A Northern Light (16 page)

"I am proud of you, Mathilde, for all dese test you take. Very proud," Fifty said, as I opened the door to the cylinder stove.

"Thank you, Uncle Fifty." I was pleased that he said it, but his words made me sad, too. I wished my father could have told me he was proud of me.

"What you do now wid all dese test? You be teechair?"

I shook my head, put two logs in the stove, and closed the door. "No, Uncle Fifty. You need more schooling for that."

He thought about that, then said, "Why you don't go for dis schooling? You plaintee smart girl. I bet you da smartest girl in da whole nord contree. Dis schooling, it cost money?"

"The school doesn't. But the train ticket and clothes and books do."

"How much? Twentee dollair? Thirtee? I give you da money."

I smiled at him. His offer was so kind, but I knew he'd spent most of his stake, if not all of it, on the supper and our extravagant presents. He probably only had five or ten dollars left to his name, all of which he'd need to get himself back into the woods to his next job. "Good night, Uncle Fifty," I said, getting up to kiss his cheek. "I'm glad you've come to see us. We missed you."

"You tink I don't have it, but you see," he said, winking at me. "I don't just tell de tale. Not always."

I was back in the kitchen when Barney started whining, so I opened the back door and let him out. "You stay out of the garden, you hear?" I told him. I waited till Pa came back in, then I made a trip to the outhouse myself. Barney was waiting for me by the shed steps when I'd finished. I got him settled, then made my way upstairs to my own bed.

Lawton was the one who discovered that voices in the parlor carry right through the wall into the stairwell. The knowledge came in handy around Christmas, when we wanted to find out if there would be any presents. I could hear my father and uncle still talking as I walked up the steps.

"Francis, you spent your entire stake, didn't you? On the supper and the presents and this bottle here, and God knows how much whiskey wherever you were last night."

Pa's voice was disapproving.
Why, oh why is he always
so sour?
I wondered. A wonderful supper and presents, and he still can't say anything nice.

"No, I deed not."

"I don't believe you."

"Well den, look here, Meester Poleeseman..." I couldn't hear anything for a few seconds, then, "...a bankair's draft for wan hondred dollair. What you say now, eh?"

"A banker's draft?" Pa said.

"A banker's draft?" I whispered.
My goodness, he really does have the money,
I thought. He has a hundred dollars and he's going to give me some of it and I am going to college after all. I'm going to Barnard. I'm going to New York City.

"Dat's right. Da boss, he give us our money one-half in cash, one-half in dis paper."

"I'd say he's looking out for you, Fran. You going to hold on to it for a change? Put it in a bank instead of pissing it all away in some Utica whorehouse?"

"I have someting in mind for it. You be very surprise."

Silence. Then, "Francis, you didn't go making any woman promises, did you? That gal up to Beaver River, the one you proposed to on your last spree, she still thinks you're going to marry her. Asks me when you're coming back every time I see her."

"You wait and see what I do. Dat's all I say. In five, six day, I go to Old Forge and cash dis paper. Den you be surprise, indeed. Now, Michel ... where is dat whiskey? where da hell she go?"

I nearly flew the rest of the way up the staircase. I hadn't told anyone in my family about Barnard. I hadn't seen the point, since I didn't think I would ever get to go, but right then, I wanted to tell Abby powerfully bad. I couldn't, though. We all slept in the same room. Lou and Beth would hear and they both have big mouths. One of them would tell Pa for sure, and I didn't want him to know until I was ready to go. Until I was sure of a room in Miss Annabelle Wilcox's home and I had my things packed and thirty dollars in my pocket. Pa had knocked me out of my chair for buying a composition book. He'd swung a peavey at Lawton. I wasn't going to give him the chance to swing one at me. I pictured the look on his face as I told him I was leaving, and I was glad at the imagining. I was. He'd be furious, but only because he was losing a pair of hands. He wouldn't miss me one bit, but that was all right. I wouldn't miss him, either.

As I burrowed down under the covers in the bed I shared with Lou, I realized it had been such a long, eventful day that I had completely forgotten to look up a word in my dictionary. It was too late now; I'd have to go all the way back downstairs to the parlor to do it and I was too tired. So I made up my own word.
Recouriumphoration. Re
for "again," and
cour
for "courage" and a bit of
triumph
tacked on, too, for good measure.
Maybe it will get into the dictionary one day,
I thought.
And if it does, everyone will know its meaning: to have one's hope restored.

