The Weight of Winter Page 8

  PIKE DILVER GIFFORD: LYNN STAYS OUT OF THE MATTAGASH RIVER

  Little Dickey Dilver

  Had a wife of silver;

  He took a stick and broke her back,

  And sold her to the miller;

  The miller wouldn’t have her,

  So he threw her in the river.

  —Mother Goose rhyme

  Conrad Gifford, age twelve, stood at the top of the stairs and listened to the disagreement downstairs between his parents. Either it would die away and they would fall asleep angry, or it would build toward some terrible crescendo. Like a snowstorm or a hurricane, fights at the Gifford house had to be ridden out, endured, lasted. Conrad stood in the moonlight filtering in through the upstairs window, and in the swath of faint light issuing from the plastic Cinderella plugged into an outlet in the bathroom. Light from the television set down in the living room came up to him, a blue light that flickered mindlessly on the stair steps. A television set running all by itself, everyone too angry to watch it.

  “Just wasting electricity again,” Conrad thought. He leaned a shoulder against the window frame and waited.

  The fight must have originated in the kitchen—at least that’s where it was coming from when Conrad roused in his sleep and finally came wide awake to the familiar sounds of it beating on the floor beneath his bed. There were some things you could count on in life. One was the sound of the old Mattagash River, the grating of it against the rocks, so harsh in the summertime that it sounded like a fine downpour of rain. Another was the snow, coming to find the little town each October or November and staying until you were crazy from it. Another thing you could depend on was the fighting. And Conrad was the lightest of sleepers, maybe because he was the oldest child. They seemed to wake to the fights in order: Conrad first, ten-year-old Reed next, and then the twins. Pecking order had descended into their dreams.

  Conrad looked out onto the Mattagash River, which had not yet frozen but lay bluish and cold in the moonlight. The moon was spectacular. All around the house, the fields of snow shimmered, sparkled, cold with excitement. Conrad saw the twins’ sled parked against a birch tree in the backyard, left behind from their afternoon sliding bout. He was always lecturing them to put the sled in the cellar after sliding, so that Maine’s harsh winter would be kinder to it. In the moonlight, the sled’s red paint looked purplish as a bruise.

  “I’m sick and tired of borrowing money to pay our bills,” he heard his mother say from the kitchen below. Her voice sounded like it was coming from another house, another family, or maybe even from out of the old television set. Its blue light flicked and danced to each of her words. But this wasn’t Lucy and Ricky.

  “You drink more money than you bring home to this family,” Lynn said. Her words were followed by a harsh slap. Something broke.

  “I don’t need no female telling me what I should or shouldn’t do,” Conrad heard his father say.

  “Don’t hit me, you bastard!” Lynn Gifford screamed. “You wake them kids and you’re a dead man.”

  “And what are you gonna do to stop me?” Pike’s voice taunted. There was another loud slap. Spook, the family dog, whined from the sofa downstairs. Stop, the whine said. Please stop.

  “I’ll go upstairs right now and drag them little bastards out into the yard if I want to,” Pike threatened. “And there ain’t nothing you can do about it.” Conrad heard ice cubes rattling. His father was throwing three into a glass and then filling it with vodka. Conrad didn’t have to be there to know this. He’d seen it too many times.

  “Leave them alone,” Lynn cried. “They gotta get up for school in the morning.” Conrad caught his breath. He looked back out at the magnificent, moonlighty snow, so cold to eyes gazing out from a warm house. His mother should never call attention to the children. His mother should know better, after all these years, as Conrad knew better. She should say to Pike, “Please go beat the kids. Please keep them up all night so that they’ll be dead on their feet at school.” Then the fun would be gone, stolen from him by someone smarter. But the problem tonight was that Lynn had been drinking too. She and Pike had gone to a wedding reception at the Knights of Columbus in St. Leonard. Lynn’s cousin had married a Frenchman, intermarriage being a common thing now among the Scotch-Irish and French-Canadian descendants of the Mattagash River Valley.

  Conrad felt Reed’s presence behind him. Reed, the second to awake.

