A Wedding on the Banks (14 page)

Amy Joy focused on the wall near her mother's bed. She stared hard at the bare space that hung there, as though someone had tacked it up.

“Damn her,” thought Amy Joy.

“What is it, dear?” Sicily asked. Amy Joy sat up and threw off the extra blanket.

“I've just realized what's missing in this room,” she said.

“Oh?” asked Sicily.

“Thank you for giving me Aunt Marge's old painting of Jesus and that awful lamb, which I dearly hate, for my wedding gift,” Amy Joy said.

“You're welcome, sweetheart,” Sicily said, and pulled the extra blanket back up about her. “Don't mention it.”

“Oh, I won't,” said Amy Joy, disappearing from Sicily's bedroom.

“We'll flip a coin. If I win,
you'll
drink of the pint of whiskey. Then I'll take the hatchet and,
snip,
before you know it, it'll be gone. Come on, Vinal. You don't use that little finger for anything but picking your nose.”

—Pike Gifford, on whether he and his brother should take out some accident insurance

Pike Gifford's brood of children gathered around the large Formica breakfast table with the wobbly aluminum legs and grabbed toast off the plate faster than Goldie could pop it from the four-slice toaster. “A four-seater” is how Pike Gifford referred to the appliance. When the last Cheerios bowl was empty, the last toast lying soggy and unwanted on the plate, Goldie sat back with a cup of Taster's Choice to relax. The morning breakfast was over well ahead of time. Usually the school bus was out in the dooryard honking itself silly while the kids were still stuffing doughnuts into their mouths, digging under the sofa for papers and books, searching for a mitten or shoe. Spring must have had a hand in getting everyone up on time. There must have been something in the April air that blew in under the blankets when the alarm clock rattled the sleepers awake.

“I even got time to finish my homework,” said Missy, aged nine, the smartest of Goldie's six children. The oldest girl, Irma, had already quit school to begin her job in Watertown, at the well-respected cash register of J. C. Penney's. The baby, Miltie, aged seven, was now in the first grade. Hodge, the shy one among the children, had just turned ten. With Little Pee past eleven, and Priscilla now thirteen, Goldie could envision a future beyond the children. She could possibly land a job at one of the sewing machines at Stitches Incorporated in Watertown. Maybe she would even take an adult education course. Let Vera say she was uppity. Goldie would do just what she wanted when the children were grown.

Goldie sipped her coffee at the kitchen table where Missy was busy ciphering math problems. The coffee was a well-earned treat, but the price of it was getting higher and higher. Goldie feared the day might come when she would have to give it up entirely. What would school mornings be like if there was no coffee?

“I heard a coffee analyst talking on the news yesterday,” Goldie said to Pike. He was still sprawled on the living room sofa where he had fallen asleep the night before. “He said that from a political point of view, it's good for the USA to support higher prices because it helps out countries like Brazil and the Ivory Coast.” Pike closed his eyes and wished Goldie would choke on her coffee, regardless of how much it cost. What in hell was a coffee analyst, anyway? If someone who simply pondered the consequences of coffee could be called an analyst, well then, Pike Gifford was a lot better off than he imagined. Once, when a welfare worker had asked Pike Gifford his occupation, he rolled over on his side on the sofa and said “television viewer.” Well, he had moved up in the world. Now he was a
hubcap
analyst
.

The truth was Goldie embarrassed him, especially when she made such highfalutin speeches in front of Vinal and others. “She says that she's trying to expand her mind,” Pike had told Vinal once, minutes after Goldie had gone on about how great Lyndon Johnson had been for the highways in the country, those busy roads she would most likely never see in her lifetime.

“That's all right,” Vinal had told his little brother. “You're still better off than I am. The only thing Vera's expanding is her ass.”

“It seems that Brazil and the Ivory Coast are having foreign debt problems,” Goldie now explained to Pike.

“Oh, I see,” said Pike. “What a pity. And here I've been, up here in northern Maine, enjoying myself in spite of it all.” He hadn't even swung his legs off the sofa to begin the day and he was already exhausted. And the herd of cattle that came down the stairs every morning for breakfast was not exactly a lullaby to his ears. He usually had one beer or a slug of cheap vodka too many to climb the long stairs up to his and Goldie's bedroom. Once in a blue moon he stayed sober enough to make love to his wife. Or he caught her early in the day, before the kids got home, and let her remember what it was she saw in him in the first place. When warmer weather arrived, he would sleep on the soft seat of the old Ford pickup, hiked up on wooden blocks below the garage. The whole family could tear the house down and be damned. He would never hear them. He wouldn't even be dreaming of them.

