The Northern Reach

by W. S. Winslow

  Near the end of the bridge, Frank looked up at the brick-and-granite buildings that crowded the riverfront and ran up the hill, gradually giving way to tightly spaced frame houses about halfway to the top. The heavy clouds of late September hovered above the city, almost low enough to snag on the church spires. His eyes traveled back down, from the sky to the river. The banks were choked with nests of weeds and rubbish; an oily film slithered along the surface, making ugly rainbows in the low light. He reached down for a pebble and threw it as far as he could, then waited to hear it hit the water.

  Nothing was familiar. Frank couldn’t remember living here as a child, but he’d expected to recognize Bangor as home, to have it match the image in his mind of chugging engine clatter, shiny glamour, and gaudy wealth. Instead, the city looked like a bigger, dirtier version of Fairleigh, the market town between here and Wellbridge where he’d spent the last two weeks, picking up odd jobs and sneaking into stables and sheds at night to sleep. Even living rough was better than staying in Wellbridge.

  Earlier that morning, in exchange for helping a trapper load up, he’d hitched a ride to Bangor in the back of a wagon full of beaver pelts. They must not have been scraped right because the rancid smell of spoiled fat lingered in his nostrils. He hoped it hadn’t seeped into his clothes. He only had the one pair of britches.

  It had taken all day to cover the twenty-odd miles to Bangor. The horses clopped along the dusty road, passing low-cut fields, their grasses harvested, dried, and baled for the winter. Here and there were clumps of trees, a few oak and maple with leaves already beginning to catch fire, glowing red and yellow around the edges. There was even the occasional house, hard up against the road, leaning in, eager for news and visitors, which Frank figured were probably rare out that way.

  The trapper had taken him as far as the other side of the river and dropped him at the foot of the bridge, tossing him two bits for his work. Frank put the coin in his pocket, adding it to the three dollars he’d saved. A poor-farm boy no more, he was done taking charity. He was a workingman now.

  “Boy, if you’re smart you’ll spend that in a rooming house and not a bawdy house,” the driver said, and wished him luck. Frank wondered how old the man thought he was. He’d be fifteen in two months and was just starting to see some ankle between his cuffs and boot tops. Even though he was smallish, Frank was strong and wiry, his face and forearms windburned from working outdoors, which he figured made him look older. He wasn’t sure what a body house was, guessed it had to do with girls, but Frank hadn’t come to Bangor for romance. He’d come for his father, and so he trudged up the hill to look for lodgings.

  He passed by several well-kept rooming houses with flowers in the dooryard and kitchen gardens at the side, but he didn’t knock until he reached a shabby one on the back side of the hill overlooking the jail, with neither flowers nor grass nor welcome of any kind, just a hand-lettered sign in the front window, “Rooms to Let.” Although she seemed unconvinced when Frank claimed to be sixteen and an orphan, Mrs. Dowd offered him the room behind the kitchen for ten cents a night, fifteen with the morning and evening meals.

  “Supper’s at six. I lock my doors at nine sharp, so if you want to sleep in the room you paid for, you’d best be in it by then,” she said, then showed him the privy and the backyard pump.

  Even with a full belly, Frank slept fitfully that night. Twice he dreamed of his mother and twice he awoke, sweating and sobbing, grasping for the wisps of her in the unfamiliar dark. At the pump the next morning, he tried to wash away the dream feeling along with the fur stink and the grime of the previous week. He rinsed out his dirty shirt and spare underclothes and hung them on the line to dry. Back in his room, he slipped out of his trousers. Dusty, but they were his only pair, so he shook them out, smoothed the wrinkles, and pulled them back on. His good shirt promised a fresh start; his cap, pulled low, anonymity.

  He tried to follow Mrs. Dowd’s vague instructions to “go over the hill towards the river, then downstreet past the bank with the clock,” and was on the verge of asking for directions when he found what he was looking for, just before midday.

