A Northern Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

  "All right, don't get so upset. Let's take a boat ride first, why don't we? It's a beautiful day We'll ask about a chapel right after."

  "Chester, no! I don't want to go boating!"

  I passed by a few more times to make sure that there was nothing they wanted. The man ate all of his lunch, then the girl's untouched soup, then he asked for dessert. He told me to charge the meal to his room. "Grahm," he said. "Carl Grahm. Room forty-two." I'd heard the name earlier from Mrs. Morrison. She'd told me a couple on vacation, a Mr. Grahm and Miss Brown, had come without any reservations and that she was putting them on the top floor and that I was to turn down their beds that night.

  I cleared their plates when they were done. And then, later, I'd seen Grace on the porch and she'd given me her letters and I'd stuffed them under my mattress and forgotten about them, and about her and Carl Grahm, because Cook kept me busy all afternoon peeling potatoes.

  I hadn't thought about them at all until the supper service started and I'd seen that their table was empty. Then I couldn't stop thinking about them.

  "Mattie! Water's boiling!" Cook shouted now. "Get a tray ready for room twelve."

  I grabbed a teapot and spooned leaves into it, careful to stay out of her way. I took the kettle off the flame and poured water into the pot. Just then Mr. Morrison came into the kitchen to get himself a cup of coffee.

  "Didn't see you at supper tonight, Andy," Cook said. "You all right?"

  "I missed it. Too busy waiting for a couple of darn fools to bring my boat back."

  Cook snorted. "Which two fools? The Glenmore's full of em."

  "Grahm. Room forty-two. Had a woman with him. Took a boat out after dinner and never came back."

  I dropped the teapot. It shattered. Scalding water splashed all over.

  "Look what you did!" Cook screeched. She whacked my behind with her wooden spoon. "What on earth's gotten into you? Get that mess cleaned up!"

  I thought of my word of the day, luciferous, as I picked up the broken pieces of the teapot. It means bringing light. It has the name Lucifer in it. I knew all about Lucifer, thanks to my good friend John Milton. Lucifer was a beautiful angel whom God chucked out of heaven for being rebellious. He found himself banished to hell, but instead of being sorry for angering God and trying to make amends, he set about agitating again. He went to the Garden of Eden and wheedled Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge and got the whole of mankind kicked out of paradise forever.

  It was a dreadful thing that he did, and he is not to be admired for it, but right then I felt I understood why he did it. I even felt a little sorry for him. He probably just wanted some company, for it is very lonely knowing things.

  Quietly, I get out of bed, dress, put up my hair, and gather my belongings. I'm not sure of the time, but I would guess about five o'clock, men I am ready, I count out my savings. Between the money I started out with, and my wages and tips, and the extra money I made walking Hamlet, and the five dollars Miss Wilcox gave me, I have thirty-one dollars and twenty-five cents.

  I leave the attic, careful to make no noise, and walk down the main stairs. I am in Mr. Morrison's office, my mamma's old carpetbag in my hand, just as the sky is starting to lighten. I place Grace's letters on his desk, then write him a note on Glenmore stationery, explaining how I got them.

  I write three more notes, address them, and put them in the mail basket. The first is to my father. It has two dollars in it, the balance of what he owes on Licorice, the mule, and a promise that I will write. The second is to Weaver's mamma. It has twelve dollars and seventy cents in it and a note telling her to use the money to pay off Emmie's taxes. The third one has a ring in it—a small, dull ring with an opal and two garnets. It is addressed to Royal Loomis and says to see if Tuttle's will take it back and that I'm sorry and that I hope he gets his cheese factory someday.

  I pass the coat tree on my way out of the office, the one made of twisted branches and deer hooves. In the gloom of the foyer, it looks like a dark, malevolent fairytale tree and for a few seconds I feel that it wants to catch me in its gnarled limbs and hold me fast. There's a woman's boater hanging on it. It's worn at the edges; its black ribbon is frayed. Grace Brown put it there when she and Chester arrived. I lift the shabby little hat off its hook and fight down the urge to crush it. I carry it into the parlor and place it next to Grace's body.

  I take her hand. It is smooth and cold. I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you.

