Disappearances (4 page)

“And you could never run whiskey again and you know that.”

After that neither of them spoke again. Except for the wind rattling my window and the fire crackling low in the kitchen stove it was as still as a night in deep winter. I was exhausted but I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed and walked across the cold planks of the loft floor to the small window under the peak of the roof. The snow had stopped again and I could see the owl very plainly. As I watched him I thought once again, as I had frequently during recent months, of certain strange and disturbing events from our family's past that had never been explained to me but that I was somehow aware of anyway.

Suddenly I realized that headlights were coming up the hollow. As the car bounced over the frozen ruts the lights rose and fell crazily. Whoever it was was traveling fast.

From around a bend ahead of us a loon whooped. Immediately my father called back, and for several minutes he and the loon conversed in plangent warbles that rang out over the cold still cedar swamp like demented laughter. After spending most of the previous night talking and laughing my father was not in the best of voices, but here in our canoe on the river at dawn nothing was going to interfere with his good spirits.

I was still sleepy and somewhat confused. “How did Uncle Henry figure out that they weren't G-men?” I said.

“He wasn't sure they warn't, Bill. That's what he was in hopes the old master could straighten out for him.”

“Have you got it straightened out yet?”

“I ain't even going to try. As long as that whiskey is waiting for us it don't matter who them boys be. But that's enough whiskey talk. Sweet Evangeline don't want Quebec Bill filling his boy's head with whiskey talk on such a beautiful morning. See the icicles along them red alders. Ain't they pretty?”

I knew that my father had no intention of changing the subject for very long. Since the previous midnight when White Lightning had come tearing into our dooryard he had talked of nothing but the Canadian whiskey hidden in the abandoned barn near Magog and his incredible plan to get it back across the border. I had been amazed when toward morning my mother agreed to let us go. Even Uncle Henry had strong reservations about the trip.

Surprisingly, it had been Rat Kinneson who had changed their minds. Sitting hunched over the kitchen stove with his gray nightcap trailing down his back he had said, “I ain't telling none of you what to do, but we've got potatoes to last just till the first of the week. That's if we stretch them. Now a thousand dollars split two ways is five hundred dollars apiece, boys. Five hundred dollars still buys quite a little bit of hay. I ain't telling you what to do. If two or three more critters go to choking to death on me we'll have more potatoes to go round for the rest and might make it through.”

We had all looked at my mother. It was her herd; she had built it up, nurtured it, kept it going through all the hard times. To her the cows were the farm, and now my father's plan must have seemed like the only way to save either. Perhaps too she may have felt that with staid old Wild Bill along my father would be less apt to take chances or start drinking again. At any rate, she had nodded. I was so excited I nearly fell in the stove; my father whooped and danced and played his imaginary fiddle; Uncle Henry looked thoughtful; Rat smirked; and Cordelia smiled grimly and read aloud a long passage from Sir Thomas Browne's “Urn Burial.”

At dawn Uncle Henry and I carried the long birch canoe down the steep hill behind the farm to the river. In places the snow was over our knees. My father sauntered along behind us in the trail we had broken, carrying a pack basket with the barrel of his old eight-gauge shotgun sticking up out of it and humming French reels. From time to time, he called out encouragement to us as we staggered along under the canoe through the frozen drifts and thick softwoods.

We launched the canoe from a wide beaver dam. Below us fringes of ice clung to both edges of the river. Above the dam it was still frozen solid from bank to bank.

“You take the bow, Wild Bill.”

I got in and knelt in back of the first thwart. I looked back upriver at the ice, now about at my eye level. “Spring comes a little later down here in the bog than anywhere else,” my father said.

“Don't it, though,” Uncle Henry said as he shoved us off. “About ten this evening, Bill.”

“About ten, Henry.”

Just before we went around the first bend I looked over my shoulder. Uncle Henry was still watching us from the dam. Behind him in the clear pink sky over the swamp the sun was coming up. My father glanced back too. “Ain't that a glorious sight, Wild Bill? I hope Evangeline is watching that.”

