God's Kingdom Read online

  He pulls up just inside the free-throw line and oh, my, he’s airborne. Up and up and up, releasing the ball in that moment of hang time when the shooter and all the world around him seem frozen in time like the grainy, black-and-white photograph of Crazy shooting his jumper in Jim’s yearbook dedicated to his cousin: “To Philmore Kinneson. October 8, 1937–December 12, 1953. Our Hardwood Hero.”

  * * *

  The villagers of Kingdom Common and Kingdom Landing had despised each other since time out of mind. As is often the case in these situations, the origin of the trouble was unclear. Of course, there were all kinds of explanations. All of these tales were lurid, and many were absurd. But no one, even Jim Kinneson’s grandfather, knew for certain how the feud had started. Perhaps it dated all the way back to Gramp’s father, Charles Kinneson II, rerouting the outlet of Lake Kingdom to flow north toward the Common.

  In the summertime the Landing had something of the character of a resort community. Wealthy families from Boston and New York had vacationed at the Lake Kingdom House, a slightly down-at-the-heels summer hotel, for generations. Kingdom Common, for its part, was home to the American Furniture factory, and more of a mill town. Academy kids regarded their peers from the Landing as stuck-up. Landingites dismissed their enemies from the Academy as hicks.

  It will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever lived in a small town to learn that the feud between the villages reached its peak each year during basketball season. The Academy gymnasium, especially, lent itself well to the rivalry. A cracker-box affair located in the basement of the school’s south wing, it was less than half the size of a regulation basketball court. There was no out-of-bounds space around the perimeter. Players in-bounded the ball by placing a sneaker on the walls, which were flush with the sidelines. Sprained and even broken ankles were far from unheard of. Moreover, it was rumored that the north basket of the Academy gymnasium was only nine feet, ten inches high. The south basket was said to be ten feet, two inches. If so, the Academy players had no trouble making the adjustment. Not so their opponents, whose shots routinely bounced away long off the back of the north basket and fell short off the front of the south rim.

  As for the fans, they crowded into a wraparound balcony overlooking the court below. Academy supporters usually sat in the east, north, and south bleachers. Away fans jammed themselves into the west balcony. Substitute players and coaches from both teams stood on the narrow flight of metal stairs leading down to the court from the south balcony. Commoners referred to the Academy gym as the fishbowl. Opponents called it the snake pit. Jim Kinneson, who covered the Common’s home basketball games for the Monitor, sometimes referred to the gym in his articles as the “Coliseum.”

  For home games, Prof allowed the kids at the Academy to carry the pole from which the skeleton of Pliny Templeton was suspended from the science room down to the gym and stand it beside the scorer’s table in the east balcony. Opposing players found the bones disconcerting. In this respect the former headmaster’s yellowing old skeleton gave the Academy team one additional edge. Prof himself had once told the students during a pep rally that all was fair in love, war, and cross-county basketball rivalries.

  * * *

  “Dunk, dunk, dunk!” one hundred Academy kids yelled in unison.

  It was the opening game of the season, with the Common hosting the Landing. The gym was already packed to overflowing as Jim’s cousin Philmore “Crazy” Kinneson led his team onto the court. Jim, now a junior at the Academy, sat next to the scorer’s table in the east balcony. He knew that Crazy wouldn’t dunk the ball. Not just for show in the pregame warm-ups, anyway. Whatever else Crazy might be, he was no show-off.

  Crazy’s parents had died when he was a small boy, and he lived with his uncle, Punk Kinneson, the local dumpkeeper. About him at all times hung the acrid whiff of the dump fires that burned day and night year-round. Some of his classmates called him Smoky. At away games, fans taunted him with the name Goldilocks because of his bright yellow hair, which he wore long and tied back in a ponytail during the games. Most Commoners called him Crazy.

  Not unusually skillful at other sports, with a basketball in his hands Jim’s cousin was a magician. At five eleven he was rarely the tallest player on the court, but he had the build of a lumberjack and could leap like a catamount. Though his hands were as large and callused as a farmer’s, Crazy had the softest shooting touch Jim had ever seen. His gently spinning jump shot fell through the net like a bird in flight settling into its nest.

