The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Don’t you ever try something like that again,” Maurice whispered to Ronny.

  “Money goes straight to some people’s heads,” said Booster, and winked. Paulie was still showing bewilderment, which the gatherers interpreted as embarras de richesses.

  “It would go to my crotch,” said Ronny. “Imagine all the female companionship you could buy for a thousand bucks.” This was the thorn in the side of Ronny Plunkett’s retirement: Mattagash had no professional whores.

  “I’m surprised to see you hobnobbing with us poor folks,” said Maurice, his nerves settling again. Where the hell had Paulie been with that thousand bucks when Maurice was open and going strong?

  “What are you guys talking about?” asked Paulie. He kicked his toe lightly against the sign at the door, the two rivers shimmering blue beneath the light of the bar. “Did your sign fall down?”

  “You know darn well what we’re talking about,” said Sally. She’d found another bottle of Budweiser, hiding beneath some Pepsi in the cooler, and uncapped it for Paulie. Now it sat next to Billy’s on the bar, cold and waiting. George Strait had begun to sing again about the women he had married and divorced and moved away from.

  “We’re talking about the thousand dollars you won in the lottery,” said Pike. “Of all the people who could’ve used that money, and there you go and win it.”

  “He picked fifteen, seven, two, nine, and eleven,” said Maurice, in a tone of confidentiality, as though the winning combination might be stolen and used again.

  “I ain’t won no lottery money,” said Paulie. He’d already found the beer and tipped it up.

  “What?” asked Sally.

  “It’s been all over town for three weeks now,” said Booster.

  “You picked fifteen, seven, two, nine, and eleven,” said Maurice.

  “I didn’t do no such thing,” said Paulie. “I won a free ticket, but I wouldn’t call that owning the goose that laid the goddamn egg.”

  “But you disappeared for all that time,” said Sally. “We thought it was because you won the lottery.”

  “Or was it fifteen, seven, two, eight, and eleven?” Maurice asked.

  “It wasn’t any of them numbers,” said Paulie, exasperated, “because I’m telling you, I didn’t win the goddamn lottery.”

  “Modest,” said Sally.

  “Where you been, in that case?” asked Booster.

  “I ain’t neither modest,” said Paulie. “I’m tired, I’m thirsty, and I’m ready for a little party. Why the hell is this place so deserted anyway? I thought there’d be a nice crowd here. I drove nonstop all the way from New Milford, and in some pretty bad snow for the last thirty miles.”

  “So how come Beena didn’t know you was in Connecticut?” asked Sally. “Beena didn’t know where in hell you was.”

  “Holy shit,” said Paulie. “Sounds like I’m gonna be in trouble back at the ranch.”

  “There ain’t no ranch left,” said Booster. “Charlie Hart’s been camping out on Beena’s couch lately.”

  “Your mother told Beena you just disappeared,” said Sally.

  “I swear,” said Paulie. “She’s my mother, but there’s times I could strangle her. She was supposed to tell Beena that I had to drive my sister and her kids back to Connecticut pronto. You know how airheaded Sandy is. She decided in the middle of the night that she don’t want to divorce that Wop she married. So I figured if I was already down there, I might as well spend some time with relatives. We got a bushel of them in New Milford.”

  “So why didn’t your mother tell Beena that?” asked Sally.

  “Mama don’t like for me to be seeing Beena, her divorced and all. She says Beena don’t wear enough clothes in the summers to pad a crutch,” said Paulie. He killed the beer. Paulie had once finished off a cold Budweiser in three and a half seconds, a Crossroads record. Maurice had timed him. “You gotta get your throat to go straight up and down,” Paulie had told his admirers, the losers. “You can’t even think of your throat having a curve in it. You do, and you’re a dead man.”

  “She’s wearing enough clothes at this time of the year,” said Booster. “You can be sure of that. But I bet she’s hot to trot. She’s got a temper as it is.” He winked at Ronny.

  “I wonder what else Mama told her,” Paulie said, ruminating on where he was going to find another woman like Beena, what with the holidays coming on, not to mention the long, cold winter ahead. “They already got Christmas lights up in Watertown,” Paulie added sadly.