  “He hitting her?” Reed asked, and Conrad nodded. The twins came out of their warm bunks to stand, rubbing their eyes, in the doorway.

  “Go back to bed,” Conrad whispered to them. “I mean it, and I ain’t telling you again. You’ll miss the school bus in the morning. Go on now.” They disappeared back into the black cave of their bedroom. “Shut their door,” Conrad said to Reed. His eye caught the night-light in the bathroom, the plastic Cinderella. She was smiling serenely, lighting the way for little children in the dark. She’d had some pretty tough family problems herself.

  “You think it’ll get out of hand?” Reed asked him, and Conrad nodded again.

  “She’s been drinking too much,” he said flatly.

  “Shit,” said Reed. “We’ll never get up in the morning, and I got a test in math.” He leaned his palms against the frosty window and stared out at the wintry night that had unfolded itself all around the house, diamonds in every flake of snow. “Pretty out, ain’t it?” he asked, and Conrad said, “Yeah.” A loud crash rose up from the kitchen.

  “Don’t!” they heard Lynn shout.

  “I wish the river’d hurry up and freeze over,” Reed said, “so we could skate.” Conrad made no reply. His ears were listening to the semantics of the fight, determining the tactics, calculating the damage. Reed abandoned the moon, and the river, and the birch tree with its red sled, and came back to stand next to his brother.

  “How is it?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell yet,” Conrad said. He tilted his head and aimed his right ear at the kitchen, a stethoscope picking up the heartbeat of the fight. “It all depends on what she’s had to drink.” He was afraid his mother may have had too many rum and Cokes. Rum made her want to fight back, brought out her anger.

  “I hope she ain’t had rum,” Reed said. He’d heard Lynn say so dozens of times, so he had it on good authority: “Rum makes me crazy,” Lynn was known to admit.

  “You get out of here,” Lynn sobbed, “or I’m calling the sheriff!” More glass broke in the kitchen, a wintry music, as though a hundred icicles had fallen. Lynn was crying loudly now.

  “You put me out!” Pike Gifford shouted. “You miserable bitch. You go ahead and try to put me out.”

  Conrad felt his fingers roll themselves up into his palms. His whole body trembled. He stood in the blue moonlight, in the flickering light of the television, and waited.

  “Think we should sneak down and call the sheriff?” Reed asked his standard question at this stage of the fight. Conrad shrugged.

  “Let’s give it another minute,” he said. “He might be too tired or drunk to keep it going.” They had called the sheriff on their father twice before at the height of the storm, and he had made them pay for it when the aftermath had passed. The slaps were a little heavier and so was the humiliation, the more stinging of the two punishments.

  “Get out, I said!” Lynn screamed again. The twins opened their door and peered out like little mice. Their faces were ghostly blue.

  “Now!” Conrad whispered, and pointed a finger at them. Their faces disappeared as the door closed quietly.

  “I think we better call,” Reed whispered. “It sounds like he’s dragging her or something.” Indeed, chairs were scraping along the kitchen floor, and Lynn’s sobs were becoming fiercer.

  “You’re the one who’s getting out,” Pike Gifford was saying to his wife. As Conrad and Reed listened in the moonlight, the back door into the kitchen opened with suc
h force that it banged loudly against the wall. Spook was beside himself now, his barks volleying up to the boys from the kitchen.

  “Get away from me, you mangy mutt!” Pike shouted, and Spook howled in pain. “You git out on the porch too. The both of you can sleep out there tonight.”

  “No, please, Pike.” Lynn was begging now, the rum fight gone out of her. “Leave me alone. I won’t say nothing else.”

  “You can say all you want to,” Pike told her. “Just say it out on the porch, to the dog. You’re lucky I don’t drag you down to the river and stick your head under.”

  The door to the twins’ bedroom opened again and they stood there, a halo of moonlight around them. Julie had her thumb in her mouth again and was sucking it frantically.

