Disappearances (16 page)

Yes, and if I had my way there was not going to be much left of it. I knew now how my father had felt back on the covered bridge over the St. John when he was not much older than I was. I knew that I wanted to shoot Carcajou more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. And although I was vaguely aware that as bad as they were our circumstances did not justify my wanting so much to do it, I knew also that if we were going to get off that lake with our lives, I was going to have to.

Behind us the light moved unhurriedly over the water. We were only a hundred yards or so beyond its range when I heard the strains of singing over the rapping engine. First I couldn't make out the words. Then I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Carcajou was singing “
En Roulant,
” the voyageur's song. For a moment I was afraid my father was going to join in.

The moon appeared from under a galloping wrack of mares' tails, and the searchlight and “
En Roulant
” cut out at the same time. My father put his hunting knife between his teeth and slipped over the side of the canoe. I looked back and made out the tossing outline of the launch. I knew Carcajou had seen us.

“
Bon soir, voyageurs.
”

Deep bestial laughter came over the water, followed closely by a bright orange burst of machine-gun fire.

“
Arrêtez,
” Carcajou shouted. He did not waste any time circling us but gunned the launch up to within a few yards of our bow. In the moonlight I saw that he was dressed in a voyageur's costume, including the sash and plumed hat. The remaining member of his gang was dressed similarly. As my father had predicted, he was the one with the machine gun. Carcajou was steering, and lashed into the seat between them was the uniformed corpse of the headless Mountie.

“
Où est le petit LaChance?
”

“He drowned,” Uncle Henry said, keeping the bow of the canoe angled slightly away from the launch so they would not see my shotgun. “His name ain't LaChance.”

“
Je ne crois pas. Où est-il?
”

“Right here,” my father said behind him, raising himself partway over the side of the launch and lifting his arm.

The gunman whirled. My father's arm drove forward. The machine gun clattered wildly, but my father was already out of sight, and the gleaming point of his hunting knife was jutting out of the back of the falling outlaw's neck.

The launch was starting to turn. I brought up the shotgun as I had brought it up dozens of times before when my father and I walked slowly through the old apple orchard below the maples, cider-fragrant, October-still, waiting for the hard sudden burr of wings, the flash of pastel gray and soft brown, the gun swinging up almost independently, leading, leading, point don't aim, point, lead, the roar—you got him, Bill, you got him.

Still in the water, my father was shouting about dead wolverines and albiners. Carcajou had bellowed when the buckshot struck him, but he had not fallen. Now the launch was heading straight toward the cliffs. Just before cracking into the rocks it flipped over. My father was back in the canoe congratulating and hugging me and doing his best to tip us over. The lake was as wild as ever.

“Paddle,” Uncle Henry said. “Paddle, by Jesus Christ.”

 

We were emerging from the notch into the open lake, which if possible was rougher still. Here the waves were at least three feet high. The surface was unbroken whitewater. But my father insisted that we forge on down the lake while there was no possibility that anyone would spot us. He said that by morning the lake would be crawling with police searching for the Mountie. Now was the time to move, boys.

High on the mountainside over the lake the darkened monastery resembled a ruined gothic stronghold. A single light flickered from a lower chamber: Brother St. Hilaire's laboratory, no doubt, where now in the dead of night he and the Holy Ghost were pursuing their avocation.

My father was paddling the bow again. Kneeling behind him, I wondered whether I could get to shore when we capsized. Now that I had done it, I did not have any strong feeling at all about shooting Carcajou. Not satisfaction, certainly not remorse, only uneasiness because I had not seen him dead. My father assured me that half of Carcajou's face had been blasted away. But the hijacker he had shot from about the same distance long ago on the covered bridge had been lifted completely off his feet. Carcajou had just turned away. I should have fired the second barrel. I didn't understand why I hadn't pulled the second trigger.

“What's that?” Uncle Henry said. “You hear that, Bill? Can that be thunder?”

“Yes,” my father said. “No. I don't know. Yes I do too. Head for shore, Hen.”

Ahead of us I heard a low steady grumbling. Ten years later I would be reminded of that sound when I heard the convoys rumbling endlessly over the thick-slabbed concrete highways by night. At the time I too thought of thunder, distant summer thunder that growls on and on over the Green Mountains on a sweltering July night when the hay is down in the fields and drying.

