Disappearances (12 page)

“‘Climb down now directly,' the first fella says. ‘No more of your tricks. This gun shoots smart-mouth French boys just as quick as white men.'

“‘This one shoots thieves and sons of bitches just as quick as rabbits and pa'tridges,' says I, and blasted a great hole clean through the buffalo robe with the shotgun I had pointed at the fella the whole time. He jumped like a Christly deer when the buckshot hit him, and flinged that lantern ten foot in the air. But I didn't have time to admire the fireworks. I got the other fella with the second barrel before the first one landed on the snow down below by the river.

“I dumb fast out of the sleigh and went up to where the second fella was laying dead across his rifle by the toll shed. I taken his feet and started to drag him down the bank to the river. But his head was half blowed off at the neck and I was afraid it would come clean off, so I had to go around and take holt of his shoulders and skid him down to the ice with the head lolling off to one side, hanging there by just a cord or two. Next I went up in the woods and found a pole, and I wasn't long about it neither. I pushed them two bodies out over the ice with the pole, one at a time, being careful not to catch that fella's head under him and shear it off. I shoved the carcasses off the ice into the open water, and throwed their lanterns and guns and the pole in after them. I never did find their team. They must have bolted when they heard my shotgun let go.

“Well, Bill, your father had a decision to make, and there was never a man who could make up his mind any faster than Quebec Bill Bonhomme—which was my second decision, to change my name back to Bonhomme. The first was to whup up the team and drive straight to the drop point to pick up my money. Then on at a dead gallop through the main street of Memphremagog and out past the lower river to the Common and along the county road and up the hollow to Cordelia's, where I'd never been before in my life and only heard about once or twice when Pa was drunk and recollecting how he and my grandfather that built barns had gotten drunk together. But I knowed right where to go. And Cordelia, who had never seen me afore or had any way to know I even existed, come to the door and held her lantern up to my face and knowed me too. ‘You look like my Grandfather René,' she said. ‘You smell like him too. You're young William's boy and you've been drinking.'

“‘That's not all I've been doing,' I says. ‘Let me in, Aunt Cordelia. I just shot and kilt two hijackers.'”

My father asked Cordelia to deliver the team and sleigh and part of the whiskey money to my grandfather and to explain what had happened. She agreed to do this and to put him on the morning train for Boston. She told him that it was near the St. John River where the men René St. Laurent Bonhomme brought to Kingdom County with him had vanished. She talked to my father about time, its cyclical and illusory nature, and the recurrence of themes and events down through the generations. Her speaking of René Bonhomme may have inspired his decision to assume the old French surname as an alias. They sat up talking all night, with Cordelia doing most of the talking. At dawn she took him to the train.

From Boston my father decided to go west. By 1896 most of the east was used up, but he had heard about the vast forests and plains of Wyoming and Montana and Oregon and Washington, so he bought a ticket for Seattle and headed out. He told me that he was drunk most of the way, though not quite so drunk as the drummers who paid for his whiskey and from whom he won hundreds of dollars at poker believed.

My father liked Washington. He said he didn't miss home because he'd never been in one place long enough to have a home to miss. Undoubtedly he missed his parents and brothers and sisters, but thinking about what he left behind in the St. John River that April night must have tempered his loneliness. He accepted the fact that for some time he would have to remain a fugitive.

From Seattle he went north to work in the tall coastal forests. He began as a bull cook, assistant to the head cook in a lumber camp. Soon he was climbing up giant Douglas firs with an axe and a safety belt and hacking off the top thirty or forty feet of the trees to prevent them from hanging up on smaller trees as they fell. When the crown snapped off, the upper trunk to which he was belted whipped and jumped like a bucking horse. He said he liked that, twanging back and forth two hundred feet up in the air. He also liked to gaze out from the treetops over the Pacific Ocean, but he never looked too long at a time because he sensed that if he did he would be a sailor the rest of his life. He tried to stay within sight of the Canadian border from the top of a tree.

