The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “If I weren’t going into the priesthood? Yes. If I loved a girl I’d marry her in a minute.”

  “Well, well. Never mind the priesthood. With the right girl, you might amount to something after all. And remember—who knows how the future can turn on a single day in our lives. Now step on it. I have to get home and pee!”

  A few days later I returned to the patisserie in Little Quebec, looking for the tall laughing girl with raven hair and morning-glory eyes. But to my great disappointment the bakery was closed. The property had been sold again, the Letourneaus had moved, and I could find no one in the neighborhood who could tell me anything at all about the baker’s assistant. I didn’t even know her name.

  What was I left with from my afternoon with Louvia DeBanville, in search of a recipe that probably never existed? A good day with a friend. Some questions about my vocation. Mysteries. And stories. Stories of Louvia, young and beautiful, gliding across the hardwood floor of the pavilion with the colored lanterns shimmering to the trombone runs of the big bands. Of two elderly sisters, feeding the families of the striking mill workers. Of the scent of fresh-baked bread. And of Louvia’s belief that our fortunes often turn on a single event in ways I could not have begun to imagine.

  3

  Enemies

  Only in the Kingdom, Commoners said of the feud between the Lacourses and the Gambinis. Only in this forgotten enclave of the Appalachian Mountain chain stretching all the way north to Vermont from Georgia and Tennessee could such an anachronism as a full-blown multigenerational family feud be sustained and tolerated and, yes, even nurtured, well into the middle of the twentieth century.

  —Father George, “A Short History”

  FOR AS LONG as anyone could remember, the Lacourses and the Gambinis had hated each other with an implacable hostility, though they were otherwise hard-working, respected members of the community, with successful businesses and large families of bright children.

  Emile Lacourse owned a productive lumbering operation, leasing tracts of timberland that he logged with the most modern methods and equipment, but carefully and responsibly, never scalping the mountainsides of every last stick of wood but instead cutting selectively and staying away from the banks of brooks and rivers. On the higher elevations he still used horses, as his Québécois ancestors had, to preserve the steep and delicate terrain from the deep ruts of gasoline-powered skidders. For all his business acumen, Emile was a conservationist before his time.

  Pietro Gambini’s Italian ancestors were stonecutters. They had come from Milano to work the pink granite on the ridge above the Kinneson family farm, where the lovely sunset-colored building stones used for the Academy, St. Mary’s, the courthouse, the railroad station, the big houses on Anderson Hill, and the monuments in the village cemetery had been quarried. Over the decades, as the granite pit had deepened, icy water from springs deep in the heart of the ridge made working the mine beyond a certain depth impracticable. The Gambinis had then turned to dairy farming and cheesemaking. Their cheese factory on the edge of the village manufactured a smooth and tangy cheddar that won awards at dairy festivals as far away as Wisconsin and Minnesota.

  Apart from the feud, it was astonishing how much alike the families were. Both the Lacourses and the Gambinis maintained close ties with relatives in their homelands. Both families kept up ancestral traditions. The Gambinis concocted flavorful wines from wild blue grapes, blackberries, chokecherries, even dandelion blossoms. The Lacourses celebrated New Year’s Day even more enthusiastically than Christmas, carting maple sugar pies and glazed cakes in the shape of logs to all their neighbors except, pointedly, the Gambinis. Both families owned expensive cars. When Emile Lacourse bought a new Pontiac, Pietro Gambini rushed to the same Burlington dealership to purchase a Super 88 Oldsmobile just off the assembly line. The following spring Emile traded his low-mileage Bonneville for a Chrysler. Soon neither family drove to mass at Father George’s Church of St. Mary’s in anything other than an El Dorado, never more than a year old.

