Disappearances (7 page)

William intended to teach the art of building round barns to his son, but died in Calvin's arms at the first Battle of Bull Run before he had the opportunity, leaving Cordelia and his frail and penniless wife to bring up my grandfather on the hilltop. His name was William too, and in 1869 when he was fourteen he ran away from home and did not return because Cordelia had refused to let him continue drinking after his father and grandfather left for the Civil War.

“They was all rum hounds, Wild Bill.” My father pounded my knee. “Rum hounds. Sweet Evangeline wouldn't want me telling you rum tales and whiskey tales.

“Now, Bill. Old René was dead against Calvin and William Shakespeare going off to war. He believed Calvin would be killed the day he returned and William wouldn't return at all. As it turned out he was right about Calvin and nearly right about William, though nobody but your aunt paid much heed to him at the time. He was an old fella up in his eighties, and no doubt they all supposed his mind was wandering.”

I listened attentively. This was a part of the story that my father had never mentioned to me.

“So Calvin and William set out like almost every other able man between eighteen and sixty in Kingdom County, as though if Vermont couldn't be sovereign and independent the way they wanted, neither by the caterwauling Christ was the South going to be. René moved up to the farm with Cordelia and William's sick wife and little William, your grandfather that later run off. He had sold the tavern by then, and give the rest of his money to Calvin, who had turned it over to the state war fund, and was poorer than when he'd come to Kingdom County years and years before with the load of brandy. All he had to his name was the canoe and his musket and two sets of clothes. The everyday clothes he'd wore around the tavern, and his old voyageur's clothes. Which Cordelia found him dressed up in early one morning in blueberry time, setting there in the summer kitchen in his mooseskin moccasins and wool leggings and red shirt with the green sash. And his beaver hat, Bill. He was wearing his beaver hat, like it was seventy years ago and he was going back up to Lake Athabasca. He told Cordelia he intended to make one last trip on Lake Memphremagog. He said he wanted her to come along.

“Well, there was a small homemade steamboat on the lake then to carry sightseers up to Magog in the summertime, but old René wouldn't hear of taking that. Nothing would do but they must go by canoe. The only thing a steamboat was good for, so he told Cordelia, was blowing up. Him and her was always very close. She couldn't deny him nothing, so she put up a lunch, and being a rugged gal, she carried the canoe down the back hill to the St. John and off they spun down through the swamp with René in the bow and your aunt in the stern.

“It was a good day, like today, only of course much hotter. By and by he commenced to singing
‘En Roulant.'
After Cordelia started keeping track he sung one hundred and twenty-four verses. Every little while in the middle of a verse he would look back and grin at her again and point north with his paddle—like maybe he expected her to transport him clear back to the Northwest Territories. He didn't, though. Because when they got up to the point where we ate lunch today he told her to stop.

“They ate there, too, and after dinner he went to sleep. Or at least he appeared to go to sleep. Your aunt thought he had, and went back up on the ridge where the railway runs now and picked her a hatful of blueberries. She said it was one of them old-time sun hats with a wide brim, and she picked it heaping full in less than an hour. She started back to show the old man, and when she got there he was gone and so was the canoe. She run to the end of the point. All she could see was that little fart-ass steamboat chuffing up the lake about a mile away.

“She waved with her handkerchief but they didn't see her. She turned the berries out of her hat into the water and waved with the hat. Still they didn't see her. They held right on course up the middle of the lake. So being a stronger swimmer than most men she dove in where she'd spilled the blueberries and struck out for the boat. It seems the captain was drunk, and nearly run over her, but she got out of the way at the last minute and clumb up the side like a pirate and told him about René.

“He said they hadn't spied any canoe coming back down the lake, so René must be up in the notch. His name was Kinneson, Bill: he was Warden R.W.'s great-grandfather. The story is that he paid a fella name of Terhune to go to the War of Rebellion in his place. I don't know about that but I know Cordelia made him put on all the steam he had, which warn't that much, and sure enough when they got up in the notch they spotted René's canoe. It was riding high in the water and moving north fast, but the old man warn't nowhere to be seen. They had the devil's own time overtaking it, too, though there warn't no more wind on the lake than there was out there today. They thought maybe René was laying down in the bottom. But when they finally caught up with it all they found was his paddle and musket. René was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don't know. Nobody ever knew. Gone. He disappeared.”

