A Northern Light (2 page)

"Beth, hush now and eat your mush," I scolded, fumbling her hair into a braid. She didn't mind me, though, for she wasn't singing her song to me or to any of us. She was singing to the motionless rocker near the stove and the battered fishing creel hanging by the shed door. She was singing to fill all the empty places in our house, to chase away the silence. Most mornings I didn't mind her noise, but that morning I had to talk to Pa about something, something very important, and I was all nerves. I wanted it peaceful for once. I wanted Pa to find everything in order and everyone behaving when he came in, so he would be peaceable himself and well-disposed to what I had to say.

There's blackstrap molasses, squaw buns as hard as rock,
Tea that's boiled in an old tin pail and smells just like your sock.
The beans they are sour, and the porridge thick as dough—
When we have stashed this in our craw, it's to the woods we go...

The kitchen door banged open and Lou, all of eleven, passed behind the table with a bucket of milk. She'd forgotten to take off her boots and was tracking manure across the floor.

"
A-hitching up our braces and a-binding up our feet.
"

"Beth, please!" I said, tying her braid with a ribbon. "Lou, your boots! Mind your boots!"

"
A-grinding up our axes for our kind is hard to beat
..."

"What? I can't hardly hear you, Matt," Lou said. "Cripes sake, shut up, will you?" she yelled, clapping a hand over Beth's mouth.

Beth squealed and wriggled and threw herself back against the chair. The chair went over and hit Lou's bucket. The milk and Beth went all over the floor. Then Beth was bawling and Lou was shouting and I was wishing for my mother. As I do every day. A hundred times at least.

When Mamma was alive, she could make breakfast for seven people, hear our lessons, patch Pa's trousers, pack our dinner pails, start the milk to clabbering, and roll out a piecrust. All at the same time and without ever raising her voice. I'm lucky if I can keep the mush from burning and Lou and Beth from slaughtering each other.

Abby, fourteen, came in cradling four brown eggs in her apron. She carefully put them in a bowl inside the pie safe, then stared at the scene before her. "Pa's only got the pigs left to do. He'll be in shortly," she said.

"Pa's going to tan your ass, Beth," Lou said.

"He'll tan yours for saying
ass,
" Beth replied, still sniffling.

"Now you've said it as well. You'll get a double tanning."

Bern's face crumpled. She started to wail all over again.

"That's enough! Both of you!" I shouted, dreading the thought of Pa getting his strap, and hearing the whack of it against their legs. "No one's getting a tanning. Go get Barney."

Beth and Lou ran to the stove and dragged poor Barney out from behind it. Pas old hunting dog is lame and blind. He pees his bed. Uncle Vernon says Pa ought to take him out behind the barn and shoot him. Pa says he'd rather shoot Uncle Vernon.

Lou stood Barney by the puddle. He couldn't see the milk, but he could smell it, and he lapped it up greedily. He hadn't tasted milk for ages. Neither had we. The cows are dry over the winter. One had just freshened, though, so there was a little bit of milk for the first time in months. More were due soon. By the end of May, the barn would be full of calves and Pa would be off early every morning making deliveries of milk, cream, and butter to the hotels and camps. But this morning, that one bucket was all we'd had for a long while and he was no doubt expecting to see some of it on his mush.

Barney got most of the milk cleaned up. What little he left, Abby got with a rag. Beth looked a little soggy, and the linoleum under her chair looked cleaner than it did elsewhere, but I just hoped Pa wouldn't notice. There was an inch or two left in the bucket. I added a bit of water to it and poured it into a jug that I set by his bowl. He'd be expecting a nice milk gravy for supper, or maybe a custard, since the hens had given four eggs, but I'd worry about that later.

"Pall know, Matt," Lou said.

"How? Is Barney going to tell him?"

"When Barney drinks milk, he farts something wicked."

"Lou, just because you walk like a boy and dress like a boy doesn't mean you have to talk like one. Mamma wouldn't like it," I said.

