Northern Borders (18 page)

By early afternoon the canalers were roaring and laughing and falling all over each other. Bumper Stevens and Plug Johnson were
going back and forth from one crew to the other, asking to be notified when the diggers hit China, and inquiring just where they expected to hook up with the Erie Canal. My little aunts were as delighted as I was by all the excitement, and Rob said the scene begged for the brush of a Brueghel or the pen of Boccaccio, and hailed my grandfather as another Disraeli.

Only my grandmother seemed unmoved by the extraordinary events of the day. Except for watching the spectacle impassively through her opera glasses for a minute or two every now and then, she simply went about her household routines as usual until, about two o'clock, she suddenly decided to post me on the edge of a row of recently-grafted young apple trees with the strictest instructions to notify her if any of my grandfather's intoxicants came within fifty feet of her sacred plantation; and I really believed, now that Gram knew how to shoot Gramp's shotgun, that she would not hesitate to use it to defend her orchard if necessary.

As the day wore on it became apparent that the new channel would be completed by nightfall. It was only four feet across, and about three feet deep. But my grandfather assured me that the rerouted river rushing through would immediately enlarge its own bed. He looked off toward the west, where for the past half hour or so a bank of purple thunderheads had been building above Jay Peak. “Let's hope that storm misses us, Austen. I don't know if these stumblebums are quite drunk enough yet to work right through it.”

Soon the entire sky had darkened. On the slope behind the house our Ayrshires were huddled around a big elm tree. I didn't wait to be told to run up and drive them into the barn. Every summer in Kingdom County farmers had cows killed by lightning. I could smell the rain coming as I trotted down the hill behind the Ayrshires, and they flared their nostrils and tossed their homs like western cattle about to stampede as they came into the barnyard. My grandmother was out shooing her laying hens into their house. As the cows ran past her she looked up with that same worn expression I'd noticed the night before. By the time I got the cows in their stanchions and joined my grandmother and little aunts on the porch, the first big spattering raindrops were hitting the barnyard.

A sudden gust of wind swooped in from the west, bearing the
powerful fresh aroma of a summer thunderstorm. On the edge of the woods across the river the poplar leaves turned up their white undersides in the onrushing wind. A few onlookers ran for their vehicles, but my grandfather's diggers toiled on, oblivious to the impending deluge. A vivid yellow jag of lightning flashed directly overhead. It was followed instantly by an ear-splitting explosion. Then the mountain storm struck Upper Lost Nation Hollow with a furious intensity. Sheets of lightning raced down the sky from zenith to horizon. Off to the west jagged tongues of fire leaped from peak to peak, illuminating the northern Green Mountain range all the way from Mount Mansfield deep into Canada.

Still the men dug feverishly on, as though their lives depended on it. Not even my Cousin Whiskeyjack's white mule could possibly have accounted for their frenzy. Rob said it was sheer curiosity to see what would happen when they connected the two ditches and broke through to the river at the top end. Despite the blinding rain, now pouring out of the sky with tropical prodigality, I could see my grandfather each time the lightning flashed, his pick rising and falling steadily, at the head of the upper crew. They were less than twenty feet from the top bend in the oxbow.

As usual during a hard storm, the rain came through the farmhouse roof in a dozen different places, and my little aunts and I had to run from room to room, under my grandmother's direction, with various domestic vessels to catch the leaks: roasting pans, chamber pots, ancient porcelain washbasins, soup tureens and gravy boats from Gram's best china.

By five o'clock the rain had stopped. The sky was a deep, washed turquoise as I ran down through the sopping orchard grass to see how much progress the diggers had made. The two ditches had been linked in the middle, and there was just a single barrier of earth, six or eight feet in width, separating the top of the uppermost section from the river.

I was standing a few feet back from the new channel, in the wedge of meadow looped by the oxbow, when I heard a new sound. To the degree that this noise resembled any other natural noise at all, it sounded something like the big hard wind that had immediately preceded the thunderstorm being sucked whooshing back to the mountains it had come from.

