The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “What are you baking for the Thanksgiving Day Co-op Dinner?” Lola asked. “I’m gonna bake six loaves of bread. I’d just like for someone to tell me how many loaves I already baked this year.”

  “I think we’ll have our dinner here,” said Charlene, wondering, “What must it be like to have dinner with an entire town, most of whom you don’t know, the others you don’t like?”

  “The newspapers is still claiming Elvis is alive,” Lola announced. “They even showed what he’s supposed to look like. Someone photographed him outside one of them Las Vegas gambling places. He’s got long hair, but he’s bald on top. And he’s still real plump.” Charlene smiled. The newspapers, her ass. When Lola said newspapers, she meant Star, Enquirer, and Globe. When Lola said news show, she meant Geraldo.

  “I was just telling Dorrie about it and she almost fell off her chair,” Lola continued. Charlene could hear children in a bitter argument, their voices welling up to a frenzy, somewhere in Lola’s house. She must be keeping Dorrie’s bratty grandchildren again.

  “Dorrie said that last week she was at Woolworth’s in Madawaska looking for percale sheets ’cause the perma-press get them little lint bumps after a few washings, and who should she see buying handkerchiefs but a man who was the spitting image of Elvis except, and listen to this, he was bald.” Charlene heard Davey mumbling on the sofa and then a long, sick sigh from the chest of her daughter. “Dorrie and me don’t know what to make of it, now that experts claim Elvis would be bald by now,” Lola was saying. “It seems like too much to be a coincidence. And northern Maine’d be the perfect place for him to hide. Who’d ever look for him in Madawaska? We’re taking a trip down to Woolworth this week and just keep our eyes open.”

  “Davey’s here for lunch,” Charlene said. She wondered if Lola knew about the broken skidder but had no intentions of telling her. Lola loved for hard times to strike, even upon her relatives. And Charlene wouldn’t be too surprised if Lola already knew that Davey’s father had cosigned for him at the bank the previous week. Davey had met Booster Mullins on the narrow road to Watertown, and Booster had, as is usual with travelers on a tiny road, waved and tooted recognition. “He’s probably wondering what we were doing on our way to Watertown,” Davey had said, and Charlene knew what he meant. She had learned, in her three Mattagash years, that you could meet an entire busload of male Giffords and no one would think twice, but for hardworking men to be seen on their way to Watertown in the middle of a good workday meant that machinery was broken or they needed to talk to the folks at the bank.

  “I hear Davey’s skidder is broke again,” Lola said. “I bet he hates the thought of another loan. If it ain’t one thing in this woodsworking business, it’s another.” Charlene leaned back against the washer and let out a long breath. How did they do it? By God, she was surprised. She was always surprised. So Lola had a week to figure out the loan, but the skidder had broken just that morning. How could one tiny little town stay so on top of things without being computerized? “Well,” Lola kept on, “maybe he’ll get as lucky as Paulie Hart and hit a nice lottery jackpot.”

  “My potatoes are boiling over,” Charlene said, a rush of emergency in her voice.

  “Oh, listen!” Lola stopped her. “I forgot the real reason I called you.” Let the potatoes burn is what she was really saying. Charlene bit her tongue. If they didn’t get away from Mattagash by spring, they would find her hanging, next to Eileen Fennelson, from the old birch tree.

  “Amy Joy Lawler’s pregnant,” Lola whispered, as if the screaming children behind her could possibly hear. “The girl who works for Dr. Brassard at the health clinic in Watertown is married to Angelique’s son, of Angelique’s Hair Factory. Angelique’s daughter goes to school with Prissy Monihan’s daughter at the University of Maine. When Prissy’s daughter come home for Labor Day weekend, she told Dorrie’s daughter, and she called Dorrie right up the minute she heard. Amy Joy went in and had a pregnancy test done. They claim the test was positive.” The they of a small town. Who were they? A collective mind? A large queen bee, fermenting with gossip?

  “It’s all over town,” Lola added with smug satisfaction. Charlene had no doubt of that, what with Lola and Dorrie at the helm of the good ship Gossip. And the town of Mattagash, Maine, was like a sheet of pure ice. Bad news seemed to slide over it. “Can you just imagine?” Lola was now saying. “They don’t know yet who the father is, but they think it might be Oliver Hart. He’s the one who come home from Vietnam with a duffel bag full of medals and just shut himself up in his daddy’s old house.” Charlene imagined, suddenly, a large modern office building, with wide windows and plenty of parking space, a sign on the door: They, Inc., a place where bad news and good news was sorted over like mail and decisions were made as to which news would be made public. They never talked about their own.

