***
The Plymouth-shark sat quietly in a dimly lighted corner of the school yard. A smothering of snow had colored the shark white, and now its great eyes gazed out at the rest of its species with deep interest. Pike and Vinal Gifford were embarrassed at the meager pickings that lined up in the Mattagash High School yard. The cars were almost all local ones, with dull and dented hubcaps, with snapped aerials, with tread-worn tires. These slim pickings had helped years ago to shape Vinal and Pike’s personal motto: Don’t rile up the old hometown more than is necessary. But where was the slew of Watertown cars they’d been promised? Where were all the southern relatives? Other than the four Cadillac hubcaps, which lay like large shiny moons on the backseat, there were no plums out there to pick, regardless of the weather. Even the old Buick from Portland had lost its hubcaps over the many years of rattling along interstates and city byways. And yet Mattagash had touted this as the social event of the decade! Vinal and Pike were good enough at their trade to be insulted. They had a good mind, at least together they did, to take the whole town to court for enticement or some such thing. Advertising through the mail and by word of mouth that a wedding was to take place which didn’t was no different from claiming a UFO had christened their new sporting lodge. To add injury to this insult, just as they were about to go back and further lighten the Cadillac of its tires and battery, it had driven away from their fingertips! It was almost enough to force a man to turn over a few leaves of his life, to rethink his career choice.
“This keeps up,” said Vinal, snapping open a beer and handing it to Pike, “and we’ll have to cut off our little fingers for the insurance money.”
SHE SAYS TOE-MAY-TOE, HE SAYS TOE-MAT, SICILY’S GLAD THEY CALLED THE WHOLE THING OFF: COPS, ROBBERS, AND BULLET DREAMS
Quand le soleil dit bonjour aux montagnes,
Et que la nuit rencontre le jour.
Je suis seule avec mes rêves sur la montagne,
Une voix me rapelle toujours.
Now when the sun says good-day to the mountains
And the night says hello to the dawn
I’m alone with my dreams on the hilltop
And I can still hear his voice though he’s gone.
—“The French Song,” sung at all French weddings in the valley, canceled at the Lawler–Cloutier bash
Amy Joy sat in the dark of her room and thought about the past because she found the present too painful, and the future too damning. The past was now a place of asylum, a sanctuary. So she thought of those strangers, those Loyalists of long ago, those people of another time. They were responsible for the blood flowing in her veins in 1969. They probably never imagined such a year would roll around, and yet here it was, and some of her blood was still theirs. Amy Joy knew this from biology class. It was all a matter of genetics, of cells and tissues and eye color, but it afforded her a feeling she had never before experienced. She wished now that she had asked Aunt Marge questions about those faded names in the family Bible. Aunt Marge had lingered under her very nose and then died. Yet instead of giving her some undivided attention, Amy Joy had offered it all to Chester Lee Gifford. But the young were forgiven, weren’t they, for cavorting with life? Chester Lee was dead now, as was Ed Lawler, the other man in her early life. They were all jumbled up together, these three, in her mind: her father, Chester Lee, Aunt Marge McKinnon. Maybe because they all died the same rainy autumn of 1959, in a matter of days. They were faces that disappeared from her life simultaneously, these three musketeers, these buccaneers of her memory. They were paper dolls to her now, hand-linked, lost forever. Just like the old Loyalist ancestors who had given rise to the lot of them. Now she could add Jean Claude Cloutier to the list.
But the truth was, if they were all standing before her again, she would choose Ed if she could choose only one. Her father, the only one she would ever have. How many times had she wondered why Ed Lawler had driven his car down to the Mattagash school, held a revolver to his head, and pulled the trigger? Did he hate Amy Joy and Sicily that much? Now, for the past few weeks, on nights when it was least expected, Amy Joy experienced what she called her bullet nightmare. In her dream, she would be walking along the old riverbank, the ancestors’ river, when out of nowhere it sounded. Bang! Bang! Or she’d be driving in her car, driving as fast as she could toward Watertown, in what seemed like a most desperate rush to escape, her foot aching on the gas pedal. Bang! Lately it was happening in all her dreams, the good and bad. She felt as though an unknown assassin were stalking her, a Lee Harvey Oswald, crazily hidden behind some warehouse window in her mind. It took her days to analyze it, even a dream so obvious. It was just the night before that she’d sat up in bed, broken away from another bad dream full of noises.
