The Île d’Illusion is located in Lake Memphremagog about half a mile off the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River. Approximately five miles long by two miles wide, it was named by French explorers in reference to the uncanny way it seems to come and go in the lake mist, sometimes appearing to hover several hundred feet above the water, sometimes vanishing altogether.
—PLINY’S HISTORY
She was standing at the bottom of the granite steps leading up to the entrance of the Academy, wearing a dress of many colors, which appeared to have been made from a crazy quilt. The multicolored dress was cut short at her knees and she was tall and slender with shiny black waist-length hair. She had a dark complexion and wide-set eyes of so deep a shade of blue that at first Jim thought they were black. Over her shoulder she carried an old-fashioned bookstrap with a large volume buckled up in it. She was about Jim’s age, seventeen, and so lovely that his heart hurt just to look at her.
On the top step, blocking the entrance, four sophomore girls were skipping rope. Two of them were spinning the rope. The other two were jumping. All four were chanting an old local jingle:
Nigger girl, nigger girl,
Lives in Niggerville,
Way out yonder on Nigger Toe Brook.
Dat’s de end of dis old book,
Dis old book ’bout Niggerville,
Way out back on Nigger Hill.
Prof Chadburn had forbidden the Academy students to use the word nigger but sometimes, out of his earshot, they did anyway. Now the girls were chanting the refrain:
Old black Pliny got two hole in him head.
Dat where Pliny got him ass shot dead.
The new girl narrowed her eyes, which had turned as purple as the big lake just before a storm. Nearby in the schoolyard a gaggle of kids looked on.
“Hey!” Jim yelled at the jump ropers. “Stop that.”
He started up the steps to take the rope away from them.
“No!” the girl in the dress of many colors said. “I will deal with this matter. Hold my book, s’il vous plaît.”
She unbuckled the thick volume and handed it to Jim. He was surprised to see that it was Webster’s dictionary.
“Niggerville, Niggerville,” the jump ropers chanted.
The girl with the stormy eyes gave the bookstrap a hard snap, cracking the metal buckle on the bottom step. She started up the steps, twirling the strap buckle over her head. The jumpers cut their eyes sideways at her as she advanced.
Whap. The buckle landed on the legs of one of the bullies. Whap whap whap. The new girl struck blow after blow on their arms and legs and shoulders as she drove them shrieking through the front door of the Academy.
“What wicked children, eh?” she said to Jim. “Very well. I teach these mals enfants their first lesson of the day. Oh! Excusez-moi! Je m’appelle Francine. Francine Lafleur.”
Francine Lafleur placed one foot behind the other and made a small curtsey, like a princess greeting a prince in one of Jim’s boyhood storybooks. Her eyes were deep azure again and they were shining with delight as if she found the incident with the rope skippers highly amusing. She held her arm out straight to shake hands and her handshake was warm and friendly.
“James Kinneson,” Jim said. “Jim for short.”
“You may, if you wish, address me as Frannie, James Kinneson,” she said. “But I will never call you Jim for short. Now, then. À l’école, oui? To school!”
While Jim walked Frannie upstairs to the senior homeroom, she told him that she lived on a farm with her parents on the Île d’Illusion. Île d’Illusion was bisected by the international border between Canada and the United States. Children from the half-dozen farms on the island had their choice of attending the French-speaking school in Magog, Quebec, or the Academy in Kingdom Common. Few went beyond the eighth grade, but Frannie had been fortunate. Her father’s older brother, Monsignor Lafleur, had invited her to board at the parish rectory in Magog and attend the Jesuit secondary school in that town. It had also been the Monsignor’s idea for his niece to spend her senior year at the Common Academy in order to polish her English.
For as long as Jim could remember, senior homeroom had been held in the second-story science lab. This morning he and Frannie were the first students to arrive. The lab was furnished with Formica-topped tables and high stools instead of individual desks and chairs. It smelled of chemicals and musty animal mounts: a mangy Canada lynx, a great horned owl with fierce yellow eyes, a beaver gnawing on a poplar stick.
