God's Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Jim climbed down the ladder with the briefcase. For some reason he sat in the same place in the second pew he’d sat in three months ago at graduation. He could feel his heart beating faster as he untied the bow knot in the string. In the early sunshine falling through the east windows of the church, Jim read the following letter, addressed to his grandfather.

  Good Friday Eve, 1900

  Kingdom Common, Vermont

  To: James Kittredge Kinneson

  My dear James,

  I believe that I may have very little time. I must write quickly. He came at dusk this evening. He will come again tomorrow “before the cock crows thrice.” He told me so.

  The all-knowing Common will no doubt suppose that we quarreled over my intention to introduce, of all things, a piano into my school. They will imagine that we fought over a minor point of doctrine. Not so, James. The only doctrine your “Kinneson father,” as I shall refer to him, ever truly subjected himself to was the doctrine of universal freedom and the total and permanent abolition of all slavery everywhere. In this regard, as has been said of him many times, he “out-Browned John Brown.” Yet the great irony, and this you must never forget, is he also has always had only your best interest, and the best interest of your descendants, in mind. He loves you as much as any true father could ever love a child. Where he and I are at variance is whether it is in your best interest to know what I believe I must now tell you, and my dear companion and adoptive brother, your Kinneson father, believes as fervently that I must not.

  Might I yet flee? Is there still time? There is. I could flee on the Midnight Special to Boston or the Aurora Borealis to Montreal. I will not be aboard either. I have fled enough, James. First from slavery. Then from Andersonville. And always, since coming here to God’s Kingdom, from my own identity. I flee no more forever.

  The hands of the steeple clock have wings. I must make my disclosures without further preamble.

  Her name—I mean the one girl born to your branch of the Kinneson family since Charles Kinneson I settled here—was Mary. Mary Queen of Scots Kinneson. She was the daughter of your Kinneson father, Charles II, and his wife, Eliza Kittredge Kinneson, and died in the Great Fire of ’82, five years after you were born.

  Now, James, I must tell you that almost from birth, Mary Kinneson was a mystery to everyone. She was much cherished as the first girl in Charles I’s family for many generations, and a very loving child at that. There was no animal, tame or wild, that she did not adore. The birds of the air sometimes flew to her, as they did to St. Francis. As she grew older, it became apparent that she was beloved by small children, whom she would entertain by the hour. She sat for days on end with the sick and elderly and comforted anyone in sorrow. Like you, James, she was a superior student. Yet at heart she was a wilding, with her father’s, your Kinneson father’s, anarchic spirit. It was the injustice in the world that she could not accept. Whereas your Kinneson father devoted his life to opposing slavery, she seemed determined, from an early age, to oppose Him whom she regarded as the architect of all injustice.

  She had long red hair and eyes as green as sea glass. She was long of limb, like her father, and well-proportioned, in a womanly way, from her early teens. That, I fear, may have led to her ultimate downfall, and mine. Yet the entire fault for what transpired rests with me, James, not with Mary. I was old enough to be her father. Nay, her grandfather. And I was married. In the eyes of God, and in my own eyes, I was still married to my wife, sold away from me down the river in what now seems like another life.

  Why mince words? Suffice it to say that it is far from unheard of for schoolgirls, at an impressionable age, to become infatuated with their teachers, be they men or women, and vice versa. I do not say this in my own defense. I have no defense.

  At my invitation, Mary began attending the evening confirmation classes I taught to the youths of my congregation. She who, at sixteen, was already as confirmed in her outspoken atheism as the Pope of Rome in his priest-craft.

  On the pretext of correcting her heresies, I catechized her. Oh, Pliny! Self-duped Pliny! You knew precisely what you were doing.

  Mary was a gifted artist. This you know. You have seen, many times, her famous mural at the courthouse, The Seven Wonders of God’s Kingdom. In her oils and watercolors she could capture the unique character of a place or a person. I confess to you that I was flattered when she proposed to paint my portrait, to hang in the great front atrium of the Academy.

  No doubt the portrait was, and is, an excellent likeness. In it, however, she had laid a subtle emphasis on my wide nose, full lips, and dark coloration. I do not mean to suggest that the painting is in any way a caricature. To the contrary, it honors its subject. But whereas, in my tenure in Kingdom County, I have done all in my power to divert attention from my race, by ignoring it, the painting, The Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton, Founder of the Kingdom Common Academy, is unmistakably that of a Negro man. What had I expected it to look like? It looked like me.

  Meanwhile, at our confirmation classes, she had a hundred questions. How could a wholly good creator fashion a world so full of iniquity? How could this same omnipotent God allow His children to so torment and slaughter one another? To be sure, I had been well schooled at the seminary in all of the stock answers to those conundrums, to which, I fear, there are no humanly understandable answers. I spoke, eloquently enough I suppose, of free will, of paradoxes, of what it is given to us to know and not to know. I spoke and she smiled.

  What more can I say? Our “classes” had begun in January. By March she was with child. Soon she began to show. Our ardor only increased. James, I should have married her. I loved her, as much for her fearless mind as for her strange beauty. I believe that, for all her antic ways, she loved me. Why else would she make the portrait in the school lobby far more handsome and noble than he who inspired it?

