Disappearances (23 page)

The abbot looked more frustrated than sick. As it turned out he was recovering from an attack of gout and expected to be on his feet again within a day or two. He was very concerned about Brother St. Hilaire's conduct, but also seemed quite sympathetic with him. He explained that about a year ago Brother St. Hilaire had pretended to recant his heretical views on the history of the Church in Canada. He had traveled to the hallowed site of the old Benedictine monastery at Fécamp in northern France and publicly repudiated his
History,
then stolen the formula for the famous liqueur manufactured there and brought it back to the small monastery on Lake Memphremagog. Since his triumphant return he had also written a brilliant renunciation of his repudiation. The abbot was at his wit's end to know what to do with him.

“We might be able to help you out, your Holiness,” my father said. “I was thinking that Hilarious might like to come up to my place for a while. Say in about a week. My wife's a devout believer. She was training to be a black nun herself before I come along and changed her mind. Also I've got an old woman up there that he could talk Latin to when he felt lonesome. I believe he'd be inspired to write more histories and renunciations too. It's a lively place. Wouldn't he be right to home up there, Hen?”

“Yes,” Uncle Henry said. “He'd fit right in.”

“Do you think he would consider coming?” the abbot asked.

“I know he would. We've already discussed it. He'll be ready as soon as this batch him and the Holy Ghost have working now is done. He don't like to leave a job half finished.”

Brother Paul looked slightly less dejected. The abbot was smiling. “I commend you for your hospitality, my son. I believe I feel well enough to go out and discuss the proposal with Brother St. Hilaire myself.”

“I commend all of you,” my father nearly shouted. “Now I have a little proposal I want to discuss with you, your Holiness. In private.”

The abbot nodded, and the rest of us went outside. About five minutes passed. My father opened the door and called Brother Paul back in. When the door opened again the abbot was up and dressed in a cassock. Leaning on two canes, with my father at one elbow and Paul at the other, he accompanied us back through the cloister.

Before we had progressed far a door at the far end flew open and Brother St. Hilaire appeared astride the red-faced monk, who was down on all fours making loud horse noises. Brother St. Hilaire had removed the surcingle from his cassock and made a loop in the end, which he was trying to twirl around his head. Without spotting us he spurred his steed off down a side passageway. “He's down in the laboratory, no doubt,” we heard him shout. “Giddap, Brother Theophile.”

“What was that commotion?” the abbot said. “I've come away without my spectacles. Has Brother St. Hilaire brought a horse into the cloister again?”

“They're up to more unseemly antics,” Brother Paul said. “I told you it was getting worse and worse.”

“They shouldn't bring horses into the cloister,” the abbot said. “I suppose I should have dealt more severely with his infractions in the past. But he has great faith in the Holy Ghost, Brother Paul. You can't disparage his faith in the Holy Ghost. You go along with William, now. I can negotiate quite well with Brother Dominic's assistance. I will try to be very severe with Brother St. Hilaire this time. Don't forget, my son, you will come back for our friend one week from today. Goodbye, my children. Goodbye, Brother Muskrat.”

While the abbot and Brother Dominic went off to the laboratory to expostulate with Brother St. Hilaire we went back to the refectory and put on our dry clothes. Our work shoes had shrunk, and Rat's wouldn't go on at all so he had to continue to wear the sandals.

“That gives me another fine idea,” my father said. “Put them white smocks back on over your clothes, boys. Paul here don't mind if we borrow four smocks for a few days, do you, Paul?”

“Not if they help speed you on your way,” Brother Paul said. “Follow me now. We will have to work quickly before the train arrives.”

Twenty minutes later we were standing in the rain in our surplices on a wooden platform between the dairy barn and the spur line. We could hear the train coming down the grade from around the shoulder of the mountain. On the platform beside us were twenty milk cans. Fourteen of them contained milk. Packed in straw inside the others were our whiskey bottles.

“I don't like this business one bit, Quebec Bill,” Rat said. “I don't like this white smock and I don't like this heathenish place and I don't like trains.”

