The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  The kids loved hazelnuts the most. They used to stake out their own personal bushes and no one else was supposed to touch them. Walter always picked north of the house. Garvin would go south along the shore of Mattagash Brook, follow it out to the Mattagash River. Percy went somewhere—I just can’t remember now where the others went, but they all had their own territory. Winnie was the only one who wouldn’t pick hazelnuts. She said the little spikes hurt her hands, like she was some little queen or something. But in hazelnut season she always had her mouth full, always talked the others into sharing. It was too bad, you know, because you got to work hard for hazelnuts. First of all, you got to pick them when they’re in their little green husks, pull them off the bush like that. If you don’t, the squirrels will get them. It’s like picking a little green cactus to pick a green hazelnut. That’s nature’s way of protecting them, I suppose, until they’re ready. So you put them in a burlap sack and beat them real good against the barn, or on the road, so they’ll leave them little husks behind. And then you put them up somewhere to ripen. Winnie never could talk Walter out of his hazelnuts. Walter saw through Winnie like she was a ghost. He always had that ability, and I mention this because most folks didn’t. Most folks weren’t that lucky when they met up with Miss Winnie Fennelson.

  I think my favorite thing back then was the rhubarb. It grew wild along the north side of the garden. I suppose some old-timer, at one year or another, had planted it there at Mattagash Brook. But you’d find it in the strangest places, growing where nobody lived, where you never even remembered anyone living. We’d come upon it in the thick of the woods, when we least expected it. “Someone must’ve lived here once,” Foster would say. “Must’ve been a house here once.” And I’d think about that, in them days later, when I had that dangerous time to think. Some man had built himself a home, and got himself a wife, and had himself a family, and all that was left to show for it was rhubarb gone wild. Nothing else. It’s true, you know, that nature reaches up and pulls down what you build. I’ve seen limp little vines bust through stone. I seen grave markers yanked down and covered so thick with vines that you can’t read them.

  And nowadays I think of my house at Mattagash Brook. I can’t help but wonder how things is with it. If moss is growing in my kitchen. If birds are nesting in my bedrooms. If the front porch is breaking up and sinking into the earth. I was seventy-six years old the last time I saw my house. You wonder, you know, if the windows is broken out, letting in the wind and the snow. Is the wellhouse rotted? Has the pump gone to rust? I’ve seen them houses many times. There was old man Hart’s homestead, a haunted place, a place full to the rafters with ghosts. And there was the Margaret Mullins house, the old Mullins place. We always called them “old” back then, when we was still new ourselves, ’cause we never imagined that they was once new. And we sure never dreamed that one day our own proud houses would be pointed out that way by the young. Are they calling my house “the old Fennelson place”? Are weeds growing up in my living room? Are rabbits and mice being born there, the way my kids was once born? These days, most of the old homesteads is gone. And when young folks get married now, they ain’t looking to move in and fix an old house up, keep it alive. They build one-story sardine cans instead, and they’re content to live in them. But that’s what the Bible tells us will happen, that one generation passeth away, and another one cometh, but the earth abideth forever. And here I am, so old I’m going and coming and abiding all at the same time.

  THE STORM BIRDS VISIT: CONRAD ANNOYS PIKE

  “Speak roughly to your little boy,

  And beat him when he sneezes;

  He only does it to annoy,

  Because he knows it teases.”

  —the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

  In the morning Mattagash was buried under two feet of fresh, deep snow. Icicles, formed days earlier, still hung from the eaves of Pike Gifford’s house, big ones a foot wide at their origin and running all the way to the ground, and littler ones the children knocked down with a broom handle and then sucked at, as though they were lanced Popsicles. The snow hadn’t stopped until ten o’clock, so school had been canceled.

  “If them kids keep missing school,” Lynn had said to her sister, Maisy, who stopped in at nine for a cup of coffee, “they’ll have to go all summer to make up for their snow days.”

  It was noon before Lynn and the children heard Pike’s boots coming down the stairs. A silence fell over them like a little gray cloud, a rain cloud in the midst of so much white.

  “Holy shit,” Pike said when he saw the faces of his family in a somber circle around the kitchen table. “You look like them Supreme Court judges.” And then the twins laughed, a tinkling laugh, fragile as icicles falling. And Reed made a small chortling sound in his throat, his best attempt to second the notion. Lynn smiled, a coloring book smile, too large to fit the circumstances, too wide to be sincere. Conrad looked away, to where a pair of black-capped chickadees had come to the coconut feeder he’d tied to the clothes post outside the kitchen window.

  “Lord,” Pike said. “You’d swear I was the one killed Bambi’s mother.” Julie ran to her father and stretched her arms up high.

  “We’re going to Freddy’s birthday party,” Julie said. Pike turned away from her. He didn’t yet have the strength to pick her up. It was much too early.

  “Aunt Maisy made him a birthday cake out of cupcakes,” Stevie said. “Each cupcake has a letter of his name on it.”

  “And there’s cupcakes that spell out Happy Birthday, too,” Julie told him. Her face had crumpled into a little frown when Pike turned away to pour himself coffee.

