Disappearances (2 page)

I was afraid R.W. might drown and my father would have to go to jail, but the warden had an obstreperous self-righteous indestructibility—his inflated opinion of himself kept him afloat. He pulled himself out onto the rocks at the foot of the whitewater and lay there gasping like a stranded trout.

My father was dancing again. He jumped high, laid his body out parallel to the ledge, twisted and landed on his feet to demonstrate his technique.

“Put the boots to him, Quebec Bill,” a man called out.

My father ran a short distance down along the ledge, booting imaginary wardens into the river. When I looked downriver again R.W. was gone.

During the next half-hour about twenty fish attempted the ascent. Since our arrival the river had risen several inches, augmented by afternoon snow runoff from high in the hills. The water was opaque as a glacial river. Overnight it would drop a foot. At dawn some of the fish would be able to clear the falls. Now they were too high, too fast, too powerful. Only one other fish was successful, a brilliant male close to a yard long. As it went over in a sparkling parabola of color and motion my father threw his arms skyward and danced furiously on deeply bent knees, as though performing some ancient fertility rite for the trout.

“He don't get excited much, do he?” Uncle Henry said mildly.

Across the Boston and Montreal tracks on the edge of the village the American Heritage Furniture Mill blasted its five o'clock whistle. Gray-faced men in gray cloth caps and gray work clothes appeared along the ledge, holding lunch buckets. The sun went under a heavy bank of clouds over the Green Mountains. The crowd thinned again.

In a week or ten days when most of the snow water was out of the river dozens of trout would go up over the falls every hour. Uncle Henry and my father would fish for them in the deep gravelbottomed spawning pools in our pasture brook with spawn sewn up in small squares of stocking net while I watched for R.W. Today most of the trout were still finning slowly in the frigid depths of Lake Memphremagog, waiting for that mysterious and infallible urge that would tell them it was time to make the run.

Another large trout was coming. It was driven back onto the rocks. Wriggling like an eel, it managed to work its way into the shallow pocket of water behind the falls, where it lay heaving on its side. My father stood in the spray of the falls, urging the fish onward with French exhortations and empathetic gyrations.

“Them fish have courage, Henry.” He roared out the word courage like a Decoration Day elocutionist. “They won't give up. Them Christly trout just refuse to give up.”

Saturnine in his sheer bulk, his eyes as inscrutable as a Buddha's, my uncle stared into the water. “The goddamn fools don't know enough to,” he said.

As we walked back across the field toward the truck two men with tan overcoats and city hats got out of a Buick with Quebec plates parked near Uncle Henry's Cadillac. “You boys interested in buying a fast car?” Uncle Henry said.

I knew he wasn't serious. The Cadillac was the most powerful car in Kingdom County, a pure white V-16 capable of cruising at ninety miles an hour. With it Uncle Henry earned his livelihood, but it still looked as pristine as it had in 1930 when it had been custom built for him. Soon after it arrived he had named it White Lightning.

One of the strangers said in French, “We're interested in renting it. With the driver.”

As my father and I drove down the lane I looked back out the window. The men were still talking with Uncle Henry. I watched them until the corner of the hotel blocked my view.

We turned onto the street paralleling the short north end of the Common. The sun had not reappeared. Under the bare elms on the Common the statue of Ethan Allen taking Fort Ticonderoga looked forlorn, as though when he had cast it my great-grandfather had not quite believed that Allen's expedition was worth the effort. Momentarily I envied my father, who carried his own good weather with him wherever he went—whom no bleak slants of late afternoon light could oppress or dispirit.

“Now, Wild Bill,” he said, “them boys that stopped your uncle by his car was G-men.”

I was impressed. “Can you always tell a G-man?”

“Yes, but you can't tell him much.”

My father laughed uproariously and pounded the rim of the steering wheel. “We'll have to remember that one for Henry, Wild Bill. Henry loves a good joke. Did you see him smile when I booted Warden down into the whitewater?”

“Dad, do you think those G-men will ever catch Uncle Henry?”

