“That’s what I like about frozen corn,” said Lola, watching. “You don’t need to pull them silky little threads off it, like you do the fresh.”
“Booster claims that God put them strings on corn to keep women busy,” said Dorrie. “Ain’t that a hoot?”
“Did you hear the latest about that shooting incident downstate?” asked Lola as she helped herself and Dorrie to the remnants of that morning’s coffee. Charlene shook her head. She hadn’t heard. Lola put the coffeepot back on its burner. If they wanted fresh coffee, Charlene decided, let them go to a restaurant in Watertown. Let them drive Booster’s big yellow pickup/plow on down to Colombia, South America, and pick their own beans.
With the corn on to boil, she leaned against the sink and waited. Why couldn’t they at least have called ahead, asked if she was busy? But that was Mattagash for you, or St. Leonard or Watertown. Your privacy was a shared thing. And there were worse things than people bursting into your kitchen at any hour. The shooting was one of them. Charlene shuddered still to think of it: A woman down in central Maine had been shot less than three hundred feet from her house by a man who claimed he saw a deer in his scope. She’d been wearing white gloves, the warning signal of a whitetail. She’d been near her own house, on her own land, and someone had shot her! She was young. She had two little babies, a husband, a family. Now she was dead. Some hunter wanted to bag a deer that badly, to hang it by its hind quarters, to show it to his hunting buddies. He had bagged a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman, thirty-four years old.
“She ought to have known better,” Dorrie said, “than to wear white gloves like that during hunting season.”
Charlene was dumbfounded. “Are you saying this was her fault?” she asked Dorrie.
“Well, if you’re gonna move here from out of state, you gotta learn to adjust,” Dorrie said. “You know. Do as the Romans do when in Rome.”
“She should’ve been wearing bright red,” Lola broke in to say. “They got some gorgeous hunting vests at Woolworth’s marked down to just a few dollars. They even got funny ones that say Don’t Shoot, I’m a Man on them.”
“What good would that have done?” Charlene asked. “She obviously needed one that said Don’t Shoot, I’m a Woman.”
“They say the man who did it is a pillar of the community,” Dorrie said.
“He’s going through a lot of pain because of this,” said Lola.
“It’s too bad she had to wear them white gloves,” Dorrie said, and twisted her own gloves on the table before her. No wonder Dorrie felt safe in Maine, Charlene thought. Only a safari hunter anxious to bag an elephant for its tusks could mistake this woman for game.
“Wait a minute,” Charlene persisted, hoping to gather a grain of sense out of this insanity. “Are you saying she didn’t have the right to walk on her own land, much less just yards from her house?”
“Basically,” said Dorrie.
“So to speak,” said Lola.
Charlene was hit suddenly with a picture, one she’d seen on the news, of the twin babies, of the husband, of the young woman herself. “Then this is as bad as those gangs in Los Angeles,” she said. “This is worse than people shooting you at random on the interstate, if they can shoot you at random on your own damn land!”
“Nevertheless,” said Dorrie.
“When in Rome,” said Lola.
Charlene felt anger rising up in her face, flushing it. They couldn’t have gotten this notion from their husbands. Charlene knew that Mattagash men disdained careless hunters. She remembered Davey discussing the event with old Walter Gifford, the best damn shot in Mattagash before he gave up hunting for good. “The sons of bitches,” Walter had said. “They get out there in the woods, and their adrenaline gets pumping, and they claim to see all kinds of things. There ain’t no excuse for any of them.” Charlene wondered about the white gloves. Had the young woman knitted them herself, not knowing that she was knitting up the final days of her life? Had someone given them to her, a mother or good friend, wrapped them lovingly for her birthday? Had she misplaced them just that morning, almost gone out without them before she remembered them on a top shelf in her closet? It wouldn’t have mattered. “He had a license to shoot a buck,” old Walter Gifford had said to Davey. “Was she wearing a three-foot set of antlers, too?” Charlene thought of this woman’s children. What if they’d been playing only feet from the house, tiny white woolen caps on their heads. Would they deserve the bullet too?
