Disappearances (3 page)

I headed for the barn. Like each of the eleven barns built by my great-grandfather ours was round rather than rectangular. It had a central feeding area in the cow stable and above the stable a circular hayloft around the perimeter of which a hay wagon could be driven. By 1932 it was in need of major repairs, listing off on the downhill side like the hulk of a wrecked ship on a reef. But it was still a landmark in Kingdom County and still appeared to be perfectly round when viewed from a distance.

From a distance is how my father usually viewed it. This evening, though, he followed me inside, where my mother and Cordelia were milking by kerosene light. Rat Kinneson, our hired man, was carrying milk to the hogs.

Even in the stanchions at the end of winter my mother's fifteen registered Jerseys were a handsome herd, clean and graceful and red as wild deer. Tonight they were also restive, stamping and shaking their heads at random intervals, unaccustomed to being milked before they were fed.

My mother had not heard us come in. She knelt by a cow, washing its flank with a white cloth. She was wearing a flowered kerchief and her gray barn sweater. My mother was almost twenty years younger than my father. She had very long dark hair and dark eyes, and looked as Indian as her St. Francis grandmother. She was several inches taller than my father and as slim as her brother Henry was stocky. She had been educated in a French convent in Montreal but now spoke only English unless she was angry. She was quite strict with me and quite indulgent with my father. She was the only person I knew who was not afraid of Cordelia.

“Evangeline,” my father called. As usual he drew out her name in his best oratorical style, stressing the last syllable. “Spring is here, Evangeline. The trout are jumping the falls. Wild Bill and me had to boot an officer of the law down into the whitewater.”

“It was Warden Kinneson,” I said. “He got out down below. He called Dad a Frenchman.”

“What a travesty,” Cordelia said.

“I'm sorry he got out,” Rat said. “The falls is a good place for a man like Brother R.W.”

“Did you find hay?” my mother asked.

“We didn't find any hay, Evangeline.” My father made this announcement with as much satisfaction as though we had brought home a truckload of alfalfa. “But we did run out of gas.”

“We can't feed fish to the cows,” Cordelia said.

“Rat here will figure a way to feed the cows. Ain't that right, Rat?”

Rat stood frowning near Hercule, my father's pet longhorn bull. Hercule was hungry, and was kicking the sideboards of his stall hard.

“Stop that,” Rat said. Hercule stopped kicking.

In the lantern light inside the barn Rat looked like a caricature of Ichabod Crane. He was tall and stooped and lean as a bent cedar rail, with a long dissatisfied face and lank colorless hair. Rat was among the last of a certain tradition of hired men which in him seemed to have reached its apotheosis: unreliable, malingering, censorious; perpetually disconsolate, infuriatingly dogmatic; prodigiously talented with crops, animals and machinery. With Rat our farm ran erratically at best. Without him it could not have run at all.

“We'll feed them critters potatoes,” he said. “That seems to be the one thing around here we ain't run out of.”

“Certainly we will,” my father said as though he had thought of the idea himself. “Now what about the truck, Ratty?”

Rat was looking at Hercule. “I always knowed that bull would be good for something,” he said.

Twenty minutes later we were all back down by the bridge. Rat hitched Hercule to the front of the Ford with a long chain. My mother and I pushed. My father sat inside the cab steering. Cordelia walked alongside reciting the following lines from “Hamatreya”:

 

Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys

Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;

Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet

Clear of the grave.

 

“Whoa,” my father shouted before we had gone ten feet. “Whoa up there, Rat. Whoa back there. Hark, Aunt. Everyone hark.”

We came to an uncertain halt and stood panting in the mud, not knowing what we were supposed to be listening for. Then from high overhead in the dark sky we heard the geese, barking faintly.

“They know,” my father said in a hushed cryptic tone.

“Come on,” Cordelia said. “Let's get over Donner Pass before the next snowstorm.”

“Giddap, Rat, giddap, Hercule,” my father called, and our bizarre processional lurched on up the hill.

