A Wedding on the Banks (8 page)

“Now oo stay wight here,” Goldie cooed to Feathers, and blew a soft kiss into the cage. Then she went back to the drudgery of her housework.

As she did so, Little Vinal was crawling up the long hill on his stomach, dragging the BB gun behind him. Occasionally a stab of pain coursed through the bruised arm if he applied too much weight to it. But war was all blood and guts. The canary suspected something and cocked its head every now and then before it returned to its preening. It felt relatively safe where it was. After all, it was in a cage, protected from freedom, and dangling high enough in the air to outwit any cats.

“You ain't built the fort that'll keep me out,” Little Vinal sneered to the enemy, and let fly a dozen BB's.

Goldie herself saw the sharpshooter bounding away, guilt in every leap. But which of Vera's kids it was, she was at a loss to say. They all looked alike to her. And for some strange reason she could never understand, they all seemed to be the same size, all eight of them. She suspected it was the steady diet of surplus food given out by the town. Goldie watched until the boy running down the hill disappeared into Vinal's teetering garage. An hour later, when she went out to see what Bond McClure had left for her, she found Feathers already stiffening in his cage.

“Oh, Feathers,” Goldie said softly. She took the stiffening bird up into her hands. A breeze rippled over its body, the soft, sad caress of spring.

“Don't cry, Mama,” Priscilla, Goldie's thirteen-year-old, pleaded. “We can get you another one.”

“I don't want another canary,” Goldie whispered.

“Let's get one of them white rats,” Little Pee excitedly offered. “They been at the Newberry's forever.”

Little Pee and Priscilla were able to find several of the little gold beads about the porch and ground. They were obvious misses or—and Goldie grimaced to think of it—ricochets. Now her grief billowed into anger. How dare they kill her bird! She was certain now of the culprit's identity. Little Vinal had already built a wide reputation around Mattagash for escapades with his BB gun. All of the Giffords at the top of the hill had heard how Little Vinal had picked the candy beads off his teacher's birthday cake and replaced them with BB's. Several of his classmates ate plenty until the teacher bit firmly onto one and destroyed her new dental bridge. Questioned by an irate principal as to why he'd done it, Little Vinal said, “Because she's always shooting off her mouth.” It brought in quite a large guffaw back home, at the bottom of the hill.

“By God, they won't get away with this,” Goldie threatened, and stomped in to wake Big Pike. She promptly snapped off
As
the
World
Turns
and insisted that he pay heed. The world wasn't turning very well in Mattagash, Goldie let him know, and she demanded that he take Feathers down the hill and collect the five dollars she had paid for him.

“Who?” asked a sluggish Pike. He wondered for a second if they had named one of their own Feathers. Flora, he suddenly remembered. They had one named Missy Flora. That's what had tripped him up. The naming process had always bothered Pike, as it would any thinking man. When two people get married and set about having children, why not just alphabetize them according to birth? It would make things a whole lot easier when talking to the welfare people.

“But there's no amount of dollars they can pay for my broken heart,” Goldie wept. “And you can tell them that!”

Pike watched as the little white dot, the same tiny ghost that appears in the old-fashioned televisions of rich and poor alike, in Mattagash or faraway Portland, flickered like a Sominex tablet on the black screen. Inside that little dot was Penny Prescott, who had just found out that husband Linton was cheating on her with her sister Ingrid, who had just adopted Korean twins—all this at a time when Penny had made arrangements at the hospital for her hysterectomy. All those problems were inside that small white dot. Then the dot vanished and the screen was blank. Pike wished his problems were like that, too. Switch-off-able.

“Linton Prescott don't know the half of it,” thought Pike, and pulled on his boots. He grabbed Feathers from Goldie and pushed open the screen door. Goldie, Little Pee, and a mob of smaller mourners followed on his heels, the screen door slamming behind them.

At Vinal's house the door was opened slowly by a small girl's hand. Then a tiny head covered with the dark Giffordish curls poked around the door and demanded, “What?!” Big Vinal appeared behind her.

“That's Molly, my baby,” he said to Pike. “Can you believe how big she's getting? She's already wanting to drive the car.”

“There's no stopping them once they take it in their heads to grow,” Pike said, and gave the child a token pat on the head.

“Tell him about Feathers,” whispered Goldie, poking Pike's back and hushing the smaller children behind her.

