A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Your objection is well taken, Mr. Kinneson. I don’t much care for the word myself. And I have no intention of postponing this trial at this point. For the time being, however, I’m getting hungry, and I imagine the jury is. It’s five-thirty. We’ll recess for supper and reconvene at seven o’clock sharp.”

  “I’d like to recall Elijah Kinneson, your honor.”

  I had never before seen the courtroom occupied at night. The suspended globe lights shone brilliantly on the bird’s-eye maple attorneys’ tables, on the judge’s bench and the polished railing around the jury box, glints of lights played off Forrest Allen’s high domed forehead and off Frenchy LaMott’s shiny black mop of hair and the bright ring of keys jingling at Elijah’s belt as he walked forward. Outside the tall windows, the village lights twinkled in the autumn gloaming, for a few moments the room seemed like a different room in another courthouse in an unfamiliar town.

  Partly my disorientation was the result of the nap I’d taken at the Monitor during the supper hour. While I slept and Charlie worked feverishly in his office preparing his summary speech my father continued to call anyone and everyone he could think of to try to find out the source of the “private funds” Zack Barrows had used to hire Moulton. But so far as I knew, he had drawn a complete blank.

  “Elijah,” my brother was saying, “could you please tell the jury what your feelings are concerning the Reverend Walter Andrews?”

  “Objection,” Moulton said wearily. “Our witness is not on trial.”

  “Your honor,” Charlie said, “I’m more than willing to leave the investigation and legal prosecution of the likeliest suspect in this case to the proper authorities. I simply want to broaden the field of suspects, as Mr. Moulton himself has chosen to do today, however facetiously he did that and for whatever purpose. I intend to establish that someone did in fact have a motive to frame Reverend Andrews. Moreover, I intend to establish that this motive dates back almost to the time of Reverend Andrews’ arrival in Kingdom County.”

  “That’s a fine point you’re making, Charles Kinneson,” Judge Allen said. “But I’m going to permit you to continue your line of questioning, so long as you don’t ask this or any other witness to incriminate himself. That rules out inquiring about ‘feelings.’”

  “Then, I’ll be more specific. Isn’t it true, Elijah, that you resented the minister from the day he arrived and supplanted you as preacher in the United Church?”

  “Nay! I was merely filling in as lay preacher. I was willing to serve in the pulpit in that capacity, and just as willing to step down when a qualified permanent clergyman could be found.”

  “You must have had quite a bit of extra time on your hands after you ‘stepped down,’ Elijah. No more sermons to prepare. No other ministering duties. How did you fill it? Do you have any hobbies?”

  “Hobbies!” Elijah stared at my brother as though he was crazy. “What do you mean, ‘hobbies’?”

  “I’m sure you understand what a hobby is, Elijah. You know. Golf, hunting, fishing. Do you have any hobbies at all?”

  “None!” Elijah said angrily, as though Charlie had asked him to confess to a shameful secret vice. “Absolutely none. We were placed here in God’s Kingdom to work, Charles Kinneson, not play and have ‘hobbies.’”

  “Well, that’s an interesting point of view,” Charlie said, and he casually walked around in front of the defense table and dragged out from beneath it an object as large as a big steamer trunk, covered with a brown rug. With a prestidigitator’s flourish, my brother whipped off the rag. There before us, looking every bit as outlandish as some arcane reliquary from King Tut’s tomb, sat Elijah’s gigantic endless wooden chain.

  “Do you recognize this object, Elijah?”

  “Aye,” he said furiously. “It’s the Endless Maze of the Kingdom, which I’ve been carving for these past forty years and more, and before me my grandfather. You have no right to display it here in a vulgar public spectacle, Charles Kinneson!”

  “Well, since I obtained a warrant from Judge Allen during the supperhour to go to your house with the sheriff and pick it up and bring it here, I believe I do have that right, Elijah.”

  Over strenuous objections from Sigurd Moulton and Zack Barrows, Charlie promptly entered the wooden chain as evidence.

  “Now, tell us, Elijah. What does this wonderful maze of yours signify?”

