The Fall of the Year (30 page)

The lumbering trace I drove over was covered with fallen leaves. The woods smelled ripe with decaying leaves and were bright with the red leaves of soft maples, toast-colored beech leaves, golden-yellow birch, purple ash, and the polished yellow leaves of sugar maples, the trees Father George had loved best of all. Red squirrels and blue jays announced the Buick's approach. On another morning I would have stopped at one of the log landings along the trace and hunted partridges for an hour or two in the beech groves. Not today.

As the trace became steeper, bright hardwoods began to give way to firs and spruces. I was climbing Anderson Mountain, with the rushing flume of the Upper Kingdom River on my right and Lord Mountain looming high just across the gorge. At the crest of the ridge, I left the car and hiked the short distance up above the treeline to the summit, taking the bird's-eye box with me. I did not hurry. At the summit I drank from a spring of cold water that emerged from beneath the huge glacial boulder known as Jesus Saves and looked out over the woods and farms of the county to the courthouse tower and church spire of the Common, visible miles away across the multicolored hills.

Beyond the village to the west the Green Mountains ran due north and south in a long jagged line. To the east, the peaks of the northern White Mountains gleamed white with September snow. This would be a good place to be buried, I thought. A good place for a man who had spent his life writing about the Kingdom, spread out before me now in all its autumn colors, with the great boulder for a monument and the spring that ran year-round for music. From here, too, you could look far to the north into Canada, from whence had come Father George's beloved whiskey runners and smugglers, the French Canadian immigrants he'd written about so passionately, not to mention his own ancestors and Chantal herself. Near the spring at the base of the boulder was a fissure, a deep natural sepulcher where the ashes would remain undisturbed. But I decided to wait before making a final decision. I returned to the Roadmaster and drove down the back side of Anderson Mountain to the pond at the head of the notch.

Father George's birch-bark canoe, our canoe, sat upside down in the cedars near the water, untouched since he and I had made our last trip to the camp. As I canoed across the pond through the mist, the sun lifted over the shoulder of Lord Mountain. A few bright red leaves floated on the surface of the water. At the head of the pond, where the current came in over a gravel bar, a trout rose. “See if you can interest him in your grasshopper fly, son,” Father George would have said. But Father George was gone, like the water that passed out of the pond into the river below. And today I had more important things on my mind than fishing. Perhaps the camp would be the right place to leave the ashes.

The cabin sat in a stand of second-growth pines just above the east shore, its chinked logs weathered the same dark color as the pond water. I had half expected to see smoke curling out of the chimney, to smell the sweet sharp scent of wood smoke. Its absence reminded me of the absence of Father George.

For some minutes I sat on the camp steps, watching the mist on the pond disperse in the climbing sun. Then I opened up the green cardboard box containing the “Short History” and riffled through the pages to Chapter VII, on Lord's Bog. In the morning sunlight I read again how the bog and the notch below it had been carved out 10,000 years ago by the glacier, how the bog was feared by the Indians, how it was discovered in 1759 by Rogers' Rangers, and, ultimately, how it was preserved from obliteration by the horse-logger Noel Lord, who had used the big flood of 1927 to take out the Kingdom Power Dam being built at the foot of the flume. That, too, I thought, would be a good story to write someday.

When I finished the chapter, I went inside and started a small fire in the stove to take the chill off the air. Then I sat down at the table and continued to read. It occurred to me, reading on into the warming morning, that Father George, with his love of the seasons and trees, the birds and animals, the past and its stories, had been both a romantic and, when he wrote about the dangers of the mill and the dark old tragedies of the Common, a realist as well. His “Short History” told the stories of the village simply and beautifully. Yet as Chantal had pointed out, it revealed little of its teller. His decision to leave his estate in the hands of a girl he'd known less than a month suggested that he was far more romantic than I had supposed. What in Father George's life would lead anyone to suspect that a pretty girl with a beguiling personality could steal his heart so completely that he would give all he had for her love?