Suddenly Frannie grabbed Jim’s arm. She was staring at the human skeleton dangling from a pole at the front of the room.
“That’s just Pliny Templeton,” Jim said. “The Negro guy in the jump-rope rhyme. He founded the Academy. In his will he left his skeleton to the school.”
“My mother tells me her grandmother may have been a Negro,” Frannie said. “She was born up the river in Canada, in the village that burned in the forest fire. Ma mère says that, except for my blue eyes, I look like this grandmother. Perhaps the evil girls jumping rope on the steps outside the school think so, too.”
A little warily, Francine approached the bones. “How he receives these holes in his head, James Kinneson?”
Francine’s eyes widened as Jim told her about the feud between his great-grandfather Mad Charlie Kinneson and the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton, ending with Pliny’s murder at the hands of his best friend.
Francine shook her head. “I do not believe this story.”
“You don’t believe Mad Charlie murdered Pliny? That’s why he’s known as Mad Charlie.”
“Oh, I believe he murdered Pliny. But not over a piano, of all things. No, James. They quarreled over a woman. A very beautiful woman with whom they were both in love. I am certain of it.”
“They were both old men at the time.”
“Nevertheless. They fought over the love of a woman. But look, he is missing one hand. How is that?”
Frannie listened intently as Jim told her the story Miss Jane had told him, how Pliny had chopped off his own hand with an ax to free himself and search for his wife, who had been sold down the river.
“I knew it!” she said. “What did I tell you? Your Pliny was a man who gave everything for love. I intend to seat myself here, next to him. Perhaps I will become the new love of his life.”
“I hope not,” Jim said before he knew he was going to.
Francine smiled. Now her eyes were the lavender color of wood violets. She raised her dark eyebrows. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Will you sit beside me?”
As Jim sat down, she opened her dictionary to the G section and began reading the first column of entries. From time to time her lips moved silently as she tried out an unfamiliar word.
Jim realized that Frannie was memorizing Webster’s dictionary.
* * *
Each weekday in the dark before dawn, Francine rowed a homemade wooden boat across the water from the Île d’Illusion to the mainland. Near the Great Earthen Dam at the mouth of the Upper Kingdom River, she caught the morning milk train to Kingdom Common. She returned to the dam again on the late-afternoon northbound local.
Soon it became apparent that Francine was an outstanding student. Every day she mastered several pages of new words in her dictionary, which she carried with her everywhere. At a glance, she memorized entire scenes from King Lear and all of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” Using the entire blackboard, she outlined the principles of calculus to her senior math class.
A year ago, Charlie’d given Jim his old truck. As the leaves began to turn that fall, Jim started meeting Frannie at the dam and driving her to school. After school they took long rides along the hilly back roads of the Kingdom to view the fall colors. Jim asked her to the annual Harvest Ball at the Academy, which she attended in a blue gown she’d made herself, appliquéd with the northern constellations.
Jim canoed out to the island on weekends. Frannie Flower, as he’d begun to call her, was a born mimic, and captured perfectly Jim’s abstract expression when he was writing in his head. Even her parents seemed a little in awe of her. They called her their “fille mirabile,” a miracle daughter born to them long after they’d given up all hope of having a child.
On a mild afternoon in mid-October Frannie took Jim to a glade on the knoll behind her house, overlooking a great sweep of the lake stretching far into Canada. In the clearing were nine lozenge-shaped cedar markers no more than a foot high and set close together, shoulder to shoulder, like meadow mushrooms sprung up after a summer rain. Carved into each of the wooden tablets was a name.
“Voilà!” Frannie said. “My older brothers and sisters, James. Arrived in the world months before their time.”
