Disappearances (26 page)

After a while my wife mentioned that it wouldn't hurt to consult a priest. I thought about that for some time. Why not? The times were out of joint again. The falcon could not hear the falconer. Maybe Weinstein was right. Maybe we needed a different kind of shaman. If so, I knew just the one.

Brother St. Hilaire was up in his sixties and still going strong. When we arrived at the monastery, this time by car on a paved road through the woods from the county home, he was in Brother Paul's laboratory developing prints for his
Pictorial History of Convents in French Canada.
He told us that he was journeying to Montreal several times a month to recruit prostitutes to simulate the licentious activities of early Canadian nuns. He showed us some blown-up black and white prints of gaunt tired-looking women in various stages of dishabille in front of a tawdry backdrop depicting the interior of a stone chapel. “A representative progression of doxies and trulls wantoning at Our Lady of the Laurentians, my children. Late eighteenth century probably. This sequence is provisionally entitled
Preparing for the Arrival of the Fathers.
What do you think?”

“I think,” said Brother Paul from the corner to which he and his retorts and petri dishes had been relegated, “that you had better come over here and look at this.”

Brother St. Hilaire squinted down into Paul's microscope. “Look here, William,” he said. “Paul's done it again.”

Brother St. Hilaire thrust my head close over the eyepiece. Racing to and fro on the slide were richly caparisoned homunculi. Some were jousting on tiny horses. Some were hunting with miniature bows and arrows. In the distance others stormed a castle on a windswept crag.

I straightened up and looked at Brother Paul. I had never seen him more lugubrious. He shook his head. “Every day a new deception,” he said. Before my wife had more than a glimpse of his medieval tableau he snatched up the slide and dashed it into a metal waste can.

“I wish I could persuade Paul to take his peepshows on the road,” Brother St. Hilaire said. “He could make a fortune. Some are quite instructive. You should see the Roman Saturnalia on agar-agar. It quite outdoes my
History
for sheer Rabelaisian vigor. Like his namesake, Paul is a true illusionist.

“Your father, William, Quebec William I mean, was the grandest illusionist of them all. Sometimes I think he was an illusion himself. I can't stop marveling over young Henry's resemblance to him.”

My wife's eyes were standing out almost as far as Uncle Henry's. She clutched our son's small hand and started backing toward the laboratory door. “I think, William, that we had better go home now.”

“But you've just arrived,” cried Brother St. Hilaire. “Wait, my children. We haven't even begun the exorcism. The Holy Ghost and I haven't exorcised a true demon since Brother Theo-phile caught one in the form of a retired railroad engineer planting a charge of dynamite in the dairy. I scourged him halfway to Magog before he stopped babbling about his legions. Here, open your mouth, my young son. Sometimes they roll up in a ball at the base of the tongue.”

My wife was running down the cloister with Henry in tow. Her high heels clacked on the tile floor. The old abbot, who had been dead ten years, put his head out of a passageway. “Has Brother St. Hilaire brought a horse into the cloister again?” he said.

On the way home my wife sat between Uncle Henry and me with our sleeping son on her lap. “Maybe he needs some more pets,” she said.

“He doesn't like pets,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “maybe we should try some different kinds.”

Uncle Henry looked straight ahead and said nothing.

 

We were keeping a few animals on the farm at the time: a milk cow, some chickens and hogs, my bird dogs and any number of barn cats. Before we could augment this assortment with a pony, Henry became interested in animals of a very different type. He began making sightings over the cedar swamp of gigantic airborne reptiles with long bills full of sharp teeth and wide leather wings bristling with claws. He saw icthyosaurs diving in the upper reaches of the St. John, and pointed out herds of triceratops cropping grass by moonlight in our upper meadow. He decided to specialize in the study of ice-age mammals, and through his mother and me initiated correspondences with three Pleistocene paleontologists. He drove imaginary herds of extinct longhorn bison around tarpits and glacial fissures in our dooryard, tethered prides of American lions in the cow stable, developed an obsession to breed short-faced bears. His night screaming abated. By the time he was five it had stopped altogether.

