A Gathering Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “I think I’m going to get some coconut drops, too, Mattie,” Beth said, still deliberating. “Or maybe some King Leo sticks. Or Necco’s.”

  “All right, just don’t be all day,” I told her.

  I saw the Loomises’ buckboard pull up to the dock. Royal was driving. I wondered how he managed to be so handsome no matter what he was doing—plowing, walking, driving, whatever. He looked better dirty and sweaty in a pair of worn trousers and a frayed cotton shirt than most men did when they’d bathed, shaved, and put on a three-piece suit. I thought about the kiss he’d given me, and the thinking alone made me feel warm and swoony. Just like all those silly, fluttery girls in the stories in Peterson’s Magazine.

  Royal’s mother was with him. They didn’t see me. Beth and I were on the far side of the boat. Mrs. Loomis got out, and he handed her down a basket of eggs and a large crock of butter. She boarded the pickle boat and gave them to Mr. Eckler. He gave her a dollar bill in return. She thanked him and returned to the dock.

  “All right, I’m ready,” Beth said. She’d put her candies in a small brown bag.

  “Go pay, then,” I said, giving her my money.

  She trotted to the back of the boat and handed Charlie Eckler the bag. “I’m going to the circus next week. The one in Boonville,” I heard her tell him.

  “Are you, dolly?”

  “Yes, sir. My uncle promised to take me. He went to Old Forge this morning, but he’s coming back tomorrow and then he’s going to take me. Me and Lou both.”

  “Well, you’ll have a fine time, I’m sure. That’ll be ten cents.”

  Mr. Eckler asked her if she was going to see the two-headed man and the snake boy. She said she was going to see everything there was to see, her uncle Fifty said she could. I barely heard them. I was watching Royal. He was talking to John Denio, a teamster for the Glenmore. They were nodding and laughing. His smile was as warm as fresh biscuits on a winter morning. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Had someone that handsome really kissed me? I wondered. Or had I dreamed it? I found myself wishing that I was pretty like Martha Miller, so that he would kiss me again someday. And then I wondered if he’d miss me at all when I went away to college. And if maybe he’d want to write me and then I could write him back.

  As I continued to moon, his mother climbed back into the buckboard and settled herself. Mr. Denio made small talk with them for a few more minutes, then headed toward the dock to pick up some guests. As soon as he left them, Mrs. Loomis fished in her pocket for the money Mr. Eckler had given her, then handed it to Royal. She said something to him, and he nodded and put the dollar bill in his pocket. And then she turned her head and looked all around herself and caught me watching. Her eyes narrowed, and if eyes could talk, hers would have said, “Mind your own damn business, Mattie Gokey.” I thought it was very strange, as I did not care one hoot what Mrs. Loomis did with her egg money.

  I watched them head up the drive and across the railroad tracks, and then Beth handed me a nickel change and we jumped down off the boat onto the dock.

  “Tell your pa I should have his bacon by tomorrow, Mattie.”

  “I will, Mr. Eckler. Thanks.”

  We climbed into our buckboard and I told Pleasant to giddyap, and of course he didn’t budge until I told him five more times and finally snapped him a good one with the reins. The ride home was uneventful, but when I turned the buckboard into our drive, I got quite a surprise. There was an automobile in it. A Ford. I knew who it belonged to. I maneuvered Pleasant around it, got the buckboard into the barn and Pleasant into the pasture, then went inside. When I opened the kitchen door, I saw Lou and Abby sitting on the staircase, leaning toward the wall.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Miss Wilcox is in the parlor with Pa,” Abby whispered. “She brought your exam results. You got an A-plus on your English literature and composition tests, an A in history, a B in science, and a B-minus in mathematics. Her and Pa are talking about you. She says you have genius in you and that you got into college and that Pa should let you go.”

  “Jeezum, Matt, I didn’t know you had a genius in you,” Lou said, wide-eyed. “You kept him hid real good.”

