She was born in 1899 and didn’t hurt me none at all, not like Walter. She was a girl, and tiny, and she didn’t hurt me. All I remember about her birth was my water breaking, and then her crying—that’s how fast and simple it was. Water, and then Mary, like they belonged together. And she was like a little sprite, all pranks and strange giggles, or silent and staring off across the river as if she could see something no one else could. And you can tell you got a special child when that happens. You can just tell.
It was right in the heart of autumn and, oh, them days around Mattagash Brook in the fall, well, there ain’t another place on earth like them. They turn over before your eyes all red and yellow and orange, and over your head, and under your feet. Some days it seemed like you could trip on the colors. Some days it seemed like the colors was bees all buzzing around your head. And then there was the land, pulsing, getting itself ready, the birds packing up, the squirrels filling their cupboards with hazelnuts. It was in the fall, and that’s the saddest time of year, you know, the fall. Everything’s harder then. Longer.
She’d gone out on the front steps, had been out there with her little book, hers and Walter’s book, the one the schoolteacher give them. It was a real little book with hard covers and pictures of trains. There was all kinds of locomotives, panting and puffing across the pages. It was a wonderful gift back then to give a child, especially a child living and growing up so far from the rest of the world, but with a big curiosity about that world. When Mary looked at the pages of that little book, it was good as magic before her eyes. So there she was, out on them steps, the leaves on fire all around her, just looking at pictures and sucking her thumb. At least I thought it was her thumb. She’d had that habit, and I meant to break her of it, but she was still only four. And it was all color that day, God in every leaf, in every bird that flew. You don’t see that anymore. There’s no real color left these days. Maybe in heaven you will, but you don’t see color here no more. So I let her be, let her sit out there on the steps, humming her little tune and sucking her thumb. Only it wasn’t her thumb. It was my sulfur matches, the sulfur on my matches! When I saw what she had, well, I dropped everything and ran to take them from her. But she had already eaten too much. “You won’t even eat potatoes!” I remember I yelled that at her. “You won’t eat potatoes, yet you eat my sulfur matches!” She was such a fussy eater, who would have ever dreamed? Walter, on the other hand, ate anything. He ate bark, so help me, and many’s the time I caught him eating dirt. There was a doctor at St. Leonard in them days, and he told me Walter needed potassium was why he did it. Can you imagine that? Medicine for the body just laying there in the ground.
When it hit, her forehead caught on fire, like she’d been lit up. And her little hands curled into balls. I bundled her up like she was kindling, light as a wish, and we took her in the canoe. We had twenty miles of river before a doctor. It was night and only moonlight. Well, you got to see it to know. You can travel by the moon, just like you can the sun, so we knew our route. We knew, I suppose, our destiny even, and it all lay downriver. Sam Gifford, the old half-Indian with cat’s eyes, he took us. He steered us by the moon. And them rapids looked like silver, like you could spend them if you had the time, all froth rearing up at us, like fish spawning. I closed my eyes, but I could see right through my lids, could feel how it was all moving around me. Real fast rapids. And I was moving too, like trying to get out of a bad dream, me and little Mary, pulled by the moon. She began clutching at my breast, like she wanted to nurse, but she’d been weaned by then. I give it to her anyway, but she couldn’t keep her mouth on it. Then she tried to sit up, as if she was well, and remember all them rapids beating against that canoe. Foster and Sam Gifford was just outlines to us, one sitting, the other standing straight up in the night. And night birds cried out from all along the shores, sounds you’ll never hear again in this life, on this earth. They was real wild sounds, to match the way things was back then. And then Mary said—and it was like all the sound died away when she said this, like only her sound was important. Or was it because I could hear nothing else but the words of my sick child? Her little mouth made an O in the moonlight, like she was a fish washed on shore, and she said, “Trains, Mama. Purple trains, and tracks.” And then the fit came upon her. I held her down. What would you do? What could anyone do? I held her down like you hold a kid you’re gonna whip and they squirm to get away. That’s just how it was. And white, spitty foam came out of her mouth, like the kind you see along the river near the bank. Frog spit, the kids call it. I could see her mouth full of it in the moonlight, like the white rapids all around us, like a little river was in her mouth. I dug it out with a finger so she wouldn’t choke, but her whole body shook. It looked like she was going under the power, if you believe in that kind of thing. Or better yet, she shook like a little sheet out on the clothesline, a pillowcase maybe, flapping with no control. When I saw that light at St. Leonard Point, the lantern they kept hanging all night on the ferryboat, it was as bright as the star in the east. We could have been three wise men, that’s how bright that light was. But we wasn’t very wise, and the only gift we brought was little Mary, not ready but willing to go to God. Still, autumn ain’t a good time for things like that. That’s what I kept telling myself. I’d want a little more of earth when it’s autumn.