  “Signify? Why, it signifies all the subtlety in the world, Cousin. The Endless Maze of the Kingdom signifies the confusion we Reformed Presbyterians must guard against at all times. It signifies Old Chaos and Evil.”

  “Old Chaos and Evil?”

  “Aye,” Elijah said grimly. “For lo! behold its twists and canny turns and snaky byways. They represent the numberless paths of evil to be avoided only by the one true path of Reformed Presbyterianism.”

  My brother did a curious thing. Reaching far into the coiling, alive-looking spirals of the convoluted wooden rings, he withdrew two rolled-up yellowing documents and a fat sheaf of plain white papers with typescript on them.

  As carefully as if he were handling an ancient scroll, Charlie unrolled one of the yellowing documents and handed it to our cousin. “Do you recognize this, Elijah?”

  “You have said so.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “An issue of the Kingdom County Monitor, dated August sixth, 1900.”

  Charlie then asked Elijah to identify the second scroll.

  “This is an issue of the Kingdom County Monitor, dated August thirteenth, 1900,” my cousin said.

  They were the issues I’d found in the basement of the shop and brought upstairs for Reverend Andrews on the morning of the church session meeting—the same issues that had turned up missing from the minister’s desk and that Frenchy claimed he saw Elijah purloin and stuff into his maze!

  “And finally, Elijah, would you please identify these sheets of typescript?”

  “They appear to be the notes that the preacher spoke of earlier. The notes he took on Black Pliny’s life and times.”

  “Your honor, I’d like to enter these three documents as evidence,” Charlie said, and immediately received permission.

  “Elijah, did you remove these documents from the parsonage desk and place them inside your Endless Maze of the Kingdom?” Charlie said.

  Silence.

  “Mr. Elijah Kinneson, did you understand the question?” the judge said.

  Silence.

  “Our witness has every right not to answer incriminating questions,” Moulton said. “He is not on trial here today.”

  “Then your witness should decline to answer those questions on the grounds that they might incriminate him,” Charlie said. “I’ll repeat the question. Did you, Elijah Kinneson, as Frenchy LaMott testified, place these documents inside your Maze of the Kingdom?”

  “I decline to answer.”

  “Your honor, I’d like to read excerpts from these two newspaper articles,” Charlie said. “I believe they’ll shed some light on the conflict between Elijah Kinneson and Walter Andrews.”

  “Objection, your honor! Any such imagined conflict is as irrelevant to these proceedings as the contents of a newspaper article fifty years old.”

  “Not if it resulted in the motivation to frame my client for murder, it isn’t!”

  Judge Allen frowned. After a moment he said “I see no reason why you shouldn’t be permitted to read those documents, Mr. Kinneson. Go ahead.”

  My brother proceeded to read first the August sixth, 1900, article by our grandfather James Kinneson, describing the suicide of Pliny Templeton in his own study after his falling out with the church and Academy Trustees; then Charlie read the August thirteenth, 1900, article describing Mad Charlie’s sudden “brain fever” and removal to the infirmary of the state asylum at Waterbury.

  When he finished, my brother placed the two old issues of the Monitor on the evidence table.

  “Elijah, would you please tell us how you’re related to the Char
les Kinneson who discovered Pliny’s body and who was shortly afterwards stricken with ‘brain fever’?”

  “He was my father.”

  “Did he ever recover from this affliction?”

  “Nay!” Elijah said angrily. “He spent the last two years of his life chained to his bed in a madhouse with certified howling madmen. How could he possibly recover under such conditions?”

  “Was he mad himself?”

  “He was not. He was brain-fevered from the shock of Black Pliny’s betrayal, the betrayal of a man he had single-handedly raised up from slavery and educated and placed in a position of trust, only to see that man turn on him, his benefactor, and foment a schism in the church, and seduce half the members of the congregation over to the heresy of United Presbyterianism. It is as disgraceful a chapter in our history as any imaginable. It required no further so-called research.”

