The Fall of the Year Read Free Page A

crowd; but at twenty-one I found no fun in being shouted at by my father in front of half the village. Finally Father George called me over to the bench and advised me to bribe Foster Boy into toning down by inviting him to the weekly bingo game in the basement social hall of the church the following Tuesday. After that Foster contented himself with bellowing a play-by-play account of the game from the top row of the bleachers while the Outlaws rolled to a lopsided 18–2 victory.
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    What an eye opener the bingo game turned out to be! For starters, Foster Boy insisted on playing eighteen cards simultaneously. Although he deposited his colored wooden markers on the faded cardboard squares at a furious pace, eventually he fell behind the caller, Father George. Then Foster kept track of his boards in his head—an astonishing feat, even for an ex-savant.
    The scowls in his direction each time he thundered out “Bingo!” were something to see. Worse yet, he exulted in his victories by hooting like a great horned owl, croaking like a raven, producing an uncanny imitation of a swamp bittern’s gulping cry.
    â€œUnder the N, forty-five!” Foster boomed out after Father G. “Under the B, twelve.”
    Louvia the Fortuneteller, herself a fanatical bingo addict with her own counters and good luck charms, stalked up to our table and threatened to put a twelve-month hoodoo on both of us if we didn’t leave immediately. Foster reared back in his chair and bayed like a Canada lynx. When he strolled off with the fifty-dollar jackpot at the end of the evening, an outraged moan went up from the entire hall.
    On our way back to the rectory together, I asked Father George why God
had
created village idiots, and he flew off the handle. “Well, Jesus Christ, Frank,” he shouted, “how the hell would I know? You’ll just have to ask God. I’m not God, you know.”
    â€œMaybe not, but the older you get, the more you act like Him around here,” I said. “I thought that, being a priest, you might ask Him for me.”
    â€œHe’d probably tell me to mind my own business,” Father George said. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and laughed. “You’re asking an age-old question, son. No one but God knows the answer. As for Foster, you know what I think he really needs?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “But I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.”
    â€œI am. I think Foster needs a regular paying job to keep himself out of trouble. Why don’t you see if you can get him a job sweeping up over at the mill? He ought to be able to handle that.”
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    Despite my great faith in Father George’s judgment, I had all kinds of misgivings about trying to wangle a job for Foster Boy at the mill. If the village of Kingdom Common was a world unto itself, containing the several smaller worlds of the railroad yard, commission-sales barn, courthouse, Academy, and furniture mill, the mill contained several distinct realms of its own. One of these was the exceedingly dangerous machine floor, where Foster was assigned a sweeping job on the graveyard shift. The floor was two hundred feet long and nearly a hundred feet wide, a tintinnabulation of shrieking saws, planers, lathes, sanders, and drills, badly lighted and poorly ventilated, with a choking mist of sawdust suspended in the air at all times. Over the previous sixty years it had claimed the lives of half a dozen French Canadians from Little Quebec, and the fingers, hands, or eyes of a hundred more.
    Foster’s job was to collect the discarded end pieces of lumber from around the saws and wheel them down to the waste disposal pit known as the Hog. At the bottom of the Hog, ten long, whirling knives reduced the wood scraps to chips, which were then fed through a blower pipe to the furnace that fired the steam boiler powering the woodworking machines. Some years ago a sweeper had tumbled into the Hog