A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Little Vinal threw me on the ground behind the schoolhouse,” she sobbed as Goldie cradled her, “and said he was going to make me a woman.”

  “Oh my Lord!” screamed Goldie. “Did he do anything to her?” she asked the teacher, who shook her head.

  Goldie hit the ceiling. Since Pike had driven to Watertown to sell a spare chain saw that had suddenly come into his possession, she took the matter into her own hands. Besides, she was tired of the manner in which Pike settled family matters. First, she phoned the sheriff in St. Leonard, and then the principal of the Mattagash Grammar School. Before Pike came home in the evening with seventy-five dollars snug in his pocket, Little Vinal had been expelled from school for two weeks, thanks to a principal who agreed with Goldie that thirteen was too young to become a woman. The issue was out of Pike’s hands. It was a school matter. But Pike told the sheriff from St. Leonard to let snarling dogs go back to sleep.

  Vera accused Goldie the next day, over the phone, of ruining Little Vinal’s academic future. She was talking to her sister and Goldie was rubbering in. Priscilla, who had stayed home from school, was behind Goldie’s shoulder, pressing an ear in close to the receiver. She was, after all, the subject of the present skirmish.

  “He’s refusing to step another step inside a school building,” Vera told her sister.

  When Goldie dialed her own sister, just a half hour later, she said, “We needn’t worry about Little Vinal. When a twelve-year-old has hair on his lip and is still in the fifth grade, you ain’t exactly losing a Shakespeare. When a kid has to sit on a special chair because the desks are all too small, there ain’t no Albert Einstein going down the drain.” When Goldie heard Vera’s angry intake of breath on the line, she was pleased.

  “It’s poor little Priscilla that I feel sorry for,” Goldie went on. “She sat up in the middle of the night last night and screamed her head off. And she’d only watched a rerun of My Three Sons before she went to bed.”

  Vera hung up with a loud click. If Priscilla was a changed child, it could only be for the better. She turned to Little Vinal, who was eating a ketchup sandwich and drinking an orange pop. The gray cat, Tinkerbell, was slinking about the boy’s feet, waiting for a crumb to fall, if even from a ketchup sandwich.

  “Molly tells me that Priscilla goes into the girls’ bathroom and stuffs bobby socks into her bra,” Vera said.

  As if in answer to his mother’s statement, Little Vinal kicked Tinkerbell. The cat slid on its side across the kitchen floor and then made a dash for the back door, where Vera let it out.

  “I will agree with Goldie on one thing, Little Vinal,” she said as the screen door banged shut. “Billy Graham Jr. you ain’t.”

  It was two days later that Priscilla was over the trauma of premature womanhood enough to conspire with Little Pee in an attempt to regain her feminine honor. The plan was to lure Little Vinal into the thick woods near Haze’s Brook. Priscilla sent a note down the hill by Miltie when she saw Little Vinal out and about on his bike. The note said that she was sorry she fought him off. She’d changed her mind. That becoming a real woman months before her fourteenth birthday wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Could he meet her, then, at Haze’s Brook, after making absolutely sure no one would see or follow him?

  Little Vinal even bathed for the event, and then splashed about his pimply neck some of the unused Raleigh aftershave Vera had given her husband for Christmas. He then pulled on Big Vinal’s stiff Sunday shoes. They were shit brown in color, and two sizes too big for him. But he knew Priscilla deserved a certain amount of worldliness for the sacrifice of herself, and he intended to supply her with it.

  Little Vinal approached the expanse of budding poplars around Haze’s Brook and stood waiting for Priscilla. He rocked back and forth in the giant-sized shoes as though they were brown boats. He recounted the hairs on his upper lip. He studied the silvery zipper on his pants. For the hundredth time that week, Little Vinal wished he knew more about the workings of the penis. Wished he’d been born with an owner’s manual, supplying him with a storehouse of bodily information. But there had been enough gossip buzzing around the schoolhouse about Priscilla that Little Vinal assumed he would have a well-educated instructress. He was pondering what would be a good way to pay Priscilla back for this needed initiation when he saw the hazelnut bushes rustle dramatically along the footpath leading back up to the highway. His heart froze. He felt a small throb in his genitals. Fool, they said to him. This is just the beginning. We’ll be getting you into messes like this all your life. He sensed a truth in this, but before his mind could process it, he saw faces emerge like flowers from the bushes. Miltie and Hodge, his little cousins. He saw Priscilla on the footpath, taunting him with her secret female knowledge. When he heard Little Pee’s voice rise up from behind him, Vinal Gifford Jr. knew what it meant. Sexual ambush. The mounds of toilet paper he had shoved into the toes of the shoes had enabled him to walk functionally, but running was another matter. The shoes turned on him.