“Well, we got us a little problem,” said Pike. “Goldie here says she saw Little Vinal shoot her canary with his BB gun, and the whole family's up in the air about it.”

Vera appeared behind Vinal with her swarm of children situated on both sides. They pressed forward eagerly, all the same height and width.

“Little Vinal!” his father shouted, and a gangly boy with freckles came forward, looking like a Norman Rockwell creation until he squirted a frothy plug of spit off the porch. His left arm was wrapped in what had been a pristine bandage the day before at the Watertown hospital but was now a brown rag.

“You shoot this canary?” Vinal thrust the remains of Feathers under Little Vinal's nose. Before the boy could shake his head no, his father gave him a sharp slap across the face. Little Vinal slumped back, and then disappeared into the mass of children around Vera. His footsteps sounded inside, angrily, on the steps leading upstairs.

“I'm sorry about this, Vinal,” said Pike to Goldie's dismay. “I guess boys'll be boys.”

“Yeah,” Vinal agreed. “But he knows he's supposed to shoot birds that ain't store bought.” He chewed on his toothpick, which was a piece of yellow straw from Vera's broom. Food stamps didn't include fancy toothpicks.

The two brothers had talked in depth about how to keep their women happy. It was far better to go along as best they could, as long as they themselves didn't get caught up with them. All women were silly, but Gifford women would come to blows. And both Pike and Vinal were certain Goldie wouldn't stand a chance against the burly Vera.

“It'd be just like that Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston fight,” Pike once said to Vinal as they sat in the battered Plymouth, beer bottles foaming between their legs. “We're talking six, maybe seven seconds.”

“We want the five dollars we paid for him,” said Goldie over Pike's shoulder.

“What for?” asked Vera over Vinal's. “It can't be to say a mass. Not over at the Holy Roller church you been going to.”

“You ain't been to a church in so long, Vera, you couldn't tell a mass from a TV commercial,” said Goldie. “And besides,” she went on, from the safety behind Pike's shoulders, “I read in
Reader
'
s
Digest
that juvenile delinquents pee the bed, then they're cruel to little animals, then they set fire to something. You know damn well the only thing that child ain't done is burn us out of house and home. And that's next. He's gonna end up in jail, in the same cell as Irving.”

“Don't talk about my boys like that,” Vera shouted, and lurched forward, but Vinal caught her arms.

“Send Goldie up the hill, Pike, so you and I can talk,” said Vinal. He shoved Vera back into the faces of her children, into a scattering of bony arms and flying ponytails.

Outside on the front steps, Vinal pushed his hands deep into his pockets and listened as Pike scolded Goldie back up the hill. She went, with the children's blond heads bobbing around her, all of them looking back at intervals to see what the men were doing. From her kitchen window Vera watched them go.

“Them kids remind me of dandelions,” she said to Molly, who was retrieving lint from her navel.

Vinal lit a cigarette and tossed the match out into April's soggy grass. He stared down at the patch Vera had glued to one of his rubber boots to keep the slush out. It could get damp on the way to the mailbox, or kneeling by the hubcaps of some stranger's car.

“How about this?” Vinal asked, and squinted at his brother. “You tell Goldie I give you the five dollars. I'll tell Vera I never give you a cent.”

“Let's hope they don't git on good terms someday,” said Pike, and winked. “If they ever start talking, look out.”

Vinal spit a large plug of snuff from under his lip. The juice of it sprayed the tomato fledglings that Vera had placed on the front steps. They grew out of milk cartons the kids had brought home from school;
Grant's Dairy Milk
, they advertised. Vinal kicked one and it flew like a small red and white football into the air until it landed with a loosening thump of dirt and seedling.

“Not them two women,” said Vinal, and reached down to pick up a set of shiny hubcaps he had selected earlier from out of the pile near the back steps. The rightful owners were probably driving around Watertown without them at that very minute, their drab wheels turning sadly.

“They're a couple of mean ones,” Pike agreed.

“Well, Vera takes after her old man,” Vinal said. “I'll admit that. Uncle Frankie was Hitler without that little mustache.” He picked at his back teeth and freed a piece of relief meat that had been bothering him since noon.

“Hell, you know Goldie,” said Pike. “She gits uppity and that sets Vera off. It'll pass. By the way, how
is
Irving making out?”

“He oughtta be out in five months,” said Vinal of his eldest son. “I don't know what he was gonna do with that snowmobile in April. He should've waited until December. Not only would it have been easier to sell, but it's hard to send a man to jail right before the holidays.”

