“‘But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved.’” Good heavens, but couldn’t the man have spent that much time talking about the blind, the lame, and the stupid? Sicily cleared her throat.“They had no water to drink back then, you know,” she said. “The Dead Sea was dead even in them days. That’s the only reason they drank so much wine.”
“Does it mention The Crossroads anywhere in St. Luke?” Amy Joy asked, a smile curling about her mouth. Sicily was always up to something these days, she knew. What, was another matter. “So you memorized all that in summer Bible school, huh?”
Sicily kept reading, determined to find some biblical logic to the paragraph somewhere, a moral perchance. She was feeling more than a little bit like the prodigal fool.
“‘No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new,’” said Sicily, “‘for he sayeth, The old is better.’”
“Who taught the class?” Amy Joy asked. “Orson Welles?” That was it, Sicily realized, for she had come to the bottom of the paragraph and only black words followed, probably a description of how the disciples raised their glasses full of old wine and toasted the Dead Sea, thankful for its demise. She slapped the book shut.
“We always memorized stuff that wasn’t well known,” Sicily said. “To test how good a memory we have. I had a real good one. Still do.”
“I’d say,” said Amy Joy, “that wasn’t exactly ‘Our Father Who Art in Heaven.’” She was taking bread from a Sunbeam wrapper. “You want a cucumber and cheese sandwich?” she asked.
“Yes sir,” said Sicily. “My memory’s just as good as in my teens. I never dreamt I’d remember that wine-ology parable.”
Amy Joy spread two slices on the counter, then went for the Miracle Whip. “You want one or not?” she asked again.
“Don’t put cucumber on mine,” said Sicily. “Cucumber don’t go with cheese.”
“Why?” asked Amy Joy. “Did St. Luke say that, too?”
“Don’t make fun of the Bible, Amy Joy,” Sicily said quite somberly.
“Well,” Amy Joy admitted, “I guess cheese really doesn’t go with cucumber. I just like something green when it’s winter. It’s so white out there it hurts your eyes.”
“Sitting here eating like this gives me an idea,” said Sicily. “If we ain’t going to the Thanksgiving Co-op Dinner, why don’t we bring Winnie over here to eat with us?”
“I told you already,” said Amy Joy. She plopped tea bags into two mugs. “I’ll gladly drop you off and then pick you up. Winnie too.” Couldn’t a single day go by without Sicily thinking up some new plan?
“Oh, by the way,” said Sicily. “I was just about to sew a button onto my dress when I remembered what Selma Craft told me last week.”
“What was that?” Amy Joy asked. She put a cheese sandwich in front of Sicily, and then reached for the whistling teakettle on the stove. She fixed them both tea.
“You remember Ernie Felby died of cancer a few months ago?” Sicily leveled a nice squirt of Carnation milk into her tea. “Well, Mary Felby’s been taking in sewing and altering to make ends meet, and when I got to thinking about that poor woman, I had to pull the thread right out of my needle and put that dress aside. It’s the least I could do to help. She’s got all them kids, you’ll remember, and one strung to the high heavens on dope.”
Amy Joy poured milk into her own tea and eyed Sicily with interest. “I thought you didn’t like Mary Felby,” she said. “I thought because the Felbys came from Massachusetts or wherever, you said they were hippies and should be run out of town. Didn’t you and Winnie used to go on and on about the Felbys? Remember how you used to say that the city was getting rid of all their trash when folks like the Felbys come and settle in the country? And have their babies in old barns, like cattle? And they don’t even believe in mowing their lawns? And they probably grow more dope than they do potatoes? Remember saying all that?”
“Did I?” Sicily asked vaguely.
“Yes, you did.” Amy Joy assured her. “You said folks shouldn’t be allowed to even move here from out of state, that they’d never be accepted here, even if all their kids were born here. You said them kids should be considered out-of-staters too, remember? You said just ’cause the cat has kittens in the oven don’t make them biscuits. Remember?”
