God's Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Miss Hark made a strangled noise in her throat and lurched to her feet. She pointed at Gaëtan, standing in the spreading pool of his own urine, then at the door. “Go!” she shrieked. “Get out.”

  Gaëtan remained bent over at the blackboard. “I do not cheat, me!” he shouted.

  “I don’t care if you cheated or not. Get out of my class, you stinking Black Frenchman.”

  Gaëtan shook his head. “With respect, Mademoiselle. I do not cheat.”

  The puddle at Gaëtan’s feet crept toward Miss Hark’s desk. She started to back away. Just as she bolted for the door, it opened and Prof stepped into the room. “Excuse me, Miss Hark. The hockey game this afternoon’s been canceled because of the weather. There’s a major blizzard coming in from Canada. I want you boys and girls to bundle up and go straight—Miss Hark? Are you all right?”

  “Him!” Miss Hark shrieked, pointing at Gaëtan. Then she rushed past Prof and out the door.

  At the blackboard, Gaëtan straightened up and turned to face the class. A dark stain covered the front of his trousers.

  “Pardon,” Gaëtan said. “Pardon, monsieur le professeur. J’ai shame.”

  Eyes down, Gaëtan walked to the back of the classroom and removed his overcoat from its hook. He threw his new skates over his shoulder, picked up his lunch pail, and left the room.

  “This is most unfortunate,” Prof told the class. “I’m sorry you folks had to witness something like this.”

  “Prof,” Jim said. “Miss Hark accused Gate of cheating, but he didn’t.”

  “I know he didn’t, son,” Prof said. “You go find your friend and tell him I know he didn’t do anything wrong. The rest of you people are dismissed. Leave your tests on your desks. I’ll collect them.”

  As the students got to their feet, Prof said, “Keep your faces covered up on your way home. It’s murderously cold out there.”

  * * *

  Gaëtan’s brogans sat side by side on the riverbank. On the dark ice below, Jim made out the diagonal telemarks of Gaëtan’s long skating strides. Hurriedly he kicked off his boots and laced up his skates. Jim knew that he could never overtake his friend in an all-out race. He had to hope that Gate would stop to thaw out at one of the fishing shanties on the South Bay.

  As Jim skated north up the river, tracing its oxbows through the frozen wetlands south of the lake, the wind buffeted his body like a hockey defenseman checking him at every turn. He had to twist his head aside to breathe. He tried burying his mouth and nose in the fleece collar of his jacket, but when he did, his breath froze to his face. He covered the five miles through the swamp to the bay in thirty minutes. Gaëtan’s skate tracks, silvery in the dwindling light of the short winter afternoon, continued past the enclave of fishing shacks toward the big lake and Canada.

  The wind funneling through the notch between the mountains struck Jim with frightening force. The peaks of Kingdom and Canada Mountains were obscured by blowing snow. Far to the southwest the sun was a pewter disc. It touched the peak of Mt. Mansfield, then vanished.

  Something came hurtling Jim’s way, tumbling wildly across the ice. As it rattled past him, he recognized Gaëtan’s lunch pail. Jim thought of Gate’s wet trousers and socks, frozen stiff by now.

  Briefly the gale let up, as if gathering itself for a more fierce assault. Just ahead, at the Great Earthen Dam, the Upper Kingdom River marking the Canadian border flowed into the lake from the east. Suddenly Jim knew where Gaëtan was headed. He was going home.

  North of the dam, the lake rarely froze until mid-January. In the last blue light of the day, Jim could see whitecaps angling from shore to shore. He heard the breakers crashing. He was almost out of ice.

  Jim skidded sideways, stumbled, regained his balance, and came to a stop. The wind picked up again, and he had to lean into it to stay on his feet as he screamed out Gaëtan’s name again and again. He thought of his friend standing at the blackboard in a pool of his own urine. He thought of himself doing nothing to help Gate, even when Miss Hark had called him a “Black Frenchman,” and of Prof’s last words to the class.

  “It’s murderously cold out there,” Prof had told them, and it was. Yet somehow Jim knew, as he started back down the ice with the howling wind at his back, that however treacherous the cold and snow and wind and fathomless dark heart of the lake might be, the greater dangers of this place they called God’s Kingdom lay closer to home.