  The Lawson printing company occupied a low brick building with double carriage doors painted shiny green and open before a loading bay. To the right was the public entrance, with gold newsprint-style letters stenciled on the window: LAWSON & SONS, PRINTERS, EST. 1860. From his place across the street, Frank faltered for the first time since running away. He reminded himself he was a respectable workingman now. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to cross the road, let alone enter the building.

  He watched two men wearing aprons and sleeve garters, standing in front of the loading platform, smoking and laughing. Soon they were joined by several others with pipes in their pockets and lunch buckets in their hands. Frank’s stomach rumbled. For breakfast, Mrs. Dowd had given him a glass of milk and a slice of brown bread with butter. At the farm, they ate their big meal in the morning, but it seemed city people saved their appetites for supper. If he’d known, he’d have taken a second helping of beans when it was offered the night before.

  Thoughts of his belly were interrupted by the sight of a tall blond man in a suit leaving the building. The workers stopped talking and nodded in his direction. Frank heard him say, “Afternoon, fellows,” in a clear, reedy voice as he strode past. The men tilted their caps and responded with a chorus of “sirs” and “good days.” Frank felt his chest tighten when he picked out an “Afternoon, Mr. Lawson” among the greetings. His memories of his father were hazy, but the man seemed familiar.

  Frank shadowed him from the other side of the street, staying well behind and out of sight. In a few blocks the business district gave way to a grid of tidy residential streets, and as they walked, the houses became bigger, the lawns more expansive. Lawson stopped in front of a spare white frame house with neither porch nor shutters nor any ornamentation on either it or the carriage barn that loomed behind. Between the peaked roof and granite foundation, the house’s plain face stared unblinking at the street, its run of flaky white clapboards broken only by three smallish windows, one on either side of the black front door and another above it. The grass in the dooryard was half-dead, seared to hay. Frank had imagined his father lived in an elaborate gingerbread house covered in curlicues and cupolas, topped with a widow’s walk and surrounded by gardens and fancy iron fencing. But this was nice.

  Lawson took the four steps in two strides and disappeared inside the house. He emerged less than an hour later and retraced his path back to the printshop, with Frank leaving his place behind a wide Dutch elm to follow him from across the street. And so it went for the next two days.

  On the third day, Lawson stopped at the foot of the dooryard. He turned around to face the elm and called, “Young man, if you have business with me, kindly speak up.”

  Frank wanted to run but forced himself to step out from behind the tree. He waited for the man to nod before he crossed the street.

  When Frank was in front of him, Lawson said, “Yes?”

  Out of habit, Frank tipped his cap. “It’s me, sir, Frank. Francis John Lawson.”

  “Is it, then?” Lawson scrutinized him, and Frank wondered what to do. Should he extend his hand, hug his father? He didn’t know, so he waited. “What’s it been, ten years? Well, I expect it was only a matter of time before you turned up. You’ll be wanting to see your father, I presume.”

  “You’re not…? I thought they called you Mr. Lawson. At the printshop.”

  “I’m William, Wesley’s brother. Come inside. I’m sure we’ve given the neighbors enough to talk about already.”

  The house was dark and close, the air stale. William Lawson removed his hat and indicated a straight chair. “I’ll speak with my brother. You may wait here.” He turned down a murky corridor, treading so silently Frank thought he might have disappeared altogether. When he opened a door, a shaft of light pierced the gloom but disappeared as soon as the door rejoined the frame.

&
nbsp; Once Frank’s eyes adjusted, he looked around. He seemed to recall the chair and the piano in the parlor. Was his father musical like his mother? She hadn’t told him much about the Lawsons, except that they were from Bangor and owned a printshop. When he asked why he never saw them, all she said was, “Your father and I didn’t see eye-to-eye, and living in that house was awful hard. We’re better off on the farm.”

  Frank hadn’t known divorce was a shameful thing until he’d gone to school. One day, when he was about eight years old, Punk Stratton called his mother a whore. He’d heard the word and had a pretty good idea what it meant. So he threw himself at Punk’s blubbery middle and managed to land a couple of punches and one good kick before his teacher pulled him off. When she asked for an explanation, Frank refused to speak. Her request for an apology met the same stone wall.

