The Weight of Winter Page 9

  “I’ll sign his damn old warrant,” Lynn said. “It ain’t no warrant I’m afraid of.” She looked up at Conrad, who stood frozen, that shiver still encasing his body. He had never felt such an extraordinary thing before.

  “I’ll tell Billy it was me hit him,” Lynn offered. Her black tears were sparkling. “He’ll be sure to end up at Billy’s when he gets out. I’ll tell Billy first thing tomorrow it was me.”

  But Conrad remembered the look in his father’s eye before the bat came down like a judgment. You’d better think about this, the look had said. Pike Gifford would wake up in the morning, Conrad was very certain, knowing two things: the first, that he was in jail with a tremendous hangover; the second, that his oldest son, that yellow trickle of horse piss, that bull’s dick, that little fairy faggot, had caused the throbbing in his temple by wielding a bat against him.

  “Oh, Conny,” Lynn muttered again, now with a cold finger pressed to her husband’s bleeding temple. “I wish to hell you hadn’t. I wish you’d stayed upstairs until it was over. You know they can’t last forever anyway. If he’d locked me out, I’d have walked down to Maisy’s. I just wish you hadn’t.”

  But Conrad wasn’t listening to his mother’s rattling words. He could still feel the frosty aluminum of the bat in his hands, could remember that flash on his father’s face when he realized that the trickle of horse piss, the little fairy faggot, was indeed going to swing. There was a vestige of fear there. Conrad hadn’t realized that fear grew anywhere inside his father. This was new knowledge, given him as a reward for his bravery, his initiation, his journey into the ritual of his manhood. But another feeling pressed upon his mind as he watched his father’s labored breathing, his mother’s black tears. It was the sensation of the bat in his hand, the impact as it connected to flesh and bone. Something grew in Conrad, too, that he had not known was there, and its appearance had caused the ecstatic tingling, like no other sensation he could ever remember. Now Conrad knew something that his father had known all along: the sweet, magical, addictive pull of power.

  IMMACULATE FOOTSTEPS IN THE SNOW: ELVIS AS EVERYMAN

  The hero has died as a modern man, but as eternal man—perfected, unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn.

  —Joseph Campbell

  In Dr. Brassard’s waiting room at the clinic in St. Leonard, Charlene Craft wrapped her feverish daughter in a blanket and then lifted her up, light as a snowflake.

  “Okay, Tanya,” Charlene said. “Upsa-daisy. Let’s go so you can watch your Fraggle Rock tape before the boys get home from school.” Tanya’s little arms shot out of the woolly blanket and wrapped themselves around Charlene’s neck.

  “I want Daddy,” a voice in the blanket whispered.

  “Daddy’ll be home for supper,” Charlene promised. “You can have all of Daddy you want after he eats.”

  Charlene hoisted Tanya easily into the front seat and snapped the bundle securely with a seat belt. The past few days of riotous sun were slowly disappearing into what the weathermen in Bangor were predicting would be eight inches of pristine snow. Already Charlene could see a heaviness in the sky above the horizon, a sky full of imminent snow.

  “Now don’t you unwrap yourself,” Charlene warned her child. “Even though the car is warm, you might still catch a cold.”

  On the ride home, a drive which took them toward the grip of the storm-to-be, Charlene thought of Dr. Brassard’s soft words, the little beads of perspiration on his forehead, the pastel paintings on the warm walls of his office. Now, in the car beside Tanya, the warmth of the room had faded, the words had turned icy.

  “I’ve ruled out both mono and rheumatoid arthritis,” Dr. Brassard had said. “But why her ankles and knees are swollen I just can’t imagine.”

  “She says her arms and her feet feel like there’s pins and needles in them,” Charlene had told him. That’s why he had suspected the arthritis. “And it’s getting so that she hardly wants to get off the sofa. She used to have so much energy.”

  “We can run some basic neurological tests in Watertown,” Dr. Brassard had added. “But if those tests don’t show us anything, we may have to send her to Boston.” Neurological.

