Disappearances (33 page)

As I remember the closeness my father and I experienced while stormbound in the cedars, the big fire we kept going through the dark while the wind howled, the talk of hunting and fishing, the comfortable silences, the plans, I am also tempted to romanticize our relationship. That is harder not to do, because it was in fact as good as any relationship between any father and son I have ever known. He was somewhat condescending toward me sometimes. Sometimes in my more callow and ironical moments I was condescending toward him. By the time I was fourteen I was filtering most of my perceptions through a layer of irony, like the layer of hardwood charcoal through which good bourbon is filtered. My father was right, I was becoming more like Uncle Henry all the time. My father must have been aware of the irony of that sobriquet Wild Bill, which he used increasingly. Irony helped to solidify our relationship. It became an expression of affection and set the tone of most of our communications. At its source was a strong mutual appreciation.

There are no men like my father in Kingdom County today. They have disappeared as irrevocably as the small family farms and the log drives and the big woods. Such men required room, both physically and spiritually, and even in Kingdom County that room is no longer available. They needed space in which to get away from people and towns and farms and highways, and other people needed space to get away from them since authentic characters are not the easiest persons to live with. To live in a world without them, though, while it is certainly easier, sometimes seems intolerable.

 

Dawn was still many hours away when my father began to talk about his plans for the future. I had built a lean-to deep in the cedars and cut a big pile of dead cedar for our fire. I wanted to dress his leg with fresh bandages from my long underwear but he told me that it would be better not to tamper with it. It was swollen badly, and he couldn't move it at all. It lay near the fire, steaming like a wet log. The wind screamed, driving snow all around us. It was a Canadian thaw all right, four feet of snow and a hell of a blow, but we were warm and snug, protected by the trees and our lean-to.

My father was making plans to go back into the whiskey business, and in grand style. He and Henry would get Rat drunk enough to repair the government plane, which they would then use to transport whiskey out of Canada to points all over New England. When they weren't smuggling whiskey they would fly the plane for their own recreation. “Wait until I swoop down on Warden when he's out on Memphremagog harassing innocent fishermen and poachers, Wild Bill. I wonder how he's accounting for himself down to the asylum.”

“I wonder how he's accounting for us,” I said. “What makes you think Mom is going to let you run whiskey again?”

“When she hears how good this trip went off she just won't have no other choice. I never took a sup, Bill. Not a single sup of whiskey passed Quebec Bill's lips. I knowed I could do it. I warn't even tempted.”

“You better move your leg back from the fire. It's going to get too hot.”

“Bill, do you know what I and Sweet Evangeline are going to do when I begin making money on them runs? I've been thinking about it all day. We're going to take us a trip.”

“Another trip?”

“Yes, and not no little piss ant canoe trip to Magog, neither. We're going to outfit that plane and fly back up to Lake Athabasca, where old René went as a boy. That's real country up there. Wild country. From there we'll fly to Washington and Idaho and Montana and I'll show Evangeline where I used to work in the tall timber and on them great cattle ranches. Then we'll slip down along the continental divide and visit Yellow Rose in Texas. She'd like that, Yellow Rose would. She'd like to know how Henry is.”

As my father talked on I dozed off. When I opened my eyes he was sleeping and mumbling in his sleep about his cross-country flight. I got up to pile more limbs on the fire. I poked at it with a limb, trying to push a partly burned smoking log further over onto the coals. Something smelled bad.

“Jesus Christ,” I said out loud.

I grabbed my father's burning leg and jerked it out of the fire. He yelled and sat up. He yelled again, then passed out. I felt his boot, which had burned through on one side. His ankle and calf had been scorched too, I couldn't tell how badly. I threw snow on the smoking flesh. It sizzled. I lifted my father up by the arms and held him against my chest. His head was dripping wet and very hot. He moaned. I had to do something, anything to alleviate that pain. I thought of the last bottle of Seagram's.

It was right there in his jacket pocket. Holding him close against me, I broke the seal and got off the cap. He moaned again and drew in his breath sharply.

“Dad,” I said. “Wake up, Dad. You've got to drink some of this.”

