Disappearances, page 26
From off down the tote road a great horned owl screamed. Not long afterward a long wailing howl broke out. I started, and so did my father. “That sounded like a wolf,” he said. “I must have dreamt that. I dreamt I heard a wolf, Wild Bill.”
“Dad, it’s stopped snowing. I think we’ve got to try to move again. If we get a good jump we can be over the dam by dawn and home by early morning. We’ve got to get you to the doctor.”
“Yes,” my father said. “A dose of salts should be just the thing for that leg. We’ll get Dr. Rupp to give me a Christly enema. No, Bill. We’ll wait right here till dawn. Then you cut me a good supply of wood and go on out to the dam and up the hill. You couldn’t never drag me up that hill through two or three foot of new snow without snowshoes. You get aholt of Henry and Rat and tell them where I be. They’ll fetch me out on a toboggan.”
“No,” I said. “We aren’t going to do it that way. You’re coming with me.”
My father laughed. “Wild Bill,” he said, “you get wilder every day. I’m staying here with a warm fire. You go along. Go now if you want to get a jump on the day.”
I had never in my life openly defied my father or mother, but there was no way in the world I was going to leave him there to pass out again and die of exposure.
“No,” I shouted, pulling him closer to me. “No.”
Suddenly there was a high piercing scream from quite nearby.
“Good Christ,” my father said. “That sounded just like a painter. There ain’t no painters around here no more.”
It screamed again.
“That’s no painter,” my father said quietly. “Put out the fire.”
I kicked snow onto the fire. When it was out I stuck the hatchet back in my belt and knelt by my father. “It’s him, isn’t it?” I said.
“You go back in the trees, Bill. Not too far. Leave the hatchet with me. When you hear me holler get out on the tote road and start running. Run as fast as ever you run in your life. Don’t stop till you’re home.”
“No,” I said.
Loon laughter filled the night. It rose to a mad crescendo. Through some hideous trick of ventriloquism it was joined by a concert of wolf howls, panther screams, hooting, baying, bellowing. I picked my father up in my arms and began to run back through the trees into the swamp.
“LaChance!”
As I came out of the cedar stand into snow over my knees I could hear the crash of brush close behind me.
“LaChance!” Carcajou screamed.
XV
For many years the next several hours were blank to me. Often I would dream that I was running with my father in my arms through an endless cedar swamp. Just as Carcajou started to bellow I would wake, terrified as a lost child. For months afterwards that is what I felt like, a bereft child alone in a swamp through which I searched with diminishing hope for a river that would lead me out. I ate, slept, went back to school in the fall, went fishing with Uncle Henry and walking with my mother. But I was only going through the motions. I had fallen into a terrible black despair.
Then it was spring again and I felt simultaneously better and guilty to be better. Then the guilt passed, and I could begin to think about my father and the trip again, with the exception of those blank hours. For twenty years my last memory of our flight through the swamp was Carcajou bellowing behind us as I ran through the deep light snow under the cedars with my wounded father in my arms.
Then I recalled lying in a high fever under quilts on the kitchen woodbox with the starving cows bellowing steadily from the barn.
“They’re welcoming us home, Wild Bill,” my father said. But I knew he was not really there. I was having a fever dream.
I could hear Aunt Cordelia and my mother talking over that constant loud moaning from the barn, but each time I tried to force myself awake I went under again. I dreamed I was back struggling in the lake under the pulpwood. I heard shots, one after another at measured intervals. Perhaps Carcajou was laying siege to the farmhouse. If so, he would have his hands full with Cordelia.
I did not wake up until late afternoon. I was very weak. Aunt Cordelia was sitting by the woodbox. Except for the crackling stove it was very still. I noticed that some of my mother’s seedlings in the windows had grown taller. Outside a snow drift combed up over the windowsill. In the afternoon light the snow was a deep blue. The silence bothered me. Then I remembered the cows. Uncle Henry must have finally gotten up with hay. I assumed that he and Rat and my mother were in the barn doing chores.
