Disappearances (6 page)

“You may tell him Brother St. Hilaire may be down in a week or so,” Brother Paul said. “My sailing days are over. I will notify the police immediately about that madman in the launch.”

“You'll do no such thing,” Brother St. Hilaire said. “We can't have the lake overrun by those dolts if we're to pursue our avocation freely.”

Brother Paul looked at us dolefully. The man had a genuinely tragic countenance. “I hope you don't run into him further up the lake, my sons.”

“I hope we do,” my father said. “Goodbye, monks. Goodbye, Hilarious.”

Fifteen minutes later we were paddling between mountains rising thousands of feet on both sides of us. The lake lay deep in the shadow of the mountains, but high overhead the sun still shone brightly on icy granite cliffs. Here in the mountain notch Lake Memphremagog was said to be bottomless. I had heard many persons including my father say that the mountains continued to fall off sharply below the surface to fathomless depths. I did not really believe that the lake plunged down toward black chaos and old night, but the unriffled surface was as still and black as the back of a mirror, and although it was not cold, I shivered and buttoned up my jacket again.

I couldn't stop thinking about that huge hijacker and his wraithlike white hair. I for one agreed with Brother Paul. I had seen all I ever wanted to of that apparition. “Dad,” I said, “do you really think that man in the launch was the devil?”

My father laughed. “That's been wearing on you, ain't it, Bill? No. He warn't the devil. There ain't no such critter.”

“Who was he then?”

“I'd like to know. If we should run into him again, I intend to slow him down and get a closer look at him. I never see such a looking rig in all my days. That white pelt he was wearing for hair must have hung clear to his ass. I believe he colors his beard. He's an old man. If I'd had a clear shot at him he never would have got no older. A specimen like that ought to be stuffed and set up next to Noel Lord's painter down to the Common Hotel.”

“I thought he'd killed Brother St. Hilaire with that oar.”

“Yes, that was an awful blow. I hope it don't interfere with his histories. Now there's a real man for you. Bill. Hilarious is a man and a scholar, in that order. Paul, he's a horse of another color. I suspicion that fella is a homocycle. Did you see where he was trying to put his hand to give Hilarious extreme unction? For a minute there I thought he was giving him an extreme enema.”

I wasn't sure what a homocycle was, but at fourteen I wasn't going to expose my naiveté by asking. I laughed somewhat uncertainly and turned to look at my father. His paddle was lying across the thwart in front of him and he was smoking his pipe. I had stopped paddling when he began talking about the hijacker. There was no wind, the lake was perfectly still, but we were moving rapidly north through the mountains. My father shrugged and grinned. “Don't ask me, Bill. It's always done this up here. Maybe it's some kind of current.”

I was thoroughly spooked by what was happening to us, but I couldn't deny that it was happening. This was no illusion. With no effort on our part we were cutting steadily north through the mountains, leaving a long rippling wake behind us on the dark quiet water. If there was any kind of current, it was imperceptible.

My father smoked his pipe and grinned over his long jaw like a fox. I didn't see how he could be so nonchalant. That was his way, though. He had a boundless sense of wonder, but nothing ever seemed to surprise him. His confidence in life was unshakable. And while I could never attain those rarefied heights of affirmation where he dwelt, so long as we were together nothing could really frighten me either. That is how much I believed in him.

Gradually I relaxed. The bare trees and rocks marched quickly past us. I shut my eyes, then opened them to see how far we had gone. I was mesmerized, nearly unaware of passing time.

“Look there, Bill. Ain't that a grand sight?”

It was late afternoon. Ahead of us the lake opened out wider again. Across an icy bay on the east side was a sweeping escarpment several hundred yards long and at least one hundred feet high, surmounted by a single balsam fir as tall as the Univer-salis! Church steeple in the Common. The upper part of the cliff was entirely glazed over with dazzling frozen springs of every color from deepest blue to light green. Wedged in between its base and the lake was a narrow strip of gravel littered with granite talus and polychromatic chunks of fallen ice, like giant jewels waiting for some Sinbad to come along and pick them up. North of the cliff the jumbled mountains sat further back from the water. Far to the north a rosy pillar of smoke from the paper mill stood motionless in the sky above Magog.

