Touch (13 page)

Virginia tapped the side of the cake. “Your mother told me how, but I’ve done something wrong. It’s collapsing. A disaster. I don’t think I cooked it enough, or perhaps I didn’t use enough flour. I don’t really suppose it can be salvaged, can it? Would you like some bread? We can slather the cake on it as a sort of jam. I’ve put enough sugar in it to give Mother a fright.” She took a knife and sliced four thick pieces of bread and then
reached with the knife into the cake and smothered it across the bread. “Do you think Jeannot will be disappointed when he finds out what sort of cake I baked?”

“What sort of cake you didn’t bake, really,” I said. The cake-smeared bread was grainy with sugar and thick against my tongue, but it tasted good. “I don’t think Jeannot much cares one way or another.” I saw the way she dropped her eyes, and I hastily added, “I’m sure he’ll be pleased that you thought of trying, though.”

“Where is he today? I thought you’d be off in the woods with him.”

“I haven’t seen him. Want to come looking with me?”

Virginia brushed the flour out of her hair and washed her face, and then we took some apples and a hunk of cheese and headed up the woods behind the village. I let Virginia walk in front of me, following her up one of the narrow paths. We passed by the Anglican church but did not see my stepfather. At Jeannot’s cabin, Virginia knocked on the door, but there was no answer and no movement behind the windows.

We decided to head up into the trees. For a short while, we were shadowed by a pair of chickadees that flew past us and around us, but mostly it was just Virginia and me, comfortable in the coolness of the tree-shaded path. We walked for nearly an hour, until we came out to the ledge that showed the village and the river below, the flats devastated by logging, and across the way, the rising mountain. I sat with my feet hanging off the ledge, occasionally tossing rocks or pebbles down the slope, and Virginia lay down away from the edge, in the grass near a spot of sun.

At first I thought the flicker that cut between the trees
below was an animal, but then I saw that it was a man. My attention was taken away for a moment by a soaring hawk, but then I saw the movement in the woods again. The man moved back and forth with no apparent meaning, but there was a certain urgency to his movements. I was about to call to Virginia to ask for her to toss me an apple when I realized the man was my grandfather. I kept still, watching Jeannot scramble up the gentle slope. He did not look up to the ledge where I sat, and it was not until my grandfather had already passed that I shook Virginia’s shoulder and we started following.

We almost had to run to stay with Jeannot, catching glimpses of him through the thick trees. The hill flattened and the trees thinned, but when we came out into the broad clearing, there was no sign of my grandfather.

“Where did he go?” Virginia said. We were both a little out of breath.

I shook my head. The open field full of wild flowers and thick, matted grasses was still. Jeannot had been in front of us, but not far enough so that he would have been able to scramble across the shallow creek and cover the thousand feet or more into the next section of trees without us seeing him. “He must have turned around somewhere back in the woods,” I said.

“What was he chasing?”

“Maybe something was chasing him.”

“We were chasing him, Stephen. No. He was after something.” Virginia walked forward to the creek and knelt down next to the water, cupping a handful to her mouth. “Cold,” she said.

“Think it will be long to freeze-up?” I squatted next to her and took a drink myself.

“A while yet, at least according to my father. He said the other Indians were laughing at the men for the early float. They don’t think much of Pearl’s ability to see the weather coming.”

As she said this, I saw something glint in the water. I fished my hand down among the rocks, wetting my sleeve. I pulled a chain from the water and held it up for Virginia to see.

“That’s a pretty chain.” She grinned at me. “You should give it to Jeannot for his birthday. He might like it more than a cake.”

I splashed some water at her and she scrambled back from the bank. “Here,” I said, holding out the chain. “You should have it.” She lifted her hair so that I could fasten it around her neck, and as she turned to show me the way the gold lay against her throat, we heard Jeannot’s voice.

“Where did you find that?” Jeannot was breathing hard, sweat on his face and tightness in his voice. He moved toward us and reached out to touch the necklace around Virginia’s neck. “Where did you get this?” He looked at Virginia and then at me.

“It was in the creek,” I said.

“Did you see …” Jeannot’s voice trailed off and then he sank to his knees. His head bent to his chest, and then he began to shake. I looked at Virginia.

We stayed silent, not moving, letting my grandfather cry. Finally, Jeannot rubbed his eyes with his sleeves. Slowly, like it pained him to do so, he rose to his feet. He touched the necklace around Virginia’s neck again, fingering the chain as if somebody else wore it.

“Don’t let Franklin see you wearing this,” he said.

“Uncle Jeannot?” Virginia looked scared as she spoke. I was scared as well. The sight of an adult crying, let alone Jeannot, was unsettling.

He turned to me and said, “It was your grandmother’s. Your grandfather,” he said to Virginia, and then looked back to me. “Martine’s brother, your great-uncle Franklin, gave it to her. It was buried with her.”

“You should have it,” Virginia said. She reached behind her neck to unclasp the chain.

“No.” He stopped her fingers with his own. “She would have been your great-aunt. She wants you to have it. That’s why you found it. I don’t know why, and I don’t know why she won’t let me find her, but when it’s time, I suppose she’ll show herself.”

He did not say anything else. He just turned and walked back toward the village.