Aunt Cordelia put her hand on my forehead. Her fingers felt light and cool, desiccated as slices of dried apple. The woodshed door opened, and Cordelia withdrew her hand quickly.
My mother came into the kitchen. She was wearing her gray sweater and barn shawl. I started to get up to go to her, but she shook her head. I saw that she was crying. It was the first time in my life I had seen her cry. She wept silently, as her Indian grandmother might have, as she must have learned to weep years ago at the convent. She was leaning slightly forward and the tears fell directly from her eyes onto the wide dark planks of the kitchen floor, staining the planks darker where they hit in splotches as large as quarters. Then I noticed that she was holding my father’s deer rifle at her side. She shook her head again. “They had suffered enough,” she said.
It was twilight. My mother sat by the woodbox holding my hand while Cordelia made supper. The snowdrift over the window was purple. On top of the barn roof the wind had whipped up a strange configuration. Something about it disconcerted me.
“Jesus Christ,” I said before I knew I was going to. “It’s the snow owl.”
Cordelia gave us tea and soup, which tasted delicious to me. Darkness fell. I got quite hot again, and my mother bathed my forehead as I had tried to cool my father’s fever the night before. My arms still ached. Intermittently I had more fever dreams. In one of these the snow owl twisted his head around to reveal the shattered face of Carcajou. He swooped down off the barn and beat his huge white wings against the kitchen window, screaming “LaChance, où êtes-vous, LaChance?”
Sometime in the middle of the night the fever left for good. The kerosene lamp on the table was flickering low. Cordelia sat in her straight-backed chair by the stove, keeping up the fire. My mother was asleep with her head on the back of her chair.
I could not seem to think about my father, though I had not yet entered the depression that was to last a full year. That would begin a few hours later. I looked at my mother’s face. In the lamplight it looked quite wan. I thought about the Jerseys, how she had loved taking care of them. When he first came to the farm my father had started some stone walls to keep them in, but of course he never got further than about ten feet with any of them. Later Rat made some beautiful stake and rider fences from cedar rails he had cut in the swamp. As the herd grew he could not keep up with the need for fencing, and we could never afford barbed wire, so my mother would go to the pasture with the cows on summer days and sit reading or playing with me while they grazed. On those long hot days she taught me many things whose value I did not guess until long afterward.
I have said what I believe my father taught me. The effect of Cordelia’s tendentious harangues is obvious. What I learned from my mother was subtler, and perhaps more important. There were the small things that have stayed with me always and that I took great pleasure in teaching Henry, like the English and French names of the common meadow and woods flowers, the birds and the trees, to all of which my mother was gently attuned. There were deeper qualities that I can appreciate without pretending to emulate. The patience to sit for hours on a rock near the brook while the cows wandered through the lower meadow. The endurance year in and year out, not only to put up with the rest of us but to enjoy us and to the extent that it was possible protect us from ourselves—and here I am thinking mainly of my father, whom she loved above anything or anyone in this world or the next, which despite my father’s most violent abrogations she continued to believe in and ultimately returned to the convent to prepare for; and where, she believed as implicitly as I have ever believed anything, she would be reunited with her parents and grandparents, her stillborn daughters, and my father.
It was only through Quebec Bill Bonhomme that my mother permitted herself to establish any liaison with this world at all. She was fully her own woman, as strong-minded and independent as any I have ever known, including my wife, but it was toward God and heaven that she was oriented, and except as worldly things and events were important to my father they were not important to her. Even the herd was insignificant compared to the glory of God, and to her Quebec Bill Bonhomme was His chief glory—an opinion with which my father no doubt would have been in full concurrence had he been at all religious. If there has ever been a better example of Emerson’s definition of wisdom as the ability to hold two contradictory ideas than my mother’s love of God and my father, I haven’t encountered it. Yet her faith was intensely private; she did not attempt to inculcate it in me or anyone else. She evidently felt that her belief was enough to guarantee our salvation.
My mother did not look old, but she no longer looked young either. I looked back at Cordelia. In the dim light she appeared incredibly old.
I said softly, “Aunt Cordelia, what happened to your father and brother?”
“Ah,” she said. “You would know your birthright at last?”
