The Weight of Winter Read online

  “I’ve seen people get along all month like they was blood brothers,” Sally once remarked. “Then as soon as that damned moon turns full, they’ll be at each other’s throats like werewolves.” And it was the same moon—at least Maurice and Sally hoped so—that spurred the Mattagash Temperance Squad on toward a petition to close the place down.

  “I wish them women would have an Avon party,” Maurice said when he heard about the uprising. “Get their minds on perfume or something.”

  “It’s the moon,” Sally predicted, and wiped clean an ashtray. “It’ll pass.”

  Moon or no moon, The Crossroads sat looking out over the banks of the Mattagash River, a river that had been witness to some of the biggest, daringest log drives of the last century. But the drives had ended. Tractors had been born, and they went into the woods and built roads so that trucks could travel deep into the forest until they reached the logs. Once, man had needed the old river to bring the logs to him; now he went in his fancy machines and got the logs himself, and he threw the river away, as if it were an old shoelace. But two or three old-timers still sat on rickety stools at The Crossroads to teach the younger generation about the days when nearly fifty million feet of lumber rattled past their doors each spring, at the peak of the drive, when the river was running with logs.

  “It was a wooden river then,” the old-timers told the young-timers, and their weary eyes would meet momentarily, remembering the curved feel of log beneath their caulked boots, remembering whose father had gone under and drowned when a jam broke, remembering their youth as if it were something they could go and look for one day, along the river, if only they had the eyes to find it.

  The log drives had ended, and the descendants of those old lumberjacks now owned expensive skidders, machines that cost as much as a Mattagash house. And they owned the best chain saws from Norway and Sweden. Swedish words like Jonsered and Husqvarna, Japanese words like Tanaka and Shindaiwa had now entered the language of the woodsmen, and could be heard in among the white pines and the black spruce instead of the old lumberjack ballads. The men worked now for the P. G. Irvine Lumber Company, a large conglomerate from Canada which had eaten up the state of Maine as if it were a mincemeat pie. The P. G. Irvine Company owned almost as much of Maine as Mainers did. It owned the men, too. Their choice was a simple one: go to Connecticut and lose yourself in those faceless factories and in backbreaking construction jobs, or work for P. G. Irvine, the old Canuck son of a bitch, and take just what he wanted to pay you and shape your life to his set of rules, while you cut down the wooded heritage of your ancestors. Considering all that, The Crossroads was a damn good idea.

  Several complacent deer heads adorned the walls of the bar, the antlers used as natural hat racks, an action that might even please the Malecite skeletons beneath the floor. Most men who frequented The Crossroads kept their hats on. Maybe they were in a hurry to get home to supper after one quick drink. Maybe their heads were cold. It didn’t matter anyway, because no etiquette demanded removal of the garment. The hat was a part of the job, of the lifestyle. One wouldn’t ask a man to remove his scalp because he happened to step inside another man’s door. But the more serious-minded regulars, the ones who came after supper and stayed until Sally bellowed last call at 12:45, usually hung their hats, as if they were well-won coats of armor, on the obliging antlers.

  Several hats were regular danglers and could be seen nightly on the racks. They sang out advertisements for a variety of products and companies: Jonsered Chain Saws, John Deere Tractors, P. G. Irvine, Inc., Mattagash Lumber Company, Aroostook County: The Crown of Maine, Blanchard Logging. You could tell a lot about the man by the hat. Billy Plunkett’s had a shitty-brown plaster spill on the visor, and Damn Sea Gulls! above it in red letters. It was a statement of what he viewed as his perpetual good humor and his lackadaisical approach to life. Pike Gifford’s hat, a floppy green felt, had a small replica of a Budweiser beer can pinned to the brim. The message read Open in Case of Emergency. The rest of the hat was littered heavily with feathered fly hooks of all sizes and bright colors. Seeing Pike Gifford in this hat, at a distance of ten or twelve feet, one might think that a large swarm of tropical insects had, for some migratory reason known only to them, settled down to colonize on Pike Gifford’s head. The appearance of the felt fly hat was even more confusing in the midst of heavy winter, when most of the fake flies ended up coated with little snowy hats themselves. But it bespoke Pike’s lifestyle; he had never worked so hard at anything as he had at fishing.

