Disappearances Read online

  “Do you ever think about getting back into the business?”

  My father smiled. “Look at them sugar houses going on that hill, Wild Bill. They’ll be boiling all night. Spring is here, boy. Spring is Christly here.”

  I looked around doubtfully. Steam was billowing out of the Kittredge sugar place, and except for the grimy frozen drifts along the north sides of stone walls and hedgerows most of the snow was gone. The ice was out of Lake Memphremagog. The rainbow run had started; that was usually a sign that winter was nearly over. But the grass in the fields and pastures was frozen flat and brown. The farmhouses that had not been abandoned were still banked high up their stone foundations with spruce and balsam boughs. Far to the east under the gray sky the northern peaks of the Presidential Range of New Hampshire were covered with snow and might be for another month.

  Halfway out the county road to the Lord Hollow turnoff we swung into Frog Lamundy’s place. Our light truck bounced up the lane. The tires spun in Frog’s dooryard, then caught on the frozen dirt under the thin slop of mud as we backed up the highdrive toward the big sliding door of the barn. In accordance with Kingdom County custom we sat in the truck waiting for someone to come out of the house.

  Frog’s buildings were all weathered gray. Like many of the French Canadian farmhouses across the border the house was banked up to its rotted sills with old manure summer and winter. Across the dooryard, Which was cluttered with nondescript pieces of junk, was the small sawmill shed where our maples had been cut into lumber a few months ago.

  Frog emerged from the long sagging ell connecting the house and barn. We got out of the truck and he greeted us in French. Frog was a small man, though not so tiny as my father, with quick shifty eyes and a thin mustache. He did a little of everything: cattle trucking, dealing in hay, distilling cedar oil, farming, running the sawmill. Most persons seemed simultaneously to admire and distrust him for his acumen in making a deal. I did not like him at all.

  “I can smell rain, Frog,” my father said. “A nice warm rain to green things up. Wild Bill here thinks we’ll have the cows out in a week. One good load of hay should carry us through.”

  “I don’t have one load to sell, good or bad,” Frog said. “I’m out myself. Maybe in a week or so, Bill. You have no idea how Christly scarce hay is this year. Ben Currier had to sell his herd last night for beef. I was there. The best herd in the county is rolling downcountry to some meat packer this minute. Nobody has hay.”

  I looked at Frog with all the unmitigated hostility of early adolescence. I was humiliated for my father, who knew as well as I did that Frog could always find hay for a man who could pay cash. Uncle Henry said that Frog was receiving hay from Canada by boxcar loads and selling it directly out of the boxcar two or three times every week.

  But my father appeared unconcerned. “At least we ain’t losing a fortune sugaring this year,” he said. “That’s one worry I and Wild Bill don’t have.”

  Frog looked down at the idle sawmill. “Nothing chews up a saw like an old sugar spout,” he said. He was alluding to the pitifully small price he had paid us for our trees on the pretext that the butt logs were probably full of old metal taps. “I had to buy two new saws to get them cut up. That runs into big money.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more of his lies. I walked down across the dooryard to the shed and looked inside at the saw. It was far from new. I stared back at Frog, but he was looking off at the mountains. Somewhat ruefully, I thought that we would not have lost money sugaring that spring, or any other spring for that matter. We had always made some money sugaring, and the spring of 1932 was the best for sugaring in a decade.

  “That old Froggie boy thinks the world of me,” my father said as we rattled back down the lane, as light as we had come up.

  “I’m sure he does,” I said. “He just thinks a little bit more of money.”

  “No, Wild Bill, Frog would do anything for me. Why, Frog Lamundy is so generous he’d give away his ass and shit through his ribs.”

  This incredible observation was typical of Quebec Bill Bonhomme, whose analyses of others were invariably more accurate as revelations about himself. He was absolutely incapable of judging persons he liked except in terms of his own personality. My father was generous, and so despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, Frog Lamundy, probably the most parsimonious man in the county, must be generous too. He loved a joke, so my Uncle Henry, one of the least risible men I have ever known, also loved jokes. He was sure spring was coming, so I had said the cows would be in the pasture in a week. He was wild and had been wilder in his youth, so his son must be wild too.

