God's Kingdom (11 page)

The warden jutted his hat up at Moose. Jim snapped a picture. A crowd was beginning to gather.

“See here, cousin,” R. W. said. “That beast never would have ventured into town if it didn't have brain-worm disease. I'm going to have to destroy it.”

Instantly all five of the large little gals burst into tears.

“Hear them, won't you,” Moose said.

R. W. took a step toward Mike and unbuckled his holster strap. Moose got down off the John Deere and stood between Mike and the warden.

“Job Kinneson, I'm warning you. You're preventing an officer of the law from carrying out his sworn duty.”

“Mike's a good moose,” Moose said. “He's taken a shine to us, is all. You gals quieten down now. Nobody's going to shoot anybody.”

“You haven't heard the last of this,” the warden said.

Moose climbed back up on the John Deere and headed home with Mike trailing along behind.

*   *   *

“
State of Vermont vs. Job Kinneson
,” the county prosecutor, Zack Barrows, announced the following Wednesday at the weekly arraignments at the courthouse.

Warden R. W. Kinneson stood beside Zack at the prosecutor's table. Moose Kinneson and his attorney, Jim's brother, Charlie, stood at the defense table across the aisle.

Jim sat in the third row of benches behind the defense table, pencil and notebook at the ready. This was his first court assignment for the
Monitor
. Feeling proud but nervous, he jotted down some details to add atmosphere to his story. The light globes hanging on metal rods from the stamped-tin ceiling. The four tall windows in the west wall, overlooking the village common. The worn hardwood floor and benches.

Most interesting of all to Jim was the mural covering the entire front wall of the courtroom. It was called
The Seven Wonders of God's Kingdom,
and had been painted by Gramp's older sister, Mary Queen of Scots Kinneson, at about the same time that she painted the life-size portrait of Pliny Templeton that hung in the foyer of the Academy. In the most vivacious colors, and with astonishing verisimilitude, Mary had depicted, from left to right across the wall, the High Falls behind the Common Hotel, Pliny's great granite Academy, the Île d'Illusion in Lake Memphremagog, the baseball diamond on the village green, Pliny's
History of Kingdom County
open to the narrative of Lake Runaway running away down the Lower Kingdom Valley, Jay Peak at the height of the fall foliage season, and the second-longest covered bridge in the world, at the southern gateway to the Kingdom, where Abolition Jim and his fellow secessionists had been wiped out by federal troops.

Soon after completing the mural, Mary Kinneson, not yet seventeen, had dropped out of the Academy and run off to live with the descendants of the fugitive slaves who had founded New Canaan, on the Canadian side of the Upper Kingdom River. Gramp had scarcely known her. Mary had died when he was five, in the Great Forest Fire of 1882 that had killed nearly a hundred residents of New Canaan.

As usual, Judge Forrest Allen, Athena Allen's father, was presiding. Judge Allen conducted his courtroom in an avuncular manner but didn't suffer fools or brook impertinence. Recently, he'd been in the hospital with heart problems. This morning he looked tired.

“Judge Allen,” Zack said, “the state is charging Mr. Job Kinneson with interfering with an officer acting in the line of duty. Also with illegally taking a protected wild animal. The animal in question is a young moose. Warden Kinneson has reason to believe that the moose has brain-worm disease. Brain-worm is highly contagious. If it's transferred to deer, it's invariably fatal. The State needs to confiscate this animal and put it down so it can be tested in accordance with the law of the land.”

“Your honor,” Charlie said, “my client, Mr. Job Kinneson, is an auxiliary deputy sheriff and well acquainted with the law of the land. He didn't ‘take' the moose in question anywhere. It followed him home. Moose put it into his lower pasture with his young stock because it isn't quite ready to fend for itself. There's nothing at all wrong with it other than it misses its mother. Mike, that's the moose's name, seems to have adopted Moose as his surrogate mother. It's very touching, actually.”

Judge Forrest Allen did not appear to be touched. He gave Charlie a weary look. “From where?” he said.

“I'm sorry, your honor? From where?”

“You said the moose followed Job home. From where did it follow him home?”

