Disappearances (5 page)

“Well, Bill. That's the trouble. Tett just might not be here when you get back. One day last week a county fella come up from the Common on surprise inspection and found Tett passed out at his desk with an empty bottle beside him. Tett come to and tried to tell that it was witch hazel, but the fella only said if it was, then Tett shouldn't have been drinking it, and went back down the line to write his report. This is three times now since we come here. Tett's down below today answering for it.”

“We're afraid the county's going to replace him certain this time,” Abiah said.

“Not Tett,” my father said, still laughing about the witch hazel. “Tett's fell in the shithouse and come out with a new suit before this. He's too smart for them.”

“I hope so,” Walter said. “We wouldn't know what to do around here without Tett.”

He picked up the wheelbarrow handles and trundled unsteadily toward the manure pile.

“See him treeble,” Abiah said proudly. “Oh, Lord preserve me, here come them maphrodites. You'll have to excuse me, boys. They'll pester me all day if I let them. I wouldn't get a tap done.”

Two large persons in overalls were shambling down the lane from the main building. “Bon-bon, Bon-bon,” they called. It was Hank and Harlan, Walter and Abiah's hermaphrodites.

My father was delighted to see them. He hugged them and gave them each a piece of maple sugar candy from his jacket pocket. It occurred to me that our trip might have been better planned than I thought, since neither my father nor I much liked candy.

While my father was talking to Hank and Harlan, Walter took me aside. “Mrs. Kittredge can't hardly stand to be around Hank and Harlan these days,” he said. “She's terrible upset over what's to become of them when we're gone. That's why we need Tett, you see. He'd never send them off.”

My father reminded Walter that we would stop back again with a little treat. He said he was very certain Dr. Tettinger would come out with another new suit. He hugged Hank and Harlan once more and called goodbye to Abiah, hiding in the barn from her children.

“Them wonderful people think the world of me,” he said.

Out on the lake again he pointed toward a rough obelisk about six feet high along the north boundary of the county home property. “There she is, Wild Bill. That's Canady.”

Just beyond the stone marker heavily wooded hills came down close to the lake on both sides. Except for a small Benedictine monastery and the spur line, there was nothing between us and Magog but water and wilderness.

My father was singing again. On the trip a subtle change had come over him. At home he created the illusion that he was in control. It was a marvelous illusion, but ultimately a sleight we all saw through. My mother managed the herd, Rat ran the farm and Cordelia established the tone of the household. Here on the lake my father was not only in control, but at home. He paddled the canoe the way he moved in the woods, as though he belonged there and was part of everything around him—the water, the hills, the sky, the burgeoning spring whose imminent arrival he continued to invoke.

Toward noon he began trolling a small red and silver spoon on a handline. Within five minutes he had hooked a good fish. As it wore itself out my father gained line. Loose coils of slack accumulated in the bottom of the canoe. A lake trout about twenty inches long came thrashing over the side. My father rapped the back of the trout's head against the canoe thwart and held the fish up in the sun. “Wild Bill's hungry,” he said. “Let's eat.”

We landed on a densely wooded point, which I explored while my father cooked lunch. From the north side of the point I could look across a bay still partially iced over and see the monastery It was a large medieval-looking stone building about a third of the way up the slope of the first big lakeside mountain. Surrounding it were walled tiers of apple orchards and meadows. The spur line ran between the big stone building and a low wooden barn, then hooked inland around the east shoulder of the mountain. North of the monastery the lake resembled a mile-wide fjord compressed between twin mountain ranges sheering straight up, gray and leafless, between the blue water and blue sky.

My father fried the trout in bacon grease over a nearly smokeless driftwood fire on a rise overlooking the lake. He tossed a handful of coffee into a pan of boiling water and slowly stirred the grounds to the bottom with the blade of his hunting knife. With our backs against the trunk of a tall black spruce we sat looking down the lake and ate pink trout and thick slices of my mother's homemade bread dipped in bacon grease, and drank steaming hot coffee. After dinner I stretched out on the warm brown needles under the tree and closed my eyes. I could still feel the motion of the canoe under me. Just before I drifted off to sleep it occurred to me that there was no place I would rather be and no one I would rather be with.