Frannie walked from one marker to the next, bending over and touching each one. “This one, Philippe. Had Philippe lived, I believe he would have become a great teacher. His little sister, Michelle. She, a wonderful mother. Regardez-vous, James. Ici est Jacques. A gifted fisherman, I think, like the Christ.”
She moved on down the row of markers, inventing a vocation for each of her stillborn siblings. “Listen to me, James. Being a fille mirabile is not always so easy. Born to an ancient mother and father, the only child of ten to survive? I must now live for ten. This I have decided to do by becoming a doctor. I will combat the terrible diseases of the world. The cancer. The stroke. The miscarriages like those of ma mère. Now you know my great secret. What is yours?”
Jim told her his plan to write the stories of the Kingdom. Frannie nodded. Then she took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes and for the first time they kissed, long and passionately, in the glade on the Île d’Illusion in the Lake of Beautiful and Treacherous Waters.
* * *
Jim loved sitting in the fall evenings beside Frannie at the plank table in her farmhouse kitchen, with its flagstone floor and great slate fireplace and smoky ceiling beams in which the adze strokes were still visible. Frannie had hand-painted local wildflowers around the tops of the white plaster walls, in the order of their blossoming: coltsfoot, spring beauties with lavender centers, paintbrush, daisies and brown-eyed Susans, chicory, cinquefoil, asters, and goldenrod. From the beams hung nets of onions and garlic bulbs from Madame Lafleur’s kitchen garden and, by their roots, medicinal herbs that Madame and Frannie picked in the nearby woods. Between the two south-facing kitchen windows, one of Frannie’s watercolors depicted the farmhouse with its Canadian-orange tile roof and the blue lake beyond, extending deep into Quebec between the mountains. Down the middle of the stone floor, from east to west, ran a straight black line representing the international border. During Prohibition, Réné Lafleur had operated a tavern out of the farmhouse. Customers could stand in the United States, on the south side of the black line, and order a whiskey or a beer. Then they could step across the line into Canada and legally drink it.
On holidays Frannie’s uncle, the old Monsignor, visited. He and Réné sat at the kitchen table and drank quantities of Réné’s hard cider and reminisced about their whiskey-running days, smuggling boatloads of Canadian booze down the lake from Magog. When American revenuers raided the farmhouse, the young Lafleur brothers would sit on crates of Seagram’s and Molson’s on the Quebec side of the line and offer the G-men a free drink.
Sometimes, to amuse Jim, Frannie would engage her uncle, the prelate, in theological disputation. “If I could, mon oncle, I would annihilate God’s henchman, Paul. Paul was a fraud, who changed his name from Saul, and invented a new religion. ‘Henchman,’ James?”
Jim nodded. Frannie was up to the H’s in her dictionary.
“Also, I would like to wipe from the face of the earth that crazed old John the Revelator.”
“Mademoiselle!” Madame Lafleur said sharply.
Réné smiled behind his hand. The Monsignor winked at Jim. “Saint Frannie of Memphremagog, our future physician, is proof against her own arguments, Jim. For all of her heresies, if your friend my niece is made in God’s image, God cannot possibly be as bad as she says, eh?”
“I guess it takes a great deal of faith to be a believer, Father,” Jim said.
“I would prefer to have a great deal of penicillin,” Frannie said. “To treat the mortal infections with which God has blessed us. Only consider, James. The good Christ had a great deal of faith. He had faith that his all-powerful father, the Caliph of Heaven, would protect him. Look where Christ’s faith got Him. Pinned up on a cross.”
“What do you think Jesus would do if He came here to God’s Kingdom today?” the priest asked Frannie.
“Depart on the first train out,” Frannie said. “Before God could get His hands on Him.”
The Monsignor, whose personal library at the rectory in Magog was well-stocked with Voltaire, Rabelais, and Balzac, and who was something of an iconoclast himself, roared with laughter. “Bien!” he said. “As our beloved Dame Julian of Norwich said, ‘All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ Of this, I am certain.”
