“The first reason I’m against this,” Uncle Henry said, “is that you’re the one that ought to ride in the Buick. We can put the whiskey in the boot and stretch you out on the back seat and Billy and Rat and me can set up front. That leg ain’t nothing to fool with. You heard what Tett said before he passed out. You freeze it up and you’ll surely lose it. Besides that, they’re bound to be patrolling them tracks with Compton’s train twelve hours overdue. They’ll pick you up before you get to Memphremagog, much less the Common. Your ideas get wilder and wilder, Quebec Bill. We’ll all go together in a nice warm car.”
We were standing beside the handcar in the first light of the morning. It was still at least an hour before sunrise, and bitterly cold. I agreed with Uncle Henry. If we all went in the Buick and kept to the back roads, I doubted that we would be picked up. Also I dreaded the idea of pumping that handcar all the way down to the Common in the cold. The temperature couldn’t have been much above twenty degrees, and the air smelled like snow. I kept thinking about poor Compton, lying roped to the top of that van. He would freeze to death for certain, I thought. He was probably stiff already.
“I’ll think about it,” my father said. He was sitting up on the seat of the handcar and twirling the chambers of the revolver Uncle Henry had gotten away from one of the LaChance brothers just before Croggins slapped the straitjacket on him. Beside him sat the one remaining milk can and the pack basket containing the rest of our rope, the hatchet and twelve bottles of Seagram’s Rat had apparently transferred before taking the other milk can up for the party.
“You go fetch Rat down, Hen. I and Bill will think on what you said.”
“You’ll run off on me is what you’ll do. I know you better than that.”
“No, I promise we won’t do that. Just look at that Roadmaster, Henry. See it begin to take shape in the light. That’s a fine automobile you’ve got there.”
“It ain’t White Lightning.”
“You could paint her white and pretend she was.”
“I’ll go get Rat,” Uncle Henry said.
After Uncle Henry left I said to my father, “We’d better go in the Buick, Dad. It’s too cold to fool around out here. Uncle Henry’s right.”
I know what my father’s answer to that would have been, but before he could reply we were illuminated in a bright swath of headlights.
“What’s Henry doing with that Buick?” my father said.
The car started up with a roar and came straight down the lane for us. Berserk laughter erupted into the dawn.
“Christ,” my father shouted. “That ain’t Henry. Pump, Bill.”
I leaped onto the back of the handcar and began pumping. The Buick missed us by inches and rammed into Walter Kittredge’s prize manure pile.
“There goes Henry’s bumper,” my father said. “Pump for your life, Bill.”
The big car backed fast out of the manure pile, spun around and started after us down the tracks.
“This is too bad,” my father said. “I’ll have to bust Henry’s windscreen.”
Encircling the last milk can and the pack basket with his left arm, he held the LaChance brother’s pistol out in his right hand at arm’s length and took careful aim. He fired and the windshield shattered. I kept pumping. The Buick kept coming.
“Damn that man,” my father said with admiration. “He’s indestructible.”
He fired again. Still the Buick came on. Over the engine and the pounding of the tires on the ties we could hear that baying laughter. I had a terrible vision of Carcajou driving with the pike pole still in his chest.
“There goes a tire,” my father said. “There’s another. That’ll slow him down, Wild Bill.”
The handcar was going very fast now on the long downhill grade toward the trestle over the St. John. All kinds of impossible expediencies occurred to me. Maybe we could jump off and run into the cedar swamp; but my father couldn’t run, he couldn’t even walk. Periodically Carcajou emitted a long uncanny imitation of a train whistle. The tire rims thundered over the ties. My father fired three more shots, but mad Rasputin was gaining on us. My arms were tiring fast. We were all through, I thought. He had us.
“Pump, Wild Bill,” my father shouted.
He was trying to stand up. As we sped out onto the trestle with the Buick only a few feet behind us, blinding me with its lights, my father did stand. He fired his last bullet directly into the driver’s seat at point-blank range. More laughter. I pumped furiously. Once again my only objective was to get off a trestle, as though it wouldn’t be so bad to be crushed to death on dry land.
“Pump, Bill.”
