God's Kingdom Read online

  Gramp handed Jim his watch. They stood together near the edge of the water, watching the color in the east bleed higher up the sky, as if in defiance of gravity. “All right, then,” Gramp said. “Have a good hunt.”

  Gramp headed back toward the camp, moving in easy, even strides. Ahead, the reflection of the sunrise glowed crimson on the granite wall of Kingdom Mountain. Jim checked his rifle to make sure the safety was on. Then he started into the cedars. The flow crawled along through the swamp, bloodred in the spreading sunrise.

  * * *

  Jim cut the runner’s track twenty minutes later. He’d expected it to be impressively big, but when he first saw the deer’s prints in the snow under the cedars he thought they might belong to a moose. At the foot of the twin cliffs, where the dammed-up Dead Water passed through the notch, the deer had angled back up Kingdom Mountain on an ancient game trail. The wind was quartering from Jim toward the ridge runner. That was what he wanted. He wanted the big buck to know that he was on its trail, as long as he didn’t panic it into going to water and vanishing into Canada.

  Partway up the mountain, in a former log landing growing up to wild raspberries, the game trail forked. The more-traveled branch ran straight up over the mountain past the Balance Boulder. A lesser-used trace angled off to the south, traversing the mountainside high above the three ponds. The runner had taken the south branch.

  Jim knew this side of the mountain well from partridge hunting here with Gramp, and berrying in the summertime. It was steep and ledgy, with stiff, gray-green caribou moss growing on the floor of the forest. Twice that morning, from far off to the south, he heard the echoing boom of some other hunter’s rifle. While the ridge runner was now heading away from the flow and Canada, it occurred to Jim that he might drive the deer out of the woods in front of a weekend hunter like the down-country sports who stayed at the Common Hotel and ventured out to road hunt for a few hours in the middle of the day, hoping for a lucky shot at something with horns that they could put on the wall back home. When the runner turned off the game trail and headed down the snowy mountainside toward Pond Number Two, far from the lumber roads cruised by the weekend hunters, Jim was relieved.

  It began to snow. The buck had turned back to the north again, seeking shelter in a thick stand of black spruce trees between Two and Three. Jim came to a deer yard where the runner’s tracks mingled with the prints of other deer. Twice he lost its trail and had to backtrack. Even so, he was gaining on the animal. He picked up its deep tracks again along the boggy southern margin of Number Three. Here the two-pronged impressions were so recent that groundwater was still oozing into them. The water reminded Jim that he needed to drink more. He refilled his canteen from an icy rill coming off the mountainside. Nearby, he came to a place where the deer had lain down beside a brush pile. It was time to begin pushing the tiring buck. Jim checked the .30-30 to make sure that the safety was still on. Then he began to trot.

  The deer surprised Jim by passing less than a hundred yards behind the hunting camp, which sat empty-looking, its stovepipe smokeless, on the slope above Three. His grandfather and father and brother were miles away, each one looking for his own deer. They might not be back at camp until long after dark.

  Near the raspberry brake where the trail forked, the ridge runner had crossed the tracks of a smaller deer, a yearling doe or a young spikehorn. Ordinarily, a mature buck in rut would follow the smaller track, to breed the doe or chase off the spike. Not today. Today, knowing that it was being hunted, Jim’s deer took the trail up the mountain toward the timberline.

  On the edge of the tree line, just below the height of land, the deer had collapsed again in a miniature forest of ancient, wind-twisted spruce and fir trees no higher than Jim’s knees. As he approached, it sprang up and went crashing through the snow, its tail flashing like a white flag waved in surrender. But the runner was not yet ready to give up.

  The mountaintop above the timberline was strewn with mossy boulders. The largest of these was the almost perfectly round Balance Boulder, a huge glacial erratic. To Jim it looked like a gigantic, dark bowling ball. The runner was standing at the base of the great round boulder, its legs trembling from fear or exhaustion or both. In the westering sun, hazy through a film of crystalline snowflakes, the animal was as red as it had been in its summer coat when Jim and Gramp had come upon it drinking from the pond back in August. One of its antler points had been snapped off, probably in combat with another buck. The runner squatted and peed nervously, its legs shaking, as Jim slowly approached it.

  Jim raised his rifle. His hands on the stock and trigger guard were as steady as the granite outcropping on the mountaintop. His heartbeat seemed to slow as he thumbed off the safety. Before the boy knew he was going to do it, he lowered the rifle. He thumbed on the safety and jacked each of the five brass-jacketed shells out of the chamber onto the mossy rocks at his feet.

