A Wedding on the Banks (23 page)

“Holy shit!” Freddy Broussard lamented. What was this? Some kind of pizza ambush? Mesmerized by the lights coming at him from Vera's yard, and from the Disney display at the top of Goldie's hill, Freddy hit a large frost heave that insisted the pizza pickup spin mercilessly out of control. The passenger door opened and pizza boxes, all remaining nine of them, fluttered like huge playing cards about the roadway. Freddy's heavy glasses flew from his face and bounced onto the floorboards. The pizza pickup came to an abrupt stop in the ditch of Mattagash's main thoroughfare.

Freddy Broussard staggered out into the blinking lights that surrounded him, his arms high above his head, his glasses on the floor of the truck. So this was what it felt like to be shot down in enemy territory. He had always wondered.

“I give up!” Freddy shouted to the approaching black Plymouth. But there seemed to be no takers. Instead the shark rolled slowly along until it reached Freddy's side. The passenger door opened spookily, slow motion to Freddy's grainy pupils.

“This is it,” Freddy Broussard thought. “This is where I hear the gunshot.” He covered his ears and hoped the bullet would find his heart immediately, hoped he would not lie writhing and bleeding among the strewn pizzas on the red, blue, green, and white road into the wilderness. Mattagash, Maine. What an awful place to give up the ghost, to say one's last good-byes. Especially if one was French Catholic. His chance of getting last rites, Freddy knew, was slim. One had a better chance of getting a pizza delivered to Mattagash than a priest.

Freddy decided that if he was going to die among Protestants, without last rites, he might as well get on the best footing he could with his Maker. The Act of Contrition would be a start. Freddy held his ears to soften the bullet's roar and chanted, “O my God, I'm heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins.”

There was no gunshot. Instead a hairy wrist poking out of a red and black lumberjack's coat dropped down beneath the Plymouth's door and grabbed one, then two pizza boxes.

“Because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell,” Freddy whispered. The shark rolled ten feet past him, again the passenger door opened, the hand scooped up another pizza, and then disappeared back into the car. At the abandoned Ford pickup, the car stopped again and one more pizza went into the belly of the shark. Had Freddy been able to see, he would have read I BRAKE FOR BLACKFLIES on the back bumper. Then the Plymouth was swallowed up by the Mattagash night.

Donnie Henderson was the first to stop, two minutes later, and offer assistance.

“Please call the sheriff,” Freddy pleaded. He was alive. He had come close to death and survived, and life would be only exhilarating from now on. He leaned against the truck and reveled in the Christmas lights. He understood suddenly. Christmas lights in April.
Why
the
hell
not?
It was pure metaphysics at work here between the Gifford homes. Freddy Broussard might never wear his thick eyeglasses again. Perhaps he would always view the world as he did now, gazing up Goldie's fiery hill, prismatic blurs floating in the air. Was this the secret poets had discovered? Did the world's greatest thinkers know this little trick of the eyesight?

“This must be the same stuff that Timothy Leary saw,” Freddy decided.

At Vera's house, small heads appeared like candles in all the windows. Vera's own face dominated the window in her front door. At Goldie's no one was the wiser about the fracas at the hill's bottom. They were still busily sipping cocoa, telling Red Ryder stories, and begging Goldie to pop them popcorn for the Saturday night movie.

***

“Christ, I wish we could eat first,” Sheriff Roy Vachon said when he received the call to arms. He had been ten minutes away from going home to a hot supper and leaving all potential skirmishes to his subordinates. His stomach growled in agreement.

“I don't suppose we can though,” said Patrolman Wayne Fortin. “There's evidence all over the road. Dogs might eat it.”

Two dozen Mattagashers, on their way home to their own suppers, had parked their cars along the road in Giffordtown and stood idly about to enjoy the excitement, which was rare in that neck of the woods. The sheriff arrived in a swirl of blue siren light, which looked purplish and meager next to the Christmas bulbs, and not at all as dramatic as he had hoped. Sheriff Roy Vachon was not pleased to be summoned to Mattagash. It wasn't just the notorious Giffords who kept law enforcement officers of northern Maine weary. One never knew what to expect from all those Scotch Irish descendants on a hard-drinking Saturday night.

“There's Petit Pierre's Pizza's pickup.” Patrolman Wayne Fortin spat out the tongue twister. He carried his official bullhorn, in case the pizza thieves were holed up and had to be coaxed out. When he saw the crowd gathered, Wayne was glad to have it. The Mattagashers might break formation.

