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

years his skeleton, dangling from a pole at the front of the second-story science lab, had become a kind of mascot to the Academy students, most of whom had grown up in the same building with it since first grade. Not so Gaëtan, who, during his and Jim’s late-morning biology class, sat in the back of the room, as far away from the bones as he could get. Jim told his new friend that the state university had proclaimed Pliny Templeton to be the first American Negro college graduate. In honor of the former slave, the university had established a full four-year scholarship in his name, awarded annually to the top-ranking graduate of the Academy. Also, Jim showed Gaëtan Pliny’s eleven-hundred-page manuscript in the school library: The Ecclesiastical, Natural, Social, and Political History of Kingdom County . No matter. Gaëtan continued to be terrified by the sight of the skeleton, the way Jim felt around snakes and heights. Gate wouldn’t even look at the thing, dangling from its pole above the blackboard like a Halloween figure.
    Despite the fact that Gate was a mathematical savant, or perhaps partly because of it, Miss Hark continued to bully him at every opportunity. Finally, Jim complained about the math teacher to Mom. Mom’s blue eyes snapped and she pursed her lips. That was all, but the next morning she marched into the Academy and closeted herself in the headmaster’s office with Prof for forty-five minutes.
    â€œHe agreed to switch Gaëtan to Mr. Benson’s trig class at the end of the term, in January,” Mom told Jim that evening. “That’s the best I could do, hon.”
    To Jim, it was obvious that, like nearly everyone else in the Common, Prof was intimidated by Miss Hark Kinneson.
    â€œI’d like to slap her face good and hard,” Mom said to Jim. “But of course she’d just take it out on Gate.”
    â€œWhat about forgiving her because she knows not what she does?” Jim kidded her.
    â€œShe knows very well what she’s doing,” Mom said. “We’ll leave it to Jesus to forgive her, sweetie. That’s more than I can muster right now.”
    â€œDo you believe in Jesus, Mom?”
    â€œI believe in love,” Mom said. “And, I’m afraid, in its absence.”
    *   *   *
    In early November, Réjean bought two more milking cows. With some of the earnings from her housekeeping jobs, Madame Dubois purchased a Toulouse laying goose. Once or twice a week Gaëtan brought a hard-boiled goose egg to school to eat with his lard sandwiches and coffee.
    With Thanksgiving week came the onset of winter in the Kingdom. As usual, the volunteer fire department flooded the ball diamond on the village green and set up sideboards for a hockey rink. Gaëtan appeared on the ice with a pair of hand-me-down skates and a homemade hockey stick. Once again Jim learned something surprising about his friend. The gangling kid who couldn’t connect with a baseball skated like the north wind out of Canada. In the first five minutes of their first pickup game, Gaëtan made a hat trick. He spent the rest of the game drawing out the goalie, then dropping off the puck to teammates for open shots on the net.
    On skates, Gaëtan Out-of-the-Woods was indomitable. In brushups with players from neighboring towns who called him a “Black Canuck,” and worse, he’d windmill his arms and fists without much strategy, but no matter how hard you hit him you couldn’t knock him down. At some point he’d get his licks in and then you’d be sorry you’d taunted him.
    On New Year’s Day, when gifts were traditionally exchanged in French Canada, Réjean and Madame presented Gaëtan with a new pair of hockey skates. He and Jim skated up the frozen Lower Kingdom River to the colony of multicolored ice-fishing shanties on the South Bay of Lake Memphremagog. Gaëtan pointed north up the lake between