“Wasn’t that sweet of him?” Lynn whispered to her son. Then she went downstairs to find her husband.
FIRES IN THE WOOD STOVE: FIRES IN THE HEAD
I went out to a hazel wood because a fire was in my head.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”
It was Prissy Monihan on the phone, blathering away angrily without even saying hello. Charlene Craft listened patiently, one ear to Prissy’s rantings, the other to a woman on Geraldo who had been involved in satanic worship, but no longer was. Every so often, Charlene had to stop and remember which conversation was which.
“They’re lucky we don’t burn the damn place down,” Prissy threatened. It was The Crossroads issue again. The wet-versus-dry debate was raging so fiercely that some old-timers were speaking of two Mattagashes, of dividing the town in the same way the old country of Ireland itself had divided. It was civil war all over again. It would be brother against brother, cousin against cousin, father against son. But then it had always been like that anyway. There were families in Mattagash whose members hadn’t spoken for years because one had voted Republican, the other Democrat, one had inherited the family’s pastureland, another the swamp. Those old Irish genes were a contrary lot.
“What is it you’re trying to do, Priscilla?” Charlene asked. She was struggling to catch the last bit of information from Geraldo about a magazine from which one could order human bones, skulls, and other sundries.
“We got us a petition to have an emergency town meeting,” Prissy said. “So far I got twenty female names on it. And Thornton Carr, the new minister, has signed it too. But we intend to get plenty more.”
“Is it really such a bad thing?” Charlene asked. “I mean, as long as Maurice doesn’t serve any minors, shouldn’t it be up to the adults?” Prissy undertook a long, frustrated sigh.
“Is that what we’re teaching our children?” she asked Charlene. “Do you want Christopher and James to end up on them bar stools?”
“Chris and James are only ten and eight,” Charlene said.
“The Bible says—” Prissy began, but Charlene stopped her.
“Priscilla, I wish you luck with your petition, but I don’t feel strong enough about The Crossroads to join you.”
“You wasn’t born here,” Prissy said. “You don’t understand our ways. We come down from a long line of God-fearing, abstaining people. My own father had the common decency to drink out in the barn where no one, not even Mother, would see him.” Charlene closed her eyes. You wasn’t born here. Well, she could be thankful for some things.
“Priscilla, thanks for calling me,” Charlene said, but Prissy hung up before she could finish. That’s all Charlene needed, to be labeled as a Crossroads sympathizer. She imagined heavy pine crosses burned on her lawn the minute the snows receded and the wood was dry enough to ignite.
Charlene heard Tanya cough, a soft garbled sound floating down from her bedroom. It had been a full week now and still no news. The neurological tests had turned up negative, much to Charlene’s relief, but she was anxious for news of the latest blood tests. She had phoned the St. Leonard Clinic every day, but every day the black-haired receptionist, the one who started the talk about Amy Joy Lawler’s pregnancy, had told her the same thing.
“Not yet, Mrs. Craft,” she had said, her French accent barely noticeable. “Dr. Brassard will call the minute he has the results. We have to send these tests off, remember.”
But Charlene couldn’t wait for phone calls. Instead, she continued to phone every day, just before lunch. That way she didn’t feel so out of control, so dependent on some stranger’s whim as to when to pick up a telephone and phone a tiny patient’s mother. And every day at lunchtime, what Mattagash called “dinner,” Davey had been coming in and staring at his plate, wishing for word about Tanya first, then for news of some kind, from some Providence, that the bank had quit calling, that the bank had, magically, forgotten that Davey Craft and his red-orange TimberJack skidder had ever existed.