With no other introduction she said, “In the summer of 1861 my Grandfather René made his grisly prediction on the day before my brother and father left Kingdom County with the First Vermont Militia. At the time I did not quite believe him, though after his disappearance I was less skeptical, and when I learned by telegram of William’s death at Bull Run on the day my grandfather had appointed I had no doubt at all that Father also was going to die where and when René had foretold. I knew that there would be nothing I could do to prevent this tragedy, though when the time came I would try.
“You see, William, I was trying to preserve what I then perceived as a sort of civilization by attempting to interfere with fate as it was to realize itself on the village Common later that summer. For me, a girl of nineteen, Father represented all the culture I knew. He had lived for the sake of books and ideas and taught me all I then believed worth knowing. He had also loved both me and my brother as much as any father can love his children. As all Goodman-Bonhomme fathers have loved their children, accepting them as equals almost from the time of their birth. So when William died at Bull Run, Father apparently went mad. He refused to bury his son on what he considered foreign soil. He dressed the corpse in full military regalia, placed it in a flag-draped coffin in a wagon and started north for Kingdom County, driving night and day and changing teams every six or eight hours. He was dressed in uniform himself, a tall gaunt unshaven wild-eyed man who did not slow down for the blue streams of soldiers he met marching south, but stood in the death wagon whipping the horses savagely, laying about with his saber and addressing the soldiers as whores of Mars as he scattered them into the ditches. Orie Royer’s father, then a sixteen-year-old private, saw him stop to change horses at a crossroads tavern north of Harrisburg. At first he did not recognize the crazed old colonel who leaped down from the wagon. ‘Horses,’ Father shouted to the tavern owner as he unharnessed the spent team. ‘Rum.’
“By that time the wagon reeked so that no man in his right mind would have denied my father anything he demanded that would hasten him on his way. A captain approached and saluted. Father seized him and dragged him up to the coffin. He threw back the cover to expose the putrefying remains of my brother. ‘See your end before you, Jezebel,’ he roared, and forced the captain’s head close down over the corpse. The captain promptly fainted, and when Granther Royer and several others ran up to revive him, Granther recognized Father. He did not recognize the body of William, which he said was black with flies and seething with worms, so that by the time Granther recovered from the shock and brought the captain to, Father was already whipping up his fresh team and sweeping the rear of the regiment out of his way, shouting hell-fire and damnation to them in the tradition of his namesake and grandfather, Calvin Matthews.
“No one was about to stop him. On a hot August day a newly formed regiment marched down the main street of a place called Poughkeepsie to the cheers of hundreds of proud citizens. At the south end of town they were met by an overpowering stench. It was followed closely by my father, coming over a hill half a mile away, already rising to his feet in the wagon and brandishing his saber. The troops hesitated. A man shouted that the rebs had broken through. Poughkeepsie’s finest turned and raced without order back through the bunting-draped street, followed by the thundering wagon, distinguishable from an apparition out of the Book of Revelations only by the ineffable redolence of death that preceded and lingered behind it. Lingered behind it, William. Lingered behind it for generations.
“There were newspaper accounts of this singular homecoming. One relates how south of Albany my brother’s corpse was jounced from the coffin and lay oozing over the road for two hours until Father discovered it was gone and returned to scrape it up. According to the same notice a company of men actually managed to stop the wagon near Troy, secure my father in a madhouse and bury the corpse in a nearby paupers’ field. That night he broke out, dug up the coffin and carried it two miles through the woods to the home of a wealthy undertaker of Dutch descent. There he commandeered a team and an ornate rolling hearse with curtained glass windows. By morning he was in Vermont. Two days later, having driven steadily from Virginia except for the two or three hours he spent in the madhouse, he appeared at the south end of the Common, heralded by the scent of my brother’s corpse and a hideous flock of soaring raptorial creatures unlike anything that had ever been seen in Kingdom County.