“Pump,” shouted Carcajou as the Buick bore down on us. He began to laugh again, and was still laughing when my father, standing on his swollen wounded leg, lifted the last milk can high above his head and hurled it through the broken windshield and into the front seat.
“There goes Henry’s Roadmaster,” my father shouted as the Buick plunged into the river.
We stopped to reconnoiter just the other side of the trestle, where many years before my father had shot the two hijackers. Over in the east above the cedar swamp the sky was pink again. Three days ago we had looked at the same sky with hope in our hearts. Since then we had lost the canoe and Henry’s Cadillac. We had lost eight thousand dollars’ worth of whiskey and been instrumental in the wreck of a freight train and a new Roadmaster Buick. We had killed five men, including Carcajou, seen another man decapitated and sent four men to a lunatic asylum. Back home our cows were starving and my mother was doubtless sick with concern for us. My father had a fractured jaw and a leg that he might never walk on and that was now beginning to bleed again, the blood soaking through the bandages onto the platform of the handcar. Besides the clothes on our backs, we had nothing left but the pack basket, some rope, a hatchet and twelve bottles of whiskey. Already I was beginning to get cold again.
My father pointed to the east. “Wild Bill,” he said, his voice quavering with wonder, “here hath been dawning another blue day. Ain’t that sky just about the grandest sight you ever hope to see?”
The grandest sight I ever hoped to see was our farmhouse, but I didn’t say this to my father. What I said was, “Your leg is bleeding. We’ve got to stop that bleeding.”
“That’s just the wound cleaning itself out. Wounds will do that, you know. Hark. What’s that buzzing?”
I ran back to the trestle to see what Carcajou was doing now. The dark surface of the river was still; there was no sign of the Buick. The buzzing seemed to be coming from out over the lake. A small gray float plane appeared out of the mist. It was coming in above the bay and heading up the river. All that occurred to me was that here was a way to get my father to a doctor before he bled to death. I ran out on the trestle, took off my hunting jacket and waved it over my head.
The plane banked and landed in the bay. It turned and taxied up into the mouth of the river. Two men were inside. Both were wearing uniforms. I thought they might be wardens.
The pilot brought the plane up under the iron bridge to the trestle. His partner got out on a pontoon and fastened a rope to one of the trestle pilings. On the side of the plane and the wings were the letters U.S.B.P. I realized that we were being rescued by the border patrol.
“Hurry, Officers,” my father called as the two men climbed up on top of the trestle. “Thank Christ you’ve arrove at last. He tried to run us down with a locomotive. He’s murdered my brother-in-law and hired man.”
“Who has?”
“The outlaw Carcajou. He stole a train and wrecked it trying to mash us. I got shot up in the fracas.”
“We know all about the train. Carcajou did that, did he? Say, I guess you got shot up all right. We better get you to the hospital right away. Get his legs, Stu.”
While the border patrol officers carried my father to the trestle and lowered him down to the plane he talked constantly. He told them that he and I had been spearing pickerel in one of the slangs up north of the border when he had been shot and captured. He said that Carcajou had tied him and his brother-in-law and hired man to the tracks; that I had been able to cut him free just in time but the other two had been sliced off at the neck and knees. Then Carcajou had wrecked the train and we had found the handcar and gotten as far as the trestle with it, where his leg had started bleeding badly. I don’t know whether the officers believed any of this or not.
I brought along the pack basket and helped get my father inside the float plane. It was a two-seater with just room enough for him and the pilot and the pack basket. “The boy and I’ll go on down to Memphremagog on the handcar and meet you at the hospital, Stu,” the pilot’s partner said.
“Wait a minute, Officer,” my father said as the pilot started to get in. “I’m in bad shape. No doubt we’ll get there in time but I’ve lost several gallons of blood already. I’d like a last word alone with my boy if you don’t mind. Just in case, you know.”
“All right, but for God’s sake, hurry,” the pilot said.
I scrambled inside, trying not to cry, but my father was grinning at me. “Pull that door to,” he said. “Wild Bill and his father need a little privacy. This leg is perfectly fine. So long as I don’t run no foot races on her she won’t leak no more. She’s stopped already.”
