A Northern Light, Page 2

  "You itching, Tom?" I called.

  "No, Matt."

  "Come get some breakfast, then. Wash your hands first."

  Last time I'd let him in to eat he gave us fleas. Tommy has six brothers and sisters. They live on the Uncas Road, same as us, but farther up, in a shabby plank house. Their land divides ours from the Loomis's land on one side, notching in from the road. They have no pa or they have lots of pas, depending on who you listen to. Emmie, Tommy's mother, does the best she can cleaning rooms at the hotels, and selling the little paintings she makes to the tourists, but it isn't enough. Her kids are always hungry. Her house is cold. She can't pay her taxes.

  Tommy came inside. He had one of his sisters by the hand. My eyes darted between them. Pa hadn't eaten yet and there wasn't so much left in the pot. "I just brung Jenny is all," he said quickly. "I ain't hungry myself."

  Jenny had on a man's wool shirt over a thin cotton dress. The shirttails touched the floor. The dress barely made it past her knees. Tommy had no overclothes on at all.

  "It's all right, Tom. There's plenty," I said.

  "She can have mine. I'm sick to death of this damned slop," Lou said, pushing her bowl across the table. Her kindnesses often took a roundabout path.

  "I hope Pa hears you," Abby said. "Mouth on you like a teamster."

  Lou poked her tongue out, displaying her breakfast. Abby looked as if she'd like to slap her. Luckily, the table was between them.

  Everyone was sick of cornmeal mush. Myself included. We'd been eating it with maple sugar for breakfast and dinner for weeks. And for supper, buckwheat pancakes with the last of fall's stewed apples. Or pea soup made with an old ham bone that had been boiled white. We would have loved some corned beef hash or chicken and biscuits, but most everything we'd put in the root cellar in September was gone. We'd eaten the last of the venison in January. The ham and bacon, too. And though we'd put up two barrels of fresh pork, one of them had spoiled. It was my fault. Pa said I hadn't put enough salt in the brine. We'd killed one of our roosters back in the fall, and four hens since. We only had ten birds left, and Pa didn't want to touch them as they provided us with a few eggs now and would make us more eggs—and chickens, too—come summer.

  It wasn't like this when Mamma was alive. Somehow she provided good meals all through the winter and still managed to have meat left in the cellar come spring. I am nowhere near as capable as my mother was, and if I ever forget it, I have Lou to remind me. Or Pa. Not that he says the sorts of things Lou does, but you can tell by the look on his face when he sits down to eat that he isn't fond of mush day in and day out.

  Jenny Hubbard didn't mind it, though. She waited patiently, her eyes large and solemn, as I sprinkled maple sugar on Lou's leavings and passed the bowl to her. I gave Tom some from the pot. As much as I could spare while still leaving enough for Pa.

  Abby took a swallow of her tea, then looked at me over the top of the cup. "You talk to Pa yet?"

  I shook my head. I was standing behind Lou, teasing the rats out of her hair. It was too short for braids; it only just grazed her jaw. She'd cut it off with Mamma's sewing scissors after Christmas. Right after our brother, Lawton, left.

  "You going to?" she asked.

  "Talk about what?" Beth asked.

  "Never mind. Finish your breakfast," I said.

  "What, Matt? Talk about what?"

  "Beth, if Mattie wanted you to know, she'd tell you," Lou said.

  "You don't know, neither."

  "Do, too."

  "Mattie, why'd you tell Lou and not me?" Beth whined.

  "Because you can't never keep quiet," Lou said.

  That started another round of bickering. My nerves were grated down bald. "It's can't ever, Lou, not can't never," I said. "Beth, stop whining."

  "Matt, you pick your word of the day yet?" Abby asked. Abby, our peacemaker. Gentle and mild. More like our mother than any of the rest of us.

  "Oh, Mattie! Can I pick it? Can I?" Beth begged. She scrambled out of her chair and raced into the parlor. I kept my precious dictionary there, out of harm's way, along with the books I borrowed from Charlie Eckler and Miss Wilcox, and my mother's Waverly Editions of Best Loved American Classics, and some ancient copies of Peterson's Magazine that my aunt Josie had given us because, as it said in its "Publisher's Corner," it was "one of the few periodicals fit for families where there are daughters."