“Not hardly. They never caught Quebec Bill when he was transporting and Henry learnt everything he knows from me. Henry Coville learnt from the old master himself. They'll never catch him. He's too Christly well trained. I showed him mountain roads where nobody could even find him, much less catch him.”

“They might pick him up between here and Barre. He could always run into a roadblock.”

“He could always go through or around a roadblock. Don't worry about old Henry, Bill. They ain't a-going to land him.”

“Do you ever think about getting back into the business?”

My father smiled. “Look at them sugar houses going on that hill, Wild Bill. They'll be boiling all night. Spring is here, boy. Spring is Christly here.”

I looked around doubtfully. Steam was billowing out of the Kittredge sugar place, and except for the grimy frozen drifts along the north sides of stone walls and hedgerows most of the snow was gone. The ice was out of Lake Memphremagog. The rainbow run had started; that was usually a sign that winter was nearly over. But the grass in the fields and pastures was frozen flat and brown. The farmhouses that had not been abandoned were still banked high up their stone foundations with spruce and balsam boughs. Far to the east under the gray sky the northern peaks of the Presidential Range of New Hampshire were covered with snow and might be for another month.

Halfway out the county road to the Lord Hollow turnoff we swung into Frog Lamundy's place. Our light truck bounced up the lane. The tires spun in Frog's dooryard, then caught on the frozen dirt under the thin slop of mud as we backed up the highdrive toward the big sliding door of the barn. In accordance with Kingdom County custom we sat in the truck waiting for someone to come out of the house.

Frog's buildings were all weathered gray. Like many of the French Canadian farmhouses across the border the house was banked up to its rotted sills with old manure summer and winter. Across the dooryard, Which was cluttered with nondescript pieces of junk, was the small sawmill shed where our maples had been cut into lumber a few months ago.

Frog emerged from the long sagging ell connecting the house and barn. We got out of the truck and he greeted us in French. Frog was a small man, though not so tiny as my father, with quick shifty eyes and a thin mustache. He did a little of everything: cattle trucking, dealing in hay, distilling cedar oil, farming, running the sawmill. Most persons seemed simultaneously to admire and distrust him for his acumen in making a deal. I did not like him at all.

“I can smell rain, Frog,” my father said. “A nice warm rain to green things up. Wild Bill here thinks we'll have the cows out in a week. One good load of hay should carry us through.”

“I don't have one load to sell, good or bad,” Frog said. “I'm out myself. Maybe in a week or so, Bill. You have no idea how Christly scarce hay is this year. Ben Currier had to sell his herd last night for beef. I was there. The best herd in the county is rolling downcountry to some meat packer this minute. Nobody has hay.”

I looked at Frog with all the unmitigated hostility of early adolescence. I was humiliated for my father, who knew as well as I did that Frog could always find hay for a man who could pay cash. Uncle Henry said that Frog was receiving hay from Canada by boxcar loads and selling it directly out of the boxcar two or three times every week.

But my father appeared unconcerned. “At least we ain't losing a fortune sugaring this year,” he said. “That's one worry I and Wild Bill don't have.”

Frog looked down at the idle sawmill. “Nothing chews up a saw like an old sugar spout,” he said. He was alluding to the pitifully small price he had paid us for our trees on the pretext that the butt logs were probably full of old metal taps. “I had to buy two new saws to get them cut up. That runs into big money.”

I didn't want to hear any more of his lies. I walked down across the dooryard to the shed and looked inside at the saw. It was far from new. I stared back at Frog, but he was looking off at the mountains. Somewhat ruefully, I thought that we would not have lost money sugaring that spring, or any other spring for that matter. We had always made some money sugaring, and the spring of 1932 was the best for sugaring in a decade.

 

“That old Froggie boy thinks the world of me,” my father said as we rattled back down the lane, as light as we had come up.

“I'm sure he does,” I said. “He just thinks a little bit more of money.”

“No, Wild Bill, Frog would do anything for me. Why, Frog Lamundy is so generous he'd give away his ass and shit through his ribs.”