"How about wintergreen hearts, Mattie? Should I get those as well as lemon drops? Abby likes them, too. Lou likes the horehound candy. There's bull's-eyes, too; what about bull's-eyes?"

"Why don't you get a few of each?" I said. "Just stand out of the way, Beth, so folks can get around you."

The two of us were on the pickle boat with a dozen other people, tourists mainly. We'd just dropped off four cans of milk and three pounds of butter. We'd received no money for them. Pa had bartered with Mr. Eckler for a side of bacon earlier in the week, and the delivery was payment against it. As I waited for Beth to make her choice, I watched the other people on the boat. A man was buying fishing line. Two girls were picking out postcards. Others were buying groceries for their camps.

When I had bought my composition book from Mr. Eckler a few weeks before, I'd only spent forty-five cents of the sixty cents I'd made picking fiddleheads. I still had fifteen cents that I hadn't given to Pa, and I was using it that afternoon to buy candy for my sisters. Abby had her monthlies and was feeling awfully blue. She'd had the cramp something wicked that morning and had to lie down until it passed, and Pa asked me why she wasn't in the barn milking with the rest of us like he always does because he forgets, and then I had to explain and he got mad at me because it made him embarrassed. Cripes, it wasn't my fault. What did he go and have four girls for?

I thought some lemon drops would be just the thing to cheer Abby up. It would be a
furtive
purchase, as I really should have given the money to Pa, but after he'd hit me, I'd decided I wouldn't.
Furtive,
my word of the day, means doing something in a stealthy way, being sly or surreptitious.
Sneaky
would be another way of putting it. I did not wish to become a sneak, but sometimes one had no choice. Especially when one was a girl and craved something sweet but couldn't say why, and had to wait till no one was looking to wash a bucket of bloody rags, and had to say she was "under the weather" when really she had cramps that could knock a moose over, and had to listen to herself be called "moody" and "weepy" and "difficult" when really she was just fed up with sore bosoms and stained drawers and the fact that she couldn't just live life in the open, swaggering and spitting and pissing up trees like a boy.

That fifteen cents was all the money I had in the world right then, but I felt I could afford to be generous with it. Uncle Fifty had left for Old Forge that morning. He planned to stay there overnight and return on the morning train. I'd have my thirty dollars by dinnertime the next day. He'd only been gone half a day, but we missed him already. It had been wonderful having him with us all week. He pulled stumps and rocks with Pa and helped us with the milking, too. The evening milking, not the morning one. He wasn't very lively most mornings. His head usually hurt him. He perked up as the day went on, though, and at night he made us special desserts—
tarte au sucre,
which is a pie made out of maple sugar; or dried apple fritters with cinnamon; or doughy raisin dumplings boiled in maple syrup. After supper he'd sit down with his whiskey and pour himself glass after glass. The liquid leaped and sparkled as it left the bottles, and once it got into my uncle, it made him sparkle, too. He laughed loudly, and played his harmonica, and told us stories every night, like Scheherezade come to life in our parlor. We couldn't get enough of him. I would watch him as he chased Beth around the kitchen—mimicking the snarls of an angry wolverine, or as he staggered back and forth, knees buckling under the weight of a phantom buck—and find it almost impossible to believe that he was related to my quiet, frowning father.

"I think I'm going to get some coconut drops, too, Mattie," Beth said, still deliberating. "Or maybe some King Leo sticks. Or Necco's."

"All right, just don't be all day," I told her.

I saw the Loomises' buckboard pull up to the dock. Royal was driving. I wondered how he managed to be so handsome no matter what he was doing—plowing, walking, driving, whatever. He looked better dirty and sweaty in a pair of worn trousers and a frayed cotton shirt than most men did when they'd bathed, shaved, and put on a three-piece suit. I thought about the kiss he'd given me, and the thinking alone made me feel warm and swoony. Just like all those silly, fluttery girls in the stories in
Peterson's Magazine.

