A Northern Light(21)
"Oh, Weaver, don't," I whisper, touching his shoulder.
His hand finds mine. "I hate this place, Mattie," he says. "It kills everything."
wan
I used to wonder what would happen if characters in books could change their fates. What if the Dashwood sisters had had money? Maybe Elinor would have gone traveling and left Mr. Ferrars dithering in the drawing room. What if Catherine Earnshaw had just married Heathcliff to begin with and spared everyone a lot of grief? What if Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale had gotten onboard that ship and left Roger Chillingworth far behind? I felt sorry for these characters sometimes, seeing as they couldn't ever break out of their stories, but then again, if they could have talked to me, they'd likely have told me to stuff all my pity and condescension, for neither could I.
At least, that's how it looked to me midway through April. A week had passed since my letter had arrived from Barnard College, but I was no closer to figuring out a way to get myself there. I would have to pick an awful lot of fiddleheads and a wagon load of spruce gum to make enough money for train fare, and books, and maybe a new waist and skirt. If only I could raise my own chickens and fry them up for the tourists like Weaver's mamma, I thought. Or keep the egg money back like Minnie's husband lets her do.
A blue jay flew overhead, screeching at me, pulling me out of my thoughts. I looked up and realized I had walked past the drive to the Cliff House on Fourth Lake and was nearly at the turnoff that led to my friend Minnie Simms's house. Minnie Compeau, rather. I kept forgetting. I neatened the bunch of violets in my hand. I'd picked them for Minnie. To cheer her up. The baby was only a month off and it was making her tired and weepy. Tired and weepy and wan.
Wan, my word of the day, means having a sickly hue or an unnatural pallor. Showing ill health, fatigue, or unhappiness; lacking in forcefulness or competence. It has parents: the Old English warm, for "dark" or "gloomy," and the German wahn, for "madness." Wan shows its breeding; it has elements of warm and wahn in it, just like the new kittens have elements of Pansy, the barn cat, and Shadow, the wild torn.
Halfway down the turnoff—a dirt road that was corduroyed here and there with logs laid side by side to make it passable—Minnie's house came into view. It was a one-room log house, as low and squat as a hoptoad. Minnie's husband, Jim, had built it from trees he'd felled. She would have liked a clapboard house, painted white with red trim, but that called for money and they didn't have much. Planks laid end to end over the muddy ground served as a walkway. Charred tree stumps stuck up in the front yard, as black and random as an old man's teeth. Jim had cleared a plot for a vegetable garden in back of the house and fenced a field for their sheep and cows. Their land was on the north shore of Fourth Lake, and they were hoping to take in boarders one day when they had more acreage cleared and a better house built.
Jim liked to say that we were all sitting on a gold mine now and that any man with a strong back and a modicum of ambition could make himself a fortune. My pa said the same, and Mr. Loomis, too. And it was all because Mrs. Collis P. Huntington, whose husband owned Camp Pine Knot at Raquette Lake, was possessed of a delicate constitution and an even more delicate backside.
Used to be that anyone coming up to Fourth Lake had to take a train from Grand Central to Utica, switch to another one to get to Old Forge, then get onboard a steamer and come up the Fulton Chain of Lakes one by one until he got to Fourth. If he wanted to go on from there, he had to take a long buckboard ride to Raquette Lake or hike to Big Moose, but that all changed when Mr. Huntington decided to bring Mrs. Huntington to his new camp. She found the journey so hard that she told her husband he could build a railroad to take her from Eagle Bay to Pine Knot or he could spend his summers by himself.
Mr. Huntington knew a lot about railroads—he'd built one that ran all the way from New Orleans to San Francisco. He had wealthy friends with camps near his, and they put themselves behind his plan. They got the state to approve it by saying the railroad would bring prosperity to a poor, rural area, and the first train had come through six years ago. Pa brought us down in the buckboard to see it. Abby cried when it arrived and Lawton cried when it left. Shortly after, tracks for the Mohawk and Malone line, which heads north out of Old Forge instead of east, were laid. The workmen cut wagon roads through the wilderness so that ties and spikes could be carried through. Those roads allowed men like Mr. Sperry to build hotels in the woods. Tourists came, and suddenly Eagle Bay and Inlet and Big Moose Lake were no longer just places where woodsmen and homesteaders lived. They were fashionable summer destinations for people wanting to escape the heat and noise of the big cities.
Both the Eagle Bay Hotel and the Glenmore had steam heat, sanitary plumbing, telegraph machines, and even telephones. It cost anywhere from twelve dollars to twenty-five dollars a week to stay at them. Their guests ate lobster bisque, drank champagne, and danced to music made by an orchestra, but we didn't even have a schoolhouse in Eagle Bay. Or a post office or a church or a general store. The railroads had brought prosperity, but prosperity didn't seem to want to stay. Come Labor Day she packed up and departed with the rest of the tourists and we were left to our own devices, hoping we had earned enough from May through August selling milk or fried chicken, waiting tables or washing linens, to feed ourselves and our animals during the long winter.
I turned onto Minnie's drive, feeling in my pocket for the letter from Barnard. I'd brought it to show her. I'd already showed it to Weaver, and he'd said I had to go no matter what it took. He said I must move every mountain, brave every hardship, vanquish all obstacles, do that which is impossible. I thought perhaps he had taken The Count of Monte Cristo too much to heart.