The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Shut up,” Conrad said softly, and Lynn motioned quickly for him to be quiet.

  “Go on,” Lynn said to Pike. “This here’s a birthday party. Go on to The Crossroads and leave us be.”

  “And everybody knows that all the Kennedys and Rockerfellers is any good for is to put on airs,” Pike added, as though his wife and son were not in the room with him. “Them kings and queens ain’t done nothing but interbreed, even more than folks do here in Mattagash. That’s why that royal family looks like a stable of horses. But us folks up here in northern Maine, we know better than to go along with all that put-your-fork-here bullshit. We know that if you sit too high up on the cow, you ain’t gonna reach the tits. If the magazine said to hang by your ankles while you eat, would you do that, too?”

  “Shut up!” Conrad said loudly, still staring down at the heap of spaghetti. Reed kicked his brother’s foot, a plea for silence.

  “Unless, of course,” Pike added, “you invited a left-handed little fag over to eat. Now that would be different. Little fags like napkins and fancy forks and stuff like that.”

  “You get out of my house,” Maisy said suddenly, and Lynn felt a rush of relief. She’d been afraid Conrad would be the one to confront Pike. “I ain’t scared of you. I ain’t no child you can push around. You get out,” Maisy said, and it sounded like she might be ready to cry. Pike stood, smiling. He bowed to Lynn. He could hear himself telling her later his side of the story: “I intended to spend some quality time with my wife and family, but Maisy threw me out. It’s her house. I can only abide. I’m pretty sure her magazine would say it’d be bad manners for me to do otherwise.” But then Maisy made the biggest faux pas of all—something Good Housekeeping had yet to write about, but about which Lynn and Conrad and Reed could write books.

  “You’re a bigger drunk than your old man was,” Maisy cried angrily. Pike had spoiled the birthday party she’d been planning for days. Thank God she hadn’t gone all out and bought some of those linen napkins she’d seen at the Woolworth store in Madawaska. Who knows what trouble they might have stirred up. Lynn caught her breath, heard Conrad and Reed do the same.

  “I ain’t ever brought up your old man, Maisy,” said Pike, slowly, deliberately. “I don’t like the son of a bitch, but I ain’t ever brought up his name to you.” Maisy sat silently, her spaghetti growing cold on the plate before her. Lynn had kicked her ankle beneath the table as a signal to, please, above all, remain quiet. “Now I expect you to do the same,” Pike said. He started to turn away, to find his green felt hat and beat a retreat, but it caught him, that flow of anger that had been his friend for so many years now. How dare she, how dare anybody, rake Pike Gifford Sr. over the coals? But Mattagash had rubbed the younger Pike’s nose into the mess of his father’s life for so many years now that his nose was sore. The sons of bitches! Pike grabbed one side of the gaily decorated birthday table and picked it several inches off the floor, scattering the cupcakes and turning glasses of milk upside down. Then he put it back down, said nothing to the women who hid their faces in their pale, wintry hands. Clutching his hat from Maisy’s kitchen counter, Pike Gifford tipped it politely at the gathered company.

  “Thanks for the invite,” he said. He pulled his felt hat on and went outside. In a minute the battered Chevy Super Sport rattled out of Maisy’s dooryard and disappeared in the direction of The Crossroads. “I should have just given him that five dollars and got it over with,” Lynn said, her eyes full of tears.

  ***

  It was only half an hour later that Maisy dropped Lynn and the kids off and drove away in a swirl of snow, the party aborted. Pike’s family tromped into the house like a small, unhappy army and then separated into various activities. The twins managed to stop fighting long enough to sit in front of the TV for a third viewing of Bambi. Reed lounged at the kitchen table in front of his open history book. He’d been doing poorly since school started, and the teacher had warned him about his bad grades.

  Lynn had taken out her sewing basket and was searching the dryer for Julie’s blouse, the blue one with the missing button. Conrad had made a quick peanut butter sandwich and then gone on up to his room. In seconds he was back, an empty brown envelope in his hands.

  “Look,” he said to Lynn. “My money’s gone.”

  “Your money?” Lynn asked, and took the envelope. “The money you been saving?” Conrad nodded. Lynn looked at Reed, who shrugged his shoulders.

  “Who knew where you kept it?” she asked Conrad.

  “Nobody.” Tears were quickly filling his eyes. “I been saving since I was nine,” he said.