"Well, Mamma's not here anymore, so I'll talk as I please."

Abby, rinsing her rag at the sink, whirled around. "Be quiet, Lou!" she shouted, startling us, for Abby never shouts. She didn't even cry at Mamma's funeral, though I found her in Pa's bedroom a few days after, holding a tin likeness of our mother so hard that the edges had cut her hand. Our Abby is a sprigged dress that has been washed and turned wrong side out to dry, with all its color hidden. Our Lou is anything but.

As the two of them continued to snipe, we heard footsteps in the shed off the back of the kitchen. The bickering stopped. We thought it was Pa. But then we heard a knock and a shuffle, and knew it was only Tommy Hubbard, the neighbor boy, hungry again.

"You itching, Tom?" I called.

"No, Matt."

"Come get some breakfast, then. Wash your hands first."

Last time I'd let him in to eat he gave us fleas. Tommy has six brothers and sisters. They live on the Uncas Road, same as us, but farther up, in a shabby plank house. Their land divides ours from the Loomis's land on one side, notching in from the road. They have no pa or they have lots of pas, depending on who you listen to. Emmie, Tommy's mother, does the best she can cleaning rooms at the hotels, and selling the little paintings she makes to the tourists, but it isn't enough. Her kids are always hungry. Her house is cold. She can't pay her taxes.

Tommy came inside. He had one of his sisters by the hand. My eyes darted between them. Pa hadn't eaten yet and there wasn't so much left in the pot. "I just brung Jenny is all," he said quickly. "I ain't hungry myself."

Jenny had on a man's wool shirt over a thin cotton dress. The shirttails touched the floor. The dress barely made it past her knees. Tommy had no overclothes on at all.

"It's all right, Tom. There's plenty," I said.

"She can have mine. I'm sick to death of this damned slop," Lou said, pushing her bowl across the table. Her kindnesses often took a roundabout path.

"I hope Pa hears you," Abby said. "Mouth on you like a teamster."

Lou poked her tongue out, displaying her breakfast. Abby looked as if she'd like to slap her. Luckily, the table was between them.

Everyone was sick of cornmeal mush. Myself included. We'd been eating it with maple sugar for breakfast and dinner for weeks. And for supper, buckwheat pancakes with the last of fall's stewed apples. Or pea soup made with an old ham bone that had been boiled white. We would have loved some corned beef hash or chicken and biscuits, but most everything we'd put in the root cellar in September was gone. We'd eaten the last of the venison in January. The ham and bacon, too. And though we'd put up two barrels of fresh pork, one of them had spoiled. It was my fault. Pa said I hadn't put enough salt in the brine. We'd killed one of our roosters back in the fall, and four hens since. We only had ten birds left, and Pa didn't want to touch them as they provided us with a few eggs now and would make us more eggs—and chickens, too—come summer.

It wasn't like this when Mamma was alive. Somehow
she provided good meals all through the winter and still managed to have meat left in the cellar come spring. I am nowhere near as capable as my mother was, and if I ever forget it, I have Lou to remind me. Or Pa. Not that he says the sorts of things Lou does, but you can tell by the look on his face when he sits down to eat that he isn't fond of mush day in and day out.

Jenny Hubbard didn't mind it, though. She waited patiently, her eyes large and solemn, as I sprinkled maple sugar on Lou's leavings and passed the bowl to her. I gave Tom some from the pot. As much as I could spare while still leaving enough for Pa.

Abby took a swallow of her tea, then looked at me over the top of the cup. "You talk to Pa yet?"

I shook my head. I was standing behind Lou, teasing the rats out of her hair. It was too short for braids; it only just grazed her jaw. She'd cut it off with Mamma's sewing scissors after Christmas. Right after our brother, Lawton, left.

"You going to?" she asked.

"Talk about what?" Beth asked.

"Never mind. Finish your breakfast," I said.