  It hadn’t taken long for Stella Martin’s tawdry story to get around, and soon fights in the schoolyard were a regular part of Frank’s day. At first, he tried to avoid them, but eventually he came to accept the inevitability of violence and almost enjoy brawling. Even when he was cut or bruised, he felt clean after a good fight, calm and peaceful. He didn’t always win, but he never backed down or failed to land at least one good punch. By the time he was twelve, he stopped going to school, at the teacher’s request.

  By then, things were bad on the farm. Mumma was always either having a baby or tending one, his sisters were too little to help much, and Ray was drinking up most of the money. So it fell to Frank to run things. He looked after the garden and the animals and fixed the equipment when it broke, but he couldn’t pay the taxes they owed. A year later, the Revenue came and took the place. With his mother expecting a sixth child and no family willing to take them in, they ended up on the Wellbridge poor farm, living off what they could grow and the charity the selectmen saw fit to provide.

  The poor farm. A string of half-ruined shacks bordering the exhausted fields like broken teeth, it sat high on a wind-whipped hill overlooking the town of Wellbridge, exposed to the elements and visible to the townspeople through a wire fence. One privy for ten families, no running water, freezing in winter, fetid in summer, and crawling with bedbugs and vermin all year round. Frank tried not to think about it, but the humiliation clung to him, covered him in a stink of shame. If he were a real Lawson, it might finally wash away.

  He took a step into the darkened parlor and tried to picture his mother there. His sisters would have loved the piano. He hadn’t had much to do with them until the oldest brought the measles home from school and he had to take care of them. Mumma wasn’t supposed to go near the girls because she was pregnant. But she was softhearted and let the littlest one into her bed when she cried. That last baby, the boy Ray had always wanted, came early and died three hours later. Mumma followed not long after. They were buried together in a single pauper’s grave with only a wooden cross to mark their lives.

  “It’s your fault!” Ray screamed at him. “Good-for-nothing. Should never’ve let her bring you. Just keep the girls away from her was all you had to do.” When Ray swung at him, Frank finally hit back, knocking his whiskey-soaked stepfather to the floor, leaving him sobbing into his chest and crying for his wife.

  “Young man, what are you doing down there? I didn’t hear the bell.”

  The voice came from the top of the stairs. It creaked like an old bedspring but still carried weight. Dressed all in black, his grandmother was at first hard to make out in the low light, but he felt a shiver of recognition at her pale face, a parchment-covered skull in a sea of darkness. Hard as a church pew was how his mother had described her; the years didn’t appear to have softened her any. He stepped back into the hall.

  “I’m Francis, Grandmother. But everyone calls me Frank.”

  “My goodness,” she said, but didn’t descend. “Aren’t you quite far from home?”

  “I’m up here to work.”

  “Work? At what?”

  “Odd jobs so far, but I’m looking for something steady. A trade.”

  “And you think we might have one for you, is that right?”

  Frank had no idea what he should say.

  “Perhaps you’d best speak with my son. I presume someone is fetching him?”

  Frank nodded.

  “Well then.” The old woman turned as if to go but stopped and said, “Were you brought up in church?”

  “I went to Sunday school, sometimes. Christmas and Easter mostly.”

  “It must have been a very forgiving congregation. Not Catholic, then?”

  “Methodist.” It was the only church within walking distance of the farm.

  She tilted her head. “You favor your mother. Small, but not quite so swarthy as her people. You should remove your cap in the house.”

  With a rustle she was gone, and Frank wondered for a moment whether she’d been there at all. He took off his cap and tucked it in his back pocket.

  The hallway door opened and William Lawson stepped through. He signaled Frank to come along. The back parlor was bright, overheated by the woodstove that had been jury-rigged into the fireplace, and Frank squinted against the light. The room smelled of liniment and dust. Somewhere in the house a pie was baking, apple by the smell, and Frank’s mouth watered. His uncle stepped back through the door and closed it behind him.

