Disappearances (31 page)

 

This weekend I will visit Grandmother Evangeline in Montreal. Of course I will see her again before I head north.

 

Take care of yourself, Bill. Last week when you and Uncle Henry dropped me off at the border I thought you seemed somehow withdrawn from this world. You ought to stay around a while longer. It's full of wonders, you know.

 

My love to you, Wild Bill, and to Mother.

 

Your expatriated son,

Henry Bonhomme

 

p.s. If that sneaking F.B.I. agent comes around asking for me again, give him a Christly good kick in the ass.

 

This afternoon the F.B.I. agent returns. I show him the letter, which he squats in the dooryard, country style, to read. He is a big man with quiet eyes and a slight southern accent. He reads the letter impassively.

“Yes, sir,” he says, handing the letter back.

After a while he says, “My name's Weed. Waylon Weed.”

A little later he says, “I've got two boys in Canada myself. Waylon defected last spring. Beauregard Benedict defected a month later.”

He stands up and shakes his head. We shake hands. “Tell your boy not to come back, Mr. Bonhomme. If he does I'll catch him. Same as I would my own. Tell him good luck. Tell him you kicked my ass.”

As Waylon Weed drives back down the dusty hollow road I look out over the cedar swamp. It is vast and wild and shimmering a little in the heat of the young summer. It is a place of mirages and illusions. A place of horrors and wonders. It is a vestigial corner of the primeval world, waiting patiently for us to disappear.

I cannot stop thinking about the sentence in Henry's letter: “It's full of wonders, you know.” And for one brief moment I believe I know how Saul felt on the road to Damascus.

 

And I felt that intensity of wonderment once again, almost a decade later, when I stepped out into the dooryard just as the sun came up and realized that Kingdom County had disappeared:

It is July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial of my country, and like Saul's my eyes have been opened again. I hadn't seen it coming because it didn't happen the way Henry predicted and I expected, with a bang. No rough beast came slouching from the primordial cedar swamp. No wind blew Kingdom County away. No fire rained down on it from the sky. It was not that way at all, but much more dreadful. And I had watched it happen without knowing what I was watching.

This is what I see from our hilltop at sunrise on the two hundredth birthday of America:

To the south the hollow road is quiet. Orie Royer's place has been bought by a young couple who keep some goats and chickens and a milk cow and like us cut their own firewood and raise their own vegetables. Between the old Royer place and the county road there is not a single working farm left, though three big flags hang limply in the morning stillness above the three farmhouses that have been renovated as summer homes. There is no flag in our dooryard. My wife and I have decided that the day Henry comes home will be the day we will fly our flag.

To the north and northeast the cedar bog is gone, inundated by one hundred thousand acres of warm brackish still water backed up behind a so-called flood control dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1972. With the swamp went the last herd of moose; the beaver and otters and mink; the pink swamp orchids and the gigantic white cedars; the speckled trout Uncle Henry loved to catch on his delicate flies; and five miles of the Upper Kingdom River, the last wild stretch of whitewater in Vermont.

To the northwest Lake Memphremagog is lined with resorts, campgrounds, trailer parks, marinas and three new industries. The monastery folded in 1970 when Brother St. Hilaire died, and has been converted into a laboratory for a rocket research corporation that uses the mountains on both sides of the lake for its testing grounds.

Although I cannot see it, the Common too has changed. There are a few healthy isolated elms on some of the side streets but the trees on the central green have all died of the Dutch elm disease. The Academy where Prof Corbitt taught Cordelia and where I went to high school has been razed, replaced by a large regional high school built on the site of Frog Lamundy's old place along the county road. The statue of Ethan Allen still stands at the south end of the village, but Calvin Goodman's church and library have both been taken down and an absurd shopping mall catering mainly to tourists now runs along the west side of the green. With the big dam across the river, the rainbow trout have stopped coming up over the falls in the spring.

I think too on this lovely Bicentennial morning when I would like to be celebrating my country's birthday, maybe even putting on my old uniform and marching in the Common and giving the address I had to decline making because of my loyalty to Henry, of the people who have disappeared and without whom Kingdom County cannot exist, for me anyway.

I think of my mother, who died in 1969 in the convent in Montreal where she grew up, and in a sense died the day she reentered the convent in the summer of 1936, the day after I graduated from high school.

I think of Cordelia, who disappeared in the spring of 1932 at the age of ninety and reappeared twenty years later to counsel my son on the origin of man.

And of Henry, living with his Cree wife in a cabin on the northern shore of Lake Athabasca.

And Brother St. Hilaire and Brother Paul, buried side by side in the small cemetery above the rocket research corporation, where the cloned abbot still has a cell with a cot and desk and still wanders through the nonrestricted areas.

Of Uncle Henry, who in the fall of 1967, with his lung disintegrating into little bloody shreds that he coughed up by the hour, took his fly rod and deer rifle and disappeared into the cedar swamp, where nearly a year later I found and did not disturb his body, inside a large beaver house not far from the Canadian line.

And of my father. And thinking of my father, I decide to see if there is still time to make the speech. There is, we'd be delighted, Judge, so I go down to the Common in my uniform and get up and try to tell about the wonders and the horrors of Kingdom County and America, to the absolute astonishment and growing outrage of the local citizenry, but I keep right on, telling how René Bonhomme settled Kingdom County with a canoeload of brandy and a long knife, and Calvin preached and drank and went off to the Civil War with his son; about my son's flight into Canada, and the disappearance of Kingdom County, gone the way of Melville's Nantucket and Hawthorne's Salem, Thoreau's Concord and Frost's New Hampshire. Listen to this, someone says, the judge is losing his marbles. No, friends and fellow celebrants, I shout, you listen to me because all I mean to say is that even though it has disappeared, Kingdom County is still a place of wonders, and even though it is disappearing, America is still a place of wonders.

