The Weight of Winter Read online

  “The punishment God wields down to unloyal children,” Sicily said. “That’s what.”

  “Mother, I mentioned once, one time, uno, that you might like the social atmosphere at the St. Leonard nursing home, what with your good friend Winnie Craft down there entertaining legions daily with her gossip.”

  “Now listen to you,” said Sicily. “What’s poor Winnie ever done to you? If the Lord was to come to St. Leonard tonight to take Winnie Craft to heaven, how would you feel?”

  “If the Lord comes to St. Leonard tonight, he’d better have snow tires,” Amy Joy said, her eyes staring out beyond the pane of Sicily’s bedroom window, to the snow falling over Mattagash. “Besides, Winnie Craft has never been a focal point in my life, so I probably wouldn’t notice if the Lord bundled her up and took her.”

  “No,” Sicily said. “And that’s just the problem. You ain’t got any focal points. Not even one or two.”

  Amy Joy sighed. “We’re back to me not having any children and therefore you no grandchildren, aren’t we?”

  “You did it out of spite,” said Sicily.

  “Shit,” thought Amy Joy. “She’ll be banging this drum even after I go through menopause.”

  “You did it out of spite just to keep me from them.” Sicily tugged at the lace border of her pillow. Amy Joy looked away from her mother’s spotted hands. She remembered when they had been smooth and white.

  “Maybe I did it out of love,” said Amy Joy. “Maybe I kept them from you.”

  “It ain’t like you’re barren or anything.” Sicily ignored the remark. “Besides, God can cure barrenness. ‘He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children.’ You’ll find that in Psalms.”

  “One of these days I’m gonna look all that stuff up,” said Amy Joy. “I swear you write most of it yourself.”

  “And I’ll bet you something else,” Sicily went on. “When I’m laying out flat next to my sister Pearl and my sister Marge, right here in the Mattagash Protestant graveyard, I hope you’ll realize then how you’ve treated me.”

  It had been nearly two years since they’d buried Aunt Pearl. Amy Joy remembered the snowy day when she went to the graveyard, months after Pearl died, and stood before the best tombstone Junior Ivy could find for his mother, the Ivy Funeral Home super deluxe. And she had watched as the snowflakes ate away at the letters, Pearl McKinnon Ivy, 1909–1987, until the engraving disappeared in a swirl of snow. Like Sicily’s name on the mailbox earlier, like her own name. Amy Joy knew that nature eventually takes back everything it has loaned to the temporary world. 1909–1987. It took it back quickly too. “We’re all disappearing,” Amy Joy had thought that snowy day in November, the first snowfall of 1987, when she had finally gone to the graveyard to say good-bye to Pearl. She had found a solace in her aunt Pearl, which was unusual for two people who had begun their acquaintance on such terrible terms. But Amy Joy had grown up, and Pearl had discovered in her the daughter she never had. She had given Amy Joy the knowledge of the old settlers, the McKinnon ancestors, who had come up the Mattagash River from Canada and founded the town. She had passed the torch on to Amy Joy and now—Sicily was right—Amy Joy had no children waiting behind her to take it up for themselves.

  “The Bible says to honor thy parents no matter what.” Amy Joy realized Sicily was still quoting. “It doesn’t say unless they’re old.”

  “I asked you once,” Amy Joy said, “after we first visited Winnie at the home, if maybe you’d like to live there.”

  “That’s like a posse of men coming up to you with a rope and asking you what you think of hangings, and then never mentioning it again,” said Sicily. “That rope gets to preying on your mind.”

  Amy Joy again stared out the big picture window that overlooked the Mattagash River. She wondered how many more days before it froze over and then immersed itself in the endless white of the fields, the ridges, the footpaths. She could almost feel the house being covered in snow, each feathery flake causing little goose pimples to spring up on her arms. This was the McKinnon homestead, the house that Marge, oldest of the sisters, had left to Sicily and Pearl. Pearl had stayed on in it after her husband, Marvin Ivy, died, and had allowed Amy Joy to move in. That was in 1969.

  “I need to get away from Mother,” Amy Joy had told Pearl. “I love her, but she’s driving me crazy.”

  It was only a matter of a year before Sicily moved in.

