Disappearances (32 page)

“Bill, does it look to you like that Christly plane can be seen from the air?”

I looked up through the cedar branches, thick as a rain forest, and shook my head.

“Good,” my father said. “Now take your hatchet over there to that clump of small trees and cut two poles about twelve foot long. Get them about three inches through at the base.”

I did what he said.

“Them are perfect. Trim off the branches. Get them nice and close. Don't leave no spurs sticking out.”

I did that too. Next my father told me to hack off about twenty feet of rope, which he proceeded to tie between the poles in an intricate crisscross pattern, making a strong travois. I didn't have to ask him who was going to pull this contraption. Here we go, I thought. Here we go again.

I tied my father into the travois, binding his wounded leg to the right pole. Then I got in between the front of the poles like an Indian pony. “Giddap, Wild Bill,” he said. “Head due south.”

I started walking south over the frozen snow. My father was very light but the terrain was so uneven that the travois jounced terribly. I was afraid his leg would start to bleed again. I kept looking back and asking whether he was all right.

“The best, Wild Bill,” he said.

The trees were very thick. Time and again I had to detour out around impenetrable stands. After each detour my father gave new instructions. “Head for the dead tree over on that low knoll, Wild Bill. The one with the three sapsucker holes in the top. We keep working our way south and we'll hit the Yellow Branch of the Upper St. John. Once we get there you can skid the old man right down the ice like nobody's business.”

In spots the crust was too thin to hold my weight and I crashed through into snow up to my waist. Once I had to break my way across an old open beaver meadow as long as the village Common, shoving the travois ahead of me over the crust. By the time I was halfway across my shirt, pants and hunting jacket were soaking wet from snow and sweat.

“Take it easy, Bill,” my father said. “There ain't no great hurry. Henry's no doubt gotten hay up to the farm by now. We ain't in that much rush. Don't bust a gut.”

Sopping wet, panting like a winded hunting dog, I looked up at the sky. “It's going to snow,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

“If it snows we'll hole up in the brush like two red foxes and wait for it to stop. I've still got my matches. We'll be snug and warm until she blows over.”

I could smell the snow coming. The air smelled slightly acrid, like the faint lingering scent of gunpowder in an old shotgun shell lying in a woods road. I shoved the travois forward several feet, and climbed up on the crust to try to go along on my hands and knees. Immediately I broke through.

A small frozen brook ran along the far edge of the beaver meadow. Its banks were choked with blowdowns, which I had to hack my way through with the hatchet.

“We'll go right on downstream,” my father told me. “This runs into the Yellow Branch about a mile south of here.”

The bank was high and steep. In order to get my father onto the ice I had to slide the travois down the bank and leave it leaning there like a ladder against the side of a building. I was going to turn it so my father wouldn't be upside down but he told me not to bother. As I jumped from the top of the bank to the ice he told me it was very refreshing to feel the blood running down into his head.

“Some of it seems to be running down your leg,” I said as I eased the travois onto the ice. “We've got to do something about that tourniquet.”

“Keep going, Bill. We won't jounce so much here on the ice. It'll stop bleeding. Keep going.”

My father was looking straight up at the sky. I knew he was thinking about the snow too. It was coming. It could begin at any time. I got back in between the poles and started downstream fast. In places I could hear the water gurgling under my feet.

The swamp was a jungle on both sides. We were committed to the brook. The whole swamp had started to melt during the thaw of the past week. Water had seeped over the ice, then frozen again, creating several translucent layers of ice. In spots, particularly on the downstream side of bends, the ice was only an inch or two thick and I could see the dark water running beneath it.

“Stop,” my father called. “Wait a minute, Wild Bill.”

I was sure we were going to crash through momentarily, but my father was not concerned with the thickness of the ice. He had made a discovery. For some time he had been twisting his head over the side of the poles and commenting on the patterns and colors of the ice. Now he had found something really unusual that I had walked over without noticing. Trapped a few inches below us was a large brook trout. He was frozen solid into the ice, immobile as a crystalline trout in a glass paperweight.

