The Fall of the Year (6 page)

My father rose slowly, reaching out to steady himself on the back of a pew. He shook his head. “Sixty-eight isn't twenty-six. My bocce days may be drawing to a close, though I hope not. I'm finally beginning to figure out the green ball.”

“For God's sake, the recipe!” Louvia cried.

“I'm afraid it was in their heads and they meant to write it down but never got around to it,” Father George said. “Still, I want to show you one more thing. Two things, actually.”

We followed Father G down the aisle of the church and outside into the evening. Below us, at the foot of the hill, the lights of our little village were coming on. Across town, the furniture mill was lit up like a village itself. Father George led us up a path through a double row of cedar trees and into the cemetery.

He stopped on a knoll beside two oblong granite memorials about three feet long and two feet tall. There was just enough light beneath the cedars to read the names of Sylvie and Marie Bonhomme on the stones. In the dusk, the memorials bore an uncanny resemblance to bread loaves. Etched into the polished granite beneath Marie's name was an engraving of an outdoor baking oven with a wisp of smoke curling out of the chimney. On Sylvie's was a small Madonna in a bathtub shrine.

“Who paid for these?” Louvia said.

Father George shrugged. “It was a small enough gesture after all they'd done for the parish.”

He rested his hand on Marie's stone. “Sometimes when I pass near here I'm sure I can smell the scent of baking bread. Very faint, but inexpressibly fragrant. Like the tiny white violets that come up in the grass all over my bocce court in May. I think I can smell it now.”

I, too, thought I caught a whiff of bread baking. But true to form, Louvia scoffed at such a notion. “It's the cedar trees,” she said. “Falling dew always brings out the aroma of arborvitae.” After leaving Father George at the Big House, Louvia and I drove back down the hill past the church toward the lighted town. Neither of us spoke until we reached the common.

“Bring your wife here someday, Frank,” Louvia said suddenly. “Tell her the story of how you and Louvia the Fortuneteller journeyed up to the church and the cemetery and whiled away the afternoon listening to fairy tales.”

I laughed. “Should I tell this wife of mine about the baker's assistant?”

Louvia reached into her reticule. “I'll consult my Daughter.”

Under the street lamps, Louvia's rose quartz gazing stone glowed softly. “Yes, tell her. She'll be amused,” Louvia said. Then: “Oh! I thought I caught a glimpse of the old dance pavilion on the common. Another vision from the other side, no doubt.”

But thinking of the open dance hall with the colored lights where Louvia and her young man had danced to the Montreal bands made me suddenly angry. “That guy you fell in love with? He should have married you, Louvia, war or no war.”

Louvia looked at me intently. “Would you have?”

“If I weren't going into the priesthood? Yes. If I loved a girl I'd marry her in a minute.”

“Well, well. Never mind the priesthood. With the right girl, you might amount to something after all. And remember—who knows how the future can turn on a single day in our lives. Now step on it. I have to get home and pee!”

 

A few days later I returned to the patisserie in Little Quebec, looking for the tall laughing girl with raven hair and morning-glory eyes. But to my great disappointment the bakery was closed. The property had been sold again, the Letourneaus had moved, and I could find no one in the neighborhood who could tell me anything at all about the baker's assistant. I didn't even know her name.

What was I left with from my afternoon with Louvia DeBanville, in search of a recipe that probably never existed? A good day with a friend. Some questions about my vocation. Mysteries. And stories. Stories of Louvia, young and beautiful, gliding across the hardwood floor of the pavilion with the colored lanterns shimmering to the trombone runs of the big bands. Of two elderly sisters, feeding the families of the striking mill workers. Of the scent of fresh-baked bread. And of Louvia's belief that our fortunes often turn on a single event in ways I could not have begun to imagine.

3

Only in the Kingdom, Commoners said of the feud between the Lacourses and the Gambinis. Only in this forgotten enclave of the Appalachian Mountain chain stretching all the way north to Vermont from Georgia and Tennessee could such an anachronism as a full-blown multigenerational family feud be sustained and tolerated and, yes, even nurtured, well into the middle of the twentieth century.