  “Let’s look at the facts,” Lola said. “Unless she’s seeing a married man—and I wouldn’t put that an inch past her—the only bachelors in town even close to Amy Joy’s age is Nolan Gifford, Oliver Hart, and Moss Fennelson. I personally think that Oliver Hart got too much of his vitals shot away in Vietnam to be chasing after Amy Joy. And I doubt that Moss is even interested in a woman,” Lola added. “He took dancing lessons for almost a year at the college in Watertown.”

  “It’s like Big Sister Is Watching You,” Charlene thought. It was true that most men in Mattagash were too worried over bills, or politics, or maybe even booze to join in with gossip of a feminine nature. They waited for car wrecks, the occasional suicide, an instate murder, theft—the important slices of a town’s life. Let the women sort out the gynecological gossip.

  “She’s forty-four years old,” Lola said with disgust. “She should have grown kids, like the rest of us her age, not babies. Anyway, Dorrie’s calling that hippie woman who sells cucumbers to Amy Joy to see if she knows anything.”

  “Another call coming in,” Charlene warned, her voice full, again, of emergency. She could say, “Someone just shot a bullet into my head, Lola,” and Lola would say, “Okay, but just one more thing.” Emergency meant nothing to Lola Monihan. To Lola, all life had become one long, dragged-out emergency. Charlene put the phone down on its cradle. Poor Amy Joy. She’d met her only a few times but had pity for her, to be lingering along unmarried in Mattagash, Maine. Now Charlene felt the utmost compassion. It was a terrible thing to be on Dorrie and Lola’s hit list.

  “Davey, wake up, honey,” she whispered. Tanya had fallen asleep too, her forehead warm and sweaty in Davey’s arm. Davey opened his eyes and looked blankly at his wife’s face, until he remembered who she was, who he was, and then he closed them again.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I just dreamed I won the lottery.”

  WHEN THE OLD BECOME YOUNG: THE DOWNHILL SLIDE INTO PINE VALLEY

  “Virginia Mullins should be shot for doing that to her own mother. I’ll tell you one thing. The day will never come when I let a parent of mine spend their last days at an old people’s home.”

  —Lola Craft Monihan, Tupperware party, 1978

  Amy Joy Lawler opened the passenger door of her brown 1982 Cavalier and allowed Sicily to swing her legs out of the car and plant her feet firmly upon the snow-packed driveway. They were at Pine Valley, the St. Leonard nursing home, to visit Winnie Craft. The day was brilliantly blue, river and sky competing against the white hills and fields. The first storm of 1989 had settled in, with one or two lesser storms packed on top of it, by the time Amy Joy and Sicily made their monthly visit to Pine Valley, known as Death Valley to all those reckless celebrants of youth who passed by, sometimes tooting their horns drunkenly in the heart of a boozy night.

  “This better not be a trick,” Sicily warned. “This better be our regular visit. I’ve heard of children tricking their parents in ways like this. This better not be another case of cheese in the trap.”

  “It isn’t,” Amy Joy assured her. “I wouldn’t do that to
you.” She took Sicily’s arm and guided her to the entrance door. “The yard is slippery. Watch your step.”

  “You watch your step,” Sicily said. “If there’s someone waiting in there with a big butterfly net that’s got my name on it, be prepared for trouble. I intend to bolt.”

  “Oh, Mother,” said Amy Joy. “What do you take me for?”

  “And just what did Winnie Craft think of her precious daughter, Lola, for years, until she was forced to move in with her?” Sicily reminded her own daughter. “Wasn’t it Lola this and Lola that? You bring up Lola’s name to her now and listen to what Winnie has to say. Lola told her she was taking her to Watertown to get her hair trimmed at Angelique’s Hair Factory, and before Winnie could shout ‘Fudge!’ she was a permanent resident here. She had no choice. Lola refused to take her back home. Where could poor Winnie go? She can’t live alone no more.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Amy Joy.

