“And so,” finished Missy, “he goes to New York City every day and dresses in old clothes and bums money from people.”
“He pretends to be poor?” Goldie asked in astonishment.
“Yup,” said Missy, pleased that her story was garnering so much attention. “That’s how he pays for his mansion and all.”
“Imagine,” said Goldie. “Pretending to be poor. It takes all kinds, I guess. There’s them who pretend to be rich, and right here in Mattagash, so I suppose it’s the same thing.”
“I wish we were rich,” said Missy.
“Know what I’m gonna do with my very first paycheck?” Goldie asked her audience. “I’m gonna buy us some sirloin steaks.”
“You ain’t gonna mash up relief meat again and tell us it’s a real meat loaf?” asked Hodge.
“No,” Goldie laughed, remembering the pinkish attempt to fool her children. Some things, Goldie realized, you can’t imagine away. Some things about poverty were too real. “They’ll be genuine sirloin steaks. And this fall we’re gonna pool all our potato-picking money and buy us an indoor toilet and a bathtub. This fall we’re gonna have hot running water.”
“We can take real baths!” Missy shouted. Miltie grabbed her around the waist and they fell upon the grass, expressing their exuberance in the rough-and-tumble language of childhood.
“Are you kidding?” asked Priscilla. “How much will that cost?”
“You just do your share this fall and let me and Irma worry about the rest,” said Goldie. “We’re the ones with jobs,” she added proudly.
“Are we gonna go look at them puppies advertised in St. Leonard?” asked Hodge.
“They’re free to a good home,” said Missy.
“Can we?” asked Miltie. “Can we get another puppy?”
“Why not?” Goldie said, as she planted more good things into the soil Joshua Gifford first squatted on in 1838. “Why not?” Goldie said again, and the remaining marigold plants went into the Gifford soil, their roots dangling like the arms of small children. “This is as good a home as any.”
SICILY AND AMY JOY: THE OAK AND THE ACORN
Al-lo, I am apologies for what go on. My brudder is brought me to Conetticut widout my permiss. But I like N. Britin bedder den home. May bee it for da bedder. How is you mudder? Bon Chance!
—Letter to Amy Joy from Jean Claude, New Britain, Connecticut, received May 15, 1969
“Gloria Mullins had her baby last night,” Sicily said. “Her water broke at the IGA, so the man in the produce department rushed her over to the hospital. It was lucky she was already in Watertown shopping.”
“I’m surprised a little water stopped Gloria Mullins from shopping.” Amy Joy was uninterested in new additions to the old town. “Too bad she didn’t have some hip waders with her.”
“Winnie told me this morning that Kevin Craft’s mother said he intends to enlist in the army,” Sicily said to Amy Joy. They sat on the front porch of their house and stared out at the road, at cars passing.
“Like two old dogs,” Amy Joy thought.
“That’ll be the tenth boy from Mattagash to be in the services,” said Sicily, “and already three of them is right in the heart of Vietnam.”
“Well,” said Amy Joy, and crossed her legs, “it’s a man’s world. Let them fight for it.” She finished polishing each of her fingernails a different shade. Sicily frowned to see this, but at least the silver streaks had not resurfaced.
“Sometimes you say the blackest things,” said Sicily.
“I wish we could see the river from here,” Amy Joy said. “The way you can from Aunt Marge’s back porch.”
“Winnie says it’s a form of suicide,” Sicily continued. “Ever since Bonita left him and moved to Connecticut with the kids, Kevin’s been drinking and acting the fool.”
“Lucky little kids,” said Amy Joy. “At least they got out of Mattagash.”
“Poor Kevin. He must be lonely.”
“He can’t be too lonely,” Amy Joy added. “He’s dating his first cousin Lola Craft.”
“No!” Sicily gasped. “He ain’t even divorced yet!”
“Well, it’s true.”