  If Emile Lacourse bought his wife, Mimi, a mink stole in Montreal, Pietro Gambini drove hell-for-leather over the White Mountains to purchase his wife, Rosa, a full-length otter coat from the finest Boston furrier. Nor was the rivalry confined to the adults. Their children competed fiercely in school for academic and athletic distinctions. Father George’s basketball team at the Academy once lost a state championship game by four points because Etienne Lacourse, a wizardly ball handler, refused to pass to Rodolfo Gambini, a high-scoring forward. In the locker room after the game, fists flew. Instead of celebrating an undefeated season with a three-foot-high trophy and a torchlight parade led by their El Dorados, the two quarreling families got into a brawl in the parking lot outside the gymnasium.

  Even so, both the Gambinis and the Lacourses continued to be highly regarded in the village. As for the feud, vengeance had become its own sweet excuse. No one in Kingdom Common seemed able to do a thing to stop the trouble—which brings me back to Father George.

  One bitterly cold November evening when I was about eight, two heavy cars roared up the drive of the Big House and skidded to a halt under the portico. Out of the automobiles poured Lacourses and Gambinis of all ages, screaming murder. From the trunk of his Cadillac, Emile Lacourse dragged an enormous buck, which he lugged up to the porch and dumped on the glider by the front door. The two families swarmed up behind him and stood around the dead deer, gesticulating wildly and shrieking at each other in Québécois and Milanese dialects that they otherwise spoke only rarely, even at home. Pietro Gambini was waving his deer rifle. Emile Lacourse ran to his El Dorado, opened the trunk, and pulled out a red chainsaw with a blade a yard long. Rushing back up onto the porch, he started the saw with a great coughing roar and brandished it over his head toward Pietro. Both men were bellowing for Father George.

  I’d been sitting at the bird’s-eye maple kitchen table listening to Father George read aloud the wonderful story from his “Short History” of his chance discovery of a stand of bird’s-eye maples, high in Lord Hollow, from which he had personally made much of the furniture for the Big House. I was startled by the commotion; but Father George grinned and told me to sit on the woodbox near the stove and be as quiet as a church mouse, and I’d see and hear something I could write my own story about someday.

  He hurried out onto the porch and said, “People, good people. For heaven’s sake. This isn’t Chicago in the twenties. Go lock your weapons in your cars. Then come back and we’ll thrash this out together.”

  Muttering more threats and exchanging hateful glances, the two families convened in the Big House kitchen, but refused the hot coffee that Father George offered them. This was not, pardon us, Father, a social visit. Oh, no.

  I watched, wide-eyed, from the woodbox as the litigants faced each other across the maple table, with their finely clad wives, both great beauties, and their handsome children to bear witness. At Father George’s request, Pietro, a stocky man with dark hair and flashing eyes, told his story first.

  It seemed that when he was out hunting, Pietro had jumped the buck in question in a beech grove bordering the brook dividing his property from the Lacourses’ and had shot it in the chest. The fatally wounded animal had sprinted a few yards, leaped the brook in one bound, and dropped in a heap at the feet of Emile Lacourse, out clearing brush from his sugar maple orchard. Emile instantly cut the throat of the dying buck with his chainsaw. But when Pietro started across the stream to claim his trophy, Emile drove him back onto his own land with the thundering saw. Pietro had then fired a round from his deer rifle into the steam vent of Emile’s nearby sugarhouse. Pietro concluded his statement with an eloquent peroration, delivered at the top of his lungs and containing an explicit threat on his neighbor’s life if he did not relinquish all claim to the deer immediately. “Excuse me, Signora,” he added in a much lower voice, with a short bow toward Mimi Lacourse.

  Emile did not dispute any of the facts of the case as presented by Pietro. On
the contrary, he responded that he would be greatly interested to see his bosom friend and dear neighbor carry out his threat after his head had been severed from his shoulders with a thirty-horse gasoline felling saw.

  Father George smiled at the two families, his bright blue eyes amused. Then he said, “Bring in the deer, Emile.”

  The buck was brought inside and laid out on an oilcloth on the bird’s-eye table. It was a lovely animal, dark as a moose. Its heavy rack of horns was darker yet, with eight points on one side and nine on the other. After dispatching it with his saw and chasing Pietro back across the brook, Emile had dressed it out. Even so, Father George, a lifelong hunter, estimated its weight at two hundred and fifty pounds.

