A Wedding on the Banks (12 page)

Could he have been too harsh on the naturalists last year, Albert wondered, as he tooted hello in answer to Winnie Craft's wave from her front porch.

“Winnie's too afraid to go inside and shut her door,” Albert said to Bruce. “Too afraid she'll miss something.”

As Albert turned the truck into his own wide drive, Bruce wagged his tail. The Albert Pinkham Motel sign always set the dog to twitching in the front seat, and by the time Albert opened the front door to release him, Bruce was often drooling.

“You love this place as much as I do, don't you, boy?” Albert asked. Bruce's tongue flapped from the side of his mouth in anticipation of the bound he would make from the front seat once the open door had given him clearance. But something stopped them both. A car was waiting for them, pulled in snugly below the house. Sicily's car. Amy Joy lolling behind the wheel. McKinnons in blood. Albert and Bruce loathed uppity-ups. The rumor that Albert had heard about Amy Joy getting hitched was true for a change. He had read in the
Watertown
Weekly
just yesterday that she was betrothed to the French grease monkey at Thibodeau's. Maybe Albert should say grease
Frog.
There was a picture of the two of them, their engagement picture, taken as they leaned against someone's refrigerator in someone's kitchen. It was a French kitchen, Albert knew that much. He had spotted two crucifixes over the refrigerator. Mattagash women might have the snazziest items Avon can offer plastered all through their houses, but there wasn't a single crucifix among them. The Giffords maybe had one or two, if they hadn't pawned them. Albert thought of the picture. Didn't the McKinnons think they were meringue on the pie, though? Bruce growled, as if reading Albert's thoughts. But engagement pictures meant weddings and weddings meant honeymoons. And honeymoons meant cozy nights of squeaking bedsprings at the all-new Albert Pinkham Motel, replete with hot running water in all the rooms.

“You people need
cold
showers, not hot ones,” Albert told two shivering newlyweds who complained upon checking out. That was before he had broken down and added hot water. Had pampered the fussy guests who graced the doors of numbers 1, 2, 3, or 4.

But in fact Albert planned, if business would only pick up, to buy a plastic swimming pool from Sears, one of the big fancy jobs, twelve feet wide with a little diving board and with a most colorful design. He would plant it where Sarah Pinkham's old flower garden had been and charge the bastards $1.00 to dip in it. For the local kids he would even go so far, being a philanthropist of sorts, to offer a $25.00 seasonal pass, a virtual giveaway at that price. Quite frankly, it wouldn't be a great variation from the price he charged tourists. If his motel was in Florida, maybe, he'd have to charge $365.25 for a seasonal pass, so as not to lose money. But in northern Maine, with a summer that comes and goes on mosquito wings, Albert could make a killing on seasonal passes. Bruce agreed.

Amy Joy got out of her mother's car and slammed the door.

“Goddamn McKinnons,” Albert thought. “Just because a door is there, they gotta slam it.” Bruce's teeth scraped, top against bottom. His tail went slack. Albert calmed him with a quick stroke of the neck fur, right where Bruce loved stroking, and opened the door.
Weddings
meant
honeymoons.

“Well, if it ain't little Amy Joy,” Albert said pleasantly. “What's this I hear about you getting married and breaking all them bachelor hearts? Good gravy, I remember when you was no higher than this,” said Albert, and held out a hand, knee high, to demonstrate the awful passage of time. He smiled, displaying his motelier smile, while Bruce, recognizing the salesmanship involved, rushed forward to insert a cold nose into Amy Joy's hand.

“I'll say one thing for the Giffords. If you're in trouble, they'll take the shirt right off your back.”

—James Henderson

Goldie Gifford saw Amy Joy's engagement picture in the
Watertown
Weekly
and showed it to Pike.

