Touch (23 page)

OUTSIDE, MY STEPFATHER
looked up at the sky and he thought again of bruises. He wondered if he were only tall enough to touch the clouds if they would split like overripe fruit, if that would make them spill their seed. As he had the thought, the first few flakes started to fall, drifting and lazy. He watched them settle on the ground, expecting them to melt as they hit brush and leaves, but even though this was the first snow it had been cold for a few weeks now. The snow stayed where it fell. He had not said anything to his wife, because he knew that she was dreading this first winter, but he had been waiting. Snow like a Communion. He bent over to pick up wood.

He made several dozen trips from the back of the house to the front. He stopped occasionally to shake out his arms. When he was done, the porch was half filled, enough for a few weeks. Too much, he knew. Father Earl did not want to admit it to his wife, but my father and his talk of witches had taken him aback. The stacked wood and the lantern in the window were things he could understand.

My stepfather took one last trip to the woodpile behind the house, this time for an armload to bring inside. As he pulled
wood off the pile he heard the door of the house shut hard. He called out to his wife—he was almost done; he could light the fire in the church before he came inside—but she didn’t hear him.

She was already out of sight by the time he came around to the porch. The snow was coming down hard, moving from an idea in the sky to the beginnings of a blanket on the ground with almost no notice. He stomped his feet on the steps before gingerly balancing the wood in one arm while he reached out with the other to open the door. A thin line of snow spilled off the shoulder of his coat, some down his collar and some down his arm, hitting his hand. He shook it off his hand and then opened the latch.

The smell of yeast and cooked meat enveloped him. He saw the large pot hanging over the fire, and he wondered if she intended for him to eat a thick stew for his lunch—hunks of meat and potatoes—or if it was something thinner and meaner, a soup, a few small chunks of venison just to hint at what his wife was capable of cooking.

She had been odd about food the last few days, alternating between cheeseparing dinners of bread and onions and lavish meals that would not have been out of place on feast days, as if she could not decide if the winter was something to be feared or embraced. Since she had realized there was a child growing inside her she had been easy with her father’s money. Not only would they not go hungry this winter, they would eat better than anybody else in Sawgamet, he suspected. There were still items that she had wanted to add to their larder in quantity—sugar being not the least—but my great-uncle had assured her that his store would be stocked to last through to the spring
when the snow would melt enough for horses to get in from Havershand.

My stepfather had been quiet about his wife’s dithering. Perhaps if she kept on with the feast or famine, but for a few days it was almost amusing to him. She was normally so surefooted, so insistent about what she wanted. He was not sure if it was something else that he needed to learn about her, or if it was a by-product of her pregnancy. Either way, she would settle down once the child was born. He was glad that she had become with child so quickly. She needed it, he thought. She needed the weight of motherhood to teach her what it meant to be a priest’s wife. Not that the life of a priest’s wife was the same here as it would have been had they stayed in Ottawa, as her mother and father had wanted.

He resisted his urge to peek in the pot to see what was cooking, and instead hung his coat on the peg by the door and settled back down at his desk. He should have time to finish the sermon before he needed to dress for the wedding. He had quickly gotten into the habit of wearing the same rough, heavy work clothes that the other men wore in the cuts, changing into collar only when he was actually in the church.

It took him a few minutes to restart his thoughts, as if he had to rejoin himself in midspeech. He loved delivering the sermon, and knew that was a weakness. He had been told many times by Father Barns that he should not take so much pride in his role as a leader of the flock. He was only given the chance to speak at all because of the words of Jesus Christ. But he could not help himself. He was good at it.

“He giveth the snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.” Looking out the window at the solid curtain that
seemed to have been lowered in front of him, he thought that perhaps Job would have been more appropriate than the Psalm: “Out of the south cometh the whirlwind; and cold out of the north. By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the waters is straightened.”

SOMETHING ACRID TUGGED
at his nose. The bread, burning, he realized. He wrapped his hands in cloth and then reached in and deftly plucked the loaf out. It was not too bad, just singed on the bottom, nothing that could not be scraped off. He had not realized his wife had been gone so long, though. He thought he had only been sitting and writing for a moment or two.

The house had grown dark. Not much light came in through the window, though the lantern on his desk and the fire helped. It should not have taken her that long to light the fire in the church and then come home.

He threw three more logs onto the fire, fastened his coat around himself, and then slowly pulled on the heavy new gloves that she had made for him. He opened the door and almost staggered back, surprised by how much the weather had turned in the time he had been writing.

Even with the covered porch, snow blew against him, small, sharp pieces, like sand, like sugar, stinging his cheeks and eyes, blurring his vision. He could not see past the bottom of the steps, and the dimness was pervasive. Almost as an afterthought, he stepped back in and took the lantern from the table. He would be no help to her if he could not lead them
home, or worse, if he spent the night wandering around like a lost soul. He closed the door tightly behind him, careful once again to make sure the latch shot home. The idea of the fire breathing out heat into the small house cheered him; while it was not the sort of house that his wife had been used to, it would keep them warm; it would be a welcome place to return to from out of this storm.