At the same time, I was astonished to see the towering logjam start to rearrange itself. The water around the logs seemed to be running out of the bend into the millpond, and no more water was flowing into the oxbow. Yet the current had not yet broken through that last earthen barrier between the river and the new channel, where my grandfather and his inebriated crew were still toiling like madmen. I could not imagine where the river had gone.

Then the backward-whooshing sound was replaced by a grumbling gurgle. The throng of men in the ditch had ceased working and were looking up with an inquisitive, listening expression on their faces. Days later, after all the excitement had quieted down and my grandfather could look back dispassionately on what happened next, he said that never before in his life had he seen a gang of men go from falling-down drunk to stone-cold sober in so short a time. One moment they were listening, with that odd, faraway expression on their flushed faces, and the hard blue clay under their boots barely moist. The next thing they knew they were ankle-deep, calf-deep, knee-deep in a churning quagmire.

“Jump, boys!” my grandfather shouted. “Jump for dry land and the devil take the shovels. Quick, for your lives. The water's coming up below us.”

He leaped out of the ditch like a man of twenty, and snatched two or three of the slower men to safety. The others came clambering out of the rushing, waist-deep water in a mad general scramble. The earth barrier was still intact, but my grandfather was right; somehow the river was cutting under it and coming up from beneath the ditch.

The grumbling sound intensified and the remaining few feet of earth between the channel and the river collapsed inward upon itself. My grandfather yanked me backward just as the grassy bank I'd been standing on gave way into the new riverbed. In seconds the narrow ditch had become a thirty-foot-wide river, whose banks continued to shear off into the brown water in chunks that must have weighed a ton apiece. Downstream, the small pond above the mill had become part of the raging river.

“Good Christ, Austen!” my grandfather shouted. “There goes my waterwheel.”

It was true. The force of the pent-up water unleashed down the
new channel and on through the little pond had torn the paddle wheel that ran my grandfather's saws loose from its moorings. I could see the thing bobbing downriver on the furious brown flood. Part of the dam was missing as well. The section where Judge Allen had stood the day before, along with a large section of the sawmill foundation, had vanished. The unsupported corner of the building now hung out into midair over the boiling penstock.

As the gigantic waterwheel approached the first bend below the mill, bobbing slowly just above the surface, I happened to glance up toward the farmhouse. My grandmother stood on the porch, her opera glasses trained downriver on the fleeing wheel, her black-clad figure diminutive and apocalyptic in the unearthly lavender light that had settled over Lost Nation in the wake of the thunderstorm. But my grandfather just nodded and made that low sardonic sound in his throat that was as close as I ever heard him come to laughing.

“It can float clear to Labrador for all I care,” he said.

That is when Uncle Rob Roy called to us. He was standing beside the bend in the oxbow, fifty or sixty feet away, and waving excitedly. At first I thought he just wanted us to see that the water had all emptied out of the marooned oxbow, and the logjam was hung high and dry. Then another man ran up beside him and shouted something about a fish. For all I knew they had discovered a record trout stranded in the old riverbed. Whatever it was, I wanted to see it before it got away.

By the time my grandfather and I arrived at the bend, half a dozen men were gathered around Uncle Rob, near the mammoth chunk of limestone Gramp had blasted loose from the ledge earlier that spring. Imbedded in the rock wall of the curve exposed by the draining water, where the chunk of ledge had toppled into the river, were the whitish bones of a gigantic fish, eighteen or twenty feet long. At first I could hardly believe my own eyes. This must be some optical trick, I thought, some illusion. A petrified tree trunk, maybe, shaped something like a fish. But as I stood gazing at this wondrous sight, I realized that it was no illusion. This was indeed the skeleton of a fish, huge beyond any fish I'd ever seen. What's more, it was in perfect condition. It looked as though it had been swimming upstream when somehow it had been instantly frozen in time.

“Look at the Christly shark!” Bumper Stevens yelled.

“It's not a shark, it's a
whale
,” Uncle Rob shouted. “It's a fossilized whale, thousands of years old. From when this was all an inland sea. Good God, boys, look at the thing. There isn't a bone missing.”

