“There’s an availability now at Pine Valley.” Sicily watched her daughter’s face as Amy Joy said this, watched how easily her lips formed the words, looked deep into Amy Joy’s eyes, the way only a mother can. But her daughter turned her face away. Availability. What in hell did that mean? There was availability at the dump, too. They might as well send her packing out there. Suddenly Sicily could no longer hold it back. First it had been her eyes that turned on her, then her hands shaking like old flags, and her knees so arthritic that some mornings it was a chore just to walk. And her back was stiffening up too, her spinal cord tired, like a door that’s been opened and closed too many times. But now this, a daughter turning on her. Her only daughter turning on her like a little Benedict Arnold. Sicily swooped all the crackers and cups off the table and onto the floor, swinging her arm with the swiftness and strength of a woman half her age. Anger could do that. Anger could call back the sweet bird of youth.
Amy Joy pulled back in surprise. “Mama!” she said.
***
Amy Joy stood on her snowshoes at the top of McKinnon Hill. Far below her, spread out like dots of paint and nearly lost in the falling snow, lay some of the houses of Mattagash. Little lights, small as the lights on the bellies of fireflies, had begun to color all the windows with a dull yellow. Mattagash lay before Amy Joy as though it were a dream she was having instead of a life there, and she turned away from it before tears could fill her eyes. She turned to the canker knot on the cherry tree, to the tracks beneath it where a whitetail deer had passed in the deep snow, each foot leaving behind two thin, separate troughs. She listened to the music offered up in a lonely wood as a fallen tree grated against another in the wind, a rusty fiddle fiddling.
Suddenly she saw the sleek body of an F-111 cut through the snowy patch of sky overhead, followed by the raucous sound of its jet engines, the plane so low she could almost see the pilot. The bastards! How many times had it happened, when she was lost in the peace of the forest, that these metallic nuisances had swooped overhead and disturbed her? It had been going on for years now, these jets taking off from Plattsburgh, New York, and buzzing Mattagash before they went back to where they belonged. There had always been planes doing weird things up there, but it had never been this bad before. Amy Joy remembered that as a child she was forever finding long shiny strips of aluminum foil in the fields, tossed down by the air force to test their radar equipment. It was as if the air force didn’t care at all that what they threw out was bound to come down to earth somewhere. But the silver falling from the sky had been no large problem. Amy Joy collected it into a large ball, and birds made shiny, colorful nests, until the air force got tired of that. Then they started breaking the sound barrier over Mattagash, as if the ears on the ground, the occasional broken window didn’t matter a bit. Now they were sending F-111s, those sleek jets that ran ahead of their sound and were forever catching Mattagashers off guard in the forest. Arthur Mullins had been threatening for years to shoot one down with his old Winchester.
“Just as a little message to the rest,” he always added. And local word was that he had indeed taken a few shots, only to miss. Ten-year-old Tommy Monihan had sat up nightly for weeks trying to orchestrate the jets into an accident by flicking out all kinds of signals with several Black & Decker flashlights. His father finally put an end to what Tommy was calling the Mattagash Code.
“If he don’t stop that, we’re gonna get up one morning and see about fifty of them air force Jeeps driving into our yard,” Tommy’s father once said at Craft’s Filling Station. “It’s a shame too,” Ben Monihan added. “If he’d managed to bring one of them down, he was gonna use the Mattagash Code as his science project.”
Amy Joy listened as the large sound of the plane disappeared over the lump of Haffey Mountain, chasing the jet that had caused it. Off in the distance, down the swoop of McKinnon Hill, she heard another sound as a flock of snowmobiles started up at The Crossroads, the excited voices of the owners rising like smoke above the engines. More noisy creatures, these snowmobiles, bursting through the quiet of the woods, disrupting nature at work, despoiling the white blankets of snow in all the fields with their tracks. Amy Joy watched the line of snowmobiles inch, like a little train, across the white field beyond The Crossroads and then disappear into the forest of black spruce, and white pine, and the leafless maple and birch. Maurice Fennelson must be smiling nicely behind his cash register. Every Saturday, the snowmobile club stopped by for a couple strong shots to ward off the cold. Sometimes a rum and Coke, or a frosty Tom Collins, could do more to keep the blood circulating in fingers and toes than could mittens and socks.