  Lou’s backhanded compliment didn’t even register. My heart had sunk to someplace down around my ankles. Miss Wilcox meant well, I knew she did, but I also knew Pa. She’d never get him to say yes; she’d only rile him. Why, oh why, had she come today? Right before my uncle was due to give me the money? Tomorrow I wouldn’t need Pa’s say-so, because I’d have thirty dollars in my pocket and that was all the say-so anybody needed, but I didn’t need him furious at me in the meantime.

  I sat down next to Lou on the step below Abby. Beth sat below us and passed out candy as if we were all spectators at some theater show. I had no appetite for sweets just then. I was busy straining my ears, trying to hear what was being said.

  “. . . she’s gifted, Mr. Gokey. She has a unique voice. An artist’s voice. And she could make something more of herself, much more, if she were allowed—”

  “She don’t need to make something more. She’s fine as she is. There ain’t a thing wrong with her.”

  “She could be a writer, sir. A real one. A good one.”

  “She’s already a writer. She writes stories and poems in them notebooks of hers all the time.”

  “But she needs the challenge of a real college curriculum, and the guidance of talented teachers, to improve. She needs exposure to emerging voices, to criticism and theory. She needs to be around people who can nurture her talent and develop it.”

  There was a silence. As I sat there on the stairs, I could picture my father’s face. There would be anger on it as there so often is, but underneath it, there would be uncertainty and the painful shyness he has around educated people and their big words. My heart suddenly turned traitor on me, and I wanted to take Miss Wilcox by the arm and drag her out of the parlor and tell her to leave my pa alone.

  “She wants to go, Mr. Gokey. Very badly,” Miss Wilcox said.

  “Well, I blame you for that, ma’am. You went and put ideas in her head. I haven’t got the money to send her. And even if I did, why would I send my girl where she don’t know anyone? Away from her home and her family, with nobody to look after her?”

  “She’s a sensible young woman. She would get along fine in New York. I know she would.”

  “She’s got a flighty streak in her. Got it from her mamma. She was flighty, too.”

  “Mrs. Gokey never gave me that impression.”

  “Well, she was. When she was younger. Round Mattie’s age. It’s what got her married to me. It’s what got her sixty acres of stumps and rocks, and a headstone at thirty-seven.”

  “Surely not, Mr. Gokey. I only visited with your wife on two or three occasions, but my reading of her was a woman who loved—”

  “Your ‘reading’ of her?”

  Oh, Lord, I thought. I nearly got to my feet, then realized he couldn’t possibly have his peavey with him. Not in the parlor.

  “People ain’t books, Miss Wilcox. What’s inside ’em ain’t all typewrit on the page for you to read. Now, if you’re about through, ma’am, I’ve got plowing to do.”

  There was a silence again, then: “I am. Good-bye, Mr. Gokey. Thank you for your time.”

  I heard Miss Wilcox’s brisk step in the hallway, and then she was gone. She was the kind of woman who came and went through the front door, not the back.

  “Oh, Mattie, don’t go! You won’t, will you? I’d miss you so,” Beth fretted. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me with her sticky candy lips.

  “Hush, Beth. Don’t be so selfish,” Abby scolded.

  Next thing I knew, Pa was in the kitchen. We all scrambled to our feet. “I guess the four of you just happened to be coming down the stairs all at once,” he said. “Wouldn’t be you were listening in on conversations you had no business listening in on?” No one said a word. “Abby, you salt the butter yet? Lou, you muck out the cow s
talls? Beth, have the chickens been fed?”

  My sisters scattered. Pa looked at me. “You couldn’t tell me yourself?” he asked.

  His eyes were hard and his voice was, too, and all the soft feelings I’d had for him only moments before swirled away like slop water down a drain.

  “What for, Pa? So you could say no?”

  He blinked at me and his eyes looked hurt, and I thought, just for a second, that he was going to say something tender to me, but no. “Go, then, Mattie. I won’t stop you. But don’t come back if you do,” he said. Then he walked out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

  ses • qui • pe • da • lian

  “Sesquipedalian is a funny word, Daisy,” I whispered to the cow. “It means one and a half feet in length, but it also means given to using long words. It’s such a long word itself, though, that it is what it accuses others of being. It is a hypocrite, Daisy, well and truly, but I still like it. And I plan on dropping it into a conversation or two when I’m in New York City.”

