The Fall of the Year (26 page)

“Not really, Chantal. It's meant to be the story of the village.”

She thought for a moment. “Well, your story is part of the story of the village. An important part at that. You should write about how you taught school at fifteen. About your experiences in the war. You have a whole chapter on baseball in the village but nothing about you as a baseball player. I myself find the game extraordinarily tedious,” she added. “But to complete the book, you must tell your own story.”

“Frank can tell my story.” Father George laughed. “He's always liked to write stories. I could tell you a few on him, for that matter. About his wild young days.”

“Do tell me a story about Frank's wild young days,” Chantal said with great delight. “Did he spirit lively young women from Little Quebec up to the cupola when you went off on retreat?”

Father George laughed. “How'd you know? But it began even earlier. When Frank was about thirteen, his English teacher hailed me down to the Academy and showed me a whole notebook full of Old Testament satires he'd written. I had to pretend to get mad at him.”

“Pretend, hell,” I said. “You threatened to give me a horsewhipping.”

“In the stories God was a lot like me,” Father George said. “He read Moses the riot act for swearing, and every third word He used was profane. Then when Frank was in his first year of college, he wrote a short story about Kingdom Common that made
Peyton Place
read like the Doxology.”

Soon afterward, Father George went to bed, and Chantal and I went out to the porch and sat on the glider. The scent of wood fires hung in the cool air, and Chantal pulled a throw rug over our laps. She told me about her travels in Europe during breaks at the University of Montreal, where she had majored in psychology. An astrologer and psychic with a degree in psychology! She indicated that she had had many boyfriends, all of whom had proven highly unsatisfactory in one way or another. From across town in Little Quebec, a dog howled. Chantal shivered. “You never know,” she said. “The werewolf that roams the forests of French Canada, the wicked loup-garou, might have slipped down over the border tonight.”

I reached out and took her hand.

Without pausing a beat she said, “What is it that the old priest is trying to conceal about himself? Thousands of pages about this town and not a word about his own life.”

“He isn't trying to conceal anything.”

“Why didn't he get married and have half a dozen children?”

“Jesus, Chantal. What sort of question is that?”

“No doubt he's impotent, like most writers. I suppose that's why he adopted you. Another would-be scribbler, very probably with the same deficiency. Oh, yes. Don't feign surprise, Frank Bennett. I've seen you scrawling away late at night. Well, better a storyteller than a priest. Not that there's that much difference.”

“Chantal, when you get up on your high horse, even Louvia couldn't hold a candle to you.”

“Never mind your inamorata, she's the strangest person I've ever known. You, however, are a connoisseur of strange people. Don't try to deny it.”

I laughed. “You're right.”

“No doubt that's why you like me so exceedingly much.”

“Is that a question? If so, it's a double-edged one.”

“Why try to hide it? Don't you think I'm strange?”

“I think you're incredibly beautiful and that you have a heart of gold that you try to hide with your sharp tongue.”

Chantal blew out an imaginary candle. “What nonsense. You don't know the first thing about me. Can you honestly deny that your priest-father with his encyclopedia of many thousands of pages is strange? I'm terribly worried about his health, Frank.”

“So am I, though I don't see how you can call Father George strange.”

“I know a great deal more about both of you than you suppose. I know, for instance, that you're dying to kiss me again.”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Go ahead and see what happens. You must realize that I have powers.”

I couldn't help laughing. “Chantal, when I'm with you I feel like I'm with about three different people.”

Then I kissed her, and this time there was no doubt at all in my mind how I felt about Chantal and how she felt about me. Until, that is, she jumped up and exclaimed, “This house would be a nice place for me to live with my husband. Perhaps I'll marry Father George!”

Then she laughed and ran inside, leaving me more baffled than ever.

 

What did I know about Chantal? That she'd been raised by a maiden aunt in Canada, had a degree from the University of Montreal, had also studied in Paris, and had traveled widely in Europe. She took her work seriously, casting horoscopes and developing elaborate astrological charts late into the night, and seemed to have all the clients she could handle. Exactly what her interest in Father George was and whether her coming to the Big House was a coincidence, I had no idea.

In the meantime, she and Father George went out to lunch together four or five times a week and continued their afternoon drives to places of local historical interest. One afternoon they drove north to Canada to get the rest of her possessions, returning with a large black tomcat, which quartered itself in the Big House as though it had lived there all its life. Father George, despite his feline phobia, actually seemed rather fond of the animal.

“Chantal wants to see you,” he said when I came in the following evening. “Go right on up.”

Since Chantal had moved in, the cupola resembled nothing so much as a wizard's aerie. A powerful telescope jutting out one window pointed up toward the heavens. Pasted to the walls and ceiling were all sorts of astrological symbols: individual planets, half and quarter moons, entire constellations. Along with a compass, a protractor, and a plumb bob, arcane books were strewn over the writing table—medieval treatises on astrology, biographies in French of Nostradamus, Spenser's
The Fairie Queene
, works of Jung and Freud, all kinds of guidebooks on birds, minerals, butterflies, plants, and trees, about which Chantal seemed to know all there was to know. Archaic instruments, including an astrolabe and a box compass, lay on the desk. Atlases and maps were heaped on the floor.

“What's the telescope for?” I asked. “Astrological inquiries?”

“Hardly. I like to look at the stars. There are a good many up there, you know. Someone needs to keep tabs on them.”

“A present from Father George, no doubt.”

“Yes. As far as he's concerned, the best is good enough for me.”

“As far as some people in this town are concerned, you're bilking him out of house and home.”

“Some people in this town should mind their own affairs or they'll soon wish they had. Give me your hand.”

She led me over to the single bed in the middle of the room, and we sat down on a blue quilt appliqued with more bright stars and moons.