Amy Joy’s own toes were growing stiff in her boots. She’d worn only one pair of socks, so eager was she to get away from the warm, unhappy kitchen where Sicily had strewn dishes into a broken heap on the floor. It wasn’t fair to Sicily, and Amy Joy knew this to be true. It wasn’t fair to anyone to be asked to give up all they know and love best, and to be led into a foreign place just because it would be easier for the young to cavort with life. But wasn’t Amy Joy entitled too to go off in search of whatever her destiny might be? She asked this of herself again, there with the snow piling up on the stump of the old cedar, a stump Amy Joy remembered sitting on as a child. But its roots had held it in place, supported it, so that even after the loss of its limbs, its leaves, the full concept of tree, even after all that had been taken away from it, it was still there, providing a comfortable place for her to sit. Amy Joy sat on the cedar stump and asked herself lots of questions. She had done this in summer, when little green mosses grew up the sides and across the top of the stump. She had done it in autumn, when she was forced to brush away the scarlet leaves thrown down by the red maple. Now her questions were heavier, fuller, harder. Bobby Fennelson was in her life now, a large looming question himself. Would he ask Eileen for a divorce? Would Amy Joy even want him to? Sometimes she did. Other times she didn’t. And then there was Mattagash, the biggest question of all, lying next to that twisting, looping question mark of a river. How did two people start their lives over again in Mattagash, where no one forgot anything, for generations? Amy Joy thought of the cups lying broken on the kitchen floor, like snowflakes, as if a storm had occurred there, too, a bigger storm than what was raging all around her.
A gray jay, that old Canada jay, called from above her head, a lilting whee-ah, downy as the wind that had found its way up the trail of McKinnon Hill. Amy Joy smiled. She reached into her pocket for the doughnut remnant she had stuffed there after breakfast. She brought it out, unwrapped the cellophane, and then let the doughnut rest on her mitten. She held her hand up, arm outstretched. The gray jay flitted about on the branch overhead, sending down a small flurry of snow. Then it gave another call, a loud one this time, the echo of it filling the wintry wood, before it flew down and landed on Amy Joy’s mitten. In a second, it had the doughnut scrap and was gone, off to the top of a balsam fir, where more snow sifted lightly down.
“You’re welcome,” said Amy Joy. She had always heard that gray jays were the ghosts of lumberjacks, too attached to the woods to leave it alone. Maybe she was like these reluctant souls. She had no training of any sort. All these years she had done nothing more than keep house for herself, for Sicily and Pearl. Then Pearl died and now she was keeping house for herself and Sicily. Or was the house keeping her? It seemed she knew more facts about the old McKinnon homestead than she knew about herself. It had been built in 1899 by the Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon, who had married his bride in June, then moved her into the new house before the leaves had gone crazy with color that autumn. When the parlor, the same to which the reverend had brought the visiting missionaries of the world, had been torn down in 1970—Pearl saw it as a useless, costly addition—the most incredibly large pieces of birch bark anyone had ever seen came out of the walls. These were white, virgin birch—sheets four feet wide and four feet long. They had kept the blustery snows from beating th
e old house to pieces for seventy-one years, natural insulation, and Amy Joy fell asleep at night glad to know that the rest of the old homestead was being protected by these ancient, blessed trees. Of course, back in the late forties, Marge had added a layer of plainer shavings to the walls to update the insulation, but beyond that, the same old birches were keeping the house warm, as though they were still growing in the forest. As if they still had roots. It was this whole notion of roots that had begun to plague Amy Joy, the kind that attach themselves to people. There was something in her blood, in her genes that tied her to the old ways of life. Pearl had said it herself.
“There’s one in every generation,” Pearl had said, “whose job it is to remember the old stories, the histories. Just like all them colored folks did in Roots.” Now who would Amy Joy pass the torch to? Was it too late to have her own little torchbearers? Amy Joy had even gone to the doctor in St. Leonard, at the health clinic there, to ask about the possibilities of conceiving a child, just in case she wanted to. And he had told her she would have to go to Caribou and have a test done there, let technicians fill her fallopian tubes with a red dye, colored rivers in her tubes.
