The Fall of the Year (7 page)

“Ah,” Father George said, sawing through the last hindquarter of the deer. “That's the question, Emile. No one knows.”

“The bird's-eye is a separate species of maple?” Pietro said.

“No, it's regular rock maple. But whether it's minerals in the soil where the trees grow or the way the wind blows or some virus that causes the eyes, I don't know. It's a mystery. Like how your quarrel began.”

No doubt my adoptive father hoped, with this exemplum, to drive home the ultimate futility and madness of the feud. Even at eight, I could see that. But now it was time for his decision. Everyone's eyes moved from Father George to the deer and back to Father George.

“Well?” Emile said.

The head, with its trophy rack and dark cape, went to Pietro to have mounted, along with one forequarter and one hindquarter. The rest of the hide and the two other quarters went to Emile for dispatching the animal. It was as simple at that.

To me, the disposition of the deer seemed eminently fair. But what a howl went up from the litigants! The men smote their foreheads. The women pulled at their gorgeous long hair as if to tear it out by the roots. The children hissed at each other like vipers, while the grownups trembled in rage and stared at one another and at Father George with incredulity. Yet as he firmly reminded them, they had given their word to accept his ruling.

Next time, both parties vowed on their way out the door into the night with their spoils. Next time there would be no recourse to the priest, and matters would turn out very differently indeed, with all due respect, Father. Afterward Father George laughed and told me not to worry, he'd been through similar charades with the feuding families a dozen times before.

Maybe so, I thought. But, young as I was, I could not help thinking that the trouble between the Lacourses and the Gambinis was far from over and, as both families had earnestly promised, that the end, when it came, would be a tragic one.

 

The feud continued straight through my boyhood. At length it reached such a pitch that Father George warned me to steer clear of both places on my hunting and fishing expeditions so I wouldn't get caught, perhaps quite literally, in the crossfire. In fact, the spring that I turned ten, when Emile Lacourse stumbled upon Pietro Gambini manufacturing
acquavite
, the hundred-proof Italian brandy used by the Gambinis at holidays and birthday celebrations, at his homemade still high on the brook between their properties, they argued, and Emile drew a pistol and put a bullet through Pietro's hat. When word of this near-tragedy got back to Father George, he lost patience with both adversaries. “For God's sake, Pietro, go tend to your distilling on some other stream,” he admonished the moonshiner, supposing that the matter would then be closed.

Far from it. To avenge himself on his neighbor, on the night before hunting season opened, Pietro cunningly affixed the mounted head of his fabled seventeen-point buck to the trunk of one of his brookside beeches, as if the animal were peering out around the tree at the Lacourse maple orchard. When Emile shot it the following dawn and crept across the brook to drag it back to his property, Pietro, who'd been lying in wait in a barberry thicket, sprang out to accost him for unlawful trespass. Father George gave both men a furious dressing-down, pounding the bird's-eye table and condemning the souls of both men to eternal perdition before forgiving them and thanking them, not without irony, for providing him with something interesting to write about in his “Short History.” But what was clemency to one party was invariably gall to the other, and both men went home more infuriated than ever.

You might think that as the two men grew older, they would gradually run out of the enormous energy required to sustain such a vendetta. Much the opposite. Over time the feud seemed to intensify in virulence, like Pietro's acquavite. Each fall the families fought over who would pay the negligible taxes on the water-filled old granite pit, until finally Father George persuaded the town assessors to stop listing it. Then they fought over who owned the speckled trout in the brook. How, Father George inquired, can a man possibly own a wild trout? He was assured by both parties that they would show him exactly how, if either caught the other angling there. At town meeting in March they debated every last item on the warning, preparing interminable eloquent speeches ahead of time, masterpieces of withering rhetoric that Father George said would have done credit to Pietro's ancestors in the Roman senate. Their lovely daughters found a hundred different ways to snub one another in school. Their sons fought with fists, wild apples, BB guns, rocks. A few months after the fiasco of the championship basketball game, Rodolfo Gambini and Etienne Lacourse asked the same girl to their graduation prom. When she prudently declined to go with either, they drove their father's expensive cars at each other full tilt, discharging guns out the windows like gangsters. That no one was killed or maimed was a miracle.

