God's Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Jim and Gram had been great pals. From birth she had been mute, and around her neck on a leather thong she wore a slate, like the desk slates children of her and Gramp’s generation did sums and practiced making letters on. With a piece of chalk from her dress or apron pocket, she’d draw on the slate, in several deft, swift strokes, a tall stick lady and a little stick boy, holding hands. Above the lady and the little boy she printed the words “Gram” and “Jim.” Then, below the figures, “Great pals.”

  Writing in chalk on the slate was how Gram communicated. She wrote each letter in reverse, working across the slate from her right to her left. Though she seemed to be writing backwards, the letters and words always appeared in the correct order.

  Since Gram could not read to Jim, she selected books for him to read to her, as she had with Dad and Charlie. As a small boy, Jim had loved reading aloud to Gram. Robert Louis Stevenson. Mark Twain. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men. Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. And, of course, Jim’s and Gram’s favorite, Charles Dickens. Jim and Gram loved anything by Charles Dickens. There was no other writer like him and no story like David Copperfield, at least until Jim read Great Expectations. Dickens didn’t write for his readers so much as converse with them. He wrote as though each of his readers was his very best friend, to whom he could freely tell absolutely anything. When Jim lay down to go to sleep, he could still hear, in his head, Dickens’s magic sentences.

  Jim was sure that Dickens would have had a field day with the Kinneson clan of God’s Kingdom. He was just as glad that the great novelist hadn’t gotten to some of his early ancestors first. His constant concern, as a boy, was that some other writer, looking for good stories to tell, would come sashaying up to the Kingdom and beat him to the punch. Pliny’s Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County alone would be a treasure trove of material. Gramp told Jim not to worry. Even if a writer from away wrote the stories of the Kingdom, they’d be written from “the outside looking in.” Jim, a Kingdom County Kinneson himself, already wrote from the inside looking out.

  When it came to books, Gram had what she called a guilty pleasure: she loved to read murder mysteries. She’d read all of Agatha Christie’s many times over, and adored Daphne du Maurier and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Also, the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane.

  From the time Jim started school, Gram took him on the train to the Saturday matinees at the old Paramount Theater in Memphremagog, particularly when a new mystery was playing. He cherished those afternoons with his grandmother at the Paramount, with its shabby elegance, the worn plush seats, faded velvet stage curtains, and roped-off balcony. He loved the cartoons, the previews of coming attractions, even the newsreels with their strident announcers and portentous images of mushroom test clouds, hordes of Red Chinese, plug-ugly strikebreakers with billy clubs and revolvers. Willie Mays making a catch that couldn’t be made. Joe DiMaggio’s picture-perfect swing, and Jackie Robinson stealing second. There was no television reception in the mountains of God’s Kingdom during Jim’s high-school years. The sports clips on the newsreels at the Paramount were the closest he’d come to seeing a major-league game.

  When the killer made his first appearance on the screen, Gram would nudge Jim with her elbow. She always spotted the culprit long before anyone else. There was one mystery, however, that Gram had been unable to unravel. That was “Mad Charlie” Kinneson’s motive for shooting his bosom friend, the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton, in their advanced years. No one in the family believed that “the trouble,” as the murder was referred to on those rare occasions when it was mentioned at all, could be entirely explained by a disagreement over a piano. Mossbacked old dogmatist that he was, it was inconceivable that Charles would murder his adoptive brother over an obscure point of church doctrine. Why, then? Even Gram, the “Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle of Kingdom County,” as Dad sometimes called her, was stymied.

  Like Jim’s great-great-great-grandmother Molly Molasses, Charles I’s wife, Gram had Indian ancestry. Plenty of Indian ancestry, to judge from her appearance, and from Dad’s and Charlie’s, as well. She had long, dark, straight hair; a dark complexion; and wide-set oval eyes as opaque as the big lake on the darkest night of the year. Dad and Charlie probably got their height from Gram, too. As Gramp liked to say, at just an inch under six feet, she stood as tall and straight as a princess.