  Daisy chewed her cud. If she had an opinion about my word of the day, she kept it to herself. My cheek was pressed into her warm belly, my hands were busy squeezing milk from her udder, and my lips were whispering all my secrets to her. I had told her all about Uncle Fifty and how he was coming back from Old Forge any minute now and bringing me the money I needed to go to Barnard.

  It was near the end of April and twelve of our twenty cows had calved and we were drowning in milk. Morning and night, the milk was poured into wide, deep pans and allowed to set. When left long enough, the cream separated from the milk and rose to the top of the pan. Then it was skimmed off. The leftover milk went into large, two-handled cans for delivery. We sold some of the cream just as it was, the rest we churned into butter. The buttermilk—which is what was left after the butter came—was fed to our pigs and chickens. Nothing was ever wasted.

  “Mattie?”

  I turned my head. “Beth, don’t stand right behind a cow. You know better than that.”

  “Daisy wouldn’t kick me. She never would.”

  “But Pa will if he sees you that close to a cow’s hind end. Now step over.”

  “But Mattie . . .”

  “What, Beth? What’s wrong?”

  “Why isn’t Uncle Fifty back? He said he’d be back from Old Forge by dinnertime today and it’s already gone five. He told me he was going to take me to see the circus in Boonville. He said he was.”

  “He’ll be back. He probably just got talking with someone and took a later train. You know what he’s like. I bet he came across an old friend, that’s all. He’ll be back soon.”

  “Are you sure, Matt?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. I wasn’t. I didn’t want to admit it, not even to myself, but I was just as worried as Beth was. Our uncle should have been back hours before.

  “Hallooo!” a man’s voice shouted from the barn door.

  “There he is, Beth! See? I told you!”

  “It’s not Uncle Fifty, Matt. It’s Mr. Eckler,” she said, skipping off to see him.

  “Well, hello there, my girl! Your pa around?”

  “I’m right here, Charlie,” Pa called out. “You’re up this end of the lake awful late, aren’t you?”

  “I am at that. It’s so busy these days, I’m not getting back to Old Forge before six, seven o’clock at night. I brought you the bacon we traded for. It’s a nice piece of meat. And I wanted to ask if I can get five cans from you tomorrow instead of four, and any extra butter you’ve got.”

  “I’ve got the milk. Cows are giving about fifteen pounds of milk a day each. Got plenty. Should have the butter, too.”

  “Glad to hear it. Well, I’ve gotta get back, but say . . . I saw your brother this morning.”

  “What was he doing? Taking the slow train home?”

  “No, not quite. He was on a fast train, if you take my meaning. Bound for Utica.”

  “Poleaxed?”

  “Yup.”

  I felt all the breath go out of me. I leaned my forehead against Daisy and squeezed my eyes closed.

  My father spat a mouthful of tobacco juice. “Bet he don’t even make it to Utica. Bet he don’t get past Remsen,” he said.

  “Pa?” Beth’s voice was quavery.

  “In a minute, Beth.”

  “All right then, Michael. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Night, Charlie.”

  “Pa!”

  “What, Beth?”

  “What’s poleaxed mean? Where’s Uncle Fifty? He said he’d take me to the circus, Pa. Ain’t he coming back? He said he’d take me, Pa.”

  “You can’t believe everything your uncle says.”

  “But he said he’d take me!”

  “Beth, he ain’t going to and that’s that, so hush.”

  “But he promised! I hate him, Pa!” she sobbed. “I hate him!”

  I was sure Beth was going to get cracked for that, but Pa only said, “No more than he’s going to hate himself in a day or two.” Then he told her to stop her noise and take the bacon in to Abby.

  I sat slumped on my milking stool, knowing that the last chance I had to go to Barnard was on its way into the till of some bartender. Knowing that my uncle was off on a three-day spree. Or four. Or five. Or however many days it took to spend a hundred dollars. It was a hard and hopeless thing.

