God's Kingdom (12 page)

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The new judge remanded Job Kinneson to the state hospital in Waterbury for evaluation to determine whether he was mentally fit to stand trial. The AP wire service picked up Jim's “Only in the Kingdom” story, giving the young reporter his first national byline. Letters to the editor in the
Monitor
ran nine out of ten in support of Moose, though a few local boosters complained that Jim's article had given the Kingdom a bad name. “Welcome to the newspaper business, son,” the editor said.

One day the following week Charlie received a telephone call from the state hospital. The official who called was not very forthcoming, but Charlie gathered that Moose had come across several attendants subduing an unruly inmate and had “gone off.” Moose was tranquilized, then referred for electric shock treatment. The next day he'd escaped the hospital grounds.

Charlie alerted Mrs. Moose, who said that no doubt Moose would show up at home in a day or two. He didn't, though. He didn't show up anywhere. Job Kinneson vanished as if he'd fallen off the edge of the earth.

Cruelest of all were the false sightings. Someone would be certain he'd spotted Moose ice fishing on Pond in the Sky. Or boxing on the county fair circuit in New Hampshire. Somebody else heard he was playing semipro baseball on Cape Cod. Charlie checked out each report. Nothing.

Eventually, Mrs. Moose sold the farm, herd, and machinery, including the John Deere, to Ben Currier, and returned to Maine with the gals to live with her parents. Years passed. Then, in one of those entirely unpredictable yet, in retrospect, inevitable-seeming turns of events, the mystery of Moose Kinneson's disappearance solved itself. As part of the nationwide deinstitutionalization movement, the Vermont State Hospital began shutting down its wards and reassigning patients to group homes and foster families in their own communities. Finally, the hospital closed altogether.

As the brushy back fields of the property where the inmates had once cultivated a small farm were being cleared and leveled for an apartment complex, workers discovered an unmarked graveyard. In it were the remains of several dozen people, including a number of newborn infants. Many of the bodies showed signs of traumatic injuries. The state forensics lab concluded that more than half of the graveyard's occupants had died violently, including the six foot six male of about thirty-five with a crushed skull and a partly missing left index finger.

Now Mrs. Moose and the grown gals seemed to have vanished. Her parents had died, she'd remarried and moved again, and Charlie and Jim were unable to trace her or the gals. The brothers claimed the long skeleton with the missing forefinger. One summer afternoon when the orange hawkweed and black-eyed Susans were in bloom, a day much like the day when Mike the Moose had appeared on the village green, Charlie and Jim attended Moose's interment in the village cemetery. Other than the backhoe operator who dug the grave, no one else was present to see the remains of the former long-ball hitter laid to rest.

“Should we say a word?” Charlie said after the backhoe had filled in Moose's grave and gone away.

Jim thought for a minute. Then he shook his head. “Only in the Kingdom,” he said.

Charlie waited for his brother to continue, but Jim didn't. What else was there to say? Even Charlie couldn't think of another thing.

 

7

False Spring

In God's Kingdom, family and work are all-important. Everything else, even religion, falls into one or both of these two categories.

—PLINY'S
HISTORY

It was the late fall of Jim's junior year at the Academy, and for the first time in more than a century, false spring had come to God's Kingdom. Two months ago, the elm trees around the perimeter of the village common had turned yellow, then dropped their leaves and gone dormant. Just yesterday Jim had noticed that the elms were putting out tiny golden leaves again. Last night he'd heard a flock of geese headed north, as if confused by the open cornfields and unseasonably warm weather. Yesterday was the fifth consecutive afternoon that the squat, old-fashioned Coca-Cola-bottle thermometer on the door of Quinn's drugstore had hit eighty degrees, with Thanksgiving now just a day away.

Driving up the one-lane track on Kingdom Mountain in the dawn mist, Jim noticed other signs of false spring. The popple trees growing up in brushy fields of long-abandoned farmsteads were pale yellow with new catkins. An easy rain overnight had given the few remaining pastures the emerald sheen you will see in the spring in the countryside of Ireland and of Kingdom County and nowhere else. The roadside stream off the mountain was up and milky from the rain.

