The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Goddamn doctors,” Davey muttered. “According to them, if you live you must’ve been okay, if you die you wasn’t okay. And either way it costs you an arm and a leg.”

  “This far north, we’d do just as well to ask a witch doctor what he thinks,” said Charlene. She turned the heat beneath the sputtering pan down to medium.

  “They’re all alike no matter where you go,” said Davey.

  “You gonna get that piston fixed in the skidder?” Charlene asked. She had opened a can of corn beef and was now slicing it.

  “You gonna win the lottery?” Davey answered her, and went into the living room to kiss the warm forehead of his sick child.

  Charlene stopped her busy hands to stare out her kitchen window. The snow had picked up momentum, maybe somewhere up north in Canada, and now Charlene could see the yellow lights of cars inching along the one ragged road that cut through the heart of Mattagash. The roads were looking dangerous. She suspected the kids would be home soon, now that the first permanent storm of 1989 seemed intent on making itself known to all those folks who still held green summer images in their foolish heads. How had she ended up in Mattagash, next door to the North Pole? No wonder her own parents had left it for industrial Connecticut in 1959 to find good factory jobs. Charlene Hart had been born in New Milford, Connecticut, in December of that same year, to former Mattagashers. She had trekked north with her parents during an occasional summer vacation, but that was her only experience of the town.

  “The end of the world,” Charlene muttered as the town snowplow poked its nose around the bend. Charlene watched it coming slowly toward her, inching past the ruins of Albert Pinkham’s motel. It was there, at the Albert Pinkham Motel, that Charlene’s family had stayed during those Maine vacations. She hadn’t minded the visits back then, and rather enjoyed jumping out of the big Buick her father had proudly driven back home for all the unfortunates to view. Charlene remembered how easily her country cousins had been impressed as they gathered around her like Munchkins, inspected her city clothes, the braces on her teeth, the transistor radio in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle. It was that same transistor that Albert Pinkham, proprietor, had smashed with a hammer when Charlene left it playing on the cement walkway outside her room. “I’ll be darned,” Albert Pinkham said, when Charlene showed him the wires inside the smashed plastic, the two tiny batteries. “The Bible says strange things will happen before the world ends. I figured singing pop bottles might be one of them.” But even someone as cautious as Albert Pinkham couldn’t keep an eye on things forever. Mattagash’s only motel had fallen into disrepair as Albert grew toward his own physical downfall. With no family to tend to him, he had gone, reluctantly, to live at Pine Valley. Sometime after that, ruffians had thrown rocks to break out all the windows. Then Charlene noticed that the front door had fallen off one hinge and was dangling. Now the motel’s shutters hung diagonally from their windows. Aging red bricks had cascaded down from the chimney earlier in the fall and lay hidden beneath the snow. Rumors were that the pot smokers among Mattagash’s newest generation held wild parties at the old motel. What would Albert Pinkham think of that? Charlene smiled, remembering the day of the smashed transistor. Instead of reimbursing her for the radio, Albert had merely gone on to charge her fifty cents for the rental of a nail clipper. Charlene smiled until she remembered where she was, back in Mattagash permanently, soon to turn thirty, and about to be buried alive beneath tons of white, indifferent snow.

  She had met David Craft at a wedding reception. Mattagashers stuck together in Connecticut, even if they hadn’t liked each other back in northern Maine. In Connecticut, Mattagashers all looked alike, and sounded alike, and suddenly there didn’t seem to be so much reason to dislike each other anymore. So those who had been enemies back on the historic soil of the first settlers suddenly discovered the logic of safety in numbers. It became the city slickers against the country bumpkins. And when one had a wedding to shout about, the rest came from their respective cities and shouted. Their city-born children might not know or understand the old northern Maine roots, yet they learned to recognize the faces and the Mattagash twang. But facial smiles and the tinge of an old Irish brogue were not enough to warn this new generation of how interrelated they were. Parents silently hoped their daughters would marry city boys, their sons new-blooded Connecticut girls, who would spread some good genes about the twisted family tree. When Charlene could not resist marrying the handsome, self-assured David Craft, she did not think they were even remotely related.

