The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Who did this woman marry?” Edie asked. She noticed the blood running like thin blue rivers beneath skin stretched on the hands, the temples.

  “She married Foster Fennelson,” Dorrie said, and quickly read the signature on a Hallmark card that was decorating the bed stand. “Larry and me is in one Fennelson line, and she married into another one. Them Fennelson lines is so twisted they look like that sign on a doctor’s door. The one with the snake in it.”

  “Did she have many children?” Edie asked.

  “She raised a whole bushel of kids,” Dorrie said, and then shooed a fly away from the old woman’s face. “You wouldn’t believe the tragedy in that family. You think the Kennedys are unlucky? This poor woman married into the Fennelson curse.”

  “A curse?” Edie asked.

  Dorrie nodded. “One of the old McKinnons cursed one of the old Fennelsons for stealing some pastureland, and it’s been passed on ever since. Thank God it didn’t come down to Booster.”

  “What do you mean?” Edie asked.

  “One of this old woman’s daughters was Justine. Booster is Justine’s son,” Dorrie explained. “They say that only the men in that family, the sons, passed that bad-luck gene on. So Justine couldn’t give it to Booster. She did have it, though. She went out to the mailbox one day to see if her mail had come, and the dry cleaner’s truck from Watertown struck her and killed her dead.” Edie’s eyes widened at the dramatic lilt in Dorrie’s voice. “The roads was icy and the driver said he didn’t see her,” Dorrie added. “However, if you ask me, and I say this even though she was my mother-in-law and I loved her, she was probably trying to look across the road into Edna Hart’s windows and didn’t see that truck coming. When Simon Craft, the mailman, finally pulled up to the box to deliver her mail, he found her. She was stiff as a poker by then. The temperature was below zero that day. Poor soul. She’d been waiting for two months for her catalog order to come and, sure enough, wouldn’t you know that was the day Simon brought it.” Edie felt her breath catch. As much as she wanted to shake off the notion of a curse as silly, she had to admit Dorrie was certainly a storyteller, her voice rising and falling like Hitchcock music.

  “I tell you what,” Dorrie whispered. “Old Rose Kennedy can’t hold a candle to this poor soul here.” She pointed dramatically at the old woman on the bed.

  “Just her sons had the bad gene, huh?” Edie asked. Mattagash was more interesting than Worcester, it was true. If only they had a mall, Edie wouldn’t mind her visits quite so much.

  “Well, no, all of her daughters got it except Winnie, who’s here at Pine Valley,” Dorrie explained patiently. Edie had always been, and Dorrie was the first to mention this, a little bit slow-witted. “Of course, Winnie did lose the tip of her finger in an electric knife accident, but if you ask me, just being Winnie is curse enough. The other daughters got that gene from their father. They just couldn’t pass it on. All but two of this woman’s children died young and most from violent deaths. One of them, Elizabeth, is an old maid. Her bad luck was to be infertile and then move to New York City. She’s been mugged a million times. But just between you and me, I think the reason she’s infertile is by choice. I strongly believe Elizabeth is of the opposite persuasion. Her hair ain’t more than an inch long anywhere on her head.”

  “The others all died violent deaths?” Edie asked.

  “All except Morton, Booster’s uncle. He died in his sleep a long time ago. But they say he was so stupid it was hard to tell if that was good luck or bad.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Edie. She reached a finger out to touch the gnarled skin, to see if the old woman was real. The skin was warm, blood pumping somewhere, life inside the shell.

  “It’s her old house that’s now The Crossroads,” Dorrie said. “Maurice Fennelson, who runs it, is her grandson.”

  “Wonder how she’d feel to know that,” said Edie.

  “Well, from what I hear on the wind, Priscilla Monihan from right here in town is trying to get The Crossroads closed down,” said Dorrie. “The Bible can say what it wants, but there ain’t no one can clear a temple faster than Prissy.”

  “Do you suppose she can hear us?” Edie asked. She had noticed an ear peeping out from the tufts of gray hair, like some old vegetable growing unnoticed.

