by Annie Proulx
Delphine’s elaborate upsweep of glossy hair, the pouf of curled bangs became a crooked side part, straggling hair held back with a plastic barrette in the shape of a seahorse. Oh how she talked and complained. If only there was some money, she said, if only she had not married him, if only she could be a child again.
He didn’t have patience. It was easier to give her a slap and tell her to shut up, to slam out the door when she sat weeping at the table, the ragged line of flesh-toned slip dipping below the hem of her cotton dress. She had a nervous cough, and despite his reminders of her place, kept at him day and night, begging him to cross the border, saying, there’s a chance there, maybe, oh I know the Depression is there, but my brother says the sawmills are still running, some of them, there’s more there than here, here there’s nothing! She held out her thin arm to make the point—not enough to eat, that was it. And her hand grazing her belly, all women did that, the argument of the belly that a man couldn’t win. Her brother, who hovered over their talk like the ghost of an ancestor, had a job in a box mill in Maine. She wrote to him, asked if there was a chance at a job for Charles. Not much, came the answer, but maybe something part time. Maybe. If Charles wasn’t choosy. He would have to take what was available, it was all a gamble, have to learn to talk American. They could stay in the brother’s house for a few weeks.
Random
They crossed the winter border on a back road through the woods late at night. Her brother, Indian-looking face sour between wrenched smiles, was waiting on the other side, guided them to a nearby house to warm themselves for half an hour before the final leg of the journey—a hovel, really, a tiny fingernail of a stranger’s house in the wastes of snow, the stovepipe shooting sparks into the night. They each drank a cup of bitter coffee, dirty children peeping from behind a torn blanket, and went on with the brother in a nail-sprung sled pulled by two horses.
Both Delphine and Charles found the dark cedar swamp through which they passed terrifying and immense. To Delphine the heavy scent from the trees was the smell of illness, of vapors and poultices, and the wind soughing through the needles was the sinister sound of the limitless forest. Charles recognized his brother-in-law’s reluctance to have them, burned with humiliation that he had married into a half-breed family unknowingly. He whispered angrily to Delphine. She denied Indian blood, her brother was dark-complexioned, that’s all. Beyond the shuddering exhalations of the horses, the squeaking thuds of hooves on the packed snow, the hissing pines, there was resentful silence.
The box mill
They tried to fit their lives into the place—the brother’s crowded house, the rough commands in American and chopped-up French. As soon as they had enough money they rented a low-ceilinged shack lit by kerosene lamps. They took possession on a biting-cold day. Charles pushed open the door with his foot and stepped in, said mais non! and dropped his armful of stove wood. Delphine, behind him, carrying the baby, saw the decaying carcass of a dead hanged cat against the wall, the plaster clawed to the lath where it had struggled to escape.
Delphine chopped ice from the brook every morning and hauled water, slipping on the icy path, slamming into the kitchen drenched and weeping, swearing oaths that she would keep her children clean if it killed her. She was repulsed by the Irish family who lived out by the dump in a hut built of Triton Motor Oil cans, ignorant immigrants who sewed their children into their clothes in the autumn and peeled the gummed rags off in June.
A year passed, another, then two more and with the twins they had six children. They stayed in Random, afraid to make a move after Delphine’s brother, whom Charles now called Chief Warbonnet, went to Rhode Island to work in the woolen mills; some of his children were old enough to bring home a pay packet. So they were alone in the alien forest. Charles cursed the filthy, freezing, fly-infested country, was sick with longing for his old, lost life, the streets and the music, the wine. He cursed Jo Privat who had all the lucky breaks.
