Disappearances (19 page)

“I love you too, Dad,” I said. “Can we go down in the hole?”

“Evangeline,” my father shouted, putting an arm around each of us, “Wild Bill here has just give me another brilliant idea. Fetch my paintbrush, Bill. We're going into business.”

This time we put signs at every crossroads in the county. “Visit Bonhomme's Sinkhole—See Subterranean Geological Phenomena.” Under the lettering my father painted a crude picture of four goggle-eyed sightseers being lowered into a hole in the ground in a bucket. After getting Rat drunk three times, my father finally got him to construct a windlass over the crevice. He secured the tub from our old cider press to the end of the windlass rope and while Rat and I turned the crank made the maiden descent himself. We ran out of rope at sixty feet.

Many persons drove up to our farm to view the hole, but after seeing the windlass few cared to go down. Those who did invariably demanded to be pulled back up again before they had been lowered ten feet in the swaying cider tub. I can still hear their panicked cries echoing up the sides of the crevice as Rat and my father and I cranked like demons. One day four of our sheep fell in, disappearing one after another like lemmings leaping into the sea. We added another forty feet of rope to the windlass and sent the cider tub down empty, but we never did hit bottom. Nor did we detect any smell indicating that the sheep had either. Finally Cordelia went out and broke up the windlass and boarded the hole over. We didn't need any more disappearances in our family, she said. At the time I thought she was talking about Ned and the sheep.

For years afterwards that arid and fathomless fissure that was to have supplied us so bountifully with water was a haven to my father in times of trouble. When it rained for two days on cut hay or a sow had a litter of thirteen dead piglets; when a fetus petrified inside a cow or it did not rain for two months; when the sugar house caught fire and burned down; when Rat deserted us in haying time; when the minister from the Common came calling after my mother's stillbirths; when my father got shingles—whenever a minor or major tragedy struck, my father returned to the ledge. He would remove one of the boards over the hole and stare down into the exposed bowels of our hill with an expression simultaneously puzzled and hopeful, as though half expecting a limpid geyser to gush forth at any moment.

“I reckon I'll slide down to the spring in the ledge, Evangeline. Would you like to go along?”

My mother was always morose at these times. Sometimes I went, but after the first ten minutes I was bored.

“I know it's still down there,” my father said, not unhopefully. “It's down there somewhere.” Though there was no water there, he was drawn to the crevice as Melville and Thoreau say men are drawn to water, and always came away refreshed and optimistic. “It's not every farm that's blessed with a mystery hole,” he told us.

There were many other projects over the years, whose successive failures inspired my father to new proclamations of faith. His spirits flourished under each adversity. Mine did not. As I grew older, my ambivalence toward the farm deepened. I was not lonely. I couldn't have been lonely if I had tried. But I was isolated from friends my own age, from town sports, from neighbors. When I read Robert Frost's “Birches” years later I knew that boy too far from town to learn baseball. We did not get a newspaper. We didn't have a radio or the electricity to operate one. Under Cordelia's pedagogy I learned much about the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy but little about the government of the United States since the Civil War. My entire family was apolitical. Sometimes we saw a ball game or a movie in the Common, but except for Uncle Henry we had no social connections there. Once when I was eight or nine we went to Montpelier on the train to watch my father win the New England Oldtime Fiddling Championship. The main event of our year was the Kingdom Fair.

Yet I don't think that we were a provincial family, except in a very narrow literal sense. Cordelia's awesome knowledge of the seen and unseen worlds was matched only by my father's faith in both. My mother's tolerance and endurance were equally remarkable. There were other places I would have chosen to grow up than on that remote hilltop, but there was no family anywhere I would rather have belonged to.

Some of my father's projects almost worked. These he quickly lost interest in. He had Rat plow up the orchard and in the spring he planted several thousand cabbages. He harvested a good crop and kept the cabbages down cellar until just before Christmas when the market had always been favorable. Just before Christmas the bottom fell out of the market. That spring he planted the cabbage field to field pumpkins. His slogan was a one-hundred-pound pumpkin for every boy and girl in Kingdom County. In July he started force-feeding the pumpkins milk through a thin glass tube. They attained monstrous and obscene proportions, frightening all the children who saw them. We couldn't give them away.

