God's Kingdom (5 page)

Réjean clicked to the cow, which bowed its neck into the yoke and plodded across the dirt road and down the lane toward the tenant house. And that is how Gaëtan Dubois and his family came to Kingdom County and took up residence on the Kinneson farm.

*   *   *

Their name, Dubois, meant “of the woods,” and out of the woods they had come, the scrubby, cut-over woods and infertile fields full of glacial rocks just north of the Upper Kingdom River marking the border between Vermont and Quebec. “Black French,” immigrants from that region were called in the Kingdom of that era. Mixed-blood descendants of the original Abenaki natives,
habitant
French-Canadian farmers, and fugitive slaves from the South who had settled in the area before the Civil War, in the border community known as New Canaan.

“You see,
monsieur
?” Réjean said that evening to Jim's father. “We have come down from the north, us, to make your farm a showplace again.”

Jim did not think that the “farm that wasn't,” as Gramp sometimes called it, had ever been a showplace. Gramp liked to joke that for generations Kinnesons had used the income from the family newspaper to support the farm and the income from the farm to support the paper. But the editor told Réjean that he and his family were welcome to stay on rent-free at the tenant house for as long as they wished. Jim's mother, Ruth, immediately befriended Madame Dubois.

With Ruth's help, Madame scrubbed the four-room tenant house from top to bottom. From the windows of her new home she hung curtains cut from burlap and dyed red, green, blue, and yellow. Jim helped Réjean and Gaëtan whitewash the milking parlor in the barn. Up went the wood-burning stove in Madame's tiny kitchen. The newcomers were settling in.

Réjean and Gaëtan scythed the wild hay off the disused fields on the hillside behind the farmhouse, raked it into windrows to dry, and pitched it into the wagon for the cow to take to the barn. Réjean got a job on the night shift at the furniture factory in the Common. Madame hired out to clean village houses. Gaëtan helped with chores on neighboring farms. On Sunday afternoons he and Jim went fishing or berrying.

In the long summery evenings after supper, Jim tried to teach his new friend how to play baseball. Flailing away with Jim's thirty-two-inch Adirondack, Gaëtan had no luck making contact with Jim's soft lobs. The Canadian boy knew little English, but one afternoon he repaired the hand-crank starter of Gramp's long-defunct Allis-Chalmers and got it running again. Next he tinkered with the engine of the editor's first car, a Model A Ford blocked up on its rusting wheel rims behind the barn. He attached a belt from the flywheel to a buzz saw and began cutting up firewood for next spring's maple sugaring.

Réjean tapped his head in a canny way and pointed at his son. “
Génie!
” he said to Jim.

Gaëtan shook his head, looked down with his diffident smile. “
Non, Papa,
” he said. “
Albert Einstein est un génie. Moi, non
.”

“
Oui,
” Réjean said. “You will see, Monsieur James. When school begins, in the autumn, you will see.”

*   *   *

Late each August, Mom and Jim spent an entire day together at the Kingdom Fair. This year they took Gaëtan with them. They started out early in the morning at the animal barns, dropped by the cattle judging, whiled away the heat of the afternoon watching sulky races and the grand cavalcade from the cool of the grandstand. In the early evening they lollygagged through the midway, riding all the rides, playing all the games, having a look at Clyde Beatty, the “longest snake in captivity,” a sleepy five-foot python in the “Exotic Animals of the World” sideshow. Jim was tremendously proud of his beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed mother. She went on the Tilt-A-Whirl and dive-bomber with him and Gate, treated them to all the fair food they could hold, and took them to see the Hell Drivers and fireworks highlighting the grandstand show that evening. “
Merci,
” Gaëtan said. “
Merci,
Madame Kinneson. Today has been, how do you say,
un bon temps
. My very good day.”