  “Your grandmothers was sisters for starters,” Charlene remembered hearing when she first announced their engagement. It had taken her mother an hour, with a sheet of paper before her, to explain the genetic complexities. “Your dad is a first cousin to Davey’s mom back up in Mattagash. Davey’s dad is, I think, my second cousin on one side and third cousin on another. Your dad and I are related a few times too.”

  Now that Charlene had looked in all the old church records, had studied birth and death certificates for the nighttime genealogy class that helped her pass her first Mattagash winter, she knew the truth. She and David Craft were related all over the place on a family tree that had a writhing mass of earthworms for branches. It was an extreme case of love that had prompted Charlene to move back north when Davey lost his job, then his confidence, all in one pavement-hot Connecticut summer. But he had money in the bank, and he had a burning urge to move back to Mattagash and put that money to work in the woods.

  “Go to Maine,” her own father, now proudly one of only a dozen plant managers at the Ronder Plastics Company in New Milford, had advised. “After all, you were spawned there,” he reminded her. Charlene smiled.

  “When we passed the Leaving Mattagash sign, I waved for you, too,” her mother loved to tell her. “Even though you were only three months along inside me.” Now Charlene wished she could wave good-bye for herself. In person. The remnants of Davey’s confidence were being scattered about the white pines like broken and discarded shards of a lumberjack’s machinery. If she didn’t get him away from the woods, which was eating his spirit alive, stealing his money, sneering at him, slapping him with blackflies in the summers, and whipping him with snow in the winters, he would be a hollow man when he came to the twilight of his years. He would be a dead stump left behind in the forest until the first strong wind came to level him. The woods was a real whore.

  “If we don’t get out of here,” Charlene thought, “we’ll all be lost souls.” And she wondered if maybe Bennett Craft, Davey’s younger brother, would be alive and well if he hadn’t moved back to Mattagash. But Benny had committed suicide the autumn before, had shot himself out on the hardwood ridge that followed the Mattagash River. “Depression runs in the family,” Davey had informed Charlene. But whether it did or not, he still hadn’t accepted Bennett’s death. Several times that autumn, just before the wind took the colored leaves away, Charlene had caught Davey staring out at the ridge, his eyes hard and unblinking, unable to cry. When Charlene Craft looked at that same ridge, covered with poplars and rock maples, it reminded her that this was her third winter.

  “The third time tells the story,” she’d told Davey that morning at breakfast. “I’ll know by spring if I can handle it anymore. If I can’t, Davey, I’m taking the kids. So help me, if you won’t come with us, we’re going alone.” Now she was sorry, standing there and watching the hordes of flakes pelting the window, that she had chosen such a time to threaten him. He had enough on his mind as it was. Coming back to Mattagash with a fancy big New Yorker and ten thousand dollars in his savings account had been a fine thing. Even his brother Peter Craft, who had himself worked long enough at Pratt & Whitney to come back to Mattagash twenty years earlier and open Craft’s Filling Station, could not imagine himself such a lucky man. Yet Davey and Charlene Craft had watched that money siphon itself off like a slow, steady leak, and when it was gone, not even a stain was left, not even a memory.
Now Davey was just another lumberman being chewed up alive by the woods. As the first big snow of 1989 filtered down upon the dried stalks of autumn, Davey Craft had already been forced to have his father cosign for him at the Greater Northern Bank. That loan had been to put four new tires on the skidder and buy it its costly chains. Tires were five hundred dollars each. Chains were a thousand dollars a set. But without the skidder, Davey would have no way to drag the logs he’d cut out of the woods to the trucks waiting to haul them away.

  “I could buy diamond necklaces for some prostitute,” Davey had told his father on the awkward drive home, “and it would be cheaper than putting chains on that goddamn skidder.”

  “No prostitutes in Mattagash,” his father had said glumly, his eyes on the meandering road ahead of them. Now, forget the chains. Davey had left the skidder—with its broken piston and motor block—sitting where it was, its red-orange ass up in the air, had come home to measure his frustrations out in shovelfuls of fat snow.

