God's Kingdom (15 page)

“The trouble took place in the summer of 1900. That was the year they built the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom and flooded out the remains of New Canaan. I think that brought back to my father the fire and the deaths of my sister and nearly a hundred former slaves and their families. He editorialized against the dam, too. He accused its backers of wanting to put the people of New Canaan out of sight, out of mind. Above all, he editorialized against the Ku Klux Klan.”

“The Klan? The same Klan that lynched Negroes down south?”

“Yes,” Gramp said. “And they didn't just murder Negroes down south, Jim. They murdered Negroes up north, too. Who did you suppose burned out New Canaan?”

“I thought New Canaan burned in the Great Forest Fire of '82.”

“It was the other way around. The Klan came riding up the old Canada Post Road in their white sheets and hoods and caught the villagers at Sunday evening services inside the church. They barred the door and hurled Greek fire in sealed glass jars through the windows. A volatile paste of sulfur and phosphorous that burst into white-hot flames on contact with the air. There'd been a bad drought and the woods were tinder dry. The burning village acted like a fuse, setting the forest on fire.”

“I never knew that,” Jim said. He felt physically sick to think of the people, including Gramp's sister, trapped inside the burning church.

“Well, there's more,” Gramp said. “Soon after the Great Forest Fire, the Klansmen who had fired New Canaan began boasting about what they'd done. Once word of their identity got out, an avenging specter, arrayed in a black cape and astride a pale horse shod in black crepe, would appear, as if from nowhere, in the dooryard of a Klansman and call him out by name. Some of the Klansmen, I'm sorry to say, were our own shirttail relatives. ‘You, Nathan Bedford Kinneson!' the apparition on horseback would roar out. ‘A word with you, sir.' Some he shot down with a great long horse pistol. Others he hacked to pieces with the sword John Brown had given him. There was no escape from him.

“One evening—I would have been six or at most seven at the time—as I was shooing the chickens into the henhouse for the night, I heard angry voices coming from the barn. I slipped into the haymow and peered down the chute into the stable, where the voices were coming from. There below, I made out my father and Pliny Templeton and Father's riding horse. Father was kneeling beside the horse, doing something by lantern light with a bucket and a brush. At first I couldn't imagine what he was up to. Then I realized that he was whitewashing it. The horse didn't like it. Every several seconds he'd stamp one of his hind feet. But he was a very tractable animal, and like Father and Pliny, a veteran of the war, so he stood there and allowed himself to be painted. Father was dressed in a black cape and he was wearing his sword.

“‘Aye, brother,' my father was saying. ‘You have smoked me out. Your assumption is correct. Surely you, who know me as well as any true brother ever knew his brother, did not suppose that I would permit the murderers of our New Canaanite brethren and my beloved daughter to go unpunished?'

“‘Brother!' Pliny cried out. ‘I implore you. Vengeance belongs to the Lord.'

“‘True. And I am His instrument.'

“‘You are no such thing! You endanger your immortal soul.'

“My father stood up, and fell to whitewashing the horse's back. Then, in a lower voice, almost as though he was speaking to himself, he repeated, ‘I am His appointed instrument, as Brown was before me.'

“At the time, Jim, I was too young to understand exactly what I was witnessing. I didn't know about the killing of the Klansmen in their own barnyards, only that Father and Dr. Templeton, who was already like an uncle to me, were genuinely angry with each other. I retreated from my spying perch and ran out of the mow, crying. That in itself was unusual. Children didn't cry much in those days. But I bawled like a bull-calf taken from its mother. Did my own mother know what my father was doing? I don't know. Did the Common suspect who was behind the killing of the Klansmen? Very likely it did. Not much happens in a village that it doesn't know about. I was twelve or thirteen before I fully understood what I'd seen that night, and I never told anyone. So far as I know, Pliny and my father didn't discuss the matter again. No doubt they each had their secrets, and it isn't the way of country people to hash over past deeds that can't be undone. Once I heard my father ask Pliny if he believed that the sins of the father were visited on their sons. Pliny said no, but I doubt Father was referring to himself and his descendants. I doubt he ever regarded killing the Klansmen as a sin. There were nineteen in all. Nineteen shot or hacked to pieces or both. Who knows if they'd all ridden on New Canaan? Some were scarcely out of their boyhood.”

