God's Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  In the long summery evenings after supper, Jim tried to teach his new friend how to play baseball. Flailing away with Jim’s thirty-two-inch Adirondack, Gaëtan had no luck making contact with Jim’s soft lobs. The Canadian boy knew little English, but one afternoon he repaired the hand-crank starter of Gramp’s long-defunct Allis-Chalmers and got it running again. Next he tinkered with the engine of the editor’s first car, a Model A Ford blocked up on its rusting wheel rims behind the barn. He attached a belt from the flywheel to a buzz saw and began cutting up firewood for next spring’s maple sugaring.

  Réjean tapped his head in a canny way and pointed at his son. “Génie!” he said to Jim.

  Gaëtan shook his head, looked down with his diffident smile. “Non, Papa,” he said. “Albert Einstein est un génie. Moi, non.”

  “Oui,” Réjean said. “You will see, Monsieur James. When school begins, in the autumn, you will see.”

  * * *

  Late each August, Mom and Jim spent an entire day together at the Kingdom Fair. This year they took Gaëtan with them. They started out early in the morning at the animal barns, dropped by the cattle judging, whiled away the heat of the afternoon watching sulky races and the grand cavalcade from the cool of the grandstand. In the early evening they lollygagged through the midway, riding all the rides, playing all the games, having a look at Clyde Beatty, the “longest snake in captivity,” a sleepy five-foot python in the “Exotic Animals of the World” sideshow. Jim was tremendously proud of his beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed mother. She went on the Tilt-A-Whirl and dive-bomber with him and Gate, treated them to all the fair food they could hold, and took them to see the Hell Drivers and fireworks highlighting the grandstand show that evening. “Merci,” Gaëtan said. “Merci, Madame Kinneson. Today has been, how do you say, un bon temps. My very good day.”

  The Kinneson men, including Dad, Gramp, Charlie, and Jim, all had tin ears. Mom loved music. Next to the woodbox in the farmhouse kitchen stood an elderly upright piano, formerly the property of the now-defunct Lost Nation one-room schoolhouse. One Saturday evening Mom invited the Dubois family to join them at the farmhouse for a kitchen junket. Réjean Dubois played the fiddle and clogged his feet to the dozens of Canadian reels he knew by heart. Madame Dubois, a grave, happy expression on her face, accompanied him on a mandolin. Gaëtan clacked two desert spoons together for percussion, and Mom, who’d attended the Boston Conservatory and knew every Beethoven sonata by heart, banged out chords on the hard-used old piano. Charlie and his girlfriend, Athena Allen, stopped by to help eat a washtubful of Gramp’s homegrown popcorn, and Madame’s French-Canadian pâtisseries. At the end of the evening, when Réjean brought them all home with the lilting strains of “Sucre d’érable,” even Dad’s foot began to tap. Mom looked at Dad’s foot, then she looked at Jim and laughed.

  Mom was the only person Jim knew who could get away with teasing Dad. She said the reason he couldn’t carry a tune was that, except for a few bloody ballads and a handful of Robert Burns’s lyrics, music had been outlawed in the Presbyterian Scotland of Dad’s ancestors. Come to think of it, Mom said, laughter and fun had been outlawed there, as well. Humor wasn’t Dad’s strong suit, but Mom could always make him laugh, even at himself. Otherwise, his idea of humor was to say, as he did when he received the Pulitzer Prize, that it and forty cents would buy him a cold one at the Common Hotel. The award committee put out a press release, which Dad refused to run in the Monitor. Mom said a Presbyterian Scotsman would rather take up devil worship than take credit for anything. Dad laughed and said it was probably true.

  Looking back years later, Jim often thought that Mom’s loveliest quality was her rare gift not to wish to please others so much as to be easily pleased herself. Pleased with her gardens, with all kinds of animals, with books and stories, with friends, and most of all, with her family. If Gramp was the chronicler of God’s Kingdom, and if Jim’s dad, the editor, was its public conscience, Mom was its heart and soul. Gramp put it best. He said it was Mom who introduced joy to the Clan Kinneson.

  * * *

  September arrived. On the first day of school Gaëtan was waiting for Jim at the Kinneson mailbox. He wore the outgrown suit he’d worn on his first day in Vermont and carried a tin lunch pail containing three bread-and-lard sandwiches and a quart canning jar of black coffee. At the Academy, Jim accompanied Gate to the office to help him register. Prof Chadburn, the headmaster, arranged for the boys to take most of their classes together so that Jim could help Gaëtan with his English.

