When the main road was tarred in 1955, the highway department cut the pine down. They said it had only a few years left. That it was dying. That it had never recovered from the lightning bolt that split its trunk years before.
Sicily had been to Watertown that day for her groceries and to take her Green Stamps to the redemption center and pick up the canister set she’d been saving for. On the bumpy ride back to Mattagash, she was thinking of how wonderful the new road would be when they finished with it. She had driven on tarred road the few trips they’d made downstate to visit Pearl, but until that year the tarred road had only come as far north as Watertown and it stopped. As if no one lived beyond it. Or as if no one mattered who lived beyond it.
She stopped at Marge’s to drop off her medicine and when she looked up the road and saw the sun going down in plain view, with nothing to hide it, nothing to filter its reds and pinks, she went inside and said to Marge, “I’ve been looking up the road as if I’m trying to remember something. There’s something different.”
“You’re trying to remember the old pine,” said Marge. “They cut it down.” And together they stood looking up the road at the pile of sawed blocks that had once been a landmark to their youth.
“They just wanted something to cut down,” said Marge. “It was fifteen feet from the road.” Sicily had brought them each a cup of tea and they sat in rocking chairs and sipped the tea and watched the men loading up their equipment for the night onto the backs of trucks. When the last of the trucks had disappeared around the turn and the land was quiet again, without the noise of machinery and voices, a small breeze came up and sifted through the branches of the trees that still had branches, and Sicily wondered if the old pine still felt it had limbs, like the stories you hear of people having arms or legs amputated and still feeling pain where they once were. Like they were ghost arms and legs. And she wondered if the old pine felt its branches were still moving with the wind and aching with age from having borne all those cones and held all those nests and children who had climbed up into her just to look down. And she had felt the sadness in Marge, who rarely showed her sadness to the rest of the world.
“Men around here are like that,” Marge said finally, as dusk came up to the porch and listened. “They get those damn chain saws out and crank them up and feel them shaking and buzzing and before you know it they gotta cut something down. They said the old pine never recovered, but men don’t give things a chance to recover. They don’t have the patience a woman has.” And she had gone on that evening to tell Sicily for the first time how a doctor from Watertown had insisted that their mother had not recovered from the complications in birthing Sicily. He had kept her confined to bed for days on end, against her wishes, until finally, with nothing else to do, she died, too weak to hear Reverend Ralph’s anxious prayers by her bedside asking God to save her sinful soul.
“They just want something to cut down,” Marge had said again before Sicily went on out to her car and Marge went inside her house, flicked the porch light on, and rolled down the Venetian blinds.
***
In Marge’s driveway Sicily and Pearl sent the two girls inside to Thelma while they stayed outside, walking around the backyard, remembering the old house as it had been. The morning was brilliant and after the long rain the mountains glittered.
“Someone ought to come get these hollyhock seeds. They’ll go to waste,” said Pearl, crushing a dried husk of seeds in her hand, then throwing them into the grass by the garage.
“Those’ll come up next year,” said Sicily. “Hollyhocks spread fast.”
“God, how Marge loved these hollyhocks,” said Pearl. “Remember how we used to squeeze the flower to trap a bumblebee inside, then slip a jar over the flower and let go?”
“It worked every time,” said Sicily.
“Bert Fogarty used to get a full jar of bumblebees. Twenty or thirty in a big jar, then fill it up with water.”
“The boys were always cruel to animals and insects here in town. Most of them, anyway.” Sicily put a piece of hay in her mouth and bit on it.
“Now they’re cruel men,” said Pearl.
“Not all of them are, Pearly. Hunting deer and bear always bothered you to hear about or see, but it’s just that their daddies did it at times when food was scarce, and now, for the ones who really don’t need it, it’s just a habit to them.”
“I’ve seen them shoot sparrows off the barn roof and beat workhorses half to death in the woods.”
“Out-of-state hunters come up and kill the deer and animals, too. It ain’t just men here.”