  “I’ll just stay until after Christmas,” Sicily assured her stunned relatives as she bounced past them to claim Marge’s old bedroom.

  “Who would’ve known she meant Christmas 1999?” Pearl remarked two years later, when it was more than obvious, even to the dog, that Sicily intended to stay. But now Pearl was gone, and soon the earth would be coming for Sicily, and Sicily was all that stood between her daughter and the fate even McKinnons must bow to.

  “And I have no intentions of getting onto that senior citizen bus neither,” Sicily threatened. “Wipe that out of your mind. If you can’t take me to Watertown to shop, I guess my shopping days are over.”

  “Why won’t you ride in the bus?” Amy Joy asked.

  “I know what you’re going to say next,” Sicily prophesied. “You’re going to say that even Winnie Craft rides on the bus.”

  “I’m surprised she’s not driving it,” said Amy Joy, remembering with chilling certainty Winnie Craft’s domineering personality.

  “There you go again with your knifelike tongue,” Sicily said.

  “Forget about the St. Leonard nursing home,” Amy Joy told her mother. “It was only a suggestion to begin with.”

  “That’s good news,” said Sicily. “I feel like I just got a last-minute pardon from Governor McKernan.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy being around folks your own age instead of me,” Amy Joy said.

  “You keep me young.” Sicily smiled.

  “I’m almost forty-five, Mum,” Amy Joy said. “We’re both going to run out of luck one of these days.”

  “You’ll manage,” said Sicily. Her cold was suddenly better, she herself rejuvenated. Amy Joy was not surprised. She watched as Sicily buried a pretend sniffle in her handkerchief.

  “Albert Pinkham is there too, you know,” Amy Joy went on. “And so is Betty.”

  “If Betty’s Grocery hadn’t burned to the ground, she’d still be going strong,” Sicily predicted. “She would’ve kept busy.”

  “Claire Fennelson is there.”

  “Lordy,” said Sicily. “There’s a strike against going. I hope they keep their piano locked up. Claire thinks she’s Liberace.”

  “Well, maybe one of these days you’ll change your mind,” said Amy Joy. In the year that Winnie Craft had been at Pine Valley, the St. Leonard nursing home, she and Sicily had made a dutiful monthly visit. “You might even be lucky enough to get a room near Winnie. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “What’s a three-letter word for ‘chemical suffix’?” Sicily asked, ignoring her daughter’s question.

  THE GIFFORDS GLISSADE INTO WINTER: BIG BUCKS IN THE LOTTERY

  Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

  Ere the sorrow comes with years?

  They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

  And that cannot stop their tears.

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”

  By late afternoon, Mattagash was safely buried beneath a foot of thick snow. The town sent out its plow, driven by Larry Monihan, who had placed a bid for the job and won it. The yellowish paint of the machine pushed like sunshine across the blankety white, leaving behind a passable road for the townsfolk. Dead goldenrod stood along the highway and in the fields, up to their tops in snow. Amy Joy Lawler’s bird feeder had attracted black-capped chickadees, gray jays, and evening grosbeaks. Winters in Maine weren’t kind to the birds. Or to d
eer. Or coyotes. Winters in Maine weren’t kind to people. Only the black bear was wise enough to crawl into a dark den and wait until winter was over.

  A cold wind, snow-filled and rolling up from the icy water, slapped Pike Gifford Jr., age thirty-one, in the face as he stood on the back porch of his house and gazed down on the Mattagash River. His stepcousin Billy Plunkett stood beside him, shivering in the wind, wearing only a faded sweatshirt. It said My Friends Went to Florida and All I Got Was This Damn Shirt. The men had stepped outside briefly to check on the storm.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Pike. “We’re up to our asses from now until April.”

  “It’s here to stay, all right,” said Billy. He snapped a cigarette off the ends of his fingers and watched it sink, sizzling, into the snow. Three of Pike’s children were sliding down the hill, their necks wrapped warmly in thick scarves, their hands in bulky mittens. Two of them, the boys, were in a fight over the biggest, fastest sled. It was a Woolworth special, bright orange, with two rope handles attached to the plastic body.

  “Kids don’t lay on their stomachs anymore to slide,” Billy observed. “It can’t be much fun sitting up like that.”

  “You boys take turns!” Pike hollered at them. “And give your sister one now and then.”