The Kinneson men, including Dad, Gramp, Charlie, and Jim, all had tin ears. Mom loved music. Next to the woodbox in the farmhouse kitchen stood an elderly upright piano, formerly the property of the now-defunct Lost Nation one-room schoolhouse. One Saturday evening Mom invited the Dubois family to join them at the farmhouse for a kitchen junket. Réjean Dubois played the fiddle and clogged his feet to the dozens of Canadian reels he knew by heart. Madame Dubois, a grave, happy expression on her face, accompanied him on a mandolin. Gaëtan clacked two desert spoons together for percussion, and Mom, who'd attended the Boston Conservatory and knew every Beethoven sonata by heart, banged out chords on the hard-used old piano. Charlie and his girlfriend, Athena Allen, stopped by to help eat a washtubful of Gramp's homegrown popcorn, and Madame's French-Canadian
pâtisseries
. At the end of the evening, when Réjean brought them all home with the lilting strains of “
Sucre d'érable
,” even Dad's foot began to tap. Mom looked at Dad's foot, then she looked at Jim and laughed.

Mom was the only person Jim knew who could get away with teasing Dad. She said the reason he couldn't carry a tune was that, except for a few bloody ballads and a handful of Robert Burns's lyrics, music had been outlawed in the Presbyterian Scotland of Dad's ancestors. Come to think of it, Mom said, laughter and fun had been outlawed there, as well. Humor wasn't Dad's strong suit, but Mom could always make him laugh, even at himself. Otherwise, his idea of humor was to say, as he did when he received the Pulitzer Prize, that it and forty cents would buy him a cold one at the Common Hotel. The award committee put out a press release, which Dad refused to run in the
Monitor
. Mom said a Presbyterian Scotsman would rather take up devil worship than take credit for anything. Dad laughed and said it was probably true.

Looking back years later, Jim often thought that Mom's loveliest quality was her rare gift not to wish to please others so much as to be easily pleased herself. Pleased with her gardens, with all kinds of animals, with books and stories, with friends, and most of all, with her family. If Gramp was the chronicler of God's Kingdom, and if Jim's dad, the editor, was its public conscience, Mom was its heart and soul. Gramp put it best. He said it was Mom who introduced joy to the Clan Kinneson.

*   *   *

September arrived. On the first day of school Gaëtan was waiting for Jim at the Kinneson mailbox. He wore the outgrown suit he'd worn on his first day in Vermont and carried a tin lunch pail containing three bread-and-lard sandwiches and a quart canning jar of black coffee. At the Academy, Jim accompanied Gate to the office to help him register. Prof Chadburn, the headmaster, arranged for the boys to take most of their classes together so that Jim could help Gaëtan with his English.

Prof clapped Gate on the shoulder and winked at Jim. “Be sure to sit next to your friend in algebra class,” he said. “Let me know if there's any difficulty.”

Jim knew that Prof was referring to Miss Hark Kinneson, the longtime math teacher at the Academy and the editor's second cousin once removed. What relation that made her to him Jim neither knew nor cared. Harkness Kinneson was a notorious tyrant who detested all children and young people. Like Prof, she had taught three generations of Commoners. Miss Hark's classes were trials by ordeal and she was universally feared by her students, past and present.

“Welcome to Algebra Two,” Miss Hark announced at one o'clock on the Seth Thomas clock over the blackboard of the mathematics room. A rail-thin woman in her late seventies with a mannish jaw, a broad forehead, hands like hay hooks, and small black eyes that missed nothing, Miss Hark surveyed the class bleakly.

“Algebra Two,” she continued, “is not metal shop. Algebra Two is not Physical Education. In Algebra Two we will not be playing math games or any games.”

Miss Hark delivered these remarks in a flat voice with no hint of humor. In the ensuing silence she reached for a piece of chalk and wrote, on the board, the symbol for pi.

Gaëtan's hand shot up. “
C'est pi, madame le professeur. Trois pointe une quatre une cinq neuf
.”

Miss Hark trained her dark little eyes on Gaëtan. “Did I call on you?”

“
Pardon, madame le professeur?
”

“I am neither a madam nor a professor. You will address me as Miss Kinneson. Did I
call on
you?”

“
Oui, Madame
. Pi is, as you say,
un décimal infini
.
Pardon. Je suis
sad in my
anglais
.”

From the class, a few snickers.

“Silence!” Miss Hark rapped out. She pointed at Gaëtan. “What is your name?”

“Gaëtan,” Jim whispered. “
Ton nom?
”

“Oh!” Gaëtan said, grinning. “
Je m'appelle Gaëtan Dubois, madame
.”