“Will you quit saying remember, remember?” Sicily asked. “Besides, the Bible says to love your neighbor, regardless of what state they moved from.” Sicily was serene with altruism. Amy Joy pulled a chair back from the table and sat down on it.
“Ouch!” she said, and felt with one hand under her rear. Out came the Super-Magnify glass. Sicily pretended to be interested only in the cheese sandwich.
“Where did this come from?” Amy Joy asked.
“Oh, that,” Sicily said, as if to pooh-pooh its very existence. “I ordered it,” she said. She looked quickly at the bulging Bible on the table before her. Should she lie, what with Jesus staring her right in the face? You bet. Jesus was only thirty-three when he died, but if he’d lived to be older, if he’d had kids of his own, especially one like Amy Joy, he would have done the same darn thing, probably even had a few parables about it. The last thing she wanted Amy Joy to know was how bad her eyesight had become. She needed a little help with this lie. Please, Jesus. Suddenly the stuffed tomato pincushion loomed before her eyes, its green cotton leaves growing limply from the stem. She’d forgotten it on the table, but there it was, blood-red as the words in St. Luke, the red letters of truth. Tomatoes.
“I bought that glass this past summer,” Sicily said idly, unconcerned. Thank you, Jesus. “To check our tomato plants for aphids.”
***
By nine o’clock, the snow lay packed upon the earth, thick with cold, with the tonnage of its own weight. The trees stood stunned above their roots, beaded with shards of frost, while the river was at work with its silent process of freezing over. A pale November moon drifted out of some scraps of cloud, then rode free in the sky. A cold, silvery moon, but, as the old-timers liked to say, it was the same one shining over Florida. A coyote sent a volley of short, rapid yaps down from the frozen slope of McKinnon Hill. He had come into the clearing, where the deer had been earlier to eat at the frozen cedar buds, and he stood there in the moonlight, a shaggy wild dog, his mate for life trailing a few cold feet behind. He had made a hard, slow comeback, the little wolf had, his numbers growing slightly in the milder winters that had come to northern Maine. A mournful howl echoed now, an eerie report that beat upon the tombstones of the Protestant graveyard, on the carved names of MCKINNON and MULLINS and CRAFT—the old settlers, the old ghosts, asleep in their icy bones beneath the snow.
When Bobby Fennelson came into the kitchen, the cold had settled upon the land with such force that a crackling seemed to resonate up from the river, down from McKinnon Hill, a fiery cold, snapping and popping like birch logs set to flame.
“Christ,” he whispered. “It must be ten below already, not counting the windchill factor.” Loose snow from the last storm had caught up in a loud, brisk wind and swept down off the roof. It had dusted his hat and shoulders while he stood waiting for her to open the door. Now she was brushing it away.
“I need to get Conrad Gifford to come shovel that roof,” Amy Joy whispered back. She was already in her flannel nightgown. She reached up quickly and took his hat off. It said Maine, A Northern Paradise, several of the letters beginning to come loose, trailing little tails of red thread about them. He leaned forward, into the breath of her words, and left a cold kiss on her mouth.
As they inched along the corridor, Amy Joy put a finger to her lips and motioned to Sicily’s closed door, a ghostly yellow light hovering beneath it.
“I don’t think she’s asleep yet,” Amy Joy whispered. She took Bobby’s hand and pulled him toward the stairway. He left his work boots at the foot so that the climb would be quieter, but,
noticing the dinginess of his socks, the little bits of wood chips embedded in the wool, he was suddenly embarrassed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Never mind your socks, silly,” said Amy Joy. She nuzzled his neck and he looked at her again, as though she were a wild colt come out of the storm, mane flying, nostrils trembling with frost. “It’s you I’ve missed,” she added. “Not your socks.”
“I’m coming down with a cold,” Bobby said, and ran a hand through his hair, messed with the constant ridge where his hat had been.
