God's Kingdom (10 page)

“What's up, Kinneson? Dad K send his wet-behind-the-ears cub reporter out to cover the basketball game, did he?”

Mr. Gil Gilbert, the Academy shop teacher, had come up behind Jim while he was studying Pliny's portrait. Mr. Gilbert made a point of addressing male students by their last names. He referred to Jim, sneeringly, as a wet-behind-the-ears cub reporter or, more sneeringly still, as “Hemingway.” Jim was quite certain that Mr. Gil Gilbert had never in his life read a book by Hemingway. He would not have been surprised to learn that Mr. Gilbert had not read any book at all in the last ten years.

“No,” Jim said. “I'm writing a story about a teacher.”

“Yeah? Who? That old colored boy in the painting?”

“The ‘old colored boy' was very popular with his students,” Jim said. “This guy I'm writing about, nobody can stand him.”

“Go to hell, Hemingway. You're no more a writer than I'm the man in the moon.”

“May I quote you on that?”

Mr. Gil Gilbert took a step forward. He had the red face of a heavy drinker, though so far as Jim knew he never touched a drop. “I bet you'd like to take a swing at me, wouldn't you, Hemingway? Be my guest. Give it your best shot.”

Mr. Gil Gilbert was forever inviting his shop students to take a swing at him and give it their best shot. He disliked Jim in particular because some years ago, when Charlie was a student at the Academy, Mr. Gilbert had urged Jim's brother to take a swing at him and Charlie had promptly obliged him, breaking his jaw. At the moment, Jim would very much have liked to take Mr. Gil Gilbert up on his kind offer, but the shop teacher had spotted Frenchy Lamott across the lobby, wearing his cap inside the Academy, and was already stomping off to confiscate it.

The brush with Mr. Gilbert made Jim wonder. Why were so many teachers either beloved, like Prof Chadburn and Athena Allen, or detested, like Mr. Gil Gilbert and Miss Hark Kinneson? One thing was for sure. The Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton had been beloved. You could see that in his portrait, too. Jim wished he knew more about him. In his great local history, Pliny had written very little about himself.

Feeling closed in, Jim jostled his way outside, onto the steps of the school. The Landing team bus was parked across the green under a streetlight, where it was less apt to be vandalized. The driver and a local deputy sheriff stood vigil beside it, stamping their feet in the frosty night. High above the village the December moon looked small and drained of color.

Jim glanced at the playground beside the Academy, dimly illuminated in the moonlight. He thought of Crazy, practicing day in and day out on the bent and netless playground hoop, even on the coldest winter mornings when the temperature in God's Kingdom fell to forty-five and sometimes fifty degrees below zero.

“Hey, Jimmy,” someone yelled from the doorway behind him. “Second half's starting.”

*   *   *

Partway through the third quarter, the Landing began to figure out the Academy's defense. On three consecutive possessions, they turned the Common's full-court press into their own fast break, scoring easy baskets each time. Charlie called time and took off the press.

The editor and Prof officiated tightly to keep the game from getting away from them. At the same time, they let the kids play hard. “Come on, call it!” Charlie continued to bellow each time the Landing players collapsed on Crazy to deny him the ball or a lane to the basket.

Crazy didn't rattle. Playing always within himself, never overreaching, he found the open man under the basket, whipped the ball back outside to an unguarded teammate, sprinted outside himself and launched his long, deadly jumpers over a screen.

With the Landing up by two and just seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Bobby LaBounty made a thread-the-needle bounce pass into Crazy at low post. Instantly the big center and two forwards from the Landing swarmed him. There was no place for Jim's cousin to go. But with his back to the basket, Crazy leaped high above the three defenders, spun around in midair, and executed the first two-handed slam dunk ever seen in the Kingdom.

As the buzzer ending the game sounded, the editor cupped one hand upside down and dipped it sharply to indicate that Crazy'd gotten his shot off in time. The basket counted. The fourth quarter had ended with the score tied and the game was going into overtime.

Or was it? Prof and the editor were conferring at mid-court. Prof looked up at the scorer's table and lifted his index finger. “Plus one,” he shouted out over the terrific din in the gymnasium. “He was fouled in the act of shooting.” Crazy had a final free throw coming. With it he could win the game.