Father George worried constantly about the children of the feuding families. Over the years he resorted to every expediency to bring the trouble to an end. But how can you solve a problem whose source no one can identify? True, the feud seemed rooted in property. But since even the principals conceded that no one could really own the brook separating their land, it seemed more rooted in some dark recess of human nature. Furthermore, as Louvia the Fortuneteller liked to observe, no one likes change, especially in a small village. And what greater change could either family imagine than a cessation of hostilities? Wouldn't that amount to acknowledging that the trouble that had informed their lives with a unique significance had been not only unnecessary but meaningless? In short, the feud had become a way of life. In his lively chapter on the Lacourses and Gambinis in his “Short History,” Father George likened the feud to a force of nature, like the water that ran into the granite quarry each time the Gambinis pumped it out to obtain a few more slabs of granite for their youngest boy, Peter, a gifted sculptor. Within three or four days the pit would again be inundated and, just as surely, the feud was bound to break out again, usually sooner rather than later.

The spring I turned twelve, Pietro Gambini hired the local volunteer fire department to pump out the quarry. On its way back to the village, the pumper, with an inebriated Harlan Kittredge at the wheel, made a wrong turn, jumped the brook, and crashed into Emile Lacourse's sugarhouse. Down to the Big House rampaged both families. This time Father George banished Emile and Pietro to the porch while he spoke at length with their wives. Laying matters directly on the line, he said that like himself, neither of the two quarreling couples was getting any younger. He told them that too often in cases of this nature it was the children of the feuding parties who paid for their parents' stubbornness. He inquired quietly, did Rosa Gambini and Mimi Lacourse know how fortunate they were to have children in the first place? Surely, he said, these two good mothers did not wish to follow their sons and daughters to the grave.

Madame and Signora burst into tears and embraced. The husbands were peremptorily summoned. Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and all twelve of the sainted apostles help Pietro Gambini and Emile Lacourse if either henceforward uttered a single litigious word to the other. Never again would they be admitted to the marriage bed, a deprivation that would signify only the beginning of their tribulations.

The men shook hands stiffly and muttered apologies to each other. The women embraced again, exchanging tearful vows of eternal sisterhood. But the very next week Pietro's heifers broke down a fence, crossed the brook into Emile's prized old-fashioned apple orchard, and girdled the trunks of six young Duchesses and four Northern Spies. Emile impounded the animals in his barnyard and threatened to slaughter one a day until Pietro printed a public apology for the invasion in the
Kingdom
County Monitor
. In a searing white fury Pietro went to get his heifers back at gunpoint. A shootout ensued, in which Pietro took a few pellets of birdshot in his right calf. That evening, from my cupola bedroom in the Big House, I could hear the Lacourses discharging shotguns and rifles into the air long past midnight, in celebration of the wounding of Pietro Gambini. Father George lost his temper completely, and the following Sunday he threatened from the pulpit, in a thundering voice, to excommunicate them from Saint Mary's, if not from the church altogether, and administer a public horsewhipping to Emile and Pietro besides.

 

In school, Thérèse Lacourse, Emile's youngest daughter and the apple of his eye, was one year ahead of Pietro's youngest son, Peter, the stone sculptor. She was a quiet and intense girl, a straight-A student at the top of her class. Peter, for his part, was a slightly built boy with serious brown eyes and brown hair that curled up at his shirt collar. In early boyhood he had contracted infantile paralysis, and though he had recovered completely from the disease, he never did become an athlete like his older brothers. During his convalescence he discovered his greatgrandfather's carving tools, wrapped in oilskins in the old stone shed near the quarry. From the moment he first held the hammers and chisels in his hands, Peter knew that he had found his life's work.

Peter Gambini studied the carvings on the pink granite tombstones in the village cemetery. He hitchhiked to Barre to familiarize himself with the great stone figures in the Rock of Ages cemetery. Then he began to carve memorials of his own. Soon customers were flocking to the Gambini place from all over Vermont and across the border in Quebec as well, to commission the young genius to carve their tombstones. Horse-loggers wanted to be laid to rest beneath stones engraved with etchings of their teams. Farmers wanted representations of their barns and houses. Woodsmen coveted leaping granite bucks and trout.

