The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  Sure enough, the next day when Foster come back from St. Leonard Point with supplies, he brung some news, too. The Germans had sunk more American ships. Thirty-seven men had drowned. “So now they’ll kill thousands to get even,” I said to Foster. But he didn’t say anything. Men are quicker to war than women. Women learned, a long time ago, to bite their tongues. But there it was. And it was only three weeks later that Foster come home with some bigger news. He’d seen a paper they was passing around in Mattagash, like it was a collection hat. So he copied down the headlines on a piece of cardboard and he brung it to show me. I took that cardboard in my hands and I saw them big words scrawled on it. U.S. DECLARES WAR ON GERMAN IMPERIAL STATE. I went right out to the front porch, slammed the door behind me. I sat down on the steps and pulled my knees up to my chin. No coat on or nothing, and it was a cold, cold day. If someone shouted out to me, I didn’t hear them. I just sat out there and knew, when there’s blood on the moon there’s trouble on earth. “I can kiss that boy good-bye,” I said. “President Wilson don’t know him from Adam, but his own mother can kiss him good-bye.” And that big front porch fell silent, like all the boards in it was sad. And the veranda, the one Foster and me built while Walter and Mary was little, seemed to sag more than it should. And the porch swing was so still and covered in snow. And I realized suddenly that if I ever heard another guitar strummed on that porch, in them long summer evenings, it wouldn’t be Walter strumming it.

  And the next day, Walter went right down to Mattagash, then on to Houlton, and he signed the papers to go. Then he come back to spend a few days with his family. At least he got that time to say good-bye. All kinds of folks come and gathered at the house. It was a big thing in them days to have our young men go so far away. None of us had a book with a map in it, or a globe of the world, something we could have stared at during them long winter nights. So folks come to say good-bye. Foster got out Grandpa Fennelson’s old handmade pung. He’d give it to Foster’s dad, for letting him stay on with them till he died. The neighbors come with their own sleighs, and we raced them in the moonlight. Can you imagine that? Sleighs full of people, harness bells screaming, folks singing out the old songs. And it was no secret that Foster and the other men dug down in them hidden places men know about and found a bottle of whiskey or two. And in among all that laughter, I kinda thought Walter might be safe after all. It was as if that crowd might save him. But every now and then, at the crest of some windy hill, while them bells carried their sound across the air, I’d find myself looking right up at that old moon. We shared a secret, the two of us. When there’s blood on the moon there’s trouble somewhere. Why only some folks can see them things, I never knew. But most people go through life with a veil over their eyes. It’s the rest of us who are forced to suffer the truth. Long after that big, safe crowd had gone, when there was only sleigh marks in the yard and dirty dishes in the kitchen, it come down on my head like a rock. That’s how hard the truth can hit you. And I looked over at his thick head of hair, all them yellow curls. I looked at them Irish eyes, so blue it was like the oceans of the world had poured into them. He was my firstborn, remember. “Ain’t nobody gonna save that boy,” I said to myself.