“If that is what Dame Julian truly thought, she was in for a very unpleasant surprise,” Frannie said.
Réné looked at Frannie with a degree of awe. Madame pursed her lips and frowned, but Jim could tell that she, too, was enormously proud of her daughter the miracle child.
As for Jim’s own parents, the editor and Ruth had fallen in love with Frannie the day Jim brought her home to meet them. Like Athena Allen, Frannie was the daughter they’d never had. At the same time, Mom surprised Jim, and embarrassed him somewhat, by giving him a package of condoms, “just in case.”
“I guess you know teenage boys,” Jim said.
“I do, sweetie,” Mom said. “Teenage girls, too. After all, I was one.”
* * *
The lake froze over in January. Frannie walked to and from the island over the ice. At school she continued to be deeply intrigued by the story of Pliny Templeton. Why were there no references in Pliny’s great History of Kingdom County to his own history? To his youth in slavery before he fled north to freedom? How did one apply for the Templeton Scholarship awarded each year by the state university? One didn’t, Jim explained. It was presented at graduation to the top-ranking senior at the Academy. Frannie continued to insist that Jim’s great-grandfather Mad Charlie Kinneson had murdered Pliny over the love of a woman. “Mark my words, James,” she said. “It is the way of the world.”
On weekends Frannie helped her father run his trapline along the Upper Kingdom River. Early in January, Réné Lafleur sprained his ankle in a beaver run. For the next two weeks Frannie stayed home from school to tend his traps. One Saturday, Jim accompanied her on her circuit. Trapping had been an important source of cash income for generations of Lafleurs. Even so, Jim was surprised by the matter-of-fact way Frannie, who loved all animals, hauled up the drowned muskrats and beavers in her father’s sets. Near the shore of Pond Number Three, across the ice from the hunting camp, they came upon a snarling fisher, caught in a trap baited with chicken skin at the base of a giant hemlock. In its determination to free itself, the animal had nearly chewed off its own back leg. Dispassionately, Frannie put the fisher out of its misery with a fireplace poker she carried in her pack basket and referred to as “Our Merciful Savior.” “And merci to you, too, Monsieur Fisher,” she told the dead animal. “Your gorgeous pelt will pay for my books at university this fall.”
Gramp would have understood, Jim thought. As a boy growing up on the farm that wasn’t, Gramp had run his own trapline, using the proceeds to buy his books and school clothes.
Late that afternoon, a snow squall came roaring down out of Canada. Jim and Frannie took shelter in the camp. Jim built a fire in the Glenwood, and they made love in the loft where he’d spent so many nights as a boy on hunting and fishing excursions with Dad and Gramp and Charlie. Afterward, Frannie cried a little, Jim hoped from happiness. Then, propped up on her elbow, she said, “Now, James, we are lovers, like Pliny and the secret love of his life, whoever she may have been. Also, we are adversaries for the Templeton Scholarship. Fierce rivals by day, passionate lovers by night. How romantic! But you must know that if you let up in your studies and allow me to win the award, I shall have no choice but to hunt you down with Our Merciful Savior and dispatch you as I did the noble fisher. That would be disagreeable for me and more so yet for you.”
“What about your physician’s oath, Dr. Lafleur?”
“What about it? When I become Dr. Lafleur, I will do no harm.”
“Frannie Flower, I never know when you’re joking and when you’re serious.”
“I have never been more serious in my life. If you let me win the scholarship, out of the pack basket comes Our Merciful Savior. You may depend upon it.”
“I won’t let up, and you may depend upon that,” Jim said, and he took her into his arms again.