“This is the bullet that killed my father,” she’d said softly. “I’m hearing it time and time again. If I’m not careful, it will kill me, too.” Then she lay back to listen to the orchestra of the Mattagash River, the old highway, to fall asleep again, hoping this time to hear the gunfire once more that had taken her father’s life.
“This is his warning to me,” Amy Joy had thought. “This is when I’m closest to him. When the bullet fires, I hear his finger sliding over the trigger. I can almost touch that finger. It’s like we’re finally holding hands.”
Amy Joy lay in the darkness. She knew now that her father didn’t hate her. He didn’t even hate Sicily. What he did hate was a way of life from which there seemed no escape. She must be careful with the lesson, the trousseau, he had left her. She must stop crying, eventually, when it was the right time to stop. And she must live. There were worse things.
“I’m becoming my father’s daughter,” she thought.
***
Sicily knocked for the hundredth time on Amy Joy’s bedroom door.
“Please, dear,” she said. “Open the door. I can’t stand to hear you cry.” Amy Joy made no response. “One day you’ll see this as the best thing that ever happened to you,” Sicily added. “Believe me. I know it’s hard to fathom right now, but it’s true.”
Back in the kitchen Sicily stood and watched a whirlwind of snow circling the pole light like a swarm of feathery moths.
“If this keeps up, winter will be back,” she thought.
Puppy came to the door and whined to be let inside. Sicily let him in, then leaned far out into the snowy night to listen. It was nearly three fourths of a mile up the road from her, around bends, past frost heaves and potholes, over dips and twists in the road, and yet Sicily could hear the music echoing down the banks of the river. Music. They must be dancing up a storm inside the new gymnasium, a structure old Nellie Monihan, who had passed her pessimism on to her daughter Girdy, had predicted would be the downfall of the town.
Sicily could almost see Winnie or Girdy motion for the janitor to come with his long wooden pole, the one with the hook on it, and open the windows of the gym to let in some cool air. She had been there a hundred times herself to see this done. And she had seen the little kids gather around to gaze up in wonderment as he unlocked those high, eagle-nest windows.
Sicily heard it again, a swell of music and laughter rolling along the acoustical banks of the Mattagash, cascading, crescendoing, breaking like waves. She was not surprised to hear this. She knew that, years ago, old-timers could shout to each other from a separation of two miles and be heard. She knew that the old workhorses, trudging along in their belled harnesses, rang out like tambourines from among the gangly pines and cedars. There were all kinds of communications going on back then, before the telephone, before automobiles sprouted like weeds in everyone’s driveway, before televisions, transistor radios, and other such nonsense. Had it not been for an electric knife—yes, truly, Sicily was almost ashamed to admit it, but had it not been for a knife that plugged into the wall—Winnie Craft would still have the meaty part of her right index finger, the fleshy part that pushes against a pen or pencil to help
execute writing. Winnie Craft had not sent out a single Christmas card since her son brought that awful contraption up from Connecticut two years ago, but Amy Joy had remarked often enough that this injury did not stop Winnie from picking her nose.
“Just to show off,” Sicily said of the knife, and then closed the door. But it was true that something was happening to the young men and women of Mattagash, particularly the women, something she did not like. There was a silent current running among them, whispering to them, tempting them to toss down the ways of their mothers. Like the knife, it was slicing through the past, cutting it into tiny, useless pieces. Pampers were another bad sign. It was true, wasn’t it, that Kevin Craft was turning up lately at town functions alone, and that his wife, Bonita, was now traipsing to Watertown every day, big as she pleased in Kevin’s new Chrysler, to shop for idle odds and ends.
