The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Louvia the Fortuneteller was out behind her shack, knee-deep in the brook, netting the big flopping suckers that she smoked over a smoldering fire of green ash sticks and hawked from door to door in Little Quebec as delicacies. “Aiee!” she cried out in her harsh voice as the monstrous Foster Boy crashed through her sucker pool. She held her crossed index fingers high over her head and shook them first at Foster, then at me. I knew very well that the old gypsy’s hexes were nothing but foolishness, but a chill went up my back even so.

  Foster whirled around in the water, made the hex sign back at Louvia, and went laughing down the brook to Little Quebec, leaving me to face the fortuneteller’s wrath alone.

  Town-team baseball was still a going concern in Kingdom Common in those days. The Kingdom Common Outlaws played their home games on the village green, where on a sunny Saturday afternoon during the season it wasn’t unusual for two or three hundred fans to turn out for a contest with a crosscounty rival like Memphremagog or Pond in the Sky. I’d played shortstop for the Academy and my college team; and a few days after my fishing excursion with Foster, Father George, who still managed the Outlaws, recruited me for the team’s opening game.

  In the bottom of the first inning we jumped out to a 2–0 lead. Then who should show up but Foster Boy, apparently with the express intention of rooting for me, his new friend and fishing partner. What a spectacle he made of himself, hollering, “Yay, Bennett!” like a madman, clanking a great tin cowbell, throwing his extra-large baseball cap, made for him by our town tailor, Abel Feinstein, high into the air whenever I made a routine play, and exchanging taunts with Sal the Berry Picker, who for decades had led the cheering by parading up and down in front of the bleachers waving her long apple-gathering crook and chanting “Go Outlaws!”

  “Dummy!” Sal yelled at Foster Boy when he chimed in with his cowbell. “Turd head!”

  “Jezebel! Hag of Endor!” Foster shouted back, clanging his bell in Sal’s wizened brown face.

  In their contention for ascendancy in the cheerleading department, it was a wonder they didn’t tear each other to pieces. “Hey, college boy!” Sal shouted when I allowed myself to be distracted by Foster’s antics and booted a grounder. “Take your dogface friend and go home. We might as well have him out there as you.”

  “You’re right about that, Sal,” shouted Father George, who brooked no nonsense and tolerated no mental lapses on the part of his ballplayers. “What the hell is the matter with you, Bennett?”

  This unpriestly outburst broke up the hometown crowd; but at twenty-one I found no fun in being shouted at by my father in front of half the village. Finally Father George called me over to the bench and advised me to bribe Foster Boy into toning down by inviting him to the weekly bingo game in the basement social hall of the church the following Tuesday. After that Foster contented himself with bellowing a play-by-play account of the game from the top row of the bleachers while the Outlaws rolled to a lopsided 18–2 victory.

  What an eye opener the bingo game turned out to be! For starters, Foster Boy insisted on playing eighteen cards simultaneously. Although he deposited his colored wooden markers on the faded cardboard squares at a furious pace, eventually he fell behind the caller, Father George. Then Foster kept track of his boards in his head—an astonishing feat, even for an ex-savant.

  The scowls in his direction each time he thundered out “Bingo!” were something to see. Worse yet, he exulted in his victories by hooting like a great horned owl, croaking like a raven, producing an uncanny imitation of a swamp bittern’s gulping cry.

  “Under the N, forty-five!” Foster boomed out after Father G. “Under the B, twelve.”

  Louvia the Fortuneteller, herself a fanatical bingo addict with her own counters and good luck charms, stalked up to our table and threatened to put a twelve-month hoodoo on both of us if we didn’t leave immediately. Foster reared back in his chair and bayed like a Canada lynx. When he strolled off with the fifty-dollar jackpot at the end of the evening, an outraged moan went up from the entire hall.

  On our way back to the rectory together, I asked Father George why God had created village idiots, and he flew off the handle. “Well, Jesus Christ, Frank,” he shouted, “how the hell would I know? You’ll just have to ask God. I’m not God, you know.”

  “Maybe not, but the older you get, the more you act like Him around here,” I said. “I thought that, being a priest, you might ask Him for me.”

