The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The men shook hands stiffly and muttered apologies to each other. The women embraced again, exchanging tearful vows of eternal sisterhood. But the very next week Pietro’s heifers broke down a fence, crossed the brook into Emile’s prized old-fashioned apple orchard, and girdled the trunks of six young Duchesses and four Northern Spies. Emile impounded the animals in his barnyard and threatened to slaughter one a day until Pietro printed a public apology for the invasion in the Kingdom County Monitor. In a searing white fury Pietro went to get his heifers back at gunpoint. A shootout ensued, in which Pietro took a few pellets of birdshot in his right calf. That evening, from my cupola bedroom in the Big House, I could hear the Lacourses discharging shotguns and rifles into the air long past midnight, in celebration of the wounding of Pietro Gambini. Father George lost his temper completely, and the following Sunday he threatened from the pulpit, in a thundering voice, to excommunicate them from Saint Mary’s, if not from the church altogether, and administer a public horsewhipping to Emile and Pietro besides.

  In school, Thérèse Lacourse, Emile’s youngest daughter and the apple of his eye, was one year ahead of Pietro’s youngest son, Peter, the stone sculptor. She was a quiet and intense girl, a straight-A student at the top of her class. Peter, for his part, was a slightly built boy with serious brown eyes and brown hair that curled up at his shirt collar. In early boyhood he had contracted infantile paralysis, and though he had recovered completely from the disease, he never did become an athlete like his older brothers. During his convalescence he discovered his greatgrandfather’s carving tools, wrapped in oilskins in the old stone shed near the quarry. From the moment he first held the hammers and chisels in his hands, Peter knew that he had found his life’s work.

  Peter Gambini studied the carvings on the pink granite tombstones in the village cemetery. He hitchhiked to Barre to familiarize himself with the great stone figures in the Rock of Ages cemetery. Then he began to carve memorials of his own. Soon customers were flocking to the Gambini place from all over Vermont and across the border in Quebec as well, to commission the young genius to carve their tombstones. Horse-loggers wanted to be laid to rest beneath stones engraved with etchings of their teams. Farmers wanted representations of their barns and houses. Woodsmen coveted leaping granite bucks and trout.

  By the time Peter was fifteen he’d left school altogether to work full-time in his great-grandfather’s granite shed. Emile’s sons left him alone, in deference to his childhood illness, and Peter’s own brothers treated him differently. After all, he was special, an artist. But the entire village knew that when Peter was sixteen, Emile Lacourse had happened upon him and Thérèse skinny-dipping together in the deep green water of the quarry and, as Father George himself put it in his “Short History,” it was well for the stone carver that afternoon that he was fleet of foot. But despite all that their parents could do, the young couple took every opportunity to be together. So it was really no great surprise when, one December evening in my thirteenth year, while Father George and I were decorating the Big House for Christmas, she and Peter showed up on the porch together.

  It was snowing lightly, and a few flakes clung to Thérèse’s long dark hair, reminding me of the dark-haired angel that traditionally went on top of the huge tree in the rectory parlor.

  “Are your folks squabbling again?” Father George said, knowing better.

  “Not tonight, Father, for a wonder,” Thérèse said. She jerked her head at Peter. “This one wants to get married.”

  The couple sat down side by side at the bird’s-eye table on which, years earlier, Father George had divided the buck between their fathers. Now he heated coffee. Once again I sat quietly on the woodbox by the blue porcelain stove.

  Father George sat down across from the couple. “Flow old are you, Thérèse?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And you, Peter?”

  “He’s eighteen, too.”

  Father George frowned. But with children and young people, he almost never lost his temper. “Let him answer for himself, Thérèse. Are you seventeen, Peter?”

  “And a half.”

  “He does the work of a man and is a man,” Thérèse said.

  Father George looked at Peter. “Do you have a job, son?”

  “Certainly. I’m a granite carver.”

