God's Kingdom Page 3

  As the bus crested the height of land and started down the long slope toward St. Johnsbury, the boys began singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The song petered out at eighty-five bottles. The night before, planning the drive to Fenway, the boys had closed down the hotel barroom. This morning they had frequent recourse to the team’s water bucket and dipper.

  Jim knew that even Dad drank a cold one at the hotel barroom now and then with his cronies Judge Allen and Doc Harrison and Prof Chadburn. Maybe what the boys said was true. Maybe you couldn’t become an alcoholic like Hank Williams on beer. Jim himself couldn’t claim any credit for not drinking. He didn’t like the taste of beer, or whiskey either, and he didn’t like the way it made him feel. If the other players wanted to drink, that was their business. They were, as some of them liked to say, “free, white, and twenty-one.” Jim didn’t much like the phrase, but so far as it went he supposed it was true. As long as he was doing the driving, he didn’t really care how much the boys drank.

  * * *

  “Just Ahead, Second-Longest Covered Bridge in the World.”

  “Swing in there, Jimbo,” Harlan said, pointing at the pull-off beyond the sign. “Pit stop.”

  Jim nosed the Ark into the pull-off beside a green trash barrel. He got out and stretched. Across the river in New Hampshire the sun was just coming up behind the White Mountains. While the boys went down to pee in the river, Jim read the historical marker beside the entrance of the bridge:

  THIS COVERED BRIDGE OVER THE UPPER CONNECTICUT RIVER WAS BUILT BY JAMES KINNESON IN 1789. IN 1812, “ABOLITION JIM” RALLIED A CONTINGENT OF LOCAL LOGGERS, TRAPPERS, ABENAKI INDIANS, AND FARMERS AND DECLARED THE INDEPENDENCE OF “GOD’S KINGDOM” FROM VERMONT AND THE UNITED STATES OVER THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY. IN 1842, IN A DAYLONG BATTLE AT THIS BRIDGE, JAMES AND EIGHT OF HIS FELLOW SECESSIONISTS WERE KILLED BY FEDERAL SOLDIERS SENT FROM BOSTON TO PUT DOWN THE INSURRECTION, AND KINGDOM COUNTY WAS DULY REINCORPORATED INTO AMERICA.

  It seemed strange to Jim to read his own name on the marker. It was almost like reading about his own death.

  “I guess old James was pretty independent-minded,” Jim said to Charlie.

  Charlie laughed. “He was pretty crazy,” he said. “Now you know where I get it from.”

  “Well, looky there, boys,” Harlan said, coming back up the bank tugging at his fly. He pointed at an ad painted in white over the arched entryway of the bridge: “Whittemore’s Country Store, 1 Mile Ahead in Woodsville, N.H. Coldest Beer in the Granite State.”

  “They sell beer at Fenway, Harley,” Charlie said.

  “It’s still early in the forenoon, Charlie K. We’ve got what, seven hours to get there? We’ll put her to a vote.”

  The Knights voted fifteen to two, Charlie and Jim dissenting, to make a beer run to Woodsville. Harlan would direct the Ark across the bridge while Jim drove.

  Harlan walked backward into the bridge, holding his arms out at eye level and waggling his fingers for Jim to come ahead. Suddenly there was an incredibly loud crunching noise, followed by the clatter of falling timbers and beams as the entryway of the second-longest covered bridge in the world collapsed onto the roof of the bus.

  Jim tried to throw the shifting lever into reverse. Instead he hit first again. His Ked slipped off the clutch and the Ark gave a bound forward. Jim twisted the steering wheel to avoid Harlan. The bus smacked into the north wall of the bridge, knocking some boards down into the river. Finally Jim located reverse. The bus bucked sideways and the black shifting knob came off in his hand. The Ark was wedged diagonally across the bridge with its back wheels and three feet of its rear end hanging out over the river.

  Standing in a jackstraw heap of beams and timbers, Harlan nodded. “Yes, sir, gentlemen,” he said.