“It appeared on the village green during our baseball game with the Landing. Moose had just walloped a walk-off home run over the bandstand and—”

“Excuse me, Charlie. Let me understand this. The moose in question hit a home run? Surely you don't expect me to believe that, even in the Kingdom, moose play town-team baseball?”

Jim was writing fast.

“No, your honor, of course not. Moose Kinneson hit the home run. Mike the Moose just ran the bases with him. Mike was on first at the time and when Moose rounded the bag, Mike followed him.”

“Mike was playing first base?”

“No, your honor. He was eating the grass near the coaching box.”

“Charlie, I have warned you often before. The Eighth District Court of Vermont is not an Abbott and Costello production. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this is an arraignment in a court of law. You do understand that, don't you?”

“Yes, your honor. That's why I'm requesting a summary ruling from the bench to dismiss these frivolous charges. This is a tempest in a teapot. I'm prepared to prove it. Defense requests permission to call one special witness.”

“This isn't a trial, Charlie. Witnesses don't usually testify at arraignments.”

“It won't take two minutes.”

The judge passed his hand over his robe in the region of his heart. “I'll give you exactly sixty seconds. And Charlie? Don't push your luck. I have had just about a sufficiency, this morning, of moose and of Kinnesons.”

The judge looked at his watch. “Fifty-five seconds.”

“Thank you, your honor. I'll be right back.” Charlie walked quickly to the rear of the courtroom and out the door. A moment later he returned with Mrs. Moose, leading Mike by a halter. “Go ahead, Moose,” Charlie called down to Job Kinneson at the defense table.

Moose whistled. “Here, Mike.”

Mike trotted down the center aisle. As he neared the front of the courtroom, he noisily deposited a heap of moose pellets beside the prosecutor's table.

“Moose, would you kindly walk to the back of the courtroom?” Charlie said.

Moose started back down the aisle. Mike came along behind him like a bird dog at heel. When they reached the door, Mrs. Moose led Mike back out into the hall.

Charlie said, “I submit, your honor, that this moose is perfectly healthy. It most certainly doesn't have brain-worm disease.”

“Warden Kinneson,” the judge said. “Can't you just take that animal out in the woods and let it go? It looks plenty big enough to care for itself to me.”

“I expect it would only come back, your honor. Besides which, if it transfers brain-worm to so much as one wild deer, there goes Vermont's whitetail population, down the drain. And a big chunk of Vermont's economy right along with it.”

“Well, R.W., you may be surprised to learn that I am more concerned with the laws of the state of Vermont than with its economy. So I am going to take all of this information under advisement. I will have a ruling within a week. In the meantime, I am remanding young Mike back to Job Kinneson's farm. In his capacity as auxiliary deputy sheriff, Job will keep Mike under house arrest, with no contact with Vermont's precious deer herd.”

“Thank you, your honor,” Charlie said.

“Next case,” Judge Allen said.

*   *   *

Editor Kinneson blue-penciled the atmospheric descriptions out of Jim's article on Moose's arraignment. “Save that for your storywriting, James,” he said. “This is the weekly court news, not
War and Peace
.”

Charlie told Jim he was confident that Judge A would hand down a ruling favorable to Moose and Mike. Even if the judge refused Charlie's request for a summary dismissal and allowed the case to go to trial, no Kingdom jury would ever vote to destroy Mike.

But on the day after the arraignment, Judge Allen experienced more chest pain and was taken to the hospital in Memphremagog. The judge's caseload was transferred to a middle-aged magistrate from Burlington, a former U.S. Marine major, who promptly threw out the charges that Moose had interfered with the warden. In the same ruling, the ex-leatherneck decreed that, in the interest of protecting the deer herd, Warden R. W. Kinneson and the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department had the right to put Mike down and run their tests.

Warden Kinneson bided his time. He waited until Moose was away with his John Deere, mowing a sick neighbor's hayfield. Then the warden descended on Moose's place with two state troopers and a sheriff's deputy. It was publication day at the
Monitor,
and Jim was folding papers as they came off the press when he happened to look out the large front window with the words
Kingdom County Monitor
written backwards on the inside of the glass and see the cavalcade leaving the village: R. W. in his forest-green warden's truck, the troopers in marked cruisers, the deputy in a sheriff department's van ordinarily used to transport prisoners. The editor, at his desk near the window, saw them, too. He tossed Jim the keys to his DeSoto. “Go,” he said.

