The Fall of the Year (24 page)

“Hark,” he said, cocking his head.

Over the diminished wind came the faraway moaning of the 10:06 Montreal Flyer, five miles to the south in Kingdom Landing. The mind reader shrugged and grinned his feckless small grin. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the backdrop. “Then again,” he said, letting his voice trail off into silence like the train whistle.

Now on the tableau, instead of high summer it was late fall. The hills and mountains rising above the village were bare and gray. Instead of midafternoon on a sunny day, it was an overcast evening; the sky was as gray as the hills. The village was different, too. The elms on the common were not only leafless but dead. The green was sere and brown, as though no rain had fallen in many weeks, the baseball diamond grown up to weeds. The village houses were dingy and peeling. The rail yard was empty, no smoke rose from the tall mill stack. Not a sign of life appeared anywhere.

The countryside beyond the village was abandoned as well. Farmhouses and barns had collapsed into the overgrown fields around them. Once-cleared pastures had been overrun with wild redtop grass, barberry, juniper, and thorn apples. The painting was a study in desuetude. What it depicted was nothing less than the eradication of a way of life.

And of all the mind reader's revelations and prophecies and shifting sleights of legerdemain, this somber scene of utter emptiness hit me hardest.

The train whistle hooted again at the crossing three miles south of town. Mr. Mentality respectfully tipped his hat. Then he vanished.

 

I hurried across the dark, wet green toward the railroad station. In the rainy darkness the wind whipped the invisible tops of the elms back and forth like something alive. Even so, I was relieved to find the trees still standing, the ball diamond still intact—that was how unsettling and real the ghost town on the backdrop had been to me. Here and there I encountered a few other townspeople, hastening home wordlessly in shared human frailty.

I arrived at the station just as the brilliant light of the Flyer came into sight. Moriarity Mentality and the Princess stood alone on the platform. The mind reader looked more tawdry than ever. One handle had fallen off his carpetbag, his shoes and trouser cuffs were sopping wet and splashed with mud, his overcoat was missing two buttons. His goatee was gone, and in the searching headlamp of the braking Flyer, he looked a hundred years old. The Petrograd Princess seemed to have regained twenty years and thirty pounds.

“Sorry to rush off without saying so long, Bob. Thought I'd best skedaddle while the skedaddling was good.”

“Frank,” the Princess said. “It's Frank.”

The reader looked at her blankly, then mumbled something about making a tight connection in Montreal for a kiddie matinee the next day in North Bay.

“Try not to get old, Bob,” he said as he ascended the steps of the Flyer's single passenger coach ahead of the Princess. “Old age is a hard pull.”

From the deep shadows at the corner of the station a familiar voice hissed, “A philosopher, no less.”

I spun around. “Louvia!”

But the fortuneteller was already slinking off through the night, and when I looked up at the coach, the Flyer was gathering momentum for its journey north through the mountains to Canada. Mr. Mentality and the Princess sat opposite each other at a window. At the last possible minute the mind reader looked back and raised his top hat an inch or two. Then he and the Princess passed out of sight forever.

 

“No doubt it was all an illusion,” Father George said to me a few days later.

“I suppose it was,” I said. “But you weren't there for the second show. You didn't see that painting change in front of our eyes.”

Father George shrugged. “Sleight of hand, mirrors. He and his helper spent half the day over at the hall getting their props ready. He's a pro, Frank. The best of the best and the last of the best. As for his revelations, I'm more certain than ever that he uses a stalking horse.”

Reflecting on the matter later, I too was quite sure that the mind reader had employed a confederate, very probably someone who lived in the village. Incredible as it seemed, the likeliest candidate in my estimation was Mr. Mentality's great adversary, Louvia DeBanville. Who else but my friend the fortuneteller could have supplied him with such unsettling details about the village, true or not? Nor, I suspected, was it any coincidence that along with the few people in town who had had sense enough to stay away from the reader's second performance, Louvia herself had been spared the worst mortifications of Mr. Mentality's revelations. Surely, after her attack on him the night before, he would have gone for her throat before anyone else's had they not been in league; and even at that, he had warned her about her great secret, whatever that might be.

