“You ain’t watching that out-of-space nonsense, are you?” Winnie asked Sicily, who was now wearing her sweater.
“No,” said Sicily. “I just had visitors. The earthly kind.”
“Did you?” said Winnie. “Ain’t that nice? Who was they?”
“Relatives,” said Sicily.
“Has Amy Joy come yet?” Winnie asked. “If she doesn’t do what you said she was gonna do by tomorrow night, you owe me twenty dollars.” Winnie fitted a white Tic Tac onto her tongue and then reeled it into her mouth.
“If I owe you twenty dollars, Winnie Craft,” said Sicily, “you’ll get your twenty dollars. In all the years you’ve known me, have you ever known me not to pay my debts?” Amy Joy was right. Winnie could be a handful. Sicily had only been at Pine Valley a week and Winnie was beginning to bob and chafe upon her nerves.
“Well,” said Winnie. She hesitated. Best not, she decided, list several gin rummy debts Sicily had allowed to lie delinquent over the years of their friendship.
“If it turns out I owe you money by tomorrow night, you’ll get it,” Sicily said.
“No need to get mad,” Winnie said. She had forgotten, in her year’s stay at the home, how her old friend Sicily could annoy. “You was the one who wanted to bet. You was the one who said Amy Joy would be begging you to come home. You was the one who said she could only stand to live with herself for a week before she’d go crazy. And you said you’d take me with you when she does come after you. It don’t matter to me if I win or not.” Winnie was now clearly hurt. “All I was trying to do is tell you I know daughters better than you do. Who would’ve ever thought Lola would’ve stuck me in here like I was some kind of hobo?”
“I would’ve,” Sicily thought. Winnie was lucky Lola hadn’t put her in years ago, while Lola was still in the fourth or fifth grade.
“But here I am,” Winnie continued, her voice trembly. “Living proof of what can happen.”
“Shhh!” one of the movie watchers in the lounge, a woman with a stern white pug atop her head, warned Winnie. Winnie didn’t know her well. She was from St. Leonard. “I’m try to watch dat movie, me,” the woman said, and pointed at the television.
“Instead, I’m living with Frogs against my will,” Winnie sobbed.
“There now,” said Sicily, and squeezed Winnie’s wrinkly hand. “I told you we’d both be out of here by Thanksgiving, and I meant it.” Winnie stopped weeping instantly.
“Really?” she asked. Sicily handed her a barely used tissue.
“Well, there’s definitely a cog in the machine now,” Sicily said, remembering Miranda’s defiant eyes, Pearl’s eyes. “Amy Joy has company and that’s sure to keep her mind on the wrong things.”
“You don’ want to watch dat picture,” the pug lady said loudly, “you go to your room, you.”
“They all get killed in the end,” Sicily shouted back. “That spaceship crashes into the Statue of Liberty.”
“Come on,” said Winnie. “Let the Frogs have the swamp.” She took Sicily’s arm up in hers and they left the TV lounge behind them, two old women rocking against each other.
“What if your plan backfires?” Winnie whispered. “What if Amy Joy finds out she can live alone? What if she won’t let me come live with you? What if she don’t ever beg you to come back home?”
“In that case,” Sicily said to her dearest friend, “I’m gonna be really pissed off.”
STOPPING THE BLOOD: HANDS OVER HEARTS
“Why does the minister keep a hand over his heart?”
—Pearl, to her mother, Hester Prynne, in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Just between you, me, and the bedpost, I never cared very much for religion. But I believed in God, so every Sunday I dressed my children just as good as anybody else’s and then I took them to church. This was providing the weather was good enough that Reverend Ralph McKinnon, my first cousin, could make it himself. Nowadays folks around here grumble if they have to drive to church in a fancy car on a sunny day. God ain’t changed, but people has. People around here has changed a whole lot. But back then we walked two and a half miles one way just to worship. We made quite a little parade as we went. It started with Foster carrying Walter, when he was all we had, and church was in a little log cabin. Then Walter walked and Foster carried Mary. By the time most of the family had come, before the war, we had a pattern to it, though we was lacking Mary by then. We looked like birds going south, like a great big V going to church. And on them days when the wind was gusting, we did break the way for the little ones. Like the birds do. They say birds can fly farther when they fly that way. You learn things from Mother Nature when you live in the heart of her. You got to survive, and nature can teach you how. One way she helped out was with flies. If you cut yourself, it ain’t a bad idea, if you can’t get to a doctor for a few days, to let flies light in the wound and lay some eggs. When the eggs become maggots, they eat up all the dead, rotten flesh. That’s what they like best. They’ll eat a wound nice and clean. You just got to abide the tickle of the maggots and the idea of them on your leg. That way your relatives won’t be visiting the graveyard on your account.