“What a shame we ain't been saving our money for the past ten years,” Pike said. “We could buy her something real nice.” They laughed together, Goldie and Pike, and so did a portion of small Giffords who happened to be doing homework within hearing distance. But a somber thought crept into Pike's mind as he lay on the sofa in front of yet another episode of
The
Edge
of
Night.
A wedding like that was bound to be the social event for years to come. And the McKinnons had rich relatives from Portland. They had a bushel of friends and acquaintances from out of state. Ed Lawler himself was born down south somewhere, near Massachusetts. Only God would know who might be coming to that wedding.
Massachusetts.
It had a magical ring. Pike was smitten with out-of-state places the way the young girls in Mattagash were. Marriageable maidens, tired of the few old family names that never seemed to change, swooned over the strange names of men from the cities. They loved going off to marry, and then dragging back to Mattagash some Polish or German name so long you couldn't fit it onto the back of a pulp truck. For Pike, however, this flirtation with other states was purely artistic. He imagined those were the places that first received all the latest hubcap designs straight from Paris, France, or wheresoever they designed them. And tires! Four to a car. Pike could almost sniff the whitewalls. He tried to imagine what an entire school yard full of fancy cars might smell like. There was no doubt in Pike's mind that the high school gymnasium would be used for the reception. Everyone had their receptions there, no attention paid to the last name. And Missy had already come home from school in a tizzy to tell Goldie that the entire fifth-grade class spent their activity period making carnations out of pink Kleenex to decorate the Mattagash gym.

“For Amy Joy Lawler's wedding reception,” Pike had heard her say, and warmth had spread throughout his groin at the thought. He stretched out longer on the couch, but inside he was curling up. In spirit, he was all bent over, rolling a tire quietly away into a soft April night.

***

Vera Gifford read of the wedding plans, too. She wondered how Sicily McKinnon Lawler was handling the affiliation with a Catholic, not to mention one that was French. Being a Catholic herself, Vera understood the religious persecution that went hand in hand with such a thing in Mattagash. But she was never really sure where Catholic began and Gifford left off. She knew one thing, though, having lived all her life on the outskirts of the social wake the McKinnons and Crafts had always caused in Mattagash. Sicily McKinnon Lawler would no more welcome a Frenchman into the fold than she would a Gifford. Look at all the fuss, years ago, when little boy-crazy Amy Joy got herself tangled up with Chester Gifford. Vera's first cousin. You'd have thought someone was selling Amy Joy up the river to slavery to hear the backlash. Well, good enough for Sicily. Let her get what she deserved. You spit up into the air, and it's bound to come back at you. At least Chester Gifford spoke English, even if it was mostly lies.

But the wedding wasn't nearly as interesting to Vera as were her troublesome relatives at the top of the hill. Retribution over the assassinated canary had finally arrived, two days earlier, when Little Pee stole Little Vinal's cumbersome bicycle. He had stripped away the paint, sawed off the bar that designated the sex of the bike, painted it a bright blue, and added a little horn. Then he presented it to his sister Priscilla, who had ridden the bike proudly up and down the road that ran between the two Gifford houses. Little Pee told Goldie that he and Priscilla had pooled their pop bottle money and bought the bike for five dollars from Old Sam, who owned the little junk shop at the St. Leonard–Mattagash town line.

“I can't imagine him selling such a nice bike for so little,” Goldie had said to her son. She even left a huge pot of macaroni boiling on the stove to come outside and admire the glistening bicycle.

“His granddaughter who lives in Caribou left it,” Little Pee lied. “She's too big for it now.”

“I didn't know Old Sam had any kin in Caribou,” Goldie had said as she shook the outdoor rug, made of plastic Sunbeam bread wrappers. Then she had gone back inside to add some hamburg and two cans of stewed tomatoes to the macaroni.

At the bottom of the hill, Vera and her children had watched Priscilla riding up and down in front of their house for two days before they recognized the bicycle as Little Vinal's.