Charlene snapped Geraldo off when she heard Davey’s pickup churning its tires across the crisp snow of the dooryard. She watched from behind the kitchen curtains as he got out, lethargic, his body heavy, and slammed the door. He stared up at Tanya’s bedroom window suddenly, as if an afterthought had hit him that she might be sleeping and the door had made such a large, metallic sound in closing. But then he looked away from Tanya’s bedroom to the river, which had nearly frozen over during the past few days. A cold blue channel ran in the center of it, but if the temperature dropped further, the channel, too, would disappear. In Charlene’s three Mattagash winters, the channel had always frozen over. She had hoped that this year it would remain open. At least there would be some blue around to ward off all the boundless white. There would be a gurgling, a rippling to fend off the silence of December, the somber monotones of January and February. There were days when Charlene walked on snowshoes along the riverbank in those wintry months, seeking out the purple-black winterberries that still clung to the alder bushes. Amy Joy Lawler had told her once, when they bumped their carts together two Christmases ago at the IGA in Watertown, that winterberries made lovely decorations. So Charlene had gone in search of them the next year, and that’s when she realized how still with snow the woods could be. And the long white riverbank lay so quiet that she had been too nervous to enjoy the outing. One expected, in the heart of such solitude, that a catastrophe would bound out of the hardwoods, a frightening truth would rise up suddenly from behind a snowy boulder. But it looked as though the channel would freeze again this year, taking the safety of its music along with it.
Charlene watched as Davey walked around his pickup, pausing at each tire to kick away the black snowy slush that had hardened and clung there. The mounds dropped beside each tire, dirty lumps. She wished he had done it elsewhere. When he drove away after lunch, the filthy lumps would remain, perfect for the boys to stomp on and then track into the house. But he needed something to do, Davey did. As Charlene watched, he finally thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his work pants, and then made his way to the front door. She was busy at the stove when he closed the door behind him and tossed his Monkeyface gloves onto the floor by the kitchen register.
“When did you drive in?” Charlene asked, stirring a pot of macaroni. “I didn’t hear a sound.”
Davey stood with his cold hands out over the heat blowing up from the register, fingers spread nicely to catch the warmth. “There ain’t no other kind of heat as nice as a hardwood fire,” he said. “It can warm your bones quicker than gas or electricity. Just good old rock maple and beech set on fire. It can warm you in places where you didn’t know you had places.”
“That might be true,” Charlene said. “But a wood stove certainly makes the ceiling and walls and curtains smoky.”
“We could probably put in a bigger wood stove,” Davey said, “and stop using oil altogether. That’ll save us a big bill during the winters.” Winters. That meant more than one winter. That meant more than this winter. Charlene stirred the macaroni and said nothing.
“I got nothing but idle time until we figure out what to do with the skidder anyway,” Davey kept on. He was washing his hands in the sink, some of the greasy water filling up the dishes Charlene had put there after Tanya’s early lunch. She left her pot of macaroni to move the glasses and plates and silverware over to the second basin of the sink. “I could be out cutting enough hardwood in the afternoons to get us through all the way to spring.”
Charlene began to set the table quietly, so that the sound of Melmac plates against Formica tabletop wouldn’t rattle its way upstairs and waken Tanya. She wished Davey would hush, would just sit and eat, talking softly with her about Tanya, about the skidder even, but not a lifetime in Mattagash, Maine, not a wish for them to wind up old and bent, leaning like question marks over the heat of a wood stove. But there was no stopping him now. She knew, when his ner
ves were in a big bundle in his stomach, there was no halting the rush of useless conversation that would come from him. And these days the past seemed to be a place of refuge for him. It was almost as if he were thinking of the days before Charlene, and the kids, and expensive lumbering equipment, before responsibility, when life was a free easy swing on a country birch tree. As long as he didn’t talk about Benny and the stick of wood, she would be okay. It used to be his favorite story to tell the kids, but that was before Bennett Craft shot himself.
“When I was a kid, we were always ready for a long winter,” Davey said, and spooned plenty of macaroni and hamburger onto a mound of mashed potatoes on his plate. “Daddy would back the old Mack truck up to the cellar window. He’d already have sawed the trees into hardwood blocks, and them blocks would be piled high on the old truck.”
“That must’ve been a big job,” Charlene said. She sensed that he was on the verge of telling the Benny story, and she was afraid for him if he did. “I missed the weather report today,” she added. “Do you think it’ll snow?”
