Disappearances, page 9
My grandfather’s rationale in sending a boy of ten out alone at night in winter through wilderness country was that if he happened to be stopped and questioned he could always say that his folks were sick and he was going for help or the house had burned down or a tree had fallen on his father. My grandfather had enormous faith in my father’s resourcefulness. Very early on their relationship developed into a professional partnership based on mutual respect for one another’s competence. They worked together in the woods. They smuggled whiskey together, and by the time my father was twelve they were drinking together, and between them consuming at least two bottles of white mule moonshine whiskey every day.
If there were schools my father and his brothers and sisters never went to any of them. Apparently my father taught himself to read and write sometime after leaving home. As is often the case with persons who learn to read later than usual, he rarely forgot anything he heard or observed. He learned how to speak English and French with equal facility and how to discern from looking once quickly at a stranger which language to address him in. He could walk through a section of spruce or fir or mixed hardwood and softwood and estimate with the precision of a professional cruiser how many cords of pulp or feet of logs could be cut on it and how long the work would take. He was an expert trapper; by the time he was ten he was making enough money on the pelts of the muskrat and mink and otter and beaver he trapped to buy his own clothes and ammunition—my grandfather furnished his whiskey free in exchange for making the runs. From moving so frequently and from his night whiskey runs he developed a preternatural sense of direction, like a wild animal’s. He often told me that I could take him blindfolded to any spot within twenty-five miles of the Canadian border from eastern New Brunswick to western Quebec and he could remove the blindfold and walk directly to the nearest town.
He did not walk to many towns while he was growing up. Without exception the farms where my grandfather bivouacked his family were as far from town as it was possible to be. Home for my father was a succession of incredibly isolated, barely habitable houses where they never stayed for more than a year and to which they never returned. This nomadic existence was especially hard for my grandmother, whom my father described as trying at first to make a home of the falling-down shanties, planting a kitchen garden, harvesting a few early table vegetables, having to leave the rest for the coons and deer and bears, and finally giving up gardening altogether—finally giving up everything but the daily routine of caring for the children and the house and her husband. My father did not know where she originally came from or who her people were, except that they were French.
My father said my grandfather was not abusive to my grandmother or to him and the other children, but regarded them all as accoutrements to his two trades and valued them in accordance with their respective abilities to handle an axe, a peavey or a loaded whiskey wagon. As my father described him to me he was a big man, well over six feet, with a dark beard and a bluff, shrewd, not unkind manner, who seemed to enjoy teaching his sons how to play the fiddle Canadian style, shoot a spruce grouse on the wing, sing the old voyageur paddling songs, tell time and direction from the sun and stars, fight like a wildcat and drink a quart of whiskey a day without falling down or getting sick. Like my father, my grandfather did not talk much about his past, though he once said that he began drinking with his father and grandfather and great-grandfather—that would have been René Bonhomme—as soon as he started walking, and that since running away from Cordelia when he was fourteen he had drunk at least a quart of whiskey a day himself.
“I run away over whiskey too,” my father said after a short pause, his voice casual and anecdotal. “Only it was under different circumstances. We was living near here then, in a cabin right where that one down below sets, though it warn’t that cabin, and Pa, he had a big load he wanted to send over the line. It was early April, and still winter. I drove north of here a mile to a spot where I could get down to the lake. Then I drove back over the ice through the notch and on to where the county home is now. From there I picked up the Memphremagog road. Back then the county home was a summer place that belonged to Dr. Tett’s folks and warn’t used at all in the winter but there was two, three farms on the road and so they kept it rolled pretty good in the winter, and it was passable.
“I had clear coasting from there down to the covered bridge over the St. John, where the iron bridge and trestle are today. It was a great long bridge, the longest in the county, and it was there until the flood of twenty-seven. During the winter they had to shovel snow onto the floor so the sleighs could get across. At the south end they had a little toll building that was open in the summer. Winters they didn’t bother.
“Well, Bill, I was sixteen at the time. I’d made hundreds of runs and never come up against anything I couldn’t handle. It was a clear night, though way down below zero, but I was bundled up good with a buffalo robe over my legs and a bottle to keep me from minding the wind. I didn’t pay much attention when the horses shied as we started over the bridge. I thought that was just because it was dark and narrow, or maybe that they heard the water running free in the middle of the river where it had started to thaw and they wanted a drink. I was halfway over before I saw the lantern at the other end. For a second or two I still thought it was all right—that the lantern was my pickup and they had mistook where they was supposed to meet me by a mile or so. Then there was a loud thumping, and the sleigh was scraping and bumping along over the bare boards of the bridge where the hijackers had shoveled off the snow to slow me down. I reined in just at the other end with the sleigh still partly inside. There was two of them. One was holding my off horse’s bridle and the other was up ahead fifty feet or so by the empty toll shed. The near fella had a horse pistol aimed right square at my head.
“‘Climb down, boy, this is where you unload,’ the fella with the pistol says.
“‘Don old me hup, meester,’ says I. ‘Papa, ees cut him foot most hoff wit de haxe and lay pass out on de cabin floor. Mama, she don know how long he las. Me, I ave to get de doctor, hor papa, she be gone.’”