—Father George, “A Short History”

 

F
OR AS LONG
as anyone could remember, the Lacourses and the Gambinis had hated each other with an implacable hostility, though they were otherwise hard-working, respected members of the community, with successful businesses and large families of bright children.

Emile Lacourse owned a productive lumbering operation, leasing tracts of timberland that he logged with the most modern methods and equipment, but carefully and responsibly, never scalping the mountainsides of every last stick of wood but instead cutting selectively and staying away from the banks of brooks and rivers. On the higher elevations he still used horses, as his Québécois ancestors had, to preserve the steep and delicate terrain from the deep ruts of gasoline-powered skidders. For all his business acumen, Emile was a conservationist before his time.

Pietro Gambini's Italian ancestors were stonecutters. They had come from Milano to work the pink granite on the ridge above the Kinneson family farm, where the lovely sunset-colored building stones used for the Academy, St. Mary's, the courthouse, the railroad station, the big houses on Anderson Hill, and the monuments in the village cemetery had been quarried. Over the decades, as the granite pit had deepened, icy water from springs deep in the heart of the ridge made working the mine beyond a certain depth impracticable. The Gambinis had then turned to dairy farming and cheesemaking. Their cheese factory on the edge of the village manufactured a smooth and tangy cheddar that won awards at dairy festivals as far away as Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Apart from the feud, it was astonishing how much alike the families were. Both the Lacourses and the Gambinis maintained close ties with relatives in their homelands. Both families kept up ancestral traditions. The Gambinis concocted flavorful wines from wild blue grapes, blackberries, chokecherries, even dandelion blossoms. The Lacourses celebrated New Year's Day even more enthusiastically than Christmas, carting maple sugar pies and glazed cakes in the shape of logs to all their neighbors except, pointedly, the Gambinis. Both families owned expensive cars. When Emile Lacourse bought a new Pontiac, Pietro Gambini rushed to the same Burlington dealership to purchase a Super 88 Oldsmobile just off the assembly line. The following spring Emile traded his low-mileage Bonneville for a Chrysler. Soon neither family drove to mass at Father George's Church of St. Mary's in anything other than an El Dorado, never more than a year old.

If Emile Lacourse bought his wife, Mimi, a mink stole in Montreal, Pietro Gambini drove hell-for-leather over the White Mountains to purchase his wife, Rosa, a full-length otter coat from the finest Boston furrier. Nor was the rivalry confined to the adults. Their children competed fiercely in school for academic and athletic distinctions. Father George's basketball team at the Academy once lost a state championship game by four points because Etienne Lacourse, a wizardly ball handler, refused to pass to Rodolfo Gambini, a high-scoring forward. In the locker room after the game, fists flew. Instead of celebrating an undefeated season with a three-foot-high trophy and a torchlight parade led by their El Dorados, the two quarreling families got into a brawl in the parking lot outside the gymnasium.

Even so, both the Gambinis and the Lacourses continued to be highly regarded in the village. As for the feud, vengeance had become its own sweet excuse. No one in Kingdom Common seemed able to do a thing to stop the trouble—which brings me back to Father George.

 

One bitterly cold November evening when I was about eight, two heavy cars roared up the drive of the Big House and skidded to a halt under the portico. Out of the automobiles poured Lacourses and Gambinis of all ages, screaming murder. From the trunk of his Cadillac, Emile Lacourse dragged an enormous buck, which he lugged up to the porch and dumped on the glider by the front door. The two families swarmed up behind him and stood around the dead deer, gesticulating wildly and shrieking at each other in Québécois and Milanese dialects that they otherwise spoke only rarely, even at home. Pietro Gambini was waving his deer rifle. Emile Lacourse ran to his El Dorado, opened the trunk, and pulled out a red chainsaw with a blade a yard long. Rushing back up onto the porch, he started the saw with a great coughing roar and brandished it over his head toward Pietro. Both men were bellowing for Father George.

