The Weight of Winter Page 10

  “Well?” Davey sat up on the sofa to ask her. “What did the doctor say?”

  “Not much new,” Charlene said, and realized immediately that something—she wasn’t sure what—was changing the course of their family life together. It wasn’t just money. It was something more precious than that.

  “He must’ve said something,” Davey said. “For Christ’s sake, what are we paying him for?”

  “Money isn’t the issue at a time like this,” said Charlene, remembering her own guilt, earlier in the day, about such things.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Davey answered.

  “I know,” said Charlene, and was at once sorry. “He doesn’t think it’s mono after all. She’s never once had a sore throat, remember, and it’s been eight weeks. He said there should be signs of it letting up if it’s mono.”

  “Did you tell him how the rash on her neck cleared up after a couple of days?” Davey asked.

  “He said now he thinks it was only coincidental and not a symptom of the larger illness.”

  “The larger illness,” Davey said, and shook his head.

  “He said six years old is real young to have mono in the first place,” said Charlene. “Or rheumatoid arthritis, for that matter. But with her being tired all the time, and with her joints being swollen, and what with that little rash, well, he just doesn’t know. They can only run superficial tests at the clinic.”

  “Superficial tests?” Davey sighed. His wife was starting to talk like a doctor running for political office, and he was paying for her campaign in costly office fees.

  “He said to give it a few more days,” Charlene added. “Just in hopes that it is a virus of some kind and she’ll pull out of it. If not, he wants to run some neurological tests in Watertown to see if there’s trouble in the brain, and if that don’t work—” Charlene stopped in midsentence. Davey had enough worries, didn’t he? Would it be right for her, as his wife through richer or poorer, to censor a few unpleasant facts?

  “Well, what?” asked Davey.

  “We’ll have to send her to Boston.” Charlene imagined an airplane, full of people drinking and laughing and reading magazines beneath their little ceiling lights, an airplane making its way through a gray sky of snow toward Boston, a frightened little girl alone in one unlighted seat, being tested in, oh, so many ways.

  “I could never let her go alone,” Charlene thought. “Neither would Davey. We’d sell the house first, rather than let that child go alone. We’ll get the money if we have to sell our car.” Then she remembered that the bank owned those items anyway, when you got right down to it. Well, they didn’t own her relatives, and Charlene would beg airplane tickets if she had to. She and Davey could sleep on the street. Tanya wasn’t going anywhere alone, not if Charlene could help it. But maybe in a few days it would all be past them. Tanya would be back to her bouncy self, and airplanes would fly to Boston well enough without her.

  “You know,” Davey said finally, and Charlene remembered him there, on the sofa beside her. “Mama still thinks it’s chilblains. She said that’s what the rash looked like.”

  “Please, don’t bring that up,” Charlene said. Mother-in-law. “She’s been calling me twice a day and telling me chilblains, chilblains. All she really wants to say is that I don’t dress Tanya warm enough.”

  “Well,” Davey said. “Maybe she’s right. Folks around here sometimes know a lot more about illnesses than city doctors.”

  “Davey,” Charlene said. She worked with the short little curl, the one she had loved from the first moment she laid eyes on David Craft, way down in Connecticut, long before Tanya Craft was even imagined—the ancestral curl that had given Tanya her own thick ringlets. “Your mother sees frostbite in everything. She’s not a doctor, you know.”

  “And what does the doctor say?” Davey asked. “Did you even ask him about chilblains?” Charlene sighed. She had, honest to God, asked the doctor about chilblains because Selma Craft had her daughter-in-law secretly hoping it was nothing more than exposure to the elements. Charlene wouldn’t be surprised anyway. Her child wasn’t created for these horrible temperatures. But Tanya had started complaining of fatigue in September, and as much as Charlene hated northern Maine, she had to admit that September up there was so pretty it hurt your eyes.

  “Well? What did the doctor say?”