  On the court Crazy seemed to have a sixth sense. When an errant shot went up, he instantly divined the precise angle of the rebound. On defense his powers of anticipation were unequaled. You’d swear he knew where opponents intended to pass before they did. He’d spring out of nowhere to intercept the ball, then it was off to the races as he led the Academy’s fast break down the floor, his golden ponytail flying.

  A year ago the Harlem Globetrotters had come to Kingdom Common on their barnstorming tour. The Globetrotters had played an exhibition game against the local men’s town team and the townies had recruited Crazy to play for them. Early on in the game Crazy’d begun to mimic the moves of the Trotters’ star, Goose Tatum. If Goose bounced in a shot off the floor from fifteen feet away from the basket, so did Crazy. Goose shot free throws blindfolded and over his shoulder, passed the ball behind his back to himself off the clanging tin backboards. Crazy followed suit. Jim had gotten his best newspaper story to date out of the evening.

  At the same time, some Commoners were a little afraid of Jim’s cousin. He liked to walk through the village cemetery late at night; no one knew why. He referred to himself in the third person and was something of a gadfly. “Crazy wonders when you’re going to start writing real stories, Jim,” he said when Jim’s Globetrotter piece appeared in the paper. He braced adults, as well. After Jim’s father wrote an editorial excoriating both the Common and the Landing for voting down the bond issue for a much-needed new central school, Crazy buttonholed the editor on the sidewalk outside the Monitor. “Ah, Cousin Charles, my good man,” he said. “Ever a prophet in your own country.”

  Jim liked Crazy and wasn’t at all afraid of him. But he understood that, as his father periodically reminded him, his cousin bore watching. Not because he grew his hair long and smelled like burning tires. No. Crazy Kinneson bore watching because for all of his athletic renown, he was widely believed to be a fire starter. A pyromaniac, who could never be trusted with a pack of matches or a cigarette lighter.

  Just in the last few weeks, several local sheds and abandoned barns had gone up in flames. Crazy’d been spotted at two of these fires. He’d even helped extinguish a small blaze at the disused Water of Life whiskey distillery on the edge of town before it could get out of hand. Jim was ashamed of himself for harboring suspicions about his eccentric cousin. Yet he couldn’t help wondering. In 1882, the entire nearby border village of New Canaan, founded by Pliny Templeton and Jim’s great-grandfather Charles Kinneson II as a refuge for fugitive slaves, had been destroyed by a fire thought to have been deliberately set. Arson was no laughing matter in the Kingdom of Jim’s youth, or in any other era.

  * * *

  “Take no prisoners, boys! Show no mercy!” roared Jim’s older brother, Charlie, the Academy’s varsity basketball coach, as the starting players lined up at center court for the opening jump ball. Though the Landing center was a good five inches taller, Crazy easily controlled the tap, batting it to his teammate Bobby LaBounty. Crazy cut hard for his basket, Bobby lobbed a perfect alley-oop pass back to him over two defenders, and Crazy laid the ball up and in uncontested. With Jim’s cousin at center, the play was a reliably successful strategy for getting out to a quick lead. Charlie referred to it as the doldrums because it took the wind out of an opponent’s sails.

  Immediately the Common applied their seven-man press—the two extra defenders being the narrow side walls of the snake pit. Crazy picked off the Landing’s inbound pass and drove hard tow
ard his basket. Common, 4; Landing, 0.

  From there the score seesawed as it usually did when the rivals played each other. Neither team was able to gain more than a five-point advantage. The much-taller Landing defense deviled Crazy fiercely, at times triple-teaming him.

  “They’re all over him, ref!” Coach Charlie hollered from his perch on the staircase. “Blow your Christly whistle.”

  Jim’s father, Editor Kinneson, who was officiating the game with Prof Chadburn, blew his whistle. “Technical foul,” he said, pointing at Jim’s brother and making the T sign. In the west balcony the Landing fans roared with delight.

  The first half ended with the Landing ahead by two. Despite the pressure defense, Crazy already had twenty of the Common’s twenty-five points. “Carrying his team on his back,” Jim scribbled in his reporter’s notebook. Then he crossed out the word “team” and wrote “town.”

