It was almost ten p.m. when she heard Bobby Fennelson at the kitchen door.
“It’s going to snow,” he said as he pulled his boots off by the door. “The weathermen are saying two or three inches but, believe me, we’re in for more than that. Do you see what that sky looks like?”
“I don’t think I can stand it,” Amy Joy told him. Her problem was weightier than snow. “Patrice Grandmaison says it’s natural to feel guilt for a while. But I don’t think I can stand it. I feel so selfish.” He put his arms around her.
“There,” he said. “Nothing’s final, is it? At least not while everyone is still alive.” He rubbed the back of her neck and she jumped at the cold of his fingers.
“Well,” she said. “Come on into the house. We’ve got it all to ourselves, for what it’s worth.”
For the first time, they sat in the living room before the television, sat like an old married couple and watched faraway people moving around in Hollywood dramas. Amy Joy made popcorn and gave him a beer, and then, when eleven o’clock sounded on the old McKinnon grandfather clock, she nudged him awake. He rubbed his eyes and asked, “Did I fall asleep?”
“You’d better get on home,” she reminded him. “It’s already eleven, and five o’clock is gonna come early.”
“I ain’t going home tonight,” he said. “I’m staying with you. I don’t have to go home anymore. Eileen’s gone. Remember?”
“Are you crazy?” Amy Joy asked him. “Do you want the Snoop Sisters to catch you here?”
“Let them.” He put his arm around her neck, pulled her closer, edged her head over on his chest. “I don’t want to go home.” He massaged his fingers across closed eyelids, soothing them. “My eyes hurt,” he said.
“Did you get something in them?” Amy Joy put her own fingers where his had been, took up the job for him.
“I had to do some welding today,” he said.
“And you did it without wearing a mask, right?” Amy Joy asked. “Why do the men around here feel that they have to punish themselves so much? What’s wrong with wearing a mask, for crying out loud?”
“I was in a hurry,” he said. “And I couldn’t find it.”
“Please don’t do it again.” Amy Joy put a soft kiss on each of his lids. “Okay?” He opened his eyes and looked at her.
“Jesus, I’m tired,” he said. “Winter’s just started, and already I’m tired. Maybe I should’ve just packed up and gone south with the birds.”
“You need to take better care of yourself,” she told him.
“Yes, Mother,” he said.
“Come earlier next time,” she reminded him, “so we can spend more time together. Maybe I’ll even cook us a nice supper.” Being able to sit comfortably in front of the TV, to chat in normal voices, they had not bothered to go upstairs and sink down into the soft mattress of the old bedstead. But he would be back. And now she had all this time alone, all this lonely house.
***
It did snow that night of Sicily’s departure from the big lumbering house her father, the Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon, had built at the turn of the century. Wind-driven snow bombarded the house as if it were being blown out of some big Hollywood machine. But it was genuine as hell as it circled the pole lights of town, swept in over the frozen river, dumped six inches of pure white. In the night, in the heart of the storm, Amy Joy came wide awake to the noise of the town’s plow filtering in to her ears, passing the house in a scraping wave of snow, then dying away in its own sound. She’d had a bad dream, hadn’t she? But she couldn’t pull the threads of it together, couldn’t recall what the terror had been. Outside, it was impossible to see the pole light. The white hump of her car, a fluffy whale, lounged near the front steps. She noticed the outline of what looked like her shovel leaning against the garage. She wished the garage were big enough for her car, but it wasn’t. Marge McKinnon had built it for flowerpots, and garden implements, and the lawn mower—more a toolshed really, since she had never come to own a car herself. One of these days, Amy Joy promised herself for the millionth time as she watched the snow covering Mattagash, one of these days she was going to buy up some lumber, hire a carpenter, and make that garage believable. In the meantime she lay back on her pillow and did all she could to count the nighttime sheep that jumped beneath her closed lids, sleek, white, snowy sheep, bouncing through the biggest, worst, deepest storm of 1989, skipping like sacrificial lambs to the inevitable slaughter.
MEMORIES OF HOME: THE WEIGHT OF WINTERS PAST
To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!
