God's Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The tip of the Orvis bent to the water as the hooked fish made its first surge downriver. Jim raised the rod above his head, applying as much pressure as he dared. Gramp had liked to say that a bamboo Orvis had backbone. It would bend almost double. Handled properly, it would never snap.

  A salmon or a rainbow trout would have jumped by now. Almost certainly this was a big native brook trout. Suddenly it turned and came fast back upriver. Jim reeled as quickly as he could to keep slack out of the line. He maintained the tension on his leader just this side of the breaking point.

  The trout made two more runs. Then it was finished. Jim held the landing net a foot below the surface close to the side of the canoe in order not to scare the fish into a last desperate flurry. He eased the played-out trout over the net and lifted it shimmering onto the floor of the Old Town beside the pack basket. It was a hook-jawed male at least twenty inches long. A true record-book brook trout.

  Jim thought of the mounted fish in the hotel barroom. Over the decades, their fins and tails had frayed and split. Their colors had faded. It was hard to tell the brook trout from the browns and rainbows.

  The trophy fish was hooked lightly and there was no sign of blood. Jim reached into the net and removed the Coachman from the cartilage in the corner of the trout’s mouth. He lifted the net with the trout in it over the side of the Old Town and turned the fish back out into the Dead Water. Briefly, it hung motionless, fanning its gills. Then it flicked its square tail and was gone, and at exactly that moment, Jim knew what he’d spent the day looking for.

  * * *

  Gramp had told Jim that their Abenaki ancestors were afraid of the big lake. The steep mountains on each side created a thirty-mile-long wind tunnel, so that on the calmest of days, when Memphremagog lay between the peaks as innocent as a mill pond, it could transform itself in scant minutes into a maelstrom. More than once, Jim and Gramp had seen it happen. For this reason, the Indians who came to the lake to fish in spawning season canoed it only in the early morning and near dusk, when the wind usually fell. Even then, they tended to stay close to shore, tracing its contours and rarely crossing open water.

  This early evening in late May, dyed crimson by the reflection of the sunset, the lake was as unruffled as stained glass. A cathedral stillness enveloped its waters. A film of mist, pink in the sunset, hung over the Île d’Illusion as Jim approached it in the Old Town, and the island seemed to hover above the water in the mist, much as it had hung in the smoke from the forest fire three quarters of a century ago when Gramp and his father approached the crescent of beach where a silent child stood surrounded by wild animals.

  The bow of the Old Town scraped on the pebbles. Jim stepped into the ankle-deep water and pulled the canoe out of the water. From the bottom of the pack basket in the bow he removed a rectangular cardboard box somewhat larger than a shoebox. “Jim, you’ll know what to do with these,” Gramp had written on the cover. Jim carried it and the short-handled garden spade up the slope through the woods to a small clearing overlooking the beach below. The floor of the woods was carpeted with caribou moss. Red-capped British soldiers grew on a decaying fallen tree. Elsewhere on the island, a few habitant French-Indian farmers grew potatoes and carrots in the sandy soil, and kept a small dairy herd and a maple orchard. Here at its southeast corner, the Île d’Illusion was still heavily wooded.

  Twice he hit roots snaking out from the surrounding spruce and cedar trees. He’d have needed an ax to slice through them. On his third attempt, he got down three feet through the duff and hard soil. That was deep enough.

  From the rectangular box, lined with crumpled back issues of the Monitor, he removed the blue Dr. Bitters bottle, heavier now than it had been when he’d transferred Our Lady of the Lake from Gramp’s kitchen table to the counter below Gram’s critters. He cradled the bottle in the bottom of the hole in the forest floor and sifted a cushiony layer of moss onto it and filled it in. He thought about saying something but didn’t. From Gramp, Jim had learned everything he knew about storytelling. From Gram he had learned the eloquence of silence.

  The sun had dropped behind the Canadian peaks to the west. The lake was a deep blue in the gathering dusk. Jim looked over the top of the Great Earthen Dam and up through the gap between Kingdom and Canada Mountains. He thought of the burned-out shells of the houses and the church, deep under the Dead Water impoundment. He thought of the hooded Klansmen galloping up the Canada Post Road. And he thought of the little girl who would become his grandmother, standing in the smoke with her kingdom of peaceable critters.