  “She’s the oldest living person in Mattagash, Maine—maybe even the whole country,” Dorrie bragged. “President Reagan sent her a special letter when she turned a hundred.”

  “Hell, someone’ll be sending him one pretty soon,” Edie said, and she and Dorrie muffled laughs.

  “It would be her great-grandson who just won that thousand dollars in the lottery,” Dorrie said, adding even more family history and mystery. “Paulie Hart. He picked eighteen, twelve, six, seventeen, and nine. Do you realize I picked three of them same numbers myself? That’s how close I come.”

  “Well, that’s pretty lucky, ain’t it?” Edie asked. “I guess he couldn’t have got the bad gene either.”

  “He’s Morton’s grandson,” Dorrie explained. “All that got passed down to Paulie was the stupid gene.”

  “Look there,” said Edie. “Her lids just fluttered.”

  “Ain’t she the oldest living thing you ever laid your eyes on?” Dorrie asked.

  “Not really,” said Edie. She was, after all, a well-traveled woman, having been married for a short time to an enlisted man. “When Larry was stationed out in California,” Edie said, pride in every word, “before he went over there to Pork Chop Hill, we piled into the Buick one Sunday and drove out to see a whole bunch of them redwoods.”

  From

  Mathilda Fennelson’s Bible

  McKinnons

  WILLIAM BRANSFORD JASPER

  Came to Mattagash in 1833

  BRANSFORD McKINNON

  b. 1808

  marries 1831

  AUGUSTA HART

  b. 1811

  LEWIS McKINNON

  b. 1832

  marries 1855 (1st cousins)

  RACHEL HART

  b. 1838

  ELIZABETH McKINNON

  b. 1865

  marries 3/1882

  NATHANIEL CRAFT

  b. 1864

  MATHILDA ANNA CRAFT

  b. December 16, 1882

  (marries Foster Fennelson 1896)

  MATHILDA FENNELSON IS BEGINNING: POSTSCRIPT FROM PINE VALLEY

  Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done

  To keep at bay

  Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,

  Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;

  So be beginning, be beginning to despair.

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Leaden Echo”

  I woke up on my hundredth birthday and thought I was young again. So I tried to get up out of my bed, and couldn’t. Imagine that. I just wanted to get up out of that bed and I could not do it. It was as if my body was a turtle shell with 1882 carved on it by a penknife, and I was just a living muscle struggling around inside. The king of England is to blame for all this.

  Me and this town was born at the same time, in the same year, and you might say for the same reasons: folks doing what they had no business doing. The king of England wanted white pine to build the masts of his ships, and that selfish notion alone brought my maternal great-grandfather to this town. I used to think a lot about that, you know, how one feller way over there across the ocean changed the lives of so many folks. He even changed their countries. My great-grandfather Bransford McKinnon was a Canadian until he and his two brothers come looking for
them white pines. That was in 1833. They was given grants to the land they might settle on, so Bransford and his brothers brung their wives and what tiny children they had among them, and they come way up here in the wilderness. It wasn’t just the pines that lost their roots before this whole shipbuilding scrape was over. And you know the funny thing? There wasn’t one of them old-timers ever saw a ship, let alone a king. They come up here in pirogues, dugout canoes. They thought they’d staked a claim in Canada, but it was a big mistake, you might say. They were really in the United States of America. That’s how all us loyalist descendants here ended up Americans. But just the same, them McKinnon boys come without ever looking back, and because of that, my great-grandmother ached to go home right up until the night she died.

  It was almost fifty years later that Mattagash made up its mind to form a township. A lot of folks had come here by then, including my father’s people, to join up with the log drives and raise their families. And I suppose, since it looked like it was going to last, they decided to make it official. That was in 1882. In that same year, a couple of foolish young people who had no business at all getting together did just that. They never would’ve met if their ancestors hadn’t come looking for pine trees. They probably wouldn’t even have been born. Them was my parents. They got married in March, and I come along in December. Looking back on it now, I wish the king had found some other way to sail his ships, without them white pine masts. I wish the king had had other things to do.

