The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  Foster, the man I come about to marry, was courting Ivy until she got too sick. When she come down fully with the cancer, she just asked him to stop coming by. She didn’t want to be seen much by folks, especially by a sweetheart. Just her family and me saw the last of Ivy Craft, saw her go downhill. I know that caused a pain in Foster’s heart. I remember he’d go down by the old pine tree on the south end of Marsh’s field, and he’d wait there for me. He’d be sitting there in the rope swing. I’d see him as soon as I turned the bend in the road. I’d see the shadow of a man swinging, and then Foster’d jump up and catch the swing in his hand to stop it. He’d say, “Any word on her?” and I’d say, “She’s the same, Foster. Now you go on home and get you something to eat.” And I think that’s when he begun to hate me, all them long years ago, waiting on Ivy’s rope swing for a single word of news. He hated that I was privy to the dying. It must’ve seemed like I was courting his sweetheart for him. And the next day Ivy’d say, “Did Foster ask after me?” and I’d nod that he did indeed. She’d draw that blanket about her and smile that weak little smile. I don’t think she ever loved Foster. Oh, I think she liked him all right, like you do someone you growed up with, but remember, she never gave him considerable thought when she was practicing to be a catalog woman. It was only after she first got a little sick that Foster took on new meaning for her. Maybe she envied the life in him. Maybe he was her last grasp at something real, the notion of a husband and a home and a family. Maybe she was trying to convince God that she didn’t care anymore about the catalog so he could go ahead and lift the curse.

  I know she was scared. In them days you knew you were gonna die long before the doctor hitched his horse up to a wagon and come to tell you. In the country, in them days, you kept one finger on nature’s pulse, and the minute it started to flutter, you didn’t need no medical books. You’d be the first one to know, and sometimes the doctor wasn’t even the second one. Sometimes other folks knew too. Sadie Craft, wife to John, mother to Marsh, grandmother to me and Ivy, she come into Marsh’s kitchen one morning, just a day or two before Ivy started feeling bad. She come into that kitchen with her hair all aflutter. She’d run the whole half mile down the road to Marsh’s with a tin dipper in her hand. And she took Marsh down to the river and showed him the tea leaves in that dipper. She explained all the fancy little patterns to him. “It’s a long funeral line,” she said, “with a windrow of horses and mourners.” Marsh knew, anyone would know, the longer the funeral line in a teacup, the younger the deceased. Well, he sat right down on the river rocks, Marsh did, and he didn’t move from there until the next day. He knew his mother was never wrong. She was born with a veil over her eyes, Grandmother Craft was, and when that happens, you can tell the future, even if you don’t like what you tell. She even knew ahead when it was her own turn to die of the same cancer, a few years later. Marsh knew he was hearing the truth about Ivy. “I’d rather lose her to the catalog,” Marsh said. And the next day he come up the hill and told Ivy to leave the dishes be. He said he’d give her the money to go off and be in a catalog. “Next year,” he promised her. Keep in mind, Marsh didn’t have no money. But he paid for Ivy’s dream aforehand. You might say he got it on credit out of his head and give it to her. And how she talked of that train out of Watertown to Bangor, and then on to Boston! She talked about that train like she’d ridden it all her life. You could almost smell the smoke of it, just listening to her. It was only when she started to get sick that she closed up the catalog for good and put her interest in Foster. “You get tired of even dreams sometime,” she said to me. It was when she got so sick she could hardly move that she closed the book on Foster, too.