“Now pay close attention, William. You are about to learn some history. At the same time that Father was carrying my brother’s body home, a certain Captain Greenwood of the Confederate Army was traveling north on a parallel route some hundreds of miles to the east in a British sailing vessel. It seems that this captain, a very bold young man, had been commissioned along with a scant dozen compatriots to slip through our coastal blockade and journey to Halifax. From Halifax they were to proceed across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to southern Quebec, where their orders were to mount sudden raids on northern New England border towns. To rob banks, blow up railroad trestles and generally harry the population into believing that a sizable guerrilla force was at work. Their purpose was to divert Union troops back to the north. They had no way of knowing that Father was doing that job adequately himself.
“When he arrived in Quebec, Captain Greenwood picked Kingdom Common as his first target. It was the county seat, and apparently thriving, with eight mills and a railroad, and it was only about ten miles from the border. Memphremagog was closer but that was a larger town and might be more hazardous to attack. The Confederate band could not have known that the Common Bank was empty and that nearly every penny in the county had gone into the state war fund. Nor could they possibly have known on that afternoon in late August when they galloped into town, mistaking Father’s library for the bank and riding their horses up the marble steps and straight through the tall carved walnut doors that had been left open for the breeze, that Father would be entering the Common from the opposite end.
“The librarian had been on her way to the door to see what could possibly smell so bad. She got out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by the woods horses Captain Greenwood had purchased in Sherbrooke. He discovered his mistake as soon as he saw the thousands of books lining the paneled walls. He raised his hat to the terrified librarian, note that, William, whirled on his horse and led his men back through the door, cursing the Frenchman who had assured him that the brick building with the white pillars was too splendid to be anything but a bank. He started across the Common toward the courthouse. Perhaps he planned to burn it. Then he began to curse again, because Father was bearing down on him in the stolen hearse, twirling his saber around his head like a Tartar.
“I am certain it was not the captain’s intention to kill or harm anyone. He was no Sherman, but a brave and handsome man performing what he perceived as his duty. But when he saw a bearded and insane old man in a uniform that was still blue enough to identify charging at him on top of that hurtling macabre conveyance for the dead, he had no choice other than to defend himself. ‘Stop,’ he shouted, raising his pistol. And at exactly the instant Captain Greenwood fired, I, who also had no choice but to defend my father despite my certain knowledge that my efforts would be futile, fired my grandfather’s musket from the base of the statue of Ethan Allen, where I had been waiting all afternoon. Captain Greenwood fell from his horse. Father sat down on the seat of the hearse. His team galloped on up the Common and out the county road.
“I stayed on the Common only long enough to ascertain that Captain Greenwood was dead. His men had ridden off down the Memphremagog road, where some of them were captured later that afternoon, at about the same time that I arrived in our reeking dooryard to find my sister-in-law weeping over the coffin and my six-year-old nephew, your grandfather, William, sitting on the roof of the barn his father had built, flanked by a score of vultures and drinking from a bottle of rum he had found under the empty blood-soaked seat of the hearse.”
“Empty?” I said. “What about your father? Calvin. Had he fallen out along the way?”
“Yes,” Cordelia said, her voice very high now, almost keening. “Calvin. My father. Whom you so much resemble, William. What about him?”
Cordelia began to rock. In her moaning night voice she said, “He had disappeared. Oh yes, disappeared. No one ever saw him again. And that is not all, William. Now you must hear. Because there is more, and herein lies your birthright.
“I dug my brother’s grave myself that afternoon as soon as I had fetched his drunken little boy away from his companions on the barn roof and put him to bed with his mother. I dug fast and hard, hurrying because of the stench. When the grave was as deep as I was tall I dragged the coffin to its edge. What I did next was unspeakable work. But I had to do it. I could not commit that body to our ground without making sure it was my brother’s. It was dark by then. I got a lantern and a bar, and opened the coffin. Instantly I was sick. That is how bad the smell was. I lay on the ground and was sick in my brother’s open grave. But I was strong and young and I must have been brave too because I had just killed a brave and handsome man, so I forced myself to hold up the lantern and look. I looked. I looked into that box that smelled like a charnel house. And when I saw that it was empty, strong and young and brave as I was, I fainted. Do you know now, William? Do you know now the nature of your birthright?”