  “He’d probably tell me to mind my own business,” Father George said. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and laughed. “You’re asking an age-old question, son. No one but God knows the answer. As for Foster, you know what I think he really needs?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.”

  “I am. I think Foster needs a regular paying job to keep himself out of trouble. Why don’t you see if you can get him a job sweeping up over at the mill? He ought to be able to handle that.”

  Despite my great faith in Father George’s judgment, I had all kinds of misgivings about trying to wangle a job for Foster Boy at the mill. If the village of Kingdom Common was a world unto itself, containing the several smaller worlds of the railroad yard, commission-sales barn, courthouse, Academy, and furniture mill, the mill contained several distinct realms of its own. One of these was the exceedingly dangerous machine floor, where Foster was assigned a sweeping job on the graveyard shift. The floor was two hundred feet long and nearly a hundred feet wide, a tintinnabulation of shrieking saws, planers, lathes, sanders, and drills, badly lighted and poorly ventilated, with a choking mist of sawdust suspended in the air at all times. Over the previous sixty years it had claimed the lives of half a dozen French Canadians from Little Quebec, and the fingers, hands, or eyes of a hundred more.

  Foster’s job was to collect the discarded end pieces of lumber from around the saws and wheel them down to the waste disposal pit known as the Hog. At the bottom of the Hog, ten long, whirling knives reduced the wood scraps to chips, which were then fed through a blower pipe to the furnace that fired the steam boiler powering the woodworking machines. Some years ago a sweeper had tumbled into the Hog and helped fire the boiler himself, but this accident had not inspired the mill management to put any safety guards around the pit. So I was actually relieved when, on the second night of his new job, Foster Boy was summarily fired for a prank that could easily have resulted in a calamity.

  Father George and I heard about the episode from Doc Harrison, over coffee at the Common Hotel the next morning. At the instigation of a few of the graveyard-shift bullies, Foster Boy had smeared his face and hands red with ketchup from the ketchup sandwiches Silent Jeannine had put up for him to eat during his break, then pretended to have fallen into the Hog. He was still playing dead when Doc arrived in his bathrobe and slippers; then just as Doc rushed onto the machine floor, Foster Boy leaped up, all bloody-faced, and trumpeted out in a demonic voice that he’d been resurrected.

  Father George shook his head. “I guess my idea to put Foster to work at the mill wasn’t such a good one after all, Frank. But if the boy’s really serious about studying scripture, our ecumenical Bible study group meets tonight. I’ll wager dollars to doughnuts that Foster would be tickled pink if you went by his place after supper and invited him to attend.”

  Tricked out in his overalls, gunboat brogans, and beloved baseball cap, fresh from his triumphal performance on the machine floor, Foster Boy not only monopolized the Bible discussion that evening, he insisted on raising racy scriptural issues. Precisely what, he demanded to know in the middle of a solemn paper on the Sermon on the Mount being delivered by Miss Lily Broom, the young Sunday School superintendent of the United Church, did Delilah do to Samson in bed to get him under her thumb? What did she know that the Hebrew girls didn’t?

  Miss Lily gasped. But Foster Boy, whose impulsiveness knew no bounds, shouted out, “Here’s an easier one. What, if anything besides her birthday suit, was Bathsheba wearing when Ki
ng David gawked over at her sunbathing on her rooftop?”

  Father George suppressed a snicker. But the dozen or so other ecumenical scholars stared at Foster in consternation.

  Deacon Roy Quinn, head of the United Church board of trustees, grabbed the savant’s shoulders and shook him. “For heaven’s sake, Foster!”

  “Exactly,” Foster Boy shot back. “What, for heaven’s sake, were the pleasures of the flesh Satan used to tempt Our Lord in the wilderness? Did the old red devil conjure up a troupe of hootchy-kootchy girls? Like the tent-show strippers at Kingdom Fair?”

  Reverend Miles Johnstone sprang to his feet. He pointed a finger at Foster and then at the door.

  “Be seated, Lot! Back to your daughters,” Foster commanded Rev. Johnstone, and he laughed like a hyena as I hustled him out of the room.

