Disappearances (21 page)

As the drive contracted the din intensified. A dark animal burst out of the woods behind Whiskeyjack's place. At first I thought it was Two Bottles' black dog that he kept for running deer. When it stood up on its hind feet and looked around I realized it was a bear. A smaller tawny animal was racing along the edge of the woods on the other side of the road. This I identified immediately as a wildcat. Several deer appeared. Then several more. Suddenly Hercule was thundering straight down the road toward my father and Uncle Henry, who seemed to be engaged in some acrobatic maneuver. Uncle Henry was bent over. When he straightened up my father was standing on his shoulders, twirling his lariat. As Hercule charged by my father lassoed him around the horns and at the same time leaped onto his back.

This time Hercule did not intend to be so quickly subdued. He began to plunge up and down in long humping leaps. My father held on. Somehow he got the lasso down around Hercule's thick powerful neck. Men appeared in the fields, which were swarming with frantic deer, rabbits, bears, porcupines, wildcats, fishers, skunks. Uncle Henry seemed to be watching it all impassively. Hercule began to run down the road. He was running flat out like a race horse. The closing ring of men broke apart in panic. Hercule disappeared around the bend, my father still aboard.

“The Ford,” my mother cried. “Get the Ford, William.”

I started the Ford and with my mother and Cordelia beside me we went fast down the hollow. Uncle Henry and Whiskeyjack and Two Bottles and Orie Royer and Justice Bullpout Kinneson and two or three others jumped in the back as we went by. Along the way people who hadn't participated in the roundup pointed toward the Common to indicate the way my father and Hercule had gone. Whiskeyjack and Two Bottles fired their guns in the air from time to time. Cordelia declaimed from
Paradise Lost
and my mother held my arm tightly. When we reached the Common Hercule was grazing serenely on the grass under the statue of Ethan Allen, and my father was doing lariat tricks for a group of small children.

Hercule never ran away again. He was not young when my father brought him home from Texas, and he apparently exhausted his passionate capacities forever on that one last amorous rampage lasting five months. Periodically I still notice a Jersey or Guernsey with a wide-shouldered and rangy aspect or a peculiar outward sweep of its horns, but Hercule lost all interest in procreation after that first summer. He developed a lachrymose expression as though he missed Texas or perhaps sensed that he was one of the last of his race, doomed to grow old in a foreign land, an avatar of a time that had passed long ago and that he could not quite recall and certainly not revive and perpetuate. Only people, very unusual people like Cordelia and my father, could do that.

We had been lying on our bed of fir boughs reminiscing over my father's projects for about an hour when he declared that he intended to salvage the whiskey.

“I was afraid you'd say that,” Uncle Henry said. “I ain't going to inquire how you propose to do it. Don't you tell me neither. I want a few hours peaceful sleep tonight. Damn few at that, Quebec Bill. It must be long after midnight already. Will you pipe down now and leave us get twenty minutes rest?”

The next thing I remember is waking up in a quiet drizzling dawn and looking out at my father roasting some kind of animal over a fire and Uncle Henry standing nearby.

“What's that you're cooking?” I said.

“Good morning, Wild Bill,” my father said, “and a beautiful spring morning at that. Feel that rain, boy, smell it, taste it. Here's spring's warm rain to green the grass.”

He held out a slice of meat on Uncle Henry's hunting knife. “Don't burn your tongue. This is a young roebuck that was sleeping a mite too heavy this morning. Ain't that tasty? See how still the lake is. There's hardly a stick of pulp on her. What wasn't thrown up on shore was driven north. I wonder if the tug made it. Maybe I'll find it down there with the whiskey. Quebec Bill's going diving today, boys. Diving down where the sturgeons live. I want in the worst way to see a sturgeon.”

“Bill,” Uncle Henry said, “I'm going to tell you something. You listen, too. You listen good. It's raining, as you've already pointed out. If it don't freeze back up you can get your cows out in a day or two. If it does freeze, I'll furnish the hay. You have my word on that.

“Now I want you to stop all this. You're overreaching yourself. Splashing around in that ice water and being shot at and setting barn fires. You're losing your grip. I see it happen over across more than once. First they stop sleeping. Then they stop eating. He ain't et a bit, Billy. Not a bite. Then they start in trying to get theirselves killed. And unless they get stove up first they usually succeed. Sometimes the other fella gets kilt trying to keep it from happening, too.”