Royal's mother was with him. They didn't see me. Beth and I were on the far side of the boat. Mrs. Loomis got out, and he handed her down a basket of eggs and a large crock of butter. She boarded the pickle boat and gave them to Mr. Eckler. He gave her a dollar bill in return. She thanked him and returned to the dock.

"All right, I'm ready," Beth said. She'd put her candies in a small brown bag.

"Go pay, then," I said, giving her my money.

She trotted to the back of the boat and handed Charlie Eckler the bag. "I'm going to the circus next week. The one in Boonville," I heard her tell him.

"Are you, dolly?"

"Yes, sir. My uncle promised to take me. He went to Old Forge this morning, but he's coming back tomorrow and then he's going to take me. Me and Lou both."

"Well, you'll have a fine time, I'm sure. That'll be ten cents."

Mr. Eckler asked her if she was going to see the two-headed man and the snake boy. She said she was going to see everything there was to see, her uncle Fifty said she could. I barely heard them. I was watching Royal. He was talking to John Denio, a teamster for the Glenmore. They were nodding and laughing. His smile was as warm as fresh biscuits on a winter morning. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Had someone that handsome really kissed me? I wondered. Or had I dreamed it? I found myself wishing that I was pretty like Martha Miller, so that he would kiss me again someday. And then I wondered if he'd miss me at all when I went away to college. And if maybe he'd want to write me and then I could write him back.

As I continued to moon, his mother climbed back into the buckboard and settled herself. Mr. Denio made small talk with them for a few more minutes, then headed toward the dock to pick up some guests. As soon as he left them, Mrs. Loomis fished in her pocket for the money Mr. Eckler had given her, then handed it to Royal. She said something to him, and he nodded and put the dollar bill in his pocket. And then she turned her head and looked all around herself and caught me watching. Her eyes narrowed, and if eyes could talk, hers would have said, "Mind your own damn business, Mattie Gokey" I thought it was very strange, as I did not care one hoot what Mrs. Loomis did with her egg money.

I watched them head up the drive and across the railroad tracks, and then Beth handed me a nickel change and we jumped down off the boat onto the dock.

"Tell your pa I should have his bacon by tomorrow, Mattie."

"I will, Mr. Eckler. Thanks."

We climbed into our buckboard and I told Pleasant to giddyap, and of course he didn't budge until I told him five more times and finally snapped him a good one with the reins. The ride home was uneventful, but when I turned the buckboard into our drive, I got quite a surprise. There was an automobile in it. A Ford. I knew who it belonged to. I maneuvered Pleasant around it, got the buckboard into the barn and Pleasant into the pasture, then went inside. When I opened the kitchen door, I saw Lou and Abby sitting on the staircase, leaning toward the wall.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Miss Wilcox is in the parlor with Pa," Abby whispered. "She brought your exam results. You got an A-plus on your English literature and composition tests, an A in history, a B in science, and a B-minus in mathematics. Her and Pa are talking about you. She says you have genius in you and that you got into college and that Pa should let you go."

"Jeezum, Matt, I didn't know you had a genius in you," Lou said, wide-eyed. "You kept him hid real good."

Lou's backhanded compliment didn't even register. My heart had sunk to someplace down around my ankles. Miss Wilcox meant well, I knew she did, but I also knew Pa. She'd never get him to say yes; she'd only rile him. Why, oh why, had she come today? Right before my uncle was due to give me the money? Tomorrow I wouldn't need Pa's say-so, because I'd have thirty dollars in my pocket and that was all the say-so anybody needed, but I didn't need him furious at me in the meantime.

I sat down next to Lou on the step below Abby. Beth sat below us and passed out candy as if we were all spectators at some theater show. I had no appetite for sweets just then. I was busy straining my ears, trying to hear what was being said.

"...she's gifted, Mr. Gokey. She has a unique voice. An artist's voice. And she could make something more of herself, much more, if she were allowed—"

"She don't need to make something more. She's fine as she is. There ain't a thing wrong with her."

"She could be a writer, sir. A real one. A good one."

"She's already a writer. She writes stories and poems in them notebooks of hers all the time."

"But she needs the challenge of a real college curriculum, and the guidance of talented teachers, to improve. She needs exposure to emerging voices, to criticism and theory. She needs to be around people who can nurture her talent and develop it."