Remembering my father's menagerie, I wondered whether Cordelia had been right. Perhaps time and events repeated themselves endlessly; illusion and reality might after all be interchangeable; extinctions and disappearances, like beginnings and endings, were matters of human perception. Late at night my wife and I began to hear the thundering of bison and screaming of mammoths from Henry's loft. We looked at each other in terror. My life was becoming more fantastical and inexplicable as I grew older. I felt a desperate need to talk to Cordelia or my father. We stopped sleeping. Uncle Henry shook his head and looked very grave.

One afternoon Dr. Weinstein reappeared. He was on foot and clad in a pink negligee. He had stopped taking drugs. He had shaved his head and no longer ate meat. With him he carried a worn copy of the
Bhagavad-Gita.
He had adopted a new name. We were to call him Swami Poomdakhuba.

Swami Poomdakhuba had walked barefoot over the mountains from a carnival in Maine to undertake the salvation of our family. He had been shot at twice, and on several occasions nearly run over. He told us that bringing people to an awareness of the godhead was even more challenging than ministering to their psychoses.

“Henry,” he said kindly, “these pets of yours no longer exist. They did not strive to attain a higher consciousness and so were superfluous. There is no glyptodont in the hayloft. I want you to chant with me now.”

“There are two glyptodonts in the hayloft and I intend to breed them,” Henry said.

The swami had fashioned a crude pair of extra arms from papier-mâché and attached them to his sides with glue. He now contrived to extend these appendages toward Henry in a supplicant gesture. “Show me,” he said.

That night as Uncle Henry and my wife and I sat in the kitchen Swami Poomdakhuba chanted by Henry's bedside. The whole house shook with the stampeding of creatures that had vanished eons ago. The trumpeting and snarling and bellowing drowned out the swami's chants. Finally I couldn't stand any more. I rushed up to the room and pulled on the light. I found my son sitting up in bed holding a grayish creature somewhat larger than a cat. He was thrusting it toward the swami. “Here, Doubting Thomas,” he said in Cordelia's voice, his eyes wide open, his forehead lined with intense concentration. “Does this satisfy you?”

I grabbed the thing by the scruff of its neck and held it out in front of me. It was ice cold. “Put it in the root cellar,” Henry said. “I've prepared a box there for it.”

Henry fed his new pet raw hamburger. It grew fast, but never warmed up. The root cellar had become as cold as an ice house. I asked Henry where he got it. “Up in the cedar swamp,” he said.

“Don't you think it would like to go back there?”

“No. I want to get it a mate.”

One day I started down cellar to get some salt pork. The creature was crouching at the foot of the rickety wooden stairs. It was now nearly as big as my springer spaniels. When I switched on the light I saw the glint of two fangs protruding an inch below its lower lip.

I shut and locked the cellar door and went up into Henry's loft. He and his mother had gone blueberrying. On the bookshelves along the wall near his bed technical works on the ice age had supplanted my sets of Dickens, Scott and Stevenson. For a while I looked out the window over the ell at the roof of the barn, where years ago I had watched the snow owl.

I went back downstairs and out into the dooryard. It was a wonderful day in August. Perfect blueberry weather. I walked across the dooryard to the granite outcropping, and looked out over the swamp and up the great lake into the distant notch where René Bonhomme had disappeared almost a century before. It was 1953, and the lake and swamp were still unspoiled, undeveloped. From Cordelia's old back bedroom by the plum tree I could hear the chanting of Swami Poomdakhuba droning on and on, persistent as a locust.

Often in difficult times I would think of some advice Cordelia had given me: “Determine as best you can what your father would do in your situation, William. Then do exactly the opposite.”

As I stood on the ledge looking north I had no difficulty determining what my father would do in this situation. He would keep the cat and help Henry find a mate. Maybe he would even tame it. I couldn't tame it, and sooner or later it would tear one of us to pieces. I believed I might be jeopardizing my relationship with my son, but I had no choice. I couldn't let the thing live another day.

I returned to the kitchen, opened the gun cabinet and without any hesitation took out the old eight-gauge shotgun that I had used back in 1932 to shoot Carcajou. I inserted two shells loaded with buckshot into the chambers. Then I went back to the head of the cellar stairs, turned on the light and blasted that creature back into the oblivion out of which Henry had retrieved it.

