The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Conrad, I keep telling you all that sugar’s bad for you,” Lynn said. “So why do you do it?”

  “’Cause it’s sweet,” Conrad replied. Lynn looked at him. Why had he suffered so much more than the rest of them? Shouldn’t the oldest son be closest to the father? Was it always like that in messes like these? Conrad had been treated the most bitterly; there was no doubt about it.

  “I just like the sweet is all,” he said, and Lynn turned away to stare off again, out beyond the packed banks of snow, so glassy in the sunshine it hurt to see them.

  “I got two houses to clean today,” Lynn said. “That old bitch Gloria Craft’s, and Amy Joy Lawler’s. You’re gonna have to keep an eye on things till Maisy gets over here.”

  Lynn hadn’t used a babysitter since Conrad turned nine and took the job over for a dollar or two. No one knew how much he’d managed to save, with that and the chores he was forever scouting around Mattagash. “Little Silas Marner,” his teacher called him when he pestered her for odd jobs. And Lynn had trusted Conrad just fine. She was always the first to say that he was a sixty-year-old man in a twelve-year-old’s body. But ever since the new warrant had been sworn out, Lynn had asked Maisy to come by whenever she herself had to be away.

  “You think he’s coming back again?” Conrad asked. “Like he done the last times?”

  “Who the hell knows what’s going on in that brain of his,” Lynn said. She poured Conrad a cup of coffee, along with her own. “Why? You miss him?”

  “Hell no,” said Conrad. He opened another pack of sugar and dumped it quickly into his mouth.

  “Here,” said Lynn. She passed him the cup. “You might as well have some coffee with your sugar.”

  When Lynn heard the thumps over her head, the music of her children’s feet hitting the floor, she took the box of grape Pop-Tarts down from a cupboard and popped two into the toaster. In no time Reed was at her side.

  “We got any more Pop-Tarts?” he asked sleepily.

  “Sit at the table,” Lynn told him. “You can have the first one if you do. Are the little ones coming?” she asked, and then heard the twins, in a fight at the bottom of the stairs.

  “They usually don’t make it down that far,” Conrad said dryly.

  The twins were quarreling over the ownership of a talking Big Bird.

  “It’s mine!” Stevie shouted as Julie grabbed the orange legs. Stevie held on to the string that led to the voice mechanism, and one of the yellow arms.

  “Mama gave it to me,” Julie insisted, and yanked at the stuffed toy.

  “Hi! I’m Big Bird,” the toy announced. “What’s your name?”

  “You little bastard!” Julie screamed. “Let go!” Stevie refused. Julie pulled again.

  “I love you very much,” said Big Bird. “Do you want to play?”

  “You stupid, you,” said Stevie. Still holding the string, he dropped the floppy arm and slapped Julie’s face. “You let go!” he screamed. Julie began to cry but did not relinquish her grasp. Hanging tightly to the bird’s legs, she pulled him to her chest.

  “Do you want some birdseed?” Big Bird seemed to be inviting them to lunch.

  “Stop that, goddammit, this minute!” Lynn shouted from the kitchen. “If you want a Pop-Tart, I’d get in here, now!”

  “Mama, it’s mine,” Julie cried. Mucus descended from one nostril, then retreated with a quick sniff. But not fast enough to elude Stevie’s eye.

  “Snotface,” he whispered as Julie gave Big Bird one last, forceful yank. The string snapped, then dangled in Stevie’s hand.

  “She broke it, Mama!” he yelled.

  “I live on Sesame Street,” Big Bird announced, a foolish piece of evidence for a victim to offer his attackers.

  “Give it to me,” said Lynn. She was towering over her two children, who were surprised at her quiet arrival.

  “He broke it,” said Julie, and pointed at her twin.

  “I don’t give a damn who broke it,” Lynn snapped.

  “I live on Sesame Street,” said Big Bird.

  “We heard you,” said Lynn. “Now shut up.”

  “He can’t, Mama,” said Stevie. “Julie broke him.”

  “He was mine anyway,” said Julie, mucus now descending without any possibility of being retracted.

  “I bought him for you both,” Lynn said angrily. “I could only afford one. Now you have none, so get into the kitchen before I get out my Ping-Pong paddle.” Julie and Stevie dropped their petitions instantly and raced to the kitchen table.