“Pampers and cake mixes,” Sicily said, and searched through the pages of the Bangor Daily for its crossword puzzle. Even as a teenager, Bonita Gifford had made the wind look tame. It was true that she came from one of those families of Giffords who were hardworking, honest folks and suffered from sharing the same last name as the renegade members. But Bonita never grew up, if you asked Winnie, or Girdy, or Sicily, or Claire. Now she was in her midtwenties, the mother of three little children, and still acting like she led the life of Riley. Word was even circulating that she was asking for a divorce! Sicily knew that the only thing more damning than Amy Joy wanting to marry a Frenchman was wanting to divorce him afterward. Mattagash had guilt notions about that action that even the Catholics had yet to learn. Yet there had been two inglorious divorces already and talk of others to come.
“All my money goes to buy fancy, factory-made, store-bought diapers,” Kevin Craft had once complained at Betty’s Grocery. Betty refused to carry the controversial item, giving Bonita the excuse to gallivant all the way to Watertown for them.
“They’re designed by real engineers to catch as much baby poop and pee as they possibly can,” Kevin had lamented. “And then Bonita rolls ’em up real nice and throws ’em out in the garbage so I can take ’em to the dump.”
And Sicily knew that without the automobile’s sudden availability to all, and without the devilish telephone, Amy Joy’s romance with Jean Claude Cloutier would never have gotten off the ground. Before these inventions, folks kept apart naturally, stuck like birds to their own kind. It hadn’t been so many years ago when the old river provided all the entertainment that was needed. In summertime the inner tubes from worn-out tires would go into the water as small, airy boats, and children could fish until dark or swim to a small heart’s content. There were sledding and skating in the wintertime around a pile of slabs from the old sawmill set ablaze or the remains of those summer tires swabbed in gasoline and lighted.
“We used to make a big pan of fudge and tell old stories,” Sicily said to Puppy. “There was always someone who could remember a song off the old tube radio, and they’d teach it to the rest of us.” She opened the door one more time to catch the cold rumble of warm music and laughter ricocheting along the riverbank. If you didn’t know better, it could be the echo of a quilting bee straight out of the 1920s. Gee, but they were kicking up their heels at the reception, even Sicily’s friends who must know how terrible she was feeling. Sicily closed the door. Before she made herself a nice cup of tea, she leaned back against the kitchen cupboard and closed her eyes. Puppy stared at her, his head canted. Let all Mattagash party themselves into a spring tizzy. Sicily knew some truths to be self-evident. First, the party was really hers in spirit, and second, she still had some clout with her personal deity.
“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!” Sicily whispered the words, so that her grieving daughter would not hear. Then she did a bit of the Charleston, executed to a perfect 4/4 time, a dance she had not attempted since her own wedding reception in 1931. Sicily did her twisting steps up and down the shiny linoleum of her kitchen floor. Jean Claude was right. La belle-mère was a good dancer, her.
***
Pearl and Marvin were having an evening snack, with Pearl about to confess the summer kitchen ghosts, when Junior waded through the few inches of snow in Marge’s old driveway and banged his fists upon the door.
“What in hell is it now?” Marvin groaned.
“It sounds like Junior,” Pearl said, relieved that no ghosts were beating upon the house.
“This better be important,” Marvin warned. He was too comfortable in his slippers and robe to be roused on such a blustery night. He padded reluctantly to the door.
“What is it, for Chrissakes?” he asked his trembling son.
“Someone stole the Caddy, Daddy!” Junior blurted, then blushed at his schoolboy rhyme.
“Again?” asked Marvin. “Are the Giffords addicted to fancy cars?”
“I think so,” said Junior, treading past Marvin to the telephone. “But this time I’m gonna nail the bastard!”
“What is it?” asked Pearl.
“Someone stole the Cadillac,” said Marvin.
“Again?” She too remembered the fateful Packard.
“If whoever it is wrecks that car,” Junior threatened as he waited for Roy Vachon’s office to answer. “If he wrecks the Caddy like that asshole did my Packard, so help me I’ll kill him!”
“You won’t have to,” Marvin said. “The last thief killed himself.”
“Sheriff? This is Marvin Ivy Jr.,” said Junior. “I’m calling from Mattagash to report a stolen car. A 1969 cream-colored Cadillac. It’s heading toward you.” There was a long pause as Junior listened to Roy Vachon. Pearl and Marvin squeezed in close to his ear for immediate information, but Junior turned away from them, cradling the phone.
