The Fall of the Year (8 page)

From the porch came laughter. I ran to the window and looked out around the curtain. “They're kissing on the glider!”

Father George sighed. Then he laughed. “Well, it's in their hands. Thérèse's and Peter's. Not mine. I'm not God, I'm a country priest. My job is to marry people who want to get married.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “I'm sorry,” he said, grinning. “I had no business saying what I did.”

Now I laughed. Father George was always getting mad at God and then apologizing to Him.

“Call them in, Frank,” he said. “An idea just occurred to me. You wait here in the kitchen with Peter while I talk to Thérèse in the parlor for a minute.”

“I already know everything there is to know about such matters,” Thérèse told Father George as they left the room together. “I grew up on a farm, you know, not in a convent.”

Five minutes later Father George rejoined us in the kitchen. “Thérèse will be back shortly,” he said. He got a bottle of Pietro Gambini's acquavite and two shot glasses from the cupboard and poured a drink for Peter and himself. “
Salute!
” he said, lifting his glass.

Peter grinned.
“Salute!”
He emptied his glass in two swallows. “So, Father. What advice do you have for me about being a husband?”

Father George finished his drink while he considered. Then he said, “Listen to your wife and try to do as she says. Apart from that, no man knows very much about being a husband. It's like being a priest. All you really need to know you'll learn as you go along.”

Peter nodded. “This is an important night in my life,” he said.

“Yes,” Father George said. He poured them both a little more brandy. Peter swirled his around the bottom of his shot glass. The snow beat harder against the window. I got a stick of yellow birch out of the woodbox and put it into the stove. As its curling bark caught fire, a sharp wintergreen scent filled the kitchen. Father George had stepped into his study. He returned with a Bible and a long sealed envelope, which he laid face down on the table.

Suddenly whiteness filled the doorway from the parlor. Thérèse Lacourse appeared, wearing the wedding dress that had belonged to Father George's mother, her dark eyes full of shyness and triumph and expectation. “Well,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

“I'll marry you,” Father George said. “But you'll both have to promise to listen to my advice after the ceremony and make every effort to follow it.”

 

Afterward there was a little more brandy. Then Thérèse said she'd change and give Father George back the wedding dress.

He shook his head. “The dress belongs to you, Thérèse. I want you to have it.”

“Some day this watching boy on the woodbox will marry a young woman.”

“She'll want her own dress then. This one is yours.”

Thérèse made a curtsy. “Naturally I will treasure it.”

Father George put his arm around Peter. “Where are you and your wife going to live?” he asked in the voice of one man addressing another.

“My great-uncle, a master stonecarver, wants me to come to Barre to work for him.”

Thérèse said quickly, “You already know far more about carving than your uncle. We'll live in my folks' empty tenants' house near the brook between our families. You can walk up to the stone shed each day. I'll go to work for my cousin, Manette Riendeau, at her hairdresser's shop here in the village.”

Father George shook his head. “You haven't asked my advice on this matter. The agreement was that I'd marry you if you'd follow my advice. Don't try to live on the disputed land or near either set of parents. They'll continue to quarrel, and sooner or later you'll get caught up in it despite your best intentions not to.”

“I think Peter and I can stop this foolishness between our families,” Thérèse said. “Now that we're married.”

“No,” Father George said firmly. “Emile and Mimi Lacourse and Pietro and Rosa Gambini will go on fighting until they're too old to fight any longer. Don't put yourselves and your new marriage in the middle. You'll have disagreements enough of your own. You don't need to assume your parents'.”

Now Father George put his arm around Thérèse. “Go to Peter's great-uncle in Barre. Peter needs to learn all he can about his chosen work. His art. Then, when you have a family of your own and your folks are elderly, come back to our little village if you still want to.”

“All this is good advice from a great man,” Peter said to Thérèse.

“I'd miss ma mère,” Thérèse blurted, and wiped at her eyes with the lace sleeve of her wedding gown.

“You have me now,” Peter said, taking her in his arms. “I'll see that you miss no one.”

“You'll both miss your parents,” Father George said. “But you'll visit them frequently. In time you can come back here to live if you want to.”