  The school lobby was packed during halftime. The Academy seniors had set up two tables and were selling candy, popcorn and peanuts, and cold bottled drinks to raise funds for their class trip. A temporary truce seemed to be in effect between the rival fans, though Jim noticed several glares and overheard a few muttered remarks.

  Next to the trophy case and directly across the lobby from the front entrance of the Academy hung a life-size portrait of the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton. In the painting the headmaster was standing at the top of the granite steps leading up to the entrance, looking youthful and confident. He was wearing his academic robes, a tall man, well set up, with dark features and dark eyes full of intelligence and, Jim thought, humor and kindness as well. The portrait had been painted in oils by Gramp’s long-deceased older sister, Mary Queen of Scots Kinneson, a somewhat shadowy figure in the family tree.

  It had been Jim’s mother, Ruth Kinneson, who herself had come to God’s Kingdom from away, who had pointed out to him the sorrowfulness behind the kindness and intelligence in the eyes of Pliny’s portrait. “I think he was always sad, Jimmy,” Mom had said. “He was sad because he never did find his wife. To him, she remained his beloved young bride sold off down the river. He stayed in love with her all his life. The sorrow in his eyes, if I’m not just imagining it, is a measure of that love. Your great-aunt Mary captured it perfectly. Just the way you will someday when you write Pliny’s life story.”

  Mom never doubted that Jim would go on to write the stories of God’s Kingdom. In that regard Mom had explained something important to Jim about himself. With the increased self-awareness of adolescence, he had sometimes worried that he was too much of a daydreaming introvert—maybe partly in reaction to Charlie’s flamboyance—to establish his own identity. True, he was captain of the Academy baseball team. He enjoyed the company of his classmates, even dated three or four of the girls from the Common. Yet his closest friend was his grown brother, and he gravitated toward Charlie’s buds on the White Knights, and toward adults in general, often preferring the company of Gramp, Dad, and Mom to that of his contemporaries. Charlie said Jim had been born old, like their straitlaced Scottish ancestors. Recently, Jim had asked Mom if she thought he was too much of a loner. He confided to her that sometimes he thought he understood other people, family members and Commoners and even characters in the novels he devoured, better than he understood himself. Mom had put her hands on his shoulders and sat him down in a kitchen chair and looked him in the eye and said, “What you are, Jim, is a writer. You spend every waking moment writing. Even when you’re reading a book or daydreaming, you’re writing. That’s your identity, sweetie.”

  “What’s up, Kinneson? Dad K send his wet-behind-the-ears cub reporter out to cover the basketball game, did he?”

  Mr. Gil Gilbert, the Academy shop teacher, had come up behind Jim while he was studying Pliny’s portrait. Mr. Gilbert made a point of addressing male students by their last names. He referred to Jim, sneeringly, as a wet-behind-the-ears cub reporter or, more sneeringly still, as “Hemingway.” Jim was quite certain that Mr. Gil Gilbert had never in his life read a book by Hemingway. He would not have been surprised to learn that Mr. Gilbert had not read any book at all in the last ten years.

  “No,” Jim said. “I’m writing a story about a teacher.”

  “Yeah? Who? That old colored boy in the painting?”

  “The ‘old colored boy’ was very popular with his students,” Jim said. “This guy I’m writing about, nobody can stand him.”

  “Go to hell, Hemingway. You’re no more a writer than I’m the man in the moon.”

  “May I quote you on that?”

  Mr. Gil Gilbert took a step forward. He had the red face of a heavy drinker, though so far as Jim knew he never touched a drop. “I bet you’d like to take a swing at me, wouldn’t you, Hemingway? Be my guest. Give it your best shot.”

  Mr. Gil Gilbert was forever inviting his shop students to take a swing at him and give it their best shot. He disliked Jim in particular because some years ago, when Charlie was a student at the Academy, Mr. Gilbert had urged Jim’s brother to take a swing at him and Charlie had promptly obliged him, breaking his jaw. At the moment, Jim would very much have liked to take Mr. Gil Gilbert up on his kind offer, but the shop teacher had spotted Frenchy Lamott across the lobby, wearing his cap inside the Academy, and was already stomping off to confiscate it.

