Disappearances (18 page)

The counterfeiter was staying with us at the time, and my father told me to go up in the attic and get him out of bed to come down and hear about the fruit trees. I went up the stairs off the hall and knocked on the attic door. “Don't attempt to lay hands on me, Warder,” the old reprobate shouted. “Ned's a desperate man and danger's his middle name.” I had every reason to believe this statement, so I retreated to the kitchen.

My father then went up himself. “I know your tricks,” I heard Ned yell. “You've got Ned's bright green money and now you want him. Good enough. Quebec Bill Bonhomme and I stand ready for you.”

“This is Quebec Bill Bonhomme,” my father said through the door. “I want to read you something.”

“Bill Bonhomme stands here by Ned's side, ready to defend him with life and limb. Open the door if you dare.”

My father prudently came back down to the kitchen.

“Is Father after scourging you again, Arthur?” Mary Magdalen said to him as he passed her rocker. “Don't fret, lad. He'll soon be rolling at the bottom of Northumberland Strait, with the blue whales and great sea fishes nibbling his white bones.”

“Do you like fresh peaches, Mother?” my father said.

“I don't know, Arthur. I never had them. Can I smoke them in me pipe?”

“You can do that as soon as you can eat any he'll grow up here,” Cordelia said.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Bonhomme's Fruit and Berry Farm was already a reality in my father's mind. He spent the rest of the winter compiling his order, studying the glossy catalogue evening after evening. In the spring he sugared feverishly, dragooning Rat and my mother and me and Clyde or Floyd and old Ned out to the sugar bush and marshaling our dubious talents in a brilliant demonstration of field generalship. He even carried Mary Magdalen out in her rocker for part of each day so she could warn us if she smelled a storm coming off the Grand Banks. She thought the sap buckets were full of cod and mistook Rat for a giant squid. “I bore twelve children,” she told my father. “Ten was boys, and my continual prayer to God was that not a one would go to sea.” She looked up at the maples, not yet leafed out. “The fleet's coming in off the Banks, Arthur. What lovely tall masts they have. See the white waves break on the keels.” To Mary the snow was surf, the blue sky the distant sea. Meanwhile, old Ned scampered like a red squirrel under the trees, writing the serial numbers of his bills in the snow with a stick. Clyde or Floyd tried to urinate in the boiling pan. Somehow my father managed to make several hundred pounds of sugar, enough to order a thousand fruit trees from Minnesota.

The order arrived in May. It filled the back of our wagon. It was a glorious sight, hundreds of little budded whips, limber twigs jutting proudly out of compact moist balls of peat moss wrapped in burlap. Multicolored tags bearing extravagant illustrations of lush fruits were wired to the tiny stalks above the grafts. The Scandinavian horticulturist had outdone himself. My father danced in the street in front of the railway station.

He had plowed up part of the upper pasture across from the maples. Now he threw himself into digging and planting, pacing off rows, making esoteric measurements and calculations. Assisted by his Barnum and Bailey gallery, he watered and mulched and cultivated and sprayed all summer. In the evenings he projected bumper crops of golden peaches, succulent rose-tinged pears, juicy plums—“as big as baseballs, Wild Bill”—a profuse Keatsian harvest of grapes, nectarines, berries of every variety. It rained frequently that summer. The hay rotted in the fields, but my father didn't care. His trees and bushes were thriving. In the fall he banked them high with straw and manure, neglecting in the process to bank our house or get Rat started with the banking. He swaddled his trees securely with roofing paper to protect them from rabbits and mice and deer. “Sleep tight, my darlings,” he said.

