A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  Sicily heard the awful words as they entered the external part of her ear. Once there, in the foyer, they were escorted on into the middle ear. Here the ruckus started. The awful words beat fiercely upon the tiny bones in the middle ear and caused something fluid to move around in the internal ear. It was in there, in the internal ear, that the awful words caused you-know-what to hit the fan. The wedding is only a week away. Amy Joy, her own daughter, her only daughter, was going to cause deafness in her.

  “What?” asked Sicily. “What?”

  “I said do I, or do I not, wear your wedding dress? If it’s going to bend you out of shape, I’ll pick up something in Watertown. It doesn’t matter to me what I wear.” Amy Joy sucked some Pepsi up through a straw.

  Bend you out of shape. What did that mean? What was happening to Mattagash’s youth? Once, they were content to skate all night around a fire on the bogan, or slide on pieces of linoleum down Russell Hill, or swim all day long in the patch of good swimming water by the bridge and then drink pops while the sun dried them again. And the next thing you know, they want cars to drive to Watertown for no reason at all. Not for shopping, or to go to the doctor’s office, or even to trade in a few books of Green Stamps at the redemption center. For no reason at all. Amy Joy had given that answer herself a thousand times. Now they wanted television sets instead of old-fashioned storytelling. They turned their noses up at handmade clothing, hand-knit mittens, home-given haircuts. The outside world had reached its hand into Mattagash, dirty fingernails and all, and had grabbed up the fancy of the youngsters. There was something missing now. A sense of heritage maybe. What young girl would not beg to wear her mother’s precious wedding dress? I’ll pick something up in J. C. Penney’s at the last minute. If it’s going to bend you out of shape. Whatever that meant, it was happening. Sicily was being bent out of shape. Her ears were bending out of shape. Her heart was twisting out of shape.

  “Speak up please, dear,” said Sicily, and held a hand to her right ear. “I can’t hear a thing,” she said. “Not even the river.”

  Not hearing the river, that downpour of water that rushed past all the houses in Mattagash clinging to its bank, was unimaginable. If you’d lived there all your life, it’s true that you wouldn’t notice it. Like the soft ticking of a clock, it went away with time. Only the tourists remained wide-eyed about the river, as they did with most foolish things. But if you listened for it, by God, the river was there. It was your family scrapbook strung out, page after page. It was the watery line of your heritage that pointed straight toward the ocean, then across the ocean, to the old country. It gurgled and rippled and snarled. In Mattagash, say you don’t hear the wind, and no one will pay you much mind. Say you don’t hear the heaving pulp truck, or the whining skidder, or the grating chain saw that has replaced the old-timer’s broadax. Say you don’t hear the throaty loon in the bogan. Say you don’t hear your own heart washing its beat against your rib cage. But, for Christ’s sake, say you hear the river.

  “No,” said Sicily, straining toward the river window. “I’m quite sure. I can’t hear it.”

  THE PINKHAM MOTEL SUFFERS FROM MALNUTRITION: EXTRATERRESTRIALS PARTY WITH THE GIFFORDS

  “Well, let’s see. He started two years ago, the same fall that Kennedy got himself shot, and he hasn’t stopped since. I can’t sleep nights for him. Even the cat is going crazy.”

  —Albert Pinkham, long distance to the receptionist at Guinness Book of World Records office, about his German shepherd’s hiccuping bout, 1963–65

  Albert Pinkham left Bruce, the German Shepard, with his head lolling from the side window of the pickup truck and went inside Macabee’s Sporting Store to inspect his business cards. There they were, all twenty-four, still flapping happily in the breeze of uninterested passersby. Albert rubbed his chin and pondered the situation. Where the hell were the naturalists who usually flocked to Maine before the hunters and fishermen could swarm in? Where were the snobs of nature, for Chrissakes? Had they discovered some other little niche where the air was pure and the scenery picturesque? He wished he knew. He wished someone would goddamn tell him because he and Bruce had lain awake all night, watching their fates race across the ceiling with the casual spray of lights from cars passing by the Albert Pinkham Motel. Passing by. He might just as well have a motel in the Yukon as in Mattagash, Maine. He might just as well stick his motel in Siberia and throw out the welcome mat to Russian prisoners. At least that’s how he felt when he looked at all the blank pages in his Big Chief tablet, which he used as a registration book. Surely this didn’t mean that he was doomed to leave behind him the wide open spaces of the country and move to the smog-filled, clogged places of the big city. Surely this didn’t mean he would have to move to Caribou!