“Hey, Deputy, you gonna do some cheerleading?” a man called out from the crowd, and Patrolman Wayne Fortin blushed to hear the laughter that followed.

“Hey, Barney Fife, did you put your bullet in your gun?” another yelled.

“Ignore them,” the sheriff said.

Before questioning Freddy Broussard, Sheriff Roy directed the deputy to watch the crowd. Patrolman Wayne was shocked to see people opening boxes and testing bites of pizza. He aimed his bullhorn.

“Please do not eat the evidence!” he yelled at the spectators.

“Is there a vegetarian one here?” a teenaged girl with acne asked the patrolman.

“Sheriff, they're eating our evidence,” Patrolman Wayne whispered into Roy's ear.

“Well, go over there and stop them, Wayne,” the sheriff said. “They won't eat
you,
for crying out loud.” Patrolman Wayne wasn't so sure. He had heard all kinds of stories about Mattagashers. He leveled his bullhorn again.

“People,” he pleaded, “go to your homes. This is police business.”

“You cops got a hand in the pizza business, too?” Donnie Henderson asked.

“If somebody'll go to Betty's Grocery,” another man offered, “I'll buy two six-packs of pop.”

As Sheriff Roy Vachon questioned Freddy Broussard, he spied something near his left foot. It was round and red. It lay like a tiny planet that had been hurled out of its orbit. It looked delicious. Roy's stomach growled, urging him on. He leaned down and plopped the thing into his mouth.

“Pepperoni,” he said to Freddy. “Now just how many Giffords, ah, suspects, were there?”

“You get me a lineup,” Freddy declared, already beyond his spiritual phase and now angry. He found his glasses on the pickup's floor and slipped them on. “I can pick those two shaggy faces out of any lineup.”

After Donnie Henderson pointed up Goldie's iridescent drive to the top of the hill, Freddy Broussard finally knew which house was Irma's. She let him in and accepted the crushed bouquet of flowers with the tiny IGA sticker. All the little Giffords lined the stair steps like potted plants and sat there quietly to view the stranger. When he gave Irma the flowers, a volley of hoots and whistles rang out.

“Go back upstairs and eat your pizza!” Irma insisted. “Come meet my father,” she told Freddy, as she got her sweater and purse.

“Speaking of fathers, I need to call the shop and tell my dad what's happened,” Freddy said at Irma's heels. “He needs to let our customers know I won't be delivering.” Freddy Broussard stopped talking and stared. His eyes grew even larger. Pike Gifford was sitting on the sofa in front of the television, his socked feet resting on a worn footstool. A pizza smiled happily in his lap. PETIT PIERRE'S PIZZA, the letters on the box announced. “A Pizza for the People.” What was it he had told Sheriff Roy Vachon, just moments ago? “I can pick those faces out of any lineup.”

“Daddy likes your pizza so much he and Uncle Vinal drove all the way to Watertown to get some,” Irma was pleased to tell Freddy.

“Piece of pizza?” Pike Gifford asked his potential son-in-law, and held out the box.

“No, sir,” Freddy said. “Thank you.” His tongue was thick in his mouth, his throat dry.

“If I'd known you was coming right to my door,” Pike said, “I would have had you deliver this.” And then he winked.

This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it,

Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?…

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,

Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion,

List to the mournful tradition, still sung by the pines of the forest;

List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Evangeline

While the gathering at Sicily Lawler's house was eating hastily made tuna salad sandwiches, another sort of celebration was taking place, thirty miles away, at the Cloutier home in Watertown. Several bottles of booze decorated the kitchen counter, paper plates lounged about with sandwiches, crackers, and chunks of cheese. Chips seemed to be everywhere, in bowls, on chairs, crumbled on the floor. The house was full to overflowing with just a few friends and Jean Claude's immediate family. The six brothers were there with wives or girlfriends in tow. The three sisters arrived with their husbands. Jean's good friends, the altar boys of childhood, had arrived with their dates. A record player boomed from the living room, where half of the revelers danced so that the other half could sit. After an hour of musical entertainment, two records surfaced in what might be considered a survival of the fittest, and they were played alternately for the remainder of the night. Old Mr. Cloutier preferred A
Potpourri
of
Cajun
Tunes
by Doug Kershaw, while the younger family members insisted on
The
Best
of
Creedence
Clearwater
Revival
. All evening the musical atmosphere went from “
Allons danser
, Colinda” to “Oh, Lord, I'm stuck in Lodi again.” From “Louisiana Man” to “Bad Moon Rising.”