  “I know that,” Lynn said. “I know you have.” She looked at Reed again, but she knew it would be no use, would even be unfair to ask, “Reed, did you take it?” And she also knew it would be unfair to ask Julie and Stevie, children too young to understand the concept of money. It would be unfair because Lynn knew in an instant where the money had gone, and she could tell by Conrad’s face that he, too, knew. So did Reed. They were children of the streets, these boys who had never even been to a city. Sometimes, when you live within the confines of a small town, the circumference of an unhappy family, the streets come to you.

  “He took it,” said Conrad, and Lynn nodded. That was why Pike had attended the birthday party. He thought it would provide him with an alibi.

  “When he said he was going up to put on aftershave,” Conrad continued, and again Lynn nodded.

  “I don’t know how,” she said, “but I’ll see to it that he finds a way to give it back to you. I’ll tell Billy. Bad as he is, Billy wouldn’t steal from a kid. I’ll tell Billy to make him give every cent back.”

  ***

  Conrad spent the next half hour as restless as anyone in his family had ever seen him, flipping through a comic book one minute, peering into the refrigerator the next, pacing the kitchen floor. Finally he left a freshly opened bottle of Coke behind—Conrad rarely wasted things—and went out to pace the cold back porch. Reed stared at the colored picture of wagons headed west in his history book—a place he wouldn’t mind going. Try as he might, and even with his teacher’s threat of keeping him off the junior varsity basketball team, he couldn’t concentrate. Conrad was more on his mind than the Oregon Trail.

  “He ain’t wearing his coat,” Reed said at last. Lynn put the sewing basket away and pulled on her own big bulky jacket. She found Conrad’s coat where he’d left it on the couch and went out to talk to her son.

  “Here’s your coat,” Lynn said, but Conrad shoved her hand away. Lynn hugged the coat to her chest. Empty, it felt useless in her arms. “You’re gonna catch your death,” she whispered.

  Conrad watched a flock of snow buntings rise up out of the field behind the house, turn pure silver in the sun, then descend on more hay stalks farther away. He remembered his mother’s favorite song, “Snowbird,” by Anne Murray. Sunday mornings, when Conrad was very little, he would wake to the strains of Lynn’s old phonograph downstairs bringing the words up to him, up to his warm bed, and he imagined he was a tiny bird in a nest, up there above Lynn’s head. And then his father’s voice would interrupt the lovely melody, the haunting words, a voice of hate, and Conrad would hold his breath and try desperately to fly away in his imagination. Little snowbird, take me with you when you go, to that land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow.

  Conrad watched as the snowbirds, the buntings, rose again and arced over the field in search of more left-behind grain. Storm birds, they had come with the latest blizzard.

  “You cold?” Lynn asked, and touched a hand to her son’s cheek. “You must be. Put your coat on, or else come on back in. I promise you we’ll get your money back. There’s no need to let him spoil the rest of the day.”

  “Why’d you let him come back in the first place?” Conrad said, and Lynn heard anger in his voice, something he didn’t often express to her, although she had always g
uessed it was there.

  “What am I gonna do?” she asked. In her jacket pocket, she found her pack of Winston 100’s, snapped one out, and lit it. When she exhaled, smoke mingled with the warm puffs of her breath against the cold air. The rings rose up like smoke signals and then disappeared.

  “Don’t let him come back,” Conrad said. “Divorce him. The sheriff ain’t gonna come the next time. You know he ain’t. He said so. He said you take Daddy back and you’re on your own. I ain’t afraid of him. All we gotta do is divorce him.” Lynn was startled at the rush of Conrad’s words. How long had it been since she’d heard more than a few words here and there, or the occasional sentence? He had stopped talking in long, full paragraphs, hadn’t he? Funny, she had just now noticed.

  “How’ll we live, Con?” she asked. “How’ll we get by? What’ll we eat, for Chrissakes?”

  “I got almost three hundred jams now,” Conrad said proudly. He’d been waiting a long time for this event, saving for it. “I got more sugar than we’ll ever use.”

  “Oh, Conrad,” Lynn whispered. “Oh, sweetie.” She held him against her chest, wrapped her arms about him. My God, but he was almost as tall as she was! She felt him sigh, long and hard, and it seemed the very force of it shot into her body like a large pang of remorse. A birth pain, even. She didn’t have an epidural for Conrad, Lynn remembered. That was a mistake she didn’t make when she had the other three kids.