VIRGINIA SENT ME
the chain a few years ago. “For one of your daughters,” she wrote. “It’s not something that any of my sons would appreciate.”

I wrote back and told her that it was not something that either of my daughters—this was before the baby was born—were of age to appreciate, either. Still, I kept the necklace. It’s in a box in the drawer of the desk now; sometimes I’m tempted to pull it out and finger it.

One thing that has been an unexpected joy in returning to Sawgamet after so many years has been the chance to spend time with Virginia again. My wife and Virginia have taken to
each other with alacrity, and for me, spending time with my cousin has been yet another thing that brings me back to my youth.

Virginia hasn’t changed as much as I would have thought. Or perhaps it is rather that, despite my travels, I haven’t nearly changed so much as I thought, either. Physically, she looks surprisingly the same. If I look closely at her hands I can see that she is as worn and old as I am, but her face is that of a much younger woman, and on the several occasions when we have taken to walking in the woods together, I have found myself winded while she gaily carries on her end of the conversation.

I wish that I’d returned to find my mother similarly unchanged.

My stepfather has remarked that it is funny how providence works; all of the details for me to come and assume my stepfather’s station as the minister of the Anglican church in Sawgamet had been settled for some months before we even had wind of my mother’s illness. But in the few weeks between when my mother first started feeling poorly and we arrived in Sawgamet, she had already taken to bed.

My mother was never a large woman, but she had been cheerfully fed and active, the sort of woman who thrived in a town like Sawgamet. I don’t mean to make her sound like farm stock, but neither was she a delicate china doll. She read and sewed and baked and complemented Father Earl in leading the church, but she also hiked through the woods with him, could handle an ax to cut firewood, and other than the winter that my father and sister died, never seemed to mind the cold.

When I finally arrived in Sawgamet, it was to a woman I barely recognized. True, it had been two years since the last
time we had seen each other—she came to Vancouver to see the new baby, her namesake—but the changes wrought so quickly were a blow to me. Is that always how it works? That we grow old in the space of a few weeks? I feel as if I should still be a young man, but when I look in the mirror I am greeted by a shock of gray hair that is thinning at the part.

Still, even though I should have been expecting the change in my mother, my first thought was that some imposter had clambered into the bed beside which my aunt Julia sat vigil. Julia—Franklin and Rebecca’s daughter—distracted me with the flicker of her hands and the shadows she threw on the wall. Shadow puppets seem like such children’s games, but as her hands moved I saw the dance of caribou, hunting wolves, sled dogs, and then, as she turned at the sound of my footsteps, a bird taking flight.

“Stephen,” she said, her voice quiet. “How was your journey?”

“How is she?”

“Sleeping,” my aunt said, “which is well enough. She’s uncomfortable and been sleeping poorly.”

As I stared at my mother, I could see some of the familiar features that had begun to sink away. Between the lights from the bedside lamp and the flame in the fireplace, stark shadows made crevices on her face.

I don’t know how long I stared at my mother, but I forgot about my aunt Julia until I felt her hand on my shoulder.

“Why don’t you sit with her?” she said. “Your mother will be happy to see you when she wakes. Just keep the fire stoked so she doesn’t catch chill.”

The door closed behind Julia, and I sat in the chair and
took my mother’s hand. Her skin had turned so thin, paper-like, that I thought I would be able to see the light pass through it if I held it up to the lamp.

SITTING ALONE IN MY STUDY
like this, night fallen hard and the house finally silent, it is no wonder that I might worry about my own mortality. It’s still a few hours yet until midnight, but the girls are asleep, as is my wife, and I know that downstairs, in the parlor, Father Earl is resting in a chair beside my mother’s bed.

I should be preparing to write my mother’s eulogy rather than thinking of my grandfather and grandmother, of my father diving through the ice and reaching out to my sister, of all of the many things that both drove me away and brought me back to Sawgamet. Easier said than done. To write the eulogy is to accept that very soon my mother will be truly and finally dead, that I will be—even though I am past forty—an orphan. Were I more like my grandfather, I would simply refuse to believe in my mother’s death. Were I more like my grandfather, I’d believe that even when my mother does die, whether it is tomorrow or tonight, somewhere out there, past the window, past the train yards and the houses, into the cuts and woods, she would still roam.

W
HEN I THINK ABOUT
the first winter after my grandparents married, I am prone—as I often am—to think of it in biblical terms. Or maybe it is simply that I am looking for a reason, for something to explain all that happened. I can explain the rise of Sawgamet easy enough: all it took was a few men—my grandfather among them—with instant wealth to cause other men to flock to Sawgamet. The Yankee who gathered enough gold dust from shaking out his clothes that he bought a horse, the Chinaman who walked into town one morning with a nugget the size of a baseball, and Twelve-Foot Pete, so named because in a mining claim measuring only twelve feet by twelve feet, he unearthed enough gold to buy a thousand acres of farmland in his native Ohio. On this, dreams were made.

We are experiencing another boom of sorts in Sawgamet now, with the growing war. The need for lumber—the resilient wood that comes from our forests—has increased enough to return some of the flush to this town, but I know it will not
last. Sooner or later, every boom has a bust, though at least there is something tangible in these forests; I can see the trees, walk through the cuts. But gold. Gold is something else. A dream that ends soon enough.