Still, I had no idea how even Louvia could have known some of the horrors the mind reader had disclosed. And what was her motivation? Revenge? Retribution because the village had laughed up its sleeve at her for thirty years? This seemed unlikely. Louvia had long ago cultivated a moral ascendancy over her detractors in the Common because of her very lack of hypocrisy.

Other mysteries bewildered me. What was Mr. Moriarity Mentality's connection to Foster Boy Dufresne? Could he conceivably have been the boy's father? I wondered but had no idea. And wasn't the mind reader's terrorization of the village on the night of the hurricane cruelly out of proportion to our crime against him? What lesson could be extracted from such an act of pure vengeance? “Do unto others as you would have done to you.” No one anywhere can deny the wisdom of those words. They were the entire basis of Father George's own faith, the way he had always explained the concept of faith to his parishioners and to me. But wasn't everything we had witnessed on that fateful night in the town hall in complete contradiction of the golden rule, not to mention all that we knew of the forgetful, deeply hypochondriacal, mildly irascible yet essentially kindly old magician?

And what of the transformed painting on the stage backdrop? While few of the mind reader's catastrophic prophecies came to pass, at least in exactly the way he'd forecast them, the tableau of the village never did regain its bold and vivid summer colors. Rather, it has continued to fade into a somber reminder of its original splendor, while the town itself has come to resemble that faded image of its former self. One by one, the elms on the common have succumbed to disease. The railroad and the mill have shut down. The parti-colored houses in Little Quebec have fallen into disrepair. The farms in the surrounding hills have continued to go under until today there are only a handful left. If you visit the village, look at the tableau. Yes, it's still there. Then step back outside the hall and look at the Common. Doesn't it seem as though life here has come to imitate art?

 

A few days after the show, I asked Louvia point-blank whether she'd had any private traffic with Mr. Mentality. She frowned and replied that she and her Daughter knew ten times as much as the reader did about the village and one hundred times more about humanity in general.

I laughed. “You didn't answer my question.”

“I've told you before, Frank. You ask too many questions. Ask fewer, you'll learn more. The man was the worst kind of mountebank. He was right about the ravages of age. I say nothing more.”

“Louvia, I have to know. Were you his stalking horse?”

“Louvia DeBanville says nothing.”

And she never did. The mysteries surrounding what happened in our town hall on that stormy night long ago remain mysteries to this day.

8

It is worth bearing in mind, before undertaking any enterprise in Kingdom County, that much of the region was settled by a Connecticut Tory fleeing the American Revolution, who homesteaded here on the false assumption that he had reached Canada and safety. In other words, we should not forget that from the start Kingdom County was, essentially, a mistake.

—Father George, “A Short History”

 

T
HE FULL TITLE
of the manuscript was “A Short History of Kingdom Common,” and it was one of the wonders of the village. The book contained chapters on local lumbering and log driving, farming and hunting, woodworking and the American Heritage furniture factory, railroading, even railroad tramps. There were lively portraits of local characters and heroes, such as the log driver Noël Lord and the fabled whiskey runners Henry Coville and Quebec Bill Bonhomme, all three of whom Father George had known personally. The greatest scholar and third baseman in the history of the county had even written a long chapter on town-team baseball in northern Vermont.

If Father George felt inspired, during the course of a chapter on brook trout fishing in the Kingdom, to digress with a thousand-word treatise on the effectiveness of the red-and-yellow grasshopper fly, he did so without hesitation. The “Short History” also contained many unpredictable and delightful vignettes, such as the story of Sylvie LaPlante, who was deserted by her husband as a young bride and kept a candle burning in her window for him for thirty-five years. There were tales of authentic Kingdom Common witches, of beekeepers and wildhoney hunters, footloose spruce gum gatherers and half-crazed barn burners. There were scholarly chapters on the history of French Canadian immigrants, including Father George's own ancestors, complete with the genealogies of each of the families in Little Quebec and Irishtown. There was a chapter on the history of the international border between Kingdom County and Quebec. There were exhaustive chapters on the plants, animals, and fish of the Kingdom. What's more, every page of the “Short History” read like an entertaining story.