We turned toward shore, but it was too late. All around us in the waves were heavy moving objects. There were dozens of them, hundreds of them, as long and cylindrical as torpedoes, grinding together, growling and pounding into the canoe.

“Christ,” Uncle Henry shouted. “The pulp.”

He was right. As I started to fend off the logs with the stock of the shotgun I realized that the booms behind the tugboat had separated in the storm; we were canoeing in a melee of pulpwood.

René Bonhomme's canoe had been built tough. You could drive your fist hard into the side with no effect. You could run over a submerged cedar stump and put a crease an inch deep in the bottom without opening it up. It had safely logged thousands and maybe tens of thousands of miles through parts of three centuries over some of the wildest water in the world. But no canoe, no small craft of any type, could have survived long in that pulp. It would have been literally ground to pulp itself.

“We've got to sink her,” my father shouted. “Stay close to Henry, Wild Bill. Swim underwater. I'll bring Rat.”

Without giving us time to object he seized the right side of the canoe and threw himself hard to the left, turning us out into the water. I couldn't catch my breath. Nothing could have prepared me for that stunning cold. We were quite near shore but my first thought was that if I ever did get my breath back I couldn't live sixty seconds in that arctic element, which was entirely unlike any water I had ever been in. A pulp log crashed into my shoulder. That gave me something else to think about. I dived.

That day and night had contained many marvels and revelations, but I did not expect to experience two more during the next ten seconds. First, I noticed with absurd detachment how contrastingly calm the water remained just a few feet below the surface: a fine lesson in the principles of fluidics for Young Lycidas. At the same time I sensed the briefest intimation of that mysterious allure drowning is said to hold, that seductive promise of a surcease of all travail, a psychological phenomenon I would never have believed if it had not happened to me. Then I was swimming underwater beside Uncle Henry, as bulky and deliberate as an old grampus.

Each time we surfaced to breathe and get our bearings we had to ward off the pulp, which seemed much denser toward shore. Under the water I had yet another vision. My life did not pass before me, but I vividly imagined the stretch of rapids in the Upper Kingdom where I had learned to swim. It was July, and I was very small and riding on my father's back like a young muskrat as he swam up through the whitewater. My mother and Cordelia were blackberrying along the woods edge of a nearby meadow. My mother waved. “Evangeline,” my father shouted as he swam. “See Wild Bill swim, Evangeline.” Cordelia said something to my mother. My mother waved again. Cordelia did not wave.

I stood in water about to my waist, trying to push my way through a solid mat of shifting pulp. It was tearing my clothes, bruising my legs and back. I staggered and fell. I tried to force my way up through the pulp but couldn't. My strength was gone. It occurred to me that I was going to drown in four feet of water. I made a last futile effort to bull up through that heaving layer of wood. Just as I began to swallow the lake Uncle Henry picked me up and carried me onto the rocks.

I coughed and sputtered. I shook uncontrollably and vomited. There wasn't much in my stomach but water, but everything there was came up. Uncle Henry held my head. I couldn't stop shaking. Finally I got myself under control enough to speak. “Uncle Henry,” I said, “thank you.”

“Oh,” Uncle Henry said mildly, “don't thank me, Billy. Thank your father.”

He turned and started back into the lake complacent as Proteus himself. Suddenly he stopped short. “Well,” he said. “Well. Look there, will you, Billy.”

I raised myself to my elbows and looked out at the lake. Running toward shore over the grinding chaos of wood and water was my father, with Rat in his arms. How he did it will always remain a mystery to me. He may have been inspired to that superhuman attempt by the dreadful possibility that if Rat should drown he would have to run the farm again by himself—but that doesn't explain how he accomplished it.

As soon as he reached shore my father set Rat upright and delivered a ferocious blow to his midsection. A quart or more of watered-down whiskey spewed out of Rat's mouth and he began to cough. My father shoved him down onto his stomach and proceeded to jump up and down on his back. Rat coughed some more. He lifted his head and croaked, “I have been down to the sea and been baptized by great fishes and small fishes.”

He choked and spewed more water. “Leviathan has sung to me sweetly,” he said.

He passed out again, but my father apparently did not feel that further resuscitation was necessary. “Rat's all right,” he said with great relief. “He thinks he's been to Sunday school with the whales.”

He rubbed his hands and played a bar on his imaginary fiddle. “What do you say, boys? Ain't this the trip to end all trips?”