Uncle Rob was right. As I examined this marvel more closely, I noted that every bone stood out distinctly, etched in the exposed wall of the bend. I was speechless, and could only stare at the great creature. It was longer than my grandfather's farm truck, longer than the farmhouse porch, and perfect in every detail. Even the delicate white bones of its fin-like flukes were clearly etched into the limestone wall, and its long, streamlined skull, though it bore little resemblance to a human skull, looked remarkably intelligent, giving it an aspect both familiar and alien.

“It's a whale, Dad!” Uncle Rob shouted to my grandfather.

My grandfather frowned. “I can see that,” he said. “What do you want me to do? Harpoon it?”

My grandfather looked at me. “I told you these customers used to venture up into this neck of the woods, Austen.”

By this time twenty-five or thirty men were crowded around the drained oxbow, gaping at the exposed remains of the whale. I had a nearly overpowering desire to run for my grandmother, to show her this wonder as if I'd discovered it myself. But even in the first flush of my terrific excitement, I sensed that like my grandfather, Abiah Kittredge was not one to be impressed by the old bones of a whale, especially during a major public standoff with her husband.

“By the water-walking Jesus, now, Austen,” Bumper Stevens said to my grandfather, “you can charge city fellas a dollar a throw to come here and have a gander at this gentleman. He's a better draw than your old paddle wheel any day of the week. You're going to make big money up here, mister man.”

“I imagine it would put up quite a little tussle on a number twelve dry fly,” my grandfather said. “How'd you like to hook into one of these Green Mountain whales some evening, Austen?”

I allowed as how I would. Yet as more and more people crowded around the oxbow to look at the Green Mountain whale, an unaccountable sadness came over me. In the aftermath of all the excitement—the river rerouting itself, the waterwheel floating away, the
discovery of the whale—I felt strangely let down. Suddenly the whale looked lonely and vulnerable to me. It looked tragically out of place, trapped in the rocky bank of our little northern river, hundreds of miles from the sea. And I believe that something about it bothered my grandfather too, because so far from trying to make a profit from the whale, he donated it a few days later to the local historical society. They hired a geology professor from the state university to come up to the Farm with a group of students and remove it intact to their small museum on the second floor of the village library; and there it remained, encased in a custom-built twenty-foot glass cabinet. The last reference my grandfather made to it was the day it was taken into the village; he remarked to me that he'd seen far bigger whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on his way to Labrador, and I would too, when I turned eighteen and he took me there.

My grandmother displayed what to me was an equally unfathomable indifference toward both the whale and its ultimate removal. As far as she seemed to be concerned, it could stay or go. I don't even recall that she ever troubled herself to walk down through the orchard to view it. Her precious fruit trees had been preserved from harm, my grandfather had sustained a sort of preliminary Waterloo when his paddle wheel washed away, and she was satisfied. Once more, she had emerged victorious in a major battle in their famous Forty Years' War.

A few weeks later, the new power line from the village reached our farm. This was an exciting event since my grandfather would now be able to run his saws with electricity, though for some years afterward my grandmother continued not to allow electricity in the farmhouse. I personally missed the big waterwheel; but there is no doubt that the advent of electrical power in the other houses and barns up and down the Hollow made life easier in a hundred ways, at the same time that it marked a milestone in the closing of the lingering frontier era of Lost Nation.

“You can't predict the future, Tut,” my grandmother told me many times, “but times change. That much we can count on.”

At the time, of course, I had no idea of the changes that lay ahead, for Lost Nation or myself. On the day we discovered the
whale, after the crowd had all left, and my grandfather had finished his barn chores and gone back up to Labrador, my grandmother read me the story of the great flood from Genesis, then repaired to Egypt to commune with her beloved relics. I sat out in the kitchen, reading until I was sleepy. But once again, I did not fall asleep immediately that night.

Outside the slanted window of my bedroom I could hear the river running hard from the afternoon cloudburst, rushing through its new channel, bypassing the oxbow and the fossilized whale. I thought of the great waterwheel, by this time undoubtedly broken into a hundred pieces and riding north on the swollen river for Lake Memphremagog and the St. Lawrence. Semi-awake and drifting like the fragments of that wheel, drifting into and out of sleep to the sound of the river, I saw myself fishing a vast Labrador river with my grandfather, as he had promised we would when I turned eighteen.