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original Abenaki natives, habitant French-Canadian farmers, and fugitive slaves from the South who had settled in the area before the Civil War, in the border community known as New Canaan.
    â€œYou see, monsieur ?” Réjean said that evening to Jim’s father. “We have come down from the north, us, to make your farm a showplace again.”
    Jim did not think that the “farm that wasn’t,” as Gramp sometimes called it, had ever been a showplace. Gramp liked to joke that for generations Kinnesons had used the income from the family newspaper to support the farm and the income from the farm to support the paper. But the editor told Réjean that he and his family were welcome to stay on rent-free at the tenant house for as long as they wished. Jim’s mother, Ruth, immediately befriended Madame Dubois.
    With Ruth’s help, Madame scrubbed the four-room tenant house from top to bottom. From the windows of her new home she hung curtains cut from burlap and dyed red, green, blue, and yellow. Jim helped Réjean and Gaëtan whitewash the milking parlor in the barn. Up went the wood-burning stove in Madame’s tiny kitchen. The newcomers were settling in.
    Réjean and Gaëtan scythed the wild hay off the disused fields on the hillside behind the farmhouse, raked it into windrows to dry, and pitched it into the wagon for the cow to take to the barn. Réjean got a job on the night shift at the furniture factory in the Common. Madame hired out to clean village houses. Gaëtan helped with chores on neighboring farms. On Sunday afternoons he and Jim went fishing or berrying.
    In the long summery evenings after supper, Jim tried to teach his new friend how to play baseball. Flailing away with Jim’s thirty-two-inch Adirondack, Gaëtan had no luck making contact with Jim’s soft lobs. The Canadian boy knew little English, but one afternoon he repaired the hand-crank starter of Gramp’s long-defunct Allis-Chalmers and got it running again. Next he tinkered with the engine of the editor’s first car, a Model A Ford blocked up on its rusting wheel rims behind the barn. He attached a belt from the flywheel to a buzz saw and began cutting up firewood for next spring’s maple sugaring.
    Réjean tapped his head in a canny way and pointed at his son. “ Génie! ” he said to Jim.
    Gaëtan shook his head, looked down with his diffident smile. “ Non, Papa, ” he said. “ Albert Einstein est un génie. Moi, non .”
    â€œ Oui, ” Réjean said. “You will see, Monsieur James. When school begins, in the autumn, you will see.”
    *   *   *
    Late each August, Mom and Jim spent an entire day together at the Kingdom Fair. This year they took Gaëtan with them. They started out early in the morning at the animal barns, dropped by the cattle judging, whiled away the heat of the afternoon watching sulky races and the grand cavalcade from the cool of the grandstand. In the early evening they lollygagged through the midway, riding all the rides, playing all the games, having a look at Clyde Beatty, the “longest snake in captivity,” a sleepy five-foot python in the “Exotic Animals of the World” sideshow. Jim was tremendously proud of his beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed mother. She went on the Tilt-A-Whirl and dive-bomber with him and Gate, treated them to all the fair food they could hold, and took them to see the Hell Drivers and fireworks highlighting the grandstand show that evening. “ Merci, ” Gaëtan said. “ Merci, Madame Kinneson. Today has been, how do you say, un bon temps . My very good day.”
    The Kinneson men, including Dad, Gramp, Charlie, and Jim, all had tin ears. Mom loved music. Next to the woodbox in the farmhouse kitchen stood an elderly upright piano, formerly the property of the now-defunct Lost Nation one-room schoolhouse. One Saturday evening Mom invited the