After Reverend Twofoot’s abrupt departure, the United Church couldn’t find a minister who’d touch the job with a ten-foot pole until, in desperation, the trustees began advertising outside the country. Dad said it was pure luck even then that they’d been able to locate a full-time replacement. Be all this as it may, my cousin Elijah would now have to take down his name from the bulletin board on the front lawn of the church (SERVICES SUNDAY AT 11 O’CLOCK, CONDUCTED BY ELIJAH T. KINNESON, LAY PASTOR) and content himself with his sexton’s duties.
He was still running on about the imprudence of hiring a minister sight unseen when I ducked out the door.
By now it must be obvious that my mother was right as rain about the Kinneson family and its “little peculiarities.” Nor was I in any way exempt from my own share of these oddities, chief among which was a very real dread of anything related to the supernatural—a fear which was invariably activated whenever I had to walk the half mile home from the village on dark nights past both the cemetery and Mason White’s undertaking parlor, not to mention the United Church parsonage.
Unpainted for decades, untenanted off and on for months at a time, its long sagging porch half-concealed by woodbine and bittersweet run crazy, the parsonage was Kingdom County’s chief claim to a haunted house. Admittedly, the legend attached to the old place was based on slender evidence. It had been built by one Pliny Templeton, colloquially known in the Kingdom, for reasons I will later explain, as Black Pliny, the founder and first headmaster of the Kingdom County Academy. After a long and distinguished career as an educator, scholar, state legislator, and local historian, Black Pliny was said to have fallen on hard times in his old age and to have shot himself in the downstairs study of the house, just off the porch. Some years before this tragic event, in the philanthropic spirit for which he was renowned, Pliny had willed his house to the Presbyterian (later the United) Church to use as a parsonage; his organs to the medical college at the state university in Burlington; and his bones to the science lab of his beloved Academy, where they had depended from a pole for the past halfcentury for the elucidation of several generations of senior anatomy students.
According to legend, on the anniversary of Black Pliny’s suicide his skeleton would reach up and deftly detach itself from the pole for a walk over to the parsonage, where it rattled up onto the porch and peered into the window of the fateful study to see who was currently living there. So far as I knew no motive apart from an eccentric but entirely benign curiosity was ever ascribed to the old headmaster’s bones. Nor did I ever know anyone who actually claimed to have seen the skeleton making its ghostly annual perambulation. But a number of villagers and former tenants averred that they had distinctly heard the clattering footsteps on the porch. And whose could they be if not Pliny Templeton’s? Whose indeed!
Of course this was exactly the sort of small-town claptrap I thrived on in those days, and I loved to scare myself by racing past the place (during the day), hooting and banging a stick against the broken fence palings in simulation of the ghost’s march up to the parsonage veranda. Charlie, however, had immortalized himself in the annals of village pranksters at the age of fifteen with an escapade which, for sheer juvenile bravado and ingenuity, remains unsurpassed in Kingdom County to this day. Entirely by himself one Halloween, when the house had been unoccupied for several weeks, he stole the skeleton from the science lab and hung it from the overhead light fixture in the empty parsonage study, then reported to Cousin Elijah that town rowdies had broken into the place and were raising hell. Although I can’t imagine that Elijah was frightened, Charlie always claimed that the crusty old sexton took one look at the skeleton, swaying gently in his flashlight beam, and fainted dead away on the spot.
No tragedy in the parsonage’s history was necessary for every kid I knew to give the place a wide berth from sunset on, especially during the intervals when no one dwelt there. In the daylight it might look pretty much like any other big rundown village home. After dark, depending on one’s age, it was positively forbidding, and the only reason I had come this way tonight instead of the alternative route by the covered bridge at the west end of the village is that I hated even more to walk through that unlighted and remote portal alone for fear of encountering something rather worse.
Charlie had been right about the snow. As I approached the parsonage, it had already begun, big wet flakes of sugar snow that melted as soon as they touched the street. I wasn’t surprised. Up in the Kingdom you can expect plenty of snow throughout April and well on into May.