  By the time the big wooden sign, describing rivers and friendships, was creaking painfully in the snow-filled blast of November wind coming down from McKinnon Hill, the seagull hat and the floppy green menagerie had been dangling from one of the deer racks since suppertime.

  “The crowd’s gonna be slow tonight,” Sally said, looking up from her People magazine to eye the snow filtering down beneath the pole lights. “Unless we get the Mattagash Milers Snowmobile Club.” Snow didn’t bother Sally. She had only two hundred yards to walk and she’d be home. She needed the business too, so if even a gaggle of folks were willing to take their own snowy chances with fate, and occasionally pump the jukebox full of quarters, Sally was willing to let them.

  There were three young women from St. Leonard huddled at a table that had been pushed snugly against the wall. Above it, a ruffed grouse—what the locals called a “pat-ridge,” spread its lifeless wings in an artificial pose. To the right of the table, atop a Ms. Pac-Man machine Maurice had purchased très cheap in Quebec City, a full Canadian lynx appeared ready to leap from its post and rush headlong into the stormy night. He peered intently down at the women. Beneath the softly tufted ears, his marble eyes caught the neon flash of the Miller High Life sign. Along with the stuffed birds and assorted deer heads, Felts canadensis was intended, at least in the dense wilderness of Maurice’s thinking, to call to the patron’s mind the quick flush of grouse on a cool summer evening, the velvety lips of the deer on a mountain freshet, the tawny, cream-colored grace of the lynx as it descended with deadly accuracy upon a snowshoe hare. But the lynx was now so old—it had been trapped by Maurice’s father—and the grouse had lost so many feathers in its bumpy move to The Crossroads, that the animal corpses added little more than a graveyard pallor to the atmosphere. One regular customer, Ronny Plunkett, who was back in Mattagash after twenty years in the navy, had gone so far as to insist that the lynx smelled. “I think whoever stuffed it left the guts in it,” he told Maurice.

  And another critic, a canoeist and animal lover from out of state, who was camped on the flat by the river, had even suggested cruelty.

  “I love animals too,” Maurice had explained patiently to her. “Your way, you only get a glimpse of them. My way, you get to look right up their assholes.”

  The women from St. Leonard, who had noticed the lynx at Maurice’s grand opening, now no longer saw him there, crouched, dead, forgotten—just as they failed to hear the rattle of precious bones beneath the floorboards of the pub. They went on talking gaily, instead, in their Franglais, their French mixed with English. Maurice scarcely paused when one of his St. Leonard clients told him they’d just bought a new car “avec air condition.” Nowadays, among the youngest of the St. Leonardians, French was no longer spoken at all, and only a trace of the old Québecois accent could be heard in their English. Supply and demand had propelled many young St. Leonard girls to smile their best smiles at the Mattagash males. And the males had been smiling back for a long time now. The Crossroads simply gave them larger berth in which to mix. And pretty Mattagash girls had been twirling on their stools and whispering about young men with last names like Robichaud, Grandmaison, and Bellefontaine. Difficult names for them to spell, much less pronounce. But they had learned to spell Mattagash as first graders, and now they were ready for the tough polysyllables of the outer world. It was true that the purists of town, those who preferred genocide to integration—the Craft
s, the Monihans, and their ilk, the hierarchy now that the McKinnons had faded away—would go barren to their coffins rather than let French Catholic blood leak into their veins. But all that interbreeding was beginning to take its toll. “It’s getting to the point now,” Willy Fennelson once noted, “that you need to know algebra just to do your family tree.” The Crafts and the Monihans might think they could control the very network of their DNA, but there were silent, invisible things called chromosomes, so strong-headed themselves that they had never even heard of the Crafts and the Monihans. And the time comes when families, like worn ropes with dangerously thin spots, must untangle themselves and own up. Unbeknownst to all but the amateur genealogists in town, The Crossroads was a blessing in disguise.

  ***

  “When’s Maurice gonna put a couple quarters of his own into this big metal hog?” Billy Plunkett asked as he kicked the jukebox. Merle Haggard stammered a bit in the midst of a song, then leveled again as the machine settled down to the music.

