A Northern Light(90)

The conductor grabs the iron railing on the side of the car and climbs up its metal steps. "Last call! Last call! All aboard!" he bellows. The engine exhales. A huge cloud of steam billows up from under it. The wheels strain against the tracks.

"Wait!" I cry, stumbling forward.

The conductor sees me. "Come on, missy!" he yells. "Her bark's worse than her bite!" He reaches down for me. I look around myself wildly, my heart bursting with grief and fear and joy. I am leaving, but I will take this place and its stories with me wherever I go.

I reach for his hand and clasp it. He hoists me onto the 10:15 southbound. To Utica and Herkimer. And all points south. To Amsterdam and Albany and beyond. To New York City. To my future. My life.





Author's Note


On July 12, 1906, the body of a young woman named Grace Brown was pulled from the waters of Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. The boat she'd been in had been found capsized and floating in a secluded bay. There was no sign of her companion, a young man who'd rented the boat under the name of Carl Grahm. It was feared that he, too, had drowned. Grace Brown's death appeared to be an accident, and neither the men who dragged the lake nor the staff at the hotel where the couple had registered could have foreseen that they would soon be embroiled in one of the most sensational murder trials in New York's history. Grace Brown, they would soon discover, was unwed and pregnant, and the man who had taken her boating was the father of her child. His real name was Chester Gillette.

Grace and Chester had met in 1905 at the Gillette Skirt Factory in Cortland, New York—a place where they both worked, and which Chester's uncle owned. A romance blossomed between them and eventually Grace became pregnant. Shortly after realizing her condition, she left Cortland for her home in South Otselic—possibly at Chester's urging. There, she worried and wrote to Chester, pleading with him to come for her, threatening to return if he did not.

Eventually, he did. They met in DeRuyter, a town near Graces home, and from there traveled to Utica and on into the Adirondack. They had little money and no set plan. Or rather, Grace had no plan, just a hope of marriage; Chester, his prosecutors claimed, did. Only a poor relation of the Cortland Gillettes and hungry for the society in which they moved, Chester hoped to improve his social standing by courting a girl from a prominent family. To do so, he first needed to rid himself of the factory girl he had once cared for but later came to regard as an obstacle.

There were no eyewitnesses to Grace Brown's death and no one knows for certain what happened on Big Moose Lake on July 11, 1906. Chester originally stated that Grace's death was an accident, then later claimed she'd committed suicide. George W. Ward, the district attorney who prosecuted the case, reconstructed Chester's activities before and after Grace's death—among them his use of an alias when registering at the Glenmore Hotel, the fact that he fled the scene and did not report Grace missing, and the fact that he was found enjoying himself at an Inlet hotel three days after her death—and argued that Chester had killed Grace. Instrumental to Ward's case were Grace's own letters.

In A Northern Light, I've taken the liberty of having Grace give a fictional character—Mattie—all of the correspondence between herself and Chester. In reality, however, when Grace was in the Adirondacks, she had only the letters Chester had written to her packed among her things. The letters she had written to him were found by the police in Chester's room in Cortland after he was arrested.

Grace's letters had a profound effect upon those who attended Chester's trial. People sobbed openly as they were read. Everyone wept, it was said, except Gillette. Though the case was based solely on circumstantial evidence, the jury found for the prosecution. Chester Gillette was convicted of murder in the first degree and executed in Auburn Prison on March 30, 1908.

Nearly a century after her death, Grace Browns words have the same effect on me that they had on the people who attended Chester Gillette's trial—they break my heart. I grieved for Grace Brown—a person I'd never known, a young woman long dead—when I first read them. There is so much fear and despair in those lines, but there is much else, too—a good heart, humor, intelligence, wit. Grace liked strawberries and roses and French toast. She had friends, and a brother who teased her about her cooking. She liked to go riding and shoot off firecrackers. Her letters remind me of what it was like to be nineteen, and I often wonder what she would have made of her life had she been allowed to live it. I'm glad that she helped Mattie live hers.

My grandmother, who worked as a waitress in a Big Moose camp in the twenties, says Grace Brown still haunts the lake.

Her letters will always haunt me.

Jennifer Donnelly

Brooklyn, New York

October 2002





Acknowledgments


Though Mattie Gokey, her family, and her friends are fictional beings, some of the story's characters, like Dwight Sperry and John Denio, were real. Others, like Henry the underchef and Charlie Eckler the pickle boat captain, are fictional but drawn from descriptions of real people. Several area authors helped me put the flesh back on old bones. I would like to acknowledge my great debt to Marylee Armour; W. Donald Burnap; Matthew J. Conway, my grand-uncle; Harvey L. Dunham; Roy C. Higby; Herbert F. Keith; William R. Marleau; and Clara V. O'Brien. Their memoirs and histories allowed me to weave fact with fiction by providing names, dates, and events; accounts of area people and their daily lives; and chronologies of towns and resorts. A list of books by these authors, plus additional sources and suggestions for further reading, follows.