  “One thing now,” Harlan said as the Knights got out to assess their handiwork. “This ain’t young Jim here’s fault. Nothing would do but we must make a beer run. I was directing. I checked for width but never looked up. This ain’t on Jim’s head.”

  The boys agreed that Jim was in no way responsible for destroying the bridge. Charlie said they should call for a tow truck. He dispatched Cousin Stub Kinneson to a nearby farm on the Vermont side of the river to put in the call. Harlan and the Riendeau brothers volunteered to slope across the river to Whittemore’s Country Store and fetch back a case or two of the coldest beer in the Granite State.

  Jim walked down the bank and stood beside the river. In the deep pool under the bridge a school of suckers flashed their reddish fins as they scavenged their way along the sandy bottom. Downriver a hundred yards the Boston and Montreal railroad tracks crossed the river on a high trestle. The tow truck would have to arrive soon for the Knights to make batting practice at Fenway.

  Harlan and the Riendeaus showed up with eight cases of Black Label in a blue wheelbarrow. Harlan eyed a notice tacked to a soft maple tree near the trash barrel: “Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages Prohibited within 100 Feet of National Monument.” Harlan peered inside the trash barrel, then turned it upside down and dumped some sandwich wrappers and empty pop bottles over the bank. He shouldered the barrel, carried it down to the river, and sozzled it out. He brought the barrel back up the bank, got out his church key, and began opening the bottles of Black Label and pouring their contents into the barrel.

  “We’ll drink turn and turn about out of the water dipper,” Harlan explained. “In case anybody comes along.”

  Cousin Stub returned from the farmhouse to report that the Woodsville wrecker was down for transmission repairs. He’d tried Bradford but couldn’t get through. Finally he’d gotten hold of White River. The White River wrecker was out on call but would be up as soon as it got back.

  “Hark. I do believe I hear the sound of a si-reen,” Harlan said.

  Jim heard the siren, too, from across the river. It was coming their way.

  A white Ford sedan with blue flashers and “Town of Woodsville Constable” stenciled on the driver’s door in red pulled up to the far side of the second-longest covered bridge in the world. A rotund man in a blue uniform and a blue hat with a black chinstrap got out and started across the bridge.

  Jim could feel his heart going faster. Maybe the accident wasn’t his fault, but he’d been driving at the time.

  “What’s all this about?” the constable said. “Didn’t you fellas see the load limit sign?”

  The officer looked into the barrel. “Have you boys been drinking?”

  “Certainly not,” Harlan said. “We’ve all tooken the pledge. Our driver, Jim Kinneson here, is sober as a judge.”

  The policeman surveyed the Knights from under the brim of his hat. “There’s no drinking within one hundred feet of the bridge,” he said. “It’s a national monument, up on the historical register. I’m afraid I’ve got to write you boys up.”

  Traffic was beginning to back up on the Vermont side of the river. The driver of a milk truck with Massachusetts plates laid on his horn, then backed up the hill and turned around in the farmer’s barnyard. An older couple from Mississippi stopped to read the historical marker. They stared at the bus trapped on the bridge. “Look at this,” the man said to his wife. He pointed at a flyer tacked to the bridge beside the entryway:

  Minstrel show, 7 P.M., July 4, Kingdom Common Town Hall. Music, skits, Amos ’n’ Andy, Walkin’ for de Cake. Admission two dollars, chirren under 12 free.

  The woman from Mississippi shook her head. “Vermont,” she said to her husband.

  Three carloads of PONY League ballplayers on their way from Bradford to a game in North Conway began to chant, “Throw the cop in the river.”

  “Here, now,” the policeman said, putting away his citation book. “You boys want the truth, I’m just a part-time constable, weekends and evenings. Mainly, I’m a Hoover repairman.”

  The morning was wearing away. There was no word from the towing service in White River. Jim overheard Harlan tell Charlie that Boston might be out the window.

  T
he PONY League team took their lunch down beside the river and had a picnic. Afterward they played flies and grounders in the farmer’s cow pasture. Charlie arranged with their coach for the White Knights of Temperance to play them, the Knights to bat left-handed. The part-time constable agreed to umpire from behind the pitcher. By the second inning the Knights were down 16–0.

