God's Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  During the opening exercises Jim looked around at the white wainscot paneling and plain glass windows decreed by his stern Presbyterian ancestors. How many hundreds of tedious hours had he spent sitting on these hard wooden pews? Whoever invented church had done boys no favor. Moreover, the United Church of Kingdom Common had a particularly unsettling feature left over from its Presbyterian days. Suspended from the ceiling over the pulpit on a long metal rod was a most curious acoustical device known as a sounding board. The board was actually a hollow wooden box, about six feet in diameter and a foot deep, octagonal-shaped, with holes an inch apart drilled in its top, bottom, and sides. Its purpose was to amplify the minister’s voice. The sounding board was affixed to the base of the rod by a carved wooden hand gripping a brass handle and known as the “Hand of God.” Though very exact and lifelike, the hand had an otherworldly, genderless eeriness about it. The Hand of God, which was rumored to have carved itself, looked like a hand that would very gladly smite down an infidel city or two, much less an inattentive congregant. Anyone who doubted it needed only to read the legend carved into the outward-facing side panel of the sounding board:

  The Board casts the Dominie’s voice on high,

  But should that Cleric tell a lie,

  The Hand of God lets go.

  The Board descends on the man below.

  The Dominie dies.

  Although Jim was no longer afraid of the Hand of God or of the sounding board, he detested them both, and viewed them as emblematic of everything that was harsh and rigid about the beliefs of his ancestors. Why the church trustees hadn’t removed them decades ago he couldn’t imagine.

  The graduation ceremony began with a lengthy invocation in which Pastor John Wesley Kittredge, who disapproved of young people in general and teenagers in particular, gave the graduates and God alike some stern marching orders. Next came the presentation of a framed citation to Prof, who was retiring after forty years as headmaster of the Academy. A few modest local scholarships were awarded. Lizzy Kittredge won the Daughters of the American Revolution Scholarship. Jim had to smile. He knew from Pliny’s History of Kingdom County that the first local Kittredges were Tories who’d fled Massachusetts in 1776. They’d settled in the Kingdom supposing that they’d reached Canada and sanctuary. No mention was made of the Templeton Award.

  It was time for Frannie’s valedictory. Prof introduced her by announcing that she was the best student he’d ever taught, and congratulating her on her scholarship to study at McGill. As she approached the pulpit, the entire class of 1956 rose and applauded. She did not seem to have a prepared text to speak from but was carrying her dictionary.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et monsieurs,” Frannie began. “My fellow graduates, parents, families, and guests. I would like to introduce you to a dear friend. Un moment, s’il vous plaît.”

  Frannie walked across the dais and drew aside a plain dark curtain. Next to the sideboard where the communion service was stored stood what looked like a tall birdcage covered with a white sheet. Frannie carried the sheeted object back across the dais and set it down beside the pulpit.

  “Voilà!” she said, and whipped off the sheet. Dangling from its pole was the skeleton of Pliny Templeton.

  Frannie stepped behind the pulpit and opened her dictionary to a page near the back. “‘Valedictory,’” she read. “‘A farewell address.’ The title of this year’s farewell address is ‘God’s Kingdom.’ I believe that the term was coined by our good friend here, the Reverend Dr. Templeton himself. So I pose to you a question. Who, exactly, was Pliny Templeton?”

  Frannie paused, giving the people gathered in the church a moment to consider her question. “As we all know, Pliny was born into slavery. At about the age of thirty, with the help of Charles Kinneson II, the man who would become his closest friend and great benefactor”—Frannie smiled and tapped her dictionary—“he made his way north to freedom on the Underground Railway. Here in Vermont, again with the assistance of Charles, Pliny became the first Negro to graduate from an American college. Congratulations, Dr. T!”

  Frannie removed her mortarboard and placed it on the skeleton’s skull. From the pews, scattered chuckles and a smattering of applause.

