A Northern Light(39)
As I burrowed down under the covers in the bed I shared with Lou, I realized it had been such a long, eventful day that I had completely forgotten to look up a word in my dictionary. It was too late now; I'd have to go all the way back downstairs to the parlor to do it and I was too tired. So I made up my own word. Recouriumphoration. Re for "again," and cour for "courage" and a bit of triumph tacked on, too, for good measure. Maybe it will get into the dictionary one day, I thought. And if it does, everyone will know its meaning: to have one's hope restored.
fur ? tive
"How about wintergreen hearts, Mattie? Should I get those as well as lemon drops? Abby likes them, too. Lou likes the horehound candy. There's bull's-eyes, too; what about bull's-eyes?"
"Why don't you get a few of each?" I said. "Just stand out of the way, Beth, so folks can get around you."
The two of us were on the pickle boat with a dozen other people, tourists mainly. We'd just dropped off four cans of milk and three pounds of butter. We'd received no money for them. Pa had bartered with Mr. Eckler for a side of bacon earlier in the week, and the delivery was payment against it. As I waited for Beth to make her choice, I watched the other people on the boat. A man was buying fishing line. Two girls were picking out postcards. Others were buying groceries for their camps.
When I had bought my composition book from Mr. Eckler a few weeks before, I'd only spent forty-five cents of the sixty cents I'd made picking fiddleheads. I still had fifteen cents that I hadn't given to Pa, and I was using it that afternoon to buy candy for my sisters. Abby had her monthlies and was feeling awfully blue. She'd had the cramp something wicked that morning and had to lie down until it passed, and Pa asked me why she wasn't in the barn milking with the rest of us like he always does because he forgets, and then I had to explain and he got mad at me because it made him embarrassed. Cripes, it wasn't my fault. What did he go and have four girls for?
I thought some lemon drops would be just the thing to cheer Abby up. It would be a furtive purchase, as I really should have given the money to Pa, but after he'd hit me, I'd decided I wouldn't. Furtive, my word of the day, means doing something in a stealthy way, being sly or surreptitious. Sneaky would be another way of putting it. I did not wish to become a sneak, but sometimes one had no choice. Especially when one was a girl and craved something sweet but couldn't say why, and had to wait till no one was looking to wash a bucket of bloody rags, and had to say she was "under the weather" when really she had cramps that could knock a moose over, and had to listen to herself be called "moody" and "weepy" and "difficult" when really she was just fed up with sore bosoms and stained drawers and the fact that she couldn't just live life in the open, swaggering and spitting and pissing up trees like a boy.
That fifteen cents was all the money I had in the world right then, but I felt I could afford to be generous with it. Uncle Fifty had left for Old Forge that morning. He planned to stay there overnight and return on the morning train. I'd have my thirty dollars by dinnertime the next day. He'd only been gone half a day, but we missed him already. It had been wonderful having him with us all week. He pulled stumps and rocks with Pa and helped us with the milking, too. The evening milking, not the morning one. He wasn't very lively most mornings. His head usually hurt him. He perked up as the day went on, though, and at night he made us special desserts—tarte au sucre, which is a pie made out of maple sugar; or dried apple fritters with cinnamon; or doughy raisin dumplings boiled in maple syrup. After supper he'd sit down with his whiskey and pour himself glass after glass. The liquid leaped and sparkled as it left the bottles, and once it got into my uncle, it made him sparkle, too. He laughed loudly, and played his harmonica, and told us stories every night, like Scheherezade come to life in our parlor. We couldn't get enough of him. I would watch him as he chased Beth around the kitchen—mimicking the snarls of an angry wolverine, or as he staggered back and forth, knees buckling under the weight of a phantom buck—and find it almost impossible to believe that he was related to my quiet, frowning father.
"I think I'm going to get some coconut drops, too, Mattie," Beth said, still deliberating. "Or maybe some King Leo sticks. Or Necco's."
"All right, just don't be all day," I told her.
I saw the Loomises' buckboard pull up to the dock. Royal was driving. I wondered how he managed to be so handsome no matter what he was doing—plowing, walking, driving, whatever. He looked better dirty and sweaty in a pair of worn trousers and a frayed cotton shirt than most men did when they'd bathed, shaved, and put on a three-piece suit. I thought about the kiss he'd given me, and the thinking alone made me feel warm and swoony. Just like all those silly, fluttery girls in the stories in Peterson's Magazine.
Royal's mother was with him. They didn't see me. Beth and I were on the far side of the boat. Mrs. Loomis got out, and he handed her down a basket of eggs and a large crock of butter. She boarded the pickle boat and gave them to Mr. Eckler. He gave her a dollar bill in return. She thanked him and returned to the dock.
"All right, I'm ready," Beth said. She'd put her candies in a small brown bag.
"Go pay, then," I said, giving her my money.
She trotted to the back of the boat and handed Charlie Eckler the bag. "I'm going to the circus next week. The one in Boonville," I heard her tell him.