A Northern Light(24)

"You've got a son," Mrs. Crego said to him. "And a daughter, too."

"Min?" he whispered, looking at his wife, waiting for her to tell him it was true.

Minnie tried to say something but couldn't. She just lifted one of the babies up for him to take. The emotion on his face, and then between him and Minnie, was so strong, so naked, that I had to look away. It wasn't right for me to see it.

I shifted in my chair, feeling awkward and out of place, and heard the letter crinkle in my pocket. I had been so excited to tell Minnie all about Barnard, but it didn't seem like so much now.

I stared into my teacup, wondering what it was like to have what Minnie had. To have somebody love you like Jim loved her. To have two tiny new lives in your care.

I wondered if all those things were the best things to have or if it was better to have words and stories. Miss Wilcox had books but no family. Minnie had a family now, but those babies would keep her from reading for a good long time. Some people, like my aunt Josie and Alvah Dunning the hermit, had neither love nor books. Nobody I knew had both.





plain ? tive


"Is this how you spend the money I give you? Making up Mother Goose rhymes?"

I jerked awake at the sound of the angry voice, uncertain for a few seconds where I was. My eyes grew accustomed to the lamplight and I saw my new composition book under my hand, and my dictionary next to it, open to my word of the day, and realized it was late at night and that I'd fallen asleep at the kitchen table.

"Answer me, Mattie!"

I sat up. "What, Pa? What money?" I mumbled, blinking at him.

There was fury on his face and alcohol on his breath. Through the sleep fog in my head, I remembered that he'd gone to Old Forge earlier that afternoon to sell his syrup. He'd had twelve gallons. We'd boiled nearly five hundred gallons of sap to get it. It was his habit on these trips to go into one of the saloons there and allow himself a glass or two of whiskey from his profits, and some male conversation. He usually didn't get back before midnight. I'd planned to be in bed well before then.

"The housekeeping money! The fifty cents I give you for a bag of cornmeal! Is this where it's gone?"

Before I could answer him, he grabbed my new composition book off the table and ripped out the poem I'd been writing.

"'...a loon repeats her plaintive cry, and in the pine boughs, breezes sigh...," he read. Then he crumpled the page, opened the oven door, and threw it on the coals.

"Please, Pa, don't. I didn't spend the housekeeping money on it. I swear it. The cornmeal's in the cellar. I bought it two days ago. You can look," I pleaded, reaching for my composition book.

"Then where did you get the money for this?" he asked, holding it away from me.

I swallowed hard. "From picking fiddleheads. And spruce gum. Me and Weaver. We sold them. I made sixty cents."

The muscle in Pa's cheek jumped. When he finally spoke, his voice was raspy. "You mean to tell me we've been eating mush for days on end and you had sixty cents all this time?"

And then there was a loud, sharp crack and lights were going off in my head and I was on the floor, not at all sure how I'd got there. Until I tasted blood in my mouth and my eyes cleared and I saw Pa standing over me, his hand raised.

He blinked at me and lowered his hand. I got up. Slowly. My legs were shaky and weak. I had landed on my hip and it was throbbing. I steadied myself against the kitchen table and wiped the blood off my mouth. I couldn't look at my pa, so I looked at the table instead. There was a bill of sale on top of it, and money—a dirty, wrinkled bill. Ten dollars. For twelve gallons of maple syrup. I knew he'd been hoping for twenty.

I looked at him then. He looked tired. So tired. And worn and old.

"Mattie ... Mattie, I'm sorry ... I didn't mean to...," he said, reaching for me.

I shook him off. "Never mind, Pa. Go to bed. We've got the upper field to plow tomorrow."





I am standing in my underthings, getting ready for bed. My camisole is sticking to my skin. It feels like a wet dishrag. It is beastly hot up here in the Glenmore's attic, and so airless I can barely draw a breath. That's no bad thing, though, on a night like tonight when you share a room with seven other girls and all of you have been waiting tables and washing dishes and cleaning rooms in the July heat and none of you has had a bath, or even a swim, for three days running.

Cook comes in. She pokes and scolds, telling this girl to tuck her boots under the bed, that one to pick her skirt up off the floor, threading her way down the middle of the room.

I hang my blouse and skirt on a hook at the side of my bed and pull the hairpins out of the twist Ada did for me this morning—a Gibson-girl style and one that looks better in the drawings in Ladies' Home Journal than it does on me. Then I peel off my stockings and lay them on the windowsill to air.

"Frances Hill, you get those boots polished tomorrow, you hear me? Mary Anne Sweeney, put that magazine away..."

I lie down on one side of the old iron bed I share with Ada, on top of the faded quilt. Ada is kneeling at the other side, praying. I would like to pray, but I can't. The words won't come.

"Now listen, girls, I want you to go right to sleep tonight. No reading or talking. I'm getting you up early tomorrow. Five-thirty on the dot. Never mind your whining. We've got people coming from all parts—important people—and I want you looking sharp. There's to be no whispering or gossiping or carrying on. Ada?"