Northern Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

  Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.

  "He's turned!" Mrs. Crego suddenly shouted.

  I risked a glance at her. Her hands were on Minnie's knees; her right one was bloodied. Minnie's screams had become short, repeating keens, the kind an animal makes when it's badly hurt.

  "Come on, girl, push!" Mrs. Crego yelled.

  I let go of Minnie's arms. She took my hands, squeezed them so I thought she would crush them, and pushed for all she was worth. I could feel her against me, arching and gripping, could feel her bones shifting and cracking, and I was astonished. I never knew that Minnie Simms, who couldn't lift the big iron fry pan off the stove when we boiled maple syrup in it for sugar on snow—at least not when Jim Compeau was around to do it—was so strong.

  She grunted as she pushed. And snorted. "You sound like a pig, Min," I whispered.

  She started laughing then—crazy, helpless laughter—and collapsed against me, but not for long because Mrs. Crego swore at me and told me to keep my mouth shut and told Minnie to keep pushing.

  And then, finally, with a noise that was part scream, part groan, part grunt, and sounded like it came from deep inside the earth instead of deep inside Minnie, a baby came.

  "Here he is! Go on, Minnie, push! Good girl! Good girl!" Mrs. Crego cheered, guiding the baby out.

  He was tiny and blue and covered in blood and what looked like lard, and he struck me as thoroughly unappealing. I started laughing, delighted to see him despite his appearance, and two seconds later, Mrs. Crego handed him to me and I was sobbing, overwhelmed to be holding my oldest friend's brand-new child. The baby was crying, too. He was wailing bloody murder.

  The second baby, a girl, came with far less ado. She had a caul over her face. Mrs. Crego pulled it off right away and threw it on the fire. "To keep the devil from getting it," she said. I could not imagine why he would want it. Mrs. Crego tied off the thick gray cords attached to the babies' bellies and cut them, which made me feel woozy. Then she got a needle and thread and began to stitch Minnie up, and I thought I was going to faint for certain, but she wouldn't let me. She bossed me right out of my light-headedness. We got Minnie cleaned up and the babies, too, and found fresh sheets for the bed and set the bloodied ones soaking. Then Mrs. Crego brewed Minnie a pot of tea from fennel seed, thistle, and hops to bring her milk in. She told me to sit down and catch my breath. I did. I closed my eyes meaning to rest for just a minute, but I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, I saw Minnie nursing one of the babies and smelled biscuits baking and soup simmering.

  Mrs. Crego handed me a cup of plain tea and touched the back of her hand to my forehead. "You look worse than Minnie does," she said, laughing. Minnie laughed, too.

  I did not laugh. "I am never going to marry," I said. "Never."

  "Oh no?"

  "No. Never."

  "Well, we'll see about that," Mrs. Crego said. Her face softened. "The pain stops, you know, Mattie. And the memory of it fades. Minnie will forget all about this one day."

  "Maybe she will, but I surely won't," I said.

  There were footsteps on the porch, and then Jim was inside, bellowing for his supper. He stopped his noise as soon as he saw me and Mrs. Crego, and his wife in bed with two new babies beside her.

  "You've got a son," Mrs. Crego said to him. "And a daughter, too."

  "Min?" he whispered, looking at his wife, waiting for her to tell him it was true.

  Minnie tried to say something but couldn't. She just lifted one of the babies up for him to take. The emotion on his face, and then between him and Minnie, was so strong, so naked, that I had to look away. It wasn't right for me to see it.

  I shifted in my chair, feeling awkward and out of place, and heard the letter crinkle in my pocket. I had been so excited to tell Minnie all about Barnard, but it didn't seem like so much now.

  I stared into my teacup, wondering what it was like to have what Minnie had. To have somebody love you like Jim loved her. To have two tiny new lives in your care.

  I wondered if all those things were the best things to have or if it was better to have words and stories. Miss Wilcox had books but no family. Minnie had a family now, but those babies would keep her from reading for a good long time. Some people, like my aunt Josie and Alvah Dunning the hermit, had neither love nor books. Nobody I knew had both.

  plain • tive

  "Is this how you spend the money I give you? Making up Mother Goose rhymes?"