The engine sputtered and caught as the pilot yanked down on the propeller. He started back along the outside pontoon, motioning for me to get out. His partner had untied the rope and was holding onto the piling with one arm. The nose of the plane started to swing around with the current.
My father reached across me and pulled down on the door latch, locking us in.
“Switch places with me, Wild Bill,” he said.
My father was even more obsessed by planes than by trains. About once a year one would go over our hill, and he would rush into the dooryard and gaze after it in silent awe, like Moses looking upon the promised land. He always took me up for the dollar scenic tour when the air show came to Kingdom County. Once he signed up for flying lessons from a bush pilot out of Memphremagog, but after the second lesson the pilot refused to go up with him again.
Now as we taxied down the river and into the bay with the border patrol officers clinging to the pontoon struts my father said he would show me some real flying. Stu beat on the door. “No riders,” my father said sternly, shaking his head.
The other officer got to his feet, pulled out his revolver and shot off the door handle on my side. The door remained locked. The officer lost his foothold and fell into the bay. Stu remained crouching on the other pontoon as we lifted off the water. My father was pulling on a leather aviator’s cap which he had found on the seat beside him. He looked like a flying gnome with a two-days’ beard and a misshapen jaw. “I wish Henry was here,” he said. “Henry would love this.”
We were climbing at an alarming angle. Before ascending very high we rolled over and flew along upside down for some distance. We flipped back over and Stu hung from the strut by one hand with his legs dangling several feet above the water.
With his free hand Stu got out his pistol and fired into the air. My father began dipping the big double wings from side to side. This was too much for the tenacious pilot, who disembarked not far from the shore.
Now we were able to gain some altitude. As we headed up toward the low ceiling my father remarked that this was the only way to run whiskey. He said that first we would have a little ride and then we would land in the St. John just below the beaver dam at the foot of our hill.
His leg had stopped bleeding. As we banked around to the southeast I could see our buildings, bare and gray on the hill above the swamp. We were over the county home and banking again. “Let’s see what Hilarious is doing this fine morning,” my father said.
On the way up the lake we passed a small engine pulling a crane car south on the railroad track. A dozen or so men were gathered around the scene of the wreck. A plane similar to ours floated near the engine. The men waved and my father dipped his wings. “Henry would have loved seeing me do that, Wild Bill. Wouldn’t Henry have appreciated that?”
From the air the secluded monastery looked even more serene and medieval. The cows were filing out into the barnyard but no monks were in sight. It didn’t look like the same place we had visited the day before. From up here nothing seemed the same. It was as though we were looking at a vast panoramic scale model of Canada and Vermont. Even the flat cedar swamp looked more like a watercolor than a real swamp.
I knew we were in more trouble than even my father was apt to get us out of, but as we soared over the mountain notch where we had recently come so close to being killed, I didn’t care. I felt completely secure, as I had felt traveling up the lake with my father in the canoe three days before. I still felt that so long as he and I were together nothing could ever harm either one of us.
Off to the west the charred remains of Carcajou’s barn looked like the blackened circle of an old campfire. Further north the booms behind the smoking paper mill were only about half full. The beach was still heaped high with pulp. There was no sign anywhere of the yellow tug. I tried to get a glimpse of the St. Lawrence River through the northern mountains, but the clouds were too low.
Looking down at the gray-toned landscape north and south of the short stretch of border where so much of our history had transpired, I knew much that I had not known a week ago. I knew that the country below us was not only a hard place to live in, but a treacherous place as well, full of unexpected and unavoidable horrors, including some that had nothing to do with furious winds and deep cold water and swamps and mountains. Yet despite my first clear vision of the darkness in which the human heart is enshrouded, I knew that my father was right when he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Bill, ain’t all that down there the most wonderful thing you ever see?”
I must have been very tired because I found myself fighting back tears again; but I was not going to deny the truth of my vision, the truth on which my father had based his life, just because I was tired or scared or too proud to be seen crying.
“Ain’t it wonderful, Wild Bill?”
“Yes,” I said, crying. “It is.”