  “Billy, quit kicking the jukebox, goddamnit,” said Sally.

  “I’m sure Merle needs this fifty cents,” Billy said. “He’s got more greedy ex-wives than I do.”

  “And don’t play ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas’ again neither,” said Sally. “I’ll dream them words tonight.”

  “When Maurice puts a quarter in this machine,” Billy said, “you can hear whatever the hell you want to. I’ll play hymns for you if Maurice is paying.” He pushed Q12, “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.”

  “I wish to hell they did,” Billy muttered as the song started up. “Unfortunately, they’re all right here in Mattagash, Maine.”

  “I’ll play you a game of cribbage,” Pike Gifford offered from the bar. “A penny a point.” He wore a Band-Aid on his temple. Despite Lynn’s worry, the cut had not required stitches and was now on its way to healing. A basket of stale popcorn, like some forgotten still life from the 1880s, sat bleakly by Pike’s vodka and tonic.

  “You cheat too damn much,” Billy said. He was slowly reading titles, choosing his next selection with more care than he had administered in choosing wives.

  “Better to cheat at cribbage than at marriage,” Pike said. He smiled broadly, several dark cavities emerging as he did so. It was good to be with Billy, as always. Billy was his closest kin, not counting Pike’s own children. Billy was better than that. He was the big brother Pike never had. Billy’s father, Tom Plunkett, was a half brother to Goldie, Pike’s mother. Things had changed when Goldie Plunkett Gifford threw out the elder Pike and got herself that job at the J. C. Penney store in Watertown. She’d met and married a man, way back in 1971, who took her and all her children off to Connecticut, where they’d started their own carpet-cleaning business. All except Pike Jr., who refused to go. Instead, he stayed on in the old house with the senior Pike. And every year when Goldie and those siblings made their migration to Mattagash, like birds unable to stop themselves, Pike had ignored their big Cutlasses and their stylish clothes and Goldie’s earrings, which reached almost to her shoulders.

  “Our little company is doing great, Pikey,” Goldie would say to her son at first. “It’s doing so good that you can have yourself a wonderful job. And we’ll all be back together again.”

  “I ain’t cleaning the shit off people’s rugs,” Pike told her. And he gave away every goddamn shirt and pair of pants she left lying on the sofa, in a bag with some fancy Connecticut store name on it. He refused to keep any of it, not even after the Cutlass pulled out of the driveway in a shower of dirt, like wonderful confetti coming down in their wake, like fistfuls of dollar bills falling. When the elder Pike died two years later, Little Pike was still only thirteen. Billy Plunkett’s family took him in. He slept in the same room with Billy, ate at the same table, shat in the same toilet, made first love to the same girl. Billy Plunkett was Pike’s real family, even if Pike did cheat him at cribbage.

  Billy settled on “’Til I’m Too Old to Die Young” for his last selection.

  “Ain’t that the truth, though,” Billy said, agreeing with the title. He punched the appropriate numbers, then returned to his bar stool next to Pike Gifford’s own.

  “I was just thinking,” Pike said. “When I retire, Maurice ought to give me this stool, you know, the way they give them fancy chairs to university professors.”

  “You’d only pawn it,” Billy said. He finished off his own vodka, then motioned with the glass to Sally for another. He knew that the girls from St. Leonard had watched with interest as he selected his songs, rocking his ass a bit to the beat, running a quick hand through his hair. He might be thirty-three but, by Christ, he still had it. Although he was two years older than Pike, his nose was just beginning to sing of a redness beyond the natural genetic intent for the color of his skin, and the little pockets beneath his eyes, swollen, puffy, could have been a lack of good sleep. Ten years down the road, no one would be confused at the telltale signs Billy’s body was shoveling up to the surface. But it was still young enough now to repair some of the damage, disguise it, repackage it. Billy knew it was no accident that young girls in their early twenties, young St. Leonard girls, were looking his way. He had seen an adjective once in a magazine in a dentist’s office, the horrible day he was waiting to have a wisdom tooth extracted. And the word had jumped up at him, as if all the little letters were living things: cocksure. God, Jesus, but Billy had come to love that word, the slinky coolness of it on his tongue, the stiffness of the k, as though it were a little gun going off. No matter that in the magazine story it had been a young marine out on patrol in the Mekong Delta who was being referred to, no matter that it was his brashness, his overconfidence that were being pointed out. Billy had stolen the word, as he had stolen so many chain saws over the years, and he had given it the only meaning such a word could, respectfully, be given. And on his tombstone, when the day for that came, he hoped to God they’d use it. Billy Plunkett: Cocksure.

