A Northern Light(8)
Didn't have it long, though. We needed it to help pay for Mamma's headstone.
"'On the 24th of February, 1810, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signaled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding the Chateau d'If...,'" Weaver began. As he read, I poked around with a stick, searching for the tiny green furls coming up through the wet, rotted leaves, each one curled in on itself like the end of a fiddle. They come up in moist, shady areas, and though they start small, they have a lot of push. I have seen them dislodge heavy rocks in their eagerness to grow. This patch, on a hill of maples and pines a quarter mile west of Weaver's place, is a good one. Nobody besides us knows about it. There are enough fiddleheads for two buckets today and another two tomorrow. We never pick them all. We leave plenty alone to become ferns.
I got my first bucket filled maybe one-third of the way, and then picking started to pale beside the sailors Dantes and Danglars and their goings-on, and I got taken outside myself like I always do by a good story and forgot all about fiddleheads and buckets and money and everything in the world except the words.
"'...We will leave Danglars struggling with the demon of hatred,'" Weaver read, '"and endeavoring to insinuate in the ear of the ship owner some evil suspicions against his comrade and...' Hey! Get picking, Matt! Mattie, did you hear me?"
"Huh?" I stood there in a trance, the bucket at my feet, listening as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.
"You gotta pick, not stand there looking touched."
"All right," I sighed.
Weaver closed the book. "Forget it. I'll help. We'll never get done otherwise. Give me a hand."
I reached for him and he pulled himself up, nearly pulling me over as he did. I have known Weaver Smith for over ten years now. He is my best friend. Him and Minnie both. But I still have to smile every time we take hands. My skin is so pale you can nearly see through it, and his is as dark as tobacco. There's more alike than different about Weaver and me, though. His palms are pink like mine. And his eyes are brown like mine. And inside, he's exactly like me. He loves words, too, and there is nothing he would rather do than read a book.
Weaver was the only black boy in Eagle Bay. And Inlet, Big Moose Lake, Big Moose Station, Minnowbrook, Clearwater, Moulin, McKeever, and Old Forge, too. Maybe in all of the North Woods. I had never seen another. Black men came to work on Webb's railroad a few years ago, the new one that runs from Mohawk to Malone and right on up into Montreal. They stayed at Buckley's Hotel in Big Moose Station—a settlement a few miles west of Big Moose Lake—but they left as soon as the last spike was driven in. One told my pa that the Bowery, the roughest stretch of road in New York City, had nothing on Big Moose Station on a Saturday night. He said that the blackflies hadn't managed to kill him, nor had Jerry Buckley's whiskey, nor the brawling lumberjacks, either, but Mrs. Buckley's cooking surely would and he was leaving before it did.
Weaver's mamma moved herself and Weaver up here from Mississippi after Weaver's father was killed right in front of them by three white men for no other reason than not moving off the sidewalk when they passed. She decided the farther north they got, the better. "Heat makes white people mean," she told Weaver and, having heard about a place called the Great North Woods, a place that sounded cold and safe, decided she and her son would move there. They lived about a mile up the Uncas Road, just south of the Hubbards, in an old log house that someone abandoned years ago.
Weavers mamma took in washing. She got a lot of business from the hotels and lumber camps. She washed table and bed linens in the summer, and in the fall and spring and winter, she washed wool shirts and pants and long Johns that had been worn for months at a time. Weaver's mamma boiled them clean in a huge iron pot in her backyard. She boiled the jacks clean, too, making them get in a tin tub and scrub themselves pink before they put their clothes back on. When a whole crew came out at once, it was best not to stand downwind. "Weaver's mamma's cooking underwear soup today," Lawton used to say.
She raised chickens, too. Scores of them. During the warmer months, she fried up four or five every evening, and baked biscuits and pies, too, and took it all down to the Eagle Bay railroad station the next day in her cart to meet the trains. Between the engineer and the conductors and all the hungry tourists, she sold everything she made. She put every penny she earned in an old cigar box that she kept under her bed. Weaver's mamma worked as hard as she did so she could send Weaver away to college. To the Columbia University in New York City. Miss Wilcox, our teacher, encouraged him to apply. He'd been granted a scholarship and planned to study history and politics and then go on to law school one day. He was the first freeborn boy in his family. His grandparents were slaves, and even his parents were born slaves, though Mr. Lincoln freed them when they were tiny children.
Weaver always says freedom is like Sloan's Liniment, always promising more than it delivers. He says all it really means is being able to choose among the worst jobs at the logging camps, the hotels, and the tanneries. Until his people can work anywhere whites work, and speak their minds freely, and write books and get them published, until white men are punished for stringing up black men, no black person will ever really be free.
I was scared for Weaver sometimes. We had hillbillies in the North Woods, same as they had in Mississippi—ignorant folk just itching to blame their no-account lives on someone else—and Weaver never stepped off the sidewalk or doffed his hat. He'd scrap with anyone who called him nigger, and was never scared for himself. "Go round cringing like a dog, Matt," he said, "and folks will treat you like one. Stand up like a man, and they'll treat you like a man." That was fine for Weaver, but I wondered sometimes, How exactly do you stand up like a man when you're a girl?