  Prof clapped Gate on the shoulder and winked at Jim. “Be sure to sit next to your friend in algebra class,” he said. “Let me know if there’s any difficulty.”

  Jim knew that Prof was referring to Miss Hark Kinneson, the longtime math teacher at the Academy and the editor’s second cousin once removed. What relation that made her to him Jim neither knew nor cared. Harkness Kinneson was a notorious tyrant who detested all children and young people. Like Prof, she had taught three generations of Commoners. Miss Hark’s classes were trials by ordeal and she was universally feared by her students, past and present.

  “Welcome to Algebra Two,” Miss Hark announced at one o’clock on the Seth Thomas clock over the blackboard of the mathematics room. A rail-thin woman in her late seventies with a mannish jaw, a broad forehead, hands like hay hooks, and small black eyes that missed nothing, Miss Hark surveyed the class bleakly.

  “Algebra Two,” she continued, “is not metal shop. Algebra Two is not Physical Education. In Algebra Two we will not be playing math games or any games.”

  Miss Hark delivered these remarks in a flat voice with no hint of humor. In the ensuing silence she reached for a piece of chalk and wrote, on the board, the symbol for pi.

  Gaëtan’s hand shot up. “C’est pi, madame le professeur. Trois pointe une quatre une cinq neuf.”

  Miss Hark trained her dark little eyes on Gaëtan. “Did I call on you?”

  “Pardon, madame le professeur?”

  “I am neither a madam nor a professor. You will address me as Miss Kinneson. Did I call on you?”

  “Oui, Madame. Pi is, as you say, un décimal infini. Pardon. Je suis sad in my anglais.”

  From the class, a few snickers.

  “Silence!” Miss Hark rapped out. She pointed at Gaëtan. “What is your name?”

  “Gaëtan,” Jim whispered. “Ton nom?”

  “Oh!” Gaëtan said, grinning. “Je m’appelle Gaëtan Dubois, madame.”

  “Well, then, Gaëtan Dubois,” Miss Hark said. “From this moment onward you will speak only when you are called on and then only in English. Do you understand? English or nothing.”

  Gaëtan looked back at Miss Hark but said nothing. He said nothing for the rest of the class or the rest of the school day. Gaëtan’s definition of pi was the first and last time he spoke in any class at the Kingdom Common Academy until the end of that term. For all he said in school from that day forward, he might as well have been mute.

  * * *

  “Algebra Deux,” Gaëtan wrote below his name on his perfect homework assignments. On each of his papers Miss Hark crossed out the word “Deux” and wrote beside it “Use English. F.” “No scratch work,” she’d write in the margin. “Where did you do your scratch work? F.”

  The standoff continued into October. Gate maintained his silence. Miss Hark did not acknowledge his work or his presence. “I know you are looking on someone else’s paper,” she wrote on his ungraded midterm exam. “Sooner or later I will prove it.” But whose papers was Gaëtan copying? No one else in the class ever got more than a C. Gate never missed a question.

  To Jim’s amusement, Gaëtan was somewhat superstitious. Sometimes on their way to or from school Gate told him, in his broken English, tales handed down by his habitant ancestors north of the border. Jim’s favorite was the story of the loup-garou, the half-man, half-wolf monster that dwelt in the depths of Lake Memphremagog. The loup-garou loved to lure unsuspecting fishermen far out onto
the lake on placid summer days, then whip up a sudden tempest and drown them. On moonless nights, and occasionally when the moon was full, the dreaded creature emerged from the lake to roam the forests on both sides of the border, tracking down and devouring lost hunters and disobedient children who’d strayed from home. It was even alleged that the werewolf had deliberately started the Great Forest Fire of 1882.

  Gaëtan was uneasy around the skeleton of the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton. “Dr. T,” as three generations of students had called him, was the founder and first headmaster of the Academy. A former fugitive slave, he’d come north on the Underground Railroad. With the help of his deliverer, later his close friend, Charles Kinneson II, Pliny had put himself through the state university and Princeton Theological Seminary. A renowned minister, educator, abolitionist, and Civil War hero, Pliny had been shot by his longtime benefactor, Charles, during a dispute over a point of religious doctrine. On those rare occasions when Jim’s grandfather and father mentioned the murder, they referred to it only as “the trouble in the family” or, simply, “the trouble.”