  The morning he left, I was big with carrying Morton, big and wobbly. But I wanted real bad to look pretty on that last day. I wanted him to remember me young, and I had been young once. So I got up an hour before sunup to try to look that way again. I turned the kerosene lamp up—ain’t that funny the things you remember?—I turned it up and then I got myself a jar of water and a comb. I put my hair up on the top of my head. I always kept my hair long, all my life, and I believe it still is. I made myself some tiny ringlets on the sides of my face and then I tried to powder myself with some old rouge my sister Laddie had give me. I was never good at fixing myself up with the store-bought things like some women. There was a time when I was pretty by nature. But I’d had eight babies by the time Walter went to war, and another on the way. So I took out that powdery rouge—it was all broken in little chunks—and I rubbed one of them chunks on my face a bit. I tried to wear the nicest dress I owned. It was a flowery blue and green one that Laddie had worn on the train trip she took to Bangor, when she went to visit her in-laws. She give it to me when she gained all that childbearing weight. “I’ll never lose back down enough to wear this dress again,” she said to me. And she was right. She never did. But I was too big with Morton to wear it myself. I couldn’t get my belly into it. It was like trying to put something big into a little sack. So I wore Foster’s Sunday shirt, left the bottom buttons undone. I didn’t care what Foster might say about it. I wanted to wear something nice. When I walked into the kitchen, Walter was already at the table. We was always the first two up, even when he was a little boy. “Mama, you’re beautiful,” he said. Bless his heart, he said it like it was true. I suppose he knew I’d done it for him. And it made me feel foolish right then, away from the dark shadows of the lamp, the sun coming up full and bright. There I stood in Foster’s shirt, with that big belly, with a face covered in rouge, with limp little ringlets trying hard to curl. I never did have a natural wave. So I turned my back to Walter, took some hen eggs from the basket, and put them in the sink. Eggs in the sink! I took down my mixing pan and broke them eggs in it, and that’s when I looked out at the barn. The sun was coming up all gold and yellow. “Sun’s coming to get the rooster,” I said to Walter. “Sun’s coming to get that old rooster for good this time.” That was a game we’d played when he was real small. “No sun can get little Walt,” he said. I hadn’t heard him say that in years! “The sun can get the rooster, but it can’t get me, Mama.” That was the second time I knew for sure he was gonna die. I turned right around and said, “Run, Walter. Run back into the woods and hide.” And I felt that baby kick me, and everything went around and around in my head. It was like life and death was happening all at the same time. One baby was going off to die and another was trying to get born. I got so dizzy Walter led me to a chair. He stroked my hand like I was something wild, a horse maybe. He calmed me down. “The sun ain’t gonna get little Walt,” he said to me.

  When I got that telegram, a year and a half later, I was almost pleased. A real telegram, addressed to me like I was someone important. Like someone out there in the wide world knew that I was on the planet. Then I remembered why anyone would want to send an fool like me a letter. I soon quit feeling important. I remember I’d been sick all that morning. I was carrying Casey at the time. Morton was already sixteen months old, and he was reaching up for the letter. I put it on the table and then wiped my hands on my apron a long, long time. Before I opened it, I remembered my kitchen as it was that morning Walt left. Time is like that, you know. You can reel it back anytime, you just can’t keep it. I thought about that pregnant old fool with red cheeks, wearing a man’s shirt, trying to hide a belly full of baby. “That’s how he must’ve remembered me,” I said to myself. “Just a fat old clown.” So I went ahead and read about how Walter had throwed himself on a grenade, over there on some hill in France, in the Argonne Forest, and that he saved a lot of men by doing so. It was one of our own bombs, and think of that, a British Mills grenade, taken by the enemy off one of our dead soldiers and throwed back at us. Life is like that, ain’t it? It’ll toss everything right back at you sooner or later. They give Walter a lot of nice medals, and the town of Mattagash, Maine, put up a nice plaque for him. He was our first soldier to die in a war.

  So this was something I wish I could have told Grace McKinnon on her deathbed. “Life throws everything back at you, like some bomb waiting to go off,” I would have told her. It’s an awful truth to realize, and yet I been punished with a hundred-plus years to think about it. I been given all this time to ponder clearly about love, and I come up with this thought. I loved two men in my life, dearly. One died in France, the other in China. Ain’t that funny how things can happen? And all them years, when folks would catch me peering way off in the distance, like I was lis
tening to the thunder, it weren’t no homey thoughts passing through my mind. I’d be thinking of Walter, all alone in that deep, black forest, with them two little sticks in his pocket he never got the chance to use. And then I’d get to wondering about Grace McKinnon’s dying face. “He must have told her,” I’d be thinking. “But why?” For three quarters of a century I been entertaining myself with the answer to that question, like it’s some kind of toy, some kind of top that just keeps spinning and spinning so I can’t ever read what’s written on it.

