Ernie's Ark (19 page)

Because Francine’s real mother has been gone a very long time, finding Cindy in the kitchen at the end of a day is like crashing through a bramble and happening upon a tame deer. Her father was better before Cindy came—home more, nicer—but she prefers Cindy to anything her father used to be. Because of this, she is careful. She tries to be only smart, only cooperative, only wanted.

“I thought you were going to the rally,” Cindy says, looking up from a sweater she’s trying to pull a thread back into.

“I decided not to.”

Cindy puts the sweater down. “Francine, you’ve talked of nothing else for a week. You were hell-bent on shaking Jesse Jackson’s hand.”

Francine digs her fingernails hard into her wrist to keep from crying. It works. “I figured I’d see him easier on TV,” she lies. “There’s about a million people.”

“Then let’s turn it on,” Cindy says, dropping everything. She switches on the public-access channel and sits next to Francine. The gym looks thronged and noisy. Roy Little gets up, takes too long to adjust the squalling mike, then delivers the bad news.

“Oh, my God,” Cindy says. She looks at Francine. “Did you know this?”

Francine nods, listens some more to Roy. They’re going to
sue for back wages, pension packages, sick time, vacation. Then he introduces Jesse; with a stab of satisfaction Francine realizes that in the developing news Eddie has lost his privilege. She looks for him in the crowd, but he is lost in there.

Then it is Jesse’s turn. Francine cannot bear to look at him. It is a feeling like grief, seeing her friend who does not know her. Who does not know what that woman said today in the union hall. As she predicted, his poetry elicits a swell of affirmation from the crowd. Listening to him feels exactly like listening to her mother’s staticky London voice on the phone: the voice is far away, familiar solely to the imagination, and tendered through a scrim of theater.

Wherever you are tonight, you can make it.

“Yes,” Francine murmurs, as if answering the preacher in Jesse’s childhood church.

You can make it.

“Yes.”

It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes.

“Yes, it gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes.” The rally goes long, with lots of singing, and shouting, and crying, and then everybody spills into the night, where they will march over to the mill gates. Some will stand mute and stolid, signs raised over their heads; some will kick doors and punch windshields. This is always how it goes.

Cindy shakes her head. She slides her arm behind Francine’s shoulders and gives her a squeeze. “Sweet Jesus,” she says. “I thought this town couldn’t get any bleaker, but I guess I was wrong.” She sighs, getting up. “You need anything, Francine? I’m going to make some phone calls.”

“No.”

“All right, then,” she says, then pads off to her bedroom.

Francine’s father does not arrive until late in the late news, which shows highlights of Jesse’s speech but manages to thwart the flow, the poetry, the presence. She hears her father in the kitchen: freezer door, ice tray, a glass taken down from the cabinet. He appears in the doorway and leans.

Francine mutes the television. “Did you hear?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Tough break.”

“Some people will make out all right,” Francine says. “Some people started with more.”

“Some people always do,” he says. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” He swirls the drink in his hand, then sits next to her, which he never does. They watch the voiceless weatherman wave his hands in front of a satellite photo.

“Daddy?” Francine says.

Her father’s head swivels toward her: she never calls him that.

“Does Cindy know?”

He takes a sip. “Does Cindy know what?”

“About that girl.”

Another sip. “What girl?”

“That girl in your office. The girl with the . . . beads.”

Her father arranges his face one way, then another. Francine stares him down, hoping he will not make up a story. What girl? Oh, her? My assistant? My colleague’s daughter? That pain in the neck who came by to complain about her grade?

Francine waits. She is willing to wait.

“No,” her father says, finally. “Cindy doesn’t know.”

The room seems to shrink around them, corralling a secret.

“Cindy will leave if she finds out,” Francine says after a moment. The words freeze between them.

Her father jiggles his glass; the ice cubes sound like chattering teeth. He does not ask her not to tell. He knows she won’t. He knows absolutely.

Now Francine gets up, rattled by an ambiguous gratitude, seduced by the notion that she, Francine Love, is a person about whom it is possible to have inside knowledge. That her father is the one who possesses it.

