Disappearances, page 16
They arrived in the Common on February 12 at a little after midnight. Uncle Henry wanted only to take the bull over to the commission sales barn and fall asleep in a bed again. My father had other ideas. He looked up at the sky, which was perfectly clear, and said he wanted to see how his longhorn stood up under brisk weather, and so would ride him home. It was about forty below zero, and Uncle Henry said that while he had no doubts about the longhorn’s endurance he himself had stood up under all the brisk weather he intended to. But of course he couldn’t let my father ride out the county road and up the hollow alone; he might fall off and freeze to death, and he supposed that having seen things through this far he could see them the rest of the way. They hitched the bull to the statue of Ethan Allen and woke up Armand St. Onge, who loaned Uncle Henry a big woods horse to ride. My father grasped the bull by his horns and somersaulted over onto his back. “Giddap,” he said, and the bull trotted up the Common and on out the county road as though he knew exactly where he was going. Uncle Henry said the bull knew that there was only one place in all New England outlandish enough to accommodate him and that place was our hilltop.
I was sleeping with my window open, and as they came up the lane below the barn my father’s voice woke me up. His song rang out clearly on the cold night air.
Come a ti yi yay
Git along little doggies,
It’s your good fortune and also my own.
Come a ti yi yay
Giddap my fine longhorns,
You know that Lord Hollow will be your new home.
“Wild Bill,” my father shouted. “Evangeline, Cordelia, Rat. Here’s Quebec Bill Bonhomme home from Texas with the lost herd.”
I rushed downstairs and outside in my nightshirt. I jumped up to hug my father, who wrapped his sheep coat around me and rode me across the dooryard and back. Rat put his head out his lower chamber window. He was wearing his long nightcap. “Did you ride all the way from Texas?” he said.
“Yes, Rat my boy,” my father said. “Didn’t we, Henry?”
“I feel as if we must have,” Uncle Henry said.
My mother was standing in the woodshed door. “Evangeline,” my father shouted, jumping off the bull and running to her, “I’ve brung you the lost herd, Evangeline.”
He set me down and stood up on his tiptoes to hug and kiss her. He was wearing riding boots with high heels. The crown of his ten-gallon hat came almost even with my mother’s nose. He looked like a small boy in a cowboy suit running to kiss his mother. “I’ve named him Hercule,” he shouted. “In honor of your father.”
“He would be pleased,” my mother said. “Nothing would have pleased him more.”
That was the beginning of the great Vermont longhorn saga, which would end as absurdly as it began, but not before Hercule became famous beyond even my father’s expectations. Before leaving for Texas my father had gotten Rat started on a cedar-pole lean-to in the upper pasture, into which he now drove Hercule and out of which Hercule immediately bolted, galloping back down the lane and across the lower pasture and frozen brook to a deer yard in the softwoods. There he spent the rest of the winter. It was as if our hill brought out in him the wildness of his Spanish progenitors. For the next three months we had to take his hay and grain down to the deer yard by hand sledge. When he and the deer smelled us coming they tore off through the woods, returning to eat only after we were gone. Except for his tracks we wouldn’t have known he was there. When spring came he abandoned the deer and went berserk. He ran wild through the county, tearing up gardens, rampaging through hayfields and impregnating dozens of Jerseys and Holsteins and Guernseys and Ayrshires, so that in time a new breed of milking cows with long wickedly curved horns began to emerge in Kingdom County.
We spent all spring and summer hunting him. Sometimes at dawn we would start him out of a cedar brake deep in some swamp. For a moment he would stare at us with red malicious eyes before snorting furiously and charging off to wreak new havoc. Enraged farmers fired at him with rifles, shotguns, Civil War pistols. They filled him with buckshot and slugs and birdshot and even one musket ball, none of which penetrated beyond his hide. He never trampled or gored anyone or really did much damage, but there was no way farmers could secure the chastity of their heifers against his onslaughts. He was as devious and crafty as the conquistadors who had brought his ancestors to this hemisphere. When a direct assault was impracticable, and this was increasingly the case as farmers began confining their heifers, he bellowed to them at night from the woods until they broke down barn doors and joined him.
In the fall when the foliage was at its peak and the hills were solid banks of red and yellow my father convened more than one hundred farmers and organized the largest drive ever put on in Kingdom County. His strategy was to array beaters in an elliptical loop high on the ridges above Lord Hollow and at a prearranged signal have them move down toward the narrow valley, enclosing Hercule in a tightening ring of men. Equipped with his lariat, he stationed himself and Uncle Henry in the road just below Whiskeyjack Kinneson’s and fired off his shotgun. The roundup was on. The farmers were armed with noisemakers of every kind. They beat sticks against dishpans and whaled triangular gongs with short metal rods. They rang dinner bells, honked on duck and goose calls, blasted cavalry charges on bugles handed down from ancestors who had participated in the wars against the Indians. Those without wind or percussion instruments augmented the clamor by hooting like bears, blatting like goats and roaring like rutting bull moose. My mother and Cordelia and I watched from our hilltop. Cordelia said there hadn’t been such a devilish tumult since the convocation of fallen angels in Paradise Lost.