Jim arrived just as the deputy and one of the troopers were fastening a rope with a loop in the middle around Mike's neck. Each of the two officers held one end of the rope to prevent Mike from bolting. The other trooper held Mrs. Moose. The large little gals shrieked. Warden R. W. Kinneson got his .30-30 and a chain saw from his truck. He set down the saw, took aim with the rifle, and shot Mike squarely between the eyes at point-blank range. Then he started his chain saw, drowning out the screams of Mrs. Moose and the gals, severed Mike's head, and drove off with it in the bed of his pickup.

Moose, who'd heard the rifle shot from half a mile away, arrived home on the John Deere a few minutes later to discover the gals wailing beside Mike's headless carcass. Mrs. Moose had told them that Mike was in moose heaven, but they were having none of it. “He is not in heaven,” the eldest child shouted. “He's laying in the barnyard dead as a doornail. Now Papa's going to shoot the warden and go to the electric chair.”

“No one's going to the electric chair,” Moose said. “Let's give Mikey a decent burial out back of the barn. You gals can dress up in your Sunday school clothes.”

While Mrs. Moose took the girls into the house to dress for the funeral, Jim got a photograph of Moose scooping Mike into the John Deere's bucket. “Do you have anything to say, Moose?” Jim asked.

“To say?” Moose said. “No, Jimmy. The gals can say something at the graveside service if they want to. Then the time for saying things will be over.”

The editor declined to run Jim's shot of the headless moose in the tractor bucket. He said that the photograph of the warden drawing a bead on Mike with his rifle from two feet away, while the police restrained Mike with a rope around his neck, told the entire story. The editor let Jim's caption stand. “The Execution of Mike the Moose.”

Jim wanted to headline his accompanying story “Only in the Kingdom.” His father said no. He told Jim that this kind of overreaching on the part of the state happened everywhere. “It doesn't matter where you live, Jim. Vermont. Idaho. It's pretty much the same everywhere. You can't beat city hall.”

“You've spent your whole career fighting city hall, Dad.”

“I have,” the editor said. “And very rarely beaten them.”

*   *   *

Moose dropped off the baseball team. He quit coming to practice and didn't show up at games. On a couple of occasions Jim pestered him into hitting him a few grounders on the green, but he could tell that Moose's heart wasn't in it. The sheriff's department no longer called him to cover barn dances and fairs. When Ben Currier brought Moose an abandoned fawn still in its spots, Moose told him to take it to the vet in Memphremagog.

Moose still drove his John Deere into town but he didn't sign up for the tractor pull at the Kingdom Fair. Sometimes, after running his errands at the feed store and hardware, he'd back up to the east side of the green across the street from the courthouse and watch the people going in and out of the sheriff's office. One morning Jim asked him what he was doing there. “Waiting,” Moose said.

At the time, Jim was on his way to take a picture for that week's
Monitor
of a local law-enforcement personnel meeting. The officers were getting together at the sheriff's headquarters for a training session on community-police relations. As Jim and Moose watched from across the street, two state police cruisers pulled into the courthouse parking lot beside three sheriff's department vehicles, a border-patrol car, and Warden Kinneson's green pickup.

“You know what those rigs over there put me in mind of, Jimmy?” Moose said. “The little tin ducks that go floating by in the shooting gallery at the fair.” Moose started the John Deere. He looked both ways, then drove it across the street at what Jim would later describe in the
Monitor
as “an unhurried rate of speed.” Jim's article went on to describe how Moose, at the helm of the tractor, drove down the row of parked law-enforcement vehicles, smashing in the hood and roof of each one with the front-end bucket, then methodically backed the John Deere up and over the patrol cars and the warden's truck, reducing Kingdom County's entire fleet of police vehicles to a heap of crushed scrap metal.

This time Jim's father let him headline his story “Only in the Kingdom.” Where else would an aggrieved farmer and former auxiliary deputy sheriff use a tractor with a front-end bucket loader as his weapon of choice to avenge the wrongful death of an overgrown cousin of a deer? Jim captioned the two photos that ran on the front page with his article “Sitting Ducks Before” and “Sitting Ducks After.”