 

During supper the wind came up hard, and as always when the wind blew out of the southwest the kitchen was drafty. Despite a good fire in the woodstove cold air seeped in around the porous old window casings, which my mother stuffed with rags every fall. Now she said, “When are we going to replace these windows?”

My father was no more adept at carpentering than farming. To my knowledge he had never repaired anything around the house or barn. Sitting at the table in his wool shirt and wool pants, his back near the stove, sipping hot coffee, he said, “You can't have city conveniences in the country, Evangeline.”

“Nor in a mountain fastness,” Cordelia said, drawing her shawl closer around her narrow shoulders.

“If by conveniences you mean running water and inside plumbing and electricity, no doubt you are right,” my mother said. “I wasn't thinking of such luxuries as those.”

“Well, you can't make an old house over into a new house. Can you, Rat?”

I think my father felt that he should not involve me in this debate, but couldn't resist a rhetorical appeal to someone. He had chosen the wrong person in Rat, who as usual was picking at his food as though he expected to find something unpalatable and odious in it at any moment. He turned over a slice of side pork the way he might turn over a rotten plank with his foot and said, “Because if he hadn't gotten out of the whitewater he couldn't go around a-slandering his relations.”

“I wasn't thinking of a new house,” my mother said, paying no attention to Rat, who was famous throughout the county for his non sequiturs. “I would just like to hope that by next winter we might be warm in our old kitchen.”

My father glanced at the windows, crowded with trays of tomato seedlings, broccoli and cauliflower shoots, tiny cabbage plants. The curtains were standing out at a sharp angle in the draft. “You never know what you're going to find when you start fooling with an old house,” he said. “Sometimes a stud gives way. Then the wall might buckle and you'd be out an entire wall. Or you might find a sill that needs jacking. If the jack slips the whole house could come down around your ears. No, Evangeline, it's better not to know what's inside an old wall. It's better just to forget about such things.”

“I wish I could forget such things.”

I noticed Cordelia glancing appraisingly at my mother, of whom even mild recrimination was uncharacteristic.

“Well,” my father said, “all you need to do is give the word, Sweet Evangeline. By fall you'll have you a ten-room home with two inside bathrooms and a warm furnace in the cellar and no cracks around the windows. Just like them new houses up to Memphremagog. You say the word,
ma fille,
and you'll have that Christly mansion by September.”

He was referring to a number of large houses that had been built during Prohibition in the border town at the south end of the lake. Uncle Henry had told us that like his Cadillac, most of these homes had been financed by whiskey running. They were capacious and stately, with pillared porticoes and secluded second-story porches. Some were surmounted by cupolas or fenced widow's walks overlooking the lake. They were more costly and elegant than any houses built in Kingdom County since the pink brick homes of the sheep boom just before the Civil War. Today they are occupied by doctors, lawyers, a banker, an Episcopalian minister—all of whom owe their educations to money their families made running whiskey during Prohibition.

“William,” my mother said, “the cows haven't eaten since morning. You go down cellar now and start putting potatoes in bushel baskets for Mr. Kinneson.”

I took one of the extra kerosene lanterns from the woodshed and went through the icy parlor and down the cellar stairs. Along with the circular hayloft, the cellar was one of my favorite retreats on the farm, redolent of cool dry earth and the rich mingled scents of the fruits and vegetables my mother stored there in greater quantities than we could consume if we didn't grow anything for a year. I hung the lantern from a nail driven into one of the eight-by-eight ceiling timbers and looked around. Among the netted hams and sides of bacon a dozen or so cabbages depended from the timbers by their roots, casting grotesque shadows on the stone walls, which were lined with shelves of quart canning jars containing every kind of vegetable that could be grown in Kingdom County. Also there were pint jars of apple butter, wild berry jams and jellies, maple syrup from previous springs. Along one wall were two twenty-gallon crocks of salt pork. There were bushels of old-fashioned varieties of apples, and bushels of pie pumpkins and winter squash—all evocative of a self-sufficiency lost sometime during the past century.