“I suppose,” said Pearl. “But it’s still a hunger for blood I never could stomach.”
“Marge always had hollyhocks of every color up and down both sides of the house. You should have seen them earlier this summer, Pearly. They were just as pretty as when we were kids.”
“Remember how we used to gather up the seeds in a big bag and give them to anyone who wanted them?” asked Pearl. “Where did Marge ever get those seeds to begin with?”
“I don’t know,” said Sicily. “From a seed catalog, I suppose. She used to tell me that the first hollyhock flower started out in China.”
“Imagine that,” said Pearl. “Starting out in China and ending up here in Mattagash.”
“I suppose that’s just like Daddy starting out in Mattagash and ending up way over in China.”
“I suppose,” said Pearl. “Except it’s bumblebees biting them and not whatever it was bit him.”
“A sand fly,” said Sicily. “And the bumblebees don’t bite the flowers. They steal their honey.”
“Whatever,” Pearl said and opened the back door to the old summer kitchen. Inside were shelves of empty Mason jars, covered with a fine dust. A rocking chair sat motionless, a hand-crocheted cushion on its seat that said, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” There were packed boxes of old clothes in one corner. The stove had a poker still sticking up from one burner, and some sticks of hardwood were still in the wood box by the door.
“Looks almost as if somebody’s gettin’ ready to cook,” said Pearl and ran one finger over the oilcloth on the table.
“There’s been a lot of dust gathered since spring. Marge got me and Amy Joy to clean it up in May. I don’t know why she never tore this down and saved us all a lot of work. Look at those Mason jars just pickin’ up dust. She hasn’t canned a thing in years.”
Pearl opened the cedar chest that sat near the boxes of clothing. Marge’s hope chest. It was full of papers, old bank statements, business and personal letters, some war ration stamps, an empty lard can of buttons, and other items that may have had value once, to someone, but were now moth-eaten and smelly from years in a closed trunk.
“We’ll have to go through that someday and throw out what’s no good,” Sicily said.
“It’s probably all no good to us,” Pearl said. “But to her it must’ve meant something.”
“Too bad she never had a family of her own,” said Sicily. “It seems like only your own kids should go through your belongings after you die.”
“I can see Thelma going through mine now.”
“It would’ve been so different if she’d only gotten married,” Sicily said and jumped as a spider fled from under a letter and burrowed deeper into the trunk.
“She almost did,” said Pearl.
“What?” said Sicily. “When?”
“You’ve forgotten about Marcus Doyle. You were real young. I was about thirteen back then.”
“I remember him a little, but not that much,” said Sicily. “I got a bad memory even as a grown woman.”
“He stayed with us two months or more and he and Margie loved each other. I used to spy on them. See them kissing and holding hands,” said Pearl, picking up a stack of handmade doilies that had become gray and fragile with age.
“What happened?” Sic
ily asked.
“I never really knew. I think Daddy might have done something to split them up.”
“That sounds like him.”
“Now why in the world didn’t she ever use these? They just went to waste out here. And that’s some fine handiwork in them too.” Pearl threw the doilies back into the chest. “Marcus Doyle used to sleep out here.”
“Out here?” asked Sicily. “In the summer kitchen?”
“On a cot right over there.” Pearl pointed.
“No wonder she didn’t want to tear this old building down,” said Sicily, and her eyes filled a second time with tears for the older sister she had never come to know. “She’s like the old pine. She just never recovered.”
Pearl put her arm around Sicily and said, “Don’t cry, Sissy. Whatever it was happened in Marge’s life to make it so awful, it’s over now. And so is Mama’s. And even Daddy’s. And soon ours’ll be too.”
“That ain’t cheering me up none.” Sicily blew her nose on the tissue she had in perpetuity in her pocket.
“No, but it’s true. At least Marge has got someone crying for her. I don’t remember anyone crying when we heard about Daddy. We just stood around for a few minutes, shuffling our feet until it sunk in, then we went on about our day and that was it. The only difference was that Marge didn’t make us write those god-awful letters to China every Sunday.”