“What should we do?” Thérèse said to Peter.

“I love you,” Peter said. Then, with a quick, desperate look at Father George, “I'll leave the decision to you, Thérèse.”

Thérèse took a deep breath and looked at the priest, who smiled back at her. “Well, then,” she said. “What must be must be. No doubt they have hairdressing shops in Barre, too.”

Father George took Thérèse's hand. “Everything changes in the fullness of time, Thérèse. This feud will end with your parents' generation. Your children will laugh about how the old folks carried on.”

“We'll have to find a rent,” Thérèse said to Peter. “I won't live with your relatives. How can we afford a rent?”

Father George handed her the envelope. On it he had written “To Peter and Thérèse Gambini.” She smiled at her new name on the outside, then gave it to Peter to open.

“Thank you, Father,” he said, looking inside the envelope. “Come, Thérèse. Now we can afford a rent. But tonight we'll stay in the little motor court on Lake Memphremagog. An hour from now Barre will be the last thing on your mind.”

 

Peter and Thérèse set up housekeeping in Barre, near the Rock of Ages quarry. Peter apprenticed himself to his great-uncle, the master carver. Thérèse found work at a hairdresser's shop.

And what of the great feud? Well! To no one's astonishment the two enemy families descended on the Big House the day after Father George performed the marriage, threatening him and each other and even the young couple themselves. But what's done is done. At first Father George shouted back, giving them as good as he got. He threatened them with excommunication, asked me if his face was getting red, and ran to the cupboard for a drink of acquavite. Then he talked to the families for a long time, and in the end they went home, the husbands with grim expressions on their faces, as though they sensed the impending end of the trouble that had sustained them for so long, the wives looking not terribly displeased.

For a few years the older generation continued to quarrel. No one repaired the right of way leading up to the quarry. Occasionally there was a run-in, shouting, threats. But their hearts no longer seemed to be in it. When Pietro had a near-fatal heart attack, Mimi Lacourse personally delivered two baguettes and a maple sugar pie to the Gambinis. Eight months later, after Mimi Lacourse slipped while gathering eggs and fractured her hip, Rosa Gambini appeared at the door with a jug of wild grape wine and a piping hot lasagna.

“They're killing each other with kindness,” Father George told me. “Now they're fighting with food.”

For two or three years Thérèse and Peter and their daughter returned to live in Kingdom Common so that Peter could work the pink granite from the quarry above their folks' places. It was Peter, in fact, whom Father George had commissioned to carve the stone memorial loaves to Sylvie and Marie Bonhomme. But it proved impossible to keep the water out of the quarry for more than a few days at a time, and the sunset-colored stone itself seemed to be about played out, like the hill farms and big woods and the mills of Kingdom County. Peter and Thérèse returned to Barre, where, as Thérèse had predicted, he soon became recognized as one of the finest stone sculptors in the country. The elder Lacourses and Gambinis all died within two years of each other; one way or another, even feuds come to an end.

During the summer after I graduated from college, Peter and Thérèse traveled north to the Common again, this time to unveil, in the cemetery behind the church, a life-size memorial sculpture that Peter had carved the previous winter and had trucked to Kingdom Common under canvas the night before. Half of the village was on hand for the ceremony, including Father George and me.

“Here it is,” Peter said as the ropes and canvas fell away. “It's called ‘Sleep after Love.'”

From the crowd of Commoners came a rising murmur of astonishment, of delight, of awe. Even Louvia the Fortuneteller lifted her hand to her wax bridgework in amazement.

On a plain bed of white Vermont marble, in an open spot overlooking the village and about midway between the burial plots of the Gambinis and Lacourses, reposed two sleeping figures of pink granite, a young man and a woman, folded together in eternal embrace, their heads close together on the marble pillow.

“Love conquers all,” someone whispered—Louvia!

Even Father George was speechless. All he could do was nod in recognition of this wonderment.

“I was the model for the woman,” Thérèse told him. “When we sleep we don't quarrel.”

“We don't quarrel anyway,” Peter said. “We're lovers, not fighters.”