  “I live on Sesame Street,” Big Bird insisted again.

  “Not anymore you don’t,” Lynn said. “You live in Mattagash, Maine, like the rest of us.” She heaved him by a leg up the stairs, toward the twins’ bedroom. He tumbled across the hallway and bumped into their battered toy chest.

  “And you’ll probably die here too,” Lynn added. A muffled voice floated down to her, Big Bird mournfully repeating his past address, Sesame Street, that place where little kids got up in the morning and said pleasant things like “Good day” to their parents, unless they were Spanish or French. Those little kids awoke with shiny faces and said things like “Buenos días” or “Bonjour.” And letters of the alphabet were large and colorful and sang songs about themselves. The numbers wore hats and talked about the importance of correct addition. And Muppets made more sense than politicians. Muppets even made movies. Lynn had seen it all on Sesame Street.

  “Ain’t nobody I know lucky enough to live there,” she thought.

  “I wanted to be Miles Standish,” Reed was saying as he ate his breakfast. “But Christopher Craft is gonna be. I think he’s too short to be anybody.” The twins were quiet at the table, anticipating a repercussion from their mother. Conrad had taken their Pop-Tarts from the toaster and was cutting them in half with a knife. “So Miss Kimball asked me to be the narrator, and that’s the longest part of anybody,” Reed said.

  “Stevie’s gonna be a Indian,” said Julie, “and I’m gonna be a turkey.”

  “That’s ’cause you are a turkey,” Stevie whispered.

  “Ain’t you even gonna be an Indian or anything?” Reed asked Conrad. “Miss Kimball says she still needs four Indians.” But Conrad wasn’t listening.

  “I got me two hundred and fifty-three packets of jam now,” he bragged to Reed. “One hundred and twenty is strawberry. Sixty is grape. Fifty-two is marmalade. And twenty-one is honey. I’m on my sixth shoe box.” Reed was impressed.

  “What you gonna do with them?” he asked, chunks of Pop-Tart turning up between the words in his open mouth. “Keep them stashed upstairs?”

  “I dunno,” Conrad said. He tossed a hot Pop-Tart quickly onto each of the twins’ plates. “We might need them someday.”

  “I don’t want no more of them fights,” Lynn said, coming back into the kitchen. “I’ve seen and heard all the fights I care to. What’s the matter with you two anyway? I thought twins were supposed to be closer than just regular brothers and sisters. I thought they dressed alike and shared the same gifts. I can’t get you two to wear the same color, much less the same outfit.”

  “There’s twins in England,” announced Reed, turning his mind away from the shoe boxes that held Conrad’s jams and sugars to the plight of twins. “They think so much alike that they don’t even have to talk. They burned down a lot of buildings, though, so now they’re in a mental house.”

  “Holy shit,” Lynn said. “Knock on wood.” She rapped the cupboard door with her knuckles and the kids laughed. But above her own knocking on wood, she heard another knocking, another rapping. She saw the faces of her children freeze within their smiles. Only their eyes told the truth: fear.

  “Let it be Maisy, please, God,” Lynn thought. But Maisy was usually late, never early. The knocking sounded again, and the drumming of it drummed into Lynn’s temples, beat harshl
y upon them. Maisy wouldn’t knock, for crying out loud! When, in her whole life, had Maisy ever knocked?

  “Don’t say a word,” Lynn whispered to her children. They sat stunned before their breakfast plates, rigid as goldenrod stalks above the glassy snow.

  “Is it Daddy?” Julie whispered. “Is he back?” Julie—and her mother knew this to be true—dearly loved her father. So did Stevie. Pike didn’t seem to mind the twins so much. He’d already had two small men to dominate, as well as a small woman, by the time they came along.

  “Shhh!” Lynn warned, and held a finger to her lips. She could read nothing in Conrad’s eyes, a habit of his lately, but Reed’s were so large that Lynn thought they might pop suddenly. She looked at the grape jelly around his mouth and felt a quick impulse to laugh.