  In desperation, I repaired to my friend and adoptive brother, your Kinneson father. I bared my soul to him. I spared myself nothing. I did everything in my power to exculpate Mary. When I finished my shameful account, Charles regarded me for a moment. I knew that he kept, in his desk drawer, his wartime pistol. I thought he might pull it out and shoot me. I half hoped that he would.

  Instead, he gave a harsh laugh. “Hoot, brother,” he said. “I cannot claim to be astonished. True, you of all persons should have known better. Then again, a man’s a man. Leave the matter in my hands. Only pledge me one pledge. Give me your word that you will never tell another what you have just told me. Will you pledge?”

  “Aye,” I said. “I give you my word. I pledge never to tell another what I have told you.”

  Note this well, James. Sly old Pharisee that I was, I pledged nothing, in our compact, about never writing the truth.

  Your Kinneson father—soon enough you will learn why I refer to him as such—then set in motion the machinery of an elaborate scheme. Mary he banished to New Canaan, the community of former slaves that he and I established on the Canadian bank of the Upper Kingdom River. And here a strange story takes a turn stranger still.

  Some months before Mary’s baby was born, Charles’s wife, your Kinneson mother, stopped going to church. She no longer came into the Common to market, nor did she call upon, or receive calls from, neighbors. Charles put out word that she was expecting another child. She was, as you know, much younger than him, though by then near the end of her childbearing years. There was a good deal of concern for her. But in due time, and without incident, she brought forth a healthy male child named James Kittredge Kinneson. That, of course, was you. As for Mary, rumors flew. She had left the Kingdom for the art institute in Montreal. She had died in childbirth. In fact, she took up with a stonecutter from New Canaan, a decent young man, by all accounts, who treated her well.

  In this way, James, a few years passed. And then, dear God, came Armageddon, Armageddon in the incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a Sunday evening, when most of the New Canaanites were at vespers worship. The Klansmen barred
the church door and burned out the church and the village. So far as Charles and I could tell, Mary and her stonecutter consort perished in the flames, which quickly ignited the nearby woods and, as you know, eventually destroyed three million acres of borderland forest, not to mention several entire towns and scores of farmsteads in Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec, and Maine.

  James, I must cut this missive short. I plan to leave it, with the genealogy, inside the sounding board at the church, and to amend, in my History, the legend carved onto that board, as a guidepost that I hope will lead you to their discovery. I know of no other stratagem to put these documents in your hands. Were I to come tonight to your home, the home of your Kinneson father, I am certain he would—but there I will not venture. I will add only that had I married Mary, had I not been a part of Charles’s plan to deceive the Common, she would not have died. Thus you perceive the terrible consequences, however unintended, of concealing the truth, and will, I hope, understand why it is of such importance to me to reveal the truth to you now.

  Earlier this year it was announced that a great dam would be built at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River, supposedly in order to prevent logjams in the mountain notch upriver. I believe that the true purpose of this structure is to conceal the site of the burned village of New Canaan. To render it out of sight and, therefore, out of mind. It was this development, to further suppress the truth, that caused me to make up my mind to break my own long silence. I told your Kinneson father that I intended to do so, and showed him the genealogy that I recently added to my History. He begged me to reconsider. He implored me. He reminded me of my pledge, and said writing was no different than telling. He went so far as to warn me that the revelation I intended to make to you might make me the agent of my own destruction. I would, he said, become an accessory to my death as surely as if I had furnished the weapon that killed me.

  “Why would you care what I reveal, brother?” I said. “You of all people. Who gave so much of your life, and nearly all of your fortune, to the abolition of slavery and the advancement of former slaves. Surely it cannot be the taint of Negro blood in your family?”

  “Blood is blood, Pliny. There is no taint. I know who you are. It is an honor to have your ‘blood,’ as well as mine, in the veins of the boy. Already I see in him, and am much pleased by, the signs of scholarship and brilliance that have distinguished your life. What distresses me is how he and his descendants will be regarded, and how treated, in God’s Kingdom and beyond. I of all people? No. You of all people. You, who, after coming here, never once mentioned your own birthright as a Negro. You should know why I wish to shield our descendants from the hatred, scorn, and perhaps, still worse, the fate that befell the New Canaanites and our beloved Mary.”

  James, it remains for me to tell you one thing more. My final words to you, or to any of our descendants who may discover this letter, have little to do with your ancestry or mine. Much ado has been made, of late, of my accomplishments over the course of my long life. My Academy. My ponderous old History. My Civil War service, and escape from Andersonville. The scholarship recently established in my name at the state university, of which you are the first recipient.

  Yet here and now, with perhaps scant hours left to live, I say to you that I would trade each and every one of these worldly attainments—my school, my degrees, my war medals, all, all, all—for the opportunity to present you to your beloved birth mother, Mary Kinneson, and to show her what a fine and promising young man you have become, a son of whom I, and she, could never have been more proud.

  Signed this Good Friday

  midnight by your loving

  father,

  Pliny Templeton

  Postscript: Attached is your family genealogy.