Uncle Henry looked at me. He looked at Rat. He looked at the lake, absolutely primeval in its moonlit tumult. He looked at my father. Just loudly enough so that we both heard him he said, “Quite possibly.”

With that reply my father seemed to attain a true epiphany. Failure of any kind had always inspired his finest moments, but we had gone far beyond mere failure. We had lost every bottle of whiskey. White Lightning had been totally demolished. We had been shot at and nearly drowned. The blood of five men, outlaws or not, was on our hands. We would have to sell our cows or watch them starve. Very probably we would lose the farm, yet my father was leaning into the screaming wind, his white hair flying like mad Lear's, and laughing and whooping and laughing at the sublimity of his own ultimate hopefulness in the face of ultimate futility.

“That's wonderful,” he screamed. “Ain't it all wonderful, Wild Bill?”

My father had not been whooping and laughing the previous October when he and Uncle Henry had cut our maples. He had loved those trees, which that provident Scotchman Calvin Matthews had planted to replace those he cut and burned for potash. With a cleared hillside and a southern exposure the trees had grown rapidly as they passed down through the family. William Shakespeare Goodman cut a few off the top of the hill to make room for the round barn and the house. When she moved up to the farm during the Civil War Cordelia tapped a few near the barn for table sweetening. But my father was the first member of our family to make a commercial enterprise of sugaring.

Unlike every other commercial enterprise he attempted after leaving the seed and farm equipment business the sugaring venture was quite successful, maybe because it demanded an enormous amount of energy over a relatively short time rather than long endurance or any particular agrarian skill. My mother later told me that tapping the trees was my father's first project when he and Cordelia brought us back home to Kingdom County from Montreal in the spring of 1918. That first week it continued to snow, so he spent his days cutting a supply of firewood and his evenings whittling out beech taps. He borrowed a dozen buckets here and half a dozen there, and when the first thaw set in he tapped fifty maples, hanging three or four buckets on each tree. For several days he worked eighteen and twenty hours out of every twenty-four, rushing over the snow from the trees to the potash kettle where he was sugaring off, carrying two sloshing sap buckets on a wooden yoke across his shoulders. He made enough money from the maple sugar Cordelia and my mother finished off on the kitchen stove to buy two good registered Jerseys from Ben Currier.

That summer he cleared the encroaching cedar and beech and fir trees out of the maples. He built a sugar house and cut ten cords of wood for the coming spring, selling the potash kettle to an antique dealer and buying a boiling pan. He made a wooden vat for collecting sap and carved out runners for it. In his initial burst of enthusiasm for farming he scythed enough hay off the lower meadow to get the two cows through the winter. He got up a big woodpile for the house stoves, and banked the foundation with fir and spruce brush. He and my mother were happy. While Cordelia read
The Aeneid
to me in Latin in the kitchen, they went blueberrying on the north slope of the hill above the cedar swamp, picked up bruised apples in the orchard for cider, sat on the back stoop and husked sweet corn from the kitchen garden. In September Uncle Henry came home, missing one lung but otherwise healthy. He and my father became friends instantly. On fall evenings Uncle Henry held me and talked to me about the weather and the woods while my father played his fiddle and my mother canned tomatoes and corn and apple sauce and Cordelia read Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides.

Cordelia was attracted to themes of revenge, incest and patricide with a horrible compulsion that I later realized she did not understand herself. She had terrible nightmares and woke shrieking in Greek and in Elizabethan English. Sometimes she shouted out in the night in habitant French, the language of René Bonhomme. She openly mocked my father, whipped me for confusing ablatives with datives, refused to talk to Uncle Henry except in Greek or Latin. Yet this haunted woman who saw too much and could not stand what she saw never spoke a harsh word to my mother, whom, when she began to have her miscarriages and then the two stillborn girls who would have been my sisters, Cordelia nursed and loved like a daughter. Once she called my mother Queedabaum, correcting herself quickly. I was about ten at the time, and did not encounter that outlandish name again for thirty years, when I came across it in one of Calvin Goodman's journals in the Common library. He was writing about René Bonhomme's early history, and mentioned that he thought his father's mother, a St. Francis Indian, was named Kwee de Baum. Cordelia was a strange woman, even to herself, but it is to her that I owe not only my education but my deliverance from the cold gray existence of children without a past.