My father and I had canoed together many times on the St. John, which wound down through the cedar swamp and emptied into Lake Memphremagog below the county home. It was a deep slow dark river with a dark gravel bottom. Under the gigantic cedars lining both banks it was almost black. Except for a disused tote road along the north side there was no sign that anyone had ever been there before us.

The cedar swamp was the last big tract of wilderness in Vermont: one hundred thousand acres of wetlands and rivers, beaver flows and low wooded hills enclosed on three sides by the tall Canadian mountains. Most of it was accessible only by canoe. It held an abundance of rare wildlife, including the only remaining moose herd in the state, but now in the early spring it looked empty and barren. The loon had flown off toward the lake, laughing insanely as though it knew something we didn't and might not want to—as all the loons I have ever heard have always laughed. The only other animal we saw was a dark thin otter, which slid off an icy log and swam for a mile or so down the river a short distance ahead of the canoe, sometimes diving, sometimes swimming on its back and watching us.

There was no wind. It was going to be yet another warm and sunny day, though now it was still very cold. I buttoned the top button of my red wool hunting jacket and paddled faster to get warm. Behind me in the stern my father began to sing in French. It was a song hundreds of years old, a paddling song that had been sung by our voyageur ancestors as they moved north in search of furs in the same canoe that was carrying us down the St. John in the spring of 1932:

 

En roulant ma boule roulant

En roulant ma boule.

En roulant ma boule roulant

Rouli, roulant ma boule roulant.

 

We ran the six or seven miles from the beaver dam to the lake in less than an hour, with my father singing or talking about the whiskey all the way. Just above the mouth of the river we passed under the railroad trestle and next to it the iron bridge leading out to the county home. There was some mist on the water as we glided onto St. John Bay. Far down across the still blue water through the light mist lay the village of Memphremagog, crowded onto the isthmus between the lake and the big south bay. Creeping north from the village was a yellow tug. It was trailing a flotilla of boomed pulpwood covering at least a hundred acres of water. At its current speed it would arrive at the paper mill in Magog in five or six days.

“Firewood,” my father said contemptuously. “That's kindling, Wild Bill. Match sticks. One spring when I was a boy I worked the big drive on the Upper East Branch of the Penobscot. That's up north in the state of Maine. The Penobscot. We drove thirty-two-foot sawlogs down whitewater that would make the Kingdom River look like a millrace. When we come to a big lake we'd haul them across it with a great raft with a capstan on it. A hawser a thousand foot long stretched from the capstan to the booms. We'd walk round and round in the spokes, winding in them Christly booms like a big tired fish. We made a sixth of a mile an hour in calm water. Six hours on, six hours off. We'd lay right down on the raft in snow and sleet and sleep like the logs we was hauling. Sometimes it took ten days or more to cross a big lake. That was bull work, Wild Bill. We was men that did that.” He sang:

 

They had not rolled off many logs when they heard the foreman say, “I'll have you boys be on your guard for the jam will soon give way.” These words were hardly spoken when the jam did break and go.

It carried off those six brave boys and their foreman—young Bonho'.

 

Even when he was hoarse Quebec Bill Bonhomme had a resonant singing voice, with a wild timbre like wind in tall trees and rushing water. He loved to sing and could remember every song he'd ever heard. As we moved up the placid lake in the big dark high-riding canoe, staying near the eastern shore, he sang interminable verses from “The Jam on Gerry's Rock,” “
En Roulant,” “Sur la Rivière
” and others, making himself the hero of each ballad. He recited pages from William Henry Drummond's French-Canadian dialect poems, including all of “The Voyageur.” He composed extravagant extemporaneous odes to our ancestor René St. Laurent Bonhomme—a voyageur of great courage and strength, Wild Bill—and sang paeans in praise of mending fence, plowing, gathering brush for peas to climb on and a dozen other vernal activities he loved to celebrate from a safe distance.