  “After receiving his Doctor of Divinity degree from the seminary at Princeton, Dr. Templeton assumed this very pulpit, as minister of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Kingdom Common. He founded, built, and was the first headmaster of the Kingdom Common Academy. He went to the Civil War as Chaplain of the Vermont 142nd Regiment. At the Battle of Gettysburg he seized a fallen officer’s sword and helped beat back Pickett’s charge.”

  From a shelf in the pulpit Frannie produced a military-style kepi from the Civil War era. She set the kepi on top of Pliny’s mortarboard and snapped off a smart salute. This time the laughter and applause were general.

  “After the war, Pliny introduced the sport of baseball to Kingdom Common. On the village green he laid out the first baseball diamond in New England. ‘Baseball Pliny,’ he was called.”

  Frannie reached into the pulpit again, like a magician reaching into a hat. This time she pulled out Jim’s ball cap, which she balanced on top of the kepi and mortarboard on Pliny’s skull.

  “During Reconstruction, Dr. T returned to the South with some of his own students and established schools for freed slaves. He even found time to write a great book, The Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County.”

  Frannie turned to address the skeleton directly. “You did indeed wear many hats, Monsieur Templeton. Preacher, teacher, soldier, scholar. You were each of those and more. And yet, though you told in your History the entire story of the place you named ‘God’s Kingdom,’ you recorded almost none of your own history. You never wrote the story we wanted most to hear: your own.

  “Why did you never tell your story?” Frannie said. “Were you ashamed of your early life as a slave? It would not be surprising if you had been. Was that not one of the chief aims of that most wicked of all human institutions? To shame its victims?”

  Frannie regarded the skeleton in the three hats. She shook her head. “I think, Dr. Templeton, that you were not ashamed. You were, after all, a proud man, and a brave man. Why, then, your silence about yourself? I believe that I know the answer. I believe that you felt that if you were to succeed with your great works here in God’s Kingdom, you would need to pass for white. Correct me if I am mistaken.”

  Frannie held out her hands palms up, inviting the skeleton to correct her. She turned to the audience. “You see, mes amis. He remains silent.

  “Of course, Dr. T, years after your death, when the university found it convenient to claim you as America’s first Negro graduate in order to aggrandize their own reputation, they were quick enough to do so. They even established a scholarship in your name. Yet you, Pliny, felt unable to claim yourself. And in that assumption you were undoubtedly correct. A place settled as the result of the massacre of a band of unarmed Indians? A place that stood by and did nothing to prevent the annihilation of an entire community of fugitive slaves? A place that built a great towering dam in order to flood and conceal the evidence of where those former slaves were murdered? To be sure, Pliny, everyone in God’s Kingdom knew very well that, like the residents of New Canaan, you, too, were a Negro. One glance at you would have told them as much. This we know from your handsome portrait in the lobby of the Academy. But as long as the matter of your race never came up, God’s Kingdom was willing to look the other way because you were useful to them. And then, in your ancient years, after you had served out your usefulness, you were killed, for reasons we can only guess at, by the very man who helped raise you from slavery.

  “Mesdames et monsieurs. It may be presumptuous”—Frannie gave her Webster’s another pat—“it may be ‘excessively forward’ of me, a ‘Black French’ girl from the so-called Indian Island, with not only Abenaki but very possibly Negro blood running through my own veins, a girl greeted on the ste
ps of Pliny’s school last fall as a ‘nigger from Niggerville,’ to speak on behalf of Vermont. So be it. I will not do so. But while Frannie Lafleur may not be a Vermonter or even, in the opinion of some in this church, an American, her ancestry here in God’s Kingdom goes back not just to the Revolution, and its daughters and sons, but thousands of years before that. So, Dr. Templeton, on behalf of God’s Kingdom, I apologize to you. We apologize to you. God’s Kingdom begs your forgiveness for forcing you to deny and ignore your own identity.”

  A faint breeze found its way into the church through the leaky window casements. Click. Pliny’s feet tapped together like the most delicate of billiard shots. Otherwise, the church was as silent as the forests of God’s Kingdom on a windless midnight in January.

  Frannie pointed upward, at the sounding board suspended above her by the unearthly Hand of God. “If one word that I have spoken to you today is a lie, may the Hand of God release its grip this instant.”