Over Warden Kinneson's strenuous protests my father got a license to guide hunters and fishermen. A bumptious cigar-smoking judge from Boston hired him for the first day of deer season. He put the judge on a good runway halfway down the north side of our hill. “You'll have to put out that cee-gar,” my father told him. “A buck deer will scent that a mile upwind from you.”

“I'll worry about the cee-gar, my little man. You worry about getting me the buck, and I'm not talking about any puny underweight little six-pointer. Is this where you propose for me to stand?”

“Yes, sir,” my father said. “Just be kind enough to turn around and face downhill.”

When the judge turned around my father booted him all the way to the cedar swamp.

The judge took him up in front of Justice Bullpout Kinneson. Bullpout listened attentively to the judge's account, nodding sympathetically. “How many points would you like on that buck of yourn, Jedge?” Bullpout asked.

“Well, Justice,” the judge said condescendingly, “ten would be all right.”

“Ten is just what I'm a-going to fine you,” Bullpout roared. “Ten dollars or ten days in jail, I don't care which. Any man that would smoke a cee-gar on a deer stand ought to consider hisself fortunate to get off that easy. Court dismissed.”

My father impaled his guide's license on a nail in the woodshed and decided to try another cash crop. This time it was oats. He used his sugaring income to buy the seed and a steam-driven threshing machine so antiquated even Rat couldn't seem to figure out how to repair it. The oats grew well, as the cabbages and pumpkins had; despairing of the threshing machine, my father bought some antique flails for winnowing out grain by hand. Before we had an opportunity to use them five marauding black bears descended on the oatfield and ravaged the crop. They knocked the heads off the stalks with long raking powerful swipes and gorged themselves. Then they regurgitated and repeated the process. My father horsewhipped all five of them out of the field but they returned at night, gluttonous as banqueting Romans, and devastated the entire field. My father shot the two biggest.

“This bear roast is Christly tasty, Evangeline. It puts me in the mind of good western beef. I wonder why a man couldn't make a dollar up here raising a herd of beef cattle.”

His eyes acquired the visionary luminosity we had all come to dread. With my father there was rarely any lapse between the conception of an idea and the first steps of its execution. He was off and running again, this time with the most quixotic scheme of all. Several local farmers had tried to raise Herefords for beef, but without much success. The cost of hay and grain over the long winters ate up any profit. My father's solution to this dilemma was to introduce a tougher breed of cattle, one that could stay out all winter and forage most of their own food. After considerable research, he decided on the Texas longhorn.

He wrote for information to state agricultural departments and colleges, private ranches, local historical societies. He received hundreds of letters, all of which he insisted on reading aloud. Everything about longhorns interested him intensely—their history, their physiognomy, their adaptability and toughness and speed. Everyone who wrote advised him against the project. For one thing, longhorns were almost extinct. They had all but disappeared from Texas, if there were any left at all. Their scarcity reinforced my father's determination to own a herd. He began to perceive himself as the chosen savior of a noble and endangered species, for which Kingdom County was to be the promised land. He read about a lost longhorn herd in a paperback western of the type specializing in lost silver mines and lost Aztec tribes. He resolved to travel to Texas, find this wandering herd and bring it back to Lord Hollow.