  The deer stood motionless as Jim raised the rifle again, flipped off the safety, aimed at the animal’s chest, and pressed the trigger. On the silent mountaintop in the sunset, the click of the firing pin falling on the empty chamber sounded louder than it was. Jim lowered his gun and took a few steps and the ridge runner was gone, off down the far side of the mountain toward the big lake where Jim’s Abenaki ancestors had once fished for salmon. Jim thought about the Indians celebrating their catch by firelight, unaware of Charles I and the Rangers crossing the rapids just upriver. As the sun rested on the peaks far to the west, and the Balance Boulder glowed red in its reflection, Jim turned to head back down the mountain, and saw Gramp standing behind him in the clearing, the unspent shells from Jim’s rifle gleaming in his hand.

  * * *

  On the way down the mountainside in the snowy dusk, they jumped a spikehorn stripping the bark from a moose maple, and Jim shot it cleanly through the heart. Probably it was the same young deer whose tracks he’d cut late that afternoon in the raspberry brake.

  “Well, son,” the editor said when Jim and Gramp dragged the spike into the camp yard at twilight, “that young skipper wasn’t what you were looking for, but it will get you blooded just as quickly.”

  “Don’t feel bad, bub,” Charlie said. “Your runner isn’t going anywhere. He’ll be there for you next year.”

  “He made a fine, running shot on the spike,” Gramp said. “No buck fever. I call this a good hunt.”

  In the morning Charlie and the editor hunted the edge of the Dead Water for a few hours. Jim and Gramp caught a mess of out-of-season trout for chowder. Jim split wood and filled the woodbox for whoever came to God’s Kingdom next. He recorded his deer in the camp journal:

  Shot a spikehorn on Kingdom Mountain. J. Kinneson III, Nov. 28, 1952.

  That afternoon Charlie rowed the editor across the three ponds in the bateau. Gramp and Jim paddled out behind them in the Old Town. The spike lay in the bottom of the canoe, its head lolling over the gunnel. Jim hadn’t mentioned the ridge runner and neither had Gramp. What had taken place on the mountaintop would remain there.

  It was snowing again when they reached Charlie’s rig, the flakes beginning to collect on the spike’s dark winter coat. Jim rode in back with his deer and the Old Town.

  Snow was still falling that evening when Charlie and Gramp and the editor drove Jim and his deer around the village green three times in Charlie’s truck, horn honking, in a procession of half a dozen other pickups carrying boys who had shot their first deer and been blooded by the oldest hunter in their family. Gramp had dipped his index and middle fingers into the cut in the spike’s throat where they’d bled it out and painted two stripes down Jim’s cheeks and two more across his forehead. Jim felt proud and a little self-conscious to be paraded around the green. He hoped that, in the years to come, he would have many more good hunts in God’s Kingdom with his grandfather and father and brother, but he knew in his heart that this would be the last deer he would ever kill.

  2

  White Knights

  During the
War Between the States, we sometimes amused ourselves with a version of One Old Cat we called “Base-ball.” I later introduced the game to Kingdom Common, where we created what I believe was the first baseball “diamond” in New England.

  —PLINY TEMPLETON

  “The Knights need a teetotaler driver tomorrow, Jimbo,” Harlan Kittredge said. “Are you a teetotaler?”

  It was the evening of June 20. Tomorrow the White Knights of Temperance, formerly the Kingdom County Outlaws, were headed to Boston to catch the twin bill between the Sox and the Yankees. They’d gotten together tonight at the Common Hotel to put the finishing touches on their plans for the trip.

  At fifteen, Jim Kinneson, the Knights’ shortstop and leadoff hitter, was the team’s youngest player. Unsure what a teetotaler was, Jim looked over the top of his orange Nehi at his older brother, Charlie, for assistance. Charlie was ogling Miss Pinky, the girl singer in the hotel band. A cat-eyed crooner out of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with a voice like a rusty yard pump, Miss Pinky could belt out “If You’ve Got the Money, Honey” loudly enough to be heard all the way from the hotel barroom to the United Church at the far end of the village green. For months Charlie had been begging her to accompany him on an all-expenses-paid romantic weekend in Montreal. In fact, the entire baseball team was in love with Pinky. Jim was infatuated with her himself.