“Well, I just heard on the news where they acquitted him,” Lola said.
“Acquitted him!” Charlene was stunned.
“I suppose it’ll be some time before he gets over the nightmare of it,” Dorrie said, and Lola nodded in sympathy.
“Get out of my kitchen,” Charlene said softly, and at first her guests giggled nervously, thinking it a joke, thinking it surely the most foolish social mistake a Mattagash woman could possibly make, almost as stupid as wearing white gloves on a chilly autumn day in your own backyard. What was the woman doing out there? Charlene now wondered. Bringing in some of the children’s toys? Hanging things to dry in the frosty air? Cutting down dried flower stalks for winter? Most likely her mind would have been on the babies, on the dishes in the sink, on what to fix for dinner. Then—bang!—that noisy rude sound which must have made her think a jet had broken the sound barrier in that last lifetime of a second. And then she was dead. Charlene imagined the snow-white gloves drenched in blood before it was all over—soiled, wasted.
“Get out of my house,” she said, and saw the shock register on their faces.
“Well, I never,” said Dorrie.
“No?” said Charlene. “Then it’s about time. Get to hell out.”
Lola followed on Dorrie’s heels back into the living room and on toward the front door.
“And take this tent with you,” Charlene added, picking up the huge burgundy stadium coat and pushing it into Dorrie’s red face.
“You just made a big mistake,” Dorrie said, and believed that statement to be true. Mattagash was a social club. You paid your dues and you kept your mouth shut. You didn’t kick the president of the club out of your house when she came to visit, especially if she was accompanied by the secretary/treasurer. But Charlene thought suddenly of the wasted days, the glorious Mattagash mornings that had been ruined by visits from this dynamic duo, the wonderful soft evenings interrupted by the roar of Booster’s pickup in her yard. Why hadn’t she done this ages ago? She felt a tremendous surge of relief.
“You always thought you was a peg better,” Dorrie said, angry now, fuming like a big old furnace. Charlene was about to counter when the phone rang suddenly, a welcomed bleat. She picked it up, thankful for something to hang on to, a little job for her trembling hands. It was Dr. Brassard, not his secretary, not anyone else but the good doctor himself, in person. Dorrie was ranting at Lola now, about how city people are just as rude as the folks you see on The People’s Court. They wear white gloves. They make white-hot statements.
“I’d like to put Tanya in the hospital for just a few days,” Dr. Brassard said. “I want to run some more extensive tests. I know this will be tough on her, and on you, but I’m afraid it’s the only way we can finally determine what’s wrong.”
“I’m afraid too,” Charlene wanted to say. “Okay,” she said instead, as though she were talking to someone at the bank. A doctor of money maybe, but not a doctor of children. Lola was searching now for her purse. Dr. Brassard had said his good-bye and hung up the phone, but still Charlene clung to the receiver, could not put it down. It grew firmly on the side of her head, an extension frozen to her ear, bad news solidified.
“You ain’t heard the last of this,” Dorrie said, buttoning her coat. She pointed a sharp, plump finger at Charlene. “This ain’t Connecticut.” Upstairs Tanya coughed, a feathery whispery cough that rose up out of her chest and floated on wings down the st
airs to her mother’s ears. On angel wings maybe, white as gloves. No one heard it but Charlene. Dorrie and Lola were too noisy with anger to have heard. Only Charlene caught it, as though it were a tiny ball tossed to her, thrown into her motherly hands, and at first she thought it had come out of the telephone and into her ear that way.
“My God,” thought Charlene. “What if my baby dies? Not like Elvis, who will never, ever die. What if my baby goes away soon, maybe when spring comes and the land will be soft enough to take her back, take her home. What if my daughter dies.”
“You come up here from New Milford with your nose in the air,” Dorrie was saying now, “and how long did it manage to stay up? The whole town knows Davey is going under.” But Charlene was no longer paying attention. She hung the phone up softly, placing it in its cradle as though it were a fragile, sleeping child. Above her head, Tanya coughed again and said, “Mama?” It came down to her, this single word, the first word her child had learned to say, it floated down to her from another world, apart from the cold, heavy snow of Mattagash. Listening to it, Charlene did not hear the front door slam.