Gramp got up, slipped into his mackinaw, and headed out to the privy. A couple of minutes later he called Jim outside to see the northern lights. The aurora came and went in vivid electric colors, shooting high into the sky to the north. “God's fireworks,” Gramp said. “That's what Pliny calls them in his
History
. God's fireworks.”

And later, in their bunks, “There's something about what you told me, Gramp. Something I don't understand.”

“There are fifty somethings about what I told you that I don't understand. What is it?”

“You said I, especially, needed to know as much about Pliny's murder as you could tell me. Why me especially?”

“So you can write about it.”

“Why don't you write about it?”

“That's not the kind of writer I am, Jim. You're the storyteller in the family. I'm a newspaperman. I can't make anything up. Or leave anything out. From the time you could spell
cat
you were inventing stories.”

Jim thought about what Gramp had said. Then he said, “Which is more important? Being able to make things up or being able to leave things out?”

“Inventing. If you can't make things up, there's no story. But leaving things out is pretty important, too. If you can't leave things out, nobody'll read what you write.”

“Can I ask you one more question?”

“You can ask me one hundred questions. There's no guarantee I can answer any of them.”

“If I make some things up and leave other things out, then they won't be true stories.”

“Sure they will. They'll be your true stories. The stories I tell you are your legacy. What you do with them is up to you. It's all still territory but little known. Waiting for you to explore it. Let's grab a few hours of sleep, son. Morning comes early up here in God's Kingdom.”

 

9

The Scout

Someone, perhaps Samuel Clemens, said that every story begins with a stranger coming to town or with a man or a woman going on a journey. Certainly this definition holds true for most of the best stories of God's Kingdom, from the arrival of Charles Kinneson I onward.

—PLINY'S
HISTORY

He wore a too-large suit jacket with a herringbone pattern, worn at the elbows; black dress shoes; dark slacks frayed at the cuffs; a white shirt yellowing around the collar; and a broad black necktie. He had a sharp-featured face and carried a carpetbag. He was clean-shaven, of medium build. He looked about fifty. His hair was still quite dark and neatly parted. His eyes were gray and quiet, and in their still attentiveness when they alighted on you, you could feel him thinking.

“Looking for this, I presume?” the stranger said, holding out a grass-stained baseball. The Outlaws, who'd taken their old name back because no one knew who the White Knights were, had been practicing on the common when Charlie swatted a foul ball over the backstop and across the street off the roof of the railroad station. As the team's youngest player, Jim had been dispatched to retrieve it.

The stranger on the railway platform flipped Jim the ball. Jim guessed that he'd probably come into town on the 6:16 northbound, now whistling at the River Road crossing. The stranger cocked his head like a bird listening for a worm. Then he said, “Young man, I am no prognosticator. Neither in my view is any other human man or woman. Like you say, the future is as blank as your scorecard before you pencil in the lineup. But if you can tell me how far off that train whistle is, I might be able to tell you if your ball game is going to be washed out.”

“A mile and a half,” Jim said. “But it isn't a game. Just practice.”

“Practice won't hurt,” the stranger said. “Baseball is a game of inches and a game of luck. The more you practice, the luckier you get.”

The stranger spoke in an accent Jim thought might be southern. He wet the tip of his forefinger and held it up to the breeze. “Wind outen the north,” he said as the whistle hooted again. “Fluty sounding but plain enough. Air's kindly heavy this evening. So you tell me. Is it fixing to rain?”

Jim shrugged. “I don't know.”

“No one knows, son. Weather? Baseball? Will it be heaven or will it be hell? Nobody can tell the future and that's a natural fact. But if it's a traveling train whistle to judge by, or even if it isn't, you'll never go wrong to say, ‘It always has.' Rained, that is.”

The stranger put out his hand. “Most call me the Scout. On account of that would be what I am.”