  4

  Haunted

  In those years every village in the Kingdom boasted its own haunted house.

  —PLINY’S HISTORY

  It was May Day in Kingdom County. This was the time of year when Jim and his close friend and fishing mentor, Prof Chadburn, would toss their fly rods in the back of Prof’s Rambler station wagon and head out the county road along the river to fish the rainbow run. They’d spend the entire day on the stream, stopping at noon to cook their catch over an open fire for a shore lunch, fishing on through the afternoon together for the gigantic silver-and-crimson trout that ran up the river to spawn in the spring of the year.

  Not today. Today Prof had recruited his prize Latin student and star shortstop on the Academy baseball team to help him empty out Miss Hark Kinneson’s former house in the village. This was Saturday. The past Monday, before the students arrived at the Academy, Prof had stepped discreetly into Miss Hark’s classroom to tell her that her employment would be terminated with the end of the current school year. He’d discovered the math teacher slumped over with her head on her desk, her eyes wide open and glaring angrily out over what had been her domain for fifty years, as if she’d divined his intention and upstaged him. To his further astonishment, a few days later Prof learned that he had inherited Miss Hark’s house, just across the street from the north end of the village green.

  Prof may well have been the only Commoner to whom the news that Harkness Kinneson had named him her heir came unexpectedly. The whole town, including Jim, knew that Miss Hark had set her cap for John Chadburn from the day they entered high school together. Unfortunately for the future schoolmistress, by then young Johnny was already in love with the remote trout streams and deep woods of the Kingdom.

  Over his long tenure as headmaster at the Academy, Prof had become something of a living legend in God’s Kingdom. A burly man with thinning white hair, a neat gray mustache, and noticing blue eyes, he still taught four classes of Latin and coached Jim’s baseball team. Malefactors actually enjoyed being sent to his office. After roaring at them for a minute or two, he regaled them with tales of his own juvenile misdemeanors, then sent them back to class laughing. To cover up his bald spot he wore his Academy baseball cap indoors and out, year-round.

  As the old Rambler rattled onto the one-lane red iron bridge over the river, Prof slowed to a crawl. He looked out his window and Jim looked out his at the river below. Jim thought he saw the dark outline of a trout shoot up through the current into the shadow of the bridge abutment. Hanging in the deep green bridge pool, the fish looked nearly as long as Jim’s arm.

  “Well, son,” Prof said as they continued into the village, “I don’t need to tell you how little I look forward to this business today. Or how much I appreciate your help.”

  Jim nodded. But as they pulled up to the curb in front of Miss Hark’s place, he was quite sure that Prof didn’t dread the day ahead as much as he did. Not only had the recently deceased math teacher been directly responsible for the terrible fate of his friend Gaëtan Dubois on the big lake, her village house was widely rumored to be haunted. Never once in his nearly sixteen years had Jim set foot inside the place, and as foolish as he knew this was, he’d fervently hoped never to have to.

  The old Kinneson manse, as Miss Hark’s place was called, had been built by Jim’s great-great-grandfather “Abolition Jim” Kinneson. Abolition Jim had constructed the manse for his wife, who was unhappy on the farm where Jim and his parents now lived and pined for a place in town. Although not as large or stately as Judge Allen’s home on A
nderson Hill, or Prof’s headmaster’s house, the manse had several handsome features. Old James had cut a sideways, or “coffin,” window between the steep upper slate roof and the tin roof of the kitchen ell. Into the front wall of the second story, overlooking the village green to the south, James had built an elegant secluded porch. A flagstone walk led from the picket fence up to the front door, over which he had inserted a horizontal transom of six frosted panes. A set of sleigh bells hung beside the door. Callers at the manse announced their arrival by giving them a shake. In the old days, visitors would sometimes jingle the bells a second time for the sheer pleasure of hearing them again. Atop the carriage shed adjacent to the house was a copper weathervane in the shape of a galloping Morgan horse. A bed of lavender scented the narrow side lawn between the manse and the lane leading down to the High Falls on the river. A few tiny white violets grew between the flagstones.

  Just when the manse was first proclaimed to be haunted was lost in the distant lore of the village. Nor was Jim sure who or what was supposed to possess the place. Children, always more keenly attuned to these matters than their elders, began crossing the street to the village green in order to avoid walking by the manse about the time Miss Hark inherited the house from James’s widow, her Kinneson grandmother.