  In the top of the fourth inning the farmer appeared to report that the first game at Fenway was in the seventh-inning stretch. The Yankees were ahead 7–2.

  “What’s the story with White River?” Charlie asked.

  “Still out on call,” the farmer said. “Their wench cable snapped in two. They had to send to Barre for a new wench cable.”

  Later that inning, a blue hound with a frayed hank of rope around its neck ran out of the woods onto the playing field. “Look there, boys,” Harlan said. “Somebody’s nigger chaser done got loose.”

  “Jesus, Harley,” Charlie said. Then he looked at Jim. “I hope you’re getting all this down in your head, Mr. Storywriter.”

  Without quite knowing why, Jim took himself out of the game and went to sit in the bus, where it was cool and dim and quiet. After a while he drifted off. When he woke up, it was late afternoon. The PONY Leaguers had gone home to Bradford. The Sox had lost the first game of the twin bill and were behind 4–0 in the nightcap.

  Some of the boys decided to go skinny-dipping in the pool under the bridge. A passenger train with a glass-domed excursion car went by on the trestle and the Knights whooped and wagged their business at the excursionists. A lady looking out of the observation car put her hands over her eyes.

  The farmer returned to report that there was no further word from White River and the Sox had now fallen behind 8–1 in the second game. The Yankees’ ace pitcher, Allie “the Chief” Reynolds, had given up only two scratch hits.

  An argument broke out between the Knights over which one of them could “get a bat on one of the Big Injun’s fastballs and at least foul it off.” Jim believed that he knew the answer to this question but didn’t offer his opinion.

  Toward evening the Knights held a temperance meeting. They stood around the trash barrel in the pull-off and passed the last dipperful of Black Label from hand to hand. Each team member took a sip and spoke a short piece.

  “My name is Stub Kinneson and I believe in a higher power.”

  “My name is Porter Quinn and I am not an alkie on account of you can’t be on beer.”

  “My name is Faron Wright. I use to be an alkie until I quit the hard stuff.”

  Faron handed the dipper to Jim, who passed it along to the constable.

  “Jim don’t drink,” Porter explained to the officer. “Not even beer.”

  “Jim here is living proof that you don’t have to drink to have a good time,” Stub said.

  The constable held up the dipper to toast the White Knights. “From this day onward I am a full-time Hoover repairman,” he said. “Here’s your tow truck, boys.”

  The driver from White River wore a cap that read “Junior” over the visor. Junior backed the truck up to the shattered entrance of the bridge. He hitched the tow hook of his new cable to the rear axle of the Ark and winched it back onto the floor of the bridge. A few more timbers and boards rained down into the river.

  While the boys negotiated payment, Jim got his jacket out of the bus and walked down to the river one last time. He took the official American League baseball Charlie’d given him out of his jacket pocket and tossed it up in the air and caught it. Then he cocked his throwing arm. Just before Jim hurled the ball as far down the river as he could, Charlie grabbed his wrist. Charlie took the ball from Jim, and on it, with his ballpoint lawyering pen, he printed, “To Jim’s girl, Pinky. Love, Joe DiMaggio.”

  Charlie flipped the ball back to Jim. “Enjoy Montreal, bub. You can borrow my pickup.”

  * * *

  To Jim’s surprise, the Ark of the Covenant was still drivable after its ordeal, though the steering wheel pulled hard to the right and he had to fight it all the way back to the Common. They arrived at the hotel just as the last strip of light was fading from the sky. The barroom was quiet. Armand was setting the chairs upside down on the tables. The stage behind the chicken wire protecting the band from flying bottles was dark and empty.

  “Like thieves in the night,” Armand said, handing Jim a Nehi. “The darky run off to Montreal with her fiddler like thieves in the night. I sent the others home for the evening.”

  Jim got out his signed baseball and set it on the table. He wished that Charlie had said something more to Harlan about the stray-dog remark. He wished he’d spoken out himself. He supposed he should feel relieved that he hadn’t had to watch the Red Sox lose twice in one day to New York, but he didn’t. Nor did Pinky ever return to God’s Kingdom. For that Jim could scarcely blame her, though for a long time afterward, whenever he thought of her long dark hair and husky voice and the way she’d winked at him, he hoped that she would.