* * *
That winter and spring Jim and Frannie made love at the farm that wasn’t whenever his folks weren’t home. Charlie gave Jim the key to his office on the fourth floor of the courthouse and they made love there, inventively and frequently. They went parking in Jim’s pickup on back roads all over the county, especially to the pull-off on the height of land south of the Landing, beside the granite obelisk inscribed with the warning “Keep Away.” Sometimes at night, from the top of the ridge, they could see the rose-tinted reflection of the lights of Montreal on thin clouds above the city, and the crimson and blue, silver and saffron flares of the northern lights far to the north over the Laurentian Mountains. “I think, James, we made that happen. The aurora.”
Once, after school hours, they made love in the science room of the Academy. “Well, Monsieur Pliny,” Frannie said afterward, “as you can plainly see, with us all is well. Is all well with you? Are all manner of things?”
“What did he say?” Jim asked her.
“He said not by a long shot, they aren’t. He said he wasn’t telling us what to do, but in our place he’d gather his rosebuds in the here and now.”
In February, Jim and Frannie ice-fished on the big lake. In March they helped her father sugar off. Late in April an all-night rain swept in on the back of a south wind, and the ice went out of the lake in three booming explosions.
Their senior year was winding down. Like many boys, Jim excelled in subjects that interested him. English, Latin, and history, in his case. In his other classes he did what he needed to do to get by. He finished his high-school career with a cumulative average of 92.5, well behind Frannie’s top-ranking 98. As class valedictorian, she would receive the Templeton Scholarship to attend the state university. Jim was offered a partial baseball scholarship and a part-time job in the university library. He’d never doubted that Frannie would win the Templeton Award and was delighted that they’d be attending college together.
But on the day before graduation, as Jim was helping his father run off programs for the ceremony, George Quinn, chairman of the Academy board of trustees, appeared at the Monitor with stunning news. Francine was ineligible for the Templeton Scholarship. The original agreement between the university and the Academy stipulated that the recipient must be an American citizen. “There’s no birth certificate for the Lafleur girl on file at the county clerk’s office or the Vermont Department of Health, editor,” George said. “Unless she can produce one herself, it looks like Jimmy’s next in line for the award.”
“Goddamn it, George,” the editor said. “Anyone born on Mirage Island is automatically a dual U.S.–Canadian citizen.”
“Actually, Charles, the school never really had to accept her in the first place. I mean, being part Indian and part Negro, too, for all we know.”
“George, are you familiar with the recent Supreme Court ruling Brown vs. the School Board of Topeka, Kansas? The local school district, that’s the Academy in this instance, is legally obligated to accept and offer full privileges to all children residing in the district. Mirage Island is in the school district. Réné Lafleur pays U.S. taxes and Vermont taxes.”
“That’s so,” George said. “But don’t you see, Charles? Without an authentic birth certificate, we don’t have any official record where the girl was born. Our hands are tied. It’s a black-and-white matter.”
“You’re right about that, George,” the editor said. “That’s exactly what it is. Jim, go over to the courthouse and get your brother. I don’t care if he’s in the middle of the trial of the century. Go get him now.”
* * *
The following morning, half the village turned out to hear Charlie’s petition to the new judge, who was still referred to as “the new judge” after two years, to issue an injunction awarding the Templeton Scholarship to Frannie. The Academy trustees had legal representation, as well. They’d hired Zack Barrows, the recently retired prosecuting attorney of Kingdom County. Jim sat directly behind Charlie and Frannie at the plaintiff’s table, with Frannie’s parents and her uncle, the Monsignor. He’d asked his father to let him cover the special court hearing but the editor had said no. That would be a conflict of interest, or at least give the appearance of one. Dad would cover today’s proceedings himself.
Charlie’s first witness was Prof Chadburn. “Prof,” Charlie said, “I’d like to begin by asking you to state your full title.”
“I’m headmaster of the Kingdom Common Academy.”
“How long have you held that position?”
“Too long. Forty-one, going on forty-two, years. Thankfully, I’m retiring at the end of this term.”
“So for more than four decades, through wind and rain and sleet and snow, you put up with young rapscallions like me. I’m impressed.”