  “You should see ‘The Magdalene Standing Vigil at the Tomb of Christ Our Lord,’ commissioned for the cemetery entrance in Memphremagog,” Thérèse said.

  “I have,” Father George said. “It’s a masterwork.”

  “I was the model for the Magdalene,” Thérèse said. She pulled her chair closer to Peter’s. “Think what he’ll be accomplishing at thirty.” She took Peter’s hands in hers and held them up. “Look. Strong and slender. The fingers of a master.”

  Father George took off his glasses and then put them back on again. “How do you feel about marrying Thérèse, Peter?”

  Peter smiled. “We’ve made our decision,” he said simply. But the way he held Thérèse’s hand answered the question far better.

  Father George poured coffee into the bone china cups he had bought in London on his way home from the Great War. From time to time Thérèse and Peter glanced at each other over the steam rising from their cups. Peter’s features were very fine, like those of his statues, yet in his face there was already considerable strength as well, an artist’s single-minded determination.

  Father George poured more coffee. Then he came right to the heart of the matter. “You two love each other very much.”

  It was a statement.

  “Yes,” Thérèse said simply.

  The clock on the mantel ticked; the snow gusted against the window. The wood fire flickered orange and red through the isinglass window of the blue stove.

  “One more question, Thérèse,” Father George said. “Do you love Peter enough to leave your mother and live with him forever?”

  “Yes. And enough to forfeit a big church wedding with a white dress, besides.”

  Peter stood up. “Come, Thérèse. We’ll wait on the porch. Let Father decide.”

  Father George sat thinking. “It’s all so improbable, Frank,” he said. “That this could ever work out. On the other hand, life is full of improbabilities that work out. I’m sitting at one.”

  He touched the bird’s-eye table. Then his eyes flashed. “You see how God puts us in impossible situations. I’m beginning to think I’ll be damned if I do marry these kids and damned if I don’t. Quite literally.” He clenched his big fist and shook it at the ceiling. “Oh, you’re a rough old cob,” he told God. “You don’t ask for much, do you? Just our souls. See how He operates, Frank? He catches us in a pickle, like a man in a rundown between second and third. We can’t go forward and we can’t go back. Well, well. ‘Whom He loveth, He chastiseth.’”

  From the porch came laughter. I ran to the window and looked out around the curtain. “They’re kissing on the glider!”

  Father George sighed. Then he laughed. “Well, it’s in their hands. Thérèse’s and Peter’s. Not mine. I’m not God, I’m a country priest. My job is to marry people who want to get married.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he said, grinning. “I had no business saying what I did.”

  Now I laughed. Father George was always getting mad at God and then apologizing to Him.

  “Call them in, Frank,” he said. “An idea just occurred to me. You wait here in the kitchen with Peter while I talk to Thérèse in the parlor for a minute.”

  “I already know everything there is to know about such matters,” Thérèse told Father George as they left the room together. “I grew up on a farm, you know, not in a convent.”

  Five minutes later Father George rejoined us in the kitchen. “Thérèse will be back shortly,” he said. He got a bottle of Pietro Gambini’s acquavite and two shot glasses from the cupboard and poured a drink for Peter and himself. “Salute!” he said, lifting his glass.

  Peter grinned. “Salute!”
He emptied his glass in two swallows. “So, Father. What advice do you have for me about being a husband?”

  Father George finished his drink while he considered. Then he said, “Listen to your wife and try to do as she says. Apart from that, no man knows very much about being a husband. It’s like being a priest. All you really need to know you’ll learn as you go along.”

  Peter nodded. “This is an important night in my life,” he said.

  “Yes,” Father George said. He poured them both a little more brandy. Peter swirled his around the bottom of his shot glass. The snow beat harder against the window. I got a stick of yellow birch out of the woodbox and put it into the stove. As its curling bark caught fire, a sharp wintergreen scent filled the kitchen. Father George had stepped into his study. He returned with a Bible and a long sealed envelope, which he laid face down on the table.

