A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Make sure the Giffords don’t find out it’s got all its furnishings,” Pearl had warned after Marge’s funeral. “Put the word around town that you’ve boxed everything up and stored it in your attic. Let them think we picked the place bone-dry.”

  Pearl sipped her milk loudly. She was no longer in Portland, Maine. She could drink her milk as she pleased.

  Pearl went into the Reverend’s old study. Next to the cherry desk, a small bookcase bulged with books. She checked the spines. All old, mostly autobiographies of missionaries who had giant ants in their pants and who had inscribed their books to the Reverend. Pearl had heard Marge tell of the days when Reverend Ralph had a stream of visiting missionaries come to entertain Mattagash with stories about the heathen world. That was before Pearl’s eyes and ears started picking up information for themselves about her environment. That was another place, another time, when Grace McKinnon, still very much alive, floated about as a gracious hostess and the house itself was newly minted.

  Pearl left the books alone. Someone should check their value someday, it was true. In Portland, there was a rare-book store on every block. Yet it was funny how most folks in Mattagash regarded anything old as valueless. They wanted new things, store-bought things. The treasures of the past embarrassed them now. Mattagash was going modern.

  Pearl closed the door to the study. It caused her mouth and her stomach to tighten, just walking into the room. There were no good memories of her father. There were no bad ones, either, when she thought about it. He was like a Mattagash winter, Pearl realized. When it’s all over, and you’re standing in the midst of summer again, you only remember that there was something harsh and unforgiving that happened to you.

  “The old devil,” Pearl said, and laughed as she remembered the look on Sicily’s face the first time she heard Pearl call him that. A man of God as the old devil himself.

  Pearl went back into the kitchen to rinse her glass. When she was a girl, there used to be two silver water pails sitting on the counter at all times. She and Sicily shared the chore of lugging water up from the spring. Marge had running water installed years later. The pails, Pearl realized now, were galvanized. But when she was a child, a morning sun could transform zinc-plated tin into pure silver.

  Pearl opened the back door cautiously and the full sound of what spring could do to a river filled her citified ears. The old summer kitchen sulked in the shadows outside, like the dinosaur it was. In its day it was used in the summer months for cooking and canning, and to keep heat out of the main house. In the winters it was closed up, ice on the linoleum and windows, a foot of snow on the roof. Marge had kept it shipshape, however, no matter that its functional qualities had been swept away with the dust of the years. Now Pearl understood all too well Marge’s need to hang on to the past. Folks knew you by name there, and you were always welcome.

  Pearl was about to abandon the bones of the old kitchen and the millions of gallons of Mattagash River water to the glittery April night when a flashy movement bounced into the corner of her eye. Above the puffs of her warm breath, she saw a light moving inside the summer kitchen. She felt her nostrils narrow with fear. Was it a light? Then Pearl remembered the stories about lights. She remembered hearing the old-timers speak of them in graveyards, and hadn’t she and Sicily seen a few themselves as children on Halloween nights? Yes, round balls of light hovering about in the Catholic graveyard. It was always the Catholic graveyard. Protestant ghosts weren’t so outspoken. The chilliness left Pearl, and she flushed warm to recall the terrifying answers to these things.

  “It’s the soul going off,” Marge had said. “Round and white and fragile.”

  Pearl stared hard at the light. It was a light, that was certain, bouncing in the darkness, in among where Marge’s old mason jars must still be shelved. She remembered that Flora Gumble, the grammar school teacher who taught so many generations of Mattagash children that she began calling the new arrivals by the names of their grandparents, had been much more scientific.

  “Those lights don’t happen when folks are embalmed,” she had said to some of the kids who waited around after school to inquire about the tales. “It’s human gas rising out of the body, is all. It’ll glow like a little lantern.” And Pearl remembered how Vinal Gifford, a little first grader then, had asked solemnly, “Do you mean them balls of fire is ghost farts?”