My father laughed. “That part about Pa laying passed out on the floor was true enough. Earlier that evening he’d got up a full head of steam and commenced to fighting the War of Rebellion with William Shakespeare and Calvin again. He’d put on a foolish blue cap he kept a-purpose for such occasions and set my little brothers and sisters to mounting a charge on the hog pen. Just before I left he dumb over into the pen himself and picked up a four-hundred-pound sow by the ears. Picked her right up off the ground, Wild Bill, and hollered at her, ‘You, sir, Robert E. Lee, sir. Will you surrender, General?’ It was a rare sight to see and a fine moving speech to hear with the little uns standing at attention and saluting, and me laughing so hard I couldn’t hardly harness the team. ‘You, sir, Robert E. Lee, sir. Will you surrender, General?’ And the poor hog squealing and hanging up there in front of Pa helpless as a small piglet. You and Pa would have taken to one another, Bill. The wilder a boy was the higher Pa prized him. He prized me very highly, and would have you.
“Well, I knowed by the time I got to the bridge that Pa was laying like a stone on the floor, and for a minute I thought the fella with the lantern believed me, because he says, ‘We won’t hold you up long, boy. We wouldn’t want your Pa to bleed to death after cutting off his foot with that haxe.’
“Then the other fella shouts out, ‘No, not after sending us all that whiskey you’ve got loaded in the back of that cutter.’
“‘Climb down now directly,’ the first fella says. ‘No more of your tricks. This gun shoots smart-mouth French boys just as quick as white men.’
“‘This one shoots thieves and sons of bitches just as quick as rabbits and pa’tridges,’ says I, and blasted a great hole clean through the buffalo robe with the shotgun I had pointed at the fella the whole time. He jumped like a Christly deer when the buckshot hit him, and flinged that lantern ten foot in the air. But I didn’t have time to admire the fireworks. I got the other fella with the second barrel before the first one landed on the snow down below by the river.
“I dumb fast out of the sleigh and went up to where the second fella was laying dead across his rifle by the toll shed. I taken his feet and started to drag him down the bank to the river. But his head was half blowed off at the neck and I was afraid it would come clean off, so I had to go around and take holt of his shoulders and skid him down to the ice with the head lolling off to one side, hanging there by just a cord or two. Next I went up in the woods and found a pole, and I wasn’t long about it neither. I pushed them two bodies out over the ice with the pole, one at a time, being careful not to catch that fella’s head under him and shear it off. I shoved the carcasses off the ice into the open water, and throwed their lanterns and guns and the pole in after them. I never did find their team. They must have bolted when they heard my shotgun let go.
“Well, Bill, your father had a decision to make, and there was never a man who could make up his mind any faster than Quebec Bill Bonhomme—which was my second decision, to change my name back to Bonhomme. The first was to whup up the team and drive straight to the drop point to pick up my money. Then on at a dead gallop through the main street of Memphremagog and out past the lower river to the Common and along the county road and up the hollow to Cordelia’s, where I’d never been before in my life and only heard about once or twice when Pa was drunk and recollecting how he and my grandfather that built barns had gotten drunk together. But I knowed right where to go. And Cordelia, who had never seen me afore or had any way to know I even existed, come to the door and held her lantern up to my face and knowed me too. ‘You look like my Grandfather René,’ she said. ‘You smell like him too. You’re young William’s boy and you’ve been drinking.’
“‘That’s not all I’ve been doing,’ I says. ‘Let me in, Aunt Cordelia. I just shot and kilt two hijackers.’”
My father asked Cordelia to deliver the team and sleigh and part of the whiskey money to my grandfather and to explain what had happened. She agreed to do this and to put him on the morning train for Boston. She told him that it was near the St. John River where the men René St. Laurent Bonhomme brought to Kingdom County with him had vanished. She talked to my father about time, its cyclical and illusory nature, and the recurrence of themes and events down through the generations. Her speaking of René Bonhomme may have inspired his decision to assume the old French surname as an alias. They sat up talking all night, with Cordelia doing most of the talking. At dawn she took him to the train.
From Boston my father decided to go west. By 1896 most of the east was used up, but he had heard about the vast forests and plains of Wyoming and Montana and Oregon and Washington, so he bought a ticket for Seattle and headed out. He told me that he was drunk most of the way, though not quite so drunk as the drummers who paid for his whiskey and from whom he won hundreds of dollars at poker believed.
My father liked Washington. He said he didn’t miss home because he’d never been in one place long enough to have a home to miss. Undoubtedly he missed his parents and brothers and sisters, but thinking about what he left behind in the St. John River that April night must have tempered his loneliness. He accepted the fact that for some time he would have to remain a fugitive.
