In God’s Kingdom, family and work are all-important. Everything else, even religion, falls into one or both of these two categories.
—PLINY’S HISTORY
It was the late fall of Jim’s junior year at the Academy, and for the first time in more than a century, false spring had come to God’s Kingdom. Two months ago, the elm trees around the perimeter of the village common had turned yellow, then dropped their leaves and gone dormant. Just yesterday Jim had noticed that the elms were putting out tiny golden leaves again. Last night he’d heard a flock of geese headed north, as if confused by the open cornfields and unseasonably warm weather. Yesterday was the fifth consecutive afternoon that the squat, old-fashioned Coca-Cola-bottle thermometer on the door of Quinn’s drugstore had hit eighty degrees, with Thanksgiving now just a day away.
Driving up the one-lane track on Kingdom Mountain in the dawn mist, Jim noticed other signs of false spring. The popple trees growing up in brushy fields of long-abandoned farmsteads were pale yellow with new catkins. An easy rain overnight had given the few remaining pastures the emerald sheen you will see in the spring in the countryside of Ireland and of Kingdom County and nowhere else. The roadside stream off the mountain was up and milky from the rain.
“It’s shortened the winter by a week,” Dad had said last night at supper. “False spring.”
“Maybe so,” Gramp said. “But we’ll pay for it later on.”
It was an unsettled season in an uneasy era in the Kingdom. Family farms were going under one after another. An early influenza epidemic was sweeping through the county. Most Commoners blamed the flu on the strange weather. Long-married couples were short with each other; schoolchildren were restless. What should they do? Get up a late-November game of flies and grounders on the village green? Deer hunters who came to the Kingdom from away each fall sat drinking coffee in the hotel dining room and grousing about the absence of tracking snow. Not, as Gramp said, that a single man jack of them could track a herd of wooly mammoths the width of the green in three feet of fresh snow.
This was an especially frustrating morning for Jim. Gramp and Dad and Charlie had gone off to deer camp without him for the first time since he’d begun going with them. Though Jim didn’t hunt deer himself any longer, going to camp with the men in his family was his favorite annual activity. In the Kingdom, deer camp was more about family than hunting, but the day before, as the men were getting ready to head out, the letter had arrived from Miss Jane, summoning Jim to her farm on Kingdom Mountain:
Dear James,
I will require your assistance tomorrow morning regarding a family matter. Kindly meet me at eight o’clock A.M. sharp, in my barnyard.
Your cousin,
Jane Kinneson
Miss Jane Kinneson was Gramp’s first cousin, and therefore Jim’s cousin as well, though several times removed. For many decades she had operated a small farm on the mountain. She was also a well-known bird carver and wood sculptor. She had even sculpted life-size, wooden figures of her Kinneson ancestors, and arranged them throughout her farmhouse, to keep herself company. Miss Jane referred to the carved family members as her people. As a small boy, Jim had been somewhat afraid of them.
During haying season, and again at maple-sugaring time, Jim assisted Miss Jane on her farm on the mountain. He helped her get up her winter’s wood, spade her garden plot, and bank her farmhouse with evergreen boughs for cold weather. Miss Jane had a sharp tongue, and was difficult to please. It was rumored that she had been disappointed in love. Some Commoners claimed that she had second sight and could predict the future.
Miss Jane relished the old ways and expressions of her ancestors. Like Gramp, she was a born storyteller. Though it often seemed to Jim that he could never do anything right in Jane’s eyes, she had always encouraged him with his own storywriting. “If you’re writing, you’re a writer,” she said. “If you aren’t writing, you aren’t a writer. You’ve been writing since you were five, James. That makes you a writer.”
Miss Jane was a writer herself. For decades she had been rewriting the King James Bible. In Miss Jane’s Kingdom Mountain Bible, God didn’t turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt to punish her for a moment’s curiosity. He didn’t flood out His own creation, or stand idly by while the Roman soldiers hammered His own begotten son up on a wooden cross. Nowhere in the New Testament of the Kingdom Mountain Bible did Jesus curse a fig tree, or any other living thing. Nor did He command His disciples to turn their backs on their parents and wives and children. To Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain, family was everything.