  As she drove the aging New Yorker over the snaky road back to Mattagash, Charlene wondered where they’d ever get the money for something like that. At least she’d kept up the insurance policies for illness on the kids. She and Davey had been forced to let their own policies run quietly out. Davey had an entire folder in the filing cabinet marked Canceled. Where would they get the money? She heard Tanya sigh, a child’s sigh, a child tired of being sick, of tests, of lying idly on the sofa while her brothers played in the lovely snows of youth. Guilt washed quickly over Charlene. How could she even remember that such a thing as money existed when her baby needed those doctors, those prescriptions, those fancy city tests, and the expensive airplane rides that would take her there? Charlene felt the strong pinching pain between her eyes, a pain that had seemed to be waiting for her at the Welcome to Mattagash sign the day she moved to town—at least, it seemed to start about that time.

  “Darn it,” she thought, and pressed a finger to the flat surface of her temple, applied pressure. “My migraine is back.”

  Tanya was asleep by the time Charlene rolled into the dooryard. The blanket had fallen away from her face, heart-shaped and porcelain, so Charlene stared at her daughter for a few seconds, at the brownish-red ringlets, the dark eyebrows, the eyelashes so thick there might have been mascara on them. Then she opened the door to the cold. Already snow was busy in the yard, establishing itself on windowpanes, fluttering like white moths about Davey’s yard light. But the snow would not sparkle beneath that light when evening fell. The light was something else filed under Canceled, fourteen dollars a month too much to pay for such a luxury item. The family had learned to rely again on the moon for that convenience, and on flashlights.

  Tanya stirred in Charlene’s arms and opened her eyes. “It’s snowing,” she said softly.

  “Yes, it is,” said Charlene, and then covered Tanya’s face again with the blanket, hoping to protect her from the cold, from the storm, from the horrible tests that might lie ahead.

  “Is Daddy here?”

  “He will be soon,” said Charlene, and stepped with careful feet upon the powdery surface of the front porch. She would send the boys out after supper to shovel off the first accumulation, then again in the morning before school. Surely, by then, the snow would be finished, but who knew for certain, up here at the North Pole, Maine.

  ***

  After supper, Davey played a game of Candyland with Tanya while the boys shoveled snow and Charlene did the dishes.

  “You didn’t let me win, did you, Daddy?” Tanya asked.

  “No sirree,” said Davey. “It was a battle every inch of the way.”

  “Someone just drove in,” Christopher, shovel in hand, opened the front door to announce. The red of his cap had nearly disappeared beneath a soft ridge of fresh snow. He beat the cap gently against the door, restoring its bright color and the sunny yellow lettering: Husqvarna Chain Saws. Christopher had been given the hat as a gift by the chain saw dealer in Watertown, when his father had purchased a 266 model in late summer.

  “It’s Lola and Dorrie,” James poked his head past Christopher and stated formally, as though he were a small butler ushering in royalty. Dorrie and Lola stomped snow from their boots and paraded past the boys without even a feigned acknowledgment. Between them they had eleven noisy, sweaty children; someone else’s offspring reminded them of their own maternal burdens.

  Charlene’s first response was to throw herself between the clothes rack and the refrigerator, so that she could slump to the floor behind the wet socks and mittens and hide forever from the stormy intruders. What on earth could lure them out on such an evening? Rain, sleet, and other forms of precipitation might keep Davey’s uncle, the m
ailman Simon Craft, at home with his feet up, but Dorrie and Lola were undeterred by weather conditions.

  “We can only stay a second or two,” Dorrie announced, a statement Charlene knew to be a lie of the highest order. The last time Dorrie had promised such mercy was at breakfast, two weeks earlier, and Charlene had ended up fixing lunch for them both.

  “What are you two doing out on a night like tonight?” Davey asked as they unbundled, Lola a small-boned blond creature, Dorrie as bulbous and meaty as well-wintered beef on the hoof.

  “I got Booster’s pickup with the plow on it,” Dorrie announced, and Charlene imagined them blazing fresh trails of gossip all over the woodsy northlands. Here was the type of pioneering woman who gladly went West with tattered, ill-planned wagon trains: You’ll never guess what happened the day we overturned crossing the Missouri River. Charlene imagined the Lolas and Dorries spread across history: That was the night Sacajawea slapped Meriwether. And she could even imagine them beyond American limits, changing the courses of events elsewhere: Yes, she most certainly did say, “Let them eat cake.” I should know. I was there. She imagined them existing for all time.

