Touch (21 page)

I HAD HEARD BITS
and pieces of this story before, whispers of that winter, and knew that my grandfather and grandmother had spent a winter buried under more than thirty feet of snow, as had Franklin and Rebecca, as had Pearl and every man and woman who lived in Sawgamet that winter. But I had not heard the details, and I remember that even though my grandfather said he had never told anybody this story before, it came from him easily, as if he told it every morning. It was only that one moment—when he stopped to touch the stovepipe—that flustered him.

It was on the thirtieth night, my grandfather said, that he woke to a small sound. He heard the complaint of wood bending, and then the shuffle of dirt. He was careful not to shift his body. He let his eyelashes part only enough to take in the dimness. He had banked the fire before going to sleep, but it still cast enough of a flame for him to make out the shadow of Gregory standing above him. Jeannot did not know how long the miner stood there watching him, but it was only when Gregory finally turned and went back to his bunk that my grandfather saw the pistol in the man’s hand. While the miner settled back onto his slatted bed, Jeannot felt the soft touch of Martine’s hand on his back, and he knew that she had seen as well.

They lay quietly for as long as they could stand, until they could hear Gregory’s ragged breathing between the occasional crackle from the fire in the stove. Neither one knew how long it was before Gregory rose again, this time with a loud groaning
and an obvious stretch. The two of them sat up and watched him move to the stove and pull the pot of water from where they had left it to warm overnight.

“Morning,” Jeannot called over, and Gregory gave a wide, tired smile and a quick wave. He took a long splinter of wood and lit the lanterns—an action that seemed to pass for sunrise in the mill—and then walked back to his pack. He pulled out the small cloth sack that carried his limited supplies, and then dropped it on the plank table. He shook his head with a grimace and then turned it out. The tins sounded hollow and sharp, and one by one he picked them up and shook them. Only one gave a soft swish, the last hint of grains or flour. He pointed purposefully to Flaireur and then gave a nod to Jeannot.

Jeannot sat up and then, after a short pause, nodded back, and then pointed to himself.

The Russian took the pot of hot water behind the screen that he and Jeannot had rigged early in their isolation, and Jeannot and Martine heard the splash of his hands in the water.

“Jeannot,” Martine said, but she stopped as he touched her mouth.

“Keep your voice even,” he said.

“You’re not going to …” She trailed off.

Jeannot looked grimly down at where Flaireur slept on the floor. “I would, if I thought it would save us,” he said. “But it won’t. He’s skin and air and might keep us fed for another week or two, but with this snow we’ve got months to go. We need more meat than that.” He glanced over at the screen and then took Martine’s hand.

She felt her stomach turn, but she was not sure if it was the baby or the thought of the Russian. She stared at her husband, and then, slowly, she nodded.

“He was going to do it to us,” Jeannot said, like he was seeking some sort of forgiveness, and then he quietly got to his feet.

Near the corner of the mill, my grandfather touched the handle of the ax. The blade was sunk into a large round from a log that he had been using to split the firewood into kindling. He gently rocked the handle, working the blade from the wood until he held the ax cleanly in his hands. The metal reflected the flickering of the lanterns, and Jeannot looked again at Martine. She closed her eyes.

My grandfather waited until he heard the creak of wood and the sound of Gregory stepping out from behind the screen, and then he swung the ax. The sound of the miner’s skull was less clean than that of wood, and he heard the wetness, but Jeannot was surprised at how much it felt like splitting a log. The sharp impact and the cleaving of the blade.

He was sick twice—once immediately after he pulled the ax from Gregory’s skull, and once having to bolt away from butchering the man’s body—and my grandmother huddled over herself in the bed, keeping her back to the proceedings.

Despite Gregory’s thinness, his body proved bountiful, as if another body lay beneath the skin of the Russian. As my grandfather worked the knife, he thought of the wehtiko, men turned cannibals, cursed to grow with every bite of human flesh they ate so that they were forever hungry. Jeannot shivered with relief when he finally finished carving, and then he dug a side tunnel out from where he had already tunneled to
the firewood, filled one barrel with bones, and put it behind another barrel that was almost full with meat. Though he knew that he had no worries of scavengers or spoiling, he packed snow on top of the meat.

When that was squared away he shooed Flaireur away from the blood-soaked floor, dug it out clean, shoveling the soil into the snow that covered the creek, and then broke apart the miner’s bed and added it to the wood to be burned in the stove. After that was finished, he lay on his own bed and cried, my grandmother trying to calm him despite the smell of the soup boiling on the stove. Finally, he sat himself at the table, but with the first bite of the greasy, floating flesh, Jeannot gagged and began to cry again: something in the taste reminded him of the rotten meat smell of the fish-pale and blind creature that visited him his first night in Sawgamet. It was not the same—it was not a qallupilluit, he knew—but still, he felt as if everything that he feared from the woods rested in the bowl before him, and that with a single bite he had called down a vengeance upon himself.

WHILE JEANNOT AND MARTINE
tried to swallow their first meal alone since the fire, Rebecca and Franklin slept late; there was not much else for them to do. They had been busy the first few days after their marriage. Even with the blizzard, the men and women left in the village made their way into the store. A few of them came with ropes tied around their waists, afraid they might be lost in the storm, but most of them just made their way in unencumbered.

