God's Kingdom (24 page)

What more can I say? Our “classes” had begun in January. By March she was with child. Soon she began to show. Our ardor only increased. James, I should have married her. I loved her, as much for her fearless mind as for her strange beauty. I believe that, for all her antic ways, she loved me. Why else would she make the portrait in the school lobby far more handsome and noble than he who inspired it?

In desperation, I repaired to my friend and adoptive brother, your Kinneson father. I bared my soul to him. I spared myself nothing. I did everything in my power to exculpate Mary. When I finished my shameful account, Charles regarded me for a moment. I knew that he kept, in his desk drawer, his wartime pistol. I thought he might pull it out and shoot me. I half hoped that he would.

Instead, he gave a harsh laugh. “Hoot, brother,” he said. “I cannot claim to be astonished. True, you of all persons should have known better. Then again, a man's a man. Leave the matter in my hands. Only pledge me one pledge. Give me your word that you will never tell another what you have just told me. Will you pledge?”

“Aye,” I said. “I give you my word. I pledge never to tell another what I have told you.”

Note this well, James. Sly old Pharisee that I was, I pledged nothing, in our compact, about never writing
the truth.

Your Kinneson father—soon enough you will learn why I refer to him as such—then set in motion the machinery of an elaborate scheme. Mary he banished to New Canaan, the community of former slaves that he and I established on the Canadian bank of the Upper Kingdom River. And here a strange story takes a turn stranger still.

Some months before Mary's baby was born, Charles's wife, your Kinneson mother, stopped going to church. She no longer came into the Common to market, nor did she call upon, or receive calls from, neighbors. Charles put out word that she was expecting another child. She was, as you know, much younger than him, though by then near the end of her childbearing years. There was a good deal of concern for her. But in due time, and without incident, she brought forth a healthy male child named James Kittredge Kinneson. That, of course, was you. As for Mary, rumors flew. She had left the Kingdom for the art institute in Montreal. She had died in childbirth. In fact, she took up with a stonecutter from New Canaan, a decent young man, by all accounts, who treated her well.

In this way, James, a few years passed. And then, dear God, came Armageddon, Armageddon in the incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a Sunday evening, when most of the New Canaanites were at vespers worship. The Klansmen barred the church door and burned out the church and the village. So far as Charles and I could tell, Mary and her stonecutter consort perished in the flames, which quickly ignited the nearby woods and, as you know, eventually destroyed three million acres of borderland forest, not to mention several entire towns and scores of farmsteads in Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec, and Maine.

James, I must cut this missive short. I plan to leave it, with the genealogy, inside the sounding board at the church, and to amend, in my
History,
the legend carved onto that board, as a guidepost that I hope will lead you to their discovery. I know of no other stratagem to put these documents in your hands. Were I to come tonight to your home, the home of your Kinneson father, I am certain he would—but there I will not venture. I will add only that had I married Mary, had I not been a part of Charles's plan to deceive the Common, she would not have died. Thus you perceive the terrible consequences, however unintended, of concealing the truth, and will, I hope, understand why it is of such importance to me to reveal the truth to you now.

Earlier this year it was announced that a great dam would be built at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River, supposedly in order to prevent logjams in the mountain notch upriver. I believe that the true purpose of this structure is to conceal the site of the burned village of New Canaan. To render it out of sight and, therefore, out of mind. It was this development, to further suppress the truth, that caused me to make up my mind to break my own long silence. I told your Kinneson father that I intended to do so, and showed him the genealogy that I recently added to my
History.
He begged me to reconsider. He implored me. He reminded me of my pledge, and said writing was no different than telling. He went so far as to warn me that the revelation I intended to make to you might make me the agent of my own destruction. I would, he said, become an accessory to my death as surely as if I had furnished the weapon that killed me.

“Why would you care what I reveal, brother?” I said. “You of all people. Who gave so much of your life, and nearly all of your fortune, to the abolition of slavery and the advancement of former slaves. Surely it cannot be the taint of Negro blood in your family?”