As the drive contracted the din intensified. A dark animal burst out of the woods behind Whiskeyjack’s place. At first I thought it was Two Bottles’ black dog that he kept for running deer. When it stood up on its hind feet and looked around I realized it was a bear. A smaller tawny animal was racing along the edge of the woods on the other side of the road. This I identified immediately as a wildcat. Several deer appeared. Then several more. Suddenly Hercule was thundering straight down the road toward my father and Uncle Henry, who seemed to be engaged in some acrobatic maneuver. Uncle Henry was bent over. When he straightened up my father was standing on his shoulders, twirling his lariat. As Hercule charged by my father lassoed him around the horns and at the same time leaped onto his back.
This time Hercule did not intend to be so quickly subdued. He began to plunge up and down in long humping leaps. My father held on. Somehow he got the lasso down around Hercule’s thick powerful neck. Men appeared in the fields, which were swarming with frantic deer, rabbits, bears, porcupines, wildcats, fishers, skunks. Uncle Henry seemed to be watching it all impassively. Hercule began to run down the road. He was running flat out like a race horse. The closing ring of men broke apart in panic. Hercule disappeared around the bend, my father still aboard.
“The Ford,” my mother cried. “Get the Ford, William.”
I started the Ford and with my mother and Cordelia beside me we went fast down the hollow. Uncle Henry and Whiskeyjack and Two Bottles and Orie Royer and Justice Bullpout Kinneson and two or three others jumped in the back as we went by. Along the way people who hadn’t participated in the roundup pointed toward the Common to indicate the way my father and Hercule had gone. Whiskeyjack and Two Bottles fired their guns in the air from time to time. Cordelia declaimed from Paradise Lost and my mother held my arm tightly. When we reached the Common Hercule was grazing serenely on the grass under the statue of Ethan Allen, and my father was doing lariat tricks for a group of small children.
Hercule never ran away again. He was not young when my father brought him home from Texas, and he apparently exhausted his passionate capacities forever on that one last amorous rampage lasting five months. Periodically I still notice a Jersey or Guernsey with a wide-shouldered and rangy aspect or a peculiar outward sweep of its horns, but Hercule lost all interest in procreation after that first summer. He developed a lachrymose expression as though he missed Texas or perhaps sensed that he was one of the last of his race, doomed to grow old in a foreign land, an avatar of a time that had passed long ago and that he could not quite recall and certainly not revive and perpetuate. Only people, very unusual people like Cordelia and my father, could do that.
IX
We had been lying on our bed of fir boughs reminiscing over my father’s projects for about an hour when he declared that he intended to salvage the whiskey.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Uncle Henry said. “I ain’t going to inquire how you propose to do it. Don’t you tell me neither. I want a few hours peaceful sleep tonight. Damn few at that, Quebec Bill. It must be long after midnight already. Will you pipe down now and leave us get twenty minutes rest?”
The next thing I remember is waking up in a quiet drizzling dawn and looking out at my father roasting some kind of animal over a fire and Uncle Henry standing nearby.
“What’s that you’re cooking?” I said.
“Good morning, Wild Bill,” my father said, “and a beautiful spring morning at that. Feel that rain, boy, smell it, taste it. Here’s spring’s warm rain to green the grass.”
He held out a slice of meat on Uncle Henry’s hunting knife. “Don’t burn your tongue. This is a young roebuck that was sleeping a mite too heavy this morning. Ain’t that tasty? See how still the lake is. There’s hardly a stick of pulp on her. What wasn’t thrown up on shore was driven north. I wonder if the tug made it. Maybe I’ll find it down there with the whiskey. Quebec Bill’s going diving today, boys. Diving down where the sturgeons live. I want in the worst way to see a sturgeon.”
“Bill,” Uncle Henry said, “I’m going to tell you something. You listen, too. You listen good. It’s raining, as you’ve already pointed out. If it don’t freeze back up you can get your cows out in a day or two. If it does freeze, I’ll furnish the hay. You have my word on that.
“Now I want you to stop all this. You’re overreaching yourself. Splashing around in that ice water and being shot at and setting barn fires. You’re losing your grip. I see it happen over across more than once. First they stop sleeping. Then they stop eating. He ain’t et a bit, Billy. Not a bite. Then they start in trying to get theirselves killed. And unless they get stove up first they usually succeed. Sometimes the other fella gets kilt trying to keep it from happening, too.”
“What other fella? Is that you? Are you that other fella, Hen?”
“Don’t provoke me, Quebec Bill Bonhomme. I’ve had all a man can stand and I won’t be provoked. You’ll hear me out. They was a city boy name of Kelly. He somehow come to be put to driving artillery mules with me. Now you know and I know that a mule above every other animal is independent-minded. Trying to get a mule to do what it don’t want to will drive a man plumb crazy. And that’s just what happened to Kelly. It was bad enough for me that had been around horses all my life but Kelly, he’d never seen a mule or horse either until a month before. Watching that man try to drive mules was one of the saddest sights I ever hope to see. He’d gee and they’d haw. He’d whoa and they’d go. The harder he tried the worse it got. Kelly stopped sleeping and set up nights thinking of new ways to drive mules. He stopped eating. He most likely could have got himself transferred but he wouldn’t ask. He said he was going to drive them mules if it kilt him. And then we hit Château-Thierry, and that, by Jesus, is just what happened.