  From the church pews came a collective gasp. In the ensuing stillness, Frannie waited for perhaps ten seconds. Then she said, “Merci, and farewell,” and rejoined her classmates.

  Pastor John Wesley Kittredge offered the age-old benediction. “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His light to shine upon you.” At a signal from Prof, the seniors rose and walked down the aisle and out of the church.

  Graduation was over.

  * * *

  It was dusk in God’s Kingdom. The lake lay still in the twilight. Half a mile off shore, the Île d’Illusion came and went in the mist. Somewhere nearby, a large fish broke the surface.

  “Now then, James Kinneson,” Frannie said. “My summer classes at McGill start not tomorrow but the day after. In the morning I depart on the train for Montreal. I intend to complete my undergraduate studies in three years. Perhaps in two. Then on to medical school. You, meanwhile, will attend the state university. Pliny’s university. There you will continue to write the stories of God’s Kingdom. If you do not”—she shook an imaginary poker in the air— “Our Merciful Savior!”

  She threw her arms around Jim’s neck and kissed him. Then she got into her boat and began rowing. She disappeared in the mist, appeared again briefly, vanished altogether. For a minute Jim could hear the creak of her oarlocks. Then nothing.

  Jim stood alone on the lakeshore. He hoped that he and Frannie Lafleur might eventually find a way to be together, but he knew, at eighteen, that the future was as invisible as Mirage Island. For now, all he could do was drive back to the village and return Pliny’s skeleton to the science room at the Academy, as he’d promised Frannie he would do. Like graduation, his senior year lay behind him.

  12

  God’s Kingdom

  God’s Kingdom? I thought they called it that because only God would want the place.

  —CHARLES KINNESON, EDITOR,

  The Kingdom County Monitor

  Jim pulled out of the dooryard of the farm that wasn’t in the pale light before the sun. It was Labor Day in God’s Kingdom, and he was on his way over the mountains to the university.

  The wild asters and goldenrod in the meadow along the river, where four years ago he’d encountered Gaëtan Dubois and his parents, were just acquiring color in the dawn. The river was invisible in its own fog, but the swamp maples along its banks were already showing sprays of red. Soon the brook trout would don their matrimonial attire, in preparation for their annual fall spawning ritual.

  For Jim it had been a busy, lonely summer. To take his mind off Frannie, he’d thrown himself into his work at the Monitor. In addition to the constant round of selectmen’s and school board meetings, court arraignments, fairs and old-home days, car wrecks, and ball games on the common—“Outlaws Remain Undefeated with 10-1 Win over Pond in the Sky”—not to mention the appearance on the village green of a snapping turtle as big around as a washtub with “Charles Kinneson 1765” carved into its shell (Jim detected his brother Charlie’s handiwork in the date and signature), there had been several unexpected developments to cover over the short northern summer.

  In late June, the Common and its longtime enemy, Kingdom Landing, had voted to build a new consolidated high school midway between the rival villages. No one in God’s Kingdom had ever imagined that such a thing could happen. Two weeks later, all passenger service on the Boston and Montreal Line running through the Common was terminated. Jim could see the time coming when rail freight service would end as well. There was talk of the Eisenhower interstate system reaching the Kingdom, and a ski resort on Jay Peak.

  One morning in early August, Mr. Arthur Anderson keeled over at his desk at the factory. His sons, who ran the firm’s sister plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania, shut down the mill on the day of their father’s funeral. It never reopened. “Closed,” the sign on the roof read.

  Pliny Templeton had written in his great book that in the Kingdom, all history was Kinneson family history. Over the summer Jim had done a series of articles for the Monitor on his ancestors. He’d written about the massacre of the Abenaki Indians by his great-great-great grandfather Charles Kinneson I, and the defeat and death of Charles I’s son, the secessionist James, at the second-longest covered bridge in the world in 1836. Another article chronicled Charles II’s rerouting of the outlet of Lake Kingdom. Yet another described the burning of New Canaan and three million acres of border country by the Ku Klux Klan.

