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

took a few pellets of birdshot in his right calf. That evening, from my cupola bedroom in the Big House, I could hear the Lacourses discharging shotguns and rifles into the air long past midnight, in celebration of the wounding of Pietro Gambini. Father George lost his temper completely, and the following Sunday he threatened from the pulpit, in a thundering voice, to excommunicate them from Saint Mary’s, if not from the church altogether, and administer a public horsewhipping to Emile and Pietro besides.
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    In school, Thérèse Lacourse, Emile’s youngest daughter and the apple of his eye, was one year ahead of Pietro’s youngest son, Peter, the stone sculptor. She was a quiet and intense girl, a straight-A student at the top of her class. Peter, for his part, was a slightly built boy with serious brown eyes and brown hair that curled up at his shirt collar. In early boyhood he had contracted infantile paralysis, and though he had recovered completely from the disease, he never did become an athlete like his older brothers. During his convalescence he discovered his greatgrandfather’s carving tools, wrapped in oilskins in the old stone shed near the quarry. From the moment he first held the hammers and chisels in his hands, Peter knew that he had found his life’s work.
    Peter Gambini studied the carvings on the pink granite tombstones in the village cemetery. He hitchhiked to Barre to familiarize himself with the great stone figures in the Rock of Ages cemetery. Then he began to carve memorials of his own. Soon customers were flocking to the Gambini place from all over Vermont and across the border in Quebec as well, to commission the young genius to carve their tombstones. Horse-loggers wanted to be laid to rest beneath stones engraved with etchings of their teams. Farmers wanted representations of their barns and houses. Woodsmen coveted leaping granite bucks and trout.
    By the time Peter was fifteen he’d left school altogether to work full-time in his great-grandfather’s granite shed. Emile’s sons left him alone, in deference to his childhood illness, and Peter’s own brothers treated him differently. After all, he was special, an artist. But the entire village knew that when Peter was sixteen, Emile Lacourse had happened upon him and Thérèse skinny-dipping together in the deep green water of the quarry and, as Father George himself put it in his “Short History,” it was well for the stone carver that afternoon that he was fleet of foot. But despite all that their parents could do, the young couple took every opportunity to be together. So it was really no great surprise when, one December evening in my thirteenth year, while Father George and I were decorating the Big House for Christmas, she and Peter showed up on the porch together.
    It was snowing lightly, and a few flakes clung to Thérèse’s long dark hair, reminding me of the dark-haired angel that traditionally went on top of the huge tree in the rectory parlor.
    â€œAre your folks squabbling again?” Father George said, knowing better.
    â€œNot tonight, Father, for a wonder,” Thérèse said. She jerked her head at Peter. “This one wants to get married.”
    The couple sat down side by side at the bird’s-eye table on which, years earlier, Father George had divided the buck between their fathers. Now he heated coffee. Once again I sat quietly on the woodbox by the blue porcelain stove.
    Father George sat down across from the couple. “Flow old are you, Thérèse?”
    â€œEighteen.”
    â€œAnd you, Peter?”
    â€œHe’s eighteen, too.”
    Father George frowned. But with children and young people, he almost never lost his temper. “Let him answer for himself, Thérèse. Are you seventeen, Peter?”
    â€œAnd a half.”
    â€œHe does the work of a man and is a man,” Thérèse said.
    Father George looked at Peter.