  In his will, Pliny had bequeathed his skeleton to his beloved school as an anatomical exhibit. Although two holes in his skull, front and back, bore eloquent testimony to his murder, and his left hand was missing as well, over the years his skeleton, dangling from a pole at the front of the second-story science lab, had become a kind of mascot to the Academy students, most of whom had grown up in the same building with it since first grade. Not so Gaëtan, who, during his and Jim’s late-morning biology class, sat in the back of the room, as far away from the bones as he could get. Jim told his new friend that the state university had proclaimed Pliny Templeton to be the first American Negro college graduate. In honor of the former slave, the university had established a full four-year scholarship in his name, awarded annually to the top-ranking graduate of the Academy. Also, Jim showed Gaëtan Pliny’s eleven-hundred-page manuscript in the school library: The Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County. No matter. Gaëtan continued to be terrified by the sight of the skeleton, the way Jim felt around snakes and heights. Gate wouldn’t even look at the thing, dangling from its pole above the blackboard like a Halloween figure.

  Despite the fact that Gate was a mathematical savant, or perhaps partly because of it, Miss Hark continued to bully him at every opportunity. Finally, Jim complained about the math teacher to Mom. Mom’s blue eyes snapped and she pursed her lips. That was all, but the next morning she marched into the Academy and closeted herself in the headmaster’s office with Prof for forty-five minutes.

  “He agreed to switch Gaëtan to Mr. Benson’s trig class at the end of the term, in January,” Mom told Jim that evening. “That’s the best I could do, hon.”

  To Jim, it was obvious that, like nearly everyone else in the Common, Prof was intimidated by Miss Hark Kinneson.

  “I’d like to slap her face good and hard,” Mom said to Jim. “But of course she’d just take it out on Gate.”

  “What about forgiving her because she knows not what she does?” Jim kidded her.

  “She knows very well what she’s doing,” Mom said. “We’ll leave it to Jesus to forgive her, sweetie. That’s more than I can muster right now.”

  “Do you believe in Jesus, Mom?”

  “I believe in love,” Mom said. “And, I’m afraid, in its absence.”

  * * *

  In early November, Réjean bought two more milking cows. With some of the earnings from her housekeeping jobs, Madame Dubois purchased a Toulouse laying goose. Once or twice a week Gaëtan brought a hard-boiled goose egg to school to eat with his lard sandwiches and coffee.

  With Thanksgiving week came the onset of winter in the Kingdom. As usual, the volunteer fire department flooded the ball diamond on the village green and set up sideboards for a hockey rink. Gaëtan appeared on the ice with a pair of hand-me-down skates and a homemade hockey stick. Once again Jim learned something surprising about his friend. The gangling kid who couldn’t connect with a baseball skated like the north wind out of Canada. In the first five minutes of their first pickup game, Gaëtan made a hat trick. He spent the rest of the game drawing out the goalie, then dropping off the puck to teammates for open shots on the net.

  On skates, Gaëtan Out-of-the-Woods was indomitable. In brushups with players from neighboring towns who called him a “Black Canuck,” and worse, he’d windmill his arms and fists without much strategy, but no matter how hard you hit him you couldn’t knock him down. At some point he’d get his licks in and then you’d be sorry you’d taunted him.

  On New Year’s Day, when gifts were traditionally exchanged in French Canada, Réjean and Madame presented Gaëtan with a new pair of hockey skates. He and Jim skated up the frozen Lower Kingdom River to the colony of multicolored ice-fishing shanties on the South Bay of Lake Memphremagog. Gaëtan pointed north up the lake between the mountains across the border. “Chez soi,” he said. Home.

  * * *

  On the morning of Miss Hark’s algebra final, the mercury in the Kinnesons’ outdoor thermometer sat at twenty-seven below zero. The air sparkled with ice crystals from the mist over the High Falls in the village. Walking the half mile into town, their skates laced together and slung over their shoulders, Jim and Gaëtan were half frozen by the time they reached the Academy.

  There was no way to keep the big granite school warm in weather that cold. Even the basement room, with its monstrous coal-burning furnace, was frigid. Most students took their tests in their winter coats and boots. At lunch, Gaëtan’s coffee steamed like a boiling kettle.

