The Fall of the Year Read Online Free PDF

DeBanville’s, the new leaves of the hardwoods were still more yellow than green, and the sunlight fell through the foliage in a rich golden haze. Drifting down the trail above ray head at intervals of about thirty seconds came a progression of brilliant yellow-and-black tiger swallowtail butterflies. The brook trout rose readily to whatever flies I tossed into the stream, splashing right up to my feet to get at them.
    Not far from the clear-cut where I’d lost the overshoe tracks ten days before, I set down my fly rod and fish basket and struck into the woods to check once again for any sign of Foster Boy. Of course I found nothing; but I spent an hour or so searching anyway, looking for something I knew I would not find, shrouded by the dense Vermont woods and the mysteries and sorrows of mankind, which no priest or prophet, no scholar or savant, not the wisest men and women in small villages or great cities the world over, can ever truly fathom.

2
The Journey
When Sylvie and Marie Bonhomme were quite young, maybe eight and seven, they were caught out on Little Quebec Mountain in a blizzard. They were in the gravest danger of freezing to death when a little blue Madonna appeared to them, illuminated like a Christmas tree angel, and led them straight as a string through the storm to their house in Little Quebec.
—Father George, “A Short History”
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    O NE SUNDAY AFTERNOON , a week or so after Foster Boy vanished, Father George dispatched me in his Roadmaster to visit Louvia DeBanville, who had sent word to the Big House that she wanted a ride into town immediately, if not sooner. Louvia’s shanty was perched on a low wooded knoll overlooking the Boston and Montreal railroad tracks, the American Heritage mill, and the straggling French Canadian enclave of Little Quebec, where the clairvoyant was widely respected, especially by the older generation, not only as a perceptive seer but as an herbalist and matchmaker. Most of the rest of the village regarded her as something of a crank but took care not to cross her for fear of her sharp tongue. Yet despite Father George’s own frequent disagreements with the fortuneteller—she was forever giving his parishioners advice that was contrary to his—from my early boyhood he had sent me to her place to stack fire-wood, clear a path through the snow, and take her presents of venison and trout.
    Louvia’s place was as gloomy as the village graveyard at midnight. Dark, looming hemlocks crowded up to her shack on all sides. On the banks of the stream that seeped out of the woods in back grew the fortuneteller’s herb garden, rank with dogbane, ragwort, tansy, love-lies-bleeding, and all kinds of other plants with dubious medicinal properties. From dawn until dusk a pair of Toulouse geese and a lame mallard duck with a gleaming emerald head patrolled her precincts. As I climbed the path through the woods to her house, I had to watch where I put my foot at every step.
    If you didn’t know Louvia, her appearance alone was enough to give you a start. She stood an inch or two under five feet and wore long, bright-colored housedresses of the old-fashioned kind called dusters, which reached nearly to her ankles. Her hair was coal black, not a strand of gray in it anywhere. Her cheeks were rouged like a cheaply embalmed corpse’s, with a compound she prepared herself from a vein of red hematite high on Little Quebec Mountain. About her at all times hung the sourish whiff of wood smoke, from the uncured hardwood slabs she scavenged from the furniture mill and burned in her kitchen range.
    When it came to fortunetelling, most of Louvia’s methods were conventional enough. She deciphered tea leaves, seized your hand and stared at it indignantly while muttering to herself in French, or squinted into a chunk of rose quartz she’d found years ago on the mountain, which she used as a gazing ball and referred to as her “Daughter.”