A Northern Light (20 page)

"Won't you sit down and have your lunch, Mattie?" Miss Wilcox asked.

But eating was the last thing on my mind. And I didn't see how Miss Wilcox could eat, or teach, or sleep, or ever find any reason to leave this room. Not with all these books in it, just begging to be read.

"Are these all Dr. Foster's books?" I whispered.

"No, they're mine. I had them sent up from the city. They're in a bit of a shambles. I never seem to get around to arranging them properly."

"There are so many, Miss Wilcox."

She laughed. "Not really. I think you and Weaver have read half of them already."

But I hadn't. There were dozens of names I didn't know. Eliot. Zola. Whitman. Wilde. Yeats. Sand. Dickinson. Goethe. And all those were in just one stack! There were lives in those books, and deaths. Families and friends and lovers and enemies. Joy and despair, jealousy, envy, madness, and rage. All there. I reached out and touched the cover of one called
The Earth.
I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.

"You can borrow anything you like, Mattie," I heard Miss Wilcox say. "Mattie?"

I realized I was being rude, so I made myself stop staring at the books and looked at the rest of the room. There was a large fireplace with two settees in front of it, facing each other across a low table. Lou sat on one of them, stuffing herself with sandwiches and slurping her tea. There was a writing table under a window, with pens and pencils and a stack of good paper. I touched the top sheet. It felt like satin. A few more sheets, covered with handwriting all in lines like a poem, were spread haphazardly across the tabletop. Miss Wilcox came over and shuffled them into a pile.

"I'm sorry," I said, suddenly remembering myself. "I didn't mean to pry."

"That's all right. It's just a lot of scribbling. Won't you eat something?"

I sat down and took a sandwich, and to make conversation, Miss Wilcox said she saw me riding the other day with a tall and handsome boy.

"That's Royal Loomis. Mattie's sweet on him," Lou said.

"No, I'm not," I said quickly. I was, of course. I was as dopey as a calf for him, but I didn't want my teacher to know. I wasn't sure she understood about amber eyes or strong arms or kisses in a boat, and I thought she might be disappointed in me for being swayed by those sorts of things.

Miss Wilcox raised an eyebrow.

"I'm not. I don't like any of the boys around here."

"Why not?"

"I suppose it's hard to like anyone real after Captain Wentworth and Colonel Brandon," I said, trying my best to sound worldly wise. "Jane Austen ruins you for farm boys and loggers."

Miss Wilcox laughed. "Jane Austen ruins you for everything else, too," she said. "Do you like her books?"

"I like them some."

"Just 'some'? Why not a lot?"

"Well, ma'am, I think she lies."

Miss Wilcox put her teacup down. "Does she?"

"Yes, ma'am, she does."

"Why do you think that, Mattie?"

I was not used to my elders asking me what I think—not even Miss Wilcox—and it made me nervous. I had to collect myself before I answered her. "Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began.

"Go on," she said.

"The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that. Like
Sense and Sensibility ox Persuasion.
But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in
Huckleberry Finn
where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up."

"People like happy endings, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up."

"I guess not, ma'am. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. And things go well for Anne Elliott in the end, but they don't go well for most people." My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. "I feel let down sometimes. The people in books—the heroes—they're always so ... heroic. And I try to be, but..."

"...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers.

"...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way ... and I feel, well ... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them, "and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?"

No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that."

I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed on me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish said and that I should leave then and there.

"I'm sorry, Miss Wilcox," I said, looking at the floor. "I don't mean to be coarse. I just ... I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay."

Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry."

She glanced at Lou, set the whole plate of cakes before her, then rose and beckoned me to her writing table. She picked up a glass paperweight shaped like an apple and took two books from under it. "
Thérèse Raquin,
" she said solemnly, "and
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Best not tell anyone you have them." Then she took her writing paper out of its box, put the books in the box, covered them with a few sheets of paper, and handed the box to me.

I smiled, thinking that my teacher sure was dramatic. "Cripes, Miss Wilcox, they're not guns," I said.

"No, they're not, Mattie, they're books. And a hundred times more dangerous." She stole another glance at Lou, then asked me, "Has there been any progress?"

"No, ma'am. And there's not likely to be."

"Would you consider working for me, then? I need help with my library, as you can see. I'd like you to come and arrange my books. Sort them into nonfiction and fiction, and then sort fiction into novels, plays, short stories, and poetry, and shelve them alphabetically. I'll pay you. A dollar each time."

It was only the first week of May. If I worked for Miss Wilcox one day a week throughout the summer, I'd have sixteen dollars or so by the time September came. Enough for a train ticket and then some. I wanted to say yes so badly, but then I heard Royal asking me why I was always reading about other people's lives, and felt his lips on mine. I heard my aunt telling me to get down off my high horse and Pa saying I didn't need to go to Miss Wilcox's to find work, there was plenty for me at my own house. And I heard my mamma, asking me to make a promise.

"I can't, Miss Wilcox," I said. "I can't get away."

"Surely you can, Mattie. Just for an hour or two. I'll drive you home. Come this Saturday."

I shook my head. "I've got the chickens to do. The coop needs whitewashing and Pa said he wants it done by Sunday."

"I'll do it, Matt," Lou said. "Me and Abby and Beth. Pa won't know. He'll be out plowing. He won't raise Cain, long as the work gets done."

I looked at my sister, who wasn't supposed to be listening. I saw the crumbs around her mouth, the lank hair hanging in her face, the dirty cuffs of Lawton's coveralls slopping down over her boots. I saw her blue eyes big and hopeful, and I loved her so much I had to look away.