“She looks like she's selling apples,” said Vera, the first day she spotted Priscilla. “Look at her. Wearing out her legs to give her ass a ride.” But the bicycle did look spectacular. Little Pee was handy at welding, painting, and sanding. In fact, the only course he was passing at school was shop. And the skills he had picked up that aided in disguising the bicycle would someday be applied to automobiles that mysteriously disappeared outside the Watertown movie theater, and other establishments, to emerge again as mere ghosts of their former selves. No, it wasn't that the quality of the job on the bicycle was shoddy that tipped off the bottom-of-the-hill Giffords. It was because the very bicycle that Little Vinal had bought a few autumns ago, with what he claimed was his potato-picking money, had mysteriously vanished. It was as if the old settler soil had opened up and swallowed it. And the new bicycle upon which Priscilla was traipsing the roads looked alarmingly like Little Vinal's.
If
you looked closely.
If
you imagined it black, instead of a dazzling blue.
If
you stuck a bar back on and made the bicycle male. For a usually unmathematical family, Vera and her offspring had put two and two together to come up with the whereabouts of Little Vinal's bike.

“Little Pee could make the
Titanic
look like a canoe if you left him alone with it for an hour,” Vera had said, and waited with her fists opening and closing like petals for Big Vinal to get home. She forgot about supper. She let her big washing machine sit with dirty loads of clothing all about it on the floor. Where the hell had Pike and Goldie gotten the money to pay for a new bike, that's all Vera wanted to know. She even forgot about the new mailbox that Vinal was thoughtful enough to get her. She had planned to touch it up with a quick paint job. Now the mailbox was leaning sadly on the back porch, its red flag lowered, the lettered announcement MR. & MRS. WALTER HEBERT, RR #2, WATERTOWN, MAINE 04774, awash in April sunlight.

The kids were eating sandwiches from sticky jars of already mixed peanut butter and jelly when Vinal Gifford finally strolled in and slammed the kitchen door.

“Is it too much work to mix your own?” he asked his wife. He was already tired from a day of imagining how the parking area of Amy Joy's reception would fill up. He expected some peace, Vera could tell, so she put her rantings in limbo. Instead of starting with the bad news, she broke ice with the good.

“Look here at Amy Joy Lawler's engagement picture,” Vera said, and thrust the newspaper into Vinal's face. “Ain't she the picture of old Marge McKinnon? Look how that little nose turns right up into the air.”

“Maybe we should wrap up a battery and give it to her,” Vinal joked. “Do you think she'd like a pair of hubcaps? Some booster cables?” That's when Vera told him about the bicycle.

“I want it back,” she warned her husband.

“If you and Goldie would keep your traps shut,” Vinal complained, “them kids would play together like they should. God didn't put us on the earth to fight. He put us here to relax.”

“He did?” Vera countered. “Well, if he'd known how much you and Pike was planning to relax, he'd have put you both on the moon, where it's quieter.”

So Vinal was obliged to trudge up the hill for a short conference with his brother Pike. When he came back, he brought the blue bicycle down the hill, leading it like a tame deer, and gave it to Little Vinal.

“Don't say a word,” Vinal told his son. “You know damn well he turned that old clunker into what looks like a brand-new bike. And he's gonna weld the bar back on so you won't look like a sissy. Take it and shut up. It didn't cost you a penny.”

“She had her heart set on tramping the roads on that bike,” Vera said, as she lay in bed that night next to Vinal. “She's as boy crazy as they come.”

Vinal reached over and clasped a limp breast in his hand. Vera tried to avoid the hand by rolling on her side, her back to Vinal, but he followed the sagging breast.

“I did five tubs of wash today,” Vera said, then she yawned. Vinal slipped off his long johns and rested a hairy leg on Vera's thighs.

“This'll keep her mind off fighting with Goldie,” Vinal thought, and smiled. “As long as she's fighting
someone,
she'll be okay.”

“I already smoked Genesis, Exodus, and a good part of Leviticus.”