  “He laughed,” said Charlene, and suddenly Davey was on his feet, surprising her with his quick movements. She had thought he was getting slower every day too, like his sick daughter. But now Davey was spry with anger. He threw the sofa pillow against the wall. It careened off and landed on a bottom bookshelf, where the school pictures of the children fell again with soft little thumps. The cat jumped from its curled sleep and skittered, yowling, into the kitchen. Davey slammed his right fist into his open palm.

  “Then why doesn’t he tell us?” Davey cried. “Why does the son of a bitch laugh when all we want is an answer?” He leaned against the doorjamb, the kitchen light coming in and framing him there in a soft sheen. Charlene could see tears sparkling in his eyes.

  “We just gotta wait,” she said.

  “Christ Almighty,” Davey said quietly. “Is he telling us that there might be something seriously wrong with her? That this ain’t something that’ll just go away?”

  “He’s saying to give it a few more days until these new tests come back,” said Charlene.

  “I’m going for a drive,” Davey said.

  “It’s snowing,” Charlene reminded him, although a drive might be a good idea. If it weren’t for the snowy roads, she would take a long, peaceful ride herself. Davey wasn’t the type to hang out at The Crossroads and guzzle beer with his cronies. He preferred, instead, to buy one or two Buds at Marshall’s Grocery, then sip them in front of the TV. Once in a great while, when the tension in the house grew heavy, Davey would hop into his pickup and cruise along the river road, or just sit in his truck on the flat by the river and watch the black water rush by in the night. After all, Charlene reminded herself, these woods, the fields, the river, were the very roots of his childhood, his closest, oldest friends.

  “Be careful,” Charlene said. “But if you run into a ditch, just call Dorrie on the CB. She’ll come plow you out.” Davey smiled, a weak smile. A sense of humor, Charlene knew, would save her damn marriage. Money certainly wasn’t going to do it.

  “What’s her handle?” Davey asked.

  “Big Mama,” Charlene said. “Big Nosy Mama.” Then she gave him a quick little kiss.

  ***

  Charlene watched his truck disappear into the storm before she switched the TV station to Thirtysomething. That was her, all right. Thirtysomething. They should set one of those episodes in Mattagash, or better yet, let the regulars winter there. It wouldn’t be long before they’d all be in a fight, the cast, the crew, the writers.

  “It’s possible, it’s just possible,” Charlene mumbled, “that all she really has is chilblains.” And as the television flickered softly, Charlene returned again to the land where hope was alive and well, where it never snowed, and little girls never went anywhere alone.

  CROSSROADS IN A SNOWY WOOD: THE PILGRIMS GATHER AT THE TABARD

  It’s only life’s illusions

  That bring us to this bar,

  To pick up these old crutches

  And compare each other’s scars.

  —“Ships That Don’t Come In,” written by Paul Nelson and Dave Gibson

  The warping bar at The Crossroads had been built in the shape of a large horseshoe, for good luck, so that its customers could rally around it as though it were a big conference table. By 1989, religions and heritages collided quite peacefully at The Crossroads. Marriages were so common between the French-speaking Catholics and the English-speaking Protestants that duels fought nowadays were fought from other primal sources. They were still territorial, although th
e real estate market was near the bottom. They still dealt with the courtship/mating game, although the pall of AIDS hung so heavily, even over the northerly Crossroads, that a rejuvenated notion of courtly love seemed to exist, at least until closing time. And feuds were still mainly old family grudges, passed down from ancestors to the descendants. Someone’s grandfather might never have gotten the chance to air his grievances toward one of his contemporaries, so they lay dormant until his grandson got drunk enough to settle the fifty-year-old squabble.

  Other changes had come to the remote area as well. Oral history was no longer a form of entertainment, not when it had to compete with the new gods—the snowmobile, the television set, VCR movies, and a burgeoning state lottery. If it wasn’t tribe against tribe, Catholic against Protestant, then it was Maine resident against those six magical digits that could turn a lumberjack into a millionaire overnight, and could make heavy-thighed Cinderellas out of any number of housewives. It was deus ex machina among the piney hills and valleys, but God was arriving upon a new kind of gadgetry. He was now in the whiny buzz of the red-orange skidders, in the chain saw’s toothy spiel, and in the lottery machine that spit its dream-filled tickets out into the hopeful hands of this new breed of Mattagasher. Machines had taken the place of all the old country customs. God was now the start button on the microwave, the play button on the VCR, the channel button on the remote control—and the best place to worship in this new religion was at The Crossroads.

