by Jeffrey Lent
As Oliver and Ruth Snow danced their marriage. Waltzed together on a late winter afternoon. Both frightened by what lay ahead. Both together, and each differently, bold and brave.
Three
Katey
The rain caught up with her hard just outside of Belfast, the wipers black streaks against a sheet of water and the otherwise long June evening slammed down, shutters closing upon the day. She wasn’t hungry, her stomach rumbling still with the grease and brine of her shore dinner but she needed to find a place to sleep for the night and was acutely aware that her envelope of money might not be sufficient for her needs. Leaving home she’d thought so but not quite three days out she was understanding how little she truly knew.
All she had were the eight years of Christmas cards, a packet held with a drying and frayed rubber band found in a shoebox at the back of her mother’s closet, five-and-dime cards with printed holiday greetings and underneath a swirl of ink sending Christmas Greetings and All Best Wishes for the New Year to Oliver & Ruth but on the envelopes the same swirl but more contained and the return address Brian Potter 41 Cannon Street, Machias Maine. She calculated she’d been seven when the last arrived.
The rain and dimming evening so dense she almost struck the woman. Which first glimpsed she thought was a bear, a short thick shambling figure and she hit the brakes hard and felt the back of the truck slip right and she pumped the brakes and turned into the slide and came to a stop beside the woman. The woman carried galvanized tin buckets in each hand. Before Katey had a chance to react the woman popped open the door handle, leaned and set the buckets on the passenger side floor and heaved herself up onto the bench seat and slammed shut the door, leaving Katey only enough time to bend and pull her own suitcase up on the seat next to her.
“Hoo!” the woman said. She wore heavy sodden skits above green rubber boots, at least two pairs of sweaters the color of wet cowhide, with a blue-and-white-striped railroad hat atop her head, her hair down her back in a thick braid, twined a dark color from the rain but with silver and white threaded through the braid. She turned, her face bright with color and cold. Her cheeks were plump and lined, red with chill and early summer sun, her skin creased and wrinkles stretched from each eye out to her temples as if some fey bird had clawed her. Water beaded on her nose, thick and wrinkled. A powerful scent like a wet dog rolled in mud and dipped in woodsmoke roiled the cab.
The buckets were filled with the tightly furled spiral heads of new ferns.
“Thanks for stopping,” the woman said. She was missing two front teeth, an upper and a lower but offset and the rest of her teeth were the color of old parsnips. Her eyes luminous as if they too had been rained on. She stuck a hand out, fingers with scabs and scars along the backs and said, “Name’s Molly Ivey Lucerne. Where ya headed?”
“Machias.” Katey was still stopped, the wipers slashing mostly useless against the rain, the headlights dull cones thrown forward to smacking wet pavement.
“Tonight?” Not incredulous so much as dismissive.
“However far I get.”
“Hoo! Well, drive on. Wicked rain, ain’t it? Caught me by surprise. I’m just up the road, outside of Stockton Springs up Muskrat Road.” Kept her eyes on Katey. Then said, “You carry me home I’d not forget it. What’d you say your name is?”
“I’m Katey.”
“Could you stand to crank that heat, Katey? I got a chill with the rain.”
Katey shifted down to first, then let the clutch out and they rolled forward and she geared up. It was slow going. After a short bit she said, “I can carry you to Stockton Springs. You show me where to let you out. I got to get on far as I can this night.”
“Whatever you say. But this storm is going to blow out of here by midnight. Stop early, up early, you can be in Machias sometime early afternoon. However you want.”
Katey wondered if there was an invitation extended but couldn’t and wouldn’t ask. So they went on in silence. Just the slap of the wipers, din of rain, suck of tires on wet pavement, the engine a low steady and comforting rumble. Warm from the heater and Katey cracked her window an inch and felt the cool air strike the side of her face.
Molly Ivey Lucerne said, “I never been to Vermont.”
Katey looked at her.
“Saw your plates.”
Katey said, “I never been to Maine.”
“Why’d you want to?”
