Touch (25 page)

BUT FOR ALL OF OUR
talking last night, we both understand that even if ghosts didn’t haunt my mother, memories did.

I’ve been up in the study most of the night, but near ten, Father Earl came to tell me that my mother had asked me to sit with her. I held her hand for a while, and then read by her side after she fell asleep. When she slept, her breath came in uneven fits and bursts. Despite the blankets covering her and the way the heat of the furnace soaked through the house, she seemed to shiver, so I stoked the fire until the room closed with warmth and my mother’s breathing flattened into regularity.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but I woke near eleven, thinking I heard Marie calling me. The lamp still angled away from my mother’s bed, light spilling over me, my book open on my lap, and it took me a moment to place myself, to remember that I was sitting vigil over my mother. I reached to pick up my book, but I heard my mother cough and realized she was awake, looking toward the window.

“Turn off the lamp,” she said, her voice a whisper, and I couldn’t tell if she was conscious of the hour or simply unable to speak louder.

“Sorry,” I said. “I fell asleep while I was reading. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

She smiled a little and blinked slowly enough that I thought she was going back to sleep, but then she shook her head. “Look out the window,” she said.

As I reached up to turn off the lamp I realized that my hand was shaking. With the room dark, I could see that a mist hung in the air outside, thin sheets of rain icing the trees.

“I want to go down to the river,” my mother said.

“You—”

She reached out and took my hand, stopping me from protesting. Her skin felt thin in my hand, and I knew that what I
had been about to say—that it was raining, that she shouldn’t be outside, that she should rest—didn’t matter.

I put on my coat and boots and then bundled my mother the best I could in her blankets. When I picked her up I staggered a little. It was not that she was heavy, but rather the opposite: she was as light as one of my daughters in my arms. I had braced myself for the weight of an adult, but it was like carrying a child, and I wondered if my mother thought of the way our roles had been reversed, how I was the one carrying her.

The street was slick, but the mist fell star-bright, and I walked carefully down to the river. It was a short distance from my stepfather’s house, a hundred yards at most. My mother had her arm around my neck, and I think we both expected to see the same thing when we got down to the banks, the same thing we had seen thirty years earlier on the night of the freezing rain: the water frozen, ice shining like the river had swallowed the moon.

But even though there was a scrum of ice against the banks of the Sawgamet, the water ran fast and clear, the river open and dark in the night.

I waited a moment for something to happen, but nothing did. It was just me, standing on the banks of the river, my mother still almost weightless in my arms, the water pushing toward Havershand. I heard a noise and turned to see that Father Earl had crept down behind us, hanging back like he always held back, but close enough so that I could take strength in knowing he was there.

My mother looked out over the river and then, while looking back to me, saw Father Earl. She reached out to him. He hesitated, and then stepped forward and took her hand, and we
just stood there, the three of us, on the banks of the Sawgamet, looking out over the water and the first pieces of ice. The mist fell over us, but the cold left us untouched.

BACK AT THE HOUSE
, I covered my mother with dry blankets and then added a log to the fire.

I kissed her on the forehead and told her that I loved her. “I’m sorry.”

She may have already been asleep, and I said it so quietly that I was not sure if she heard me, but Father Earl did. He touched my elbow but did not say anything, and the two of us sat in the room together, not saying anything together, watching over my mother’s body.

She died just past midnight.

M
Y GRANDPARENTS THOUGHT A
ghost haunted them that long winter. They did what they needed to get through—the meat from Gregory’s body was enough to sustain them, though my grandfather swore that every bite made him feel more hungry—but at times they thought they were going mad. Every creak of boards at night, every shifting of the hard-packed snow, every crack of a log in the fire seemed like the miner’s footsteps, his voice. They lost track of days, buried alive under snow so deep that there might as well not have been a sun. They subsisted on the flesh of a man they had killed and watched my grandmother’s pregnant belly round out as my father grew inside her.

When it finally stopped snowing that year, in July, none of the men or women in Sawgamet, including Jeannot and Martine, knew it; even the three-story buildings in Sawgamet were covered over. But by the seventeenth of July, winter had broken hard. The sun pushed the temperature into weather that would have called for short sleeves had any men or women been unburied.

In the brothel, Pearl was the first to notice the sound of water trickling off the snowpack. He had ended the night of Franklin and Rebecca’s marriage by paying for the touch of a woman—a woman who I suspect later ended up becoming Mrs. Gasseur, though that was only whispers—and when he found himself cut off from the rest of the world the next morning, he did not mind his plight.