  “Maisy’s a genius,” Pike said. “You can’t take that from her.”

  “Please,” Lynn thought. “Don’t start.”

  “Daddy, will you come with us?” Julie asked. Lynn made a quick, subtle movement of her hand, as if to quiet Julie, but then she realized there would be no need. Pike Gifford at a birthday party? He might have attended one or two of Conrad’s and Reed’s earliest ones, but he had soon asked that his name be taken off the invitation list.

  “Naw, I guess not,” Pike said to Julie. “My tux is at the cleaners.” He popped two slices of white bread into the toaster and stood waiting for them to spring up as brown toast.

  Lynn bit her lip. “Just don’t say anything,” she reminded herself. “We’ll be gone in an hour, unless he leaves first.”

  “You got any money left?” Pike asked her. “From that household money I give you?” Lynn wanted to laugh. It had been such a meager amount—only when Pike stayed true to his promises and avoided The Crossroads did the disability check manage to support them—that she had had to borrow again from her mother.

  “That was spent before you give it to me,” Lynn said. She had swept a small pile of dirt up with the broom and now she was looking for the dustpan. Pike would never learn about the thirty dollars she still had, every cent intended to go for school lunch money and gas for the car.

  “You don’t even have a five?” Pike asked, and Lynn shook her head, her eyes avoiding his.

  “Will you, Daddy?” Julie asked again. “Will you come with us?” She had locked her arms about Pike’s leg. Pike now had a bowl of cereal in his hands, milk sloshing dangerously close to the rim. He made a feeble attempt to shake Julie loose, but then he stopped. Putting the bowl down carefully on the kitchen counter, he patted his daughter’s head.

  “Yeah,” Pike said suddenly. “I’ll go to Freddy’s party and look at Maisy’s cupcakes. Sure. Why not?” Lynn looked quickly at Conrad, who was still staring at the chickadee feeder.

  “It’s in just a few minutes,” Lynn said, her tone urgent. Pike rarely rushed anything. “It was supposed to be after school, but since school was canceled, Maisy moved it up.”

  “She’s a social wonder,” said Pike. He bit into a buttered slice of toast, cru
mbs falling onto his chest like brown dandruff.

  “There ain’t any other men gonna be there,” said Lynn. “Just Maisy’s kids, and Beena’s kids, and these kids here.” She made a frail swoop of her hand at the children, as though introducing them to Pike. Conrad and Reed sat like frozen gargoyles, the mirth of the impending birthday party suddenly turned grotesque.

  “Freddy’s gonna be five years old,” Julie told her father.

  “No he ain’t,” said Stevie. “He’s fifty.”

  “He’s gonna be five,” said Julie. “And he’s gonna be a Indian in the play.” Stevie reached out quickly and slapped her.

  “Stop that!” Lynn said. She turned to Pike. “Don’t Maurice open The Crossroads at noon today?” she asked. Pike was busy with a box of cornflakes. “I don’t mind if you go looking for Billy or Ronny over there. They’re probably over there, wouldn’t you guess?”

  “Now listen at you,” Pike said. “First it’s I don’t spend enough time with you and the kids. Now it’s go to The Crossroads with Billy and Ronny. Make up your mind, woman.” Lynn tried frantically to read him, to look beneath the gesture, to rifle through the motives that lay behind his Pike Gifford grin. But she could find nothing. She knew it was always one of two things when he acted this way. Usually it was that he needed an excuse to get out of the house so he could beat a retreat to The Crossroads. Those times, he looked to Conrad as a means of providing him with an exit. Or Lynn. Reed, if necessary. But sometimes it was nothing more than boredom, Lynn had decided. On those lazy days when Billy and Ronny had gone downstate looking for entertainment, or The Crossroads was closed, and Pike had nothing to do but rewatch a rental movie, he was pressed to shape his own entertainment. Pike, on the other hand, saw the maneuver more clearly: it was a game of power, the flesh-and-bone bodies of his family only pieces forced to scuttle unhappily about the large squares of the playing board. Offense was Pike Gifford’s middle name.

  “We were just getting ready to go out the door,” Lynn said, and wanted to say more. But her tongue lay limp in her mouth, a piece of recording tape too tired and worn to replay itself.

  “I won’t be but a minute,” Pike assured them as he headed upstairs. “I just need to splash on a little aftershave.” Lynn put a finger to her lips, a message for the kids to be quiet, as she quickly rang Maisy’s number.

  “The only thing I can tell you,” Maisy said finally, “is to let him come on. You know he won’t be here ten minutes before he’ll up and leave. Don’t pick no fight with him, whatever you do.” Lynn hung up the phone. Defense had become an integral part of their lives.