“Let's cut him free,” my father said. “Cut him out of there with your hatchet, Wild Bill. That's a fate I wouldn't wish on man or fish.”

“He's dead,” I said.

“No he ain't. They'll live for weeks like that.”

“I don't trust this ice. I don't want to fool around with it. Even if we do get him out, there's no water to put him back into.”

“We'll warm him up and release him down to the open water below the dam. Cut him free, Bill.”

I shoved the travois back upstream several yards and began to chop a hole in the ice around the fish. The chips flew every which way. It took me quite a while to get him out without cutting into him or breaking through to the water. He was fourteen or fifteen inches long and still wearing his spawning colors. His stomach was a brilliant orange and the edgings on his fins were much whiter than the ice in which he was still encased. I knew the fish was a male because of the sharp upward hook on his bottom jaw. I presented him to my father, who tucked him inside his jacket against his shirt.

“Good luck,” I said as we continued.

“Maybe I'll take him home to show Evangeline, Wild Bill. This would be a fine thing to show Evangeline.”

“I'm glad we'll have something to show her,” I said.

Ahead of us a big cedar had pulled out of the bank by its roots and toppled laterally across the brook. It took me at least twenty minutes to cut a passage through with the hatchet. I was sweating heavily again. It occurred to me that I was probably going to catch pneumonia but there wasn't anything I could do about it. We had to keep going. I was very worried about my father's leg, and above everything wanted to be out of that swamp when the snow hit. The wind was coming out of the northwest now. That was where all our big storms came from. When I got back into the poles I began to trot.

“Wild Bill's running,” my father said. “Wild Bill don't want to get caught out in a Canadian thaw.”

“You're right,” I said, trotting faster.

When we finally emerged onto the frozen Yellow Branch I didn't dare stop to rest. I knew my father must be in agony from the jolting, but we were still at least ten miles from the big beaver dam where we had put in the canoe three days before.

The Yellow Branch had received its name from the distinctive color of the sand in its bed and banks. It was a deep slow winding tributary of the St. John, cutting through the very heart of the swamp. In places it opened up into backwaters covering many acres. Naked gray cedar stumps, some more than twenty feet tall, stuck up out of the ice like a petrified forest. There were very few live trees here. Even the red alders so prolific elsewhere in the swamp had trouble surviving in this diluvial wilderness.

In spots where the ice had frozen and thawed several times during the past two weeks it was rough as a washboard. I had to be careful to avoid spring holes where the river never froze completely over even in the coldest weather. They were identifiable only as slightly darker patches in the ice, which was uniformly quite dark from partial thawing, then freezing again. Around us the swamp shrieked in long splintering eerie cries, as rapidly freezing water does. The swamp was already illuminated by the peculiar radiance that touches everything just before it snows.

My breath was coming hard. My lungs ached. My arms ached from the weight of the travois. I kept telling myself I couldn't stop until we got down to the trees again. There was no shelter at all in the heart of the swamp, just those smooth naked cedar stumps, mockeries of trees. My head pounded and my vision was blurring. I was no longer sure that we were still on the river, which wound through those labyrinthine dead trees like a rabbit maze in a brush pile.

Some small live cedars began to appear along the banks. I was running in a slow stumble, slower than a fast walk. My arms were heavy as waterlogged limbs and my head throbbed steadily. It occurred to me that my father had not spoken a word since we had started down the Yellow Branch. That might have been an hour or three hours ago. I had no way of knowing.

I laid the poles down and turned to look at him. His eyes were closed. For the first time in four days he was sleeping, breathing quite evenly. Snow was collecting on his face and hair, on his red jacket and on the bad leg, which was stiff and cold and no longer bleeding. Behind us I could see my footprints and the two long wavy grooves left in the new snow by the travois poles. It had been snowing for some time.

