Disappearances (17 page)

She gave my father a free rein to do whatever he pleased with the farm. He bought my mother three more registered Jerseys the second spring with the maple sugar money, but except for the sugaring, which he loved doing up until the year he cut the trees, his interest in farming began to wane. He did not return to whiskey running or drinking, but he counseled Uncle Henry in the business and found many excuses to neglect the routine work of mending fence, haying, spreading manure. While my mother and Cordelia worked the farm he hunted and fished and rode around the country in his wagon, purporting to look for stock to buy or trade. Before I was old enough to walk he carried me out to the barn several times a week to see the prizes he brought home from his daily peregrinations. Sometimes it was a horse with chronic heaves or an old cow gone dry. Sometimes it was an animal he had found hurt by the side of the road: a hawk with a broken wing; a three-legged mink that had escaped from a trap by chewing off its own foot; a baby lynx separated from its mother.

His greatest prize of all was Rat Kinneson, whom he discovered late in the spring of our second year on the farm, about the time his fervor for living off the land had started to cool. He was walking down the north end of the Common, undoubtedly on some spurious mission he had invented to give himself a chance to ride the roads or talk to Uncle Henry, when he noticed a group of jeering children standing in a circle in the commission sales barnyard. Thinking that they might have found some strange animal he could add to his collection, he hurried over and discovered instead a man sprawled out in the mud. My father was quite alarmed. He rushed up to the man and lifted up his head. “Are you all right?” he said.

“Certainly,” the man said indignantly. Reeking of whiskey, he raised himself up on one elbow. He opened one yellowish eye and stared at my father. “I'm just showing these boys and girls how to set mushrat traps.”

Nothing pleased my father more than that kind of presence. “You better come home with me,” he said. “I can use a man like you.”

That turned out to be a monumental understatement, probably the only one of my father's career. Without compromising his obstinate recalcitrance a single degree, Rat took over the farm, liberating my father to ride about the countryside like a squire, hunt and fish with Uncle Henry, play his fiddle, take long walks with my mother, tell me stories and for two or three weeks in the spring run his frenzied sugaring operation.

Every day the road was passable he took the milk cans down to the county road and dropped Cordelia and me off at school. Then he usually went to see a man about a hog or a goat or a woodlot. Often he did not return until late afternoon, picking up the empty milk cans and us at the same time. Taking the milk down to the county road every day instead of every second day was an inspired ruse. It permitted my father to lead approximately the same kind of picaresque existence he had always enjoyed, circumscribed now only by the boundaries to which he could travel and still return by late afternoon.

The rest of his work could be divided into two distinct but interdependent categories. The first consisted of a difficult and time-consuming process called getting Rat started. Getting Rat started always began about the same way. “Rat, come look at something most curious down in the barn.” Or, “I'd like to show you something I can't for the life of me figure out, Ratty. You'll know what it is, all right.” These standard overtures never amounted to anything more than futile exercises in the rhetoric of chicanery. They might work with men of lesser sophistication, men like Warden R.W., for example, but never with Rat. Next my father resorted to cajoling. Then threatening. When these tactics proved inefficacious he would have Uncle Henry bring up a bottle from the Common and ply Rat with whiskey until he would stagger down to the pasture that needed ditching or the stone wall in need of repair. Rat, who knew more about farming when he was so drunk he could hardly stand up than most professors of agriculture, would tell my father how to begin. My father would hurl himself into the job with all his characteristic ardor. He would work furiously for twenty minutes or half an hour, but never longer, because no matter how drunk he was, Rat could never stand to see another man do a job he could do better. Despite all his better judgment, he would take the shovel or scythe or axe or post maul away from my father and continue the job himself. My father would watch admiringly for a few minutes, then concoct a reason to go to the barn or better yet the Common, knowing that Rat could not leave a job unfinished once he had started it.

After he had gotten Rat started, my father could devote himself to his projects. I cannot remember a time when he didn't have at least one elaborate project under way for making money. As the years went by these schemes became progressively more grandiose and impractical, finally culminating in the whiskey run of 1932, but the first one was easily the most absurd. “By the Great Roaring Christ, Evangeline,” he said one spring day when I was five, “let's start us a game farm.”

