A Northern Light(3)

"What? I can't hardly hear you, Matt," Lou said. "Cripes sake, shut up, will you?" she yelled, clapping a hand over Beth's mouth.

Beth squealed and wriggled and threw herself back against the chair. The chair went over and hit Lou's bucket. The milk and Beth went all over the floor. Then Beth was bawling and Lou was shouting and I was wishing for my mother. As I do every day. A hundred times at least.

When Mamma was alive, she could make breakfast for seven people, hear our lessons, patch Pa's trousers, pack our dinner pails, start the milk to clabbering, and roll out a piecrust. All at the same time and without ever raising her voice. I'm lucky if I can keep the mush from burning and Lou and Beth from slaughtering each other.

Abby, fourteen, came in cradling four brown eggs in her apron. She carefully put them in a bowl inside the pie safe, then stared at the scene before her. "Pa's only got the pigs left to do. He'll be in shortly," she said.

"Pa's going to tan your ass, Beth," Lou said.

"He'll tan yours for saying ass," Beth replied, still sniffling.

"Now you've said it as well. You'll get a double tanning."

Bern's face crumpled. She started to wail all over again.

"That's enough! Both of you!" I shouted, dreading the thought of Pa getting his strap, and hearing the whack of it against their legs. "No one's getting a tanning. Go get Barney."

Beth and Lou ran to the stove and dragged poor Barney out from behind it. Pas old hunting dog is lame and blind. He pees his bed. Uncle Vernon says Pa ought to take him out behind the barn and shoot him. Pa says he'd rather shoot Uncle Vernon.

Lou stood Barney by the puddle. He couldn't see the milk, but he could smell it, and he lapped it up greedily. He hadn't tasted milk for ages. Neither had we. The cows are dry over the winter. One had just freshened, though, so there was a little bit of milk for the first time in months. More were due soon. By the end of May, the barn would be full of calves and Pa would be off early every morning making deliveries of milk, cream, and butter to the hotels and camps. But this morning, that one bucket was all we'd had for a long while and he was no doubt expecting to see some of it on his mush.

Barney got most of the milk cleaned up. What little he left, Abby got with a rag. Beth looked a little soggy, and the linoleum under her chair looked cleaner than it did elsewhere, but I just hoped Pa wouldn't notice. There was an inch or two left in the bucket. I added a bit of water to it and poured it into a jug that I set by his bowl. He'd be expecting a nice milk gravy for supper, or maybe a custard, since the hens had given four eggs, but I'd worry about that later.

"Pall know, Matt," Lou said.

"How? Is Barney going to tell him?"

"When Barney drinks milk, he farts something wicked."

"Lou, just because you walk like a boy and dress like a boy doesn't mean you have to talk like one. Mamma wouldn't like it," I said.

"Well, Mamma's not here anymore, so I'll talk as I please."

Abby, rinsing her rag at the sink, whirled around. "Be quiet, Lou!" she shouted, startling us, for Abby never shouts. She didn't even cry at Mamma's funeral, though I found her in Pa's bedroom a few days after, holding a tin likeness of our mother so hard that the edges had cut her hand. Our Abby is a sprigged dress that has been washed and turned wrong side out to dry, with all its color hidden. Our Lou is anything but.

As the two of them continued to snipe, we heard footsteps in the shed off the back of the kitchen. The bickering stopped. We thought it was Pa. But then we heard a knock and a shuffle, and knew it was only Tommy Hubbard, the neighbor boy, hungry again.

"You itching, Tom?" I called.

"No, Matt."

"Come get some breakfast, then. Wash your hands first."

Last time I'd let him in to eat he gave us fleas. Tommy has six brothers and sisters. They live on the Uncas Road, same as us, but farther up, in a shabby plank house. Their land divides ours from the Loomis's land on one side, notching in from the road. They have no pa or they have lots of pas, depending on who you listen to. Emmie, Tommy's mother, does the best she can cleaning rooms at the hotels, and selling the little paintings she makes to the tourists, but it isn't enough. Her kids are always hungry. Her house is cold. She can't pay her taxes.

Tommy came inside. He had one of his sisters by the hand. My eyes darted between them. Pa hadn't eaten yet and there wasn't so much left in the pot. "I just brung Jenny is all," he said quickly. "I ain't hungry myself."

Jenny had on a man's wool shirt over a thin cotton dress. The shirttails touched the floor. The dress barely made it past her knees. Tommy had no overclothes on at all.

"It's all right, Tom. There's plenty," I said.

"She can have mine. I'm sick to death of this damned slop," Lou said, pushing her bowl across the table. Her kindnesses often took a roundabout path.

"I hope Pa hears you," Abby said. "Mouth on you like a teamster."

Lou poked her tongue out, displaying her breakfast. Abby looked as if she'd like to slap her. Luckily, the table was between them.

Everyone was sick of cornmeal mush. Myself included. We'd been eating it with maple sugar for breakfast and dinner for weeks. And for supper, buckwheat pancakes with the last of fall's stewed apples. Or pea soup made with an old ham bone that had been boiled white. We would have loved some corned beef hash or chicken and biscuits, but most everything we'd put in the root cellar in September was gone. We'd eaten the last of the venison in January. The ham and bacon, too. And though we'd put up two barrels of fresh pork, one of them had spoiled. It was my fault. Pa said I hadn't put enough salt in the brine. We'd killed one of our roosters back in the fall, and four hens since. We only had ten birds left, and Pa didn't want to touch them as they provided us with a few eggs now and would make us more eggs—and chickens, too—come summer.