God's Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Read Free Book Online

reached for a piece of chalk and wrote, on the board, the symbol for pi.
    Gaëtan’s hand shot up. “ C’est pi, madame le professeur. Trois pointe une quatre une cinq neuf .”
    Miss Hark trained her dark little eyes on Gaëtan. “Did I call on you?”
    â€œ Pardon, madame le professeur? ”
    â€œI am neither a madam nor a professor. You will address me as Miss Kinneson. Did I call on you?”
    â€œ Oui, Madame . Pi is, as you say, un décimal infini . Pardon. Je suis sad in my anglais .”
    From the class, a few snickers.
    â€œSilence!” Miss Hark rapped out. She pointed at Gaëtan. “What is your name?”
    â€œGaëtan,” Jim whispered. “ Ton nom? ”
    â€œOh!” Gaëtan said, grinning. “ Je m’appelle Gaëtan Dubois, madame .”
    â€œWell, then, Gaëtan Dubois,” Miss Hark said. “From this moment onward you will speak only when you are called on and then only in English. Do you understand? English or nothing.”
    Gaëtan looked back at Miss Hark but said nothing. He said nothing for the rest of the class or the rest of the school day. Gaëtan’s definition of pi was the first and last time he spoke in any class at the Kingdom Common Academy until the end of that term. For all he said in school from that day forward, he might as well have been mute.
    *   *   *
    â€œAlgebra Deux, ” Gaëtan wrote below his name on his perfect homework assignments. On each of his papers Miss Hark crossed out the word “ Deux ” and wrote beside it “Use English. F.” “No scratch work,” she’d write in the margin. “Where did you do your scratch work? F.”
    The standoff continued into October. Gate maintained his silence. Miss Hark did not acknowledge his work or his presence. “I know you are looking on someone else’s paper,” she wrote on his ungraded midterm exam. “Sooner or later I will prove it.” But whose papers was Gaëtan copying? No one else in the class ever got more than a C. Gate never missed a question.
    To Jim’s amusement, Gaëtan was somewhat superstitious. Sometimes on their way to or from school Gate told him, in his broken English, tales handed down by his habitant ancestors north of the border. Jim’s favorite was the story of the loup-garou , the half-man, half-wolf monster that dwelt in the depths of Lake Memphremagog. The loup-garou loved to lure unsuspecting fishermen far out onto the lake on placid summer days, then whip up a sudden tempest and drown them. On moonless nights, and occasionally when the moon was full, the dreaded creature emerged from the lake to roam the forests on both sides of the border, tracking down and devouring lost hunters and disobedient children who’d strayed from home. It was even alleged that the werewolf had deliberately started the Great Forest Fire of 1882.
    Gaëtan was uneasy around the skeleton of the Reverend Dr. Pliny Templeton. “Dr. T,” as three generations of students had called him, was the founder and first headmaster of the Academy. A former fugitive slave, he’d come north on the Underground Railroad. With the help of his deliverer, later his close friend, Charles Kinneson II, Pliny had put himself through the state university and Princeton Theological Seminary. A renowned minister, educator, abolitionist, and Civil War hero, Pliny had been shot by his longtime benefactor, Charles, during a dispute over a point of religious doctrine. On those rare occasions when Jim’s grandfather and father mentioned the murder, they referred to it only as “the trouble in the family” or, simply, “the trouble.”
    In his will, Pliny had bequeathed his skeleton to his beloved school as an anatomical exhibit. Although two holes in his skull, front and back, bore eloquent testimony to his murder, and his left hand was missing as well, over the