  Suddenly whiteness filled the doorway from the parlor. Thérèse Lacourse appeared, wearing the wedding dress that had belonged to Father George’s mother, her dark eyes full of shyness and triumph and expectation. “Well,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

  “I’ll marry you,” Father George said. “But you’ll both have to promise to listen to my advice after the ceremony and make every effort to follow it.”

  Afterward there was a little more brandy. Then Thérèse said she’d change and give Father George back the wedding dress.

  He shook his head. “The dress belongs to you, Thérèse. I want you to have it.”

  “Some day this watching boy on the woodbox will marry a young woman.”

  “She’ll want her own dress then. This one is yours.”

  Thérèse made a curtsy. “Naturally I will treasure it.”

  Father George put his arm around Peter. “Where are you and your wife going to live?” he asked in the voice of one man addressing another.

  “My great-uncle, a master stonecarver, wants me to come to Barre to work for him.”

  Thérèse said quickly, “You already know far more about carving than your uncle. We’ll live in my folks’ empty tenants’ house near the brook between our families. You can walk up to the stone shed each day. I’ll go to work for my cousin, Manette Riendeau, at her hairdresser’s shop here in the village.”

  Father George shook his head. “You haven’t asked my advice on this matter. The agreement was that I’d marry you if you’d follow my advice. Don’t try to live on the disputed land or near either set of parents. They’ll continue to quarrel, and sooner or later you’ll get caught up in it despite your best intentions not to.”

  “I think Peter and I can stop this foolishness between our families,” Thérèse said. “Now that we’re married.”

  “No,” Father George said firmly. “Emile and Mimi Lacourse and Pietro and Rosa Gambini will go on fighting until they’re too old to fight any longer. Don’t put yourselves and your new marriage in the middle. You’ll have disagreements enough of your own. You don’t need to assume your parents’.”

  Now Father George put his arm around Thérèse. “Go to Peter’s great-uncle in Barre. Peter needs to learn all he can about his chosen work. His art. Then, when you have a family of your own and your folks are elderly, come back to our little village if you still want to.”

  “All this is good advice from a great man,” Peter said to Thérèse.

  “I’d miss ma mère,” Thérèse blurted, and wiped at her eyes with the lace sleeve of her wedding gown.

  “You have me now,” Peter said, taking her in his arms. “I’ll see that you miss no one.”

  “You’ll both miss your parents,” Father George said. “But you’ll visit them frequently. In time you can come back here to live if you want to.”

  “What should we do?” Thérèse said to Peter.

  “I love you,” Peter said. Then, with a quick, desperate look at Father George, “I’ll leave the decision to you, Thérèse.”

  Thérèse took a deep breath and looked at the priest, who smiled back at her. “Well, then,” she said. “What must be must be. No doubt they have hairdressing shops in Barre, too.”

  Father George took Thérèse’s hand. “Everything changes in the fullness of time, Thérèse. This feud will end with your parents’ generation. Your children will laugh about how the old folks carried on.”

  “We’ll have to find a rent,” Thérèse said to Peter. “I won’t live with your relatives. How can we afford a rent?”

  Father George handed her the envelope. On it he had written “To Peter and Thérèse Gambini.” She smiled at her new name on the outside, then gave it to Peter to open.

  “Thank you, Father,” he said, looking inside the envelope. “Come, Thérèse. Now we can afford a rent. But tonight we’ll stay in the little motor court on Lake Memphremagog. An hour from now Barre will be the last thing on your mind.”

  Peter and Thérèse set up housekeeping in Barre, near the Rock of Ages quarry. Peter apprenticed himself to his great-uncle, the master carver. Thérèse found work at a hairdresser’s shop.