  “She told her you hit the thousand-dollar lottery and then the road,” said Booster.

  “Shit,” said Paulie. He had appreciated Beena’s city experience when it came to positions d’amour. “Shit,” he said again. He plunked the empty Bud bottle onto the bar.

  “Well, here’s to fortunes down the drain,” said Ronny, and raised his own bottle.

  “You don’t believe in using the telephone?” Sally asked. “Why didn’t you call Beena up yourself and tell her where you was? You’re a big boy.”

  “Long distance?” asked Paulie. “All the way from Connecticut?” Sally shook her head. This from the man who spent a couple hundred a week on lottery tickets.

  “Besides,” Paulie added, “it’s good for a woman to stew a little bit where a man’s concerned.”

  “I wouldn’t call what Beena’s been doing with Charlie stewing,” said Booster. “Although it rhymes.”

  “Oh well,” said Paulie. “As far as women go, you win some, you lose some.” It was the same philosophy he applied unsparingly to the lottery, but it seemed more the latter than the former in that case, too. “So anyway,” he said. “What’s been happening in this old town since I been gone? Any excitement? Where’s Billy the Kid?” The others stared at him. With all the forms of communication available now in Mattagash, with telephones shaped like animals in some of the better bathrooms, with machines that could rumble into the woods, limb a tree in eight seconds, and then cut it down where it stands, with all of that available, Paulie Hart still didn’t know beans, even with the bag open. He was green as the grass that would eventually come back to Mattagash in the spring. It had been said of Paulie Hart before, and it was true. He had inherited more than the lion’s share of the stupid gene.

  “I tell you what,” said Maurice. Where would he start? Probably with Mathilda Fennelson’s death. The least surprising gem should always come first, and besides, she was Paulie’s great-grandmother. “You go upstairs and bring us down another case of beer.” Maurice was almost cavalier. “And we’ll fill you in.”

  SLEEPING THE DREAM: LIFE IN ANYONE'S TOWN

  anyone lived in a pretty how town

  (with up so floating many bells down)…

  someones married their everyones

  laughed their cryings and did their dance

  (sleep wake hope and then) they

  said their nevers they slept their dream

  stars rain sun moon

  (and only the snow can begin to explain…)

  —e. e. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”

  Because of the thick snow, which was now circling Mattagash, Simon Craft was late delivering the mail. Amy Joy had been watching for the nose of his car to peek around the bend in the road. When it finally did, she had quickly bundled into her coat, waded through the snow piling up in her driveway, and was now waiting for him by the Lawler mailbox. She could feel the oppressive heft of the storm as it bore down, the wild power of it. In Mattagash, Maine, winter is like a weight that presses you down, holds you there until you think you can’t breathe anymore. You just seem to black out, and when you wake up, it’s spring again. Amy Joy had learned, or so it seemed to her now, to bend with the weight of winter, to go with it, to survive beneath it. It’s true that there were warmer places in the world, and some of them not all that far from Mattagash. Bobb
y Fennelson had found one of them. But there was that rotting dream of roots, that notion of home, of heritage, of family scrapbooks that had been nagging at her for years. And now it seemed that, for some folks anyway, the roots run too deep to pull up and plant elsewhere. It has to do with something in the soil, maybe down there in the dark, quiet areas that the roots tap into, a little secret the roots have learned about survival.

  And there was something else happening inside Amy Joy Lawler, something that middle age had done for her. She didn’t seem to care so much now about raising her own family, about men she might marry, about the gray that was scattering itself in her hair, about what clothes were in style. Those were the things that nature taught you, when you knew how to look in the right places. The earth, the water, the sky, the stars have been around a lot longer than McKinnons and Crafts and Fennelsons. Maybe that’s why the answers lie there. It no longer frightened Amy Joy to admit that she might be in Mattagash forever, might die there and take her own place in the Protestant graveyard overlooking the Mattagash River. Because the Mattagash River had been there a long time too. And it didn’t bother her that maybe, if Sicily went first, Amy Joy might be compelled again to contemplate the wide places of the world. If that happened, then it happened, the way an earthquake happens, a storm, a flood. The way a star dies and suddenly disappears forever. You have no control over it, so you deal with it when it comes.