  Miss Hark’s Algebra II test was scheduled from one to three. Mr. Benson’s juniors were taking their trig exam in the math room that period, so the algebra test was moved to the science lab. As Jim walked into the room, he felt his breathing tighten at the sight of the exams stacked on the corner of the teacher’s desk. The scent of fresh mimeograph ink hung on the air like ether in an operating room. From its pole at the front of the room, Pliny Templeton’s skeleton seemed to be grinning out at the students, delighted by their apprehensive expressions. As usual, Gaëtan sat in the back of the room.

  At precisely one o’clock, Miss Hark marched up and down the aisles passing out the test papers. With a sinking heart, Jim riffled through the exam. There was an entire page of word problems that might have given Einstein himself pause. The first one began, “A runaway locomotive traveling at 96 mph is hurtling down upon the Academy team bus, stalled on the crossing in Kingdom Common, 3.4 miles away, with the bus door and emergency exit frozen shut.” Across the aisle to Jim’s left a single tear slid down Becky Sanville’s cheek, whether for her own plight or for that of the doomed students on the bus was impossible to know.

  At one fifteen, Gaëtan stood up, walked to the front of the room, and placed his completed test on Miss Hark’s desk. Jim noticed that he approached the desk on the far side from Pliny’s skeleton.

  “What?” she said.

  For the first time in four months, Gaëtan spoke in school. “J’ai finis,” he said.

  “Speak English. This is America.”

  Miss Hark picked up Gate’s test and glanced at it. “There’s only one way you could possibly be finished, Dubois. You got your hands on a copy of the examination ahead of time. Where did you get it? Out of the teachers’ room?”

  Gaëtan shook his head. “No, madame. Mademoiselle.”

  Miss Hark stood up. “Then where is your scratch work? Show me.”

  Gaëtan shrugged, then touched his head to indicate that was where he did his figuring. At the same time, he glanced at the skeleton.

  “What are you looking at?” Miss Hark said. “Why are you looking at me that way? Are you mocking me?”

  “I don’t look you. I look him. I don’t like.”

  “Oh, you don’t, don’t you? Well, how do you like this?”

  Very deliberately, Miss Hark tore Gaëtan’s exam in two and dropped it into the wastebasket beside her
desk. She stood up, turned to the blackboard, and drew a small circle just above the chalk tray, at about waist height, inches from the dangling skeleton. “Bend over, Monsieur Dubois,” she said. “Nose in the circle.”

  Jim jumped to his feet, so angry he was shaking. “He didn’t cheat, Miss Hark. I’ll go in his place.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Kinneson. Sit down this instant. Get back to work. All of you, get back to work.”

  Gaëtan, already bent over at the blackboard with his nose in the circle, motioned for Jim to sit down. As terrified as he was of the bones, this was between him and Miss Hark.

  “You may resume your seat, Dubois,” Miss Hark said, “when, and only when, you confess to cheating.”

  * * *

  As the afternoon wore on, clouds began to sail in from the northwest. The wind picked up and the classroom windows rattled in their wooden sashes. Stooped over at the blackboard, Gaëtan reached under his tattered jacket and rubbed the small of his back. From time to time he twisted his head and glanced fearfully at the skeleton. Jim thought about going for Prof but didn’t. Gaëtan seemed determined to fight this battle himself.

  At two twenty-five Gaëtan waved his hand. “Mademoiselle Kin’son,” he said. “S’il vous plaît.”

  “Are you ready to confess, Dubois?”

  “Je dois aller aux toilettes, Mademoiselle.”

  “Fine. When you admit that you cheated on your examination, you may go to the boys’ room. Not until.”

  Gaëtan lifted one large brogan, then the other, like a nervous horse. Jim thought of the quart jar of coffee his friend had drunk at lunch. The boy must be in agony.

  Across the aisle, Becky gasped. Her hand shot to her mouth. She was staring at Gate, bent over in his too-small suit like a ragged old man. The entire class was staring at Gaëtan. A stream of liquid came pouring out of the frayed cuffs of his trousers, splashing over his square-cut shoes onto the floor of the classroom. On and on it came, more than Jim would have thought possible.

  Miss Hark frowned at the class. She looked over her shoulder at the clock. “You still have five minutes. Double-check your—”