A Stranger in the Kingdom (6 page)

Two hours later, as I reached for my red hunting jacket, Elijah was haranguing Dad about a grievance that had been eating at him for the past few weeks. “As I was saying, Cousin, you never, I repeat never, hire a minister until you've interviewed him in person and heard him preach at least one sermon.”

My father stopped typing. “Elijah, we have been over this terrain forty-eleven times. How often do I have to tell you that George Quinn and Bill Simpson and I each spoke with the man on the phone for at least fifteen minutes. We checked his credentials and references, and the guy seems to be exactly what we want and have wanted for the past ten years or so.”

“Did you hear him preach a sermon over the phone?”

“What the hell sort of question is that? Of course not.”

“Then how do you know he can?”

Now my father was really exasperated. “Because, damn it, he has been preaching sermons to Canadian enlisted men and officers for the past sixteen years.”

Elijah just shook his head and continued to type. As I tried to sidle past his machine unnoticed he said, “Boy, remember this. You never fill a pulpit until you've interviewed your candidate in person and heard him preach at least one sermon.”

It did not seem very likely to me at thirteen that I would soon be in a position to fill a pulpit. I detested church and always had. Now that the trustees had finally landed themselves a full-time minister, Sunday school, which was nearly as bad, would no doubt start back up again too. A night or two ago I'd overheard Dad telling Mom that Elijah's real grievance was that any minister at all had been hired because now my cousin the lay preacher would have to relinquish the pulpit from which he had bored the pants off every last member of the dwindling congregation since the departure of the last resident minister, Reverend Twofoot—who had left Kingdom County nearly two years ago, after suffering a total nervous collapse.

Some members of the congregation felt from the start that Sanford Twofoot was not cut out for the rough-and-tumble demands of a remote border-town pulpit to begin with. He was a high-strung little man in his early sixties, yet it turned out that years ago he'd done a couple of tough missionary stints in the Congo; and though you never would have guessed it to look at him, he had guts and plenty of them In fact, poor Reverend Twofoot had more guts than common sense. When somebody told him about Resolvèd Kinneson's cockfights, and the gambling and drinking that accompanied them, he marched right up to my outlaw cousin's toting his trusty King James Revised Bible to put a stop to the proceedings. Afterwards, he told Dad that at first the cockfighters just laughed at him. But when he stepped right into the cockpit and began to read them the story of Jesus and the moneychangers in the temple, Bumper Stevens, our local cattle auctioneer, threw his prize leghorn fighting rooster on Reverend Twofoot's head. The bird never did get the minister's eyes—it was wearing three-inch steel fighting spurs honed as sharp as a barber's razor—but that was the only luck he had that day. Doc Harrison said he had to use seventy-eight stitches to close him up.

Dad tried to get Reverend Twofoot to press charges, but he wouldn't, and the following Sunday he insisted on preaching as usual. His text was “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” but his head and face were bandaged up like King Tut's mummy and you couldn't understand more than half of what he said. The next week he had his collapse and his wife took him away from here. Just a few months ago he'd written to Dad from Africa, where he was doing missionary work again. The heat got to him quicker now that he was older, he told Dad, and the work wasn't easy; but on the whole he found the place considerably more civilized than Kingdom County.

After Reverend Twofoot's abrupt departure, the United Church couldn't find a minister who'd touch the job with a ten-foot pole until, in desperation, the trustees began advertising outside the country. Dad said it was pure luck even then that they'd been able to locate a full-time replacement. Be all this as it may, my cousin Elijah would now have to take down his name from the bulletin board on the front lawn of the church (
SERVICES SUNDAY AT
11
O'CLOCK, CONDUCTED BY ELIJAH T. KINNESON, LAY PASTOR
) and content himself with his sexton's duties.

He was still running on about the imprudence of hiring a minister sight unseen when I ducked out the door.

 

By now it must be obvious that my mother was right as rain about the Kinneson family and its “little peculiarities.” Nor was I in any way exempt from my own share of these oddities, chief among which was a very real dread of anything related to the supernatural—a fear which was invariably activated whenever I had to walk the half mile home from the village on dark nights past both the cemetery and Mason White's undertaking parlor, not to mention the United Church parsonage.

