Disappearances (35 page)

One morning at breakfast Rat looked up at me and declared that the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children. He then went out to the barn, and that was the last we ever saw of him.

After a halfhearted search for him, I asked Cordelia whether children always inherited their fathers' sins. She hadn't eaten anything for more than a week but she was still strong and alert. “No, William,” she replied, “that is priestcraft. The children, however, are determined to assume them. Yea, even unto the third and fourth generation.”

We were standing in the dooryard. It was another warm blue day, a good day to begin putting in the garden, but for the first time in fifteen years my mother was not going to have one. The farm no longer meant anything to her, or to any of us for that matter.

“Listen carefully, William,” Aunt Cordelia said. “They are calling to me. Grampa René. Father. Brother William and his son. Your father is calling. This is not the rambling of an old woman but the truth as I have lived and taught it. They do not seem to be managing their affairs well.”

“Where are they?”

“I have no idea, but I must join them. I saw your son last night. He resembled my grandfather and your father. Rely upon his being troublesome. Your wife will be French. Teach her not to drop her
h's.
Your mother never dropped an
h
in her life.”

“Where are you going, Aunt?”

“Anywhere. Nowhere. Keep up your Milton. Read
Paradise Lost
at least once a year. It is a metaphor for life, we have all been disinherited. You will read the
Aeneid
in Latin every third year. Prof Corbitt will assist you with any difficult lines. Once a decade is often enough for Homer but do not lose your Greek. If you have an opportunity to learn Hebrew, improve upon it. I should have devoted a summer to mastering that tongue. I do not need to tell you to read some Shakespeare daily.

“In matters of this world consult your Uncle Henry, not your mother. Her attachment to life was through your father. Never regard what is ordinary without perceiving in it the extraordinary. Remember ‘Hamatreya.' You can't possess land, any more than you can possess another person. We dispossess ourselves through possessions.

“Your education has been provided for. You will leave Kingdom County for a time and then return, as my father did. The house will be here, waiting for you. I have arranged matters so it cannot be sold.”

Cordelia walked across the dooryard to the ledge overlooking the wilderness. I followed her and we stood looking out across the vast green swamp. Cordelia began to quote from the Earthsong in Emerson's poem:

 

Mine and yours;

Mine, not yours.

Earth endures.

 

Cordelia bent over and pulled up the rotten planks over the crevasse my father had opened in the ledge.

“I loved a man once, William,” she said. “A fine valiant man whom I killed on the Common before I ever saw his face.”

She stepped into the hole in the rock and disappeared. A fast shadow passed over the ledge. I looked up to see the snow owl flying rapidly north over the swamp. When I looked down again the opening in the ledge had closed. Once again the dark rock was laved by a trickle of cold spring water.

 

Later that spring Uncle Henry rented a house for my mother and me in the Common. It had indoor plumbing and electricity and the windows didn't leak. My mother could walk to church and to the store. The Academy was only two blocks away. Uncle Henry bought a Ford and resumed running whiskey. By the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed he had saved enough to carry us through until I graduated from high school.

I became intensely involved in sports and in my studies. It seemed to me that my life had been divided into two distinct epochs: before the spring of 1932, and after it. Sometimes we talked about my father, but never for very long. Later, when I read Proust, I understood why Swann's poor old father could never think for very long at one time about his deceased wife. And for years I had no remembrance at all of the most important event in my own past.

My depression ended as suddenly as it had begun. One morning in May of 1953 I woke up and it was gone, though I still could not remember what had happened back in the swamp after I had started running. My mother continued to act abstracted, as Cordelia had predicted she would.

When I wasn't in school or reading or playing ball I was with Uncle Henry. He came to all my ball games and throughout my high school years we hunted and fished together several times a week, as we would for most of the next forty years. When I graduated from the Academy and my mother returned to the convent in Montreal he kept the house in the Common so that I would have a place to come home to while I was in college.