  And what of the great feud? Well! To no one’s astonishment the two enemy families descended on the Big House the day after Father George performed the marriage, threatening him and each other and even the young couple themselves. But what’s done is done. At first Father George shouted back, giving them as good as he got. He threatened them with excommunication, asked me if his face was getting red, and ran to the cupboard for a drink of acquavite. Then he talked to the families for a long time, and in the end they went home, the husbands with grim expressions on their faces, as though they sensed the impending end of the trouble that had sustained them for so long, the wives looking not terribly displeased.

  For a few years the older generation continued to quarrel. No one repaired the right of way leading up to the quarry. Occasionally there was a run-in, shouting, threats. But their hearts no longer seemed to be in it. When Pietro had a near-fatal heart attack, Mimi Lacourse personally delivered two baguettes and a maple sugar pie to the Gambinis. Eight months later, after Mimi Lacourse slipped while gathering eggs and fractured her hip, Rosa Gambini appeared at the door with a jug of wild grape wine and a piping hot lasagna.

  “They’re killing each other with kindness,” Father George told me. “Now they’re fighting with food.”

  For two or three years Thérèse and Peter and their daughter returned to live in Kingdom Common so that Peter could work the pink granite from the quarry above their folks’ places. It was Peter, in fact, whom Father George had commissioned to carve the stone memorial loaves to Sylvie and Marie Bonhomme. But it proved impossible to keep the water out of the quarry for more than a few days at a time, and the sunset-colored stone itself seemed to be about played out, like the hill farms and big woods and the mills of Kingdom County. Peter and Thérèse returned to Barre, where, as Thérèse had predicted, he soon became recognized as one of the finest stone sculptors in the country. The elder Lacourses and Gambinis all died within two years of each other; one way or another, even feuds come to an end.

  During the summer after I graduated from college, Peter and Thérèse traveled north to the Common again, this time to unveil, in the cemetery behind the church, a life-size memorial sculpture that Peter had carved the previous winter and had trucked to Kingdom Common under canvas the night before. Half of the village was on hand for the ceremony, including Father George and me.

  “Here it is,” Peter said as the ropes and canvas fell away. “It’s called ‘Sleep after Love.’”

  From the crowd of Commoners came a rising murmur of astonishment, of delight, of awe. Even Louvia the Fortuneteller lifted her hand to her wax bridgework in amazement.

  On a plain bed of white Vermont marble, in an open spot overlooking the village and about midway between the burial plots of the Gambinis and Lacourses, reposed two sleeping figures of pink granite, a young man and a woman, folded together in eternal embrace, their heads close together on the marble pillow.

  “Love conquers all,” someone
whispered—Louvia!

  Even Father George was speechless. All he could do was nod in recognition of this wonderment.

  “I was the model for the woman,” Thérèse told him. “When we sleep we don’t quarrel.”

  “We don’t quarrel anyway,” Peter said. “We’re lovers, not fighters.”

  Thérèse laughed. “We quarrel all the time. It’s in our blood. Isn’t that so, Rosa?”

  The small dark-haired girl between them laughed, either in delight at the sculpture or at Thérèse’s remark.

  Father George smiled, too, though his face was abstracted. I wondered what he was thinking of.

  All that was a long time ago. Thérèse Lacourse and Peter Gambini have grandchildren of their own now. The special world of the village has become much like the rest of the world. Yet the stone lovers still lie entwined in the graveyard above the town, and the inscription chiseled into the foot of the marble bed is still sharp and clear.

  SLEEP AFTER LOVE

  To the Memory of

  Pietro and Rosa Gambini

  Emile and Mimi Lacourse

  Peter and Thérèse Gambini

  Father George Lecoeur

  May They Rest in Love Eternal

  4

  The Daredevil

  Just as it is impossible to define the village of Kingdom Common separately from the railroad that informed it with so much of its character, it is impossible to define the Murphy family of Irishtown, that tiny enclave of a dozen battened houses just north of the village, apart from the context of the railroad that had brought the Murphys to Vermont and the Common the first place.

  —Father George, “A Short History”