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

little more like him. Privately, Jim worried that Charlie would let Athena slip through his fingers.
    Charlie and Athena had been on the river since dawn and were still wearing their waders. As usual, they were arguing. In fact, Jim could not remember a time when Charlie and his longtime girlfriend had not been arguing. Mom said that arguing was how Charlie and Athena conversed with each other, which Jim supposed was the case, though he wished that when they were conversing, they wouldn’t try to enlist him on behalf of their respective causes.
    Today the couple was engaged in a debate over the size of a trout Athena had lost in the basin pool below the High Falls behind the hotel. She’d played it for several minutes, and it had jumped twice, so both Charlie and Athena had gotten a good look at it. But when Charlie had tried to net it for her, he’d inadvertently—or not—knocked it off the hook. Athena claimed the fish weighed at least six pounds. Charlie said four pounds was more like it.
    â€œYour so-called teacher here, Jimmy, is accusing me of deliberately causing her to lose that mediocre trout,” Charlie said. “Would I do that?”
    Outside, the long noon freight was rumbling by. Charlie had to speak just below a shout to make himself heard. So did Athena when she said, “What do you mean ‘so-called teacher’? I am Jim’s teacher. Your brother bumped that fish off my hook on purpose, Jim. All he caught all morning was a pathetic little fingerling and he was jealous. It’s the sort of thing I’d have expected him to do when we were twelve.”
    Jim gave Prof a pleading look, hoping he’d intervene and get him down from the witness stand. The old headmaster, however, was watching the train go by and only half paying attention to the conversation. Like many men who’d grown up in the Common during its heyday as a railroad town, with a roundhouse where mechanics worked on hundred-ton steam engines, and thirty trains a day passing through the village, Prof loved everything about railroading. When Prof was a boy, and for decades afterward, the railroad was the town’s main link to away, the other side of the hills. It was how Commoners got to St. Johnsbury to shop and to the matinees in Memphremagog. Jim loved trains, too, especially the exotic-sounding names on the sides of the freight cars. Baltimore and Ohio. Pine Tree State. Great Northern. Grand Trunk. Jim loved the names of the railroad lines the way he loved the names of Gramp’s hand-tied trout flies and Mom’s old-fashioned apple trees on the farm that wasn’t.
    At last, the caboose rattled over the crossing. A mile away, at the trestle north of town, one of the four diesel engines whistled. As the whistle faded away, a brief lull settled over the hotel dining room and the village, an empty quietude that Jim always found slightly melancholy.
    â€œI’ll net my own fish from now on, buster,” Athena said to Charlie. “Wouldn’t you, Jimmy?”
    This time Prof came to his rescue. He pointed his crooked index finger, broken twice from his glory days as a standout catcher at the Academy, at the squabbling couple. “Enough,” he said. “I listened to your catfights for four years when you two were going to school. I don’t intend to have my dinner ruined by them today. Charlie, what’s the farthest you’ve ever seen a baseball hit on the common?”
    Charlie looked out the dining room window, across the railroad tracks at the bandstand, and on down the green toward the baseball backstop at the far south end. “A few years ago my cousin Moose Kinneson tagged one off the upper story of the brick shopping block across the street from deep left field. There’s no telling how far it might have traveled. Four hundred and fifty feet? Maybe five hundred.”
    Prof nodded. “I remember that. I was umping behind the plate that day. But that