Disappearances (34 page)

It was only through Quebec Bill Bonhomme that my mother permitted herself to establish any liaison with this world at all. She was fully her own woman, as strong-minded and independent as any I have ever known, including my wife, but it was toward God and heaven that she was oriented, and except as worldly things and events were important to my father they were not important to her. Even the herd was insignificant compared to the glory of God, and to her Quebec Bill Bonhomme was His chief glory—an opinion with which my father no doubt would have been in full concurrence had he been at all religious. If there has ever been a better example of Emerson's definition of wisdom as the ability to hold two contradictory ideas than my mother's love of God and my father, I haven't encountered it. Yet her faith was intensely private; she did not attempt to inculcate it in me or anyone else. She evidently felt that her belief was enough to guarantee our salvation.

My mother did not look old, but she no longer looked young either. I looked back at Cordelia. In the dim light she appeared incredibly old.

I said softly, “Aunt Cordelia, what happened to your father and brother?”

“Ah,” she said. “You would know your birthright at last?”

With no other introduction she said, “In the summer of 1861 my Grandfather René made his grisly prediction on the day before my brother and father left Kingdom County with the First Vermont Militia. At the time I did not quite believe him, though after his disappearance I was less skeptical, and when I learned by telegram of William's death at Bull Run on the day my grandfather had appointed I had no doubt at all that Father also was going to die where and when René had foretold. I knew that there would be nothing I could do to prevent this tragedy, though when the time came I would try.

“You see, William, I was trying to preserve what I then perceived as a sort of civilization by attempting to interfere with fate as it was to realize itself on the village Common later that summer. For me, a girl of nineteen, Father represented all the culture I knew. He had lived for the sake of books and ideas and taught me all I then believed worth knowing. He had also loved both me and my brother as much as any father can love his children. As all Goodman-Bonhomme fathers have loved their children, accepting them as equals almost from the time of their birth. So when William died at Bull Run, Father apparently went mad. He refused to bury his son on what he considered foreign soil. He dressed the corpse in full military regalia, placed it in a flag-draped coffin in a wagon and started north for Kingdom County, driving night and day and changing teams every six or eight hours. He was dressed in uniform himself, a tall gaunt unshaven wild-eyed man who did not slow down for the blue streams of soldiers he met marching south, but stood in the death wagon whipping the horses savagely, laying about with his saber and addressing the soldiers as whores of Mars as he scattered them into the ditches. Orie Royer's father, then a sixteen-year-old private, saw him stop to change horses at a crossroads tavern north of Harrisburg. At first he did not recognize the crazed old colonel who leaped down from the wagon. ‘Horses,' Father shouted to the tavern owner as he unharnessed the spent team. ‘Rum.'

“By that time the wagon reeked so that no man in his right mind would have denied my father anything he demanded that would hasten him on his way. A captain approached and saluted. Father seized him and dragged him up to the coffin. He threw back the cover to expose the putrefying remains of my brother. ‘See your end before you, Jezebel,' he roared, and forced the captain's head close down over the corpse. The captain promptly fainted, and when Granther Royer and several others ran up to revive him, Granther recognized Father. He did not recognize the body of William, which he said was black with flies and seething with worms, so that by the time Granther recovered from the shock and brought the captain to, Father was already whipping up his fresh team and sweeping the rear of the regiment out of his way, shouting hell-fire and damnation to them in the tradition of his namesake and grandfather, Calvin Matthews.

“No one was about to stop him. On a hot August day a newly formed regiment marched down the main street of a place called Poughkeepsie to the cheers of hundreds of proud citizens. At the south end of town they were met by an overpowering stench. It was followed closely by my father, coming over a hill half a mile away, already rising to his feet in the wagon and brandishing his saber. The troops hesitated. A man shouted that the rebs had broken through. Poughkeepsie's finest turned and raced without order back through the bunting-draped street, followed by the thundering wagon, distinguishable from an apparition out of the Book of Revelations only by the ineffable redolence of death that preceded and lingered behind it. Lingered behind it, William. Lingered behind it for generations.