  “Don’t Mattagash look just like one of them paperweights that you pick up and shake and it snows all over everything all at once?” Simon Craft asked from his open window. His mail car had slid in on the waves of the storm and up to Amy Joy’s mailbox. She smiled. It did, indeed, look like the little towns in paperweights, the snowflakes so big and fat they could be artificial.

  “What are you doing out on a day like today?” Amy Joy asked. “And so late? I thought you liked to sit out a storm.” Simon nodded, and then blew his perpetually running nose into a handkerchief. Amy Joy had always wondered, when a bad cold or a twenty-four-hour bug had passed around town over and over again, like something borrowed, if Simon was not the one responsible.

  “I got caught in it,” said Simon. “I never dreamed it would get so bad so fast. It’s taking me forever to get this mail delivered. And you know darn well, judging by what’s coming down now, that they won’t even be able to find the gymnasium tomorrow. What a way to spend Thanksgiving! And my little grandkids has been practicing for that play since day one. They was gonna be two little Pilgrims. The cutest little outfits you ever saw. I tell you, they’re brokenhearted over this.”

  “I need some stamps,” said Amy Joy. She removed her mitten in order to get a better grip on the dollar bills in her coat pocket. Simon Craft was probably also late because, by now, everyone in town had been told how disappointed his little Pilgrim grandchildren were. Amy Joy knew that everyone in town received from Simon a sort of homogeneous gossip until he got down to the personal details of individuals.

  “I just dropped a gas bill and two flyers off at The Crossroads,” Simon announced. “Maurice is pretty long-faced over the vote they took yesterday.”

  “I don’t blame him,” said Amy Joy. “This should be a democracy, but with Prissy around, it really isn’t.” But Amy Joy also realized that Prissy still had too much of the old loyalist blood pumping in her veins to give a hoot about such upstart notions as democracy.

  Amy Joy was still waiting for her own mail, and finally Simon Craft stopped sorting through it and passed it on out the window.

  “Booster’s over there too,” said Simon. “His skidder is broke down, and I suppose having a beer is better than twiddling his thumbs. You got a gas bill, too, and a couple of flyers,” he added, pointing at the bundle. He blew his large nose again, a raucous bleat. “And it looks like your subscription to Life is running out. Oh, and you got one of them thank-you notes Lynn Gifford’s been sending out to let folks know she appreciated the flowers and money and sympathy in her time of need, et cetera. Wasn’t that the worse you ever heard of, though? I bet she sent out fifty of them notes just to folks here in town.” Amy Joy was only half listening as she flipped through her mail. It was all there as Simon had reported it to be, but there was also a postcard, a lovely, colorful thing sporting large chunks of petrified trees, and eroded hills turning to yellowish rust in the sun.

  “And you got a postcard,” Simon said, “but it don’t have a name on it. It’s pretty, though. I suppose you know who it’s from.” He waited. Amy Joy nodded. Missing You was all the hand-scrawled message said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do know.” Simon was still waiting.

  “Well, I don’t push people to tell me where their mail is from,” he said. “My job is to deliver it. And if I don’t get going soon, I won’t be able to do that. It’s a darn shame that dinner is gonna have to be canceled, Amy Joy. There would have been plenty of eligible bachelors down there at the gymnasium for you to talk to.” Fifty seven miles east of Winslow, Arizona, off historic Highway 66 is the Petrified Forest National Park featuring the Blue Mesa, Jasper, Crystal, and Rainbow Forests, where the best and most colorful specimens are seen.

  “You know what I been telling you about that bird of time,” Simon was saying. “That bird of time is gonna end up like a Thanksgiving turkey if you ain’t careful.” She imagined him there with the children, careening about the trunks of polished wood, trees his ancestors never dreamed existed, trees they could never cut. She imagined Eileen, having a cigarette in the car, waiting it out, too hot for her suddenly, now that it was no longer too cold.