“Fear not, Brother Kinneson. You're going to love this ride. So are you, Wild Bill. I'm going to see if I can get the engineer to let you and me ride up in the cab. There she is. There she is, boys. There's Old Ninety-seven. Just look at that, will you.”

I was as interested in trains as any boy, but my father was obsessed by them. He spent hours sitting on the hotel porch in the Common with Uncle Henry watching them go by and announcing for the delectation of anyone within two hundred yards the names on the sides of the cars. “Wabash, boys. There's the old Wabash. Great Northern. Hi, there's the Pine Tree State; that's the State of Maine, gentlemen. Canadian National, Canadian National, Canadian National—that's all newsprint from them big paper mills up on the Gaspé. There we go, there she is, that's the one I and Henry took: Santa Fe. Ain't that a glorious name for you? Northern Pacific, Northern Pacific, Central Vermont. Pine Tree State; that's the State of Maine, boys. I come down on the rods from Houlton to Portland once and this railroad detective thought he'd play a trick on me . . .”

Or we would be at home playing High, Low, Jack and the Game and listening to Cordelia read to us around the kitchen table on a winter evening when the wind was right, and we would hear the whistle of the evening freight from Montreal on the downgrade outside the Common, faint and faraway and unmistakable. My father would raise his head like a hunting dog and say in the mystical voice he reserved for the passing of trains and geese, “Hark. There she is, Wild Bill. There she goes. Don't that sound send shivers up and down your back.”

The milk train from Magog to Memphremagog and the Common was no less exotic to my father than the glorious Santa Fe. He was infatuated by trains, any train at all, even a superannuated local laboring to pull a milk car, two flatbeds piled high with hardwood logs for the American Heritage Mill, two closed boxcars and a caboose.

The engineer was a heavy man named Compton with a red face and a red bandanna. While Brother Paul and Henry and Rat loaded the milk cans Compton checked the logs by pulling on them with a hooked pike at least eight feet long. When he was satisfied that they were secure he replaced the pike in its vertical slot at the end of one of the log cars and started to climb back into the engine.

“Excuse me, Captain,” my father said. “I and these other clergymens was wondering if we could ride along down to—”

“Nope,” Compton said with satisfaction, continuing up the ladder into the engine. “No riders. Company policy.”

A moment later he leaned out the engine window. “Watch out for that steam. That'll scald your legs.”

“Who runs the company, Captain?”

Compton stared at my father. “Who runs the company? Judas Priest, I don't know who runs the company. They do. The company.”

“Does the company run your engine for you too?”

“I run my engine.”

“Good, then you wouldn't mind if I and this young brother here had a look at her, would you? Climb up, Brother William.”

I climbed up the short ladder into the cab, followed by my father.

“Here now,” Compton said.

“What's this?” my father said, pulling down sharply on an overhead lever.

The whistle emitted a screeching blast. I jumped about a foot. “Here,” Compton said.

“Here yourself,” my father said, handing him a whiskey bottle. “Company don't say nothing about not drinking Seagram's, does it?”

“Well. No. Not so long as I don't drink at the throttle, no, they don't. Thanks, Father.”

“I can tell by one look that you ain't the sort of man that drinks at the throttle, Captain. Company don't have no worries on that score. You got a fine engine here and a fine train. All we wanted was a peek. It's most unfortunate that you have to work for an outfit that don't let you determine who's to ride on your own train. We just hoped to ride down to the county home. Rules are rules, though, I always say. Especially company rules. You're Catholic, Captain?”

“Judas, no. I'm English.”

“I suspicioned as much. That's actually the reason I wanted to have a word with you. We're Anglican priests in disguise, my son. We're trying to spread the re-formation a bit further. A wedge here, a wedge there, you know; popery will fall before you know it. They give us the bottle so's we wouldn't report what we see in there. Last night they had a party of women of the night down from Montreal. I never see such goings ons.”

“Hoors, you say? I always suspected it. How many of you are there? Four, five?”

“Just four. Them other two could ride right in the milk car. But I don't blame you for not wanting to go against the company. That's your bread and butter.”