  Gram had some Indian ways, as well. She knew all of the names and uses of the wildwood plants of the Kingdom, from ginseng to pennyroyal. She could catch trout with her hands by reaching up under cut banks or submerged boulders, tickling their bellies, then sliding her fingers into their gills and yanking the fish out of the river. By putting her hands out of sight behind her back and taking one slow step at a time, she could walk right up to a curious young buck deer.

  Gram had been an orphan. Gramp’s parents, Charles II and Eliza Kittredge Kinneson, had adopted her after the St. Francis Orphanage across the border in Quebec had burned in the Great Forest Fire of ’82. Of all of Gramp’s stories, Jim’s favorite was how, after the fire, Gramp and his father had discovered Gram on the Île d’Illusion. Gramp, just five, had ridden up the lake with his father in the bateau, looking for survivors, hoping against hope that somehow Gramp’s grown sister, Mary Queen of Scots, had escaped from the fire, when out of the lingering yellowish smoke, standing on the shore of the island beside an unpainted skiff, they’d spotted a child, a little girl surrounded by a dozen or so Jersey cows. No, not cows. Deer. Deer watching Gramp and his father through the smoke. A little apart, a half-grown black bear stood up on its hind legs, like a circus bear, to get a better look at them. There was a family of foxes, a bobcat, and two wolves, all of which had evidently swum over to the island to retreat from the flames. Around the child’s neck on a thong was a slate on which someone had written, “Je m’appelle Jeannette St. Francis. Je ne parle pas.” The animals showed no signs of hostility. Except for the soot on her face and hair and hands, Jeannette seemed unharmed by the fire. There were no oars in the skiff.

  Charles II picked up the child and returned to the bateau and set her down on the bow seat next to Gramp. The two children looked at each other for a moment as Gramp’s father tied the skiff by its painter to the iron ring bolted into the stern of the bateau. Then he began to row back down the lake through the smoke. Gramp reached out and took Jeannette St. Francis by the hand. The children were still holding hands when Gramp’s father put into shore across the water meadow from the Kinneson farmhouse. “Home, Jeannette,” he said.

  “From that day forward, we were inseparable,” Gramp liked to tell Jim. Then he’d glance at the blue Dr. Bitters bottle and smile, more to himself, Jim thought, than to him, and say, “We still are.”

  * * *

  It was the spring of Jim’s junior year at the Academy, and Gramp had been feeling poorly all winter. Doc Harrison wasn’t able to put his finger on just why. Old age, Gramp told Jim. Plain and fancy old age. No more, no less.

  “Watch out for April,” Gramp liked to say. April was the month when, having come through another Kingdom winter, elderly Commoners sometimes got caught leaning the wrong way like napping base runners. Sometimes they leaned so far in the wrong direction that they toppled right over into their graves.

  April in God’s Kingdom seemed to be an unlucky month in other ways, as well. April was when Jim’s Abenaki ancestors had been massacred by Charles I and his Rangers. It was April when Charles’s son, James Kinneson, and twenty of his fellow secessionists fought to the last man against more than three hundred federal troops dispatched to the Kingdom to put down their insurrection. And in the drought-stricken April of 1882 the village of New Canaan, established by fugitive slaves brought north by Gramp’s father and Pliny Templeton, had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan.

  To Jim’s huge relief, Gramp survived April. But he didn’t fish the rainbow run on the river with Jim and Prof, and he
missed several of Jim’s home baseball games. As May approached, it seemed doubtful that Gramp would be up to making their annual Memorial Weekend fishing trip to the wilderness ponds on the border.

  “Limber up your fly rod, son,” Gramp said one evening when the peeper frogs along the river were singing their hearts out. “I won’t be running any footraces soon. But come Decoration Day, you and I’ll be hitting out together. That record-book brook trout is still up there waiting for you to catch it.”

  For as long as Jim could remember, Gramp had promised him that if he caught a brook trout twenty inches long or longer, Gramp would have it mounted for him. Jim wasn’t sure that there were any twenty-inch brook trout left in God’s Kingdom to catch. But a trophy fish would be a bonus. What mattered was that he and Gramp would be going fishing together again.