“I’ve never told this next to nobody, but I’m going to tell it now. It come time to go up closer behind the trenches with the artillery. So we started in. Kelly was right beside me with his team and for once they was doing somewhere near what he wanted them to. Then somebody hollers out gas. Sure enough, creeping along through the bob wire we see what looked like fog. We’d been instructed beforehand what to do if that happened. We was to mask first the mules, then ourselves. Out come the mule masks and you can wager it didn’t take me long to clap them on and lower my own. Then I see Kelly, a-fighting and struggling to mask his mules. And the mules raring and plunging, and that fog a-creeping closer and closer on the morning breeze. I said to myself, the hell with that man, Henry Coville. Any man that will lose sleep over mules deserves what he gets. But I knowed he didn’t deserve to be gassed. Nobody deserved that. So I shouted to him to forget the mules and lower his mask. By then the gas was very near, no further than from here to the lake. It was the most fearsome sight I ever see—until recently. But no, Kelly had his orders and he was going to mask them mules or die trying. And they warn’t about to be masked, and the mule that was doing most of the raring, he reached out and bit that raised gas mask off the top of Kelly’s head and chomped the end right out of it. And Kelly, he continued trying to force on the mule’s mask until the gas was lapping around his knees.
“Well, I hollered for a spare mask. And while I was doing that I was knocking Kelly down and getting my mask over his head, and holding my own breath, as though that was going to do any good. He fit like a wildcat to get me off him, but I held his arms and strapped on my mask. Somebody come up quick with a spare mask and got it on me, but you know the rest as well as I do.”
“What about Kelly?” my father said.
“He died right there under his mules. He’d took too much of it. Now, Bill, I can’t whup you. You’ve proved that. I can’t tell you what to do. Nobody can. But I can beg you again to stop all this. Don’t go back on that lake. Don’t try to mask no more mules. You go on home. Go on home to Kingdom County and Vangie. You’ll have your hay. You’ll have enough hay to start up the game farm again. Plant you a big pineapple grove and mulch it with hay. I’ll go back to Texas myself and bring you home a herd of sidewinders packed in hay. But stop this mule business here, now and forever. I can’t stand no more.”
With tears in his eyes my father ran up to Uncle Henry and embraced him. “Brother,” he said, “you’re right. It’s time to go home. As soon as we finish breakfast I’ll run down to the lake and fetch up the whiskey and we’ll head straight home by the quickest way. We won’t even go back to get that cannon truck with the whiskey in it.”
“Good Christ, was that what you was planning? Why, that cliff will be swarming over with Mounties by now. So will the lake for that matter as soon as they get the pulp cleared away. They’re likely dragging the upper end right now. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Bill. Don’t go looking for no more.”
“Right again, Henry. All we’re going to do is get our whiskey and go home. A rattlesnake farm you say? There’s money to be made in training poison serpents. Big money. Cadillac money. People will come hundreds of miles to see vipers perform. What’s more, I’ve always had a way with them.”
My father rushed over to the lean-to and began tickling Rat’s neck with a fir bough. “Snakes,” he shouted. “The snakes are coming, Ratty.”
Rat screamed and leaped to his feet, knocking down the lean-to. My father clung to his neck like a weasel. Rat charged into the woods with my father dangling from his neck.
Uncle Henry stared after him. “We could bind him in his sleep,” he said. “If he ever slept, that is.”
Now Rat was pursuing my father with a big stick. My father leaped over the spitted deer and ran toward the lake. Rat stopped to catch his breath. “What’s that?” he said. “Roast deer meat?”
“Yes,” Uncle Henry said. “You better have a bite, Rat. It may be a long morning.”
“I have to have it well done,” Rat said. “I can’t stand the sight of pink. Clyde or Floyd once catched a case of worms from eating pink. Great long slender white fellas, they was. He put up a dozen or so in a quart mason jar.”
“Didn’t they put you in the mind of snakes?”
“Yes they did. He liked to get the jar out and look at them now and again. They was looped up in there like tripe. Bill buried them with him, jar and all.”
That was too much for me. I followed my father down to the lake, where I found him getting ready to embark in Brother St. Hilaire’s small blue rowboat.
“When did you get that?”
“After you and Henry went to sleep, Wild Bill. I come across the deer on the way over to the monastery.”
“Dad, I can’t stand that Rat Kinneson. He’s up there telling Uncle Henry about Clyde or Floyd’s pet worms.”
“Rat’s a good enough fella, Bill. When you get to know him the way I do, he’s the best.”
“You think everybody’s a good fella. You probably think Carcajou’s a good fella.”
“Not no more, Bill. Carcajou’s a dead fella. Wild Bill Bonhomme blasted a great hole in the side of his head last night. Just like his father back on that covered bridge when he blasted them two hijackers.”
