A few days after the show, I asked Louvia point-blank whether she’d had any private traffic with Mr. Mentality. She frowned and replied that she and her Daughter knew ten times as much as the reader did about the village and one hundred times more about humanity in general.
I laughed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’ve told you before, Frank. You ask too many questions. Ask fewer, you’ll learn more. The man was the worst kind of mountebank. He was right about the ravages of age. I say nothing more.”
“Louvia, I have to know. Were you his stalking horse?”
“Louvia DeBanville says nothing.”
And she never did. The mysteries surrounding what happened in our town hall on that stormy night long ago remain mysteries to this day.
8
A Short Local History
It is worth bearing in mind, before undertaking any enterprise in Kingdom County, that much of the region was settled by a Connecticut Tory fleeing the American Revolution, who homesteaded here on the false assumption that he had reached Canada and safety. In other words, we should not forget that from the start Kingdom County was, essentially, a mistake.
—Father George, “A Short History”
THE FULL TITLE of the manuscript was “A Short History of Kingdom Common,” and it was one of the wonders of the village. The book contained chapters on local lumbering and log driving, farming and hunting, woodworking and the American Heritage furniture factory, railroading, even railroad tramps. There were lively portraits of local characters and heroes, such as the log driver Noël Lord and the fabled whiskey runners Henry Coville and Quebec Bill Bonhomme, all three of whom Father George had known personally. The greatest scholar and third baseman in the history of the county had even written a long chapter on town-team baseball in northern Vermont.
If Father George felt inspired, during the course of a chapter on brook trout fishing in the Kingdom, to digress with a thousand-word treatise on the effectiveness of the red-and-yellow grasshopper fly, he did so without hesitation. The “Short History” also contained many unpredictable and delightful vignettes, such as the story of Sylvie LaPlante, who was deserted by her husband as a young bride and kept a candle burning in her window for him for thirty-five years. There were tales of authentic Kingdom Common witches, of beekeepers and wildhoney hunters, footloose spruce gum gatherers and half-crazed barn burners. There were scholarly chapters on the history of French Canadian immigrants, including Father George’s own ancestors, complete with the genealogies of each of the families in Little Quebec and Irishtown. There was a chapter on the history of the international border between Kingdom County and Quebec. There were exhaustive chapters on the plants, animals, and fish of the Kingdom. What’s more, every page of the “Short History” read like an entertaining story.
What I liked best about Father George himself was that for as long as I could remember, he had treated me like a man. He talked to me exactly the way he talked to Editor Kinneson or Doc Harrison or Judge Allen. For this reason we were not just acolyte and priest, athlete and coach, a young man and his mentor, a boy and his adoptive father. We were friends. And each fall we celebrated our friendship and the traditions Father George was passing on to me by going to his hunting camp, far up in Lord Hollow.
The hunting camp, which had originally been a lumber camp, was made of logs chinked with moss. Its cracked old stove had once heated the Lost Nation school, where Father George had gone to teach when he was fifteen. A dozen deer and moose antlers were nailed to the outside front wall. Inside, a six-pound mounted brook trout, a brilliantly colored male with a hooked jaw that Father George had caught in the beaver bog north of camp, hung over the door. On shelves and tables were odd rocks and tree fungi and animal skulls that he had picked up in his ramblings. The shelves were strewn with his favorite books. Thoreau’s Maine Woods, Keats’s poems, John Burroughs’s nature essays, and all kinds of guidebooks to the birds and animals, fish, plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees of northern New England. Especially trees, for which Father George had an abiding love.
When I was ten years old, my adoptive father took me by canoe through the great bog beyond his camp to the remnants of the stand of bird’s-eye maples that he had long ago made into furniture for the Big House. “What I like best about these trees,” he told me, “is the mystery of them. Nobody knows exactly what makes the maple sap rise in the spring or the leaves turn yellow in the fall. It’s like religion, son. Or falling in love. Nobody really knows why we worship God or fall in love.”
At ten I was far more interested in maple trees and partridges and brook trout and deer than in falling in love. But love was a subject that Father George often came back to; the story of Sylvie LaPlante and the candle in the window was just one of several local love stories included in the “Short History.”
The year I turned twelve, Father George took me up to the ridge behind the hunting camp to cut down a large paper birch tree. From its bark we made a canoe, which from then on we used to fish and explore the bog. For my thirteenth birthday, he made me a two-piece, seven-foot bamboo fly rod. With it, and the brightly colored old-fashioned trout flies that Father George tied each year by the score, I caught hundreds, perhaps thousands, of brook trout, in Lord Hollow and elsewhere in the Kingdom.