“It’s going around,” Amy Joy whispered. She lodged a cool finger beneath the collar of his work shirt, along the neckline of his T-shirt, tugged at the Fruit of the Loom tag.
“I’m tired,” he said, and coughed into his hand to squelch the noise. Amy Joy glanced quickly at Sicily’s door. There was no sound. If she heard the bed creak, she would still have a minute or two to hide him. The truth, and it even saddened Amy Joy, was that Sicily wasn’t as fast as she used to be in keeping an eye on her daughter. Amy Joy couldn’t have gotten away with anything of this magnitude just ten years back. But what was her alternative? Put Sicily into Pine Valley with Winnie and Albert and all the rest so that she could live her own life, have her own privacy? Sometimes it seemed to Amy Joy that she was caught between a solid rock of ice and a hard wall of frozen pine trees, with Sicily in the middle of it all, and both of them were drowning, choking on snow and trees and mosquitoes, and the truth of their aloneness: a widow and a spinster.
“Did you take the spring path up from the river?” she asked, and Bobby nodded. He’d been parking his four-wheel drive far down the old road that fishermen followed to the river. From there all he had to do was trace the well-beaten path Amy Joy made during her daily walks for exercise, to fill the bird feeders hanging from the cold birches, and to gather dead winter foliage for study. She had bought a book called New England in Winter, and now the woods fascinated her, all the bulky little secrets of the cankers on the branches, the hair-filled feces of the coyotes and foxes, the certain lay of a mink’s track. She had even learned to estimate the size of a whitetail buck by measuring the tree where he left a “buck rub,” his territory marker.
“Dorrie and Lola have been cruising by most nights,” Amy Joy said. “I put my light out upstairs and just watch them.”
“Toody and Muldoon,” Bobby said.
“I don’t know how they think I can miss them,” Amy Joy mused. “They got that big yellow plow of Booster’s. You’d have to be blind. Do you suppose they’ll ever think to look down the river road some night? If they see your truck—” She stopped, imagining.
“They ain’t that smart,” he said. “Besides, that’s where the plow turns, so there’s always tracks there. They’d be afraid to drive such a narrow road, late at night, all the way to the river.”
“I hope so,” Amy Joy said.
“The Snoop Sisters,” Bobby said. “Ignore them.”
“It’s hard when they’re turning ten times a night in my yard.” Amy Joy heard a long sweet snore from Sicily’s room, followed by several short zappy ones.
“We’d better go up,” she said. “I don’t want to wake her.”
They made their way up the wide stair of the old McKinnon homestead, the house that Reverend Ralph had built before he left his family behind and went off as a missionary to die in China. It had been a real showplace in its day, especially when the visiting missionaries had come from all corners of the globe to tell their stories of heathen salvation. The reverend’s wife, Grace, had died in that house, up in Amy Joy’s very bedroom, had died giving birth to Sicily. And Marge McKinnon, the oldest of the daughters, had given in to death during one of the rainiest autumns anyone could ever remember. Marge had died in the downstairs bedroom, Sicily’s room. And of course, the inimitable Pearl McKinnon Ivy, the second of the sisters, had taken her last breaths in the upstairs bedroom, again Amy Joy’s bedroom. It seemed to be their destiny, these McKinnon women, to outlive their men, outlive their own legends, until they found themselves in one of the fated bedrooms with the high ceilings and old-fashioned wallpaper, waiting for death to tuck them in.