  “She ended up getting her wings clipped instead of her hair trimmed,” Sicily said. She was taking her time as she put one foot in front of the other.

  “I’d never do such a thing,” Amy Joy promised. “You can stay with me as long as you want.” She knew Lola to be the kind of creature who would trick her own mother into a home. Lola had once, twenty years ago, been Amy Joy’s friend. She had been Amy Joy’s maid of honor, had been there to see Amy Joy jilted by a Frenchman from Watertown, a Catholic, something akin to a devil worshipper in Mattagash. Amy Joy had known all about Lola’s gossiping disloyalty.

  “You might say our friendship ticket has expired,” Amy Joy told Lola when she called, a year after that fateful day in 1969, to say that she herself was getting married and could they finally bury the hatchet? The only place Amy Joy cared to bury it was between Lola’s thin shoulder blades.

  “Besides,” Lola had added, “I’d love to borrow them bridesmaid gowns of yours that never got used.”

  “Oh no,” Sicily said suddenly, and stopped on the bottom step leading up to the front door. Out in the bright, telltale sunshine, Amy Joy noticed how pale her mother had become, how shrunken in her big woolen coat.

  “What if Winnie begs us to take her home? She called me yesterday and asked again.”

  “Just pretend you’re hard of hearing,” Amy Joy advised.

  “But there’s that extra bedroom of Pearl’s…” Sicily began. A soft white spittle formed on her bottom lip like a little snowfall.

  “Mama, let’s go in,” Amy Joy insisted, and tugged at Sicily’s arm. Sicily calculated the remaining steps before she lifted a foot to try one. With the slow-footedness of old age, she climbed all six and waited at the top as Amy Joy knocked on the door.

  Amy Joy felt despair settle over her again. She was entitled, wasn’t she, to one last stab at life before she laid down the sword? The truth was that Sicily would have better company at Pine Valley than she found back at the old McKinnon homestead. She stayed on the phone to Winnie all day anyway. Why not be there in person? Besides, Amy Joy was accustomed to spending the long daylight hours of summer along the Mattagash River and in the deep woods, collecting her wildflowers to be dried and pressed between the pages of a book. In the summer Amy Joy abandoned Sicily for the meadowsweet, field mint, yarrow, caraway, the rare St. John’s tansy, the wild cucumbers that grew on vines along the edges of the wood. In the winter, even on those blustery, snow-swept days, Amy Joy went on snowshoes to quiet places too narrow for the noisy snowmobiles. She went about the winter hills, leaving Sicily behind to complain on the phone to Winnie about abandonment, as she switched from channel to channel with her remote control and waited for Amy Joy’s return. Now it was becoming a danger to leave Sicily alone for very long at a time. What if she fell? Should Amy Joy, then, forfeit the rest of her own life to look after what was left of Sicily’s?

  “I’ll come visit you every day,” Amy Joy had promised when Sicily complained of loneliness. This was the very first time the subject of Pine Valley had floated up between them. “And you wouldn’t be lonely at Pine Valley. You’d have all the company you could stand over there.” But Sicily preferred her own room at the old McKinnon homestead, her birthplace. Amy Joy knocked again on the door.

  “We could make Winnie’s Christmas this year,” Sicily said. “All we have to do is take her home with us, and today could be the day we tell her.”

  “Three minutes ago, you were about to collapse with fear that I might be putting you here against your will,” Amy Joy said. Her patience was waning, as it always did. “Now that I tell you I won’t do that, you want to bring Winnie the Poop home.”

  “Don’t call her that,” Sicily scolded. “You’re as bad as Lola.” Amy Joy looked at her mother. That was an insult of utter magnitude to Amy Joy, and Sicily knew it.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Amy Joy said. “Why don’t you and Winnie move in at the house, and I’ll come live here.”

  “We’ll visit every day,” Sicily said. Amy Joy was about to waltz her ornery little mother down the Pine Valley steps and into the car, give her a breakneck ride back home, when the door flew open.

  “Come on in,” a girl from Watertown, whom Amy Joy knew only as M. J., told the pair on the porch. She was one of the regular workers at Pine Valley. “You’ll freeze to death out here.”

  Winnie Craft was already settled in the lounge where the social hour was held. She wore a pair of nubby wool slacks under her dress, and what looked like two sweaters. Her hair was gossamer as snow. She was staring at Amy Joy with an inordinate interest.

