The Fall of the Year by Howard Frank Mosher Page B

claim his trophy, Emile drove him back onto his own land with the thundering saw. Pietro had then fired a round from his deer rifle into the steam vent of Emile’s nearby sugarhouse. Pietro concluded his statement with an eloquent peroration, delivered at the top of his lungs and containing an explicit threat on his neighbor’s life if he did not relinquish all claim to the deer immediately. “Excuse me, Signora,” he added in a much lower voice, with a short bow toward Mimi Lacourse.
    Emile did not dispute any of the facts of the case as presented by Pietro. On the contrary, he responded that he would be greatly interested to see his bosom friend and dear neighbor carry out his threat after his head had been severed from his shoulders with a thirty-horse gasoline felling saw.
    Father George smiled at the two families, his bright blue eyes amused. Then he said, “Bring in the deer, Emile.”
    The buck was brought inside and laid out on an oilcloth on the bird’s-eye table. It was a lovely animal, dark as a moose. Its heavy rack of horns was darker yet, with eight points on one side and nine on the other. After dispatching it with his saw and chasing Pietro back across the brook, Emile had dressed it out. Even so, Father George, a lifelong hunter, estimated its weight at two hundred and fifty pounds.
    â€œOf course. It fattened itself on my apples all fall,” Emile said.
    â€œIt spent the summer grazing like a prize heifer on my high upper mowing,” Pietro responded.
    â€œWell, gentlemen, a man doesn’t need to be another Solomon to know what to do in this situation,” Father George said. “If you’ll give me your word to agree to my decision and make every effort to abide by it, I’ll help you out.”
    What choice did the combatants have? With many intransigent looks across the table, Pietro and Emile agreed to abide by Father George’s finding, whatever it was. To the letter and in the spirit? Well, yes. To the letter and in the spirit.
    Father George spread a layer of
Kingdom County Monitors
on the yellow linoleum tiles under the table. He rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, exposing forearms as thick and powerful as Pietro’s and Emile’s. From the woodshed off the kitchen he fetched a meat saw and his hunting knife, with which he expertly cut off the head and hide of the great buck. Then he began to quarter the carcass like a beef. As he worked he told the story of the bird’s-eye table, just as he’d written it in his “Short History.” How for a hundred and fifty years the maple trees hidden on the ridge north of Lord’s Bog had not been considered worth lumbering because of the mysterious dark oval imperfections riddling their wood. Then Father George, who had a hunting camp nearby, had recognized the bird’s-eyes, in a pile of firewood, for what they truly were and decided to fell one tree for stock to make furniture for the Big House. By degrees, as Father George described skidding the logs down over the frozen bog, putting the cured lumber through the mill’s shrieking ripsaw, planer, and sander, then shaping the dowels for chair and table legs, gluing the pieces, and sanding and varnishing the furniture, everyone’s attention became focused on the story.
    Suddenly Emile Lacourse spoke up. “Father G. What makes the little bird’s-eyes in the wood?”
    â€œAh,” Father George said, sawing through the last hindquarter of the deer. “That’s the question, Emile. No one knows.”
    â€œThe bird’s-eye is a separate species of maple?” Pietro said.
    â€œNo, it’s regular rock maple. But whether it’s minerals in the soil where the trees grow or the way the wind blows or some virus that causes the eyes, I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Like how your quarrel began.”
    No doubt my adoptive father hoped, with this exemplum, to drive home the ultimate