"What, Matt? Talk about what?"

"Beth, if Mattie wanted you to know, she'd tell you," Lou said.

"You don't know, neither."

"Do, too."

"Mattie, why'd you tell Lou and not me?" Beth whined.

"Because you can't never keep quiet," Lou said.

That started another round of bickering. My nerves were grated down bald. "It's
can't ever,
Lou, not
can't never,
" I said. "Beth, stop whining."

"Matt, you pick your word of the day yet?" Abby asked. Abby, our peacemaker. Gentle and mild. More like our mother than any of the rest of us.

"Oh, Mattie! Can I pick it? Can I?" Beth begged. She scrambled out of her chair and raced into the parlor. I kept my precious dictionary there, out of harm's way, along with the books I borrowed from Charlie Eckler and Miss Wilcox, and my mother's Waverly Editions of Best Loved American Classics, and some ancient copies of
Peterson's Magazine that
my aunt Josie had given us because, as it said in its "Publisher's Corner," it was "one of the few periodicals fit for families where there are daughters."

"Beth, you carry it but let Lou pick the word," I shouted after her.

"I don't want no part of baby word games," Lou grumbled.

"
Any,
Lou.
Any
part," I snapped. Her carelessness with words made me angrier than her dirty mouth and the filthy state of her coveralls and the manure she'd tracked in, combined.

Beth returned to the kitchen table, carrying the dictionary as if it were made of gold. It might as well have been. It weighed as much. "Pick the word," I told her. "Lou doesn't want to." She carefully flipped a few pages forward, then a few back, then put her index finger on
the left-hand page. "
Fff ... fraaak ... fraktee ... frakteeus?
" she said.

"I don't think there's any such word. Spell it," I said. "F-r-a-c-t-i-o-u-s."

"
Frakshus,
" I said. "Tommy, what's the meaning?"

Tommy peered at the dictionary. "Apt to break out into a passion ... snappish, peevish, irritable, cross,'" he read. "'P-per-verse. Pettish.'"

"Isn't that just perfect?" I said. "
Fractious,
" I repeated, relishing the bite of the
f,
teeth against lip. A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping. "Your turn, Jenny. Can you make a sentence from the word?"

Jenny bit her bottom lip. "It means cross?" she asked.

I nodded.

She frowned, then said, "Ma was fractious when she chucked the fry pan at me 'cause I knocked her whiskey bottle over."

"She chucked a fry pan at you?" Beth asked, wide-eyed. "Why'd she do that?"

"Because she was out of sorts," Abby said.

"Because she was drinking," Jenny said, licking bits of mush off her spoon.

Jenny Hubbard is only six years old, but the growing season is short in the North Woods, and children, like the corn, have to come up fast if they are to come up at all.

"Your mamma drinks whiskey?" Beth asked. "Mammas shouldn't drink whiskey—"

"Come on, Beth, let's go. We're going to be late," Abby said, hurrying her up from the table.

"Ain't you coming, Matt?" Beth asked.

"In a few minutes."

Books were gathered. Dinner pails, too. Abby bossed Lou and Beth into their coats. Tommy and Jenny ate silently. The shed door slammed. It was quiet. For the first time that morning. And then, "Matt? Come here a minute, will you?"

"What is it, Lou? I've got my hands full."

"Just come!"

I walked into the shed. Lou was standing there, ready to go, with Lawton's fishing pole in her hand.

"Lou, what are you doing?"

"Can't eat no more mush," she said. Then she took hold of my ear, pulled my face to hers, and kissed my cheek. Hard and sharp and quick. I could smell the scent of her—woodsmoke and cows and the spruce gum she was always chewing. The door slammed again and she was gone.

My other sisters, like me, take after our mother. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Lou takes after Pa. Lawton, too. Coal black hair, blue eyes. Lou acts like Pa, too. Angry all the time now. Since Mamma died. And Lawton went away.

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.