Jane stood waiting in her barnyard beside Black Hawk, her elderly Morgan driving horse. She wore her red-and-black wool hunting jacket over a long black dress, and was toting her father’s Civil War rifle. It occurred to Jim that the tableau of Jane with the rifle, standing near her horse, her weathered barn attached to her weathered house by a series of ramshackle weathered sheds in the background, could itself have been a daguerreotype from the Civil War era. Kingdom Mountain, looming in the background, might have been a peak in the Blue Ridge or Great Smokies, Jane the matriarch of an outlier family from some Kentucky hollow an unlucky stranger might wander into, never to be seen again.
This morning Black Hawk was hitched to Jane’s high-sided hay wagon. Lashed upright with bailing twine to the open-slatted sides of the wagon were several of Miss Jane’s carved wooden people, including Charles Kinneson I, in a painted-on buckskin jacket and leggings; James I, the secessionist, bearing the green Kingdom Republic flag, with a leaping brook trout embroidered on it; and Gramp’s father, Charles “Mad Charlie” II. Beside Charles II was a carved black man wearing a dark suit and a clerical collar. The black man, of course, was Pliny Templeton. Jim also recognized, in the hay wagon, his Abenaki great-great-great-grandmother Molly Molasses, Charles I’s wife; Jane’s father, Supreme Court Justice Morgan Kinneson; and several other Kinneson forbears. Why they were tied in the wagon, and what Jane intended to do with them this morning, Jim had no idea. On the bed of the wagon were two shovels, a pickax, and a grave blanket woven from spruce and fir boughs. Cradled in the evergreen blanket was Jane’s black lunch pail.
Jim nodded at the rifle. “Are you going to shoot a deer if we see one?”
“Hardly,” Jane said.
She clicked to Black Hawk, who started up the lane behind the house and barn. The wagon bounced over the ruts as Black Hawk pulled it up the slope past blossoming dandelions and cowslips. The horse was gray around the muzzle. Once Jane had kept two stocky Canadian workhorses for plowing and haying, harvesting corn, and gathering maple sap. She’d milked a dozen Jerseys and raised chickens and hogs. Lately, as her dairy herd and other animals had died off, Jane had not replaced them. Except for a barn cat, Black Hawk was the last domestic animal on her farmstead. Jim thought that the Morgan was about twenty-five. He’d learned to ride on him.
A silvery rill, brimful from the rain the night before, poured off the slope beside the lane. Along the brook, fluorescent-green skunk’s cabbages were poking up. Jim’s English class had been reading Macbeth. He pointed at the skunk’s cabbage. “The times are out of joint,” he said.
“When haven’t they been?” Miss Jane said. “Up here in God’s Kingdom, when have the times not been out of joint?”
And, higher on the mountainside, “How are you getting on with your storywriting, James?”
Jim said he was just finishing a new story inspired by Pliny Templeton’s account of Gramp’s father, Charles II, rerouting the outlet of Lake Runaway and flooding out the Lower Kingdom Valley.
As they continued up the lane, Jane said, “You know, of course, that’s how Charles II met his future wife, Eliza Kittredge. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Charles appropriated the Kittredges’ plough horse to ride down the valley ahead of the cresting flood and warn the people in its path. When he returned the horse, she fell in love with him, though they didn’t get married until some years later. First he ran away to the Mexican War to avoid being tarred and feathered, or worse, for the damage done by the flood. Shall we have a quick round of Connection, James?”
Connection was a game Miss Jane had invented for the purpose of teaching Jim local history. She’d name two seemingly unrelated events, often decades or even centuries apart. To win the game, Jim had to explain how the events were directly connected by an unbroken chain of cause and effect.