  “Nerves,” she told herself. She heard footsteps crunching on the snowy porch, on their way to the kitchen window. She was about to whisper, “Quick! Hide under the table!” But she didn’t whisper this. And she didn’t hide herself behind the refrigerator. She simply couldn’t move. She looked, instead, into Pike Gifford’s pained, bleary face as he cupped sunlight from his eyes and peered into the window, where his entire family had gathered for a Saturday morning breakfast without him. He and Lynn locked eyes.

  “He looks like an old dog, out there on the porch,” Lynn thought. “He looks just like a poor old dog someone left out in the cold.”

  “He sees us, Mama,” Conrad whispered.

  “I know he does,” said Lynn. “No need for you to whisper now.”

  “Hi, Daddy!” Julie said, and waved a hand. Bonjour, Papa. Buenos días.

  “This ain’t Sesame Street, that’s for sure,” Lynn told herself. “Let’s go on upstairs. Right now,” she said to the children.

  “Bye, Daddy!” Julie waved again. Au revoir, mon père.

  “Bye,” said Stevie.

  “You gonna call the sheriff?” Conrad asked her as they stood huddled at the top of the stairs, where Pike Gifford could not spy on them. “He said the minute Daddy turns up here, call.”

  “I don’t know,” Lynn answered truthfully, for she didn’t know, feel, what was right. “Seems like he’s got enough problems without having the law on his back too.” A loud blast of horn, the horn on Pike’s old Chevy, sounded from the chilled driveway. The echo of it carried on the cold air, far out across the Mattagash River behind the house, and was lost in the thickness of white pines.

  “He’s gonna run his battery down,” Reed said after two solid minutes of horn blowing. Lynn moved to an upstairs window and peeked out cautiously.

  “I’m surprised the fenders ain’t fell off,” she observed, “much less the battery run down.” Reed, Julie, and Stevie crowded around her, stealing their own peeks.

  “Stay back now,” she warned them. “Don’t let him see you.”

  “You gonna call the sheriff?” asked Conrad again. He hadn’t moved from the spot at the top of the stairs. Even curiosity had gone out of his eyes. “He said the minute Daddy turns up, be sure and call,” he repeated.

  “No,” said Lynn. She ushered her other children away from the window. “I better go out and send him on his way. We get the sheriff involved and there ain’t no telling how mad your daddy’ll get. It might be better if I just talk to him a bit and then maybe he’ll leave. You kids don’t move from this upstairs.” She slid past Conrad, who had noticed in a brief instant something on his mother’s face, something in her eyes. What was it? Love? The curiosity he himself could no longer muster? He knew one thing. It was no longer hate. There might be some fear there, amid the other things, but the hate was gone.

  As Lynn grabbed her winter coat from the sofa downstairs, Conrad went into his room and got out one of his shoe boxes, the one that held the fifty-two marmalades. For almost two years now he’d been saving jams and jellies and sugar packets daily from the school cafeteria. Each child was allowed one packet with a dinner roll, so they were rightfully his. Sometimes he traded his milk or his chocolate cake for a honey or a strawberry. Honey was hardest to collect. Conrad hated sick days and snow days, when all you could do was sit around the house and miss out on a grape or a strawberry. One day Mr. Hatteras, whom nobody liked, had caught him pocketing a honey.

  “Eat it here or not at all,” Mr. Hatteras said, and Conrad had lost a precious day of collecting. The sugar packets, on the other hand, were so plentiful at school, or around the diners in Watertown, that he allowed himself five or six daily, usually with meals but not always.

  While his brothers and sisters stood in the hall and spied out the upstairs window at their parents down in the yard, Conrad sat on his bed and counted his marmalade packets. He wished they were like baseball cards that he could trade with other kids, share his hobby. But his was an isolated calling, he knew, one to be ridiculed by his classmates and unappreciated by his family. There was a straining in his eyes, a pressure, as though tears might come of this knowledge if he let them. But he did not. Instead, he put the marmalades away, safely counted, and picked up the honey. Hickory Farms Pure Orange Blossom Honey, he read, over and over again, as if it were a mantra. He counted each packet.

  “They’re just talking,” Reed said loudly from the window, for Conrad to hear. But Conrad went on counting and said nothing.

  “Daddy’s giving her something,” said Julie.

  “Move, stupid!” Stevie said, pushing against her. “I wanna see too!”