Unpainted for decades, untenanted off and on for months at a time, its long sagging porch half-concealed by woodbine and bittersweet run crazy, the parsonage was Kingdom County's chief claim to a haunted house. Admittedly, the legend attached to the old place was based on slender evidence. It had been built by one Pliny Templeton, colloquially known in the Kingdom, for reasons I will later explain, as Black Pliny, the founder and first headmaster of the Kingdom County Academy. After a long and distinguished career as an educator, scholar, state legislator, and local historian, Black Pliny was said to have fallen on hard times in his old age and to have shot himself in the downstairs study of the house, just off the porch. Some years before this tragic event, in the philanthropic spirit for which he was renowned, Pliny had willed his house to the Presbyterian (later the United) Church to use as a parsonage; his organs to the medical college at the state university in Burlington; and his bones to the science lab of his beloved Academy, where they had depended from a pole for the past halfcentury for the elucidation of several generations of senior anatomy students.

According to legend, on the anniversary of Black Pliny's suicide his skeleton would reach up and deftly detach itself from the pole for a walk over to the parsonage, where it rattled up onto the porch and peered into the window of the fateful study to see who was currently living there. So far as I knew no motive apart from an eccentric but entirely benign curiosity was ever ascribed to the old headmaster's bones. Nor did I ever know anyone who actually claimed to have seen the skeleton making its ghostly annual perambulation. But a number of villagers and former tenants averred that they had distinctly
heard
the clattering footsteps on the porch. And whose could they be if not Pliny Templeton's? Whose indeed!

Of course this was exactly the sort of small-town claptrap I thrived on in those days, and I loved to scare myself by racing past the place (during the day), hooting and banging a stick against the broken fence palings in simulation of the ghost's march up to the parsonage veranda. Charlie, however, had immortalized himself in the annals of village pranksters at the age of fifteen with an escapade which, for sheer juvenile bravado and ingenuity, remains unsurpassed in Kingdom County to this day. Entirely by himself one Halloween, when the house had been unoccupied for several weeks, he stole the skeleton from the science lab and hung it from the overhead light fixture in the empty parsonage study, then reported to Cousin Elijah that town rowdies had broken into the place and were raising hell. Although I can't imagine that Elijah was frightened, Charlie always claimed that the crusty old sexton took one look at the skeleton, swaying gently in his flashlight beam, and fainted dead away on the spot.

No tragedy in the parsonage's history was necessary for every kid I knew to give the place a wide berth from sunset on, especially during the intervals when no one dwelt there. In the daylight it might look pretty much like any other big rundown village home. After dark, depending on one's age, it was positively forbidding, and the only reason I had come this way tonight instead of the alternative route by the covered bridge at the west end of the village is that I hated even more to walk through that unlighted and remote portal alone for fear of encountering something rather worse.

Charlie had been right about the snow. As I approached the parsonage, it had already begun, big wet flakes of sugar snow that melted as soon as they touched the street. I wasn't surprised. Up in the Kingdom you can expect plenty of snow throughout April and well on into May.

Tonight, a light was burning in the parsonage study for the first time in nearly a year. Remembering that my mother had been killing herself there all afternoon to prepare the place for the new minister, I gathered courage and walked steadily forward. I knew better than to run. There was nothing like a running boy to excite the least charitable instincts of the ghouls and zombies I strongly suspected took up residence in that house every time the church lost another minister. But as I approached the gate in what remained of the picket fence, the snow suddenly thickened, blotting out the light inside the house and the lights of the village behind me. Within seconds I could see nothing but a yard or two of the macadam road at my feet. It glistened darkly, like a deep river crawling through woods on a starless night.

“Splendid spring weather you chaps have here.”

I must have jumped a foot. Someone—I hoped it was someone—was standing just inside the parsonage gate. All I could make out of his presence was the red glow of his cigarette in the snow squall. That, at least, was somewhat reassuring. Though I had no hard evidence that ghosts did not smoke cigarettes, I had never heard that they did.