  As he paddled back across the narrow strait between the Île d’Illusion and the mainland, Jim was more aware than ever that he dwelt in no peaceable kingdom. Yet out of the atrocities, out of the murders and hatred that made not a particle of sense, had come the almost accidental meeting of Gramp and Gram, his Lady of the Lake, and their love for each other and for their family.

  In the twilight the dam was an indistinct hulk, but Jim could make out Dad’s DeSoto sitting on the gravel road beside the spur track. Dad was leaning against the front fender and smoking his pipe. He lifted his hand as the Old Town glided toward the shore and Jim lifted his hand in acknowledgement after a hard, good day on the water.

  11

  Senior Year

  The Île d’Illusion is located in Lake Memphremagog about half a mile off the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River. Approximately five miles long by two miles wide, it was named by French explorers in reference to the uncanny way it seems to come and go in the lake mist, sometimes appearing to hover several hundred feet above the water, sometimes vanishing altogether.

  —PLINY’S HISTORY

  She was standing at the bottom of the granite steps leading up to the entrance of the Academy, wearing a dress of many colors, which appeared to have been made from a crazy quilt. The multicolored dress was cut short at her knees and she was tall and slender with shiny black waist-length hair. She had a dark complexion and wide-set eyes of so deep a shade of blue that at first Jim thought they were black. Over her shoulder she carried an old-fashioned bookstrap with a large volume buckled up in it. She was about Jim’s age, seventeen, and so lovely that his heart hurt just to look at her.

  On the top step, blocking the entrance, four sophomore girls were skipping rope. Two of them were spinning the rope. The other two were jumping. All four were chanting an old local jingle:

  Nigger girl, nigger girl,

  Lives in Niggerville,

  Way out yonder on Nigger Toe Brook.

  Dat’s de end of dis old book,

  Dis old book ’bout Niggerville,

  Way out back on Nigger Hill.

  Prof Chadburn had forbidden the Academy students to use the word nigger but sometimes, out of his earshot, they did anyway. Now the girls were chanting the refrain:

  Old black Pliny got two hole in him head.

  Dat where Pliny got him ass shot dead.

  The new girl narrowed her eyes, which had turned as purple as the big lake just before a storm. Nearby in the schoolyard a gaggle of kids looked on.

  “Hey!” Jim yelled at the jump ropers. “Stop that.”

  He started up the steps to take the rope away from them.

  “No!” the girl in the dress of many colors said. “I will deal with this matter. Hold my book, s’il vous plaît.”

  She unbuckled the thick volume and handed it to Jim. He was surprised to see that it was Webster’s dictionary.

  “Niggerville, Niggerville,” the jump ropers chanted.

  The girl with the stormy eyes gave the bookstrap a hard snap, cracking the metal buckle on the bottom step. She started up the steps, twirling the strap buckle over her head. The jumpers cut their eyes sideways at her as she advanced.

  Whap. The buckle landed on the legs of one of the bullies. Whap whap whap. The new girl struck blow after blow on their arms and legs and shoulders as she drove them shrieking through the front door of the Academy.

  “What wicked childre
n, eh?” she said to Jim. “Very well. I teach these mals enfants their first lesson of the day. Oh! Excusez-moi! Je m’appelle Francine. Francine Lafleur.”

  Francine Lafleur placed one foot behind the other and made a small curtsey, like a princess greeting a prince in one of Jim’s boyhood storybooks. Her eyes were deep azure again and they were shining with delight as if she found the incident with the rope skippers highly amusing. She held her arm out straight to shake hands and her handshake was warm and friendly.

  “James Kinneson,” Jim said. “Jim for short.”

  “You may, if you wish, address me as Frannie, James Kinneson,” she said. “But I will never call you Jim for short. Now, then. À l’école, oui? To school!”