"If you come, you can borrow anything you like, Mattie. Anything at all," Miss Wilcox said.

I imagined myself here on a Saturday afternoon, in this calm, quiet room, digging among all these books, gleaning my own treasures.

And then I smiled and said yes.

It was seven o'clock on a May evening. It was after the supper was cooked and served, the dishes washed, the pots scrubbed, dried, and put away, the stove wiped down, the coals banked, the floor mopped, the dishrags put to soaking, and Barney fed. Lou and Beth were polishing their boots. Abby was sitting in front of the fire with a heap of darning. Pa was sitting across from her, mending Pleasant's bridle. And me? I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking at my family, each one of them close enough to touch, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst.

There were more chores to do. The wood box next to the stove was nearly empty. There were ashes to dump down the outhouse and Abby could have used my help with the darning, but I felt as if the very walls themselves were pressing in upon me. As if I would go crazy if I stayed in this prison of a kitchen for one second longer. I leaned against the sink and closed my eyes. I must have sighed or groaned or something, because Abby suddenly said, "What's wrong, Mattie?"

I opened my eyes again and saw her looking up at me. Lou and Beth looked up, too. Even Pa did.
Dehiscence
was my word of the day. It is a fine word, a five-dollar word. It means when pods or fruits burst open so that their seeds can come out. How was it that I could learn a new word every day yet never know the right ones to tell my family how I felt?

"Nothing's wrong. I'm fine. Just tired, that's all. I ... I think I forgot to latch the barn door," I lied, then ran to the shed, grabbed my shawl, and kept going. Out into the yard, past the garden and the outhouse, past the black earth of the cornfields.

I kept going until I got to the eastern edge of Pa's land, where the fields give way to woods and there's a stream, and just past it, a small clearing ringed with tamaracks. To the place where my mother is buried.

I could hardly breathe by the time I got there. I walked around and around her grave, trying to get hold of myself. My head felt giddy and light, like the time Minnie and I filched brandy from her father's cupboard. Only this time it wasn't alcohol I'd had too much of. It was books. I should have stopped after Zola and Hardy, but I hadn't. I'd gone right on like a greedy pig to
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman,
Songs of Innocence
by William Blake, and
A Distant Music by
Emily Baxter.

I'd borrowed the volumes of poetry on Saturday, when I'd gone back to Miss Wilcox's house to start organizing her books. "You can keep this one, Mattie," she'd said about the Baxter, "but keep it to yourself." I didn't need telling. I'd heard all about
A Distant Music.
I'd read articles about it in Aunt Josie's cast-off newspapers. They said that Emily Baxter was "an affront to common decency," "a blight on American womanhood," and "an insult to all proper feminine sensibilities." It had been banned by the Catholic Church and publicly burned in Boston.

I thought there would be curse words in it for sure, or dirty pictures or something just god-awfully terrible, but there weren't—only poems. One was about a young woman who gets an apartment in a city by herself and eats her first supper in it all alone. But it wasn't sad, not one bit. Another was about a mother with six children, who finds out she's got a seventh coming and gets so low spirited, she hangs herself. One was about Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, setting fire to her loom and heading off to do some traveling herself. And one was about God being a woman instead of a man. That must've been the one that made the pope boiling mad.

Jeezum ... What if God
was
a woman? Would the pope be out of a job? Would the president be a woman, too? And the governor? And the sheriff? And when people got married, would the man have to honor and obey? Would only women be allowed to vote?

Emily Baxter's poems made my head hurt. They made me think of so many questions and possibilities. Reading one was like pulling a stump. You got hold of a root and tugged, hoping it would come right up, but sometimes it went so deep and so far, you were halfway to the Loomis farm and still pulling.

I took a deep breath. I smelled wet earth and evergreens and the dusk coming down, and they calmed me some. I was agitated something fierce. There was a whole other world beyond Eagle Bay, with people like Emily Baxter in it, thinking all the things you thought but weren't supposed to. Writing them, too. And when I read what they'd wrote, I wanted to be in that world. Even if it meant I had to leave this one. And my sisters. And my friends. And Royal.

I stopped pacing and hugged myself for warmth. My eyes fell on my mamma's headstone,
ELLEN GOKEY. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. BORN SEPTEMBER
14, 1868.
DIED NOVEMBER
11, 1905. Her maiden name was Robertson, but Pa wouldn't allow it on the headstone. Her father had disowned her for marrying my pa. He'd forbidden the match, but my mamma went against him. She loved to tell the story of her courtship with Pa. Pa didn't like the stories; he'd always leave the room when she started. We liked them, though. Especially the one about how she'd seen him for the first time showing off at her father's sawmill on the Raquette River. He was biding a log with another lumberjack, trying to knock him off. Whoever lost had to give the other man his bandanna. My pa saw my mother watching, dumped the other man in the water, and gave her his bandanna. She was buried with it in her hand.

Mamma also liked to tell us how Pa had asked her to marry him in the woods, in the dead of winter, under a bough of snowy pine branches. And how—on the night they'd eloped—he'd told her to take just a carpetbag with her. "Pack your most important things," he'd said, thinking she would know he meant dresses and boots and underthings and such, but she was so young and giddy, she'd packed her favorite books, a box of caramels, and her jewelry. He'd had to sell a gold bracelet right off to get her some clothes. He'd wanted to sell the books, not the bracelet, but she wouldn't let him.