By the time Peter was fifteen he'd left school altogether to work full-time in his great-grandfather's granite shed. Emile's sons left him alone, in deference to his childhood illness, and Peter's own brothers treated him differently. After all, he was special, an artist. But the entire village knew that when Peter was sixteen, Emile Lacourse had happened upon him and Thérèse skinny-dipping together in the deep green water of the quarry and, as Father George himself put it in his “Short History,” it was well for the stone carver that afternoon that he was fleet of foot. But despite all that their parents could do, the young couple took every opportunity to be together. So it was really no great surprise when, one December evening in my thirteenth year, while Father George and I were decorating the Big House for Christmas, she and Peter showed up on the porch together.

It was snowing lightly, and a few flakes clung to Thérèse's long dark hair, reminding me of the dark-haired angel that traditionally went on top of the huge tree in the rectory parlor.

“Are your folks squabbling again?” Father George said, knowing better.

“Not tonight, Father, for a wonder,” Thérèse said. She jerked her head at Peter. “This one wants to get married.”

The couple sat down side by side at the bird's-eye table on which, years earlier, Father George had divided the buck between their fathers. Now he heated coffee. Once again I sat quietly on the woodbox by the blue porcelain stove.

Father George sat down across from the couple. “Flow old are you, Thérèse?”

“Eighteen.”

“And you, Peter?”

“He's eighteen, too.”

Father George frowned. But with children and young people, he almost never lost his temper. “Let him answer for himself, Thérèse. Are you seventeen, Peter?”

“And a half.”

“He does the work of a man and is a man,” Thérèse said.

Father George looked at Peter. “Do you have a job, son?”

“Certainly. I'm a granite carver.”

“You should see ‘The Magdalene Standing Vigil at the Tomb of Christ Our Lord,' commissioned for the cemetery entrance in Memphremagog,” Thérèse said.

“I have,” Father George said. “It's a masterwork.”

“I was the model for the Magdalene,” Thérèse said. She pulled her chair closer to Peter's. “Think what he'll be accomplishing at thirty.” She took Peter's hands in hers and held them up. “Look. Strong and slender. The fingers of a master.”

Father George took off his glasses and then put them back on again. “How do you feel about marrying Thérèse, Peter?”

Peter smiled. “We've made our decision,” he said simply. But the way he held Thérèse's hand answered the question far better.

Father George poured coffee into the bone china cups he had bought in London on his way home from the Great War. From time to time Thérèse and Peter glanced at each other over the steam rising from their cups. Peter's features were very fine, like those of his statues, yet in his face there was already considerable strength as well, an artist's single-minded determination.

Father George poured more coffee. Then he came right to the heart of the matter. “You two love each other very much.”

It was a statement.

“Yes,” Thérèse said simply.

The clock on the mantel ticked; the snow gusted against the window. The wood fire flickered orange and red through the isinglass window of the blue stove.

“One more question, Thérèse,” Father George said. “Do you love Peter enough to leave your mother and live with him forever?”

“Yes. And enough to forfeit a big church wedding with a white dress, besides.”

Peter stood up. “Come, Thérèse. We'll wait on the porch. Let Father decide.”

Father George sat thinking. “It's all so improbable, Frank,” he said. “That this could ever work out. On the other hand, life is full of improbabilities that work out. I'm sitting at one.”

He touched the bird's-eye table. Then his eyes flashed. “You see how God puts us in impossible situations. I'm beginning to think I'll be damned if I do marry these kids and damned if I don't. Quite literally.” He clenched his big fist and shook it at the ceiling. “Oh, you're a rough old cob,” he told God. “You don't ask for much, do you? Just our souls. See how He operates, Frank? He catches us in a pickle, like a man in a rundown between second and third. We can't go forward and we can't go back. Well, well. ‘Whom He loveth, He chastiseth.'”