to.

The old Kinneson manse, as Miss Hark's place was called, had been built by Jim's great-great-grandfather “Abolition Jim” Kinneson. Abolition Jim had constructed the manse for his wife, who was unhappy on the farm where Jim and his parents now lived and pined for a place in town. Although not as large or stately as Judge Allen's home on Anderson Hill, or Prof's headmaster's house, the manse had several handsome features. Old James had cut a sideways, or “coffin,” window between the steep upper slate roof and the tin roof of the kitchen ell. Into the front wall of the second story, overlooking the village green to the south, James had built an elegant secluded porch. A flagstone walk led from the picket fence up to the front door, over which he had inserted a horizontal transom of six frosted panes. A set of sleigh bells hung beside the door. Callers at the manse announced their arrival by giving them a shake. In the old days, visitors would sometimes jingle the bells a second time for the sheer pleasure of hearing them again. Atop the carriage shed adjacent to the house was a copper weathervane in the shape of a galloping Morgan horse. A bed of lavender scented the narrow side lawn between the manse and the lane leading down to the High Falls on the river. A few tiny white violets grew between the flagstones.

Just when the manse was first proclaimed to be haunted was lost in the distant lore of the village. Nor was Jim sure who or what was supposed to possess the place. Children, always more keenly attuned to these matters than their elders, began crossing the street to the village green in order to avoid walking by the manse about the time Miss Hark inherited the house from James's widow, her Kinneson grandmother.

Over the decades the place had fallen into disrepair. Virginia creeper had twined up the outside walls. A few of the square nails holding the roof slates in place had rusted out. Several slates had pulled free and fallen onto the lawn below or shattered on the flagstone walk. The copper horse on the carriage shed had acquired a sickly verdigris patina, as if it had become nauseated from its own air of perpetual motion.

It was said that the manse contained a secret chamber, where Miss Hark's father had hidden fugitive slaves before smuggling them across the border to Canada. Some Commoners swore that they'd heard snatches of old spirituals coming from the front parlor late at night, accompanied by the wheezing strains of the ancient pump organ that had belonged to James's widow.

While Prof sorted through a ring of iron keys, Jim tugged on the sleigh bells. Prof gave a start. “Jesum Crow!” he said.

Jim struggled not to laugh out loud. Evidently Prof was as frightened of the manse as he was. The vestibule and front hallway smelled cold and stale, like a disused church. A curved staircase led to the second story. Prof laid his hand on one of the carved balusters. “Butternut,” he said. “You don't see much butternut being used in houses these days, Jimmy. This house was
built.
”

He poked his head into the front parlor off the hall. “And just look at this wainscoting. Bird's-eye maple all the way up to the chair rail. I played here with Harkness as a kid. I never would have noticed how pretty the woodwork was then.”

“Are you going to move in?”

“I'll have to have someplace to hang my fish pole after I retire,” Prof said. “The headmaster's house goes with the job.”

“I wouldn't live in a haunted house for a million dollars,” Jim said.

Prof grinned. He touched one bushy eyebrow, then his lips, then made a circle of his thumb and forefinger: their private code for “I say nothing.”

“Truth to tell,” Prof said, “I've never thought it was the house that was haunted.”

There wasn't much to see in the parlor. A horsehair love seat with yellowed antimacassars on its arms and back. Two uncomfortable-looking Morris chairs. The antiquated organ rumored to play itself. A glass-fronted bookcase containing old-fashioned romance novels from the era of Jim's grandparents and great-grandparents. “I don't think this room has been used since the manse was a boardinghouse, Jim,” Prof said.

“I didn't know it ever was a boardinghouse.”

“Oh, yes, and within my memory. After Abolition Jim was killed by federal troops and the Kingdom was reincorporated into the nation, James's widow operated a very respectable boardinghouse here, mainly for traveling single ladies and old-maid schoolteachers and such. She willed the place to her grown granddaughter Harkness—speaking of old-maid schoolteachers. Miss H continued to run the boardinghouse for a few years after she inherited it. Then she got her normal-school degree and started working at the Academy. That's about when the boarding business went by the board. Sorry for the bad pun.”

They returned to the hallway, which led into a dining room. A trestle-style table with twelve ladder-back chairs arranged around it took up most of the space in the room.

Out in the ell, the pale-yellow kitchen linoleum gleamed from a recent waxing. Next to the deep-welled zinc sink sat an icebox, as Prof referred to it, with a squat round motor on top. It was unplugged and the door was ajar. Except for an open box of baking soda, the shelves were bare. A massive black Home Comfort cooking and heating stove, converted at some point from wood to gas, sat between the empty icebox and the door to the woodshed. Off the kitchen was a narrow bathroom, formerly a pantry, Prof thought, containing a toilet with a pull-chain attached to an overhead water tank, and a tub with high sides resting on lion-claw feet.

Another door led from the kitchen to a downstairs bedroom. Prof told Jim that he believed that Miss Hark had slept here for decades. Her severe dark teaching dresses hung in a wooden chifforobe. An oak dresser contained clean, folded blouses, sweaters, and underthings. Beside Miss Hark's narrow brass bed was a stack of books on a washstand. Prof read the titles out loud to Jim.
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice
. He shook his head, touched one eyebrow, then his lips, and shot Jim the thumb-and-forefinger sign.

*   *   *

Upstairs in the master bedroom off the secluded porch, Prof and Jim discovered several dozen cardboard boxes filled with graded examinations dating all the way back to Miss Hark's first years as a math teacher at the Academy. “Look at this, Prof!” Jim said, holding up a blue test booklet. “‘Charles Kinneson III. November 4, 1915. Algebra II. D -. Did not follow assignment.'”