“This has happened before,” Junior said. “In 1959. Chester Gifford, from here in Mattagash, stole my Packard and wrecked it. And you can almost bet that it’s another Gifford driving this time, too. I want that car, Sheriff, before it happens again. What? What do you mean, can’t I keep track of my cars?”
***
Randy Ivy pulled into Watertown’s limits and passed the old customhouse looming on the left, marking the entrance into Canada, where the friendly sign announced BIENVENU! But Randy declined the invitation, and Canada slept on, its lights curled along the other side of the river like little stars, unaware that Lola and Randy and their nits could have swung a left onto the steel-green bridge and invaded their territory.
“I got two sisters who’ll just love you,” Randy was telling Lola, as Roy Vachon pulled out from the shadows of the customshouse and blasted the creamy Cadillac with a wave of flashing blue light.
“Balls!” said Randy. “It’s the pigs! Did I mention that I lost my license last month?”
THE LAST BARN BUILDER, YO-HO-HO, AND A BOTTLE OF RUM: BRUCE SEES DOG DAYS IN MAY
“I predicted this mess when they took the snow fences down too early. We’ll be lucky if an avalanche don’t bury us all.”
—Girdy Monihan, town pessimist, to fellow punch servers at Amy Joy’s wedding reception, May 1, 1969
Albert Pinkham drove the three hundred yards from the Mattagash gym to his motel in a zigzaggedy line, doing his best to follow the last set of tire tracks before the snow filled them in. It was just after eleven, but he had abandoned the party an hour earlier than everyone else. The full effect of the rum, the sweaty closeness of dancing bodies all around him, the reverberating gossipy words of the women, had caused a notion to go to his brain. There was a very good chance, Albert realized, that he was drunk.
Back at the gymnasium door, Albert had steadied himself to gaze around at the snowy lumps in the yard, the camouflaged pickups. There were only six pickups parked about, with their hollow boxes filling up quietly with snow. The rest were cars, and even though he was smoldering with Puerto Rican rum, Albert Pinkham could still tell snowy pickups from snowy cars.
Bruce watched the road carefully. Albert knew that if he veered too far to the dangerous right Bruce would bark loudly and snap him back to attention. But he managed to keep the weaving pickup on the road that wound away from the gymnasium and on toward the welcoming Albert Pinkham Motel sign, now layered in snow. Warm yellow lights burst out of number 1, the Ivy castle these past few days.
“Spoiled sons of bitches,” Albert muttered to Bruce, and pulled the trusty rum bottle from its wiry nest beneath the seat. He drank a long drink from it, then passed the bottle over to Bruce, who turned away from the smell to stare out the window at the snow-tipped trees.
“Oh, excuse me,” said Albert. “I forgot. You don’t drink.” Albert snorted laughter through his nose and Bruce whined expectantly. He had seen Albert Pinkham, his master, in such condition only a dozen times in their ten-year relationship. Sparse as they were, Bruce disliked these times. Once, Albert had even passed out on the sofa, after Kevin Craft’s marriage, before filling Bruce’s water bowl and leaving him a healthy serving of chunky IGA-brand dog food. When Albert Pinkham got drunk, Bruce was subjected to a dog’s life.
“The old barn builder,” Albert whispered. “Ain’t no one anywhere today can build a barn to match the ones that old son of a bitch built.” His eyes misted. “Ain’t no one even wants a goddamn barn anymore.” He struggled with the door handle, and the door flew open so smoothly that Albert teetered out after it. He launched headfirst into the snow, where he felt the quick, heavy impact of the ground against his temple. It didn’t hurt a bit.
“But it’s gonna hurt like hell in the morning,” Albert joked to Bruce, who had jumped, whining, to the rescue. Bruce licked his owner’s face, licked away the fragile flakes and the little red trail of blood that had popped like a spring from beneath the skin of Albert’s temple.
“Ha ha,” Albert giggled, and tried to lift an arm to push the dog away. “Ha ha ha. Bruce, don’t, boy! That tickles.”
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