I'd been sitting at the bird's-eye maple kitchen table listening to Father George read aloud the wonderful story from his “Short History” of his chance discovery of a stand of bird's-eye maples, high in Lord Hollow, from which he had personally made much of the furniture for the Big House. I was startled by the commotion; but Father George grinned and told me to sit on the woodbox near the stove and be as quiet as a church mouse, and I'd see and hear something I could write my own story about someday.

He hurried out onto the porch and said, “People, good people. For heaven's sake. This isn't Chicago in the twenties. Go lock your weapons in your cars. Then come back and we'll thrash this out together.”

Muttering more threats and exchanging hateful glances, the two families convened in the Big House kitchen, but refused the hot coffee that Father George offered them. This was not, pardon us, Father, a social visit. Oh, no.

I watched, wide-eyed, from the woodbox as the litigants faced each other across the maple table, with their finely clad wives, both great beauties, and their handsome children to bear witness. At Father George's request, Pietro, a stocky man with dark hair and flashing eyes, told his story first.

It seemed that when he was out hunting, Pietro had jumped the buck in question in a beech grove bordering the brook dividing his property from the Lacourses' and had shot it in the chest. The fatally wounded animal had sprinted a few yards, leaped the brook in one bound, and dropped in a heap at the feet of Emile Lacourse, out clearing brush from his sugar maple orchard. Emile instantly cut the throat of the dying buck with his chainsaw. But when Pietro started across the stream to claim his trophy, Emile drove him back onto his own land with the thundering saw. Pietro had then fired a round from his deer rifle into the steam vent of Emile's nearby sugarhouse. Pietro concluded his statement with an eloquent peroration, delivered at the top of his lungs and containing an explicit threat on his neighbor's life if he did not relinquish all claim to the deer immediately. “Excuse me, Signora,” he added in a much lower voice, with a short bow toward Mimi Lacourse.

Emile did not dispute any of the facts of the case as presented by Pietro. On the contrary, he responded that he would be greatly interested to see his bosom friend and dear neighbor carry out his threat after his head had been severed from his shoulders with a thirty-horse gasoline felling saw.

Father George smiled at the two families, his bright blue eyes amused. Then he said, “Bring in the deer, Emile.”

The buck was brought inside and laid out on an oilcloth on the bird's-eye table. It was a lovely animal, dark as a moose. Its heavy rack of horns was darker yet, with eight points on one side and nine on the other. After dispatching it with his saw and chasing Pietro back across the brook, Emile had dressed it out. Even so, Father George, a lifelong hunter, estimated its weight at two hundred and fifty pounds.

“Of course. It fattened itself on my apples all fall,” Emile said.

“It spent the summer grazing like a prize heifer on my high upper mowing,” Pietro responded.

“Well, gentlemen, a man doesn't need to be another Solomon to know what to do in this situation,” Father George said. “If you'll give me your word to agree to my decision and make every effort to abide by it, I'll help you out.”

What choice did the combatants have? With many intransigent looks across the table, Pietro and Emile agreed to abide by Father George's finding, whatever it was. To the letter and in the spirit? Well, yes. To the letter and in the spirit.

Father George spread a layer of
Kingdom County Monitors
on the yellow linoleum tiles under the table. He rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, exposing forearms as thick and powerful as Pietro's and Emile's. From the woodshed off the kitchen he fetched a meat saw and his hunting knife, with which he expertly cut off the head and hide of the great buck. Then he began to quarter the carcass like a beef. As he worked he told the story of the bird's-eye table, just as he'd written it in his “Short History.” How for a hundred and fifty years the maple trees hidden on the ridge north of Lord's Bog had not been considered worth lumbering because of the mysterious dark oval imperfections riddling their wood. Then Father George, who had a hunting camp nearby, had recognized the bird's-eyes, in a pile of firewood, for what they truly were and decided to fell one tree for stock to make furniture for the Big House. By degrees, as Father George described skidding the logs down over the frozen bog, putting the cured lumber through the mill's shrieking ripsaw, planer, and sander, then shaping the dowels for chair and table legs, gluing the pieces, and sanding and varnishing the furniture, everyone's attention became focused on the story.

Suddenly Emile Lacourse spoke up. “Father G. What makes the little bird's-eyes in the wood?”