  Wild Bill: I was proud of this epithet because it had been conferred by my father, but it was as incongruous a misnomer as any he could have devised, reflecting his own personality and accentuating the rather reserved turn of mine. My father was close to forty when I was born, and in our easy amicability we were more like grandfather and grandson than like most fathers and sons I have known. There was no one I liked or admired more. Early in my childhood, however, I began to develop a private tendency toward skepticism as a buffer against the constant disappointments and the ultimate disillusionment that would have resulted from adopting his unqualified optimism. Not that there was anything facile or unauthentic about his positive outlook, but to subscribe to his perennial optimism could have been psychologically disastrous for me. By the time I was fourteen I was cultivating an appreciation of irony for its own sake. Like my father’s confidence in the essential fortuity of life, my capacity for enjoying some of its less tragic discrepancies was more a style than a philosophy. In both cases, I think, it was less a way of perceiving the vicissitudes of life in Kingdom County than a stay against being overwhelmed by them.

  Now it began to snow. The flakes were gigantic, some as large as the palm of a man’s hand. “Sugar snow,” my father said, pounding my knee. “The snow that takes the snow. Ain’t that right, Wild Bill?”

  For a few minutes the snow fell thickly. Then it stopped abruptly. As we climbed higher into the hills, more snow appeared in the fields. The countryside was shaggy with pastures going back to brush and cut-off sugar places growing up to spruce and fir. One by one the farms were disappearing. I noticed a collapsed barn I hadn’t seen on the way down to the Common earlier in the afternoon. The heavy snows had built up on the roof, started to melt, frozen again and continued to accumulate until the weight was too great. The barn itself had not been used for years. Broken horse-drawn machinery stood rusting in the scrubby fields.

  Yet inherent in the desolation was a latent vitality. Here in the hills of Kingdom County everything superfluous to bare existence had been purified out of the land by the long winter. It was impossible to live in that bleak landscape of fir and granite and cold rushing water and infertile soil without becoming permanently, if ambivalently, a part of it. Particularly in the uneasy hiatus between late winter and early spring, the austere and uncompromised land, now rapidly reclaiming itself, conveyed an intimation of the kind of energy and endurance it exacted of the men and women who still depended on it for their livelihoods.

  Ten miles out of the Common we turned north off the county road over a one-lane steel bridge and started up Lord Hollow. The schoolhouse was dark in the twilight. Cordelia had walked home. The road wound steadily up, roughly following the bends of the hollow brook. The wind whipped the snow across the fields. My father switched on his headlights. He had gradually fallen silent, entranced by reveries of spring which remained unbroken until, just as we crossed the plank bridge over the brook at the foot of our hill, we ran out of gas.

  So together in the wintery twilight we started the long walk up the lane: past the lower hay meadow; past the ancient straggling apple orchard; through the gigantic snow-covered stumps of the sugar bush; into the dooryard on the crest of the hill, twenty-six hundred feet above sea level. Home.

  For a moment we stood in the dooryard. The wind gusted erratically out of the southwest. Wr
aiths of snow materialized around our knees, ghosted across the frozen mud, vanished. Down the hollow a mile the Royer barn lights flickered through the whirling snow. I felt vaguely unsettled by intimations of the impermanence surrounding our lives—the distant light blinking through the swirling insubstantial snow, the evanescent warmth of the afternoon, the bare dusty hayloft inside the barn.

  As though to protect me from the consequences of his own ebullience, my father put his arm around me. With his free hand he pointed to the barn roof. Against the nearly dark sky I could see the white outline of the snow owl that had roosted there for a week. His body was facing south, but his head was turned around to the north. My father squeezed my shoulder. “Look at that rubber-necked son of a bitch, Wild Bill. Ain’t he the best sign of spring you ever see?”