This incredible observation was typical of Quebec Bill Bonhomme, whose analyses of others were invariably more accurate as revelations about himself. He was absolutely incapable of judging persons he liked except in terms of his own personality. My father was generous, and so despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, Frog Lamundy, probably the most parsimonious man in the county, must be generous too. He loved a joke, so my Uncle Henry, one of the least risible men I have ever known, also loved jokes. He was sure spring was coming, so I had said the cows would be in the pasture in a week. He was wild and had been wilder in his youth, so his son must be wild too.

Wild Bill: I was proud of this epithet because it had been conferred by my father, but it was as incongruous a misnomer as any he could have devised, reflecting his own personality and accentuating the rather reserved turn of mine. My father was close to forty when I was born, and in our easy amicability we were more like grandfather and grandson than like most fathers and sons I have known. There was no one I liked or admired more. Early in my childhood, however, I began to develop a private tendency toward skepticism as a buffer against the constant disappointments and the ultimate disillusionment that would have resulted from adopting his unqualified optimism. Not that there was anything facile or unauthentic about his positive outlook, but to subscribe to his perennial optimism could have been psychologically disastrous for me. By the time I was fourteen I was cultivating an appreciation of irony for its own sake. Like my father's confidence in the essential fortuity of life, my capacity for enjoying some of its less tragic discrepancies was more a style than a philosophy. In both cases, I think, it was less a way of perceiving the vicissitudes of life in Kingdom County than a stay against being overwhelmed by them.

Now it began to snow. The flakes were gigantic, some as large as the palm of a man's hand. “Sugar snow,” my father said, pounding my knee. “The snow that takes the snow. Ain't that right, Wild Bill?”

For a few minutes the snow fell thickly. Then it stopped abruptly. As we climbed higher into the hills, more snow appeared in the fields. The countryside was shaggy with pastures going back to brush and cut-off sugar places growing up to spruce and fir. One by one the farms were disappearing. I noticed a collapsed barn I hadn't seen on the way down to the Common earlier in the afternoon. The heavy snows had built up on the roof, started to melt, frozen again and continued to accumulate until the weight was too great. The barn itself had not been used for years. Broken horse-drawn machinery stood rusting in the scrubby fields.

Yet inherent in the desolation was a latent vitality. Here in the hills of Kingdom County everything superfluous to bare existence had been purified out of the land by the long winter. It was impossible to live in that bleak landscape of fir and granite and cold rushing water and infertile soil without becoming permanently, if ambivalently, a part of it. Particularly in the uneasy hiatus between late winter and early spring, the austere and uncompromised land, now rapidly reclaiming itself, conveyed an intimation of the kind of energy and endurance it exacted of the men and women who still depended on it for their livelihoods.

Ten miles out of the Common we turned north off the county road over a one-lane steel bridge and started up Lord Hollow. The schoolhouse was dark in the twilight. Cordelia had walked home. The road wound steadily up, roughly following the bends of the hollow brook. The wind whipped the snow across the fields. My father switched on his headlights. He had gradually fallen silent, entranced by reveries of spring which remained unbroken until, just as we crossed the plank bridge over the brook at the foot of our hill, we ran out of gas.

So together in the wintery twilight we started the long walk up the lane: past the lower hay meadow; past the ancient straggling apple orchard; through the gigantic snow-covered stumps of the sugar bush; into the dooryard on the crest of the hill, twenty-six hundred feet above sea level. Home.

For a moment we stood in the dooryard. The wind gusted erratically out of the southwest. Wraiths of snow materialized around our knees, ghosted across the frozen mud, vanished. Down the hollow a mile the Royer barn lights flickered through the whirling snow. I felt vaguely unsettled by intimations of the impermanence surrounding our lives—the distant light blinking through the swirling insubstantial snow, the evanescent warmth of the afternoon, the bare dusty hayloft inside the barn.

As though to protect me from the consequences of his own ebullience, my father put his arm around me. With his free hand he pointed to the barn roof. Against the nearly dark sky I could see the white outline of the snow owl that had roosted there for a week. His body was facing south, but his head was turned around to the north. My father squeezed my shoulder. “Look at that rubber-necked son of a bitch, Wild Bill. Ain't he the best sign of spring you ever see?”