“Christ,” my father said. “Did I pass out?”

“You went to sleep and burned your leg in the fire. Drink this.”

He turned his head aside. “No,” he said. “I don't need that. I promised Sweet Evangeline before we left. I can't feel nothing in that leg. I don't need no booze. Jesus, it's hot in here. Bill, put some snow on my head.”

“I don't want you to take a chill, Dad.”

“I won't take a chill. Put some snow on my head.”

I propped my father against the back of the lean-to and went outside again. It had stopped snowing and the wind had died. In under the cedars the snow was not deep, but just outside the tight ring of trees in the tote road running down to the beaver dam the snow lay deep and blue under the clear sky. The moon was out, and quite low in the west. It must have been around five o'clock. At home my mother would be getting up to start chores.

I got some snow and applied it to my father's forehead with his handkerchief. He was burning up. I didn't feel right myself. I was shivering a little. I held my father in my arms with his head cradled on the inside of my shoulder. He slept again, fitfully, mumbling. I tried to keep his head cool with the handkerchief.

From off down the tote road a great horned owl screamed. Not long afterward a long wailing howl broke out. I started, and so did my father. “That sounded like a wolf,” he said. “I must have dreamt that. I dreamt I heard a wolf, Wild Bill.”

“Dad, it's stopped snowing. I think we've got to try to move again. If we get a good jump we can be over the dam by dawn and home by early morning. We've got to get you to the doctor.”

“Yes,” my father said. “A dose of salts should be just the thing for that leg. We'll get Dr. Rupp to give me a Christly enema. No, Bill. We'll wait right here till dawn. Then you cut me a good supply of wood and go on out to the dam and up the hill. You couldn't never drag me up that hill through two or three foot of new snow without snowshoes. You get aholt of Henry and Rat and tell them where I be. They'll fetch me out on a toboggan.”

“No,” I said. “We aren't going to do it that way. You're coming with me.”

My father laughed. “Wild Bill,” he said, “you get wilder every day. I'm staying here with a warm fire. You go along. Go now if you want to get a jump on the day.”

I had never in my life openly defied my father or mother, but there was no way in the world I was going to leave him there to pass out again and die of exposure.

“No,” I shouted, pulling him closer to me. “No.”

Suddenly there was a high piercing scream from quite nearby.

“Good Christ,” my father said. “That sounded just like a painter. There ain't no painters around here no more.”

It screamed again.

“That's no painter,” my father said quietly. “Put out the fire.”

I kicked snow onto the fire. When it was out I stuck the hatchet back in my belt and knelt by my father. “It's him, isn't it?” I said.

“You go back in the trees, Bill. Not too far. Leave the hatchet with me. When you hear me holler get out on the tote road and start running. Run as fast as ever you run in your life. Don't stop till you're home.”

“No,” I said.

Loon laughter filled the night. It rose to a mad crescendo. Through some hideous trick of ventriloquism it was joined by a concert of wolf howls, panther screams, hooting, baying, bellowing. I picked my father up in my arms and began to run back through the trees into the swamp.

“LaChance!”

As I came out of the cedar stand into snow over my knees I could hear the crash of brush close behind me.

“LaChance!” Carcajou screamed.

For many years the next several hours were blank to me. Often I would dream that I was running with my father in my arms through an endless cedar swamp. Just as Carcajou started to bellow I would wake, terrified as a lost child. For months afterwards that is what I felt like, a bereft child alone in a swamp through which I searched with diminishing hope for a river that would lead me out. I ate, slept, went back to school in the fall, went fishing with Uncle Henry and walking with my mother. But I was only going through the motions. I had fallen into a terrible black despair.

Then it was spring again and I felt simultaneously better and guilty to be better. Then the guilt passed, and I could begin to think about my father and the trip again, with the exception of those blank hours. For twenty years my last memory of our flight through the swamp was Carcajou bellowing behind us as I ran through the deep light snow under the cedars with my wounded father in my arms.

Then I recalled lying in a high fever under quilts on the kitchen woodbox with the starving cows bellowing steadily from the barn.

