The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  Amy Joy smiled. “How is your mother?” she asked.

  “Still the scourge of Portland, I’m sure,” said Miranda. She bent over a sketch at the little table Amy Joy had moved down from the upstairs hallway so that Miranda could spend her workday in the kitchen, overlooking the Mattagash River, where all the Mattagash light seemed to converge at once. “She says I’ll be sick of Mattagash within a month and back in Portland, banging on her door.”

  “She may be right,” said Amy Joy.

  “I doubt it,” said Miranda. “I was a stranger in that house, being raised by hostile Gypsies. I know, I just know, that they stole me from some nice normal Portland family. My real parents are out there somewhere, still mourning my loss, still putting fresh flowers on my bed when each birthday rolls around, burning candles in front of the only baby picture they have left of me.”

  “Did you tell her about our business plans?” asked Amy Joy. Earlier she had slid the precious postcard under a plate on the bottom shelf of the cupboard. Now, with the other household members busy with their own interests, she slipped it quickly into the pocket of her housecoat. She wanted to take it up to the privacy of her bedroom. She wanted to study each letter in the two words of the message.

  “I don’t need to tell you what all she said,” Miranda replied. She was studying a sketch, turning it at angles to catch the hundred-watt light.

  “You might as well,” said Amy Joy. “Although I can imagine.”

  “First she quoted statistics of how many new businesses go bankrupt within the first year,” said Miranda.

  “But we’re only turning the toolshed into a shop for tourists,” Amy Joy protested. “It’s not like we’re investing anything but my sweat and your talent.”

  “Then she asked how many tourists I thought I could sell to from a toolshed,” said Miranda.

  “Did you tell her that the owners of Mainly Maine in Watertown saw your snowflake sketches and agreed to take some on consignment? And Country Cottage, that new store, loves the Furbish lousewort prints you’re doing? Did you tell her The Tourist Trap in Caribou thinks that the pressed-leaf place mats I’ve been making all these years are quite the rage?”

  “Of course I didn’t tell her,” said Miranda. “What difference would it make? The woman was born to rain on parades, especially mine.”

  “Did you tell her about the ad we’re placing in Yankee magazine for mail orders?” Amy Joy continued. “Not to mention Furbish lousewort T-shirts and hats? I mean, dammit, they thought for years that plant was extinct and now here it is, growing in Mattagash’s backyard. And did you tell her about the Christmas wreaths?” Amy Joy asked, remembering the thick, rich smell of balsam fir, imagining it filling apartments in cities where no such smell exists.

  “No! Stop it already,” said Miranda. “You’re as bad as she is!”

  “Sorry,” said Amy Joy. The postcard again in her hand, she was struck by an image of an impersonal mail slot at the airport in Phoenix. Did he write the note while standing at one of those fast-food places she had seen so often in movies, where people eat hot dogs or a single slice of pizza while they wait for their next flight? “I’m done ranting. We’ll just show her we mean business. I do agree, though, that you were stolen.”

  “By the way,” said Miranda. “Winnie is much better now. I just took them in a bedtime cup of tea. She’s stopped crying. She said that at least Mrs. Fennelson is now with her Maker.”

  “Good,” said Amy Joy. She glanced up at the clock. The Golden Girls had just started, possibly another reason Winnie’s tears had dried. “She’s been, as we’ve heard her say five hundred times already, expecting it any day now for years.”

  “What do you think of this?” Miranda asked. It was a snowflake in shades of blue and white, shimmering, cold, flaky.

  “I like it.”

  “No two will ever be alike,” said Miranda, “just like the real models. There are worse ways for a budding young artist to stay alive, don’t you think?”

  “Especially in Mattagash,” said Amy Joy.

  “I’ve got something I want to show you,” Miranda said, and motioned upstairs with her long, slender hand.

  It was time for bed anyway, so after putting out all the kitchen lights and plugging in the timer coffee maker, Amy Joy went in to say good night to Sicily and Winnie. Their TV show was just finishing up, and Sicily was looking for a pencil to begin her assault upon the crossword puzzle.

  “Like I been telling your mother, dear…” said Winnie. She was already in her nightgown, her thin gray hair splayed about her shoulders like a messy cobweb. There was no doubt she had changed her mind about Amy Joy Lawler in the past few days. “I been expecting Mama’s death for almost twenty years now. I might as well get on with my own dying. She’s with her Maker now anyway, bless her soul.” Sicily rolled her eyes up at the ceiling and found a pencil all at the same time.