  Albert followed the writhing Mattagash River home, thirty frost heaved, potholed miles from Watertown, and contemplated his fate. Bruce bounced sadly on the seat beside him but kept a sharp eye out for female canines trotting along the road or lounging seductively on front lawns. Bruce even spied a black jockey on one lawn, wearing a red jacket and holding a riding crop. This confused him. He sniffed the air for an odorous clue. What was it? One of those fancy little Chinese dogs? But the truck rolled on and the jockey was soon gone from his sight and mind.

  Albert had noticed the black jockey when it first appeared, a couple years back. At first he thought that the French family who lived in the house must have adopted a small black child to put to work during the potato harvest. On his return trip that same day, he wondered why any child would want to stand erect in the same place for so long. Was he being punished? That was when Albert had slowed for a better look. It almost surprised him at first. But then he was pleased to realize that no matter how far Mattagash was from civilization, at least according to city folks, here was proof that fine art from the faraway South could drift north. At Christmastime, Albert noticed, the family placed a Santa’s cap on the jockey’s head and strung him with firefly lights. Albert worried that the jockey might not be accustomed to such extremely cold weather, but, after all, it wasn’t a real coon. There had been real ones come north to Maine, back in the heart of the logging era, past the turn of the century. They were lumbermen, or tried to be. Albert’s father told him how they nearly froze to death in the thin clothes they wore and how the women and children ran from them in fear. There’s even a brook in Mattagash called Nigger Brook, and some say it’s because one of those darky lumbermen drowned in that brook during a log drive. And it was also true that a KKK organization sprang up in the Mattagash River valley in the 1940s, but there weren’t any niggers around, not even wooden ones, so the group had gone out of business due to apathy.

  Albert reached a heavy hand over and rubbed Bruce’s neck fur.

  “What do you think, pal?” Albert asked his traveling companion. “Could you put up with the big-city life in Caribou? They can come in a truck, you know, and take you to the pound if you don’t have a collar and put you to sleep.” Bruce whined and canted his head.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t,” Albert said. “But if this keeps up you might see the Albert Pinkham Motel go by one day on a flatbed. This keeps up and we might both end up in the pound.” Bruce rahoooooed from deep in his throat.

  “I was kidding,” Albert soothed. “We won’t go to the pound.”

  Albert stopped in St. Leonard to gas up at Henri Nadeau’s Quick Lunch and Gas.

  “Tank you,” Henri said, replacing the gas cap and waving Albert on. “Tanks ha lot!” Henri shouted.

  “Tank yourself,” Albert muttered, back on the road now. Bruce growled back at Henri until the gas pumps, and the large sign displaying a lovely giant hot dog in its fat roll, disappeared around a turn in the road. Henri charged too much for his gas. And his quick snacks were gourmet meals after they were added up on the cash register. But, like Albert’s motel, his gas pumps were the only ones from Watertown to Mattagash, and Mattagash had only recen
tly acquired theirs. Peter Craft had finally saved enough money by working at Pratt & Whitney aircraft plant in Connecticut for ten years to come home and launch into the filling station business. Albert disliked Peter Craft. Peter Craft had a habit, every time a jet flew over Mattagash on its way to Europe, of pointing and saying, “Look, that might be one of them planes I stuck the little metal piece on at Pratt & Whitney.” What a show-off. At times like that, Albert always hoped the passengers onboard had plenty of them little bottles of booze. They’d probably end up needing them somewhere in the middle of the ocean if Peter Craft had been allowed to stick things on their plane. And Albert didn’t like the one other businessman in Mattagash, either. That was Charles Mullins, who slung sandwiches and doughnuts, damn near off the Mattagash bridge, to starving canoeists just coming to shore from two weeks of roughing it on the Mattagash River. Albert didn’t mind Betty, whose grocery had been around long before the motel opened, and who was a woman anyway. That didn’t count. But he had enjoyed being the only big fish in a small pond and did not encourage other Mattagash men to leave the woodsworking business of their heritage. This wasn’t New York City. There wasn’t room in Mattagash for that many entrepreneurs. He should have recognized the business philosophy of Henri Nadeau: it was his own “I got something and you want it” style. But he didn’t.