  The evolution of The Crossroads had the same kind of history as the good old U. S. of A. itself. It was a hardworking man’s destiny to push to the ends of his emotional limits, to expand beyond the familiar territory of his wife’s kitchen, to seek solace from a long day’s work which, by Puritan ethics, should bring one a just reward. Manifest Destiny, Mattagash style, had demanded the opening of The Crossroads, where just rewards were a dime a dozen, and even cheaper at happy hour. It took a new breed of philosopher to overthrow the rusted political minds of the past which had always voted to keep Mattagash a dry town. And a new voice arrived in Billy Plunkett, tired of driving all the way to Watertown for a quick beer or two. Like some woodsy existentialist, Billy reminded everyone that their ancestors had always liked a brew stronger than tea, even if the Holy Rollers kept it hidden in barns, or in fake Bibles. “If God hadn’t wanted us folks up here in northern Maine to drink,” Billy said, during his campaign for wet votes, “he wouldn’t have created the Budweiser truck.” Machines had, indeed, made themselves known everywhere, and it was this Sartrian Existence Precedes the Essence of Booze notion that the new generation of Mattagasher, one that already had seen its share of Boston-bought pot and other illegal sundries, took to instantly. At the town meeting of 1989, every self-respecting imbiber within miles turned up to vote. In the school’s gymnasium, debates raged on well into the afternoon while outside, oblivious to the needs of the townsfolk, a new crop of pussy willows, those ancient catkins, were being blown about in the late-March winds. By the time the votes were begrudgingly counted by Prissy Monihan, a teetotaler if ever there was one, things were looking pretty moist for Mattagash. And with society demanding change or threatening revolution, Maurice Fennelson, who had read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, decided to do just that, provided those friends never asked for credit. With a few coats of paint, a few tables, chairs, and a jukebox, Maurice remodeled the old Fennelson homestead into The Crossroads.

  In its day, the building had lolled up on the grassy knoll overlooking the mouth of Mattagash Brook, which ran into the Mattagash River ten miles from the thrust of town. It had been built in 1894 by a man named Luther Monihan, no doubt a distant relative of Prissy’s—another of life’s ironies. Foster Fennelson, Maurice’s grandfather, husband to Mathilda—who was now lolling herself in St. Leonard’s nursing home and God only knows how old—bought it from Luther in 1897. Maurice had seen pictures of the house in its prime, Brownie snaps of the enormous front yard which had once accommodated large Sunday picnics, dozens of hens with chicks trailing happily behind, and sweaty lumberjacks just stopped in for a tin dipper of water and a quick smoke before launching out on a spring log drive. Maurice had seen pictures of folks he never even dreamed of, great-great-aunts in high, stiff collars, with their slender young hands grasping the white rails of the magnificent veranda. He had seen great-great-uncles with cocky smiles perched atop a slew of haying wagons, the smoke from their pipes spiraling into the autumn air, the wooden spokes of their wagons locked in time. Several of the first settler families had seen fit to build their homes there, but new folks coming into the area were reluctant to live so far back in the wilderness. The tiny gathering at Mattagash Brook had died away as quickly as the settlement at Mattagash had flourished. With the passing years, nature had begun to reclaim the area, had sent vines and ferns and mosses up out of the heart of the land to cover again what man had interfered with. None of Foster and Mathilda’s children wanted the old house, so it had gone to Casey, their youngest son. Casey was Maurice Fennelson’s father.