  “Has Prissy called you yet to sign her petition?” Lola asked.

  “What petition is that?” asked Davey. Charlene felt like weeping when she saw Davey taking two cups out of the cupboard. He poured the guests some tea.

  “She wants an emergency town meeting,” said Dorrie. “She wants another vote on the wet/dry ticket. She says we need to close down The Crossroads.” She blew on the hot tea and it rippled.

  “I ain’t signed it,” said Lola. “Raymond has yet to admit to me that he goes there. You should hear some of the crazy stories he comes up with.”

  “Well, I ain’t signing it,” Dorrie said. “The last thing I want is for Booster to be home every night.”

  “Oh, by the way,” said Lola. “Did anyone find out where the ambulance went this evening? It went up through town and then back in a flash, but we’ve yet to find out why. At first we thought they must have accidentally driven past Pine Valley. Mama’s there, you know, and I worry about her.”

  “We also thought it might be old Mrs. Fennelson,” Dorrie added. “Booster’s grandma. She’s gonna be a hundred and eight next month and the Women’s Auxiliary is planning a big Thanksgiving bash for her. They think she might be the oldest person in Maine.”

  “She’s my great-grandmother, too,” Lola said competitively.

  “Yeah, but Booster’s related to her in a hundred different ways,” Dorrie allowed. Lola thought about this.

  “So am I,” she said. “And so is everybody in Mattagash, for that matter.” She and Dorrie stared at each other. Charlene knew that if poor Mrs. Fennelson were in the room at that very moment, Lola and Dorrie would pull her arms off in a tug of war.

  “So where did the ambulance go?” Davey asked.

  “No one knows where it went,” Lola said. “And I never caught a word about it on my police scanner. It had to be a false alarm or we’d have heard by now.” Ambulances screaming through the black nights and sunny days of small towns meant something bad had happened to someone you knew. Not necessarily someone you liked. Just someone you knew.

  “No, we can only stay a minute or two,” Dorrie announced again when Davey offered them a snack, and Charlene caught the rewrite immediately. From seconds to minutes. Next it would be hours. So that’s how Dorrie craftily enlarged her visits. She stole time, willfully, right from under their noses.

  But on this night of snowy nights, the women did stay only twenty minutes. They had other places of business to be on this wintry, tempestuous night, as Charlene was soon to learn.

  “The minute it stops snowing tomorrow, we’re off to Madawaska,” Lola announced. She and Dorrie sipped loudly at their tea and stared at the plate of freshly baked brownies Davey had placed before them. The brownies stood only a remote chance with Lola, and none at all with the bulging Dorrie. She ate a large one within a minute—Charlene glanced at the clock and timed her—and another with her second cup of strong Mattagash tea, brownies going into the large burner her body had become, fuel to keep the heavy train moving along.

  “We’re going back to Madawaska to check on the latest development on Elvis,” Lola continued, and Charlene vaguely remembered having heard this nonsense somewhere before, on the telephone, perhaps, during one of Lola’s many calls—conversations Charlene rarely listened to, much less remembered.

  “Brenda Monihan saw him this time,” Dorrie said, brownie bits peeking from between her teeth.

  “Who?” asked Davey.

  “Brenda swears she saw a man who was the spitting image of Elvis, down at Radio Shack in Madawaska, buying guitar strings and picks,” said Lola.

  “So she followed him to the drugstore,” Dorrie continued, “where he bought a box of Dexatrim.”

  “Does that, or does that not, sound like he’s planning a comeback?” asked Lola, excitement in her eyes. Dorrie’s own eyes were on the last brownie, which clung helplessly to the plate beneath her stare. Charlene pushed it toward her, and it met its fate quickly, painlessly. It ain’t over till the fat lady eats the last brownie.

  “Thanks,” Dorrie said. “I hated to eat the last one, but if no one else was going to, it’d be a shame to let it go to waste.” Charlene wondered how Booster Mullins had survived all these years, married to this huge woman. She imagined Dorrie as a ravenous spider, with poor Booster clinging to the outer fringes of their webby bed, holding on for dear life, loath to cause any vibrations that indicated prey caught.