  I jerked awake at the sound of the angry voice, uncertain for a few seconds where I was. My eyes grew accustomed to the lamplight and I saw my new composition book under my hand, and my dictionary next to it, open to my word of the day, and realized it was late at night and that I'd fallen asleep at the kitchen table.

  "Answer me, Mattie!"

  I sat up. "What, Pa? What money?" I mumbled, blinking at him.

  There was fury on his face and alcohol on his breath. Through the sleep fog in my head, I remembered that he'd gone to Old Forge earlier that afternoon to sell his syrup. He'd had twelve gallons. We'd boiled nearly five hundred gallons of sap to get it. It was his habit on these trips to go into one of the saloons there and allow himself a glass or two of whiskey from his profits, and some male conversation. He usually didn't get back before midnight. I'd planned to be in bed well before then.

  "The housekeeping money! The fifty cents I give you for a bag of cornmeal! Is this where it's gone?"

  Before I could answer him, he grabbed my new composition book off the table and ripped out the poem I'd been writing.

  "'...a loon repeats her plaintive cry, and in the pine boughs, breezes sigh...," he read. Then he crumpled the page, opened the oven door, and threw it on the coals.

  "Please, Pa, don't. I didn't spend the housekeeping money on it. I swear it. The cornmeal's in the cellar. I bought it two days ago. You can look," I pleaded, reaching for my composition book.

  "Then where did you get the money for this?" he asked, holding it away from me.

  I swallowed hard. "From picking fiddleheads. And spruce gum. Me and Weaver. We sold them. I made sixty cents."

  The muscle in Pa's cheek jumped. When he finally spoke, his voice was raspy. "You mean to tell me we've been eating mush for days on end and you had sixty cents all this time?"

  And then there was a loud, sharp crack and lights were going off in my head and I was on the floor, not at all sure how I'd got there. Until I tasted blood in my mouth and my eyes cleared and I saw Pa standing over me, his hand raised.

  He blinked at me and lowered his hand. I got up. Slowly. My legs were shaky and weak. I had landed on my hip and it was throbbing. I steadied myself against the kitchen table and wiped the blood off my mouth. I couldn't look at my pa, so I looked at the table instead. There was a bill of sale on top of it, and money—a dirty, wrinkled bill. Ten dollars. For twelve gallons of maple syrup. I knew he'd been hoping for twenty.

  I looked at him then. He looked tired. So tired. And worn and old.

  "Mattie ... Mattie, I'm sorry ... I didn't mean to...," he said, reaching for me.

  I shook him off. "Never mind, Pa. Go to bed. We've got the upper field to plow tomorrow."

  I am standing in my underthings, getting ready for bed. My camisole is sticking to my skin. It feels like a wet dishrag. It is beastly hot up here in the Glenmore's attic, and so airless I can barely draw a breath. That's no bad thing, though, on a night like tonight when you share a room with seven other girls and all of you have been waiting tables and washing dishes and cleaning rooms in the July heat and none of you has had a bath, or even a swim, for three days running.

  Cook comes in. She pokes and scolds, telling this girl to tuck her boots under the bed, that one to pick her skirt up off the floor, threading her way down the middle of the room.

  I hang my blouse and skirt on a hook at the side of my bed and pull the hairpins out of the twist Ada did for me this morning—a Gibson-girl style and one that looks better in the drawing
s in Ladies' Home Journal than it does on me. Then I peel off my stockings and lay them on the windowsill to air.

  "Frances Hill, you get those boots polished tomorrow, you hear me? Mary Anne Sweeney, put that magazine away..."

  I lie down on one side of the old iron bed I share with Ada, on top of the faded quilt. Ada is kneeling at the other side, praying. I would like to pray, but I can't. The words won't come.

  "Now listen, girls, I want you to go right to sleep tonight. No reading or talking. I'm getting you up early tomorrow. Five-thirty on the dot. Never mind your whining. We've got people coming from all parts—important people—and I want you looking sharp. There's to be no whispering or gossiping or carrying on. Ada?"

  "Yes, Cook."

