The Fall of the Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

of Foster’s latest misadventure.
    Sometime around midnight the night before, Doc said, Foster had burst in on Bumper Stevens’s weekly all-night poker game at the commission-sales barn, full of crazy talk about God bringing him a mature older woman. Harlan Kittredge had promised he’d have just such a seasoned beauty waiting for Foster half an hour later in the auction barn’s hayloft. Someone who’d had her eye on him for a long time and was dying to show him the ropes. Then Harlan had dispatched Little Shad Shadow, Bumper’s softheaded ring man, up to the dump to roust out Sal the Berry Picker. At Harlan’s instructions, Little Shad had told Sal that Foster Boy had designs on her and had offered her five dollars to lie in ambush for him in Bumper’s loft.
    â€œAfter she was ensconced there,” Doc told us, “the good-for-nothings sent Foster up the ladder. When he got to the top, old Sal jumped up out of the hay and lambasted him with her apple crook and knocked him down into the straw and filth below. Foster Boy picked himself up and ran out of the barn, and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”
    Â 
    I spent that day and all the next day and the day after that searching for Foster Boy, with no results. As each day went by and my friend did not turn up, I found myself seething every time I thought of the joke the commission-sales rowdies had played on him. I was tempted to file a formal complaint with the sheriff. But what could the sheriff have done about it even if he’d been inclined to? As Father George pointed out to me, a prank can be criminal without being against the law. The important thing now was to locate Foster before he came to any harm.
    On the second day after he went missing, I had an unsettling experience. In the melting snow in the woods above Louvia the Fortuneteller’s place, I came across an indistinct set of what appeared to be large overshoe tracks. The boot prints, if that is what they were, headed up the trail along the brook where Foster Boy and I had fished earlier that spring. But by then the snow from the freak blizzard was going off quickly, and the tracks simply ended near the top of the ridge in a clear-cut grown up to wild raspberry bushes. Whether they were Foster’s was impossible to say.
    That evening Father George and I sat up late in the rectory kitchen while I thought out loud about Foster. Might he be posting hard for Florida in search of a girlfriend? Or en route to Utah to examine the tenets of Mormonism on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, his laughter ringing out over the desert? Father George shook his head. He was afraid not.
    All right, I conceded. Maybe, even as we spoke, Foster was putting some hard questions to God Himself. Demanding, absolutely demanding, that, as promised in scripture, the heretofore ineluctable mysteries of the universe and his place in it be disclosed to him at last. Might not Foster be posing to God the questions mankind had asked of Him since the tribulations of Job, the questions at the heart of human existence? If so, what would God say?
    Father George hesitated. Then he shook his head again. “It’s hard enough to guess at what people will do, Frank. As for God, I have no idea. Neither does anyone else.”
    Â 
    Well. As Foster Boy himself had often said, life must go on. One morning in early June I lifted my eyes to the ridges rising in serried ranks to the mountains west of the Common and saw that the last of the spring snow was gone from the summit of Jay Peak.
    I decided to go trout fishing. It was black-fly time; in the dooryards of Little Quebec, the smokers had been started up, rusty steel barrels in which damp chunks of black spruce were kept smoldering night and day to discourage the black flies and mosquitoes. The roadside ditches that Foster Boy had combed for bottles were pink and purple with wild lupines. High on the ridge above Louvia