“Why did Margie want to go with Daddy so bad? Especially if he stopped her from marrying a man she loved?” asked Sicily.
“It was her only way to get out of Mattagash. I don’t think she wanted to get old in Mattagash alone. With no husband or children. Even dirty old China, full of short little heathens, sounded better to her than that. Or maybe she wanted to go off looking for Marcus Doyle somewhere in the world. He was a missionary, you know.”
Pearl pushed at the trunk with one finger to avoid dirtying her hand, and the cover of the hope chest fell with a thud, scattering bits of dust about that caught the sun before settling again. Unnoticed at the bottom of the trunk were precious letters, neatly stacked, letters with hearts drawn on them. In the center of each heart, which was pierced by a rickety arrow, was a hastily scrawled M.D. The lid to the hope chest fell, and the letters were left to the darkness, and the weather, and to time.
“If you’re a homely girl and you happen to be Catholic, you’re all set,” Pearl continued in one of the socioreligious treatises Mattagashers were well known for. “Have you ever seen a pretty nun? And it wasn’t even that Marge was unattractive. There wasn’t any men her age around here. She always used to say that she was the only baby born in Mattagash for seven years. A Protestant girl bound for spinsterhood is in big trouble. We got no convents to hide in.”
“Pearly, can we live in such a little town and still keep secrets from each other?” Sicily asked. “Can we live in the same family, in the same house, and still hide our pain from each other?”
“Some of us can,” said Pearl. “And there’s some that can’t hide anything about themselves in a small town no matter how hard they try. It’s just a knack, I guess. Some have it. Some don’t.”
There was an awkward moment between them, each wondering into which category the other fell.
“I don’t know if it’s a talent worth having or not,” said Sicily.
“The river sounds like a downpour of rain,” said Pearl.
“We never hear it, we’re so used to it.” Sicily took the poker from its niche in the burner and hung it from a nail behind the stove.
“I didn’t ever hear it when I lived here,” said Pearl. “Listen! Someone’s yelling to us.”
It was Thelma. There was a phone call for Sicily. Pearl closed the door to the summer kitchen. The one leading into the main house had been locked from inside, so the two went around to the back porch and through Marge’s back door.
“I heard the news,” Winnie Craft told Sicily. “We’re all real sorry for you and yours.”
Sicily thanked her and told her those details of the previous night that did not need to be censored. There was a knock on the front door, and Pearl went to answer it. Sicily tried to say good-bye to Winnie, who was not ready to hang up without a complete rundown. It was the sheriff at the door asking for Marvin Ivy Jr. That much Sicily could hear.
“I suppose you heard the other bad news last night?” asked Winnie, savoring the words.
“No,” said Sicily. “What news?”
“Well, Sicily Lawler, where do you live? In New York? Almost everyone knows by now. Sarah Pinkham just happened to pick up her phone to call Martha Fogarty and she heard the sheriff calling for an ambulance. The wreck was just above Lyman’s store so the sheriff was calling from there. Lyman and Sarah is on the same line.”
“What wreck?” asked Sicily.
“The sheriff told them don’t hurry. He was good as dead. Ain’t that just typical of him, though? A stolen car?”
“Who, Winnie, for God’s sake? Don’t drag this out any more!”
It was representative of the way Mattagash women delivered bad news, turning the words in their mouths like morsels of food, savoring them, for fear it might be the last meal of their lifetimes.
“Chester Lee Gifford. Dead as a doornail in a stolen car. The sheriff didn’t say whose. Sarah’s trying to get Lyman on the phone now to find out. But ain’t that just the kind of mess you could expect to find one of the Giffords in?”
Sicily heard another receiver being lifted on her party line. “Phones must be going up all over town,” she thought.
“Someone’s rubberin’, Winnie,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later,” and she put the receiver back on its hook.