Thérèse laughed. “We quarrel all the time. It's in our blood. Isn't that so, Rosa?”

The small dark-haired girl between them laughed, either in delight at the sculpture or at Thérèse's remark.

Father George smiled, too, though his face was abstracted. I wondered what he was thinking of.

 

All that was a long time ago. Thérèse Lacourse and Peter Gambini have grandchildren of their own now. The special world of the village has become much like the rest of the world. Yet the stone lovers still lie entwined in the graveyard above the town, and the inscription chiseled into the foot of the marble bed is still sharp and clear.

 

SLEEP AFTER LOVE

 

To the Memory of

 

Pietro and Rosa Gambini

Emile and Mimi Lacourse

Peter and Thérèse Gambini

Father George Lecoeur

 

May They Rest in Love Eternal

4

Just as it is impossible to define the village of Kingdom Common separately from the railroad that informed it with so much of its character, it is impossible to define the Murphy family of Irishtown, that tiny enclave of a dozen battened houses just north of the village, apart from the context of the railroad that had brought the Murphys to Vermont and the Common the first place.

—Father George, “A Short History”

 

I
T WAS CIRCUS DAY
in Kingdom Common. The dawn sky was reddening quickly, though the lurid strip of crimson along the horizon was caused in part by the Canadian forest fires that had been burning out of control two hundred miles to the northeast for the past two weeks, creating in that quarter of the night sky a glow like embers. The wildfires had suffused a haze over the entire Kingdom, through which everything took on a slightly illusory quality.

At the same time, though it was now mid-July, there had been a sharp frost overnight, and those of us drinking our early morning coffee at the hotel could look out and see, on the glaze of frost on the green, the faint reflection of the red dawn sky.

“That could almost get to be discouraging,” Bumper Stevens said, meaning the summer frost.

“It's the sky I'm more concerned about,” Doc Harrison said. “Red sky in the morning, circusgoers take warning.”

“Today will be just fine, Doc,” Father George said. “Look at Blackhawk.”

Everyone's eyes moved across the common and up the one-hundred-foot-high granite clock tower of the courthouse. Above the clock was a lookout with four tall paneless windows, one in each side of the tower. Some twenty feet above the lookout, looming high over the tallest elms on the common, was the copper weathervane, set in place half a century ago, of the fabled thoroughbred Morgan pacer Blackhawk, mane and tail flying. Today Blackhawk's head was into the north, from which quarter both the recent run of good weather and the filmy haze of smoke from the Canadian fires were coming.

“His nose never lies,” Father George said, and everyone nodded.

That, at least, was a relief. For in those years in Kingdom Common, when the circus came to town, we all prayed for good weather. Now it only remained for the Slade Bros. Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth to arrive in the village. It was due at any moment.

 

The circus handbills promised wonderful things. See the grand, free, mile-long parade and the Four Horses of the Apocalypse! See the Bestiary of Antipodean Rarities! See two three-ring performances! In fact, the Slade Bros. Railway Extravaganza was a shabby little affair. A couple dozen dingy blue-and-yellow circus wagons chained on rusty flatbeds, a few boxcars, and two faded Pullman sleepers that had formerly belonged to the Santa Fe Line, pulled by a single, grimy, snub-nosed diesel locomotive that limped into town every two or three years for a one-day stand on the common, then departed, leaving a trampled ring in the outfield grass of the baseball diamond where the Big Top had been pitched and a sad litter of crushed lemonade cups, popcorn boxes, and hot dog wrappers.

My job for today, as Father George had explained it the night before, was to chaperone Kingdom Common's seventeen-year-old tomboy and self-declared daredevil, Molly Murphy. Until three years ago, when her parents were killed in a railroad wreck on the trestle a mile north of town, Molly had lived in one of the half dozen shanties near the trestle, an area known as Irishtown. After she was orphaned, Father George had arranged for her to go to the convent boarding school in Memphremagog. For almost as long as I could remember, she had wanted to run away with the circus—which was just now pulling into town, with Molly herself waving from the cab of the locomotive.