Tonight, a light was burning in the parsonage study for the first time in nearly a year. Remembering that my mother had been killing herself there all afternoon to prepare the place for the new minister, I gathered courage and walked steadily forward. I knew better than to run. There was nothing like a running boy to excite the least charitable instincts of the ghouls and zombies I strongly suspected took up residence in that house every time the church lost another minister. But as I approached the gate in what remained of the picket fence, the snow suddenly thickened, blotting out the light inside the house and the lights of the village behind me. Within seconds I could see nothing but a yard or two of the macadam road at my feet. It glistened darkly, like a deep river crawling through woods on a starless night.
“Splendid spring weather you chaps have here.”
I must have jumped a foot. Someone—I hoped it was someone—was standing just inside the parsonage gate. All I could make out of his presence was the red glow of his cigarette in the snow squall. That, at least, was somewhat reassuring. Though I had no hard evidence that ghosts did not smoke cigarettes, I had never heard that they did.
“Walt Andrews,” the voice said. “I just moved in.”
I sensed rather than saw him put out his hand. After a couple of false stabs I located it and we shook hands in the dark across the gate. Walt Andrews, whoever he was, had a big hand and a very firm grip, like my father and brother.
“You’re the new minister,” I said stupidly, and he laughed.
“I plead guilty. But don’t hold that against me. What’s your name, chum?”
I told him and immediately he said, “The editor’s son?”
“I plead guilty,” I said, and again he laughed and said he hoped I’d give him time to get his car unloaded before I asked for an interview. Then I laughed, too. But although I was no longer scared I still felt like a base runner caught leaning the wrong way off first. It was a strange experience, to be talking to the disembodied voice of an invisible man less than three feet away.
Stranger still, there was something unaccountably familiar to me about that voice. It was casual and friendly but with an undercurrent of . . . amused irony, I suppose.
A gust of wind hit us. The snow drove faster. When Reverend Andrews flipped his cigarette butt out across the fence, it vanished in the storm before it hit the road.
“Brother!” he said. “This is April in Vermont? Your blooming weather is worse than Korea’s.”
I knew from the sound of his voice that he’d turned away from the road. A small orange flame spurted up across the gate as he hunched over to light another cigarette. I leaned closer to help block some of the wind, the way I’d seen Charlie and other men do.
And knew where I’d heard Reverend Andrews’ voice before.
With a jolt of surprise, I saw in the quivering flame of the lighter that the new minister of the United Church was the black man my father and I had run into earlier that afternoon at the Ridge Runner Diner on our way back to Kingdom County from Burlington.
2
Of all the wonderful stories my parents read aloud to me when I was a boy, my favorite of favorites came out of a vast, leatherbound, musty-smelling, ancient-looking tome entitled (unpromisingly enough) The Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County, which Dad kept on a long shelf behind his desk at the Monitor, along with The Dictionary of American Newspapers and his prized 1910 eleventh edition of The
Encyclopedia Britannica. Written and compiled by the same indefatigable Black Pliny Templeton who founded the Kingdom Common Academy and served nearly fifty years as its headmaster, the Ecclesiastical History, besides chronicling local church events, contained whole chapters on such diverse and fascinating subjects as the wild animals and plants native to our corner of New England, the Kingdom’s geological evolution and political history, and all kinds of curious legends, anecdotes, diary entries, occasional poems, copies of letters to and from prominent local sons and daughters—even a section of regional recipes like brook trout chowder and partridge pie.
It also included a lively account of the Kinneson family history, beginning with the arrival in the Vermont wilderness of my great-great-great-grandfather, familiarly known in Kinneson family annals as Charles I, which I found endlessly intriguing both in its own right and because, for a number of years in my own early history, I supposed that it had been authored by a skeleton!