At three other times in my life I was to experience this heightened vision of wonderment. Each experience also involved a perception of horror. Each time I came away convinced that my vision had been strengthened, as a religious faith is said to be strengthened by some arduous test, though it had little to do with religion:
It is the night of June 3, 1967. Along the marshy shore of Lake Memphremagog the small frogs are singing loudly, nearly drowning out the low putter of Uncle Henry’s three-horse motor. Once again I am headed north, this time with my son and uncle, knowing that this will be the last time, because Uncle Henry is an old man with his single lung going bad and my son is defecting from the United States and going home to the country of our ancestors, the country of his great-great-great-great-grandfather, René Bonhomme. I keep thinking, who is rejecting whom? Is Henry rejecting his country or is his country rejecting him? He sits motionless in the bow of the boat with my father’s eight-gauge shotgun across his lap. In the starlight his profile exactly resembles my father’s. Canada, I conclude, is where my son belongs. Like my father, he needs space and wild country to be happy, and like my father and old René, he acknowledges no allegiance to any particular country.
As we approach the county home, which has now been transformed into a luxury resort with a long lighted dock for pleasure boats and a long pipe discharging kitchen waste and human waste directly into the lake, time seems to repeat itself. With no warning at all we are blinded by a powerful searchlight. A voice through a loudspeaker commands us to stop. My first thought is of the F.B.I. agent who personally delivered Henry’s draft papers this afternoon, after Henry had sent them back unopened twice.
“Easy,” I say. “Easy, Henry.”
And I seem to be talking to my own father.
“Easy, boy,” Uncle Henry says softly.
The patrol boat approaches, blinding us with its light. The amplified voice tells Henry to put down the shotgun. Strangely, I am as aware of the outrageous stench of effluvia from the resort as I am of the boat intercepting us. “You shut out your light,” Henry says in that abrasive voice so like Cordelia’s. “Then maybe I’ll put down this gun.”
The launch is now directly across our bow, and directly in line with Henry’s shotgun, which he holds easily and surely, he who never shot anything but a clay pigeon in his life and is the best shot I have ever seen with the possible exception of his grandfather. Time is repeating itself, I think.
“Put the gun down, Henry,” I say.
“Shut out your light, Captain,” Henry says, his voice rasping.
The stench is really overpowering.
The voice crackles out again. “Drop the gun.”
It sounds familiar but I can’t quite place it.
“Who are you?” my son says.
“Border Patrol R. W. Kinneson,” the voice says, and my son laughs out loud, a short harsh barking sound such as Cordelia might have made if she had ever laughed.
“Border Patrol Kinneson,” Henry says with delight. “Shut out your light, Border Patrol Kinneson, or I’ll blow you to Kingdom Come.”
Silence.
The light goes out.
“Now, Border Patrol Kinneson,” Henry says, “you have a choice. You can go on about your border peregrinations or you can pull that trigger and get yourself blasted to Kingdom Come. I don’t care which.”
I can see Warden’s bulky outline and the shape of the pistol he holds pointed at my son. Warden too is an old man now, almost ready to retire. Too old to risk being killed by a disaffected boy with a shotgun. “What the hell,” he says. “Go on back where you come from. I wish all of you frogs would disappear off the face of the earth.”
“Yes,” Henry says, holding the shotgun pointed directly at Warden’s chest, “I’m sure you do.”
A few minutes later we drop Henry off at his own request just north of the stone border marker. He says he wants to walk up the tracks to Magog alone. He wants to be alone and think. He shakes hands with his uncle and me and stands looking up at us with a calculating half-amused expression like his grandfather’s. Then he hugs and kisses us both and begins walking north.
Somewhere off on the lake a loon whoops—maybe the last loon on Memphremagog. Henry whoops back. They continue talking to each other for a long time while Uncle Henry and I stand on the shore and listen. Once again I think that time is repeating itself, or maybe running backwards now, and Henry is not only walking north along the abandoned railway but heading back into the past, as my father and I did in 1932, with the difference that he will stay there, where he belongs.
Uncle Henry begins to cough. I don’t have to ask if it is the lung that bothers him. I know it is. I know that he too has seen his last full cycle of seasons in Kingdom County and that next year at this time he will not be here, or anywhere where I can talk to him. Everything, it seems, is disappearing.
