A Wedding on the Banks (2 page)

Sicily rolled over in bed and stared at Amy Joy.

“There are four hundred and fifty-six people in this town and I will die a thousand deaths in front of each and every one of them,” she said. “You'll kill me with this. You mark my words.”

“I'll take my chances,” said Amy Joy. “If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.”

“Great odds for me,” thought Sicily.

“I'm marrying Jean Claude Cloutier in three weeks,” Amy Joy said. “Whether your organs like it or not.”

A large symphony burst forth in Sicily's interior. The pancreas clanged. The bladder blared. The heart and lungs rang like bells. The large intestine, an entity that had heretofore left its landlady in peace, twisted itself and coiled, snakelike. How could Amy Joy call her a hypochondriac with all this commotion and upheaval going on inside her, against her will?
Hilda
Hypochondriac,
she had heard her daughter whisper into the telephone, to that short-legged little Jean Claude from Frogville.

“Three weeks,” Amy Joy said, and left the room.

Sicily rolled onto her back to let the organs and glands and tissues all settle down. She stared at the tired oil painting of Jesus and the lamb. Funny, she had always hated it too. Its colors were the faded tones of another era. Jesus looked more angry than benign. The artistry belonged to a world of zealous missionaries, willing to go around the globe to convert savages. Sicily's father, the Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon, had died in China of kala-azar, which had been administered by the bite of a sand fly. He had died among the Chinese, who were even shorter than Frenchmen. Sometimes, when the mosquitoes and no-see-ums were troublesome during the summer months in Mattagash, Sicily thought of sand flies and wondered how big they were, what color. Wondered if the Reverend had managed to smack the one that bit him. She was surprised, remembering the little of him she knew, that he had stood still long enough to be bitten. Maybe there was some of his restlessness in Amy Joy's genes, this strange need to abandon a way of life, quickly and forever. The Reverend's daughters, Marge, Pearl, and Sicily, never saw him again, or cared to really. By 1927 he was already safely dead, just another missionary statistic slid between the flimsy pages of the Good Book and left there until the fat rewards were passed out on Judgment Day.
Judgment
Day.
Sicily hated the thought of the McKinnons lining up on that special occasion, in their best clothes, with a Frenchman in their ranks. The shortness alone could make the line unsightly. It could spoil family pictures for generations.

Sicily studied the lamb in the painting. Its face reminded her of a sad dog she'd seen the Watertown pound cart away one afternoon as she was having her hair clipped and curled at Chez Françoise's Hair Styles. It really was an unsettling picture. Yet throwing it out seemed a sacrilege. Sicily decided to pray to it instead, about the situation with Amy Joy.

“Dear Jesus,” she implored, but before she could finish her petition, a thought struck her that was earth-shattering. It would mean social eviction from Mattagash for sure. It would mean all hell breaking loose on Judgment Day. Earlier, it had seemed bad enough that Jean Claude Cloutier, with his phone conversations of
Al-lo. Dis is Jean Claude. His Amee Zhoy dere?
was infiltrating a pedigree that had, like royalty, remained within its own kind for generations. This was worse! Of course! A Frog straight out of the heart of Watertown. Why hadn't it occurred to her before? Organs Sicily had not dared contemplate stomped and wambled and scuffed inside of her. She would die, she knew this, and the room grew hazy as the stark eyes of Jesus glowered above the piteous eyes of the lamb. When she realized that Jean Claude Cloutier, be he short or tall, was inevitably a
Catholic,
Sicily McKinnon Lawler and her bedraggled organs stayed in bed a full six days longer than they'd planned.

“If you want them boys to love school, you got to switch things around on them. Put their school books out there in the outhouse and take that old stack of
Playboys
to school. They'll be there in the mornings before the teacher even rings her bell.”