  The brush with Mr. Gilbert made Jim wonder. Why were so many teachers either beloved, like Prof Chadburn and Athena Allen, or detested, like Mr. Gil Gilbert and Miss Hark Kinneson? One thing was for sure. The Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton had been beloved. You could see that in his portrait, too. Jim wished he knew more about him. In his great local history, Pliny had written very little about himself.

  Feeling closed in, Jim jostled his way outside, onto the steps of the school. The Landing team bus was parked across the green under a streetlight, where it was less apt to be vandalized. The driver and a local deputy sheriff stood vigil beside it, stamping their feet in the frosty night. High above the village the December moon looked small and drained of color.

  Jim glanced at the playground beside the Academy, dimly illuminated in the moonlight. He thought of Crazy, practicing day in and day out on the bent and netless playground hoop, even on the coldest winter mornings when the temperature in God’s Kingdom fell to forty-five and sometimes fifty degrees below zero.

  “Hey, Jimmy,” someone yelled from the doorway behind him. “Second half’s starting.”

  * * *

  Partway through the third quarter, the Landing began to figure out the Academy’s defense. On three consecutive possessions, they turned the Common’s full-court press into their own fast break, scoring easy baskets each time. Charlie called time and took off the press.

  The editor and Prof officiated tightly to keep the game from getting away from them. At the same time, they let the kids play hard. “Come on, call it!” Charlie continued to bellow each time the Landing players collapsed on Crazy to deny him the ball or a lane to the basket.

  Crazy didn’t rattle. Playing always within himself, never overreaching, he found the open man under the basket, whipped the ball back outside to an unguarded teammate, sprinted outside himself and launched his long, deadly jumpers over a screen.

  With the Landing up by two and just seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Bobby LaBounty made a thread-the-needle bounce pass into Crazy at low post. Instantly the big center and two forwards from the Landing swarmed him. There was no place for Jim’s cousin to go. But with his back to the basket, Crazy leaped high above the three defenders, spun around in midair, and executed the first two-handed slam dunk ever seen in the Kingdom.

  As the buzzer ending the game sounded, the editor cupped one hand upside down and dipped it sharply to indicate that Crazy’d gotten his shot off in time. The basket counted. The fourth quarter had ended with the score tied and the game was going into overtime.

  Or was it? Prof and the editor were conferring at mid-court. Prof looked up at the scorer’s table and lifted his index finger. “Plus one,
” he shouted out over the terrific din in the gymnasium. “He was fouled in the act of shooting.” Crazy had a final free throw coming. With it he could win the game.

  From the Landing fans in the west balcony came an anguished howl rising to a crescendo of pure outrage. The Commoners responded with thunderous applause. Crazy stepped up to the foul line, bounced the ball once, and lifted it to his one-handed shooting position. He seemed oblivious to the furor in the balconies. Crazy shot one hundred free throws a day on the playground hoop. In his entire varsity career he hadn’t missed half a dozen foul shots.

  Just as Crazy bent his knees to shoot, someone in the Landing balcony flung a handful of Good & Plenties onto the court. Some of the hard little pink and white candies struck Crazy. Others bounced off the floor and skittered across it to the opposite wall. Crazy glanced up at the shrieking fans.

  “Pyro!” a voice screamed out. “Crazy pyro bastard.”

  Suddenly the air was full of missiles. Green, red, and yellow Dots. Canada mints. Black Crows, candy corn, more Good & Plenties, flying from balcony to balcony. Some seemed aimed at Crazy himself. A three-ring binder struck his leg. A lunch box narrowly missed his head.

  The editor and Prof ran to Crazy’s side, held up their hands, and shouted at the mob to stop throwing things. Crazy continued to stand at the foul line, knees slightly bent, the ball cradled in his big hands just above his head. Then he lowered the ball and set it down on the line.

  In a blizzard of popcorn, hard and soft candies, peanuts and peanut shells, with his hands held up to his eyes like horse blinders, Crazy turned and walked across the gym floor toward the stairs at the far end of the court. Shielding his eyes, he glanced back over his shoulder once, as if checking to be sure that the ball was still where he left it.

  As Crazy continued toward the stairs, an empty pop bottle, bright and flashing, caught him flush on the left temple. All Jim could be sure of was that the flying glass bottle had come from somewhere behind him in the home balcony. Crazy sank to his knees as if to pray. Then he crumpled sideways onto the court.