God's Kingdom (8 page)

Prof nodded. “I remember that. I was umping behind the plate that day. But that wasn't the longest ball I ever saw hit here. The longest ball was one I hit, by sheer blind luck, when I was just out of the service and playing town ball. We were facing a fireball pitcher, one of those crazy Carter boys out of the Landing, and I literally closed my eyes and ‘swang from the heels,' as old John McGraw used to say. Somehow, I connected. I lambasted that old grass-stained baseball clear over the bandstand in center field.

“Well, the Montreal Flyer—a misnomer if there ever were one—just happened to be passing through town at the time. I thought the ball I hit was going to clear the train, maybe bounce off the steps of the hotel porch. Instead, a fella in a seersucker suit and a blue-and-white boater hat, smoking a cigar on the rear platform of the caboose, reached up and caught that baseball one-handed, neat as you please. He made as if to throw it back onto the green but instead he dropped the ball in his jacket pocket. Then he lifted his hat in our direction and made a little bow, and he was still bowing and tipping that foolish boater hat as the caboose passed out of sight. A howl went up from both teams. That was our only ball, you see. Stealing our baseball was about the meanest thing we'd ever seen a man do.”

“You didn't see this one lose my trophy fish for me,” Athena said, nodding at Charlie.

Charlie laughed, but Prof, still looking out the window as if at the man in the seersucker suit making off with the team's only baseball, said, “We scrounged up another ball from somewhere or other and finished the game. I'm pretty sure we lost, but at least we were left with something to talk about. And with a grievance, too, which of course was almost as satisfying as a win over a much-despised rival. One day a month or so later a package arrived at the post office. It was about the size of a shoebox, and addressed to the “Baseball Players, General Delivery, Kingdom Common, Vermont.” That's all. No return address. Old Cap Wally Bowen, our playing manager, opened it up and inside were two baseballs. No note or other explanation. Just the balls. One was grass-stained and scuffed, like the one I'd whacked over the bandstand. The other was brand-new, white as fresh paint, with bright-red stitching and that wonderful horsehide scent that of all the things in the world only a baseball has. What's more, that new baseball had been signed. It was signed by Ty Cobb and every other member of the 1906 Detroit Tigers. And under Cobb's signature, in the same flourishing handwriting, it said, ‘Back to you, fellas.'”

“Wow!” Athena said.

“Great story,” Charlie said. But Prof wasn't finished.

“My point,” he said, “is that in the realm of human affairs, people aren't always exactly who they seem to be. Look, it was said that Cobb would spike his own grandma, if necessary, to steal second base. I'm sure he would have. But there was more to him than that. And that's the point.”

“What happened to the baseballs?” Jim said.

Prof gave him an approving look. “That's just the kind of question I'd expect a storywriter to ask. What happened is I put them on top of that glass-fronted bookcase in my office at the Academy and a year or so later the damn things vanished without a trace. At first I was mad, but after I cooled down, I figured some kid was getting the good out of them in a cow pasture or vacant lot, and that's what a baseball was meant for. This meal's on me, kiddos.”

Prof stood up and tipped his cap to Athena. “Ma'am,” he said. Then he shook Charlie's hand.

To Jim he said, “Let's hit the high dusty, son. No rest for the wicked.”

*   *   *

Before returning to Miss Hark's place, Jim and Prof walked down the lane through the field behind the manse to watch the rainbow trout jumping the High Falls on their way upriver to spawn. The run was at its peak this weekend. Several fish a minute fought their way up through the rapids, arcing out of the water to clear the falls, their crimson sides flashing in the spring sunshine. Jim inhaled the fresh scent of the aerated water. He was dying to feel the pulsing weight of a fish on the end of his line. Prof clapped him on the shoulder. “I know, son,” he shouted over the roar of the cataract below. “You feel like the detained wedding guest in the poem. Don't give up hope. We may yet sneak in an hour on the bridge pool before nightfall.”

Jim had no idea who the detained wedding guest was or what poem Prof was referring to, but how many warm Saturdays in early May when the rainbow run was on did a young fisherman have in his life?

An impossibly red male trout Jim estimated would weigh between seven and eight pounds leaped, hit the lip of the flume, and was knocked back down the current. It gathered itself in the holding pool below the falls, then shot up the cataract again. This time it tailwalked the last foot or two over the top of the falls into the calmer water above.

