The Fall of the Year by Howard Frank Mosher Page A

traded his low-mileage Bonneville for a Chrysler. Soon neither family drove to mass at Father George’s Church of St. Mary’s in anything other than an El Dorado, never more than a year old.
    If Emile Lacourse bought his wife, Mimi, a mink stole in Montreal, Pietro Gambini drove hell-for-leather over the White Mountains to purchase his wife, Rosa, a full-length otter coat from the finest Boston furrier. Nor was the rivalry confined to the adults. Their children competed fiercely in school for academic and athletic distinctions. Father George’s basketball team at the Academy once lost a state championship game by four points because Etienne Lacourse, a wizardly ball handler, refused to pass to Rodolfo Gambini, a high-scoring forward. In the locker room after the game, fists flew. Instead of celebrating an undefeated season with a three-foot-high trophy and a torchlight parade led by their El Dorados, the two quarreling families got into a brawl in the parking lot outside the gymnasium.
    Even so, both the Gambinis and the Lacourses continued to be highly regarded in the village. As for the feud, vengeance had become its own sweet excuse. No one in Kingdom Common seemed able to do a thing to stop the trouble—which brings me back to Father George.
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    One bitterly cold November evening when I was about eight, two heavy cars roared up the drive of the Big House and skidded to a halt under the portico. Out of the automobiles poured Lacourses and Gambinis of all ages, screaming murder. From the trunk of his Cadillac, Emile Lacourse dragged an enormous buck, which he lugged up to the porch and dumped on the glider by the front door. The two families swarmed up behind him and stood around the dead deer, gesticulating wildly and shrieking at each other in Québécois and Milanese dialects that they otherwise spoke only rarely, even at home. Pietro Gambini was waving his deer rifle. Emile Lacourse ran to his El Dorado, opened the trunk, and pulled out a red chainsaw with a blade a yard long. Rushing back up onto the porch, he started the saw with a great coughing roar and brandished it over his head toward Pietro. Both men were bellowing for Father George.
    I’d been sitting at the bird’s-eye maple kitchen table listening to Father George read aloud the wonderful story from his “Short History” of his chance discovery of a stand of bird’s-eye maples, high in Lord Hollow, from which he had personally made much of the furniture for the Big House. I was startled by the commotion; but Father George grinned and told me to sit on the woodbox near the stove and be as quiet as a church mouse, and I’d see and hear something I could write my own story about someday.
    He hurried out onto the porch and said, “People, good people. For heaven’s sake. This isn’t Chicago in the twenties. Go lock your weapons in your cars. Then come back and we’ll thrash this out together.”
    Muttering more threats and exchanging hateful glances, the two families convened in the Big House kitchen, but refused the hot coffee that Father George offered them. This was not, pardon us, Father, a social visit. Oh, no.
    I watched, wide-eyed, from the woodbox as the litigants faced each other across the maple table, with their finely clad wives, both great beauties, and their handsome children to bear witness. At Father George’s request, Pietro, a stocky man with dark hair and flashing eyes, told his story first.
    It seemed that when he was out hunting, Pietro had jumped the buck in question in a beech grove bordering the brook dividing his property from the Lacourses’ and had shot it in the chest. The fatally wounded animal had sprinted a few yards, leaped the brook in one bound, and dropped in a heap at the feet of Emile Lacourse, out clearing brush from his sugar maple orchard. Emile instantly cut the throat of the dying buck with his chainsaw. But when Pietro started across the stream to