  “Mama’s crying, looks like,” Reed announced. He glanced toward the bedroom and saw that Conrad was still taking inventory of his booty.

  “They’re fighting!” Stevie said.

  “Daddy’s gonna slap Mama,” said Julie. Reed looked away from Conrad and back to the car down below, where two people sat as innocently as though they were on a first date.

  “They ain’t fighting,” he said. He abandoned the window to the twins and ambled on into the bedroom he shared with Conrad. He threw himself onto the bed, flat on his stomach.

  “They’re hugging, for Chrissakes,” Reed said.

  “Stop it!” Conrad shouted angrily. “You’ve knocked down all my honey packets!” He struck out at Reed’s legs, pushed at them with his fists.

  “You and your old honey,” Reed said sullenly. He got up from the bed. He would sprawl instead on one of the twins’ bunks. “What do you know about anything anyway?” Reed asked as he left the room.

  ***

  “I don’t know what it is you expect of me,” Lynn said to Conrad. She was sitting on the edge of his bed, still wearing her navy-blue coat. Conrad didn’t look up from the tier of strawberries he had just begun to stack, then count, but he could smell winter on her. It was the same smell as when he was littler and she’d come in from the mailbox or from shoveling the front porch. A fresh, cold smell of winter. He kept on counting. He could smell something else, too, besides winter on his mother. He could smell his father lurking there, the cigarette smoke, the aftershave Pike wore on Sundays—not Saturdays. Oh, he smelled a lot of things besides winter. He went on stacking and counting. With all these interruptions he would probably be there counting until doomsday. He wished they’d just leave him alone.

  “It’s real hard, Conny, for me to try and take care of this big family alone,” Lynn said. She rubbed her hands to warm them. Conrad said nothing, but he knew better. What had his father ever contributed but trouble? Now he could no longer recognize the truth about the family. He just knew better. What was it Reed had said? They ain’t fighting. They’re hugging.

  “He wants to try it one more time,” Lynn told him. “He says the third time will tell the story. He wants just one more chance to show us he’s changed, and this time I think he really has. He even bought me a great big box of candy. Lord, it’s been years since he done something like that. He didn’t even do that the last time, and you know how close we come to divorce that time. Here. I brought you a piec
e.” She prodded his hand with something in green cellophane. Conrad ignored it.

  “He ain’t drinking no more neither, Conny,” Lynn added.

  Conrad finished a tall tier of ten strawberries and then began construction on another. He could no longer smell winter on his mother’s coat. Winter had gone quietly away. Maybe his father even controlled the seasons, for Conrad could smell nothing at all.

  “He says he knows it was you hit him with the bat, but he forgives you anyway. Give him another chance, Conny,” Lynn went on. “Talking back to him’s what gets you into trouble. Maybe if you could just try to ignore him or something. Reed says he’ll try if you will. What do you say?” Conrad could hear her sniffing. He knew she would go into the bathroom and cry a bit if he refused to answer. And his answer didn’t matter anyway. It wouldn’t keep his father away. It would just make his mother unhappy. He could hear the twins’ laughter rising up from downstairs as they scrambled happily about their father’s lap. Reed was now sitting at the top of the stairs, his shoulders drooping, waiting for his own kind of answer. It seemed that, being the oldest, Conrad was in first place for a lot of things, whether it was a decision or a slap.

  “Well?” Lynn reached out to run a hand through Conrad’s thick, Giffordish curls. He stacked more packets, little Towers of Babel. Seven. Eight. Nine. The strawberry packets were red as blood. He heard his mother’s sniffing grow louder. How he hated to cause her pain. It was even worse than seeing him mistreat her. The jams and honeys and the sugars melted into a sweet, syrupy mass before his eyes. He would give in to her, but not to him, not to that son of a bitch!

  “Okay,” said Conrad without looking up. Lynn sighed. Reed sighed too, but there was little relief in it.

  “Look what he brung you,” Lynn said softly. She put a VHS tape of Rambo III into his hands. “It’s only been at the Movie Factory two days.”

  Conrad felt some of the excitement now—the latest Stallone!—and he hated himself for it. He looked down at the tape box, still aware of his mother quivering like a rabbit beside him.