  But Pearl knew better. She’d seen a real ghost when she was twelve. A young, pretty ghost. A woman ghost. Pearl had not only seen her; there had been words between the living and the spectral. When she remembered, all the wispy neck hairs on Pearl’s nape stood up. The only person Pearl told had been Sicily. She had no intention of being shackled and then packed off to Bangor and locked in a padded cell due to unearthly visions.

  “I’m looking for my children,” the ghost had said softly. “Are you my child?”

  Terror seized Pearl again, as it had that day out behind the lilac bushes, where rumor held that three little children had been buried after a bad spread of influenza. This was before the Reverend Ralph built the McKinnon house and started his own family. But even after all those years, Mattagashers still told of how the mother of those three little kids had gone mad and had to be taken away. But she had managed, after death, to come back and ask a twelve-year-old the whereabouts of her children. Pearl believed in ghosts, and that’s why she had run from the inquiring woman without answering.

  “Why didn’t you tell her to dig beneath the lilac bush?” eight-year-old Sicily had asked later.

  Yes, Pearl believed in ghosts, but what ghost would be interested in ransacking the summer kitchen? What ghost would be content to rattle dust off the mason jars and search through Marge’s moldy trunk, read her mildewed letters? Fear drove a knife into Pearl’s heart. Marge!

  “Marge?” The word trembled out of Pearl’s mouth, and her hand quickly flicked the switch. A fan of porch light fell out into the blackness, turned the lurking black beast into harmless gray shingles. Pearl looked again. The light was gone. She flicked the porch light off once more and tried again to find the eerie light. Sheer blackness confronted her, except for the worn stars that had patterned themselves over Mattagash before even the Indians found the place. This was way back when God first put stars in the sky there, so that one day the McKinnons could follow them upriver to found a town. And later the Giffords could utilize that same starlight to shine a path for them to the nearest hubcap or tire iron. There were only stars out there, behind Marge’s old house, and the pounding swell of the spring river.

  “Margie?” Pearl tried once more before she closed the door and locked it.

  It must have been only minutes after she had fallen asleep that the voice woke Pearl. She had snuggled up to Marvin for nearly an hour while she pondered the unearthly circumstances out in the summer kitchen, that haven for ghosts. And although she was sure it couldn’t happen, she’d fallen asleep. At first it had filtered in to her as part of her dream, but then it grew louder and tugged her toward it until she opened her eyes and realized that it was coming from outside the house, from the back of the house, from the site of the summer kitchen.

  “Marvin?” Pearl whispered. “Wake up.” He answered by chopping off a snore in midflight and turning over on his side. Pearl was glad he hadn’t awakened. If she let him see her like that, frightened in the night by ghosts, how could she convince him she could stay in the house alone? The voice again, a male’s. Had the old reverend himself come home from China? Could ghosts navigate such great distances? In real life he couldn’t even drive a car.

  Pearl struggled out of bed and tiptoed over to the window. She leaned forward to the cold glass and peered down. Suddenly a male form moved out of the shadows of the house, into a pond of starlight. It stood stiffly, looking toward the river, toward the old highway. All Pearl could discern, from her crow’s nest view, was the figure of a sturdy man with a full head of thick curls. She gaspe
d. She remembered just such a dark, curly head from her childhood, one connected to the summer kitchen.

  “Marcus Doyle,” thought Pearl. Who else but Marge’s missionary lover, who had slept in the very summer kitchen during the autumn of 1923, would come back to cavort with Marge among the mason jars and old love letters of another time?

  “He wrote those letters to her,” Pearl whispered, and shivered involuntarily as she peered down on the phantom. Then it was gone, lost on the black trail that led around the house. Maybe he had followed the trail all the way to the river, past the lilac graveyard where Pearl had seen the woman-ghost. Maybe he was inside the summer kitchen right now, had gone straight through the shingled wall, rather than follow any old river path. Maybe he was, at this very minute, huddled with Margie over her trunk of letters, reading them again, almost fifty years after they were written. Another thought occurred to Pearl, as she stood barefoot on the cold floorboards of her old bedroom and looked down on the summer kitchen. And it frightened her more than the pale woman-ghost seeking her dead children. It frightened her much, much more than the Catholic fireballs that used to roll at little Protestant trick-or-treaters, fireballs from hell. This was much scarier.

