South of Superior (6 page)

“Jack!” she cried in a gravely voice. The woman who'd gotten out of the car stopped as Jack jumped in ecstatic circles around her knees.

“Jack, get down, get back here,” Mary rasped, her voice even gruffer than usual. She'd had a start, her eyes playing tricks on her, seeing the face of a woman who'd been dead and in the ground for a long, long time.
Ada Stone
, she'd thought for one shocked moment. “Jack,” she rasped again, and after a few more leaps he trotted back to her.

Her visitor made her way forward, her arms full of boxes. “Hi, I'm Madeline Stone, I'm staying with Gladys Hansen?”

“I thought so.” Mary turned herself around to go in the door but the girl didn't follow. “Come on, then!” Mary barked and heard the plank steps creak behind her.

Mary had cobbled her place together and knew what it must look like to her visitor: a couple of wooden boxes Up on wheels. Which it was. Virgil Higley of Higley Logging had given her two old tool cribs when he was finished with them and she'd bolted them together and cut a doorway in between. The place suited her. Real small, so it heated Up good. The girl would find out, if she stayed north long enough. You only needed what you needed, nothing more. The woodstove was burning hot in the first room and it was warm as toast. A cracked leather armchair was pulled Up close by it, and six chickens sat in beds of straw in a long wire hutch on the floor, clucking softly. Jack gave them a calculating look and Mary growled, “Jack.” Jack sighed and trotted past.

The second room held a cookstove, a pegboard hung with pots and pans, a countertop and cupboards and a sink without spigots, a gas refrigerator, a footstool, a couple of old easy chairs. There was a bunk along one wall, covered with a quilt and bolstered with pillows, a metal wardrobe, shelves of food and books, an old card table with a puzzle spread across it, and finally another wire cage, Jack's. Mary shooed him into it.

“He's still got his puppy ways. Got to be able to get some peace now and then. John Fitzgerald brought him to me, you know John?”

Madeline Stone shook her head.

“Lives in town, you'll meet him. A great knurl of a man, built like a stump. Runs the hardware. Anyway, John brought Jack to me and I told him I didn't want a dog but he wouldn't take no. Somebody dropped him off, looks like, left him to die or find a home. No collar, no tags, skinny, running loose. Maybe he just run off and got lost, I don't know, but either way, John couldn't find nobody to take him, so here he is.” Mary sat in the chair beside Jack's cage and scratched his head through the wire. “Sit down, it don't matter where.”

Madeline set her load of boxes on the table and eased into the other chair. Mary took note of her Unease. Well, what could you expect? She was from the city and she looked it—not fancy, but smooth. Smooth skin, smooth hands, a real modern short haircut showing, now that she'd plucked off the cap she'd been wearing. (It was the hat that made her look so like that face out of the past, Mary decided. She couldn't recall if she'd ever seen Ada minus her hat. And the girl was bosomy too, like Ada had been. Bosomy and solid. She could do some work if she had to, not like some of these girls who looked as if a stiff breeze would blow them away.) She had on very clean blue jeans with a cream-colored sweater knitted in intricate cables, and shiny, smooth-soled leather shoes. Those would be Useless if she ended Up having to walk out of the woods. Mary wondered what she'd have to say for herself.

“Gladys sent some things for you,” Madeline said, then cleared her throat. Polite. Uncomfortable. She wouldn't have lasted ten minutes around Joe. Though maybe that was wrong. Probably was. Mary knew this girl had looked after the woman who'd raised her for years and years when she was real sick, so she was no coward. And she had turned Up here, staying with Gladys to boot, so she had some spark to her. “Gladys made too much meat loaf,” Madeline was saying. “And cookies, and bread.”

“Did she now? Well, that was nice of her. You tell her she don't have to.”

“Oh, it's just extra—”

“Ha. Extra all done Up in its own pan, eh? Well, you tell her I'm grateful, and I'll get her pan back to her directly, next time I'm in town. I'll be bringing the maple syrup in, might be some people about if the weather ever clears. Ought to be some travelers showing Up by Memorial Day anyway.”

