The Fall of the Year (3 page)

“Foster, my man,” Bumper Stevens called out. “Here's a bill of the realm with Honest Abe Lincoln's picture on her, belongs to the first fella to march up to that Christly overgrown deer and plant a big kiss on its snout.”

Bumper waved the five-dollar bill over his head. “Hey, hey, hey,” he chanted in his raspy auctioneer's voice. “Going once, going twice, going three times to the one, the only, Savant of Kingdom Common.”

This was all the encouragement Foster needed. Emitting his crazy laugh, he struck off straight toward the sick moose, which lowered its head and began to paw up great divots of grass around the base of the statue. Whereupon Foster promptly lowered his own head and scuffed at the grass with his broken old shoes.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted our unorthodox priest, to the great delight of the crowd, and started across the street to rescue Foster.

By then I'd seen enough myself. I raced past Father G, grabbed Foster by the back of his overalls, and dragged him, still whooping and laughing, off the green. The moose, in the meantime, gave an anguished bellow, broke into a wobbling charge, crashed head-on into the statue and, mercifully, collapsed dead at its base.

Later that morning Judge Allen signed papers authorizing the local sheriff to pick Foster Boy up and cart him off to be evaluated at the state mental hospital. Not that the judge, as he confided to Father George and me over beers at the hotel that evening, expected the hospital doctors to be of the slightest help to Foster. But if nothing else, the savant's “sabbatical” would give him a much-needed breather from the village and the village a much-needed breather from him.

 

In the first of more than twenty notes and letters that Foster Boy bombarded me with from the state hospital during the next two weeks, he spoke of his doubts concerning divine providence, suggesting that his own existence might contradict such a concept. He called his letters “Epistles to the Ephesians.” In fact, most of them dealt with his ongoing metaphysical concerns and biblical studies, which seemed to have taken a radical new turn. Instead of scriptural passages dealing with intimacies between the sexes, Foster was now preoccupied by those that revealed what he deemed to be instances of God's injustice to man.

I had no idea how to respond to Foster Boy's theological concerns. Father George undoubtedly could have helped me, but he was laid up with another bout of angina. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote back to Foster with tidbits of village gossip that I thought might amuse him. After winning the hundred-dollar monthly bingo jackpot, Sal the Berry Picker had ordered the first television set in Kingdom Common. Unfortunately, her hemlock-bark shack overlooking the town dump had no electricity, and there was no TV reception in the village in those days anyway. At the same time a rumor had been noised abroad that Louvia the Fortuneteller had been observed driving a black potash kettle fast through the twilit sky above Little Quebec just before the worst thunderstorm to hit the Common in years. And on the day after the storm, Alf Quimby's honey bees had emerged from their hive, swarmed with a squadron of their wild brethren on the courthouse tower, and flown off toward Canada.

One morning toward the end of May I received six letters from Foster. “If God had really wanted to test Job's mettle, He'd have arranged for the old boy to be a bottle picker in Kingdom Common,” one note concluded. “Don't you agree, Friend Frank?”

Friend Frank. This was how Foster had begun addressing me. “You're my closest friend, Frank,” he wrote. “And I guess I'm yours. Like David and Jonathan.”

“No girlfriend yet, though,” he wrote the following day. “Maybe I ought to come back and set my cap for a hometown girl. Say a long-legged Sunday School teacher, like Miss Lily Broom. Or a plump juicy widow woman like Julia Hefner. Or should I throw in the towel when it comes to the girls and live on a pillar like St. Simeon Stylites? Or change my name, like Saul on the road to Damascus? Or to Job? Job Boy Dufresne? What do you think, Friend Frank?”

Memorial Day was just around the corner. The backyard apple trees were dropping their pink and white petals. From Little Quebec to the big houses on Anderson Hill, peas and lettuce were up and flourishing. Commoners had cut their lawns several times, the ratchety
click click click
of the hand-pushed mowers in the early evening after supper reminding me of so many miniature trains as I practiced with the Outlaws for our upcoming holiday double-header with Magog.

