The gym fell deathly quiet.
* * *
Whoever threw the pop bottle that killed Jim’s cousin was never charged. Maybe the bottle was meant for the Landingites and slipped out of the thrower’s hand. No one ever came forward to testify, much less accept responsibility for the boy’s death. In an editorial in the Monitor entitled “The Stoning of Philmore Kinneson,” Jim’s father wrote that it was the feud itself that had killed Crazy, and the two towns should be prosecuted for murder.
The entire Common seemed to turn out for Crazy Kinneson’s funeral. Donors came together to commission a granite tombstone in his memory, with a regulation-size, carved granite basketball on top. But Crazy’s story didn’t end there. One snowy evening several weeks after his death the defunct distillery caught fire again. This time it burned to the ground. That same night the Lake Kingdom House in the Landing, closed for the winter, went up in flames.
“At least they can’t lay these latest fires to Crazy’s door,” Jim told his father the next morning.
“Don’t be too sure about that, James,” the editor said, and as usual, he was right. At first each village blamed its most recent fire on its rival. But the blackened ruins of the distillery and the old resort hotel were still smoking when a new rumor began to fly through the towns. Crazy’s ghost had returned to God’s Kingdom and set the fires.
Jim’s father summed it up in a second editorial. “We needed a hero and a scapegoat,” he wrote. “Philmore Kinneson was unfortunate enough to be both, in life and in death.”
6
Only in the Kingdom
With the help of a red ox named Samson, Charles II and I built the Academy from pink, or “Scotch,” granite blocks quarried on Canada Mountain by stonecutters from New Canaan. Except for Samson, whose task it was to turn a bull wheel atop a platform reached by a series of inclined ramps, and thereby raise the one-ton granite blocks, we had very little assistance, but dozens and even scores of superintendents, and you may be sure that not one thing Charles or Samson or I did was right. At last the walls were erected. But imagine our astonishment, and the gleeful delight of the superintendents, when Samson refused to descend the ramps to terra firma. Sadly, we were constrained to butcher the poor beast on high, whereupon we held a great, free ox roast on the Common at which about half of our self-anointed superintendents declared that we had burned the beef, the other half that the meat was so bloody underdone they could not lay a lip over it.
—PLINY’S HISTORY
Mike the Moose appeared on the village green in the bottom of the ninth inning of the opening game of the Northern Vermont Town Team League between Kingdom Common and Kingdom Landing. There were two outs and the Common was behind by a run, with Jim Kinneson on first base and his cousin Job “Moose” Kinneson, the team’s cleanup hitter, at bat. Everyone’s attention was riveted on the game so nobody saw exactly where Mike had come from. There he was, moseying in past the hometown bleachers along the first-base line as though he’d just fallen out of the sky.
The Landing’s closer, a raw-boned logger with a frighteningly errant fastball, had just brushed Moose back from the plate with a head-high pitch six inches inside. Moose was a good-natured giant, but as Jim’s older brother, Charlie, had told him, beware the wrath of a patient man. He pointed the business end of his forty-inch Louisville Slugger at the pitcher. “Don’t do that again, old son,” he said.
The pitcher went into his stretch. He checked Jim, who had a shorter lead than usual, and no intention of taking the bat out of the hands of his team’s best hitter by getting picked off. That’s when Jim’s dad, Editor Kinneson, umping behind the plate, spotted Mike.
“Time, gentlemen!” The editor threw up his hands and stepped out from behind the catcher. He pointed at the three-quarters-grown bull moose, now standing near the Outlaws’ on-deck circle as if waiting for his turn to bat.
“Why, looky there,” Moose said. “It’s a moose.”
From the bleachers, laughter. Charlie liked to refer to Job Kinneson as the master of the obvious. At six-six and two hundred and forty pounds, Moose was the best long-ball hitter in the league. He owned a small dairy farm on the county road, just outside the village. Weekends he filled in as an auxiliary deputy sheriff at local events requiring the presence of a police officer. The master of the obvious could take the air out of a dance-hall slugfest just by walking through the door.