  "I'm not going to do it, Grace," I whisper to her. "Haunt me if you want to, but I'm not going to do it."

  IN THE BACK of the Glenmore, a little ways into the woods, is a cottage where the male help sleeps. It is quiet and dark. I pick up a handful of pebbles and toss one at a window on the second floor. Nothing happens; no one comes, so I toss a second and a third, and finally the window opens and Mike Bouchard sticks his sleepy face out.

  "That you, Mattie? What's up?"

  "Get Weaver, Mike. I need to see him."

  Mike yawns. "Huh?"

  "Weaver!" I hiss. "Go get Weaver!"

  He nods. His head disappears, and a few seconds later, Weaver's pops out.

  "What do you want?" he asks me, looking cross.

  "I'm leaving."

  "What?"

  "I'm leaving, Weaver."

  He pulls his head in and then barely a minute later, the cottage door opens and he's outside, shrugging his suspenders up over a half-buttoned shirt.

  "Where are you going?"

  I reach into my skirt pocket instead and press seven dollars into his hand. "What's this for?"

  "For your train ticket to New York. Use the money you earn here to pay for a few months' room and board in the city. You'll have to get a job when it runs out, but it'll get you started."

  Weaver shakes his head. "I don't want your money. I'm not taking it." He hands it back to me.

  I throw it on the ground. "Better pick it up," I said. "Or someone else will."

  "Mattie, it's not just train fare and rent. You know that. It's my mamma. You know I can't leave her."

  "She'll be fine."

  "No, she won't. She's got nowhere to go after Emmie's place is sold."

  "Emmie's taxes have been paid. The auction's off Didn't you hear?"

  Weaver gave me a long look. "No, I didn't," he said.

  "You will."

  "Mattie—"

  "Good-bye, Weaver. I've got to go. Now. Before Cook gets up."

  Weaver bends down and picks up the money. Then he takes hold of me and hugs me so hard, I think he'll break me right in two. I hug him back, my arms tight around his neck, trying to draw some of his strength and fearlessness into me.

  "Why, Matt? Why are you going now?" he asks me.

  I look at the Glenmore. I can see a light glowing softly in a window in a little bedroom off the parlor. "Because Grace Brown can't," I tell him.

  We let go of each other. His eyes are welling.

  "Don't, Weaver. If you do, I'll never make it. I'll run right back inside and put my apron on and that will be the end of it."

  He nods and swallows hard. He makes a gun of his hand and points it at me. "To the death, Mathilda Gokey," he says.

  I smile and aim right back at him. "To the death, Weaver Smith."

  IT IS JUST past ten o'clock. The dawn came and the sun rose on a flawless summer morning. I am standing, frightened but resolved, on the train platform in Old Forge.

  Is there a word for that? Feeling scared of what's to come but eager for it, too? Terricipatation? Joybodenous? Feager? If there is, I mean to find it.

  My carpetbag weighs heavy in my hand. I have most everything I own inside it. I also have my train ticket in there, an address for Miss Annabelle Wilcox of New York City, and two dollars and twenty-five cents. It is all I have left from the money I saved. It isn't very much at all. I will have to find a job right away.

  It had only just gone light when I left the Gle
nmore, but I was able to get a ride into Eagle Bay from Bill Jarvis, who owns the Jarvis Hotel in Big Moose Station. He was on his way to see Dr. Wallace. He was suffering from a toothache and was not in a talkative mood. I was glad for that. I didn't want to answer any questions.

  The Clearwater was still in dock when we arrived, and I was able to get a seat on its return run to Old Forge. I had decided not to take the train so I wouldn't have to explain myself to Mr. Pulling. The engineers change a lot on the steamers; I didn't know the one on the morning run. I was worried when I saw the pickle boat coming, but I just scrunched down in my seat and Charlie Eckler never saw me. I looked back once, just before Eagle Bay disappeared from sight, and I felt more lonely and frightened than I have ever felt in my life. I thought about turning around when I got to Old Forge, but I didn't. There's no going back once you're already gone.