  ***

  Maisy had decorated the kitchen table with streamers and then arranged the cupcakes neatly in three curved rows. Happy Birthday, Frederick, they read in order. Positioned on the ceiling above the table was a white, foldout Hallmark bell, left over from her own wedding souvenirs and now used at birthday gatherings. She was serving spaghetti, with the littler kids eating on metal TV trays in the living room and the adults around the cupcakes on the kitchen table. She’d been expecting only Lynn, and Pike’s cousin Beena, but Beena had called to cancel. She was snowed in, with no one to plow her yard, and with a sick child to boot. Maisy had been about to remove Beena’s plate when she received the call from Lynn that Pike, of all people, would be coming along. If he stayed long enough to eat, which Maisy doubted, he could have Beena’s place.

  At first Pike was all smiles, even complimentary, and Lynn began to think he was there for the duration. But by the time Freddy had opened his gifts and the children were given plates of spaghetti, she could tell that Pike’s enthusiasm was waning. So could Reed and Conrad. Maisy had seated them at the kitchen bar. Her three small children, and Julie and Stevie, had already filled the tiny living room.

  “Here, Pike,” Maisy said. “Sit here. This was Beena’s plate.” It was difficult to hide her anger. Lynn might not be sure about the emotions she felt toward her husband, but there was no doubt in Maisy’s mind about her own opinion of her brother-in-law. She hated him.

  “Is Beena still dating Paulie Hart?” Lynn asked, looking nervously away from Pike and into Maisy’s eyes.

  “She would if she knew where he was,” said Maisy, straightening the r cupcake in Birthday. “But nobody’s seen him since he won that thousand dollars in the lottery.”

  “I think she’s too old for him anyway,” said Lynn. She saw that Pike was fidgeting with his napkin, and it worried her.

  “Well, she’s got them two kids to raise,” said Maisy. “I suppose she has to think of that. Mattagash don’t have bachelors to pick from. It ain’t the best place to be divorced in.”

  “Ain’t this pretty, though?” Pike said, and picked up a paper napkin Maisy had left in a triangular shape beneath his knife. “Fancy, fancy. When you give a party, Maisy, you really give a party.”

  “Yeah, well,” Maisy managed, and tried not to look at Pike. After the incident with Conrad and the bat, she was quite sure she would never have to see Pike Gifford again, much less discuss napkins with him. Sometimes it seemed she would never figure Lynn out. She glanced quickly at Conrad, but he sat looking down into his spaghetti, waiting.

  “Poor kid,” thought Maisy.

  “Do you know what?” Lynn said finally. She could see a look on Pike’s face that she knew too well, a little curl playing up around the sides of his mouth. He was getting ready for some outrage and Lynn hoped she could forestall it. “Priscilla Monihan called me yesterday and asked me if I’d sign her petition to close The Crossroads. I ain’t heard a word from that snobby bitch in my entire life, not even a hello when I meet her on the street in Watertown.”

  “Don’t she think she wrote the Good Book, though,” Maisy agreed.

  “This sure is pretty, all right,” Pike said again. “But tell me something, Maisy.” Lynn caught her breath.

  “Here it comes,” she thought.

  “What’s that, Pike?” Maisy asked. She put a plate of spaghetti in front of Reed, who, like Conrad, only stared at it.

  “Here it comes,” thought Reed.

  “Why’d you go and put my fork way over here on the left side of my plate?”

  “What?” Maisy asked.

  “My fork,” said Pike. “What’s it doing over here on the left side of my plate? I’m right-handed.” Maisy looked to Lynn’s face for support, but found none there. There was none to be given when Pike was on a roll.

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” said Maisy. “That’s how you set a table.” She waited. Pike had picked at her often, it was true, throwing out little barbs about her Sunday brunches.

  “I’m just curious,” said Pike. “It seems to be a good idea if a fellow’s left-handed, but if he ain’t, it don’t seem like such a good move. It seems like a right-handed fellow is going to drag his sleeve in his food when he reaches for that fork. So I was just wondering why you put my fork over there.”

  “That’s how it was in the magazine,” announced Freddy, the birthday boy. He’d come to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

  “Oh, I see,” said Pike. “A magazine told you to do this. They must all be left-handed then, the folks down at the magazine.” Maisy’s lip had begun to tremble. Her mother had always told her she’d get in trouble for putting on airs.

  “Pike, please,” Lynn said, but nothing more. It would only make him worse.

  “Now, I noticed,” Pike continued, “that you put my glass of milk over here by my right hand. If I’m gonna have to reach over anyway and get my fork, why didn’t you put my milk over there too? Then I could take a quick drink of milk before I grab my fork.” Maisy had taken her place at the table, and she looked helplessly at her own fork in its neat position on the left side of her plate. Pike was right. She’d have to reach over her food to get it. She wished now she’d never seen the damn picture in Good Housekeeping. But she had imagined that Beena an
d Lynn would be impressed with the setting as everyone chatted happily over the expensive paper napkins and the well-placed forks. Why was Pike Gifford ever born?

  “It would seem to me,” Pike said, “that the magazine people ought to rethink this thing. If you ask me,” he went on, although no one would, “a bunch of left-handed kings and queens over in England, or maybe some Kennedys and Rockerfellers, got together and decided all this, and now they expect poor folks like us, like you, Maisy, to go along with all their foolishness.” Maisy’s face was suddenly drained of color, as white as the snow in her yard.