Moose had a tiny, loud wife from Maine, known in the Common as Mrs. Moose, and five large, loud daughters, ranging in age from six to twelve, whom he referred to as “the gals.” Mrs. Moose and the gals never missed one of Moose’s home games. When Mike showed up on the green, they were perched in the bucket loader on the front of Moose’s green John Deere farm tractor next to the first-base bleachers, rooting for their father to bust one into the street in front of the brick shopping block and win the game.
“You gals stay put,” Moose called over to them. To the moose he said, “Keep off the playing field, young fella. We’ve got a ball game to finish here.”
As Moose liked to put it, he had a way with critters. When someone in the Kingdom found an orphaned beaver kit or an injured fawn, they’d bring it to him to raise. He knew how to heal hawks with broken wings. Once he adopted a motherless bear cub. When it nipped off his left index finger at the middle knuckle during a play fight, he gave it to the Quebec provincial zoo across the border.
Moose pointed at Mike with his abbreviated forefinger. “Stay,” he said.
Mike, for his part, knelt down on his front legs, as moose will sometimes do in a hay field, and began to crop the short grass near the first-base coaching box.
“Good moose,” Moose said. Then he stepped back into the batter’s box and poled the next pitch over the bandstand in deep center field for a game-winning home run.
No gloater, Moose ducked his head and started around the bases with his eyes on the ground. As he jogged toward first, the gals swarmed him. They clung to his legs and scrambled onto his shoulders, shrieking joyously. Just behind them came Mike, ambling along and from time to time giving Moose an encouraging reef with its modest set of antlers. Jim crossed home plate, where the team had gathered to greet him and Moose, then ran for his reporter’s camera in the dugout. His shot of Moose rounding third base with the gals hanging off him like young possums in pinafores and Mike tagging along behind made the front page of that week’s Monitor. A second photo of Moose driving his John Deere past the courthouse with Mrs. Moose in the seat beside him, the gals riding in the bucket, and Mike bringing up the rear appeared on the sports page with Jim’s account of the game.
“Uh-oh, boys,” Cousin Stub Kinneson, the team’s second baseman, said as Moose’s outfit, now including Mike, proceeded up the street. “Here comes trouble in a big hat.”
Warden R. W. Kinneson came striding along the sidewalk from the courthouse. He cut off Moose’s entourage at the northeast corner of the Common. “Just where do you think you’re taking that animal?” Cousin R. W. said.
“The gals here have named him Mike,” Moose said to the warden. “Mike the Moose. I’m not taking him anywhere. He seems to have muckled onto me. I believe he thinks I’m his mother.”
The warden jutted his hat up at Moose. Jim snapped a picture. A crowd was beginning to gather.
“See here, cousin,” R. W. said. “That beast never would have ventured into town if it didn’t have brain-worm disease. I’m going to have to destroy it.”
Instantly all five of the large little gals burst into tears.
“Hear them, won’t you,” Moose said.
R. W. took a step toward Mike and unbuckled his holster strap. Moose got down off the John Deere and stood between Mike and the warden.
“Job Kinneson, I’m warning you. You’re preventing an officer of the law from carrying out his sworn duty.”
“Mike’s a good moose,” Moose said. “He’s taken a shine to us, is all. You gals quieten down now. Nobody’s going to shoot anybody.”
Moose climbed back up on the John Deere and headed home with Mike trailing along behind.
* * *
“State of Vermont vs. Job Kinneson,” the county prosecutor, Zack Barrows, announced the following Wednesday at the weekly arraignments at the courthouse.
Warden R. W. Kinneson stood beside Zack at the prosecutor’s table. Moose Kinneson and his attorney, Jim’s brother, Charlie, stood at the defense table across the aisle.
Jim sat in the third row of benches behind the defense table, pencil and notebook at the ready. This was his first court assignment for the Monitor. Feeling proud but nervous, he jotted down some details to add atmosphere to his story. The light globes hanging on metal rods from the stamped-tin ceiling. The four tall windows in the west wall, overlooking the village common. The worn hardwood floor and benches.