“Petey’s job was to roll the blocks off the truck where Daddy could split them into firewood,” Davey said evenly, as though he hadn’t heard her question. “Kevin’s job was to toss the firewood down into the basement through the cellar window. Me and Benny was already down there, and our job was to stack the firewood into long tiers against the wall.”
Charlene ate her own macaroni in silence. She knew there was nothing more she could say. He was talking as if the boys were there, eating with him, listening with the keen ears of youth, wishing they had a cellar window and a truckload of firewood to tend to. But today Davey’s audience consisted only of his wife and so he kept his eyes on the sugar bowl as he spoke, on the Chinese design that laced like a crack around its circumference.
“And during the winter, Petey Junior and Kevin and Benny and me would all take turns splitting them bigger sticks into kindling, as we needed it. That old wood stove was the size of this table,” Davey said, and he held his arms out to emphasize—empty arms, nothing in them but the static air of another Mattagash winter, of another charged conversation with his wife. His eyes teared suddenly, and the sugar bowl design snaked like a living thing.
“Didn’t you hit Benny on the head?” Charlene asked quietly. She could almost feel Davey’s desperation to talk again about his younger brother, to remember the old days without remorse. “Didn’t you just let him have it across the head one day with a big stick of firewood?” Davey closed his eyes, and Charlene knew he was remembering that smoky afternoon in the old Craft basement, when neither boy could stoke the fire well enough and then, in the catalyst of smoke, Benny had called Davey a name, and Davey had swung a stick of firewood and nailed his younger brother against the wall. Charlene wished suddenly that it was snowing again and the boys were home from school, so that James could say, “Really, Dad? You actually walloped Uncle Benny with a stick of pulp? Wow!” And Davey could answer, “Not pulp, son, firewood,” and the boys could whistle softly, and Tanya could twirl her hair on her finger and giggle, and Charlene could feel quite safe to hide her own feelings about it all.
“I did,” Davey said, his words a whisper. “I hit Benny on the head.” Charlene couldn’t count the Thanksgivings and Christmases and Fourths of July that Bennett Craft had felt obliged to peel off his lumberjack’s cap and reveal to the whole family the thin white scar inching across the back of his scalp, bonelike and hairless, some proof of Davey’s masculinity. And then Davey’s mother would say again how surprised everyone was at Davey, the quiet one, the gentle one. “If they’d told me it was Petey or Kevin did it, well, that would’ve been a different matter, but Davey?” How many times had Charlene listened to the family talk about that smoky winter’s day, smoky now with the passage of time, when Davey Craft showed the whole world a new side to his personality.
“That scar on his head was this long,” Davey said suddenly, and held out his thumb and index finger to measure off an inch or more.
“Who is he talking to?” Charlene wondered. She had been staring down at her plate of macaroni, sorry now that she’d asked the token question, the question that belonged to Christopher or James. She glanced quickly at Davey’s hand, still extended, still measuring out the bloody gash, the mark of childhood’s unpredictability, like some terrible mark of Cain. The fingers were trembling, the whole hand and arm shaking pitifully. Charlene reached out and clutched the hand in hers.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” she said softly. The family story, the oral history of that moment in time, of one boy’s act of brotherly defiance, had lost its meaning with Benny no longer there to jerk the greasy hat off his head and expose his skull, like some kind of happy jester.
“Why’d he do it, Char?” Davey asked suddenly, and all Charlene could do was shrug. It would seem that it wasn’t just the leaves that were raging and fiery the previous autumn. Something was raging in Bennett Craft’s head, some kind of fire that no one had been able to put out. So he had taken a rifle and gone out to the back mountain, to a spot where the maples had already begun to drop their red and yellow leaves, and he had put the rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He had done, finally, what no psychiatrist, what no loved one ever could do. He had put out the fire in his head. He had done it himself, and, Charlene imagined, Benny Craft’s hand had not trembled at all. And she knew that Benny’s was far from the only suicide, or near suicide, to occur in Mattagash, Maine. Everyone still talked about Ed Lawler, the principal from out of state, but there’d been plenty of others since the turn of the century, and the ratio was way out of proportion to the rest of the world. Charlene had come to believe that little towns were like big families. Sometimes the child prospers in the family. Sometimes the child suffers. And it’s the suffering child, the child who can hear and see things that other children, happy at play, can never see and never hear, it’s this child who holds the gun to his or her own head. And when the gun fires, it isn’t just a mother or a father, a sister or a brother who must share the burden. The whole town has helped to put that needed pressure on the trigger.