  “Wanna go sit with them young things?” Billy asked Pike, and then motioned with his head to that oasis of fleshy fruit growing out of a cold Mattagash landscape, between the stuffed grouse and the rotting lynx. “I’m feeling pretty cocksure,” Billy added, and winked at Pike. Pike surveyed the girls evenly. No pretenses with Pike. Marriage had taken the pretense out of him. Now even courting was filled with an urgency. It was a little like jacking deer to Pike Gifford. It was illegal, so you did it fast, planted your bullets accurately (but in this case prayed they were all duds), covered your tracks, and didn’t forget your hat.

  “We’ll probably have to buy them their drinks,” Pike calculated. “And I only got twenty dollars or so, just enough to carry myself through the rest of the night. Maybe you could lend me a twenty. I’ll give it back to you when my check comes.” Pike never considered the tip. That was a social pressure that bothered few customers at The Crossroads.

  “I only got about ten bucks myself,” Billy said. “I was hoping you’d carry me until my check comes.” Billy’s disability, like Pike’s, had something to do with those mysterious little disks in his back. He didn’t know much about them, but he knew they were best friends to the fake compensation claim. Billy had long ceased to mention the stick of pulp that had supposedly jarred against his back, leaving him partially disabled. Now that his checks were arriving safely, he preferred to elaborate, instead, on the poetic effects of his disability. “Them disks in your back work just like the shocks in a car,” Billy often lectured the women he dated, before lovemaking. “President Kennedy had to put all his girlfriends on top too.”

  “You stay away from that jukebox,” Pike said, “and we’ll manage. Who do you think you are anyway? Some big-time lottery winner like Paulie Hart?”

  Pike didn’t really mind being down to his last twenty. His check would arrive any snowy day now, from Augusta, if he could count on Lynn to send the damn thing over to Billy’s. He thought of Lynn then. He had missed her earlier, in those
lonely waking hours at Billy’s, the sun prying between his crusty eyelids, his head thrashing back and forth as though someone had plugged it into a wall socket. He had missed the soft swell of her body curving against his, the way it did on the nights when he came home sober enough to climb the stairs. And he remembered another climbing, remembered the uneven scuffle of his father’s boots on the creaking steps, on their way up to Goldie’s room, and then Goldie crying softly, the springs of the bed squeaking as if in pain, until suddenly there was just pure silence and all the kids could let out their frozen breaths and go back to sleep.

  “Liz Taylor took off with a strange man on a motorcycle,” Sally said. She was still reading People magazine. “On her most recent visit to the Betty Ford Clinic,” she clarified when she saw that several of her listeners had raised their eyebrows.

  “I wish they’d leave that poor woman alone,” Billy said sympathetically.

  “She’s gained all her weight back again,” said Sally, scrutinizing the magazine photo of Liz.

  “Just the same”—Billy leaned over to survey the picture—“if it wasn’t for my Kennedy back, I’d take my chances with her. But them disks can just take so much pressure, especially when Liz is overweight.”

  “Oh, Billy,” Sally said, and shooed him away with the magazine. “As if Elizabeth Taylor would give you the time of day.”

  “She might,” said Billy. “Who knows? One of these nights she might end up here, at the Betty Ford Clinic Northeast.” He waved his arm at the surroundings. Pike smiled.

  Let Lynn say what she wanted. Pike had a right, goddamnit, to sit in a bar and enjoy his friends. He had one of those inalienable rights he remembered having to salute the blasted flag for back in grammar school, in Mrs. Fennelson’s class. That was before those atheist parents—those freethinking hippies from St. Leonard—had complained to the authorities that flag allegiance was being secretly carried out in Margaret Fennelson’s fifth-grade class. Someone from Augusta came up and put a stop to it. Margaret Fennelson had cried so hard that ten-year-old Pike thought she, personally, was responsible for the separation of church and state.