  * * *

  On the height of land south of the Landing, just above the original outlet of Lake Kingdom, Jim pulled off beside the tall granite obelisk carved with the words “Keep Away.” Not quite a year ago, he’d brought Frannie here to view the panorama of God’s Kingdom in its autumn colors. Later, the height of land became their favorite romantic rendezvous. A few times over the past summer Jim had driven out here, hoping to feel closer to Frannie.

  Today a bluish haze hung in the air, a hint of the fall days to come. To the north, the Canadian peaks and the big lake between them were slightly indistinct, though Jim could make out the Île d’Illusion, and the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River where, two hundred years ago, his great-great-great-grandfather Charles I had come upon the Abenaki fishing encampment. In the opposite direction, guarding the southeastern entryway to the Kingdom, were the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the long, north-and-south-running crease in the hills of the Upper Connecticut River where Abolition Jim had made his last stand against the federal troops at the second-longest covered bridge in the world. Visible to the west were one hundred miles of the Green Mountains. They, too, had kept God’s Kingdom closed off to itself, a territory but little known long after the rest of Vermont had been settled.

  “I knew I’d married into a distinguished family,” Mom had said after Jim had burst into the newspaper office with the letter from Pliny and the genealogy, and explained what he’d discovered. “I just didn’t know how distinguished.”

  “What should we do with them?” Jim asked his father.

  Dad looked at Jim over the top of his reading glasses. “You’re the one who found them, son. I’d say it’s your call.”

  Jim hesitated, but only for the briefest moment. “Print them both,” he said.

  The editor nodded. “Gramp would be proud of you,” he said. That was all, but coming from Dad, it meant everything to Jim.

  “Now,” Dad said, “you’ve got to get to college and your mom and I have a newspaper to get out. Let’s get this show on the road, folks.”

  High on the ridgetop, Jim looked up the Lower Kingdom River Valley toward the village that had been his home for eighteen years. Already he was homesick. Yet, as he started his truck and headed over the height of land toward the other side of the hills, he knew in his heart that however far he might go, he would always take with him the stories, the mysteries, and the imperishable past of God’s Kingdom. For now, that was enough.

  About the Author

  Howard Frank Mosher is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. Mosher has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the New England Book Award, and the 2011 New England Independent Booksellers Association’s President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Born in the Catskill Mountains, Mosher has lived in Vermont’s fabled Northeast Kingdom, “God’s Kingdom,” since 1964. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY HOWARD FRANK MOSHER

  The Great Northern Express

  Walking to Gatlinburg

  On Kingdom Mountain

  Waiting for Teddy Williams

  The True Account

  The Fall of the Year

  North Country

  Northern Borders

  A Stranger in the Kingdom

  Marie Blythe

  Where the Rivers Flow North

  Disappearances

  Advance Praise for God’s Kingdom

  “This is American fiction at its very best, a rip-roaring story full of hilarity and heartbreak. I finished it feeling better about myself and life in general. God’s Kingdom is the good stuff, the very best stuff, honest and emotionally resonant. Don’t miss it.”

  —Stephen King

  “It’s impossible to read God’s Kingdom without thinking of Mark Twain on every page, because in this lovely, moving book Howard Frank Mosher strikes that same Manichaean balance between deep misgivings about the “damned human race” and equally profound affection for individual men and women. Over the years Mosher’s beloved Vermont “Kingdom” has become one of America’s most magical literary places.”

  —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning a
uthor of Empire Falls

  “With God’s Kingdom, Howard Frank Mosher has delivered a powerful and striking tale of family and place and of how deeply intertwined the two can be—a sense of a vanishing America but truly a rural America that is familiar in tone if not detail to us all. Mosher’s keen wit and gentle sense of the absurdity of life is fully present but also a telling examination of the secrets that bind and can also splinter a family. The ghosts of history, alongside a landscape that appears to nurture, while in fact being careless of our existence, run side by side throughout the novel and in the end, we are left with the pause of beauty, the moment of grace, the relentless swelling of hope. A rare achievement in contemporary American letters.”

  —Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall

  “Howard Frank Mosher is an American treasure in the long or short form, or any hybrid between. And guess what: he keeps getting better.”

  —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

  “We are just plain lucky that Howard Frank Mosher has written so deeply and in the end invented Vermont, this version, so far north that the border runs through it; and he is able in this rich coming-of-age story to invoke the humane spirit of Sherwood Anderson, who had his own kingdom in Winesburg. This love letter to the North Country brims with the profound natural world and peels back layers of the personal mysteries imbedded in its history. God’s Kingdom held me to the last page.”

  —Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine

  “This irresistible novel should bring Howard Frank Mosher the big audience his work deserves. Reading God’s Kingdom is like listening to a masterful storyteller around the fire. There’s a man named Moose with a pet moose, an inspiring mute, a brilliant former slave, a basketball phenom named Crazy, a Pulitzer-winning curmudgeon, and a spinster who sees the future. These bighearted stories build artfully upon each other. And along the way, Mosher invents—and often kills—more unforgettable characters in one sprawling family in one slender novel than most writers create in a lifetime. His quirky imagined world is tinged with whimsy and magic yet utterly convincing, as if these pages sprang from the soil of northern Vermont.”