  The Gifford cousins surrounded Little Vinal the way those tiny people did poor Gulliver. Heads of curly hair, like roving tumbleweeds, were everywhere. Instead of seducing the plump, ravenous Prissy, he found himself tied to a medium-sized birch tree and stripped down to his shorts. His clothing was gleefully tossed into Haze’s Brook by the revelers. So were Big Vinal’s shit brown Sunday shoes. Little Vinal sucked in his breath. He would, even after all the humiliation, probably have let it pass, blaming himself for the blunder. He would simply have counted it as a game lost, although well fought. It would’ve been Little Vinal zero, his genitals one. And he certainly didn’t dare tell Vera the real reason he’d gone down there in the first place. Yes, he would have turned the other cheek had it not been for Little Pee, in a spontaneous gesture even Prissy was against, urinating upon his helpless cousin. Hands tied, Little Vinal could not even wipe away the warm strings of pee that lashed against his face. He listened to the disappearing laughter of his cousins as they raced home along the narrow footpath, and considered firsthand the irony in Little Pee’s nickname.

  When Little Vinal finally worked himself free, after an hour of twisting and turning within his nylon stocking bonds, he’d devised a good reason for being where he was. He had been innocently fishing. He’d cut himself a nice pole. He’d tied a line, hook, and sinker to it. He’d dug a few worms. Yes, he’d gone fishing, just to test his luck. They had attacked him from behind. Had thrown his clothes into the brook. And then Little Pee had peed on him, the ultimate disgrace. And, Little Vinal told his group of avid, livid listeners back in the warm kitchen, they’d made off with a thirteen-inch trout that he’d just pulled, all shiny and wiggling, from the brook.

  No one in his family questioned Little Vinal about the logic of fishing in April, much less catching a fish. It was still possible for a sudden shift in the weather to bring the snow back. And the brook, like the Mattagash River, was bursting at its seams from the spring freshets. It would take a brick, not a foolish sinker, to sink a fish line in those burgeoning waters. But Little Vinal could have told Vera that he’d caught an alligator in Haze’s Brook and she’d have believed him. That’s how much she hated Goldie. And no way had she forgotten the Christmas lights incident.

  “They’re probably sucking its bones dry this very minute,” Vera said of the trout, and slammed a fist into the palm of her hand.

  Goldie didn’t believe a word of it when she heard. Perhaps because Little Vinal, in his emotional state, in his urge to bestow himself with a hunter’s prowess since he’d bombed as a lover, had made the story too dramatic.

  “If he’d throw that trout back,” Goldie told her sister over the phone, “I might believe him. But if Little Vinal caught a trout in April, he must have been fishing in Vera’s Frigidaire.”

  But even this distasteful skirmish was kept in hand by the two senior Giffords. Pike dragged Little Pee down the long hill and deposited him on the
front porch where he apologized, however angrily, to Little Vinal.

  “And say you’re sorry you peed on me,” Little Vinal demanded.

  “I’m sorry I peed on you,” Little Pee said between clenched teeth.

  On the ignominious climb back up the hill, with all the bottom-of-the-hill Giffords burning their eyes into his back, Little Pee was seething.

  “I should’ve shit on him, too,” he said to Priscilla, who had come halfway down the hill for a report on what was said.

  Curtain panels moved in the front windows of both Gifford households for nearly an hour. Vera looked up and Goldie looked down. The battle over the Christmas lights might still be waged through their children, but neither woman was getting any relief.

  “And they threw your good Sunday shoes into the creek,” Vera added, hoping that would spark anger in Vinal. She failed to consider that he might take that anger out on Little Vinal for wearing the shoes in the first place.