  “Sicily and I threw those old letters away!” Pearl thought, and leaned against the wall. Hell hath no fury like a letter writer scorned. Marge would be furious when she found out! Marge would be what Randy called really pissed off. Had she been waiting, then, these ten long years by the lilac bush, that favorite hangout of ghosts, for Pearl to innocently, unsuspectingly come home?

  “Her ghost’ll probably go into a tailspin,” Pearl thought.

  Pearl McKinnon Ivy developed such a genuine case of the jimjams that she was unable to sleep anymore on the first night of her homecoming.

  BABY JESUS RETURNS TO MATTAGASH: LET THE GAMES BEGIN

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,

  Everywhere you go…”

  —sung by Bing Crosby

  The last week of April turned into a cold one, with the ground reluctant to shake loose the embedded icy veins. Then, to no one’s surprise, a heavy wind decided to get involved. The last week of April was not heralding wedding weather, by any means, and the fact that Amy Joy Lawler was having hers on May first suggested a hurriedness to the entire town that left it purring with gossip. Both clans of Giffords had passed the notion that something was afoul around the supper table since they first heard of the quick wedding. It did not occur to anyone in town that Amy Joy’s head was in a rush for the wedding, not her belly.

  It was not wedding weather that followed the Gifford kids out to the school bus on the last Friday of April. Cold still clung to the mammoth cakes of ice that lay like white Roman walls along the Mattagash River bank. Snow still peeked out from beneath the trees at the edge of the woods, and during the nights, the dead grass in the fields crusted with frost so that the morning sun careened off it in glittering bounces.

  The last Friday of April found a school bus full of rambunctious children, with MATTAGASH CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL DISTRICT #12 on its side, winding its way along the main road, dropping off all the modern descendants of the old loyalist settlers. That daily bus ride home from school had been a ride of terror for everyone on board until Fred, the driver, grabbed Little Pee and Little Vinal and knocked their heads together. He then assured them that if they so much as breathed loudly on his bus again, they would become acquainted with the two-by-four he had stashed beneath the driver’s seat.

  “If you two don’t want the Watertown mortician visiting your mothers,” Fred had said, “you’d better sew up them lips.”

  Although Little Pee and Little Vinal had quieted during rides, Fridays always contained an excitement that stirred up the whole busload. Freedom from school, and the elusive joy that creeps in as the weekend is about to roll around, precipitated a kind of People’s Revolution on board. When the lumbering school bus pulled to a halt in the heart of Giffordtown that Friday, all the school-age Giffords except for Little Vinal, who was enjoying the final days of his suspension, raced down the steps and out into the chilly air wafting up from the river. Vera’s kids went left, across the road to their house, and Goldie’s climbed the hill as the bus pulled away in a cloud of exhaust. Among the mountaineers was Miltie, Goldie’s baby, who had been so congested during the notorious cough season that Goldie insisted he wear his mittens even before April turned cold on them. Preferring to tough the nippiness, as the big kids did, Miltie perpetually lost his mittens. Sometimes they stayed sizzling on the warm register at school. They were often left behind in his seat on the bus. They were forgotten in the boys’ bathroom or, worse, they were actually lost. On the last Friday of April, Miltie managed to come home with his mittens.

  Slower than the older, long-legged children, Milton was the last off the bus. Despite Goldie’s constant plea for Priscilla and the others to lag behind with him as protection, Miltie’s siblings usually raced each other up the long hill, seeing who could tap their hand on the front door first. Miltie had long gotten over the insult of being left behind in such a fashion. He no longer even looked up in envy at the retreating soles of boots and sneakers. He consoled himself with the knowledge that one day he would be taller and faster than all of them. One day he would run up, tap the door, then run back to meet the losers halfway up the hill.