  NOW, AS I WAIT for my train, Grace's words echo in my memory. I have been bidding good-by to some places to-day. There are so many nooks, dear, and all of them so dear to me. I have lived here nearly all my life ... Oh, dear, you don't realize what all of this is to me. I know I shall never see any of them again...

  A NORTHBOUND train pulls in. An express. There are only a few people on it. A handful of tourists and some workmen get off, followed by two men wearing jackets and ties.

  "That's him. Austin Klock. He's the undersheriff," a man standing next to me says to his companion. "Told you this was more than some run-of-the-mill drowning." They pull out notepads. Reporters, I imagine.

  "Who's the man with him?"

  "County coroner. Isaac Coffin."

  "Coffin? You're kidding me, right?"

  "Brother, I am not. Come on. Let's see if we can get a statement before that guy from the Watertown paper does."

  The undersheriff holds his hands up as they approach him. "Gentlemen, I know as much about it as you do. A girl drowned at the Glenmore. Her body's been recovered. Her companion's has not..."

  Soon you'll know more, I think. A lot more. Soon you'll know that the girl was called Grace. And that she spent her last weeks on this earth pregnant and afraid, begging the man who'd made her so to come and take her away. But he'd had other ideas.

  I close my eyes and I can see Chester Gillette. He's signing the guest book at the Glenmore. And having his dinner, and going for a boat ride. I see him row all the way out to South Bay. Maybe he and Grace get out and sit on the bank for a while. He leaves his suitcase there. They row some more. He waits until he's sure there's no one else around, and then he hits Grace. He tips the boat and swims to shore. Grace can't swim. He knows that because she told him. She'd drown even if she wasn't unconscious, but it's quieter this way. She can't scream for help.

  Later, when the boat is recovered, it will look to the searchers like Grace Brown and her companion both drowned. No one will ever find out that Grace was pregnant or that Chester Gillette was the father of her child. Her death will be Carl Grahm's fault, and Chester will be free to return to Cortland and have a good and dandy time.

  I see Chester now, today. He's eating breakfast somewhere. Maybe up at Seventh Lake. Maybe at the Neodak in Inlet, or the Arrowhead. Swinging his tennis racket. Smiling. He's sure as hell not dead. Not him. I'd bet my last dollar on that.

  I see Grace Brown, too. Stiff and cold in a room in the Glenmore with a tiny life that will never be, inside her.

  And then I hear a whistle, shrill and piercing. I open my eyes and see the tracks, and the southbound train coming down them. The monstrous engine pulls in. Screeching and steaming, it comes to a halt. I cannot move. The conductor jumps down and helps passengers out. The porters unload trunks and luggage. People swirl around me. Heavy canvas mailbags land on the platform beside me.

  "All aboard!" the conductor yells. "This is the ten-fifteen New York Central for Utica, Herkimer, and all points south! Tickets, please! Have your tickets ready!"

  People are boarding the train. Mothers and children. Businessmen. Holidaymakers on their way home. Couples. And still I cannot move.

  I think of my family. Of Bern's songs. Of Lou's swagger. Of Abby's gentle voice. I can see Pa sitting by the fire. And Emmie and Weaver's mamma picking beans. I see Royal plowing his father's fields, gazing across them to my father's land with a look of love and longing he'd never shown me. I see Barney's blind eyes turned up to mine. And the poor dead robin at my mother's grave.

  The conductor grabs the iron railing on the side of the car and climbs up its metal steps. "Last call! Last call! All aboard!" he bellows. The engine exhales. A huge cloud of steam billows up from under it. The wheels strain against the tracks.

  "Wait!" I cry, stumbling forward.

  The conductor sees me. "Come on, missy!" he yells. "Her bark's worse than her bite!" He reaches down for me. I look around myself wildly, my heart bursting with grief and fear and joy. I am leaving, but I will take this place and its stories with me wherever I go.

  I reach for his hand and clasp it. He hoists me onto the 10:15 southbound. To Utica and Herkimer. And all points south. To Amsterdam and Albany and beyond. To New York City. To my future. My life.