  “Now that’s a shame,” said Vinal, as he headed for the outhouse with a copy of National Geographic that had come home as part of a child’s schoolwork. Vinal had developed a sudden interest in the Auca Indians of Ecuador, especially the women. “Now what am I gonna wear to Amy Joy’s wedding?” he asked, and disappeared on the well-trodden path.

  THE IVYS GET OUT OF DODGE: UNWELCOME VISITORS FROM PORTLAND AND A PAIR OF THIRTY-EIGHTS

  Oh, every year hath its winter,

  And every year hath its rain;

  But a day is always coming

  When the birds go north again.

  Oh, every heart hath its sorrow,

  And every heart hath its pain;

  But a day is always coming

  When the birds go north again.

  —Ella Higginson, “When the Birds Go North Again”

  The Ivy wedding entourage pulled out of Portland, Maine, in the thin, gray morning as herring gulls oversaw the departure north. The lead car scurried up front with Pearl lounging comfortably in the front seat, happy to be free of Thelma for the trip.

  Behind, in his 1969 cream Cadillac, Junior anxiously followed his father’s taillights, the only advice he had taken from Marvin in years. But it was a relief to get out of town for a while. Monique had begun calling him at home the day before. Junior himself had answered the phone three different times to hear her say, “It’s me. Monique. Call me.” The last time he answered she’d been curt. “I’m not fooling around, Junior. Now get out of that goddamn house and call me.” Each time Junior could not race Thelma, or one of the kids, to the phone, Monique had simply hung up. But how long could he count on her doing that? Thelma knew about the affair. Granted. She had caught them at the Ocean Edge. But why let his kids know? It was a constant battle to garner even a modicum of respect from them as it was. This would squelch any father-child relationship. And he had been planning to look so parental yet dashing in the tuxedo he was to wear next month at Regina’s Father-Daughter Dance at school. Goddamn it, but he wished he knew what Monique was up to.

  Junior had found out one valuable piece of information from the whole miserable experience: A mistress was worse than a wife. When a mistress wants to be a wife, look out. And that’s what Marvin had told his son when he decided to fire the temptation. “She’s after our money, son,” Marvin had said. “There ain’t a woman in Portland who wouldn’t want to be in Thelma’s shoes. They want to rise up in the world, women like Miss Tessier. You got to realize that we’re sort of like the Kennedys of Portland, Maine. We got a responsibility. We got to look out for Camelot, son. Tell the bitch to walk.”

  Junior glanced in the rearview mirror and saw his son Randy’s face glowering there. In the backseat, Randy bit at his thumbnail and thought about his unpleasant circumstances. There was a hot shipment coming in from Mexico over the weekend. Buddy had promised to buy a couple ounces for him with some of the money Randy earned by eating pastries and acting like a houseguest. But that wouldn’t do him much good right now. He was going to Mattagash, Mattagash for shitsakes, with half an ounce. That was like throwing Christians to the lions. And Randy was leaving behind Leslie Boudreau, the waitress at Cantina’s. Leslie Boudoir, the guys called her. Sweet, womanly, leggy Leslie. She was the reason he crawled out on his father’s veranda every single night and shimmied down the massive elm to the ground, which he hit running. Leslie had been teaching him things that sex manuals were yet to print. She smoked too much of his dope, it was true, but she was his first, his very first, his usherette on that magical journey into the land of the libido. A burning erupted in his groin area. It had been there for days now, even when he wasn’t thinking of Leslie. It was different from burning, really, this adult passion to which he had been so recently introduced. Itching might be a better word for it. Whatever it was, Randy itched and sulked for the entire eight-hour, uneventful drive to Mattagash, Maine. The tiny visitors he unknowingly brought with him snuggled down beneath his pubic hairs, as though they were the thick massive pines of Maine, and waited patiently as burrs for their next excursion.

  In the front seat, on the passenger side, Thelma Parsons Ivy stared out the window with eyes that needed sleep. When the car rolled past Tusculum Street, Thelma’s eyes misted. She used to wait for the school bus right there, right where the stop sign still was. She used to be a little girl on her way to school one day, waiting for a bus, with loving parents waiting back at home for her. She should have stayed there, beneath that stop sign. Better yet, she should have stayed at home, in her bedroom, with the diamond-pattern curtains in the window. She should have told her mother, “Never let me out of bed. Never let me out of this room. Out of this house. Keep us here. All together. Don’t you know what’s about to happen to us all?” But she hadn’t said any of that. Life had pulled the covers off her and shoved her out into the street with an armful of books. And at Portland High School she had finally met and fallen in love with pudgy Junior Ivy. Was it love, or pity? Now she wondered. But she knew one thing, as Tusculum Street fell far away behind the Cadillac, like an old movie reel being rewound.