If hell was a great fiery-hot music hall, he thought, where untuned instruments scraped and shrieked in diabolic cacophony, all chaos and noise and maimed devils capering, then entering the box mill was like stepping into l’inferne through a side door. The machinery boomed and rattled, metal ground against screaming metal, moving belts roared overhead, the air filled with fine dust. One got used to it or left. The Yankee foreman watched him at his planing machine, the boards screeching through. Dollar and a half a day for fifteen hours of work and lucky to have it. Then he was too tired for anything but shoveling food into his mouth and sleep. But Saturday night he would drink and quarrel, then strike, then mount Delphine. It was, he said to her cruelly, just for relief. Only a blind man could desire her, a blind man with a clothespin on his nose and gloves on his hands, for she stank and her skin was as rough as that of a crocodile. It was necessary to show her he was someone to reckon with. On Sunday afternoon he killed his hangover with more whiskey—there was no wine in this lousy country—and at these times he got out the accordion and tried “Honeysuckle Rose” with fingers stiff from handling boards, dreaming of the clubs and the cobbles gleaming under the streetlights in the rain.
Random was proof of his black star. He had been duped and cheated all his days since his cursed mother had twisted the wire hangers tight to hold his arms at his sides and slapped him to the edge of the quay and into the greasy Seine, he had been forced to Québec where they masticated the language into a sodden porridge, tricked—yes, tricked and trapped by wily redskins—into an unsavory marriage, lured to Maine, a brutally provincial cul-de-sac, with false information. He had another proof in the spring of 1937 when the planer sheared off three fingers of his right hand, leaving the index finger partially severed and, in a few days, fat and green with infection. The doctor arrived at two in the morning and after a squinting look said the kerosene lamp was worthless and he couldn’t see anything. He went out and drove his shock-sprung Buick up to the kitchen window and, in the headlight glare, examined the remaining finger.
“Got to come off.”
Charles couldn’t understand how it had happened; it had simply occurred in a moment indistinguishable from a million others that had passed safely.
He recovered slowly, his stubbed fingers a raw sensitive pink. They were on the dole, a box of food each week—weevily flour, a can of lard and a small sack of beans. The box mill folded suddenly and everyone was out of work, robbed of their last week’s pay because the owner skipped with the money. Families slank away in the night, heading south to Woonsocket, Pawtucket, Manchester, for the mills of woolen, cotton, silk, shoes, where relatives already in place could help.
Charles cursed his life, and his morose nature, sanded to the quick by difficulties, exposed a sublayer of permanent rage. He tried once after the accident to play the accordion upside down and backward, with the left hand pressed into service, but his own clumsiness made him wild and he shoved le maudit instrument into the stove to punish it, crammed and hit with the poker, did it damage, but it wouldn’t fit the firebox. Delphine yanked it out and threw it in the yard. Burning like that, it made too much smoke. In the morning she brought it in again, wrapped it in brown paper and put it on a shelf.
That winter Delphine walked in her sleep, walked barefoot in the snow. When she came back inside, her feet were like red wax, the hem of her nightdress clotted with frozen crystals. On a night of red snow under the aurora borealis Charles told her he was going down to Bangor the next day to look for work, that special job the one-handed man imagines. He left the shack early in the morning. By the end of the week she knew he was gone for good, back to France, with a life and a family and a half-learned language to forget. The baby, Dolor, was two years old.
(Back in France when the Second World War broke out, Charles acted as a courier for the Resistance, was seriously injured in a fall from his bicycle on a moonless night, yet crawled ten miles on hands and knees to deliver the message which was, after all, of little importance. He abruptly switched allegiance to the coll
aborationists, took part in anti-zazou raids, standing in the shadows outside swing nightclubs with his pair of clippers, eager to scalp the greasy pompadours of the callow, egotistical youths as they came out into the streets, exhausted from dancing “J’ai un clou dans ma chaussure.” Call that music? It wasn’t jazz, that swing, nothing but noise, the dancers stupid with their popping eyes and snapping fingers, jerking their arms and leaping about like fleas on griddles. After the war he hung around nightclubs for years, running errands, sweeping out rest rooms in the predawn hours, enough for the six bottles of vin blanc he drank daily. In 1963 he was still working the clubs, still sweeping, and ended polishing faucets at the Golf Drouot Club, fell under a sink with a heart attack and died surrounded by the synthetic-stockinged ankles of a circle of young yé-yés.)
