A Wedding on the Banks (18 page)

“What's that?” asked Pearl.

“Where?” asked Sicily.

“Right there,” said Pearl, and pointed to the moist pile on the bottom step of Sicily's stairs.

“Dog puke,” said Amy Joy.

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air…

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.”

—William Shakespeare,
The
Tempest

The very first night in the old McKinnon homestead welcomed Pearl McKinnon Ivy with terrifying dreams. Maybe the coconut cream pie from which she and Marvin had eaten two extra-large slices before bedtime added a luster to the nightmare. Or maybe the old-settler ghosts were unhappy over being stirred up, fidgety with the intrusion from the outer world they never visited in their time, when their bones held flesh. Or maybe they had questions about that world to ask the prodigal daughter. One thing Pearl could be sure of was that they'd welcome her back. It wasn't good to stray so far from home, downriver, away from the rituals.

“If you're a missionary, it's okay,” Pearl had remembered hearing the day she bumped south on a Greyhound bus to Portland. The day she had abandoned (that's how Margie had put it) her family, her town, a way of life, and set off for Portland with the dream to become a hairstylist.

“If you're a missionary, it's all right,” Margie had told her. “Then you got a purpose. Then God will watch out for you.”

“Well, maybe that's why there's so many missionaries,” Pearl had answered. “Maybe all that religious zeal is just nature's way of covering up for ants in the pants.” Then Pearl had snapped the tiny padlocks shut on her suitcase. End of argument. But for years she sensed that Marge took pleasure in Pearl's having ended up married into an undertaking family. God wasn't watching out for her, as he surely would a missionary. God wouldn't let one of his sheep marry a grave digger.

Pearl opened her eyes and adjusted them to the architecture of her old bedroom. She felt the row of beaded perspiration on her forehead turn cold, and reached up with her pajama sleeve to wipe it away. She lay next to Marvin and stared at the ceiling. Outside, she could hear the Mattagash River bursting at its seams. When the water was lower and the boulders along the shore emerged out of the deep, the river would be even noisier. Pearl knew this. She
remembered.
She remembered a lot of things, like how to spy a good fishing hole after a heavy rain caused the water to rise just so. How to discover where the kingfisher's tunnel nest was hiding by finding the telltale scratches around a hole in the riverbank. And Pearl remembered all kinds of wonderful things about the old-timers she'd grown up with. She recalled how Old Man Gardner could harvest a bucketful of earthworms just by pounding a pointed piece of wood, what he called a stob, into the ground and then rubbing a piece of steel across the stob. The vibrations in the earth drove all those worms right out of their minds, and Pearl remembered seeing them rush to the surface and give themselves up. A kid could walk along and pick up enough fish bait for a week, just like picking wild strawberries. Old Man Gardner used to boast that on good days he could harvest over two thousand of the squiggly, wiggly things. Fishermen from out of state bought them up as if they were something good to eat. And old Mrs. Sophia Mullins was a case to remember, too. There was no one in Mattagash in that day and age who would even attempt to dig a well until old Sophia hobbled around with her willow switch jumping in her hands like something alive. Divining water. Pearl supposed backhoes and fancy hole diggers had replaced Old Sophia, who had been divining water in her coffin for at least forty years. And Samuel Gifford, the old half Indian, would make a stick from a cherry tree and beat ash out so fine it looked like yarn.

“They never
built
an ash pounder that good,” Pearl said aloud. “Yet I can barely remember Samuel Gifford.” She felt Marvin stir sleepily beside her and, rather than wake him, she let the ghosts of Old Man Gardner, Sophia Mullins, and Samuel Gifford take their worms, and willow switches, and ash-woven baskets and go back to peddle their wares among the dead.

In the hallway Pearl followed the tiny night-light she'd left on in the kitchen. A glass of warm milk would help her to sleep. Margie used to do that. Often Pearl would wake up in the middle of the night and hear a soft clattering in the kitchen below. Margie. Unable to sleep again.

