God's Kingdom (13 page)

By noon they had opened up a hole about eight feet long, four feet wide, and five or six feet deep. To Jim it looked large enough to accommodate Jane's people, if that was her plan.

Out of her black lunch pail Jane produced deviled-egg sandwiches on homemade salt-rising bread; a pound wedge of cheddar cheese, aged for five years in her root cellar; a paper sack of Vermont common crackers; two stone jars of sweet cider from the old-fashioned apple orchard beside her farmhouse; and her specialty, molasses cartwheel cookies. Jane gave Black Hawk a feedbag. After last night's rain there was plenty of drinking water for him in the nearby rivulet, which sounded like it did in April, a steady background murmuring that Jim heard without listening to it.

“You are, of course, wondering what Pliny, who grew up on a tobacco plantation in Kentucky, was doing in Louisiana,” Jane said in the matter-of-fact tone in which she delivered her prescient observations. “So I'll give you a chance to redeem yourself. What is the connection between Pliny's loss of his hand in Kentucky and his appearance in Louisiana six months later?”

“I don't know how he got to New Orleans. Gramp told me Pliny never talked about his missing hand, or anything else from his life in slavery. Gramp said Pliny's master probably cut off his hand to punish him.”

“Pliny's master did no such thing, James. What he did do, however, was worse yet. One evening Pliny returned from the fields to discover that his young wife had been sold down the river.”

“My God!” Jim said.

Jane continued her story. “Pliny loved his wife more than life itself, James. To prevent him from running after her, his owner chained him by the wrist to the boiler of a wrecked steamboat that he used for an impromptu jail. That's when Pliny made his great covenant with God. He got down on his knees and closed his eyes and told God if He'd let him search for his wife—he didn't say
find
her, James; Pliny figured that was up to God, not him—if God would free Pliny from that boiler so he could search for her, Pliny would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching God's word and doing His works. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he spotted was an old ax with a broken-off helve.”

“I don't understand,” Jim said. “You said he was chained to the boiler. You can't cut through a chain with an ax.”

“No,” Jane said. “But you can cut off a hand. With his shirt and the broken-off ax handle he made a tourniquet, and he cut his left wrist clean in two. There was a granny woman, a slave too old to work, who lived in a nearby swamp. She hid Pliny and nursed him back to health and gave him a little fishing skiff. Pliny traced his wife all the way down the river to New Orleans. That's where he met Charles II, who brought him north and had him educated.”

“But he never did find his wife?” Jim said.

“No. He never did find his wife. He went back down south to look more than once. First during the Civil War, which is how he wound up in Andersonville. Again several times during Reconstruction, when he and his students were setting up schools for former slaves. But he never found her.”

“Gramp never told me any of this.”

“I don't think he knows, James. To the best of my knowledge, Pliny told the story of his wife, and how he lost his hand, to just one other person, a chum of mine. She swore me to secrecy for as long as she and Pliny were alive. I think they were lovers.”

Jim waited for Miss Jane to tell him who that other person was, but she didn't. All she said was, “It's turning colder, James. Let us get back to work.”

“Cousin Jane?”

“Aye?”

“What are we digging up here?”

“A grave, James.”

Jim gestured at the figures tied to the sides of the hay wagon. “Why did you bring them?”

“To bear witness,” Miss Jane said. “Now let us return to work before it comes off to snow. Our false spring is over.”

*   *   *

Jane was right. By mid-afternoon the wind had swung around into the north and it was sharply colder. The grave, which was about twice the size of an ordinary grave, was finished. “Fetch me my father's rifle from the wagon, James.”

Jim gave a start. “What for?”

“Heavens to heavens, child. Your old relation isn't going to shoot herself. Is that what you thought? I'm going to put down the horse.”

“Put down the horse! There's nothing wrong with the horse.”

“He's ancient, like me,” Jane said. “I promised my father that I'd never let an animal leave the farm for a situation where it might be abused. If I pass on before the horse, it might fall into the hands of someone who would mistreat it. I gave my father my word. It was every bit as much a covenant as the one Pliny made with God.”