“It's shortened the winter by a week,” Dad had said last night at supper. “False spring.”

“Maybe so,” Gramp said. “But we'll pay for it later on.”

It was an unsettled season in an uneasy era in the Kingdom. Family farms were going under one after another. An early influenza epidemic was sweeping through the county. Most Commoners blamed the flu on the strange weather. Long-married couples were short with each other; schoolchildren were restless. What should they do? Get up a late-November game of flies and grounders on the village green? Deer hunters who came to the Kingdom from away each fall sat drinking coffee in the hotel dining room and grousing about the absence of tracking snow. Not, as Gramp said, that a single man jack of them could track a herd of wooly mammoths the width of the green in three feet of fresh snow.

This was an especially frustrating morning for Jim. Gramp and Dad and Charlie had gone off to deer camp without him for the first time since he'd begun going with them. Though Jim didn't hunt deer himself any longer, going to camp with the men in his family was his favorite annual activity. In the Kingdom, deer camp was more about family than hunting, but the day before, as the men were getting ready to head out, the letter had arrived from Miss Jane, summoning Jim to her farm on Kingdom Mountain:

Dear James,

I will require your assistance tomorrow morning regarding a family matter. Kindly meet me at eight o'clock
A.M.
sharp, in my barnyard.

Your cousin,

Jane Kinneson

Miss Jane Kinneson was Gramp's first cousin, and therefore Jim's cousin as well, though several times removed. For many decades she had operated a small farm on the mountain. She was also a well-known bird carver and wood sculptor. She had even sculpted life-size, wooden figures of her Kinneson ancestors, and arranged them throughout her farmhouse, to keep herself company. Miss Jane referred to the carved family members as her people. As a small boy, Jim had been somewhat afraid of them.

During haying season, and again at maple-sugaring time, Jim assisted Miss Jane on her farm on the mountain. He helped her get up her winter's wood, spade her garden plot, and bank her farmhouse with evergreen boughs for cold weather. Miss Jane had a sharp tongue, and was difficult to please. It was rumored that she had been disappointed in love. Some Commoners claimed that she had second sight and could predict the future.

Miss Jane relished the old ways and expressions of her ancestors. Like Gramp, she was a born storyteller. Though it often seemed to Jim that he could never do anything right in Jane's eyes, she had always encouraged him with his own storywriting. “If you're writing, you're a writer,” she said. “If you aren't writing, you aren't a writer. You've been writing since you were five, James. That makes you a writer.”

Miss Jane was a writer herself. For decades she had been rewriting the King James Bible. In Miss Jane's
Kingdom Mountain Bible,
God didn't turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt to punish her for a moment's curiosity. He didn't flood out His own creation, or stand idly by while the Roman soldiers hammered His own begotten son up on a wooden cross. Nowhere in the New Testament of the
Kingdom Mountain Bible
did Jesus curse a fig tree, or any other living thing. Nor did He command His disciples to turn their backs on their parents and wives and children. To Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain, family was everything.

Jane stood waiting in her barnyard beside Black Hawk, her elderly Morgan driving horse. She wore her red-and-black wool hunting jacket over a long black dress, and was toting her father's Civil War rifle. It occurred to Jim that the tableau of Jane with the rifle, standing near her horse, her weathered barn attached to her weathered house by a series of ramshackle weathered sheds in the background, could itself have been a daguerreotype from the Civil War era. Kingdom Mountain, looming in the background, might have been a peak in the Blue Ridge or Great Smokies, Jane the matriarch of an outlier family from some Kentucky hollow an unlucky stranger might wander into, never to be seen again.

This morning Black Hawk was hitched to Jane's high-sided hay wagon. Lashed upright with bailing twine to the open-slatted sides of the wagon were several of Miss Jane's carved wooden people, including Charles Kinneson I, in a painted-on buckskin jacket and leggings; James I, the secessionist, bearing the green Kingdom Republic flag, with a leaping brook trout embroidered on it; and Gramp's father, Charles “Mad Charlie” II. Beside Charles II was a carved black man wearing a dark suit and a clerical collar. The black man, of course, was Pliny Templeton. Jim also recognized, in the hay wagon, his Abenaki great-great-great-grandmother Molly Molasses, Charles I's wife; Jane's father, Supreme Court Justice Morgan Kinneson; and several other Kinneson forbears. Why they were tied in the wagon, and what Jane intended to do with them this morning, Jim had no idea. On the bed of the wagon were two shovels, a pickax, and a grave blanket woven from spruce and fir boughs. Cradled in the evergreen blanket was Jane's black lunch pail.