“Why don’t you go lie down?” Charlene asked Davey. His hand was moist, and Charlene could see sweat beaded on his forehead, too. She wished now that she had never mentioned Benny. Oh, if only Christopher or James had been there to ask for themselves, then Davey would be okay. He would never break down in front of his sons. It was something Mattagash men could not do, and that, Charlene sensed, was part of the problem. If only good news would arrive about Tanya, if only money would fall like snow from the sky, if only Benny would turn up at the next Thanksgiving dinner, his scar still white and pure and innocent, hiding all those other scars, those inner scars, those hurts which cannot be stitched and then admired.
“Daddy, I dreamed of Santa Claus,” Charlene heard Tanya say, a little voice filtering in through the cares of adulthood. “I dreamed Santa brought me a Li’l Miss Makeup doll and a Little Tikes Party Kitchen.” She was teetering in the kitchen doorway, weak on her feet, her hair matted and messed from napping, her flannel pajamas twisted about her.
“Come here, sweetie,” Charlene said, and scooped the child up onto her lap. “It’s not even Thanksgiving. What are you doing talking about Santa Claus?” Davey had pushed his chair back at the sound of Tanya’s voice and disappeared into the bathroom. Charlene heard water running.
“Daddy’ll be back in a minute,” she said to her daughter, and settled her comfortably on her lap. “Want some macaroni?”
***
By evening, any number of phone calls had poured into Charlene’s house concerning the Crossroads petition. Had she heard of it? What did she think of it? Did she intend to sign it? By the time she had the children ready for bed, the calls, like early labor pains, seemed to be twenty minutes apart.
“Mama, it’s for you,” Christopher said. He left the receiver on the kitchen table and vanished before Charlene ha
d a chance to ask him who it was. She had decided, after her first long year in Mattagash, that it was not morally wrong to ask her children to lie about whether or not she was home. Jesus would forgive her. If Jesus lived in Mattagash, he’d have an answering machine.
“Hey there.” It was Lola, breathing heavily into the phone. “You’ll never guess who left town today.” Charlene heard a long intake of cigarette smoke and breath on the other end of the line. Lola was waiting for the drama of the statement to register.
“Eileen,” Charlene said, and the word surprised her. How did she know it would be Eileen? She was just about to play Lola’s little game and ask who, when the name came rolling out of her subconscious. She’d known all along, hadn’t she, that Eileen wouldn’t make it, that Eileen wasn’t strong enough.
“Who told you?” Lola asked, genuinely disappointed.
“She did,” Charlene lied. She felt an instant urge to bite her fingernail. That was a habit she’d given up years ago.
“She drove herself and the kids to Presque Isle this morning,” Lola added, “and caught an airplane back to Arizona.” Arizona. Charlene could almost hear the sweep of sand in each lazy syllable. She imagined herself flying on a plane, just across the aisle from Eileen, her own children in tow, Davey in a seat nearby.
“I know you two was friends and all,” said Lola. “But that wasn’t a very nice trick for her to play. Bobby didn’t even know about it until she phoned him from the airport to come get the car.”
“It isn’t a trick,” said Charlene. Did they think it was magic? Some kind of disappearing act? Eileen had been dropping all the hints she could. They all should have known. Especially Bobby.
“I was just talking to Dorrie about it,” Lola continued. “And Dorrie says that if Eileen Fennelson wants to decorate a cactus this Christmas, good riddance. I don’t suppose Bobby’ll follow her out there. There ain’t no trees to cut in Arizona.”
The Weight of Winter Page 16