  Over the decades the place had fallen into disrepair. Virginia creeper had twined up the outside walls. A few of the square nails holding the roof slates in place had rusted out. Several slates had pulled free and fallen onto the lawn below or shattered on the flagstone walk. The copper horse on the carriage shed had acquired a sickly verdigris patina, as if it had become nauseated from its own air of perpetual motion.

  It was said that the manse contained a secret chamber, where Miss Hark’s father had hidden fugitive slaves before smuggling them across the border to Canada. Some Commoners swore that they’d heard snatches of old spirituals coming from the front parlor late at night, accompanied by the wheezing strains of the ancient pump organ that had belonged to James’s widow.

  While Prof sorted through a ring of iron keys, Jim tugged on the sleigh bells. Prof gave a start. “Jesum Crow!” he said.

  Jim struggled not to laugh out loud. Evidently Prof was as frightened of the manse as he was. The vestibule and front hallway smelled cold and stale, like a disused church. A curved staircase led to the second story. Prof laid his hand on one of the carved balusters. “Butternut,” he said. “You don’t see much butternut being used in houses these days, Jimmy. This house was built.”

  He poked his head into the front parlor off the hall. “And just look at this wainscoting. Bird’s-eye maple all the way up to the chair rail. I played here with Harkness as a kid. I never would have noticed how pretty the woodwork was then.”

  “Are you going to move in?”

  “I’ll have to have someplace to hang my fish pole after I retire,” Prof said. “The headmaster’s house goes with the job.”

  “I wouldn’t live in a haunted house for a million dollars,” Jim said.

  Prof grinned. He touched one bushy eyebrow, then his lips, then made a circle of his thumb and forefinger: their private code for “I say nothing.”

  “Truth to tell,” Prof said, “I’ve never thought it was the house that was haunted.”

  There wasn’t much to see in the parlor. A horsehair love seat with yellowed antimacassars on its arms and back. Two uncomfortable-looking Morris chairs. The antiquated organ rumored to play itself. A glass-fronted bookcase containing old-fashioned romance novels from the era of Jim’s grandparents and great-grandparents. “I don’t think this room has been used since the manse was a boardinghouse, Jim,” Prof said.

  “I didn’t know it ever was a boardinghouse.”

  “Oh, yes, and within my memory. After Abolition Jim was killed by federal troops and the Kingdom was reincorporated into the nation, James’s widow operated a very respectable boardinghouse here, mainly for traveling single ladies and old-maid schoolteachers and such. She willed the place to her grown granddaughter Harkness—speaking of old-maid schoolteachers. Miss H continued to run the boardinghouse for a few years after she inherited it. Then she got her normal-school degree and started working at the Academy. That’s about when the boarding business went by the board. Sorry for the bad pun.”

  They returned to the hallway, which led into a dining room. A trestle-style table with twelve ladder-back chairs arranged around it took up most of the space in the room.

  Out in the ell, the pale-yellow kitchen linoleum gleamed from a recent waxing. Next to the deep-welled zinc sink sat an icebox, as Prof referred to it, with a squat round motor on top. It was unplugged and the door was ajar. Except for an open box of baking soda, the shelves were bare. A massive black Home Comfort cooking and heating stove, converted at some point from wood to gas, sat between the empty icebox and the door to the woodshed. Off the kitchen was a narrow bathroom, formerly a pantry, Prof thought, containing a toilet with a pull-chain attached to an overhead water tank, and a tub with high sides resting on lion-claw feet.

  Another door led from the kitchen to a downstairs bedroom. Prof told Jim that he believed that Miss Hark had slept here for decades. Her severe dark teaching dresses hung in a wooden chifforobe. An oak dresser contained clean, folded blouses, sweaters, and underthings. Beside Miss Hark’s narrow brass bed was a stack of books on a washstand. Prof read the titles out loud to Jim. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice. He shook his head, touched one eyebrow, then his lips, and shot Jim the thumb-and-forefinger sign.