“Well,” said Pike sympathetically, “his timing was just a little off. Looks like a storm coming over from Hayfey Mountain.”

“I got to get me a new mailbox,” Vinal said, and motioned with his head to the road. “Little Vinal tore the door off that new one.”

“You must be expecting a wedding invitation from Amy Joy Lawler, too,” said Pike. “Special delivery, with Sicily licking the envelope herself.”

Hearing with satisfaction that his brother found the joke worthy of a belly laugh, Pike started off across the road, scuffing his heavy boots. He lifted one finger high in the air to test for raindrops.

“A good rain won't hurt us none,” Pike said with authority.

“It'll eat up the last of that snow,” Vinal shouted after him. Then he went back inside his house, where Vera was waiting to hear that no way in hell did he give one penny to pay for some foolish dead bird.

Vera listened with satisfaction as she shoved another pair of grayed long johns through the wringer of her washer, and then sent the littlest children to close all the windows from the rain.

“What high-class stunt will she pull next?” Vera asked gruffly. “Can you imagine buying a bird in a store when your garden is so full of starlings nothing will come up?”

“Well, what do you expect her to do? It isn't like she can
take
them
off
till after the party.”

—Marvin Ivy, to his wife, Pearl, with respect to Monique Tessier's bosoms, Ivy Funeral Home Christmas party

Randy Ivy tapped his fingers on the desk and waited for his grandfather to acknowledge his presence. Junior, his father, sprawled in a chair next to him, his belly threatening to pop the buttons on his shirt. The elder Ivy was on the phone, engaged in a frustrating conversation with an irate customer.

“But we can't guarantee a monument against
vandalism,”
Marvin Sr. was saying. “I'm sorry to hear that hoodlums would go into a sacred place and do such things but…”

Randy's fingers tapped more slowly. It was a Steppenwolf tune he was drumming out on his grandfather's desk.
Don't Bogart that joint, my friend
. Junior sweated in his tight shirt and tried to ignore the gestures of Monique Tessier, whom he could see through the open door of his father's office. She was at her desk, in a splendid cranberry-red sweater with an unabashedly low neckline. She held up a sheet of typing paper, quickly, for Junior to read CALL ME TONIGHT! Junior nodded imperceptibly, then glanced at Randy to see if he had witnessed the communique between his father and the Ivy Funeral Home secretary. But Randy was tapping a fast-paced rendition of “Born to Be Wild.” Marvin put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “You want to lose those fingers, keep on doing what you're doing.” Randy's fingers stopped. Marvin nodded.

“No, we certainly did not guarantee that the angel wings wouldn't break off, not if someone went at them with a sledgehammer,” Marvin said. People could be irrational during a reign of grief. “Well, have your lawyer do that, then,” he said and hung up.

“Hoodlums in the graveyard with sledgehammers,” Marvin said to Junior. “What will the world do next? They were probably all high on drugs,” he added, and cast a remonstrative eye on his grandson. Randy Ivy didn't catch the slur. He had become awestruck with the fluid movement beneath Monique Tessier's cranberry-red sweater. Junior felt a surge of jealousy when he followed his son's gaze. Ignoring Monique's eyes, he got up abruptly and closed the door.

“Was that Dale Porter's wife?” Junior asked.

“Yeah,” said Marvin. “Crib death, remember? I don't know why she just doesn't have another baby and leave us to hell alone.”

“Hoodlums in the graveyard,” Junior mused. He was hoping to ingratiate himself by repeating Marvin's contempt. “What next?” he scoffed.

“Speaking of hoodlums,” Marvin said, and turned his attention to his only grandson. “If it hadn't been for your grandmother, I want you to know, I'd never have agreed to this.”

“Great,” said Randy. “Like you're doing me a big favor letting me work in the boneyard.”

Marvin's face tightened, and his hairline receded slightly.

“That'll be enough,” said Junior. The old man was already on the warpath about him and Monique. Randy needn't add to it. “You tell your grandfather thank you.”

“Thanks, man,” said Randy, and his fingers went back to “Born to Be Wild” on his grandfather's desktop.

Randy's offense was a first one, so his father had managed to get him released on probation. Speeding on the Kawasaki had alerted a policeman, who pulled him over and discovered the Baggie. It was not, as Marvin first suspected, parsley flakes but some of the best Colombian gold to hit Portland in months.