“You wait a minute, Pastor. I don't hold with popery myself. I wouldn't stop to get their milk if the company didn't make me. Hoors, is it? The boys up to the Legion should be interested in this piece of news. Just last fall we was saying we ought to bring a cross down here and burn it. I want to hear more about that hoor business. You and your 'prentice wait right here.”

Compton stepped back to have a word with his fireman. When he returned a minute later his bottle was not quite full. “What the company don't know won't hurt them,” he said. “Tell your two friends to get in the milk car.”

“This must be a grand job,” my father said to Compton as we pulled away from the platform, waving to Brother Paul, who watched us as though we were close relatives being deported.

“It used to be,” Compton said. “Back before they started hiring Frenchmen on the section gang. Now we never know whether we're going to make Memphremagog or not. They've let the track go all to ruin. Loose rails, rotted-out ties, spikes laying all over every which way. It's enough to make an old railroad man cry, Pastor. You can't get one of them Canuck fellas to do an honest day's work to save your life.”

“They're a shiftless lot, all right,” my father said.

Compton warmed to his subject. “You can say that again. I went to work walking the line from St. Hyacinth to Drummondville when I was twelve years old. Nothing escaped my eye. By the time I was sixteen I was head flagman in the freight yards up to Granby. I engineered my first run for Canadian National on my twenty-first birthday. I had the Portland to Montreal for thirty-two years. Until they commenced hiring Frenchmen. That was the end of the line for me. ‘I won't engineer with a frog crew,' I says. ‘Then you won't engineer for Canadian National,' they says. ‘Suit yourselves,' I says, and walked out. It was the high monky-monk from the head office. ‘Suit yourselves,' I told him and walked out on thirty-two years and a good pension. I come home to Magog, and when the boys to the Legion heard about it they made me an honorary member and helped me get this job. That was back before this company started taking on Frenchmen. The sight of them little dark frogs smoking their black pipes by the side of the tracks makes me sick, Pastor. It's gotten so they act just as lordly as a white man.”

“They're a bad bunch, Captain. We don't let them in the church. They ought to be kept down in their place. I've always said so.”

“They ought all to be sent back.”

“Sent back?”

“Back over across. Where they come from in the first place. That or cut, so's they can't have no more. There's your main social problem in a nutshell, Pastor: the French, going about dropping litters of ten and twelve like the Pope tells them to. Just last night we had a meeting down to the Legion on it. We don't just set around and guzzle up beer the way some seem to think; we try to deal with real social problems. Like the French. I stood right up on my hind legs and said send them back or cut them. We don't need them babbling little darkies slaughtering the King's English and taking jobs away from white men. Not when jobs are scarce as they are now. Not any time. You should have heard the boys holler and stomp. Commander said he'd put that about the babbling darkies in next month's newsletter. We send a copy to every post in Quebec. Every English post, that is. It ain't them being little that I mind, Pastor. You ain't that big a chap yourself. It's the dark part I can't go.

“It wasn't no French gang that killed that Mountie and cut off his head last night out on the lake, though. You hear about it, did you? They was big doings last night. It's been two big days in fact. First thing yesterday morning the boys down to the fire hall got a call on a barn fire over the other side of the lake. They skun right out and going up the lane they hit some kind of crater and turned the hook and ladder over onto its side. It was my day off and I was there. I try to go to all the fires on my day off. I've got a blue light on the Ford and a hand si-reen that the wife cranks. Sometimes we'll see where the smoke is and beat the hook and ladder.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“No. Frenchman named Gagne got throwed off of the truck but he landed on his head so he was all right. Eula and I was further behind than usual. She was in church at the time and I had to pull her out. That's the Anglican church, Pastor. Time we arrived the shooting had started. We thought it was shooting. From the stable, loud pops like a twenty-two might make. Talk about confusion. Commander down to the Legion's also the fire chief. He took right charge and ordered the boys and me and Eula to retreat into the swamp and lay low. ‘We'll smoke them jerries out of there,' Commander says, just as though he'd set the fire for that purpose. We was all very proud of him.