Somehow Cordelia had established a trust fund that paid for my undergraduate education. There was enough money left in the fund to finance a law degree, which I took partly for that reason, though I've never regretted my profession, except perhaps briefly when I lost my judgeship.

I've never regretted coming home again either. I discovered that it is after all possible to do that in some instances, and if I gravitated back to Kingdom County in 1945 more or less the way I gravitated into law school, coming home was what I was consciously doing when my wife and I moved back up to the farm in 1950.

It was spring once again. My law practice was picking up, and we had been able to afford some basic structural repairs on the farmhouse. We weren't using the barn, which had continued to buckle out in back, but we kept a cow and some hogs in the connecting ell. I intended to cut all our firewood, and my wife was going to raise a big garden in my mother's old plot between the Canada plum tree and the granite outcropping where Cordelia had disappeared nearly twenty years before.

It was a sunny day a week or so after the snow had gone. The plum tree was budding out and Henry, who was just two, was sitting in its low crotch watching us plant peas. Even then he had an intense serious expression, and spent long periods of time apparently just thinking. When we straightened up to stretch and look around, the Green and White Mountains looked close enough to hit with birdshot. I thought that this was the kind of day my father would have spent trout fishing, as Uncle Henry and I had planned to spend the afternoon.

Shortly before noon my wife went inside to get lunch. I planted a last row and stood up, pressing the heels of my hands against the ache in the small of my back. I looked down along the one hundred miles of parallel mountain ranges. When I looked back at the plum tree Henry was gone.

I went into the house and asked my wife if he had come inside with her. She said he had been sitting in the tree when she left the garden. I ran back out to the dooryard and called his name. He didn't answer.

There weren't many places to go on our hilltop. The barn was off limits, but I went through the stables and the hayloft calling for him anyway. He wasn't there. He wasn't in the root cellar. I ran partway down the lane through the stumps of the old maple orchard, growing up to brush now. It was muddy enough so I would have seen his footprints if he'd been there. There weren't any tracks.

Shouting Henry's name, I ran back up to the outcropping overlooking the swamp. My wife was standing beside me and sobbing. I had told her about the disappearances in my family, and now I tried to reassure her that no Bonhomme child had ever disappeared. But she was getting hysterical, and I was close to panicking myself. I hadn't been so frightened since 1932.

I was certain that Henry had wandered down the back side of the hill toward the swamp. I could see Uncle Henry's car coming up the road so I started off down the path toward the river. In traces of old snow under the shade of the firs I could make out his small tracks. I kept shouting his name as I plunged through the trees and brush. I thought I might find him on the new beaver dam across the river but he wasn't there. When I stopped to get my breath the only noise was the water spilling out around the edges of the dam. Then from downriver a loon laughed.

I started across the dam toward the cedar swamp, where I picked up Henry's tracks in the snow almost immediately. I called for him and the loon laughed back. Henry's tracks went straight back away from the river. He was heading due north, up into the heart of the swamp.

The tote road was now completely grown over, but otherwise the swamp was the same as in 1932 or 1796. In open glades between the cedars where the snow had melted I had trouble locating Henry's tracks. I didn't see how a two-year-old could have walked so far in such a short time. Half an hour couldn't have gone by since I had looked up in the plum tree and realized that he was missing.

Near a tangle of red raspberry bushes and windfalls I lost his trail altogether. I backtracked frantically. My own footprints were hopelessly mixed up with Henry's. I returned to the berry patch, which must have covered ten acres. On two Sides were deep open backwaters. Repeatedly I called Henry's name. I began running up and down along the edge of the raspberries as though I were the one who was lost. I plunged into the thorns several yards. I fell over a rotten stump and lay gasping and sobbing in the wet moss.

Someone was helping me up. “Take it easy,” Uncle Henry said. “We'll find him shortly.”