  “That sanctimonious outfit of hypocrites could all benefit from an old-fashioned horsewhipping,” Father George told me on our way for coffee at the hotel the next morning. “Even so, I’m concerned that Foster may—my God, Frank! Look at that, will you.”

  Reeling blindly around the statue of Ethan Allen on the north end of the green was a full-grown moose. The animal, which seemed to be in the final stages of brain distemper, had evidently staggered into town in the night. A dozen or so Commoners had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the hotel to watch it, and not a minute later, who should heave into sight, feed sack and all, but Foster Boy Dufresne.

  “Foster, my man,” Bumper Stevens called out. “Here’s a bill of the realm with Honest Abe Lincoln’s picture on her, belongs to the first fella to march up to that Christly overgrown deer and plant a big kiss on its snout.”

  Bumper waved the five-dollar bill over his head. “Hey, hey, hey,” he chanted in his raspy auctioneer’s voice. “Going once, going twice, going three times to the one, the only, Savant of Kingdom Common.”

  This was all the encouragement Foster needed. Emitting his crazy laugh, he struck off straight toward the sick moose, which lowered its head and began to paw up great divots of grass around the base of the statue. Whereupon Foster promptly lowered his own head and scuffed at the grass with his broken old shoes.

  “Jesus Christ!” shouted our unorthodox priest, to the great delight of the crowd, and started across the street to rescue Foster.

  By then I’d seen enough myself. I raced past Father G, grabbed Foster by the back of his overalls, and dragged him, still whooping and laughing, off the green. The moose, in the meantime, gave an anguished bellow, broke into a wobbling charge, crashed head-on into the statue and, mercifully, collapsed dead at its base.

  Later that morning Judge Allen signed papers authorizing the local sheriff to pick Foster Boy up and cart him off to be evaluated at the state mental hospital. Not that the judge, as he confided to Father George and me over beers at the hotel that evening, expected the hospital doctors to be of the slightest help to Foster. But if nothing else, the savant’s “sabbatical” would give him a much-needed breather from the village and the village a much-needed breather from him.

  In the first of more than twenty notes and letters that Foster Boy bombarded me with from the state hospital during the next two weeks, he spoke of his doubts concerning divine providence, suggesting that his own existence might contradict such a concept. He called his letters “Epistles to the Ephesians.” In fact, most of them dealt with his ongoing metaphysical concerns and biblical studies, which seemed to have taken a radical new turn. Instead of scriptural passages dealing with intimacies between the sexes, Foster was now preoccupied by those that revealed what he deemed to be instances of God’s injustice to man.

  I had no idea how to respond to Foster Boy’s theological concerns. Father George undoubtedly could have helped me, but he was laid up with another bout of angina. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote back to Foster with tidbits of village gossip that I thought might amuse him. After winning the hundred-dollar monthly bingo jackpot, Sal the Berry Picker had ordered the first television set in Kingdom Common. Unfortunately, her hemlock-bark shack overlooking the town dump had no electricity, and there was no TV reception in the village in those days anyway. At the same time a rumor had been noised abroad that Louvia the Fortuneteller had been observed driving a black potash kettle fast through the twilit sky above Little Quebec just before the worst thunderstorm to hit the Common in years. And on the day after the storm, Alf Quimby’s honey bees had emerged from their hive, swarmed with a squadron of their wild brethren on the courthouse tower, and flown off toward Canada.

  One morning toward the end of May I received six letters from Foster. “If God had really wanted to test Job’s mettle, He’d have arranged for the old boy to be a bottle picker in Kingdom Common,” one note concluded. “Don’t you agree, Friend Frank?”

  Friend Frank. This was how Foster had begun addressing me. “You’re my closest friend, Frank,” he wrote. “And I guess I’m yours. Like David and Jonathan.”

  “No girlfriend yet, though,” he wrote the following day. “Maybe I ought to come back and set my cap for a hometown girl. Say a long-legged Sunday School teacher, like Miss Lily Broom. Or a plump juicy widow woman like Julia Hefner. Or should I throw in the towel when it comes to the girls and live on a pillar like St. Simeon Stylites? Or change my name, like Saul on the road to Damascus? Or to Job? Job Boy Dufresne? What do you think, Friend Frank?”

