I AM NOT SURE if I thought of this last night, but now I wonder if part of the reason my stepfather never told me this story before was because of that exact moment. Such a small one, really, this interaction between the man who was to become my father and the man who was to become my stepfather, but it would have been enough to make my stepfather hesitate in telling it to me when I was younger.
And that makes me wonder if I am doing justice by my stepfather, if when I tell these stories to my own children they will understand what a fine man Father Earl was.
It is easy enough with my grandfather and my father. They were, as I’ve said before, like gods among the forest, a sort of living folklore. Something that I in particular, as a man of the cloth, should know better than to believe in.
And yet. And yet. And yet, of course, how can I not believe in them, how can I separate the raw, natural—supernatural—Sawgamet that was already dying when I was a child from the settled land which I now occupy?
And how do I place my stepfather among that mythology so that my daughters can understand that despite the fact that he did not settle the land, did not work the cuts or run the river, he was, nevertheless, very much part of my own story?
But it is not that simple. Nothing ever is. My daughters can just as easily look at me and see the ways in which I did not follow my stepfather’s path, the ways in which I am much more like my grandfather or my father. Or maybe if I can figure out how to untangle these stories, how to tell them properly, my daughters will be able to understand the things that brought me to where I am now: in the study of my stepfather’s house, waiting for the moment when my mother will breathe her last.
One of the things I do know is that on that first day of winter in Sawgamet for my stepfather and his wife, Father Earl cannot have known how entangled his life was to become with the threads of my grandfather’s and my father’s lives.
AS MY FATHER MOVED closer to the woodpile, he looked up and saw Father Earl. “Morning, there,” my father said. “How you doing, Father?”
“Well, thank you,” Father Earl said, glad to see it was my father and not one of the other Catholics. So many of the loggers kept their distance, as if he could not possibly understand them as men because he did not speak their bastardized French. My father was not that kind of man, or perhaps it was because he thought of Father Earl as the man who had married him to my mother. Either way, Father Earl had found it hard to believe that a Catholic would allow him to perform a marriage; while he knew that it was necessary for survival, the men of Sawgamet showed a certain moral flexibility that he sometimes found to be uncomfortable. He supposed he might begin to understand it with time.
My stepfather told me that, as he looked at my father, he thought that my parents would start having children soon. A presentient thought, though looking back I can count the pages of the calendar and realize that my mother would already have been early in her pregnancy. My stepfather did not know this, of course, but he could read the seasons; in Sawgamet, with the snow and the cold, he thought it would be that time of year, and there would be many families that would have children sometime in the fall.
Now, though, the men were frantic. There was little time between the end of logging and the float and the beast of winter for them to prepare for the months of short days. Father Earl’s own wife had been anxious, canning and sewing, making him a new pair of gloves from thick leather and fur.
He wondered if his wife was anxious enough. When they had left her parents’ house, when she had agreed to come to Sawgamet, he could not make her see why she should favor thick-spun cotton over lace, why an extra quilt was more important than an extra gown. She had been pleased when she discovered that Franklin kept some canned foods. She thought Father Earl had been too narrow with their needs: wood, flour, salted meat, and beans. “It will be a longer winter than necessary if you do all our provisioning,” she told him.
My father motioned with his ax toward the woodpile. The handle had a burn scar and he gripped the ax with a sureness that my stepfather was beginning to think of as something that was necessitated by the woods and the brutality of Sawgamet. “Would you like me to help you split some more wood, Father? There’s a snow coming, that much I’m sure of,” he said, and then he raised his ax, as if he were challenging God to prove him wrong.
“Thank you, Pierre, but I’ll be fine. I’ve got plenty of wood split. I just need to move some to the porch. Besides,” my stepfather said to my father, trying a clumsy wink, “I can always borrow from the woodpile at the church if I need.”
“Keep a lantern lit,” my father said.
“Oh, it’s not so dark as that, at least not yet.”
“In the window,” my father said. “If you’re going to be out in this, keep a light going so you can find your way home.”
“It’s only a few feet,” Father Earl said.
“Men get turned around easy,” my father replied. “Don’t let the qallupilluit call you down. Don’t listen to them if they call for you.”
Father Earl started to smile, and then he realized that my father wasn’t joking. “I thought they lived in the sea ice.”
He shrugged. “It’s an old tale, and we hear these things only the way we want to hear them. I don’t know that they tell us all of it. But you’d best stay away from the river in weather like this. They don’t look like witches all the time, the qallupilluit.”
“I’m a man of the cloth, Pierre.”
“One with a wife,” my father said. “Keep a light.” He waited until my stepfather nodded in assent and then he gave a brief nod himself and started down the trail again.
MY STEPFATHER TOLD ME that when he watched my father walk away, it seemed as if my father towered over him, though he knew that my father was not a particularly tall man. Perhaps it was the solidness of him, the knotted sinews, the implicit availability of violence. Father Earl finally allowed himself to smile once my father was out of sight. The Indian children’s stories that were told throughout Sawgamet did not scare him, though he understood the allure of the qallupilluit; sea witches were more effective than any parent’s warnings.