  Jim’s favorite piece was the three-part biography he’d written of Pliny Templeton himself. A condensed version had been syndicated by the Associated Press. Jim hoped someday to write a novel about Pliny.

  He crossed the red iron bridge and came into the Common on the county road. As he headed south between the east side of the village green and the Academy, he noticed a light in the headmaster’s office. On impulse, he pulled into one of the diagonal parking slots in front of the playground. As Jim walked up the granite steps of the school, it seemed just yesterday that he’d first seen Frannie, standing on the bottom step in her dress of many colors and narrowing her eyes at the jump-rope girls.

  The front door was propped open with a cardboard box containing several framed photographs and plaques that Jim recognized. Down the hallway, in his former office, Prof was cleaning out his desk. “Hey, there, Jim,” he said. “I should have done this months ago. You on your way to future fame and fortune this a of m?”

  Jim grinned at his old friend. “I’m on my way somewhere. You mind if I slip upstairs and say so long to Dr. T?”

  “I don’t mind and it wouldn’t matter if I did,” Prof said. “Congrats again on your scholarship. Hit ’em hard, son.”

  They shook hands and Jim went on down the dim hall and upstairs to the science room. Thanks, Dr. Templeton. Thanks for your school. Later, Jim wasn’t sure whether he’d spoken the words aloud or just thought them.

  Jim continued along the upper corridor from the science lab to his favorite room in the Academy. The library smelled excitingly of well-read old books. On the lectern next to the librarian’s desk sat Pliny’s wonder-book. Jim began to page through the manuscript. It occurred to him that he might be doing this to put off his departure from the village.

  On some pages Pliny had drawn a line through a sentence or paragraph. Here and there he’d inked in a revision. The old headmaster had even made what he’d evidently deemed an improvement to the legend he’d copied from the sounding board above the pulpit. The first three lines, written in the same jet-black ink as the rest of the manuscript, remained unaltered:

  The Board casts the Dominie’s voice on high.

  But should that Cleric tell a lie,

  The Hand of God lets go.

  The last two lines—“The Board descends on the man below. The Dominie dies”—had been struck out, then revised in blue ink, to read:

  The Board splits apart on the pulpit below.

  There end all lies.

  To Jim the revision seemed out of sync with the rest of the legend. “There end all lies” was less momentous than
“The Dominie dies.”

  “See Genealogy,” Pliny’d written in the margin beside the revised lines. But all that remained of the genealogy at the end of the bound manuscript was a jagged strip of paper where the page had been torn out of the book. Why? Why, for that matter, would “all lies end” if the sounding board were to shatter apart on the pulpit of the church? There was a way to find out.

  * * *

  In those years in God’s Kingdom, no church door was ever locked. A church was a sanctuary. If a member of the congregation needed to go there to pray, no matter the hour of the day or night, the church needed to be open. If a traveler came through town, even a hobo or a bindle stiff off the railroad, the church door must be unlocked.

  The eight-foot stepladder used to dust the woodwork around the tall windows stood on the bottom landing of the belfry, where it was kept when not in use. In the cabinet under the sink of the basement kitchen, Jim located a claw hammer. The ladder and hammer should be all he needed.

  A layer of dust coated the top of the sounding board and the carved hand gripping the brass handle. To Jim there was still something deeply disturbing about the Hand of God. He was tempted to smash the thing to bits with his hammer.

  Instead, he steadied the wooden box from below with his left hand, wedged the hammer claw under one of the top boards, and began to pry the board upward. The square-headed nails shrieked in protest as they pulled away from the checked pine wood. Jim reached inside the box and felt something smooth. In order to remove it, he had to wrench up another board with the hammer claw.

  It was a leather-covered briefcase. Embossed on its side in gold letters were the words “To the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton in Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kingdom Common Academy.” Over time, the metal hasps of the case had tarnished, but with a little pressure they snapped open. Inside was a sheaf of papers bound together with a slender cord. They appeared to be the same high-quality vellum as Pliny’s manuscript. The elegant, copperplate handwriting was almost certainly the headmaster’s.