A Northern Light(37)

"Oh no! I forget someting for Mathilde!" my uncle cried, looking at me. He dug in his bag. "No, no, wait! I have someting..." He pulled out a dirty wool sock, which made everyone laugh. "Or dis..." Out came his red long Johns. "Or maybe she like dis..."

He placed a narrow ivorine box in my hands, and when I opened it, I gasped. It was a pen. A real honest-to-God fountain pen, with a metal nib and a silver-plated case and cap. It was as shiny as a minnow in its bed of black felt. I had never had a pen in my life—only pencils—and I couldn't even imagine what it would feel like to put words onto paper in rich blue ink instead of smudgy lead. I could feel my eyes welling up as I looked at the pen, and I had to blink once or twice before I could thank my uncle.

Pa was next—he got a new wool shirt—then Uncle Fifty pulled out a fearsome hunting knife and a pretty beaded bag. "For Lawton. And your mamma," he said. "Maybe you geev heem da knife when he come home, eh?"

"But Uncle Fifty, he ain't never...," Beth started to say. A look from Abby silenced her.

"And maybe you girls can share da purse."

We all nodded and said we would, but no one took the purse and no one touched the knife. We thanked our uncle again, and hugged him and kissed him, and then it really was time for bed. I picked up all the brown wrapping paper, smoothing it out for another use, as my sisters made their trips to the outhouse.

While I waited for my turn, I noticed the fire in the cylinder stove was low and went to fetch more wood for it. On my way back, just as I was about to push the parlor door open, I heard my uncle say, "Why you stay here squeezing cow teets all day long, Michel? Wat kine life dat be for a reevairman? Why you not come back and drive da logs?"

Pa laughed. "And let four girls raise themselves? All that whiskey's addled your brain."

"Your Ellen, she make you come off da reevair. Don't tink I don't know. But she gone now, and I tink da reevair be a better ting for you. You like dis farming?"

"I do."

I heard my uncle snort. "Now who tell da tales, eh?"

About ten years ago, my mother and father had had a terrible, terrible fight. We were living in Big Moose Station then. Pa had just come home from a spring drive. He had Ed LaFountain, another woodsman, with him. They got to drinking after supper and Mr. LaFountain got to telling stories and he told one about my pa working a bateau and how close he and his crew had come to getting swallowed up by a loosening jam.

Mamma went crazy when she heard it. Before Pa had left for the woods that year, she'd made him promise he wouldn't work the jams, that he'd stay on the shore. It was too dangerous, she said. Men were killed all the time. Jams tended to give way with no warning, and unless the oarsman could get his crew back into the boat and row clear in time, the boat would be pulled under. Pa apologized to her. He said he'd only done it for the money. Most woodsmen made less than a dollar a day, but a good oarsman got three and a half, sometimes four, and Pa was one of the best.

Mamma didn't want to hear any apologies, though. She was furious. She told him she wanted him to come out of the woods for good and work for her father in his sawmill. They could live in Inlet, she said, right in the village, near Josie. He'd make good money. The children would be closer to a school. Things would be easier for everyone.

"Never, Ellen," he'd said. "You know better than to ask me."

"Papa said he would forgive everything, Michael. He said he'd help us."

"He would forgive? Forgive what? Forgive me for falling in love with you?"

"For us running away. For not..."

"He's the one needs forgiving, not me. He's the one called me no-account French trash. The one who said he'd rather see you dead than married to me."

"What are you trying to do, Michael, make me a widow? I won't have you on a bateau!"

"I ain't working for your father, and I ain't—" Pa didn't get to finish his sentence, because Mamma slapped him. Good and hard. My mamma, who never even raised her voice to him. She slapped him and put on her coat and made us put on our coats, and she put us in a buckboard at the train station and paid the man to take us to Aunt Josie's.

We stayed with my aunt for three weeks, and she refused to let my father in for two of them. But then one day, Pa came to the door and pushed her aside and got my mamma to go for a walk with him. Lawton cried something fierce; he didn't want her to go. When they came back, Mamma gave Pa all her jewelry—all the pretty things her parents had given her before she married. Pa went to Tuttle's, a secondhand store in Old Forge, the following day and traded it all for cash money. And the next thing we knew, he was clearing trees on sixty acres of land he'd bought in Eagle Bay. He built us a house from the trees he felled—a real house, not some pokey log cabin with hemlock bark for a roof. He had the trees milled into planks at Hess's sawmill in Inlet, not at my grandfather's mill or my uncle's. He built a barn and a smokehouse and an icehouse, too. And though he did haul lumber out of the woods in the winter to make extra money, he never worked a river drive again.

"And someting else," my uncle continued, "why you don't teach your girls to speak French?"

"They have no use for it," Pa said gruffly. "And neither do I."

"Dey be French girls, Michel. Dey be Gauthiers"—he pronounced it Go-chay—"not Gokey. Gokey! Ba jeez, what da hell is Gokey?"