Most interesting of all to Jim was the mural covering the entire front wall of the courtroom. It was called The Seven Wonders of God’s Kingdom, and had been painted by Gramp’s older sister, Mary Queen of Scots Kinneson, at about the same time that she painted the life-size portrait of Pliny Templeton that hung in the foyer of the Academy. In the most vivacious colors, and with astonishing verisimilitude, Mary had depicted, from left to right across the wall, the High Falls behind the Common Hotel, Pliny’s great granite Academy, the Île d’Illusion in Lake Memphremagog, the baseball diamond on the village green, Pliny’s History of Kingdom County open to the narrative of Lake Runaway running away down the Lower Kingdom Valley, Jay Peak at the height of the fall foliage season, and the second-longest covered bridge in the world, at the southern gateway to the Kingdom, where Abolition Jim and his fellow secessionists had been wiped out by federal troops.
Soon after completing the mural, Mary Kinneson, not yet seventeen, had dropped out of the Academy and run off to live with the descendants of the fugitive slaves who had founded New Canaan, on the Canadian side of the Upper Kingdom River. Gramp had scarcely known her. Mary had died when he was five, in the Great Forest Fire of 1882 that had killed nearly a hundred residents of New Canaan.
As usual, Judge Forrest Allen, Athena Allen’s father, was presiding. Judge Allen conducted his courtroom in an avuncular manner but didn’t suffer fools or brook impertinence. Recently, he’d been in the hospital with heart problems. This morning he looked tired.
“Judge Allen,” Zack said, “the state is charging Mr. Job Kinneson with interfering with an officer acting in the line of duty. Also with illegally taking a protected wild animal. The animal in question is a young moose. Warden Kinneson has reason to believe that the moose has brain-worm disease. Brain-worm is highly contagious. If it’s transferred to deer, it’s invariably fatal. The State needs to confiscate this animal and put it down so it can be tested in accordance with the law of the land.”
“Your honor,” Charlie said, “my client, Mr. Job Kinneson, is an auxiliary deputy sheriff and well acquainted with the law of the land. He didn’t ‘take’ the moose in question anywhere. It followed him home. Moose put it into his lower pasture with his young stock because it isn’t quite ready to fend for itself. There’s nothing at all wrong with it other than it misses its mother. Mike, that’s the moose’s name, seems to have adopted Moose as his surrogate mother. It’s very touching, actually.”
Judge Forrest Allen did not appear to be touched. He gave Charlie a weary look. “From where?” he said.
“I’m sorry, your honor? From where?”
“You said the moose followed Job home. From where did it follow him home?”
“It appeared on the village green during our baseball game with the Landing. Moose had just walloped a walk-off home run over the bandstand and—”
“Excuse me, Charlie. Let me understand this. The moose in question hit a home run? Surely you don’t expect me to believe that, even in the Kingdom, moose play town-team baseball?”
Jim was writing fast.
“No, your honor, of course not. Moose Kinneson hit the home run. Mike the Moose just ran the bases with him. Mike was on first at the time and when Moose rounded the bag, Mike followed him.”
“Mike was playing first base?”
“No, your honor. He was eating the grass near the coaching box.”
“Charlie, I have warned you often before. The Eighth District Court of Vermont is not an Abbott and Costello production. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this is an arraignment in a court of law. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, your honor. That’s why I’m requesting a summary ruling from the bench to dismiss these frivolous charges. This is a tempest in a teapot. I’m prepared to prove it. Defense requests permission to call one special witness.”
“This isn’t a trial, Charlie. Witnesses don’t usually testify at arraignments.”
“It won’t take two minutes.”
The judge passed his hand over his robe in the region of his heart. “I’ll give you exactly sixty seconds. And Charlie? Don’t push your luck. I have had just about a sufficiency, this morning, of moose and of Kinnesons.”
The judge looked at his watch. “Fifty-five seconds.”
“Thank you, your honor. I’ll be right back.” Charlie walked quickly to the rear of the courtroom and out the door. A moment later he returned with Mrs. Moose, leading Mike by a halter. “Go ahead, Moose,” Charlie called down to Job Kinneson at the defense table.
Moose whistled. “Here, Mike.”