“Blood is blood, Pliny. There is no taint. I know who you are. It is an honor to have your ‘blood,' as well as mine, in the veins of the boy. Already I see in him, and am much pleased by, the signs of scholarship and brilliance that have distinguished your life. What distresses me is how he and his descendants will be regarded, and how treated, in God's Kingdom and beyond.
I
of all people? No.
You
of all people.
You,
who, after coming here, never once mentioned your own birthright as a Negro.
You
should know why I wish to shield
our
descendants from the hatred, scorn, and perhaps, still worse, the fate that befell the New Canaanites and our beloved Mary.”

James, it remains for me to tell you one thing more. My final words to you, or to any of our descendants who may discover this letter, have little to do with your ancestry or mine. Much ado has been made, of late, of my accomplishments over the course of my long life. My Academy. My ponderous old
History.
My Civil War service, and escape from Andersonville. The scholarship recently established in my name at the state university, of which you are the first recipient.

Yet here and now, with perhaps scant hours left to live, I say to you that I would trade each and every one of these worldly attainments—my school, my degrees, my war medals, all, all, all—for the opportunity to present you to your beloved birth mother, Mary Kinneson, and to show her what a fine and promising young man you have become, a son of whom I, and she, could never have been more proud.

Signed this Good Friday

midnight by your loving

father,

Pliny Templeton

Postscript: Attached is your family genealogy.

*   *   *

On the height of land south of the Landing, just above the original outlet of Lake Kingdom, Jim pulled off beside the tall granite obelisk carved with the words “Keep Away.” Not quite a year ago, he'd brought Frannie here to view the panorama of God's Kingdom in its autumn colors. Later, the height of land became their favorite romantic rendezvous. A few times over the past summer Jim had driven out here, hoping to feel closer to Frannie.

Today a bluish haze hung in the air, a hint of the fall days to come. To the north, the Canadian peaks and the big lake between them were slightly indistinct, though Jim could make out the Île d'Illusion, and the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River where, two hundred years ago, his great-great-great-grandfather Charles I had come upon the Abenaki fishing encampment. In the opposite direction, guarding the southeastern entryway to the Kingdom, were the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the long, north-and-south-running crease in the hills of the Upper Connecticut River where Abolition Jim had made his last stand against the federal troops at the second-longest covered bridge in the world. Visible to the west were one hundred miles of the Green Mountains. They, too, had kept God's Kingdom closed off to itself, a territory but little known long after the rest of Vermont had been settled.

“I knew I'd married into a distinguished family,” Mom had said after Jim had burst into the newspaper office with the letter from Pliny and the genealogy, and explained what he'd discovered. “I just didn't know how distinguished.”

“What should we do with them?” Jim asked his father.

Dad looked at Jim over the top of his reading glasses. “You're the one who found them, son. I'd say it's your call.”

Jim hesitated, but only for the briefest moment. “Print them both,” he said.

The editor nodded. “Gramp would be proud of you,” he said. That was all, but coming from Dad, it meant everything to Jim.

“Now,” Dad said, “you've got to get to college and your mom and I have a newspaper to get out. Let's get this show on the road, folks.”

High on the ridgetop, Jim looked up the Lower Kingdom River Valley toward the village that had been his home for eighteen years. Already he was homesick. Yet, as he started his truck and headed over the height of land toward the other side of the hills, he knew in his heart that however far he might go, he would always take with him the stories, the mysteries, and the imperishable past of God's Kingdom. For now, that was enough.

 

About the Author

Howard Frank Mosher
is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. Mosher has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the New England Book Award, and the 2011 New England Independent Booksellers Association's President's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Born in the Catskill Mountains, Mosher has lived in Vermont's fabled Northeast Kingdom, “God's Kingdom,” since 1964. You can sign up for email updates
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