A Wedding on the Banks (15 page)

Goldie didn't believe a word of it when she heard. Perhaps because Little Vinal, in his emotional state, in his urge to bestow himself with a hunter's prowess since he'd bombed as a lover, had made the story too dramatic.

“If he'd throw that trout back,” Goldie told her sister over the phone, “I might believe him. But if Little Vinal caught a trout in April, he must have been fishing in Vera's Frigidaire.”

But even this distasteful skirmish was kept in hand by the two senior Giffords. Pike dragged Little Pee down the long hill and deposited him on the front porch where he apologized, however angrily, to Little Vinal.

“And say you're sorry you peed on me,” Little Vinal demanded.

“I'm sorry I peed on you,” Little Pee said between clenched teeth.

On the ignominious climb back up the hill, with all the bottom-of-the-hill Giffords burning their eyes into his back, Little Pee was seething.

“I should've shit on him, too,” he said to Priscilla, who had come halfway down the hill for a report on what was said.

Curtain panels moved in the front windows of both Gifford households for nearly an hour. Vera looked up and Goldie looked down. The battle over the Christmas lights might still be waged through their children, but neither woman was getting any relief.

“And they threw your good Sunday shoes into the creek,” Vera added, hoping
that
would spark anger in Vinal. She failed to consider that he might take that anger out on Little Vinal for wearing the shoes in the first place.

“Now that's a shame,” said Vinal, as he headed for the outhouse with a copy of
National
Geographic
that had come home as part of a child's schoolwork. Vinal had developed a sudden interest in the Auca Indians of Ecuador, especially the women. “Now what am I gonna wear to Amy Joy's wedding?” he asked, and disappeared on the well-trodden path.

Oh, every year hath its winter,

And every year hath its rain;

But a day is always coming

When the birds go north again.

Oh, every heart hath its sorrow,

And every heart hath its pain;

But a day is always coming

When the birds go north again.

—Ella Higginson, “When the Birds Go North Again”

The Ivy wedding entourage pulled out of Portland, Maine, in the thin, gray morning as herring gulls oversaw the departure north. The lead car scurried up front with Pearl lounging comfortably in the front seat, happy to be free of Thelma for the trip.

Behind, in his 1969 cream Cadillac, Junior anxiously followed his father's taillights, the only advice he had taken from Marvin in years. But it was a relief to get out of town for a while. Monique had begun calling him at home the day before. Junior himself had answered the phone three different times to hear her say, “It's me. Monique. Call me.” The last time he answered she'd been curt. “I'm not fooling around, Junior. Now get out of that goddamn house and call me.” Each time Junior could not race Thelma, or one of the kids, to the phone, Monique had simply hung up. But how long could he count on her doing that? Thelma knew about the affair. Granted. She had caught them at the Ocean Edge. But why let his kids know? It was a constant battle to garner even a modicum of respect from them as it was. This would squelch any father-child relationship. And he had been planning to look so parental yet dashing in the tuxedo he was to wear next month at Regina's Father-Daughter Dance at school. Goddamn it, but he wished he knew what Monique was up to.

Junior had found out one valuable piece of information from the whole miserable experience: A mistress was worse than a wife. When a mistress wants to
be
a wife, look out. And that's what Marvin had told his son when he decided to fire the temptation. “She's after our money, son,” Marvin had said. “There ain't a woman in Portland who wouldn't want to be in Thelma's shoes. They want to rise up in the world, women like Miss Tessier. You got to realize that we're sort of like the Kennedys of Portland, Maine. We got a responsibility. We got to look out for Camelot, son. Tell the bitch to walk.”

Junior glanced in the rearview mirror and saw his son Randy's face glowering there. In the backseat, Randy bit at his thumbnail and thought about his unpleasant circumstances. There was a hot shipment coming in from Mexico over the weekend. Buddy had promised to buy a couple ounces for him with some of the money Randy earned by eating pastries and acting like a houseguest. But that wouldn't do him much good right now. He was going to Mattagash,
Mattagash
for shitsakes, with half an ounce. That was like throwing Christians to the lions. And Randy was leaving behind Leslie Boudreau, the waitress at Cantina's. Leslie Boudoir, the guys called her. Sweet, womanly, leggy Leslie. She was the reason he crawled out on his father's veranda every single night and shimmied down the massive elm to the ground, which he hit running. Leslie had been teaching him things that sex manuals were yet to print. She smoked too much of his dope, it was true, but she was his first, his very first, his usherette on that magical journey into the land of the libido. A burning erupted in his groin area. It had been there for days now, even when he wasn't thinking of Leslie. It was different from burning, really, this adult passion to which he had been so recently introduced.
Itching
might be a better word for it. Whatever it was, Randy itched and sulked for the entire eight-hour, uneventful drive to Mattagash, Maine. The tiny visitors he unknowingly brought with him snuggled down beneath his pubic hairs, as though they were the thick massive pines of Maine, and waited patiently as burrs for their next excursion.