  "Lizzie?"

  "Yes, Cook."

  "Mrs. Morrison needs you all on your very best behavior. Sleep well, girls, and remember that poor thing downstairs in your prayers."

  I wonder how I am supposed to remember the dead girl downstairs and sleep well. Seems to me it's got to be one or the other. I hear Ada get up off the floor, then feel the mattress shake and bounce. She plumps her pillow and tussles around. She curls up on her side, then stretches out onto her back. "I can't sleep, Matt," she whispers, turning toward me.

  "I can't, either."

  "She wasn't much older than us, I don't think. Do you really suppose her young man is still alive?"

  "He could be. They haven't found his body," I say, trying to sound hopeful.

  "They're still out there, Mr. Sperry and Mr. Morrison and more besides. I saw them going into the woods after supper. They had lanterns."

  We are both silent for a minute or so. I turn on my side and slide one hand under my pillow. My fingers touch the letters.

  "Ada?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "When you make someone a promise, do you always have to keep it?"

  "My ma says you do."

  "Even if the person you promised to dies?"

  "Especially then. On his deathbed, my uncle Ed made my aunt May promise never to take his likeness down off the wall, even if she married again. Well, she did marry and Uncle Lyman, her new husband, didn't care much for Ed watching his every move. But May wouldn't go back on her promise. So Lyman bought a bit of black cloth and glued it across Ed's photograph. Like a blindfold. May reckons that's all right, as Ed never said anything about blindfolds. But you can't break a promise to anyone who's dead. They'll come back and haunt you if you do. Why are you asking?"

  Ada blinks at me with her huge, dark eyes, and even though it's boiling hot in our room, I suddenly feel cold. I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. "No reason," I say.

  Uri • ah the Hit • tite, stink • pot, wart • hog

  John the Baptist was looking dustier than a man should. Even a man who spent all his time wandering around in a desert.

  "Mattie, be careful with that! You know those figurines mean the world to me."

  "Yes, Aunt Josie," I said, gently wiping John's porcelain face.

  "Start with the top shelf and work your way down. That way you're—"

  "—not dusting the dust that I already dusted."

  "A smart tongue does not become a young lady."

  "Yes, Aunt Josie," I said obediently. I did not want to anger my aunt. Not today. I wanted her in a good mood today, for I had finally thought up a way to get myself to Barnard—one that didn't involve my father's say-so or a job up at the Glenmore.

  My aunt Josephine had money. Quite a bit of it. Her husband, my uncle Vernon, made a good living with his sawmills. Maybe, just maybe, I hoped, she would loan a little bit of it to me.

  I was cleaning house for my aunt as I did every Wednesday after school. And she was sitting in a chair by the window, watching me work, as she did every Wednesday after school. My uncle and aunt live in the nicest house in Inlet—a three-story clapboard painted gold with dark green trim. They have no children, but my aunt has nearly two hundred figurines. She says her rheumatism keeps her from doing any real work because it makes her bones ache something wicked. Pa says his bones would ache, too, if they had as much lard hanging off them as hers do. She is a big woman.

  Pa does not like my aunt Josie, and he did not want me to clean her house. He said I was not a slave—which was rich, coming from him—but there was not much either of us could do about it. I had started helping my aunt to please Mamma—Josie was unwell and Mamma had worried about her—and it wasn't right to stop just because Mamma died. I knew she wouldn't want me to.

  Aunt Josie does not like my pa, either. She never thought he was good enough for my mother. Josie and my mamma grew up in a big house in Old Forge. Josie married a rich man, and she thought my mother ought to have married a rich man, too. She thought Mamma was too fine to live on a farm, and often told her so. They had a falling-out over it once, when Mamma was expecting Beth. They were sitting in Josie's kitchen, drinking tea, and I was in the parlor. I was supposed to be dusting, but I'd been eavesdropping instead.

  "That huge farm ... all the work, Ellen," my aunt said. "Seven babies ... three buried because they weren't strong enough, because you weren't strong enough... and now another one coming. What on earth can you be thinking? You're not a field hand, you know. You're going to ruin your health."

  "What would you like me to do, Josie?"