Out on the lake there is a solid splash. Uncle Henry returns to the boat and begins assembling his fly rod, though it is well after midnight. “A small white coachman would be right,” he says.
And the world again seems full of terror and wonder.
It is a week later. A letter has arrived from Henry, written in the crabbed hand he inherited from Cordelia:
Dear Wild Bill and Mother,
I have given a considerable amount of thought to Border Patrol Kinneson’s parting words to us on the lake, and decided that without knowing it he was accurately prophesying not only the fate of us Canucks but of the entire human race. This observation sheds some new light on the disappearances in our own family, which can be seen as emblematic of the unalterable destiny of the species. In our tendency to vanish we are only a little closer than most others to our collective annihilation, which, I am certain, cannot be far away. A generation or two at the most, I suspect.
I have read that the northern Cree understand this and do not burden themselves with unnecessary possessions or cumbersome technologies. They know their tenure is brief, and rounded by a dreadful bang. I hope to visit them soon, following the same route Grampa René took in 1792. I am saving to buy a canoe out of my earnings at the Magog paper mill. I know you would gladly pay for the trip but I want to remember always why I went, and working here will assure me of that; paper mills, Wild Bill, are the best arguments against newspapers.
On Sunday I visited Brother St. Hilaire and Brother Paul at the Benedictine monastery. When I arrived they were playing a fast game of rugby in the cow pasture with the old abbot you keep wondering about, who, it turns out, is not really the abbot at all, but a clone. Paul tried to shut him up, but Brother St. Hilaire was determined to tell me that one afternoon back in the mid-1940s Brother Paul accidentally cloned the abbot from a cell taken from a scraping of his swollen foot. When the abbot died the clone lived on. It is a benign creation, like its progenitor, and seems greatly amused by Brother St. Hilaire, who is somewhat senile now and persisted in calling me William, my son. All three of them asked about you and mother and hoped you would both get up to see them soon. Brother St. Hilaire is keeping the monastery going by writing for the Montreal sex tabloids. He said he has some choice passages to read you. He also has a new girlfriend, a Gretchen somebody, whom I met briefly. She is a burned-out old lady who claims to remember you and who goes around all day with a tape cassette blaring Hank Williams songs plastered to her ear.
This weekend I will visit Grandmother Evangeline in Montreal. Of course I will see her again before I head north.
Take care of yourself, Bill. Last week when you and Uncle Henry dropped me off at the border I thought you seemed somehow withdrawn from this world. You ought to stay around a while longer. It’s full of wonders, you know.
My love to you, Wild Bill, and to Mother.
Your expatriated son,
Henry Bonhomme
p.s. If that sneaking F.B.I. agent comes around asking for me again, give him a Christly good kick in the ass.
This afternoon the F.B.I. agent returns. I show him the letter, which he squats in the dooryard, country style, to read. He is a big man with quiet eyes and a slight southern accent. He reads the letter impassively.
“Yes, sir,” he says, handing the letter back.
After a while he says, “My name’s Weed. Waylon Weed.”
A little later he says, “I’ve got two boys in Canada myself. Waylon defected last spring. Beauregard Benedict defected a month later.”
He stands up and shakes his head. We shake hands. “Tell your boy not to come back, Mr. Bonhomme. If he does I’ll catch him. Same as I would my own. Tell him good luck. Tell him you kicked my ass.”
As Waylon Weed drives back down the dusty hollow road I look out over the cedar swamp. It is vast and wild and shimmering a little in the heat of the young summer. It is a place of mirages and illusions. A place of horrors and wonders. It is a vestigial corner of the primeval world, waiting patiently for us to disappear.
I cannot stop thinking about the sentence in Henry’s letter: “It’s full of wonders, you know.” And for one brief moment I believe I know how Saul felt on the road to Damascus.
And I felt that intensity of wonderment once again, almost a decade later, when I stepped out into the dooryard just as the sun came up and realized that Kingdom County had disappeared:
It is July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial of my country, and like Saul’s my eyes have been opened again. I hadn’t seen it coming because it didn’t happen the way Henry predicted and I expected, with a bang. No rough beast came slouching from the primordial cedar swamp. No wind blew Kingdom County away. No fire rained down on it from the sky. It was not that way at all, but much more dreadful. And I had watched it happen without knowing what I was watching.