“She must have been lonely,” Pearl thought. She put a pan on the stove. She took milk from the refrigerator, Marge's same old Kenmore, and poured a generous amount into the pan. She turned the gas burner on and watched the flame engulf it with a blue hiss. The Mullins girls had done a good job of getting the house in order. It was almost as good as new. Almost. Pearl could detect a most noticeable sagging, with her older sister gone a decade. Marge had kept a discerning eye on every nook and cranny. But winters are cruel in northern Maine, and no matter how lovingly spring comes back to caress the bruises, to lick the wounds, there is a stiffness that never leaves. The joints of the old McKinnon homestead, like the joints of its last human occupants, were stiffening with age.

“It's tired is all,” Pearl whispered, as the floor beneath her feet creaked with her weight. “But it's still nice. It's still home.” She stopped short, sure that she heard a scuffling in the basement, or outside,
somewhere.
When silence came back at her, she smiled.

“The mice must be as big as I remember them,” she thought, and opened a box of graham crackers from which she selected three. She and Marvin had picked up a few things to get them through the night, but tomorrow it would be necessary to stock the fridge. She would also have to explain the phone to Marvin tomorrow, with some kind of lie.

“Why a phone when we'll only be here a week?” he was bound to ask her when he discovered it in the den.

“Oh, just to keep in touch,” Pearl would say. “Anything can happen.” Soon, though, she would be compelled to tell her husband that she was staying on in Mattagash.

Pearl stood in front of Marge's old china cabinet and bit into a graham cracker. The baby roses were still on all the dishes, a pattern Pearl dearly loved. How many Sunday dinners had the three sisters and the Reverend spent hovering above those roses like a family of bees? Pearl even remembered how many roses had been on each plate.

“Twelve,” she said, and pressed a finger against the glass door. And she used to count them as she ate, knowing that when a dozen flowers surfaced, the meal would be over, her plate empty, dessert waiting. It was wise of Sicily to leave the dishes in the cabinet. To leave most of Marge's stuff right where it was, in the old house.

“There's no room in my house either,” Sicily had agreed with Pearl. “I suppose I could rent it all furnished to one of the schoolteachers who has to travel all the way from Watertown, but somehow it don't seem right. Some things shouldn't be moved. And they shouldn't be trifled with by strangers. But one day, Pearl, we need to sort through it all and divide it between Amy Joy and your granddaughters.”

“Make sure the Giffords don't find out it's got all its furnishings,” Pearl had warned after Marge's funeral. “Put the word around town that you've boxed everything up and stored it in your attic. Let them think we picked the place bone-dry.”

Pearl sipped her milk loudly. She was no longer in Portland, Maine. She could drink her milk as she pleased.

Pearl went into the Reverend's old study. Next to the cherry desk, a small bookcase bulged with books. She checked the spines. All old, mostly autobiographies of missionaries who had giant ants in their pants and who had inscribed their books to the Reverend. Pearl had heard Marge tell of the days when Reverend Ralph had a stream of visiting missionaries come to entertain Mattagash with stories about the heathen world. That was before Pearl's eyes and ears started picking up information for themselves about her environment. That was another place, another time, when Grace McKinnon, still very much alive, floated about as a gracious hostess and the house itself was newly minted.

Pearl left the books alone. Someone should check their value someday, it was true. In Portland, there was a rare-book store on every block. Yet it was funny how most folks in Mattagash regarded anything old as valueless. They wanted new things, store-bought things. The treasures of the past embarrassed them now. Mattagash was going modern.

Pearl closed the door to the study. It caused her mouth and her stomach to tighten, just walking into the room. There were no good memories of her father. There were no bad ones, either, when she thought about it. He was like a Mattagash winter, Pearl realized. When it's all over, and you're standing in the midst of summer again, you only
remember
that there was something harsh and unforgiving that happened to you.

“The old devil,” Pearl said, and laughed as she remembered the look on Sicily's face the first time she heard Pearl call him that. A man of God as the old devil himself.

