“I still dream about it,” Amy Joy said, and Pearl saw, within the eyes of youth, that painful lesson sometimes never learned. She saw a truth one would never find in the eyes of Winnie or Girdy or Claire. She saw the eternal, universal truth for some of the pilgrims who traverse the twisted highways and byways of small towns.
“It takes a strong person to outgrow their environment,” Aunt Pearl Ivy said to Amy Joy. “You’d make ten Dorrie Fennelsons any day. She can’t hold a candle to you.”
Amy Joy smiled and for the second time in less than a decade, the women, those old agriculturists, those first gardeners, saw their men folded like seeds into the indifferent earth, and they grew stronger for it.
ALBERT AND BRUCE: A MAN, HIS DOG, HIS SWIMMING POOL
Since most of us are now citified or at least suburban, we’ve probably never set foot in a barn.
—Richard Rawson, Old Barn Plans
Albert Pinkham swept the last autumn leaves of 1968 away, once again, from his cement walkway. They had blown from his lawn and from the nearby fields. A new autumn would bring others, but 1968 could finally be scooped up and burned. Spring had no tricks up her sleeve this day. The temperature had risen over the days since Albert’s last hangover, and now birds had arrived from those distant places most folks in Mattagash could not even find on the globe. Six herring gulls, their bills like yellow pencils, interrupted their steady flapping to soar over the river. Albert watched them closely. Six was more than he’d ever seen at one time all the way up in Mattagash.
“Probably stormy weather along the coast,” Albert explained to Bruce. “Either that or they’ve found out that our garbage up here in Mattagash is just as good as the garbage down around Portland.”
The doors to numbers 3 and 4 in back were gaping open as Albert aired them out. A group of nature enthusiasts would be arriving later in the afternoon, a party of six, with requests to reserve three rooms. Albert had already swept and dusted in number 1, but number 2, his bridal suite, was left untouched. Inside, a thin layer of spring dust, like thin grains of rice, had spread soundlessly over the dresser, the pillowcases, the throw rug, the lamp. Amy Joy’s bridal suite in utter disrepair. Albert had already received three advance reservations for the room in June alone. The first, second, and fourth Saturdays of that month, the good old-fashioned wedding month if your head was screwed on straight, had been filled. More of the newest members of the old stock were settling down with the age-old notions of keeping the whole shebang going forward to the future, keeping the family alive, the hearth rosy, the old-settler ghosts appeased.
If hunters needed the bridal suite, they could have it, except for those wedding nights when its services would be required. Albert even decided that once this latest batch of nuisance enthusiasts was gone, he would move the bridal suite to number 3, the pink room, that lair of mysterious women. All that really dictated that number 2 be the wedding chamber, instead of just an ordinary room, were the small plastic and metal chandelier that Albert had poetically hung over the bed, and the plaster of Paris statue of one of those naked Greek gods he had found at a yard sale in Caribou. A small candy dish by the bedside was always filled with salted peanuts for the occasion, compliments of the establishment. And Albert tried to remember to toss a few extra bath towels into the deal. We aim to please had been, after all, his motto since opening in 1958.
Albert sat on the bed in number 3 to catch his breath. Bruce flopped on the rug near his feet and watched him curiously. A soft breath of perfume still clung to the room, an aroma of hyacinth hovering mothlike in the air. Could it be Miss Tessier’s perfume, fresh to the room? Or was it perfume from an old memory, an autumn ghost who had arrived in a swirl of colored leaves. It had been almost a month since Monique Tessier had come and gone from Mattagash. Was Violet La Forge still lingering in his memory, in the pink room she had painted and then left behind her? That secretary from Portland had stayed just long enough to tear open the wound that Albert had lovingly nursed over the past decade, until he thought it had closed and healed. Now he saw the light, pink as it was, filtering in through the windows of number 3. He was a man alone, and like the old barn builder, he found his very life was disappearing. He needed a change, goddamn it, a big one. He looked at Bruce, who yawned a sleepy spring yawn, displaying his crippled fang.