  Author's Note

  On July 12, 1906, the body of a young woman named Grace Brown was pulled from the waters of Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. The boat she'd been in had been found capsized and floating in a secluded bay. There was no sign of her companion, a young man who'd rented the boat under the name of Carl Grahm. It was feared that he, too, had drowned. Grace Brown's death appeared to be an accident, and neither the men who dragged the lake nor the staff at the hotel where the couple had registered could have foreseen that they would soon be embroiled in one of the most sensational murder trials in New York's history. Grace Brown, they would soon discover, was unwed and pregnant, and the man who had taken her boating was the father of her child. His real name was Chester Gillette.

  Grace and Chester had met in 1905 at the Gillette Skirt Factory in Cortland, New York—a place where they both worked, and which Chester's uncle owned. A romance blossomed between them and eventually Grace became pregnant. Shortly after realizing her condition, she left Cortland for her home in South Otselic—possibly at Chester's urging. There, she worried and wrote to Chester, pleading with him to come for her, threatening to return if he did not.

  Eventually, he did. They met in DeRuyter, a town near Graces home, and from there traveled to Utica and on into the Adirondack. They had little money and no set plan. Or rather, Grace had no plan, just a hope of marriage; Chester, his prosecutors claimed, did. Only a poor relation of the Cortland Gillettes and hungry for the society in which they moved, Chester hoped to improve his social standing by courting a girl from a prominent family. To do so, he first needed to rid himself of the factory girl he had once cared for but later came to regard as an obstacle.

  There were no eyewitnesses to Grace Brown's death and no one knows for certain what happened on Big Moose Lake on July 11, 1906. Chester originally stated that Grace's death was an accident, then later claimed she'd committed suicide. George W. Ward, the district attorney who prosecuted the case, reconstructed Chester's activities before and after Grace's death—among them his use of an alias when registering at the Glenmore Hotel, the fact that he fled the scene and did not report Grace missing, and the fact that he was found enjoying himself at an Inlet hotel three days after her death—and argued that Chester had killed Grace. Instrumental to Ward's case were Grace's own letters.

  In A Northern Light, I've taken the liberty of having Grace give a fictional character—Mattie—all of the correspondence between herself and Chester. In reality, however, when Grace was in the Adirondacks, she had only the letters Chester had written to her packed among her things. The letters she had written to him were found by the police in Chester's room in Cortland after he was arrested.

  Grace's letters had a profound effect upon those who attended Chester's trial. People sobbed openly as they were read. Everyone wept, it was said, except Gillette. Though the case was
based solely on circumstantial evidence, the jury found for the prosecution. Chester Gillette was convicted of murder in the first degree and executed in Auburn Prison on March 30, 1908.

  Nearly a century after her death, Grace Browns words have the same effect on me that they had on the people who attended Chester Gillette's trial—they break my heart. I grieved for Grace Brown—a person I'd never known, a young woman long dead—when I first read them. There is so much fear and despair in those lines, but there is much else, too—a good heart, humor, intelligence, wit. Grace liked strawberries and roses and French toast. She had friends, and a brother who teased her about her cooking. She liked to go riding and shoot off firecrackers. Her letters remind me of what it was like to be nineteen, and I often wonder what she would have made of her life had she been allowed to live it. I'm glad that she helped Mattie live hers.

  My grandmother, who worked as a waitress in a Big Moose camp in the twenties, says Grace Brown still haunts the lake.

  Her letters will always haunt me.

  Jennifer Donnelly

  Brooklyn, New York

  October 2002

  Acknowledgments

  Though Mattie Gokey, her family, and her friends are fictional beings, some of the story's characters, like Dwight Sperry and John Denio, were real. Others, like Henry the underchef and Charlie Eckler the pickle boat captain, are fictional but drawn from descriptions of real people. Several area authors helped me put the flesh back on old bones. I would like to acknowledge my great debt to Marylee Armour; W. Donald Burnap; Matthew J. Conway, my grand-uncle; Harvey L. Dunham; Roy C. Higby; Herbert F. Keith; William R. Marleau; and Clara V. O'Brien. Their memoirs and histories allowed me to weave fact with fiction by providing names, dates, and events; accounts of area people and their daily lives; and chronologies of towns and resorts. A list of books by these authors, plus additional sources and suggestions for further reading, follows.