A Northern Light(5)

When I came back in, Tommy was working his spoon around his bowl so hard I thought he'd take the paint off it. I hadn't had more than a few bites of my mush. "Finish mine, will you, Tom?" I said, sliding my bowl over to him. "I'm not hungry and I don't want it wasted." I plugged the sink, poured hot water into it from the kettle, added a bit of cold from the pump, and started washing. "Where are the rest of you kids?"

"Susie and Billy went to Weavers. Myrton and Clara went to try at the hotel."

"Where's the baby?" I asked.

"With Susie."

"Your ma's not good today?"

"She won't come out from under the bed. Says she's scared of the wind and can't bear to hear it no more." Tommy looked at his bowl, then at me. "You think she's crazy, Mattie? You think the county 11 take her?"

Emmie Hubbard certainly was crazy, and I was pretty sure the county would take her one day. They'd almost done so on two or three occasions. But I couldn't say that to Tommy. He was only twelve years old. As I tried to figure out what I could say—to find words that weren't a lie but weren't quite the truth, either—I thought that madness isn't like they tell it in books. It isn't Miss Havisham sitting in the ruins of her mansion, all vicious and majestic. And it isn't like in Jane Eyre, either, with Rochester's wife banging around in the attic, shrieking and carrying on and frightening the help. When your mind goes, it's not castles and cobwebs and silver candelabra. It's dirty sheets and sour milk and dog shit on the floor. It's Emmie cowering under her bed, crying and singing while her kids try to make soup from seed potatoes.

"You know, Tom," I finally said, "there are times I want to hide under the bed myself."

"men? I can't see you crawling under no bed, Matt."

"End of February. We got four feet in two days, remember? On top of the three we had. Blew onto the porch and blocked the front door. Couldn't get the shed door open, either. Pa had to go out the kitchen window. The wind was howling and wailing, and all I wanted to do was crawl under something and never come out. Most of us feel like that from time to time. Your ma, she does what she feels. That's the only difference. I'll go over to her before school. See if I can find a jar of apples to take and a bit of maple sugar. Think she'd like that?"

"She would. I know she would. Thank you, Mattie."

I packed Tommy and Jenny off to school, hoping that by the time I got to the Hubbards', Weaver's mamma would already be there. She was better at getting Emmie out from under the bed than I was. I finished the washing, looking out the window as I did, at the bare trees and the brown fields, searching for spots of yellow among the patches of snow. If you can pick adder's-tongue in April, spring will come early. I was awful tired of the cold and the snow, and now the rain and the mud.

People call that time of year—when the root cellar is nearly empty and the garden not yet planted—the six weeks' want. Years past, we always had money come March to buy meat and flour and potatoes, and anything else we might need. Pa would go off logging at the end of November up at Indian or Raquette Lake. He'd leave as soon as the hay was in and stay there all winter, is hauling logs cut the previous summer. He drove teams of horses hitched to jumpers—low flat sledges with big runners. The loads were piled as high as a man standing on another man's shoulders. He took them down off the mountains over icy roads—relying on the weight of the logs and his own skill to keep the jumper from hurtling down the hills and killing the horses and anything else in its way.

Come March, the snow would melt and the roads would soften, and it became impossible to drag the heavy loads over them. As it got toward the end of the month, we would look for Pa every day. We never knew just when he would arrive. Or how. In the back of someone's wagon if he was lucky. On foot if he wasn't. We often heard him before we saw him, singing a new song he'd learned.

We girls would all run to him. Lawton would walk. Mamma would try her best to stay on the porch, to hang back and be proper, but she never could. He would smile at her, and then she was running down the path to him, crying because she was so glad he was home with his hands and feet and arms and legs all still attached. He'd hold her face in his hands, keeping her at arm's length, and wipe her tears away with his dirty thumbs. We'd all want to touch him and hug him, but he wouldn't let us. "Don't come near me. I'm crawling," he'd say. He'd take his clothes off in back of the house, douse them with kerosene, and burn them. He'd douse his head, too, and Lawton would comb the dead lice from his hair.

Mamma would be boiling water while he did all this, and filling our big tin tub. Then Pa would have a bath in the middle of the kitchen, his first one in months. When he was clean, we would have a feast. Ham steaks with gravy. Mashed potatoes with rivers of butter running down them. The last of the corn and the beans. Hot, fleecy rolls. And for dessert, a blueberry buckle made with the last of the put-up berries. Then there were presents for each one of us. There were no stores in the woods, but peddlers knew to make their rounds of the lumber camps just as the men were paid for the season. There might be a penknife for Lawton, and ribbons and boughten candy for us girls. And for Mamma, a dozen glass buttons and a bolt of fabric for a new dress. A cotton sateen the exact shade of a robin's maybe. Or a butterscotch tartan. An emerald velveteen or a crisp yellow pongee And once he bought her a silk faille the exact color of cranberries. Mamma had held that one to her cheek, looking at my pa as she did, then put it away for months, unable to take the scissors to it. We'd all sit in the parlor that night, in the glow of the cylinder stove, eating the caramels and chocolates Pa had brought, and listen to his tales. He'd show us all the new scars he'd picked up and tell us the antics of the wild lumberjacks, and how wicked the boss was, and how bad the food was, and all the tricks they'd played on the cook and the poor chore boy. It was better than Christmas, those nights that Pa came out of the woods.