  “Shit,” said Billy. “We used to slide on a chunk of linoleum and were darn glad to get it. We used to dream of getting a nice wood sled with metal runners. Nowadays kids don’t even know what them sleds look like. They got Flying Saucers and Magic Carpets and all sorts of gizmos.” He adjusted his hat, pulled it down a bit to cover his ears. It said Damn Sea Gulls!

  “Remember the time you cut a swath of carpet out of your mother’s kitchen floor and we slid on that?” asked Pike. He slapped his leg in memory of the event.

  “Yeah, well,” said Billy. “I was in a bind at the time.” More snowflakes bombarded the back porch of Pike’s house. At the bottom of the hill, one of the boys overturned on the Woolworth sled, allowing the other to steal the apparatus from him. A volley of cries and protests rolled up the hill.

  “Eat some snow!” the larger boy shouted as he shoveled a mittenful into the smaller boy’s mouth. “It’s full of germs!”

  “Daddy, make him stop!” the smaller boy yelled, but Pike ignored the plea.

  “I don’t know what’s worse.” Billy sighed. “All this goddamn snow, or all them summertime blackflies.”

  “Well,” said Pike, “at least the snow don’t bite.”

  “The hell it don’t,” Billy said. “What about frostbite?”

  The wind came up the steps in heavy gusts of snowflakes. The rocks along the Mattagash River lay like white polar bears. The pines, the spruces, the tamaracks, the heavenly birches, all fluffed white. In the wind they scattered themselves in tufts of soft down. The sky was dark, swollen with more snow to come.

  “I’m freezing my balls off,” said Billy. He lifted his glass to his lips. It was a juice glass belonging to Pike’s wife and was covered with fragile daisies. It was full of straight, cheap vodka.

  “Tell them kids to stay away from the river,” a voice said sharply from behind them. It was Lynn, Pike’s wife, her face barely visible in the crack of the kitchen door. “They fall in, they’ll freeze to death in a second. We won’t even find them until spring.” The door slammed with a wide spray of snow.

  “Wasn’t that music to your ears?” Pike asked Billy. “Wasn’t that what you call one of them symphonies?” He raised his own cold glass of daisies and looked at it. It would be six months before a daisy even considered sprouting in Mattagash. Snow swept down from the porch roof in a flurry of wind and pelted the necks of the two men. They scooped it off.

  “Reed, you fucking bastard,” Pike heard his younger son shout into the wind. Reed dropped his sled and ran back to the slanderer, buried him facedown in the snow, and administered several well-weighted punches.

  “Your mother says that if you fall in that river,” Pike yelled to his children, “she ain’t even gonna look for you until next spring!”

  “Dirty prick,” Pike’s daughter screamed at Reed as she kicked one of her little boots into his back. “Daddy said to give me a turn!”

  “Listen to her,” Pike chuckled. “She can fight back just like a boy.”

  “I hear that Paulie Hart won a thousand bucks in the lottery this week,” Billy said.

  “As if Paulie Hart needs to win money,” said Pike. He spit a warm hole into the snow by the back step. “What is he anyway? Early twenties? No wife. No kids. No bills.”

  “He started working for the P. G. Irvine Lumber Company the minute he got out of high school,” Billy said. “And his paycheck has gone to buy lottery tickets ever since. So you might say he has bills.”

  “Well, I seen all the first storm I care to see,” said Pike, and he followed Billy Plunkett back into the house.

  On Pike’s living room floor Conrad, his firstborn, twelve years old, lay sprawled on his stomach in front of the television. He was watching a movie his mother had rented for him at the Watertown Movie Factory.

  “See you later?” Billy asked his cousin. “Ronny’s been home a whole month from the navy, but he’s still buying the drinks.” Ronny Plunkett was Billy’s big brother.

  “I don’t think so,” Pike said, and then winked. “I’ll probably stay home and watch a movie with the kids.” Lynn banged a pot in the kitchen sink. The music of it rang out loudly.