Father George had other unusual skills. Frequently he flew me into remote lakes and ponds across the border with the birch canoe lashed to the wing of his float plane. And I never tired of hearing how he had bought the Big House with money earned from smuggling whiskey into Vermont from Canada before World War I or of how once, with a large load of booze, the plane had been forced down by cloud cover on the bog north of his camp. When the ceiling lifted and he discovered there wasn’t enough taxiing room to take off, he promptly disassembled the plane, moved it piecemeal by horse-drawn dray over the height of land to Lake Memphremagog, welded it back together again, and continued the whiskey run. Lately, I’d started writing a story about Father G’s smuggling days, which was fast turning into the first draft of a novel about him.
Father George knew a great many things that I very much wanted to know. He knew where the last big brook trout spawning bed in Kingdom County was, up on the flow north of his hunting camp. He knew how to find a bee tree, full of wild dark honey; where the hidden springs in the bog and the big surrounding woods were; where the best spots were to wait in November for a buck to come down to the flow to drink. He showed me where, nearly two hundred years before, Robert Rogers and his fabled Rangers had passed through the bog.
At the hunting camp, Father George was the first man into the woods in the morning and the last man out at night even in his late sixties, when at last his angina began to wear him down. He could outwalk me well into my teens. When he first came back to Kingdom Common from the university, he continued to box at come-one, come-all Saturday night matches all over northern New England. On the wall of his camp were two faded photos clipped out of the Kingdom County Monitor, both taken after he had entered the priesthood. One showed him accepting the heavyweight boxing championship trophy at Kingdom Fair after winning six consecutive fights in one day by knockouts. In the other, taken when he was in his fifties, he was wearing his Outlaws baseball uniform and charging the mound with fists flying after being brushed back from the plate by an opposing pitcher!
Father George was appealingly human in any number of ways. While delivering a blistering sermon from his pulpit on the cardinal sins of swearing and anger, he might become so angry that he would enjoin us, at the top of his lungs, “And don’t you good people forget it, goddamn it!” After his angina set in, he would station me in the first row at St. Mary’s to alert him, by raising my hand to my cheek, that his face was getting red during these interesting jeremiads. This private signal was supposed to remind him to calm down lest he sustain a stroke—but in fact he rarely noticed my frantic gestures or was too worked up by then to care if he did. Though he feared little else, Father George had a dread fear
of a common cold. And while he liked most animals, cats made his skin crawl, and he’d cross the street to avoid one. He never wore a clerical collar outside of church but was famously fastidious about his dress and appearance. At home he wore a white shirt and necktie even when he was working in his extensive flower beds, transplanting an old-fashioned apple tree, or just raking leaves. At the hunting camp he always looked as though he’d stepped out of an L. L. Bean catalog.
Recently, since Father George’s health had started to fail, I’d begun thinking seriously about postponing my matriculation at seminary, at least for a semester. But one night in mid-August, as he and I were sitting in the kitchen of the Big House visiting over a few beers, he confided something to me that, in its way, astonished me more than anything that had happened that summer.
“Frank,” he said, “I want you to be the executor of my will.”
I had known for years that I had been well provided for in Father George’s will and that with the balance of his estate he had established a scholarship fund for graduates of the Kingdom County Academy. And, as much as I hated to contemplate Father George’s death, I immediately agreed to act as his executor. But I was amazed when he went into his study off the kitchen and returned with a special bankbook for the scholarship fund, showing a balance of slightly more than $750,000, which he told me he’d amassed over the years as a result of careful investments and reinvestments of the original small fortune he’d made smuggling bootleg whiskey—not to mention interest on loans he’d made to the diocese for various charitable endeavors, which to me shed some illumination on why the monsignors he’d served under had allowed him to lead such an unorthodox life.
“Well, there’s no point dwelling on this, then, son,” Father George said, returning the bank book. “But knowing that you’ll take care of things for me when the time comes is a relief.”
“I’m sure you’ll live another twenty years,” I said hurriedly. He just smiled and shrugged.
Over the next couple of weeks, I was further alarmed by the rapid deterioration of Father George’s health. By the last week of August he’d stopped work on his “Short History” and in his extensive flower gardens and had begun going to bed right after supper. His spirits were flagging along with his energy. Some days he didn’t shave. Until that summer Father G had been known as the champion walker of Kingdom County, out tramping the roads at all hours of the day, but recently he hadn’t gone outside at all. He had missed the last two Sunday masses. Clearly he would soon have to retire altogether, though the thought of that was terribly discouraging to him.
To my surprise, it was Louvia DeBanville who finally summoned me up to her place and demanded to know what long-range provisions I’d made for my adoptive father. She insisted that at the very least I should use my influence to persuade him to hire a live-in companion to stay at the Big House. She added with vehemence that neither I nor the parish was doing right to let the stubborn old fool disintegrate from ill health and old age.
The fortuneteller was also right in predicting that Father George would not put up much of a fuss when I suggested he hire a companion. “You’ve been working too hard on all fronts yourself lately,” he said when I broached the subject. “Go ahead and advertise, son.”