Jim nodded at the rifle. “Are you going to shoot a deer if we see one?”

“Hardly,” Jane said.

She clicked to Black Hawk, who started up the lane behind the house and barn. The wagon bounced over the ruts as Black Hawk pulled it up the slope past blossoming dandelions and cowslips. The horse was gray around the muzzle. Once Jane had kept two stocky Canadian workhorses for plowing and haying, harvesting corn, and gathering maple sap. She'd milked a dozen Jerseys and raised chickens and hogs. Lately, as her dairy herd and other animals had died off, Jane had not replaced them. Except for a barn cat, Black Hawk was the last domestic animal on her farmstead. Jim thought that the Morgan was about twenty-five. He'd learned to ride on him.

A silvery rill, brimful from the rain the night before, poured off the slope beside the lane. Along the brook, fluorescent-green skunk's cabbages were poking up. Jim's English class had been reading
Macbeth
. He pointed at the skunk's cabbage. “The times are out of joint,” he said.

“When haven't they been?” Miss Jane said. “Up here in God's Kingdom, when have the times not been out of joint?”

And, higher on the mountainside, “How are you getting on with your storywriting, James?”

Jim said he was just finishing a new story inspired by Pliny Templeton's account of Gramp's father, Charles II, rerouting the outlet of Lake Runaway and flooding out the Lower Kingdom Valley.

As they continued up the lane, Jane said, “You know, of course, that's how Charles II met his future wife, Eliza Kittredge. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Charles appropriated the Kittredges' plough horse to ride down the valley ahead of the cresting flood and warn the people in its path. When he returned the horse, she fell in love with him, though they didn't get married until some years later. First he ran away to the Mexican War to avoid being tarred and feathered, or worse, for the damage done by the flood. Shall we have a quick round of Connection, James?”

Connection was a game Miss Jane had invented for the purpose of teaching Jim local history. She'd name two seemingly unrelated events, often decades or even centuries apart. To win the game, Jim had to explain how the events were directly connected by an unbroken chain of cause and effect.

“What is the connection between my uncle Charlie's rerouting the outlet of Lake Runaway and your college education?”

“I guess I don't know,” Jim said.

“Why, certainly you know. On his way back from Mexico, Charles met Pliny in New Orleans. He helped Pliny escape from slavery, and paid for his education at the state university. Years later, the university established the Templeton Scholarship, to be awarded annually to the top-ranking graduate of Pliny's Academy. In two years, that will be you.”

Jim grinned. “How do you know? Second sight?”

“No one knows the future, me least of all,” Jane said. “But I should be greatly disappointed in you, James, greatly disappointed indeed, if you do not win the Templeton Scholarship.”

They continued up the lane together to the family cemetery where Jane's ancestors were buried. She unhooked Black Hawk from the traces and turned him loose to graze along the edge of the rill, where the grass was greening again in the false spring. She told Jim there was no need to hobble the horse. He was too old to stray very far.

Just outside the pointed iron fence stakes surrounding her ancestors' plots, Jane began digging in the thin mountain topsoil. Jim picked up the second shovel and joined her. It crossed his mind that she might intend to bury her wooden people, though why, he couldn't imagine. Here and there inside the fence, spring beauties were blossoming. For years, on May Day, Miss Jane had recruited Jim to help her pick spring beauties for the miniature sweetgrass flower baskets she left hanging on the front doorknobs of friends' houses in the Common. Miss Jane noticed the blooming flowers, too. She shook her head. Mayflowers in late November.

A couple of feet down, they hit blue clay. Miss Jane exchanged her shovel for the pickax, loosening the hardpan for Jim to spade out of the deepening trench. In places, they encountered pockets of shale and shards of slate.