Father George was keeping me busy doing yard work and cutting wood for elderly parishioners, but then, two days before the start of the long weekend, the village woke to half a foot of new snow. The north wind out of Canada, known locally as the Arctic Express, had brought the Common its usual late-spring blizzard even later than usual, burying the young peas in Father George's garden and the yellow and blue pansies Judge Allen had set out around the base of his great-great-great-grandfather Ethan's statue, and transforming the pitcher's mound at the opposite end of the common into a miniature white ski jump. I spent most of the morning shoveling snow for shut-ins.

Around noon the village lost its electricity. When I returned to the rectory I found a note from Father George saying he'd gone down the hill to the church. As I lighted a kerosene lamp and set it on the kitchen table, a silence akin to the deep stillness of a winter night seemed to settle over the entire town.

Just then there was a loud rapping on the window by the table. A moment later the door flew open, revealing a towering figure completely encased in white. “Hello, Friend Frank,” the snowman said. “What goes around comes around, you know. I've come around to find that hometown girl.”

Foster Boy stepped inside, shaking off snow like a Saint Bernard, already hooting his wild laugh.

His storm gear consisted only of his Outlaws cap, a thin spring jacket, and a gigantic pair of galoshes with all the buckles missing. His gloveless hands were chapped red as the glowing stove. Yet what seemed to concern Foster most today was not his own plight but that of the songbirds on the ridge where he and I had gone fishing earlier that month. Wouldn't they freeze or starve in the blizzard? “Why would God do this to them, Frank? Would a truly loving father kill off his own creatures like flies?”

“I don't know that God personally manages the weather, Foster.”

“Why not? Doesn't He know about every sparrow that falls?”

Foster grinned at his lamp-lit reflection in the window. “Hoo! God would need a savant to keep track of the fallen sparrows today. But let's get down to brass tacks, Frank. The question on the docket this morning is why God doesn't see fit to bring me a girlfriend. Say a young widow, all tanned from the Holy Land sunshine. Like Queen Bathsheba after King David knocked off her husband.”

“Foster, when it comes to God's motivations, no one—” Foster brushed aside my equivocations with an impatient gesture, repeated in mime by his distorted replica in the window. “Don't you think it was unfair that God rubbed out David's best friend, Jonathan? After all, what did Jonathan have to do with King David's transgressions?”

Foster shut one yellow eye and gave me a canny look with the other. He tucked his index finger under his middle finger and tapped me on the arm. “Frank Bennett and Foster Boy Dufresne,” he said. “David and Jonathan.”

He smiled. “Which one of us is going to wind up like Jonathan, Frank?”

“Foster—”

“So why doesn't God bring me a woman?” Foster Boy demanded again. Now he seemed to be speaking directly to his reflection.

“Maybe God has better things to do with His time right now.”

“Like what? Killing off robin redbreasts in the spring storm of the century?”

Suddenly I realized that Foster Boy had undergone a transformation. There was a new intensity about him, a hardness in his saffron eyes and in the set of his mouth when he spoke of his ongoing dialogue with the God he had never doubted. Today Foster Boy was not pleading. He was insisting, insisting that God let him know what was what. With a jolt of astonishment—astonishment with myself, mainly, for not having understood this before—I realized that my friend the bottle picker was susceptible to all of the uncertainties and desires and frustrations of any other eighteen-year-old. And he was no longer willing to let God off the hook lightly.

“Let's level with each other,” Foster Boy was saying. “We're all God's children, right?” But instead of looking at me, he turned for confirmation to the dim, bloated image of himself in the window.

“Right,” the reflection replied.

“Well, then, my boy,” Foster said to his reflection, “what could be more important to a loving father than making his son happy?”

“No one knows how God works,” I protested.

“In ways wondrous to behold,” Foster Boy's image informed me with an ironical bow. Then it broke into such a fit of laughter that I was afraid that it or, rather, Foster, might have a seizure.

An inspired expression came across Foster's face. “Friend Frank. God helps those who help themselves, right? So what if I were to wander off in the bush up by the border? Like Our Lord in the wilderness. Would the Evil One vouchsafe me a vision of young dancing girls?”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Foster Boy?”