“To see the ocean.”
“Found it yet?”
“I did.”
“What’d you think?”
“It scared me.”
“That’s good. Good to be feared of something so big and don’t care less. Can drag you down.”
They rode silent.
Katey said, “Most things can, you let them.”
“Some things can, let them or not.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Hoo, yes! So you seen the ocean but on to Machias?”
“It’s family business.”
“I’m sorry.”
Katey glanced over. “Sorry?”
“Family. Who we’re stuck with and mostly a mess, what I learned. Until you can learn to do without em.”
“Is that what you do? Do without?”
Molly Ivey Lucerne said, “Now and again one or another shows up on my doorstep—I can deal with that. Real trouble is, they’re still all crawled up in my mind. You can’t ever get rid of that.”
A quarter-mile on Katey said, “That’s an interesting way to see it. True, I guess.”
“True is what’s true to me. Might be true to you, might not. You get on in years, you see most people do their best. Might not amount to much but it’s the striving that counts.”
Katey chewed on that and drove on. They came into Stockton Springs, not more than a dab of houses and a store, the neon of a bar, the gloom of rain beating down.
“Where do I let you out?”
“Muskrat Road’s a mile up. To the left. I went right I’d end up in water. But you should carry me home.”
Katey said, “What you doing with all those fiddleheads?”
“I’ll fry some up for supper, the rest I’ll carry down the morning to the store—they sell em there to those won’t gather their own.”
“What store? We could stop now.”
“Hoo! The owner isn’t there of a evening. Has a girl ringing the register instead. He’s the one buys.”
“I was only trying to save you a trip.”
“Listen.” Molly Ivey Lucerne turned her upper bulk sideways. “I told you—you stop now, be in Machias in the afternoon. What you plan? Waste money in some No-tell Mo-tel? I’d feed you supper and it’s a warm bed, dry too. And not charge you a red cent.”
She glanced at Katey and made a smile, as if knowing her unease and said, “I give up trying to roast little girls in my oven a long time ago. Some think I’m not the brightest flame on the birthday cake but if there’s ten candles I’m sharper than the other nine, all put together. You out chasing what you don’t know, well girl, you need to learn when to trust, when to cut and run. Up to you. There’s a blue painted mailbox the side of the road coming up, just beyond that is Muskrat—turn or stop, it’s your choice.”
Katey pumped the brakes, downshifted and looked over at the woman. Who was studying the rain and wipers on the windshield. She looked back and saw a big pale blue RFD box glinting in the rain and thought She’s odd but I’ve seen worse. Odd but kind.
Katey said, “You need to check the box?”
“Whyever?” Molly Ivey said. “It’s not mine—Joe Rangely’s. Now there’s a odd soul. Not bad, just odd.”
Katey clicked up the turn signal and they both heard the snap of the electricity within the cab. She drove into the turn and said, “What do I look for?”
The house was back from the road through a swale of scrub brush and young trees, once a pasture. Once a farm or a go at one. The house was wood-shingled and the wet glistening roof as well. Behind, in the twilight
, a caved-in barn and behind that a wall of cedars and hemlocks. The rain pelting down, a liquid screen over all she saw. Nigh upon dark but a slow dark, one that could pour back down into the earth fast if the rain quit and sky cleared. Late golden blades of light slashing through the trees, lighting up a side of the house, casting long shadows. If the rain quit. Which there was no sign of happening.
She left her suitcase and offered to take one of the buckets but Molly Ivey Lucerne was striding along through the puddles and plash. Through a woodshed ell and then through an unlocked door and they were in the kitchen.
Along one wall was a white enamel sink-and-counter unit, a white electric range and next to that a refrigerator humming along. Wide pine floorboards scrubbed to a soft glow, a simple table and pair of chairs. A fish-cannery calendar on the wall of flocked wallpaper, the calendar showing May, the page not yet turned. There was a circular fluorescent fixture in the ceiling above the sink and another over the table and they glowed and hummed and brightened. The faintest smell of Pine-Sol. Beyond the table stood a door into a dim room, the kitchen lights enough to show a couch and set of padded easy chairs. A television on spraddled legs with rabbit-ear antennas on top, augmented with twists of aluminum foil.