“Dad. Wake up. Your leg's freezing.”

My father opened his eyes. They were very blue through the snow on his long dark lashes. “Don't worry, Wild Bill, I ain't going to leave you alone here. Go on up ahead another two, three hundred yards. We'll make a camp. You done good, Bill. We're only a couple of miles from the dam. You done very good.”

The snow was falling fast. The flakes were small and dry and hard to see. As we started down the river again I tried to guess what time it was. Maybe the middle of the afternoon. Maybe later. It was quite dark, so dark I didn't see the open running water ahead until it was nearly too late. Then I heard it before I saw it. I stopped short, swung around and yanked the travois back upriver toward shore. In the snowy twilight I made out a thick stand of big cedars. Here my father and I would wait out the storm for as long as it lasted.

“Bill,” my father said as I started up the bank toward the trees. “Just a minute.”

I stopped and looked back.

“Come here.”

He handed me something cold. First I thought it was the last bottle of Seagram's. Then I felt a tremor run through it.

“Throw him back in the Christly water, Bill. I told you he'd come to.”

I hurled the trout far downriver and waited for the splash, which when it came was muffled by the snow.

“I knowed he wasn't dead, Bill. I knowed we could bring him back to life.”

“Well,” I said, heading for the cedars, “maybe he'll grant us three wishes. But I doubt it.”

My father laughed. “Wild Bill sounds more like his Uncle Henry Coville every day. What do we need to wish for? We've got everything we need right here. Let her blow, we'll be all right. We're still together, ain't we?”

 

In thinking about my father, I always try not to romanticize him. While he was certainly the most romantic man I have ever known, it would not be fair to him to simplify his personality by eulogizing him as such. He was also in many ways a driven if not exactly haunted man, whose ebullience, while authentic, must have been generated in part by desperation. He was heedless of his own safety and at times of mine. He was both supremely selfish and deeply empathetic, even with fish. A more vainglorious man never lived in Kingdom County, but he was full of awe and delight and humility in the presence of any wonder, and to him, as to me, the world was always a wonderful place. I do not believe that he shared many of the apparently psychic powers that characterize our family, but he had certain instincts that were still more remarkable, instincts most of our race lost thousands of years ago.

Often I have asked myself what I learned from him. To answer this question, I usually begin with the simple things, including many of the things he and I talked about during the twelve hours we spent holed up in the cedars that stormy night in 1932.

I learned how to fish and hunt, in that sequence. From the time I was two, we fished the small brook that flowed out of our maples into the apple orchard. He would hold his fly rod in one hand and my hand in the other and flip a small piece of worm on a number-ten hook into a pocket behind a stone or stump. He would jerk up his wrist to set the hook, then hand the rod to me so I could derrick out a bejeweled five-inch speckled trout. Soon he began handing me the rod to set the hook myself. By the time I was five I was a journeyman trout fisherman.

It is more difficult to shoot a bird on the wing than to catch a trout, and it is a particularly tricky business to shoot a marvelously camouflaged partridge in heavy cover, but by the time I was ten I was doing that too. I got my first deer a year later.

The one accomplishment my father tried without success to teach me was to play the fiddle. I wasn't tone deaf and loved to hear him play. The night he won the New England championship in Montpelier remains one of the most exciting in my life. But for some reason my fingers just wouldn't move the right way, and to his everlasting credit he realized this early on and stopped trying. “Wild Bill would have been one of the great violinists, Evangeline,” he said many times with considerable pride. “If he'd ever learned how.”

Then there were the things that I didn't know I had learned from him until years later, things that helped me to be a father and husband, lawyer and judge, which I learned laboriously and mastered imperfectly, as I might have learned to play the fiddle if he had forced me to keep trying. These things I believe he knew instinctively, and always had, as he had always known which way north was. The tolerance for variety in people. A sense of one's own worth, and by extension of everyone's. A sense of humor. Of wonder. Of priorities: we're still together, ain't we?