  In 1960, two years after Foster Fennelson died, Casey decided to move the main part of the old building into Mattagash, where it could be renovated to become the new town hall. There was still enough road left on which to drive a truck to Mattagash Brook, so one summer afternoon, while the sky was alive with heat lightning, Casey and several of the townsmen rolled the house up onto a flatbed and drove it slowly into town. Left behind to rot in the upcoming wilderness were the summer kitchen and the red-roofed barn. No one told Mathilda about the change. She was seventy-eight years old by then, living with her daughter Winnie, and still believing she would be allowed to go back home one day, to the old house, to set up housekeeping once again. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and the town was in desperate need of a big building. But folks had bickered so much about what the old homestead was worth, and where it should ultimately stand, that Casey had said to hell with them and left it languishing on his property, catty-corner to the Mattagash River. When Casey’s skidder turned wheels up in the woods one muggy, blackflied summer day in 1968—another casualty of the Fennelson curse, it would seem—no one told Mathilda that, either. By then she was already eighty-six and permanently ensconced at Pine Valley, serving the rest of her life sentence. The news that her youngest son had preceded her into death would only be painful. Maurice, her grandson, inherited the house after Casey’s death, and if he had any say in the matter, there would be different pictures taken of the old Fennelson homestead. Maurice expected that nowadays Kodaks and video cameras would be making memories out of any number of pickup trucks, and snowmobiles, and rattly Chevrolets, instead of the rickety hay wagons of yore. But the faces, Maurice knew when he looked at the old photographs belonging to Mathilda, the faces hanging out at The Crossroads in 1989 would be almost the same as the faces in those photos. Time might change knickers into jeans or boots laced to the knees into tennis shoes, but some things time couldn’t tamper with, and those were the thin, narrow noses of the old settlers, the Irish-blue eyes, the wisps of hair yellow and brown as all those autumns past.

  It was out of this architectural folklore that The Crossroads was eventually born. Maurice carved a lovely wooden sign, in the English fashion of The White Stag or The Boar’s Head. Beneath the words The Crossroads, two graceful roads curved up to a single point and met happily. After a consultation with his sister/business partner, Maurice painted these roads a watery blue, making them rivers instead.

  “After all,” Sally reminded him, “this town’s name means ‘where the two rivers meet.’” So, at the bottom of the sign, this historical reminder appeared. It made a terrific slogan. The Crossroads. Where Good Friends, Like the Rivers, Meet. Maurice hung the sign outside, suspended by heavy chains, so that it could rock sweetly, even in the strongest of river winds. He then reminded everyone that the site on which the tavern stood, the one lying catty-corner to the river, was reputed to be an old Malecite Indian burial gr
ound, and would surely bring the Great White Drinker any amount of good luck. Not realizing that he had his omens mixed saved Maurice and his clientele from most of the psychological hazards that threaten trespassers on sacred soil. When Maurice was granted a liquor license from the state, he hung it with such pride on the wall behind his bar that it might have been a high school equivalency diploma. With the wheels of democracy spinning in his favor, he chose a beautiful Saturday in May for his grand opening, one that brought with it the aroma of wild apple and cherry, a sky bluer than the old Mattagash River, and the biting freshness of retreating snow. It would seem the old Malecite chieftains were, indeed, smiling their toothless smiles. A full house at the grand opening appeared to be the perfect send-off. Oh, it was true that among the Crafts and Monihans—those Jesus-loves-me-more-than-he-loves-you types, those snowbound, mosquito-bitten Carry Nations—a great wave of protest rose up in a judgmental cloud, one that was ignored. And it seemed to the patrons of The Crossroads that despite the dreary prophecies of these temperance agitators, God had better things to do—in the Middle East, for instance—than lift a single finger to level The Crossroads. God could even find his work cut out for him back in Ireland, back in the old country, for Chrissakes, where people threw bombs out of their cars instead of beer bottles. So, despite the quibbling storm that always surrounds a controversial institution, Mattagash’s first bar was born; and, as with that inevitable westward expansion, the rest is history.

  Sally Fennelson-Henderson, who worked four nights a week behind the horseshoe bar, said the occasional fight that did occur was connected, one way or another, to the moon.