“Well, Charlie, in all honesty, I’m afraid I’d have to say that I never knew any other boys quite as troublesome as you. You were in a league of your own.”
General laughter.
“Well, you know what they say, Prof. Some very bad boys grow up to be very good men.”
“I can assure you from a fair amount of experience that most don’t,” the new judge interrupted. “Mr. Kinneson, make your point.”
It was evident to Jim that the new judge did not care for Charlie or, for that matter, for his assignment to Kingdom County. Charlie himself had said he didn’t blame him. Who’d want to adjudicate in a place whose motto for two centuries had been “Keep away”?
“Certainly, your honor,” Charlie said. “Prof, could you please describe the Templeton Scholarship?”
“It’s a full four-year scholarship, all expenses paid, to the state university in Burlington. It’s awarded annually by the university to the Academy graduate with the highest cumulative four-year average. It’s given in honor of Pliny Templeton, whom the university claims as the first American Negro college graduate.”
“Who is the top-ranking student this year?”
“Francine Lafleur. She ranks first in her class by more than five percentage points.”
“Thank you, Prof. Your honor, I’d like to call George Quinn.”
After the president of the Academy trustees was sworn in, Charlie asked him if there were any additional eligibility requirements for the Templeton Scholarship.
“Just one,” George said. “It stipulates that the recipient must be an American citizen. Miss Lafleur hasn’t been able to prove to the trustees that she was born in the United States.”
“How would she do that?”
“With an American birth certificate. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been able to produce one.”
Next, Charlie called Francine, who was wearing her blue dress with silver constellations embroidered on it. To Jim, she looked more beautiful than ever.
Frannie stated her name and address, Mirage Island.
Charlie said, “Miss Lafleur, is Mirage Island located in the United States or Canada?”
Frannie smiled. “Both.”
“How can it be located in two countries at the same time?”
“Well, Charlie Kinneson, you must know that the international border between Vermont and Quebec, as established by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, is the forty-fifth parallel of latitude. The forty-fifth parallel of latitude cuts directly through Mirage Island. South of the parallel is the United States. North is Canada.”
“And your family’s farm is located?”
“Directly on the parallel. The line is painted through the middle of our kitchen.”
“Thank you, Miss Lafleur. That’s all. Your honor, I’d like to call Miss Lafleur’s mother, Mrs. Madeleine Lafleur, to the stand.”
Madame Lafleur, in her black church dress, came forward and took the oath.
“Mrs. Lafleur, you heard your daughter testify that the international border runs directly through your kitchen. It’s represented by a painted black line.”
“Oui. I pass from the United States to Canada and back again one dozen, two dozen times a day.”
“Which side of that line was Francine born on?”
“The south. Our bedchamber is off the parlor on the north side. So for the birth of Francine, we move the bed into the kitchen, south of the line. In the United States.”
“Were there any other witnesses, besides you and your husband, that Frannie was born south of the line?”
“Oui. The midwife. But when we come with the midwife to the county clerk here in this courthouse, to have made a certificate of birth for Francine, your clerk refuses to allow the midwife to speak because she is Canadian, not American. So we are never able to receive the certificate.”
Zack Barrows got to his feet. “Your honor, I object to all this hearsay. Without an American witness, the girl and her parents can’t prove where she was born. Therefore, she can’t procure a birth certificate. Without a birth certificate proving that she’s an American, she isn’t eligible for the Templeton Scholarship.”
“Mrs. Lafleur,” the judge said. “You have no other witness who could testify where your daughter was born?”
“Oui. Is one other witness.”
“Besides your husband?”
“Oui. Yes. Besides.”
“And who would this other witness be?”
“God,” Madame said. “The island, Île d’Illusion, this village, your county, it is all, as they say, God’s Kingdom. God is our witness that Francine was born in His Kingdom.”
“Well, I don’t believe God is available to testify this morning,” Zack said.