  “Ain’t it nice that the Women’s Auxiliary is gonna give that plaque to Daddy?” Sicily asked, and Amy Joy nodded. “They’ll have to wait until the Christmas Arts and Crafts Bazaar to do it, but that’s okay. Long as they do it. It’s gonna say In Memory of the Reverend Ralph McKinnon, Famed Missionary to China. Ain’t that pretty? He was, you know, probably the most religious man ever to come out of Mattagash.” The truth, like plaques, is sometimes gilded.

  “I wish they’d put someone else in charge of the Women’s Auxiliary,” said Winnie, “instead of that peaked-faced girl of Rose Monihan’s.”

  “Good night,” said Amy Joy.

  “Good night, dear,” said Sicily. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  Switching off more lights as she went, Amy Joy followed Miranda, trailing her footsteps up the carpeted staircase, the reverend’s staircase, then down the high-ceilinged hallway where Grace had trodden, where Marge, Pearl, and Sicily had trodden, and now younger women were coming, their footfalls still light and springy above the little red roses on the carpet. Miranda paused at her open door, at Pearl McKinnon’s old door, and nodded her head into the room.

  “What do you think?” she asked. Amy Joy stepped inside and looked about. There it was, the finished painting of Grace McKinnon, a young woman in the electric moments of her youth, one hand to her eye, shading it, staring out toward the river, and there, in the background, was the river itself, stretching past the house, snaking its way to the sea. Grace McKinnon in a pink dress, pink as the hollyhock blossoms she was the first to plant at the edges of the McKinnon house, her hair dark as Pearl’s, dark and shiny as Miranda’s own. Women and rivers. As far as the old McKinnon homestead was concerned, those were probably the two most important factors in its history: women and rivers, and the snow and the rain that had fallen on its roof and then gone into the making of rivers. And inside women there are other rivers that surface now and then to run, like winterbournes, rivers of love and hate and gossip and pain and hope and despair. Rivers of blood to bear children.

  “She’s absolutely beautiful,” said Amy Joy, and outside she could hear the storm shift, like some old Edsel car grinding its gears, mustering its power. Downstairs Winnie’s and Sicily’s voices rose up, in their old Irish brogue, some of the last old- timer’s brogue in Mattagash. Nowadays, youngsters were talking like television sets. From the entrance to Pearl’s old bedroom, Amy Joy could hear Sicily and Winnie doing their nightly crossword puzzle, their door open, their words rising like steam, the house itself hissing warm air through its arteries.

  “What’s a five-letter word for ‘opera house feature’?” Winnie was asking.

  “Porch,” Amy Joy heard Sicily answer. And suddenly the old McKinnon homestead became to her a kind of inn, one where there is always room for the Sicilys, and the Winnies, and the Mirandas, and even the Amy Joys. It was an inn full of women, women young, women in midlife, women old enough to die, women wise, women silly, women able to give birth, women past giving birth. An
d there would be new women come after them to take up the old roles, but the work would remain. Some jobs never end.

  ***

  It was almost eleven o’clock when Amy Joy heard Miranda’s voice outside her door. Minutes earlier, when Miranda had gotten up to use the bathroom, Amy Joy had listened to her footsteps tiptoeing past, and then to water being flushed through the veins of the house, then the tiptoeing back again.

  “I saw your light beneath the door,” Miranda’s voice said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” said Amy Joy, and it was true. The postcard from Arizona was beneath her pillow, where nice things belong, where dreams sometimes come true, where fairies are known to leave quarters.

  “Good night, then,” said Miranda.