“Do you make the syrup?”

“Got near to fifty gallons this year.” Mary heaved herself Up out of her chair and went to the cupboard and pulled out a jug. She poured a dollop of golden brown syrup as thick as molasses into a teaspoon and held it out.

Madeline took the spoon and hesitated. Mary gave her a sardonic look and Madeline popped the spoon in her mouth. “Wow,” she said, then licked the spoon. “That's amazing. It's so good.”

“Damn good.” Mary took the spoon back. “I sell out every year, got people asking after it's gone, but now they want to get rid of me.”

“Who does?”

“Folks at the grocery. They don't like me peddling my stuff. Cuts into their trade.”

“Oh.”

“You don't believe me but it's true. Gladys tell you they cut me off my credit?”

Madeline nodded.

“They don't want my fish no more, either. I been supplying that grocery with all I could get for fifty years. Smoked, fresh, you name it. Now they don't want it. Don't want the fish or the syrup or the berries I get in the summer. It ain't hygienic, they said, and I'm not licensed. Damn right I'm not licensed, I never had to be. Says right on my deed I got the right to farm my property, I can show you. They don't want me to set Up and sell it myself, either, no more than they do the fruit man, and he's been coming here since sixty-six. Bah.” She made a gesture of disgust and changed the subject.

It was good to have company. Mary showed Madeline all over her place that afternoon—the sugar shack and maple grove, the smokehouse, the root cellar and woodshed, the pump in the yard for water and further back the outhouse, the little old camping trailer she'd bought for a good deal years ago now but then never done anything with. “This here was my house,” she told Madeline, waving at a burned-out structure.

“Oh—what happened?”

“Chimney fire. Been meaning to rebuild. But Higley give me them old tool cribs and I'm okay there.”

“When did it happen?”

“Been fifteen years ago or so now, I guess. Time gets by.”

Madeline nodded.

They walked across the yard to a small barn and pasture in which stood one cow and a handful of sheep. “I got forty acres,” Mary said. “I cut my wood from the property, got all the heat you could ask for. Well, folks help me now I've got older, but still, this place keeps me going. I got all I need.”

Mary felt compelled somehow to show Madeline everything—her old truck stowed in its tiny shed, the earrings she made of beads and porcupine quills, the boxes of paperbacks people brought her out to read, the wool she had clipped from the sheep and not yet spun into yarn. She even showed Madeline the family plaid, for she was a Scotswoman, the great-great-granddaughter of one of the earliest white settlers in the Upper Peninsula, or the U.P. as everyone in Michigan called it.

“Was this his place then?” Madeline asked and Mary frowned with impatience—of course it wasn't!—forgetting in a way that Madeline hadn't grown Up here and had no reason to know one way or the other.

“I bought it myself, years ago. Saved my money hard to get it. Always did like it Up here near the big lake. I was born down in Crosscut. My mother run a hotel there when I was young.”
Same as Glad and Butte's ma and dad did here
, she had been about to say, but got distracted by the look on Madeline's face.

“I was there today, in Crosscut. I saw my grandfather's house. It was pretty awful.”

Pretty nice, is what Mary would've said. Gas heat, indoor toilet, two bedrooms Upstairs if she recalled right, a good many closets and cupboards, which is something she felt the lack of. But of course to this girl it mightn't look like much. “I know the house. I knew Joe.”

Madeline looked startled, alarmed even. “You did?”

“Of course I did. He played a mean fiddle. Always played at the fiddle jamboree they hold in Crosscut every summer, you should have heard him.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Yup. Nobody could play ‘Sally Barton' like your granddad.”

Madeline nodded, seeming speechless.

“You play?”

“What? Me? Oh, no. I don't play anything.”

“I'll bet you can draw.”

“Joe was a dab hand at drawing. Used to do these little cartoons at the jamboree. You paid him a dollar, he give you a drawing of yourself. Did it in about two minutes flat, I never saw the like.”

“Oh,” Madeline said, looking shaken. Mary would've bet the farm the girl was good with a drawing pencil.