Later in the morning, after reading nearly two hundred pages, I came to the wonderful chapter on the secret stand of bird's-eye maples north of the bog. Once more I read how Father George had felled the giant maple and built the furniture for the Big House. The chapter ended: “What I liked best about the furniture when it was completed was that it retained the mysteries of the maple trees themselves.”

As I finished the chapter I realized that my hand was resting on the bird's-eye box. And at that moment I knew what I would do with Father George's ashes.

 

I walked down the slope to the birch canoe, put the maple box under the stern seat, and started paddling north. The sky was clouding over; it was becoming colder, cold enough for my hunting jacket. By the time I was a mile into the flow, a region of black water and naked dead cedar trees, with the tall Canadian mountains dark in the distance, it was misting. The only noise was the drip of water off my cedar paddle each time I brought it forward. Ahead, within easy range, two black ducks rose off the flow, but I did not reach for my shotgun.

Two miles above the camp I came to the first big beaver dam, audible well before I reached it from the steady murmur of water running out around its edges. I stepped onto the neatly woven sticks of the dam, pulled the canoe up behind me, slid it into the dark flat water above, and continued.

Three more miles and two dams farther north, the flow narrowed into a dark corridor between fir and spruce trees, reflected upside down in the water when the sun abruptly came back out. I looked for a rainbow. There wasn't one, but the entire woods exhaled a rosy golden mist. The fir trees smelled fresh and green, more like spring than fall. On a rise to my right was a stand of double-topped pines. Schoolmarm pines, Father George had called them, in reference to bowlegged spinster schoolteachers.

This was the heart of the bog. Here there were no roads, no logging traces, no sign that any human being had ever passed this way before. No one, not even Father George, knew for sure whether this region was in the United States or Canada.

Above the fourth dam I pulled the canoe out onto the bank. I put the maple box into my jacket pocket, left my shotgun and fly rod in the bottom of the canoe, and walked through the woods over a hidden moose path Father George had shown me long ago. The rosy mist continued to rise all around me. Beside the trail, white caribou moss grew thick on the floor of the forest.

I came out of the woods by the spawning pool, where the bog changed character once again. Here, where the stream emerged from the Canadian mountains, it was a meandering channel of icy pools and riffles, with the clean sand-and-gravel bottom that brook trout seek out to lay their eggs on. Near the bank was a lone, topless, partly hollow maple tree, four feet in diameter and less than twenty feet tall. Decades earlier the tree had been struck by lightning. Yet year after year its few remaining branches still put out leaves, which had turned an umber-orange for fall, a bright lone flag in the bog, shimmering in the watery sunlight. This was the last remaining tree from Father George's secret stand of bird's-eye maples. Below the bank on which the shattered tree grew ran the long pool where the biggest brook trout in the Kingdom still came to spawn.

I set the maple box down on the caribou moss and lay on the bank to look into the spawning pool. There they were, a dozen or so big squaretails, finning slowly on the streambed below. Their backs were as green as the firs on the opposite bank. One of the trout turned, flashing pink. I flicked a bit of stiff white caribou moss into the pool. Instantly two males, each about twenty inches long, swirled at it. Downriver a young moose, as dark as the forest he emerged from, waded into the flow and crossed to the other side. Overhead an osprey cried out.

Of all the places Father George had loved—the long-abandoned farm where he'd grown up, the caved-in schoolhouse where he'd first taught, the Academy, the ball diamond on the Common, the Big House, the Church of St. Mary's—the spawning pool deep in the bog had been his favorite.

I stood up, spooking the trout, and slid the bird's-eye box into the deep hollow of the maple tree. I covered it with a few handfuls of fresh leaves and moss. Here, in what was left of the great maple, what was left of George Lecoeur would be safe. And when this last tree toppled and crumbled, the ashes and it together would join the forest floor and the bog and Father George's Kingdom.

On my way back to the camp it turned colder. Storm clouds over the Canadian mountains were descending fast toward the bog, settling in to conceal Anderson and Lord Mountains. Within an hour the season seemed to have jumped ahead two months to November.