“Jim Kinneson,” Jim said, shaking hands. “Scout as in baseball scout?”

The stranger looked Jim up and down with his assessing eyes. “Shortstop?”

Jim nodded.

“Leadoff hitter? Pick 'em up and put 'em down on the base path, can you?”

Jim nodded again.

“Who's your big-league club up here? Who do you go for?”

“The Red Sox,” Jim said.

“My condolences to you,” the Scout said. He set his carpetbag on the bench outside the station. He rummaged in the satchel, then pulled out a baseball cap with a bright red bird above the bill. He put it back in the bag and got out a cap embossed with a feather, then one with the letters
NY
entwined on it. Hurriedly, he thrust the
NY
cap back in his grip. Finally he located a blue cap with an ornate red
B
piped out in white. Just as he put it on, the train whistle gave one last wail.

“Let's play ball, Mr. Leadoff Hitter Shortstop,” he said, picking up his bag. “We got us an hour at the outside before the deluge hits.”

*   *   *

The Scout sat on the top row of the empty bleachers on the first-base side of the diamond. The Outlaws looked at him curiously. Jim swung two bats in the on-deck circle while Charlie finished taking his rips. “Who's your bud in the Sox cap?” Charlie said.

“He's a baseball scout,” Jim said.

“Is that so? Harley,” Charlie called out to the pitcher. “Lob me two, three more.”

Harlan Kittredge floated in a pitch that might have broken a pane of glass. Charlie popped it sky-high between first and second. “That ought to bring on the rain,” the Scout said to no one in particular.

Little Ti Thibideau, the team's forty-year-old water boy, gave a whoop. He pointed at Charlie. “Hey, b-b-b-batter. Hey, batter, batter, b-b-b-batter.”

Charlie leveled his bat belt-high across the plate. “Right here, Harley K.”

Harlan went into an exaggerated windup and flipped one down the pike over the heart of the plate. Charlie caught all of it and drove the ball high off the bandstand in deep center field, a good four hundred feet away.

“Hell damn!” Little Ti said. “That's a home run in any m-m-major-league ballpark.”

“As long as you s-s-say so, Ti,” Harlan said.

The boys laughed. The Scout was writing in a pocket memorandum book with the nub of a pencil. Jim wasn't sure he'd even seen Charlie's blast.

“Okay, bub, show 'em what you've got,” Charlie said as Jim stepped into the batter's box.

With the Scout watching, Jim was nervous at first. He got out on his front foot too soon and topped a weak comebacker to Harlan. “Hey, batter, batter, b-b-b-batter,” Ti chanted.

Soon Jim found his rhythm. His swings were compact and crisp and the ball seemed to jump off his bat. He drove one pitch after another exactly where it was pitched. In the hole between short and third, up the middle over second. Into the gaps in the outfield.

“Okay, Jimbo, lay one down and hoof it out,” Harlan said. Jim dropped a bunt down the third-base line and sprinted to first. At sixteen he was the fastest player on the team.

“Wait till you see him throw some leather out at short,” Charlie called up to the Scout. The Scout winced as if he'd pulled something in his back.

Jim walked over to the bleachers to get his glove. “Well?” he said.

“Well, what?” the Scout said.

“Did you see anything?”

“I saw you look back over your shoulder when you were dogging it down to first. Don't do that.”

Jim grinned. “Something might be gaining, right?”

“Not in this backwater it won't be,” the Scout said. “It's nothing up here to gain. Looking back slows you down a step. What does that billboard say?”

“What billboard?”

“Over yonder.” The Scout jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Up top the factory roof. I can't make it out without my eyeglasses.”

“It says ‘81 Days Without an Accident,'” Jim said. He noticed that the Scout was wearing his glasses.

“What was the last one?”

Jim thought. “Lefty Greene, our number two pitcher, got his shirtsleeve caught in the planer. He lost his arm.”

“Right or left?”

“Left.”

“Yes, sir,” the Scout said. “Know anyone who works there?”

“Half the guys on the team work there. I'm working there this summer.”

“Big fella with the mouth on him. Hit just before you did. He work there?”