  I guess I’ll be taking the charm with me when I go, ’cause I never told nobody but Walter. But I’ll see Walt when I do die. And Mary. And them other children I barely remember. And Uncle Frank. And Ivy Craft. And poor, poor Jennie. And Martha’s little bleeder. And when I think about meeting up again with the Reverend Ralph McKinnon, with his strong hands and his cool, whispery voice, it makes the goose bumps raise on my arms and my breath catch up fast. I guess there is still the foolish notions of a young girl growing like moss inside this old fool’s body. But I would hope that all is forgiven up there. That Gracie’s little wrists will be good as new, with flowers growing around them for bracelets. And we’ll all have a real good laugh at earthly charms, and match-made crosses, and them loving Sunday sermons that never seemed to end.

  THE BOTTLE FAMILIES: HALT

  I never knew childhood, like the kids on TV

  So I held on to dreams, like a farm boy would do

  And I made the bottle, into my family

  But that’s no way to be, what’s a poor child to do?

  If I had the money, for the dues that I’ve paid

  Baby I’d have it made, I know just where I’d be

  I’d build me a castle, with tapestry walls

  And fill up the halls, with lost souls like me.

  —J. Lynn Glaser, “I’ve Been an Orphan”

  It had been a long time since Lynn Gifford had gone to so much trouble with her makeup, her hair, and the clothes she finally chose to wear. But then this was a special occasion. The Crossroads had been open for six months and Lynn had yet to investigate the premises herself. It was Pike’s stomping ground, a place where he and Billy convened like the members of a dysfunctional family reunion, and there was a tacit agreement floating about in the air that Lynn should never stop by without Pike’s permission. The few times Lynn and Pike ever went out socially were to Watertown, where wedding receptions were usually held, or to the Acadia Tavern. But change comes to all things, and The Crossroads was no exception. Lynn had heard news that Pike’s favorite bar would very likely be closed. Prissy Monihan, as Pike had often said, watched far too much 60 Minutes.

  It was five o’clock when Lynn called Pike’s cousin Beena Gifford Rodriguez. Beena had gone off to Florida, married, had two children, divorced, and was now back in Mattagash, not an easy place to survive as a single mother.

  “I’m like them damn salmon,” Beena said once to Lynn. “Except there ain’t anything worth swimming upstream for, not if you end up in Mattagash.”

  “So why are you back?” Lynn asked her, and Beena shrugged. Lynn had seen that shrug before, from Mattagashers who had left their well-paying jobs in Connecticut and trudged back home. A shrug. But it was a word, this shrug, in a secret Mattagash language, because everyone seemed to understand what it meant. Everyone seemed to nod in answer. The shrug said: Who knows why? I guess I must love it.

  “I ain’t got nothing better to do anyway,” Beena had said when Lynn asked if she’d go with her to The Crossroads. “Paulie ain’t so much as called me. Even his mother don’t know where he is. I guess money changes some people.”

  By the time Beena and Lynn drove over the crunchy snow in the Crossroads parking area, there were several cars gathered, Pike’s old Chevy and Billy’s Dodge Ram among them. Maurice had a respectable crowd for a weeknight.

  “He’s here,” Lynn said, and nodded toward Pike’s clunker. They sat there for a few minutes, the car still running, the old heater working hard to fend off the cold, and stared up at the big wooden sign as it rocked gently in the river wind.

  “You sure you wanna go in?” Beena asked. Lynn scraped a fingernail against the glass of her window and thought about it.

  “I got to,” she said. “Conrad’s going bat shit. He ain’t ever missed a day of school in his life except when he had the measles in the first grade, but now I can’t even get him out of bed in the morning. I’m real worried about him, Beena. You know how he’s different from other kids. He takes things real serious. Saving up that money all these years meant a lot to him. Kind of like a security blanket, I guess. If it was Reed, I wouldn’t worry too much. But it’s Conny, and besides, I promised him I’d get his money back.”