  The day me and this town turned a hundred years old, you’d have thought we was royalty, instead of born out of royalty’s whims. That was some years back. I don’t remember now just how many, but they had a big party for me. Folks I didn’t even know come and stared down at me like I was already dead. They read me like you might read a tombstone, an obituary. So I did what any self-respecting woman would do. I packed up and moved further back inside my head, where I wouldn’t have to look at them. That’s no different than buying a ticket on a train or a bus. A ticket is something that takes you where you want to go. So I moved back up into the woods by Mattagash Brook, up where I was born. I went for free. I just looked at them all and realized that I was tired of hearing them talk. After living for a hundred years, you deserve some things. So I turned the sound off, you might say, and suddenly everything I saw out there was like a big television screen. Just a picture with no noise at all. I could see their faces, could even recognize a couple of them as my own children, children old enough to be dead themselves. I could see their mouths opening and closing, and I knew words must have been pouring out. But I couldn’t hear a single one. I heard the water instead, at Mattagash Brook, the way it cascades over the rocks, catches up crayfish and inch-long trout. People are foolish, you know, when you quit listening to them. Their mouths kept coming at me like they was goldfish in a tank, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, God only knows how many generations of them has been born out of me. I give up counting years ago. But now it’s all pure silence. Sometimes, when I ain’t prepared, they get a word or two to come through. Every now and then, folks I ain’t ever seen before come into this room. “Grammie! Grammie!” they shout. “Can you hear us?” The lines are down, my eyes say back to them. There’s been a storm and the lines are all down. A real bad connection. So go away and leave me alone.

  Sometimes Winnie, the most despisable of all my children, comes and puts her ear next to mine and listens for the longest time, like she might be able to hear what’s going on in there. Maybe she thinks there’s people living inside my head. Chairs being pushed around. Dishes washed. Babies crying. Maybe she thinks I’m raising my family again, without her. She was always the jealous type. Get your ear away from mine, you old fool, that’s what I don’t tell her. Get your old ear out of here. I ain’t no seashell, and there ain’t no babies in here. I didn’t get off the train in the middle of being big all the time with children, which I always was back then—me, and the pigs, and the cows, and anything else that was female. I had thirteen babies. Or was it fourteen? One of them died inside me and I used to wake up at night and think I heard it crying. But it was me, crying in my sleep, crying because I was glad that baby was dead. And I knew that God knew. It was an awful burden to carry that child until it was born. It was winter and the ground was frozen so hard you couldn’t take an ice pick to it. We put it in a little wooden box, and then buried it in the snow behind the barn, so no animals would find it some hungry night. When spring come, just before the wild apple trees fell into their bloom, and the river was free of ice and flowing good, we loaded it into the canoe and brought it down to the graveyard at Mattagash Point. That’s where we buried it, without a marker or anything. Back then only a few folks could afford to mark their dead. It was a boy baby and, in my heart, I named it. I named it Last Baby Fennelson, but I never told anybody, ’cause I didn’t want anybody to know, especially Foster. He’d have done all he could have, out of spite, to give me another one. He tried anyway, but my womb was all wore out by then. You’ve seen an old towel so threadbare there’s nothing left to wring out of it? That was me. But God has punished me for being glad that baby was dead. He’s making me live forever, like Methuselah, and that’s an awful thing to do to one of your children. I wanted mine dead, but God wants his to live and live and live. You might say I’m condemned to life. I already seen most of my children buried. I don’t know anymore how many of them’s left. I think some of them got too old to visit. Maybe only Winnie’s alive now. She’s contrary enough to outlive us all. By the time I turned a hundred, I had grandchildren with full heads of gray hair. I’ve been around so long now that I wonder if anyone even remembers who I am. Maybe I’ll be in this world after my descendants are all dead and gone, and strangers will be poking me with a stick and asking, “Who is she anyway?”