Molly Ivey set a colander into the sink and dropped a double-handful of fiddleheads into it, turned on the tap and carried the two buckets through a door to the cool pantry and returned. She’d taken off the railroad cap and left it in the pantry. She shut the tap and placed the colander on the drainboard and turned to Katey.
“You particular about what you eat?”
She wanted to say she’d just eaten but of a sudden it seemed that was hours ago and she guessed it was. She said, “Not terribly.”
“You should be. Most all those things you get off a store shelf, those supermarkets, it’s not a thing you should eat. Cans of stew or soups, potato chips, hot dogs, all doctored up to make em taste like something good but they’re not. Most of em just imitations of food. And what’s a imitation but one thing fake standing in for another real. A hot dog looks like something else, a honest sausage. All loaded up with chemicals and God knows what to make em taste like something you want to eat but the good parts is stretched thin—how they make em so cheap. Now, you can take it too far the other way, also: Father ate bacon breakfast and supper often as he could, honest bacon made right but anything too much isn’t good for you. Keeled over dead of a heart attack when he weren’t but a year younger than I stand now. It’s got so it’s hard to trust a thing, you didn’t grow it yourself or known the person who did. But just last winter there opened what they call a health food store down to Portland. Milk & Honey; that’s the name a the place. Folks a bit strange but they mean well. What they sell is in bins or sacks; you can dig your hand in it and feel it’s real. So when I can, that’s where I go. What I’ll feed you for supper. Them fiddleheads and a pot of stick-to-your-ribs rice and a couple brook trout Joe Rangely brung by this morning before I set off. All right?”
Katey sat back and down in the chair. She said, “Sure. Sounds good.” Caught where she was. A snatched thought, she said, “You thumb a ride to Portland? When you need to? And back. Those folks happy to carry what you bought?”
“Hoo, lord no! I only thumb round-about. I got a car. Bought it new off the lot a year ago. I’m not poor, just live light. It’s one a those pony cars—”
“Pony cars?”
“A Mustang. Dark blue with light blue interior and a convertible top. Snazzy, is what it is.”
“I guess! A boy I sort of know, a couple towns over, he had one. Fire-engine red. He liked to run it fast up the valley roads, wouldn’t take it off onto the dirt roads. Is what I hear. I saw him go through a couple of times. I guess it’s parked now.”
“What happened to him?”
“He signed up. Last I heard he was a Green Beret. What the word is, anyhow.”
Molly Ivey had started rice and again rinsed the fiddleheads. She put a pair of cast-iron skillets on the stove burners and was letting them heat. Had taken a plate from the refrigerator that held a pair of trout, gutted but otherwise intact.
She turned and, shaking her head, said, “I watch Cronkite most nights but I can’t say I understand that business. I don’t want the Ruskies in my backyard any more than the next person but for the life of me can’t figure out how they’d get there to here. But folks thought the same of the Nazis, the Japs. I don’t know. Let me fix this food. I’m tuckered—maybe I’m too old to be climbing down riverbanks to the beds of ostrich ferns. I don’t know—somethin will kill me and I can’t choose what it’ll be.”
On a shelf above the stove there was a black-and-gold radio the size of a child’s shoebox and Molly Ivey turned it on, and for moments an unfamiliar guitar sang sweetly high and fast before she spun the dial with her right index finger and hit upon a swap-and-shop call-in show and left it there as she worked over the fish and the fiddleheads, making supper. Katey sat silent, smelling butter and bacon grease and then the trout skin browning which brought to mind those suppers she’d had as a young girl—the gifts of trout given to her father. She was tired and her spirits were low, wondering why in the world she was upon this chase and then recalled the conversation from March that had set her off and knew she was doing what had to be done, what she had no choice but to do or hold regret and questions all of her life. Then came to her an image of Molly Ivey Lucerne squeezing down into the driver’s seat of a Mustang and almost laughed but then watching the woman work over her stove, the sturdy heft of her thighs and backside, the spread of her back under the sweaters, she thought This wasn’t an accident, meeting her. Suddenly sleepy, warm, the smell of food, Katey smiled, thinking I ended up like this, it wouldn’t be so bad.
