Disappearances (25 page)

“Jump, Wild Bill,” my father shouted from the top of the boxcar behind the gondola.

We were off the trestle, but I didn't know whether I had strength enough in my legs to jump clear of the train. I looked at Carcajou once more. He was bent over, struggling to raise the gun with both hands. As he started to straighten up I saw the long wooden handle projecting from his red coat. My father had skewered him with the pike pole.

The gun went off again just as I turned and leaped. I hit on my hands and knees and rolled down the embankment. Cinders and gravel cut into my palms and face. The earth seemed to rotate under me.

I got to my feet but everything was tipping. The whole ridge was tilting. I fell and got up again. This time I stayed upright.

The train was really rolling. I saw my father swing down through the open door of the milk car. Immediately milk cans began to fly out, followed closely by Rat, Henry and my father. Still dressed in their surplices, they rolled down the embankment like three big white rabbits, and had the same trouble getting to their feet. I waved and shouted that I was all right.

Old Ninety-seven was breaking all her speed records. Near the bottom of the ridge the whistle began to scream. It continued blasting as the engine derailed itself and plunged over the embankment into the lake. The six cars were whipped off the track behind the engine. They came uncoupled and flipped lazily through the air end over end, descending into the lake beyond the engine, which lay on its side in shallow water, still puffing, like some stranded and dying behemoth surrounded by its offspring. The whistle continued to shriek for another halfminute or so. From where I stood the derailment had resembled the wreck of a little boy's toy train.

My father had hobbled back up on the track and was sitting with his right leg spraddled out at a curious angle. “That was a dandy,” he said. “It warn't what I'd call spectacular, but it was better than adequate. Did you see that spout go up when she hit? I wish Compton could have been here to see that. Don't she looked like a beached whale, though, boys? Our alfalfa got wet, I reckon. We seem fated to have our hay get wet, Bill.”

“Are you all right?”

“Certainly. Look at Rat down there in the bushes seeing if he can recover his case. I would give that wreck an eight out of a possible ten, Henry. How would you rate her?”

Uncle Henry had cut a long slit up my father's right pant leg with his hunting knife. Now he was ripping his surplice into bandages. He squatted by my father's leg and began to wrap it above the knee.

I leaned over his shoulder. “I thought you said you were all right?”

“I am. I'm fine, Bill. It's just my leg here that's got a hole in it. I don't know how he did it with that pick pole through his chest. Jesus, boys, the Christly hook on the end is ten inches long and I swear it went clear through him and out the other side. He fell back too. But then he just commenced to bringing that pistol up and up, a-holding it in both hands. There, boys, is one tough hombre. You should have seen his face, Hen. What was left of it. It didn't look like a human man's. It was blowed all to pieces. That man just won't kill. Or wouldn't until now. I reckon we don't have to worry about him no more. Not with seventy tons of steel on top of him.”

Uncle Henry tightened the tourniquet. He stood up and looked down through the rain at the wreck. “I reckon we do,” he said. “I reckon if I seen him laid out in state and buried I would still worry about him at least once a day for the rest of my life.”

Without another word he went down to help Rat recover what was left of the whiskey. Some of the covers had been jarred off the milk cans, and many of the bottles were smashed. When we had packed those that remained into two cans, we had only fifty-two bottles.

“Plus the joker,” Rat said, holding up the fifty-third, which was about three-quarters full. He took a drink and smacked his lips loudly. “You know, boys,” he said, “I don't so much mind trains after all.”

“How do you like railroad detectives?” Uncle Henry said. “Because in about an hour this stretch of track is going to be crawling with them. Them and Mounties and border patrol and sheriffs and deputies and G-men.”

“See the fog rolling in, boys,” my father said. “They may not even spot her until morning.”

“Are we going to wait for them to arrive so's we can assist with the investigation?” Uncle Henry said.

“Listen,” my father said. From up the track I heard a regular clicking, like the telegraph at the railroad station in the Common. It grew louder. The section handcar appeared on the trestle. It was Compton, pumping like a madman.

My father lay back on the cinders beside the tracks. He crossed his hands over his breast. He was still wearing Compton's engineer gloves and the surplice. Nothing I had ever seen looked more ludicrous. As wretched as our circumstances were, I had to laugh.

The handcar was slowing down. Compton leaped off. “Where is he?” he shouted. “Where's that bastard dwarf that stole my train?”

“Easy, my son,” Uncle Henry said, his face expressionless. “Can't you see he was kilt jumping off the train? Have respect for the dead.”

“Respect for the dead? What about respect for my train? Where's Ninety-seven?”

“She's all right,” Uncle Henry said. “After we got scart and jumped she just went on down the line. She'll run out of steam shortly and we'll overtake her. Now let's get the deceased aboard. Be careful, boys. They'll probably want to martyr him. He was a most uncommon priest.”

“I don't care what you do with the carcass. I want my train back.”

“The milk must go through,” Uncle Henry said as he and Rat set the two cans on the platform of the handcar. “Where's your fireman? I hope he ain't hurt.”

“He's walking back up the line to Magog. He said he'd had enough train rides for one day.”

“That's why he's still a fireman and you're an engineer,” Uncle Henry said. He and I picked up my father, who held himself stiff as a board, and laid him on the opposite side of the platform from the milk cans.

“Are you sure he's dead?” Compton said. “I thought I seen a tremor.”

“No doubt. Sometimes priests and monks will jerk like that for hours. It's the spirit departing.”

“I thought he said you were Church of England?”

“The same is true of them.”

“See him jerk. He must have a lot of spirit. Jumpy as a dead snake, ain't he?”

Compton bent down over my father. “I wish Eula could see this.”

“I wish she could see this,” my father said, raising his good leg and booting Compton down over the embankment for the second time in half an hour. “That will learn you some respect for the dead.”

Simultaneously Uncle Henry and I began to pump. Rat sat between the milk cans, hugging them close. Compton was on his feet again, giving pursuit and shouting maledictions.

“Plucky fella, ain't he?” my father observed.

“Pump,” Uncle Henry said.

He seemed anxious to get home.

Years later, when my own son was growing up, I was struck time and again by his physical resemblance to my father. Young Henry had the same tiny frame, light hair and vivid blue eyes, the same extraordinary strength and agility.

There were striking differences too, which may have made their external similarity more remarkable to me. Henry did not, for example, have the slightest interest in trains, cars, live animals, music or games of any kind, though he once remarked to me that when he played baseball at school he could see the individual seams on the ball as it came spinning up to the plate. He liked the woods but did not care for hunting or fishing. He was not unpopular with other children, but he had none of my father's intense feelings about people. He had little of my father's capacity for affirmation, but was not cynical. He possessed the most remarkable powers of divination in a family noted for this gift.

These first came to our attention when he was about four. For a year he had talked in his sleep, but whatever he was saying was unintelligible to us. Shortly after his fourth birthday my wife, whose family spoke only French, began to pick out certain habitant expressions. When I listened carefully I too recognized old French words and phrases. Henry would sit upright in his bed with his blue eyes wide open and talk or shout in an archaic dialect until we woke him. Sometimes he seemed to be conversing pleasantly. At other times he pleaded or railed. Remembering Cordelia's terror-filled nights, her shrieks in Greek and sixteenth-century English, I was not reassured. In desperation we decided to consult a psychiatrist.

Dr. Weinstein was a vague amiable low-keyed man who, I supposed at first, had been mellowed by much contact with the profoundly and irremediably mad. Two hours after he arrived I realized my error. Dr. Weinstein, I discovered, had been mellowed by the astonishing variety of pills and shots which he administered to himself at frequent intervals and which kept him dazed or euphoric throughout his three-day visit. By night he took handfuls of amphetamines to stay awake for his vigils at Henry's bedside. In the morning he descended from his nocturnal flights with massive doses of narcotics.

Henry put on several memorable evening performances. Twice he tried to choke Dr. Weinstein to death, mistaking him for a seventeenth-century sergeant-major named Davignon who had raped his sister. During his waking hours he refused to take either Dr. Weinstein or his questions seriously.