Foster jerked his head toward his reflection. “Ask him.”

“He means would the Author of All Evil tempt him with the pleasures of the flesh,” the image boomed out in a demonic voice.

The reflection nodded in solemn agreement with itself. Then it seemed to address both Foster and me. “Life is still good when everything's said and done. Wouldn't you gentlemen concur?”

“Certainly,” Foster said in his own voice. “But—”

“But me no but's,” interrupted the flickering image. “We have to believe that, for all its tribulations, life is good. Friendships are good.”

My head was swimming. But the grotesquerie in the window roared out, “David and Jonathan!”

“Never mind him, Frank,” Foster said. “Listen to me. This is important. Our Lord wasn't the only one to strike into the bush alone. Remember Prophet Elijah?”

I nodded vaguely.

“What became of Prophet Elijah after he wandered off?”

I had to think for a minute. “Supposedly he ascended directly to heaven.”

“Supposedly is right. Don't you think it more likely that the old boy just hit the road for Beersheba or Stowe or some other resort town and went into retirement?”

Abruptly, Foster stood up. “What if I took a page out of Elijah's book? What if I lit out without telling anybody? To Niagara Falls, say, the Honeymoon Capital of the U.S.A.? Or Florida, the Sunshine State? What if I hooked up with a bathing beauty from California and put this hellhole they call a village behind me forever? Who'd have the last laugh then?”

Foster held out his slab of a hand and shook hands with me. He doffed his cap to the reflection in the window. “He who laughs last laughs best,” he said.

And he vanished into the blizzard.

 

Overnight the storm clouds lifted, and the weather turned warm again in Kingdom Common. By six o'clock the next morning, when Father George and I arrived at the hotel dining room for our coffee, sunlight was pouring through the wavy old plate-glass window. In the palest of pale blue sheets, water from the melting snow ran down the gutter from Anderson Hill. At the far end of the green, a bluebird appeared on the backstop behind home plate, just as Doc Harrison showed up with the news of Foster's latest misadventure.

Sometime around midnight the night before, Doc said, Foster had burst in on Bumper Stevens's weekly all-night poker game at the commission-sales barn, full of crazy talk about God bringing him a mature older woman. Harlan Kittredge had promised he'd have just such a seasoned beauty waiting for Foster half an hour later in the auction barn's hayloft. Someone who'd had her eye on him for a long time and was dying to show him the ropes. Then Harlan had dispatched Little Shad Shadow, Bumper's softheaded ring man, up to the dump to roust out Sal the Berry Picker. At Harlan's instructions, Little Shad had told Sal that Foster Boy had designs on her and had offered her five dollars to lie in ambush for him in Bumper's loft.

“After she was ensconced there,” Doc told us, “the good-for-nothings sent Foster up the ladder. When he got to the top, old Sal jumped up out of the hay and lambasted him with her apple crook and knocked him down into the straw and filth below. Foster Boy picked himself up and ran out of the barn, and that's the last anyone's seen of him.”

 

I spent that day and all the next day and the day after that searching for Foster Boy, with no results. As each day went by and my friend did not turn up, I found myself seething every time I thought of the joke the commission-sales rowdies had played on him. I was tempted to file a formal complaint with the sheriff. But what could the sheriff have done about it even if he'd been inclined to? As Father George pointed out to me, a prank can be criminal without being against the law. The important thing now was to locate Foster before he came to any harm.

On the second day after he went missing, I had an unsettling experience. In the melting snow in the woods above Louvia the Fortuneteller's place, I came across an indistinct set of what appeared to be large overshoe tracks. The boot prints, if that is what they were, headed up the trail along the brook where Foster Boy and I had fished earlier that spring. But by then the snow from the freak blizzard was going off quickly, and the tracks simply ended near the top of the ridge in a clear-cut grown up to wild raspberry bushes. Whether they were Foster's was impossible to say.

That evening Father George and I sat up late in the rectory kitchen while I thought out loud about Foster. Might he be posting hard for Florida in search of a girlfriend? Or en route to Utah to examine the tenets of Mormonism on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, his laughter ringing out over the desert? Father George shook his head. He was afraid not.