But some different activity was taking place in the bedroom now. It was not new, this activity. It had been going on between men and women for so long that probably no one even remembered where it all began. In caves, most likely, Amy Joy guessed when she thought about it, although ten below zero in a cave gave mating an entirely different wrapper. But Amy Joy did assume it was new for the old McKinnon homestead. She imagined that the Reverend Ralph was the only male to have caused the headboard to bang against the old-fashioned wallpaper. Amy Joy did not know that Marcus Doyle, Marge’s beau in her youth, had spent the autumn of 1923 in the old summer kitchen, where Marge visited him on those special nights when the leaves raged all around them like a fire painted up and down the hillsides. And she didn’t know that her own mother, Sicily, had sneaked her father, Edward Elbert Lawler, up into her room one night, while Marge and Pearl dreamed innocent dreams in their own beds. And it was in this very house that Chester Lee Gifford had climbed through a window in 1959, the night he died in a rainy car wreck, and tried to seduce the bony Thelma Ivy. That was thirty years ago. And Pearl? Maybe Pearl’s secret was that she didn’t sneak a lover into the lofty chambers of the old reverend’s house. And who knew what secrets the reverend himself had buried beneath the floorboards? Or his wife, for that matter? It was no family secret that she despised her husband as much as he loved the Lord. Maybe someday—like those bodies out in Lake Mead Amy Joy had read about, those drowned corpses dancing around in an underwater current—maybe one day it would all surface.
“The sheets are cold,” Amy Joy said as she turned back the blankets. He had already put his shirt on the chair and was unbuckling his belt. She stood looking out the window, waiting for him to undress. The river lay blue as a bruise in the moonlight, the ice beginning to take hold along its edges. It had seen a lot of traffic, that old river had. Amy Joy’s ancestors had followed its course, one summery day in 1833, and had founded the entire town of Mattagash, Maine. And a lot of folks had used it since then, a lot of dreams had poled up and down, a lot of lives had gone under, a lot of chances drowned. Those people were all gone now, but the river was still there, waiting, making its soft music in the moonlight.
The sound of belt buckle against wood as his pants were flung upon the chair reminded her of Bobby’s presence, this lumberjack, this man of the woods, smelling of spruce and fir and tamarack. New England in Winter told about some of the happenings in the wild north woods, but Amy Joy knew, as she slid beneath the cold blankets and snuggled up to him, that there were other wild happenings yet to be recorded.
The Fennelson Curse
FOSTER FENNELSON
b. 1879 d. 1960
marries
MATHILDA ANNA CRAFT
b. 1882
WALTER
born 1897
died September 1918, in combat
MARY
born 1899
died October 1, 1903, sulfur matches
LUCY
born 1900
died 1937, in childbirth
ESTER
born 1902
died 1924, in childbirth
GARVIN
born 1905
died 1957, woods accident
WILLIAM
born 1906
died 1918, drowned on log drive
WINNIE
born 1910
at Pine Valley
PERCY
born 1912
died 1930, went through ice
MORTON
born 1917
died 1947, in his sleep
CASEY
born 1919
died 1968, woods accident
JUSTINE
born 1921
died 1975, hit by truck
ELIZABETH
born 1922
infertile, New York City
LAST BABY
born 1923
male child, misbirth
MATHILDA WATCHES THE WALL: PURPLE TRAINS IN NORTHERN MAINE
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face—the face of one long dead—
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Cross of Snow”
When you want to remember only childhood, only the sweet things, you can’t do it. It’s as if something pulls you forward, like you’re on some old wagon you got no control over, and it just rolls wherever it wants to. Memory’s driving that wagon, and when you’re as old as I am, you just kind of hang on tight and try your best to enjoy the ride.
I was fourteen when I married Foster Fennelson, and fifteen when Walter was born. After that, there was a lot of kids. Some of them I hardly remember. You can say that ain’t motherly, but it’s true. They was just kids, like everyone else’s kids, nothing to make them stand out. But there’s some of them children I won’t ever forget. Some stood out real good. I remember Mary a lot, maybe because she was my first girl. She was born second, right after Walter. Maybe I like to remember her because I was still young myself, and things still meant something to me. After a lot of years of life go by, you get kind of like an old badger. You get a shell-like heart, and you back your way into a corner and show everyone your teeth. But Mary—no, I hadn’t shut any doors to my heart until Mary died.
The Weight of Winter Page 13
