Disappearances (15 page)

The second load banged against the edge of the rock shelf. The next cleared the edge with a foot to spare but glanced sharply off the cliff below. My father was almost yanked off his feet, and I heard the sound of glass breaking.

“Send down two cases instead of four,” Uncle Henry called up. “We ain't in that much hurry.”

Rat was picking his way along over the talus like some ancient aquatic denizen coming ashore for the first time and not much liking it. He looked up at the descending whiskey and quickly sat down and covered his eyes. Then he uncovered them and looked straight up at my father. “Quebec Bill,” he shouted, “you be careful of my case. Don't you bang my case like that.”

Six cases were now descending from the top of the cliff, and now lodging, as anyone but my father would know they would, on the shelf. With the sudden release of pressure he staggered back out of view, jerking one corner of the rope sling off the cases. A case tottered on the edge of the shelf.

“Look out,” I yelled.

Uncle Henry flattened himself against the base of the cliff. The falling case smashed to bits on the rocks at his feet. His face remained quite calm as he wiped the whiskey off it.

“I hope that warn't mine,” Rat called up.

“No, Rat,” my father said. “Yours is hung up on the ledge. Just climb up like that albiner fella did and tie the rope back on again if you will.”

Rat looked up at the smooth beetling granite. In spots below the ledge exfoliation had actually cut the cliff back toward its base at an obtuse angle. “What albiner?” he said.

“Leave them go,” Uncle Henry called up to my father, who had tied the free end of the rope around the fir tree and was unraveling the slack down onto the shelf beside the stranded whiskey.

“Leave them go, for Christ's sake,” Uncle Henry shouted.

Paying no attention to us, my father hopped down the face of the cliff on the taut rope. He knelt on the ledge and readjusted the sling. Then he stood up and lowered the remaining five cases to the bottom. He walked back up the cliff on the rope and successfully lowered the last seven cases—all at once.

“Are you going to climb down the rope?” I called up hopefully.

“No, we may need it.” He snapped his wrist and the rope came down in a long undulating wave and coiled up like a snake at the foot of the cliff.

“Paddle back to where you put in,” my father said. “I'll meet you there in five minutes.”

Uncle Henry got into the stern. “Come on, Rat,” I said.

Rat sat on a rock back near the base of the cliff, working on his bottle. “I can't do it,” he said. “I've got the lumbago too bad to risk it. My whole spine is numb.”

“Both my feet are numb,” I shouted. “Get in this canoe.”

“Have another sup and get in,” Uncle Henry said.

Rat had another sup. “I still can't do it,” he said philosophically. “Seasickness runs in the family. You don't know how deathly sick us Kinnesons get when we leave dry land.”

“Fine,” Uncle Henry said. “You can stay behind on dry land and greet General Grant for us. Something tells me he'll be along sooner or later. Get in, Billy.”

“I believe it'll be sooner,” my father called down. “Get in that canoe like the devil was after you, Rat Kinneson. Because I think he is. Quick now, boys. Beat for the point. There's a vehicle coming down the tote road.”

Rat nearly swamped us in his haste to get into the canoe. I thought my father was playing a trick to get Rat in gear, but he shouted again for us to head for the point as quickly as we could.

“What are you going to do?” I yelled.

“Join you directly. Paddle now. Paddle, boys.”

Uncle Henry and I began to paddle fast. The canoe was stable, but we were moving directly into the waves angling in off the lake. I looked back over my shoulder and saw my father's red hunting jacket moving through the dark branches of the fir. “Paddle like hell,” he shouted. “It's that cannon truck and it's backing up.”

A moment later we heard fiendish bellowing followed closely by a cannon blast and the clangorous rending of metal. White Lightning plunged over the edge of the cliff. It bounced off its nose on the rock shelf, exploded and fell flaming like a meteor into the lake.

“No,” Uncle Henry said.

“Did you see that, boys?” my father shouted from the fir tree.

I didn't dare look at Uncle Henry's face, but Rat's was uplifted and had assumed a beatific mien.

“Zacchaeus,” a voice rumbled, “come down out of that tree.”