Nature can give you powers, too, just like you’re some kind of witch. There’s some folks who can stop your blood if you need them to. There’s a charm to doing it. It runs in families, but men got to pass it on to women and women to men, or it won’t work. No one could stop blood like Uncle Frank. He was a great uncle to me. He could stop blood like he invented it. Men working way back in the woods felt a little safer if Uncle Frank was at the same lumber camp. They had a better chance of making it if they got an ax in the foot or the calf of a leg. And when Uncle Frank stopped their blood, it was like he’d hit them over the head with a hammer. Their knees would buckle and down they’d go, that’s how fast that blood would stop! I’ve seen it. I’ve seen men and women knocked out of the chairs they was sitting in. And the doctor we had down at St. Leonard in them days laughed about all this. He said it was in a person’s mind, is all. That they do that to themselves, and that it has nothing to do with Uncle Frank. But we was the ones who laughed at that doctor. It must’ve been in old Nellie’s mind then, I said to Foster. And there she was, a horse!
I recall the day Nellie was twitching a log behind our house, dragging it up the slope there. Foster had cut some cedar to make the front porch, so I put Walter and Mary to sleep in the wagon and come to help him. That’s when Nellie fell and drove a pointy sapling into her side. Well, blood come out of that little hole like she was a faucet! Foster went as fast as he could for Uncle Frank. Uncle begun right away working something in his hands that you couldn’t see. He’d never let you see. That was part of the charm. Then he started saying some words to hisself, saying the charm words. When that blood stopped, it was like the little Dutch boy had stuck his thumb in that horse’s side. Nellie’s front legs wrinkled up like they was cardboard. She went down—plop!—and she didn’t get up till an hour later. Foster and I put tar pitch onto the hole to seal it and Nellie was back at work the next day. So don’t let a doctor try to talk you out of what you know to be true. That blood stopping sure wasn’t all in Nellie’s head. I’ll tell you something else, too. Folks couldn’t stick a pig if Uncle Frank was leaning on a fence watching them. The pig just wouldn’t bleed.
Uncle Frank finally taught me the charm before he died. “My dance is almost up,” he said. And he give me the charm, sort of like a good-bye gift. For it to work, you need two sticks or such to make a cross. Uncle Frank used to carry matchsticks, but you can pick up twigs if you need to. And then you make a cross out of them. By the time he showed me the secret, his hands was so old they shook. But I can’t tell the rest of the charm. It’d ruin it if I did. I can only pass it on to a male in my family, and I don’t even know if there’s any males left alive. Nor do I care. But them charm words are between Uncle Frank and me. And Walter. I told it
to him before he went off to war in France. But I will tell you this. When God intends for blood to run, it will run. And then there’s no stopping it. Take Martha Craft’s little boy. He was born a bleeder, and when he started bleeding that last time, there wasn’t enough crosses from here to China to stop him. And I guess Walter’s wound over in France was too big to plug up with charms.
When you know the blood charm, you’re cursed with seeing things most folks don’t ever see. All the important days in my life has had to do with blood, it seems, now that I think back to them. There was the blood of my children being born, my children dying, of folks I saved with the charm. But I’ll never forget the day I decided to give up the blood charm for good. That was the day one of the McKinnons come after me to stop blood. Keep in mind, the McKinnons—and I say this being descended from them—thought God made the world in six days and on the seventh he asked if they’d like him to change anything. But one day Marge McKinnon, my second cousin, come running up the steps to my front porch, banging on my door. That was toward the first of April in 1913, another spring that stands out in my life, and I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was the earliest spring ever recorded in these parts. The ice broke up in the river and run itself out by the time April 1st come. And little limp flowers, the first flowers of spring, had begun to poke up about the roadsides. In all my days I never saw such an early spring in northern Maine. You’d have swore it was the middle of May. Porter Craft had poled Marge that seven miles upriver by canoe, to the mouth of Mattagash Brook. She was all in a tizzy. Keep in mind she was only about twelve and her mother was bleeding to death. I tell you Grace McKinnon was one of the kindest, softest souls ever to tread this earth. So I tore off my apron and yelled for Ester to watch the littler kids. It was a half mile, maybe more, down to the river where the canoe was waiting. I run all the way. You can do things like that when you’re scared. I could still smell the snow laying quiet in the woods. Spring cress had sprung up along the road, and I remember thinking how I’d rather be laying on my back in that cress, looking straight up at them April clouds. They was slow moving across the sky that day, like big puffy horses. And I could hear a crow calling out from his watch, warning his flock. There’s a woman coming on the run, that’s probably what he told them. Here comes a woman and a girl and something’s up. And all the time I’m running, I’m thinking. My thoughts are running with me, down that road to the river. I was wondering just what God was up to. That’s what I was thinking. My feet was hitting the ground and my mind was saying Please God each time they did.