—Vinal Gifford to his wife, Vera, after the fifth truant officer visit of 1969

At Vinal Gifford Sr.'s house, there were no rugs beaten to cleanliness. There were no tulip bulbs or gladioli pried into the earth near the front steps. No marigold plants were set out. The same pile of used tires that had sprouted there last fall, before the first snow, was still blooming in the front yard. Hubcaps glistened in the soft April sun. Pickup trucks and discarded cars, gutted and useless, rested on hardwood blocks at various angles and locations about the yard, their tires and parts long gone to newer vehicles. When the weather outlook indicated there would be no more snow until October or thereabouts, Vinal Gifford Sr. (Big Vinal) ordered Vinal Gifford Jr. (Little Vinal) to rip away all the plastic insulation from the windows and let a few straggling bars of sun in past the greasy streaks of seasons gone by.

All spring really meant to Vinal Gifford was that the snow-filled path he followed to the mailbox to pick up his disability checks was now more accessible. And he left no snowy tracks, no large heavy imprint of gum rubbers to and from the mailbox in case some snoop from Augusta, some welfare revenuer, came poking his nose about the Gifford house, asking questions about that bad back that had lain Vinal up in front of the TV for years now. Big Vinal wasn't worried about the innocent track that he made to the outhouse and back. Surely it was forgivable. An act of God. But the beaten trail to the mailbox kept him nervous as a long-tailed cat. He spied the road both ways, long and hard, before trekking out to the box. He had even asked Bond McClure, the mailman, if he would simply toot the horn if the check was there, in its familiar brown envelope with the lovely Augusta postmark. It would have made those few days during the third week of each month easier ones for Vinal if Bond had simply agreed to toot a positive signal.

“Sorry,” Bond had said. “That ain't company policy.” And he had driven off in a short, quick burst of pebbles and gravel. Vinal stood in the wake and watched him go.

“I didn't ask you to French-kiss me, Bond,” Vinal had said to the retreating bumper of Bond's new 1969 station wagon with the U.S. MAIL sign dangling from the side. Vinal knew damn well that if a McKinnon or a Craft had asked Bond to shit in their mailbox each time the new Sears Roebuck arrived, he would. Giffords, on the other hand, got no favors from the government, although they were highly paid by the organization.

***

At the top of the hill, across the road from Vinal Gifford, at his brother Pike's residence, spring arrived in much the same fashion. It thawed out the flies around the windows, shook the sluggishness from them that they might begin a new assault on the delectable outhouse. Used tires flowered about the front and back steps at Pike Gifford's house as well. Hubcaps gleamed like large silver quarters from along the sides of the makeshift garage. They poured out of the mouth of the garage itself, a mountain of silver spilling from a cornucopia. And if they looked spendable that's because Pike Gifford would turn them into money as soon as he was able to function better on his stiff leg. He had asked the Henley Lumber Company to make good on their workman's compensation, and as he was already collecting for the mysterious blow to his kneecap that had occurred when a stick of pulp jarred against it, an action only Pike and God had witnessed, Pike decided he'd better not venture just yet into the used hubcap business, in spite of how lucrative it might be.

“I didn't want to hire you in the first place, Pike,” Mr. Henley himself had said. “I told you I didn't like to hire Giffords because they claim fake injuries. And your nickname is Pike ‘Comp' Gifford around Mattagash. My insurance bill is sky-high because of you folks.”

Pike had been sitting in a chair at Watertown's emergency room, waiting to be examined. Old Henley had driven him there, too angry to speak on the bumpy forty-mile ride from the work site to the hospital. Waiting for the doctor, he had broken his silence in the hopes of luring Pike into a confession.

“I wouldn't want a man to miss out on medical attention if he needs it,” said Henley. Pike thoughtfully watched a nurse shimmy by in her clean white uniform, the kind of sterilized white that hypnotizes Giffords. Pike watched her buttocks beneath all that white and had difficulty listening to his employer. But Henley had wagged on.

“You assured me you had no intention of faking an injury,” he said. “You told me your family was up against it financially. I trusted you and now
this
.” He pointed at Pike's knee where a soft little violet bruise had spread. “I think you probably did that at home last night, Pike. Tell the truth now. Did you and Vinal go on a spree?”