“There were newspaper accounts of this singular homecoming. One relates how south of Albany my brother's corpse was jounced from the coffin and lay oozing over the road for two hours until Father discovered it was gone and returned to scrape it up. According to the same notice a company of men actually managed to stop the wagon near Troy, secure my father in a madhouse and bury the corpse in a nearby paupers' field. That night he broke out, dug up the coffin and carried it two miles through the woods to the home of a wealthy undertaker of Dutch descent. There he commandeered a team and an ornate rolling hearse with curtained glass windows. By morning he was in Vermont. Two days later, having driven steadily from Virginia except for the two or three hours he spent in the madhouse, he appeared at the south end of the Common, heralded by the scent of my brother's corpse and a hideous flock of soaring raptorial creatures unlike anything that had ever been seen in Kingdom County.

“Now pay close attention, William. You are about to learn some history. At the same time that Father was carrying my brother's body home, a certain Captain Greenwood of the Confederate Army was traveling north on a parallel route some hundreds of miles to the east in a British sailing vessel. It seems that this captain, a very bold young man, had been commissioned along with a scant dozen compatriots to slip through our coastal blockade and journey to Halifax. From Halifax they were to proceed across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to southern Quebec, where their orders were to mount sudden raids on northern New England border towns. To rob banks, blow up railroad trestles and generally harry the population into believing that a sizable guerrilla force was at work. Their purpose was to divert Union troops back to the north. They had no way of knowing that Father was doing that job adequately himself.

“When he arrived in Quebec, Captain Greenwood picked Kingdom Common as his first target. It was the county seat, and apparently thriving, with eight mills and a railroad, and it was only about ten miles from the border. Memphremagog was closer but that was a larger town and might be more hazardous to attack. The Confederate band could not have known that the Common Bank was empty and that nearly every penny in the county had gone into the state war fund. Nor could they possibly have known on that afternoon in late August when they galloped into town, mistaking Father's library for the bank and riding their horses up the marble steps and straight through the tall carved walnut doors that had been left open for the breeze, that Father would be entering the Common from the opposite end.

“The librarian had been on her way to the door to see what could possibly smell so bad. She got out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by the woods horses Captain Greenwood had purchased in Sherbrooke. He discovered his mistake as soon as he saw the thousands of books lining the paneled walls. He raised his hat to the terrified librarian, note that, William, whirled on his horse and led his men back through the door, cursing the Frenchman who had assured him that the brick building with the white pillars was too splendid to be anything but a bank. He started across the Common toward the courthouse. Perhaps he planned to burn it. Then he began to curse again, because Father was bearing down on him in the stolen hearse, twirling his saber around his head like a Tartar.

“I am certain it was not the captain's intention to kill or harm anyone. He was no Sherman, but a brave and handsome man performing what he perceived as his duty. But when he saw a bearded and insane old man in a uniform that was still blue enough to identify charging at him on top of that hurtling macabre conveyance for the dead, he had no choice other than to defend himself. ‘Stop,' he shouted, raising his pistol. And at exactly the instant Captain Greenwood fired, I, who also had no choice but to defend my father despite my certain knowledge that my efforts would be futile, fired my grandfather's musket from the base of the statue of Ethan Allen, where I had been waiting all afternoon. Captain Greenwood fell from his horse. Father sat down on the seat of the hearse. His team galloped on up the Common and out the county road.

“I stayed on the Common only long enough to ascertain that Captain Greenwood was dead. His men had ridden off down the Memphremagog road, where some of them were captured later that afternoon, at about the same time that I arrived in our reeking dooryard to find my sister-in-law weeping over the coffin and my six-year-old nephew, your grandfather, William, sitting on the roof of the barn his father had built, flanked by a score of vultures and drinking from a bottle of rum he had found under the empty blood-soaked seat of the hearse.”

“Empty?” I said. “What about your father? Calvin. Had he fallen out along the way?”