***
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lola said. “I’m cooking one of them turkeys for the co-op dinner, and Charlene Craft better not sink her teeth into one bite of it. I don’t care if she does pay the four ninety-five.”
“It’s a damn shame,” Dorrie said. She had Booster’s bright yellow plow aimed straight at the stores in Watertown, following it as though it were the proverbial ear of corn. “Davey could’ve married Tina Trudeau straight out of high school. You remember her? She was a Miss Watertown and she come this close to being a Miss Potato Blossom Queen runner-up. She got some kind of award as it was.”
“I think it was for being the contestant who’d traveled the farthest,” said Lola. She had taken her hair comb out earlier, when Dorrie first stopped in her yard to pick her up, and had scraped the snow on the windshield away enough to allow her a square-foot peephole. Now she was leaning forward on the seat, trying desperately to peer out at Dorrie’s careless maneuvers along the snaky highway. It was at times like this that Lola missed the dark smelly tar of summer. She clutched her purse and said nothing. Dorrie had been contradicted once that year, and once was enough.
Dorrie barreled on toward Watertown, her knuckles white as little banks of snow, her thoughts sizzling. How dare that puny little sandwich-eater treat her thusly? Just who did she think she was? Charlene might like to place herself on the uppity shelf next to Eileen Fennelson, who had thankfully gone back to Arizona where she belonged, but it should be remembered that Charlene was, after all, the daughter of former Mattagashers. Her grandmother on her mother’s side had had an illegitimate child back around the turn of the century. Dorrie decided it was time to resurrect these old sins.
“No!” said Lola. “Old Natalie had a child out of wedlock?”
“Well, she didn’t have it in wedlock,” said Dorrie, and shifted into third, then second, catching up to the heels of the Mattagash school bus. “She wasn’t married.”
“I’ll be,” said Lola, remembering Natalie, dead since the sixties.
“And Charlene’s own father, Sidney Hart, got a girl in the family way while he was stationed at Fort Dix. She come to Mattagash with a baby in her arms and went from house to house, like she was the Avon lady, looking for Sidney.”
“I remember that,” said Lola. “I was only about eight years old. Everybody thought she was with the Gideons at first.”
“And there Sidney was, all scheduled to marry Charlene’s mother. I tell you, it was a hot time in the old town for a while.”
“That girl died, didn’t she?” asked Lola. “In a car wreck?”
“The baby too.” Dorrie nodded. “Sometime after she went back down to New Jersey. But I bet Miss Charlene Perfect never got wind of all them goings on.”
“Someone ought to tell her,” Lola said, and looked at Dorrie. Dorrie looked back suggestively.
“Maybe someone will,” Dorrie said.
“What say we put this behind us and enjoy the nice, sunshiny day?” Lola asked. She relaxed. Following the school bus had forced Dorrie into a sensible pace. By the time the bus driver signaled the go-ahead for her to pass, Dorrie would regain her composure.
“What’s the bus doing out at this hour?” Dorrie asked.
“The kids got a basketball game in Houlton tonight,” said Lola. “They must be on their way.” She fumbled in her purse for her big double pack of Juicy Fruit. She offered Dorrie a stick. The gum was sweet on their tongues, almost as sweet as the gossip about Charlene’s family skeletons, almost as sugary as the words about babies born marked, of women scorned, of men cornered.
“Sidney’s father used to call it Fort Prix for a long time after that,” Dorrie said, suddenly remembering old Grant Hart sitting up in front of the big Warm Morning stove at Betty’s Grocery, back in the days when Betty’s father owned the store, and entertaining legions with his puns and witticisms. “That was when Sidney was stationed at Fort Prix,” Grant would say, and a warm volley of hoots would ring out around the jars of molasses and the cloth sacks of flour. In the telling now, in 1989, the same joke found the same home, and laughter bounced again about the cab of Booster’s big pickup/plow, its huge yellow lip cutting a bright picture on the road to Watertown. This was a laughter descended, a genetic laughter, a trousseau.