They ate. It wasn’t how her mother cooked but she had the comfort-sense that she was home. The rice was dusky brown and sticky and she followed Molly Ivey’s lead and melted a gobbet of butter into it and added salt and it was good—reminding her of the oatmeal her mother made but without the sweetness. The trout flaked off the fine thin bones and the fiddleheads were the best she’d ever had—crispy on the outside and sweetly slippery as she chewed them. When they were done Molly Ivey set her fork on her plate and said, “Most people give thanks before they eat and I understand that—holding off on satisfying your appetite. But I like to do so after—to me it feels more complete that way.” And without pause she folded her hands before her and kept her eyes open and someways off from Katey and said, “Thank you Lord for the gift of this day and for this food and for my company tonight, for all good things. Thank you for gifting us all with eyes to see and ears to hear and help us keep those all wide open as can be. And bless the traveler upon the road, wherever they may be, whatever joys or travails they may face.” She looked at Katey. “There,” she said.
They were up at first light and drank strong coffee and ate toast from a dark dense loaf studded with sunflower seeds. Katey offered to drive Molly Ivey and her buckets of fiddleheads to the store in Stockton Springs but she declined. “He don’t open till seven today and you’ll be an hour onward by then. I won’t sit outside waiting, like I’m anxious to sell. I may be different but I’m not poor. I’ll take the pony car. It confuses em.”
An hour later Katey was driving along Route 1, dropping and lifting the visor against the rising sun as the land rose and fell about her, the road dipping south then up a rise of land and east again. And all the time the sense of water, deep, endless, close upon her. She passed over many bridges and did not know if the waters below were rivers emptying seaward or bays reaching inland; inlets, outlets. Now and again she rose high enough to see the broad expanse stretching to a distant meld of water and sky, the water this morning only a lesser darker blue than the sky vaulting upward. The sun now high enough to heat the clear thin air and soon the cab was hot and she rolled down her window and then leaned to roll down the side window and air passed through, over and against her, cooling her and whipping her hair against her
face. She turned the radio on and worked through the dial but passed over song after song—there was nothing to fit her mood because her mood was leaping and bouncing, refusing to stay in any one place.
She came to Ellsworth and rolled slow through the town and passed three different churches with full lots and only then realized it was Sunday morning. She slowed even more and came to a stop in a gravel parking lot of a general store with a set of Texaco pumps out front. She thought How could I have missed that it was Sunday? And then thought Couldn’t be a better day, time I hit Machias he’ll be home and fed and napping on the couch. He wouldn’t be at work, anyway. Most likely. And she teared up, not knowing anything, anything at all. Except she wasn’t so far from the place she’d had in her mind these months. And then thought of Molly Ivey Lucerne and decided how that woman presented herself, how she took on the world at her own pace and by her own figuring, was a gift bestowed along the way. Thought also of her own mother and the small tidy cramped world she’d made of her life and ground her teeth and promised not for the first time that she’d never live that way, herself, ever.
She rolled the truck forward to the pumps and filled up with gas and went inside and bought a Coca-Cola and a Hershey bar with almonds, paid the clerk who was reading the Sunday Portland newspaper and who set the paper on the counter and continued reading as he took her three dollars and made change and handed it back to her. She couldn’t see what it was that absorbed him so but never in her life thus far had she been so happy to be ignored. She went back to the truck and stuck the bottle between her legs and drove out of the lot back onto the road, tearing the wrapper off the chocolate with her teeth and ate it down before the warmth of the day could smear her fingers. Then drank the cold Coke and felt ready all over again. Even, perhaps, more so than ever.