“How do they do it, Prof? It's like they defy gravity.”

“It's their matrimonial instinct, son. That's the strongest force there is. Stronger than gravity, even. You'll know when the time comes.”

Another huge trout cartwheeled its way up and over the thundering waterfall. Prof grinned. “I felt like that once.”

Suspecting that a story was about to follow, Jim waited silently. Already, he was beginning to learn that the fewer questions he asked, the more people were apt to tell him. Especially in the Kingdom, no one liked too many questions.

Prof retreated several steps back from the edge of the bank, where they could speak without shouting. “It was the late summer of '99. I'd been home from that hoo-ha in Cuba for a month or two. I'd just hired on to teach Latin and ancient history at the Academy. Somehow, I'd also managed to get myself appointed justice of the peace for Kingdom Common. The old justice, Judge Benson, was ailing, and nobody else wanted the job so the town fathers hung it on me.

“One evening a few days before the school term started, Ephraim Fairbrother, the town constable, showed up at my place with a young woman in tow. A very attractive young woman, I might add. She had dark eyes and hair and a dark complexion, like one or two Cuban gals I'd gotten to know down below, and a figure like—oh my, Jim, she had a figure. I couldn't tell for sure, but I wouldn't have guessed she was a day over twenty. Well, Old Man Fairbrother, who didn't have the sense God gave a gnat, had hauled her up in front of me for peddling without a license, and for vagrancy. But as the girl was quick to point out, she wasn't a peddler at all. She was a traveling dressmaker from Montreal. She'd breeze into a town, take a room at a boardinghouse or hotel, and make arrangements to model her dresses for the better-off ladies of the area. She had a dress for every occasion. Being such a beauty herself, she'd have looked good in a washerwoman's smock, much less an expertly tailored evening gown, so of course she always got a good number of orders for bespoke dresses. For a modest down payment, she'd take a lady's measurements, and when she'd accumulated enough orders, she'd go back to Montreal and make them tailored dresses.

“Well, Jimmy. That comely young seamstress was as mad as a blue-tailed hornet. She said she was no more a common peddler than ‘the old gendarme' was the ‘bishop of Montreal.' As for being a vagrant, she was boarding at the manse, and she assured me that Miss Hark would most certainly give her a good name. She said that if I wished to verify her claims, I could come over to the manse and she'd model her dresses in a private show just for me.

“Needless to say, son, I swallowed the bait. The very next evening I took her to dinner at the hotel. The following night I squired her to a dance at the town hall. She wore a short, flouncy red dress with matching open-toed heels. Jim, every man at that dance was jealous of me and every woman hated her. And dance? Why, she floated over the floor as if she'd been dancing as long as she'd been walking. Those dark eyes of hers were shy and bold at the same time, and she had what you'd call a fetching accent. Not French. Maybe Eastern European. Actually, I think she was part gypsy.”

“What was her name?”

“Sophia. Her name was Sophia. I called her Sophie. That night when I took her back to the manse she let me kiss her and mister man, you can just imagine. We made a date to go buggy riding the next afternoon, but when I showed up at the manse with a hired trap from the livery stable—she was gone.”

“Gone!” Jim said. Then, despite his resolution not to interrupt, “Gone where?”

“Miss Hark said an urgent telegram had come from Montreal very early that morning. It was bad news. Sophie's sister had died. Sophie'd left in her black funeral dress, the same one she'd modeled for her customers, and a black veil, on the dawn Flyer. And that was the last I ever heard of her.”

“She never came back? Or wrote?”

“Nope. I went up to Montreal to look for her and pounded the sidewalks of the garment district, but a gypsy, you know, can vanish into thin air in a room with just two people in it, much less a great city.”

Prof stared at the rushing river. Finally he shrugged. “It couldn't ever have come to anything, whatever there was between us. Other than the fact that we were both young, we didn't have a thing in common. I was a village schoolteacher. She was as wild and free as—” Prof flipped the back of his hand toward the falls—“one of those leaping trout.”

There was so much more that Jim wanted to know, but all Prof said, as they cut back across the field toward the manse, was, “You'll have to write the story yourself someday, son.”