“I’m gonna open my pool this summer, boy!” Albert confided to Bruce, who bounded up in excitement to push his cold nose against Albert’s hand. “And then,” Albert said, and lay back on the bed to gaze up at the pink horizon billowing in around him, “then I’m gonna allow the rich widow Pearl a reasonable amount of time in which to grieve.” Bruce was perplexed. He whined, and then wagged an inquisitive tail.
“Why?” Albert asked. “Because I plan to whisper some sweet nothings into her McKinnon ears.”
BOTTOM-OF-THE-HILL GIFFORDS: THE GOOD OLE BOYS OF NORTHERN MAINE
“I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?”
—Bob McDill, “Good Ole Boys Like Me”
Vinal Gifford had just returned from consulting a lawyer in Watertown. Vinal had intentions of suing the Wilcher Binocular Company for the unfortunate blindness of his youngest son, nine-year-old Willis.
“He looked straight at the sun with that contraption, and now he’s been stone-blind for three months,” Vinal had assured the lawyer. “It fried his eyes like two eggs.”
“So you want to sue the Wilcher Binocular Company?” the lawyer had asked his client.
“Sure,” Vinal had answered. “What else can I do? Sue the sun?”
As Vinal drove into his bumpy yard, over the indentations from dried-up mud puddles, past pop bottles and candy bar wrappers, he spied Willis in the middle of a game of hopscotch.
“Willis!” Vinal shouted. “Get your ass into the house.” Willis thumped the rock in his hand onto the ground and stomped off.
“He can’t stay in the house forever,” Vera said, as her husband stretched out on the living room sofa with a beer.
“He can until this law scrape is over,” Vinal said.
“How long will that be?” Vera asked.
“Three or four years,” said Vinal.
Willis came into the living room and plunked down into a chair to watch television. Behind his thick eyeglasses his pupils loomed large as a Down East codfish. He had the same problem with his eyes his cousin Irma had learned to live and love with, retinitis pigmentosa, an inheritance from their great-grandmother Caroline McGilvery Gifford. Where the ailment first started is anybody’s guess but what is certain is that it crossed the ocean with the McGilverys. Vinal’s oldest son, Irving, serving time for robbery in Thompson Penitentiary, was also afflicted with the malady.
“Irving has to hold his face an inch or two above them license plates he’s making, or he wouldn’t even see ’em,” Vera had mentioned several times, with a mother’s concern.
“Willis,” Vinal sat up on the sofa and said to his son, “I warned you for the last time. I never again want to see you hopscotching in the yard. And don’t let me catch you skipping over firewood and mud puddles to catch the milkman either.”
“I wanted some chocolate milk,” Willis said.
“Chocolate milk comes from nigger cows but Willis wants some,” sang Molly, Vera’s eight-year-old baby. Willis swung his arm loosely in the air to smack her, but missed.
“Four eyes! Four eyes!” Molly taunted, in singsong, and hid behind Vera’s thighs as if they were sheltering trees. “Willis is blind as a bat! Willis can’t see a thing!”
“Yes I can!” Willis’s voice cracked poignantly. “I can see as well as you can!”
“No, now, son,” Vinal reminded him. “You can’t. If you want that bicycle we talked about, you’re gonna have to remember that you’re binocular blind.” Willis lay back in his chair and buried his head in the c
ushion of its arm.
“And if someone should come around looking important and asking you questions, I want you to walk into walls. To knock over lamps. You understand? I want you to pick up the eggbeater and say hello.” Willis hid his head and said nothing.
“Speaking of blind,” said Vera. “Can you imagine the little bats Irma and Freddy Broussard’ll have if they get married?”
“Priscilla says that Freddy Broussard has been to college,” Molly blurted, her mouth full of graham crackers.
“That Priscilla is gonna be just as bad as Goldie,” Vera said. She snapped her dish towel at Willis’s head. “You poke that pencil into my Naugahyde chair one more time, Willis, and you won’t have to pretend you’re blind,” Vera warned.