The top of the fir tree was shaking. It began to sway in long rhythmic dips. My father's body came catapulting out of the spire in a compact tumbler's ball just before the next blast. Halfway up its trunk the fir split in two. The upper half dropped onto the ledge. Meanwhile my father shot through the air a hundred and fifty feet above the lake.

“Hallelujah,” yelled Rat. “He has been taken up.” He threw both his arms over his head, and for the second time nearly capsized us. “Whup. Here he comes back down again. See there, Henry, they won't have him. Look out. There he goes. He's under. He's gone. I warned him. That's the end. Goodbye, Quebec Bill.”

We had nearly reached the point by then. The cannon truck appeared under the splintered fir. Standing beside the projecting muzzle was Carcajou. He was wearing a black suit, with his beard tucked inside a clerical collar, small and white against the dark suit and the dark sky. His white hair was flying back away from his head in the gale. His arms were outstretched in a parody of a benediction. He looked like a crazed old Elijah, a storybook wizard rocking up a storm to drown us, an enraged and blinded Cyclops preparing to hurl boulders at fleeing Odysseus. He did not look like any man I had ever seen. I was overpowered by a dreamlike helplessness, as though I were entering a realm of myth and illusion over which I had no control.

Rat evidently had a similar impression. “There were giants in the earth,” he informed Uncle Henry and me with great piety before fainting away on the whiskey cases.

My father emerged in the middle of the bay. He rolled onto his back and swam with only his head out of the water, looking back up at Carcajou, bracing himself against the wind.

“Fire,” Carcajou roared.

The cannon went off. A waterspout geysered up near my father's head. Instantly he sounded.

“Fetch him, Gabriel. Bring that soul to Christ.”

Out of the dark interior of the cannon truck sprang one of the two remaining members of Carcajou's gang. He ran straight off the edge of the cliff like a water spaniel and hit the water swimming.

My father surfaced again.

“Look out,” Uncle Henry and I shouted together.

We were having trouble keeping the canoe off the ice chunks and rocks at the end of the point but Uncle Henry was going to have to handle that job by himself. I reached for the shotgun. “Swing the bow around,” I shouted at Henry.

My father and Gabriel had both gone under while still a hundred yards or so apart. While we waited for them to come up I kept expecting to be blasted to bits by the cannon. But Carcajou evidently didn't care about us, it was my father he wanted. A white head appeared fifty feet away: Gabriel's. I pulled up, fired and missed. The head turned inquiringly in my direction, reminding me again of a spaniel searching the water for a dead duck. I fired the second barrel. The canoe pitched. Another miss.

I fumbled in the pack basket for shells, stuffed two more in the gun and swung it up. A fraction of a second before I fired Gabriel vanished like a duckling pulled under by a turtle.

“Look,” Uncle Henry said. “Deliverance is at hand.”

A boat was speeding across the bay out of the north. As it drew closer I could see the RCMP insignia on its prow. An officer in a crimson coat and a black hat stood up behind the wheel. His gun was out and pointed in our direction. I quickly lowered the shotgun. Uncle Henry gestured with his paddle toward the cliff. The cannon thundered again just as the officer started to turn his head, which simply disappeared from his shoulders. For a second or two the decapitated Mountie continued to stand behind the wheel while a fountain of blood spurted out of his torso and sprayed back over the lake on the wind. Then he toppled overboard and the boat veered in toward shore. I watched in amazement, horror, disbelief. It was like watching a matinee at the Common picture show, with myself as one of the actors. I couldn't accept the fact that this was happening to me, even though I was training the shotgun over the bay again, waiting for Gabriel to come up, determined this time to blast off his head like the Mountie's.

My father surfaced close to the canoe. He pulled himself over the side and grabbed the bow paddle. The last sound we heard as we rounded the point was a simultaneous baying, whinny
ing, crowing, bleating, the frenzied ululations of an entire deranged barnyard.

I kept turning back, expecting to see Gabriel pursue us in the Mountie's launch.

“Don't worry about him,” my father said. “He's down below keeping his brother company.”

Ahead in the dusk the looming notch resembled nothing so much as the gates of hell. Whoever or whatever Carcajou might be, that wild dark lake was no myth.

