Disappearances (13 page)

He began to run a little whiskey again, carrying a case or two at a time under the boxes of sample seeds and catalogues. He continued drinking. Somewhere in his travels he acquired the name Quebec Bill, pronounced with the hard French k. He ran an impromptu delivery service, carrying notes, invitations, packages, covered dishes, word-of-mouth messages. Sometimes he crossed the border several times a day. He was never more than twenty-five or thirty miles north or south of the forty-fifth parallel, that arbitrary demarcation that had stretched through five generations of our family like a five-thousand-mile umbilical cord to the past, along which he had sojourned all his life and which existed only on paper but represented all the geographical and historical continuity he had ever known.

He loved just to travel through the countryside, as he later enjoyed driving around in our Ford. Often he was up before the family he had stayed overnight with, especially if there was a daughter of eighteen or twenty with an even better reason than she had the night before to want him to stay. He drove out of dooryards in the chill dawn, sometimes catching half a dozen speckled trout and cooking them for breakfast along some misty wild stretch of the St. Croix or Allagash or St. John; sometimes stopping between farms at noon and eating cheese and crackers, sitting with his back against a sugar maple and looking down over the variegated patchwork landscape of corn and standing hay and cut hay and buckwheat and oats and clover grown from the seeds he sold, so that he was able to enjoy a sense of accomplishment and belonging without being tied down to one piece of land. He worked hard, played hard, drank hard, measuring time by the seasons that governed his comings and goings and by his yearly visits to Cordelia and to the cabin site on Lake Memphremagog.

Years passed.

“William Goodman? I knowed some Goodmans over Sherbrooke way. Not those? I can't call to mind no others. My boy might know. He's traveled all over these parts girling it, but he's over across in France just now. That would be Henry. He's a great big fella, like his pa you might say. That's most likely why they taken him. I've got a picture of him inside. You say your name is Bonhomme? I'd like to see that book you've got there. I work in the woods mainly but I've got ten, twelve acres of hay up on the ridge that I'd like to cut off for the horses. Do you rent out equipment? Just me and the girl here now that Henry's over beyond whupping Kaiser Bill. Stay around a day or so. It gets downright lonely. Girl's down from Montreal on holiday this month. She goes to nun school up there. Studying to be a sister, she be. One of them black praying kind. I'd like to change her mind, but she promised her ma just before she passed away . . .”

It was July, the time of year my father usually visited the overgrown clearing on the lake where his parents had lived twenty years before. Now the garrulous man who already at eleven in the morning was quite drunk was leading him into a cabin almost identical to the one he had left for good on the same site two decades before, except that it was so new that pitch was still oozing out of the logs, some of which were still encased in bark. It was the sort of crude tight cabin René Bonhomme might have thrown together, working hurriedly so he could get on to something more important. To this huge verbose hearty intoxicated woodsman, clearing the land and drinking were more important, so my father couldn't avoid connecting him with his own father and feeling that he had finally through sheer perseverance found something like the home he had spent half his life searching for.

On and on the big man talked. He told how cheaply he had bought the land and how he had put up the cabin in less than two weeks. He had great hopes for the place. He would cut the woods off, root out the stumps, make a farm of it if it killed him. He and Henry would run the farm together after Henry finished whupping the Kaiser. The farm was not all he intended to run with Henry. With the lake and the border so near there were other ways of making money besides farming. If my father, whom he had not known for five minutes, wanted to stay on for a few days he might tell him how. He looked at my father with amused eyes and poured him a drink. “You might be just the man to save Vangie from the praying nuns,” he said.

“By that time, Bill, I was thinking exactly the same thing,” my father said. “As soon as I laid eyes on that slim dark-haired gal setting an extra place at the table I knowed that if I had anything to do with it she was never going to be a praying nun or any other kind.”

I think that my father's resolution may have been inspired more by his discovering a family, or part of a family, where he had left his own than by my mother's good looks. As Aunt Cordelia once said, my mother was a woman of considerable pulchritude, but my father had seen hundreds of good-looking girls in his travels, many of whom would have liked to marry him and some of whom undoubtedly had good reason to wish they had. Psychologically, the impact of discovering anyone at all on this haunted spot by the lake must have been so overpowering that he had no choice other than to stay and help Hercule Coville.

It is impossible to know what attracted my mother to my father. Sometimes, growing up on the farm, I thought she loved him most for his laughter, especially since like her brother, Henry, she was a rather grave person herself. Since she was five she had spent eleven months of every year at a convent school, where there could not have been much levity of any kind. She had just turned eighteen the summer she met my father, and had one month to decide whether to become a cloistered nun. Until the day my father appeared in the dooryard of the cabin she had never considered any other course than joining the convent. As my Grandfather Coville told my father during the first two minutes of their acquaintance, she had made a vow to her dying mother.

There was nothing sacred about this vow to my father or old Hercule. Immediately they entered into a conspiracy to change my mother's vocation. This did not prove difficult. Except for his white hair, Quebec Bill Bonhomme never looked or acted any older than my mother. She later implied to my father that their unsubtle machinations were all unnecessary—she had fallen in love with him almost as quickly as he fell in love with her. Evenings after he had worked in the woods and drunk whiskey and plotted all day with her father, he and my mother canoed on the lake, picked blackberries and blueberries, sat talking around the bug-swirled lantern while Hercule smirked in the background or conspicuously absented himself to go drink in the woods. Sometimes they went riding in my father's wagon. Sometimes they walked to the clearing on the ridge to sit under the boulder and look down the long blue sweep of the lake. I have often wondered whether I might have been conceived in that spot, with Hercule rubbing his whiskey-numbed hands together down at the cabin or lurking like a satyr in some nearby copse, delighted to have reduced the risk of an isolated old age by having acted the part of a procurer for his own daughter, the erstwhile novitiate.

