A Dismal Thing To Do (8 page)

“I can imagine. What’s new on the grapevine?”

“Well, the biggest news seems to be you an’ Janet. Anything fresh to keep the pot boilin’?”

“Plenty, I’m afraid. Poor Jenny took a bad tumble yesterday and banged herself up in grand style. I expect I’ll be branded as a wife beater before the day’s out.”

Fred chuckled, as Madoc had hoped he would. “I shouldn’t be surprised. How’d it happen?”

“I’m blaming Marion Emery, myself. If she hadn’t presented us with one of those old-fashioned pitcher and bowl sets from the Mansion, Janet wouldn’t have been out hunting for an antique washstand to set it on.”

Madoc repeated the yarn Janet had spun to Annabelle. Fred nodded in complete sympathy.

“That’s a woman for you. Whatever she can’t have, that’s the thing she wants most. Mine’s been yammerin’ at me to move all the furniture out of our Marilyn’s room an’ turn it into a sewin’ room for herself. Marilyn’s finishin’ up at Acadia this year, an’ be darned if she didn’t announce her engagement to a nice young feller from Digby whose father runs a lobster pound. Does all right, too; sells ’em to the tourists in summer an’ ships ’em down to Boston in the winter. The boy’s studyin’ to be a lawyer, but at least he’s got somethin’ to fall back on if the law don’t pan out. Though I don’t know’s I’d want to fall back on a lobster, myself.”

Fred chuckled again. “So the gist of it is, they want to be married as soon as Marilyn graduates, which means she won’t be comin’ back to stay and the wife wants to get goin’ on the bridal gown an’ the bridesmaids’ dresses. Any furniture Marilyn don’t want, Millie’s goin’ to get rid of, she claims.”

“Well, before she sells any of it, ask her if there’s one of those washstands with a hole on the top and a shelf underneath. I’ll pay whatever she asks to keep my wife off any more rotten ladders.”

“Hell, is that what Janet was lookin’ for? I got one right over there in the corner. Don’t ask me where it came from. I’ve forgotten, if I ever knew. It ain’t in too bad shape, far’s I can see. I could slap on a coat o’ fresh paint.”

“If you do, I’ll run you in for disturbing the peace. The idea, I believe, is either to preserve them in a suitably battered condition or else to strip them down and then restore them, whatever that may mean. If you’d just brush off the cobwebs and let me know what you think it’s worth?”

“Hell’s flames, how do I know what it’s worth? You better take a look for yourself before you decide whether the thing’s even worth luggin’ home.”

Fred set aside the chipped graniteware basin that had been sitting in the top since God knew when. Together, the two upholders of law and order went over the washstand. Barring a few grease stains and too many coats of the wrong color paint, each one knocked off in spots to show the color underneath, they pronounced it sound and fit to travel. This was definitely a strip-and-restore job, and that was fine with Madoc. It would give Janet something to work off her surplus energy on, once she got some back.

“Want to take it with you now?” Fred asked. “Or shall I run it up in the truck later?”

“Why don’t you take it, if you don’t mind? Janet will be glad of a chance to say hello. But about the money—”

Fred gave Madoc a sly grin. “Tell you what. You get Perce Bergeron’s truck and Jase Bain’s lumber back for me, and we’ll call it square.”

“But suppose they’re beyond getting? Would you settle for the thieves who took them?”

“I’d settle for anything that will get Perce an’ Jase off my back.”

“In that case, it’s a deal. Now Fred, can you describe this truck of Bergeron’s in detail?”

“I can do a little better’n that. Why don’t you take yourself a run out to Bergeron’s and ask Perce for a picture of it? He must have hundreds of ’em. Old Elzire, Perce’s father, was a real sharp feller. He believed it paid to advertise. He’d have postcards printed up with a picture of the truck an’ the bull an’ some cute sayin’. ‘Why wait till the cows come home? We’ll throw the bull your way,’ that was one of ‘em. ‘Service with a smile,’ that was another.”

“Catchy,” said Madoc.

“Ayup. Elzire was a smart one, all right. It was a good idea, you know, cartin’ the bull around to the cows instead o’ makin’ the farmer drive ’em to stud. That truck put Perce’s food on the table an’ clothes on his back, an’ sent him to school, an’ he darn well knows it, eh? Hell, he’d rather ’o lost his mother-in-law. A damn sight rather, though you needn’t tell ’er I said so. I used to have a few of Elzire’s postcards kickin’ around myself, but don’t ask me what became of ’em. Anyway, I expect likely you’d as soon go get Perce’s story for yourself. Straight from the bull’s mouth, as you might say.”