—Randy Ivy, on where to find the best substitute for reefer papers, April 1969

Pearl packed everything she might try to grab in case of a fire. Her concentration was no longer on dresses or purses or which pair of shoes. She wanted the important things now. The things you couldn't replace if flames raged through your home. And there
was
a fire curling around the old memories in Pearl's brain. Eating them up. Pearl put
the
little
things
in her suitcase, the kind of items that people look at once you're dead and marvel at what you ever saw in them. She remembered how she and Sicily had jokingly belittled the contents of Marge's moldy trunk, the leftovers of her life.

“Why would she keep these old clippings from World War One?” Pearl had laughed. “And look, here's a tattered handkerchief from France. It says ‘Argonne Forest' on it. Now who do you suppose ever sent her that?” Well, Pearl saw things differently now. Lives were like wars. You could only study them years after they were over.

“Margie was only fourteen when that war broke out,” Pearl thought, and packed the battered locket Marge had given her for her ninth birthday, January 25, 1918. The locket opened out into two very young faces of Pearl and Sicily. “The war was almost over when she gave me this,” said Pearl. “Who might she have known in that war that worried her? Where did she ever find the money to buy this little locket? Where did she buy it?” She wished she still had Marge's old trunk so that she could look at the items anew, with a fresh interest. All they had saved from it were things that had been passed down from the Reverend and the papers of Grace McKinnon. The other things had seemed of no consequence. Personal letters from Marcus Doyle, the missionary Margie had loved so dearly, who had abandoned her for some reason or other. Pearl remembered seeing the two of them walking among fields of goldenrod, Margie's brown hair blowing in the wind, her skirts picking up burrs and dead dandelion spores. She loved that missionary, and Sicily and Pearl had thrown away his letters. Had thrown away all the secrets of her life. Because there must have been important clues there, Pearl knew. If they had only known it at the time. Pearl had read how archaeologists could dig up cities thousands of years old and tell all sorts of things about the people just from what they ate, what they wore, how they set about housekeeping. And she and Sicily had opened their own sister's trunk, only a few years old, and had seen
nothing.
Now here she was herself, on the threshold of being the owner of a trunk of items that held more interest to moths, and spiders, and the inching dampness of rot, than to her grandchildren.

Pearl packed the McKinnon family scrapbook, its back broken from bending, its pages loosening like wings. Family members,
flown
into
death.
She took Junior's bronzed baby shoes. Maybe he hadn't turned into the most perfect son. She would admit that. But why should she forfeit those early years of waking in the night, of standing over his bed, sometimes for hours, watching his tiny red upper lip blowing outward with the small pop of his sleeping breath. What a beautiful child he had been, and what a precious thing to own. How had the Reverend gone off and left three of these soft, darling things behind?

“He loves the flock,” Marge had said once of the Reverend after he was gone. “He loves the flock, but he has no need for the lamb.”

Pearl packed the engagement ring she had not worn in years. Her finger had grown too large for it. The wedding band was let out to accommodate the growth of her finger. A jeweler had enlarged it for her. But the engagement ring, like the virgin it truly represented, was left untouched. Its little stone sang out as Pearl held it up to the light so that the facets could catch fire.

“How tiny it is,” she thought. Had it shrunken with age? Had it shriveled up the way old people do? Or if she had stayed in Mattagash, where things were kept safe from their tininess, would the ring loom larger than ever? This was true of small towns. Things are big there. And you are sheltered from the oddities of foreign cities and phrases, from menus you can't read, from wines you can't pronounce. You're protected from fancy tables where there are no paper napkins, but linen ones you're reluctant to soil in case someone's mother has to wash them. You're saved from silverware around your plate, enough for a whole family, but it's all for you, and you struggle with which fork to use first. Which wine with fish? How much tip? Oh, the questions involved in just trying to get something to eat when you leave a small town and move up in the world!
When? Where? To what extent? How often?
The horrible adverbs of the city. Yes, a small town is safe enough for some things, but if you make a mistake there, a mistake that might otherwise be lost in the casual rush hour of the city, it will follow you around a small town all your life, like an unrepentant dog.