This is what I see from our hilltop at sunrise on the two hundredth birthday of America:
To the south the hollow road is quiet. Orie Royer’s place has been bought by a young couple who keep some goats and chickens and a milk cow and like us cut their own firewood and raise their own vegetables. Between the old Royer place and the county road there is not a single working farm left, though three big flags hang limply in the morning stillness above the three farmhouses that have been renovated as summer homes. There is no flag in our dooryard. My wife and I have decided that the day Henry comes home will be the day we will fly our flag.
To the north and northeast the cedar bog is gone, inundated by one hundred thousand acres of warm brackish still water backed up behind a so-called flood control dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1972. With the swamp went the last herd of moose; the beaver and otters and mink; the pink swamp orchids and the gigantic white cedars; the speckled trout Uncle Henry loved to catch on his delicate flies; and five miles of the Upper Kingdom River, the last wild stretch of whitewater in Vermont.
To the northwest Lake Memphremagog is lined with resorts, campgrounds, trailer parks, marinas and three new industries. The monastery folded in 1970 when Brother St. Hilaire died, and has been converted into a laboratory for a rocket research corporation that uses the mountains on both sides of the lake for its testing grounds.
Although I cannot see it, the Common too has changed. There are a few healthy isolated elms on some of the side streets but the trees on the central green have all died of the Dutch elm disease. The Academy where Prof Corbitt taught Cordelia and where I went to high school has been razed, replaced by a large regional high school built on the site of Frog Lamundy’s old place along the county road. The statue of Ethan Allen still stands at the south end of the village, but Calvin Goodman’s church and library have both been taken down and an absurd shopping mall catering mainly to tourists now runs along the west side of the green. With the big dam across the river, the rainbow trout have stopped coming up over the falls in the spring.
I think too on this lovely Bicentennial morning when I would like to be celebrating my country’s birthday, maybe even putting on my old uniform and marching in the Common and giving the address I had to decline making because of my loyalty to Henry, of the people who have disappeared and without whom Kingdom County cannot exist, for me anyway.
I think of my mother, who died in 1969 in the convent in Montreal where she grew up, and in a sense died the day she reentered the convent in the summer of 1936, the day after I graduated from high school.
I think of Cordelia, who disappeared in the spring of 1932 at the age of ninety and reappeared twenty years later to counsel my son on the origin of man.
And of Henry, living with his Cree wife in a cabin on the northern shore of Lake Athabasca.
And Brother St. Hilaire and Brother Paul, buried side by side in the small cemetery above the rocket research corporation, where the cloned abbot still has a cell with a cot and desk and still wanders through the nonrestricted areas.
Of Uncle Henry, who in the fall of 1967, with his lung disintegrating into little bloody shreds that he coughed up by the hour, took his fly rod and deer rifle and disappeared into the cedar swamp, where nearly a year later I found and did not disturb his body, inside a large beaver house not far from the Canadian line.
And of my father. And thinking of my father, I decide to see if there is still time to make the speech. There is, we’d be delighted, Judge, so I go down to the Common in my uniform and get up and try to tell about the wonders and the horrors of Kingdom County and America, to the absolute astonishment and growing outrage of the local citizenry, but I keep right on, telling how René Bonhomme settled Kingdom County with a canoeload of brandy and a long knife, and Calvin preached and drank and went off to the Civil War with his son; about my son’s flight into Canada, and the disappearance of Kingdom County, gone the way of Melville’s Nantucket and Hawthorne’s Salem, Thoreau’s Concord and Frost’s New Hampshire. Listen to this, someone says, the judge is losing his marbles. No, friends and fellow celebrants, I shout, you listen to me because all I mean to say is that even though it has disappeared, Kingdom County is still a place of wonders, and even though it is disappearing, America is still a place of wonders.