What was she supposed to do? She wrote to her brother in Providence although she knew he had moved south not only for work but to get away from the burden of the Gagnon family. Then come on, he answered sourly. I’ll send the money for the bus. But you can’t bring all the children. Life is difficult for everyone. Only the two oldest. They can work. And you can take employment as well.
Birdnest
In Old Rattle Falls the finest building was Birdnest, an ornate mansion built for a nineteenth-century railroad baron, the facade crenellated and bow-windowed, topped with an octagonal widow’s walk, fronted by a porte cochère and two immense Chinese urns, girdled by a twenty-foot-wide porch. In 1926 the town seized Birdnest for back taxes and turned it over to the county to be used as an orphanage. Those tall rooms papered with imported William Morris wallpaper, the ceilings worked in wedding-cake plaster, the carved linen-fold panels, stained glass, walnut banisters, the ballroom, all were converted and partitioned into orphanage appointments: dormitories furnished with metal beds, ballroom transformed into a potato-smelling cafeteria, parquet floor painted grey. Metal file cabinets crowded the breakfast room. The linen closet became a punishment cell. The gardens, designed by Calvert Vaux, turned rank and wild, with Virginia creeper smothering the ornamental trees, branches littered the marble stairs to the grotto, ash saplings crowded the flower beds, and the perennial bulbs were eaten by skunks.
He was two years old and at first he cried for the shack and the familiar smell of the wood stove and his mother’s lean, hard hands, the sound of her nervous cough. Even at this time, barely out of infancy, hours of depression visited him when the only thing possible was to sleep or lie still with his eyes closed, inhaling, exhaling, breathing in, breathing out, in, out, slow, slow, slow.
His twin sisters, Lucette and Lucille, and an older brother, Lucien, were in another part of the building though he did not know it. He spent his days with the babies and toddlers, long, long hours in a wooden crib, in a row of cribs, each with its caged child, rocking, babbling, wailing, head-banging. Two women came in the early morning, changed diapers and bedding, handed out bottles of bluish milk, saying little and handling the children as though they were billets of firewood. Dolor had been weaned for a year but discovered the solace of the gummy rubber nipple. For a single hour in the morning the babies were carried into a large room—the morning room where the railroad baron’s wife wrote her dull letters in post–Civil War times—and there put on a grimy square of carpet to play with wooden blocks so worn the corners were rounded and few traces of paint remained. Running was forbidden. The sound of French receded; all the new words were American. Sick children stayed in their crib prisons. Birdnest was a place of orphans and adult women. The only men who came there were the doctor, the county inspector, and once a month a Pentecostal minister who shouted Jesus, Jesus, until the youngest ones cried. The older children went to Sunday school in the church bus, a stubby green vehicle with canvas flaps on the sides, rolled up in summer, a wonderful outing. The bus creaked down the long hill and through the town past the SLOW sign changed to read VICTORY SPEED 35 MILES when the war began, and over the gravel road along the river. In the spring they gaped at the huge cakes of ice thrown up on the banks.
The population of the orphanage changed, a few children reclaimed by mothers or a mother’s relatives. Fathers never came there. Some children went to the hospital, and some to the morgue. Some children were adopted, indeed Dolor himself was adopted for a few months when he was six, but the family decided to move south when the man got war work and returned him to the orphanage. They said he was a quiet child. What he remembered of the time with them was speckled chickens who ran forward when he threw handfuls of cracked corn on the ground, the smell of their hot, louse-crammed feathers and their clucking voices asking him questions in poultry language. He answered them with similar words. He also remembered the man of the house sitting at a player piano whose keys rose and fell by themselves as though an invisible musician sat in his lap, while he sang in a thick voice, “Oh bury me not …”
In school he was a small child on the edge of things, too timid to speak, hesitating even to stare or watch openly how others did things. He was fastened tightly into himself, sometimes made tiny smiles and nods over imagined conversations. The best thing was the Weekly Reader, a real little newspaper; it made him feel tremendously grown up to hold and read it. In Current Events he sat facing a cardboard sign, GIVE IT YOUR BEST. Sometimes he was allowed to fold the flag because he was quiet.