  3

  The Ballad of Gaëtan Dubois

  It must be said that to this day in God’s Kingdom, there is a deep and abiding distrust of anyone from “away” or “the other side of the hills.”

  —PLINY’S HISTORY

  They appeared in the Kinneson barnyard one afternoon when the air was thick with haze from forest fires across the border in Canada. Jim had been scything off the bank beside the RFD mailbox when he happened to look up and see them. There they were, standing perfectly still, like a family tableau looking silently back at him out of an old-fashioned daguerreotype: an older man and woman, perhaps in their late fifties, dressed in Sunday black, and a tall boy about Jim’s age. All three looked slightly apparitional through the haze from the fires, which had been burning out of control in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal for several weeks. The boy, too, wore a dark suit, short in the jacket sleeves and trouser legs. Under the jacket he wore a dark shirt buttoned at the collar, and on his feet square-toed brogans that could have been carved from blocks of wood. Between the boy and the old man stood an ox with brass balls on the tips of its horns. No, not an ox. A cow. An ordinary black-and-white milk cow yoked to a wagon piled high with bedsteads and bedding, wooden chairs, a rough table, winter clothing, shovels and pitchforks, a churn and dasher, sap buckets—even an ancient black wood-burning range.

  “Bienvenu, monsieur!” the old man called out, as if Jim were the stranger. “Je m’appelle Réjean Dubois. Ma femme, Madame Dubois. Et Gaëtan, notre fils.”

  Madame Dubois nodded politely at Jim. The son, Gaëtan, ducked his head and grinned, as if amused by his talkative father, who was already surveying the Kinneson place with an appraising expression. His quick dark eyes took in the swaybacked hay barn, the overgrown pasture along the river, the empty tenant house across the road.

  “Très belle,” Réjean said. “You have here, monsieur, une très belle fermé. Only she appears to be running away from you a little. I tell you what. I will bring your farm back. I, Réjean Dubois, will make of her a beautiful place.”

  Réjean clicked to the cow, which bowed its neck into the yoke and plodded across the dirt road and down the lane toward the tenant house. And that is how Gaëtan Dubois and his family came to Kingdom County and took up residence on the Kinneson farm.

  * * *

  Their name, Dubois, meant “of the woods,” and out of the woods they had come, the scrubby, cut-over woods and infertile fields full of glacial rocks just north of the Upper Kingdom River marking the border between Vermont and Quebec. “Black French,” immigrants from that region were called in the Kingdom of that era. Mixed-blood descendants of the original Abenaki natives, habitant French-Canadian farmers, and fugitive slaves from the South who had settled in the area before the Civil War, in the border community known as New Canaan.

  “You see, monsieur?” Réjean said that evening to Jim’s father. “We have come down from the north, us, to make your farm a showplace again.”

  Jim did not think that th
e “farm that wasn’t,” as Gramp sometimes called it, had ever been a showplace. Gramp liked to joke that for generations Kinnesons had used the income from the family newspaper to support the farm and the income from the farm to support the paper. But the editor told Réjean that he and his family were welcome to stay on rent-free at the tenant house for as long as they wished. Jim’s mother, Ruth, immediately befriended Madame Dubois.

  With Ruth’s help, Madame scrubbed the four-room tenant house from top to bottom. From the windows of her new home she hung curtains cut from burlap and dyed red, green, blue, and yellow. Jim helped Réjean and Gaëtan whitewash the milking parlor in the barn. Up went the wood-burning stove in Madame’s tiny kitchen. The newcomers were settling in.

  Réjean and Gaëtan scythed the wild hay off the disused fields on the hillside behind the farmhouse, raked it into windrows to dry, and pitched it into the wagon for the cow to take to the barn. Réjean got a job on the night shift at the furniture factory in the Common. Madame hired out to clean village houses. Gaëtan helped with chores on neighboring farms. On Sunday afternoons he and Jim went fishing or berrying.