And fare you well for evermore,
O ladder at the hayloft door,
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Farewell to the Farm”
You think you know about snow? Well, let me tell you about moonlight nights in the blue of January that come right out of dreams. They’re too blue, too crackling with cold to be real. That’s when the pines would be all crusted with snow, just like they was baked that way. And all the needles would be glistening like glass. Up overhead you could see Orion shimmering, the buckle on his belt so cold your fingers would stick to it if you could touch it, the way your tongue sticks to a pump handle, or to a frosty windowpane. The thing to do when that happens, the trick of it, is not to panic but just breathe out some warm breath to melt the frost. That way your tongue’ll let go with all its skin. If you don’t, mind this, you’ll carry a sore tongue around in your head for a few days.
I got two important memories of snowstorms, one when I was a child, one when I had children of my own. There ain’t been a day of my life when I’ve looked out a window and seen the first flake, that these two memories ain’t come straight back to me. The first one was of my papa, the night he died, in the heart of that big storm, back in 1890. Winter is one thing. A blizzard is something else. We couldn’t see the barn from the house. I tell you, you wonder where God is when he makes his mind up to let it snow like that. It makes you think God has turned his head south, ignoring you. Or he covers his holy, blessed eyes and pretends not to see what he’s wrought. In them days you went hungry when the snow trapped you in, like scared rabbits in a hutch. You dug away what you could from the door, and you waited, and you dug away more, and you watched the sky. If you got a sick child it stays sick, unless it dies. There’s no getting a sick child out at times like that. That snow comes down so heavy you drag your feet just from carrying it on your shoulders. I’m talking about snow most people only read about.
I was eight years old when Papa died. He had a cancer of the stomach and had been sick a good time. Anything he ate he’d throw back up in a thick yellow fluid. And even in winter he’d break all out in a sweat. Back then you might visit a doctor just long enough to get the medical term for what was killing you, but that was it. He’d been in an awful lot of pain all that beautiful long autumn. So I suppose that when the storm hit that next January, he was ready to lay down the burden of life. And there we were, snow packed right up to the door like we was in a big white prison. Mama wrapped the oldest blanket around him, the one with the yarn-patched holes, because we needed the better ones. Then she broke some pieces of bark off the firewood, shaped a little cross, tied it with yarn, and she put it in his hands, just like he was a Catholic or something. I remember how Papa’s face was all drawed inward, like he was still sucking on his pipe, going for the last puff. My brothers Percy and Oscar, the oldest boys, they dug the door open until it was wide enough to put Papa outside. It was the best we could do. It was five days before they could get to the barn to feed the animals, and then half of them was dead. So Papa sat out in the snow, not taking up any more space than is necessary in death. We could see him through
the window, a thin creamy layer of snow covering him at first. Then humps of snow, so that he looked like a snowman. And pretty soon the snow was so deep on him that he could’ve been a stump, or an old log, or a little hill of rocks. And then he was completely gone. It was like the earth had whisked him into her mouth and took him down to her own hungry belly.
They were long, them nights of snow banging at the eaves, black nights, when the oil lamps had been blowed out to save oil, and the fire snapped. Keep in mind we burned our table, chairs, and part of one wall before it was all over. How do I explain to you how whispery them nights was, snow hanging like a net over our camp, the wind banging and rattling like some runaway train? Me and my brothers and sisters all huddled in the same bed for body warmth. When I was sure they was all fast asleep, I’d sit up in bed and I’d listen real hard, so hard my heart would rise up in my throat like a little Adam’s apple. And I’d hear it. So help me, as Jesus is the savior of all things, even things that go unexplained on the earth, I’d hear Papa’s voice rising like a song above the storm. Words fluttering like butterflies out of that snowy cocoon he’d become. “He’s saying his prayers,” Mother would whisper, and the wind would rattle the windows. And the coyote’s throat would whine like it was broken, the whine of the hungry. That’s when I would imagine I was flying, and I’d look down on our camp from the air, happy I could still see a bit of the stovepipe, the line of the road. “He’s saying his prayers,” Mother would whisper in the dark, and I’d slide my little house of bones up to hers, sharing our natural heat, stoking them furnaces in our bodies that were keeping us alive. And I already knew, just as she did, that when the thaw come and we took Papa to Mattagash Point to bury him, we’d only be taking an old stump, or a log, or a little hill of rocks. He was already gone off from his suffering body, gone into the smell of pine, into the whine of the coyote. And so it ain’t a bad memory to think of him, when it comes to snow, and my mind starts to reeling. When you’re eight years old, you lean to the adults for your answers. And my mother got us through all that. She was a great big answer in the heart of all that storm. “Just think,” she told us, happy in what she said. “There ain’t no pain for him now. Just them warm heavenly streets of gold where it don’t ever snow.”