  “If it hadn’t been for him,” Conrad said, “we’d have money, too. Three hundred and seventeen dollars.” His voice seemed to leave, a ventriloquist’s voice, and rise far above his body, a hovering voice.

  “This is what being doomed means,” thought Conrad. “This is doomed.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Lynn said again. “It’s so much more than sugar and jam, and what we’ll eat, or what we’ll wear. It’s so much more than any of them things, and if I knew what it was, if I could explain it to you, so help me Christ I would. I’d do it this very minute.” She leaned back to look at his face. Tears swam in his eyes. “But I can’t,” she said softly, finally, and she felt him take his sigh back out of her body, felt his remorse reel itself out of her, as if it were a current of sheer electricity. She felt, suddenly, two emotions—one of having just given birth, the other of having lost something irretrievably precious.

  CURVES AND SPARKLES: MILES STANDISH VISITS TANYA

  To have or take on a facial expression showing usually pleasure, amusement, affection, friendliness, etc., or, sometimes, irony, derision, etc., and characterized by an upward curving of the corners of the mouth and a sparkling of the eyes.

  —Collins American English Dictionary, definition of smile

  Dorrie Mullins cut a big wide arc as she turned Booster’s pickup/plow at the Greater Northern Bank in Watertown, and then headed up Basile Street in the direction of the hospital. In the passenger seat, Lola Monihan braced herself, a hand on the dashboard, another on the door handle, and waited until Dorrie hit the notorious pothole in front of LaVerdiere’s Drugstore. Then she relaxed her position.

  “When do you think they’re gonna fix that hole?” Dorrie asked. “It’s been there since last spring, but I can’t ever seem to remember it’s there.” Lola nodded. It was true that Dorrie always managed to head right for that hole, as though it were some kind of treasure pit. If Lola could remember to brace herself each time she saw the LaVerdiere sign, why couldn’t Dorrie remember the damn hole? Lola was truly sorry she’d never gotten her driver’s license.

  “I still don’t believe it,” said Lola. She straightened the big violet bow on the IGA fruit basket, which rode on the seat between them. “About Tanya having AIDS, I mean. I think that’s just gossip from folks who got nothing better to do.”

  Dorrie took her eyes off the street for a moment to look at her friend Lola. It had been Lola who started the rumor that Booster Mullins had only two months to live, the time Booster had gone into the hospital to have his hemorrhoids taken the rest of the way out. Booster had been too embarrassed to let Dorrie tell the truth about his ailment, knowing the kind of jokes it would generate along Mattagash telephone lines. So Dorrie had been most secretive, suggesting that Booster suffered from an ailment inherited from the doomed Fennelson line, something beyond the stupidity gene and the bad-luck curse. It was all too much for Lola. Before nightfall she had given poor Booster only two months to live. That would have been okay if every last woman in Mattagash, except the Giffords and Amy Joy Lawler, hadn’t turned up at Dorrie’s house with a casserole, or a cake, or a loaf of homemade bread. Dorrie had the refrigerator and the cupboards full of food before she figured out what had happened. And it had taken her three weeks to return every one of those damn pans to the rightful owners. And then Selma Craft had accused her of denting her new Teflon fudge pan. But Lola was stingier with gossip when it affected her own relatives.

  “She’d have had to have a blood transfusion to catch it,” Lola was saying now. Dorrie saw the pothole, Watertown’s second largest, lurking in front of the post office. She ever so slightly eased the Bronco toward it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lola reach out a pale thin arm and brace herself against the dashboard. Dorrie smiled as the right tire struck the hole, ka-thunk. Lola bounced in the passenger seat.

  “I wish they’d fix them damn holes,” Dorrie said. “They just seem to jump out at a person at the last second.”

  “I don’t remember Tanya having a blood transfusion,” Lola went on. “Who told you she had AIDS, anyway?”

  “She could’ve had a blood transfusion down in Connecticut, before they ever moved up here,” said Dorrie. She swung into the parking lot of the Watertown hospital, the tires of the pickup spinning musically on the gravelly sand that had been spread there on the pavement. “How would you have known about it? I know you try, Lola, but you can’t be everywhere at once.” Lola felt a sting of warm blush cover her face in an instant. At moments like these, when Dorrie seemed intent on bullying her, Lola was inches away from signing up for a driver education course.