“You look a mite like him. But more like his ma—your great-grandma, I mean.”

“You got her eyes, and that same dark hair, though she always wore a cap, I can't recall if I ever saw her without it. You got her build, too—” Mary made a shape with her hands in the air.

“Square,” Madeline said glumly and a smile flickered over Mary's face.

“Sturdy,” she said. “Real pretty, in her own way.”

There was a long moment of silence and then Madeline said, very softly, “What was her name?”

Mary frowned. Didn't this girl know anything? “Ada. Ada Stone. You give me a start when you got here. I always liked her real well, so I remember.”

“I—I didn't know. I don't know anything about them. Joe Stone didn't want me. The authorities tracked him down but he said no.”

“Oh well, a man. It don't surprise me. Course he probably could've found somebody to help out, if he tried. Jackie's ma took off on him when Jackie was pretty young, and Ada would've passed on by the time you came along. I expect he was too proud to go asking.”

Madeline bit her lip, and then she said, like she was admitting to something she might rather not've, “I looked in Gladys's phone book. It said it covers this whole area, three counties. There weren't any Stones. I just thought maybe—you know.”

Mary nodded. There wouldn't be any Stones in the book, she could've told the girl that. She studied Madeline, sizing her Up, considering saying something more, but in the end she didn't. It wasn't her place. If Gladys and Arbutus hadn't told Madeline about her family, it wasn't Up to her to butt in.

 

 

Madeline saw in her
rearview mirror that Mary watched Until she was out sight. The rain beat down, smoke drifted from the chimney. Jack danced at her ankles but she seemed Unaware of him. Her loneliness and independence seemed absolute. Maybe they went hand in hand.

Madeline bumped down the narrow two-track, peering through the increasing rain. She turned the windshield wipers on high, but before she'd gone a quarter mile the driver's-side blade peeled away from its clip and fell along the road. She stopped and searched in the weeds, the rain pelting on her back, Until she found the pieces. The rubber had rotted and there was nothing left but two cracked, broken halves.

She tossed the chunks aside. She started the car Up again but stopped right away. The metal of the blades was screeching against the windshield, scratching the glass. She sat and thought, then climbed out and kneeled in the mud to search on the floor Under the seats Until she found an old, long-cuffed knit glove, each finger a different garish color, a many-years-old and not very well-liked gift from someone or other. Wet and cold and muddy now, she leaned grimly over the windshield to fit it over the naked blade and made her way back to 26 Bessel, the glove waving gaily.

 

 

“Lonely!” Gladys scoffed
when Madeline got back. “Mary Feather doesn't want a thing or soul on earth but what she's got, she's not lonely.”

Madeline didn't say what she really thought:
Everybody's lonely, who are you kidding?

She might have said it to Emmy and she wished for her with a sudden intensity. Emmy with her gray braids and pretty smile, her blue felt hat with the yellow daisy on it, her Birkenstocks and cotton smocks, her fresh vegetables and herb tea and never a cigarette ever. How could she die of cancer and how could Madeline live without her?
Oh Emmy
. Her grief sliced as sharp as when it was new. It Unnerved her, that Mary Feather had known her grandfather, spoke of him so easily, revealed these things—the fiddle, the drawing (and she couldn't even think about the fact that they had this in common) —as if they were nothing more than comments on the weather. Unnerved her to think that she looked like him but more like his mother. In her heart she went running for safe harbor, for Emmy.

“Mary knew my grandfather,” she blurted out, and was instantly angry at herself, and yet could not stop. “She said he played the fiddle. And that he liked to draw.”

“He did,” Gladys said coolly. “He was good.”

Madeline waited for her to say something more but she didn't. So Madeline said, “Well. Goodnight.” She didn't care if she seemed abrupt. No one here cared that Joe Stone had not had the decency to look after his own granddaughter, had refused to even really acknowledge her existence. And that was fine because she'd been better off without him. Clearly his had been a bleak, mean life lived in a bleak, mean town, and there was nothing to be gained by considering it. She headed for the stairs.