“What is the connection between my uncle Charlie’s rerouting the outlet of Lake Runaway and your college education?”
“I guess I don’t know,” Jim said.
“Why, certainly you know. On his way back from Mexico, Charles met Pliny in New Orleans. He helped Pliny escape from slavery, and paid for his education at the state university. Years later, the university established the Templeton Scholarship, to be awarded annually to the top-ranking graduate of Pliny’s Academy. In two years, that will be you.”
Jim grinned. “How do you know? Second sight?”
“No one knows the future, me least of all,” Jane said. “But I should be greatly disappointed in you, James, greatly disappointed indeed, if you do not win the Templeton Scholarship.”
They continued up the lane together to the family cemetery where Jane’s ancestors were buried. She unhooked Black Hawk from the traces and turned him loose to graze along the edge of the rill, where the grass was greening again in the false spring. She told Jim there was no need to hobble the horse. He was too old to stray very far.
Just outside the pointed iron fence stakes surrounding her ancestors’ plots, Jane began digging in the thin mountain topsoil. Jim picked up the second shovel and joined her. It crossed his mind that she might intend to bury her wooden people, though why, he couldn’t imagine. Here and there inside the fence, spring beauties were blossoming. For years, on May Day, Miss Jane had recruited Jim to help her pick spring beauties for the miniature sweetgrass flower baskets she left hanging on the front doorknobs of friends’ houses in the Common. Miss Jane noticed the blooming flowers, too. She shook her head. Mayflowers in late November.
A couple of feet down, they hit blue clay. Miss Jane exchanged her shovel for the pickax, loosening the hardpan for Jim to spade out of the deepening trench. In places, they encountered pockets of shale and shards of slate.
By noon they had opened up a hole about eight feet long, four feet wide, and five or six feet deep. To Jim it looked large enough to accommodate Jane’s people, if that was her plan.
Out of her black lunch pail Jane produced deviled-egg sandwiches on homemade salt-rising bread; a pound wedge of cheddar cheese, aged for five years in her root cellar; a paper sack of Vermont common crackers; two stone jars of sweet cider from the old-fashioned apple orchard beside her farmhouse; and her specialty, molasses cartwheel cookies. Jane gave Black Hawk a feedbag. After last night’s rain there was plenty of drinking water for him in the nearby rivulet, which sounded like it did in April, a steady background murmuring that Jim heard without listening to it.
“You are, of course, wondering what Pliny, who grew up on a tobacco plantation in Kentucky, was doing in Louisiana,” Jane said in the matter-of-fact tone in which she delivered her prescient observations. “So I’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself. What is the connection between Pliny’s loss of his hand in Kentucky and his appearance in Louisiana six months later?”
“I don’t know how he got to New Orleans. Gramp told me Pliny never talked about his missing hand, or anything else from his life in slavery. Gramp said Pliny’s master probably cut off his hand to punish him.”
“Pliny’s master did no such thing, James. What he did do, however, was worse yet. One evening Pliny returned from the fields to discover that his young wife had been sold down the river.”
“My God!” Jim said.
Jane continued her story. “Pliny loved his wife more than life itself, James. To prevent him from running after her, his owner chained him by the wrist to the boiler of a wrecked steamboat that he used for an impromptu jail. That’s when Pliny made his great covenant with God. He got down on his knees and closed his eyes and told God if He’d let him search for his wife—he didn’t say find her, James; Pliny figured that was up to God, not him—if God would free Pliny from that boiler so he could search for her, Pliny would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching God’s word and doing His works. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he spotted was an old ax with a broken-off helve.”
“I don’t understand,” Jim said. “You said he was chained to the boiler. You can’t cut through a chain with an ax.”
“No,” Jane said. “But you can cut off a hand. With his shirt and the broken-off ax handle he made a tourniquet, and he cut his left wrist clean in two. There was a granny woman, a slave too old to work, who lived in a nearby swamp. She hid Pliny and nursed him back to health and gave him a little fishing skiff. Pliny traced his wife all the way down the river to New Orleans. That’s where he met Charles II, who brought him north and had him educated.”