With his obsession for collecting the halt, infirm and unfit of almost every species of domestic and wild animal found in northern New England, my father had a fairly good start already. Our barnyard was crowded with featherless turkeys, hideously goitered ducks and geese and other fowl absolutely indistinguishable by virtue of their esoteric handicaps. At first he had combed the country in search of these blue ribbon grotesqueries; but by the time he decided to formalize his pursuit by opening up the game farm, people were bringing their freak offcasts to him. At least once a week a wagon or truck would appear in the dooryard carrying a six-legged mule, an albino fawn or some other rare and useless mutant.

My father decided to specialize in what he called crosses, and began to interbreed different species. He tried to mate cats and rabbits, and when this failed he caught some gray squirrels on the Common and attempted to breed them with barn rats. He always had to report his most trivial activity to my mother, and was forever running into the kitchen to announce the birth of some surpassingly bizarre hybrid. The large population of wild coydogs in Kingdom County is said to have evolved from the litter of pups he bred from my mother's cow dog and a female coyote someone brought us from New Hampshire.

My father took ads in little country newspapers all along the border. “Visit Bonhomme's Game Farm. See Rarities of the Animal Kingdom.” He lettered out garish signs. “Bonhomme's Wonder Place and Zoological Gardens, Five Miles Ahead at the End of the Road.” City people in Reos and Franklins and Landovers drove up our hill. They took one look at the unholy congregation of anomalies clucking and neighing and hissing and bellowing in our dooryard and sped back down the hollow without even getting out of their cars. An incredulous biologist from the University of Vermont spent a week with us. He shook his head every time a new monstrosity hove into sight around the corner of the house or crawled out from under the barn. At one time during the heyday of the game farm we took an inventory and counted two hundred and thirty-four animals of every kind, coloration and disability. My father paired these off with all the vigor of Noah. Under his unflagging nurturing they thrived and multiplied, bringing forth their own kind and preserving their grossest discrepancies. He refused to cage any of them. The obtaining principle seemed to be the survival of the most outrageous. Our entire farm was overrun by freaks, flouting with impunity their huge vestigial claws and limbs, bunches and distentions, superfluous organs and double sets of teeth. A team of evolutionists from Harvard came to visit. The second night they made a pact not to write a word of what they had seen and went back to Cambridge under the cover of darkness.

Finally our family began to come apart under the strain. Rat went off with the fair, vowing not to return until every last cross was gone. My mother, who for three years had not been able to grow anything in her kitchen garden or walk across the dooryard to the barn without stepping on or being stepped on by some squawking unidentifiable renegade from the bird or mammal phylum, delivered an ultimatum: either they went or she did. My father temporized, promising to give away some of the more fecund individuals in his flocks. No one would take any off his hands, so he transported scores in crates deep into the cedar swamp, releasing them miles from our farm. They all returned, hitching up the north hill singly, by pairs and in droves. When she saw them reappearing my mother began to pack. My father rushed off to the Common to seek Uncle Henry's advice.

As soon as he was a mile down the road Cordelia said, “This is a sufficiency.”

She got his shotgun and hatchet and dispatched more than two hundred of the most egregious aberrations in less than two hours. Working methodically and dispassionately, she piled the dead in a huge cancerous heap in the upper pasture across the lane from the sugar place. She drenched them with kerosene and ignited them. My father and Uncle Henry saw the billows from the county road and thought the barn was on fire. They whipped up my father's team of Siamese mules and came sluing up the hill, my father standing and lashing the mules with the reins, Uncle Henry sitting complacently beside him.

“What are you doing?” my father shouted to Cordelia, who was standing near the blackened remains of his game farm and reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Periodically she poked a partially immolated corpse over onto the glowing part of the pile with a long stick.

“Your blasphemous menagerie is gone,” she said when she finished the poem. “Go cleave unto your wife. I'm not up to another excursion to Montreal.”