 

“Look up the lake, Bill. Stay low.”

I sat up. Through the trees I saw two monks coming across the bay along the edge of the ice in an unpainted rowboat. One of them was holding a short casting rod. The other was rowing and singing:

“
Adoramus te Christe, et benedicimus tibi quia aper sanctam.
”

“Stay down,” my father whispered. “I'm going to hide the canoe.”

“
Domine, domine, miserere nobis,
” chanted the monk. He pulled harder first on one oar, then on the other, causing the boat to swing erratically from side to side. He was a burly man with a white-fringed tonsure. From behind he looked like the woodcut of Friar Tuck in my Robin Hood book at home.

The fisherman was a lean man with a lugubrious face. As the boat weaved toward the point he said in French, “This is a blasphemous venture, Brother St. Hilaire.”

The big monk shipped his oars. He reached into one of several wooden crates in the bottom of the boat and brought out a dark bottle. He tipped back his head and took a long deliberate drink. “Ah,” he said, wiping his mouth on the wide loose sleeve of his cassock. “Our Lord Himself was a fisherman, Brother Paul. We will sing His praises to keep up our courage. Let us try the
‘Adoramus'
again. That's a fine one for courage. The Holy Ghost will perhaps sing with us.”

“Our Lord was not a smuggler,” Brother Paul said. “I wouldn't think you'd want to call His attention to this enterprise.”

“
Adoramus te Christe,
” sang Brother St. Hilaire loudly.

“They're calling up the devil,” my father said in my ear as he crouched back down beside me.

“That's Latin.”

“That's mumbo jumbo and they're talking with the devil.”

Brother St. Hilaire's voice boomed out over the lake. Brother Paul stared sorrowfully at the wooden crates and did not join in the singing. I noticed that the tip of his casting rod was not bending with the drag of a lure.

Before they had gone fifty feet Brother St. Hilaire stopped again. “Brother Paul, I have a portentous proclamation to issue.”

“What is it, Brother? Have you decided to take my counsel and give over this ungodly business?”

“Certainly not. This ungodly business is going to put the monastery on a paying basis. I have to piss in the worst way.”

“Surely not in the lake?”

“Where else? You don't want me to besmirch Tettinger's Benedictine, do you? Turn your head aside if you're offended. I've never encountered such delicate sensibilities, Brother Paul. You should have joined a convent. The Holy Ghost needs men in His service, not timid eunuchs.”

Brother St. Hilaire got to his feet and hiked up the voluminous skirts of his cassock. He began fumbling with the buttons of his long underwear. Beside me on the ground my father shook with suppressed laughter.

“Take, drink, O Memphremagog, this is holy water,” Brother St. Hilaire announced in a solemn pontifical voice, releasing a great arcing jet out over the lake toward shore.

“Here he comes now,” my father said.

“Here who comes?”

“The devil, who else?”

He pointed up the lake at a motor launch bearing down on the rowboat. As the launch buzzed past, Brother St. Hilaire lost his footing and nearly pitched overboard. In the process he played a looping stream of holy water over himself and Brother Paul.

The launch had swung around and was returning. In it was the biggest man I had ever seen. He was wearing what appeared to be a blue uniform and a blue cap. His hair, which was totally white, fell put from under the cap over his shoulders and down his back to his waist. Most of his face was concealed by a black beard.

As he pulled up alongside the rowboat he said in French, “What would you two men of God be doing out here this early in the year?”

“Trolling for the wily trout, my son,” Brother St. Hilaire said as he buttoned his underwear back up.

“That's a strange way to troll,” the man said, emitting a prolonged epileptic bellow from deep in behind his beard. “What's in them cases?”

“Clothing for the children at the American county home.”

“Pass it over, Father, and I'll deliver it for you. You can't imagine how I love children. That old scow of yours don't look safe anyway. If the slightest breeze come up you might drown.”

He made that terrible braying squall again. “Hand over them cases, I say. We'll have no blockade running today.”