“How?” Jim said. “I don't know the ending.”

“That's all right,” Prof said. “Leave it a mystery, then.”

*   *   *

Jim finished his last dump run late that afternoon. It looked as though he and Prof might get their fishing in after all, but first Prof wanted to “take a gander” at the carriage shed. Jim slyly asked him what he proposed to do in the shed with a male goose and Prof snatched off his Academy ball cap and made as if to flail his student about the head and shoulders with it. Two good friends and fishing chums, horsing around after a fraught day.

They didn't find much in the shed. A one-horse run-around pung, a larger cutter on ornately curved runners that had belonged to Miss Hark's father. A grain bin next to the door leading to a two-stall stable.

Jim lifted the heavy lid of the bin and peered inside. Empty. “Maybe this is where the runaway slaves hid,” he said.

Prof chuckled. “I'd forgotten all about the so-called secret slave chamber. Come on back to the house, Jim. I'll show you. Then we'll hit the bridge pool.”

In the front hallway of the manse, Prof showed Jim a china knob, not much larger than a shooter aggie, in the paneling below the curving staircase. It opened outward, revealing a small space under the stairs. “Harkness and I used to play hide-and-seek in there,” Prof said. “Rumor had it that's where the fugitive slaves were hidden, but I've always been skeptical. There was a saying that here in the Kingdom, the Underground Railroad ran aboveground. Slavecatchers didn't dare venture up to these parts. If they did, they never went back. Crawl in there, Jim. See if there's anything worth looking at.”

In the back of the cubbyhole beneath the stairs, under a throw rug, Jim discovered a trunk. “Geehaw it out,” Prof said. “Maybe that's where Miss H kept her nest egg. If so, I'll split it with you, fifty-fifty.”

The trunk was wedged under the exposed underside of the staircase. By degrees Jim worked it over to the door. Together, he and Prof wrestled it through the opening into the hallway. Jim crawled out after the trunk and took a deep breath, glad to be out of the cubbyhole.

“Or,” Prof said, “it could contain some old slavecatcher's bones. Be my guest, Jim. Open it up.”

“I'll leave that honor to you, Prof.”

The slanted rays of the lowering sun, dancing with motes, fell through the frosted glass transom above the front door onto the old chest. As Prof clicked open the hasp and lifted the lid, the sunlit hallway was suffused with the scent of lavender. Desiccated lavender blossoms, as blue as Prof's eyes, lay inside on several large albums. Brushing aside the still-fragrant flowers, Prof lifted out one of the volumes and began to leaf through the brittle pages. It was a scrapbook containing clippings about Prof from the
Monitor,
some with photographs. Prof at about Jim's age, in his baggy baseball uniform, wearing a catcher's mitt. Prof in a graduation cap and gown, delivering his valedictory address. And a few years later, in puttees and a uniform blouse with lieutenant's stripes, standing in front of a military tent with a young Teddy Roosevelt. Other scrapbooks in the lavender-scented trunk contained articles on championship Academy teams Prof had coached and trophy trout he'd landed, and Prof's entire speech upon receiving the Vermont Headmaster of the Year award. And then, two baseballs, one scuffed and grass-stained, the other signed with the just-discernible names of the 1906 Detroit Tigers. Jim couldn't help laughing, but Prof was visibly nonplussed.

“My goodness, Jimmy,” he said. “I don't know whether this is a shrine or a mausoleum or both. Let's keep this between ourselves, shall we?”

Below the scrapbooks were some toilet articles. A hand mirror backed in mother-of-pearl. A compact case, a tortoiseshell comb and brush. And folded neatly and separated by tissue paper, layer after layer of dresses. Out of the trunk, one by one, Prof lifted a lime-green dinner dress, a short scarlet dress and a matching pair of open-toed high heels, and a black funeral dress and black veil. Finally, under one last layer of tissue paper, at the bottom of the trunk, a small hand purse containing some faded notes on the Bank of Lower Canada, a few hairpins, and a snapshot of a pretty, dark-complected young woman, smiling at the camera with an expression that was both demure and bold.

Prof drew in his breath. He passed one hand in front of his eyes, stared at the smiling girl again, then, with his hand shaking slightly, put the snapshot in his shirt pocket.