  * * *

  Gramp had liked to say that the day for their trip picked them more than they picked it. On the Friday before the long holiday weekend it rained steadily all morning and on into the afternoon. That evening the wind backed into the northwest and the sky cleared. Gramp would have predicted a Canadian high, three or four days of sunny weather with falling water in the ponds and river. Falling water in the soft of the year, as Gramp called the days in late May when the hillsides and mountains of God’s Kingdom were pale gold with newly opened hardwood leaves, was the best time to go brook-trout fishing.

  Soon after sunrise on Memorial Day, Jim and Dad roped Gramp’s Old Town to the roof of the family DeSoto and drove up the River Road to Pond Number One.

  They carried the canoe to the water’s edge. Jim got into the stern seat. Dad set the long-handled boat net, Gramp’s pack basket, and a garden spade on the floor of the canoe. Then he gave the stern a push away from shore and Jim dug in his paddle.

  There was a hatch of mayflies on the water this morning and the trout were rising to them. The brook trout in Pond Number One weren’t large, but they were numerous and colorful, with crimson fins edged as white as Mom’s Christmas paperwhites.

  The first fish Jim hooked came straight toward the canoe, then jumped a foot out of the water. Before Jim knew what he was going to do, he’d reached out with the boat net and snared the leaping trout in midair. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do it again in a hundred tries.

  This time of year the Kinneson men, Gramp and Dad and Charlie and Jim, relied mainly on number-twelve, red-and-white Coachman flies that Gramp tied by the dozen over the winter at his kitchen table. Jim fished his flies wet, two or three inches below the surface, just as his Kinneson ancestors had done all the way back to the Hebrides. He believed that Gramp privately considered fishing with floating flies an elitist pursuit. Also, Gramp frowned on the catch-and-release practices of many of the anglers who came to fish in the Kingdom from away. In Gramp’s opinion, trout were meant to be eaten, not caught and put back in the water to be caught again. Yet Gramp had taught Jim always to break the necks of his fish before dropping them into his creel so that they didn’t suffer needlessly.

  As Jim approached the collapsing log-driving dam at the outlet of Pond Number One, where he and Gramp had first seen the ridge runner, he reeled in his line and leaned his fly rod against the middle thwart of the Old Town. Jim studied the dam. “Hold on,” he said aloud, and with several hard thrusts of his paddle, he shot the canoe through the gap in the dam where the sluice gate had been.

  Jim caught more trout in the flow between One and Two, then fished his way up along the west side of Two. Today was turning into what Gramp would have called, in the camp journal, a good day on the water. Usually, fly fishing the river and ponds made Jim feel close to his grandfather and to the remote trout waters they both loved. Through his rod and line and the hard-fighting trout, Jim felt connected to the Kingdom itself. This morning he felt as moorless as an empty canoe on a windswept lake. It was hard to imagine that he would ever feel differently.

  By the time Jim reached Three the trout had quit rising. The mayfly hatch was over and the sun glared on the water. Toward evening the fish would begin to feed again. “Let’s see how the camp wintered over,” Jim said. “Then we’ll have a shore lunch.”

  * * *

  The hunting camp with the words “God’s Kingdom” carved into the lintel sat where Jim and Gramp had left it last winter. Here on the northeastern slope of Kingdom Mountain the hardwoods were just coming out. Tiny red maple flowerlets littered the path from the shore up to the camp.

  Inside, the air smelled of dead stove ashes. Jim swept some dried mouse droppings out the door. Then he penciled into the camp ledger:

  Memorial Day, 1955. Opened camp after a good morning on the water. Jim Kinneson.

  Gramp had an all-purpose saying: “You’ll know what you’re looking for when you see it.”

  The shelf on the wall behind Gramp’s old-man’s chair was wide enough. But it wasn’t exactly what Jim was looking for.

  He closed up the camp. Then he collected a handful of birch bark and hemlock stobs and kindled a driftwood fire on the gravel apron beside the pond in front of the camp. There he cleaned his catch. From the time Gramp had given Jim his first fishing knife, he’d loved to slit open the bladderlike stomachs of their trout and show Gramp what the fish had been feeding on. Today they were crammed with mayflies. A few hellgrammites and minnows. One lone peeper frog no larger than a dime.