Charles III was Jim's father, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of
The Kingdom County Monitor,
whose scathing columns on Senator Joseph McCarthy had helped lead to McCarthy's recent censure on the floor of the Senate. It was as if Miss Hark, otherwise not a hoarder, had held on to the exam papers all these years to maintain power over her now-grown former students.

“These boxes and what's in them need to go to the dump,” Prof said. “I'll lug them down to the front door and you put 'em in the back of the Rambler.” This time Prof didn't bother to flash Jim the “I say nothing” signal. He was angered, and unsettled as well, by the discovery of the exams.

For the rest of the morning Jim loaded boxes into Prof's station wagon and ran them up to the village dump on the back side of Anderson Hill. Crazy Kinneson, Jim's second cousin, helped him heave the old examinations onto the smoky fire of discarded treadless tires, broken boards, and household garbage that smoldered day and night at the dump in those days. An unstoppable center on the Academy basketball team, Crazy lived with his uncle the dumpkeeper in a shack constructed of old lumber and packing crates. For company he conversed with an array of imaginary companions, both living and dead.

“Tell Miss Hark that Crazy says hello, Jimmy,” Crazy said. “Tell the pretty dark lady hello, too.”

Jim liked Crazy and was accustomed to his strange pronouncements. Privately, he thought that his cousin might not be crazy at all. Jim waved to Crazy out the window of the Rambler and headed back toward the manse.

*   *   *

At noon Prof sprang for Armand St. Onge's famous hot roast pork sandwiches at the hotel dining room. The dining room was crowded this noon, with both local and out-of-state fishermen. Jim's brother, Charlie, and Charlie's girlfriend, Athena Allen, Jim's much-beloved English teacher at the Academy, waved Prof and Jim over to a table by the window, overlooking the railroad crossing at the north end of the village green. “How are you guys coming over at Miss Havisham's?” Charlie said. “Did you bring us a slice of her wedding cake?”

Athena gave Charlie a look. “Speaking of weddings,” she said.

Jim grinned. He was a little shy around his favorite teacher because she was so beautiful. He didn't understand why his big brother didn't marry her and neither, Charlie'd recently confided to him, did he. Jim surely would have. In Charlie's place he'd have married his good-looking teacher long ago. Jim would have given anything to have a whip-smart, funny, Hollywood-gorgeous girlfriend like Athena Allen, who encouraged him with his storywriting and never wrote “Did not follow assignment” on his compositions—though he often did not—at the same time that she teased him, fondly and mercilessly, like a big sister, calling him a “daydreaming romantic,” often adding that she wished “you know who” was a little more like him. Privately, Jim worried that Charlie would let Athena slip through his fingers.

Charlie and Athena had been on the river since dawn and were still wearing their waders. As usual, they were arguing. In fact, Jim could not remember a time when Charlie and his longtime girlfriend had not been arguing. Mom said that arguing was how Charlie and Athena conversed with each other, which Jim supposed was the case, though he wished that when they were conversing, they wouldn't try to enlist him on behalf of their respective causes.

Today the couple was engaged in a debate over the size of a trout Athena had lost in the basin pool below the High Falls behind the hotel. She'd played it for several minutes, and it had jumped twice, so both Charlie and Athena had gotten a good look at it. But when Charlie had tried to net it for her, he'd inadvertently—or not—knocked it off the hook. Athena claimed the fish weighed at least six pounds. Charlie said four pounds was more like it.

“Your so-called teacher here, Jimmy, is accusing me of deliberately causing her to lose that mediocre trout,” Charlie said. “Would I do that?”

Outside, the long noon freight was rumbling by. Charlie had to speak just below a shout to make himself heard. So did Athena when she said, “What do you mean ‘so-called teacher'? I
am
Jim's teacher. Your brother bumped that fish off my hook on purpose, Jim. All he caught all morning was a pathetic little fingerling and he was jealous. It's the sort of thing I'd have expected him to do when we were twelve.”

Jim gave Prof a pleading look, hoping he'd intervene and get him down from the witness stand. The old headmaster, however, was watching the train go by and only half paying attention to the conversation. Like many men who'd grown up in the Common during its heyday as a railroad town, with a roundhouse where mechanics worked on hundred-ton steam engines, and thirty trains a day passing through the village, Prof loved everything about railroading. When Prof was a boy, and for decades afterward, the railroad was the town's main link to away, the other side of the hills. It was how Commoners got to St. Johnsbury to shop and to the matinees in Memphremagog. Jim loved trains, too, especially the exotic-sounding names on the sides of the freight cars. Baltimore and Ohio. Pine Tree State. Great Northern. Grand Trunk. Jim loved the names of the railroad lines the way he loved the names of Gramp's hand-tied trout flies and Mom's old-fashioned apple trees on the farm that wasn't.

At last, the caboose rattled over the crossing. A mile away, at the trestle north of town, one of the four diesel engines whistled. As the whistle faded away, a brief lull settled over the hotel dining room and the village, an empty quietude that Jim always found slightly melancholy.

“I'll net my own fish from now on, buster,” Athena said to Charlie. “Wouldn't you, Jimmy?”

This time Prof came to his rescue. He pointed his crooked index finger, broken twice from his glory days as a standout catcher at the Academy, at the squabbling couple. “Enough,” he said. “I listened to your catfights for four years when you two were going to school. I don't intend to have my dinner ruined by them today. Charlie, what's the farthest you've ever seen a baseball hit on the common?”

Charlie looked out the dining room window, across the railroad tracks at the bandstand, and on down the green toward the baseball backstop at the far south end. “A few years ago my cousin Moose Kinneson tagged one off the upper story of the brick shopping block across the street from deep left field. There's no telling how far it might have traveled. Four hundred and fifty feet? Maybe five hundred.”