Beside Jim, Frannie’s uncle, the old bootlegger-Monsignor, got to his feet. “Your honor,” he called out. “As God is my witness, He is here this morning. God is everywhere. This we would all do well to remember.”
The new judge and former marine major looked as if he wished he were back on Pork Chop Hill. He looked as if he wished he were anywhere other than God’s Kingdom.
“Your honor,” Charlie said hurriedly. “There’s a precedent that goes back to a verbal but binding agreement between Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton that anyone born on Mirage Island is de facto a dual U.S.–Canadian citizen. Neither the school trustees nor anyone else has produced any proof that Frannie Lafleur, the valedictorian of the Academy graduating class of 1956, is not an American citizen.”
“Your honor,” Zack said, “no one can prove a negative. We need proof of citizenship. Until the girl can show the trustees a birth certificate, their hands are tied.”
“Well, I can understand that,” the new judge said. “While I fully acknowledge that there is a great deal, a very great deal indeed, about Kingdom County, Vermont, that I do not, and probably never will, comprehend, I can and do understand why the trustees of the Kingdom Common Academy need to see an American birth certificate for Mr. Kinneson’s client in order to award her the scholarship. And now I will share a little story with you. I can understand this in part because my own parents, Antonio and Rosa Paglia, came to this country from Sicily. I was born the next year and I will assure you that they immediately obtained an American birth certificate for me.”
Jim’s heart fell. When the judge had revealed that his parents had been immigrants, Jim had felt hopeful. But only momentarily. Antonio and Rosa Paglia had done everything according to the letter of the law. Clearly, Judge Paglia was going to rule against Francine.
“So, Mr. Barrows,” the judge continued. “This is your lucky day. It is your lucky day and it is the lucky day of the Academy trustees. Because if all you need to see in order to award Miss Lafleur the scholarship is an American birth certificate, I am going to arrange for you to see one. Mr. Kinneson, I’d like for you to go down to the county clerk’s office on the second floor and bring back the clerk, Mrs. Kittredge. Kindly tell her to bring a blank birth certificate and her official stamp along with her. I intend to order the county clerk, Mrs. Kittredge, to issue Miss Francine Lafleur a birth certificate stating her place of birth as Mirage Island, Kingdom County, the State of Vermont, the United States of America. Right now.”
“Your honor,” Zack said. “She isn’t even white.”
“Neither, as I understand it, was Pliny Templeton,” Judge Paglia said. “Miss Lafleur,” the judge continued, “I would like to be the first to congratulate you. You are the 1956 recipient of the Pliny Templeton Scholarship. If I may add a personal note, the state university will be most fortunate to have you as a student. You will do them, and us, proud.”
“Your honor, I object. These proceedings are an outrage.”
Bang! Down came Judge Paglia’s gavel. “Mr. Barrows,” he said, “on that point, we are in total agreement.”
* * *
In accordance with a tradition dating back to the founding of the Academy as a Presbyterian institution, graduation was held at the now United Church at the south end of the village green. The following afternoon at precisely two o’clock, the twenty-eight members of the class of ’56 filed into the church to the labored strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” on the ancient organ. Proudly, and a little self-consciously, the seniors seated themselves in the first two rows of pews. Directly behind them sat their teachers and the Academy trustees. Then family and friends. The soon-to-be graduates were aligned in alphabetical order. Frannie sat next to the center aisle in the first pew. Jim sat beside her.
It seemed to Jim much longer ago than just yesterday that Judge Paglia had ordered the town clerk to make out an American birth certificate for Frannie, and the school trustees to award the Templeton Scholarship to her.
Frannie, however, had news of her own. Earlier that year, on the advice of Prof Chadburn, she’d submitted a backup application to McGill University in Montreal. Recently, she’d learned that McGill had offered her a full scholarship to attend its premed program. For the time being, her citizenship status was a moot point. Jim, for his part, was relieved for Frannie, but devastated that they wouldn’t be going to college together.
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 steps 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.