“Good night,” she tells him, moving quickly up the stairs, hoping to be asleep before the feeling fades. Instead, she pauses, as she has on countless nights, in the shadowy hallway outside her father’s bedroom. She covers her eyes with her fists to shut out the frightening dark. Listening hard, she hears it at last: the comfort of Cindy’s slumber, those long, solid breaths, reliable and unaware.

Ernie Whitten, retired pipefitter

Five months to the day after Marie’s passing, Ernie won free dance lessons in a raffle. He’d bought the ticket from a girl in the neighborhood raising money for her middle-school jazz band. There were other prizes on the list—movie passes, a year of bouquets from Showers of Flowers, and a month of lunches at the Libby Road Burger King—all of which assumed the presence of a partner. With Marie gone, Ernie saw the world more than ever as a place for two-by-two.

He had tried to explain this to the eighth-grader standing on his doorstep who introduced herself as Francine Love, but she merely shrugged her meaty shoulders and informed him, “You won’t win, anyway.” She was a round, soft girl with beach-colored hair cut straight off just below her ears. Her glasses were heavy and squarish, and she wore a big blue sweatshirt over big blue sweatpants. Ernie’s son had been a child like this, inexplicably heartbreaking, out of step in ways hard to pin down. For her awful glasses alone, Ernie bought four books of tickets at five bucks a crack, enough, he figured, to finance a new reed for her saxophone.

And now here she was again, back on his doorstep, grinning at him through chapped lips, holding out a pink-and-white brochure for Melanie Bouchard’s School of Dance at 425 West
Main. Ernie’s had been the fourth ticket drawn. Last prize, but a prize nonetheless, the only winning ticket Francine Love had ever sold in her eight-year school career.

“So we’re both winners, in a way,” she said.

Ernie took the brochure timidly, as if its folds might conceal a tiny, sharp-toothed animal. “Well,” he said. “Thank you, then.”

The girl was staring at him through her magnified green eyes, her whispery eyelashes brushing against the lenses. “Thank you, then, Francine,” Ernie said again, hoping to hurry her along.

“It’s an excellent school of dance,” Francine proclaimed, nudging her chin toward the brochure. “Dancing is very good exercise, particularly for older people.” Her eyes darted right, then left; she spotted Marie’s Yorkie quaking in the sunporch behind him.

“Oh, what a
cute
little dog,” Francine exclaimed. “Can I hold him?”

Ernie handed over the terrified dog, whereupon Francine proceeded to cuddle it close to her face and kiss its ears. The dog went limp with gratitude. “What’s his name?” Francine asked. “He’s so
cute
.”

“Pumpkin Pie,” Ernie said. “My wife named him.”

“Hi, Pumpkie,” Francine squealed, hugging the dog. “Hi, Pumpkie-boy-boy.”

Ernie allowed the girl to go on for a few moments, for this is exactly how Marie had handled the dog, all this cooing and carrying on, and he figured the poor beast missed a woman’s voice in its wiry ears. When she was done, Francine said, “You’re not going to take the dance class, are you.”

“Well, no,” Ernie admitted. “I’m no dancer.” When she didn’t leave, he added, “If that’s all right.”

Francine petted the dog absently. She began to look around at Ernie’s yard, the empty bird feeders, the untended grass. It was May, and Marie’s wildflowers were beginning to dot the lawn. Inevitably Francine’s gaze fixed upon the ark Ernie had built in his first and only fit of artistic inspiration, one that had come to him—from God, he believed now—during the last lucid weeks of Marie’s cancer. He’d swaddled his dying wife on the sunporch so she could watch him prove he was a man who could still see the possibility in a blank board. Over the years he’d built furniture for her, and birdhouses, and a new bathroom, and the sunporch, but the ark was a mystery that only after her passing he’d recognized as a monument to her, a vessel that contained her last weeks, which had been filled with entertainment and unseasonable weather and the joyful
ping
of hammer on nail.

“I watched you build that boat,” Francine said.