Winter came early. The first spitting flurries fell on the last day of August. By the end of September the frost was deep in the ground. October was a month of heavy pelting snows. The wind came whipping down over the vast frozen expanse of Lake Memphremagog. In January the temperature dropped to fifty below zero. The big maples cracked in the cold like rifle shots. The old square nails in the walls of the house snapped like firecrackers. We burned a cord of wood every week and still couldn't keep warm. One night in February Clyde or Floyd went out to the backhouse without letting anyone know he was going. The next morning we found him sitting frozen on the four-holer, the Montgomery Ward mail-order catalogue open to the ladies' underwear section in his rigid hands. My father's capacity for affirmation was unshaken. He called all of us out to the backhouse and delivered a short elegy. “Grieve not, friends,” he shouted into the frosty air. “A good shit was all Clyde or Floyd had in this world and probably the next to look forward to.” When we dug the poor man's corpse out of the sawdust pit behind the barn where my father had wintered him over until spring burial, a hideous grin was still frozen on his face. “He died happy” was the epitaph my father carved into his slate marker.

It was a winter of death. Mary Magdalen died in her rocker in March, though we did not know it immediately because the chair continued to rock for several hours after she was cold. The ground was still frozen four feet deep, so down she went into the sawdust pit with Clyde or Floyd, tied into the rocker, in which my father buried her in May when the ground finally thawed. He got Rat to build a large square box resembling a packing crate, and when we put her inside and nailed down the top the chair began to rock again. My father put his mouth up to the crate. “It's Arthur, Mother,” he said soothingly. “You can rest quiet now. Your sons are all on dry land.” Immediately the creaking stopped.

Cordelia, who had informed us that Mary Magdalen was dead without even looking up from her book, said that there would be a third death soon and she hoped it would be hers, she could not endure much more of my father's lunacy. A week after Mary Magdalen died in the rocker old Ned failed to return from one of his night walks in the woods. It had snowed the day before and my father and I were able to trace his path down the north side of our hill and across the beaver dam into the cedar swamp. He had walked in a straight line, stopping now and then to scratch into the snow numbers from plates melted down twenty years ago. A mile into the swamp the tracks stopped. We spiraled out in widening concentric circles but could not pick up the trail. Ned was canny in a crazed way. Maybe he had backtracked somehow. We checked, but found nothing. His tracks simply stopped, like the tracks of a snowshoe rabbit picked out of its stride by an owl. It was as though he had been translated, like Elijah. Cordelia said this was undoubtedly the case; some benign power had swooped him up to spare him from the fate of the sawdust pit.

Long after the rest of us gave Ned up as lost, my father went to the swamp to search for him. Several times he walked the ten miles to the Canadian line. Once he followed the old tote road along the river all the way to the lake. I was eight at the time and had seen enough death to know that Ned was gone. I did not understand what drove my father day after day to fight his way through blowdowns and over beaver dams and up frozen streams, treacherous with spring holes, in search of someone who had obviously disappeared. I asked Cordelia and my mother why he persisted. They looked at each other, but said nothing.

With the first thaws the cedar swamp became a morass of flowing water and quaking bogs, and my father had to abandon his hunt.

I have always suspected that Ned, master counterfeiter that he was, walked backwards in his own tracks, maybe a long ways, then climbed an overhanging cedar without stepping out of his original footprints. I think he then worked his way high into the tight branches, wedged himself in and went to sleep. Of course this possibility occurred to us at the time. We actually climbed and searched several trees. But there was no way we could investigate them all, and in spots they were so dense that spry old Ned in his frenetic and gleeful self-satisfaction over at last eluding his imaginary pursuers might have scrambled for another halfmile from tree to tree above the swamp before curling up for one last night's sleep.

The spring of 1926 was a busy time for my father. He had to tap the maples, bury Clyde or Floyd and Mary Magdalen, and visit his orchard a dozen times a day to see whether his trees had survived the harsh winter. Early in May when we had our usual week of false spring a few scattered plum and pear trees started to show green buds and he danced all over the farm. Then the weather froze up again and it snowed steadily for two days. The snow did not go that year until the end of May, leaving hundreds of black sapless rigid sticks where my father's Eden had been. He was charmed, and averred that with proper management the lifeless stocks would put up even hardier shoots from their roots. He hitched the team to the great wooden sap vat and brought up water from the brook all summer. By fall not a single tree had put up any shoots. “Well, Bill,” he said cheerfully, surveying that blasted chiaroscuro of leafless switches, “we can use any with a fork in them for divining rods.”