Now my father was paddling again, driving the big canoe along through the floating ice in the bay with short chopping powerful Indian strokes. “Up there,” he said, tilting his head toward the tall fir. “That's where we'll be meeting Henry.”

I broke a channel through the rotting yellow ice with my paddle blade, and we landed just south of the cliff. This time my legs were so stiff they almost buckled when I stepped out. We carried the canoe up into the woods and turned it upside down out of sight from the lake. I must have been looking at it askance because my father laughed and said, “She won't get up and walk away, Bill. She just plays them tricks on the water.”

He slipped into the shoulder straps of the pack basket and started up through the woods, making a wide circuit around the cliff. There was no trail and the slope was very steep. It took us about ten minutes to work our way up and then over to the clearing where the big lone fir stood.

Back on the edge of the clearing a dilapidated cabin sagged into a copse of young beech trees. The cabin had been rough hewn from fir or spruce logs, and no one had lived there for a long time. The door had fallen off its leather hinges into a patch of wild raspberries. Most of the floor had rotted out from snow and rain blown in through the open doorway. Behind the cabin a tote road ran back through the hardwoods toward a cut in the mountains. The road was quite dry, and looked passable.

I got some dead limbs together and my father built a fire a few feet back from the cliffside fir. He made another pan of woodsman's coffee and fried a big steak from Hercule. He didn't seem disconcerted to be eating his pet bull, though he remarked that the steaks would taste better after the beef had hung for a week. Down along the lakeshore a few peeper frogs began to sing, first tentatively, then in a loud unbroken chorus. It was very early in the year for them.

“Hear them go it,” my father said. “Them little sleigh-bell frogs are singing for rain, Wild Bill. In one or two days we'll have a warm rain. Sweet Evangeline will have her herd out in the pasture within a week.”

Dusk was settling quickly over the snowy mountains to the northwest. Beyond the peaks lay the St. Lawrence River. Beyond the great river, the enormous Canadian wilderness into which my great-great-great-grandfather had traveled when he was my age, paddling the same canoe, singing with his father the same songs my father had sung all day.

“Dad, tell me about René Bonhomme.”

Like many persons with romantic impulses, my father loved to talk about the distant past. While he was almost painfully circumspect about his own past before his marriage, he enjoyed nothing more than eulogizing his ancestors. Now in the lavender mountain twilight he lit his pipe, poured himself more coffee and began again the story of how René St. Laurent Bonhomme had built the birch canoe and come to Kingdom County: the story I had heard from him and Cordelia so many times that I felt I knew it as well as they did, yet always wanted to hear again.

In 1792, when he was fourteen years old, René St. Laurent Bonhomme went into the woods with his father near their home in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, and found a white birch tree seventy feet tall and perfectly straight. It was March, before the sap had started to run, and there was still deep snow where they felled the tree. When the tree was down they stripped off thirty feet of bark, which they laid out on a cleared spot with the outer side facing up. Under his father's close supervision and using only an axe and a crooked knife, René fashioned the gunwales and ribs from a nearby cedar. When the shell was finished he fit in cedar planking and maple thwarts and tapped in the ribs. Before coming out of the woods he etched a fleur-de-lis into the stern and a floating loon on the bow.

During each of the next four years he and his father and two other men of habitant descent paddled the nineteen-foot birch canoe from Trois-Rivières to Lake Athabasca and back, a distance of nearly three thousand miles. They left in April as soon as the ice was out of the St. Lawrence, and from that day until the day in late October when they arrived home they paddled or portaged eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. On the return trip each man carried a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound pack of furs over the portages.

The birch canoe proved durable, but after his father's death of a strangulated hernia on the wild northern shore of Lake Superior in the early fall of 1795, the fabled life of a voyageur no longer appealed to René. In the spring of 1796, the spring he was eighteen, he and his crew of two paddled the canoe south instead of north, traveling up the swollen St. Francis and Magog rivers into Lake Memphremagog. There René's crew disappeared, leaving him to proceed alone up the Lower Kingdom River to the Common Falls, where he used the load of brandy he had stolen from the Northwest Fur Company's warehouse to establish the first tavern in what would later become Kingdom County. It was a strategic spot, catching most of the Indian, trapper and settler traffic between the Upper Connecticut River and what was still generally called French Canada. Even before he finished building the tavern he began to make money.