So when I married Foster Fennelson and went to live at Mattagash Brook, I was more or less prepared for a blizzard. When it snowed heavy in them days, you could almost go blind from the white of it. All the pines and black spruce were white as angels. Even the bare trees looked like they was dazzled with pussy willows. When I got up before Foster to start the fire, I’d look out my kitchen window and it was always a shock. It was like we’d been picked up and put down on another planet. Like all our mistakes had been erased, all the old familiar markers gone. It was like we’d been given another chance. If Foster got up before me, I’d see his footprints going to the barn, all frozen and blue in that early light, and I hated him for spoiling the freshness of it. But most times it was mine first, and I didn’t mind getting up so early if it was. If the snow was done, you’d see the first sun coming up over the barn, and it never come up the same way twice. “Sun’s coming to get the rooster,” Papa used to say to me. “Sun’s coming, and he’s gonna get that old rooster.” And the gorbies would fly right up to the window, begging for food. That’s what the old-timers called them gray jays, because they was so greedy. They got the souls of lumberjacks in them, you know. That’s why they’re tame. They come looking for crumbs from their descendants. Sometimes they hit against the windows as if they’re saying, “Remember me?” If it was me, I’d just go off and leave the living alone. I’d have seen enough of the living. But them gorbies, them ghosts, they can’t seem to let go. They follow along with the lumberjacks in the woods. I guess they miss the work. At noontime they fly right up to eat out of a lumberjack’s hand. But I rarely had extra to feed the birds in them days. The dog was lucky to get something from the table. Them was the days when if it snowed and then stopped, you didn’t mind. But when it snowed and snowed and snowed, you started looking in your cupboard real serious. And at what you’d stored in your cellar. And you measured out your flour, counted your potatoes, thinned the soup. One winter like that, we ate horse meat.
That’s my other snow memory, the winter of 1916, when we had to kill old Nellie. It was a terrible, terrible winter. Even the snow, when it fell, was soiled. Coyote ate deer and deer ate nothing. I remember it clear as if it’s happening right now. Foster walked old Nellie out behind the barn. I remember that all the kids were in the windows crying, watching. And Nellie stopped at the corner of the barn and looked back. You could just make her out in the snow, her mane all wet with it, her eyes wet. She knew, you know, that the dance was over. The jig was up. I’ve seen more animals in my day with a head full of brains than I’ve seen people. And Nellie was real hungry too, so she knew, all right. And there are folks who claim an animal don’t have feelings—well, I’m here to tell you that Nellie had every kind of feeling known to man. She loved my children, all of them, even the mean ones. And I think she was a better mother to them than I was. She tended them all summer out in the lower pasture, let them torment her the way kittens do a mother cat. They climbed all over her back, swung on her tail, put bonnets on her head, made her jump stumps, rode her four at a time. Yes, I gotta say it. She had a patience with them that I never found. So when they cried in the windows that day, she stopped and looked back. Then she went on by herself. Foster only had to poke her once. She just seemed to know where she had to go, what she had to do. That’s when Walter—he was already about eighteen or so—grabbed me by the arm. “We won’t eat meat is all,” he said. “Please, Mama, don’t kill Nellie.” And I think to this day I was about to run out that door and stop it. I do believe that. “Something always comes through for us,” I was going to tell Foster. “It will again.”