Mike trotted down the center aisle. As he neared the front of the courtroom, he noisily deposited a heap of moose pellets beside the prosecutor’s table.
“Moose, would you kindly walk to the back of the courtroom?” Charlie said.
Moose started back down the aisle. Mike came along behind him like a bird dog at heel. When they reached the door, Mrs. Moose led Mike back out into the hall.
Charlie said, “I submit, your honor, that this moose is perfectly healthy. It most certainly doesn’t have brain-worm disease.”
“Warden Kinneson,” the judge said. “Can’t you just take that animal out in the woods and let it go? It looks plenty big enough to care for itself to me.”
“I expect it would only come back, your honor. Besides which, if it transfers brain-worm to so much as one wild deer, there goes Vermont’s whitetail population, down the drain. And a big chunk of Vermont’s economy right along with it.”
“Well, R.W., you may be surprised to learn that I am more concerned with the laws of the state of Vermont than with its economy. So I am going to take all of this information under advisement. I will have a ruling within a week. In the meantime, I am remanding young Mike back to Job Kinneson’s farm. In his capacity as auxiliary deputy sheriff, Job will keep Mike under house arrest, with no contact with Vermont’s precious deer herd.”
“Thank you, your honor,” Charlie said.
“Next case,” Judge Allen said.
* * *
Editor Kinneson blue-penciled the atmospheric descriptions out of Jim’s article on Moose’s arraignment. “Save that for your storywriting, James,” he said. “This is the weekly court news, not War and Peace.”
Charlie told Jim he was confident that Judge A would hand down a ruling favorable to Moose and Mike. Even if the judge refused Charlie’s request for a summary dismissal and allowed the case to go to trial, no Kingdom jury would ever vote to destroy Mike.
But on the day after the arraignment, Judge Allen experienced more chest pain and was taken to the hospital in Memphremagog. The judge’s caseload was transferred to a middle-aged magistrate from Burlington, a former U.S. Marine major, who promptly threw out the charges that Moose had interfered with the warden. In the same ruling, the ex-leatherneck decreed that, in the interest of protecting the deer herd, Warden R. W. Kinneson and the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department had the right to put Mike down and run their tests.
Warden Kinneson bided his time. He waited until Moose was away with his John Dee
re, mowing a sick neighbor’s hayfield. Then the warden descended on Moose’s place with two state troopers and a sheriff’s deputy. It was publication day at the Monitor, and Jim was folding papers as they came off the press when he happened to look out the large front window with the words Kingdom County Monitor written backwards on the inside of the glass and see the cavalcade leaving the village: R. W. in his forest-green warden’s truck, the troopers in marked cruisers, the deputy in a sheriff department’s van ordinarily used to transport prisoners. The editor, at his desk near the window, saw them, too. He tossed Jim the keys to his DeSoto. “Go,” he said.
Jim arrived just as the deputy and one of the troopers were fastening a rope with a loop in the middle around Mike’s neck. Each of the two officers held one end of the rope to prevent Mike from bolting. The other trooper held Mrs. Moose. The large little gals shrieked. Warden R. W. Kinneson got his .30-30 and a chain saw from his truck. He set down the saw, took aim with the rifle, and shot Mike squarely between the eyes at point-blank range. Then he started his chain saw, drowning out the screams of Mrs. Moose and the gals, severed Mike’s head, and drove off with it in the bed of his pickup.
Moose, who’d heard the rifle shot from half a mile away, arrived home on the John Deere a few minutes later to discover the gals wailing beside Mike’s headless carcass. Mrs. Moose had told them that Mike was in moose heaven, but they were having none of it. “He is not in heaven,” the eldest child shouted. “He’s laying in the barnyard dead as a doornail. Now Papa’s going to shoot the warden and go to the electric chair.”
“No one’s going to the electric chair,” Moose said. “Let’s give Mikey a decent burial out back of the barn. You gals can dress up in your Sunday school clothes.”
While Mrs. Moose took the girls into the house to dress for the funeral, Jim got a photograph of Moose scooping Mike into the John Deere’s bucket. “Do you have anything to say, Moose?” Jim asked.
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