  “I hope Tanya likes this fruit basket,” Lola said idly. It was all she could say, from her powerless position in the passenger seat.

  “Oh shit,” said Dorrie. “Charlene’s car is here.” She pointed to the aging New Yorker, ice clinging to its mud flaps. It was parked in the visitors’ parking lot. “Well, that ends it. I ain’t going in to visit if Charlene’s here. She’ll say we’re just dropping by to see if we can find out what Tanya’s got.”

  “We are,” Lola pointed out, “just dropping by to see what Tanya’s got.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Dorrie. She rammed the Bronco into reverse and it shot backward, out of the parking lot and up onto the main street. A horn bleated loudly, from a car that had been about to turn into the hospital until the Bronco came flying out. Dorrie ignored the complaint. She gave the Bronco more gas and it sped forward with great urgency. Lola was rummaging in her purse for a pen.

  “I’m just gonna address this card to little Tanya,” Lola said, “so we can mail it to her from the post office. Charlene don’t control the mail. Not even Simon Craft does.” She found the pen and went to work on the envelope. That was when Dorrie hit the patch of ice near the railroad tracks. It had always been a dangerous place, forever in the shade of a cluster of abandoned potato storage buildings. The strip of ice was spread across the road like scattered blue paint. Her heart throbbing with panic, Dorrie went for the brake, something she had promised Booster she would never do again when driving on ice, not after she had driven his last Bronco into the side of the garage. The Bronco spun wildly and executed a perfect cop turn, its nose now pointing in the opposite direction. Lola looked up from her writing.

  “You forget something?” she asked.

  ***

  Charlene remembered thinking that hospitals were havens, and yet even the huge stuffed teddy bear that lounged in the corner of the children’s ward at
Watertown Community Hospital looked as though he wished he were somewhere else, somewhere safe. In the four days that Tanya had spent there, undergoing more tests, Charlene had been unable to get her to smile. Charlene herself had been exhibiting smiles of all sizes and designs, but by the end of the third day, she wasn’t really sure anymore if she was pulling it off.

  She’d been prodding Tanya to finish her soup, to drink one more sip of milk, to at least taste the pudding, when she became aware that her facial muscles felt knotted up into some kind of grisly lump. She had nodded at Davey to step outside. In the hallway Charlene had to steady herself by leaning back against the wall. “What’s wrong with my face?” she asked. An article she had read in Reader’s Digest about Bell’s palsy flicked through her mind. Her face felt distorted, little tremors lacing across her cheekbones, occasional involuntary tics commanding her left eye to twitch. “What’s wrong with my face?” Charlene asked again. Davey hadn’t slept much more than she had in the past three days, but he’d pulled her up against his chest, made useless, circular motions against her back with his hand.

  “Char,” Davey had whispered. “You’re smiling. That’s all.”

  That was when Charlene finally agreed to the sedative and curled up on the narrow bed next to Tanya’s. And she had not opened her eyes until the first rattling sounds of breakfast carts in the hallway broke through to her. During the night she hadn’t wakened, nor had she dreamed. It was as if someone had snipped a short piece out of the tape of Charlene Craft’s life. All she had cared about when she woke was that Tanya was still there, pale and thin, and that the beaded terror that seemed to grip her own face up in a fisted frenzy—a smile, not Bell’s palsy—was instantly back. By the start of this fourth day, Charlene knew she had mastered the fine art of smiling. And maybe the smile would never go away. Like little girls who are told their faces will freeze forever into frowns, she might find herself in the saddest of places still wearing that inappropriate mask. On the fourth day of Tanya’s hospitalization, on the day Charlene had always believed God had created the sun, and the moon, and the stars, that day, Charlene sat up on the cot in Tanya’s hospital room and looked at the clock. It was not quite seven. Davey would still be at home. Grandma Craft was probably cooking Christopher and James their breakfast. It was, after all, a school day and the boys were at the beginning of fresh, new lives, with all kinds of things still to learn about math, and verbs, and the history of countries they would never visit. Long lives, Charlene hoped. And when Tanya’s test results were conclusive, and tomorrow they would be, surely she would live to learn about the problems of long division, about fresh boys she would meet in the dating years, about the pains and joys of children she herself might bear. Davey answered. He was already up and about—Charlene could tell by his voice. It was drained of vitality, but it was wide awake.