  “Did you, Elijah, in order to put a stop to the Reverend Walter Andrews’ research on the church schism and Pliny’s suicide and your father’s brain affliction, enter the parsonage on the afternoon of August sixth and go through the minister’s desk in search of papers relating to your father and Pliny Templeton?”

  “Inquire of the Black Man.”

  “By the ‘black man’ do you mean Walter Andrews?”

  “I mean the Black Man who has navigated over these hardwoods and softwoods both by day and by night since they were first settled, and for many a long century before that, since his fiery expulsion from the Realm of Glory.”

  “Do you mean the devil?”

  “Some call him by that name. Call him what you will. I mean mankind’s one great implacable enemy. Inquire of him, Charles Kinneson!”

  “Elijah, did you enter the United Church parsonage on the late afternoon of August sixth and go through the minister’s desk and remove the articles I’ve just read, along with the minister’s notes, and secret them in your Endless Maze?”

  Moulton was on his feet. “Your honor, what proof does the defense have to support this wild conjecture—apart from the highly unreliable testimony of a juvenile delinquent? Anyone could have planted those documents in the maze.”

  “Yes,” Charlie roared. “And anyone could have come into the parsonage and stolen the minister’s gun and gone out the county road to the red iron bridge and up into the gore to the quarry and shot Claire LaRiviere. Right, Elijah?” in the shocked silence that ensued, Charlie took three quick strides toward the witness stand. “Did you, Elijah Kinneson, on the late afternoon of August sixth, steal the minister’s revolver from his desk, follow Claire LaRiviere to the quarry, and murder her there? Did you mutilate her body and throw it onto the ledge on the back side of the quarry, where you expected it to be discovered or planned to discover it yourself? Did you then throw the murder weapon into the water where it was bound to be found?”

  On the witness stand, Elijah Kinneson was silent.

  “Did you murder Claire LaRiviere with the minister’s service revolver on the afternoon of August sixth at the granite Quarry in Kingdom Gore?”

  “Our witness is not on trial here!” Moulton said, raising his voice for the first time.

  “Well, he damn well should be, and I’ll see to it that eventually he is!” Charlie shouted. “Elijah Kinneson, I’d like to ask you to remove one of your shoes and place it on the witness stand.”

  “I object, your honor!”

  “Sustained. That’s going too far, Charles.”

  “No more questions, your honor.”

  But when Elijah walked down from the stand past the jury, though he walked very fast, every pair of eyes was fixed on his work shoes, which were covered with shiny little scallops of lead and pocked like Swiss cheese from the hot lead that had spattered on them from his linotype.

  It did not seem like enough for a defense to be built on. A pair of pockmarked shoes. A delinquent’s testimony and a zealot’s raving. An old family skeleton, literally and figuratively, the baffling story of Pliny Templeton and my mad great-grandfather, who spent his last years in the lunatic asylum raving at a dead man over the use of a piano in his school—a story which, for some unknown reason, Elijah Kinneson did not want told. Yet that my old cousin would go so far as to murder an innocent girl for the purpose of framing an innocent man was nearly impossible for me to imagine. The facts remained that Claire LaRiviere had been killed with Walter Andrews’ revolver, and at the time she had been pregnant, very probably with Nat’s child.

  What Charlie could make out of it all in his summary, and what the jury would make out of it, I had no idea.

  Sigurd Moulton made the closing statement for the prosecution, and it was brief and bitter. He began by citing a number of serious breaches of standard courtroom procedure. He characterized the day’s events as bush league, and stated that regardless of Elijah Kinneson’s final testimony, and his silence, which he was guaranteed the right to maintain by the Constitution, there were still far more unanswered questions about Reverend Andrews than about Elijah, beginning with where the minister was at the exact time of the murder—on his way home from Montreal or already in Kingdom County.

  Sigurd Moulton pointed out that the defense’s chief witness was a juvenile delinquent who made Huckleberry Finn look like a model boy. Despite Elijah’s theological differences with Reverend Andrews, Moulton said, the sexton had no reason to kill the girl or frame the minister over a piece of long-forgotten history and there was not a shred of real evidence that he had done so. Moulton emphasized that both the minister and Nat had plausible reasons for wanting Claire out of the way, but the minister had more reasons, whether the jury believed Nat’s story that he was with the girl on the parsonage couch or not, and Nat had almost certainly been in Montreal at the time of the murder.

