A Northern Light(6)

He hadn't gone into the woods this year. He didn't want us by ourselves. Without his logging money, things had been hard indeed. He'd done some ice cutting on Fourth Lake over the winter, but the pay wasn't as good as logging money, and the yearly tax bill on our land took it all, anyway. As I stood there drying the dishes, I hoped the fact that we were flat broke and would be for some weeks yet, until Pa could sell his milk and butter again, would make him listen to what I had to say and tell me yes.

I finally heard him come into the shed, and then he was in the kitchen, a small snuffling bundle in his arms. "That devil of a sow et four of her piglets," he said. "Every one except the runt. I'm going to put him in with Barney. Heat'll do him good. Lord, this dog stinks! What's he been eating?"

"Probably got into something in the yard. Here, Pa." I put a bowl of mush on the table and stirred maple sugar into it. Then I poured the watery milk over it and hoped to God he didn't ask for more.

He sat down, looking thunderous, no doubt toting up the money he'd lost on the dead piglets. "Cost your mother a whole dollar secondhand, that book," he said, nodding at the dictionary still open on the table. "Never spent a penny on herself and then throws away a whole dollar on that thing. Put it up before it's covered in grease."

I put it back in the parlor, then poured Pa a cup of hot tea. Black and sweet, just the way he liked it. I sat down across from him and looked around the room. At the red-and-white-checked curtains that needed washing. At the faded pictures cut off calendars from Becker's Farm and Feed Supply that Mamma had tacked on the walls. At the chipped plates and yellow mixing bowls on the shelf over the sink. At the cracked linoleum, the black stove. At Barney licking the piglet. I looked at everything there was to see and some things twice, practicing my words in my head. I'd just about worked up the nerve to open my mouth when Pa spoke first.

"I'm sugaring tomorrow. Sap's flowing like a river. Got about a hundred gallons already. Wait any longer and it'll all spoil. Weather's unseasonable warm. You're to stay home and help me boil tomorrow. Your sisters, too."

"Pa, I can't. I'll fall behind if I miss a day, and my examinations are coming up."

"Cows can't eat learning, Mattie. I need to buy hay. Used up most everything I cut last fall. Fred Becker don't take credit, so I'll need to sell some syrup to get it."

I started to argue, but Pa looked up from his bowl and I knew to stop. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "You're lucky you're going at all this year," he said. "And it's only because the notion of you getting your diploma"—it came out French-sounding, dee-plo-MA, as his words do when he's angry—"meant something to your mother. You won't be going next year. I can't run this place by myself."

I looked at the table. I was angry with my father for keeping me home, even for a day, but he was right: He couldn't run a sixty-acre farm alone. I wished then that it was still winter and snowing night and day and there was no plowing or planting, just long evenings of reading and writing in my composition book, and Pa with nothing to say about it. Fractious, I thought. Cross, irritable, peevish. Fits my father to a tee. It was useless to try and soften him up with sweet tea. Might as well try and soften up a boulder. I took a deep breath and plunged ahead.

"Pa, I want to ask you something," I said, hope rising in me like sap in one of our maples, though I tried not to let it.

"Mmm?" He raised an eyebrow and kept on eating.

"Can I work at one of the camps this season? Maybe the Glenmore? Abby's old enough to get the meals and look after everyone. I asked her and she said shed be fine and I thought that if I—"

"No."

"But Pa—"

"You don't have to go looking for work. There's plenty"—there it was again, his accent, plain-tee—"right here."

I knew he'd say no. Why had I even asked? I stared at my hands—red, cracked, old woman's hands—and saw what was in store for me: a whole summer of drudgery and no money for it. Cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing, feeding chickens, slopping pigs, milking cows, churning cream, salting butter, making soap, plowing, planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, haying, threshing, canning—doing everything that fell on the eldest in a family of four girls, a dead mother, and a pissant brother who took off to drive boats on the Erie Canal and refused to come back and work the farm like he ought to.

I was yearning, and so I had more courage than was good for me. "Pa, they pay well," I said. "I thought I could keep back some of the money for myself and give the rest to you. I know you need it."

"You can't be up at a hotel by yourself. It's not right."

"But I won't be by myself! Ada Bouchard and Frances Hill and Jane Miley are all going to the Glenmore. And the Morrisons—the ones managing the place—are decent folk. Ralph Simms is going. And Mike Bouchard. And Weaver, too."

"Weaver Smith is no recommendation."

"Please, Pa," I whispered.

"No, Mattie. And that's the end of it. There are all sorts at those tourist hotels."

"All sorts" meant men. Pa was always warning me about the woodsmen, the trappers, the guides, and the surveyors. The sports up from New York or down from Montreal. The men in the theatrical troupes from Utica, the circus men from Albany, and the Holy Rollers that followed in their wake. "Men only want one thing, Mathilda," he was always telling me. The one time I asked, "What thing?" I got a cuff and a warning not to be smart.