  “Pike’s gonna be mad,” Beena said. She turned the ignition off and the car, borrowed from her mother, settled down on its tires to wait for the real cold to hit. “Just be prepared.”

  “Even in my sleep,” Lynn said, “I been prepared.” She pulled on her woolen gloves, shouldered the strap of her raggedy cloth purse, and opened the car door. Beena followed, their boots scuffing the well-packed snow.

  It was Ronny Plunkett who saw the women first, his face filling up with a quick rush of unexpected excitement, that old Nam jungle rush, when you could hear the enemy breathing but you couldn’t see the little son of a bitch.

  “Bogey at six o’clock,” Ronny whispered to Pike and Billy. Billy had been in the midst of badgering Maurice for some of the establishment quarters with the black X on them.

  “You get them back, Maurice darling,” Billy said. “It ain’t like you’re paying me alimony.”

  “You just wanna play that damn ex-wife song,” Maurice complained. “And I can’t, I tell you I can’t stand to hear it one more time.”

  “Bogey at six o’clock, Piko!” said Ronny again, urgency now lacing his words, and it all suddenly registered with Pike. A problem somewhere on the clock, somewhere in time, and he struggled with his reasoning mechanisms. His mind raced around the invisible face of his old alarm clock back at the house. Six o’clock was directly behind him, at the door to The Crossroads. He spun around on his stool and met Lynn’s gaze, over the heads of the two couples dancing on Maurice’s small floor. For a moment it was almost exciting, the way it was all those years ago when he and Lynn were dating. Walking into the Acadia Tavern in Watertown on a Saturday night, wondering if she’d be there again with her girlfriends, supposing she just might come home with him if she was. It was all a part of that wonderful mating ritual, the sparks of which had slowly gone out with babies being born, with bills accumulating, with time passing. Lynn at six o’clock, as if she were halfway through her life, or his life, maybe. Pike nodded his head at her and hoped it was imperceptible to his comrades at the bar. He mustn’t look too agreeable, but still, what in hell was she doing there?

  “Seems to me this would be a fine time to play ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas,’” said Billy, and Maurice handed him a marked quarter. “Unless there happens to be a funeral march on there somewhere,” Billy added, and kicked the rung of Pike’s stool. Pike rounded up a weak smile. He saw Lynn dodge the dancers and head directly for him, Beena at her heels. He had always liked his cousin Beena. Why was she down here offering Lynn support? What had happened to all that blood-is-thicker-than-water shit? But Pike supposed that being female was the thickest blood of all.

  “Somebody call a priest,” Ronny said loudly. “This man’s a Catholic.” Pike wanted to smile at this, but couldn’t. What was so important that Lynn couldn’t have waited until he decided to go home again? True, he had been gone for three days, ever since he borrowed the money from Conrad. But he intended to go home that very night, assuming the smoke of battle would have cleared. Apparently not, judging by Lynn’s face.

  “Hey,” Pike said to Lynn. She had stopped before him, her hands in her jacket pockets, her eyes unsmiling. “What you
doing here?”

  “It’s a free country, asshole,” Beena said over Lynn’s shoulder, and this saddened Pike. When blood doesn’t run thicker than water, it really flows.

  “You want a beer?” Pike asked. He shot Lynn one of his fast little smiles, the kind she had singled out years ago as the building block of his charm. “How about it, girls?” Pike said. He hoped Billy was done selecting his two usual songs and was taking note. Pike felt downright cocky, and to think that just moments ago, he was distressed that his name was now on the cribbage skunk list six times. “Give the ladies a beer on me, Maurice.” Pike motioned with a gallant sweep of his arm.

  “Don’t you mean them beers would be on Conrad?” Lynn asked. Pike’s smile went away, fast as light, and in its place came the scowl Lynn knew so well. But she was ready for it. “How much of that money you got left?”