“Well, then, Gaëtan Dubois,” Miss Hark said. “From this moment onward you will speak only when you are called on and then only in English. Do you understand? English or nothing.”

Gaëtan looked back at Miss Hark but said nothing. He said nothing for the rest of the class or the rest of the school day. Gaëtan's definition of pi was the first and last time he spoke in any class at the Kingdom Common Academy until the end of that term. For all he said in school from that day forward, he might as well have been mute.

*   *   *

“Algebra
Deux,
” Gaëtan wrote below his name on his perfect homework assignments. On each of his papers Miss Hark crossed out the word “
Deux
” and wrote beside it “Use English. F.” “No scratch work,” she'd write in the margin. “Where did you do your scratch work? F.”

The standoff continued into October. Gate maintained his silence. Miss Hark did not acknowledge his work or his presence. “I know you are looking on someone else's paper,” she wrote on his ungraded midterm exam. “Sooner or later I will prove it.” But whose papers was Gaëtan copying? No one else in the class ever got more than a C. Gate never missed a question.

To Jim's amusement, Gaëtan was somewhat superstitious. Sometimes on their way to or from school Gate told him, in his broken English, tales handed down by his
habitant
ancestors north of the border. Jim's favorite was the story of the
loup-garou
, the half-man, half-wolf monster that dwelt in the depths of Lake Memphremagog. The
loup-garou
loved to lure unsuspecting fishermen far out onto the lake on placid summer days, then whip up a sudden tempest and drown them. On moonless nights, and occasionally when the moon was full, the dreaded creature emerged from the lake to roam the forests on both sides of the border, tracking down and devouring lost hunters and disobedient children who'd strayed from home. It was even alleged that the werewolf had deliberately started the Great Forest Fire of 1882.

Gaëtan was uneasy around the skeleton of the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton. “Dr. T,” as three generations of students had called him, was the founder and first headmaster of the Academy. A former fugitive slave, he'd come north on the Underground Railroad. With the help of his deliverer, later his close friend, Charles Kinneson II, Pliny had put himself through the state university and Princeton Theological Seminary. A renowned minister, educator, abolitionist, and Civil War hero, Pliny had been shot by his longtime benefactor, Charles, during a dispute over a point of religious doctrine. On those rare occasions when Jim's grandfather and father mentioned the murder, they referred to it only as “the trouble in the family” or, simply, “the trouble.”

In his will, Pliny had bequeathed his skeleton to his beloved school as an anatomical exhibit. Although two holes in his skull, front and back, bore eloquent testimony to his murder, and his left hand was missing as well, over the years his skeleton, dangling from a pole at the front of the second-story science lab, had become a kind of mascot to the Academy students, most of whom had grown up in the same building with it since first grade. Not so Gaëtan, who, during his and Jim's late-morning biology class, sat in the back of the room, as far away from the bones as he could get. Jim told his new friend that the state university had proclaimed Pliny Templeton to be the first American Negro college graduate. In honor of the former slave, the university had established a full four-year scholarship in his name, awarded annually to the top-ranking graduate of the Academy. Also, Jim showed Gaëtan Pliny's eleven-hundred-page manuscript in the school library:
The Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County
. No matter. Gaëtan continued to be terrified by the sight of the skeleton, the way Jim felt around snakes and heights. Gate wouldn't even look at the thing, dangling from its pole above the blackboard like a Halloween figure.

Despite the fact that Gate was a mathematical savant, or perhaps partly because of it, Miss Hark continued to bully him at every opportunity. Finally, Jim complained about the math teacher to Mom. Mom's blue eyes snapped and she pursed her lips. That was all, but the next morning she marched into the Academy and closeted herself in the headmaster's office with Prof for forty-five minutes.

“He agreed to switch Gaëtan to Mr. Benson's trig class at the end of the term, in January,” Mom told Jim that evening. “That's the best I could do, hon.”

To Jim, it was obvious that, like nearly everyone else in the Common, Prof was intimidated by Miss Hark Kinneson.

“I'd like to slap her face good and hard,” Mom said to Jim. “But of course she'd just take it out on Gate.”