  “That bird of time ain’t gonna be able to lift itself off the ground pretty soon,” Simon said. “I’d stop trifling with destiny, if I were you, Amy Joy.” Missing You, the Y shaped like a delicate wineglass, the way he always made them, even in high school. In the center of the o he had drawn two eyes and a turned-down mouth. Visit Agate Bridge, a single petrified tree spanning a 40-foot-deep arroyo.

  “You sure you know who that’s from?” Simon asked again, and Amy Joy nodded, a sweet nod of remembrance. It was like a lost bird, this card in her hand, arriving out of the blizzard, settling down beneath the storm, maybe like one of those Canada geese who lose their sense of direction and are forced to land in the strangest of places.

  “The postmark is Phoenix, Arizona,” Simon badgered. “I don’t recall you knowing anyone from there. Course Eileen Fennelson is from Flagstaff. She already sent a few change-of-address cards to Mattagash. I suppose Bobby’s settled in out there by now.” Amy Joy looked at Simon’s eyes, looked deep into those little cameras that had seen and photographed so many addresses, so many beautiful stamps, a ton of zip codes. Simon Craft, the town crier, the sexton, the keeper of the keys, the Pony Express in another place, another time. The harbinger of news both good and bad. Some jobs never end.

  “Course that would have had to be mailed the very same day Bobby left,” said Simon, “in order for it to get here.” Amy Joy looked at the postmark. He was right. So Bobby hadn’t visited the Petrified Forest yet. He must have mailed it from an airport, where racks of just such cards wait to be twirled by tourists who will never visit the sites. Of course, it would have been the airport in Phoenix. Eileen would have been waiting with the children for his arrival in Flagstaff. There’s something about having kids, Amy Joy, for some people, that you just gotta be there to see them kids grow up. Some of us even give up our roots to see it. Amy Joy looked again at Simon Craft, the courier, dispatch, old Paul Revere, in another time, another place, rewarded for delivering good news, killed for the bad.

  “So it couldn’t have been from Bobby Fennelson, either,” Simon kept on, a meaningful look in his eyes, a this-will-be-our-secret look. “You must have yourself one of them secret admirers.”

  “I guess so,” said Amy Joy. There were some big secrets still kept in little towns. There were heroes everywhere, if you knew where in the storm to look for them.

 
“Well, I want to see you at the Christmas Arts and Crafts Bazaar, then,” said Simon. “I hear tell some of the women have already started the planning of it. I’m hoping they’ll go ahead and do the Thanksgiving play then. You oughta see the hats that go with them little outfits. Now I better get myself home. The missus will think I’ve gone all the way to the North Pole this time. I ain’t seen another soul out on the road for the past two hours except, of course, for Dorrie and Lola. You’ll remember they got that plow. Well, happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, and make sure Winnie fills out a change-of-address card.” And then he was gone, in a spray of snow and gray exhaust—or was it a dappled gray horse instead of the mail car, already foaming at the mouth, somewhere on the speedy trail from St. Joe to Sacramento?

  ***

  Inside the old McKinnon house, with evening coming on full speed, with the storm still intensifying, Amy Joy had just finished with her nightly bath. A towel around her dripping hair, she padded downstairs in search of Miranda.

  Sicily and Winnie were in Sicily’s old bedroom, already settled in. Amy Joy had brought the foldaway bed out of the hall closet until Winnie could purchase a comfortable twin-size. Then she and Miranda had packed up the meager belongings Winnie had scattered about her room at Pine Valley and, along with Sicily’s things, had brought them home. Amy Joy had doubted almost immediately that it was a wise decision to bring Winnie along, but, at least so far, it was working out better than she ever could have imagined. Winnie was now the one to take up the slack in Sicily’s life, to listen to the biblical quotes, even add to them. Winnie was the one to hear and appreciate any new gossip, and then share some in return. Winnie was the one to complain along with Sicily, while the two sat in front of cable TV, that there weren’t enough families anymore like the Donna Reed family.

  “I finally caught her home,” Miranda said. She was just hanging up the telephone. “And I’ve told her where I am and blah, blah, blah, so now are you happy?”