“I can't hear a thing you're saying,” Pike Gifford had answered, his eyes on the disappearing rear end of the nurse. “I can't hear a thing for pain.”

Goldie Gifford, Pike's wife, had a better eye for the scenery around her yard than did Vera, Vinal's wife, at the bottom of the hill. Goldie had coaxed then threatened her children to help pick up all the pop bottles and candy bar wrappers. She would try to manage it alone, if she ever found time, but she rarely did. Beseeching Pike to transport the flowering black hill of tires to a secluded spot out under the back field poplars had been for naught.

“They're an eyesore, Pike,” she had nagged.

“Beauty's in the eye of the beholder,” Pike had answered her. “That goes for tires, too.” Of all of Hodge Conrad Gifford's many sons, Pike, the youngest, had turned out the most poetic.

“There ain't a sight from here to Bangor prettier than that right there,” said Pike, studying the snaky mass of tires until his eyes grew misty with appreciation. “And there's no smell on earth like a fresh pile of rubber just thawing out from the winter,” he assured Goldie. Then, forgetting to limp in case Henley had a spy out from the insurance company, Pike trotted briskly to the tilting garage and began counting his trove of hubcaps.

***

The two plots of land that Vinal and Pike owned had been given to them by the old man, Hodge Conrad Gifford. His huge acreage had been passed down through many generations, from Old Joshua, the first Gifford to settle the land in 1838. On his deathbed, Hodge Conrad Gifford divided the three-hundred-acre plot among his eight children. Four of the Gifford sons and two daughters still remained on their plots, scattered up and down the road in country-style proximity and forming what the rest of Mattagash called Giffordtown.

Vinal Gifford had received the flat hay field plot and built his house there when he married Vera. When Pike Gifford built his house across the road from Vinal, he cleared away trees along the hill that bordered directly on the river. This would afford him the prettiest view of the water, at the spot where the river turned sharply and seemed to disappear. It would also give him an unobstructed view of the forever burgeoning homestead of his brother Vinal, only four hundred feet down the hill. Goings and comings could be monitored by both sides, which proved useful when a childhood spat between Goldie and Vera, involving who had jumped up and down on whose pencil box, grew in later years to monstrous proportions. By then, the sisters-in-law had become dread enemies. Their husbands didn't mind this tinderbox situation; they rather encouraged it. It wouldn't be to either man's benefit if Goldie and Vera joined forces. “You can fight the Japs, or you can fight the Germans,” Pike often philosophized to Vinal. “But you can't fight the Japs
and
the Germans.” But the tinderbox finally erupted into full flame on December 26, 1968, when the
Watertown
Weekly
advertised the biggest sale of Christmas tree lights ever to befall the J. C. Penney Company in northern Maine. Never before had the manager seen such an overstock, and so he marked the lights down in his after-Christmas sale to pennies, to mere shadows of their former prices. Goldie's oldest daughter, Irma, who wore thick eyeglasses, was a part-time clerk at J. C. Penney's, and so had inside info about the sale two days before the newspaper officially announced it. Irma had come home for supper on Christmas Eve, worn to a holiday frazzle, and told her mother.

“It'll be in the paper day after tomorrow,” Irma had said, as she blew on one of her thick lenses to clean it. So, after a busy Christmas Day, Goldie had risen before anyone's alarm clock rang in Mattagash. She had pulled the pink sponge curlers from her hair and brushed the little blond humps into waves. She did not risk taking the time to fry a few slices of bacon and brown a couple of yesterday's biscuits for breakfast. She'd breakfast in Watertown, after the sale, when the rear end of her car would be dragging with Christmas lights. Only then would she pull into Una's Valley Cafe and have one of those big Farmer Breakfasts. So she had downed a quick cup of Taster's Choice and then skimmed over the snowy road to Watertown in time for the store to open.