  I’d packed up a few things and come over to stay with her until she was gone. She wanted me there because she knew the end was near. The rest of us did too. I was sitting up late with her on that last night. She usually got tired right after supper and would sleep until one or two in the morning. Then she’d be awake and in pain until six or seven, trying her best to fall asleep again. My mother said it was the sleep of the dying, that time stops its foolish meaning for things like that. So I packed up some stuff and went over to watch Ivy Craft die. There was no more talk of Boston by this time. She had held on to that notion all she could, until she couldn’t close her fingers around the idea of it no more. This one night, this last night, she’d been off in that little sleep of hers, that half-pain, half-waking sleep. All of a sudden she sat right up in bed and tugged at the sleeves of her nightdress. It looked to me like her nightdress was choking her. I was sitting in a chair by the bed, humming to her, humming “Rock of Ages” to her. The lamp was turned down low, but it was flickering on the walls. No one had real wallpaper back then, remember, so the walls was covered with old newspapers. And that lamplight was flickering on the walls, lighting up all the faces around us, lighting up all them old people in the news. This was real old news, keep in mind, important the day it happened, but no longer of matter to anyone. And I suddenly saw myself that way. And I saw Ivy Craft that way too. Important for a little flick in time, but then not really worth mentioning. That little flick would be our lives, I suppose. And Ivy felt this too. She looked around at all them line-drawn faces of yesterday like she wanted to grab them. She looked at a picture of our president so long that I thought she was gonna ask him something. Then she reached out her hand to me, the way she’d practiced for the catalog, reached it out and said, “What do you suppose the news is where I’m going?” And I said, “No different than here, I’d bet.” And then Ivy said, “It’s all secrets out there, Tildy. No one, not even President Cleveland, can tell us the answers to them. I can’t even tell you.” That’s just what she said. “I can’t even tell you,” she said, “to help you when it’s time for your own self.” Her little hand was like a piece of string in mine. I just went ahead and held on to it, because there was nothing I could say. Keep in mind we were both thirteen then. “I’ll be the news soon,” Ivy Craft said to me. And we held each other for a long, long time. Then I went back to my chair, and I fell asleep there.

  It was two hours later that I come wide awake. But Ivy was gone. She’d hemorrhaged from the mouth. Her mother was leaning over her, wiping off her sad little face. Marsh had gone back down to the Mattagash River. It is true that a river or a mountain is the best place to go when you got a problem, when something big is breaking up inside of you. I hear of people going to doctors, in their fancy offices, paying a week’s work for every hour of talk. The best place to go is a river, or some little spot under a birch, where the birds can listen to your grief. And the crickets. They’ll do this for free, mind you. So Marsh went back down to his river, and I stood there looking down at the last of Ivy Craft, my best friend and future catalog woman. “Ain’t she pretty as a picture?” her mama was saying as she wiped that bloody spittle from around Ivy’s mouth. “Ain’t she the loveliest child God ever made?”

  I wanted to name my first girl Ivy, but I knew Foster wouldn’t want me to. So I went ahead and called her Mary, but I always thought that child was Ivy come back again, Ivy come back for just another taste of it all. Mary was such a little elf, a child full of giggles and dark, brooding looks. It was almost as if she knew secrets, like maybe she’d learned some answers somewhere, the kind of answers Ivy went looking for. And then there was that little book of trains, the one the schoolteach give Walter. That little book was like a friend to Mary. “Ivy’s still trying to get to Boston,” I’d find myself thinking as I watched Mary. And you know, I think Foster sensed it too, that Mary was no ordinary child. When she died, I think he felt like he’d lost Ivy twice. I know that’s how I felt.

  It was only a year after Ivy died that me and Foster got married. The most god-awful, rainy, dull day you would ever want to wake up to. That was June 19, back in 1896, a Friday. I don’t think we ever would’ve gotten married if it hadn’t been for Ivy. Me and Foster joining up was just a means of being closer to her. There’s no way I can
relate just how much we both missed her. It was as if we’d lost someone who could see and hear things the rest of us couldn’t. It’s like you’re a snake and then someone cuts off your head, and so you just go on and wiggle through life, knowing the whole time that a real big part of you is gone. Marsh Craft died six months after Ivy did. You can think what you want to. You can listen to a doctor tell you it can’t be done. But I’ll tell you the exact truth about it. Marsh Craft died of a broken heart. It was like his heart turned into a tumor, turned on the rest of him. Maybe he saw that in the tea leaves too, that day down by the river. Maybe that’s what made his soul too heavy to get up and come on back to the house. Maybe he knew.