From the Landing fans in the west balcony came an anguished howl rising to a crescendo of pure outrage. The Commoners responded with thunderous applause. Crazy stepped up to the foul line, bounced the ball once, and lifted it to his one-handed shooting position. He seemed oblivious to the furor in the balconies. Crazy shot one hundred free throws a day on the playground hoop. In his entire varsity career he hadn't missed half a dozen foul shots.

Just as Crazy bent his knees to shoot, someone in the Landing balcony flung a handful of Good & Plenties onto the court. Some of the hard little pink and white candies struck Crazy. Others bounced off the floor and skittered across it to the opposite wall. Crazy glanced up at the shrieking fans.

“Pyro!” a voice screamed out. “Crazy pyro bastard.”

Suddenly the air was full of missiles. Green, red, and yellow Dots. Canada mints. Black Crows, candy corn, more Good & Plenties, flying from balcony to balcony. Some seemed aimed at Crazy himself. A three-ring binder struck his leg. A lunch box narrowly missed his head.

The editor and Prof ran to Crazy's side, held up their hands, and shouted at the mob to stop throwing things. Crazy continued to stand at the foul line, knees slightly bent, the ball cradled in his big hands just above his head. Then he lowered the ball and set it down on the line.

In a blizzard of popcorn, hard and soft candies, peanuts and peanut shells, with his hands held up to his eyes like horse blinders, Crazy turned and walked across the gym floor toward the stairs at the far end of the court. Shielding his eyes, he glanced back over his shoulder once, as if checking to be sure that the ball was still where he left it.

As Crazy continued toward the stairs, an empty pop bottle, bright and flashing, caught him flush on the left temple. All Jim could be sure of was that the flying glass bottle had come from somewhere behind him in the home balcony. Crazy sank to his knees as if to pray. Then he crumpled sideways onto the court.

The gym fell deathly quiet.

*   *   *

Whoever threw the pop bottle that killed Jim's cousin was never charged. Maybe the bottle was meant for the Landingites and slipped out of the thrower's hand. No one ever came forward to testify, much less accept responsibility for the boy's death. In an editorial in
the Monitor
entitled “The Stoning of Philmore Kinneson,” Jim's father wrote that it was the feud itself that had killed Crazy, and the two towns should be prosecuted for murder.

The entire Common seemed to turn out for Crazy Kinneson's funeral. Donors came together to commission a granite tombstone in his memory, with a regulation-size, carved granite basketball on top. But Crazy's story didn't end there. One snowy evening several weeks after his death the defunct distillery caught fire again. This time it burned to the ground. That same night the Lake Kingdom House in the Landing, closed for the winter, went up in flames.

“At least they can't lay these latest fires to Crazy's door,” Jim told his father the next morning.

“Don't be too sure about that, James,” the editor said, and as usual, he was right. At first each village blamed its most recent fire on its rival. But the blackened ruins of the distillery and the old resort hotel were still smoking when a new rumor began to fly through the towns. Crazy's ghost had returned to God's Kingdom and set the fires.

Jim's father summed it up in a second editorial. “We needed a hero and a scapegoat,” he wrote. “Philmore Kinneson was unfortunate enough to be both, in life and in death.”

 

6

Only in the Kingdom

With the help of a red ox named Samson, Charles II and I built the Academy from pink, or “Scotch,” granite blocks quarried on Canada Mountain by stonecutters from New Canaan. Except for Samson, whose task it was to turn a bull wheel atop a platform reached by a series of inclined ramps, and thereby raise the one-ton granite blocks, we had very little assistance, but dozens and even scores of superintendents, and you may be sure that not one thing Charles or Samson or I did was right. At last the walls were erected. But imagine our astonishment, and the gleeful delight of the superintendents, when Samson refused to descend the ramps to terra firma. Sadly, we were constrained to butcher the poor beast on high, whereupon we held a great, free ox roast on the Common at which about half of our self-anointed superintendents declared that we had burned the beef, the other half that the meat was so bloody underdone they could not lay a lip over it.