That spring he sugared with unprecedented energy. He gathered sap until the last week of May when the trees yielded only a crude low grade which he boiled down into a thick dark blackstrap used to sweeten chewing tobacco. Somehow he persuaded Uncle Henry to agree to accompany him. Then the day before they were scheduled to leave for EI Paso to find the lost herd he came down with shingles. For the next several months he was in agony. The pain was excruciating. He screamed imprecations against doctors, who he was convinced were responsible for all human disease. He grew worse instead of better. He lay on a pallet on top of the kitchen woodbox, lapsing into deliriums in which he roared out cowboy songs, deployed the ghosts of old Ned and Mary Magdalen and Clyde or Floyd up and down dusty arroyos in pursuit of the elusive lost herd. He delivered impassioned defenses of buffalo, eagles, whooping cranes and other threatened species. He was haunted by disappearances and the possibility of disappearances. He reverted to this theme each time his fever returned. I was afraid he would die. Rat was so distressed he began working around the clock on the threshing machine. My father raved on. “I looked fifteen years for you,” he shouted. “Now I've found you here in El Paso. I ought to put the boots to you, you old son of a bitch, running off on me like that. What is it you run across this border?” I had no idea whom he was talking to. He stopped eating and lost weight. He lost more weight. He couldn't have weighed sixty pounds. When he went into a coma my mother got old Doctor Rupp to come up from the Common.

By the time Doctor Rupp arrived my father hardly seemed to be breathing. His legs were thinner than mine. “This man needs a physic,” Doctor Rupp said.

Doctor Rupp was a notorious alcoholic. A physic was his panacea for every illness. He extracted a huge purging apparatus from his bag and asked for warm water. I stood at the foot of the woodbox, frightened and weak from weeping, but also angry. I knew my father would not want this old drunken quack to touch him. Rupp mumbled about purgatives as he prepared the massive enema. He said a dose of salts in time would have prevented my father's shingles.

My father opened one feverish red eye. He looked straight at me and winked. Doctor Rupp called for a chamberpot. When it was in position he bent over to turn his victim. Instantly my father leaped up and seized the astonished physician by the windpipe. There was a brief and furious struggle. Doctor Rupp lay pinned on his back on the woodbox, my emaciated father astride his chest in his nightshirt. My father thrust the long rubber tube of the enema down Doctor Rupp's throat, simultaneously pumping the red ball full of water. He began to bounce up and down on his shriveled knees on Doctor Rupp's taut distended stomach. The effects of this procedure were worthy of the medical journals. The doctor gagged briefly, then produced a copious double evacuation which he later admitted surpassed the most violent discharges of his most responsive patients. With a hand clapped over the source of each eruption, Doctor Rupp rushed out to his Ford.

Nothing could have been more salubrious for my father than this diverting masque. That night he sat up and ate supper with us. His fever subsided and did not return. He was able to concentrate again on planning the Texas trip with Uncle Henry.

They left the Common on New Year's Day, 1929. I wanted to go and my father wanted to take me but that time my mother said no and wouldn't change her mind, so I stood outside the station between her and Cordelia, waving sadly, while my father danced on the platform of the caboose, shaking his clasped hands over his head, until Uncle Henry pulled him back inside out of the cold. One of the most senseless cross-country misadventures of all times was under way.

In order to save his money to get the lost herd back to Kingdom County my father worked out impromptu arrangements with the conductors of several lines to earn his fare and Uncle Henry's by entertaining in the lounge cars. Uncle Henry played the banjo, rocking with the rhythm of the train, his huge fingers flying, his slightly protruding eyes watching my fiddling father, whooping and nodding and cakewalking.

“We're cattlemen,” my father told every salesman and pregnant woman and concessionaire and porter and conductor and waiter between shows. “I and this big fella are cattlemen from Kingdom County, Vermont.”

 

Texas, 1929. In one respect it resembled Vermont, since the Depression that was about to rock the rest of the country would be largely unfelt in both states. Texas was too rich to notice, Vermont too poor. It was vast even beyond the Canadian wilderness our farm overlooked. Uncle Henry said that it made him uneasy. It was so full of anomalies—cities soaring out of desert wastelands, oil where there wasn't even water—and except for the anomalies so flat and expressionless. Maybe the flatness was what unsettled Uncle Henry, as though his own expressionlessness needed contrast to be effective. My father on the other hand could not have been more at home. As soon as they got off the train in El Paso he produced a forked stick he had broken off one of our red astrachans before leaving and announced that he would witch an oil well for anyone who could tell him where to find the lost herd. Uncle Henry said they hadn't been on the station platform two minutes before my father had a crowd around him, laughing and hanging on every word he said.