  Moulton admitted that the case was more complicated than even he had realized at first. But he asked the jury to make the clearest distinction in their minds between complications introduced by my brother to cloud the issue, and the legitimate complications of any murder case. By far the likeliest chain of events, he said, involved Nat sleeping with Claire early on in their acquaintanceship and getting her pregnant, Claire informing Reverend Andrews that she was pregnant on the very early morning of August 6, and Reverend Andrews deducing that Nat was the child’s father and killing Claire on the early evening of that day, after returning from Montreal, to protect his son’s reputation and his own.

  “Rely on the facts,” Moulton advised the jury. “Don’t be misled by extraneous complications. Fact number one: the murder weapon was the minister’s gun, which he had already used against a local citizen just two nights before the murder. Fact number two: Nathan Andrews has admitted that he repeatedly slept with the girl, who was found to be pregnant. Fact number three: the chief witness for the defense is a village outcast with a reform school record. Fact number four: the minister was overheard by a prominent local citizen and churchman making arrangements to help the girl take care of her pregnancy, and so was clearly aware of her condition. Fact number five: the minister has a history of protecting his son, which is good and admirable and natural, too, until it results in violence and murder. Fact number six: by his own admission, the defendant arrived home from Montreal on August 6 at nine o’clock and didn’t notify the police of Claire LaRiviere’s absence until ten—leaving a full unaccounted hour during which he had plenty of time to take her to or meet her at the quarry and kill her.

  “Reaching the proper conclusion this evening, ladies and gentlemen, now requires only common sense. Common sense, as the defense attorney himself has pointed out, is a quality we Vermonters—and we are all Vermonters, whether we live in Kingdom County or Montpelier or Brattleboro or White River Junction—have valued and prized for generations. Exercise that common sense for which we are so justly famous and you can come to only one conclusion, despite the defense’s extremely clever attempts to cloud the fundamental issues by dragging in irrelevant information and incompetent witnesses. Mere cleverness must not win
the laurels tonight. The victory tonight, if victory there can be in the most gruesome murder case I have ever seen in this state, must result from common sense and a dedication on your part to preserve the law of this land, and particularly that most supreme law that forbids the taking of a human life. I don’t envy you your task. But Mr. Barrows and I urge you to do your duty, however unpleasant you find it. We have every confidence that you will discharge it responsibly and correctly.”

  Charlie’s summary speech was entirely different from what I had expected. I had expected a thunderous oration. There was none. My brother made relatively little reference to the ubiquitous lined yellow legal pads, which he, like Zack Barrows and Sigurd Moulton, had filled with notes during the past two days. He spoke instead extemporaneously in a down-to-earth, natural way, as though visiting with two or three of the jury members on the street in front of the brick shopping block or in the post office.

  Charlie began by saying that several months ago a minister, a stranger from another country, had come to Kingdom County with his son to live and to work. He said that to the credit of this stranger and of our community, he had been well-received. He pointed out that Reverend Andrews had made considerable efforts on behalf of the church and the congregation. He mentioned Reverend Andrews’ taking over the Academy baseball team, and reminded the jury how genuinely interested the Canadian minister had been in our community, its people and history, and how eager he had been to make himself and his son a part of it from the start. By incorporating himself into the community rather than imposing himself and his ideas on it, Charlie said, Reverend Andrews had quickly established himself as a leading citizen.

  Speaking quietly but with feeling, Charlie conceded that Reverend Andrews had also earned a few enemies, to whom, for the worst possible reasons, he and all Negroes would always remain strangers. My brother cited the episode with Bumper Stevens at the cockfight back in late May and the shooting at the parsonage and the subsequent investigation of Reverend Andrews rather than Resolvèd Kinneson. Finally, he cited the murder charges, which he said were based on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence.