Disappearances (30 page)

“Hurry, Officers,” my father called as the two men climbed up on top of the trestle. “Thank Christ you've arrove at last. He tried to run us down with a locomotive. He's murdered my brother-in-law and hired man.”

“Who has?”

“The outlaw Carcajou. He stole a train and wrecked it trying to mash us. I got shot up in the fracas.”

“We know all about the train. Carcajou did that, did he? Say, I guess you got shot up all right. We better get you to the hospital right away. Get his legs, Stu.”

While the border patrol officers carried my father to the trestle and lowered him down to the plane he talked constantly. He told them that he and I had been spearing pickerel in one of the slangs up north of the border when he had been shot and captured. He said that Carcajou had tied him and his brother-in-law and hired man to the tracks; that I had been able to cut him free just in time but the other two had been sliced off at the neck and knees. Then Carcajou had wrecked the train and we had found the handcar and gotten as far as the trestle with it, where his leg had started bleeding badly. I don't know whether the officers believed any of this or not.

I brought along the pack basket and helped get my father inside the float plane. It was a two-seater with just room enough for him and the pilot and the pack basket. “The boy and I'll go on down to Memphremagog on the handcar and meet you at the hospital, Stu,” the pilot's partner said.

“Wait a minute, Officer,” my father said as the pilot started to get in. “I'm in bad shape. No doubt we'll get there in time but I've lost several gallons of blood already. I'd like a last word alone with my boy if you don't mind. Just in case, you know.”

“All right, but for God's sake, hurry,” the pilot said.

I scrambled inside, trying not to cry, but my father was grinning at me. “Pull that door to,” he said. “Wild Bill and his father need a little privacy. This leg is perfectly fine. So long as I don't run no foot races on her she won't leak no more. She's stopped already.”

The engine sputtered and caught as the pilot yanked down on the propeller. He started back along the outside pontoon, motioning for me to get out. His partner had untied the rope and was holding onto the piling with one arm. The nose of the plane started to swing around with the current.

My father reached across me and pulled down on the door latch, locking us in.

“Switch places with me, Wild Bill,” he said.

My father was even more obsessed by planes than by trains. About once a year one would go over our hill, and he would rush into the dooryard and gaze after it in silent awe, like Moses looking upon the promised land. He always took me up for the dollar scenic tour when the air show came to Kingdom County. Once he signed up for flying lessons from a bush pilot out of Memphremagog, but after the second lesson the pilot refused to go up with him again.

Now as we taxied down the river and into the bay with the border patrol officers clinging to the pontoon struts my father said he would show me some real flying. Stu beat on the door. “No riders,” my father said sternly, shaking his head.

The other officer got to his feet, pulled out his revolver and shot off the door handle on my side. The door remained locked. The officer lost his foothold and fell into the bay. Stu remained crouching on the other pontoon as we lifted off the water. My father was pulling on a leather aviator's cap which he had found on the seat beside him. He looked like a flying gnome with a two-days' beard and a misshapen jaw. “I wish Henry was here,” he said. “Henry would love this.”

We were climbing at an alarming angle. Before ascending very high we rolled over and flew along upside down for some distance. We flipped back over and Stu hung from the strut by one hand with his legs dangling several feet above the water.

With his free hand Stu got out his pistol and fired into the air. My father began dipping the big double wings from side to side. This was too much for the tenacious pilot, who disembarked not far from the shore.

Now we were able to gain some altitude. As we headed up toward the low ceiling my father remarked that this was the only way to run whiskey. He said that first we would have a little ride and then we would land in the St. John just below the beaver dam at the foot of our hill.

His leg had stopped bleeding. As we banked around to the southeast I could see our buildings, bare and gray on the hill above the swamp. We were over the county home and banking again. “Let's see what Hilarious is doing this fine morning,” my father said.

On the way up the lake we passed a small engine pulling a crane car south on the railroad track. A dozen or so men were gathered around the scene of the wreck. A plane similar to ours floated near the engine. The men waved and my father dipped his wings. “Henry would have loved seeing me do that, Wild Bill. Wouldn't Henry have appreciated that?”

From the air the secluded monastery looked even more serene and medieval. The cows were filing out into the barnyard but no monks were in sight. It didn't look like the same place we had visited the day before. From up here nothing seemed the same. It was as though we were looking at a vast panoramic scale model of Canada and Vermont. Even the flat cedar swamp looked more like a watercolor than a real swamp.

I knew we were in more trouble than even my father was apt to get us out of, but as we soared over the mountain notch where we had recently come so close to being killed, I didn't care. I felt completely secure, as I had felt traveling up the lake with my father in the canoe three days before. I still felt that so long as he and I were together nothing could ever harm either one of us.

Off to the west the charred remains of Carcajou's barn looked like the blackened circle of an old campfire. Further north the booms behind the smoking paper mill were only about half full. The beach was still heaped high with pulp. There was no sign anywhere of the yellow tug. I tried to get a glimpse of the St. Lawrence River through the northern mountains, but the clouds were too low.

Looking down at the gray-toned landscape north and south of the short stretch of border where so much of our history had transpired, I knew much that I had not known a week ago. I knew that the country below us was not only a hard place to live in, but a treacherous place as well, full of unexpected and unavoidable horrors, including some that had nothing to do with furious winds and deep cold water and swamps and mountains. Yet despite my first clear vision of the darkness in which the human heart is enshrouded, I knew that my father was right when he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Bill, ain't all that down there the most wonderful thing you ever see?”

I must have been very tired because I found myself fighting back tears again; but I was not going to deny the truth of my vision, the truth on which my father had based his life, just because I was tired or scared or too proud to be seen crying.

“Ain't it wonderful, Wild Bill?”

“Yes,” I said, crying. “It is.”

 

At three other times in my life I was to experience this heightened vision of wonderment. Each experience also involved a perception of horror. Each time I came away convinced that my vision had been strengthened, as a religious faith is said to be strengthened by some arduous test, though it had little to do with religion:

It is the night of June 3, 1967. Along the marshy shore of Lake Memphremagog the small frogs are singing loudly, nearly drowning out the low putter of Uncle Henry's three-horse motor. Once again I am headed north, this time with my son and uncle, knowing that this will be the last time, because Uncle Henry is an old man with his single lung going bad and my son is defecting from the United States and going home to the country of our ancestors, the country of his great-great-great-great-grandfather, René Bonhomme. I keep thinking, who is rejecting whom? Is Henry rejecting his country or is his country rejecting him? He sits motionless in the bow of the boat with my father's eight-gauge shotgun across his lap. In the starlight his profile exactly resembles my father's. Canada, I conclude, is where my son belongs. Like my father, he needs space and wild country to be happy, and like my father and old René, he acknowledges no allegiance to any particular country.

As we approach the county home, which has now been transformed into a luxury resort with a long lighted dock for pleasure boats and a long pipe discharging kitchen waste and human waste directly into the lake, time seems to repeat itself. With no warning at all we are blinded by a powerful searchlight. A voice through a loudspeaker commands us to stop. My first thought is of the F.B.I. agent who personally delivered Henry's draft papers this afternoon, after Henry had sent them back unopened twice.

“Easy,” I say. “Easy, Henry.”

And I seem to be talking to my own father.

“Easy, boy,” Uncle Henry says softly.

The patrol boat approaches, blinding us with its light. The amplified voice tells Henry to put down the shotgun. Strangely, I am as aware of the outrageous stench of effluvia from the resort as I am of the boat intercepting us. “You shut out your light,” Henry says in that abrasive voice so like Cordelia's. “Then maybe I'll put down this gun.”

The launch is now directly across our bow, and directly in line with Henry's shotgun, which he holds easily and surely, he who never shot anything but a clay pigeon in his life and is the best shot I have ever seen with the possible exception of his grandfather. Time is repeating itself, I think.

“Put the gun down, Henry,” I say.

“Shut out your light, Captain,” Henry says, his voice rasping.

The stench is really overpowering.

The voice crackles out again. “Drop the gun.”

It sounds familiar but I can't quite place it.

“Who are you?” my son says.

“Border Patrol R. W. Kinneson,” the voice says, and my son laughs out loud, a short harsh barking sound such as Cordelia might have made if she had ever laughed.

“Border Patrol Kinneson,” Henry says with delight. “Shut out your light, Border Patrol Kinneson, or I'll blow you to Kingdom Come.”

Silence.

The light goes out.

“Now, Border Patrol Kinneson,” Henry says, “you have a choice. You can go on about your border peregrinations or you can pull that trigger and get yourself blasted to Kingdom Come. I don't care which.”

I can see Warden's bulky outline and the shape of the pistol he holds pointed at my son. Warden too is an old man now, almost ready to retire. Too old to risk being killed by a disaffected boy with a shotgun. “What the hell,” he says. “Go on back where you come from. I wish all of you frogs would disappear off the face of the earth.”

“Yes,” Henry says, holding the shotgun pointed directly at Warden's chest, “I'm sure you do.”

A few minutes later we drop Henry off at his own request just north of the stone border marker. He says he wants to walk up the tracks to Magog alone. He wants to be alone and think. He shakes hands with his uncle and me and stands looking up at us with a calculating half-amused expression like his grandfather's. Then he hugs and kisses us both and begins walking north.

Somewhere off on the lake a loon whoops—maybe the last loon on Memphremagog. Henry whoops back. They continue talking to each other for a long time while Uncle Henry and I stand on the shore and listen. Once again I think that time is repeating itself, or maybe running backwards now, and Henry is not only walking north along the abandoned railway but heading back into the past, as my father and I did in 1932, with the difference that he will stay there, where he belongs.

Uncle Henry begins to cough. I don't have to ask if it is the lung that bothers him. I know it is. I know that he too has seen his last full cycle of seasons in Kingdom County and that next year at this time he will not be here, or anywhere where I can talk to him. Everything, it seems, is disappearing.

Out on the lake there is a solid splash. Uncle Henry returns to the boat and begins assembling his fly rod, though it is well after midnight. “A small white coachman would be right,” he says.

And the world again seems full of terror and wonder.

 

It is a week later. A letter has arrived from Henry, written in the crabbed hand he inherited from Cordelia:

 

Dear Wild Bill and Mother,

 

I have given a considerable amount of thought to Border Patrol Kinneson's parting words to us on the lake, and decided that without knowing it he was accurately prophesying not only the fate of us Canucks but of the entire human race. This observation sheds some new light on the disappearances in our own family, which can be seen as emblematic of the unalterable destiny of the species. In our tendency to vanish we are only a little closer than most others to our collective annihilation, which, I am certain, cannot be far away. A generation or two at the most, I suspect.

 

I have read that the northern Cree understand this and do not burden themselves with unnecessary possessions or cumbersome technologies. They know their tenure is brief, and rounded by a dreadful bang. I hope to visit them soon, following the same route Grampa René took in 1792. I am saving to buy a canoe out of my earnings at the Magog paper mill. I know you would gladly pay for the trip but I want to remember always why I went, and working here will assure me of that; paper mills, Wild Bill, are the best arguments against newspapers.

 

On Sunday I visited Brother St. Hilaire and Brother Paul at the Benedictine monastery. When I arrived they were playing a fast game of rugby in the cow pasture with the old abbot you keep wondering about, who, it turns out, is not really the abbot at all, but a clone. Paul tried to shut him up, but Brother St. Hilaire was determined to tell me that one afternoon back in the mid-1940s Brother Paul accidentally cloned the abbot from a cell taken from a scraping of his swollen foot. When the abbot died the clone lived on. It is a benign creation, like its progenitor, and seems greatly amused by Brother St. Hilaire, who is somewhat senile now and persisted in calling me William, my son. All three of them asked about you and mother and hoped you would both get up to see them soon. Brother St. Hilaire is keeping the monastery going by writing for the Montreal sex tabloids. He said he has some choice passages to read you. He also has a new girlfriend, a Gretchen somebody, whom I met briefly. She is a burned-out old lady who claims to remember you and who goes around all day with a tape cassette blaring Hank Williams songs plastered to her ear.