  “Good night,” said Amy Joy. She heard the sounds of Miranda—footfalls, a hand scraping the dark wall, breathing, all the noises that were Miranda, inch along the hallway and then disappear. Amy Joy closed the book she’d been reading, Favorite Poems of the American People, and laid it on the night table. O Western wind, when wilt thou blow, that the small rain down can rain? Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again! She snapped out the light, fluffed her pillow up a bit, and then lay back hoping to sleep, maybe to dream. It was all right to dream. Maybe somewhere, in the big cities of the world, there were folks dreaming of the country, of the orange and yellow hawkweed, the barred owl’s doglike bark, the little crayfish that hide under rocks at the river’s edge. And maybe those folks as well were too uncertain to make the big move. But sometimes, and Amy Joy truly believed this now, lives could be lived in that gauzy realm of wishing. Like postcards tourists send of places they haven’t visited, maybe desire is the same as doing. Maybe desire is even better than doing. Maybe the Painted Desert would really be too hot, too lizardy, but on the card it abides forever lush. Grecian urns in the strangest of places. Maybe with desire as her friend, Amy Joy could live a lot of lives. Maybe she could even imagine all of Simon Craft’s scraggly bachelors as potential husbands, what their children would look like, what cars they would drive, what house they might live in. All over America they could set up housekeeping, in ranch-styles, in Tudors, in three-cornered Capes, driving Toyotas, Chevys, Fords. Their children would be blond, dark, short, tall, gifted, burdened with dyslexia. Her mothers-in-law would all be wonderful and terrible. None of the pets would ever have ear mites. Amy Joy could sit on the back porch of the old McKinnon homestead, summer after winter after summer, and live, fully, a million different lives.

  ***

  As Larry Monihan scooped by with the town plow, snow was beating against the windows of the McKinnon homestead and spiraling down beneath the yard light. He didn’t hear the coyotes as they rattled off a few yowls from the back fields edging the woods. And he didn’t hear the steady, calm breathing coming from the bedrooms of the old homestead. His mind was on other things as he listened to the scraping blade of the plow. It looked to him like he was going to have one hell of a busy winter. As he rounded the most treacherous bend in the Mattagash road, the lights of the plow swept across the yard of the McKinnon house—proud house clinging for dear life to the banks of a proud river. In the swirl of white snow, only the shutters stood out, black eyes open to the blustery night. Larry Monihan didn’t know that, just moments before, a light had been burning in one of the upstairs windows, a little supernova, the heart of the house glowing. Then the old homestead disappeared into the raging blackness behind him.

  Amy Joy didn’t hear the scraping sound of Larry Monihan’s plow inching along through the night as he did his job. She had already fallen asleep. And during the night, during that Thanksgiving eve turning into Thanksgiving day, snow, that pristine slate, that white blanket that sweeps away all the mistakes and gives everyone a fresh start once they’re able to shovel themselves out again. Snow, more of it than the meteorologists down in faraway Bangor had even dreamed of. And with it came a whipping wind, a cold, wild breath from the Canadian plains. It riled the white pines, scattering cones and rippling through the needles. It shook the black spruce, the telephone wires, the old McKinnon house. It rattled the very stars. It moved toward Mattagash like an ancient ghost, the souls of all the old descendants come back for a second look. The wind played around the tombstones in the Protestant graveyard: McKinnon, Lawler, Ivy, Mullins, Craft, Fennelson, Monihan, some of the lettering too ancient to read, some still fresh from last year’s harvest. At the Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon’s empty grave, the wind circled listlessly, howling a coyote howl. At the Catholic graveyard the wind shifted, then came off the crest of McKinnon Hill with full force. It bent the tops of the goldenrod still decorating the back fence, scattered seed that would never find birth on the hard crust of winter. The crevices of the carved names caught the snow, the letters in Gifford turning white quickly, the K in Plunkett nestling flakes in its branch. When the weather warmed and the earth was moist enough, new names would sprout out of this landscape of the dead. People doing their jobs. But now, on this Thanksgiving eve, the wind tore at a plastic flower come loose from some veteran’s grave bouquet. It rushed it along over the crust of the snow, blew it beyond the hill and down the slope of the Mattagash River bank. The flower was a pale pink, the red of the Veterans Day parade already bled out of it. It caught up within the roots of a dead birch, tangled with old growth, and huddled there, waiting, until the Mattagash River thaws itself in April and comes rushing along the banks, taking everything within reach along with it, beating its way out to the ocean, retracing the steps of the McKinnon ancestors. And one spring evening, while Amy Joy Lawler still lingers within the safety of her dream, the flower will go bobbing and dipping by, like a tiny boat, and she will come out of a fast sleep, snap her little bedside light on, certain she has heard something scraping past her in the night.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Available August 2014 from Sourcebooks Landmark

  1

  THE SURVIVORS

  JEANIE

  Henry had been gone a year now, but Jeanie would never forget the moment he died, how the bed became lighter, his soul floating upward like a white balloon. She felt it, as though someone’s hand had pressed down on the mattress, indenting, then releasing it again. A guardian angel, maybe. But Henry didn’t believe in such stuff. “I believe in the IRS,” Henry liked to say. “And I believe in staying one foot ahead of the bastards.” Jeanie knew now that death was faster than the IRS because Henry Munroe had disappeared from the breakfast table, the supper table, the leather recliner, the bathroom, the workshop in the garage. He had disappeared forever.