When he grew tired of lumbering he moved over to northern Montana and worked on a ranch. From there he crossed the border to a wheat farm in southern Saskatchewan. He drifted back into whiskey running because it was an easy way for him to make money. He drank every day.

One night in a backroom gambling parlor in some nameless border fourcorners in northern Idaho a self-styled promoter of quick money-making schemes watched my father beat into insensibility a man more than a foot taller and a hundred and fifty pounds heavier than himself. A week later they were in Denver, where my father was fighting barefisted matches for purses of several hundred dollars against some of the toughest men in the Rocky Mountains. Denver was still a wide-open settlement then, and such activities were apparently regarded as principal attractions of the city. Men congregated there from New Orleans and Chicago, San Francisco and St. Louis and Portland to bet on the fights, promote them or participate in them. Every night bouts were held on back street corners, in makeshift rings inside warehouses, in abandoned mining camps on the outskirts of the city. The only regulation was that no weapons were permitted, so if he got into trouble with his fists my father could and did use his feet, against which even the biggest men were helpless. He told me that before Uncle Henry broke his jaw he had never lost a fight or sustained a lasting mark on his head or body. Then just as the promoter was talking about arranging for him to turn professional and fight as a lightweight, he left Denver to visit his family, departing as suddenly and with as little forethought as he had gone west originally. This time, though, he was not running away from anything. He said that April night on the covered bridge was the only time in his life he had ever had to do that.

It was April again. He had been away five years. Possibly it was the time of year that stirred that desire in him to leave Denver, to begin the pilgrimage which he had no way of knowing would become a quest that would last more than fifteen years. Not that he expected to find his family in the cabin on Lake Memphremagog where they had been living the night he ran away—he knew they would have left there years ago. A farmer who lived a few miles from the abandoned cabin said that the Goodmans had left in the spring after that first winter. He thought they had headed over toward Megantic, near the Maine border. My father didn't expect to find them in Megantic either, or in Chateauguay in upstate New York where he heard they had gone next. But as the summer wore on into fall and the first snow found him back in Memphremagog with no money and no idea where his parents and brothers and sisters might be, he thought of Cordelia. It was possible, he supposed, that his family had maintained some contact with her. She was in the barn when he arrived, and she knew who he was without even looking up from the cow she was milking. “Is the sky the same color out there?” she said.

Cordelia hadn't heard of William Goodman or his family since the day she returned the team five years before. She said she hadn't thought about them. She had spent the time since my father had left milking her cow, feeding her chickens, carrying water from the well to the barn and house, and when the well was dry carrying it from the brook a quarter of a mile away; scything enough hay off the meadows to get her cow through the winter; making a little maple sugar; teaching Milton and Aristotle and Pope and Virgil to children who if they spoke English at all often did not know their letters; immersing herself in the isolation of the hilltop farm, her profession and her conviction that all human endeavor, including her own, was illusory though not necessarily futile.

“Where do you think they might be?” my father said.

“Anywhere,” Cordelia said. “Nowhere.”

Then she had told my father how René Bonhomme had disappeared.

“You mean they just disappeared like Grampa René?” I said. “Twelve people disappeared off the face of the earth?”

“Eleven, Bill. I was the twelfth, and I ain't disappeared yet.”

“They must have gone somewhere.”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you? I thought so at the time. I couldn't see what some old man drownding on the lake or walking off to die in the woods had to do with my folks. Just like you, I figured they had to be someplace. So I set off in earnest to find them.”

He persuaded Cordelia to outfit him with a team and sleigh, and spent that winter traveling along the border inquiring for his family and taking orders for a seed company out of Montreal. In the spring the seed company branched off into farm implements, which he sold that summer and fall to subsidize his search. By the following winter he had built up a sizable clientele and was beginning to be well known along the Canadian line: a small man, not old, with white hair and sharp blue eyes who sold more seeds and machinery than most of the other men who worked for the company precisely because he didn't seem to care whether he sold any seeds or machinery at all; the selling was incidental to the search.

