Disappearances (11 page)

My father was so moved he was speechless—briefly. He ran back to the cabin and got our blanket out of the pack basket and covered up Uncle Henry. “We'll do it, too, Hen,” he said. “You and Bill and me. We'll do it.”

“No,” Uncle Henry said without opening his eyes, “we won't. I will.”

It was only about nine o'clock, though so much had happened since dawn that it seemed much later. While my father built a fire and shaved with his hunting knife I unloaded the whiskey. There were twenty-five full cases left, including three cases of loose bottles. I asked whether I should start carrying them down to the canoe.

“No, Bill, we'll tend to that later. I feel like a swim now. Quebec Bill and Wild Bill are going swimming.”

Fifteen minutes later we were diving into the lake, out of which I immediately jumped again. But the cold didn't bother my father. He was a superb swimmer, as agile and quick in the water as an otter. He dived and frolicked in the icy lake like a laughing white-headed seal. Once he stayed under for the better part of a minute. When he came up he was holding a rainbow trout nearly as long as his arm.

Rat and Henry continued to sleep while we cooked the trout. After breakfast we left the last of our bread and some fish for them, which my father assured me Rat could get his friend to multiply, and went for a walk back through the woods.

The sun was shining through the haze, and it was warm enough to leave our hunting jackets by the pack basket inside the cabin. Behind the cabin the beeches were beginning to put out fuzzy green buds. Further back in the hardwoods spring beauties and trillium were up. A few trout lilies were in blossom, bright yellow against the brown leaves on the floor of the woods. Off in the mountains a male partridge began to drum. A snowshoe rabbit, still mostly white, bounded out of a brush pile. “He don't know it's spring, Bill,” my father said. “If he don't change clothes pretty soon he's going to make a tasty dinner for some smart red fox.”

After a long climb we came out into a clearing full of blueberry bushes. From here the view was spectacular. Everywhere we looked there were lakes, rivers, forests and small farms. Far down the lake I could just distinguish the yellow tug, still well south of the notch. Back in the hills across the lake smoke was still rising from Carcajou's barn. Beyond that the Laurentian Mountains lay scattered under the hazy blue sky.

My father put his arm around me. With his other hand he pointed off across the mountains. “Wild Bill,” he shouted as loudly as his broken jaw would permit, “ain't that a Christly wonderful sight to see?”

In the middle of the field sat a giant boulder. It was not an outcropping but a glacial erratic picked up by the ice sheet in northern Canada and later dropped here on the ridge. My father walked over to this house-sized anomaly and sat down on a patch of moss under the side facing the lake. As I sat down next to him he got out his pipe and began to fill it.

Looking down the lake through the notch, I thought again of René St. Laurent Bonhomme, who had disappeared near here seventy years before. I wondered why my father had chosen the previous evening to tell me about René's disappearance. I had also been surprised to hear him refer to his father, whose life, like my father's own past before his marriage, had always been one of those taboo subjects my family refused to discuss. Even Cordelia, that most irreverent of all iconoclasts, never mentioned my Grandfather Goodman.

Now it occurred to me that my father might actually want to tell me something about those times in his own life he had never to my knowledge discussed with anyone. Even if he didn't, I might be able to get him to; a taboo, I suddenly realized, was at the least a two-way agreement, a contract that one person alone could not enforce.

“Dad,” I said quickly so that I wouldn't have time to change my mind, “tell me what happened to Grampa Goodman after he ran away.”

“Wild Bill wants to hear about his grandfather,” my father said to his ever-present gallery. Then in his lilting narrative voice he began to talk about his father and that three-quarters of his own life that he had not mentioned half a dozen times to me since I could remember.

Soon after running away from Cordelia in 1869 my Grandfather William Goodman apprenticed himself to a gunsmith. He was talented at the work, but after two or three years he left with the eight-gauge shotgun that he had made himself and went to work for a professional smuggler. One night my grandfather and the smuggler drank more than usual. They began to argue, my father didn't know what over, and the gun went off. After that my grandfather ran the business himself.