“But he never did find his wife?” Jim said.
“No. He never did find his wife. He went back down south to look more than once. First during the Civil War, which is how he wound up in Andersonville. Again several times during Reconstruction, when he and his students were setting up schools for former slaves. But he never found her.”
“Gramp never told me any of this.”
“I don’t think he knows, James. To the best of my knowledge, Pliny told the story of his wife, and how he lost his hand, to just one other person, a chum of mine. She swore me to secrecy for as long as she and Pliny were alive. I think they were lovers.”
Jim waited for Miss Jane to tell him who that other person was, but she didn’t. All she said was, “It’s turning colder, James. Let us get back to work.”
“Cousin Jane?”
“Aye?”
“What are we digging up here?”
“A grave, James.”
Jim gestured at the figures tied to the sides of the hay wagon. “Why did you bring them?”
“To bear witness,” Miss Jane said. “Now let us return to work before it comes off to snow. Our false spring is over.”
* * *
Jane was right. By mid-afternoon the wind had swung around into the north and it was sharply colder. The grave, which was about twice the size of an ordinary grave, was finished. “Fetch me my father’s rifle from the wagon, James.”
Jim gave a start. “What for?”
“Heavens to heavens, child. Your old relation isn’t going to shoot herself. Is that what you thought? I’m going to put down the horse.”
“Put down the horse! There’s nothing wrong with the horse.”
“He’s ancient, like me,” Jane said. “I promised my father that I’d never let an animal leave the farm for a situation where it might be abused. If I pass on before the horse, it might fall into the hands of someone who would mistreat it. I gave my father my word. It was every bit as much a covenant as the one Pliny made with God.”
After a stunned moment Jim said, “If anything happens to you, I’ll take Black Hawk down to our place. I promise I will.”
“You may well be off at college. Who’d care for the horse then?”
“Dad and Mom would.”
“Your parents aren’t spring chickens, James. They could both be dead, too.”
“Jesus, Miss Jane. Black Hawk’s what, twenty-five? How many more years does he have? This doesn’t make sense.”
“I didn’t say it did. I don’t know of much that makes sense, James, up here in the Kingdom or beyond. What I said was, I made a covenant with my father. I am willing to make the same covenant with you. If you will promise to me that you will shoot the horse, and bury him here next to me if I go first, then we won’t need to go any further with this today.”
Jim looked at Miss Jane, hoping that she might change her mind and give him a better choice. He suspected she’d planned this from the start.
“All right,” he finally said. “If you go first, I’ll dispose of the horse.”
“Then we have a covenant,” Jane said. “My people, who are also your people, have borne witness to it.”
High above the mountain, a flock of geese went barking over, heading south. Jim wondered if they might be the same flock he’d heard going north the night before. Jane picked up her shovel and began refilling the grave. Jim reached for his shovel and joined her.
Later, as they walked back down the mountainside next to the horse, it started to snow, flakes of sugar snow as large as the palm of Jim’s hand, the snow that came in maple sugaring season. The sugar snow was heavy and wet on Jim’s face, the final sign of the upside-down weather.
Jim wondered who Jane’s chum was, the girl Pliny had told his story to. Could the chum be fictitious? Could Jane and Pliny have been lovers? He doubted he’d ever know.
Jim had no intention of shooting Black Hawk if Jane died before the horse did. If necessary, he’d make another covenant, one with his parents, to care for the horse while he was in college. By doing so he would fail Jane and her people, his people, who had borne witness to his promise. In his heart he had already failed his ancestors and lied to Jane.
“What does make sense?” Jim said as they came into the dusky barnyard. “You said not much makes sense. What does?”
“Love,” Miss Jane said. “Love and love alone makes sense. Carry my people into the house, Jim. I’ll put the horse in the stable.”