 

My father was an expert at witching water. He knew just how to handle a wand so that it would pull down in his strong hands like a striking trout. His own optimism seemed to flow into the wand. Everywhere he went he found water. Everywhere, that is, except our hilltop. Water was a perennial problem for us. The lower meadow was full of good springs and the brook itself rose halfway up our maple orchard, but the only supply for the house and barn was a hand-dug well that ran dry every two or three years. Sometimes it would go dry in the winter, and we would have to bring up water in milk cans from the brook until spring, chopping a fresh hole through the ice every day.

Just behind our house on the northern brow of the hill was a low granite outcropping that was always covered with a dark gleam of cold water, even in drought time. For his own amusement my father occasionally cut a witching wand and had it nearly jerked out of his hands over this ledge. The fall he gave up on the orchard he decided to dynamite the hairline fissure out of which that cold water seeped and reveal the spring he was sure lay just below the rock.

Now my father loved to blow things up. Detonations of all kinds excited him, and he was always looking for an excuse to dynamite something. The previous year he had dynamited the beaver dam across the St. John, which he claimed was backing water up so he couldn't get near his favorite brook trout hole. A week later the beavers had replaced it under the supervision of a large chocolate-colored male with huge yellow incisors. This time my father placed three charges, one at each end of the dam and one in the middle. Sticks and mud flew a hundred feet into the air. Whiskeyjack and Two Bottles Kinneson, Rat's cousins from down the hollow, came galloping up with their shotguns, riding double on Two Bottles' mule, thinking a G-man had blown up a still. For several weeks there was no beaver activity in or near the river. Then one afternoon late in August when my father and I decided to go fishing we discovered the entire colony working feverishly on a new dam. This one was wide enough to drive a team across, the biggest dam we had ever seen. The chocolate beaver with big teeth was working alongside the others. Sitting on the dam directing the emplacement of the last sticks was a black beaver that must have weighed close to a hundred pounds. “I should have knowed they'd do that,” my father said. “Wild Bill, they've went up to Canady and gotten theirselves a French engineer to build that dam so she'll stay built. I've heard beaver will do that. This is the proof. Just look at that great black Frenchman. He ain't a bit afraid of us. Well, he don't have to be. We'll save the rest of our dynamite for another project.”

So equipped with three sticks of dynamite and a dead Bartlett pear sapling my father went out to that outcropping to blast for water. My mother and Cordelia and Rat and I stood back by the Canada plum tree at the corner of the house. We were all quite apprehensive. My mother did not say so, but I could tell that she didn't want my father fooling around with explosives. Cordelia was afraid he would blow up the house along with the ledge. When Rat saw my father pretend to be yanked off his feet by the nonexistent attraction of that dead forked stick to the water he was outraged. He said blasphemy was walking abroad up and down in the land and that my father was making a mockery of Moses' striking the rock with his rod to bring forth water. My father overheard part of this. He began to laugh uncontrollably and flail the ledge with his pear switch. He held each stick of dynamite in his teeth to light it, then walked casually off to observe the blast from a short distance away. There was a fearsome explosion. A shower of rock fragments fell all over the dooryard and rained down on the house roof. We ran toward the ledge. My father stood in a sulphurous cloud of smoke and dust pouring out of a jagged aperture about three feet long and two feet wide. When the air cleared we looked into the crevice and saw water rising up its sides. My father began to caper all around the edge of the hole. He ran into Cordelia and nearly knocked her down in. She smiled grimly and went back to the house. Rat followed her, muttering about the devil's work. In his ecstasy my father leaped back and forth across the gaping hole like a puppet. The water continued to rise steadily. It was almost to the top. My father stooped and reached out his hand.

Instantly the water started to recede. Like a disappearing mirage, it retreated leisurely down the smooth granite sides of the opening until it was out of sight. My father looked at his dry hand, still extended. He ran it over the dark high-water mark inside the hole and brought it away damp. He sniffed his fingers and touched them to his tongue. “It's water,” he said. “It's water, all right. It has to be down there still. Somewhere.”

My mother knelt beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. “William,” she said, “who else but you could have done this? You are a true miracle worker, and I love you.”