“How’d you find out?” he asked.
“Your mother called,” Charlene said. But she didn’t tell him about the talk she and Selma Craft had had just hours ago. She didn’t tell him how much she had ached to ask Selma now, “Wouldn’t you say this is a big thing, old fool? Wouldn’t you say a big thing has happened in this goddamn little town?”
LIFE AS A MAID: THE JAWS OF MATTAGASH
I thought, my love, that I should overtake you.
Sweet heart, sit down under this shadowed tree,
And I will promise never to forsake you,
So you will grant to me a lover’s fee.
Whereat she smiled, and kindly to me said,
“I never meant to live and die a maid.”
—from John Ward’s First Set of English Madrigals, 1613
Amy Joy pulled Sicily’s dinner roll apart and then buttered one half. Sicily had been toying with her peas, pushing them deep into the mashed potatoes and burying them there. Now the potatoes were polka-dotted, green and white. Amy Joy tried not to look at them.
“How’s Winnie?” she asked, ignoring the fact that Sicily had picked up the unbuttered piece of roll, leaving its counterpart to sit idly by her plate.
“Too much butter,” said Sicily. “Of course, if you fill me full of cholesterol, you’ll get rid of me a lot sooner.”
“Now don’t talk silly,” said Amy Joy.
“Winnie says that Lola sends her all kinds of candy and cakes in hope that she’ll die of a sugar high,” Sicily went on, and then took a bite of the polka-dot potatoes. “Winnie says that’s because Lola thinks she’s in her will. But she ain’t. The other day Winnie got out a copy of her will and scratched Lola’s name off it. She tore a hole in the paper she erased so hard.”
“Winnie needs to call her lawyer if she wants to change her will,” said Amy Joy. “He must have a copy. That’s the one needs to be changed.” Then she felt a bit embarrassed to admit how pleased she would be to see Lola miss out on even a tiny windfall. “But don’t worry. Winnie will die when she’s ready, not from too much sugar.”
“That’s not how Winnie sees it,” said Sicily.
“How’s her mother?” asked Amy Joy. “How’s old Mathilda?”
“The Women’s Auxiliary can’t give her a plaque, after all,” said Sicily. “The doctor won’t let them take her out of here. He says she’s ready to go any minute.”
“And what does Winnie say to that?”
“Winnie says it’s about time,” said Sicily. “I mean, with Mathilda being so old, Winnie says she’s been expecting it for twenty-some years now.”
“I suppose so,” said Amy Joy. She was hoping the talk would take an exit down some more positive road.
“Still,” said Sicily.
“Still what?”
“I wonder if you’re ever really ready to lose a mother.” She threw her roll back onto her plate, one bite missing. “After all,” she said, “each person has only one.” She pretended to look off, past Amy Joy, out the snowy window. Amy Joy had seen this look too many times to mistake it for pensiveness. She pushed the banana pudding closer to Sicily’s plate, but Sicily scooted it off the tray. It bounced onto the table with a quick little thud.
“Winnie says they use old bananas for that,” Sicily explained.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Amy Joy. “It’s probably prepackaged.”
“Who wants to eat prepackaged pudding?”
“You loved instant pudding when you were at home,” Amy Joy reminded her.
“Things taste different when a person’s home,” said Sicily.
Winnie appeared at the door, her walk a bit bouncier, or so it seemed to Amy Joy. “I suppose if they did have the funerals instead of putting them in the morgue, they’d probably have closed caskets,” said Winnie. The shootings at Pike Gifford’s house, two days earlier, was still the talk of Mattagash, a solid wave of what-ifs, hows, and whys sweeping the town. “There ain’t been a closed casket around here since that tractor rolled over my brother Casey,” Winnie added.
“It wasn’t a tractor,” said Sicily. “It was a skidder.”
“You gonna eat that?” Winnie asked, pointing at the banana pudding. Amy Joy looked quickly at Sicily. Winnie says they use old bananas for that.
“Go ahead and eat it,” said Amy Joy, and pushed the bowl in Winnie’s direction. “Mama was just saying a few minutes ago how banana pudding didn’t agree with her.”