  I headed for the barn. Like each of the eleven barns built by my great-grandfather ours was round rather than rectangular. It had a central feeding area in the cow stable and above the stable a circular hayloft around the perimeter of which a hay wagon could be driven. By 1932 it was in need of major repairs, listing off on the downhill side like the hulk of a wrecked ship on a reef. But it was still a landmark in Kingdom County and still appeared to be perfectly round when viewed from a distance.

  From a distance is how my father usually viewed it. This evening, though, he followed me inside, where my mother and Cordelia were milking by kerosene light. Rat Kinneson, our hired man, was carrying milk to the hogs.

  Even in the stanchions at the end of winter my mother’s fifteen registered Jerseys were a handsome herd, clean and graceful and red as wild deer. Tonight they were also restive, stamping and shaking their heads at random intervals, unaccustomed to being milked before they were fed.

  My mother had not heard us come in. She knelt by a cow, washing its flank with a white cloth. She was wearing a flowered kerchief and her gray barn sweater. My mother was almost twenty years younger than my father. She had very long dark hair and dark eyes, and looked as Indian as her St. Francis grandmother. She was several inches taller than my father and as slim as her brother Henry was stocky. She had been educated in a French convent in Montreal but now spoke only English unless she was angry. She was quite strict with me and quite indulgent with my father. She was the only person I knew who was not afraid of Cordelia.

  “Evangeline,” my father called. As usual he drew out her name in his best oratorical style, stressing the last syllable. “Spring is here, Evangeline. The trout are jumping the falls. Wild Bill and me had to boot an officer of the law down into the whitewater.”

  “It was Warden Kinneson,” I said. “He got out down below. He called Dad a Frenchman.”

  “What a travesty,” Cordelia said.

  “I’m sorry he got out,” Rat said. “The falls is a good place for a man like Brother R.W.”

  “Did you find hay?” my mother asked.

  “We didn’t find any hay, Evangeline.” My father made this announcement with as much satisfaction as though we had brought home a truckload of alfalfa. “But we did run out of gas.”

  “We can’t feed fish to the cows,” Cordelia said.

  “Rat here will figure a way to feed the cows. Ain’t that right, Rat?”

  Rat stood frowning near Hercule, my father’s pet longhorn bull. Hercule was hungry, and was kicking the sideboards of his stall hard.

  “Stop that,” Rat said. Hercule stopped kicking.

  In the lantern light inside the barn Rat looked like a caricature of Ichabod Crane. He was tall and stooped and lean as a bent cedar rail, with a long dissatisfied face and lank colorless hair. Rat was among the last of a certain tradition of hired men which in him seemed to have reached its apotheosis: unreliable, malingering, censorious; perpetually disconsolate, infuriatingly dogmatic; prodigiously talented with crops, animals and machinery. With Rat our farm ran erratically at best. Without him it could not have run at all.

  “We’ll feed them critters potatoes,” he said. “That seems to be the one thing around here we ain’t run out of.”

  “Certainly we will,” my father said as though he had thought of the idea himself. “Now what about the truck, Ratty?”

  Rat was looking at Hercule. “I always knowed that bull would be good for something,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later we were all back down by the bridge. Rat hitched Hercule to the front of the Ford with a long chain. My mother and I pushed. My father sat inside the cab steering. Cordelia walked alongside reciting the following lines from “Hamatreya”:

  Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys

  Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;

  Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet

  Clear of the grave.

  “Whoa,” my father shouted before we had gone ten feet. “Whoa up there, Rat. Whoa back there. Hark, Aunt. Everyone hark.”

  We came to an uncertain halt and stood panting in the mud, not knowing what we were supposed to be listening for. Then from high overhead in the dark sky we heard the geese, barking faintly.

  “They know,” my father said in a hushed cryptic tone.

  “Come on,” Cordelia said. “Let’s get over Donner Pass before the next snowstorm.”

  “Giddap, Rat, giddap, Hercule,” my father called, and our bizarre processional lurched on up the hill.