“Henry,” Dr. Weinstein said in what I came to suspect was an affected accent, “it makes Toctor sad when you von't talk sincerely to him. Vouldn't you like to make Toctor happy?”

“No,” Henry said.

“Vouldn't you like to be happier little boy, Henry?”

“I like the way I am.”

“Henry, do you know vat you shout out in night?”

“Certainly. Do you think I'm deaf?”

“Vat is it you shout?”

“You've been sitting there listening for the past two nights. You ought to know.”

Dr. Weinstein unscrewed a bottle with shaking hands and popped two large bright green pills into the back of his mouth. “Henry,” he said, “do you know you talk in French? Dat last night you said in French you slit two men's throats?”

“Be grateful it wasn't three.”

It was September. From our dooryard we could look out over hundreds of square miles of lovely mountain country. “Vermont is so beautiful,” Dr. Weinstein said. “See all the beautiful colors. I feel so free here. It's so good to talk to you, Henry.”

“You're an old fake,” Henry said, going into the house.

“Dat vill be twelve hundred and fifty dollars,” Dr. Weinstein said to me the next day.

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about? You haven't even given us a diagnosis.”

“Oh, dat is most simple. You see. Mr. Bonhomme, young Henry is having linguistic identity crisis. Ve have to remember dat he is undoubtedly very sensitive about being Franco-American.”

I was furious. “He isn't a Franco-American,” I shouted, “he's a four-year-old child. Put that syringe away and listen to me, Weinstein. You haven't done a goddamn thing for us.”

Dr. Weinstein was engrossed in hunting for a vein. “I never do,” he said abstractedly. “I know I'm a charlatan. Charlatan, mountebank, what have you. Have one of these tablets, Mr. Bonhomme. It'll calm you down.”

I grabbed Dr. Weinstein by his shirt front. “I'm not going to pay you twelve hundred dollars. I wouldn't pay you twelve cents.”

“I didn't really suppose you would,” he said mildly. “It was worth a try. After all, I paid Henry.”

“You paid Henry?”

“Of course. I paid him fifty dollars for talking to me.”

“You gave fifty dollars to a child?”

“Ah, but what an unusual child. It really did make me feel much better to talk to him. After our little chat I almost decided to cut down on my medication. You have a fine family, Mr. Bonhomme. What nationality is the old woman? I couldn't understand her at all.”

“What old woman?”

“That woman who keeps coming into Henry's room at night. She's very tall.”

“There isn't any old woman. What nationality are you, if I might inquire? Where the hell has that accent of yours gone?”

“Gone with my fee,” Dr. Weinstein said cheerfully. “You've heard of Brooklyn? I'm from Brooklyn. The accent is phony as a three-dollar bill. Things aren't always what they appear to be, you know. Could I tell you another little secret? You seem like the sort of person I can confide in.”

“No,” I shouted. “No, no. I don't want to know any more of your secrets. Don't tell me another word.”

“I'm not even a real psychiatrist, Mr. Bonhomme. Henry was right. I'm a fake. My diploma is from the Queens School of Chiropody. You don't need my help for Henry and you don't need a real psychiatrist. Are you religious?”

I was dumbfounded.

“It doesn't matter whether you are or not. Take Henry to a rabbi. If you can't find a rabbi, take him to a priest. There are different charlatans for different occasions. You need a religious charlatan. I really do have to go now. I'm running low on medication.”

That night my wife and I sat in the kitchen drinking beer with Uncle Henry and looking out the window and down the hollow at the few remaining farm lights. The crickets were singing loudly. As Uncle Henry talked on about the fall it could have been 1932 again. Up in the loft where I had spent so many hours listening to my parents when I was a boy Henry was conversing heatedly with a presence named Robertshaw about the French and Indian Wars. I found myself drinking more than usual and actually missing the addicted Dr. Weinstein. Just before driving off in his Lincoln Continental he had repeated his remark about my having a fine family. He had tried to give me fifty dollars for talking to him. How my father would have relished him, I thought. He would have kept the man around for years.