“If you ask me, she could’ve stopped it,” said Winnie. She was referring to Lynn Gifford. “Some folks are saying now that she was abused too. I tell you, people get away with all kinds of stuff these days, things we never would’ve gotten away with in my generation. And they go on talk shows and they blame everything on liquor, or them drugs they take. They blame it on the television set and the radio. They even blame stuff on their poor old mothers.” She took a big yellow bite of the pudding.
“What a way for children to have to live,” Sicily said quietly, and for once Amy Joy agreed with her.
“I feel sorry for Pike, too,” said Amy Joy.
“What!” Sicily exclaimed.
“You can’t mean that,” said Winnie.
“I do,” said Amy Joy. “I remember how lost he seemed after Goldie went off to Connecticut with the other kids.”
“He wouldn’t go,” Winnie argued. “She couldn’t get him to go, and she tried everything. Bought him all kinds of clothes. Promised him stuff. He was too much like his father, that was his problem.” Amy Joy thought about this. Who should a little boy be like? Who would he most likely grow up to become? If given the chance, would Conrad have gone on to be Pike?
“I remember how some of the girls like Wilma Fennelson and Dorrie made fun of him,” Amy Joy said, leaving Lola’s name off the list for Winnie’s sake, although Lola should have headlined. “They made fun of his clothes, his hair, the house he lived in. All through school, they never let up on him.”
“You can’t feel sorry for people like that,” said Winnie.
“You might save me a bite of that pudding,” said Sicily.
“You give people like that a foot and they take a yard,” Winnie cautioned. Amy Joy looked down at the laces on her boots, tied into bows, knotted like tongues. Once, while she had been picking blueberries by Albert’s motel, Amy Joy had seen Pike—Little Pee he was called then—coming along the road with an alder fishing pole. Behind him, skipping along like cherubs, was a string of Mattagash maids, all in a row; a Craft, a Fennelson, a Hart, a Monihan.
“A grown man picking on a little boy,” said Sicily. “It’s too darn bad he didn’t get shot instead, like he was supposed to.” Pike wasn’t much more than six or seven years old, Amy Joy remembered. A little boy with a fishing pole, on his way home—one of those Norman Rockwell paintings—trudging along the road. Behind him came the girls, skipping to the Baptist church, the girls on their way to God.
“All he’s ever done in his life,” said Winnie, “is drink and chase women and steal and lie. And that Billy Plunkett, rest his soul, wasn’t much better.” The girls, descendants of the old settlers, had surrounded Pike, had tugged his pole away from him, pulled at his hair, tied his shoelaces up so that he couldn’t run.
“And he won’t pay the price of any of this,” said Sicily. “He’s gonna go scot-free. What can they arrest him for?”
“They ought to put both him and her in jail,” said Winnie. “I’ll say it again. She’s as much to blame for this as he is.”
“We’re all to blame,” Amy Joy said. She was thinking of the look of terror she had seen on Little Pee’s face, that blueberry-picking day all those years ago. They had broken his fishing pole, pulled his hair, tied his laces, rubbed grass in his face, and Amy Joy had only watched them. She had wanted to cry out, as Pike had done, for them to stop, but there was something on their faces
, something flushed and breathless and sensual, that enabled them to move apart from the real world, to operate outside its human principles. They were protected, not Pike, not Amy Joy. This was what she remembered, and now she wondered if Pike remembered it too—that look on their faces, that privilege they shared, that secret. They might have been pilgrims on some long and zealous crusade to the Holy Land. They might even have been men on the dusty road to war. But they weren’t. They were little girls, virgins, on the road to God.
“I hope they take them other children away from her,” said Winnie. “No wonder them kids turn out like they do.”
“Yes,” said Amy Joy. This time Winnie was right. “It is no wonder.” She had helped Pike up from the ditch, tried to untie the laces for him, but he had pushed her hands away. Instead, he took his shoes off and slung them over his shoulder, picked up the broken fishing pole, and went off down the road, past the tiny white Baptist church where the sermon was just starting. Behind him, half-hidden in the grass of the ditch, lay a fistful of shiny dark hair, a wave running through it like a quick shiver. Amy Joy had picked it up. It was like holding the sad remnant of some animal that has been caught in a trap. The jaws of Mattagash are firm and merciless.