In the front seat, on the passenger side, Thelma Parsons Ivy stared out the window with eyes that needed sleep. When the car rolled past Tusculum Street, Thelma's eyes misted. She used to wait for the school bus right there, right where the stop sign still was. She used to be a little girl on her way to school one day, waiting for a bus, with loving parents waiting back at home for her. She should have stayed there, beneath that stop sign. Better yet, she should have stayed at home, in her bedroom, with the diamond-pattern curtains in the window. She should have told her mother, “Never let me out of bed. Never let me out of this room. Out of this house. Keep us here. All together. Don't you know what's about to happen to us all?” But she hadn't said any of that. Life had pulled the covers off her and shoved her out into the street with an armful of books. And at Portland High School she had finally met and fallen in love with pudgy Junior Ivy. Was it love, or pity? Now she wondered. But she knew one thing, as Tusculum Street fell far away behind the Cadillac, like an old movie reel being rewound.

“I wasn't waiting for a school bus all them mornings,” Thelma thought, and fingered the hidden bottle of Valiums in her purse. “I was waiting for a hearse.”

A few hours later, in Millinocket, the two cars stopped to gas up and to order a hasty sandwich at The '95er restaurant. Pearl barely glanced at Thelma, but this time the insult fluttered by unnoticed. Thelma had rushed into the ladies' room as soon as Junior brought the big car to a lurching stop.

“Did you see her eyes?” Pearl asked Marvin, when the entourage, like a miniature version of a funeral procession, progressed on. “Talk about piss holes in a snowbank. She's beginning to look like an owl.”

“That's what I've been trying to tell you,” Marvin said, and signaled to his son that he would be pulling out in the left lane to pass a dawdling pickup truck ahead of him. Junior immediately complied and Marvin saw the creamy Cadillac follow his move. It made a warm glow in his stomach, the way a good scotch or two can simmer down there. This was the relationship he'd always wanted with his only son. Junior didn't have what it takes to sweep up moose cookies, for Chrissakes. But if Marvin had a steady hand on the broom, well, that was a different matter. Marvin passed the pickup, signaled right again, and saw the reflected Cadillac follow suit.

“Like father, like son,” thought Marvin, and smiled.

“It'll be good to see the old house again,” said Pearl. “But it's going to be strange with Margie not there.”

“All things must pass away,” said Marvin. This would have been soothing to Pearl, in its philosophical way, except that it was also on a sign Marvin had tacked up in the coffee lounge at the funeral home.

“Sicily said she'd have someone go in and do a bit of cleaning,” Pearl said. “Get the old place in order for us.”

“The last time I slept in that house,” said Marvin, “we'd only been married a few years. It always seemed haunted to me.”

“It
is
haunted,” said Pearl. “I'll be the first to say that. But I'd rather fall asleep with ghosts in the house than Thelma.” Thank God that Junior and his family would be staying at Albert Pinkham's motel. They had been thrown out ten years ago, but Albert Pinkham was most forgiving and hospitable on the phone. Junior and his family could have as many rooms as they wanted, he assured them, and for as long as they wished.

“Now, Pearly,” said Marvin. “Remember what I've been telling you. We need to get this family straightened out. Get it running smoothly again.” He felt suddenly like old Joe Kennedy, and sat a bit more upright behind the wheel.

“Why me?” asked Pearl. “I didn't give her that prescription. Why do
I
have to listen to her loony tunes?”

“You're both women,” Marvin said. “She probably could use a mother's advice. How long has her own mother been dead, anyway?”

A
mother's advice!
Pearl felt nauseated. It could have been the hamburger, a half hour ago, but more likely it was the notion of mothering Thelma Parsons Ivy, Pill Addict.

“We'll see,” said Pearl, turning her face to the window and gazing out at the rain that had begun to fall lightly. Soon she'd be back in the safety of her childhood home, and free from all of them.