  “Of course. It fattened itself on my apples all fall,” Emile said.

  “It spent the summer grazing like a prize heifer on my high upper mowing,” Pietro responded.

  “Well, gentlemen, a man doesn’t need to be another Solomon to know what to do in this situation,” Father George said. “If you’ll give me your word to agree to my decision and make every effort to abide by it, I’ll help you out.”

  What choice did the combatants have? With many intransigent looks across the table, Pietro and Emile agreed to abide by Father George’s finding, whatever it was. To the letter and in the spirit? Well, yes. To the letter and in the spirit.

  Father George spread a layer of Kingdom County Monitors on the yellow linoleum tiles under the table. He rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, exposing forearms as thick and powerful as Pietro’s and Emile’s. From the woodshed off the kitchen he fetched a meat saw and his hunting knife, with which he expertly cut off the head and hide of the great buck. Then he began to quarter the carcass like a beef. As he worked he told the story of the bird’s-eye table, just as he’d written it in his “Short History.” How for a hundred and fifty years the maple trees hidden on the ridge north of Lord’s Bog had not been considered worth lumbering because of the mysterious dark oval imperfections riddling their wood. Then Father George, who had a hunting camp nearby, had recognized the bird’s-eyes, in a pile of firewood, for what they truly were and decided to fell one tree for stock to make furniture for the Big House. By degrees, as Father George described skidding the logs down over the frozen bog, putting the cured lumber through the mill’s shrieking ripsaw, planer, and sander, then shaping the dowels for chair and table legs, gluing the pieces, and sanding and varnishing the furniture, everyone’s attention became focused on the story.

  Suddenly Emile Lacourse spoke up. “Father G. What makes the little bird’s-eyes in the wood?”

  “Ah,” Father George said, sawing through the last hindquarter of the deer. “That’s the question, Emile. No one knows.”

  “The bird’s-eye is a separate species of maple?” Pietro said.

  “No, it’s regular rock maple. But whether it’s minerals in the soil where the trees grow or the way the wind blows or some virus that causes the eyes, I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Like how your quarrel began.”

  No doubt my adoptive father hoped, with this exemplum, to drive home the ultimate futility and madness of the feud. Even at eight, I could see that. But now it was time for his decision. Everyone’s eyes moved from Father George to the deer and back to Father George.

  “Well?” Emile said.

  The head, with its trophy rack and dark cape, went to Pietro to have mounted, along with one forequarter and one hindquarter. The rest of the hide and the two other quarters went to Emile for dispatching the animal. It was as simple at that.

  To me, the disposition of the deer seemed eminently fair. But what a howl went up from the litigants! The men smote their foreheads. The women pulled at their gorgeous long hair as if to tear it out by the roots. The children hissed at each other like vipers, while the grownups trembled in rage and stared at one another and at Father George with incredulity. Yet as he firmly reminded them, they had given their word to accept his ruling.

  Next time, both parties vowed on their way out the door into the night with their spoils. Next time there would be no recourse to the priest, and matters would turn out very differently indeed, with all due respect, Father. Afterward Father George laughed and told me not to worry, he’d been through similar charades with the feuding families a dozen times before.

  Maybe so, I thought. But, young as I was, I could not help thinking that the trouble between the Lacourses and the Gambinis was far from over and, as both families had earnestly promised, that the end, when it came, would be a tragic one.

  The feud continued straight through my boyhood. At length it reached such a pitch that Father George warned me to steer clear of both places on my hunting and fishing expeditions so I wouldn’t get caught, perhaps quite literally, in the crossfire. In fact, the spring that I turned ten, when Emile Lacourse stumbled upon Pietro Gambini manufacturing acquavite, the hundred-proof Italian brandy used by the Gambinis at holidays and birthday celebrations, at his homemade still high on the brook between their properties, they argued, and Emile drew a pistol and put a bullet through Pietro’s hat. When word of this near-tragedy got back to Father George, he lost patience with both adversaries. “For God’s sake, Pietro, go tend to your distilling on some other stream,” he admonished the moonshiner, supposing that the matter would then be closed.