  No, I didn’t stop the train for any more babies. I took it further back to where I could see the wild cherry blossoms, white as snow on the branches. They grew all around the upper pastures and down to the river, then along its bank. Wild cherry trees. Imagine that. And beechnuts. And pines so thick and full it was dark as night beneath them. Sometimes we’d peel gum from a spruce tree and pop it into our mouths and chew it until it didn’t taste so bad, and then, after a time, it even tasted good. That was nature’s gum, not some of the store-bought foolishness that folks started buying. There’s fly wings and mice droppings in store-bought stuff. That’s what Winnie told me once. She said that nowadays everything you buy has got its share of something awful like that, and it’s okay with the government. Can you imagine that?

  I made a mess in my bed today. Think about that. I was always such a neat and clean person, and I kept my kids that way, no matter how much work it took. I had to make my own soap, remember. And I washed everything in a wooden tub until Foster got me a galvanized, store-bought one. My firstborn, Walter, was the hardest child to train that I ever saw. He’d just squat wherever he was and go in his pants. He’s dead now. World War I. But that child could’ve been in church, it didn’t matter. He’d just squat.

  They sent the nurse to clean me up. She kept a sour face, but it weren’t her fault. She should be around young folks all day and not us spoon-fed corpses that look up from our beds and ask if we’re dead yet. I even tried to tell her that there was nothing spiteful in what I did. I guess it happened with me the same way it did to Walter. There was just a burst of warm bubbles inside me, and then it was over. I wanted to tell her that, so I pushed my thoughts forward, felt them all rise up in me, even tasted the words rolling around on my tongue. But I couldn’t spit one of them out. My mouth felt like it was full of chokecherries instead of words. It was all drawn up and thick. That nurse stripped me, changed my bed, dressed me back up like I was some old doll, and yet I couldn’t say a single word to her. You’re really home, you old fool, I told myself. You wanted to go there, like a sick dog, just in case God changes his mind and lets you die. Well, now you are. Put your suitcase do
wn. Take off your hat. You might as well dust everything off and enjoy the view, ’cause ain’t it good to be back? For almost forty years now I’ve twisted and turned my hands on my lap like I was knitting something. But nothing ever come of it, just the twisting and the turning, and staring at the television, or at plants in my window. If I’d had yarn and needles, there’d be sweaters everywhere. If I’d had yeast and flour, I could’ve fed the multitude. But it goes nowhere, that useless work. There’s just imaginary socks, just loaves of bread I’ll never eat.

  I wish, though, that I could’ve talked to Elizabeth again. She’s my daughter who couldn’t have her own babies. The one I named after my mother. My youngest child. The last time I saw her—oh, I just can’t remember the year—she’d come from whatever state it is she lives in now. She sat there with her big eyes full of tears, and held my old hand, and touched my old face with her lips. They were like bird feathers brushing up against me. She’s the only one who’s kissed me in years. All the others, all them children and grandchildren, think I’m too old. They don’t want to take any chances, I guess. Maybe they think my face might crumble and fall to the floor. Maybe they think they’ll catch something from me. You’ve caught it already, you silly geese, that’s what I’d say if I were still talking to them. You came into this world afflicted with what I got.

  When I opened my eyes this morning, I thought I saw Foster sitting next to me. It was like he was in a room full of smoke. He was almost here, almost wasn’t here. “Tildy, oh, Tildy,” I heard him whisper. Or did I imagine that? Foster, can you smell the thick smell of pine? Listen! The whippoorwill has come back to his tree. Remember how, when the kids was little, we’d stand on the porch and listen? It must be night again, ’cause that’s the only time he’ll come. He sleeps all day, Foster, all day in the forest. And he looks so much like the leaves that you could step on him if you ain’t careful. Sometimes I still stand on the night porch and hold the lantern up to catch his eyes, and Foster, they light up like real rubies. Them eyes are so fiery and red they belong on a woman’s necklace. But he goes off with his treasure before anyone comes too close. Another place, another time, I might have been that whippoorwill.