The Fall of the Year Read Free

DeBanville’s shanty. Did I know that he had been studying the Bible again recently? To learn why God had created village idiots and bottle pickers in the first place? Hoo hoo! Nearby, a nesting Cooper’s hawk shrieked at us with displeasure. Foster shrieked back and laughed louder than ever.
    Higher on the ridge the hardwoods were just budding out. Crimson flowerlets from tall sugar maples lay strewn over the logging trace near the brook. Painted trillium with raspberry-stained throats were in bloom. Warblers—green, blue, black, yellow—flashed through the treetops. The woods rang with their mating calls. I tried to call Foster’s attention to the songbirds and wildflowers, but he was preoccupied with weightier considerations. He confided to me that he expected to find the answers to his questions in the Book of Job, which he was currently reexamining.
    Soon we were fishing our way down the brook. Foster Boy plunged through the pools and riffles, his wake spreading out twenty feet behind him. The elegant dark shapes of panicked trout darted away for cover. Catching any of them was out of the question. Foster wondered, Did a trout have a soul? Did a village idiot?
    Louvia the Fortuneteller was out behind her shack, knee-deep in the brook, netting the big flopping suckers that she smoked over a smoldering fire of green ash sticks and hawked from door to door in Little Quebec as delicacies. “Aiee!” she cried out in her harsh voice as the monstrous Foster Boy crashed through her sucker pool. She held her crossed index fingers high over her head and shook them first at Foster, then at me. I knew very well that the old gypsy’s hexes were nothing but foolishness, but a chill went up my back even so.
    Foster whirled around in the water, made the hex sign back at Louvia, and went laughing down the brook to Little Quebec, leaving me to face the fortuneteller’s wrath alone.
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    Town-team baseball was still a going concern in Kingdom Common in those days. The Kingdom Common Outlaws played their home games on the village green, where on a sunny Saturday afternoon during the season it wasn’t unusual for two or three hundred fans to turn out for a contest with a crosscounty rival like Memphremagog or Pond in the Sky. I’d played shortstop for the Academy and my college team; and a few days after my fishing excursion with Foster, Father George, who still managed the Outlaws, recruited me for the team’s opening game.
    In the bottom of the first inning we jumped out to a 2–0 lead. Then who should show up but Foster Boy, apparently with the express intention of rooting for me, his new friend and fishing partner. What a spectacle he made of himself, hollering, “Yay, Bennett!” like a madman, clanking a great tin cowbell, throwing his extra-large baseball cap, made for him by our town tailor, Abel Feinstein, high into the air whenever I made a routine play, and exchanging taunts with Sal the Berry Picker, who for decades had led the cheering by parading up and down in front of the bleachers waving her long apple-gathering crook and chanting “Go Outlaws!”
    â€œDummy!” Sal yelled at Foster Boy when he chimed in with his cowbell. “Turd head!”
    â€œJezebel! Hag of Endor!” Foster shouted back, clanging his bell in Sal’s wizened brown face.
    In their contention for ascendancy in the cheerleading department, it was a wonder they didn’t tear each other to pieces. “Hey, college boy!” Sal shouted when I allowed myself to be distracted by Foster’s antics and booted a grounder. “Take your dogface friend and go home. We might as well have him out there as you.”
    â€œYou’re right about that, Sal,” shouted Father George, who brooked no nonsense and tolerated no mental lapses on the part of his ballplayers. “What the hell is the matter with you, Bennett?”
    This unpriestly outburst broke up the hometown