“But I sure can’t feel sorry for Pike Gifford,” said Winnie, “and I don’t see how you can.” She threw the second half of the sentence at Amy Joy.
“Not to change the subject or anything,” Sicily interrupted. For years now, she had believed it was her job to keep Winnie and Amy Joy from falling face-first into an argument. “But who is the Women’s Auxiliary gonna give a plaque to?”
“They’ll find somebody,” said Amy Joy. If the Women’s Auxiliary had already bought a plaque, they would give it to someone.
“It only takes the trophy shop in Madawaska a few minutes to inscribe a name on it,” said Sicily. “They still got some time to decide.”
“That peaked-faced girl of Rose Monihan’s is in charge of it,” said Winnie. “If it was up to me, I’d take that responsibility away from her. I don’t think she’s up to it, so close to her hysterectomy.”
“That’s made with old bananas,” Sicily said as Winnie finished up the yellow pudding.
***
Amy Joy was thankful that Miranda was upstairs napping, in Pearl’s old bedroom with the lilac-flowered wallpaper, when she saw Bobby Fennelson standing outside on the steps. But it was early afternoon. Why in the world was he not out with his crew, on the wooded section of P. G. Irvine land he had contracted to cut? Why hadn’t he telephoned to warn her? Now his truck was sitting in the broad sun of daytime, out in the telltale yard for everyone to see! She opened the door quickly and whisked him inside.
“What is it?” she asked. There was frost in his mustache, little beads of frozen perspiration.
“Christ, it’s cold out there,” he said. He pounded his gloves together, stomped his feet a bit on the rug by the kitchen door.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” Amy Joy offered, and hurried to the sink. “A hot cup of tea, or maybe hot chocolate, will warm you up. Does that sound good? I’ve got a guest with me now. My cousin Junior Ivy’s granddaughter. She’s a little firecracker on the surface, with lots of tough talk, but underneath she’s really just a young, smart little girl. It’s almost as though I’ve got Aunt Pearl back again. She wants to be an artist. You should see the things she can draw with just a piece of paper and a felt pen.”
“We need to talk,” Bobby said, and Amy Joy felt her panic escalate. There was something in his eyes, in those dark Fennelson eyes, that frightened her.
“The stuff that’s been happening in this little town lately!” she exclaimed. “The funerals are tomorrow. I guess it’s more like a service. They won’t be buried until spring really, with the ground frozen and all. Are you going to the service? I tried to call you the minute I heard about it, but your phone was busy. It seems like your phone is either busy these days or there’s no answer.” He had been talking to Eileen, hadn’t he?—all those times she’d gotten the busy signal, blaring in her ear like a warning call, a siren.
“Amy Joy.”
“Can you imagine all that happening? Poor little Conrad. He used to shovel my roof, you know. And in the summer he mowed the lawn for me. I could’ve done it myself, but he was such a nice boy, and he seemed to appreciate getting paid. And he was always so polite, not like some of the kids these days. He reminded me a lot of Reginald Monihan. He was a little go-getter. I think his mother is the reason for that. I think Lynn has been through a lot, and now, with this, who knows how she’s gonna make out. I called her up and asked her if I could help in any way. She used to clean house for me twice a month. I could have done it myself, but—” Amy Joy’s hands fluttered about the teakettle. It took her forever to plug it into the wall. “What does this remind me of?” she asked herself. Then she remembered. This was Sicily. This was the prattle of the cornered beast. This was Sicily talking fast and hard and long, so that reality could not get a word in, so that reality would flounder somewhere in silence. This was Sicily. She pulled the kettle plug out of the socket and turned to face Bobby.
“What?” she said. It occurred to her—seconds before he said anything about Eileen, or the kids, or even Arizona, warm, sweet, level Arizona—that she had always hated mustaches.
