Read Online The Fall of the Year by Howard Frank Mosher - Free Book Online

futility and madness of the feud. Even at eight, I could see that. But now it was time for his decision. Everyone’s eyes moved from Father George to the deer and back to Father George.
    â€œWell?” Emile said.
    The head, with its trophy rack and dark cape, went to Pietro to have mounted, along with one forequarter and one hindquarter. The rest of the hide and the two other quarters went to Emile for dispatching the animal. It was as simple at that.
    To me, the disposition of the deer seemed eminently fair. But what a howl went up from the litigants! The men smote their foreheads. The women pulled at their gorgeous long hair as if to tear it out by the roots. The children hissed at each other like vipers, while the grownups trembled in rage and stared at one another and at Father George with incredulity. Yet as he firmly reminded them, they had given their word to accept his ruling.
    Next time, both parties vowed on their way out the door into the night with their spoils. Next time there would be no recourse to the priest, and matters would turn out very differently indeed, with all due respect, Father. Afterward Father George laughed and told me not to worry, he’d been through similar charades with the feuding families a dozen times before.
    Maybe so, I thought. But, young as I was, I could not help thinking that the trouble between the Lacourses and the Gambinis was far from over and, as both families had earnestly promised, that the end, when it came, would be a tragic one.
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    The feud continued straight through my boyhood. At length it reached such a pitch that Father George warned me to steer clear of both places on my hunting and fishing expeditions so I wouldn’t get caught, perhaps quite literally, in the crossfire. In fact, the spring that I turned ten, when Emile Lacourse stumbled upon Pietro Gambini manufacturing
acquavite
, the hundred-proof Italian brandy used by the Gambinis at holidays and birthday celebrations, at his homemade still high on the brook between their properties, they argued, and Emile drew a pistol and put a bullet through Pietro’s hat. When word of this near-tragedy got back to Father George, he lost patience with both adversaries. “For God’s sake, Pietro, go tend to your distilling on some other stream,” he admonished the moonshiner, supposing that the matter would then be closed.
    Far from it. To avenge himself on his neighbor, on the night before hunting season opened, Pietro cunningly affixed the mounted head of his fabled seventeen-point buck to the trunk of one of his brookside beeches, as if the animal were peering out around the tree at the Lacourse maple orchard. When Emile shot it the following dawn and crept across the brook to drag it back to his property, Pietro, who’d been lying in wait in a barberry thicket, sprang out to accost him for unlawful trespass. Father George gave both men a furious dressing-down, pounding the bird’s-eye table and condemning the souls of both men to eternal perdition before forgiving them and thanking them, not without irony, for providing him with something interesting to write about in his “Short History.” But what was clemency to one party was invariably gall to the other, and both men went home more infuriated than ever.
    You might think that as the two men grew older, they would gradually run out of the enormous energy required to sustain such a vendetta. Much the opposite. Over time the feud seemed to intensify in virulence, like Pietro’s acquavite. Each fall the families fought over who would pay the negligible taxes on the water-filled old granite pit, until finally Father George persuaded the town assessors to stop listing it. Then they fought over who owned the speckled trout in the brook. How, Father George inquired, can a man possibly own a wild trout? He was assured by both parties that they would show him exactly how, if either caught the other angling there. At town meeting