“He couldn't have. René Bonhomme couldn't have disappeared, Dad. He must have drowned and they found his body. Because there's a gravestone with his name and dates on it right in the plot behind mother's garden.”

“Cordelia put that stone there. He ain't under it, Bill. He could have set the canoe adrift and then went off in the woods. A man could easy enough get turned around in these big woods even today. Old René wouldn't have though, not unless he meant to. Maybe he meant to. However it happened, they never found a trace.”

For a few minutes neither of us spoke. It had been dark for about an hour. The fire had died down to coals. Up to the north I could see the lights of Magog reflected in the sky.

“What about Calvin and William Shakespeare?” I said. “You said René was right about them.”

“He was nearly right, Wild Bill. Hark. Listen.”

“I am listening. What happened to them? I thought they both died in the war.”

“Listen, Bill. There's a car coming down the tote road.”

 

“How was your trip up the lake?” Uncle Henry said, hunkering down by the fire.

“It was uneventful,” my father said. “Wild Bill told me stories all day to pass the time. How was your drive up?”

“I'll tell you how it was,” Rat said. “It was heathenish fast. We must have been doing forty miles an hour round them bends. Now you tell him what you told me after we crossed over the line, Henry Coville.”

“Well, Bill, I ain't backing out. Neither's Rat. We all need that money in the worst way. But after we went through customs tonight I commenced to thinking again about something that's been bothering me since yesterday.”

“What's the matter, Hen, don't you think I and Wild Bill can get it back across for you? You ain't losing faith in the old master?”

“No, Bill, it ain't nothing like that. You could get that whiskey down the lake if the Women's Temperance League was patrolling it.”

“Yes, and sell them a case into the bargain,” my father said. “But go ahead, Henry, don't let me sidetrack you. What was it you thought of?”

“Here it is. We're going to transport about forty cases. All right. Them two French fellas have agreed to pay us a thousand dollars, flat rate. That's fine. For us that's very fine. Now look at it another way. That comes to twenty-five dollars a case. Where does that leave them? Where's their profit, Quebec Bill?”

“That's easy. What will a case of good Canadian whiskey fetch downcountry these days?”

“A case of Seagram's, which is what we'll be running according to them boys, will go for one hundred dollars.”

“Then their profit is seventy-five dollars a case. That's a total of three thousand dollars after paying us.”

“Ain't you forgetting something?”

“Spit it out, Henry. What's the trouble?”

“The trouble is they would have to pay seventy-five dollars a case for it right here in Canada to buy it in the first place.”

“Henry Coville,” my father said, “whatever made you think they bought that whiskey? They didn't buy no whiskey. They hijacked it. I knowed that much from the minute you started telling me about it. Except for what they pay us, it's all profit. Does that relieve your concern for their financial security?”

“It ain't their financial security I'm concerned about. It's our personal security. I don't like this, Bill. I didn't like it when they first proposed it. I like it less now.”

“I won't be a party to common thievery,” Rat said. “Transporting spirits is one matter. Common thievery is another. Them spirits don't rightfully belong to them Frenchmen.”

“They rightfully belong to the Seagram family in Montreal,” my father said. “They're an uncommon family, Rat, so this is uncommon thievery. You don't have a thing to worry about. But if you want to wait here alone in the dark woods for us to get back long after midnight that's fine with me. Hark, what's that?”

“I'm coming,” Rat said.

I got my father aside. “Why did he have to horn in?” I whispered. “He'll spoil everything.” I was jealous of Rat, whom I regarded as an interloper, a constraint on the adult camaraderie I had planned on enjoying with my father and Uncle Henry.