“Walt Andrews,” the voice said. “I just moved in.”

I sensed rather than saw him put out his hand. After a couple of false stabs I located it and we shook hands in the dark across the gate. Walt Andrews, whoever he was, had a big hand and a very firm grip, like my father and brother.

“You're the new minister,” I said stupidly, and he laughed.

“I plead guilty. But don't hold that against me. What's your name, chum?”

I told him and immediately he said, “The editor's son?”

“I plead guilty,” I said, and again he laughed and said he hoped I'd give him time to get his car unloaded before I asked for an interview. Then I laughed, too. But although I was no longer scared I still felt like a base runner caught leaning the wrong way off first. It was a strange experience, to be talking to the disembodied voice of an invisible man less than three feet away.

Stranger still, there was something unaccountably familiar to me about that voice. It was casual and friendly but with an undercurrent of . . . amused irony, I suppose.

A gust of wind hit us. The snow drove faster. When Reverend Andrews flipped his cigarette butt out across the fence, it vanished in the storm before it hit the road.

“Brother!” he said. “This is April in Vermont? Your blooming weather is worse than Korea's.”

I knew from the sound of his voice that he'd turned away from the road. A small orange flame spurted up across the gate as he hunched over to light another cigarette. I leaned closer to help block some of the wind, the way I'd seen Charlie and other men do.

And knew where I'd heard Reverend Andrews' voice before.

With a jolt of surprise, I saw in the quivering flame of the lighter that the new minister of the United Church was the black man my father and I had run into earlier that afternoon at the Ridge Runner Diner on our way back to Kingdom County from Burlington.

Of all the wonderful stories my parents read aloud to me when I was a boy, my favorite of favorites came out of a vast, leatherbound, musty-smelling, ancient-looking tome entitled (unpromisingly enough)
The Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County
, which Dad kept on a long shelf behind his desk at the
Monitor
, along with
The Dictionary of American Newspapers
and his prized 1910 eleventh edition of
The Encyclopedia Britannica.
Written and compiled by the same indefatigable Black Pliny Templeton who founded the Kingdom Common Academy and served nearly fifty years as its headmaster, the
Ecclesiastical History
, besides chronicling local church events, contained whole chapters on such diverse and fascinating subjects as the wild animals and plants native to our corner of New England, the Kingdom's geological evolution and political history, and all kinds of curious legends, anecdotes, diary entries, occasional poems, copies of letters to and from prominent local sons and daughters—even a section of regional recipes like brook trout chowder and partridge pie.

It also included a lively account of the Kinneson family history, beginning with the arrival in the Vermont wilderness of my great-great-great-grandfather, familiarly known in Kinneson family annals as Charles I, which I found endlessly intriguing both in its own right and because, for a number of years in my own early history, I supposed that it had been authored by a skeleton!

To this day what springs to my mind when I think of Charles I's arrival in the Kingdom is not a date, though there is a date attached—it was the fall of 1781—but a picture. It is a picture such as Frederick Remington (with whom my father no doubt would have gone brook trout fishing) might have painted, an autumnal image of a lone man paddling a birch canoe up the Lower Kingdom River from Lake Memphremagog, past pale yellow butternut trees and flaming swamp maples. The paddler's name is Sabattis and he is an Abenaki hunter, trapper, basket weaver, and storyteller, on his annual trek south from his summer home on the upper St. Lawrence to his winter home on the coast of southern New England

In the picture it is hazy, one of the thirty “smoky” days Pliny claimed always preceded winter in Kingdom County, and getting toward evening. Jay Peak and its sister mountains in the western background are bluish and indistinct and softly contoured, drifting along the horizon more like smoke themselves than a lofty range of northern peaks. But the birch canoe and the amber river, the sparse yellow butternut leaves and the vivid scarlet maples and the lone Abenaki Indian hunter with the single name are as clear to me now as when I was four or five years old and my father read to me from Pliny's big book for the first time. The man is listening, with his head slightly cocked, his lips slightly parted. His paddle is arrested in mid-stroke. A thin stream of droplets slides noiselessly from its cedar blade back onto the motionless surface of the river.