  At present Miss Pinky and her fiddle player were taping a cardboard sign over the bar. It said, “We Still Love You, Hank.” Miss P had hand-lettered it with a red crayon in tribute to the late, great Hank Williams, who, at just twenty-nine, had died this past New Year’s Day. That was the day the Outlaws had taken the pledge and changed the team’s name. Right here in the hotel barroom, with Armand St. Onge, the proprietor, as a witness, the boys had raised their right hands and solemnly sworn to let the hard stuff alone for an entire year. Beer was still permissible. It was a well-known fact, at least to the Knights, that you couldn’t become an alkie like Hank on beer. Even Armand said so and he should know. Armand drank two six-packs of Black Label every weeknight and three apiece on Saturday and Sunday.

  Still, suds and long-distance driving didn’t mix. If the Knights were to get to Boston tomorrow, they needed a sober driver. Jim didn’t drink beer or hard stuff. According to Charlie, the team’s attorney and catcher, the fact that Jim didn’t have his driver’s license yet was immaterial. Like most other teenagers in the Kingdom, Jim had been driving for years.

  Miss P shimmied her way over to Jim and Charlie’s table and shut one eye and surveyed the “We Still Love You, Hank” sign to see if it was plumb. She had long dark hair down her back and a complexion the color of Armand’s black-cherry bar. She was tall and slender and sang with a Cajun accent. The fact that she was the only Yankees fan in Kingdom Common made her even more exotic.

  Armand stepped up to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “straight from the Lou’siane bayou, Mademoiselle Pinky, dark as chocolate and just as sweet.”

  Pinky rolled her eyes as the boys hooted and stomped. The fiddler played a bar of “Jole Blon” while she adjusted the mic.

  “Listen, all y’all,” Pinky croaked in a voice like a swamp bittern. “Whichever one you alkies bring me back a baseball signed by Joe DiMaggio, I’ll take you up on that weekend in Montreal.”

  She pointed a long finger straight at Jim and winked. “That include you, hotshot.”

  * * *

  Snub-nosed and hunch-shouldered, the team bus sat in the hotel parking lot in the mountain dawn. It had formerly belonged to an automobile junkyard dealer from Pond in the Sky whom Charlie had gotten off the hook for possession of stolen property. The dealer had paid Charlie in kind with the property in question. The words “Burlington Transit Company” could still be faintly discerned on the side of the bus where the junkyard owner had tried to sand them off.

  Harlan Kittredge had painted the team’s new name just below the imperfectly deleted “Burlington Transit Company.” In fire-engine-red letters a foot high Harlan had inscribed the words “White Nights of Temprance.” Someone, probably Charlie, had added an inebriated-looking “K” in front of “Nights.” No one had bothered to correct the “Temprance.”

  The bus had a new name of its own: the Ark of the Covenant. It had been conferred by Charlie in commemoration of the vow the boys had made to leave the hard stuff alone.

  They headed out just after five A.M. Jim had been practicing for the trip by driving the Ark to away games. Shifting through its six forward gears was the biggest challenge. “Shift!” the boys hollered as the Ark headed south between the village green and the brick shopping block. Jim mashed down on the metal clutch pedal and ratcheted up the floor shift to the next gear.

  At the end of the brick block, Jim’s dad, Editor Charles Kinneson, was unlocking the door of The Kingdom County Monitor. He glanced over his shoulder at the bus but didn’t wave. The editor was down on the Sox because they hadn’t yet broken the color barrier in Boston by signing on a Negro player. Neither, for that matter, had the Yankees. Jim’s dad hadn’t told him that he couldn’t go to Boston with the Knights, but Jim knew that he didn’t approve of the trip.

  Jim’s only disappointment was that he would miss seeing Ted Williams play. Ted was serving his country in Korea. Seeing Joe DiMaggio would be the next best thing, even if he was a damn Yankee. In Jim’s jacket pocket was a brand-new, official American League baseball Charlie’d given him for his fifteenth birthday. If they arrived at Fenway in time for batting practice, Joltin’ Joe might sign Jim’s baseball for Miss Pinky.