Chuckling at his own wit, Fred told Madoc how to find Bergeron and said he guessed maybe he’d better get back to lining Jim Allenby’s brakes. However, Madoc was not quite ready to let him go.

“By the way, would you happen to know a chap from somewhere around these parts named either Grouse or McLumber who went into the military quite some years ago and did pretty well for himself? He’d be around your age, give or take a few years, tall and sturdily built, probably blond when he was younger but grayhaired now, roundish face, florid complexion, and bright blue eyes that look as if you could take them out and play marbles with them.”

“Cripes yes, that’d be Charlie Grouse. I went to school with him. Eyeball Grouse, we used to call him. General Grouse nowadays, from what his relatives try to make you believe, but I don’t think Eyeball’s ever got quite that far. Colonel or major, I forget which. They say he’s turned into a kind of a stuffed shirt, but what the hell, he’s entitled, is the way I look at it. Yep, you got to hand it to ol’ Eyeball, he didn’t do so bad for a boy from Bigears. You run into him down to Fredericton, eh?”

“Yes, but please don’t mention it if you should happen to run across him. I’m not supposed to know who he is.”

“Huh. So he’s gone in for the cloak-an’-dagger stuff now? Well, I s’pose that’s all part o’ the game if you want to get ahead. ’Twouldn’t be my cup o’ tea an’ I shouldn’t o’ thought it would o’ been Eyeball’s when we was playin’ one ol’ cat at recess forty years ago, but that’s the way it goes. If he ever lets you in on the secret, tell him Fred Olson says hello. At least I don’t have to make believe I ain’t me.”

P
ERCE BERGERON WAS PRECISELY
where Fred Olson had said he’d be, out in his barn looking mournful. He was sitting on a high stool at a workbench built into the front left-hand corner, doing something to a piece of equipment whose use Madoc could guess the general nature of but didn’t care to hear the particulars.

“Afternoon, Mr. Bergeron,” he said. “I’m Bert Wadman’s brother-in-law. My name is Rhys.”

“Oh, the Mountie. Glad to meet you. Fred Olson sent you over about my truck, I’ll wager.”

“As a matter of fact, he did. I’ve brought my wife for a little visit with Annabelle, and Bert happened to mention your problem. I came down to ask Fred about it, because I thought it might possibly tie in with a bigger one we’ve run into.”

“You mean there’s a gang going all over the province stealing bull trucks?”

“Heavy equipment of various sorts, actually. From the way Fred describes your truck, I’d doubt very much if there are many like it around.”

“And you couldn’t be more right. I’ve never seen another one like ours. My father built that bull box himself, and had it mounted to his own specifications. Pa was a man ahead of his time, if you want my opinion. Only the time caught up with us and now it’s all this goddamn artificial insemination. Hell of a way to treat animals, but what can you do?”

He threw down the instrument he’d been working on, and pulled out a drawer from under the bench. “Fred tell you about my father’s advertising campaign? Now, that took imagination and enterprise. That was Pa all over, imaginative and enterprising. Damn, I miss that truck! It’s like losing Pa all over again.”

“You were his only son, Mr. Bergeron?”

“Hell no, I was his fifteenth. Some of them were twins, of course. Pa was sixty-seven when I was born, and as good a man as he ever was. Sired two more after me, but they were both girls, Annette and Finette. Mama called her that because she said Finette was positively the last, and she was. Mama wasn’t getting any younger herself by then, you know. ‘Forty-eight’s too old to be washing diapers,’ I can remember her saying. So Pa bought her a new washing machine, which didn’t change her mind any, not but what she didn’t appreciate the gesture, you understand. Yes, Mr. Rhys, I’ve got brothers old enough to be your grandfather. Damn near old enough to be mine, if it comes to that, scattered from here to hell and gone. They all turned out imaginative and enterprising, like Pa. Lit out and made their fortunes in the wide world.”

“But you stuck to the farm.”

“Oh yes, I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else but here. Besides, I couldn’t leave the parents. By the time I was full-grown, they were getting on a bit.”

Madoc nodded. Elzire would have been pushing ninety by then. Perce must be another of Eyeball Grouse’s classmates himself, or pretty close to it.