“Don't pay no attention to him, Bill. He's curious as an old woman; he couldn't stand to sit home and not know what was happening for fear he would be missing something to disapprove of. I knowed all the time he'd come. We'll have some sport with him.”

We poured the last of the coffee on the coals of the campfire. My father put the shotgun and the pack basket inside the cabin and we got into White Lightning. Immediately my father began to bounce high up off the back seat. “Bill,” Uncle Henry said. “Please.”

Uncle Henry was in most respects even less acquisitive than my father, with a contempt for land ownership equal to Cordelia's and Ralph Waldo Emerson's. To him nearly all owned property, if not an outright illusion, was an encumbrance to be eschewed at all costs. He excepted only one material object from this code and that was White Lightning. Uncle Henry drove White Lightning hard but with great respect. He spent entire days polishing its alabaster enamel, rubbing esoteric compounds into the white leather upholstery, touching up the white paint on the wheel spokes. It was one of the most luxurious American automobiles ever built, and I didn't blame him for not wanting my father to use the seat for a trampoline.

Even on that rough logging trace the six-thousand-pound car rode as smooth as the canoe on calm water. The myriad dials and gauges recessed into the snowy leather dashboard glowed alluringly. The seats smelled brand new. Under our feet the floors were carpeted with white lamb's skin. I put my head back on the smooth plush seat, took one more deep breath of that heady aromatic leather scent and fell asleep.

When I woke up I imagined for a moment that we were still in the canoe, which was still moving north.

“We're in Magog, Wild Bill,” my father was saying. “We'll be stopping here for a short while.”

On a Friday night in the early spring Magog was a busy place. The wooden sidewalk along the unpaved and muddy main street was swarming with loggers, truckers and rivermen, going in and out of the taverns across from the long lighted paper mill. The mill whined loudly, permeating the town with its sulphurous acrid stench.

We parked White Lightning in front of a place called Chez Joie de Vivre and went inside. It was a long rectangular dim room reeking of strong Canadian tobacco and crowded with men and a few women. The tables were packed close together. At one end of the room a country band was playing raucously. We got a table near the door and Uncle Henry ordered beers for himself and Rat. My father got out his pocketbook and looked inside. “I'm springing, Bill,” Uncle Henry said. “You'll want coffee, and a sarsaparilla for Billy here?”

“You can get me the coffee, Henry. I'm buying Wild Bill a beer.”

Rat stared at his beer but didn't pick it up. I thought he was still sulking over running stolen whiskey. “What's the matter, Ratty?” my father said. “You was never a fella to let a head stand long on an ice-cold brew. That's a Molson's, ain't it? You can't get beer like that down to Cousin Whiskeyjack's kitchen. See them little golden beads, boy. See them dance.”

“Quebec Bill, you like to talk about drinking as well as any man I ever met liked to drink,” Uncle Henry said.

“If you must know,” Rat said morosely, “Lord Jesus come to me in the night and said I warn't to drink no beer in Canady.”

“Did he give you a reason, Rat?”

“Yes. He said it would give me the dyspepsia.”

“What time was this, my boy?”

“I ain't sure except it was afore midnight. Afore Henry arrove. Because I had to get up to go to the privy just afterwards and Henry wasn't here yet.”

“Well now, Rat, I've got glad tidings for you. Because along about five a.m. when I was setting in the kitchen loading buckshot into my shells the Lord appeared to me. ‘What are you up to now, Quebec Bill?' says He in a stern voice. ‘I'm loading buckshot, Lord, in case we run into any hijacking sons of bitches out on the lake.' ‘Very good, my son,' He says. ‘I ain't telling you what to do, but I would advise a double load. You can never tell what you may run into out there. Now to get down to business. Earlier in the evening I had me a little visit with Muskrat Kinneson and warned him against imbibing of beer up to Canady on account of it causing him discomfort and possibly embarrassing winds. But it seems I neglected to tell Brother Muskrat that he could feel free to have all the hard stuff he wanted. He's sleeping now and I don't want to roust him out again. Would you kindly deliver the message for me when he wakes up?'”