  “Okay then,” said Billy. “See you tomorrow.” He went out into the first permanent snowstorm of 1989. Pike watched Billy’s taillights, cloudy with snow, swing around and around like crazy flashlights. Billy was busy executing half a dozen cop turns in the slippery yard. Then, as Pike watched, Billy drove a straight path across the yard and up onto the main road. Then he put the pickup in reverse, backed up to within a few feet of the house, shifted into first, and retraced the same track. Billy knew that if Pike had his heart set on tipping up a couple at the local bar, he’d need a path to the road. The old Chevy clunker couldn’t tackle snow like the invincible Dodge Ram with its four-wheel drive. With a neat trail packed down all the way to the main road, Billy straightened the truck and made a dash for The Crossroads. Pike smiled.

  “What a character,” he said to his son, who was deep within the drama of the movie. “A real cowboy, that cousin of mine.” He heard Lynn grunt from the kitchen. More utensils banged, forks and knives being roughly stacked in the dishwasher, which Lynn had picked potatoes to buy.

  “Did you tell him to make that track to the road?” Lynn asked.

  “No.” Pike answered the question from the living room. He preferred being where Lynn—or Judge Wapner, as he called her—couldn’t see him. He had heard Lynn tell her sister, Maisy, when they thought Pike was asleep on the couch, that she could read Pike Gifford like a book. “It’d have to be a comic book, then,” Maisy had answered. Pike and Maisy weren’t the most loving of in-laws.

  “Why’d he do it, then?” Lynn asked. He could hear the icy anger in her voice. Pike could do a bit of book reading himself.

  “He’s just got a big heart, is all,” Pike answered. “Nothing wrong with things being big, is there?” He grabbed his genitals dramatically and shook them. Conrad ignored him.

  “His heart is about the same size as his brain,” Pike heard Lynn say. “And next to Billy Plunkett’s brain, a pea would look like a boulder.” He listened with a smile on his face. Let her rant on. It was only a matter of time before he would be telling Billy about it at The Crossroads, two frosty shots of vodka in front of them, the snow above their heads covering the roof, the town, hiding them from their women, their children, and sometimes the law. It was no secret that Giffords and Plunketts had seen their share of misdemeanors. But Pike Gifford and Billy Plunkett regarded this truth as a kind of family curse.

  “Look how much trouble the Kennedys has been in,” Pike liked to po
int out.

  “And for felonies,” Billy always added.

  “What movie she rent?” Pike asked his son. He settled down on the sofa and put his feet up on Lynn’s hassock.

  “Rambo,” Conrad said.

  “Shit!” Pike lamented. “That big Wop? He’d better get behind a machine gun. A real man could whip his ass in a second.” He sloshed his vodka about in the glass. The fifth he’d come home with earlier in the day was almost empty, had disappeared as if beneath a cold snow in Pike’s gut, a place that was now warm. In just an hour, Billy had helped put a mighty dent in the bottle. But Pike had another one stashed away upstairs, beneath the socks in his sock drawer. Pike Gifford was never afraid to look at the bottom of a bottle.

  “Just watch the movie,” said Conrad.

  “Big Italian Wop,” Pike muttered.

  “Shut up,” threatened Conrad, “or I’m turning it off.”

  “Don’t you even consider talking to me like that.” Pike shook a finger at his son.

  “Go to hell,” Conrad said softly.

  “Nice talk for a kid,” Pike observed.

  “I got it from you,” the boy answered.

  “The fuck you did!” said Pike. Conrad continued to watch the movie, an orange ring of Cheese Twist crumbs about his mouth. Pike listened for sounds in the kitchen, determining Lynn’s mood. He was growing restless. Billy must be just driving into the yard at The Crossroads.

  “Hey, Lynn!” Pike shouted. “You gonna make us some popcorn or ain’t you?” More noises, brittle and angry, volleyed back from the kitchen as a blender was washed and dried. Seeing that Conrad had gone back to the drama of the movie, Pike threw a sofa pillow at him. It bounced off the top of the boy’s head and he jumped in honest surprise. Rambo had been ready to attack.

  “Ma, make him quit!” Conrad wailed. “I can’t watch my movie!” He got up and rewound the suspenseful scene. “Leave me alone,” he said to his father, and then lay back down on his stomach, hands beneath his chin. He wished he had arms like Rambo. He would crush his father, Pike Gifford Jr., the way you crush a snowflake. The way Rambo crushes a Commie. He wished he had an AK-47 like Rambo’s. He would blast away at his father, splattering red blood and Gifford guts all across the white dooryard.