“And Hodge Gifford told our teacher that he’s going to college someday too,” Molly added.
“That sounds like something Goldie would put in that poor kid’s head,” said Vera. Her mouth was still mending from the fight with her sister-in-law, a pale purple line evident on the bottom lip.
“I ain’t going to no college,” Little Vinal said with pride. He picked a scab off his elbow, the last remnant of his most recent bicycle wreck, and flicked it at Molly.
“If you don’t go to jail, Little Vinal,” his mother said, “we’ll all consider you a big success.”
“I’m quittin’ school the second I turn sixteen,” Little Vinal continued.
“Why bother?” Vera joked. “You oughtta be used to the sixth grade by then.”
“Shut up,” said Little Vinal, and then leaned back, away from Vera’s attempt to slap his face. She must be tired. Little Vinal remembered his mother being much faster than that.
“If I didn’t ache all over, I’d get up and massacre you,” Vera threatened.
“Son, there’s only two things you need to learn in life,” said Vinal, launching into one of his fatherly lectures. “One is don’t trust a woman or a nigger. That’s one thing I learned from the army.”
“You was only in the army a month before they give you your dishonorable,” Vera reminded him.
“What’s the second thing?” asked Little Vinal with growing interest.
“Don’t ever admit you’re in the wrong, even when all your cards is down,” Vinal cautioned. “That only guarantees trouble for you. My way, you still got a chance. There now. Consider that your college education, all paid for by your old man.”
“How long is Uncle Pike gonna sleep with me and Little Vinal?” Willis asked. His eyes were large as plums from behind his glasses. “He snores and kicks in his sleep.”
“He farts in his sleep too,” said Little Vinal.
“That poor man can stay in this house as long as he wants to,” said Vera. “He’s been a saint to stay with Goldie Plunkett all these years.”
“I wish he was gone,” Willis said.
“I have to look out for him because he’s my baby brother,” Vinal said. “Just like you’re Little Vinal’s baby brother.”
“Don’t you want Little Vinal to look out for you someday?” Vera asked.
“Not really,” said Willis.
“Not really,” said Little Vinal.
“Daddy, is it true that chocolate milk comes from nigger cows?” Molly asked, as she inserted a finger into one tiny nostril.
“I hope to hell not,” said Vinal, and lay back on the sofa. “It’s bad enough it comes from female ones.”
GOLDIE AND HER CHILDREN: TOP OF THE HILL WHERE THEY BELONG
But in the mud and scum of things
There always, always something sings.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Goldie had all of her children, even a reluctant Little Pee, out in the yard collecting pop bottles, picking up papers, raking dead leaves. They collected the strings of Christmas lights, folded them into boxes, and put them in the attic until the next holiday. Goldie had made her point, but now it was time to face the summer ahead, and to go on with life. Vera could leave hers up, unlighted, until doomsday, for all Goldie cared.
“We’re gonna paint this house if it kills us,” Goldie told them. “We’re gonna paint this weekend when Irma comes home. She’s using her discount to get us some of the prettiest pale yellow paint you ever saw. We’re gonna have the nicest house in Mattagash.”
Miltie clapped his hands. Little Hodge followed them around with a burlap potato sack, left over from the harvest, and held it open as the family filled it with outdoor debris.
“I asked your father to move them junked cars and pickups and all them tires,” Goldie said. She had her hair pinned up in a blue bandanna and the crisp spring air had caused a bloom on her face. The children had never seen her look so young and pretty. “If I have to put flower boxes full of geraniums on all the running boards, I will,” said Goldie. “If I have to cover the tires with old quilts and the pickups with couch covers, I will. If he ain’t moved that junk by summer, we’ll hire someone to tote it all to the dump.”
“I found Red Ryder’s old soup bone under that pile of leaves,” Miltie told his mother. “So I run up the hill and put it on his grave.”
“You did?” asked Goldie, and patted his curly head. “How sweet of you, Miltie.”