When the gun went off, they all fell silent, like mice listening for the cat. Walter turned white as a sheet. He looked right at me like I’d done it. And then Winnie came down from her chair in the window and said, “Now what’ll we ride this summer?” Like it was nothing. She weren’t much more than a yard high at the time. Just a little tyke. And she was the only child who ate meat that night, just her and Foster. The only one for a week or more. Then finally Garvin did, and Ester, Lucy, and Billy. One by one they come out of hiding, like that table was a magnet and their little stomachs was made of lead. I suppose they was tired of potato soup. But they chewed that meat slowly, and so did I. And when our eyes met, we shared our guilt. It was like Nellie was giving us another free ride. You get hungry enough, you do a lot of things to get unhungry. All except Walter. He wasn’t just a special child of mine. He was one of God’s special creatures. Every once in a while you hear about someone like that, but you rarely meet them. They’re the person who runs into a burning house and dies saving a stranger. Or they starve so someone else can eat. That’s the way Walt was. And you can’t expect them special people to live out long lives. You just can’t. When you ain’t thinking of yourself all the time, you just ain’t cautious enough. With all them other folks on your mind, you get careless. Just staying alive becomes a full-time job. But Walter’s another heartache. I’m gonna let that old wagon of memory roll past him for the time being. I’m gonna remember some of the good times for a change.
And I do need to remind myself that there was some good times. I got to admit that. There wasn’t just raging blizzards of snow in my life. I can remember days most people don’t even know about, long summer evenings on the front porch with all the crickets alive in the grass. And there’d be frogs down at the swamp blowing their throats into bubbles. Sometimes a buck deer would wade Mattagash Brook and come right up to the front steps, his antlers all brownish-gold in the sun. Most any day you’d catch a bald eagle soaring on its flat wings over the tops of the trees. Foster put out a salt block for the whitetail deer that come to drink from Mattagash Brook, and they sure liked that salt. We never kill
ed what we didn’t need bad. Most folks around did the same. Killing weren’t a sport but a necessity. And them days turned over slowly, like the pages flipping on a calendar, all colors and noises and long lasting. I do have to admit this. And I do have to wonder just how many city folks have ever heard a real barn door swing in the wind. I wonder if they know the song in it, because it is music, you know. Nature’s music. And sometimes you’d hear lumberjacks in the woods, cutting down white pines, and that was music too. Them axes rung out for a mile. And you could hear the bells on them horse harnesses so loud it sounded like Christmas all year round. Jingle bells in the wild woods! Ain’t that something? So I kind of enjoyed them slow times. I guess maybe when my oldest kids got big enough to help, and I got more time to think, maybe that’s when things seemed to sour before my eyes. It’s a dangerous thing, you know, too much time to think. It can twist and turn your mind. But I got to say it now—before my mind turned, there was some awful good times.
I always had a big garden full of string beans, carrots, cucumbers, potatoes, everything I could get to take root and grow fast. It had to grow fast up here in northern Maine. It seemed like half the year was spent getting ready for the snow to come, and the other half was spent getting ready for it to leave. We didn’t have no fancy gadgets back then. Nature could be your friend one day, enemy the next. But she was mostly good to us in the summers. When my kids was big enough, I sent them into the woods and the fields and they come back with all kinds of wonderful stuff from nature’s store. Tiny wild strawberries, and raspberries the size of quarters, and blackberries so easy to pick they dropped off the bushes into your pail. Blueberries grew good where a fire had passed. And the trees gave us chokecherries, and wild cherries no bigger than a fingernail. And from bushes along the riverbank, or along the edge of fields, they’d find hazelnuts and beechnuts. And beneath trees in the forest grew the little orange bunchberry, what we called pigeonberries. Can you imagine city folks getting all this stuff for free at some fancy store? And we used to pick fiddleheads, with their heads shaped just like the scroll of a fiddle. Them is one of the cleanest, most insect-free plants you’ll ever find. We used to pick them on Wolf Island, in the Mattagash River, but they grow all over. Sometimes we’d fill ten burlap sacks with them. Then there’s the good old dandelion green, a hard thing to clean but delicious to eat. Best to get them in the spring, when they’re young and tender. Cook them with salt pork for thirty minutes, along with a mess of new potatoes. I canned what vegetables I could for the winter months. We put our potatoes and carrots in barrels and buried them in the ground. That kept them real good all winter. And it kept our meats. I’d mince deer meat, mix it with spices, make pies out of it. But all summer long we had fresh berry pies. And we caught rainbow trout from Mattagash Brook in them summer months. And Foster brought home partridge and an occasional rabbit. I even used wild shore onions, summer savory, caraway, and wild mint to flavor things. I let them dry, chopped them up, and kept them in cheesecloth sacks. And I always made lots of jars full of mustard pickles.
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