  “He’s a greedy bastard,” Albert told Bruce, of Henri’s high gas prices. Bruce’s lip curled up involuntarily at the displeasure in his master’s voice, exposing the broken tip of his left fang.

  Albert waved at nearly every car he met, especially after he left the Watertown line and entered St. Leonard. He knew all the drivers from St. Leonard to Mattagash. If teenagers were driving, well, he still recognized the cars as belonging to their fathers. Little towns grew up next to each other, regardless of religion and nationality, and since they were little towns, everybody knew everybody for miles, whether they liked it or not.

  Among the cars Albert met was Vinal Gifford’s old sharklike 1960 Plymouth, black as a killer fish, with dangerous fins sprouting from its back. The Plymouth looked to be hunting, preying, its headlights beady and attentive, its fins hurling it forward to Watertown. Vinal was driving and Pike was in the passenger seat. Albert was forced to pull his pickup off the road to give the shark elbow room. Even if Vinal was in the habit of braking, which he was not, the Plymouth had probably seen its last abrupt halt around 1966. Its brake shoes were worn to a frazzle. It rocked over the frost heaves and then bobbed out of sight. Everyone in Mattagash marveled that Vinal could keep such a bouncing vehicle on the road. Why, everyone wondered, doesn’t the first frost heave it hits send it to Mars?

  “That’s why Pike and me drink a bit,” Vinal had answered Henri Nadeau when asked about the mechanical miracle that seemed to chart right up there with how bumblebees can fly. “We’re both afraid of heights,” Vinal said, just as Henri finished pumping two dollars’ worth of gas into the shark. And then it was off again, looking for smaller, weaker fish.

  “There won’t be a battery, a hubcap, or a virgin safe from here to Watertown,” Albert Pinkham said to Bruce, as he steered the sensible gray pickup back onto the road, back onto the trail of thought. He had had his own run-in with the Giffords just two years before, and he had taken the whole nest of them to court. Folks in Mattagash had warned him to leave things be.

  “You’ll end up like them big crime bosses,” Tom Henderson told Albert. “You’ll end up in the trunk of some Plymouth, I ain’t saying whose.”

  But Albert took the Giffords to court, and he garnered a pile of respect near and far by doing so. The whole trouble began when he discovered that the Giffords had converted an empty, two-story house into a motel by adding several rickety bunks. A good strong wind could have leveled the establishment, not to mention what a heavy snowfall would do. Albert couldn’t possibly see how Gifford & Gifford Sportsman’s Lodge had a prayer, and he wasn’t too worried about it until he found out, after a quick visit to Macabee’s Sporting Store, that all his business cards had been picked and pocketed by small children with dirty hands and faces, who all appeared to be the same size, and who had heads of massive curls.

  “They all looked like bottle brushes,” Macabee told Albert.

  But cute misdemeanors turned into grim felonies when the Bangor Daily News ran a sensational story about Gifford & Gifford Sportsman’s Lodge. Vinal Gifford had phoned a reporter, collect, at the Bangor Daily News, and told him that a UFO had landed several times in front of the lodge. The reporter didn’t believe the story, but he foresaw the humorous impact of printing it.

  Vinal also claimed that two of his sons had been taken aboard the spacecraft and whisked about Mattagash before being put back on the front steps. The two boys, only eight and nine years old, had managed nonetheless to give several interviews themselves, one stretching as far away as the Boston Globe. Albert stopped by the sheriff’s office in Watertown and filed a complaint of deceptive advertising. He couldn’t have a Boston paper doing this to the Albert Pinkham Motel. He depended too heavily on out-of-staters. So the Giffords had come grudgingly to court, thanks to one brave lone man and his loyal dog. Let other, lesser men say that the lone man was prompted by avarice.

  The Giffords were a lot less willing to be interviewed by the judge than they had been by the Boston Globe. In court they snapped shut, tight as oysters. Oysters a little too far north in Maine to be near the safety of an ocean. That’s how Giffords were, once you got them away from the thickly sprouted pines of Mattagash, where they could disappear like wild men in a split second. But, oh, and Albert seethed to think of it, hadn’t their lips flapped to reporters! Their Christian names alone had garnered much limelight. Vera Gifford had been a country music fan from birth, and she had named a parcel of her kids accordingly. The two sons who had been taken on a carnival ride through the clear skies over Mattagash in a souped-up spaceship were Hank Snow Gifford and Johnny Cash Gifford. The newspapers had a field day.