  Running this imaginary race in his mind, Miltie decided he’d best put on his mittens, since they’d both come home with him anyway, and satisfy Goldie. The right one went on smoothly enough but, as Miltie’s hands were also encumbered by a weeklong accumulation of school papers, the other green mitten fell to the roadside. Holding his papers in his teeth, Miltie squatted to retrieve it. But a gust of wind came roaring up like a truck and swept the mitten across the road and into Vera’s yard. Miltie bit into his papers and chased it. He spotted the mitten, but so did Popeye, Vera’s dog, who had long ceased to receive the hearty dishes that Vera insisted he eat last January. Popeye went for the mitten as if it were meat. Miltie was no match for the huge animal, but he dived in anyway. Popeye was less frightening than his mother, angry over another lost mitten.

  Popeye had never taken sides in the Gifford family feud and instead wagged his tail diplomatically at all the children. But whether he meant to do it, or whether it was a freak accident, was not important. What was important was that Miltie’s leg came out of the shuffle with tooth marks and some bleeding. Aunt Vera came running out and demanded to know what Milton Gifford was doing in her yard, on private property. Miltie was crying too hard to tell her. Instead he grabbed the mitten from Popeye, who was shaking it in an attempt to play, and raced up the hill, falling twice.

  Goldie could not speak as she washed the wound and doused it with iodine. She covered it with a Band-Aid, planted Miltie on the couch, tucked a blanket about him, and snapped on Bozo the Clown. Then she bundled up in a scarf and coat and marched down the hill. But, like the January fight, nothing came of it except some extraordinarily loud shouting. Big Vinal came running from the garage, where he had been busy with some clandestine cuttings and skinnings that involved an illegally shot deer.

  “She sicced Popeye on Miltie!” shouted Goldie.

  “I did no such thing,” said Vera, who was barefoot, and stepping on one foot, then the other, on her chilly front porch.

  “That dog ain’t all there,” said Goldie. “He walks around all day with a rock in his mouth.”

  “I wish you’d do the same,” said Vera, all ashiver. “It’d keep your tongue from wagging.”

  Back at the Gifford house on the hill, Goldie told the senior Pike what had taken place. Still not wanting the roof to blow off, considering the weather, Pike inspected Miltie’s leg wound and said, “That ain’t too bad a bite, is it, Miltie?”

  Miltie felt differently. It was indeed a monstrous bite, a trauma he might never get over, but then Pike said, “You’re Daddy’s little man, ai
n’t you? You ain’t gonna act like no old girl now, are you?” No. Of course Miltie wasn’t.

  “You can’t blame Popeye,” said Goldie. “It’s the first time that poor dog’s been near a bone with meat around it.” She was briskly folding towels from her laundry basket. “Vera never feeds him. Half the time he walks around looking for low crotches to sniff. He’s too weak to jump for the high ones.”

  The more Vera sat at the bottom of the hill and thought about it, the madder she became. Why hadn’t she brought up the Christmas tree lights to Goldie? She had been waiting since December, in a kind of emotional hibernation, to remind Goldie of her greed. To reacquaint her with the fact that all of Mattagash knew that the basement or the attic at the top of the hill must be bulging with boxes of lights. She wanted to rub it in Goldie’s face like it was snow, or maybe even snot. Either one would be distasteful in April. Instead she had only shouted, and chilled her bunion-cursed toes. What a waste of a wonderful opportunity. And Goldie had been on Vera’s land, in case the sheriff from St. Leonard had taken an interest in the family reunion. Well, now was the time to remind Goldie of those Christmas lights in a big way.

  Toward evening, Goldie looked down the hill and saw Vera outside in the icy wind, trying to install what looked like Christmas decorations! A five-foot-long cardboard poster of Santa Claus, with a mittened hand on Mrs. Claus’s shoulder, proved especially difficult. The wind caught the bottom of the poster several times and yanked the tacks out of the top where Vera was trying in vain to secure it. When the wind died down for a minute, Vera managed to get several tacks up and down the poster, and now her door was no longer a dull brown but brightly emblazoned with the holiday husband-and-wife duo.