Father Earl carried an armful of wood onto the porch and then looked up at the sky again. It had gotten darker, dark enough that he was not sure how long it would be before he was willing to be tricked into believing it was already night. Through the window he saw the shadow of his wife moving through the house, or at least he thought it was the shadow of his wife; the fire in the hearth cast light and darkness with equal measure. He brushed some bark and dirt off his sleeve and then opened the door. Whatever else he might wonder, Father Earl believed that my father seemed to understand the weather in some way that Father Earl did not.
“That was quick,” his wife said. “Would you light the fire in the church for me, then? I still haven’t put the bread up.”
“No,” he said, “I’ve still to put wood on the porch. I’m just putting a lantern in the window.” He did not say why, and as he moved the lantern to sit on his desk, his wife did not ask him. Even after less than a year of marriage, she was used to him by now, understood that he had a reason for everything he did. That’s not to say that she did not disagree with him, did not read through his sermons and mark them up. If he was honest about it, he knew that she was smarter than him, had certainly had a more rigorous education, alternating between the tutors and the girls’ school where he had briefly taught and she had picked him to be her husband.
“That’s fine, then,” she said. “I’m thinking I might try to hurry down to DeBonnier’s, to buy some sugar. I’d meant to do it yesterday. If this storm is really to be all that we’re making it out to be, I’d rather be stuck in here with a pie or two.” She stepped over to him and grabbed his open coat with her hands, pulling him toward her. He bent down and let her kiss him lightly on his lips, rubbed his nose against hers. “And that way I won’t have to listen to you complain about how bitter the tea is.”
They had argued about i
t once, during the first week or two after they had come to Sawgamet. He did not think it right that they use her father’s money. “I’m given enough for us to live on,” he said.
“No,” she said, “enough not to die on. There’s no shame in it. My father came to it honestly, and besides, I don’t think an extra sack of flour, a bolt of cloth, is anything to get up in arms about. I said I’d live with you in Christ, but I’m not living with you in rags.”
If he were a different man, he would have settled the issue, would have insisted, but if he were that kind of man, she never would have married him. And she was not that kind of woman. She did not say any of it with the bite or malice that he had heard other women use, and he knew that she was right. It was only that she did not limit it to an extra sack of flour or a bolt of cloth. She had bought up much of DeBonnier’s expensive canned foods, had ordered a new mattress and bureau to be brought in from Vancouver.
“I saw Pierre just now,” he said. “He warned me of the qallupilluit.”
“He believes in them?” She shook her head. “Why a Christian would believe in witches is beyond me.”
“He says that they’ll promise anything to get a man under the water.”
“Even sugar?”
“We can go without sugar for a few days,” my stepfather said, turning away. The tea they had been able to get was almost unbearably bitter without the soft cut of sugar, but it bothered him that she could not do without it for a short time. “Light the fire in the church and then stay inside the house.”
“We need candles, too. I’m happy enough for an excuse to spend time in bed with you,” she said, and then paused to smile, though she knew it discomforted him when she spoke so openly. “But I don’t relish sitting in the dark and just listening to the wind and the brush of the snow on the roof.”
“You can pull your chair a little closer to the fire, that’s light enough,” he said, but he smiled and touched his finger to her cheek to let her know that he was joking. “After the storm we’ll go down to DeBonnier’s.”
OUTSIDE, MY STEPFATHER looked up at the sky and he thought again of bruises. He wondered if he were only tall enough to touch the clouds if they would split like overripe fruit, if that would make them spill their seed. As he had the thought, the first few flakes started to fall, drifting and lazy. He watched them settle on the ground, expecting them to melt as they hit brush and leaves, but even though this was the first snow it had been cold for a few weeks now. The snow stayed where it fell. He had not said anything to his wife, because he knew that she was dreading this first winter, but he had been waiting. Snow like a Communion. He bent over to pick up wood.
He made several dozen trips from the back of the house to the front. He stopped occasionally to shake out his arms. When he was done, the porch was half filled, enough for a few weeks. Too much, he knew. Father Earl did not want to admit it to his wife, but my father and his talk of witches had taken him aback. The stacked wood and the lantern in the window were things he could understand.
My stepfather took one last trip to the woodpile behind the house, this time for an armload to bring inside. As he pulled wood off the pile he heard the door of the house shut hard. He called out to his wife—he was almost done; he could light the fire in the church before he came inside—but she didn’t hear him.
She was already out of sight by the time he came around to the porch. The snow was coming down hard, moving from an idea in the sky to the beginnings of a blanket on the ground with almost no notice. He stomped his feet on the steps before gingerly balancing the wood in one arm while he reached out with the other to open the door. A thin line of snow spilled off the shoulder of his coat, some down his collar and some down his arm, hitting his hand. He shook it off his hand and then opened the latch.
The smell of yeast and cooked meat enveloped him. He saw the large pot hanging over the fire, and he wondered if she intended for him to eat a thick stew for his lunch—hunks of meat and potatoes—or if it was something thinner and meaner, a soup, a few small chunks of venison just to hint at what his wife was capable of cooking.