Pearl went back into the kitchen to rinse her glass. When she was a girl, there used to be two silver water pails sitting on the counter at all times. She and Sicily shared the chore of lugging water up from the spring. Marge had running water installed years later. The pails, Pearl realized now, were galvanized. But when she was a child, a morning sun could transform zinc-plated tin into pure silver.

Pearl opened the back door cautiously and the full sound of what spring could do to a river filled her citified ears. The old summer kitchen sulked in the shadows outside, like the dinosaur it was. In its day it was used in the summer months for cooking and canning, and to keep heat out of the main house. In the winters it was closed up, ice on the linoleum and windows, a foot of snow on the roof. Marge had kept it shipshape, however, no matter that its functional qualities had been swept away with the dust of the years. Now Pearl understood all too well Marge's need to hang on to the past. Folks knew you by name there, and you were always welcome.

Pearl was about to abandon the bones of the old kitchen and the millions of gallons of Mattagash River water to the glittery April night when a flashy movement bounced into the corner of her eye. Above the puffs of her warm breath, she saw a light moving inside the summer kitchen. She felt her nostrils narrow with fear. Was it a light? Then Pearl remembered the stories about lights. She remembered hearing the old-timers speak of them in graveyards, and hadn't she and Sicily seen a few themselves as children on Halloween nights? Yes, round balls of light hovering about in the Catholic graveyard. It was always the Catholic graveyard. Protestant ghosts weren't so outspoken. The chilliness left Pearl, and she flushed warm to recall the terrifying answers to these things.

“It's the soul going off,” Marge had said. “Round and white and fragile.”

Pearl stared hard at the light. It
was
a light, that was certain, bouncing in the darkness, in among where Marge's old mason jars must still be shelved. She remembered that Flora Gumble, the grammar school teacher who taught so many generations of Mattagash children that she began calling the new arrivals by the names of their grandparents, had been much more scientific.

“Those lights don't happen when folks are embalmed,” she had said to some of the kids who waited around after school to inquire about the tales. “It's human gas rising out of the body, is all. It'll glow like a little lantern.” And Pearl remembered how Vinal Gifford, a little first grader then, had asked solemnly, “Do you mean them balls of fire is ghost farts?”

But Pearl knew better. She'd seen a real ghost when she was twelve. A young, pretty ghost. A woman ghost. Pearl had not only
seen
her; there had been words between the living and the spectral. When she remembered, all the wispy neck hairs on Pearl's nape stood up. The only person Pearl told had been Sicily. She had no intention of being shackled and then packed off to Bangor and locked in a padded cell due to unearthly visions.

“I'm looking for my children,” the ghost had said softly. “Are you my child?”

Terror seized Pearl again, as it had that day out behind the lilac bushes, where rumor held that three little children had been buried after a bad spread of influenza. This was before the Reverend Ralph built the McKinnon house and started his own family. But even after all those years, Mattagashers still told of how the mother of those three little kids had gone mad and had to be taken away. But she had managed, after death, to come back and ask a twelve-year-old the whereabouts of her children. Pearl believed in ghosts, and that's why she had run from the inquiring woman without answering.

“Why didn't you tell her to dig beneath the lilac bush?” eight-year-old Sicily had asked later.

Yes, Pearl believed in ghosts, but what ghost would be interested in ransacking the summer kitchen? What ghost would be content to rattle dust off the mason jars and search through Marge's moldy trunk, read her mildewed letters? Fear drove a knife into Pearl's heart.
Marge!

“Marge?” The word trembled out of Pearl's mouth, and her hand quickly flicked the switch. A fan of porch light fell out into the blackness, turned the lurking black beast into harmless gray shingles. Pearl looked again. The light was gone. She flicked the porch light off once more and tried again to find the eerie light. Sheer blackness confronted her, except for the worn stars that had patterned themselves over Mattagash before even the Indians found the place. This was way back when God first put stars in the sky there, so that one day the McKinnons could follow them upriver to found a town. And later the Giffords could utilize that same starlight to shine a path for them to the nearest hubcap or tire iron. There were only stars out there, behind Marge's old house, and the pounding swell of the spring river.

“Margie?” Pearl tried once more before she closed the door and locked it.