The truth is that Grace McKinnon didn’t deserve to have me stop her blood. I only met her a few times in my life. Folks was always so busy back then, and there we were, all them miles from Mattagash settlement, up there at Mattagash Brook. But I read her through and through the few times I met her. She was a very good woman. I said before that God takes the special people home right away. That’s why Mary and Walter and folks like them is long gone. That’s why I’m living enough time for two lives. This is my sin. But I wasn’t the only woman who lay down with the Reverend Ralph McKinnon. I may not even be the last. There’s a good chance he’s now laying down with angels. He could talk you out of your soul. He could use the Bible to turn your head. He could strike just when you’ve lost a child, and I had just lost Mary. And here’s something else. I’d do every heavenly bit of it again. He was my first cousin. You tell that to most folks nowadays and they’ll cover their ears. But in my time it weren’t at all unusual for first cousins to marry and have big healthy families. What ain’t healthy is that Ralph McKinnon had one family and I had another. What ain’t healthy is that Ralph McKinnon was a minister, and he preached a strong sermon every Sunday, which always mentioned sinfulness. What ain’t healthy is that after Mary died, and I knew what it was like to lie down in bed with a man I loved, I went to church mainly to see him. I hardly ever went to see God in them days. I pulled my kids out of bed on some of the rainiest Sundays ever to fall on Maine. We had no church in the winter, those of us from Mattagash Brook. It was too far away. But in the blessed summer, when the elms rattled their silvery leaves, in them wonderful summers, years of them, I knew a little bit of what it feels like to love. That’s when Ralph McKinnon come by the house after church, after being so kind as to hitch a pung up to a horse and come preach a sermon in the wilderness. And Foster was—how can I remember where Foster was, all them times? Even then I didn’t much care.
So this is what I’m thinking, all the time I’m running through the woods with little Marge McKinnon, his daughter. I’m thinking this ain’t the way it should be. There should be someone else in Mattagash, Maine, knows how to stop blood. But Uncle Frank was long dead, and I was on my own. When Porter Craft brought the canoe to shore, just behind the McKinnon house, I saw Reverend Ralph standing on the bank. He was whittling. He could shape the most beautiful crosses out of wood that you ever saw. I climbed that hill, him standing on the top of it like he was a cross himself, and I went past him and into the house. The curtains in the bedroom was all drawed up, the windows shut tight. I could barely see to move, so I pulled the curtains back in one window and then opened it. You could almost see the stench of death waft its way out. I looked at the woman in the bed. “Gracie,” I said to her. “It’s Mathilda Fennelson. I’m here to help you.” And then I put my hand on the bed, just rested it there. She’d had a baby, she’d had Sicily three weeks earlier, so I figured some of the afterbirth had stayed in her and was causing her to hemorrhage. “I’m gonna help you,” I said again to her. “I’m gonna stop your blood.” And she smiled, the sweetest, weakest smile I ever saw. I brought my hand away, so I could reach into my apron pocket for the two little sticks I always carried with me, and that’s when I saw the blood. My hand was wet and sticky with it. And it was a different color blood than afterbirth blood. I lifted the blankets and saw a bed full of it, Grace’s blood. And it didn’t seem to be coming from her womb at all. There was no blood on her there. And she said, “You can’t stop this kind of blood, Tildy Fennelson. This is a blood has a right to run.”