  Charlene glanced in to see that Davey had fallen asleep sitting on the sofa, Tanya’s little brunette head nestled in the crook of his arm. A small twitch pulled occasionally at the corner of his mouth, a nervous tremor. Tanya was softly singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

  “He’s only thirty-five years old,” Charlene thought, “and he’s already a hundred percent beat.”

  “Santa Claus is coming, Mom,” Tanya said, her pale face like a little moon lodged in Davey’s arm.

  “He might be coming empty-handed,” Charlene thought. “He might be coming for nothing.” She took the potatoes off the burner and quickly deposited the hot pan into the sink, where she would mash them. She heard the screech of the school bus as it swung into the snowy yard and braked. Its door popped open and Charlene’s two boys, Christopher and James, ages ten and eight, jumped out into the yard, their arms flailing snow at each other. Charlene glanced at the clock. Ten thirty. She would now have the boys for lunch at eleven. She could only hope that the snow would quit sometime soon, or at least by nightfall, so that the chunky plow could make things orderly by morning and allow the school bus passage.

  “They’ll drive me crazy if they’re home again tomorrow,” Charlene thought. She went quickly out the front door and stood shivering in her jeans and blouse until the boys heard her and ceased their snow wrestling.

  “Daddy’s asleep on the sofa,” Charlene told them.

  “What’s Daddy doing home so early?” Christopher asked.

  “The skidder broke,” said Charlene.

  “Again?” Christopher was genuinely concerned for a second, until he brought a mittenful of snow up and rubbed it into James’s face.

  “Stop it, Miles!” James shouted.

  “Ma, James says I’m too short to be Miles Standish,” Christopher said. His cheeks were rosy with cold.

  “You’re even too short to be Christopher Craft,” James said, and began shaping a snowball.

  “Stay outside and play until I call you in,” Charlene told them. “Daddy didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

  Inside, the phone rang just once before Charlene caught it up. She walked with it, its long cord coiling behind her, out into the laundry room, where she could shut the door and talk without waking Davey. It was Eileen Fennelson, whom Bobby Fennelson had wed in the service. Eileen had no Mattagash roots whatsoever and refused even now to put any down.

  “What do you think of this storm?” Charlene asked her. “Not exactly your idea of getting back to the land, is it?”

  “Bobby just informed me I won’t even see land again until April or May,” Eileen said. “I feel like I’m out to sea. This isn’t Arizona, Char. What in hell will I do?”

  “Get a satellite dish,” Charlene advised. “That’s what I did. Believe you me, it helps. I don’t know what the old-timers did, and I don’t care. Get a satellite dish.”

  “Bobby and I are fighting all the time now as it is,” Eileen said. Charlene could tell by her breathy words that she was in the process of lighting one of her sixty daily cigarettes.

  “Are you smoking again?” she asked. “I thought you said last week that you had it licked this time.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought so too until Jesus decided to dump the down out of his pillows all over us.” Eileen laughed, and Charlene could hear her intake of smoky breath. “Beth’s teacher told the class that’s how snow is made. Beth is in the fourth grade, Char. Is that too young to be told the truth about frozen water vapor? I tell you, I’m not made for this country. I’ll be a suicide case by Christmas. Mark my words. You’ll find me hanging from the old birch one of these days.”

  “Just dig your heels in,” Charlene told her. “Go out and get some exercise.”

  “At least you’re from Connecticut,” Eileen said. “You’ve been introduced to snow. I feel like I’m being attacked right now. There should be some kind of halfway house for first-timers like me. You know. Little snowstorms. Someone serving hot coffee. Talking me down.”

  “What are you and Bobby fighting about now?” Charlene put a load of whites into the machine and turned it on. If she was stuck in the laundry room for a time with the phone, she might as well do a bit of work. And she expected to be on the phone for a lengthy chat. Bobby’s Arizona wife was known all over town—and this was one time Charlene had to agree with the gossips—as finicky.