It began to snow. At first the flakes were big and sparse, then smaller and thicker. In the snow I felt utterly alone, yet at peace in the knowledge that, whatever lay ahead, at last I understood what Father George had wanted me to do.

But I did not understand yet, not entirely. Not until I pulled the canoe onto the shore of the pond and went up to the camp through the snow to get the “Short History” and saw the candlelight in the window and found the girl sitting at the table, waiting for me.

She was wearing a dark blue dress that matched her eyes, which were dark blue in the twilight, and white fur boots and a white fur jacket. I took her in my arms and kissed her, and when we stepped apart, it was snowing much harder outside and almost full dark.

“I thought you were in Canada,” I said.

Chantal laughed. “How strange. Why would I go back to Canada when all I want is right here? Here I have my house, my work, my lover and husband-to-be, whom I met in Quebec—Little Quebec!” And she kissed me again, more passionately than before.

“Look,” Chantal said. “I even have the old woman's foolish stone. She made a great to-do about giving it to me as an early wedding present.”

She set Louvia's rose quartz on the table beside the “History” and said, “You were wrong about other things as well, Frank Bennett, besides my comings and goings. For instance, you thought Father George left no word behind for you. But of course he did. He told me I'd understand when to give this to you. Now's the time.”

She handed me a manila envelope with the words “Fina Chapter” printed across the front. Inside, in Father George' clear handwriting, was a sheaf of pages on lined yellow table paper. I sat down at the camp table to read them by candleligh while Chantal sat across the table and watched me intently.

The final chapter of the “Short History” was an account of Father George's own life, beginning with his boyhood on the farm in Lost Nation, his teaching at the one-room school, and his trek to the Common, at seventeen, with his shoes in a paper bag, to attend the Academy. With increasing excitement, I read the stories that Father George had told me over the course of my life but had never recorded in his “History.” Even now there was a certain reticence in the memoir, reflected by his use of the second person to refer to himself in the account of working his way through college, joining the RCAF, living with the Benedictines in France, and coming home to Vermont to take orders. Then, near the end of the chapter, a story that I had never heard before:

 

To return, now, to those halcyon days of teaching and bootlegging and playing ball before the war. In those summers, the young people of the area sometimes gathered to dance to big-name bands in a pavilion on the common. There they would dance on into the night under colored lanterns strung above the pavilion like Christmas lights, and on the warm summer nights it was easy to fall in love. Those were summer romances, as evanescent as the brief northern summer; and at the end of the summer, when the fall of the year brought the colors and the pavilion on the village green closed and looked all the more desolate by contrast with your summer memories of it, and the Canadian winds and snowfalls came, the romances died like the summer but were not forgotten. For sometimes, years later, when you were walking back up the hill to the house you never, as a boy, could have imagined you would live in, you would think back to those years and wonder what your life might have been like if the war had never come and you'd married a girl you met at the pavilion in your youth.

Now suppose that late one night, many years later, the woman from that long-ago summer appeared at your hunting camp when you were there alone, and it seemed that night as if the war had never been and the intervening years themselves had been mere days, and that from this encounter came the single greatest regret of your life: a regret you could never acknowledge to anyone because of your position in the village and your vocation. But suppose that in the end, miraculously, the secret regret of your life became the greatest joy you had ever known, so much so that illness and impending death meant nothing

 

Here the last chapter stopped abruptly in the middle of the page. I looked up at Chantal. I was still not entirely sure what I had read.

“So,” she said. “Do you understand at last? What he said you would understand?”

My heart racing, I looked across the table at Chantal, her eyes shining in the candlelight.

“And yet,” she said, laughing, “you seemed only too ready to abandon me for the imaginary daughter behind the old woman's curtain. How fickle! I can see I'll have to watch you like a hawk, Frank Bennett. When it became apparent to me that you were beginning to show romantic interest in the apparition, it made me a little jealous. I decided I had to take measures.”