“Dad,” I yelled, “the whiskey isn't worth it. The farm isn't worth it.”

“You're right, Wild Bill, they ain't. There's only one thing now that's worth staying here for one more minute. That is killing that son of a bitch Carcajou. I intend to kill him.”

The lake was running in long high rolling oceanic swells coming directly up through the notch from the south, so that we seemed to be trying to paddle against the current of a large and powerful river that over the eons had cut its own dark canyon into the mountains. The indistinct gleaming of the cliffs above us enhanced this riverine illusion. When I looked up at the whitish clouds scudding north across the face of the moon we seemed to be moving very fast. This too was an illusion; it was the clouds that were making good time, not us. I tried to gauge our progress through the notch by taking a sighting on a particular cliff. Then the moon would go under the racing clouds. When it reappeared I couldn't tell whether the cliff we had seemed to gain on was the same one. My father was in the bow again and I was kneeling close behind him to offset Uncle Henry's weight in the stern. Rat was still stretched out on the whiskey, dead to the world. That, I thought, was the one thing in our favor.

The water between those mountains was more like a tidal bore than a lake. The waves were so close together that as they broke one after another onto the rocks to our left the spray rose six or eight feet into the air in a continuous line.

“Them are real breakers,” my father shouted. “Hear them thunder, boys. Hear that old wind howl. I told you we'd have us a sleigh ride.”

I was badly frightened. René Bonhomme had built his canoe to move heavy loads over heavy water, but anything that floated, from an outrigger to a battleship, would have had trouble on the lake that night. Uncle Henry said later that he would have run for shore despite my father's objections if there had been any way to make it safely through those breakers.

I was also afraid that we had not seen the last of Carcajou. I couldn't believe that anyone but my father would enjoy being out on any part of Lake Memphremagog in that storm, much less caught in the middle of the notch, but as Uncle Henry had said, Carcajou was crazy. Now he had a boat again, and a good one. He might do anything. He might come at us at any moment from any direction, baying and howling like the wind.

 

I still cannot understand how I managed to go to sleep in the midst of all that fury. Rat was drunk, but I wasn't. Some persons have the marvelous faculty of dropping off to sleep in seconds when they are worried or afraid. I have never been able to do this. Motion can be lulling, but the wild heaving of our canoe on Lake Memphremagog that night could not be described as soporific. I must have been terrifically fatigued, physically and mentally, but too excited to know it until I woke up and realized that I had been asleep, and for some time, since the moon was now noticeably lower in the sky.

Over the wind and waves I could hear the faint steady rapping of the launch engine. We were still in the notch and there was no place to land. The noise of the engine seemed to fade. Then it grew louder. A light appeared several hundred yards behind us. It swept over the shoreline, illuminating the spray on the dark cliffs. It traveled methodically out toward the middle of the lake. It swung back toward shore. The launch did not appear to be moving fast. It was barely possible, I supposed, that it was another police boat, searching for the missing officer.

My father turned around. “Load the shotgun, Bill.”

“It is.”

“Good. Change places with me. You come up here.”

He inserted the paddle under the bow, and we crawled past each other. He handed the shotgun up to me. “Hold it over the side like it was a paddle, Bill. Now listen. There will be two of them. The albiner will have the gun. I'll tend to him. Then I'll holler. When I holler you fling up and let loose for Carcajou. Don't aim. Just point and cut loose. Bag yourself a wolverine, Wild Bill.”

So Wild Bill Bonhomme was going to get a trophy for himself. That was my father's incredible plan. He had brought us out on that wild night so that I could shoot my first man. Squeeze the trigger, Bill, don't jerk it. When them birds go up from under that apple tree point the gun, don't aim. You won't have time to aim. Whiskey running warn't all I learned him, Evangeline. Wild Bill shot his first wolverine out there on that lake. We was going to set up the head on the wall down to the hotel, only Bill here blowed it clean off. Rat dressed off the carcass; it's hanging in the Canada plum tree outside Cordelia's window. Wild Bill bagged him. Our boy. How was it, Bill? Did it give you satisfaction? Did you feel like you felt when you got your first buck. Look out in the plum tree, Aunt. See Bill's wolverine. What's left of it.