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Dubois family to join them at the farmhouse for a kitchen junket. Réjean Dubois played the fiddle and clogged his feet to the dozens of Canadian reels he knew by heart. Madame Dubois, a grave, happy expression on her face, accompanied him on a mandolin. Gaëtan clacked two desert spoons together for percussion, and Mom, who’d attended the Boston Conservatory and knew every Beethoven sonata by heart, banged out chords on the hard-used old piano. Charlie and his girlfriend, Athena Allen, stopped by to help eat a washtubful of Gramp’s homegrown popcorn, and Madame’s French-Canadian pâtisseries . At the end of the evening, when Réjean brought them all home with the lilting strains of “ Sucre d’érable ,” even Dad’s foot began to tap. Mom looked at Dad’s foot, then she looked at Jim and laughed.
    Mom was the only person Jim knew who could get away with teasing Dad. She said the reason he couldn’t carry a tune was that, except for a few bloody ballads and a handful of Robert Burns’s lyrics, music had been outlawed in the Presbyterian Scotland of Dad’s ancestors. Come to think of it, Mom said, laughter and fun had been outlawed there, as well. Humor wasn’t Dad’s strong suit, but Mom could always make him laugh, even at himself. Otherwise, his idea of humor was to say, as he did when he received the Pulitzer Prize, that it and forty cents would buy him a cold one at the Common Hotel. The award committee put out a press release, which Dad refused to run in the Monitor . Mom said a Presbyterian Scotsman would rather take up devil worship than take credit for anything. Dad laughed and said it was probably true.
    Looking back years later, Jim often thought that Mom’s loveliest quality was her rare gift not to wish to please others so much as to be easily pleased herself. Pleased with her gardens, with all kinds of animals, with books and stories, with friends, and most of all, with her family. If Gramp was the chronicler of God’s Kingdom, and if Jim’s dad, the editor, was its public conscience, Mom was its heart and soul. Gramp put it best. He said it was Mom who introduced joy to the Clan Kinneson.
    *   *   *
    September arrived. On the first day of school Gaëtan was waiting for Jim at the Kinneson mailbox. He wore the outgrown suit he’d worn on his first day in Vermont and carried a tin lunch pail containing three bread-and-lard sandwiches and a quart canning jar of black coffee. At the Academy, Jim accompanied Gate to the office to help him register. Prof Chadburn, the headmaster, arranged for the boys to take most of their classes together so that Jim could help Gaëtan with his English.
    Prof clapped Gate on the shoulder and winked at Jim. “Be sure to sit next to your friend in algebra class,” he said. “Let me know if there’s any difficulty.”
    Jim knew that Prof was referring to Miss Hark Kinneson, the longtime math teacher at the Academy and the editor’s second cousin once removed. What relation that made her to him Jim neither knew nor cared. Harkness Kinneson was a notorious tyrant who detested all children and young people. Like Prof, she had taught three generations of Commoners. Miss Hark’s classes were trials by ordeal and she was universally feared by her students, past and present.
    â€œWelcome to Algebra Two,” Miss Hark announced at one o’clock on the Seth Thomas clock over the blackboard of the mathematics room. A rail-thin woman in her late seventies with a mannish jaw, a broad forehead, hands like hay hooks, and small black eyes that missed nothing, Miss Hark surveyed the class bleakly.
    â€œAlgebra Two,” she continued, “is not metal shop. Algebra Two is not Physical Education. In Algebra Two we will not be playing math games or any games.”
    Miss Hark delivered these remarks in a flat voice with no hint of humor. In the ensuing silence she