Jean Claude stopped once during the party to wonder why his family was happily dancing up a storm the night before his wedding. It was no secret that the Cloutiers as an entity disapproved of his marriage to Putois Lawler. The Cloutiers were far from being uppity-ups in Watertown. It was true many of the French-speaking Americans there had sent their children away to good colleges where they had cleverly learned to disguise their French accents. And they had come home to Watertown and settled down to take up whatever professional activities they'd learned with barely a vestige of their former French influence peeping out. These
this, that
types looked down on the all-out
dis, dat
reminders of the old French Canadian settlers who had inched their way to the border, and then across the border into the United States of America. A few people were wise enough to be proud of this heritage, to strengthen the link with their Canadian and French ancestry. But in 1969 few French accents were heard on radio sets, or on television sets, and few politicians running for Maine's offices had last names that spoke of other than English or Scottish or Irish ancestries. In 1969 the
these, those
French descendants of Watertown, Maine, tended to look down their inherited noses at the
dease, dose
members of the community. The Cloutier family fell into the latter category, but by no means were they considered Giffords. The French equivalents to the Giffords were also abundant in Watertown. They were the ones who slipped through the windows of the KC Hall and stole a case of vodka. They attacked the Watertown drive-in with a chain saw, felling the large picture screen into the grassy field and crushing twenty speakers in the process. They brawled at one of the three drinking establishments. They rarely worked. Thanks to a religion that forbids birth control, their houses swelled to the rafters with children. The Cloutiers, on the other hand, were a hardworking family, loyal to their roots, their God, and most of all, their kin. And they looked down
their
inherited noses at anyone from Mattagash, Maine, Catholic or not.

“Put back on dat
Potpourri
guy,” the elder Cloutier insisted, and when the strains of “Jolie Blonde” reached him, his boots went to work dancing. There was no scheme to the footwork. It was simply a lot of heavy foot stomping intermixed with an occasional gyration and a stream of perspiration from the forehead. Mattagashers were sometimes afraid to go out on the dance floor at the old Newberry store, now the Acadia Tavern, when these Frogs were kicking up a storm.

“They're gonna take us all through the floor one night,” Peter Craft once complained to Donnie Henderson as they ordered more beers.

Unlike the uptight Scotch Irish of Mattagash, the French people from Watertown loved to have a good time, a genetic trait from
their
old settlers, and they loved to have it, of all places, in public, a dirty word to the McKinnons and Crafts, who were more used to closets and barns for such practices.

“I'm
chaud
,” Jean said to his mother, intermixing his French and English, as more and more of the new breed were learning to do.
Franglais
they called it. “It's hot,” he said, and she took her handkerchief out of her dress pocket and wiped his brow, arranged the dark, wet curls. How could she let this beautiful child, her youngest, end up married to a Mattagasher? She could not. Mrs. Théophile Cloutier, Genevieve to her friends, could not allow such a thing.

“Where's Guillaume?” Jean Claude asked his mother. His brothers Guillaume and Rene had driven all the way from their new home in New Britain, Connecticut, where a community of French-speaking Americans from northern Maine had gathered to work in factories or in construction. Frogtown, it too was called by locals, and was only fifty miles away from New Milford, known as Little Mattagash, where the sons and daughters of the old settlers had chosen to congregate. Connecticut was like the last step of some social underground railway that carried off the dissatisfied young of Aroostook County in uppermost Maine. After all, they had only the woods to turn to for a living if they stayed on their ancestors' soil. A relative in New Britain or New Milford was always glad to take in the transient souls who finally gave up their chain saws for the shiny tools of some factory. But these souls longed for the weather-beaten WELCOME TO MATTAGASH and ST. LEONARD and WATERTOWN signs, and for the first year or so, they made the eleven-hour drive often, eleven hours straight up to the northern tip of Maine. But the city slowly claimed them, and being lonesome was not as bad as spending all those hours in a car. Homesickness eventually went away, like measles or chicken pox. Their children grew up with only a trace of French accent, or the old Irish brogue, and no interest whatsoever in the cold, wooded area that had once harbored their parents. By the next generation the accent, like the homesickness, was completely gone.

“He's gone to gas up the car,” Jean's mother answered him in French. “St. Rose is a long way.” They were, the brothers and the altar boys of old, taking Jean Claude to St. Rose, Canada, where the strippers from Montreal danced, and where the management didn't mind if a full-blooded, French-speaking, all-American boy of Canadian descent rubbed a leg or tweaked a nipple, as long as he flipped a few pink Canadian two-dollar bills onto the stage.