“And why should we give a damn about countries in Europe?” Pike asked. He sat up on the sofa and rubbed the residue from the corners of his eyes—his morning bath. “Let them pay their own goddamn bills and keep to hell away from our coffee,” he added.

Missy folded her paper and stuffed it inside her math book.

“Stupid,” she said. “Brazil and the Ivory Coast ain't in Europe. That's all
you
know.”

Pike stared at his daughter. She was getting more and more like her mother every day. Goldie was even encouraging this one to finish high school.

“You read too damn much,” Pike said, and pointed a finger at Missy. “You just remember, one day when it's too late, that I told you so.”

“Did you go to school, Daddy?” Missy asked. “I bet you didn't even get past kindergarten.”

“You're wrong there,” Pike said, and wished for a cup of that Brazilian coffee. “I went all the way to where the two men was fighting in the book.” Missy and Goldie both laughed at this, but it was true. Sometimes Pike Gifford dreamed of those burly men in that old fifth-grade primer. Sometimes he was even tempted to go back to school, just to see who won.

But education was not to be the major issue on this glorious spring day, not if Little Vinal Gifford had his way. With the birds chirping and the buds almost popping on the trees, Little Vinal decided it was the perfect time to avenge himself for the manhandling of his bicycle.

Priscilla came home from school early, in tears and a torn dress. One of the teachers drove her up the long hill and then helped her climb the rickety front steps to where she folded herself in Goldie's arms.

“Little Vinal threw me on the ground behind the schoolhouse,” she sobbed as Goldie cradled her, “and said he was going to make me a woman.”

“Oh my Lord!” screamed Goldie. “Did he do anything to her?” she asked the teacher, who shook her head.

Goldie hit the ceiling. Since Pike had driven to Watertown to sell a spare chain saw that had suddenly come into his possession, she took the matter into her own hands. Besides, she was tired of the manner in which Pike settled family matters. First, she phoned the sheriff in St. Leonard, and then the principal of the Mattagash Grammar School. Before Pike came home in the evening with seventy-five dollars snug in his pocket, Little Vinal had been expelled from school for two weeks, thanks to a principal who agreed with Goldie that thirteen was too young to become a woman. The issue was out of Pike's hands. It was a school matter. But Pike told the sheriff from St. Leonard to let snarling dogs go back to sleep.

Vera accused Goldie the next day, over the phone, of ruining Little Vinal's academic future. She was talking to her sister and Goldie was rubbering in. Priscilla, who had stayed home from school, was behind Goldie's shoulder, pressing an ear in close to the receiver. She was, after all, the subject of the present skirmish.

“He's refusing to step another step inside a school building,” Vera told her sister.

When Goldie dialed her own sister, just a half hour later, she said, “We needn't worry about Little Vinal. When a twelve-year-old has hair on his lip and is still in the fifth grade, you ain't exactly losing a Shakespeare. When a kid has to sit on a special chair because the desks are all too small, there ain't no Albert Einstein going down the drain.” When Goldie heard Vera's angry intake of breath on the line, she was pleased.

“It's poor little Priscilla that I feel sorry for,” Goldie went on. “She sat up in the middle of the night last night and screamed her head off. And she'd only watched a rerun of
My
Three
Sons
before she went to bed.”

Vera hung up with a loud click. If Priscilla was a changed child, it could only be for the better. She turned to Little Vinal, who was eating a ketchup sandwich and drinking an orange pop. The gray cat, Tinkerbell, was slinking about the boy's feet, waiting for a crumb to fall, if even from a ketchup sandwich.

“Molly tells me that Priscilla goes into the girls' bathroom and stuffs bobby socks into her bra,” Vera said.

As if in answer to his mother's statement, Little Vinal kicked Tinkerbell. The cat slid on its side across the kitchen floor and then made a dash for the back door, where Vera let it out.

“I
will
agree with Goldie on one thing, Little Vinal,” she said as the screen door banged shut. “Billy Graham Jr. you ain't.”