  * * *

  At the south edge of town, just before the dead man’s curve and the junction with U.S. Route 5, the “Welcome to Kingdom Common” sign stood shrouded in mist off the Lower Kingdom River. Good, Jim thought, as he shifted down for the hairpin bend. He detested the welcome sign, which went on to proclaim, in tall black letters, “Home of the Kingdom Common Academy Catamounts, 1947 Division Four State Baseball Runners-up.” As though to notify all visitors to the Common, and remind villagers on a daily basis, that the Academy teams hadn’t won any title at all for six years and even then the baseball team had just been runners-up, and in lowly Division IV at that. This coming season, Jim thought. This coming season, the following season at the latest, that was going to change.

  Again Jim shifted down, and the ancient transit bus shuddered as it started into the sharp curve. This past New Year’s Day, after word of Hank Williams’s death had come through to the Common, Charlie and Harlan Kittredge had decided to race their pickups to Hank’s funeral in Montgomery, Alabama. Whoever reached Montgomery first would win a one-hundred-dollar pot, to be put up by the other boys on their baseball team. Harlan and Charlie had gotten just this far, the dead man’s curve, before the race ended unceremoniously, in an eight-foot snowbank, less than a quarter of a mile from their starting point in the hotel parking lot.

  Jim’s brother and Harlan had been fortunate. Over the years there had been several bad wrecks at the curve. A decade ago, a carload of kids from the Academy, returning from a drinking binge across the border in Canada, had skidded into the dead man’s curve from Route 5 at a high rate of speed. They’d hit black ice and rolled off into the river. Three of the young people had been killed, including a second cousin of Jim and Charlie’s. Going drinking at roadhouses across the border was a rite of passage during Jim’s youth. Even after the three fatalities at the dead man’s curve, local parents tended to look the other way when it came to underage drinking. After all, they’d gone drinking to Canada themselves when they were teenagers. How could they tell their kids not to?

  A mile south of town, the long-abandoned Water of Life whiskey distillery slumped into an overgrown field between the Boston and Montreal railroad tracks and the Lower Kingdom River. The roofs of the malting sheds had collapsed. The whiskey-barrel mill beside the penstock on the river looked as though it might topple into the river at any moment. Jim’s great-great-great-grandfather Charles Kinneson I ha
d brought the family recipe for the Water of Life whiskey to America from Scotland. For decades before the Civil War the Kinnesons had used every penny from their distillery to support the cause of abolition, but despite the humanitarian purpose to which the proceeds were put, Jim’s father, Editor Kinneson, blamed the astronomical present-day rate of alcoholism in God’s Kingdom squarely on the family business. As the editor pointed out, it was Kinneson whiskey that Charles I’s Rangers had drunk before massacring the Abenaki fishing party and cutting off their heads. Then, of course, there was the sipping perquisite. Pliny Templeton had written about it in his Ecclesiastical and Natural History. In accordance with this privilege, workers at the distillery and barrel factory were allowed a dram of whiskey before starting work in the morning, another at noon, and yet another at the end of the day. Also they enjoyed the perquisite of sipping, while at work, all the raw whiskey they could hold and still complete their task. Dad said that even after Prohibition came in and the distillery finally shut its doors, as much illegal whiskey was made in God’s Kingdom as in any remote hollow of Kentucky or West Virginia.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jim headed south out of the Landing along Lake Kingdom. Lake Kingdom was sometimes known as Runaway Lake. Lying in a five-mile-long glacial bowl on the height of land dividing the St. Lawrence and Connecticut River watersheds, the lake had originally drained south to St. Johnsbury, then into the Connecticut and, eventually, Long Island Sound. At just eighteen years old, Jim’s great-grandfather Charles Kinneson II had undertaken, with a crew of men from the distillery, well lubricated with hundred-and-ten-proof Water of Life, to dig a new outlet through a huge natural sand dike at the opposite, north end of Lake Kingdom. Charles’s design was to increase the flow of water through the penstock of the whiskey-barrel factory on the Lower Kingdom River, which dwindled to little more than a brook nearly every summer. The ensuing flood, when they breached the natural dam, washed away, besides the first distillery and the barrel mill, several farmsteads in the Lower Kingdom Valley. The green in Kingdom Common lay under six feet of water, and the Landing, then located at the original outlet at the south end of the lake, was left with no water power to turn its half dozen gristmills and sawmills. Some of the buildings—the livery, the hotel, the one-room school, and several houses—were jacked onto rafts and winched up the lake to the new outlet at the north end. But the townspeople and millers of Kingdom Landing never did get over their anger toward Charles II, and the Common, for stranding their town high and dry, and the animosity between the two villages had continued to simmer up to the present.