“Crack! Down would come his schoolmastering cane, Jack Regulator, on the edge of the teacher’s dais. ‘I’ll tell you to get out your McGuffeys, miscreants, and be quick about it. Otherwise, you’ll have a taste of Jack.’ ‘Old Dr. Bluster,’ we called him, behind his back. He never did have the heart to cane us. And yes, sooner rather than later he’d tell us his wonderful old stories. We’d gotten Old Temp going again.”
“But he never did tell you about his life as a slave, before coming north?” Jim said.
“Nope,” Gramp said. “He never did. It was as if his life didn’t begin until the day he stepped across the Mason-Dixon Line.”
Gramp finished his brandy. “Well,” he said. “If we’re going to accomplish anything tomorrow, we’d best hit the hay tonight.”
Jim filled the firebox in the Glenwood and shut down the stovepipe draft for the night. Then he went up to the loft.
Gramp blew out the wicks in the kerosene lamps and made his way across the uneven floor of the camp to his bunk. A few minutes later they were both asleep.
* * *
The next day was colder yet. The thermometer on the privy door read forty-two below zero. For breakfast Gramp fried eggs in the grease left over from last night’s steak, cut up home fries, and made buckwheat cakes laced with maple syrup. They drank camp coffee, and topped off with stewed prunes from the Canada plum tree behind the farmhouse. After breakfast Jim did the dishes while Gramp tidied up the camp and scattered bread crumbs on the snow outside for the chickadees.
“It’s warmed up to thirty,” Gramp said. “Thirty below, that is. I call that good winter weather, Jim. Let’s go scout up some grouse for a game supper tonight.”
They headed up the slope behind the camp on their snowshoes, climbing side by side through the leafless hardwoods, moving slowly so they wouldn’t sweat and then take a chill. A large, dark bird flushed from below a sugar maple tree. Jim started to raise his shotgun, then saw the flash of red on the bird’s head. It was a pileated woodpecker, the bird Gramp called Lord God because of its regal crimson cockade. Gramp pointed at the base of the maple tree, where the woodpecker had hammered out an oblong cavity a foot high and several inches wide, searching for insects that bored their way into the tree. A heap of fresh wood chips lay on the snow.
“It’s good luck to see a Lord God bird, Jim.”
“Why?”
“It means the woods are healthy. If somebody waltzes in here and clear-cuts the mountainside, the pileated woodpeckers are going to pack their bags and move north to Canada.”
Jim gestured across the river. “At least they won’t have far to go.”
A few minutes later Gramp shot a grouse out of a popple tree it was budding. Another one rocketed out of the deep snow ahead. Jim hurried his shot and missed. A few minutes later he got two grouse budding a yellow birch.
Halfway up the mountainside they crossed the faint trace through the trees, now mostly grown up, where the Canada Post Road had once run up to the border. Gramp chuckled. “A good many loads of Canadian booze traveled along this old woods road during Prohibition, Jim. I was all for the smugglers. It was Prohibition that finally did in the family distillery. The runners would bring booze into Vermont on the train sometimes, too, in milk cans or hidden under pulpwood or logs. And a lot of it came down the lake by motor launch.”
Jim loved hunting up the mountain with Gramp at this time of the year. In the summer the leaves were too thick for them to see much. Climbing the mountain with Gramp in the winter when you could see off to the south and east for miles was like traveling back into history.
From the Balancing Boulder on top of the mountain, high above the tree line, he and Gramp could look out 360 degrees, at the entire Kingdom. Far below on the frozen Dead Water a black dot was inching its way across the ice.
“Bog lemming,” Gramp said. “I haven’t seen more than three or four in my life.”
Suddenly Gramp pointed at the cliff face of Canada Mountain, across the notch.
A very large white bird had launched itself off a ledge and was plummeting, wings folded, toward the frozen impoundment below. At the last moment it leveled out of its free fall and swooped up the lemming in its talons, then swiftly ascended to its ledge a thousand feet above the ice.
“Great Snowy?” Jim said.
“Gyrfalcon,” Gramp said. “Right down from the tundra. It must be a very tough winter up north, Jim. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever seen one here in the Kingdom.”