  “I wasn’t waiting for a school bus all them mornings,” Thelma thought, and fingered the hidden bottle of Valiums in her purse. “I was waiting for a hearse.”

  A few hours later, in Millinocket, the two cars stopped to gas up and to order a hasty sandwich at The ’95er restaurant. Pearl barely glanced at Thelma, but this time the insult fluttered by unnoticed. Thelma had rushed into the ladies’ room as soon as Junior brought the big car to a lurching stop.

  “Did you see her eyes?” Pearl asked Marvin, when the entourage, like a miniature version of a funeral procession, progressed on. “Talk about piss holes in a snowbank. She’s beginning to look like an owl.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Marvin said, and signaled to his son that he would be pulling out in the left lane to pass a dawdling pickup truck ahead of him. Junior immediately complied and Marvin saw the creamy Cadillac follow his move. It made a warm glow in his stomach, the way a good scotch or two can simmer down there. This was the relationship he’d always wanted with his only son. Junior didn’t have what it takes to sweep up moose cookies, for Chrissakes. But if Marvin had a steady hand on the broom, well, that was a different matter. Marvin passed the pickup, signaled right again, and saw the reflected Cadillac follow suit.

  “Like father, like son,” thought Marvin, and smiled.

  “It’ll be good to see the old house again,” said Pearl. “But it’s going to be strange with Margie not there.”

  “All things must pass away,” said Marvin. This would have been soothing to Pearl, in its philosophical way, except that it was also on a sign Marvin had tacked up in the coffee lounge at the funeral home.

  “Sicily said she’d have someone go in and do a bit of cleaning,” Pearl said. “Get the old place in order for us.”

  “The last time I slept in that house,” said Marvin, “we’
d only been married a few years. It always seemed haunted to me.”

  “It is haunted,” said Pearl. “I’ll be the first to say that. But I’d rather fall asleep with ghosts in the house than Thelma.” Thank God that Junior and his family would be staying at Albert Pinkham’s motel. They had been thrown out ten years ago, but Albert Pinkham was most forgiving and hospitable on the phone. Junior and his family could have as many rooms as they wanted, he assured them, and for as long as they wished.

  “Now, Pearly,” said Marvin. “Remember what I’ve been telling you. We need to get this family straightened out. Get it running smoothly again.” He felt suddenly like old Joe Kennedy, and sat a bit more upright behind the wheel.

  “Why me?” asked Pearl. “I didn’t give her that prescription. Why do I have to listen to her loony tunes?”

  “You’re both women,” Marvin said. “She probably could use a mother’s advice. How long has her own mother been dead, anyway?”

  A mother’s advice! Pearl felt nauseated. It could have been the hamburger, a half hour ago, but more likely it was the notion of mothering Thelma Parsons Ivy, Pill Addict.

  “We’ll see,” said Pearl, turning her face to the window and gazing out at the rain that had begun to fall lightly. Soon she’d be back in the safety of her childhood home, and free from all of them.

  In the car behind, Thelma turned her own face to the window, to the passing pines. They were going deeper and deeper into the heart of the forest. They were going up, up, up the road just to surface nowhere. You could get the bends going to Mattagash. At one time in her life, Thelma had not been able to envision anything north of Bangor. No houses. No hospitals. No schools. No people. Now, thanks to her marriage, the world had expanded for her. But now she wished that the world had indeed dead-ended at Bangor, and that if you ventured any farther, you would fall off the edge. She wished that Maine had been flat, the way the world was once believed to be. Knowing that something and someone lay north of Bangor had not enriched Thelma’s life, had not expanded it. Stretched it, maybe. She had had a terrible vacation there ten years earlier, when the kids were still small, when she could still halfway cope. Now here she was on the road back, the road north, the road into the heart of the wilderness. Thank God for pills.