Birdnest was the first stop the school bus made, ten minutes from the school, so there was no reason to say anything to anyone, just file out of the bus with the grey bag the county gave each of them for books and lunch, and always, in front of him, walked a girl with blond braids tinted a strange green color on the ends where they had been dipped in the inkwell until the school district abandoned ink and everyone had to bring a ballpoint pen from home. Birdnest passed out pens that read LeBlanc’s Mortuary on the side. Fat William, wheezing with asthma, often afflicted with earache, was his best friend in the fifth grade. The Birdnest children stuck together. On the bus there was an older boy whose pants were too short; the others called him Highwaters or Frenchie. He was always fighting and his nose ran.
“That guy’s your brother, and he’s bad,” Fat William told Dolor, who began to watch for a sign of recognition, but Frenchie looked past and never said anything to him though he could speak French a mile a second and swear terrible curses, said Fat William, and then he wasn’t on the bus anymore, gone, and no one knew where.
(The twin sisters, Lucette and Lucille, had been adopted their first year in Birdnest by a couple who moved to Rochester, New York. In 1947, Lucette, who sang “White Christmas” in a pure voice and suffered from a perplexing chronic skin disorder, entered the hospital where she was injected with plutonium in a secret medical experiment. In 1951 she died of leukemia. She was seventeen years old yet weighed only sixty-three pounds.)
After Fat William’s worst asthma attack a lopsided woman appeared and claimed him as grandson; now the one Dolor watched was Winks, the school clown, a sore-eyed kid with curly, dirt-colored hair, two or three years ahead of him. Mugging, reeling and pretending he was drunk, making squeaking noises in class, tickling girls, rubbing his shoes on the floor and tapping nervously during tests, the pencil, his feet, fingertips all going at once, he was a one-man percussion section at the back of the class.
“Winks!” the teacher barked and he stopped for a few minutes, then started again.
Dolor stood behind him in the lunch line and as Winks turned and looked down the seething lunchroom, searching for a place to sit, Dolor saw chaos in his eyes, could see right through the thin circle of blue surrounding the distended pupil, examine a naked anxiety that repelled. He turned away, pretended interest in the cook’s stainless-steel ladle and the orange gruel punctuated by minuscule cubes of turnip, but through his eyelashes watched Winks swagger down the aisle between the tables bopping kids on heads and shoulders, slopping his milk and going pah, pah, pah, pah with his mouth.
Standing in the back rows and holding silence did not save him. In the fourth grade the older boys fell up
on his name.
“Hey, Dollar! You must be rich! Give me some money!”
“Doughnut! Hey, Doughnut, how’s your hole!”
Mrs. Breath, the director of Birdnest, tapped her fountain pen on a note from the school.
“You know, I think it would be better for you if you had a regular boy’s name. Which do you prefer, Frank or Donald?”
“Frank,” he whispered. And so he was renamed and another fragment of self fell away like a flake of rust.
A disappointing inheritance
When he was eighteen he finished Old Rattle Falls High School but did not go to the graduation ceremony. The thought of having to climb up the wooden steps, cross the stage and shake the principal’s hand, then grasp the diploma, gave him a blinding headache, made his joints ache intolerably.
The mirror reflected an oval face, dark hair parted on the left, brown eyes under black bushy brows, a long nose with a slight bulb at the tip. His ears were well proportioned and set close to his head, the horizontal mouth somewhat full and unsmiling. He made himself smile, showed the crooked teeth, the high cheekbones and skin very pale under the black hair. An arrow of black hair descended his torso. He had neither photographs nor memories with which to compare his image, and he did not expect anything from anyone. He was free to leave Birdnest.