On December 26, 1968, known as Boxing Day just across the border in Canada, Goldie stood outside the J. C. Penney store waiting for its doors to open at nine. She stood there in that blustery winter wind that poured down off Marquis Hill, gushed past the drugstore, and slammed into J. C. Penney's at the street's end. She pulled it off, too. Irma unlocked the door at nine sharp, and Goldie stomped the snow from her boots and went inside to buy every color of Christmas tree light known to man. There were forty boxes of firefly lights, big lights, blinking lights, nonblinking lights. Red. Blue. Green. Orange. White. It was Christmas all over again. Goldie knew she'd pull it off. No one in Mattagash would get their newspaper until Bond McClure brought it to them in his mail car around one o'clock. And no one in Watertown got early papers, either. They got theirs in the mail as well or waited until the paperboy got home from school to trudge up and down the streets flinging them to and fro.

But even in the slow-moving cold of late December, word got out. A lot of women from Mattagash drove all the way over to Watertown in the afternoon. They barely took the time to dress properly once they read about the sale in the
Watertown
Weekly.
They snapped the strings off their aprons and whipped them through the air. They abandoned smaller children to larger ones for tending. They tried to hide bobby pins and curlers beneath woolen kerchiefs. They sent boys outside in the cold to shovel out their cars. Some, who hadn't plugged in their block heaters the night before, found to their disappointment that the engines wouldn't turn over in December's cold. They were out of the running unless they could trust a friend, because no one really wanted to let anyone else know about the sale. It was survival of the fittest. It was evolution in full swing. And it would seem that Goldie was the fittest of them all. It would seem that the descendants of Goldie Plunkett Gifford would be the first in line at any sale for many generations to come and would always have the finest holiday display of tinkling, twinkling, blinking lights that a small amount of money could buy. And that may have been true but for one thing. Charles Darwin had not met Vera Gifford.

Vera had been scraping that morning's oatmeal out of a supposed-to-be-a-no-stick pan when she heard her dog barking beyond its usual enthusiasm. She looked up from the sink in the direction of the barking dog, right up Goldie's hill, and saw her sister-in-law carrying a box into her house. No, it looked more like a big box piled full of little boxes.

“What do you suppose got her out of the house so early?” Vera had thought. Then, when the pan was shining again and ready to be rinsed, Vera heard a car door slam. She looked up quickly.

“Just out of instinct,” she later told Vinal. “Just pure holiday instinct.” But there Goldie was, half dragging
another
box, and it looked full of little boxes, too!

“She was all nerves,” Vera told Vinal, “like she was trying to drag a dead body into the house. And she kept dropping her purse and trying to sling it back on her shoulder.”

The drama had deepened when Goldie's little white crocheted hat with the three big diamond shapes on it flew off her head and went tumbleweeding in the wind. That's when Vera's dog, Popeye, had gotten involved in the action, had gone after the hat and caught it up in his teeth. This aroused Vera's suspicions more than anything.

“No matter how hard he pawed it, or shook it in his mouth like he does one of the kids' socks when he wants to play, Goldie never give him a second of her time,” Vera told her uninterested husband. “She let him chew that crocheted hat to smithereens and yet, if you heard her talk, it took her weeks to make it, and it was past perfection. No, sir! She just went on inside her house, dragging that box.”

Vera had watched out her window until there was just one big maroon diamond and a few strings left between Popeye's paws, but still no Goldie to rescue her hat.

“What jackpot do you suppose she hit?” Vera had thought. But that was before the newspaper had come, all snowy and damp because Vinal still hadn't welded the mailbox door back on. Little Vinal had turned the mailbox into a play horse just a day before Christmas. He straddled the box, cowboy style, then tied a rope around the open door for reins. The billowing gust from the Mattagash snowplow had knocked him off, reins in hand, and with the reins came the mailbox door. But the newspaper wasn't so snowy that Vera couldn't read about the Christmas lights sale, and she put away her puzzlement at Goldie's behavior in order to drive to Watertown for several boxes of lights.

“It ain't just the Catholics who light up their yards,” Vera told Vinal as she was leaving. “I need to get there before the goddamn Protestants hear about the sale. They're just greedy is all. What do they need extra lights for? There ain't a single Nativity scene among them.”