Jim grinned. “Is it good luck? To see one?”
“Not for the lemming it wasn’t,” Gramp said. “Let’s head back to camp before we freeze solid up here. I wouldn’t be surprised if the temperature hits fifty below tonight.”
* * *
On the way down the mountain Gramp shot a snowshoe hare turned white for winter. Back at the camp Jim dressed out the partridges and hare, careful not to slice into the rabbit’s gallbladder and spoil the meat. Then he cut half a dozen holes in the ice on Three. Gramp brought down the tip-ups in a pail and baited their hooks with strips of pork rind. Almost immediately one of the red-cloth flags snapped up and Jim reeled in a thrashing foot-long brook trout. In less than an hour they had six trout from twelve to about fifteen inches. In the winter months the bellies of the fish were pale, but their backs were a beautiful forest green and their sides were sprinkled with red speckles ringed with powdery-blue halos. Inside, the winter trout were as orange as salmon.
“I didn’t know there was an ice-fishing season for brookies,” Jim said. “What’s the limit?”
“How many can you eat?” Gramp said. “That’s the limit.”
While Jim refilled the woodbox, Gramp peeled and cut up into the game stew four more of Mom’s big potatoes, half a dozen carrots, several onions, and a yellow turnip. He fried the brook trout in butter in the camp skillet and they feasted on rabbit-and-partridge stew and freshly caught trout and Mom’s homemade bread warmed in the overhead warming oven of the Glenwood. For dessert they split one of Mom’s maple-sugar pies.
Jim heated water on the stove and did the dishes. Gramp made the day’s entry in the camp ledger. “Be sure to mention the gyrfalcon,” Jim said.
“You think I’d forget to do that?” Gramp said. “Pliny Templeton was pretty sure they came down here once in a great while. He wanted in the worst way to see one for his History.”
Gramp closed the ledger. “What do you know about the trouble in the family, Jim?”
Jim turned quickly away from the wooden sink, the damp dish towel still in his hand, to face Gramp. In that era in God’s Kingdom, certain family secrets—suicides, children born out of wedlock, mental illnesses—were rarely discussed.
“I know Charles II, your father, shot Pliny. That’s how Pliny’s skeleton got the two holes in its skull. Pliny wanted to introduce a music program at the Academy. Your dad, being a strict old-school Presbyterian, and president of the school board, opposed the idea. Pliny brought in a piano and that was the final straw.”
Gramp nodded. “That’s the gist of it. My father went right off the deep end and murdered his best friend and adoptive brother. He spent the last years of his life chained to his bed at the state insane asylum. I was in my third year at the university when the murder took place. I had to drop out of school and come home to run the paper and the distillery and the farm. It was a terrible stain on the family. We’ve never really lived it down. I’ve tried to shield your dad from it, and you and Charlie, too, by not talking about it. Lately, I’ve come to think that was a mistake. It happened. It happened and you, especially, need to know as much about it as I can tell you.”
Gramp pointed at his rocker. “Sit down, Jim.”
“I don’t want to take your chair,” Jim said.
“Go ahead. That’ll be your chair someday.”
Jim sat down in Gramp’s chair. Then Gramp began his story. “After my older sister, Mary, went to live in New Canaan with the stonecutters, and then died with everyone
else in the Great Fire of ’82, my father was said never to be the same. He kept the distillery going—by then the proceeds were paying for the schools Pliny was setting up in the South for emancipated Negroes—and the newspaper. He editorialized tirelessly against the so-called wars with the western Indians, and against the Spanish-American War. He said we had every bit as much right to claim the Philippine Islands as we did the moon and the sun. And he was never anything less than a kind and even indulgent father to me. My father continued to be active in the governance of the church and school and to hunt and fish. But as I came into my teens I could see him changing. He’d run on for hours about riding with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. I believe he felt somehow guilty about getting away scot-free and leaving Brown to his fate there. And he’d hash over Pickett’s charge, and his and Pliny’s imprisonment at Andersonville, and Charles I’s massacring those Abenaki fishers, and the federal troops annihilating his father James I’s ragtag little band of secessionists. More and more my father had the look of a haunted man.