  Jim looked up the mountainside above the camp, where he and Gramp had gone to hunt deer and partridge and pick wild raspberries and blackberries in season. Partway up the mountain a stand of mature beech trees grew in a long-abandoned log landing. Gramp had taken him there many times to see the claw marks on the smooth gray bark of the trees where black bears had climbed up after beechnuts. In a damp depression nearby, a patch of pink lady slippers came up year after year. The year before Gram died Jim brought her here when the lady slippers were in blossom and offered to transplant a few to her flower garden. Gram had smiled. Then she’d written on her slate, “Let them stay home.” The beech grove was a possibility.

  Out of the pack basket Jim removed a number-fourteen black-iron spider, a loaf of Mom’s oatmeal bread wrapped in waxed paper, salt and pepper, a pound of butter swaddled in cheesecloth, flatware, a crock of Mom’s just-in-case baked beans—just in case the fishing was slow—a plain white crockery plate and a matching cup with a chipped handle, a tin of loose black tea, and an empty lard pail with a homemade wire bail for boiling water.

  The pack basket was nearly two centuries old. Jim’s Abenaki great-great-great grandmother had made it with a crooked knife from the inner bark of a white ash tree. When Jim was a little boy, Gramp had carried him on his back, standing in the pack basket, up the step-across brook above the camp. Gramp would hook a trout and pass his fly rod over his shoulder to Jim. Using both hands, Jim would derrick the thrashing little fish out of the water onto the ferns beside the bank.

  Today Jim sat on a drift log on the scree beside the pond under a blue Canadian sky in the soft of the year and ate pink-fleshed trout with thick slices of homemade bread and butter washed down with black woodsmen’s tea. He looked at the beautiful ash pack basket and wondered if he would have children and grandchildren to carry fishing in it. The pack basket was a link to the past. The future was as opaque as the surface of the ponds on the darkest night of the year.

  * * *

  Below Pond Number Three, the character of the river changed twice before it emptied into the big lake at the Great Earthen Dam. The first mile was fast and riffly, with natural stone-bars perpendicular to the current. In the fall of the year, when the brook trout ran both up and down the Lower Kingdom to spawn on the sand-and-gravel bottoms of the pools below the stone-bars, the fishing in this stretch of the river was superb.

  Below the spawning pools, as the river entered the notch between Kingdom and Canada Mountains, it narrowed, deepened, and slowed to a crawl. Finally the current seemed to stop altogether. This was the Dead Water impoundment where Jim and Gramp had seen the river otter take th
e trout this past winter.

  The Dead Water was the single stretch of the entire river that Jim didn’t love. Here the Klan had surprised the former slaves of New Canaan at Sunday evening services with their families. Between ninety and one hundred New Canaanites were incinerated alive. A few others jumped out the windows. All but three were hunted down and slaughtered in the nearby forest.

  The Great Earthen Dam had been built in 1900, creating the Dead Water and flooding out the charred remains of New Canaan. Jim felt that on the Dead Water in the notch between the mountains, he was in the presence of a great, lingering evil. But today he was determined not to dwell on the past or, for that matter, on the future. Today Jim had business in the present.

  By the time Jim glided into the Dead Water, the afternoon sunlight was falling directly on the cliffs of Canada Mountain. Thirty feet to Jim’s right, where the mountain plunged into its own upside-down reflection in the river, a thin curtain of water seeped down the face of the escarpment. Sometimes large trout lay in wait where the spring-fed rill washed aquatic life into the river.

  Jim shipped his paddle and began false casting. He dropped his Coachman just above the junction of the waterfall and the river. What appeared to be a good fish, either a salmon or a very large trout, swirled at the fly but didn’t strike. The Old Town or Jim’s profile or the shadow of his leader on the water had spooked it.

  Jim rested the fish. Then he picked up his Orvis again. Using his wrist as a fulcrum, the way Gramp had taught him, he began to false cast. When he straightened his arm, the loops of slack line in his lap hissed out through the metal guides of his fly rod. The Coachman ticked off the base of the cliff and the trout struck.