“Is Daddy coming home again?” Missy asked.
“I don’t know, honey. I really don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Me neither,” said Missy. “I hate him.” Her eyes welled with tears. She looked away from her mother.
“Why?” asked Goldie. “Did he hurt you?”
“Never mind,” said Missy.
Goldie squatted down to look into Missy’s eyes. “If he hurt you,” she said, wiping away the child’s tears, “he’s never coming back. Not over my dead body. Drunk or sober. Does that make you feel better?” Missy smiled and Goldie hugged her.
“You and Miltie get your pop bottles ready,” she told the little girl, “and we’ll take them to Betty’s Grocery for the refund. You can get them comic books you’ve been wanting.”
Missy ran off to count the rattling sacks and boxes of bottles, some with dead spiders in them, others with bloated cigarette butts, all crowding the back porch.
“Mama, it’s Irma on the phone,” Priscilla shouted from behind the screen door. “She wants to know, can you start Monday morning?”
“Tell her that’s fine,” Goldie shouted back.
“Did you get the job?” Little Pee asked.
“Sounds like it!” Goldie said, and clapped her hands with some of Miltie’s fervor. She had applied for a job clerking at J. C. Penney’s in Watertown. Her sister Lizzie had said she would let Goldie borrow her car every day until Goldie could make a down payment on one of her own.
“If I get this job, I can help get you one, too, Lizzie,” Goldie had promised. “That way, you can get away from Frank.” Thank God for Irma, thank God for her oldest daughter, to have paved the way. Goldie might not have been able to do it without a job, and all jobs in Watertown were watched with envy by Watertown girls. But the manager liked Irma. The manager wanted to see Irma get ahead. Thank God for Irma.
“Pike?” Goldie said softly, and her son, who had been rolling tires behind the garage, stopped.
“What?” he asked.
“I know Daddy’s been getting you to sell stuff to Old Sam for him,” Goldie said. “He pays you a couple dollars to do it, don’t he?”
“No he don’t,” said Little Pee. He kicked his toe at the tire.
“Yes he does,” Goldie said. “Priscilla told me.”
“So what?” Little Pee looked over at her with narrow eyes. Eyes like Big Pike’s. Anger like Big Pike’s.
“From now on,” Goldie said, “I don’t want you to touch a thing he gives you. That’s stolen stuff. You can go to jail for doing that.”
“I’ll do what I wanna,” Little Pee said, and went off
into the garage. This one, this child, Goldie would have to watch closely. But she feared it was already too late.
Priscilla came out onto the front steps.
“My homework’s done,” she told Goldie. “And I done the dishes, too.” Goldie left the others behind to catch Priscilla alone on the porch.
“Did your father ever touch you?” she asked her daughter. “You know, like he shouldn’t touch you?”
“Never mind,” said Priscilla, and looked instead up at Red Ryder’s grave, the grave of her childhood playmate.
“I’ll go to the sheriff and report him if he ever steps a foot near any of you kids again,” Goldie promised her daughter. “Now come help Missy rake leaves.”
“Irma said she’s bringing the paint this weekend,” Priscilla said, and took the rake from Missy. “Freddy Broussard’s bringing it in the back of his pickup.”
“Are they gettin’ married, Mama?” Missy asked.
“If they want to,” Goldie said, and pried one of her IGA marigold plants into the soft earth by her front steps.
“Is Freddy rich, Mama?” Hodge sat on the steps for a breather and asked.
“Richer than most around here, I suppose,” Goldie answered.
“I’m gonna marry someone rich someday, too,” said Priscilla. “I ain’t marrying nobody on welfare.” Goldie looked at her second oldest daughter. Thank God for lrma. Thank God for Irma paving the way.
“I done something right,” Goldie thought. “Even if it took a long time to realize it.”
“Our teacher told us about a man who has a mansion in the country,” said Missy. “And he has a Rolls-Royce and a swimming pool and a stable of horses.”
“And so?” Hodge kicked his feet together impatiently.
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