Today in Kingdom County René Bonhomme is something of a legend. He is regarded as the founder of the village of Kingdom Common, and near the falls is a state historical marker commemorating his exploits as the progenitor of that dubious tradition of whiskey running to which successive generations of our family were to revert so frequently. I admire my great-great-great-grandfather more for being able to build a birch canoe and for having the initiative to break free from a despotic monopoly than for opening the first bar in the area, but as my father pointed out to me in the course of his history, without a reliable local supply of liquor Kingdom County probably couldn't have been settled at all.

Kingdom County—it remains a wonder to me that it was settled under any conditions. When René first saw it, it was completely covered with a nearly impenetrable forest of pine, fir, spruce and cedar. It was accessible only by water, and much of that was rocky and treacherous and white. Wherever it wasn't mountainous it was swampy. Even the Indians, who could live anywhere, used it only as a trade route. In 1932 Cordelia would call Kingdom County a waste, and like other wastes across the country it attracted many misanthropes and a few genuinely desperate men looking for a sanctuary, including René Bonhomme himself.

Cordelia was his granddaughter and remembered him well. She described him as a tiny man, smaller even than my father, with the same thick white hair and striking combination of Indian features and coloring and shrewd blue eyes. René was nothing if not shrewd, she said. Soon after he arrived it became clear that Kingdom County was going to become part of Vermont and Vermont part of the United States instead of the independent republic many of its citizens still think it should be; so in 1800 he formally changed his name from Bonhomme to Goodman. Later the same year he married the blond-haired daughter of a tall Scottish settler named Calvin Matthews.

René's son Calvin had his Grandfather Matthews' height and his father's dark complexion and vivid blue eyes. From his mother's father Calvin inherited a small library consisting mainly of Wesleyan tracts but including one volume of Scottish history and a complete set of Shakespeare's plays. His mother taught him to read these and accept them all at face value so that later when he was at Yale preparing for the ministry he read widely, if more discriminatingly, in history and literature as well as theology. When he returned to Kingdom County he allocated his time about equally between establishing the first Universalist church in northern Vermont, reading the books he ordered by the thousands from New York and Boston, and drinking with old René, who by then was the second wealthiest man in the county.

René Bonhomme was apparently as generous as my father. In 1845 he gave half his fortune to Calvin to build a library on the west side of the Common across from the courthouse and bank. It was a handsome brick structure three stories tall with slender columns of Vermont marble, and throughout the nineteenth century contained one of the finest collections of poetry, drama, history and theology in the state. By the time he built the library Calvin had turned over the church to another minister and was spending all his time reading, hunting and fishing, and drinking with René and his own son, Cordelia's brother.

Like his grandfather before him who built the birch canoe, William Shakespeare Goodman was a born craftsman. By the time he was twelve and drinking in his grandfather's tavern he had constructed intricate scale models of the Parthenon, the Colosseum at Rome, the Temple of Apollo and the Globe Theater. In 1850 when he was sixteen he cast the bronze statue of Ethan Allen for the village Common. The same year he conceived the project that would occupy him for the rest of his life, building the round barns that can still be found in Kingdom County.

Working mainly alone with infinite care and usually half-drunk, he built eleven of these magnificent structures, including one for himself and his bride on our hilltop at the end of Lord Hollow, overlooking much of northern Vermont and New Hampshire and a large sector of southern Quebec. Even Uncle Henry said that William Shakespeare had chosen a homestead with a grand prospect, though my uncle and all the rest of us knew very well that William's objective in building on the hill was not to see Kingdom County but to assure himself that Kingdom County would see his splendid barn—a vanity we paid for all winter when the arctic gales came roaring down across the ice on Lake Memphremagog, funneled between the mountain notch like polar tornadoes, and on over the flat cedar swamp to present us with their full blasting force. If William had not had the foresight to connect the barn to the house with an ell there would have been blizzard days when we simply could not have gotten across the dooryard to the barn to do the chores. Also there was no reliable source of water on the hill, but that problem did not trouble my great-grandfather any more than the winter winds. He was an architect and a builder, not a farmer.