“Goodman? I believe there's a Goodman over near Edmunston, across the line. I think he works at the depot. I don't know whether he has a family. May be. Now that corn planter in your book there. Where would I have to go to see one of them in operation? You come in and have a bite, mister. I want to show that book of yours to Marie. She might be able to tell you more about that Goodman fella.”

My father's search was gradually becoming a way of life. He learned not to raise his expectations as one after another he met dozens of wrong Goodmans: lumberers and tenant farmers; railroad clerks and teamsters; mill workers, blacksmiths, a bank president and even a few whiskey smugglers. He realized after two or three years that he was probably not going to find his family, though like those mythological knights who devoted their lives to searching for mythological chalices he remained as opti
mistic as ever. He stayed on with the company because he liked the work.

He made money fast and spent it and gave it away faster, trusting farmers who while they were perfectly trustworthy had no money and no expectations of getting any. Often he exchanged a harrow or hay rake for a woods horse or a couple of Jersey heifers, which he hitched behind his wagon and traded or sold in the next town or next county. He never seemed to be in a hurry. He spent hours drinking coffee in kitchens, tea in lumber camps, liquor at the schoolhouse parties and dances where he played his fiddle almost nightly. He often visited five or six farms a day, played half the night at a dance, traveled all the following day and fiddled again that night. Regular customers who knew his route and approximate schedule arranged weddings and other family celebrations to coincide with his arrival. He was well liked by everyone for his vitality, his generosity and his keen disinterested curiosity about people—who they were, what they did, where they came from. He was an entertaining talker and a good listener and never forgot anything his customers told him about themselves or their families.

Everywhere he went he was deluged with invitations to eat meals, stay overnight, stay for a week. With the men he spoke knowledgeably about crops, stock, hunting, fishing, local politics. He was equally conversant with effective ways of canning applesauce, putting up wild blackberry jelly, appliquéing quilts. He made a good deal of the children and was much made of by them and by their older sisters, but he was not ready to settle down. There was always a hamlet twenty miles to the south that he hadn't visited; a Goodman who worked a farm or leased a section of softwoods on the back side of a mountain ten miles to the north; a man in the next county who could tell him who was running whiskey locally. Even after he knew that his family was gone for good he acted as though he would discover them next week or next month or by fall at the latest. Everything else was secondary to that epic hunt. It structured his life as a family or profession or religion or driving personal ambition structures the lives of other men and women.

Once every year he visited Cordelia. He found her un
changed, uncompromised by time, which she refused to acknowledge anyway. In contrast the cabin on Lake Memphremagog where he had last seen his family and which he also visited annually was progressively ravaged by the years, sinking fast into the encroaching woods, a windowless shell hidden by fireweed and paintbrush and beech saplings, the song of a white-throated sparrow high in some distant pine or the laughter of a loon on the lake the only sound. But even after it was only a cellar hole of charred timbers he continued to return, as to a family burying place. He tried to find some sign of his family's brief habitation—a horse hame in the fallen shed, a whiskey bottle, anything at all that would be tangible proof that the family of which he had been dispossessed had actually been there at all. Maybe at those times more than any other he was aware of that longing for permanence, for a home, which Cordelia once told me has haunted every born wanderer since Odysseus.

He carried his fly rod and shotgun with him everywhere, the same gun his father had made, which he had used that night on the covered bridge and then given to Cordelia to store for him while he was west, the old eight-gauge he later taught me to shoot with and that we had brought with us on our trip in 1932. When he had temporarily had a surfeit of the selling and talking and parties and dances he would leave his team and wagon at some farm at the end of a dirt road and walk miles back into the mountains to hunt or fish for a few days. He was equally at home performing for a large group of people and completely alone in the woods.