—PLINY'S
HISTORY

Mike the Moose appeared on the village green in the bottom of the ninth inning of the opening game of the Northern Vermont Town Team League between Kingdom Common and Kingdom Landing. There were two outs and the Common was behind by a run, with Jim Kinneson on first base and his cousin Job “Moose” Kinneson, the team's cleanup hitter, at bat. Everyone's attention was riveted on the game so nobody saw exactly where Mike had come from. There he was, moseying in past the hometown bleachers along the first-base line as though he'd just fallen out of the sky.

The Landing's closer, a raw-boned logger with a frighteningly errant fastball, had just brushed Moose back from the plate with a head-high pitch six inches inside. Moose was a good-natured giant, but as Jim's older brother, Charlie, had told him, beware the wrath of a patient man. He pointed the business end of his forty-inch Louisville Slugger at the pitcher. “Don't do that again, old son,” he said.

The pitcher went into his stretch. He checked Jim, who had a shorter lead than usual, and no intention of taking the bat out of the hands of his team's best hitter by getting picked off. That's when Jim's dad, Editor Kinneson, umping behind the plate, spotted Mike.

“Time, gentlemen!” The editor threw up his hands and stepped out from behind the catcher. He pointed at the three-quarters-grown bull moose, now standing near the Outlaws' on-deck circle as if waiting for his turn to bat.

“Why, looky there,” Moose said. “It's a moose.”

From the bleachers, laughter. Charlie liked to refer to Job Kinneson as the master of the obvious. At six-six and two hundred and forty pounds, Moose was the best long-ball hitter in the league. He owned a small dairy farm on the county road, just outside the village. Weekends he filled in as an auxiliary deputy sheriff at local events requiring the presence of a police officer. The master of the obvious could take the air out of a dance-hall slugfest just by walking through the door.

Moose had a tiny, loud wife from Maine, known in the Common as Mrs. Moose, and five large, loud daughters, ranging in age from six to twelve, whom he referred to as “the gals.” Mrs. Moose and the gals never missed one of Moose's home games. When Mike showed up on the green, they were perched in the bucket loader on the front of Moose's green John Deere farm tractor next to the first-base bleachers, rooting for their father to bust one into the street in front of the brick shopping block and win the game.

“You gals stay put,” Moose called over to them. To the moose he said, “Keep off the playing field, young fella. We've got a ball game to finish here.”

As Moose liked to put it, he had a way with critters. When someone in the Kingdom found an orphaned beaver kit or an injured fawn, they'd bring it to him to raise. He knew how to heal hawks with broken wings. Once he adopted a motherless bear cub. When it nipped off his left index finger at the middle knuckle during a play fight, he gave it to the Quebec provincial zoo across the border.

Moose pointed at Mike with his abbreviated forefinger. “Stay,” he said.

Mike, for his part, knelt down on his front legs, as moose will sometimes do in a hay field, and began to crop the short grass near the first-base coaching box.

“Good moose,” Moose said. Then he stepped back into the batter's box and poled the next pitch over the bandstand in deep center field for a game-winning home run.

No gloater, Moose ducked his head and started around the bases with his eyes on the ground. As he jogged toward first, the gals swarmed him. They clung to his legs and scrambled onto his shoulders, shrieking joyously. Just behind them came Mike, ambling along and from time to time giving Moose an encouraging reef with its modest set of antlers. Jim crossed home plate, where the team had gathered to greet him and Moose, then ran for his reporter's camera in the dugout. His shot of Moose rounding third base with the gals hanging off him like young possums in pinafores and Mike tagging along behind made the front page of that week's
Monitor
. A second photo of Moose driving his John Deere past the courthouse with Mrs. Moose in the seat beside him, the gals riding in the bucket, and Mike bringing up the rear appeared on the sports page with Jim's account of the game.

“Uh-oh, boys,” Cousin Stub Kinneson, the team's second baseman, said as Moose's outfit, now including Mike, proceeded up the street. “Here comes trouble in a big hat.”

Warden R. W. Kinneson came striding along the sidewalk from the courthouse. He cut off Moose's entourage at the northeast corner of the Common. “Just where do you think you're taking that animal?” Cousin R. W. said.

“The gals here have named him Mike,” Moose said to the warden. “Mike the Moose. I'm not taking him anywhere. He seems to have muckled onto me. I believe he thinks I'm his mother.”