It was two days later that Priscilla was over the trauma of premature womanhood enough to conspire with Little Pee in an attempt to regain her feminine honor. The plan was to lure Little Vinal into the thick woods near Haze's Brook. Priscilla sent a note down the hill by Miltie when she saw Little Vinal out and about on his bike. The note said that she was sorry she fought him off. She'd changed her mind. That becoming a real woman months before her fourteenth birthday wasn't such a bad idea after all. Could he meet her, then, at Haze's Brook, after making absolutely sure no one would see or follow him?

Little Vinal even bathed for the event, and then splashed about his pimply neck some of the unused Raleigh aftershave Vera had given her husband for Christmas. He then pulled on Big Vinal's stiff Sunday shoes. They were shit brown in color, and two sizes too big for him. But he knew Priscilla deserved a certain amount of worldliness for the sacrifice of herself, and he intended to supply her with it.

Little Vinal approached the expanse of budding poplars around Haze's Brook and stood waiting for Priscilla. He rocked back and forth in the giant-sized shoes as though they were brown boats. He recounted the hairs on his upper lip. He studied the silvery zipper on his pants. For the hundredth time that week, Little Vinal wished he knew more about the workings of the penis. Wished he'd been born with an owner's manual, supplying him with a storehouse of bodily information. But there had been enough gossip buzzing around the schoolhouse about Priscilla that Little Vinal assumed he would have a well-educated instructress. He was pondering what would be a good way to pay Priscilla back for this needed initiation when he saw the hazelnut bushes rustle dramatically along the footpath leading back up to the highway. His heart froze. He felt a small throb in his genitals.
Fool,
they said to him.
This
is
just
the
beginning. We'll be getting you into messes like this all your life.
He sensed a truth in this, but before his mind could process it, he saw faces emerge like flowers from the bushes. Miltie and Hodge, his little cousins. He saw Priscilla on the footpath, taunting him with her secret female knowledge. When he heard Little Pee's voice rise up from behind him, Vinal Gifford Jr. knew what it meant.
Sexual
ambush.
The mounds of toilet paper he had shoved into the toes of the shoes had enabled him to walk functionally, but running was another matter. The shoes turned on him.

The Gifford cousins surrounded Little Vinal the way those tiny people did poor Gulliver. Heads of curly hair, like roving tumbleweeds, were everywhere. Instead of seducing the plump, ravenous Prissy, he found himself tied to a medium-sized birch tree and stripped down to his shorts. His clothing was gleefully tossed into Haze's Brook by the revelers. So were Big Vinal's shit brown Sunday shoes. Little Vinal sucked in his breath. He would, even after all the humiliation, probably have let it pass, blaming himself for the blunder. He would simply have counted it as a game lost, although well fought. It would've been Little Vinal
zero,
his genitals
one.
And he certainly didn't dare tell Vera the real reason he'd gone down there in the first place. Yes, he would have turned the other cheek had it not been for Little Pee, in a spontaneous gesture even Prissy was against, urinating upon his helpless cousin. Hands tied, Little Vinal could not even wipe away the warm strings of pee that lashed against his face. He listened to the disappearing laughter of his cousins as they raced home along the narrow footpath, and considered firsthand the irony in Little Pee's nickname.

When Little Vinal finally worked himself free, after an hour of twisting and turning within his nylon stocking bonds, he'd devised a good reason for being where he was. He had been innocently fishing. He'd cut himself a nice pole. He'd tied a line, hook, and sinker to it. He'd dug a few worms. Yes, he'd gone fishing, just to test his luck. They had attacked him from behind. Had thrown his clothes into the brook. And then Little Pee had peed on him, the ultimate disgrace.
And
, Little Vinal told his group of avid, livid listeners back in the warm kitchen, they'd made off with a thirteen-inch trout that he'd just pulled, all shiny and wiggling, from the brook.

No one in his family questioned Little Vinal about the logic of fishing in April, much less catching a fish. It was still possible for a sudden shift in the weather to bring the snow back. And the brook, like the Mattagash River, was bursting at its seams from the spring freshets. It would take a brick, not a foolish sinker, to sink a fish line in those burgeoning waters. But Little Vinal could have told Vera that he'd caught an alligator in Haze's Brook and she'd have believed him. That's how much she hated Goldie. And no way had she forgotten the Christmas lights incident.

“They're probably sucking its bones dry this very minute,” Vera said of the trout, and slammed a fist into the palm of her hand.