  “They keep the temperature in here at sixty-eight,” Winnie griped immediately, before the visitors had removed their wraps. “One of these mornings we’ll get up and find frost on everything.”

  Amy Joy undid her scarf and placed it, along with her gloves, inside the pockets of her coat. Then she helped Sicily off with hers.

  Sicily gave Winnie a big hug. They appeared almost conspiratorial. Amy Joy smiled cautiously. Surely her mother hadn’t promised to break Winnie out of Pine Valley.

  “They claim they’re gonna bus us all over to that co-op dinner on Thanksgiving Day,” Winnie said. “Those of us who can still sit up.”

  “Ain’t you lucky,” said Sicily, patting Winnie’s bony arm. “Amy Joy won’t take me. She says we’re gonna eat our dinner home alone, like a couple of nuns. Amy Joy says it’s Thanksgiving dinner, not a jamboree.”

  “You said the part about the nuns,” Amy Joy reminded her.

  “Albert Pinkham’s giving them a hard time again,” Winnie whispered suddenly, and nodded at a figure slumped in a wheelchair. He was pointed toward the sunny window, as though enjoying the day. But his eyes were shut, his tongue lolling about in his open mouth.

  “This is only the second time he’s come out of his room since he’s been here,” Winnie reported. Amy Joy was shocked. It had been only three years since she’d seen Albert Pinkham, yet she wouldn’t have recognized this old man who was caving into his own bones like an avalanche.

  “Albert calls the staff goddamn Frogs,” Winnie offered further. She was, Amy Joy noticed, still happily able to finger all the hairs in her nose, albeit her hand now shook. “He says he didn’t live his whole life speaking the King’s English in Mattagash only to die among Frogs in St. Leonard.” Winnie fingered as she spoke. “He says one night, after they turn out the lights, he’s heading back to his motel.”

  Amy Joy thought about that. The old-timers, and even many young-timers, were still hanging on to the prejudices as though they were heirlooms. It was a lucky thing Mattagash had no blacks. She could imagine one hanging from each and every lynchworthy pine.

  “How’s your mother?” Sicily asked. This was one of life’s little ironies. Winnie’s mother was still alive, well beyond a hundred years old, and in another room at Pine Valley.

  “I was in to see her this morning,” Winnie said. “She seems to be resting well enoug
h. The Women’s Auxiliary wants to present a plaque or something to her at the Thanksgiving Day dinner. That peaked-faced girl of Rose Monihan’s come and asked me if it was okay for them to wheel Mama into the gym, even though she ain’t aware of things. They thought it would be good for the little kids to sort of see her, her being the oldest Mattagasher and all.”

  “That’s real nice,” said Sicily. “I wish I was going to that dinner.”

  “I dreamed of Morton last night,” Winnie said wistfully.

  “Poor Morton,” said Sicily. Morton was Winnie’s brother, who had died in his sleep when he was only thirty years old. At the time, the doctor couldn’t figure out why the incident had occurred, but the whole town knew that Morton was so stupid he had probably just forgotten to breathe.

  “That old woman from Watertown died last night,” Winnie added. “I heard them take her out.”

  “Which old woman is that?” Sicily asked. Amy Joy watched the two old women referring to someone else as such.

  “Remember the one who was doing the needlepoint of that moose scene?” asked Winnie. “It said Maine, Vacationland over the antlers.”

  “Yes,” said Sicily. “Now I remember her. She had an awful steady hand.”

  “Well,” Winnie said flatly. “It’s even steadier now.”

  “Too bad she couldn’t have finished it,” said Sicily. “She’d put an awful lot of work into it.”

  “The family would’ve just thrown it out anyway,” Winnie said. “Nothing means anything to folks anymore.” A small piece of silence fell upon them. Amy Joy wished the mood were more festive. Her greatest prayer was that one day Sicily would throw up her hands in jubilation and shout, “I love it here, Amy Joy! Please, God, let me stay!” Then maybe Amy Joy could go off somewhere and live a life of her own. Maybe she’d even leave Mattagash.

  “Mrs. Faber, from right here in St. Leonard, pees the bed like a baby,” Winnie whispered suddenly, and Sicily gasped.