Abruptly she turned my hand palm up. After a quick glance she dropped it, and her hand shot to her mouth. “Oh! Mai!”

“What do you mean? I don't believe in any of that nonsense.”

“It's as well that you don't. You'd never have another moment of peace. Far from becoming a priest, you're destined to marry a veritable shrew. Ask me a question.”

“Why did you come to Kingdom Common?”

“You'll learn in good time. Ask another.”

“What's your last name?”

“Last names are a great inconvenience. I have just the one. I'm sorry that it doesn't suit you. Ask one more.”

“All right. Will Father George get better?”

Chantal took my hand again, her marvelous eyes the same deep blue as the bed quilt and very serious. “Frank Bennett, you must ask the right questions. How, otherwise, can I give you the right answers?”

We sat on the edge of her bed, looking at each other.

“It's a sincere question, Chantal.”

“I know. But I can't answer it. It isn't given to us to know the future.”

“Then what good is it being a psychic?”

Chantal frowned, bit her lower lip. She pointed outside the east window where the moon was rising. “What do you know about the moon, Frank?”

“It's a quarter of a million miles away and exerts a gravitational pull on the oceans.”

“What an odd reply. I was hoping for something more poetic. Still, it exerts a pull on people as well. When it's full like this, we astrologers don't get a minute's rest. People are after us night and day to bail them out of all kinds of difficulties. You wouldn't believe the mischief they get themselves into.”

“What do you tell them? If you can't predict the future?”

Chantal shrugged. Her perfume smelled like the lavender in Father George's gardens. Sitting on the bed this close to her, far and away the most beautiful and desirable woman I'd ever known, was driving me crazy. What's more, I was certain that she knew it.

“What do you tell your clients?” I said again.

“I listen carefully. Which, frankly, you must learn to do if you have any hope of becoming either a priest or a story writer. Then I tell them to ask me the right questions. If they do, I answer them. Or, more frequently, they answer their own questions. When you ask the right question, the answer usually becomes apparent.”

“All right, then. What is it that you want from Father George?”

“Everything.”

“I was afraid of that.”

Chantal's tomcat came into the room and jumped up on her lap.

I scratched the animal's ears and it purred loudly. “Is this customer your familiar?”

She laughed. “He's a stray barn cat I picked up on the road. I like cats, it's as simple as that. They're so comfortable with themselves, they make a room like this one comfortable. For a would-be story writer, you have a great gift for missing the obvious. Perhaps you should become a critic instead.”

I laughed. “All right, let's get to the obvious. What are all these old maps for?”

“I love to look at them. Occasionally I use them to locate missing objects.”

“Can you locate Foster Boy Dufresne?”

“The bottle picker?”

“How did you know he was a bottle picker?”

Chantal smiled. She set the cat down on the bed, went to the writing table, and opened an old atlas to a 1900 map of North America. She held the plumb bob over the map by its string. It described several narrowing circles, finally coming to a standstill over Niagara Falls. “Honeymoon capital of the world, Friend Frank,” she said.

A chill went up my back. But I was determined to see exactly how prescient the astrologer was.

“Where did the two old Bonhomme sisters Louvia was looking for, Sylvie and Marie, go to after they disappeared from Father George's church?”

“I don't know,” Chantal admitted. “No one knows such things as that. They're unfathomable, like the future.” There was a new urgency in her voice this time when she said, “You
must
ask the right question.”

“Should I enroll at St. Paul's or not? It starts at the end of this month.”

She laughed, and now her perfume smelled like lilacs. “Ah! That, Frank Bennett, is the right question. But only you can answer it.”

Before I could reply, she spun away like a dancer and ran downstairs to see how Father George was doing, leaving me standing in the cupola with the cat rubbing against my legs, and far more questions than answers.

 

Two mornings after my conversation with Chantal in the cupola, Father George awoke with numbness in his left side. Chantal and I rushed him to the hospital in Memphremagog, where the doctors couldn't find anything more than his chronic angina; they speculated that he might have sustained a small stroke in the night and sent him home under Doc Harrison's care, with strict orders to rest.

At the end of that week Chantal had to return to Canada for a day to see a client, and Father George asked me to take him up to his hunting camp. While he napped, with his throw rug over his knees, I drove out along the county road beside the river, up into Lord Hollow, past one abandoned farm after another, and over Anderson Mountain to Lord's Pond. There we launched the birch canoe and paddled across to the camp.

After checking inside to make sure everything was in order, Father George and I sat out on the porch steps in the afternoon sunshine. “Tell me a story,” I said. “About your whiskey-running days.”

Father George laughed. “You've always loved stories, haven't you, son. Hearing them, reading them, writing them. Maybe that's what you ought to do for a living. Write.”

“Chantal told me the same thing.”

Father George smiled. “When it comes to your profession, son, you were looking for a fast ball down the middle. Something straightforward. But God tripped you up and threw you a curve on the outside corner instead.”

“So what should I do?”

“What I taught you to do a long time ago. Go with the pitch.”

“What if someone had told you to consider writing full-time instead of becoming a priest?”

“I was me and you're you,” Father George said. “After I was shot down and the Benedictines found me, I felt that I personally owed God a life. A vocation. And I did. God, not a sense of duty, will guide you toward the life you should live. If you want to write stories, that's what you ought to do. That's what God wants you to do. Jesus, Frank. You're getting me worked up. Is my face red?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. You've got to calm down, Father G.”

“I am calm,” he said. Then he began to laugh. “I'm
never
calm, and you know it. Now listen to me, son. I'm a local historian and a priest, not a fiction writer. But there's a novel in Kingdom County if you can find it. Hell, there are ten novels. Someday you'll write them, if you go with the pitch God threw you. I'm going down to the pond to see if the trout are rising.”