“Yes,” Cordelia said, her voice very high now, almost keening. “Calvin. My father. Whom you so much resemble, William. What about him?”

Cordelia began to rock. In her moaning night voice she said, “He had disappeared. Oh yes, disappeared. No one ever saw him again. And that is not all, William. Now you must hear. Because there is more, and herein lies your birthright.

“I dug my brother's grave myself that afternoon as soon as I had fetched his drunken little boy away from his companions on the barn roof and put him to bed with his mother. I dug fast and hard, hurrying because of the stench. When the grave was as deep as I was tall I dragged the coffin to its edge. What I did next was unspeakable work. But I had to do it. I could not commit that body to our ground without making sure it was my brother's. It was dark by then. I got a lantern and a bar, and opened the coffin. Instantly I was sick. That is how bad the smell was. I lay on the ground and was sick in my brother's open grave. But I was strong and young and I must have been brave too because I had just killed a brave and handsome man, so I forced myself to hold up the lantern and look. I looked. I looked into that box that smelled like a charnel house. And when I saw that it was empty, strong and young and brave as I was, I fainted. Do you know now, William? Do you know now the nature of your birthright?”

I did not reply. Cordelia evidently did not expect me to, because almost immediately she fell asleep in her chair, her body still rocking slightly. She was breathing lightly and rapidly, as the very old and the very young do, and already muttering in French, Latin, Greek. Once she said, “Come off that roof instantly, young sir.”

My mother had not awakened. It was very quiet. I was slept out. I lay awake thinking about Cordelia's story. Despite all I had heard and seen during the past week, it seemed incredible. I could not believe that it was my birthright to disappear.

My arms ached badly. I tried to remember what had happened after I started running through the swamp with my father. I could still feel his weight in my arms, his arm around my neck. I wanted to remember but couldn't. I felt like crying, but I couldn't do that either.

After a long time it began to get light. Very quietly I got up and went to the window. The snow in the dooryard was blue again. In the sunrise it turned pink, and the long range of the Green Mountains to the west turned from blue to pink in the rays of the rising sun.

Around the corner of the barn a man appeared, large and bulky in his sheep coat. He was bucking his way through snow up to his waist and pulling a pair of huge staggering horses behind him by main force. Hitched behind the horses was a long sledge piled high with hay, and on top of the hay sat a lean man in a blanket coat and slouch hat. His mouth was going fast.

One of the horses went down onto his knees. The big man lifted the horse to his feet. He took off his knitted cap and wiped his dripping forehead. The man on the load was still talking. I rapped on the window. The man in the sheep coat looked up and solemnly raised one big mittened hand, his face inscrutable as a Buddha's.

Cordelia was awake. Once again she had laid the spectres of her ancestors. “Who is it?” she said sharply.

I motioned for her to come and see for herself. I wasn't crying. I didn't cry for many months. I could only stand at the window and stare out at Uncle Henry and Rat and the hay with the indefinable oppression of the heart that I would wake with and live with and go to sleep with for the next year.

 

After the big blizzard spring came very quickly. The snow began to melt the morning Uncle Henry and Rat brought up the hay. Under the hot May sun it went fast, dripping from the budded Canada plum by Cordelia's window, sliding off the spruces and firs in great thudding avalanches, cascading down from the barn roof onto Henry and Rat as they lugged the stiff carcasses of our herd out to the sledge in the dooryard. The snow melted into the gullies in the stony fields, into the brooks pouring down to rivers that flowed north to empty into the great lake. The spring birds that hadn't frozen came out of the woods. In a week all the snow was gone, though the snow owl remained on the barn roof.

Cordelia stopped eating and did not return to school. I didn't feel like eating but my mother made me. She seemed sad but not grief-stricken. Rat moped around the barn. Uncle Henry stayed on with us for a while. No one mentioned my father in my presence. It would have helped us to be able to talk about him, but that was simply not the way of our family, or of many hill families.