  Wesley Lawson was a wizened version of his brother, half a head shorter and slightly stooped, nearly bald, the blue of his eyes the same as Frank’s, but so faded the irises were nearly clear. Like William, he was dressed in a business suit, but Wesley’s seemed to be in the process of swallowing him beneath the afghan draped over his shoulders. Frank was already sweating in the heat. He knew his father was older than Stella by a good bit and had calculated that he must be near fifty. He had the beginnings of that soft, baby look old men got.

  Wesley stepped from behind a desk cluttered with books and papers.

  “Frank,” he said, then repeated the name.

  “Hello,” Frank said, wondered what he should call him, settled on nothing.

  Wesley crossed the room and gave Frank a brief, weak embrace.

  “Please come and sit down. Etta will bring some luncheon. You must be hungry. Frank. It’s been such a long time.…” He pointed to a chair and lowered himself to the settee, sending a cloud of dust motes swirling into a sunbeam.

  “You’ve come from Wellbridge, then?”

  Frank nodded. He had dreamed of this meeting for years but now found himself tongue-tied. He took a deep breath.

  “Are you not missing school?”

  “I work now.”

  “So you’re missing work, then?”

  “Nothing steady yet, but I want a trade. Come up to Bangor to find one, I guess.” Frank was strung tight as a wire.

  “And how is your mother?” Wesley asked.

  “Um, she passed. Last year.” Saying it always brought it back. Mumma’s gray face, her screams as the farm warden’s wife pried the tiny dead boy from her arms, the whimpers of his sisters, Ray’s rage, and his own endlessly bleeding grief. He turned his face from his father and dragged his sleeve across his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Frank. I hadn’t heard. So young. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.” Wesley seemed to be waiting for Frank to collect himself. “Is that why you left the farm?”

  His father was talking about Ray’s place. He thought Frank had left the scraggly patch of rock and dirt his mother and Ray had finally managed to buy, then lose. He couldn’t tell his father how low they’d all sunk, so he just nodded.

  “Have you a place to stay? Here in town.”

  “Mrs. Dowd’s over on Oak Street.”

  “I’m not familiar with it. I trust it’s satisfactory? Safe and clean?”

  Frank nodded again.

  A side door to the dining room swung open, and an old woman waddled through it carrying a tray.

  “We’ll be in presently, Etta. Just leave the things on the table, please.”

  It was an odd meal: pi
ckled cucumbers and cold ham, no bread or pie. They ate mostly in silence, with Wesley posing questions and Frank providing short answers. Frank watched his father eat. He cut each piece of meat in a perfect square, each cucumber slice into triangles, and chewed slowly.

  Before he could stop himself, Frank said, “I thought you were a printer. At the shop.”

  Wesley swallowed the last of his ham and put his fork down. “I was, but now I prefer to spend my time studying, and on my work at the church. I’m the sexton.”

  “Studying what?”

  “Why, the Good Book, of course. I was once quite interested in history. Still am, but since the … in recent years, I’ve devoted myself to the Lord. Perhaps I’ll have a flock of my own one day.”

  Frank couldn’t imagine why anyone would do that when he could go to a nice office and be the boss every day, but he kept it to himself.

  After they returned to the parlor, Wesley said, “I wish I could ask you to stay, Frank, but your loss was very trying for your grandmother, and William feels that the strain of being reminded of it, of the scandal, would be too much for her. There’d be talk again. Perhaps he’s right. She has spells, you see.”

  Frank didn’t see. The old girl seemed plenty tough to him. He said nothing, and his father hurried on.

  “We can help you in other ways, though. Financially, with schooling. There are places you could board, academies or homes. You’re not even fifteen.”

  Frank stood. Even with his slight stature he towered over his father, who was hunched in his chair. When he spoke his voice was too loud, but he didn’t care. “That’s not why I come—for a handout, for charity. I wanted to see you, to find out why you never visited. The farm, to see me. Why?” He wouldn’t cry again, not here. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and pinched the skin of his elbow crease to keep the tears at bay. His mother taught him that trick.