  While Jim walked Frannie upstairs to the senior homeroom, she told him that she lived on a farm with her parents on the Île d’Illusion. Île d’Illusion was bisected by the international border between Canada and the United States. Children from the half-dozen farms on the island had their choice of attending the French-speaking school in Magog, Quebec, or the Academy in Kingdom Common. Few went beyond the eighth grade, but Frannie had been fortunate. Her father’s older brother, Monsignor Lafleur, had invited her to board at the parish rectory in Magog and attend the Jesuit secondary school in that town. It had also been the Monsignor’s idea for his niece to spend her senior year at the Common Academy in order to polish her English.

  For as long as Jim could remember, senior homeroom had been held in the second-story science lab. This morning he and Frannie were the first students to arrive. The lab was furnished with Formica-topped tables and high stools instead of individual desks and chairs. It smelled of chemicals and musty animal mounts: a mangy Canada lynx, a great horned owl with fierce yellow eyes, a beaver gnawing on a poplar stick.

  Suddenly Frannie grabbed Jim’s arm. She was staring at the human skeleton dangling from a pole at the front of the room.

  “That’s just Pliny Templeton,” Jim said. “The Negro guy in the jump-rope rhyme. He founded the Academy. In his will he left his skeleton to the school.”

  “My mother tells me her grandmother may have been a Negro,” Frannie said. “She was born up the river in Canada, in the village that burned in the forest fire. Ma mère says that, except for my blue eyes, I look like this grandmother. Perhaps the evil girls jumping rope on the steps outside the school think so, too.”

  A little warily, Francine approached the bones. “How he receives these holes in his head, James Kinneson?”

  Francine’s eyes widened as Jim told her about the feud between his great-grandfather Mad Charlie Kinneson and the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton, ending with Pliny’s murder at the hands of his best friend.

  Francine shook her head. “I do not believe this story.”

  “You don’t believe Mad Charlie murdered Pliny? That’s why he’s known as Mad Charlie.”

  “Oh, I believe he murdered Pliny. But not over a piano, of all things. No, James. They quarreled over a woman. A very beautiful woman with whom they were both in love. I am certain of it.”

  “They were both old men at the time.”

  “Nevertheless. They fought over the love of a woman. But look, he is missing one hand. How is that?”

  Frannie listened intently as Jim told her the story Miss Jane had told him, how Pliny had chopped off his own hand with an ax to free himself and search for his wife, who had been sold down the river.

  “I knew it!” she said. “What did I tell you? Your Pliny was a man who gave everything for love. I intend to seat myself here, next to him. Perhaps I will become the new love of his life.”

  “I hope not,” Jim said before he knew he was going to.

  Francine smiled. Now her eyes were the lavender color of wood violets. She raised her dark eyebrows. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Will you sit beside me?”

  As Jim sat down, she opened her dictionary to the G section and began reading the first column of entries. From time to time her lips moved silently as she tried out an unfamiliar word.

  Jim realized that Frannie was memorizing Webster’s dictionary.

  * * *

  Each weekday in the dark before dawn, Francine rowed a homemade wooden boat across the water from the Île d’Illusion to the mainland. Near the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River, she caught the morning milk train to Kingdom Common. She returned to the dam again on the late-afternoon northbound local.

  Soon it became apparent that Francine was an outstanding student. Every day she mastered several pages of new words in her dictionary, which she carried with her everywhere. At a glance, she memorized entire scenes from King Lear and all of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” Using the entire blackboard, she outlined the principles of calculus to her senior math class.

  A year ago, Charlie’d given Jim his old truck. As the leaves began to turn that fall, Jim started meeting Frannie at the dam and driving her to school. After school they took long rides along the hilly back roads of the Kingdom to view the fall colors. Jim asked her to the annual Harvest Ball at the Academy, which she attended in a blue gown she’d made herself, appliquéd with the northern constellations.

  Jim canoed out to the island on weekends. Frannie Flower, as he’d begun to call her, was a born mimic, and captured perfectly Jim’s abstract expression when he was writing in his head. Even her parents seemed a little in awe of her. They called her their “fille mirabile,” a miracle daughter born to them long after they’d given up all hope of having a child.

