A Northern Light(50)

I shook my head. "I've got the chickens to do. The coop needs whitewashing and Pa said he wants it done by Sunday."

"I'll do it, Matt," Lou said. "Me and Abby and Beth. Pa won't know. He'll be out plowing. He won't raise Cain, long as the work gets done."

I looked at my sister, who wasn't supposed to be listening. I saw the crumbs around her mouth, the lank hair hanging in her face, the dirty cuffs of Lawton's coveralls slopping down over her boots. I saw her blue eyes big and hopeful, and I loved her so much I had to look away.

"If you come, you can borrow anything you like, Mattie. Anything at all," Miss Wilcox said.

I imagined myself here on a Saturday afternoon, in this calm, quiet room, digging among all these books, gleaning my own treasures.

And then I smiled and said yes.





de ? his ? cence


It was seven o'clock on a May evening. It was after the supper was cooked and served, the dishes washed, the pots scrubbed, dried, and put away, the stove wiped down, the coals banked, the floor mopped, the dishrags put to soaking, and Barney fed. Lou and Beth were polishing their boots. Abby was sitting in front of the fire with a heap of darning. Pa was sitting across from her, mending Pleasant's bridle. And me? I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking at my family, each one of them close enough to touch, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst.

There were more chores to do. The wood box next to the stove was nearly empty. There were ashes to dump down the outhouse and Abby could have used my help with the darning, but I felt as if the very walls themselves were pressing in upon me. As if I would go crazy if I stayed in this prison of a kitchen for one second longer. I leaned against the sink and closed my eyes. I must have sighed or groaned or something, because Abby suddenly said, "What's wrong, Mattie?"

I opened my eyes again and saw her looking up at me. Lou and Beth looked up, too. Even Pa did. Dehiscence was my word of the day. It is a fine word, a five-dollar word. It means when pods or fruits burst open so that their seeds can come out. How was it that I could learn a new word every day yet never know the right ones to tell my family how I felt?

"Nothing's wrong. I'm fine. Just tired, that's all. I ... I think I forgot to latch the barn door," I lied, then ran to the shed, grabbed my shawl, and kept going. Out into the yard, past the garden and the outhouse, past the black earth of the cornfields.

I kept going until I got to the eastern edge of Pa's land, where the fields give way to woods and there's a stream, and just past it, a small clearing ringed with tamaracks. To the place where my mother is buried.

I could hardly breathe by the time I got there. I walked around and around her grave, trying to get hold of myself. My head felt giddy and light, like the time Minnie and I filched brandy from her father's cupboard. Only this time it wasn't alcohol I'd had too much of. It was books. I should have stopped after Zola and Hardy, but I hadn't. I'd gone right on like a greedy pig to Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Songs of Innocence by William Blake, and A Distant Music by Emily Baxter.

I'd borrowed the volumes of poetry on Saturday, when I'd gone back to Miss Wilcox's house to start organizing her books. "You can keep this one, Mattie," she'd said about the Baxter, "but keep it to yourself." I didn't need telling. I'd heard all about A Distant Music. I'd read articles about it in Aunt Josie's cast-off newspapers. They said that Emily Baxter was "an affront to common decency," "a blight on American womanhood," and "an insult to all proper feminine sensibilities." It had been banned by the Catholic Church and publicly burned in Boston.

I thought there would be curse words in it for sure, or dirty pictures or something just god-awfully terrible, but there weren't—only poems. One was about a young woman who gets an apartment in a city by herself and eats her first supper in it all alone. But it wasn't sad, not one bit. Another was about a mother with six children, who finds out she's got a seventh coming and gets so low spirited, she hangs herself. One was about Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, setting fire to her loom and heading off to do some traveling herself. And one was about God being a woman instead of a man. That must've been the one that made the pope boiling mad.

Jeezum ... What if God was a woman? Would the pope be out of a job? Would the president be a woman, too? And the governor? And the sheriff? And when people got married, would the man have to honor and obey? Would only women be allowed to vote?

Emily Baxter's poems made my head hurt. They made me think of so many questions and possibilities. Reading one was like pulling a stump. You got hold of a root and tugged, hoping it would come right up, but sometimes it went so deep and so far, you were halfway to the Loomis farm and still pulling.

I took a deep breath. I smelled wet earth and evergreens and the dusk coming down, and they calmed me some. I was agitated something fierce. There was a whole other world beyond Eagle Bay, with people like Emily Baxter in it, thinking all the things you thought but weren't supposed to. Writing them, too. And when I read what they'd wrote, I wanted to be in that world. Even if it meant I had to leave this one. And my sisters. And my friends. And Royal.

I stopped pacing and hugged myself for warmth. My eyes fell on my mamma's headstone, ELLEN GOKEY. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. BORN SEPTEMBER 14, 1868. DIED NOVEMBER 11, 1905. Her maiden name was Robertson, but Pa wouldn't allow it on the headstone. Her father had disowned her for marrying my pa. He'd forbidden the match, but my mamma went against him. She loved to tell the story of her courtship with Pa. Pa didn't like the stories; he'd always leave the room when she started. We liked them, though. Especially the one about how she'd seen him for the first time showing off at her father's sawmill on the Raquette River. He was biding a log with another lumberjack, trying to knock him off. Whoever lost had to give the other man his bandanna. My pa saw my mother watching, dumped the other man in the water, and gave her his bandanna. She was buried with it in her hand.