“The trouble took place in the summer of 1900. That was the year they built the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom and flooded out the remains of New Canaan. I think that brought back to my father the fire and the deaths of my sister and nearly a hundred former slaves and their families. He editorialized against the dam, too. He accused its backers of wanting to put the people of New Canaan out of sight, out of mind. Above all, he editorialized against the Ku Klux Klan.”
“The Klan? The same Klan that lynched Negroes down south?”
“Yes,” Gramp said. “And they didn’t just murder Negroes down south, Jim. They murdered Negroes up north, too. Who did you suppose burned out New Canaan?”
“I thought New Canaan burned in the Great Forest Fire of ’82.”
“It was the other way around. The Klan came riding up the old Canada Post Road in their white sheets and hoods and caught the villagers at Sunday evening services inside the church. They barred the door and hurled Greek fire in sealed glass jars through the windows. A volatile paste of sulfur and phosphorous that burst into white-hot flames on contact with the air. There’d been a bad drought and the woods were tinder dry. The burning village acted like a fuse, setting the forest on fire.”
“I never knew that,” Jim said. He felt physically sick to think of the people, including Gramp’s sister, trapped inside the burning church.
“Well, there’s more,” Gramp said. “Soon after the Great Forest Fire, the Klansmen who had fired New Canaan began boasting about what they’d done. Once word of their identity got out, an avenging specter, arrayed in a black cape and astride a pale horse shod in black crepe, would appear, as if from nowhere, in the dooryard of a Klansman and call him out by name. Some of the Klansmen, I’m sorry to say, were our own shirttail relatives. ‘You, Nathan Bedford Kinneson!’ the apparition on horseback would roar out. ‘A word with you, sir.’ Some he shot down with a great long horse pistol. Others he hacked to pieces with the sword John Brown had given him. There was no escape from him.
“One evening—I would have been six or at most seven at the time—as I was shooing the chickens into the henhouse for the night, I heard angry voices coming from the barn. I slipped into the haymow and peered down the chute into the stable, where the voices were coming from. There below, I made out my father and Pliny Templeton and Father’s riding horse. Father was kneeling beside the horse, doing something by lantern light with a bucket and a brush. At first I couldn’t imagine what he was up to. Then I realized that he was whitewashing it. The horse didn’t like it. Every several seconds he’d stamp one of his hind feet. But he was a very tractable animal, and like Father and Pliny, a veteran of the war, so he stood there and allowed himself to be painted. Father was dressed in a black cape and he was wearing his sword.
“‘Aye, brother,’ my father was saying. ‘You have smoked me out. Your assumption is correct. Surely you, who know me as well as any true brother ever knew his brother, did not suppose that I would permit the murderers of our New Canaanite brethren and my beloved daughter to go unpunished?’
“‘Brother!’ Pliny cried out. ‘I implore you. Vengeance belongs to the Lord.’
“‘True. And I am His instrument.’
“‘You are no such thing! You endanger your immortal soul.’
“My father stood up, and fell to whitewashing the horse’s back. Then, in a lower voice, almost as though he was speaking to himself, he repeated, ‘I am His appointed instrument, as Brown was before me.’
“At the time, Jim, I was too young to understand exactly what I was witnessing. I didn’t know about the killing of the Klansmen in their own barnyards, only that Father and Dr. Templeton, who was already like an uncle to me, were genuinely angry with each other. I retreated from my spying perch and ran out of the mow, crying. That in itself was unusual. Children didn’t cry much in those days. But I bawled like a bull-calf taken from its mother. Did my own mother know what my father was doing? I don’t know. Did the Common suspect who was behind the killing of the Klansmen? Very likely it did. Not much happens in a village that it doesn’t know about. I was twelve or thirteen before I fully understood what I’d seen that night, and I never told anyone. So far as I know, Pliny and my father didn’t discuss the matter again. No doubt they each had their secrets, and it isn’t the way of country people to hash over past deeds that can’t be undone. Once I heard my father ask Pliny if he believed that the sins of the father were visited on their sons. Pliny said no, but I doubt Father was referring to himself and his descendants. I doubt he ever regarded killing the Klansmen as a sin. There were nineteen in all. Nineteen shot or hacked to pieces or both. Who knows if they’d all ridden on New Canaan? Some were scarcely out of their boyhood.”