In the car behind, Thelma turned her own face to the window, to the passing pines. They were going deeper and deeper into the heart of the forest. They were going up, up, up the road just to surface nowhere. You could get the bends going to Mattagash. At one time in her life, Thelma had not been able to envision anything north of Bangor. No houses. No hospitals. No schools. No people. Now, thanks to her marriage, the world had expanded for her. But now she wished that the world had indeed dead-ended at Bangor, and that if you ventured any farther, you would fall off the edge. She wished that Maine had been flat, the way the world was once believed to be. Knowing that something and someone lay north of Bangor had not enriched Thelma's life, had not expanded it. Stretched it, maybe. She had had a terrible vacation there ten years earlier, when the kids were still small, when she could still halfway cope. Now here she was on the road back, the road north, the road into the heart of the wilderness. Thank God for pills.

“And just think,” Junior was saying, “if we'd had more time, we could've taken Route One. That road starts out in Fort Kent, Maine, and runs all the way to Key West.” The Cadillac passed a small blue car by the side of the interstate, its hood up, its owner thumbing.

“Yes, sir,” said Junior, as the car whisked by the stranded driver without a thought. “Good ole Route One. Two thousand one hundred and nine miles long. Ain't that something?” He heard Thelma mumble. Good. He was finally getting a response. It was all a matter of patience. His father had been right about that. In just a few hours of driving, Junior had managed to interest his wife and son in some interesting highway facts about the state of Maine.

“What?” asked Junior. “What did you say, hon?”

“I said, ‘God love the traveler,'” Thelma replied, as the distraught driver and his little blue car disappeared in her side-view mirror. In the backseat, a large snore cascaded from Randy's mouth as Leslie Boudreau undid her blouse in his dreams.

The procession continued north, each in his or her own reverie. What it did not know was what everyone back at The '95er restaurant already knew: that behind the Ivys, only minutes away, a lone Buick was in pursuit, its driver scorned and bosomy and furious as hell.

“She looks just like Elizabeth Taylor,” Petey Simpson, back at The '95er had said to the waitress, as Monique Tessier ordered a ham sandwich to go.

“And make it quick,” she had said.

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

—William Wordsworth, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”

As a proper welcome for his Portland guests, soon to arrive, Albert Pinkham swept the leaves from last autumn, crinkly and broken, into a respectable windrow on the cement walkway. He felt like a successful businessman again. It was true that he had thrown the Ivys out of the Albert Pinkham Family Motel ten years earlier for disruptive behavior. But forgiveness is the mark of a good Christian man, especially if that Christian man is going broke. And ten years was enough time for that awful little Ivy boy to grow up. He'd be a young man by now. Albert Pinkham had never liked Pearl McKinnon, it was true, with all her city airs and bloated sense of self-importance. But Pearl wouldn't be staying at Albert's establishment. It would be only that wimpy son of hers, Junior, and his simpleminded little wife, and the child that such a union might expect. He would put the two adults in number 1, in the front, and the kid around back, in number 4. It would be a show of sudden prosperity to have a big fancy car from downstate parked on the gravel driveway of the Albert Pinkham Motel. And, by jiminy, it was about time the Pinkham coffers began to hear coins clinking about in them again instead of mothballs. Almost overnight, Albert Pinkham had gone from being barely able to keep his head above water to walking on the stuff.

The Ivys weren't the only boost to his good fortune. Another room had been reserved by a woman who was also from Portland, coincidence of all coincidences. Albert didn't give a damn if she was from Mars, as long as she paid with good ole American moolah. A nature enthusiast, he assumed by the gravelly quality in her voice. He had learned to read his clients over the phone, just from the cadence of their speech. This was a nature enthusiast all right, longing to hoof about in the slushy woods and tramp her feet off along the Mattagash River. Blisters for nature. He had intended to put her in number 2, but there was something in the way the smooth April breeze was rearranging the noisy leaves of another year, another time, creating something like a sad music, an old song, that prompted Albert to change his mind. He would put her in number 3. Violet La Forge's old room. For old time's sake. She had sounded quite young, younger than Violet, and yes, damn it, she had sounded sexy. He would put her, nature enthusiast that she was, in the pink room, with its pink wooden bed, and its pink walls that could loom over her in the morning like a reddish dawn.

Albert opened the doors to the three rooms and raised their single windows. April rushed in and pushed out the mustiness of nonuse. He noticed cobwebs in each corner of each room, those finely knit doilies that spoke of Sarah Pinkham's disappearance from the premises. She had kept things spick-and-span, it was true, but Albert didn't mind that in her stead was the gauzy embroidery of insects.