  "Tell him no, for goodness' sake. He shouldn't make you."

  There was a long, cold silence. Then my mamma said, "He doesn't make me." And then the parlor door almost hit me in the head as she burst into the room to fetch me home even though I hadn't finished dusting. They didn't speak for weeks after that, and when they finally did make up, there were no more words against my pa.

  My aunt could be very trying and she made me angry at times, but mostly I felt sorry for her. She thought that figurines on your shelves and white sugar in your tea and lace trim on your underthings were what mattered, but that was only because she and Uncle Vernon didn't sleep in the same room like my mother and father had, and Uncle Vernon never kissed her on the lips when he thought no one was looking, or sang her songs that made her cry, like the one about Miss Clara Verner and her true love, Monroe, who lost his life clearing a logjam.

  I put John the Baptist down and picked up Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. The quality wasn't so good on that one. Jesus had an odd expression and a greenish cast to his face. He looked more like a man with stomach trouble than one who was about to be crucified. I squeezed him tightly to get his attention, then sent him a quick prayer to make my aunt amenable.

  As I polished him, I wondered why on earth someone would collect such junk. Words were so much better to collect. They didn't take up space and you never had to dust them. Although I had to admit I hadn't had much luck with my word of the day that morning. Uriah the Hittite was the first word the dictionary had yielded, followed by stinkpot, then warthog. And then I'd slammed the book shut, disgusted.

  After Jesus, there was a bible with THE GOOD BOOK written on it in real fourteen-karat gold. I picked it up and was just going to tell my aunt about Barnard and ask her for the money, when she spoke first.

  "Watch you don't polish the gold off that," she cautioned me.

  "Yes, Aunt Josie."

  "You reading your bible, Mattie?"

  "Some."

  "You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"

  I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself.

  I did not think the Good Book was all that good. There was too much begetting, too much smoting. Not much of a plot, either. Some of the stories were all right—like Moses parting the Red Sea, and Job, and Noah and his ark—but whoever wrote them down could have done a lot more with them. I would like to have known, for example, what Mrs. Job thought about God destroying her entire family over a stupid bet. Or how Mrs. Noah felt to ha
ve her children safe on the ark with her while she watched everyone else's children drown. Or how Mary stood it when the Romans drove nails straight through her boy's hands. I know the ones writing were prophets and saints and all, but it wouldn't have helped them any in Miss Wilcox's classroom. She still would have given them a D.

  I put the bible back and started in on the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Greed. I had to stand on the step stool to reach them. They were on a shelf over one of the parlor's two windows.

  "There's Margaret Pruyn," my aunt said, peering out the window and across the street to Dr. Wallace's house. "That's the second time this week she's been to the doctor's. She's not saying what's wrong, but she doesn't have to. I know what it is. She's as thin as a pike pole. Got that waxy look to her, too. Cancer of the breast. I just know it. Same as your mamma, God rest her." There was a sigh, and then a sniffle, and then Aunt Josie was dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief. "Poor, dear Ellen," she sobbed.

  I was used to these displays. My aunt didn't have much to distract her and she tended to dwell. "Look, Aunt Josie," I said, pointing at the doctor's house. "There's Mrs. Howard going in. What's wrong with her?"

  My aunt honked and coughed and pulled aside the curtain again. "Sciatica," she said, brightening considerably. "Pinched nerve in the spine. Told me it pains her something awful." Aunt Josie loves a good illness. She can talk about signs and symptoms for hours on end and is considered to be something of an authority on catarrh, piles, shingles, dropped wombs, ruptures, and impetigo.

  "There's Alma on her way home," she said, craning her neck. Alma Mclntyre was the postmistress and my aunt's good friend. "Who's she with, Mattie? Who's that talking to her? She handing him something?"

  I looked out the window. "It's Mr. Satterlee," I said. "She's giving him an envelope."

  "Is she? I wonder what's in it." She knocked on the window, trying to get Mrs. Mclntyre's attention, or Mr. Satterlee's, but they didn't hear her. "Arn's been seen up at the Hubbard place twice this week, Mattie. You know anything about it?"