  On a mild afternoon in mid-October Frannie took Jim to a glade on the knoll behind her house, overlooking a great sweep of the lake stretching far into Canada. In the clearing were nine lozenge-shaped cedar markers no more than a foot high and set close together, shoulder to shoulder, like meadow mushrooms sprung up after a summer rain. Carved into each of the wooden tablets was a name.

  “Voilà!” Frannie said. “My older brothers and sisters, James. Arrived in the world months before their time.”

  Frannie walked from one marker to the next, bending over and touching each one. “This one, Philippe. Had Philippe lived, I believe he would have become a great teacher. His little sister, Michelle. She, a wonderful mother. Regardez-vous, James. Ici est Jacques. A gifted fisherman, I think, like the Christ.”

  She moved on down the row of markers, inventing a vocation for each of her stillborn siblings. “Listen to me, James. Being a fille mirabile is not always so easy. Born to an ancient mother and father, the only child of ten to survive? I must now live for ten. This I have decided to do by becoming a doctor. I will combat the terrible diseases of the world. The cancer. The stroke. The miscarriages like those of ma mère. Now you know my great secret. What is yours?”

  Jim told her his plan to write the stories of the Kingdom. Frannie nodded. Then she took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes and for the first time they kissed, long and passionately, in the glade on the Île d’Illusion in the Lake of Beautiful and Treacherous Waters.

  * * *

  Jim loved sitting in the fall evenings beside Frannie at the plank table in her farmhouse kitchen, with its flagstone floor and great slate fireplace and smoky ceiling beams in which the adze strokes were still visible. Frannie had hand-painted local wildflowers around the tops of the white plaster walls, in the order of their blossoming: coltsfoot, spring beauties with lavender centers, paintbrush, daisies and brown-eyed Susans, chicory, cinquefoil, asters, and goldenrod. From the beams hung nets of onions and garlic bulbs from Madame Lafleur’s kitchen garden and, by their roots, medicinal herbs that Madame and Frannie picked in the nearby woods. Between the two south-facing kitchen windows, one of Frannie’s watercolors depicted the farmhouse with its Canadian-orange tile roof and the blue lake beyond, extending deep into Quebec between the mountains. Down the middle of the stone floor, from east to west, ran a straight black line representing the international border. During Prohibition, Réné La
fleur had operated a tavern out of the farmhouse. Customers could stand in the United States, on the south side of the black line, and order a whiskey or a beer. Then they could step across the line into Canada and legally drink it.

  On holidays Frannie’s uncle, the old Monsignor, visited. He and Réné sat at the kitchen table and drank quantities of Réné’s hard cider and reminisced about their whiskey-running days, smuggling boatloads of Canadian booze down the lake from Magog. When American revenuers raided the farmhouse, the young Lafleur brothers would sit on crates of Seagram’s and Molson’s on the Quebec side of the line and offer the G-men a free drink.

  Sometimes, to amuse Jim, Frannie would engage her uncle, the prelate, in theological disputation. “If I could, mon oncle, I would annihilate God’s henchman, Paul. Paul was a fraud, who changed his name from Saul, and invented a new religion. ‘Henchman,’ James?”

  Jim nodded. Frannie was up to the H’s in her dictionary.

  “Also, I would like to wipe from the face of the earth that crazed old John the Revelator.”

  “Mademoiselle!” Madame Lafleur said sharply.

  Réné smiled behind his hand. The Monsignor winked at Jim. “Saint Frannie of Memphremagog, our future physician, is proof against her own arguments, Jim. For all of her heresies, if your friend my niece is made in God’s image, God cannot possibly be as bad as she says, eh?”

  “I guess it takes a great deal of faith to be a believer, Father,” Jim said.

  “I would prefer to have a great deal of penicillin,” Frannie said. “To treat the mortal infections with which God has blessed us. Only consider, James. The good Christ had a great deal of faith. He had faith that his all-powerful father, the Caliph of Heaven, would protect him. Look where Christ’s faith got Him. Pinned up on a cross.”

  “What do you think Jesus would do if He came here to God’s Kingdom today?” the priest asked Frannie.