For once, they did not buy tin pans or shovels or any of the things that might be used for mining. They bought rice and beans, butter, sugar, tea, even the canned goods that Franklin had despaired of ever selling because of their enormous cost. They bought candles and thread and books, paper and ink, nails and wire. By the end of the first week of their marriage, however, the traffic to the store had stopped. The broad front windows were covered half over with snow, and though at night, during the breaks in the storm, when the snow slackened enough that there was hope of it stopping, they were able to see light from the second-floor windows of a few other buildings—the brothel, Dryden’s saloon two buildings down from that, and a well-built house further down the street that glowed from candles and lanterns—all else was a sea of whiteness. They did not mind the privacy.

I
’VE ASKED MY STEPFATHER
to stay on in the rectory—it has been his house for more than four decades and has room enough—but he does not seem convinced that he wants to stay here. He has been talking some of reclaiming the small house beside the church, the one that he lived in for his first winter in Sawgamet, though I suspect he does not know what he wants. He is as adrift as I am at the impending loss of my mother.

It is as hard for me to imagine him living in that small house now as it is for me to imagine him living there as a hopeful young man in a new town.

Again, I’ll have to ask forgiveness at what might seem another digression, but it was only last night that my stepfather told me this story. I have to think it was the snow in the first winter of my stepfather’s marriage that shaped his faith as much as it was the snow in the first year of my grandparents’ marriage that broke my grandfather’s faith. And though I know in a village the size of Sawgamet there is little in the way of coincidence, it still startles me the ways—both small and
large—that my stepfather’s life and mine have been entwined from even before I was born.

The day of my parents’ wedding was only Father Earl’s second day in Sawgamet, but his parishioners had insisted he and his wife come down to the banks of the river for the picnic. He had marveled at the mass of logs piled at the top of the chute, sampled as much pie from his congregants as he could stomach, and much to the amusement of his wife, he even tried a bit of logrolling, quickly ending up in the water. He was changed and dry and back at the picnic in time to see my father dunk Pearl Gasseur, but he had not understood it as anything remarkable until my father and my mother already stood before him. My father was dripping with water and laughing. My mother was laughing herself, blushing, wearing a simple dress instead of a wedding gown, but radiant despite or perhaps because of it. I still wonder if that was the day—though he had a wife of his own—that my stepfather first fell in love with my mother, even if only a little bit.

He asked my parents if they ought not to wait for Father Hugo, a little stunned at their casual ability to switch churches, but my father had insisted, had said they could marry again after the float; he did not want to wait lest my mother change her mind. So Father Earl married them, right there, right then, with my father still wet from the river. The next day, after Father Earl blessed the float—Father Hugo still sleeping off his drunk—the men started poling down the river and my mother came to Father Earl’s house to give his wife a pie. A little thank-you, my mother said.

When he told me this story yesterday, I was not sure if it was the knowledge that my mother was so close to death or
simply the newness of my return that led to the unsettled feeling between us. My daughters had long gone to bed, and my wife was in the kitchen, starting on her baking for the next day. My stepfather and I shared a pot of tea and alternated between staring silently through the window at the clouded sky and engaging in the sort of small, weightless chatting that characterizes unease. The fire gave off small and flickering light, just enough for me to think that he blushed when he said that he thought the pie my mother had brought over as thanks for officiating at her wedding was the best that he had ever eaten, something that he never told his wife.

When he and his wife arrived in Sawgamet, his parish members told him he was lucky to enjoy the last blush of summer, and then they showed him the small house next to the Anglican church that was to be his until the house in town was ready. They showed him the store, the mill, pointed out the drunks, the degenerates, and the Catholics, told him how to cut and stack firewood, and how to keep his pregnant wife warm. But they did not tell him the most important thing: how cruel and final the winters were.

The day winter arrived, his wife said, “The sky hurts,” and my stepfather, who was sitting at his desk, looked out the window and saw what she meant: clouds like bruises.

“It’s too early for snow,” he said, but his wife laughed.

“Yet I don’t think you’ll be able to stop it from coming. Even you can’t put a halt to winter. You’d best get some wood stacked up on the porch.”

Father Earl finished the sentence that he was writing and then pushed the sermon aside. He could complete it later. He
had tried working in the church earlier that morning, but the ink kept freezing in the well; it seemed too much of an extravagance to light a fire simply so he would have a place to work outside of the rough-hewn mouse hole of a house. He touched his finger to the glass of the window, happy that they at least had that, had something to let the light in. The house that the congregation was building in town would be much more comfortable, but until that was finished sometime in the spring, this house would be satisfactory enough. It was better than what many men had lived in during winters in the past, he thought; he knew that the first men in Sawgamet, the ones who had come for gold, had lived in dark and brutal, patched-together cabins. Father Earl had not passed on to his wife the stories he’d heard about the original miners, the ways they kept themselves warm in the winters.

The light had already begun to dim, though it was still midmorning. As he stepped outside and looked up, he felt as if the clouds were joining together before him. Holy matrimony, Father Earl thought.

When he was telling me the story he paused and grinned at me for a moment, knowing that I had picked up his habit of thinking of almost everything in a biblical light. He joked that becoming the sort of clichéd pastor that he heard on radio dramas was an occupational hazard, though in truth, I find it comforting both in him and in myself. Maybe that is why I am not worried that my stepfather will be lost and wandering in the woods looking for the ghost of my mother: he has the compass of God to guide him.

That day, however, he had more immediate concerns: he
had a wedding to perform in the afternoon and was worried about the onset of snow and the sudden drop in temperature. He opened the door to the house again.

“Do you think we should light the church fire?”