Like my father, Uncle Henry could track anything anywhere. We returned to where I remembered last seeing my son's prints, and Uncle Henry quickly picked up the track again. It headed northeast, toward the spot where my father and I had camped in the snowstorm. We followed it for another quarter of a mile or so, and then what I thought wasn't possible happened. Uncle Henry lost the track. He circled, backtracked, circled again, finding nothing. We went back to the last track. Henry had been crossing a small opening between two thick stands of cedars. There was still about a foot of frozen snow in the clearing, which just revealed the faint heel prints of Henry's small boots. Halfway across the clearing the tracks stopped, as the tracks of old Ned the counterfeiter had stopped in the fresh snow in the swamp two decades before. Uncle Henry got down on his hands and knees. He shook his head.

I had heard or read somewhere that sometimes lost children are frightened by the shouts of searchers; that they huddle up under a tree in a catatonic state and let rescuers pass within a few feet of them, remaining as rigid and unnoticed as a small wild animal. Nevertheless I continued to call for my son. I was close to distraction again. I had never missed my father more than now. He would have been able to walk directly to wherever Henry was wandering.

Uncle Henry was plainly worried, though he never panicked and probably kept me from totally panicking. He told me to make a circuit out to the northeast while he swung northwest. He reminded me to move slowly and watch for Henry under the cedars and blowdowns.

I started out. I was very hoarse, but I kept calling. When I came to the St. John I followed the north bank for a ways, then cut back into the trees along a narrow game trail. Cedar limbs grow very close to the ground. I lifted up the branches of the larger trees to make sure he wasn't sitting back in under them. Where there was snow there were no footprints, only the tracks of wildcats and deer and bear. Once I jumped a moose that crashed back through the brush and into the river. Without realizing it I had gotten turned around and come back to the St. John. I was weeping, panting, bargaining desperately with the God I didn't believe in.

Late in the afternoon I met Uncle Henry back in the clearing where the tracks had stopped. His face was very grave. I knew he hadn't found anything. Henry had disappeared as inexplicably as all the others. I thought of the question Cordelia asked me about my birthright. It was inconceivable to me that my birthright was to witness the disappearance of our son. I thought about my wife, alone on the hilltop and going crazy with uncertainty. I had to get back to her and get up a search party before dark.

Uncle Henry said he would stay and continue to look while I went back to the farm. I started running again. I ran through the trees, jumped muskrat runs, passed the raspberry thicket, the canes blood red in the slant sun, and came out near the beaver dam, where I discovered Henry asleep. He was wrapped in a torn and faded hunting jacket and propped against the dead stump of a tall cedar.

I picked him up and started across the dam. He did not wake up. I held him close to my chest, as I once held my father. The rough wool of the jacket smelled like woodsmoke and tobacco. For the first time in eighteen years I remembered my father's features clearly.

I ran up the hill toward home as our voyageur ancestors had run through the original wilderness, frantically, fleeing time. For some reason I felt that I had to be in the dooryard by sunset. Fleetingly I thought of other, earlier voyagers. Of Odysseus, to whom Cordelia had compared my father, yearning homeward toward his wife and son. Of Aeneas, carrying his old father away from their home on his back. Of Daedalus, watching helplessly as his son soared into the sunlight.

I ran fester, inhaling the redolence of smoke and tobacco, thinking again of my father, no longer sure whether I was carrying my father or my son. I came over the crest of the hill into the freshly planted garden and thrust Henry into my wife's arms just as the sun went behind the mountains. My head was spinning. The garden and hilltop were spinning. Time was spinning backward on its axis, and once again I was fleeing through the swamp with my father in my arms, his jacket pressed close against my face and Carcajou howling close behind us.

As I ran through the deep snow with my father in my arms Carcajou's laughter seemed to be everywhere. Wave upon wave of laughter rolled out into the darkness before the dawn, reverberating on the cold air, filling the cedar swamp with a palpable terror that seemed emblematic of the wilderness itself.