Gramp got up, slipped into his mackinaw, and headed out to the privy. A couple of minutes later he called Jim outside to see the northern lights. The aurora came and went in vivid electric colors, shooting high into the sky to the north. “God’s fireworks,” Gramp said. “That’s what Pliny calls them in his History. God’s fireworks.”
And later, in their bunks, “There’s something about what you told me, Gramp. Something I don’t understand.”
“There are fifty somethings about what I told you that I don’t understand. What is it?”
“You said I, especially, needed to know as much about Pliny’s murder as you could tell me. Why me especially?”
“So you can write about it.”
“Why don’t you write about it?”
“That’s not the kind of writer I am, Jim. You’re the storyteller in the family. I’m a newspaperman. I can’t make anything up. Or leave anything out. From the time you could spell cat you were inventing stories.”
Jim thought about what Gramp had said. Then he said, “Which is more important? Being able to make things up or being able to leave things out?”
“Inventing. If you can’t make things up, there’s no story. But leaving things out is pretty important, too. If you can’t leave things out, nobody’ll read what you write.”
“Can I ask you one more question?”
“You can ask me one hundred questions. There’s no guarantee I can answer any of them.”
“If I make some things up and leave other things out, then they won’t be true stories.”
“Sure they will. They’ll be your true stories. The stories I tell you are your legacy. What you do with them is up to you. It’s all still territory but little known. Waiting for you to explore it. Let’s grab a few hours of sleep, son. Morning comes early up here in God’s Kingdom.”
9
The Scout
Someone, perhaps Samuel Clemens, said that every story begins with a stranger coming to town or with a man or a woman going on a journey. Certainly this definition holds true for most of the best stories of God’s Kingdom, from the arrival of Charles Kinneson I onward.
—PLINY’S HISTORY
He wore a too-large suit jacket with a herringbon
e pattern, worn at the elbows; black dress shoes; dark slacks frayed at the cuffs; a white shirt yellowing around the collar; and a broad black necktie. He had a sharp-featured face and carried a carpetbag. He was clean-shaven, of medium build. He looked about fifty. His hair was still quite dark and neatly parted. His eyes were gray and quiet, and in their still attentiveness when they alighted on you, you could feel him thinking.
“Looking for this, I presume?” the stranger said, holding out a grass-stained baseball. The Outlaws, who’d taken their old name back because no one knew who the White Knights were, had been practicing on the common when Charlie swatted a foul ball over the backstop and across the street off the roof of the railroad station. As the team’s youngest player, Jim had been dispatched to retrieve it.
The stranger on the railway platform flipped Jim the ball. Jim guessed that he’d probably come into town on the 6:16 northbound, now whistling at the River Road crossing. The stranger cocked his head like a bird listening for a worm. Then he said, “Young man, I am no prognosticator. Neither in my view is any other human man or woman. Like you say, the future is as blank as your scorecard before you pencil in the lineup. But if you can tell me how far off that train whistle is, I might be able to tell you if your ball game is going to be washed out.”
“A mile and a half,” Jim said. “But it isn’t a game. Just practice.”
“Practice won’t hurt,” the stranger said. “Baseball is a game of inches and a game of luck. The more you practice, the luckier you get.”
The stranger spoke in an accent Jim thought might be southern. He wet the tip of his forefinger and held it up to the breeze. “Wind outen the north,” he said as the whistle hooted again. “Fluty sounding but plain enough. Air’s kindly heavy this evening. So you tell me. Is it fixing to rain?”
Jim shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“No one knows, son. Weather? Baseball? Will it be heaven or will it be hell? Nobody can tell the future and that’s a natural fact. But if it’s a traveling train whistle to judge by, or even if it isn’t, you’ll never go wrong to say, ‘It always has.’ Rained, that is.”
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