With the population of the game farm diminished to a scant twenty or so of the hardiest and least deformed prodigies, Rat returned. My mother planted her garden again. My father remained an easy mark for a farmer who wanted to get rid of a superannuated cow dog or woods horse, but he stopped bringing home freaks and launched into his second project. This was the establishment of a private and most assuredly nonprofit asylum for unwanted and homeless persons. Beginning with Rat Kinneson, his clients burgeoned into an eclectic group of unfortunates of every description. Over the next few years our farm was a sanctuary for dozens of derelicts from the human race. There never seemed to be a time when an old man in the latter stages of delirium tremens or an opium addict or a homeless boy or girl was not staying with us. They slept everywhere: on the parlor couch, in the hayloft, across kitchen chairs, in my bed. For years we hosted a man whose name was Clyde or Floyd, he wasn't sure which, whose chief function was to rush out of the backhouse, where he spent most of his time, and open the barnyard gate when the cows came up from the pasture to be milked, affording my father the distinction of employing the only full-time gatekeeper in the county and probably in Vermont.

Nothing pleased my father more than seeing one of his protégés performing some token task around the place. “Look at old Obadiah weed that lettuce, Evangeline. There's a man that earns his keep.” Obadiah had cataracts over both bleary eyes and earned his keep by groping up and down the neat rows of my mother's garden on his knees and systematically rooting up everything in his way. The lettuce came up with the witch grass, the carrots with the pigweed. My mother didn't have the heart to interfere.

Some of my father's clients required only short-term crisis intervention—detoxification, two or three hot meals and a ride down to the freight yards behind the American Heritage Mill. Others settled in for a longer regimen of more intense therapy. My father provided superb counseling in the arts of whiskey running, poaching and warden-baiting. Cordelia conducted all her therapy sessions in Greek. Rat, who regarded the clients as interlopers and rivals, handled the encounter sessions for us. In addition to Clyde or Floyd there were six or seven other long-term residents who stayed a year or more. One was an escapee from Windsor State Prison, an aged counterfeiter my father harbored in the attic, who for exercise walked the woods by night reciting serial numbers from his confiscated five-hundred-dollar bills. Another, a laudanum-crazed anile woman from the county home whose name was Mary Magdalen, spent the last months of her life in the parlor rocking chair talking to the children she never had. She mistook my father for Arthur, her youngest boy, and Lake Memphremagog for the ocean. There was an emaciated fifteen-year-old girl named Little Gretchen who had run away from the septuagenarian farmer to whom her father had sold her two years before. To my father's amusement, Little Gretchen crawled into my bed and tried unsuccessfully to seduce me when I was nine. I had just lost a molar and supposed that she was the tooth fairy, and was disappointed that I couldn't oblige her. My mother was neither amused nor disappointed. The next week she found another home for Little Gretchen, who I think may have had designs on my father also.

Where did these sad, lost persons come from? Some were farmed out from the county home. Others just seemed to materialize. They were all attracted to my father, whom they worshipped like a saint. My mother, too, was loved by pariahs, mad persons and runaways of every description. But while she could live happily enough in a halfway house environment, she could live just as happily without it. My father could not; he depended upon his coterie of hangers-on as much as they depended on him. They gave him an opportunity to be generous while simultaneously aggrandizing his ego. Also, I think he derived enormous satisfaction from providing for rootless persons the home and family he never found himself during that fifteen-year search along the border.

 

My father had a passion for reading through catalogues that almost equaled his interest in road maps and atlases, which he would pore over for hours. One winter night when we were all assembled in the kitchen he began to read aloud to us from a fruit and berry catalogue sent out by a nursery in Minnesota. According to this bulletin, a brilliant Scandinavian immigrant had developed superhardy northern varieties of pears, peaches, plums, cherries and apricots that had been tested to survive temperatures of forty below zero. No feat of endurance was too much for these miraculous trees. “Listen to this, Evangeline. ‘Guaranteed to resist every known blight and rust, bear abundantly the first year, withstand fierce arctic temperatures.'”