From Seattle he went north to work in the tall coastal forests. He began as a bull cook, assistant to the head cook in a lumber camp. Soon he was climbing up giant Douglas firs with an axe and a safety belt and hacking off the top thirty or forty feet of the trees to prevent them from hanging up on smaller trees as they fell. When the crown snapped off, the upper trunk to which he was belted whipped and jumped like a bucking horse. He said he liked that, twanging back and forth two hundred feet up in the air. He also liked to gaze out from the treetops over the Pacific Ocean, but he never looked too long at a time because he sensed that if he did he would be a sailor the rest of his life. He tried to stay within sight of the Canadian border from the top of a tree.
When he grew tired of lumbering he moved over to northern Montana and worked on a ranch. From there he crossed the border to a wheat farm in southern Saskatchewan. He drifted back into whiskey running because it was an easy way for him to make money. He drank every day.
One night in a backroom gambling parlor in some nameless border fourcorners in northern Idaho a self-styled promoter of quick money-making schemes watched my father beat into insensibility a man more than a foot taller and a hundred and fifty pounds heavier than himself. A week later they were in Denver, where my father was fighting barefisted matches for purses of several hundred dollars against some of the toughest men in the Rocky Mountains. Denver was still a wide-open settlement then, and such activities were apparently regarded as principal attractions of the city. Men congregated there from New Orleans and Chicago, San Francisco and St. Louis and Portland to bet on the fights, promote them or participate in them. Every night bouts were held on back street corners, in makeshift rings inside warehouses, in abandoned mining camps on the outskirts of the city. The only regulation was that no weapons were permitted, so if he got into trouble with his fists my father could and did use his feet, against which even the biggest men were helpless. He told me that before Uncle Henry broke his jaw he had never lost a fight or sustained a lasting mark on his head or body. Then just as the promoter was talking about arranging for him to turn professional and fight as a lightweight, he left Denver to visit his family, departing as suddenly and with as little forethought as he had gone west originally. This time, though, he was not running away from anything. He said that April night on the covered bridge was the only time in his life he had ever had to do that.
It was April again. He had been away five years. Possibly it was the time of year that stirred that desire in him to leave Denver, to begin the pilgrimage which he had no way of knowing would become a quest that would last more than fifteen years. Not that he expected to find his family in the cabin on Lake Memphremagog where they had been living the night he ran away—he knew they would have left there years ago. A farmer who lived a few miles from the abandoned cabin said that the Goodmans had left in the spring after that first winter. He thought they had headed over toward Megantic, near the Maine border. My father didn’t expect to find them in Megantic either, or in Chateauguay in upstate New York where he heard they had gone next. But as the summer wore on into fall and the first snow found him back in Memphremagog with no money and no idea where his parents and brothers and sisters might be, he thought of Cordelia. It was possible, he supposed, that his family had maintained some contact with her. She was in the barn when he arrived, and she knew who he was without even looking up from the cow she was milking. “Is the sky the same color out there?” she said.
Cordelia hadn’t heard of William Goodman or his family since the day she returned the team five years before. She said she hadn’t thought about them. She had spent the time since my father had left milking her cow, feeding her chickens, carrying water from the well to the barn and house, and when the well was dry carrying it from the brook a quarter of a mile away; scything enough hay off the meadows to get her cow through the winter; making a little maple sugar; teaching Milton and Aristotle and Pope and Virgil to children who if they spoke English at all often did not know their letters; immersing herself in the isolation of the hilltop farm, her profession and her conviction that all human endeavor, including her own, was illusory though not necessarily futile.
“Where do you think they might be?” my father said.
“Anywhere,” Cordelia said. “Nowhere.”
Then she had told my father how René Bonhomme had disappeared.
“You mean they just disappeared like Grampa René?” I said. “Twelve people disappeared off the face of the earth?”
“Eleven, Bill. I was the twelfth, and I ain’t disappeared yet.”
“They must have gone somewhere.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I thought so at the time. I couldn’t see what some old man drownding on the lake or walking off to die in the woods had to do with my folks. Just like you, I figured they had to be someplace. So I set off in earnest to find them.”
He persuaded Cordelia to outfit him with a team and sleigh, and spent that winter traveling along the border inquiring for his family and taking orders for a seed company out of Montreal. In the spring the seed company branched off into farm implements, which he sold that summer and fall to subsidize his search. By the following winter he had built up a sizable clientele and was beginning to be well known along the Canadian line: a small man, not old, with white hair and sharp blue eyes who sold more seeds and machinery than most of the other men who worked for the company precisely because he didn’t seem to care whether he sold any seeds or machinery at all; the selling was incidental to the search.
“Goodman? I believe there’s a Goodman over near Edmunston, across the line. I think he works at the depot. I don’t know whether he has a family. May be. Now that corn planter in your book there. Where would I have to go to see one of them in operation? You come in and have a bite, mister. I want to show that book of yours to Marie. She might be able to tell you more about that Goodman fella.”
My father’s search was gradually becoming a way of life. He learned not to raise his expectations as one after another he met dozens of wrong Goodmans: lumberers and tenant farmers; railroad clerks and teamsters; mill workers, blacksmiths, a bank president and even a few whiskey smugglers. He realized after two or three years that he was probably not going to find his family, though like those mythological knights who devoted their lives to searching for mythological chalices he remained as opti mistic as ever. He stayed on with the company because he liked the work.