“I get along better with spiders than I ever did with that woman,” Albert told Bruce, who had jumped onto the bed of number 1 and stretched out for a little spring nap. Albert left him there, and the door ajar for his escape when nap time ended. He decided to leave the cobwebs clinging. Some city slickers liked such things. They don't have cobwebs in New York City, Albert knew. Cobwebs don't stick good to concrete and steel. You need some nice old-fashioned wood to make spiders feel at home. Albert had redone the walls of rooms, 1, 2, and 4 when he discovered that barn boards were a hot new item with tourists. He simply went out to the flat field behind his house, behind the thicket of pines, and he tore boards from the old barn of his youth. His grandfather, John Pinkham, the best goddamn barn builder of his day, had built it. The passage of years and the heavy snows of so many winters no one could count them anymore had tilted the barn. It had already begun its aging plans by the time Albert was born. But he remembered it still strong enough, solid enough, that he could climb up into its loft and lie back on the molded hay of another time, hay meant for workhorses whose bones lay beneath the gravel pit and whose names no one could remember. Even the sunlight that splayed in rickety streams through the spaces in the boards was sunlight of a different era. You could lie on your back in that old hay, with all the sweetness leaked out of it, and you just knew that the ball of sun outside the timeless barn was not a real sun. It was round and yellow as a summer apple and only
painted
in the sky.

Nowadays even Albert's grandfather was no longer real to him. Nowadays his grandfather peered out from a daguerreotype with the eyes of a terrified man lost to time, lost between the pages of the years. His grandfather didn't exist anymore. Now he was just a face full of whiskers, with hands folded in his lap like a carpenter's tools, with a fat ridge of snuff protruding his lower lip. And even this sparse reminder of his grandfather was disappearing into bits and pieces because Albert didn't take good care of the old tintype. It was slowly eroding, flecks of the silver nitrate peeling away like paint. The damage had begun at the base of the photo, but as Albert tossed pens and knives and coins into the drawer where he left it lying unprotected, the face was beginning to peel away, as it must in death, exposing only sockets until even those are gone. Albert hoped one day to give the picture to his daughter, Belle, so she could at least catch a glimpse of the old man, the old barn builder himself, before he disappeared for good.

Albert Pinkham leaned against the front wall of the Albert Pinkham Motel and closed his eyes. On the far ridge, where the wild cherry and ash still grew thickly, he could hear the metallic
tok
tok
tok
of a solitary northern raven and he knew, if he opened his eyes, he would see it gliding on its flat wings, a black plane skirting the horizon above the old river. Albert felt like that sometimes, that he was skirting, skimming through life. Things had changed, it was true, from the days of the old barn builder. So what then was the grandson to do? Was it wrong for him to leave his barely used Jonsered chain saw on a stump one day and just turn his back on it and walk out of the woods forever?

“Things ain't the same anymore,” he had come home in the middle of the day and said to Sarah Pinkham, who was terrified to see him. Men never left the woods during good daylight working hours unless a falling tree had crushed someone, a pulp hook had embedded itself in a fleshy foot, a chain saw had bounced off a tree and into the muscles of a meaty leg. A woman could usually see blood coming from somewhere if a man left the woods early.

“Times ain't what they used to be,” Albert said to Sarah, and he lay in broad daylight on the sofa, like a crazed man, like a Gifford, until nightfall came with his solution. The Albert Pinkham Family Motel. Why should the innkeepers in Watertown make all the money from tourists who tramp Mattagash into the ground? Why shouldn't a native son prosper as well? Everyone in Mattagash had laughed behind his back at the new venture. Albert could see it in their eyes. But folks had sneered at Fulton. At the Wright brothers. At Henri Nadeau's mini golf course behind his filling station. Yet the steamship had puffed away. The Wrights had taken wing. And Henri Nadeau could be seen every Sunday behind the wheel of the only goddamn Lincoln Continental this side of Caribou.

Times had been hard, very hard, at first. Damn hard. Sarah could tell you, but she would be too proud. Bruce could tell you, if he could talk. His daughter, Belle, couldn't see well enough to know what was going on, and instead stayed cloistered behind her thick eyeglasses. But after he borrowed five thousand dollars from the Great Northern Bank of Watertown to open his business, Albert Pinkham had to go to the town for support. There just wasn't enough money coming in to put food on the table for his family and clothing on their backs. It was rough sitting there with a list in his hand upon which Sarah had written the necessities—groceries, medicines, and so on—and waiting for the town's first selectman, like some kind of god, to sign it so Albert could go shopping. Albert remembered that Frederick Craft, Winnie's husband, had been the town's first selectman that year. He went over each item thoughtfully, Winnie peering over his shoulder like she was
second
selectman, or treasurer, or something, instead of just a nosy wife, which she was. And Frederick Craft had, almost gleefully, crossed out the occasional “3 lbs. hamburg” to make it “2 lbs. hamburg.” Once, he deleted altogether “1 tube toothpaste,” as if a grown man and woman didn't know for themselves what was required to make a household run efficiently. As if it took some foolish first selectman to tell them. As if Albert and Sarah Pinkham were trying to cheat the entire town of Mattagash, Maine, out of a goddamn tube of Crest.