That was when I saw her wrists, cut, the way you take a plum and slice into the red of it. Someone had put bandages around them little wrists, had tried to close them off. It had taken a lot of time, the coming to get me, the coming back. She’d bled an awful lot by then. But I’ll tell you one thing. I wouldn’t have used my charm even if I’d been there the second she did it. I can’t tell you the charm words, but I will tell you this. Them words you use is the words to a prayer. And that wasn’t a place for prayers, even though it was a minister’s house. It wouldn’t have worked a whit anyway. You can’t bring God into a room where the Devil’s been. And for a sweet young woman like her to take her own life, there must have been a devil in her room. There must have been a devil in her life. And I knew who it was. I’d seen the Devil standing on a hill, whittling his cares away, making another cross for someone to bear. “Who put them bandages on your wrists?” I asked her. I’d put my little sticks away and I’d started tearing up the top sheet into strips. “Margie,” she said in the tiniest whisper. It was that twelve-year-old child who did the wrapping, who did the journey to fetch me. All this while Nero fiddled. I circled her wrists back up in clean, tight strips, and while I was wrapping she said, “Tell me something, Mathilda,” and I said, “I’ll tell you what little I can, Grace. What is it you want to know?” I expected she wanted to talk about death, you know, like Ivy Craft did, back when we was kids. But she lifted herself on her elbows, that little smile always right there in the same place, and she said, “How many of your children did he father?” If she had raised up them bloody wrists to slap me, I wouldn’t have been more shocked. That’s the gospel truth. To this day I don’t know how she knew. I never heard a word of gossip about it, all them years I lived in that little town. And not one of my kids come home crying from school ’cause another kid had said something cruel about me. All I can figure is she
knew because he told her. But no matter, I found I couldn’t lie to that dying woman. “Four of them,” I said, and I kept on wrapping that last wrist of hers. “Garvin, William, Winnie, and Percy,” I said, and it was the truth. I knew my times of month, and I knew who I was with during them. Then I dipped a cloth in the washbasin and put it on her forehead. I loosed up her nightclothes. All that while them two little sticks was bobbing and clinking in my apron pocket. Would the charm have saved her if I’d give it a try? Your guess is as good as mine. She was a woman who wanted to die, there was no doubt in my mind of that. And sometimes I wonder if three of them children, three of them four tainted children, might have lived long lives if they’d knowed they weren’t born with the Fennelson curse. Them notions can prey on your mind, you know. There was other notions preying on mine. I never lifted my eyes again to look at Ralph McKinnon after that sad, bloody day in his wife’s bedroom. A decade later, he went off to China and died there.
And I never told them kids that Ralph McKinnon was their father. When Percy started looking at Sicily McKinnon like he might want to marry her, I knew I’d have to say something. But Percy went through the ice when he was only nineteen and drowned. God must have been keeping a close eye on the family genealogy. And Winnie never knew, in all the years she felt she wasn’t as good as Sicily McKinnon, that Sicily was her half sister. It wouldn’t have benefited her one bit to know that. It would have benefited Sicily even less. Some folks around here thought Reverend Ralph was a god. And I’ll tell you something else. Not all of the women who knew that man as I did owned up to their youngsters when them kids growed up and started marrying. The sins of their fathers was never so true as it is in Mattagash, Maine.
I wish I’d have knowed right then, so I could have told Grace McKinnon, that I would be punished for my sins. That I would watch most of my children die off, one by one, before my very eyes. That’s what happened too. When you know the blood charm, it makes you a lot more watchful. You begin to see things other folks miss. Blood on the moon is a real bad sign, when you know how to look for it. I remember clearly the night the moon spoke loudest to me, a night early in March 1917. I’d woke up because of a coyote way off, howling its heart out. It was probably chasing a bobcat, or a lynx. I could hear the old dog whining on the porch, scared, scratching to get let in. When I got up to tend to it, I stepped out on the porch just a second to listen. That’s when I saw the moon. I tell you, in all my days I’ve yet to see another ring like that. It was a big, big ring around the moon, all violet and yellow on the outside but scarlet on the inside. Scarlet like blood. Now, I’ve seen northern lights bright enough to scare a southerner. But that ring I saw, that cold night out on my porch, was not of this earth. It was red as blood. Blood around the moon. And I knew there was more than a spring storm coming. I knew a powdering of snow wasn’t what that moon had in mind. And I knew I was cursed by being able to see it all aforehand.
The Weight of Winter Page 32