  Recouriumphoration. What a stupid, stupid word. I’d do better thinking up a word to describe how it felt to have your hopes dashed over and over again, rather than restored. Dolipeatalous or vicipucious or nullapressive or . . . bitter. Yes, bitter did the job just fine.

  “What is it?” a brusque voice suddenly said. It was Pa. He was standing next to Daisy, frowning down at me.

  “Nothing,” I said, wiping my eyes. I grabbed my bucket, brushed past him, and went to work in the milk house. I heard his footsteps behind me as I poured the milk into a separating pan.

  “Mattie, I don’t know what Francis might’ve said to you, but when he promises things, it’s the whiskey promising, not him. You know that, don’t you? He don’t mean bad; he can’t help it.” I felt his eyes on my back, heard him take a step toward me.

  “I’m fine, Pa,” I said sharply. “I’ll be along.”

  He stood where he was for a few seconds, then left. I was glad for once that straining the milk was my job. Glad of the time it took to pour it into the pans. Glad no one could see me sitting on a bench and bawling. Served me right, my uncle breaking his promise to me, seeing as I’d been only too eager to break the promise I’d made.

  When I’d cried myself dry, I wiped my face, covered the milk pans with cheesecloth, and left the barn for the kitchen. Abby had started the supper. There would be no apple fritters or tarte au sucre tonight. No songs. No music. No stories.

  But there would be fresh spinach, the first crop. And potatoes fried with the bacon Pa had traded for. There would be a big jug of milk, a loaf of bread, and a dish of butter to spread on it.

  My father had put these things on the table.

  I looked at him standing by the sink. He was washing his hands, splashing water on his face. My mamma left us. My brother, too. And now my feckless, reckless uncle had as well. My pa stayed, though. My pa always stayed.

  I looked at him. And saw the sweat stains on his shirt. And his big, scarred hands. And his dirty, weary face. I remembered how, lying in my bed a few nights before, I had looked forward to showing him my uncle’s money. To telling him I was leaving.

  And I was so ashamed.

  You can’t argue with the dead. No matter what you say, they get the last word.

  I try to have it out with Grace as I sit with her. I tell her that she was wrong to have given me her letters and that sneaking around on her behalf will cost me my job if I’m not careful and that I need my wages because I am to be married and they’ll help pay for a stove and pots and pans. I tell her it is entirely possible that Carl Grahm is really Carl Grahm and that Chester Gillette is someone else entirely an
d the fact that Grace called Carl “Chester” and wrote “Chester, I have done nothing but cry” and “Chester, do you miss me”—while certainly a big fat coincidence—proves nothing. I tell her I have taken plenty of risks for her already and that I won’t take another. I say I’m not going to read any more of her letters, either, and if it was her intention all along to get me to, then she is very selfish and underhanded.

  Was. She was very selfish and underhanded.

  I look at her arm as I argue with her, because I don’t want to look at her face anymore. I notice that the fabric of her sleeve is puckered from dampness. I see tiny hand stitches where some lace was added at the cuffs, and I wonder if she’d made those stitches herself or if maybe her mother had. Or if she had a sister who was good at sewing, like my sister Abby is. I wonder how she got her nickname, Billy. It was what Chester—no, Carl, his name is Carl—had called her. Did her pa give it to her? Maybe she had a brother who called her that. It sounded like a nickname a brother would give. Lawton was the one who’d first called me Mattie. Tillie would’ve been so much prettier. Or Millie. Or Tilda. Or even Hilda.

  I open another letter.

  South Otselic

  June 20, 1906

  My Dear Chester—

  I am writing to tell you that I am coming back to Cortland. I simply can’t stay here any longer. Mamma worries and wonders why I cry so much and I am just about sick. Please come and take me away to some place, dear . . . My headache is dreadful to-night. I am afraid you won’t come and I am so frightened, dear . . . You have said you would come and sometimes I just know you will, but then I think about other things and I am just as certain you won’t come . . . Chester, there isn’t a girl in the whole world as miserable as I am to-night, and you have made me feel so. Chester I don’t mean that, dear. You have always been awfully good to me and I know you will always be. You just won’t be a coward, I know . . .