To this day what springs to my mind when I think of Charles I’s arrival in the Kingdom is not a date, though there is a date attached—it was the fall of 1781—but a picture. It is a picture such as Frederick Remington (with whom my father no doubt would have gone brook trout fishing) might have painted, an autumnal image of a lone man paddling a birch canoe up the Lower Kingdom River from Lake Memphremagog, past pale yellow butternut trees and flaming swamp maples. The paddler’s name is Sabattis and he is an Abenaki hunter, trapper, basket weaver, and storyteller, on his annual trek south from his summer home on the upper St. Lawrence to his winter home on the coast of southern New England
In the picture it is hazy, one of the thirty “smoky” days Pliny claimed always preceded winter in Kingdom County, and getting toward evening. Jay Peak and its sister mountains in the western background are bluish and indistinct and softly contoured, drifting along the horizon more like smoke themselves than a lofty range of northern peaks. But the birch canoe and the amber river, the sparse yellow butternut leaves and the vivid scarlet maples and the lone Abenaki Indian hunter with the single name are as clear to me now as when I was four or five years old and my father read to me from Pliny’s big book for the first time. The man is listening, with his head slightly cocked, his lips slightly parted. His paddle is arrested in mid-stroke. A thin stream of droplets slides noiselessly from its cedar blade back onto the motionless surface of the river.
“Imagine our wayfarer’s astonishment,” Pliny writes, “when he crept up a steep wooded hillside and emerged on a jagged clearing in the wilderness only to behold a towering lean raw-boned man hacking away at a heap of freshly felled spruce logs, attempting to raise a cabin before snowfall in a mountainous fastness where Sabattis had never before seen any sign of another man within fifty miles.”
“How is the trout fishing in these parts?” my ancestor is said to have asked Sabattis, who, according to Pliny, was so impressed by his singlemindedness that he stayed on for the rest of the fall to help him complete his cabin and learn his story.
Charles Macphearson Kinneson had been born in the Outer Hebrides Islands, off the western coast of Scotland, in 1730, the eldest son of a Highland salmon poacher and implacable Jacobite put to the sword by the British during the abortive Uprising of ’45. After his father’s death, young Charles fled to France, where he dedicated himself to a single objective: to fight the British wherever and whenever possible, though never in formal affiliation with another government since as a Reformed Presbyterian bound by the Oath of the Covenant, he was forbidden to swear allegiance to any secular authority whatsoever.
Soon after he arrived in France, Charles took passage on a Marseilles privateer bound for the West Indies to harass the English rum, molasses, and slave trade. In 1766, with the proceeds of his pirate’s booty, he established the first printing press in Guadeloupe, on which he composed hundreds of anti-British broadsides and which, a decade later, he moved lock, stock, and barrel to Bath, Maine, to assist the rebelling American colonists with his literary efforts. After the war Charles successfully petitioned President Washington for a pitch of one hundred and sixty acres on the northern slope of the New Hampshire Land Grants (subsequently to become part of Vermont) along the Canadian border. Here in 1786 he wed Sabattis’ youngest daughter, the sixteen-year-old Memphremagog (Abenaki for “Beautiful Waters”). The following year he established The Kingdom Monitor, which he used chiefly as a vehicle for his undiminished Anglophobia. In 1793 he built the first of six potato-whisky distilleries that would eventually grace the banks of the Lower Kingdom, whose proceeds this strict Scottish teetotaler reserved exclusively for the construction of his crowning accomplishment—the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Kingdom Common.
On Easter Sunday morning of 1952, as my father and mother and I headed up the slate flagstone walk of the church during the bell’s final call to worship for the day, the wind was gusting straight up out of the south, bringing with it a tantalizing intimation of earlier and gentler springs farther downcountry. Everyone lingering in the unseasonably mild sunshine on the church steps that morning knew that despite the advent of mud season and trout season there would be more sudden snow squalls and gray subfreezing Kingdom days and frigid Kingdom nights before warm weather set in to stay. But everyone seemed grateful for the temporary break in the cold and eager to discuss the unusually good weather, the banner early runs of maple sap, the Red Sox’ promising start, the upcoming Republican presidential primary, and Charlie’s town team’s sweep of the Memphremagog Basketball Tournament.
Everyone, that is, but my father, who, besides loathing all small talk, attended church and served on the board of trustees strictly from a sense of community responsibility. “Let’s get this show on the road, Ruth,” he said as we headed up the steps.