  Far from it. To avenge himself on his neighbor, on the night before hunting season opened, Pietro cunningly affixed the mounted head of his fabled seventeen-point buck to the trunk of one of his brookside beeches, as if the animal were peering out around the tree at the Lacourse maple orchard. When Emile shot it the following dawn and crept across the brook to drag it back to his property, Pietro, who’d been lying in wait in a barberry thicket, sprang out to accost him for unlawful trespass. Father George gave both men a furious dressing-down, pounding the bird’s-eye table and condemning the souls of both men to eternal perdition before forgiving them and thanking them, not without irony, for providing him with something interesting to write about in his “Short History.” But what was clemency to one party was invariably gall to the other, and both men went home more infuriated than ever.

  You might think that as the two men grew older, they would gradually run out of the enormous energy required to sustain such a vendetta. Much the opposite. Over time the feud seemed to intensify in virulence, like Pietro’s acquavite. Each fall the families fought over who would pay the negligible taxes on the water-filled old granite pit, until finally Father George persuaded the town assessors to stop listing it. Then they fought over who owned the speckled trout in the brook. How, Father George inquired, can a man possibly own a wild trout? He was assured by both parties that they would show him exactly how, if either caught the other angling there. At town meeting in March they debated every last item on the warning, preparing interminable eloquent speeches ahead of time, masterpieces of withering rhetoric that Father George said would have done credit to Pietro’s ancestors in the Roman senate. Their lovely daughters found a hundred different ways to snub one another in school. Their sons fought with fists, wild apples, BB guns, rocks. A few months after the fiasco of the championship basketball game, Rodolfo Gambini and Etienne Lacourse asked the same girl to their graduation prom. When she prudently declined to go with either, they drove their father’s expensive cars at each other full tilt, discharging guns out the windows like gangsters. That no one was killed or maimed was a miracle.

  Father George worried constantly about the children of the feuding families. Over the years he resorted to every expediency to bring the trouble to an end. But how can you solve a problem whose source no one can identify? True, the feud seemed rooted in property. But since even the principals conceded that no one could really own the brook separating their land, it seemed more rooted in some dark recess of human nature. Furthermore, as Louvia the Fortuneteller liked to observe, no one likes change, especially in a small village. And what greater change could either family imagine than a cessation of hostilities? Wouldn’t that
amount to acknowledging that the trouble that had informed their lives with a unique significance had been not only unnecessary but meaningless? In short, the feud had become a way of life. In his lively chapter on the Lacourses and Gambinis in his “Short History,” Father George likened the feud to a force of nature, like the water that ran into the granite quarry each time the Gambinis pumped it out to obtain a few more slabs of granite for their youngest boy, Peter, a gifted sculptor. Within three or four days the pit would again be inundated and, just as surely, the feud was bound to break out again, usually sooner rather than later.

  The spring I turned twelve, Pietro Gambini hired the local volunteer fire department to pump out the quarry. On its way back to the village, the pumper, with an inebriated Harlan Kittredge at the wheel, made a wrong turn, jumped the brook, and crashed into Emile Lacourse’s sugarhouse. Down to the Big House rampaged both families. This time Father George banished Emile and Pietro to the porch while he spoke at length with their wives. Laying matters directly on the line, he said that like himself, neither of the two quarreling couples was getting any younger. He told them that too often in cases of this nature it was the children of the feuding parties who paid for their parents’ stubbornness. He inquired quietly, did Rosa Gambini and Mimi Lacourse know how fortunate they were to have children in the first place? Surely, he said, these two good mothers did not wish to follow their sons and daughters to the grave.

  Madame and Signora burst into tears and embraced. The husbands were peremptorily summoned. Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and all twelve of the sainted apostles help Pietro Gambini and Emile Lacourse if either henceforward uttered a single litigious word to the other. Never again would they be admitted to the marriage bed, a deprivation that would signify only the beginning of their tribulations.