She had been odd about food the last few days, alternating between cheeseparing dinners of bread and onions and lavish meals that would not have been out of place on feast days, as if she could not decide if the winter was something to be feared or embraced. Since she had realized there was a child growing inside her she had been easy with her father’s money. Not only would they not go hungry this winter, they would eat better than anybody else in Sawgamet, he suspected. There were still items that she had wanted to add to their larder in quantity—sugar being not the least—but my great-uncle had assured her that his store would be stocked to last through to the spring when the snow would melt enough for horses to get in from Havershand.
My stepfather had been quiet about his wife’s dithering. Perhaps if she kept on with the feast or famine, but for a few days it was almost amusing to him. She was normally so surefooted, so insistent about what she wanted. He was not sure if it was something else that he needed to learn about her, or if it was a by-product of her pregnancy. Either way, she would settle down once the child was born. He was glad that she had become with child so quickly. She needed it, he thought. She needed the weight of motherhood to teach her what it meant to be a priest’s wife. Not that the life of a priest’s wife was the same here as it would have been had they stayed in Ottawa, as her mother and father had wanted.
He resisted his urge to peek in the pot to see what was cooking, and instead hung his coat on the peg by the door and settled back down at his desk. He should have time to finish the sermon before he needed to dress for the wedding. He had quickly gotten into the habit of wearing the same rough, heavy work clothes that the other men wore in the cuts, changing into collar only when he was actually in the church.
It took him a few minutes to restart his thoughts, as if he had to rejoin himself in midspeech. He loved delivering the sermon, and knew that was a weakness. He had been told many times by Father Barns that he should not take so much pride in his role as a leader of the flock. He was only given the chance to speak at all because of the words of Jesus Christ. But he could not help himself. He was good at it.
“He giveth the snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.” Looking out the window at the solid curtain that seemed to have been lowered in front of him, he thought that perhaps Job would have been more appropriate than the Psalm: “Out of the south cometh the whirlwind; and cold out of the north. By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the waters is straightened.”
SOMETHING ACRID TUGGED at his nose. The bread, burning, he realized. He wrapped his hands in cloth and then reached in and deftly plucked the loaf out. It was not too bad, just singed on the bottom, nothing that could not be scraped off. He had not realized his wife had been gone so long, though. He thought he had only been sitting and writing for a moment or two.
The house had grown dark. Not much light came in through the window, though the lantern on his desk and the fire helped. It should not have taken her that long to light the fire in the church and then come home.
He threw three more logs onto the fire, fastened his coat around himself, and then slowly pulled on the heavy new gloves that she had made for him. He opened the door and almost staggered back, surprised by how much the weather had turned in the time he had been writing.
Even with the covered porch, snow blew against him, small, sharp pieces, like sand, like sugar, stinging his cheeks and eyes, blurring his vision. He could not see past the bottom of the steps, and the dimness was pervasive. Almost as an afterthought, he stepped back in and took the lantern from the table. He would be no help to her if he could not lead them home, or worse, if he spent the night wandering around like a lost soul. He closed the door tightly behind him, careful once again to make sure the latch shot home. The idea of the fire breathing out heat into the small house cheered him; while it was not the sort of house that his wife had been used
to, it would keep them warm; it would be a welcome place to return to from out of this storm.
Squinting, he could barely see what lay in front of him. There, the man-sized boulder beside the path, already covered in white, and over there, the unbroken geometry of the church. The well-worn path between the house and the church, fifty paces, more or less, was gone.
He hunched over, burrowing his head between his shoulders, reaching up and tugging his hat down further over his ears, trying to protect the exposed skin of his face from the biting snow. That was what it felt like, he thought, like a plague of biting insects swarming against him, and as he had the thought, he realized that was also the way the falling snow sounded.
He had always thought of snow as something quiet, as something that drifted silently from the sky and lay in dampening blankets on the ground, the trees. It would make a solid whoosh and whomp as it fell from trees and roofs in sheets, but it was not supposed to sound like this. This snow hissed. It crackled against the small house, against his coat, his pants, against the trees. The snow reminded him of fire, of locusts, of devouring destruction.
He stayed bent over, and when he looked up, he realized that all he could see was trees and whiteness. The church was gone. A magic trick. A miracle. He could see the boulder ahead of him. Behind him, he could still see the house, but even though he was barely a dozen paces gone, it was already shimmering, ready to disappear just like the church. He held up the lantern, as if that would help, and then lowered himself into the storm again, confident that his initial line would hold true. The church was not like the stone and stained-glass cathedrals that his wife’s parents had envisioned, but it was large enough to hold a hundred men and women, large enough that he would not pass by it in the artificial night.
The snow lapped his ankles; he could not understand how it had come so quickly. It had been cold for days, for weeks, and they had known that winter was coming, but still, here it was, like an unexpected and unwelcome visitor. And suddenly Father Earl had the image of winter circling like a wolf, waiting until his back was turned. He still could not see the church, and he had to stifle the impulse to run. He could turn around, he thought, but when he looked behind him, the house had disappeared.
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