  "Beth, you carry it but let Lou pick the word," I shouted after her.

  "I don't want no part of baby word games," Lou grumbled.

  "Any, Lou. Any part," I snapped. Her carelessness with words made me angrier than her dirty mouth and the filthy state of her coveralls and the manure she'd tracked in, combined.

  Beth returned to the kitchen table, carrying the dictionary as if it were made of gold. It might as well have been. It weighed as much. "Pick the word," I told her. "Lou doesn't want to." She carefully flipped a few pages forward, then a few back, then put her index finger on the left-hand page. "Fff ... fraaak ... fraktee ... frakteeus?" she said.

  "I don't think there's any such word. Spell it," I said. "F-r-a-c-t-i-o-u-s."

  "Frakshus," I said. "Tommy, what's the meaning?"

  Tommy peered at the dictionary. "Apt to break out into a passion ... snappish, peevish, irritable, cross,'" he read. "'P-per-verse. Pettish.'"

  "Isn't that just perfect?" I said. "Fractious," I repeated, relishing the bite of the f, teeth against lip. A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping. "Your turn, Jenny. Can you make a sentence from the word?"

  Jenny bit her bottom lip. "It means cross?" she asked.

  I nodded.

  She frowned, then said, "Ma was fractious when she chucked the fry pan at me 'cause I knocked her whiskey bottle over."

  "She chucked a fry pan at you?" Beth asked, wide-eyed. "Why'd she do that?"

  "Because she was out of sorts," Abby said.

  "Because she was drinking," Jenny said, licking bits of mush off her spoon.

  Jenny Hubbard is only six years old, but the growing season is short in the North Woods, and children, like the corn, have to come up fast if they are to come up at all.

  "Your mamma drinks whiskey?" Beth asked. "Mammas shouldn't drink whiskey—"

  "Come on, Beth, let's go. We're going to be late," Abby said, hurrying her up from the table.

  "Ain't you coming, Matt?" Beth asked.

  "In a few minutes."

  Books were gathered. Dinner pails, too. Abby bossed Lou and Beth into their coats. Tommy and Jenny ate silently. The shed door slammed. It was quiet. For the first time that morning. And then, "Matt? Come here a minute, will you?"

  "What is it, Lou? I've got my hands full."

  "Just come!"

  I walked into the shed. Lou was standing there, ready to go, with Lawton's fishing pole in her hand.

  "Lou, what are you doing?"

  "Can't eat no more mush," she said. Then she took hold of my ear, pulled my face to hers, and kissed my cheek. Hard and sharp and quick. I could smell the scent of her—woodsmoke and cows and the spruce gum she was always chewing. The door slammed again and she was gone.

  My other sisters, like me, take after our mother. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Lou takes after Pa. Lawton, too. Coal black hair, blue eyes. Lou acts like Pa, too. Angry all the time now. Since Mamma died. And Lawton went away.

  When I came back in, Tommy was working his spoon around his bowl so hard I thought he'd take the paint off it. I hadn't had more than a few bites of my mush. "Finish mine, will you, Tom?" I said, sliding my bowl over to him. "I'm not hungry and I don't want it wasted." I plugged the sink, poured hot water into it from the kettle, added a bit of cold from the pump, and started washing. "Where are the rest of you kids?"

  "Susie and Billy went to Weavers. Myrton and Clara went to try at the hotel."

  "Where's the baby?" I asked.

  "With Susie."

  "Your ma's not good tod
ay?"

  "She won't come out from under the bed. Says she's scared of the wind and can't bear to hear it no more." Tommy looked at his bowl, then at me. "You think she's crazy, Mattie? You think the county 11 take her?"

  Emmie Hubbard certainly was crazy, and I was pretty sure the county would take her one day. They'd almost done so on two or three occasions. But I couldn't say that to Tommy. He was only twelve years old. As I tried to figure out what I could say—to find words that weren't a lie but weren't quite the truth, either—I thought that madness isn't like they tell it in books. It isn't Miss Havisham sitting in the ruins of her mansion, all vicious and majestic. And it isn't like in Jane Eyre, either, with Rochester's wife banging around in the attic, shrieking and carrying on and frightening the help. When your mind goes, it's not castles and cobwebs and silver candelabra. It's dirty sheets and sour milk and dog shit on the floor. It's Emmie cowering under her bed, crying and singing while her kids try to make soup from seed potatoes.