Pearl packed the grandchildren's most recent pictures. They might not be perfect either, these children, but they had not asked to be born. And for that, surely, they could be forgiven some things. She stared a minute at the wedding picture of her only son and his bride, Thelma Parsons. Pearl left it on her dresser where it had been since the day Thelma excitedly gave it to her. Pearl left the picture where it had stood all those years. She was still in the city, after all, and while in the city, she
could
put some unrepentant dogs to sleep. This was one mistake she didn't want following her back to Mattagash, nipping at her heels.

She did pack clothing, but they weren't special clothes. There were no “Look at me, I've gone off to the city” clothes. No silk blouses, no fancy dresses. No things that would tear easily if you were planting in the spring earth. She packed none of the impractical clothes that Mattagashers wouldn't even wear on a Sunday. Mattagash saw those clothes differently. Mattagash saw them as “Look at her come home from the city and who the hell does she think she is?” clothes. Pearl had been a victim of that kind of dressing. Sometimes you can't help wanting a pat on the back from your heritage, and when one doesn't come, well then, some ex-Mattagashers dress themselves up a bit too fancy, and they vacation in Mattagash with accents they've borrowed from the city. Pearl knew. She'd done it herself. But after a while, you're gone from the small town longer than you've ever lived there. Gone a lifetime. And then you realize one morning that there's no more pretense. Your accent
has
changed. Your style of dressing
has
changed. Your taste in food
has
changed. You find out, quite suddenly, that you're the genuine article. And there's no backtracking. You're gone for good. You're caught between two worlds now because Mattagash will never accept you as the genuine article. They remember you from the day you were born. They remember you without silk clothing. They've seen you in the buff.

“Well, I'm going home anyway,” Pearl answered her own train of thought. And she believed she'd have the good fortune to go home alone. The way she'd left years ago. On a Greyhound bus with its nose pointed toward adventure. Maybe she could
retrace
her path, if she tried.

“I'd go back to when it was just me and Margie and Sicily, finding Orion in the sky and making snowhouses for fairies. The year Daddy left for China. The best year of my life. I'd go straight back to a September day in 1922. I'd go back to the first leaves of autumn falling.”

But very modern footfalls stepped upon the crinkly leaves of 1922 and mashed them well when Marvin announced that he would drive his wife back to her birthplace. To the old McKinnon breeding grounds.

“You're as bad as them salmon I've read about,” Marvin said.

“But you hate Mattagash,” Pearl protested. “You know you do. And what about business?”

“I'm worried about you, Pearly,” Marvin had said as he left for the office, the calfskin briefcase obediently in tow. “And business is so slow Randy could handle it, for Chrissakes. Just kidding,” he added when he saw the look on Pearl's face. “I wouldn't leave Randy alone with a
houseplant,
much less a
guest
.”

This had surprised her. Did Marvin actually notice when things had risen up inside Pearl's emotions and refused to settle back down? Was there an understanding there all those years that she had overlooked? Or was it something else? Was it something akin to how the crows start up before a storm? Or how rabbits sense the earthquake in their feet? Did Marvin look at her the way you look at a gold watch, one that's not been keeping accurate time lately, one that's been squandering seconds and minutes? Yet if you took it apart for a look inside, all you would see would be whirling, complicated mechanisms that meant nothing to you, and you would be very sorry you pried in the first place.

“Bless him,” thought Pearl. “He tries.”