“Ark,” Ernie corrected her. “It was an artistic inspiration.”

“I knew that,” Francine said. “Everybody wondered what the heck you were doing. You know what I told them?”

“I can’t say as I do.”

“I told them creativity can’t be thwarted.” She blinked a few times. “That’s what our band director always says. He’s an extremely smart man.”

Ernie pondered this for a moment. “My wife liked it,” he said. The ark’s shadow covered most of the lawn at this time of day, he was surprised to notice; though it was broad and hulking and a story high, Ernie could go days without seeing it at all.

“You’ve let it go,” Francine said. “You’ve got chipmunks and things in there.”

“So did Noah.”

Francine didn’t laugh. “All my family felt bad about your wife,” she said. “She was a nice person to see around the neighborhood.” She pointed down the street. “I live over there.”

He looked at the white house on the corner. He’d lost track of most of the neighbors over the years; he was not, as Marie always put it, a “mixer.”

“Did you get our card?”

Ernie nodded, though in truth he had yet to open any of the cards that had come in, many from people Ernie didn’t know well: people from Marie’s book group, from the library where she’d worked for years, from neighbors and acquaintances who had been Marie’s domain. Marie had been the one in charge of friendships, and he couldn’t imagine what comfort her friends’ words might provide now.

“Anyway,” Francine went on, “my question is, is it still a winning ticket if the winner doesn’t claim the prize?”

“But I don’t have the time to claim it,” Ernie said. “My son’s coming out from California to visit. You could give the prize to somebody else.”

Francine thought this over. “When does your son get here?”

Ernie sensed a trap but stepped right in, mostly because Marie’s dog looked as if it had been born in Francine’s arms. “Saturday,” he allowed.

“The lesson’s on Friday,” Francine said. “Your son won’t even be here yet.” Her face stilled, and Ernie saw that this girl was like everyone else in this town—fixed on the smallest triumphs, undone by losses they could neither identify nor comprehend. Probably her only girlfriend had moved away, or her parents had broken up, or there was an uncle or cousin who’d crossed the
picket line. Although Ernie, whose retirement date had fallen three weeks after the mill went out on strike, should have been as affected as anyone by the strike’s ache and duration and violence, Marie’s cancer had kept him in a strangely comforting netherworld. It wasn’t until after she died that he looked around the town he’d lived in all his life and could not believe what he saw.

“You don’t have to have a partner, Mr. Whitten,” Francine said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Oh, well,” Ernie said, “that’s not—”

“Mr. Whitten,” Francine said, “it would mean a real, real lot to me if you claimed your prize.” She put the dog down. “We could go together.”

In this manner, the matter was settled. A simple request from a neighbor girl, the first request from any human being since Marie’s breathless “Hold me, Ernie,” when he’d felt what was left of her lift from the earth and dissolve into stars.

Francine stopped in at five-thirty on Friday evening with her dance shoes stowed into a plastic grocery bag that dangled from her wrist. She was wearing the same blue sweatpants she’d had on when she first sold him the ticket, plus an oversized T-shirt emblazoned with
SOLIDARITY FOREVER
in red letters.

“The deal went through this morning,” Francine said. “Did you hear that?”

Ernie nodded. Atlantic Pulp & Paper had been bought out by Global Paper Products, a South African firm that promised to have the plant up and running within weeks, honoring back wages and pension packages and seniority. It was as if the town of Abbott Falls, Maine, had won the raffle of raffles, but the whiff of despair
and burned bridges had settled so far into the valley that it would be a long time before anyone felt like dancing. No one liked the idea of being bailed out by foreigners, of course, but there were other, worse things: too many who had said and done what they were now ashamed of; too many families ripped apart by money and rage; too many faces with similar features had foamed at one another from opposite sides of the gauntlet over too many shift changes. A year ago there might have been a mass celebration, people kissing in the streets as at the end of a war, an unleashing of church bells, but it was too late now; what Ernie sensed, taking the town’s measure, was an oddly calibrated resignation, a triumph with most of the satisfaction scoured clean off it.