  "You know, Tom," I finally said, "there are times I want to hide under the bed myself."

  "men? I can't see you crawling under no bed, Matt."

  "End of February. We got four feet in two days, remember? On top of the three we had. Blew onto the porch and blocked the front door. Couldn't get the shed door open, either. Pa had to go out the kitchen window. The wind was howling and wailing, and all I wanted to do was crawl under something and never come out. Most of us feel like that from time to time. Your ma, she does what she feels. That's the only difference. I'll go over to her before school. See if I can find a jar of apples to take and a bit of maple sugar. Think she'd like that?"

  "She would. I know she would. Thank you, Mattie."

  I packed Tommy and Jenny off to school, hoping that by the time I got to the Hubbards', Weaver's mamma would already be there. She was better at getting Emmie out from under the bed than I was. I finished the washing, looking out the window as I did, at the bare trees and the brown fields, searching for spots of yellow among the patches of snow. If you can pick adder's-tongue in April, spring will come early. I was awful tired of the cold and the snow, and now the rain and the mud.

  People call that time of year—when the root cellar is nearly empty and the garden not yet planted—the six weeks' want. Years past, we always had money come March to buy meat and flour and potatoes, and anything else we might need. Pa would go off logging at the end of November up at Indian or Raquette Lake. He'd leave as soon as the hay was in and stay there all winter, is hauling logs cut the previous summer. He drove teams of horses hitched to jumpers—low flat sledges with big runners. The loads were piled as high as a man standing on another man's shoulders. He took them down off the mountains over icy roads—relying on the weight of the logs and his own skill to keep the jumper from hurtling down the hills and killing the horses and anything else in its way.

  Come March, the snow would melt and the roads would soften, and it became impossible to drag the heavy loads over them. As it got toward the end of the month, we would look for Pa every day. We never knew just when he would arrive. Or how. In the back of someone's wagon if he was lucky. On foot if he wasn't. We often heard him before we saw him, singing a new song he'd learned.

  We girls would all run to him. Lawton would walk. Mamma would try her best to stay on the porch, to hang back and be proper, but she never could. He would smile at her, and then she was running down the path to him, crying because she was so glad he was home with his hands and feet and arms and legs all still attached. He'd hold her face in his hands, keeping her at arm's length, and wipe her tears away with his dirty thumbs. We'd all want to touch him and hug him, but he wouldn't let us. "Don't come near me. I'm crawling," he'd say. He'd take his clothes off in back of the house, douse them with kerosene, and burn them. He'd douse his head, too, and Lawton would comb the dead lice from his hair.

  Mamma would be boiling water while he did all this, and filling our big tin tub. Then Pa would have a bath in the middle of the kitchen, his first one in months. When he was clean, we would have a feast. Ham steaks with gravy. Mashed potatoes with rivers of butter running down them. The last of the corn and the beans. Hot, fleecy rolls. And for dessert, a blueberry buckle made with the last of the put-up berries. Then there were presents for each one of us. There were no stores in the woods, but peddlers knew to make their rounds of the lumber camps just as the men were paid for the season. There might be a penknife for Lawton, and ribbons and boughten candy for us girls. And for Mamma, a dozen glass buttons and a bolt of fabric for a new dress. A cotton sateen the exact shade of a robin's maybe. Or a butterscotch tartan. An emerald velveteen or a crisp yellow pongee And once he bought her a silk faille the exact color of cranberries. Mamma had held that one to her cheek, looking at my pa as she did, then put it away for months, unable to take the scissors to it. We'd all sit in the parlor that night, in the glow of the cylinder stove, eating the caramels and chocolates Pa had brought, and listen to his tales. He'd show us all the new scars he'd picked up and tell us the antics of the wild lumberjacks, and how wicked the boss was, and how bad the food was, and all the tricks they'd played on the cook and the poor chore boy. It was better than Christmas, those nights that Pa came out of the woods.