“They're welcoming us home, Wild Bill,” my father said. But I knew he was not really there. I was having a fever dream.

I could hear Aunt Cordelia and my mother talking over that constant loud moaning from the barn, but each time I tried to force myself awake I went under again. I dreamed I was back struggling in the lake under the pulpwood. I heard shots, one after another at measured intervals. Perhaps Carcajou was laying siege to the farmhouse. If so, he would have his hands full with Cordelia.

I did not wake up until late afternoon. I was very weak. Aunt Cordelia was sitting by the woodbox. Except for the crackling stove it was very still. I noticed that some of my mother's seedlings in the windows had grown taller. Outside a snow drift combed up over the windowsill. In the afternoon light the snow was a deep blue. The silence bothered me. Then I remembered the cows. Uncle Henry must have finally gotten up with hay. I assumed that he and Rat and my mother were in the barn doing chores.

Aunt Cordelia put her hand on my forehead. Her fingers felt light and cool, desiccated as slices of dried apple. The woodshed door opened, and Cordelia withdrew her hand quickly.

My mother came into the kitchen. She was wearing her gray sweater and barn shawl. I started to get up to go to her, but she shook her head. I saw that she was crying. It was the first time in my life I had seen her cry. She wept silently, as her Indian grandmother might have, as she must have learned to weep years ago at the convent. She was leaning slightly forward and the tears fell directly from her eyes onto the wide dark planks of the kitchen floor, staining the planks darker where they hit in splotches as large as quarters. Then I noticed that she was holding my father's deer rifle at her side. She shook her head again. “They had suffered enough,” she said.

It was twilight. My mother sat by the woodbox holding my hand while Cordelia made supper. The snowdrift over the window was purple. On top of the barn roof the wind had whipped up a strange configuration. Something about it disconcerted me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said before I knew I was going to. “It's the snow owl.”

Cordelia gave us tea and soup, which tasted delicious to me. Darkness fell. I got quite hot again, and my mother bathed my forehead as I had tried to cool my father's fever the night before. My arms still ached. Intermittently I had more fever dreams. In one of these the snow owl twisted his head around to reveal the shattered face of Carcajou. He swooped down off the barn and beat his huge white wings against the kitchen window, screaming “
LaChance, où êtes-vous, LaChance?
”

Sometime in the middle of the night the fever left for good. The kerosene lamp on the table was flickering low. Cordelia sat in her straight-backed chair by the stove, keeping up the fire. My mother was asleep with her head on the back of her chair.

I could not seem to think about my father, though I had not yet entered the depression that was to last a full year. That would begin a few hours later. I looked at my mother's face. In the lamplight it looked quite wan. I thought about the Jerseys, how she had loved taking care of them. When he first came to the farm my father had started some stone walls to keep them in, but of course he never got further than about ten feet with any of them. Later Rat made some beautiful stake and rider fences from cedar rails he had cut in the swamp. As the herd grew he could not keep up with the need for fencing, and we could never afford barbed wire, so my mother would go to the pasture with the cows on summer days and sit reading or playing with me while they grazed. On those long hot days she taught me many things whose value I did not guess until long afterward.

I have said what I believe my father taught me. The effect of Cordelia's tendentious harangues is obvious. What I learned from my mother was subtler, and perhaps more important. There were the small things that have stayed with me always and that I took great pleasure in teaching Henry, like the English and French names of the common meadow and woods flowers, the birds and the trees, to all of which my mother was gently attuned. There were deeper qualities that I can appreciate without pretending to emulate. The patience to sit for hours on a rock near the brook while the cows wandered through the lower meadow. The endurance year in and year out, not only to put up with the rest of us but to enjoy us and to the extent that it was possible protect us from ourselves—and here I am thinking mainly of my father, whom she loved above anything or anyone in this world or the next, which despite my father's most violent abrogations she continued to believe in and ultimately returned to the convent to prepare for; and where, she believed as implicitly as I have ever believed anything, she would be reunited with her parents and grandparents, her stillborn daughters, and my father.