And even though I was a good judge, at election time a petition was circulated and I lost my judgeship by two votes and considered going off to live with the Cree myself. I didn’t, though. I went back to my law practice in the dim musty office on the third floor of the courthouse overlooking the Green Mountains, which hadn’t changed at all, and where I have had much time to think about time and my family, Kingdom County and America, wonders and horrors and illusions, and my father and the spring of 1932.
“I wonder what kind of plane this is,” my father said.
“I think they’re called flying boats.”
“I wonder how high they’ll go.”
I was still wondering at the country below us, musing over all that had taken place down there, no longer bothering to differentiate between past and present.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think they’re built to go very high.”
This observation was a mistake on my part. Immediately we were climbing. When the engine started to stall out we began to circle, moving upward through layer after layer of clouds. We ascended in great spiraling loops. Nothing was visible but clouds. Still we climbed. I lost all track of time and place. He’s doing it, I thought. He’s finally doing it. Soon we would soar into that forbidden ethereal bourn from which we would be hurled headlong toward the earth.
My father began to sing “En Roulant.” This is it, I thought. The ultimate voyage of the voyageurs. Those magnificent frogs in their flying machine. Daedalus and Icarus, sunbound and hellbent.
I didn’t see how my father could sing at all. The air was so thin and cold I could hardly breathe. I thought I was going to black out. Then I did.
In recent years this incredible flight has been incorporated into a recurrent nightmare. Again I am entrapped with my father inside that lumbering purloined float plane, laboring ponderously up into the clouds. Again I start to black out. When I come to we are still climbing, with Aunt Cordelia sitting on the upper port wing.
“Ad astra,” she says grimly, pointing up with her yardstick.
Croggins and Hathaway from the lunatic asylum are leering in through my window at me. Hathaway’s reeking chloroform cloth comes closer. It covers my window. I struggle. Darkness.
“Hail to thee, blithe Baron von Bonhomme,” Cordelia says. She is wearing an astronaut’s suit and is tethered by a long cord to the port wing strut, against a background of stars as dazzling as the ceiling of a planetarium. She quotes:
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
And singing “En Roulant” dost soar,
And soaring ever singest.
Then she deliberately casts off her lifeline and without looking back floats off into the universe. It is very quiet. The dream ends.
“We can’t go no higher, Wild Bill,” my father said. “We’re out of gas.”
I have never dreamed about our noiseless descent through the clouds and back into the present and the real world, though there was a distinctly dreamlike and surreal quality about it. My father handled the plane so well we almost wafted to the ground, circling again, but this time the way a glider circles, using only air currents.
I had no idea how long we had been up there or where we were going to come down. I hoped that if we were over the lake we could land near shore. Then we were out of the clouds and dropping toward thick flat green woods, cedar woods, stretching for miles in every direction and interrupted only by the threads of frozen beaver flows and the irregular white expanses of frozen backwaters.
“Stay low and hang tight,” my father said as we swooped down over the treetops.
The silence of our fall was terrible. Any amount of thundering would have been preferable to that premonitory noiselessness. Again my expectations had been reversed. Death was not supposed to be so quiet. When something gave beneath us with a sound like a buzz saw splitting a big log I was relieved. The pontoons, I thought. The pontoons had been ripped off by the treetops.
The pontoons were of no use to us anyway with the watercourses still frozen solid. It was undoubtedly the cedars that saved us by breaking our fall and cushioning our impact. We would not have blown up. There wasn’t any gas left to explode. But if we had ever hit that ice and frozen snow head-on, we would have been dashed into more pieces than the Packard demolished by Carcajou’s land mine. As it was the trees tore off part of the starboard wing as well as the pontoons. We flipped over and the pack basket flew through the air. Bottles shattered. It was raining Seagram’s and glass.
My father and I lay on the roof of the cockpit. My hands and face were cut in several places, but otherwise I seemed to be all right. My father was jubilant. “Warn’t that the best crash landing you ever see executed?” he shouted.
The plane was caught by its tail in the cedars twenty feet above the ground. Through the shattered window I could see the detached piece of the wing sticking out of the snow. Part of the government insignia was visible. “What’s the border patrol going to say, Dad?”
“They ain’t going to say nothing for a while. We’re back in Canady again. Welcome back to Canady, Wild Bill.”