Squinting, he could barely see what lay in front of him. There, the man-sized boulder beside the path, already covered in white, and over there, the unbroken geometry of the church. The well-worn path between the house and the church, fifty paces, more or less, was gone.

He hunched over, burrowing his head between his shoulders, reaching up and tugging his hat down further over his ears, trying to protect the exposed skin of his face from the biting snow. That was what it felt like, he thought, like a plague of biting insects swarming against him, and as he had the thought, he realized that was also the way the falling snow sounded.

He had always thought of snow as something quiet, as something that drifted silently from the sky and lay in dampening blankets on the ground, the trees. It would make a solid whoosh and whomp as it fell from trees and roofs in sheets, but it was not supposed to sound like this. This snow hissed. It crackled against the small house, against his coat, his pants, against the trees. The snow reminded him of fire, of locusts, of devouring destruction.

He stayed bent over, and when he looked up, he realized that all he could see was trees and whiteness. The church was gone. A magic trick. A miracle. He could see the boulder
ahead of him. Behind him, he could still see the house, but even though he was barely a dozen paces gone, it was already shimmering, ready to disappear just like the church. He held up the lantern, as if that would help, and then lowered himself into the storm again, confident that his initial line would hold true. The church was not like the stone and stained-glass cathedrals that his wife’s parents had envisioned, but it was large enough to hold a hundred men and women, large enough that he would not pass by it in the artificial night.

The snow lapped his ankles; he could not understand how it had come so quickly. It had been cold for days, for weeks, and they had known that winter was coming, but still, here it was, like an unexpected and unwelcome visitor. And suddenly Father Earl had the image of winter circling like a wolf, waiting until his back was turned. He still could not see the church, and he had to stifle the impulse to run. He could turn around, he thought, but when he looked behind him, the house had disappeared.

He looked for the church, and then for the house again, and as he turned, he realized what he had done by turning around. There was no front, no back now, just the biting whiteness, the stinging snow attacking him.

He would not die. He knew that. In one direction was the church, in another was the house. The other ways were toward the slope down to the river, which he could follow to town, or to the woods. If he ended up in the woods, the force of the snow would be blunted and he would find trails that would either lead him into the cuts and the quick-built shelters or back into town. But it was his wife that he was thinking of. He did not want to lead her purposelessly through the night.

He closed his eyes for a moment, standing straight and raising his face into the storm. He had read a book once that described a sandstorm somewhere in Arabia, and he thought that it would feel like this, the way the snow scraped against him and slipped down his collar. He did not know which way to go, but it was best to move. Best to do something other than stand out in this stinging snow. He opened his eyes again and started walking, purposefully, forcefully, as if he knew which way would take him to the church, as if he were leading his flock behind him, and he felt as if he had been touched by providence when, after a few dozen steps, he saw the broad face of the church in front of him.

He was relieved when he stepped inside the church; though it was no warmer inside the church than out, at least he was given shelter from the biting storm. His relief quickly turned to anger, though. She was not there, and he knew that she had decided to go to town despite his instructions, thinking she would stop in the church to light the fire on her way back. She may have been smarter than him, but she was not as cautious as he would have liked her to be; there were still times when she thought that Sawgamet was quaint, when she did not realize that men died out in the woods. He gave himself a moment to fume and then he touched a match to the kindling. He knew Franklin and Rebecca would not let her leave the store in weather like this. She would have to wait out the snow in town, but she would be safe.

In front of him, the wood quickly began to eat at itself, sending up a welcome light and touch of warmth. He was glad that he had laid the fire out so carefully earlier in the week. He let it take, and then carefully added a few logs. The fire
was for him—the wedding would be on another day, a day with better weather, he knew—and he luxuriated before its warmth. Inside the church, the sound of the snow on the roof and the walls was almost peaceful, a lulling comfort, like the river. He could have lain down in front of the fire and gone to sleep. He wanted to. Tiredness had descended on him, had fallen on him, and he thought about it for a few seconds, but then he heard something.

The sound was high and keening, not quite animal, but not like anything my stepfather had heard before. At first he thought it was just the wind, the snow howling at him, or perhaps a leftover, a ringing in his ears from his time outside, but whatever it was, it was not natural. He could not hear words, and he did not know why he was sure, but he knew that it was a voice, that it was calling him. The voice was not human, and it was not ethereal; nobody would ever mistake that voice for anything angelic, Father Earl thought. It was unnerving, and it cut through him, yet he could not stop himself from going to the window. He could not see anything, of course, but he stood by the window and looked anyway, transfixed. He wanted to see the qallupilluit, to hear what the sea witches were promising if he followed them down to the river, to death and destruction. And then it came clear to him, a single note, like somebody had touched a fork to a crystal goblet: he realized that the voice had to be his wife.