  “It’s Bobby’s family again,” Eileen said. “You remember the Munsters.” Charlene smiled. Eileen had been a breath of fresh air when she moved to Mattagash six months ago, straight from Germany, when Bobby’s twenty-year enlistment with the army finished. “And it’s his friends, too,” Eileen went on. “It’s this whole damn town.” Charlene sighed. Maybe the whole town was saying she was finicky too, because when it came to the shortcomings of Mattagash, Charlene Craft had a long, long list. “They drop in at any time of day.” Eileen was still complaining. “It’s impossible to sit around in my pajamas for a cup of coffee because any ragamuffin can come through the door. They don’t even knock.” Charlene sighed again. Why did this all sound so familiar? Because she and Davey had argued about just the same thing.

  “Gee, it’s really coming down, isn’t it?” Charlene asked. If she joined in with Eileen by listing her own grievances, they’d be on the phone all day. She glanced at the clock. Five minutes to eleven. She would need to finish preparing lunch—or dinner, as they called it in Mattagash—and then wake Davey from his few minutes of earthly relief. He had to solve the problem of the skidder as soon as possible. How, Charlene was pressed to know. “Listen, dear, it’s gonna be a long winter,” she reminded Eileen. “And, as Dorothy once said, this ain’t Kansas.”

  “It ain’t even New Jersey.”

  “You’re gonna have to grin and bear it.”

  “But, Char.” Eileen had begun a perfect protest when Charlene heard the beep that meant another incoming call. All progress was inching its way to Mattagash, even call waiting.

  “I gotta go, sweetie,” Charlene said. “Another call. Keep the chin up.”

  “Why? It’ll just get covered with snow.”

  Charlene pressed her finger down on the button and Eileen was lost in the white swirling storm, cut loose somewhere on the telephone wires lining the main road. It was Davey’s cousin Lola on the phone. Charlene frowned when she heard the voice. If she had only known, she would have let Eileen drone on and on. Lola Craft Monihan. Cousin-in-law. Another reason to pack everything she owned into a U-Haul and haul ass back to Connecticut.

  “Say hello to Mr. Winter.” Lola was poetic for such a blustery day. “It sure is coming down, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Charlene. “At least the kids are loving it. They canceled school.”

  “Well, if we wanted Arizona, we would move to Arizona,” said Lola. “At least that’s what I was just telling Dorrie.” Arizona. They must have been gossiping about Eileen again, t
heir favorite pastime—a pastime against which not even a satellite dish could compete.

  “I was telling Dorrie,” Lola went on, “about that time me and Raymond drove out to California to see his cousin and take the kids to Disneyland. We almost died in that earthquake, the one that weighed seven on that earthquake scale.”

  Charlene closed her eyes and listened to her cousin-in-law’s Mattagash twang bounce along the snowy wires. She put the load of whites into the dryer and packed the washer with Davey’s work clothes. She added some extra detergent. The gummy stains of spruce and fir were something TV housewives never mentioned in all those Tide commercials. She swept a remnant of cobweb down with a dirty towel, then wondered if she should wait until spring to paint the laundry room. She was surprised to hear Lola still on the line, had forgotten her there, in some kind of snowy limbo.

  “Who would want to get up and look out their window every morning just to see one of them big cactuses staring back at you, hardly a leaf on it. No sirree. I was just telling Dorrie. We had us a trip to California once and it’s enough to satisfy me. The only time I want to see six lanes of traffic again is in my nightmares. And we almost died driving across dusty old deserty Arizona. I’ll stay right here the rest of my life, thank you, in good ole northern Maine and love every blessed minute of it. There ain’t nothing them states out there got that we don’t.”

  “I’d better call the kids for lunch,” Charlene said, and had planned to add something about their surely being starved, but Lola cut her off.

  “Me and Dorrie just had our dinner at The Crossroads,” said Lola. “We’d never go in there at night or anything, it being a bar, but we do stop for dinner once in a while, or for a take-out pizza. Did you hear that Maurice got himself a microwave put in and now he serves hot sandwiches and pizzas?”

  “I hadn’t heard,” said Charlene, and was glad that she hadn’t.