The potato bins were still about a third full. Some of the potatoes had started to sprout soft purple tentacles, a sign of spring that had not passed unnoticed by my father. I got a stack of empty bushel baskets and started to fill one. There was a loud thump, a rush of cold air, and Rat came down the stairs from the outside bulkhead with a wheelbarrow.

If there was a way to do a job slower than necessary, Rat would always find it. I used to think that he did this deliberately to annoy me, but later I realized that he worked just as slowly when I wasn't around. Now he insisted on taking only one bushel of potatoes out to the barn at a time though the wheelbarrow could have easily accommodated two or three. Also he refused to tell me how many bushels he thought he would need. I filled six or eight and left him to finish the job alone.

Upstairs in the kitchen my father had gotten out his fiddle. While my mother and Cordelia washed the supper dishes he sat in his straight-backed chair by the stove and played as blithely as though we were cutting up seed potatoes for spring planting and the cows were eating new green grass in the pasture. He pounded his feet up and down in the clog dancing tradition of French Canadian fiddling. His white hair flew as he nodded his head chivalrously toward my mother. His eyes were an intense blue in the lamplight. His fiddle rang with a pure unquavering wildness reminiscent of the wildness in his past. My mother made a fresh pot of coffee. Cordelia and she and I sat at the table drinking coffee and listening to reels and jigs and waltzes that were hundreds of years old.

Suddenly Rat rushed in through the woodshed shouting my father's name.

“What is it, Rat?” cried my father.

“Oh, Bill, Bill, Bill,” Rat shouted. “It's your bull, Bill. Your bull be choking.”

My father leaped for the door. He raced across the dooryard and into the stable, where we found him bent over the prostrate bull, driving his fist repeatedly into its neck. He pried Hercule's mouth open and thrust his arm deep inside. Hercule remained motionless. He jumped up and began kicking the animal in the stomach, trying desperately to make him cough. But it was futile. Hercule had choked to death on a potato.

I began to cry. This was terrible, far worse than running out of hay. My father had thought the world of the old bull, and I knew he must be heartbroken.

If he was, though, he didn't show it. “Butcher him,” he told Rat. “We'll keep one side and the Royers can have the other. Cheer up, Wild Bill. He was an old fella, he must have been close to twenty.”

He put one arm around me and one around my mother and walked us out into the dooryard. It was snowing again. “It's a Christly spring blizzard, Evangeline,” he shouted ecstatically. “This is the snow that takes the snow. This is the poor man's fertilizer.”

 

That night in my loft bedroom over the kitchen I lay awake a long time. Cordelia and Rat had gone to bed, but my mother and father sat up talking at the kitchen table. Since I could remember I had loved to lie under the warm quilts and hear my parents talking, but tonight I tried not to listen. They were speaking French, which meant they were disagreeing. From snatches I overheard I knew my father was trying to persuade my mother to sanction a whiskey-smuggling trip.

There had been a similar argument the previous fall. The summer had been a succession of rainy days interspersed with intervals of hazy sunshine lasting just long enough to seduce us into cutting our hay. As soon as we had a few acres down and drying they would be soaked by another sudden rain, coming out of nowhere. The entire family had abandoned the usual summer rituals of gardening, canning, berrying and getting up a winter woodpile to go to the fields and turn the brown sodden hay between rains. We turned the hay in one field of about ten acres five times before we gave it up as beyond saving. In desperation some farmers put wet hay in their barns, salting it down repeatedly to reduce the risk of fire. Three barns within sight of our farm caught fire spontaneously from damp steaming hay. In September with less than a ton of hay in the barn, my father had almost begged my mother to endorse one whiskey run. She had not given him any kind of ultimatum but neither had she given her blessings to a trip. Ultimately he had cut the maples to buy hay. And as bad as things were with us now, I did not think she would approve a run this time either.

“William, sell part of the herd. Frog would give us enough hay to get through for two good milkers.”

“I couldn't do that, Evangeline. I couldn't sell another living thing off this farm. Not a tree, not an animal. Especially not part of your herd. I could never do that and you know it.”