Just inside the door, Cousin Elijah Kinneson, now demoted to usher from his former Sunday morning incarnation as lay preacher, handed my father and mother a program. My father took another one and gave it to me. “Can’t tell the players without one,” he said.
My mother smiled. I laughed out loud. Cousin Elijah, however, scowled like a constipated parody of his Biblical namesake. Even this morning Elijah emitted a faint sulphurous odor compounded of the hot lead he worked with, stale sweat, and some ineffable but to me quite real essence of universal disapprobation. Yet his unabated disapproval of all boys in general and me in particular was nothing compared to the absolute hatred he bore for his ex-brothers Resolvèd and Welcome, whom he had publicly disowned some years ago with a paid notice in the Monitor to the effect that he would no longer acknowledge blood ties with these unregenerate men. Shortly after this unusual announcement, in one of the practical jokes for which he was renowned, Charlie had sneaked into the Monitor while Cousin E was enthroned at his linotype and taped to the back of his seat a large placard, visible from the street, which said: RESOLVÈD AND WELCOME KINNESON ARE MY OWN BLOOD BROTHERS AND I’M DAMN PROUD OF IT.
Thinking of Charlie, who at that very moment was fishing the rainbow trout run and maybe already onto a big one, the throbbing tip of his bamboo rod bowed to the river’s surface, I trudged morosely up the uncarpeted central aisle of the church behind my folks and turned into the pew five rows back on the left where Kinnesons had planked down for the past century and a half to have their spiritual needs ministered to.
Except for the addition of an organ, the interior of the church had changed very little since the days of Charles I. The windows were plain glass, wavy now and lavendered from time, but without any trace of ornamentation and purposely set too high for the seated congregation to see out of. The wainscoting below them, the pews, the pulpit, and the wooden ceiling were all painted a flat white. On the walls there hung no pictures of any kind. Even the likenesses of Jesus and the disciples had been deemed to smack vaguely of the idolatrous by Charles I and the six other original member families of the church, whose descendants had insisted that this happy tradition be continued to the present day. And although the Presbyterian Church had been a U
nited Protestant Church for sixteen years, with the stipulation that the minister must be an ordained Presbyterian clergyman, not so much as a single small blue crocus brightened its alter this Easter morning as the worshipers trooped in and sat down to the lugubrious strains of Julia “Hefty” Hefner’s organ prelude.
The church was by no means full. Still, there were easily one hundred people in attendance today, half again as many as Cousin Elijah had ever drawn in his capacity as lay preacher. Some, no doubt, were there simply because it was Easter. But many must have come to view the curiosity of a minister who was not only the first full-time incumbent in two years but black as well, since no black family had lived in Kingdom County within recent memory.
Anyone who expected Reverend Andrews to say or do much that was out of the ordinary must have been disappointed. He began by thanking the congregation for welcoming him and his son so warmly. (Nathan had slipped in alone and slouched down at the end of the pew across from ours just before the service began.) Reverend Andrews added that if he received one more hot covered dish he’d be able to open a restaurant at the parsonage, this got him a ripple of laughter and broke the ice. I glanced over at Nathan and grinned, but if he noticed me he didn’t acknowledge it. He looked as bored now as he had at the Ridge Runner Diner, and as uncomfortable in his jacket and tie as I felt in mine.
Reverend Andrews’ sermon was blissfully brief. I can’t remember much of what he said, except that he talked about hope and concluded by saying that he personally expected, on this most hopeful of all days, to resurrect the tradition of a minister who would do more than show up in church for an hour on Sunday morning and drink tea in the afternoon with his lady parishioners, which got him another general laugh. Speaking easily in that pleasant and resonant tone that had fascinated me in the diner and again in front of the parsonage during the snowstorm, he enumerated a couple of the goals he hoped to achieve: reestablishing an active youth group and a Bible study class for adults, mounting an organized fundraising drive. Finally, he did one small unexpected thing by inquiring whether anyone in church that morning wished to add to these objectives.
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 5