One evening in early September, when it was just chilly enough for a wood fire, I was working late painting the inside of the basement social hall at St. Mary’s when suddenly Father George appeared at the door looking ten years younger. He’d had a haircut, was freshly shaven, wore a neat white shirt, a tie, twill slacks, and a new pair of walking shoes.
“Frank,” he said, his voice stronger than it had been all summer. “You aren’t going to believe what I’m about to tell you.”
“I don’t imagine I could,” I said. “But you look like a million bucks.”
“I ought to look like a million bucks. I just let out the room you got me to advertise to a very special person. Her name’s Chantal and she’s from Montreal. She looks like a movie star, Frank. But the surprising thing is, she’s like you. She’s interested, I mean really interested, in this town and its history. She sat at the kitchen table and we visited for two hours this evening. You’re going to like this girl a lot, son.”
I laughed. “She seems to have done wonders for you already.”
“You’re right. She makes me feel alive again. And there’s something else I want to tell you. Chantal knows amazing things about me. Things that she wouldn’t have had any way of learning. She just knows.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I played ball in Canada when I was in college. And flew for the RCAF. I don’t know if she’s some kind of seer, but she knows things.”
“Come on, Father G. You don’t believe in seers any more than I do.”
“Well, maybe not, but I believe in this girl. You will, too. We made a deal. She’s going to drive me to the doctor’s and so forth, do a half hour or so a day of light housekeeping, sort of keep track of me, in exchange for the room.”
“In exchange for which room?”
Father George hesitated. Then he grinned. “She wanted the cupola.”
“My room.”
Father George stood up and rubbed his hands over the stove. “You won’t mind when you meet her. You can move into the bedroom off the kitchen. I’m telling you, son. You’re really going to like this girl. She’s moving in this coming Sunday.”
And he was on his way out the door, walking with more spring in his step than he had in a year.
I thought for a minute, then shrugged. A beauty queen who claimed to be clairvoyant wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I’d advertised for a live-in companion for Father George. But if having an attractive young woman hang on his every word and drive him around in his Roadmaster made my father happy, that was fine with me.
I divided Sunday afternoon between working on my whiskey-running novel and plugging away at the painting job at the social hall. Late in the afternoon, Father George came by to notify me that he’d be serving tea at the Big House in fifteen minutes.
“Tea?” I laughed. “Since when has the beer-drinking unorthodox priest of Kingdom County started serving tea? Are we talking about high tea here or low tea?”
“This is definitely high tea,” Father George said. “You’ll see why when you get there. Chantal wants very much for you to come right over. We’ll have dinner later.”
“Chantal what? You haven’t told me her last name.”
Father George chuckled. “Just Chantal. It’s like a stage name, I guess. It turns out she’s a professional astrologer.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Maybe she can read my future in tea leaves. Like Louvia.”
But the girl sitting at the bird’s-eye table in the Big House kitchen when I walked in bore little resemblance to Louvia. She wore a deep blue dress, the color of the late summer sky; her long hair was dark and shiny and fell below her shoulders; and her wide-set eyes were the same blue as her dress. She was already smiling at me as I came through the door, and I was so surprised that I reached out for the edge of the table to steady myself.
It was those eyes and the smile, the unmistakable delighted irony in them, that made me positive. Chantal was the baker’s girl from the patisserie in Little Quebec, who had kissed me earlier that summer.
And it seemed to me that she was fully aware of the effect her presence had on me and delighted by that, too, because she covered her mouth with her hand as if to conceal laughter.
“Chantal, I’d like you to meet Frank Bennett,” Father George said.
“Hello, Frank Bennett.” Chantal smiled her ironical smile. “How nice to see you again.”
To Father George, who was pouring our tea, she said, “Frank Bennett and I are old friends, you might say. Isn’t that so, Frank?”
I looked around the kitchen, but the bird’s-eye table, the blue porcelain stove, the worn yellow linoleum I’d grown up with, all seemed unfamiliar.
“Why are y
ou holding the table down?” she said. “It isn’t going to fly away.”
I looked at my hands, still gripping the edge of the table, and slowly let go.
“So. You didn’t know I intended to visit Vermont for a time,” Chantal said. “When I saw the ad in the newspaper, I came to see Father George immediately. Here I am. It’s all settled. But what about that prying old woman you were squiring around last summer? Your ancient grandmother, the self-declared witch? Did she ever get her recipe?”
I laughed. “No. And she’s no witch. She’s a good friend of mine.”
“I’m not surprised,” Chantal said. “You should see the ancient gypsy woman he consorts with, Father. A born troublemaker if one ever existed.”
“You’ve got that right,” Father George said. “I know all about her.”
“Frank was very forward with me,” Chantal said. “I think the old woman put him up to it.”
Father George laughed out loud. Everything about Chantal seemed to please him. “I don’t quite know what’s going on here,” he said. “But you two obviously don’t need me around to carry on a conversation. I’m going to put three big steaks on the grill.”
“Chantal,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
The Fall of the Year Page 19