  “He kick Spook?” asked Stevie. But this time Conrad didn’t tell them to go back inside their room and wait for the fighting to subside. It was as if he didn’t hear Stevie’s question, or Julie’s wild sucking, behind him, in the winter moonlight of the house. He was listening to something else, to a medley of his father’s boozy lullabies, a tune that stretched out from the time he could walk to the time he could finally act. And that was now. He was twelve. He was a man now. Enough was enough.

  Conrad went into his own room, the one he shared with Reed, and rummaged around in the dark until his hands felt the cool aluminum of his baseball bat.

  “What you gonna do?” Reed’s whispery voice asked him. “You crazy? He’ll kill you.”

  “Stay here with the twins,” Conrad said. He was no longer whispering.

  “You crazy?” Reed asked again. “You know for sure he’ll kill you.”

  “Stay here,” Conrad said, but Reed followed him down the stairs. The back door was still open, a cold gust of river wind sweeping about the room. Spook’s barks were coming from the porch now, cold, crisp, the echo of them bouncing off into the night.

  “Pike…for God’s…sake.” Lynn’s sobs came from outside, and broke her sentence with large pauses. “I’ll freeze to death,” she cried.

  “You should’ve thought of that before you took to running your mouth off,” Pike said. He was trying to step away from Lynn and pull back into the kitchen, but she held tightly to his legs.

  “Let go!” Pike yelled. Spook grabbed his pant leg and tugged, along with Lynn. He still wasn’t sure if it was war or if it was play. Humans were very complex creatures.

  Conrad stepped into the kitchen directly behind his father, who had his back to him. Pike was busily trying to kick Lynn away from his legs. Conrad raised the bat and held it straight up, with both hands, high above his head.

  “Pike, please,” Lynn begged. Her head jerked backward onto the crisp snow of the porch. In an instant she saw her oldest son silhouetted in the warm yellow of the kitchen door, something shiny as silver in his hands, something like a chance, an opportunity, glowing there in the doorway. Her eyes met Conrad’s. Don’t hit him, her eyes said. Conrad read this quickly. He had grown up with subtle implications, with thousands of messages behind a single glance. He knew the books that lay behind one small word. This was the shorthand of a family abused. Hit him and you’ll never live in peace here again, Lynn’s eyes warned her son. Then she closed them, released her grip on Pike’s leg. She would rather freeze to death in the car than have Conrad take his father down to the mat. But Conrad’s eyes were talking too. Conrad’s eyes were saying some important things. Lynn had read them like little obituaries, brimming with the sad facts of his life. I have no peace here anyway, his eyes said.

  Pike sensed him there, sensed something behind him, a memory maybe, of when he himself had wanted badly to rise up against Pike Gifford Sr. on his mother Goldie’s behalf, to strike at his own father with useless fists. But he never had. Now, for a quick, vaporous instant, part of him was almost proud to see Conrad do so. By Christ, he had passed on something good after all. Then the feeling was gone, forgotten. With Lynn no longer clinging like a burdock to his legs, Pike turned. Time slowed down for the family, the way it does for the occupants of a car wreck. Time became watery slow motion. Take note, time warned. Something very important is happening here.

  “You’d better not,” Pike Gifford said, just as Conrad brought the silver bat, as if it were a pure flash of lightning, down on his head. It caught his left temple, and Pike crumpled beneath the blow of it. He went down on both knees and then stretched out across Lynn’s body, his mouth opened to the snowy night as blood trickled from an inch-long cut on his head.

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?” Reed asked as Conrad handed him the bat.

  “Naw,” said Conrad, and his throat was so thick with victory, his Adam’s apple drumming so fiercely, a little war drum, that the tiny word nearly stuck there on his tongue. “Naw,” he said again, just to be sure it hadn’t, indeed, stayed in his mouth.

  “He kill him?” the twins asked from behind Reed’s position in the doorway. Julie was wearing the head to her turkey costume.

  “Naw,” Reed said, passing on Conrad’s triumphant message. “He just knocked him out.”

  Lynn had stopped crying. The mascara she’d applied earlier with such finesse had washed with her tears down from her lashes. But beneath the black ring of her right eye, a real black eye was growing, a purple flower blossoming amid the November snows. And on her right arm, her left leg, more bruises were sprouting silently under the skin. Flowers from her husband, Pike.