The doctor had to be stirred up from his bed, and he seemed to want no part of a sick child in the night. I heard his wife, her voice coming down from upstairs, like she was some kind of god. “Tell them to come back tomorrow,” the doctor’s wife said. “But she’s sick right now,” Foster said, in one of them voices the poor use. I used it too back then. And like all the others, I hunkered down in clothes I was ashamed of. And like all the others who ain’t doctors, or schoolteachers, or store owners, I suppose I thought I didn’t have as much right to breathe the same air as them folks. Maybe I thought the doctor’s wife owned the air. “Please,” I remember Foster said. “She’s sick tonight.” So the doctor give her a red medicine, for growing pains. “But she sucked all the sulfur off them matches,” I said to him in a quiet voice, the voice of a mouse. It was then that Mary sat up and looked at the doctor. She looked him right in the eye and said, “Trains!” It was like she was accusing him of something. And when I put my arms around her, a shiver shot up both of them. I can still feel it when I remember. It was like I’d been hit by lightning. It was like I’d got the shock of my life. It was her soul passing through me, is what it was. Mary’s sweet little soul. And I knew then that she’d gone off to where little children go. “She won’t suffer no more growing pains,” I told the doctor.
Foster and I sat up with her all night. We watched dawn come in through the downstairs curtains of the doctor’s house, listened to him and his wife snoring upstairs. Foster put a few dollars on the table. He said we didn’t owe anybody for Mary’s birth, and we wasn’t gonna owe any son of a bitch for her death. And we was glad, then, that she’d be going to a place where money don’t matter to anyone. Then we put on our coats and left, left them nice snores rattling like Mary’s little trains up in that warm bed, up in that place where little children are made.
My sister Laddie lived in St. Leonard, before that Spanish grippe come through in 1912 and took her and a parcel of her children with it. I went over to Laddie’s house and woke her up and said, “Mary’s gone. We lost Mary.” That was about all I could say. We didn’t have a long time to dwell on things back then. We always had other kids. We always had things that needed doing. You don’t stop for it, but you carry it in your heart forever. You carry it around, silent, like a germ. We didn’t make no grave clothes for her. We left her in the calico dress I’d made down from an old one of mine. But I had to take her coat and boots, and, oh, how I wanted her to have them. Mary’s little blue coat. She wore it all winter like it was a piece of sky. But I had three tiny children back at Mattagash Brook, one barely walking. Them other babies, them babies waiting for me at home, they could
still feel the cold. And all them babies still in me not born, they’d need something to keep them warm until the little coat wore itself out. Until the little boots scuffed themselves to death. So I took them off her, think about that. I pulled them stiff little arms out of that sky-blue coat. Then I took the tiny feet out of them boots. I did this just like a grave robber. It’s a difficult thing to get folks nowadays to understand how hard times was back then. Nature weren’t always your friend. Sometimes it seemed that nature was out strictly to get you.