  * * *

  Upstairs in the master bedroom off the secluded porch, Prof and Jim discovered several dozen cardboard boxes filled with graded examinations dating all the way back to Miss Hark’s first years as a math teacher at the Academy. “Look at this, Prof!” Jim said, holding up a blue test booklet. “‘Charles Kinneson III. November 4, 1915. Algebra II. D -. Did not follow assignment.’”

  Charles III was Jim’s father, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of The Kingdom County Monitor, whose scathing columns on Senator Joseph McCarthy had helped lead to McCarthy’s recent censure on the floor of the Senate. It was as if Miss Hark, otherwise not a hoarder, had held on to the exam papers all these years to maintain power over her now-grown former students.

  “These boxes and what’s in them need to go to the dump,” Prof said. “I’ll lug them down to the front door and you put ’em in the back of the Rambler.” This time Prof didn’t bother to flash Jim the “I say nothing” signal. He was angered, and unsettled as well, by the discovery of the exams.

  For the rest of the morning Jim loaded boxes into Prof’s station wagon and ran them up to the village dump on the back side of Anderson Hill. Crazy Kinneson, Jim’s second cousin, helped him heave the old examinations onto the smoky fire of discarded treadless tires, broken boards, and household garbage that smoldered day and night at the dump in those days. An unstoppable center on the Academy basketball team, Crazy lived with his uncle the dumpkeeper in a shack constructed of old lumber and packing crates. For company he conversed with an array of imaginary companions, both living and dead.

  “Tell Miss Hark that Crazy says hello, Jimmy,” Crazy said. “Tell the pretty dark lady hello, too.”

  Jim liked Crazy and was accustomed to his strange pronouncements. Privately, he thought that his cousin might not be crazy at all. Jim waved to Crazy out the window of the Rambler and headed back toward the manse.

  * * *

  At noon Prof sprang for Armand St. Onge’s famous hot roast pork sandwiches at the hotel dining room. The dining room was crowded this noon, with both local and out-of-state fishermen. Jim’s brother, Charlie, and Charlie’s girlfriend, Athena Allen, Jim’s much-beloved English teacher at the Academy, waved Prof and Jim over to a table by the window, overlooking the railroad crossing at the north end of the village green. “How are you guys coming over at Miss Havisham’s?” Charlie said. “Did you bring us a slice of her wedding cake?”

  Athena gave Charlie a loo
k. “Speaking of weddings,” she said.

  Jim grinned. He was a little shy around his favorite teacher because she was so beautiful. He didn’t understand why his big brother didn’t marry her and neither, Charlie’d recently confided to him, did he. Jim surely would have. In Charlie’s place he’d have married his good-looking teacher long ago. Jim would have given anything to have a whip-smart, funny, Hollywood-gorgeous girlfriend like Athena Allen, who encouraged him with his storywriting and never wrote “Did not follow assignment” on his compositions—though he often did not—at the same time that she teased him, fondly and mercilessly, like a big sister, calling him a “daydreaming romantic,” often adding that she wished “you know who” was a little more like him. Privately, Jim worried that Charlie would let Athena slip through his fingers.

  Charlie and Athena had been on the river since dawn and were still wearing their waders. As usual, they were arguing. In fact, Jim could not remember a time when Charlie and his longtime girlfriend had not been arguing. Mom said that arguing was how Charlie and Athena conversed with each other, which Jim supposed was the case, though he wished that when they were conversing, they wouldn’t try to enlist him on behalf of their respective causes.

  Today the couple was engaged in a debate over the size of a trout Athena had lost in the basin pool below the High Falls behind the hotel. She’d played it for several minutes, and it had jumped twice, so both Charlie and Athena had gotten a good look at it. But when Charlie had tried to net it for her, he’d inadvertently—or not—knocked it off the hook. Athena claimed the fish weighed at least six pounds. Charlie said four pounds was more like it.

  “Your so-called teacher here, Jimmy, is accusing me of deliberately causing her to lose that mediocre trout,” Charlie said. “Would I do that?”

  Outside, the long noon freight was rumbling by. Charlie had to speak just below a shout to make himself heard. So did Athena when she said, “What do you mean ‘so-called teacher’? I am Jim’s teacher. Your brother bumped that fish off my hook on purpose, Jim. All he caught all morning was a pathetic little fingerling and he was jealous. It’s the sort of thing I’d have expected him to do when we were twelve.”