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and he had to fight it all the way back to the Common. They arrived at the hotel just as the last strip of light was fading from the sky. The barroom was quiet. Armand was setting the chairs upside down on the tables. The stage behind the chicken wire protecting the band from flying bottles was dark and empty.
    â€œLike thieves in the night,” Armand said, handing Jim a Nehi. “The darky run off to Montreal with her fiddler like thieves in the night. I sent the others home for the evening.”
    Jim got out his signed baseball and set it on the table. He wished that Charlie had said something more to Harlan about the stray-dog remark. He wished he’d spoken out himself. He supposed he should feel relieved that he hadn’t had to watch the Red Sox lose twice in one day to New York, but he didn’t. Nor did Pinky ever return to God’s Kingdom. For that Jim could scarcely blame her, though for a long time afterward, whenever he thought of her long dark hair and husky voice and the way she’d winked at him, he hoped that she would.

 
    3
    The Ballad of Gaëtan Dubois
    It must be said that to this day in God’s Kingdom, there is a deep and abiding distrust of anyone from “away” or “the other side of the hills.”

    â€”PLINY’S HISTORY
    They appeared in the Kinneson barnyard one afternoon when the air was thick with haze from forest fires across the border in Canada. Jim had been scything off the bank beside the RFD mailbox when he happened to look up and see them. There they were, standing perfectly still, like a family tableau looking silently back at him out of an old-fashioned daguerreotype: an older man and woman, perhaps in their late fifties, dressed in Sunday black, and a tall boy about Jim’s age. All three looked slightly apparitional through the haze from the fires, which had been burning out of control in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal for several weeks. The boy, too, wore a dark suit, short in the jacket sleeves and trouser legs. Under the jacket he wore a dark shirt buttoned at the collar, and on his feet square-toed brogans that could have been carved from blocks of wood. Between the boy and the old man stood an ox with brass balls on the tips of its horns. No, not an ox. A cow. An ordinary black-and-white milk cow yoked to a wagon piled high with bedsteads and bedding, wooden chairs, a rough table, winter clothing, shovels and pitchforks, a churn and dasher, sap buckets—even an ancient black wood-burning range.
    â€œ Bienvenu, monsieur! ” the old man called out, as if Jim were the stranger. “ Je m’appelle Réjean Dubois. Ma femme, Madame Dubois. Et Gaëtan, notre fils. ”
    Madame Dubois nodded politely at Jim. The son, Gaëtan, ducked his head and grinned, as if amused by his talkative father, who was already surveying the Kinneson place with an appraising expression. His quick dark eyes took in the swaybacked hay barn, the overgrown pasture along the river, the empty tenant house across the road.
    â€œ Très belle, ” Réjean said. “You have here, monsieur, une très belle fermé. Only she appears to be running away from you a little. I tell you what. I will bring your farm back. I, Réjean Dubois, will make of her a beautiful place.”
    Réjean clicked to the cow, which bowed its neck into the yoke and plodded across the dirt road and down the lane toward the tenant house. And that is how Gaëtan Dubois and his family came to Kingdom County and took up residence on the Kinneson farm.
    *   *   *
    Their name, Dubois, meant “of the woods,” and out of the woods they had come, the scrubby, cut-over woods and infertile fields full of glacial rocks just north of the Upper Kingdom River marking the border between Vermont and Quebec. “Black French,” immigrants from that region were called in the Kingdom of that era. Mixed-blood descendants of the