Albert opened his eyes and saw the raven this time. He could still hear its grating
prruk, prruk
after it disappeared from his line of vision. He knew where it was. Most likely everyone in Mattagash, including little kids, could tell an outsider that the bird had landed in Old Mrs. Mullins's backyard birch, where it would survey the odd scraps of bread and doughnuts and the skin-colored chunks of suet before it swooped down to carry off its supper.

Two herring gulls, now becoming a common sight to such an inland part of Maine, appeared from behind a twist in the river. Upon spotting the raven, they sounded their anxiety notes,
gah, gah, gah.
Albert heard, and anxiety sounded in his chest as his heart drummed rapidly. Now only the gulls and the ravens, ospreys and the occasional bald eagle used the river as a highway. Albert's generation had come, and now it was going. He was a member of a group who still had a foot in nature's door. He was among a rare cabal of storytellers who now had no one to listen to them. They were replaced by radios with speakers the size of car batteries, by fancy television sets, and driver's licenses for all, and movies every weekend in Watertown. Albert Pinkham could remember the day when a strange man and woman came from somewhere downriver, and they invited the whole town to pay a nickel to watch as they made shapes with their hands in front of a lantern. As the shadows fell on the wall behind them, it came to life with birds and deer and horses. Oh, no television ever emitted such lovely visions! And that woman's voice was almost as deep as any man's as she told stories for these shadowy animals. Even the grown-up men, immovable at the sight of bodies busted beneath pine trees, of wounded horses spurting blood from their chests, even these tough, wizened woodsmen who thought they'd seen everything, sat with mouths fallen down like trapdoors and knew their minds had been pried open and tampered with, and that they could never be certain of anything again.

Albert Pinkham looked long and hard out across the winding Mattagash road. He let his eyes settle down on the river. It used to be a
road,
that old girl did. The Indians had broken it in years before the white man knew it was there. But Albert easily remembered when it was still functioning. He remembered the cold mornings of being bundled, still frozen, in the bow of the canoe as he and his father whipped over the fast rapids to Watertown. With their sugar, and their flour, and their molasses neatly packed, they would begin the long, tedious poling upriver, until finally they saw smoke from the Pinkham chimney curling like a white man's signal up into the evening sky. Nowadays, no one used the river for anything. No one, that is, but the tourists. There were still the local fishermen, but they searched for out-of-the-way lakes and ponds to avoid the onslaught of city slickers. Youngsters barely swam in it anymore, preferring the public pool in Watertown. Was Albert wrong, then, to offer them a plastic pool himself?

For Albert and his forebears, the river was a directional device, a compass, even after the canoe was replaced by the automobile and it became a dusty back road no longer trodden.

“Guess I'll go downriver today,” Albert Pinkham would tell Sarah, “and find me a used snowplow.” It meant direction, and no matter how crooked it twisted, in the end it always pointed right to the spot you meant. The river had social connotations, too.

“He married a girl from downriver somewhere,” Sarah would say, and Albert knew that it meant someone from outside Mattagash, past St. Leonard and Watertown. Albert knew what else it meant. Everyone knew.

“He married a stranger,” Sarah could have said. “He married a girl no one here in town even knows. He went and married himself a stranger and, because of that, God only knows what will become of him.” And whoever heard it would sip their tea with the loud sucking noise that Albert's generation liked—it meant good, strong, hot tea, by Jesus. They would sip their tea and feel sorry for anybody who had to go all the way downriver looking for a mate. Nowadays, the young regarded it as a blessing to “marry away.” And more and more of them were growing discontented with boredom, which their ancestors had considered a good rest. Mattagash was losing its young blood to factories downriver, to the makers of toilet paper and jet planes, and in their place more and more seagulls were coming to Mattagash with the news that there was an ocean out there somewhere. And you could almost hear the jackhammers and the graders down around Portland and Bangor, building, building, coming north, inching upriver, until one day maybe the ocean itself would sweep in to wash them all away.

The river meant safety, too. Sometimes the river was your mother, or your father, or the best friend you've ever had. Sometimes Albert Pinkham would be all the way down to Madawaska, below Watertown, tacking his business cards to only the busiest bulletin boards, when he would spy a shift in the weather. He would see a grayness creeping up into the sky over the treetops. He would see the birds panicking. He would feel the very air around him tense in anticipation.