“My brother Armand stayed around, too, but Armand was never one for the bulls, unless it was a bull moose. He likes the woods. Started guiding before he was fifteen. Pa said if that was what Armand wanted, then that was what Armand ought to do. He said Armand would find his way, and Armand did. He married one of the McLumber girls from out back and started his own hunting lodge.”

“Really?” Madoc wondered how many brothers he might have to work through before he could get Perce back to the bull truck. “How is the lodge doing?”

“It was going great guns, till the lakes began dying. Fishing’s pretty slim around here by now, you know. It’s the goddamn acid rain that’s killing ’em off. Armand gets hot under the collar about those smokestacks down in the States, not that we’re a hundred per cent innocent ourselves, but Armand says it’s all the same because who the hell comes up here throwing money into Canadian industry anyway? Armand’s real big on emission controls. Last time he was out home here, he was raising hell with me because I’ve never put a catalytic converter on the bull truck.”

“You don’t suppose Armand might have decided it was his civic duty to remove the truck from temptation’s way?” Madoc suggested diffidently.

Perce spurned any such notion. “Armand would never do a thing like that! Not behind my back, anyway. He might drive her off to Fred Olson’s garage in a fit of righteous indignation and make Fred fix her up. I won’t say he mightn’t do that, because he damn well might. Armand’s pretty bullheaded, which isn’t surprising, bulls being our heritage, so to speak. But he wasn’t that riled up. He knows the bull truck doesn’t get driven much nowadays.”

“But the truck was in drivable condition at the time it disappeared?”

“For sure. I’ve kept her that way as an act of filial piety, clean as a whistle, tires pumped up, all shipshape and Bristol fashion. Only I’ve never repainted the body because Pa did that last when he was eighty-six and I felt it would be a desecration of his memory to cover up his handiwork. I do throw on a fresh coat of varnish now and then to protect it from the ravages of the elements.”

“You’ve never thought of building a garage for the truck?”

“Not I, no sir. She sat right out there where she’d always sat. That was Pa’s way, you see. He was a good man, mind you, a kind man in his way, but he didn’t hold with pampering. If she couldn’t stand up and take whatever the heavens chose to dish out, then she wasn’t the truck for him.”

“I’m surprised she survived as long as she did, in that case.”

“Oh well, you see, Mr. Rhys, she went through a few what you might call metamorphoses along the way. Sooner or later the old frame would rust out and the engine get past repair, so Pa would send for a new one and just bolt the old bull box on to the new chassis.”

“Ah, then she wasn’t precisely an antique in her moving parts.”

“Not at all. I told you Pa was always one to move with the times. We remounted the bull box less than twenty years ago, shortly before Pa passed to his reward. I didn’t honestly think he’d be taking the bull out much more, him being just hitting the century mark by then, but he said do it, so I did. No, Mr. Rhys, there are plenty of trucks on the road today that look older than she does, though damn few with so long or so distinguished a history, if I do say it myself.”

“And proudly, I’m sure. Would you have a photograph of the truck in her most recent incarnation?”

“Incarnation, I like that word. Pa would have, too. Yes, I’ve got her right here. We had new cards made at the time, see. That was part of the tradition. I have to admit I’ve come to rely mostly on ads in the paper and the telephone book, but I’m sure Pa would have done the same. He was all for progress, though I’m personally damned if I see where artificial insemination falls within that category. Jesus, they’re even doing it to people now!”

It was a
cri de coeur.
Madoc made no attempt to respond, but busied himself with the truck photos. Not many of the last batch had got distributed. Perce was easily persuaded to part with a number of them. He even produced a front-on shot which had an assortment of Perce’s own grandchildren clustered on and around it but was reasonably clear as to detail. Janet had got a close enough look at the oncoming cab; she should be able to determine whether or not this could have been the truck she encountered on that accursed hill.

“This is exactly what I need, Mr. Bergeron. Now, you said the truck was ready to go. Does that in fact mean somebody could merely have climbed in and driven it away?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. The drive was plowed, the truck was shoveled out, the gas tank was full, and she even had her battery in. You’d have had to warm her up a while before you started out, but she’d have turned over all right. I’d had her out myself just a couple of days before. I used to drive her down the road and back, you know, just far enough to loosen the old joints and keep the battery charged. She ran fine as silk, all things considered. Pa would have been proud of her. Damn it, Rhys, I can’t believe she’s gone!”