Sam Gifford had spent the night making up a coffin. He’s good at work like that. It’s the Indian in him. He makes baskets, too, the old way. He goes off into the mountains before dawn to find the right ash tree, and then the right cherry, and from the cherry he makes a stick to beat the ash. But the sun has to come up just so on them trees or Sam won’t do it. Ain’t that something? The sun just so on the cherry tree or he’ll turn right around and come back home. But that ash beats out so fine it’s like yarn. He makes good snowshoes, too, and I was glad he made the coffin, because I think he put a little bit of his heart into it, the Indian way. He was all drawn inward from building it, like his heart was pulling him inside his chest, so there must have been a lot of Indian went into that coffin.
We took Mary to the graveyard at St. Leonard, up on the high pretty bank where you can see the river. I wanted to bring her back to Mattagash Brook, bury her on the edge of the blueberry patch. But Foster said it didn’t matter which part of the earth took her. What mattered is that she was gone. And he was right. So we buried her next to Albion, my sister Laddie’s oldest child, who built a snow tunnel and it fell on him. He was always building something, Albion was. Anything his hands touched, he made something out of it. I often wondered if Albion would’ve gone off to the city one day and built some of them tall, skinny buildings that seem to scratch the sky. The weight of the snow suffocated him. Laddie said she looked out and saw a red arm sticking out of the snowbank, just one red sleeve, like it was blood seeping out. We buried Mary next to Albion, aged nine. Maybe with Albion there beside her, she could go on dreaming her train dreams. Maybe Albion could build her some little tracks. And I remembered how she had looked that doctor right in the eye, not one bit afraid of him. Maybe death gives you some courage, allows you that extra edge. I know it taught me a big lesson. I started looking at everyone real different after that.
We poled back up the river, back up to Mattagash Brook, back up to where you could fall off the edge of the world if you wasn’t careful. I sat in the middle of the canoe, holding that little blue coat and them boots. I could still smell her in them. I could smell her, like she was spruce. Like her soul was all fresh pine. Foster sat in front of me, in the bow, with his head down. Once in a while I’d see a shudder run through him, a little memory, I suppose. “Cough syrup,” he kept muttering. “That weren’t nothing but cherry cough syrup he give her.” And we went on upriver like that, with me holding that coat and them boots, me sitting up like the prow of some old ship.
And there was a door slammed shut that day. I heard it, above the rapids and the birds—I heard it. And everything went quiet for it to be heard, like it did the night before, when Mary sat up in the moonlight and said, “Trains, Mama.” There was a real banging noise. I looked at Foster, to see if he heard it, but he was far off, turning that bottle of syrup in his hands like it was blood. It stayed on a shelf in the cupboard, that bottle. I never used it, but I couldn’t throw it out. It’s still back at my house, and think of that, having a house and knowing where things are in it, and not being able to go there. Someone will when I’m dead. They’ll go in like crows to throw things out, to keep what’s shiny and interesting to their eyes. That bottle’s so dusty and sticky you can’t even read it, so they’ll toss it out. No one will remember that cold autumn night, October 1, 1903. No one will remember the softness of a sick child against my breast, her head full of angry trains and empty tracks running nowhere. I think that’s why I never liked Winnie, the way she always sported that little coat like it was nothing. After Ester got too big for it, I put it away for a few years, for Winnie. How many times did I see her take it off and throw it down, like it was just a coat. And for years I’d come fast awake, out of a dark sleep, and ask, “Are you cold, Mary?” I’d ask this so soft that no one ever heard me. But all I could hear her say back was, “Trains, Mama. Purple trains.” So I’d lay back and try to sleep, until dawn came in the window, until I heard the first kid put a foot out of bed and onto the floor above me. And I got to be honest with you. For a lot of years there I didn’t care which kid it was.
EXITS AND DETOURS: THE WIFE OF MATTAGASH'S PROLOGUE
I feel it on my ribs, right down the scale,
And ever shall until my dying day.
And yet he was so full of life and gay
In bed, and could so melt me and cajole me
When on my back he had a mind to roll me,
What matter if on every bone he’d beaten me!