  Memorial Day was just around the corner. The backyard apple trees were dropping their pink and white petals. From Little Quebec to the big houses on Anderson Hill, peas and lettuce were up and flourishing. Commoners had cut their lawns several times, the ratchety click click click of the hand-pushed mowers in the early evening after supper reminding me of so many miniature trains as I practiced with the Outlaws for our upcoming holiday double-header with Magog.

  Father George was keeping me busy doing yard work and cutting wood for elderly parishioners, but then, two days before the start of the long weekend, the village woke to half a foot of new snow. The north wind out of Canada, known locally as the Arctic Express, had brought the Common its usual late-spring blizzard even later than usual, burying the young peas in Father George’s garden and the yellow and blue pansies Judge Allen had set out around the base of his great-great-great-grandfather Ethan’s statue, and transforming the pitcher’s mound at the opposite end of the common into a miniature white ski jump. I spent most of the morning shoveling snow for shut-ins.

  Around noon the village lost its electricity. When I returned to the rectory I found a note from Father George saying he’d gone down the hill to the church. As I lighted a kerosene lamp and set it on the kitchen table, a silence akin to the deep stillness of a winter night seemed to settle over the entire town.

  Just then there was a loud rapping on the window by the table. A moment later the door flew open, revealing a towering figure completely encased in white. “Hello, Friend Frank,” the snowman said. “What goes around comes around, you know. I’ve come around to find that hometown girl.”

  Foster Boy stepped inside, shaking off snow like a Saint Bernard, already hooting his wild laugh.

  His storm gear consisted only of his Outlaws cap, a thin spring jacket, and a gigantic pair of galoshes with all the buckles missing. His gloveless hands were chapped red as the glowing stove. Yet what seemed to concern Foster most today was not his own plight but that of the songbirds on the ridge where he and I had gone fishing earlier that month. Wouldn’t they freeze or starve in the blizzard? “Why would God do this to them, Frank? Would a truly loving father kill off his own creatures like flies?”

  “I don’t know that God personally manages the weather, Foster.”

  “Why not? Doesn’t He know about every sparrow that falls?”

  Foster grinned at his lamp-lit reflection in the window. “Hoo! God would need a savant to keep track of the fallen sparrows today. But let’s get down to brass tacks, Frank. The question on the docket this morning is why God doesn’t see fit to bring me a girlfriend. Say a youn
g widow, all tanned from the Holy Land sunshine. Like Queen Bathsheba after King David knocked off her husband.”

  “Foster, when it comes to God’s motivations, no one—” Foster brushed aside my equivocations with an impatient gesture, repeated in mime by his distorted replica in the window. “Don’t you think it was unfair that God rubbed out David’s best friend, Jonathan? After all, what did Jonathan have to do with King David’s transgressions?”

  Foster shut one yellow eye and gave me a canny look with the other. He tucked his index finger under his middle finger and tapped me on the arm. “Frank Bennett and Foster Boy Dufresne,” he said. “David and Jonathan.”

  He smiled. “Which one of us is going to wind up like Jonathan, Frank?”

  “Foster—”

  “So why doesn’t God bring me a woman?” Foster Boy demanded again. Now he seemed to be speaking directly to his reflection.

  “Maybe God has better things to do with His time right now.”

  “Like what? Killing off robin redbreasts in the spring storm of the century?”

  Suddenly I realized that Foster Boy had undergone a transformation. There was a new intensity about him, a hardness in his saffron eyes and in the set of his mouth when he spoke of his ongoing dialogue with the God he had never doubted. Today Foster Boy was not pleading. He was insisting, insisting that God let him know what was what. With a jolt of astonishment—astonishment with myself, mainly, for not having understood this before—I realized that my friend the bottle picker was susceptible to all of the uncertainties and desires and frustrations of any other eighteen-year-old. And he was no longer willing to let God off the hook lightly.

  “Let’s level with each other,” Foster Boy was saying. “We’re all God’s children, right?” But instead of looking at me, he turned for confirmation to the dim, bloated image of himself in the window.