“You done the only thing you could,” Uncle Henry said to me that night in the kitchen as we listened to the slow grinding retreat of the glacier from the loft. “Even your father wouldn't have kept that thing around to devour his family. You done just right.”

“Yes, William,” my wife said, putting her hand on mine, looking at me with her level brown eyes. “I know Henry will understand when he's older. We'll get him the pony tomorrow.”

A downdraft of arctic air came sweeping out of the loft. The rumbling receded. Swami Poomdakhuba chanted urgently.

Henry dutifully rode the pony a few times around the dooryard. The next morning the cellar door was open and I found his pet on the earth floor with a visceral banner of blue and red trailing behind it down the steps. It was still kicking, and I had to dispatch it with the eight-gauge. Henry viewed the remains dispassionately.

That night we were awakened by screams from Cordelia's room. I rushed in to find Swami Poomdakhuba thrashing on his bed. He seemed to be struggling with a large invisible creature. I grabbed him by the shoulders and brought my hands away wet. His throat had been torn open from one side to the other.

“Poor swami,” Henry said in the morning. “I'll miss him. Now we must burn the remains.”

“What?” I shouted. “Burn the remains?”

“Certainly. He left instructions with me in case something like this happened. We have to build a pyre and burn him. The remains are to be immolated.”

My son built a cunning rectangular crib of firewood in the meadow near where Cordelia had burned the remains of my father's deformed flocks. He filled the hollow center with hay, which he soaked with gasoline. In a daze I stuffed the swami's remains into a large feed sack, which I carried down to Henry's impromptu crematorium. Twenty minutes later there was nothing left of the protean chiropodist from Brooklyn but his two papier-mâché arms, which lay on the pile of ashes upraised and unsinged.

“There, Wild Bill,” my son said with an air of satisfaction. “That should propitiate the smilodon.”

He did not bring home any more pets, and there were no more sanguinary deaths on our hill. The estrangement between us that I had feared didn't materialize. The ice age gradually came to an end. Henry proceeded to an interest that would preoccupy him for years: the study of man's evolution.

When he was about ten Henry began to spend whole days at a time alone in the cedar swamp. By the time he was twelve he was camping there for three or four nights in succession. One June evening after he had been away camping two days I walked down the hill behind the house with Uncle Henry to fish off the beaver dam for the evening rise. As we approached the dam we saw Henry standing on it and talking with a tall stooped woman. Their backs were to us and the woman was pointing upriver. Suddenly a hirsute creature about Henry's size dropped out of a cedar tree a hundred yards or so beyond them. It landed with great agility on its hind feet on a rock sticking out of the still water. It looked incuriously at them, its legs bent, its knuckles loosely brushing the rock. The sinking sun shone directly on it. I saw very plainly that its features were neither simian nor human, nor anything in between. Casually it reached up and swung into the cedar. Henry started up through the swamp after it. The old woman disappeared just as I opened my mouth to call out to her.

I looked at Uncle Henry with astonishment.

“I saw it,” he said. “But I ruther I hadn't.”

The flat water above the dam was dimpled with rising brook trout, but already Uncle Henry was walking back up the trail. It was the first time in my life that I had seen him pass up an opportunity to fish.

I think that Uncle Henry would rather not have seen a great many things during his life, but it seemed to be his inescapable fate to be subjected by our family to the outrageous and impossible, as it seems to have been my fate to spend most of my life in the shadow of either my father or my son. Their personalities were not only indomitable but overwhelming, and throughout my adult life I have had to pause repeatedly and remind myself who I am, apart from a son and a father: first a young country lawyer practicing out of a room in the hotel next to Uncle, Henry's; then a middle-aged lawyer with an office in the courthouse, who would rather sit on the hotel porch talking with Uncle Henry and a few broken-down poachers and retired brakemen than practice law; then a county judge and weekend farmer who would still rather sit on the hotel porch and talk, or fish in the few remaining spots where a trout can be caught, than sit at the head of a courtroom.