And even though I was a good judge, at election time a petition was circulated and I lost my judgeship by two votes and considered going off to live with the Cree myself. I didn't, though. I went back to my law practice in the dim musty office on the third floor of the courthouse overlooking the Green Mountains, which hadn't changed at all, and where I have had much time to think about time and my family, Kingdom County and America, wonders and horrors and illusions, and my father and the spring of 1932.

 

“I wonder what kind of plane this is,” my father said.

“I think they're called flying boats.”

“I wonder how high they'll go.”

I was still wondering at the country below us, musing over all that had taken place down there, no longer bothering to differentiate between past and present.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't think they're built to go very high.”

This observation was a mistake on my part. Immediately we were climbing. When the engine started to stall out we began to circle, moving upward through layer after layer of clouds. We ascended in great spiraling loops. Nothing was visible but clouds. Still we climbed. I lost all track of time and place. He's doing it, I thought. He's finally doing it. Soon we would soar into that forbidden ethereal bourn from which we would be hurled headlong toward the earth.

My father began to sing “
En Roulant.
” This is it, I thought. The ultimate voyage of the voyageurs. Those magnificent frogs in their flying machine. Daedalus and Icarus, sunbound and hellbent.

I didn't see how my father could sing at all. The air was so thin and cold I could hardly breathe. I thought I was going to black out. Then I did.

In recent years this incredible flight has been incorporated into a recurrent nightmare. Again I am entrapped with my father inside that lumbering purloined float plane, laboring ponderously up into the clouds. Again I start to black out. When I come to we are still climbing, with Aunt Cordelia sitting on the upper port wing.

“
Ad astra,
” she says grimly, pointing up with her yardstick.

Croggins and Hathaway from the lunatic asylum are leering in through my window at me. Hathaway's reeking chloroform cloth comes closer. It covers my window. I struggle. Darkness.

“Hail to thee, blithe Baron von Bonhomme,” Cordelia says. She is wearing an astronaut's suit and is tethered by a long cord to the port wing strut, against a background of stars as dazzling as the ceiling of a planetarium. She quotes:

 

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest,

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing “
En Roulant
” dost soar,

And soaring ever singest.

 

Then she deliberately casts off her lifeline and without looking back floats off into the universe. It is very quiet. The dream ends.

“We can't go no higher, Wild Bill,” my father said. “We're out of gas.”

I have never dreamed about our noiseless descent through the clouds and back into the present and the real world, though there was a distinctly dreamlike and surreal quality about it. My father handled the plane so well we almost wafted to the ground, circling again, but this time the way a glider circles, using only air currents.

I had no idea how long we had been up there or where we were going to come down. I hoped that if we were over the lake we could land near shore. Then we were out of the clouds and dropping toward thick flat green woods, cedar woods, stretching for miles in every direction and interrupted only by the threads of frozen beaver flows and the irregular white expanses of frozen backwaters.

“Stay low and hang tight,” my father said as we swooped down over the treetops.

The silence of our fall was terrible. Any amount of thundering would have been preferable to that premonitory noiselessness. Again my expectations had been reversed. Death was not supposed to be so quiet. When something gave beneath us with a sound like a buzz saw splitting a big log I was relieved. The pontoons, I thought. The pontoons had been ripped off by the treetops.

The pontoons were of no use to us anyway with the watercourses still frozen solid. It was undoubtedly the cedars that saved us by breaking our fall and cushioning our impact. We would not have blown up. There wasn't any gas left to explode. But if we had ever hit that ice and frozen snow head-on, we would have been dashed into more pieces than the Packard demolished by Carcajou's land mine. As it was the trees tore off part of the starboard wing as well as the pontoons. We flipped over and the pack basket flew through the air. Bottles shattered. It was raining Seagram's and glass.

My father and I lay on the roof of the cockpit. My hands and face were cut in several places, but otherwise I seemed to be all right. My father was jubilant. “Warn't that the best crash landing you ever see executed?” he shouted.

The plane was caught by its tail in the cedars twenty feet above the ground. Through the shattered window I could see the detached piece of the wing sticking out of the snow. Part of the government insignia was visible. “What's the border patrol going to say, Dad?”

“They ain't going to say nothing for a while. We're back in Canady again. Welcome back to Canady, Wild Bill.”

Again my father and I were alone in the cedar swamp, this time miles from any help. Every time we moved, the fuselage swayed in the branches. Both doors were jammed, and I wondered how either of us was ever going to get out.

My father was fumbling in the bottom of the pack basket. He pulled out an unbroken whiskey bottle, which he put in his jacket pocket. He rummaged around again and brought out the hatchet. With a short hard blow he smashed out his window. He reached out and yanked the door handle down hard. The door opened stiffly.

“Stick this in your belt, Wild Bill,” he said, handing me the hatchet.

Next he found an end of the rope and tied it around a brace under his seat. He dropped the slack through the door, picked up his smashed leg, and lifted it over the edge of the doorway. Turning over on his stomach, he began to ease himself off the seat and down the rope, moving with great deliberation.

“You come along when I give the word,” he said.

I waited for what seemed like a long time before my father called to me. As I descended through the limber interlocking ends of the cedar branches, I felt the tail start to slide. The entire fuselage was tipping sharply. I yelled and let go. I dropped the last ten or twelve feet, hit the frozen snow and began rolling, expecting the plane to come crashing down on top of me.

It didn't, though; it remained hanging in the dense branches at an almost impossible angle. My father was sitting on the snow with his back against the broken wing. He was grinning through the sweat running down his face, trickling through his whiskers and off the end of his long twisted chin. I had never seen him in need of a shave before, and was surprised to notice how dark his beard looked under the glistening sweat.