  He hadn't gone into the woods this year. He didn't want us by ourselves. Without his logging money, things had been hard indeed. He'd done some ice cutting on Fourth Lake over the winter, but the pay wasn't as good as logging money, and the yearly tax bill on our land took it all, anyway. As I stood there drying the dishes, I hoped the fact that we were flat broke and would be for some weeks yet, until Pa could sell his milk and butter again, would make him listen to what I had to say and tell me yes.

  I finally heard him come into the shed, and then he was in the kitchen, a small snuffling bundle in his arms. "That devil of a sow et four of her piglets," he said. "Every one except the runt. I'm going to put him in with Barney. Heat'll do him good. Lord, this dog stinks! What's he been eating?"

  "Probably got into something in the yard. Here, Pa." I put a bowl of mush on the table and stirred maple sugar into it. Then I poured the watery milk over it and hoped to God he didn't ask for more.

  He sat down, looking thunderous, no doubt toting up the money he'd lost on the dead piglets. "Cost your mother a whole dollar secondhand, that book," he said, nodding at the dictionary still open on the table. "Never spent a penny on herself and then throws away a whole dollar on that thing. Put it up before it's covered in grease."

  I put it back in the parlor, then poured Pa a cup of hot tea. Black and sweet, just the way he liked it. I sat down across from him and looked around the room. At the red-and-white-checked curtains that needed washing. At the faded pictures cut off calendars from Becker's Farm and Feed Supply that Mamma had tacked on the walls. At the chipped plates and yellow mixing bowls on the shelf over the sink. At the cracked linoleum, the black stove. At Barney licking the piglet. I looked at everything there was to see and some things twice, practicing my words in my head. I'd just about worked up the nerve to open my mouth when Pa spoke first.

  "I'm sugaring tomorrow. Sap's flowing like a river. Got about a hundred gallons already. Wait any longer and it'll all spoil. Weather's unseasonable warm. You're to stay home and help me boil tomorrow. Your sisters, too."

  "Pa, I can't. I'll fall behind if I miss a day, and my examinations are coming up."

  "Cows can't eat learning, Mattie. I need to buy hay. Used up most everything I cut last fall. Fred Becker don't take credit, so I'll need to sell some syrup to get it."

  I started to argue, but Pa looked up from his bowl and I knew to stop. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "You're lucky you're going at all this year," he said. "And it's only because the notion of you getting your diploma"—it came out French-sounding, dee-plo-MA, as his words do when he's angry—"meant something to your mother. You won't be going next year. I can't run this place by myself."

  I looked at the table. I was angry with my father for keeping me home,
even for a day, but he was right: He couldn't run a sixty-acre farm alone. I wished then that it was still winter and snowing night and day and there was no plowing or planting, just long evenings of reading and writing in my composition book, and Pa with nothing to say about it. Fractious, I thought. Cross, irritable, peevish. Fits my father to a tee. It was useless to try and soften him up with sweet tea. Might as well try and soften up a boulder. I took a deep breath and plunged ahead.

  "Pa, I want to ask you something," I said, hope rising in me like sap in one of our maples, though I tried not to let it.

  "Mmm?" He raised an eyebrow and kept on eating.

  "Can I work at one of the camps this season? Maybe the Glenmore? Abby's old enough to get the meals and look after everyone. I asked her and she said shed be fine and I thought that if I—"

  "No."

  "But Pa—"

  "You don't have to go looking for work. There's plenty"—there it was again, his accent, plain-tee—"right here."

  I knew he'd say no. Why had I even asked? I stared at my hands—red, cracked, old woman's hands—and saw what was in store for me: a whole summer of drudgery and no money for it. Cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing, feeding chickens, slopping pigs, milking cows, churning cream, salting butter, making soap, plowing, planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, haying, threshing, canning—doing everything that fell on the eldest in a family of four girls, a dead mother, and a pissant brother who took off to drive boats on the Erie Canal and refused to come back and work the farm like he ought to.

  I was yearning, and so I had more courage than was good for me. "Pa, they pay well," I said. "I thought I could keep back some of the money for myself and give the rest to you. I know you need it."

  "You can't be up at a hotel by yourself. It's not right."

  "But I won't be by myself! Ada Bouchard and Frances Hill and Jane Miley are all going to the Glenmore. And the Morrisons—the ones managing the place—are decent folk. Ralph Simms is going. And Mike Bouchard. And Weaver, too."