My mother told my father that that summer was the happiest time in her life since her own mother had died. It was marred by only two considerations, neither involving her vow to enter the convent—she had apparently decided not to do that so suddenly and unequivocally that there had never been any period of uncertainty at all. One day she implicitly accepted the inevitability of the nunnery; the next she realized that she had renounced it forever without even having to decide to do so. Her main concern was for Uncle Henry's safety in France, which must have secretly worried my grandfather as well, quite possibly contributing to his uninterrupted drinking. That, the drinking, was my mother's second anxiety. Hercule and my father were drinking together every day, all day, as my father had drunk with his own father before going west. They drank whiskey like water from the time they got up in the morning until they went to bed at night. It did not seem to affect my father, but over the years my mother had seen its effect on my grandfather, that bemused scheming giant who like my Grandfather Goodman had saturated himself in alcohol all his life.

Uncle Henry made it safely home from France, surviving both the loss of a lung in a gas attack and the subsequent medical treatment at an army hospital. But as a result of one of those unaccountable and tragic ironies to which both sides of my family have been susceptible, Hercule Coville never had the opportunity to rejoice in either his son's safe return or the formal consummation of that deliverance from the convent he had spent so much time intriguing to obtain for his daughter. The day in August my parents drove up to Magog to be married, planning to surprise the old man with the news on their return, a bull spruce he was cutting swiveled on its half-severed base, kicked off at a diabolical angle and crushed him to death. Late that afternoon they found him by the alcohol reek, potent and unmistakable over the evergreen scent of the tree that had killed him.

My mother apparently believed that Hercule's death would sober my father up if anything could. But he continued to drink, consuming a quart of whiskey while he dug his father-in-law's grave on a knoll above the cabin. He laughed at my mother's objections and began transporting Canadian whiskey by boat down to Memphremagog. He laughed with delight when she told him she was pregnant, and he continued drinking and smuggling and laughing until one morning in October after the leaves were down he returned from a whiskey run to discover that she had disappeared, vanished as inexplicably as his parents and brothers and sisters.

When he first discovered my mother's disappearance he believed that she might have wandered into the woods and gotten lost. Sometimes, so he had heard, pregnant women isolated from other persons did strange things. He spent days and nights combing the wild ridges above the lake and found nothing. A horrible possibility occurred to him: she might be in the lake itself. He began to dive, going down sixty and seventy and eighty feet where the water was so dark he had to grope along the bottom feeling for her body with his hands. He continued diving on into November, but found nothing.

When the lake froze over he drank himself into a raving frenzy and found the convent where my mother had studied in Montreal. He threatened to kill the mother superior if she didn't tell him where his bride was. A priest rushed in. My father promptly kicked him through a stained-glass window. He ran through the inner sanctum of the convent, flinging open cell doors and blaspheming like old Karamazov. He told me that during this privileged if hurried tour he hoped to expose priests and nuns in lewd embraces. He did not, he said, expect to find my mother. Before the police arrived he got out through a back door and scrambled over a tall stone wall.

Again it was April. He was standing in Cordelia's dooryard without being able to remember how he had gotten there or why he had come. It was twilight and snowing. Cordelia was chopping wood, bent cronelike over the big maple block on which she was hacking up slabs for the kitchen stove.

“Ah,” she said. “They're gone.”

Full of whiskey, malnourished, having spent the winter raging through border towns in search of my mother, my father thought that his great-aunt was succumbing at last to senescence. He thought that in her conviction that the passage of time was illusory and events only repeated themselves infinitely she was confusing his appearance with that other abrupt appearance nearly twenty years before when he had announced that his par
ents had disappeared. Then almost as quickly as that thought entered his mind he knew he was wrong. He knew that Cordelia was referring to my mother and me.

My father had not yet told Cordelia he was married. He did not know how she could be aware of our existence at all, any more than she could have been aware of his existence when she first saw him. Yet she not only knew about us, she knew where and how to find us and was determined to do so and bring us back to Kingdom County. She did not even wait for my father to sober up. Two hours after he rode into her dooryard they were sitting in the station in Kingdom Common waiting for the next train to Montreal, which left at dawn. They had to sit on a bench near the tall coal stove all night, a bent woman with a relentless almost prehistoric aspect, to whom the perpetuation of her grandfather's family against all odds had suddenly become an end in itself, and a tiny white-haired man who might except for time, which she refused to acknowledge, have been that grandfather. My father told me that once during the night she looked at him and said calmly, “Your canoe is still safe in the barn. It will be there when you need it.” So maybe it was the perpetuation of René St. Laurent Bonhomme and the past itself that Cordelia was trying to ensure, as though to persuade herself that the past at least was real.

It was dawn, and they were riding north, headed back toward the city from which René Bonhomme had departed for good more than a century before. Cordelia had never been in Montreal. She had never been in any city. But she walked straight from the train station to her destination a mile away in the old part of the city, my father skipping to keep up as she led the way through the narrow cobbled slushy streets. She veered sharply without breaking stride and swung open a black iron gate. She had never before failed to close a gate in her life and would have rather misquoted Dryden than left a gate open. Now she did not even swing it to behind them. Nor did she shut the massive black door of the convent. She walked straight past the astonished nuns, past the new stained-glass window, up two winding flights of stairs my father had overlooked in his rampage and directly to the room where I had been born three days before and where now the mother superior and the priest were filling out the papers that would relegate me unnamed and fatherless to a Catholic orphanage. My mother was holding me for what she thought was the last time and crying.

Cordelia went straight to the bed. “Get dressed and get your son ready,” she said. “Your husband is here to take you home.”

The priest started to object.