“We can tell if they’re blocked,” he said to Amy Joy, but she hadn’t gone on to Caribou. She had said good-bye to the friendly girl behind the desk, Dr. Brassard’s receptionist, and had gone out into the leafy autumn day. She would let Mother Nature tell her what was what, if she ever made a decision to start her own family. In the meantime, she swallowed her birth control pills daily, as though they were a school of dreadful pink fish, swimming nowhere inside of her. And she carefully guarded her nest egg, her legacy from Pearl, so that it would keep her nicely in case she did nothing more than live on in the house, die in the house, finally pay that last visit to the Mattagash Protestant graveyard. But each time her eye spied an advertisement about overseas employment, no experience necessary, she clipped it out and read every word over and over again while she pondered filling out the form. Now even her precious nest egg was beginning to seem awful, like something that needed to hatch, but couldn’t possibly do so in the long cold winters that wrapped themselves so harshly about Mattagash. Life had grown stale, without any hope of expectations.
Up on McKinnon Hill, named for the old reverend Ralph, who had no trouble himself getting out of town, Amy Joy Lawler watched another trickle of lights come on in the houses below. Supper lights. Just as in the morning, before dawn, although she wouldn’t be there to witness it, breakfast lights would dot the valley like pointy stars, the houses swirling like universes around the lives of the folks inside them. Amy Joy sat on the well-rooted stump, beneath the dull, dark eyes of the gray jay, and felt the heavy weight of the snow come to rest on her shoulders.
***
After a good long cry, longer than any of her daily naps—yes, dammit, she took a little nap every day, and who was the worse for it?—Sicily opened the top drawer of her dresser and looked down at the contents. There were pictures, plenty of them, of ancestors long gone. Some were of Amy Joy leaning jauntily in the door of her little playhouse. Nowadays it seemed that Amy Joy was leaning jauntily in the door of the old McKinnon homestead, barring Sicily’s way.
Sicily picked up the last photo ever taken of her husband, Ed, who had killed himself, who would never have to grow old. He was standing in front of the Mattagash Grammar School, in his gray suit, with the sun splaying about his shoulders, his eyes squinting a bit. The year was 1959. Sicily knew this because the photo had been taken right after Amy Joy’s eighth-grade graduation. Sicily had snapped the button on the camera herself and had captured Ed three months before he would fire a bullet into his brain. Were his black thoughts swirling in his head even then, Sicily wondered as she held the picture up close to her eyes. She had framed this picture and had kept it on her dresser, where she could say hello to it each morning and say her prayers within earshot of it each night. That way, she hoped, God might let a few of her prayers rub off on Ed. It was a terrible thing to die a nonbeliever. Sicily at least had her God waiting at the end of her earthly travails, and it hurt her deeply to hear Amy Joy make atheist statements. “Man invented God,” Sicily had heard her daughter say often, and it made no sense at all. Man invented things like Tupperware. But Sicily knew that Amy Joy had inherited that notion from her father. Atheism, and Sicily had said this many times, was in the Lawler family’s DNA. “There isn’t a single freethinker in the McKinnon family,” she always reminded Amy Joy. She didn’t mention Cousin Flavie, who had turned Catholic right in the middle of her change of life. Why should the McKinnons own up to Flavie when she wasn’t right in the head anyway? Now Sicily feared that Ed’s lack of religious leaning meant she might not meet up with him in the hereafter. And along with all those “Good morning, Eds” and those “Amens,” something else had happened. She had grown shockingly old and Ed hadn’t changed a bit. Here she was, moving forward in time, however reluctantly, and there was Ed, not moving a single inch. It got to the point where Sicily had to put the picture away, in the darkness of her dresser. She still said good morning to him and earnestly recruited him in her prayers, but looking at him had become unbearable. She felt like his mother, his grandmother even, an old, gray-haired, foolish woman still thinking married thoughts about this younger man. Sicily stood the picture back up on her dresser, so that Ed squinted his eyes out at her from an eighth-grade graduation that had taken place over thirty years ago, on a dusty June day in the town of Mattagash, Maine.