  Me and Foster lived with his folks for a few months after we was married. But I got it into my head I had to be under my own roof by the time Walter was born. And I was, too. We made a down payment on Luther Monihan’s house, the one sitting up on that little knoll that teeters above Mattagash Brook. It was just like new when we bought it. Luther built it himself, and then moved his wife, Jennie, into it, and they set about building up a family. But their first baby was born dead, and then Jennie died a couple days later. Complications, they said. I guess it was one of them things in a woman’s body that can go wrong. Luther went a little crazy. There’s no other way to put it. He couldn’t stay in the house no more, so he sold it to Foster and me for a lot less than it was worth. And Luther went off downstate, or out of state maybe, looking for work, looking for something. And no one, not even his family members, ever saw that man again. It was as if the large places of the world had opened up and gulped him down.

  I had a pile of doubts about the house. People were saying they could see Jennie’s ghost during a full moon. She’d be all dressed in white, like she was in her wedding gown, and she’d be rocking nothing at all in her arms. She’d be rocking back and forth like she was cradling a baby in her arms. She’d be all decked out in her wedding dress, just peering out the window. I suppose she was looking down the road for Luther, waiting for him, knowing he’d come one day, sooner or later, knowing he had to. We all do. I never seen Jennie, but she was in my house. I felt her there. And some of my children saw her when they was real little, too little to make stuff up. Walter, my firstborn, come in one night from the garden with a little button in his hand. “Where’d you get that button?” I asked him, and he said, “From the lady.” I says, “What lady was that?” and that’s when he told me. He’d been out in the garden catching up lightning bugs to put in a mason jar when he saw a woman digging up the ground like she was looking for something. When she saw Walt, she stood up and come toward him. “Are you my baby?” she asked him. “No, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m Walt Fennelson.” That’s when she reached out and give him a button covered in white satin. It was the prettiest thing, almost like a little white pearl. And Walter said her hands were cold as ice, but she give him the biggest, nicest smile. And then there was light all around her. “Like she was all lightning bugs, Mama,” he told me. He was about five or six years old then. I took that button up the road the next morning. I took it right up and I give it to Jennie’s mother. I never said a word about what it was, or where it come from, or nothing. I just put it flat out in her hand. She looked at it for a long, long time, turned it over and over careful as could be, like it had a little life of its own. She looked up at me then, and I saw the tears in her eyes. “I just wish she could find some peace,” she said. And then she went inside her house and shut the door, took the little button with her. And many times over the years, some of my children talked about me covering them up in the night, kissing their foreheads, whispering nice things to them. I knew all the time I hadn’t done no such thing, but I never let on it was Jennie. She wasn’t hurting them. They were as close as she could come to her own baby, and if you ask me, she must’ve wanted that dead child real bad. That’s a sad thing, you know, when a woman wants a baby so bad that she hangs on to earth looking for one. It seems to me it might’ve been better for Jennie to let go of all that unhappiness, to go on to something better. But over the years, she become like a friend to me. I guess she might be like them imaginary friends children have when they’re little. I couldn’t see her, but she was always there. When Mary died, it was Jennie helped me to get through it. All them special children I lost young in their lives, it was like Jennie lost them too. And I believe to this day that Jennie showed my babies the right way to go when they left this life. And I bet she’s still there in the old house, wearing her tattered wedding dress, watching, waiting, a satin-covered button in her hand to give to a special child.

  I won’t be no ghost after I die because I’ve seen enough of this life. I been a ghost already, you might say, for more than thirty years, hovering on the outskirts of life, haunting my children with my old age. I had enough babies for me, and Jennie, and my daughter Elizabeth, too. I had babies enough for a dozen women, so you won’t see me hanging on to life, not when I been hanging on so long just to leave it. I don’t know where I will go, but after I die, I’m going straight there. You won’t catch me lingering on the dusty road to the hereafter.

  ROD SERLING AS AN ALIBI: THE ABC’S OF RECONCILIATION

  “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’

  With Lovin’ on Your Mind.”