“What other fella? Is that you? Are you that other fella, Hen?”

“Don't provoke me, Quebec Bill Bonhomme. I've had all a man can stand and I won't be provoked. You'll hear me out. They was a city boy name of Kelly. He somehow come to be put to driving artillery mules with me. Now you know and I know that a mule above every other animal is independent-minded. Trying to get a mule to do what it don't want to will drive a man plumb crazy. And that's just what happened to Kelly. It was bad enough for me that had been around horses all my life but Kelly, he'd never seen a mule or horse either until a month before. Watching that man try to drive mules was one of the saddest sights I ever hope to see. He'd gee and they'd haw. He'd whoa and they'd go. The harder he tried the worse it got. Kelly stopped sleeping and set up nights thinking of new ways to drive mules. He stopped eating. He most likely could have got himself transferred but he wouldn't ask. He said he was going to drive them mules if it kilt him. And then we hit Château-Thierry, and that, by Jesus, is just what happened.

“I've never told this next to nobody, but I'm going to tell it now. It come time to go up closer behind the trenches with the artillery. So we started in. Kelly was right beside me with his team and for once they was doing somewhere near what he wanted them to. Then somebody hollers out gas. Sure enough, creeping along through the bob wire we see what looked like fog. We'd been instructed beforehand what to do if that happened. We was to mask first the mules, then ourselves. Out come the mule masks and you can wager it didn't take me long to clap them on and lower my own. Then I see Kelly, a-fighting and struggling to mask his mules. And the mules raring and plunging, and that fog a-creeping closer and closer on the morning breeze. I said to myself, the hell with that man, Henry Coville. Any man that will lose sleep over mules deserves what he gets. But I knowed he didn't deserve to be gassed. Nobody deserved that. So I shouted to him to forget the mules and lower his mask. By then the gas was very near, no further than from here to the lake. It was the most fearsome sight I ever see—until recently. But no, Kelly had his orders and he was going to mask them mules or die trying. And they warn't about to be masked, and the mule that was doing most of the raring, he reached out and bit that raised gas mask off the top of Kelly's head and chomped the end right out of it. And Kelly, he continued trying to force on the mule's mask until the gas was lapping around his knees.

“Well, I hollered for a spare mask. And while I was doing that I was knocking Kelly down and getting my mask over his head, and holding my own breath, as though that was going to do any good. He fit like a wildcat to get me off him, but I held his arms and strapped on my mask. Somebody come up quick with a spare mask and got it on me, but you know the rest as well as I do.”

“What about Kelly?” my father said.

“He died right there under his mules. He'd took too much of it. Now, Bill, I can't whup you. You've proved that. I can't tell you what to do. Nobody can. But I can beg you again to stop all this. Don't go back on that lake. Don't try to mask no more mules. You go on home. Go on home to Kingdom County and Vangie. You'll have your hay. You'll have enough hay to start up the game farm again. Plant you a big pineapple grove and mulch it with hay. I'll go back to Texas myself and bring you home a herd of sidewinders packed in hay. But stop this mule business here, now and forever. I can't stand no more.”

With tears in his eyes my father ran up to Uncle Henry and embraced him. “Brother,” he said, “you're right. It's time to go home. As soon as we finish breakfast I'll run down to the lake and fetch up the whiskey and we'll head straight home by the quickest way. We won't even go back to get that cannon truck with the whiskey in it.”

“Good Christ, was that what you was planning? Why, that cliff will be swarming over with Mounties by now. So will the lake for that matter as soon as they get the pulp cleared away. They're likely dragging the upper end right now. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Bill. Don't go looking for no more.”

“Right again, Henry. All we're going to do is get our whiskey and go home. A rattlesnake farm you say? There's money to be made in training poison serpents. Big money. Cadillac money. People will come hundreds of miles to see vipers perform. What's more, I've always had a way with them.”

My father rushed over to the lean-to and began tickling Rat's neck with a fir bough. “Snakes,” he shouted. “The snakes are coming, Ratty.”