After a stunned moment Jim said, “If anything happens to you, I'll take Black Hawk down to our place. I promise I will.”

“You may well be off at college. Who'd care for the horse then?”

“Dad and Mom would.”

“Your parents aren't spring chickens, James. They could both be dead, too.”

“Jesus, Miss Jane. Black Hawk's what, twenty-five? How many more years does he have? This doesn't make sense.”

“I didn't say it did. I don't know of much that makes sense, James, up here in the Kingdom or beyond. What I said was, I made a covenant with my father. I am willing to make the same covenant with you. If you will promise to me that you will shoot the horse, and bury him here next to me if I go first, then we won't need to go any further with this today.”

Jim looked at Miss Jane, hoping that she might change her mind and give him a better choice. He suspected she'd planned this from the start.

“All right,” he finally said. “If you go first, I'll dispose of the horse.”

“Then we have a covenant,” Jane said. “My people, who are also your people, have borne witness to it.”

High above the mountain, a flock of geese went barking over, heading south. Jim wondered if they might be the same flock he'd heard going north the night before. Jane picked up her shovel and began refilling the grave. Jim reached for his shovel and joined her.

Later, as they walked back down the mountainside next to the horse, it started to snow, flakes of sugar snow as large as the palm of Jim's hand, the snow that came in maple sugaring season. The sugar snow was heavy and wet on Jim's face, the final sign of the upside-down weather.

Jim wondered who Jane's chum was, the girl Pliny had told his story to. Could the chum be fictitious? Could Jane and Pliny have been lovers? He doubted he'd ever know.

Jim had no intention of shooting Black Hawk if Jane died before the horse did. If necessary, he'd make another covenant, one with his parents, to care for the horse while he was in college. By doing so he would fail Jane and her people, his people, who had borne witness to his promise. In his heart he had already failed his ancestors and lied to Jane.

“What does make sense?” Jim said as they came into the dusky barnyard. “You said not much makes sense. What does?”

“Love,” Miss Jane said. “Love and love alone makes sense. Carry my people into the house, Jim. I'll put the horse in the stable.”

 

8

Territory but Little Known

The summits of Kingdom and Canada Mountains and the Great Northern Bog north of Ponds One, Two, and Three are in fact boreal fragments of the Canadian Far North. On the treeless, windswept mountaintops grow the Alpine bilberry, black crowberry, Bigelow's sedge, purple and yellow mountain saxifrages, and bird's-eye primrose. In the Great Bog one may find cotton grass, Labrador tea, and northern rosemary. In the surrounding black-spruce and cedar forest, I have sighted northern three-toed woodpeckers, lemmings, the Canada lynx, gray wolf, and both snowy and great gray owls. In all respects these last remnants of the original wilderness of “God's Kingdom” resemble the subarctic tundra a thousand miles to the north more than they do the rest of Vermont and New England.

—PLINY'S
HISTORY

Jim and Gramp waited on the station platform. The temperature had been fifteen degrees below zero when they'd left the farmhouse. The forecast for the St. Lawrence River Valley and Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, always more accurate for the Kingdom than the forecasts for Burlington and Montpelier, called for frigid weather for the next three days.

Gramp pointed down the track with one big leather mitten. “There she is. The old Cannonball.”

Far down the line Jim saw the round eye of the diesel locomotive. The light was bright in the slant winter sunshine. Jim shifted his pack basket. He loved the surge of excitement he felt when he saw a train.

The Cannonball consisted of a mail car, a baggage car used mainly for milk cans, three empty flatbeds with stake sides, the blunt-nosed locomotive, and a rust-colored caboose. Jim and Gramp rode in the caboose.

The Cannonball ran along the spur line up the east side of the big lake to Magog, Quebec. Once it passed the South Bay there was just room enough for the tracks and the single-lane dirt road beside them to squeeze between the frozen lake and the mountains.

Gramp liked to tell Jim that the Cannonball was the slowest train in North America. Its top speed was thirty-five miles an hour. Between the Common and the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River it stopped half a dozen times to drop off empty milk cans on wooden scaffolds beside the tracks, where snowy lanes led back to rough-looking farms.