“St. Rose!” Jean Claude said to Guillaume when he returned with a full tank. “
Vierge
!”

“You doan find no virgin in dat place,” said Guillaume, who had been working to dispose of what he considered his rustic, country French. The English of the big city would be better, Guillaume decided, for a man who was on his way up to one of the foreman positions of O'Donnell Brothers Construction Company in New Britain. Everybody in Connecticut called Guillaume, at his own insistence, Bill.

“Put on dat
Potpourri
man, tank you,” Mr. Cloutier shouted and the house rocked with dancing. It was almost ten o'clock before the brothers and altar boy friends, traveling in three cars, set out for St. Rose's new discotheque. Jean's mother and father hugged him tearfully.

“
Demain à ce temps je serai un homme marié
,” he said to his parents. This time tomorrow I'll be a married man. They nodded, and his mother hugged him a second time. Then his sisters kissed him. He climbed into Guillaume's Pontiac GTO with the bright blue Connecticut license plates, of which the whole family was proud. It told of their son's rise in the world, among the godly English, in Connecticut, THE CONSTITUTION STATE. The Pontiac sped off, its engine rattling power beneath the hood. On the return trip, they would cross the border into the United States at Madawaska, fifteen miles from Watertown. Where they crossed the border depended on what time of day it was and therefore which customs officer would be on duty. They could be regular nice guys with a job to do, or they could be power hungry men in official suits. Jean Claude had seen much of both types in his days of border crossing, and driving fifteen miles out of one's way, even if it was three o'clock in the morning, could be well worth the trip.

The second car pulled out and followed Guillaume into the wet night. All the women remained behind to finish the party at the Cloutier house. St. Rose was no place for them. They might see their men do things that would bring tears to their eyes.

The third car lingered. Jean's brother Rene came out carrying a suitcase in each of his large hands and tucked them both away in the trunk. Even if the customs officer did ask to look through the suitcases, Guillaume's car would already be safely on its way to St. Rose, and Jean Claude would suspect nothing.

“His money.” The old woman was teary-eyed. She gave Rene an envelope. “Keep him down there,” she said to Rene, and kissed him good-bye.

“Once he's thinking straight”—Rene spoke French back to them, and discovered that in just a short year of living in Connecticut he was already struggling to remember his native language—“we'll bring him back for his car.” Mr. Cloutier took his son's hand and shook it.

“Take him to that French bar where you and Guillaume go, down there in New Britain. Introduce him to a nice French girl,” the old man advised.

“Get him a good job,” the mother said. “He'll be better off.”

They watched Rene drive away in Eloie Thibodeau's old black Ford with the bland, unsuccessful MAINE, VACATIONLAND on the plate. What was that compared to THE CONSTITUTION STATE? They were giving Jean Claude, as his wedding present, a very important trousseau. They were giving him Connecticut.

The three sisters stood with the parents on the front steps, which were sagging with the memory of too many Watertown snows. On-the-border winters. The family waved good-bye until even the sound of the car died away, and then they went back inside the house. Aunts and uncles had arrived at eight o'clock. Even though everyone knew there would be no wedding, it was a shame to let a good party go to waste.

“Put back on dat
Potpourri
guy,” Old Man Cloutier said. Then he wiped the tears from his eyes.

***

Jean Claude drank all the vodka that his brothers and friends put in front of him. His stag party was a major success. He developed a particular interest in a brunette stripper who called herself La Petite Hirondelle. The Little Swallow. Guillaume and Rene drank 7-Ups, which looked enough like vodka, but the rest of the large group saw no reason to drive all the way to St. Rose and stay sober. Besides, whether he knew it or not, this was Jean Claude's going-away party.

“Tabernacle! Look at dem buns!” Eloie Thibodeau shouted and grabbed the fleshy cheek of one stripper's rear. That was the last line of poetry Jean Claude heard. The next thing he would remember was sitting up in the backseat of the Pontiac GTO Sunday morning and asking his whereabouts.

“Almost to Mass,” said Guillaume, and lit a Canadian cigarette, a DuMaurier. He would need to smoke them all, rather than be seen back in New Britain with a reminder of his heritage.

“Où?” Jean Claude asked. “Where?”
Mass?
He couldn't go to church as hung over as he was.

“Massachusett,” said Rene, forgetting the
s.
He would need to start remembering such things, now that he was headed back to the land where
s
's were never forgotten.

“Massachusett?” said Jean Claude, and lay back on the seat. “Chalice!” he said. He was on his way to the Constitution State.