“Go back to hell, you thieving demon,” shouted Brother St. Hilaire, brandishing an oar.

Instantly the man seized the oar out of Brother St. Hilaire's hands and broke it over his head. Holding his head with both hands, Brother St. Hilaire sank into the bottom of the boat. Blood was pouring out from between his fingers and running down his face.

Brother Paul stumbled over Brother St. Hilaire in his haste to transfer the wooden crates to the launch. The hijacker ripped open one of the cases, pulled out a bottle and drained it in three or four long gulps. Trumpeting like an enraged elephant he began to circle the rowboat fast. The churning wash from the launch spilled over the sides of the trembling little boat.

My father ran for his shotgun, but he didn't dare fire until the hijacker headed back up the lake away from the monks. By then he was out of range, braying frightfully over his engine, his white mane flying backwards. The entire episode couldn't have taken two minutes.

“Come on,” my father called to me. “Hurry, Bill.”

Brother St. Hilaire was thrashing around in the water in the bottom of the rowboat. “Paul,” he moaned, “I've been trepanned with my own oar.”

“Lie still, Brother. I must administer extreme unction.”

“We will omit that exercise. Scull us to shore with the other oar or we'll both need last rites. We're sinking, Paul.”

“The other oar fell overboard in the fray. Oh, Brother, here is the wage of our sin. We must compose ourselves. The end is nigh.”

“Bullshit. Use your hands. Here, like this.”

Brother St. Hilaire took one hand away from his gushing pate and swiped at the lake. Brother Paul promptly slumped over onto his seat.

“Oh, shit,” Brother St. Hilaire said. He sounded more exasperated than alarmed. Reaching under his bloody cassock he withdrew a bottle and took a long pull.

Meanwhile my father and I paddled fast toward the foundering rowboat. A minute later we had attached a rope to the bow and were towing the monks to shore. Brother St. Hilaire's head had nearly stopped bleeding; apparently he had sustained the kind of superficial scalp wound that bleeds profusely but isn't serious.

“Wake up, Paul,” he said, splashing water into Brother Paul's face. “The Holy Ghost has plucked us from a watery grave. The trouble with Paul, my children, is that he has no faith in the Holy Ghost. Tell me, did you see Him? I'm famished by curiosity. Is He hitched onto the other two like Siamese triplets?”

While we emptied out the rowboat and revived Brother Paul, Brother St. Hilaire talked incessantly. He was the only man I had ever met who talked more than my father. He was highly intrigued by our canoe. He told us that he had written a chapter on the history of birch canoes in his definitive history of the Catholicizing of French Canada. He described how he had been relegated to one obscure monastery after another as punishment for writing the true sordid chronicle of Jesuit fanaticism in Quebec, which had been subsequently distinguished by being listed on the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

“Contain yourself, Brother,” cried Brother Paul as we towed them back across the bay toward the monastery. “Your history is a satanic and pernicious document. He lampoons the Holy Fathers mercilessly, my sons.”

“Does he now?” my father said, beside himself with delight.

“
Hodie Christus natus est,
” sang Brother St. Hilaire. “
Hodie salvatore aperuit.
”

When Brother St. Hilaire paused for a drink my father struck up a rousing rendition of “
En Roulant.” “Derrière chez nous y'a-t'un étang,
” he sang.

Immediately Brother St. Hilaire began to submit the refrain: “
En roulant ma boule.
”

“
Trois beaux canards's'en vont baignant.
”

“
Rouli, roulant MA BOULE.
”

As we approached the shore Brother St. Hilaire had a final drink. He did not appear to be discouraged over losing his shipment of Benedictine. “That warms up
mes boules
all right,” he said. “
Avez-vous deux boules,
Paul?
Non?
”

Brother Paul hurriedly crossed himself.

My father declined Brother St. Hilaire's invitation to tour the monastery. It was midafternoon, and we still had about ten miles to cover. He said we would be back soon for a more leisurely visit.

“If you see Tett before I do tell him we'll be down in a week or so,” Brother St. Hilaire said. “Even now the Holy Ghost and I have another batch working.”