***
Amy Joy lay awake, beneath the extra blanket, and stared at the picture at the foot of her bed, one of Jesus holding a woolly lamb. She had hated it for years until she came to know it, until Pearl told her of the many hours Grace McKinnon had spent painting it. “She was always painting something,” Pearl had said. “I was not quite five years old when she died, but I can still hear the lapping of her brush, that little tune she’d be humming as she worked.” Now, instead of hating it, Amy Joy saw the painting as a kind of tapestry of Grace McKinnon’s life, a piecing together of seconds and minutes and years into yellows and greens and blues. Sometimes, Amy Joy knew, people don’t even have paint-by-number pictures to show for their lives. Sometimes there wasn’t a single solid piece of evidence to prove that a person had been there on the planet, loving, hating, laughing, crying, dying.
Amy Joy wondered what she would leave behind besides books of pressed wildflowers and red maple leaves. What had Conrad left? Billy Plunkett? What would be the statement of their lives? And Bobby Fennelson? She supposed that, for some people, their children remained behind, like pictures and books and wildflowers. For some people, that was the answer. And Bobby would leave new trails, in the deserty places of Arizona. She had always wanted to see the desert, long before Bobby Fennelson had cut her the firewood that soft, sweet autumn, just two months earlier, and had spent his weekend splitting it into blocks for her. He had been gone for years in the army, a lifer like Ronny Plunkett, and had returned just that spring to Mattagash. He had seen firsthand a lot of the places in the world that Amy Joy had dreamed of seeing one day.
“Paris,” Bobby told her, “is like the inside of a crazy pinball machine, all cars whizzing and horns tooting and lights flashing.” And she had seen it, just as he described, she had seen the twelve magnificent avenues spoking out from the Arc de Triomphe, had listened as the traffic spun around it like a flashing wheel. “Paris,” he said, “is little cafés where you can sit outside and order all kinds of wines you can’t pronounce.” And she had seen the cafés then, just as they were in her big art book. She had imagined Paris as a city of little shops, and dancing girls, and cherry blossoms, with huge red sunsets eating up the waters of the Seine.
Amy Joy lay awake and listened to the mouselike noises coming from Pearl’s old bedroom. Miranda was up late working on a painting, from a photo she’d found in the McKinnon family scrapbook.
“I didn’t even know that a name like McKinnon was in my family tree,” she had said to Amy Joy. In her hands was a photo of Grace McKinnon, a silhouette really, the camera capturing more shadow than flesh. But it was
a striking shot, with Grace slim and petite, a wide-brimmed hat covering one eye. Behind her, swimming for the camera, was a swarm of hollyhocks, the flowers in different shades of black and white. Hollyhocks, like the wide forehead and long aquiline nose, had been part of the McKinnon heritage. Grace was standing behind the old homestead, on the spot where Amy Joy now had a lilac bush, and she was looking downriver. She was looking in the direction of the sea from landlocked Maine, one hand shading her eyes, as if she remembered something from there, from the old country, the way eels remember. Miranda loved the picture. “She’s flirting with the river,” she said to Amy Joy. “I’ve started a painting of her. You’ll see, in a few days she’ll be alive again.”
Having Miranda in the house for just a short time had been like rewiring the old homestead, taking it from the dark flickering of candlelight, or the soft hissing of gas, to the quick, bright flash of electricity. It was alive, the way it must have been when the visiting missionaries came, with their haughty tales of taking a foreign religion into a land where it didn’t belong. The old house was living, breathing again, exhaling smoke from its chimney, settling down on its haunches for another Mattagash winter. The old house was a kind of shell, Amy Joy realized now, a hard outer skin for the soft flesh inside. How could she have entertained the notion of selling it? With the house wrapped firmly about her, the Chester Giffords, the Reginald Monihans, the Jean Claude Cloutiers, the Bobby Fennelsons could come and go, like billowy ghosts passing through wind chimes. Sometimes, Amy Joy knew, people are glued to the pages of their heritage. Sometimes people are married to houses. With Miranda’s scratching noises filling the old homestead with a soft litany, Amy Joy rolled over on her side and fell asleep.
The Weight of Winter Page 37