It was pure luck that the Ivy Funeral Home had buried the judge's mother a month earlier. His driver's license, a hefty fine, an apology, and a promise is what the judge wanted from Marvin Randall Ivy III. The judge took the license. Junior paid the fine. Randy apologized. And Marvin, at Pearl's prodding, promised to give Randy gainful employment at the Ivy Funeral Home. The probation would last a year and would be over when spring bounced back again with daffodils and green grass. The kind that doesn't get smoked.

Marvin was explicit about what tasks Randy would
not
be expected to perform as part of his official duties.

“Stay to hell away from the mourners,” he warned his grandson. “Don't touch a thing in the embalming room. And don't even
think
of going into the chapel.”

Marvin was in a grandfather-employer quandary. Maybe the boy would be capable, later on, of learning the line of caskets. He could be a salesman of sorts in the showroom. Junior could teach him. It might keep them both out of trouble.

“Balls,” said Randy. “So like, what am I supposed to do then?” He ran his musical fingers through his closely cropped hair. He felt bald. He longed for his ponytail, but a barber had heartlessly disposed of it on Saturday. It had been one of Marvin's strictest demands. Almost a year of growth, gone down the drain at some stranger's barbershop. “Like, what is
my
job?”

“I'll tell you what your
job
is,” Marvin said, and pulled out a file before him. “It says here your take-home pay will be sixty-eight dollars and ninety cents every week.”

“So whadda I do?” asked Randy, wishing he could see through the wooden door to the reception room where the secretary was lounging.

“Let's see,” said Marvin, as he pondered the business details in his head. “Sixty-eight ninety a week. Looks to me like you sit in the coffee room, stuff your face with doughnuts, and keep your mouth shut.”

“It's a deal, man,” said Randy, suddenly enlightened by the world of big-time employment.

***

Ever since the wedding invitation had arrived from her niece Amy Joy, Pearl had been in the doldrums. Maybe it was because she hadn't seen Amy Joy in ten years, and this wedding reminded her of the cruel passage of time, as everything did these days. Time had become Pearl's mortal enemy. Time was gobbling up everyone and everything she ever loved. Time would be coming for her soon.

Pearl McKinnon Ivy turned the thick pages of the old McKinnon scrapbook as she sat on the edge of her bed, still in housecoat and slippers at ten thirty in the morning.

“What would Marge have thought of that?” Pearl wondered, as she stared down at a picture of her older sister. Marge was brown-haired, with a wash of freckles across the straight bridge of her nose. Hollyhocks swam in the frame around her. The picture was taken, then, just outside the old McKinnon homestead, famed for its display of the flower.

“What would Marge say about me sitting here on my bed, still in my nightclothes, in the middle of the day?” Pearl wondered again. “Marge was always up with the birds.” The hollyhocks began to swim around Marge's head as Pearl's eyes filled with warm tears. The memory of the old homestead, with its charming summer kitchen, drenched in all those colored flowers of China, had unlocked another kind of memory inside her. Suddenly her bedroom in Portland, Maine, was overpowered with the smell of hollyhocks. Their fragrance burst out of the closet, killing the formaldehyde aroma of Marvin's suits. It fairly flew from the drapes, seeped out of the rugs, was so strong it stirred up a small breeze and moved the loose strands of hair still clinging, uncombed, around Pearl's face. Or was that just a regular breeze, billowing up from the streets of Portland? Who could tell anymore? Hollyhocks. Marge. The Reverend Ralph. The old homestead.

“Why are you bothering me now?” Pearl asked Marge's faded picture. “Why now, after all these years?' she asked the fragile hollyhocks, and now the fragrance of them was so thick that Pearl closed the scrapbook and lay back on her bed. The flowery perfume moved in on her, the way a heat wave presses down, blanketed, solid as a wall. She could even hear bumblebees, which unnerved her at first. The last time she heard bees was when she had her nervous breakdown. That was the balmy spring of 1928, when Marvin came into their small apartment and announced that he was dropping out of law school to become an integral part of the family funeral business. Pearl heard bees buzzing in her head, loud enough to be a swarm of little airplanes.
Undertaking,
instead of
law.
How does one adjust to that? But it had been forty-two years now. She had recovered. The bees had eventually flown away. Today was different. These were different bumblebees. These were the bumblebees of 1923, the year her father left. There had been hollyhocks that day, hadn't there? And Marge had put one hand on Pearl's shoulder, one on Sicily's, and they had watched the Reverend bounce away in a horse and buggy. To catch the train in Houlton. To go to China. To die of kala-azar. When he had disappeared, Marge said—oh, what
had
she said? It was something straight out of the Bible, word for word, but Pearl couldn't remember. What she did remember was that she had gone immediately and stuffed her nose into a hollyhock, a lavender one.