Lola Craft was no longer Amy Joy’s best friend. She had told too many fantastic versions of Amy Joy’s reaction to being jilted by Jean Claude Cloutier. The first time she had seen Lola since the wedding fiasco was at Betty’s Grocery the day before, with Kevin Craft. Lola probably needed the company. Amy Joy knew through her aunt Pearl’s grapevine that Lola had besieged the Ivy residence in Portland with phone calls and letters, neither of which Randy Ivy answered. It would upset Winnie Craft to learn that Junior and Thelma Ivy did not think her daughter, or any other in Mattagash, worthy of their son. At Betty’s Grocery, Lola had appeared sheepish, Kevin dazed with his own denial of life’s events. They both seemed to have taken up an unusual new hobby since Amy Joy saw them last. It would seem that the city crabs had settled down like pioneers, like homesteaders.
“Why ain’t you called me?” Lola had stepped away from the side of Kevin’s pickup to ask.
“Oh,” said Amy Joy, “I guess your story that I cut my wrists, then tied them up with your panty hose, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Well,” said Lola. “Then I’m not your friend anymore!”
“Ditto,” Amy Joy had said, and watched the weary taillights of Kevin Craft’s pickup as it disappeared in the dip past Betty’s Grocery.
“Did you know there used to be camels in Alaska?” Amy Joy asked her mother.
“Go on,” said Sicily, and smiled.
“Who knows?” said Amy Joy. “There was probably even camels in Mattagash, Maine, once upon a time.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Sicily. “There’s too much snow in the winter.”
Amy Joy tried to imagine camels up to their asses and humps in snow. What were the thoughts, the doubts, she’d had since her eighteenth birthday? What were Amy Joy’s greatest fears about this moment, this event of two women sitting idly on their front porch? To make Sicily happy in her old age, Amy Joy knew what she was expected to do. She would need to stay in the Lawler house and share Sicily’s old age. She’d seen daughters growing old within the shadows of their mothers. They were gnarled young, bent and twisted without sunlight, too close to the mother oak. They became children again, together. They grew into sisters. They shared old age like a crust of bread. They shared the aging disease until the day came when no one could tell them apart anymore.
“But if there were camels here,” Sicily said with pride, “you can be sure the first McKinnons brought them.”
Amy Joy closed her eyes and felt her thoughts reel. Like the raven, they rode up on a warm current, up, up, far away from Sicily.
“I meant hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago,” Amy Joy said. “The McKinnons got here in 1835.”
“Be careful now,” Sicily warned. “You know Reverend Glass says that the earth was created only ten thousand years ago. It says so somewhere in the Bible.” Amy Joy thought about this. She knew from school that the pyramids were six thousand years old, or older.
“Somewhere in the Bible,” said Amy Joy, “it probably says that pigs can fly.” But she was at least relieved to learn that her mother didn’t believe the world had been created in 1835 by the McKinnons.
“You’re starting to talk just like one of them freethinkers,” Sicily said. “I swear, Amy Joy, but you sound more like your father every day.”
Amy Joy closed her eyes again. Suddenly she was far over Mattagash, looking down on everyone, at the black, insignificant speck of Dorrie Fennelson and her baby carriage, at the foolish glint of her wedding ring. She saw Kevin Craft’s inch-long pickup turn off the main road and onto a leaf-riddled dirt road where he could touch Lola’s warm breasts and try not to imagine they were Bonita’s. Amy Joy went far up, on thoughts
warm and tender as thermals, to look down on the pirogues bringing the first settlers up the clean blue river with their papery grants from the king of England. She no longer heard her mother, sitting in the warm sun, so near to her.
“Come to think of it,” Sicily was saying, a stern, theosophical look on her face. “If there was camels in Alaska, why can’t pigs fly?”
Amy Joy heard nothing, as she imagined her arms to be wings, imagined the old river falling away beneath her like a blue dream.
“I am my father’s daughter,” she thought.
THE WIDOW PEARL SETTLES IN: LESSONS IN GENEALOGY
“It’s no big deal, man, but I seem to have misplaced a houseguest.”
—Randy Ivy, back at work in the family
Pearl hung up the phone from talking to Junior. Things were back to normal in Maine’s southernmost city. People were still dying, on schedule these days, and other people were paying someone to bury them. The dry spell was over, her son was happy to report. And people were still getting married. Thelma came on the phone to inform Pearl excitedly that her granddaughter Cynthia Jane had announced plans to marry in August.