He specialized in transporting whiskey across the Canadian line, and covered up his clandestine operations by ostensibly dealing in timber lots. During the spring and early summer he traveled through southern Quebec and New Brunswick and northern New England, cruising played-out border farmland for marketable stands of timber, on which he then leased stumpage rights for the following winter. He would locate two or three wood lots, not too large, within an hour's traveling distance of one another and the border and always near or in a dry county or township. Later in the summer he would move his wife and ten children, of whom my father was the eldest, to a centrally located farmhouse, invariably run down and invariably a long way from any settlement. Then he would begin cutting.

From the time he was six until he was sixteen and left home for the first and last time my father worked in the woods with my grandfather. For the first year or so he piled brush. Then he learned to use a small bucksaw to cut the upper limbs and tops of down trees into kindling. By the time he was ten he was driving my grandfather's team of big woods horses, hauling tree-length logs out to roadside landing yards during the day and by night driving those same horses back and forth across remote unwatched border crossings in front of a wagon or sleigh loaded with whiskey. My grandfather would make one run with him to show him the route. After that my father went alone, often driving twenty-five or thirty miles over roads that were little more than log traces through heavy forests, sometimes in temperatures of thirty and forty below zero. He told me he first began drinking in order to keep warm on those night runs.

My grandfather's rationale in sending a boy of ten out alone at night in winter through wilderness country was that if he happened to be stopped and questioned he could always say that his folks were sick and he was going for help or the house had burned down or a tree had fallen on his father. My grandfather had enormous faith in my father's resourcefulness. Very early on their relationship developed into a professional partnership based on mutual respect for one another's competence. They worked together in the woods. They smuggled whiskey together, and by the time my father was twelve they were drinking together, and between them consuming at least two bottles of white mule moonshine whiskey every day.

If there were schools my father and his brothers and sisters never went to any of them. Apparently my father taught himself to read and write sometime after leaving home. As is often the case with persons who learn to read later than usual, he rarely forgot anything he heard or observed. He learned how to speak English and French with equal facility and how to discern from looking once quickly at a stranger which language to address him in. He could walk through a section of spruce or fir or mixed hardwood and softwood and estimate with the precision of a professional cruiser how many cords of pulp or feet of logs could be cut on it and how long the work would take. He was an expert trapper; by the time he was ten he was making enough money on the pelts of the muskrat and mink and otter and beaver he trapped to buy his own clothes and ammunition—my grandfather furnished his whiskey free in exchange for making the runs. From moving so frequently and from his night whiskey runs he developed a preternatural sense of direction, like a wild animal's. He often told me that I could take him blindfolded to any spot within twenty-five miles of the Canadian border from eastern New Brunswick to western Quebec and he could remove the blindfold and walk directly to the nearest town.

He did not walk to many towns while he was growing up. Without exception the farms where my grandfather bivouacked his family were as far from town as it was possible to be. Home for my father was a succession of incredibly isolated, barely habitable houses where they never stayed for more than a year and to which they never returned. This nomadic existence was especially hard for my grandmother, whom my father described as trying at first to make a home of the falling-down shanties, planting a kitchen garden, harvesting a few early table vegetables, having to leave the rest for the coons and deer and bears, and finally giving up gardening altogether—finally giving up everything but the daily routine of caring for the children and the house and her husband. My father did not know where she originally came from or who her people were, except that they were French.

My father said my grandfather was not abusive to my grandmother or to him and the other children, but regarded them all as accoutrements to his two trades and valued them in accordance with their respective abilities to handle an axe, a peavey or a loaded whiskey wagon. As my father described him to me he was a big man, well over six feet, with a dark beard and a bluff, shrewd, not unkind manner, who seemed to enjoy teaching his sons how to play the fiddle Canadian style, shoot a spruce grouse on the wing, sing the old voyageur paddling songs, tell time and direction from the sun and stars, fight like a wildcat and drink a quart of whiskey a day without falling down or getting sick. Like my father, my grandfather did not talk much about his past, though he once said that he began drinking with his father and grandfather and great-grandfather—that would have been René Bonhomme—as soon as he started walking, and that since running away from Cordelia when he was fourteen he had drunk at least a quart of whiskey a day himself.