  “You’re kidding, of course,” Davey laughed. He looked at them carefully. “My God, you’re not kidding. They’re serious,” he said to Charlene, and she nodded, thinking, “Yes, of course they’re serious. You’re looking at the products of nearly two hundred years of inbreeding, kiddo.”

  “Be one of them doubting Thomases if you want to,” Lola said. “But Elvis ain’t why we’re out tonight. We got another mission.” She said this in a little singsong, a teasing riddle, as she and Dorrie piled into their new coats. Mattagash women selected their winter coats carefully; they would become a familiar print to the whole town by the following spring, a license plate of sorts, dog tags.

  “Why are you out tonight?” Davey asked.

  “We’re conducting a detective-like investigation,” Lola said.

  “We’re gonna find out who’s impregnated Amy Joy Lawler,” Dorrie added, the “impregnated” a breezy whisper intended to save Charlene’s children from the truth about the origins of life. She pulled on her man-sized gloves with surprising deftness.

  “Word’s all over town she’s expecting,” Lola explained. “They think now that maybe it’s Nolan Gifford. He’s one of the good Giffords and he ain’t married.”

  “He just bought a second skidder,” Dorrie said, “and now he’s contracting on his own for P. G. Irvine Lumber Company. His car ain’t never in his yard at night and we never see it at The Crossroads.”

  “So we been driving back and forth now and then in the evenings,” Lola added, “to see if we can catch someone coming and going.”

  “You’ve been driving by her house?” Charlene asked. She hoped Davey was listening to this.

  “Just until she goes to sleep,” Dorrie explained good- naturedly.

  “Hell, our kids is all growed,” Lola said. “Raymond and Booster spend so much money at The Crossroads we figure they probably pay the electric bill over there. So why not have our own little excitement? It’s free.”

  “You drive by her house and spy on her?” Charlene asked again.

  “But we ain’t seen a thing yet,” Lola said. “Not a single track, not even one made by her cat.”

  They ambled to the door. Two of the kids’ school pictures on the bottom shelf of the bookcase fell noisily as Dorrie rumbled past. Otis the cat flew for safety. Where was Chic
ken Little? Dorrie stopped and gazed down at the pictures, one James, the other Tanya with her valentine face. Charlene stood the frames back up.

  “You must have a loose board in this floor,” Dorrie said. “Booster could fix that for you.” Then she plowed on.

  “Don’t people know how fat they are?” Charlene wondered. “Don’t they realize how they frighten the rest of us?”

  “So far we can’t find a single trace of anyone coming around over there,” Lola said. “I’m beginning to think it’s like one of them immaculate conceptions, the kind the Catholics have.” Charlene had forgotten how annoying Lola’s trumpeting laugh could be, especially when accompanied by Dorrie’s trombone.

  “Don’t let them Catholics fool you,” Dorrie warned. “If somebody’d had the foresight way back then to look around Mary’s house, they’d have seen plenty of tracks in the snow.” She ambled out the door and onto the front porch. Snow squeaked painfully beneath her boots. Lola followed, like a pitifully thin, misplaced shadow.

  “Well, good-bye,” Lola shouted in to Davey, who waved to his cousin from the kitchen table.

  “Don’t get stuck in Amy Joy’s yard,” Davey yelled back.

  “You ever want to take a little trip to Madawaska with us,” Dorrie turned and offered Charlene, “you just call.”

  Charlene said a fast, chilly good night—thank God for some things about winter—and closed the door on these creatures of the night. What could be more torturous than an eighty-mile round-trip ride with Lola Monihan and Dorrie Mullins, bouncing from the bony Lola over to the mattress that was Dorrie’s body, and then back again? Tanya stuck her small face up from behind the armchair where she’d been crouching.

  “Are they gone?” she whispered.

  ***

  With the children in bed sleeping soundly, Charlene knew the time had come when she could no longer avoid the medical events of the day. She hadn’t wanted to go back over Dr. Brassard’s conversation so quickly because there had been no answers in it. She hated being without answers. Some things she knew for sure: It was snowing heavily outside, her children were sleeping warmly in their beds, and her husband was stretched restfully upon the sofa. Why, then, cut through the tranquility of this scene with a swath of uncertainty?