“Timothy will be a full-fledged dentist then,” Thelma had said, a calmness, a steadiness in her voice Pearl had never noticed before. “We’ll all get discounts,” Thelma had added. “The whole family, and that means you, too.”
“Good,” said Pearl. She could almost imagine Thelma simpleminded enough to expect Pearl to drive to Portland for cleanings, and fillings, and root canals, and discounts. But the truth was that Thelma was just trying to be nice.
“Tell Timothy thanks,” said Pearl. “You can be sure I’ll be there for the wedding.”
“He’s doing just fine,” Junior had lied when Pearl asked about Randy. “I think he’s finally gonna get his rabbit raisins together.” Pearl smiled warmly to hear this analogy still in use.
“We’ll come visit you this autumn,” Junior promised. “After the leaves change.”
“That’ll be nice,” said Pearl, and realized she meant it.
“I won’t be bringing my new Caddy,” said Junior. “I’m taking the Greyhound. A fancy car hasn’t got a prayer in Mattagash.”
“How’s the old house?” asked Pearl.
“It’s still up for sale,” said Junior. “Like you wanted.”
“Good for you,” said Pearl.
“I kinda hate driving by there, though, and seeing the sign. I been taking a longer route home.”
“Soon,” said Pearl, “when another family moves in, and you see someone’s kids in the yard, someone’s curtains in the window, someone’s car in the driveway, you’ll get used to it. Soon, it’ll seem like you never lived there.”
“If that’s true,” said Junior, “then why are you back at your old homestead?”
“This is different,” said Pearl. “This old house ain’t been doing nothing but waiting.”
***
In the afternoon, when the sun broke out of the clouds and cascaded down on the roof of the old summer kitchen, Pearl put her coffee cup in the sink and decided the time was now. She took her sweater from the back of a kitchen chair and draped it over her shoulders. Then she went out into the river-sweet air of the McKinnon backyard.
The latch to the summer kitchen creaked, as did the door. But it was time to lay the dusty ghosts to rest. They had been coming and going sporadically, boisterous some nights, silent others. Like tourists, they did what they pleased. Pearl was ready now to face them, be they Marge, Marcus Doyle, or any other spectral baggage they might have picked up along the way.
Pike Gifford lay on his stomach beneath the newly leaved hazelnut bushes and focused the same Wilcher Company binoculars that had reportedly blinded his nephew Willis. He watched Pearl leave the house and make her way along the gray shingles of the summer kitchen. He watched her lift the rusty latch and push open the wooden door.
“Uh-oh,” Pike said to the Canada warbler overhead. “I think the jig is up.”
Pearl adjusted her eyes to the tiny building’s interior. It seemed veritably stuffed with things. Sundries. Items. These couldn’t be Marge’s things. She and Sicily had gone through most of Marge’s belongings and then tossed them out like leftovers. There were only chairs, a table, a trunk, and rows of mason jars left. Pearl pulled the curtains down from the upper window and sunlight spilled in on all the goodies: batteries, hubcaps, rearview mirrors, sideview mirrors, aerials, skidder chains, chain saws, axes, pulp hooks, gas cans, wrenches, screwdrivers, and hammers. Pearl saw that the mason jars had been filled with nails, bolts, nuts, and shiny car keys.
“What kind of ghosts are they?” Pearl wondered. “Mechanics?” She looked further. There were car mats, women’s purses, radios. Then some of the spring light bounced off something shiny. Pearl picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It was a tiny crown emblem with wheat growing up around it. A Cadillac emblem.
“I’ll be damned,” said Pearl. “The Gifford storehouse.”
“Goddamn!” said Pike Gifford. “She’s found our surplus.”
When word bustled around town that Pearl McKinnon Ivy was home to stay, Pike and Vinal had begun looking for a new lair. It was just that morning that Vinal remembered the old barn builder in a way he perhaps didn’t care to be remembered.
“Ain’t that barn still standing out in the field behind Albert Pinkham’s?” he asked Pike.
“I think so,” said Pike.