  But Albert and Bruce put a foot and paw, respectively, down. Asked by the judge what the inside of the spaceship looked like, Hank Snow and Johnny Cash paled. They hung their heads, a Gifford genetic coding, and shrugged.

  “Well?” the judge demanded.

  “Considering all them lights,” Johnny Cash Gifford finally answered, “it looked just like Bangor.”

  “At Christmastime,” added Hank Snow.

  Albert and Bruce swept by the very spot where the shady lodge had boasted visitations. A good swift northeasterly, like a needed kick in the ass, had leveled it all before the first snow of 1967. Albert had mourned that it was not chock-full of Giffords at the time. But there the old building was, a pile of weathered lumber, birds circling in search of nest-building sites, last summer’s hay bent about the doorway. It couldn’t be the Giffords causing his latest lack of business. All of Albert’s business cards were still flapping back at Macabee’s, tacked up high enough that little delinquent hands could not reach them.

  “I hope you don’t have any Quebecers for clients,” Macabee had mentioned to Albert. “They won’t be able to reach up that high either.”

  Albert rolled his window down and let April hit him in the face. A golden splash of afternoon sun was lying on the river, rippling there. The river was high and dangerous, having been free of its ice for only two weeks. It was an act of nature that could make you believe in God, if you didn’t, when the Mattagash River ran. Sheets of ice thirty feet wide and five feet thick could stand straight up in the water and look down on you. And trees a chain saw could barely cut through would uproot and find themselves fifty miles down the river before they came to. And the sound of it! The noise! Well, it wasn’t until them supersonic jets from Loring Air Force Base, seventy miles away, started flying low over Mattagash, shattering sound barriers, and windows, and ear drums, that Albert Pinkham finally had something to compare to the natural noise of a river breaking up in the spring. It was nothing
to toy with, the river. At any time of the year. Yet you can’t tell a tourist that. They’re used to city ways. Tourists think it’s okay if they accidentally drown in the Mattagash River. They think they can just go back to the city when it’s all over and sue somebody. But Albert and Bruce knew the truth of it. They knew what a tourist looks like who’s been vacationing at the bottom of the river for two weeks. They’d seen cute little firm-thighed college girls so black and bloated even the flies wouldn’t go near them.

  Could he have been too harsh on the naturalists last year, Albert wondered, as he tooted hello in answer to Winnie Craft’s wave from her front porch.

  “Winnie’s too afraid to go inside and shut her door,” Albert said to Bruce. “Too afraid she’ll miss something.”

  As Albert turned the truck into his own wide drive, Bruce wagged his tail. The Albert Pinkham Motel sign always set the dog to twitching in the front seat, and by the time Albert opened the front door to release him, Bruce was often drooling.

  “You love this place as much as I do, don’t you, boy?” Albert asked. Bruce’s tongue flapped from the side of his mouth in anticipation of the bound he would make from the front seat once the open door had given him clearance. But something stopped them both. A car was waiting for them, pulled in snugly below the house. Sicily’s car. Amy Joy lolling behind the wheel. McKinnons in blood. Albert and Bruce loathed uppity-ups. The rumor that Albert had heard about Amy Joy getting hitched was true for a change. He had read in the Watertown Weekly just yesterday that she was betrothed to the French grease monkey at Thibodeau’s. Maybe Albert should say grease Frog. There was a picture of the two of them, their engagement picture, taken as they leaned against someone’s refrigerator in someone’s kitchen. It was a French kitchen, Albert knew that much. He had spotted two crucifixes over the refrigerator. Mattagash women might have the snazziest items Avon can offer plastered all through their houses, but there wasn’t a single crucifix among them. The Giffords maybe had one or two, if they hadn’t pawned them. Albert thought of the picture. Didn’t the McKinnons think they were meringue on the pie, though? Bruce growled, as if reading Albert’s thoughts. But engagement pictures meant weddings and weddings meant honeymoons. And honeymoons meant cozy nights of squeaking bedsprings at the all-new Albert Pinkham Motel, replete with hot running water in all the rooms.