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

slept here for decades. Her severe dark teaching dresses hung in a wooden chifforobe. An oak dresser contained clean, folded blouses, sweaters, and underthings. Beside Miss Hark’s narrow brass bed was a stack of books on a washstand. Prof read the titles out loud to Jim. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice . He shook his head, touched one eyebrow, then his lips, and shot Jim the thumb-and-forefinger sign.
    *   *   *
    Upstairs in the master bedroom off the secluded porch, Prof and Jim discovered several dozen cardboard boxes filled with graded examinations dating all the way back to Miss Hark’s first years as a math teacher at the Academy. “Look at this, Prof!” Jim said, holding up a blue test booklet. “‘Charles Kinneson III. November 4, 1915. Algebra II. D -. Did not follow assignment.’”
    Charles III was Jim’s father, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of The Kingdom County Monitor, whose scathing columns on Senator Joseph McCarthy had helped lead to McCarthy’s recent censure on the floor of the Senate. It was as if Miss Hark, otherwise not a hoarder, had held on to the exam papers all these years to maintain power over her now-grown former students.
    â€œThese boxes and what’s in them need to go to the dump,” Prof said. “I’ll lug them down to the front door and you put ’em in the back of the Rambler.” This time Prof didn’t bother to flash Jim the “I say nothing” signal. He was angered, and unsettled as well, by the discovery of the exams.
    For the rest of the morning Jim loaded boxes into Prof’s station wagon and ran them up to the village dump on the back side of Anderson Hill. Crazy Kinneson, Jim’s second cousin, helped him heave the old examinations onto the smoky fire of discarded treadless tires, broken boards, and household garbage that smoldered day and night at the dump in those days. An unstoppable center on the Academy basketball team, Crazy lived with his uncle the dumpkeeper in a shack constructed of old lumber and packing crates. For company he conversed with an array of imaginary companions, both living and dead.
    â€œTell Miss Hark that Crazy says hello, Jimmy,” Crazy said. “Tell the pretty dark lady hello, too.”
    Jim liked Crazy and was accustomed to his strange pronouncements. Privately, he thought that his cousin might not be crazy at all. Jim waved to Crazy out the window of the Rambler and headed back toward the manse.
    *   *   *
    At noon Prof sprang for Armand St. Onge’s famous hot roast pork sandwiches at the hotel dining room. The dining room was crowded this noon, with both local and out-of-state fishermen. Jim’s brother, Charlie, and Charlie’s girlfriend, Athena Allen, Jim’s much-beloved English teacher at the Academy, waved Prof and Jim over to a table by the window, overlooking the railroad crossing at the north end of the village green. “How are you guys coming over at Miss Havisham’s?” Charlie said. “Did you bring us a slice of her wedding cake?”
    Athena gave Charlie a look. “Speaking of weddings,” she said.
    Jim grinned. He was a little shy around his favorite teacher because she was so beautiful. He didn’t understand why his big brother didn’t marry her and neither, Charlie’d recently confided to him, did he. Jim surely would have. In Charlie’s place he’d have married his good-looking teacher long ago. Jim would have given anything to have a whip-smart, funny, Hollywood-gorgeous girlfriend like Athena Allen, who encouraged him with his storywriting and never wrote “Did not follow assignment” on his compositions—though he often did not—at the same time that she teased him, fondly and mercilessly, like a big sister, calling him a “daydreaming romantic,” often adding that she wished “you know who” was a