“I run away over whiskey too,” my father said after a short pause, his voice casual and anecdotal. “Only it was under different circumstances. We was living near here then, in a cabin right where that one down below sets, though it warn't that cabin, and Pa, he had a big load he wanted to send over the line. It was early April, and still winter. I drove north of here a mile to a spot where I could get down to the lake. Then I drove back over the ice through the notch and on to where the county home is now. From there I picked up the Memphremagog road. Back then the county home was a summer place that belonged to Dr. Tett's folks and warn't used at all in the winter but there was two, three farms on the road and so they kept it rolled pretty good in the winter, and it was passable.

“I had clear coasting from there down to the covered bridge over the St. John, where the iron bridge and trestle are today. It was a great long bridge, the longest in the county, and it was there until the flood of twenty-seven. During the winter they had to shovel snow onto the floor so the sleighs could get across. At the south end they had a little toll building that was open in the summer. Winters they didn't bother.

“Well, Bill, I was sixteen at the time. I'd made hundreds of runs and never come up against anything I couldn't handle. It was a clear night, though way down below zero, but I was bundled up good with a buffalo robe over my legs and a bottle to keep me from minding the wind. I didn't pay much attention when the horses shied as we started over the bridge. I thought that was just because it was dark and narrow, or maybe that they heard the water running free in the middle of the river where it had started to thaw and they wanted a drink. I was halfway over before I saw the lantern at the other end. For a second or two I still thought it was all right—that the lantern was my pickup and they had mistook where they was supposed to meet me by a mile or so. Then there was a loud thumping, and the sleigh was scraping and bumping along over the bare boards of the bridge where the hijackers had shoveled off the snow to slow me down. I reined in just at the other end with the sleigh still partly inside. There was two of them. One was holding my off horse's bridle and the other was up ahead fifty feet or so by the empty toll shed. The near fella had a horse pistol aimed right square at my head.

“‘Climb down, boy, this is where you unload,' the fella with the pistol says.

“‘Don old me hup, meester,' says I. ‘Papa, ees cut him foot most hoff wit de haxe and lay pass out on de cabin floor. Mama, she don know how long he las. Me, I ave to get de doctor, hor papa, she be gone.'”

My father laughed. “That part about Pa laying passed out on the floor was true enough. Earlier that evening he'd got up a full head of steam and commenced to fighting the War of Rebellion with William Shakespeare and Calvin again. He'd put on a foolish blue cap he kept a-purpose for such occasions and set my little brothers and sisters to mounting a charge on the hog pen. Just before I left he dumb over into the pen himself and picked up a four-hundred-pound sow by the ears. Picked her right up off the ground, Wild Bill, and hollered at her, ‘You, sir, Robert E. Lee, sir. Will you surrender, General?' It was a rare sight to see and a fine moving speech to hear with the little uns standing at attention and saluting, and me laughing so hard I couldn't hardly harness the team. ‘You, sir, Robert E. Lee, sir. Will you surrender, General?' And the poor hog squealing and hanging up there in front of Pa helpless as a small piglet. You and Pa would have taken to one another, Bill. The wilder a boy was the higher Pa prized him. He prized me very highly, and would have you.

“Well, I knowed by the time I got to the bridge that Pa was laying like a stone on the floor, and for a minute I thought the fella with the lantern believed me, because he says, ‘We won't hold you up long, boy. We wouldn't want your Pa to bleed to death after cutting off his foot with that haxe.'

“Then the other fella shouts out, ‘No, not after sending us all that whiskey you've got loaded in the back of that cutter.'