Even the slow northern spring seemed to be conjured into acquiescence by my father's optimism. In places the rocky shoreline was strewn with giant slabs of ice, but further back some of the marshes were already bright with yellow cowslips. Redwing blackbirds clung to last year's cattails along the base of the railway embankment. The lake was perfectly calm but high overhead an osprey soared on the strong upper air currents. “By the Christ, Bill, look at that hawk,” my father exclaimed. “If I could do that I'd eat raw fish myself.”

A quarter of a mile ahead the county home stood on a knoll near the lake. It was a bleak square-framed wooden building four stories tall that served several purposes: poorhouse, orphanage, jail, old-age home. My father and the superintendent, Dr. Tettinger, were close friends. During good weather my father played his fiddle there every other Sunday night. In the past when the home was crowded some of the residents had stayed for a while on the farm with us.

“Let's pay Tett a short visit,” my father said.

We left the canoe at the foot of a narrow meadow sloping down to the lake and headed up toward the dairy barn. Already my legs were stiff from kneeling. It seemed good to stretch them. As we came around the corner of a big manure pile and crossed the railroad tracks we met old Walter Kittredge emerging from the stable with a loaded wheelbarrow.

“Walter K.,” my father called. “Spring is here, Walter. What does your fancy turn to?”

“Cow shit,” Abiah Kittredge said from the stable door. “Same as any other season. Look at the old fart treeble and tremble. That makes thirteen trips so far this morning. No offense, Quebec Bill, but I told Kittredge just yesterday that if he intended to keep on slaving like a Frenchman he should have hung onto the farm and slaved there.”

“Mrs. Kittredge, there wasn't no way in creation to hang onto the farm and you know it,” Walter replied. “How be you, Bill? This can't be young Billy? My, how he's growed. Look here, Mrs. Kittredge. Billy's a good foot higher than his pa. I didn't know you had it in you to make a boy like this, Bill. Stand up next to your pa, Billy. You're going to be big as your Uncle Henry, ain't you?”

“He don't need you measuring him like a prize fish,” Abiah said. “Don't pay Kittredge no mind, boy. He don't see many new people up here. When he does he don't know enough not to measure them. You look more and more like your ma's side, if I do say so. I call him a Coville clear through, Quebec Bill.”

“Yes,” my father said, “but he's got the Bonhomme wildness in him.”

“He don't look wild to me. Does he look wild to you, Kittredge?”

“No, not a-tall. He don't have Henry's shoulders yet, but they may come later.”

I did not much care for this genealogical evaluation, but I liked Walter and Abiah, who had been our nearest neighbors below Royers until they lost their farm to the bank two years before. The entire hollow had turned out for their first mortgage sale. People bid five cents for each head of stock and each implement, ten cents for the buildings, ten cents for the one hundred and fifty acres of land—then returned everything intact to the Kittredges. But they were simply too old to go on and after the first wet summer had to leave anyway. Several of their children had offered Walter and Abiah a home, but they had decided that they would be more independent at the county home, where they could take care of the dairy. Wherever they went, they would go together. They were up in their eighties and as inseparable as Baucis and Philemon. Walter was not much bigger than my father, but he was quite a hale old man. Abiah weighed over three hundred pounds and was afflicted with a brilliant indigo goiter that depended from her chin like a turkey wattle.

Walter looked down the muddy road along the tracks. “Where's your Ford, Bill? I don't see your Ford.”

“He don't see period, the cataracted old bat,” Abiah said.

“I can see that great long blue necktie you're wearing plain enough,” Walter said, winking at my father.

“It's a great deal longer than anything he ever sported,” Abiah said.

Walter slapped both his knees. “That's so, boys, and it stands up straighter, too.”

“He didn't do that poor,” Abiah said. “Give me twelve altogether. Nine gals, one boy and Hank and Harlan. Boy died, the rest thrived.”

“I done fair,” Walter said. “Just fair. It warn't that difficult. Except for little Kittredge and Hank and Harlan I had the pattern right afore me each time. Where's your truck, I say, Bill?”

“We're traveling by water today, Walter. I and Wild Bill are making a trip up Canady way. Might have a small treat for you and Tett and the boys on the way back.”