He’d have my love, so quickly he could sweeten me.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” The Canterbury Tales
Lynn Gifford slid into her jeans and then sat for a moment on the side of her bed, thinking. Pike wasn’t on the other side. And he wasn’t asleep, as usual, on the sofa downstairs, too bewildered with booze to bother with a climb. Even though the kids had begun calling the living room “Daddy’s bedroom,” he was not asleep down there now. He’d been forbidden, after the last fight, to darken the threshold. But as dawn was beginning to take hold of the morning, Lynn had felt her way quietly down the dark stairs and peered at the sofa, just to make sure, before she went back to bed.
Lynn found the sweatshirt she’d worn the day before, crumpled at the end of the bed. She pulled it over her head. It said Aroostook County: The Crown of Maine. Pike had given this statement a great deal of thought the first day he saw Lynn wear it. “If we’re the crown up here at the top, what’s that make Portland?” he had asked.
Minutes passed, but still Lynn sat. She tried to breathe deeply, to collect her emotions. She looked at her Woolworth tennis shoes, flopped on their sides on the rug, and wished she had the energy to reach for them. But they looked miles away. They looked as if they weighed tons. She gazed down at her watch and discovered it was only seven thirty, earlier than she had thought. The kids wouldn’t rouse on a Saturday for another two hours, and that was fine with Lynn. Maybe they could find some comfort in their dreams.
Pike Gifford had been told, most unceremoniously, by the St. Leonard sheriff that if he came banging on the door, harassing his wife and children, he would be just as unceremoniously arrested. Lynn had filed for divorce, the third time in her eleven-year marriage.
“It ain’t like he’s broke any of our bones or anything,” Lynn told her sister Maisy. “Although this last time, he come close.” It was the first time she’d ever admitted her mistake so freely to her family, and this was a good sign. “It ain’t like he’s broke our bones,” Lynn said. “It’s what he does with our minds that hurts so much.”
“If you find yourself even considering taking him back,” Maisy had advised, “I want you to use the same technique I learned at Weight Watchers. It’s called HALT. Alcoholics use it too. Just don’t make a decision when you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. HALT.”
“What does that leave?” Lynn asked. Maisy thought about this question.
“Dead, I guess,” she answered.
Down in the kitchen, Lynn lingered at the sink, waiting to summon the energy she would need to make the coffee. She stared vaguely out the window at the only road that wound its way through Mattagash. In the sunshine, it was silver with ice, dangerous. Only one road left so few choices for people living in a town. Even for people passing through a town. Some lives, it seemed, were like small towns—only one road, only one choice.
But Lynn had left the single path of her fate.
She’d blazed a trail in the past week. She’d taken an exit. Now she was just sitting, waiting to determine what new directions she might be headed in. So why then didn’t she sense a hopefulness in it all? Why didn’t she sigh a large, wintry sigh of relief that her children would now be safer, happier?
“Something like a cloud is hanging over my head,” Lynn thought as she tore open a sack of Mr. Coffee. While the coffee was brewing, she took another quick peek, out of habit, into the living room, to make certain she hadn’t missed Pike, snoring among the throw pillows and the children’s winter coats. No sign of him, of course. Once, that would have brought on a sharp pain of fear: Where was he? Was he all right? Then fear would be replaced by jealousy and anger: Was he asleep in some other bed, the son of a bitch? And then fear again: What if he’s dead! Because she had managed, like a fine trooper, to love him, in spite of it all. Now all she felt was dread, dread and that big black cloud that followed her.
“He come back, Mama?” Conrad asked from the kitchen table. He had slid into a chair there without his mother hearing him. He rubbed sleep from his eyes. He had asked this question every morning for the past week.
“Dammit, Con,” she said. “You scared me so bad I almost shit.”
“I don’t see his car in the yard either,” said Conrad. He opened a packet of sugar he’d brought home from school and emptied it into his mouth.
The Weight of Winter Page 14