“I got Amy Joy a pretty little vanity set,” Sicily said. “With Green Stamps.” And she was glad she had given Reginald Monihan a card with two dollars in it. He was a very nice boy, and he died a hero in Vietnam in 1968. Sicily wondered what Reginald had done with the money, wondered if he ever thought of it while he was over there in the jungle, lying on his bunk, waiting to go out on that last maneuver. His family had been very poor and Sicily remembered that Reginald’s face had lit up when he opened the card. Good Luck, Graduate, it had said. Everyone was sure Reginald would do great things one day. And he did. He risked his life to save others. He was a very, very nice boy. He deserved every penny of that two dollars.
Sicily put Ed’s picture back into the dark drawer, where he could continue to lie in limbo. For the first time in ages, maybe for the first time ever, she went to bed without saying her prayers. Lately it seemed that there was very little to be thankful for. And as for Ed’s spiritual salvation, well, it looked like he might have to fend for himself.
MATHILDA FENNELSON: PITFALLS OF THE WISH BOOK
The mail-order business in the United States began in the late 19th century and became one of the chief sources of supply to rural areas. The early catalogs usually advertised only a few items. The mail-order giants that emerged from that era (Montgomery Ward, founded 1872; Sears, Roebuck, and Co., founded 1886) now feature almost every type of consumer item—from automobile parts to knee socks.
—Academic American Encyclopedia
I used to think of catalog women. I used to look at how smooth their hands was, used to envy their pearly faces. I used to wonder what it’d be like to just do nothing but let someone make your picture. The day after my wedding, I was slopping the hogs. I didn’t have no time to look at a catalog, let alone be in one. Ivy Craft, daughter to Marsh Craft, wanted to be a catalog woman. You’d see her coming along the road practicing. She’d curtsy and stick out one hand, beckoning, I suppose, to the cameraman. And then she’d twirl the skirts of her dress. She hardly ever saw you when she met you, that’s how caught up she was with the catalog. Her daddy, Marsh, said it was the Devil’s curse, that Satan uses what he has to work with. He worked on Eve with that shiny red apple, Marsh said, and he works on good country girls with the catalog. That might all be so, but Ivy Craft died before she saw the dream she was always dreaming come true. So maybe it was a curse to want to be in the catalog. But a bigger truth was that she died of the same cancer her grandmother, Sadie Craft, wife to
John and mother to Marsh, died of. Sadie was my grandmother too. And our aunt Persia and our uncle Thomas died of the same. A long, lingering cancer, like it come invited. Like someone asked it to stay. And it’s a sad thing, you know, to realize one day that you’ve given your child something in their blood that is so bad as a cancer. So I suppose it’s a good thing Marsh had the catalog to blame.
Death was a hard reality back then. We didn’t have no merciful needles or hospital beds. I tell you, you sat up all night long with Death. You knew him like you knew your own family. And you saw how he could twist and turn bodies, break spirits. Oh, he’s an old geezer, Death is. But nowadays it’s all a drug, this going out of life. It’s all tubes and liquid food and pain shots. I don’t know but what the old way was better. Maybe the pain was at least something, some little hope to hang on to. If I remember correctly, all Ivy could do at the last of it was to sit on the front porch wrapped in a blanket. The heat of July’d be all around her and there she would sit, full of chills, shaking in her little yellow blanket, yellow like a buttercup is. That’s when someone realized they had no picture of her, not a single one, much less a catalog full of them. Ivy’s mother said she couldn’t bear it, that she wanted to remember the early beauty Ivy had, and not this Ivy, not this ravished beauty. But Marsh wanted it, something to hold in his hands, I suppose, after Ivy was finally gone. And you know, I think Ivy wanted it too, after all that practicing for it. By this time there was big, dark rings under her eyes, and her cheekbones stuck out just terrible. She’d gone down to seventy pounds. You almost wanted to laugh at the poor little thing rather than feel sorry, that’s how much she looked like a tiny raccoon. But somebody borrowed a camera somewhere and snapped her picture. She made a weak little smile for them, but she was too far gone to curtsy or even stick out her hand. She just pulled her blanket in tight, and sweated, and waited. Ivy Craft curled into a ball one night and took her catalog dream up to heaven. She was my cousin and my best friend.
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