Rat screamed and leaped to his feet, knocking down the lean-to. My father clung to his neck like a weasel. Rat charged into the woods with my father dangling from his neck.

Uncle Henry stared after him. “We could bind him in his sleep,” he said. “If he ever slept, that is.”

Now Rat was pursuing my father with a big stick. My father leaped over the spitted deer and ran toward the lake. Rat stopped to catch his breath. “What's that?” he said. “Roast deer meat?”

“Yes,” Uncle Henry said. “You better have a bite, Rat. It may be a long morning.”

“I have to have it well done,” Rat said. “I can't stand the sight of pink. Clyde or Floyd once catched a case of worms from eating pink. Great long slender white fellas, they was. He put up a dozen or so in a quart mason jar.”

“Didn't they put you in the mind of snakes?”

“Yes they did. He liked to get the jar out and look at them now and again. They was looped up in there like tripe. Bill buried them with him, jar and all.”

That was too much for me. I followed my father down to the lake, where I found him getting ready to embark in Brother St. Hilaire's small blue rowboat.

“When did you get that?”

“After you and Henry went to sleep, Wild Bill. I come across the deer on the way over to the monastery.”

“Dad, I can't stand that Rat Kinneson. He's up there telling Uncle Henry about Clyde or Floyd's pet worms.”

“Rat's a good enough fella, Bill. When you get to know him the way I do, he's the best.”

“You think everybody's a good fella. You probably think Carcajou's a good fella.”

“Not no more, Bill. Carcajou's a dead fella. Wild Bill Bonhomme blasted a great hole in the side of his head last night. Just like his father back on that covered bridge when he blasted them two hijackers.”

Uncle Henry came down through the wet bushes. “Rat's still running on about tapeworms,” he said. “He ain't doing a bad job on what's left of the deer neither, though he says to tell you he prefers it parboiled and fried with a side dish of turnip greens and a glass of something.

“Bill, I can't say I ain't curious. Was you actually proposing to go back to that whiskey truck? Not that I want to, you understand. I just would like to know if that was truly your intention.”

“Certainly, Hen. I was thinking I would keep the cannon and you could use the truck for your runs. Think what you could lug over the line in that.”

“It boggles the mind. What was you going to do with the cannon?”

“I thought I might fire it out over the swamp from time to time. Maybe first thing in the morning and then at noon and again in the evening. It might come in handy in other ways too. Keep the wardens away if nothing else.”

“Where do you suppose Carcajou got it?”

“That's just what I've been wondering. Maybe he drug it up off the bottom of the St. Lawrence. It's full of them, they say. Maybe he stoled it from an old fort. He might have made it too.”

“Here's another one for you. Wherever would a fella like Carcajou and his gang come from? He just seemed to appear from nowhere.”

“Henry Coville,” my father said, “a fella like that always comes from nowhere. The first time I see him, back here off this very point two days ago, I told Wild Bill he was the devil. I was wrong, though. Because even the devil comes from someplace. That fella didn't. He didn't come from nowhere, and he didn't know who he was neither. That's why he called himself a wolverine: part bear, part skunk, part wolf. All of them and none of them. I am sorry I didn't get a closer look at him. You know, boys, there's a sadness about a thing like that. A thing that don't belong nowhere. I wanted to look in its eyes and see if they was sad.”

“Bill Bonhomme, next you'll wish you'd took him home and tamed him. I never see a man like you in all my life. That fella called himself Carcajou because the wolverine was the fiercest animal he could think of. Sad? Fierce, Bill. Fierce and cunning and cold-blooded as a wolverine.”

“Not no more he ain't,” my father said, winking at me. “He ain't sad or fierce or nothing else no more. He ain't nothing but dead. Wild Bill here properly seen to that last night. Wild William Bonhomme, Henry. What do you think, Bill? Was he man or beast, fierce or sad?”

By that time I didn't know what I thought about Carcajou. For one thing, I couldn't believe I had killed a man. As I looked out across that gray still water the entire experience of the past night, the past two days, seemed illusory. I could no longer be sure what was real and what was imaginary. But I was certain that if we ever did find out who or what Carcajou was, we would not like the answer. I said so, and neither my father nor Uncle Henry disagreed with me.