What I liked best about Father George himself was that for as long as I could remember, he had treated me like a man. He talked to me exactly the way he talked to Editor Kinneson or Doc Harrison or Judge Allen. For this reason we were not just acolyte and priest, athlete and coach, a young man and his mentor, a boy and his adoptive father. We were friends. And each fall we celebrated our friendship and the traditions Father George was passing on to me by going to his hunting camp, far up in Lord Hollow.

The hunting camp, which had originally been a lumber camp, was made of logs chinked with moss. Its cracked old stove had once heated the Lost Nation school, where Father George had gone to teach when he was fifteen. A dozen deer and moose antlers were nailed to the outside front wall. Inside, a six-pound mounted brook trout, a brilliantly colored male with a hooked jaw that Father George had caught in the beaver bog north of camp, hung over the door. On shelves and tables were odd rocks and tree fungi and animal skulls that he had picked up in his ramblings. The shelves were strewn with his favorite books. Thoreau's
Maine Woods
, Keats's poems, John Burroughs's nature essays, and all kinds of guidebooks to the birds and animals, fish, plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees of northern New England. Especially trees, for which Father George had an abiding love.

When I was ten years old, my adoptive father took me by canoe through the great bog beyond his camp to the remnants of the stand of bird's-eye maples that he had long ago made into furniture for the Big House. “What I like best about these trees,” he told me, “is the mystery of them. Nobody knows exactly what makes the maple sap rise in the spring or the leaves turn yellow in the fall. It's like religion, son. Or falling in love. Nobody really knows why we worship God or fall in love.”

At ten I was far more interested in maple trees and partridges and brook trout and deer than in falling in love. But love was a subject that Father George often came back to; the story of Sylvie LaPlante and the candle in the window was just one of several local love stories included in the “Short History.”

 

The year I turned twelve, Father George took me up to the ridge behind the hunting camp to cut down a large paper birch tree. From its bark we made a canoe, which from then on we used to fish and explore the bog. For my thirteenth birthday, he made me a two-piece, seven-foot bamboo fly rod. With it, and the brightly colored old-fashioned trout flies that Father George tied each year by the score, I caught hundreds, perhaps thousands, of brook trout, in Lord Hollow and elsewhere in the Kingdom.

Father George had other unusual skills. Frequently he flew me into remote lakes and ponds across the border with the birch canoe lashed to the wing of his float plane. And I never tired of hearing how he had bought the Big House with money earned from smuggling whiskey into Vermont from Canada before World War I or of how once, with a large load of booze, the plane had been forced down by cloud cover on the bog north of his camp. When the ceiling lifted and he discovered there wasn't enough taxiing room to take off, he promptly disassembled the plane, moved it piecemeal by horse-drawn dray over the height of land to Lake Memphremagog, welded it back together again, and continued the whiskey run. Lately, I'd started writing a story about Father G's smuggling days, which was fast turning into the first draft of a novel about him.

Father George knew a great many things that I very much wanted to know. He knew where the last big brook trout spawning bed in Kingdom County was, up on the flow north of his hunting camp. He knew how to find a bee tree, full of wild dark honey; where the hidden springs in the bog and the big surrounding woods were; where the best spots were to wait in November for a buck to come down to the flow to drink. He showed me where, nearly two hundred years before, Robert Rogers and his fabled Rangers had passed through the bog.

At the hunting camp, Father George was the first man into the woods in the morning and the last man out at night even in his late sixties, when at last his angina began to wear him down. He could outwalk me well into my teens. When he first came back to Kingdom Common from the university, he continued to box at come-one, come-all Saturday night matches all over northern New England. On the wall of his camp were two faded photos clipped out of the
Kingdom County Monitor
, both taken after he had entered the priesthood. One showed him accepting the heavyweight boxing championship trophy at Kingdom Fair after winning six consecutive fights in one day by knockouts. In the other, taken when he was in his fifties, he was wearing his Outlaws baseball uniform and charging the mound with fists flying after being brushed back from the plate by an opposing pitcher!