  But that morning he died, maybe the very second it happened, Jeanie had felt a tremor of movement in their bed, a quick shudder. Henry’s heart! was her first thought. Henry having a heart attack had been a worry for months, ever since the doctor told him his cholesterol was dangerously high. But Henry had refused to change his diet of fast-food burgers and greasy fries. Jeanie could monitor what he ate at home, but each time he walked out the door Henry was a free man, responsible for his own behavior. And this had been his handicap.

  They’d been married for twenty-three years, and that was her next thought. Twenty-three years. She opened her eyes then and saw the thread of dawn uncurling along the windowsill. Without looking, her own heart fluttering, she reached a hand over and touched the side of Henry’s face. It was cool, damp almost, and beneath the skin there was a stiffness, as though boards were there holding up the frame of his body, the shell of his life. A fresh stubble of beard had grown during the night, his body still trying in its primitive way to protect his face from the elements. But his body itself had been the enemy, or at least it had turned into the enemy, storing all that cholesterol in its arteries. “Henry?” Jeanie had asked. “You okay?” When he didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, she had reached for the lamp on her nightstand and snapped it on. Then she picked up the phone and quickly dialed 911. “My husband�
�s had a heart attack,” Jeanie told the distant voice who answered the call.

  And that’s when the truth washed over her, her eyes filling quickly with tears. All the time she gave directions to the house, gave her name and then Henry’s, she didn’t look at him once, there on his side of the bed, as if he might be sleeping in late as he often did on lazy Sundays. Jeanie thought that if she looked at Henry, especially when she said the words, “I think he’s dead,” that this would make it true. Would seal his fate. And she didn’t want to do that if there was still a chance. They could work miracles these days with all that fancy technology. That’s what she kept reminding herself as she waited for the ambulance, as she listened to the kind voice on the other end of the line telling her, They’ll be there soon, Mrs. Munroe. Stay on the phone with me. Try to be calm now. They could even bring people back from long, winding tunnels, folks who had already clinically died. So maybe, maybe they could still save Henry.

  Jeanie had lain back on the bed, phone still to her ear, and put her head on Henry’s stiff arm. This was the way they used to sleep in those first, sexy years of marriage. It occurred to her that this might be the last time she would ever be able to do so. In those minutes before they took Henry Munroe away, she wanted to get all of him that she could. She wanted to imagine that their lives were just beginning, that those seconds left between them were little lifetimes. She tried to think of what Henry would say about this scene, if he could see it, if he were hovering up at the ceiling somewhere, looking down. Just the notion of it would make him laugh: Jeanie, of all people, being appointed by fate to find her dead husband first. Jeanie, who was afraid of spiders, and the dark, and of any suggestion to stray even slightly from the missionary style of lovemaking in all those years of their marriage.

  It would take time, Jeanie knew, that morning she lay next to her dead husband, warm tears spilling down the sides of her face and onto Henry’s cold arm. It would take time. She had given answers to all the questions she was being asked about her husband, questions that seemed so distant from the man himself—no pulse, no heartbeat—questions she answered without checking his cold wrist, without putting her ear to the silent drum of his heart. She knew the answers. And as much as she tried to stay there in the present, she couldn’t stop her mind from rushing ahead, from giving her a glimpse into the rest of her life. Yes, it would take time to get used to certain words and phrases: My husband died last month. Widow. My husband has been dead for five years. Beneficiary. But that’s how it was when they’d gotten married, back in 1980, the same year Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the United States, and Jimmy Carter took Rosalyn and went back to Georgia. Jeanie had said the new words and phrases then, learning them easily as the years began to unfold: We’ve been married just a month. Husband. We’re celebrating our fifth anniversary. Wife. The words and phrases of change. And that’s when it occurred to her that she would have to break the news to the kids. Lisa now lived down in Portland with her new husband. And Chad, poor Chad, was still only fifteen and worshipping every move Henry made.