“This is us, Jim,” Gramp said when the train stopped just south of the dam before crossing into Canada. “To quote a certain newspaper editor well-known to us both, let's get this show on the road. Don't forget your pack basket.”

*   *   *

It was three miles up the frozen Dead Water impoundment under the cliffs in the notch between Kingdom and Canada Mountains, then another mile along the rapids, which never froze, to Pond Number Three and the hunting camp, where Jim and Gramp would spend the weekend. Even though he no longer hunted deer, Jim still loved to go to camp. This weekend was special because Jim would have Gramp and his stories to himself.

As they started up the impoundment on the snowshoes Gramp had made with white-ash frames and deer-hide thongs, Jim carried the pack basket containing their food, ice-fishing tip-ups, shotguns, and extra clothing. Gramp went first. At seventy-six, he moved over the snow swiftly and easily. Overhead, the ice on the rock walls of Kingdom and Canada Mountains was every shade of blue and green. The ice walls were a thousand feet high. Once Jim had asked Gramp if anyone could climb them. Gramp had looked up at the cliffs. “A man can do what he has to,” he'd said. Jim was glad he didn't have to climb the cliffs.

One day when Jim and Gramp were fishing the impoundment in a late-summer drought, they had looked far down into the water and seen, wavering in the pulse of the Dead Water, the blackened church steeple and burned-out stone houses of New Canaan. Today the ice was a foot thick, but thinking about the incinerated village below his snowshoes made the bottoms of Jim's feet tingle.

Gramp came to a sudden stop. He pointed across the ice, where a spring open year-round spilled straight down the rock wall of Canada Mountain into a pocket of ice-free water three or four feet in diameter beside the bottom of the cliff. Humping its way along the ice toward the spring hole was a river otter. It stood up on its short hind legs and looked at Gramp and Jim. Then it slipped into the open water and vanished under the ice. A minute passed. Another. Jim's breath began to come tighter. What if the otter couldn't find the hole again? It would be trapped below the ice.

The otter popped up, slid out onto the ice, and undulated its way toward a stand of hemlock trees at the foot of the mountain. In its jaws was a brook trout a good sixteen inches long. Gramp grinned at Jim, who grinned back. It was a fine sight to see a river otter catch a trout. It was better yet to see such a sight together.

They heard the rapids before they saw them, then spotted the steam rising above the rushing water, pink in the reflected rays of the sunset. They snowshoed up the game trail inside the dusky cedars beside the rapids. Twenty minutes later they came out a few hundred yards downriver from the old driving dam at the outlet of Three. There was the camp, on the hardwood slope above the dam. In the noiseless winter twilight, with no smoke curling out of the stovepipe jutting through the roof, the camp looked like a painting of itself.

While Gramp got a fire going in the Glenwood, Jim shoveled a path up to the camp door from the pond and another from the door to the privy. In places the drifts were waist-deep. Jim used the camp ax to hack a hole through the ice on the pond. He carried two pails of water up to the camp, one for drinking and one for washing. Before leaving camp the past fall, Jim had packed the woodbox full of sugar-maple, yellow-birch, and ash splits.

The Glenwood was beginning to throw heat. Gramp had lighted the kerosene lamps on the table and the shelf above his old-man's rocking chair. He seared the camp skillet and slapped in a quarter pound of salted butter from Mom's Ruthie cow and tossed in a two-pound slab of beefsteak. He'd already peeled two of Mom's Green Mountain potatoes and set them to boil. Along with the steak and potatoes, Mom had sent up butternut squash, already cooked and ready to warm up, and an apple pie from the Westfield Seek-No-Further tree in the dooryard; also a cooked roast chicken from her flock of leghorns for tomorrow in case the partridge hunting was slow.

Before setting the table with the heavy, off-white camp crockery and mismatched flatware, Jim made the entry for the day in the ledger:

Jan. 20, 1955. Rode local to dam with Gramp, snowshoed up still water to God's Kingdom. Saw an otter take a trout, 1½–2 pounds, out of spring hole at base of Canada Mountain. Temperature at 6:00
P.M.
25° below. Twenty inches of ice on Three. James Kinneson III.