  —Loretta Lynn

  Pike Gifford awoke on his living room sofa in the gray light of dawn and tried his damnedest to remember where he was. For a second he felt sure he must be at Billy’s, maybe even in bed with Ruby, overbite or not. But he was not at Billy’s, he realized, noticing Reed’s ice skates before him on the floor and a coloring book belonging to one of the twins. And there was Lynn’s big old winter coat puffed up on the recliner, as if spying on him. Pike rubbed his eyes, and then shook his head, as though he might make the dull ache between them disappear. Jesus, but Lynn was going to be on the rag about this. He’d managed for almost a week to follow her latest rules, even to drive past The Crossroads with a load of groceries from Watertown and pretend that it was just another establishment.

  Pike had not always been able to do this. He could recall one incident that had given Lynn great pause as to whether she should forgive him. It was shortly after The Crossroads opened. Lynn had stayed on with her sister Maisy in Watertown and sent Pike home with that week’s grocery supply, so that she could have her hair permed at Angelique’s Hair Factory without him coming in a hundred times and asking how many more goddamn minutes he would have to wait out in the car. Pike had done a fine job of zipping past the three drinking establishments in Watertown and felt almost akin to a man in control until he saw Billy’s Dodge Ram pulled happily up to the front door of The Crossroads. Pike decided he would go inside and pop down a couple of quick ones—Lynn would be another two hours at least—and maybe catch Billy in the mood for a fast game of cribbage. He drove his car around to the back, nestled in between Maurice’s Ford pickup and Sally’s old Bonneville with the missing fender. That way there would be no need to upset any of Lynn’s relatives should they drive by and, seeing Pike’s car there, feel a great need to interrupt the course of their own lives in order to fill Lynn in on some details. But those two beers had gone down even quicker than anticipated, so he’d had another, this time adding his usual vodka. God intended beer to be drunk as a chaser anyway. And what do you know but Pike gave Maurice one of the few shellackings in cribbage he’d ever given him. Maurice died in the shit hole, of all places, only one peg away from winning! Pike had to hang around just a bit longer to bask in that glory. And Lynn was supposed to do a bit of shopping in Watertown—a dress for Julie—and that meant she’d probably be longer than two hours and, well, nobody ever said a barroom was the place for a man to do his most best thinking. Before it was all over, Pike had several sacks of groceries spread out on the bar and folks were making themselves a variety of snacks. Even a couple of canoeists from out of state found the opportunity to eat a Devil Dog and some Vienna sausages.

  That was in Ju
ne, and it had seemed to Pike that Lynn was honest-to-God going to leave him. She even had papers served on him, as though he were some kind of dog the Watertown pound needed to know about. But, like the slush of spring, like the mosquitoes of summer, the snows of January, it had all passed, had gone downstream in the river of Lynn’s mind. Then Conrad had hit him with the bat—the little trickle of piss—and Pike had gone to convalesce at Billy’s house, which was not exactly an intensive care unit. But before the lump had time to leave Pike’s head, Lynn had served him with more papers. With that kind of workload heaped on him, Pike Gifford would have to start carrying a briefcase.

  But Pike had come back with a big box of candy, and had gained admittance once more into the realm of his family. He had actually bought the candy at LaVerdiere’s Drugstore in Watertown, when he’d gone in for a pack of cigarettes. He was on his way to visit Ruby, knowing that with her generous overbite she’d have an easy time on the hard-filled type he’d selected. But when he’d driven over to Ruby’s house in St. Leonard, he discovered her husband’s pickup in the yard, its tan nose pointing proudly at Ruby’s front door. It reminded Pike of a dog that had just peed on its territory in hopes of keeping other dogs away. Pike had watched the windows of Ruby’s house for a few minutes, for a sign from the female in heat. When none came, he knew without a doubt that Ruby had taken her old man back. It was another one of those left-out feelings that overtook Pike then. He thought of Lynn, of the twins, of the television blaring out and the wind whipping about the windows. There was a family over there at his house, his own family, going on without him. Billy could help ease that feeling, but then, Billy was in bed with Claudette, and Pike didn’t want to sit on the sofa with Claudette’s two kids until she got up and took them home. The Crossroads wouldn’t be open for a couple more hours. So Pike took the candy and went on home. He didn’t know at the time if Lynn would accept the candy or have him arrested. Sometimes Pike saw his marriage as a kind of lottery: it was anybody’s guess.