The sheriff was telling Junior, who was white-faced with fury, that his Packard had been wrecked and was at that moment being towed to Watertown by Bob’s Wrecker Service and Car Wash.
“Chester Lee Gifford dead,” Sicily said softly. She felt an instant flash of relief. There would be no gossip about her now. And Amy Joy could grow up safely and slowly. Then guilt washed over her. “That poor man is dead,” she thought.
Reaching for her coat, she came to the living room door. All the Ivys had gathered there to listen to what details the sheriff had to offer them.
“They’ll be planning a funeral for the Packard this afternoon,” thought Sicily and, catching Pearl’s eye, she motioned with a finger for her sister to come closer.
“I’m just going back home for a minute.”
“It was Chester Lee Gifford,” said Pearl. “He’s dead. The sheriff said he had a wad of cash in his pocket and was all packed and heading south when it happened.”
“I’ll be back before too long,” said Sicily and left the excited Ivys in a noisy huddle in the living room.
Amy Joy had just taken a hot bath and was still wrapped in a large blue bath towel and sitting on the end of her bed clipping her toenails when Sicily told her. Told her as gently as she could. As gently as one can be told, even one so young as Amy Joy, that your lover, the man you wanted, planned, to spend the rest of your days with, was no longer among the living. He had disappeared like the white, feathery bristles of a dandelion, had drifted off, had gone back to take root in the earth, to become the earth, so that every stroll taken by a widow through wild hay leaves her feeling as though the man she loved is reaching out with a thousand fingers to stroke her thighs as she walks. Or he’s watching her from among the pine boughs in the forest with eyes that belong to the forest as stars to the universe. And the wind is his warm breath and he’s alive somewhere, waiting, for old age, or scarlet fever, or a slippery stone along the riverbank, to reunite him with his female soul so that they can run the endless moors together, wild and free. The living, who don’t know what answers the dead have learned, are forced to ask the questions over and over: Can he hear me? Is that light blinking in the attic a sign from him? Is hearing this old song a clue?
Can he watch me undress? Does he know how quickly my memory of him grows vague?
Amy Joy began to weep. The towel undid itself and fell open, exposing her breast. There was a purple mark on it the size of a quarter, like a bruise, or a grape, or a violet flower. Sicily knew it was from Chester Lee and that it was probably all he had left behind him. And when it disappeared, there would be nothing left to show he’d been alive. Except for some papers, maybe, with his name on them, like the ones in Marge’s trunk. Or a few pictures that would lie around in boxes until the owners died their own deaths and their souvenirs were thrown away in the rubbish.
Amy Joy had quickly covered herself with the towel, but something about the mark left behind by Chester Lee, above her daughter’s beating heart, above the life in Amy Joy’s body, as if he would be part of her until it gradually dissolved and he was free to go, left Sicily shaken. She felt tremendous grief for Chester Lee, and her daughter’s warm body reminded her that his must be cold, without sound or heat, like the vacant houses in Mattagash during the harvest. And she wished that they could keep the mark where Chester’s lips had blossomed alive, nourishing it daily, like a secret garden of their own. But she knew they couldn’t. She knew it would slowly fade. Like the river roses, in a few days, a week, it would be past its peak and gone.
THE DISCIPLES ARM THEMSELVES: SHOOT-OUT AT THE OK MOTEL
“We used to see her go by every day on her way to Watertown to strip. She had her head so high up in the air you’d have swore she was on her way to church. She had that little car loaded down with books, all strewed about the back window. Donnie Henderson saw her go by one day, books flapping in the back of that little red Volkswagen buggy, and he says look, boys, there goes the hook-mobile. He’s always quick like that, Donnie is. But I tell you what. If I could have got a little of that action myself and come out clean back at the house, I’d have jumped onto her as quick as a horsefly on a mare with no tail.”
—Bert Fogarty, Lumberman,
and Martha’s Husband, 1964
Sarah Pinkham gathered her committee about her on Winnie’s front lawn and gave them some last-minute instructions.
The Funeral Makers Page 21