  “Get him off me,” Lynn said. Conrad and Reed rolled their father over onto his back as she pulled her legs out from under the body. With Conrad’s help she managed to stand. A fight was a sobering thing, but still, she was rickety with rum and adrenaline. She would feel the bruises in the morning.

  “Jesus, Conny,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t done that.” Conrad said nothing. Instead, he looked down at his father, at the fresh trickle of red blood oozing slowly out of Pike’s temple and onto the snow. He tingled all over, little jets of electricity darting beneath his skin, as though his entire body were asleep.

  “Reed,” said Lynn. “Go call the sheriff. Tell him the cut’s gonna need some stitches.” Reed disappeared into the living room.

  Julie and Stevie stepped, in their stocking feet, out onto the back porch and carefully inspected their father. Julie was sucking her thumb through the plastic beak of the turkey mask.

  “Get in here,” Lynn told them. “You look like them Munchkins gathering around the dead witch.”

  “He ain’t breathing,” Stevie said, ignoring his mother.

  “Yes he is, he is too, you stupid you,” said Julie, her words coming from behind the immovable beak. She plunked herself down on Pike’s stomach, as though it were a bench. Or perhaps a nice flat stump on which a turkey might roost.

  “He’s got lint in his nose,” Stevie observed, leaning in closely, inspecting his father’s face.

  “For Christ’s sake, get in this house,” Lynn moaned. “You’ll freeze your feet off.”

  “That ain’t lint, it’s a booger,” Julie announced.

  “Jesus,” said Lynn. “Sometimes I don’t know what in hell to do with you kids.” She began to sob again.

  “And sometimes we don’t know what to do with you,” Conrad thought. But he couldn’t say it. Nor could he move within the confines of his electrified body. His eyes were fixed on the red blood he had caused to ooze from his own father. Already it was turning icy in the cold, a bloody river freezing over.

  Reed came back to the porch. “The sheriff’s coming,” he said.

  “What’d he say?” asked Lynn. She had always liked Pierre Latour. He seemed human about his job, and that made a huge difference. Lynn knew that if you put most men and women into a uniform, they go crazy.

  “He said someone should’ve laid the son of a bitch out before this,” said Reed. “He said this better not be another wild-goose chase.”

  “Are they gonna tak
e him to the emergency?” asked Lynn. “He needs to go to the emergency.”

  “Shit, you really nailed him good,” said Reed, gazing for the first time down upon his father’s countenance.

  “I want the quarter!” screamed Julie. She and Stevie were wrangling over the contents of Pike’s pockets. “You take the jackknife.”

  “I already got a knife,” Stevie whined. He grabbed for the quarter. It fell from Julie’s hand and rolled across the porch, leaving a tiny road behind it, a snowy wake.

  “Bastard!” Julie shouted. Her turkey face stared blankly at her brother.

  “Take them kids inside before they freeze to death,” Lynn told Reed. “They’re out there like two little Judas Iscariots, fighting for them quarters.”

  “Get in that house,” Reed said. “You’ll never get up in the morning.” He grabbed Julie’s arm and dragged her off Pike’s body. He scooted her into the kitchen and then came back for Stevie, who had his hand deep into Pike’s shirt pocket.

  “How much money is this?” Stevie asked Reed, holding up a fistful of crumpled ones with a fiver sprouting greenly from the midst. “Will it buy me a comic book and a Pepsi?”

  “I want a Pepsi too!” Julie shouted from the kitchen.

  “He needs to go to the emergency, Reed,” his mother urged again. Reed pushed Stevie into the kitchen, then gave each of the twins such a hardy shove that they found themselves reeling into the living room.

  “The sheriff said he’d take him,” said Reed.

  “He needs to go, all right,” Lynn sobbed. Conrad said nothing.

  “Sheriff says this is the last straw,” Reed said as Pike groaned in his vodka dreams. “Either you sign a warrant, the sheriff says, or he ain’t coming the next time we call.”