  During supper the wind came up hard, and as always when the wind blew out of the southwest the kitchen was drafty. Despite a good fire in the woodstove cold air seeped in around the porous old window casings, which my mother stuffed with rags every fall. Now she said, “When are we going to replace these windows?”

  My father was no more adept at carpentering than farming. To my knowledge he had never repaired anything around the house or barn. Sitting at the table in his wool shirt and wool pants, his back near the stove, sipping hot coffee, he said, “You can’t have city conveniences in the country, Evangeline.”

  “Nor in a mountain fastness,” Cordelia said, drawing her shawl closer around her narrow shoulders.

  “If by conveniences you mean running water and inside plumbing and electricity, no doubt you are right,” my mother said. “I wasn’t thinking of such luxuries as those.”

  “Well, you can’t make an old house over into a new house. Can you, Rat?”

  I think my father felt that he should not involve me in this debate, but couldn’t resist a rhetorical appeal to someone. He had chosen the wrong person in Rat, who as usual was picking at his food as though he expected to find something unpalatable and odious in it at any moment. He turned over a slice of side pork the way he might turn over a rotten plank with his foot and said, “Because if he hadn’t gotten out of the whitewater he couldn’t go around a-slandering his relations.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of a new house,” my mother said, paying no attention to Rat, who was famous throughout the county for his non sequiturs. “I would just like to hope that by next winter we might be warm in our old kitchen.”

  My father glanced at the windows, crowded with trays of tomato seedlings, broccoli and cauliflower shoots, tiny cabbage plants. The curtains were standing out at a sharp angle in the draft. “You never know what you’re going to find when you start fooling with an old house,” he said. “Sometimes a stud gives way. Then the wall might buckle and you’d be out an entire wall. Or you might find a sill that needs jacking. If the jack slips the whole house could come down around your ears. No, Evangeline, it’s better not to know what’s inside an old wall. It’s better just to forget about such things.”

  “I wish I could forget such things.”

  I noticed Cordelia glancing appraisingly at my mother, of whom even mild recrimination was uncharacteristic.

  “Well,” my father said, “all you need to do is give the word, Sweet Evangeline. By fall you’ll have you a ten-room home with two inside bathrooms and a warm furnace in the cellar and no cracks around the windows. Just like them new houses up to Memphremagog. You say the word, ma fille, and y
ou’ll have that Christly mansion by September.”

  He was referring to a number of large houses that had been built during Prohibition in the border town at the south end of the lake. Uncle Henry had told us that like his Cadillac, most of these homes had been financed by whiskey running. They were capacious and stately, with pillared porticoes and secluded second-story porches. Some were surmounted by cupolas or fenced widow’s walks overlooking the lake. They were more costly and elegant than any houses built in Kingdom County since the pink brick homes of the sheep boom just before the Civil War. Today they are occupied by doctors, lawyers, a banker, an Episcopalian minister—all of whom owe their educations to money their families made running whiskey during Prohibition.

  “William,” my mother said, “the cows haven’t eaten since morning. You go down cellar now and start putting potatoes in bushel baskets for Mr. Kinneson.”

  I took one of the extra kerosene lanterns from the woodshed and went through the icy parlor and down the cellar stairs. Along with the circular hayloft, the cellar was one of my favorite retreats on the farm, redolent of cool dry earth and the rich mingled scents of the fruits and vegetables my mother stored there in greater quantities than we could consume if we didn’t grow anything for a year. I hung the lantern from a nail driven into one of the eight-by-eight ceiling timbers and looked around. Among the netted hams and sides of bacon a dozen or so cabbages depended from the timbers by their roots, casting grotesque shadows on the stone walls, which were lined with shelves of quart canning jars containing every kind of vegetable that could be grown in Kingdom County. Also there were pint jars of apple butter, wild berry jams and jellies, maple syrup from previous springs. Along one wall were two twenty-gallon crocks of salt pork. There were bushels of old-fashioned varieties of apples, and bushels of pie pumpkins and winter squash—all evocative of a self-sufficiency lost sometime during the past century.