The women had plenty of food stocked away—the madam ran a restaurant as a side business—and after the first few weeks they were as bored as Pearl was; it did not matter that he had run out of money. By the time the snowfall let up for long enough that he could have seen his way back to his cabin, it had piled high enough that he had no desire to try. Though he worked cutting trees for my grandfather, Pearl still lived at his old mining camp, a good mile away. Even if he had been able to return, he knew what he could expect. The men would be mining and sleeping, mining and sleeping, mining and sleeping. At some point they would slaughter their mules for meat, and if they had any sense—which he was not sure of—they would start digging through the snow in hopes of finding town and food. An unlikely miracle, given the distance. A mile of digging was much more difficult to navigate than a mile of walking, but it was worth trying. Anything rather than starving to death in the cold and dark.

In July, though, Pearl finally heard trickling water instead of the soft whisper of falling snow. He opened the window on the third floor and used his hands to dig out enough so that he could see through to the bright, clear sky. It took him nearly a full minute to understand that it had finally stopped snowing and that summer had come. He cleared enough snow that
some of the light spilled into the room, and then he called for the women in the brothel to join him. They crowded around him, standing in the brilliance of light that did not come with the choking smoke of an ill-trimmed lantern wick or the dim flickering of a candle. Nobody knew who started laughing first, but the mirth infected them, and they laughed for hours, until the sun went down.

IN THE MILL
, my grandmother woke my grandfather from a light sleep. A thin lick of water came in through the cracks in the wall, puddling on the floor. They listened quietly to the sound of the snow settling under the new heat. Working carefully from the doorway of the mill, Jeannot broke through the roof of the tunnel and dug upward. He took the cleared snow and packed it into steps, widening the hole as he went so that the snow would not collapse upon him. As he came nearer to the surface, he could first see a dim glow, and then a burning whiteness. It was blinding. Whiteness and light.

The sun reflected against the snow, bouncing the rays until it was so much brightness that he felt like his eyes would melt. With his eyes closed, however, my grandfather realized that along with light, sound had returned. During the snows, he and Martine had firewood and enough of a store of oil to see them through the winter, but still, they spent half of every day in the dark, trying to sleep away the winter. It was a darkness that could only be found underground, a complete absence of light. It was the sound during those months, though, that was harder to get used to. At first they had the wind and the pelting
of snow against the sides of the building, but after a while even that had disappeared, leaving them with only a hush and the imagined whisperings of the man they killed; after butchering Gregory, neither Jeannot nor Martine found much to say.

That first day, he and Martine spent several hours simply standing at the top of their snow-packed staircase, but neither of them could figure out how to hoist themselves on top of the snow. Each time Jeannot tried, the snow crumbled under his weight, and he feared being buried. Finally, they simply retreated back inside the mill. By the next day the sound of water came louder, and a thin veil flowed constantly across the floor. Every few minutes the mill crackled and groaned, nails squeaking against the weight of the shifting and settling snow.

On the third day after Jeannot had broken through, the treetops melted clean, and from the top of the staircase they were able to see green pines. They stood on the stairs and watched birds dart from branch to branch, and a squirrel came close enough to the hole in the snow that Jeannot was able to hit it with the shovel. They had a different kind of stew for dinner that night. The sun shone down warmly enough that Jeannot and Martine stripped off their clothing while they stood atop the staircase, until they realized that the sun was baking them red with unforgiving intensity.

Day by day they climbed to the top of the stairs and watched the snow melt, still unable to exit from their burrow. They were not prepared, however, at the end of July, when they heard a voice calling to them. At first they thought they were hearing things again. In the long darkness of the winter, with only each other for quiet company, they had often
imagined the sound of another person’s voice—usually Gregory’s, though sometimes that of a person who they were less intimately acquainted with—and though it broke their sleep, they had mostly learned to ignore the phantom callings. But this time, at the sound of the voices, Flaireur perked his head up. The dog, as if he, too, had been hearing voices that he could not believe, stood warily, and then, with something approaching a great joy, he began to bark.

Jeannot and Martine, feeling like prairie dogs peeking their heads from the ground, greeted the man at the top of their staircase. He stood above them, his feet strapped into crudely fashioned snowshoes that appeared to have been made with a frame taken from chair backs and webbing from ripped silken undergarments. He wore only light pants and an undershirt, but a scarf swaddled his head; they could barely see his eyes behind the thin slit that he peered out of. Only when he lowered the scarf did Jeannot recognize Pearl Gasseur.

Jeannot brought out scrap lumber to make his own poorly constructed snowshoes. Pearl hauled him to the surface, and then he and Pearl together helped Martine emerge from beneath the snow. They had to move slowly; not only were the planks unwieldy, but Martine’s enormous, pregnant girth made it difficult for her to keep her balance. The sun beat down upon them with a welcome warmth. Thin streams of water ran across the surface of the snow at frequent intervals, and they could hear a powerful rushing sound.