“I ain’t surprised,” said Vinal. “That old son of a hoot could build himself a barn.”
“Nobody’d ever look out there,” said Pike. “But it’s a shame Pearl relocated, as they say. That old kitchen was sure handy.”
“You keep your eye on Pearl,” Vinal instructed. “The very next time she hoofs it to Watertown, we’ll drop by and do some relocatin’ ourselves.”
Pike watched Pearl scurry out of the summer kitchen, in what looked like a lawful rush, a legal hurry. He lowered his binoculars and looked down at them.
“I might as well look at the sun with these,” Pike lamented. “’Cause what I just saw has burned my pupils forever.”
***
After the sheriff assured Pearl that he would be back with a truck to empty the summer kitchen, he nailed the door shut.
“I’ll need to go over a lot of old paperwork,” he told her, “to try and contact folks who’ve filed reports. That way, they can come down to the station and claim their possessions.”
“Can’t you arrest them?” asked Pearl. “Can’t you arrest Vinal and Pike?” Roy Vachon shook his head.
“Why?” she asked.
“Haven’t you heard?” the sheriff said wearily, and then smiled. “Giffords don’t have fingerprints.”
***
It was suppertime, Pearl’s loneliest time of day, the time she had learned to expect Marvin home for the night. She had just finished stirring a can of tomatoes into a pot of rice soup when the phone rang. It was Amy Joy.
“Can I come over?” she asked. “I want to ask you about the old settlers. Mama says you know a lot more than she does about how that all happened.”
“I probably do,” Pearl agreed happily. “There’s always one in each family, in each generation, who carries the torch. I guess I’m the one in mine.”
“I got a lot of questions,” Amy Joy said.
“I got a lot of answers,” Pearl replied. “Did you know that your great uncle, Fernald McKinnon, suffered from soldier’s heart? That’s what they called it when soldiers came back from the Civil War and couldn’t forget about it.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Amy Joy.
“Did you know that I even got the original grant your great-great-great-grandfather William McKinnon was given by the king of England?”
“Really?” asked Amy Joy. “I’ve heard about that. But if you listen to Mama, you’d ha
ve to believe William knew the king personally.” Pearl laughed.
“Come early enough for a bowl of rice soup,” she told her niece.
When she opened the door to find Amy Joy standing there with a suitcase and two cardboard boxes full of her belongings, Pearl was surprised.
“I guess you do have a lot of questions, Amy Joy,” she said.
“I used to have a room here, too,” Amy Joy told Pearl. “When Aunt Marge was alive.”
“I remember,” Pearl said. “Come on in.”
“The truth is,” said Amy Joy, “that as much as I love her, Mama’s driving me crazy.”
“I remember that, too.” Pearl laughed. “Pull up a chair and put up your feet, as they say.”
After bowls of hot rice soup, Amy Joy and her aunt Pearl sat out on the back porch, next to the summer kitchen, and listened to the old river.
“Well,” said Pearl, and began the speech that she had waited years to tell. “Jasper, Ransford, and William McKinnon were the first of your ancestors to come up that very river you see before us, and stake their claims in the piney undergrowth.”
“In 1833,” Amy Joy nodded.
“They were really something,” Pearl said, “to come all the way from Campbellton, New Brunswick, in pirogues.”
“I know,” said Amy Joy.
“They had their faults, I’m sure,” said Pearl. “Like we all do. But they were tough, and so are we!” Pearl raised her cup of tea to Amy Joy’s and they toasted each other, the old settlers, the wash of the Mattagash River.
“I guess,” said Amy Joy, just as the frogs and crickets began their evening serenades. Far over their heads, the northern raven was anxious to make its way to a night roost. Beneath it, the soft lights of town flicked on, little fireflies dotting the black river. Electricity lived along the sleek wires between the toothpick telephone poles, as it lived still in the people, in the old stories, in the stories fresh off the press, in the stories still to come. The firefly lights winked softly up at the raven as it found a heavenly current and, like the dreams of young children, like the wishes of trapped spinsters, like the prayers of aging widows, it was carried high up, over the crest of town, untouched, unharmed, unnoticed by Mattagash, and was finally gone.
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