“My heavens, yes,” she thought, as she lay on the bed. “It
was
lavender, wasn't it?” And lavender had always been her favorite color. Did it begin there? Or did she choose that flower because she had always loved the color? Things of the mind were so complicated. The fat smell of hollyhocks was fingering its way around her on the bed. She undid the top buttons of her nightdress and loosened the garment away from her throat. Her hand brushed the skin of her neck and she pulled it back quickly, outraged at the work nature had done there, the loosening, the harrowing, the furrows. The way one readies earth in order to plant a garden. Useless work. What seeds could come up after sixty years? What plants could prosper?

“Weeds,” Pearl whispered. She heard the mailman flop her mail into the box and the cast-iron thud as the cover fell. Then she heard the neighbor's dog barking as mail was delivered in the next yard. The phone rang many times, but she did not even consider answering.

“Some people are more patient than others,” Pearl thought, “depending on how long they allowed the phone to ring before giving up.” Perhaps this was a secret of life, of why some succeed where others don't. It all has to do with how long a person will sit with a phone to his or her ear and listen to it ring.

A housefly landed on her nose, and she squinted her eyes to stare at it. But she hadn't been able to read anything up close for so many years now, what did she expect to see right on the very end of her nose? Her eyes were growing toward cataracts. That's what the eye doctor told her.
It
happens
to
all
of
us,
he had said. She wrinkled her nose and the fly, with its head of magnificent eyes, launched off for new territory.

Pearl heard her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tinley, hosing down her car.

“Washing off the mud,” Pearl thought, and even this seemed significant in life, another clue perhaps as to how some folks manage where others don't. She had lived in Mattagash long enough, eighteen years of her life, to know that this could be an effective maneuver. The McKinnons, Pearl had come to realize, were famous for such. She and Sicily were the only McKinnons left in Mattagash. The name, at least there, had died out. But she thought of the old aunts and uncles. The second cousins. If one had a drinking problem it was shoved into a closet. None of the McKinnons drank in public. They preached “Love thy neighbor” a good part of the day, then spent the rest gossiping about that neighbor.

“Real good Christians,” thought Pearl. She wondered if Amy Joy was in the family way. Why else would anyone shiver and shake to get married on May first? Well, if she was, so be it. She was always boy crazy. Yet Pearl knew that if someone else's daughter found herself “up the stump,” to use Marvin's expression, and still unmarried, she would be nothing short of scandalous. But if a McKinnon ended up in the same predicament, or a Craft, or a Fennelson—and many of them did—it was another matter.

“The Lord will take care of her,” Pearl remembered her great-aunt Caroline saying of her pregnant daughter Lydia. Pearl was very young then. And she believed her great-aunt. She felt there
was
a difference between a Gifford getting pregnant out of wedlock and a McKinnon doing so. Now she was too many miles down the road from Mattagash, too many years, to believe any of that nonsense.
The
Lord
will
take
care
of
her.
Great-Aunt Caroline was dead. So was Lydia. And that child was God only knows where. Lydia had never come back to Mattagash after she'd had that baby. Baby. Pearl still thought of it as a small woolly bundle kicking its feet, yet in real years it would be almost as old as she was now.
The
Lord
will
take
care
of
her.
Just a matter of washing off the mud.

“The Lord didn't knock her up,” Pearl thought. She listened as the lunchtime traffic in front of her house increased. Folks putting food into their bodies just to keep going. Time was moving on, with or without her. She felt around on the bed for the scrapbook and walked her fingers over the cover. Marge's old book, passed on to Pearl because she was next in line. And, of course, that meant she was next in line for a lot of things. Marge was dead, and she, Pearl McKinnon Ivy, was
next
in
line.
Thanks a lot. Thanks a hell of a lot.

When she heard Mr. Tinley turn into his driveway, his car door slam, his dog bark, his house door shut behind him, Pearl smiled.

“It's so routine,” she thought, “I don't even have to look to know what's going on. Or what's gonna happen next. Marvin will be home in a half hour. Him and Mr. Tinley are as regular as clocks.”