Once in Mattagash, Pearl would announce her need to stay on at the old McKinnon homestead for a time. “At least for a while,” she would tell Marvin. “I want to walk in that blue vetch, that cow's vetch that fills the back field. I want to lie awake to the noisy river. I want to find holes drilled in the birches and catch the sapsucker at it. It might be a pile of bones to you, Marvin, and to Junior and the kids, that old house might be. But even elephants have got a place to go. Even dogs can find the right field to die in.” She would tell him all that. Sort of. She'd probably leave out the part about the cow's vetch and the birches and sapsuckers. Men weren't much for poetry. Not even men from Portland, Maine. And it wasn't dying she was going home to achieve. At least not in the flesh. But the spirit was ready, like some beaten, misunderstood snake straight out of the Reverend's Genesis, to shed sixty years of old skin.

“Absolutely
not,”
Pearl told Marvin when he went on to say that Junior, Thelma, and Randy would be going, too. “Not one inch will I drive with Thelma.” And she meant it. “You remember the last trip north we took with her. We ended up in a clover field.”

“That was better than the river,” said Marvin.

“Yes,” said Pearl. “You're right about that. But the only reason we
didn't
end up in the river is that Thelma is not real good at wrecking cars. She's not real good at anything.”

“Well,” said Marvin. “I'll tell you one thing, Pearly. I'm worried about this family. Whether you want to admit it or not, we've got to get Junior away from that secretary.”

“What secretary?” asked Junior's mom.

“Come on,” said Marvin, and smiled. Pearl was almost girlish when she coyly took Junior's side. “First of all, I'm gonna fire Monique Tessier. I was hoping this little infatuation would run its course, but it doesn't look like it will. I don't want that woman to step one step back inside my funeral home, unless it's as a houseguest. Houseguests are always welcome.” Pearl frowned. Must he always consider business?

“I know that Thelma, and this is putting aside what you think of her,” Marvin continued, “needs a good rest away from here.”

“How about Bangor?” Pearl asked. “How about a week at the nuthouse?”

“I see a lot more than you do, Pearl. I work with Junior and, God help me, Randy too. I overhear the employee gossip. Thelma's been taking a lot of some prescription drug. She's wired up most of the time.”

“She was wired up when he married her,” Pearl said. She remembered how silly Thelma had been on her wedding day. She had giggled aloud when it was time for her to say “I do,” and later, at the reception, she had dropped wedding cake all over the floor and thrown a bridesmaid's bouquet instead of her own.

“And Randy can't be left alone. You know that. We'll have to take him along. Maybe it's time we started pulling together as a family, Pearly,” Marvin said. “It doesn't matter what the occasion is, really. I don't care if Amy Joy is getting married or divorced. I don't care if she just got out of jail and they're throwing a big welcome-home party for her. What matters is us. The Ivys.” He squeezed Pearl's hand. “Come on,” he said again. This wasn't like him at all. Something had jarred him out of his complacency. So he recognized, did he, that his good old watch, his forty-years-of-marriage gold watch, was losing some costly seconds. Was ticking like a bomb.

“Junior says the girls don't want to go,” Marvin added. “He says they both hate Amy Joy.” Well. At least Pearl wouldn't have to watch Cynthia Jane tug at her crotch for eight hours, one way, to Mattagash.

“Not in the same car,” Pearl said finally, and meant it. “I
will
not
ride in the same car with her.”

“All right,” said Marvin. He had anticipated this reply. “We'll separate, then. Junior can take his own car, and we'll take the company car. I'll deduct it as a business trip. You know I've been wanting to check out that funeral home in Watertown. The one that's for sale.”

“The one you were going to buy and set Junior up in?” Pearl asked. What a strange reversal of feelings! When Marvin had first suggested this business expansion idea, just last Christmas, Pearl was all against it. She hadn't liked the notion of Junior being so far away from Portland. From her. Now that these homecoming notions had sprouted inside her and she secretly planned to stay on in Mattagash, she didn't want Junior and his family in Watertown because they would be too close.

“Junior needs to get his rabbit raisins counted, if he expects me to buy him his own damn business,” Marvin said, forgetting his speech about families pulling together.