“Speaking of Fort Prix,” Lola said. They were just passing Amy Joy Lawler’s house and a thought had occurred to her. “Do you suppose it’s been Bobby Fennelson that Amy Joy’s seeing? Do you suppose that’s why Eileen left?” Dorrie thought about this.
“I don’t think Amy Joy is Bobby Fennelson’s type,” Dorrie replied after a few seconds of pondering. “He’s spent all that time in the army, like Ronny Plunkett did, and that changes a man. They get used to them city women with their brash, rude ways. You’ll notice Ronny Plunkett ain’t dated anybody since he’s come home, not to my knowledge, not more than a night or two anyway. I don’t think Bobby Fennelson would give Amy Joy the time of day.”
“Well, you can just drop your suspicions about Davey,” said Lola. “Just because we saw him out driving around last night don’t mean he’s up to anything. He thinks Charlene hung the moon, why I don’t know.” Davey was, after all, her first cousin, and Lola had always liked him.
“Them’s the kind to watch the closest,” Dorrie said. “Hey, I got an idea.” The earlier humiliation was dying away.
“What?” asked Lola. She had just caught sight of her daughter in a back window of the bus. They exchanged a wave as Dorrie pulled out to pass the lumbering vehicle. It would be a sweet day after all, sweet as Juicy Fruit, sweet as gossip.
“Let’s go all the way to Madawaska,” Dorrie said. “Just in case Elvis is back at Radio Shack.”
***
A half mile from his brother’s filling station, Davey Craft pulled his car onto an old river road and sat there, engine off, while the outside cold crept deeper into the upholstery, crept into his fingers, into his very bones. The tip of his nose had begun to sting, and yet he could not bring himself to turn the engine back on, to flick the switch that would send warm air from the heater into the automobile. If he turned the engine on, he might never shut it off again. He might find himself a length of hose. He might sit there with his car idling, his brain idling, his life idling, as the precious perfume of carbon monoxide swirled up about him and carried him away. It was tempting to follow his brother Benny’s unwavering footsteps into the abyss, but the terrible truth was that he couldn’t abandon Charlene and the kids that way. Davey had read about carbon monoxide poisoning. When it’s all over, your blood is a bright cherry red, and there was something enticing about such a brilliant red, as welcome as the first burst of wild cherries on the mountain after the longest of winters. But the vivid memory of his family was like a sharp slap to his face. He had been on h
is way to ask his big brother, proprietor of Mattagash’s only filling station, if he could lend him money. The first time he had ever had to ask Peter for assistance was several months earlier.
“Sure,” Peter had said quickly. “Hell yes.” And he’d taken out his checkbook and dashed off a check for a thousand dollars, a payment on the skidder and the car. “Never hesitate, kid,” Peter had said proudly to Davey. And as much as it had hurt, Davey had appreciated it greatly. The second time was four months ago, after Davey had mortgaged the house. Peter was a little slower in taking out his checkbook that time. But he did, the pen less fluid as he wrote the zeros out in a thick black line. Davey had stared at them, feeling very much like a zero himself. The third time he came to ask Peter for money was only a month ago, and that time Peter was ready for him, had met his eyes firmly and said, before Davey could let the dreaded words fly, “This has been my worst month, kid. My own back is against the wall.”
“Hey,” Davey had said, his arm waving erratically, his hand trying to shuffle off the notion as unfounded. “I was just coming by to shoot the shit,” he lied. But Peter could tell, as most folks can, the bent, beaten stride of a man going under, his eyes vacant as someone who has just drowned, his feet waterlogged. Now he was hoping Peter would be able to help once more—brothers were like lotteries sometimes—but he could not bring himself to drive on. The determination to beg had suddenly gone out of him. He had been the family’s shining star, hadn’t he? He’d been the one born with the caul over his head, an event that had midwives and other, just plain wives talking excitedly of the truckloads of good luck it would bring him. The good-luck caul, passed down to him from his great-great-grandmother Sadie Craft. The gift Benny Craft had not been lucky enough to inherit.
The Weight of Winter Page 22
