A Wedding on the Banks (7 page)

“He didn't do it, Sheriff. He's as pure as the driven snow.”

—Goldie Gifford, of her son Little Pike, in reference to the broken windows at the grammar school

“Of course he is. Have you ever seen snow once it's been driven on?”

—Vera Gifford, Little Pike's aunt, when she quit laughing

Vera Gifford had nearly given up hopes of keeping a mailbox standing erect and in good condition by the side of the road in front of her house. In the twelve years that Little Vinal had been on the planet, Vera had lost eight shiny aluminum mailboxes to bicycle accidents alone. Two other boxes had been mown down by a late-night, drunken Big Vinal and his tanklike old Plymouth, when neither he nor the Plymouth had enough sober sense to execute the sharp turn into the driveway. This infuriated Vera. The taste of S&H Green Stamps had barely worn off her tongue when another six books needed to be filled, page by page, to replace the last box. A mailbox was more essential to the Giffords than running water, electricity, or a telephone. Without a functional mailbox, one that fit governmental standards, Bond McClure refused to deliver the daily mail. Vera and Vinal were not very interested in the pamphlets from stores in Watertown, or the occasional personal letter from downstate relatives, or the light bill, or the
Reader's
Digest
Sweepstakes giveaway of the dream house. But they were obsessed with that narrow brown envelope that arrived every month with its familiar Augusta postmark: the treasured disability check.

It was just two weeks after Vera had received another new mailbox with her S&H Green Stamps that Little Vinal dragged his fenderless bicycle out from beneath the mound of tires in the lopsided garage and took his first quick ride of 1969. The road was still muddy in places, but the air was April's finest and the long winter months of bicycle dreaming were finally over. Little Vinal was beset, as usual, with a flood of adrenaline to his loins when he came barreling down the main road in Mattagash, over the one-way bridge and then onto the short stretch of road that would take him home. He saw the sun on the mailbox first, a silver bounce of light that glowed, clean and pure as money. His breath caught up in his throat. There was the red flag, waving at him, taunting him, daring him on, the way a matador teases the bull. Little Vinal gulped in a mouthful of April air and bore down on the mailbox. His aim, as he often told spectators, was only to see how close he could come to the box without hitting it. But April got to him, the budsy trees lining the roads, the birds mate-singing back and forth along the telephone wires, the black swath of beautiful tar he had not seen since last October. Added to this, he spied the younger Gifford children, those waiting to inherit the bicycle the way they did hand-me-down clothes and shoes, gathered as audience on the warping front porch. Little Vinal put his hands on his hips, a large smile on his face, and shouted to his siblings, “Look! No hands!” It was at this moment that the opened mailbox door caught his left side and hauled him violently off the speeding bicycle. The door clattered onto the road behind him. But this time the damage done to the perpetrator was much more noticeable than the missing door, and the little boy and girl Giffords on the front porch danced up and down and clapped their hands in appreciation of some fine and unexpected entertainment.

Little Vinal lay sprawled, the April air knocked out of him, on the warm tar in front of the Gifford house, his ancient bicycle several yards away. His shirt was torn open to reveal a deep gash that had blossomed on his arm. His eye, which had struck against a handlebar during the spill, had already begun to swell into a bluish hill, on its way to turning into a black mound. When the air came again to Little Vinal's lungs, he sat up and inspected the tear on his arm. It was deep and bleeding heavily. In his pain he tried to weigh the two dangers he faced: bleeding to death quietly, or informing his mother of the injury, thereby incurring her wrath over the mailbox. But the dilemma was settled for him by one of the smaller Giffords, who kicked the screen door and shouted, “Mama! Little Vinal done it again!”

Vera wanted to pound Little Vinal as she stood over him at the scene of the accident. But he quickly turned his injured arm up to her, a broken bird's wing, so she could see that he was already badly wounded. The cut would require stitches. The closest doctor was in Watertown, thirty miles of frost heaves and potholes down the road. Vera wished Grammie Gifford were still alive. Grammie G. could have stopped the blood with her blood charm and then stitched the gash herself with regular thread. She had had an eye like a hawk when it came to stitching, whether it was fancy-material sewing or skin sewing. But old Grammie was peacefully reposing in the Catholic graveyard, her days with the needle finally over.

The accident threw Vera into a dilemma of her own. How would she get Little Vinal to Watertown? Big Vinal had left in the rattling Plymouth, the battered fenders shaking off mud until he had disappeared over the hill. Calling the ambulance in Watertown would be a useless endeavor. Vera might as well call the moon. The Watertown Ambulance Service had no intention of hightailing it to Mattagash to pick up an injured Gifford. They didn't give a damn what the first name was, but if the last name was Gifford, you might just as well stand by the side of the road and whistle when it came to calling
them
. You might just as well hold your breath and bleed to death. The Watertown Ambulance Service had had it with the Giffords.

It was all Big Pike and Big Vinal's fault. Where the idea came from in the first place no one remembers. Perhaps their ancient cars had broken down either with misuse or with sheer disgust over the owners, but Vinal and Pike concocted the brainstorm of phoning the Watertown Ambulance Service whenever they needed a ride to Watertown, feigning once a ruptured appendix and once a severe heart attack. Vinal always played the victim, as he was in his midfifties, in bad physical shape, and thus made a more believable potential corpse than did the younger Pike. Once Vinal was lifted into the ambulance Pike, beset with worry, climbed in as consoling relative for the breakneck ride to Watertown. It was always at the city limits that Vinal recovered, rubbing his side or his chest, mumbling that it wasn't as bad as he thought. Maybe it was the heat. Or something he ate. But the pains were miraculously gone. He and Pike would get out right there in front of the Newberry store. Friends were in town who would drive them back to Mattagash. The tired ambulance drivers, sick of the twisting, hairpin road, were only too happy to be free from the drive. It was not until the gunshot wound that the Watertown Ambulance Service got wise to Vinal and Pike Gifford.

At the city limits of Watertown Vinal had sat up with his usual mien and asked where the hell he was.

“You're in the am-bhew-lance,” Pike told him.

“Why?” asked Vinal.

“You've been accidentally shot,” Pike reassured him.

“Hell no, that wasn't me,” Vinal said. “That was Alphonse. I'm sleeping off a drunk.”

“Shit! You're right,” Pike Gifford said, and slapped the side of his own head. “Sorry, boys,” he told the irate drivers, as though the joke were on them. “In all the excitement, we grabbed the wrong man.”

“You just let us out here at the Newberry store,” Vinal was offering as the ambulance promptly drove them to the Watertown police station.

“Looks like it backfired,” Pike whispered to Vinal, while they waited for the drivers to finish the story they were telling the chief of police. “I guess they must of recognized us.”

With Little Vinal spread-eagle in the road and bleeding profusely, Vera was at her wits' end. She retrieved the wobbly bicycle, held it upright as one of the littler Gifford boys, his head a mass of dark curls, climbed up onto the seat. He positioned his feet on the pedals and clasped the handlebar tightly.

“Are you the one who just learned to ride this goddamn thing?” Vera asked the child. When he nodded a positive response, she pushed him off in the direction of the steep hill that would take him down the slope to Alphonse Gifford's house.

“Go see if Daddy's at Uncle Alphonse's,” Vera shouted to the retreating back. “If he ain't, get Uncle Alphonse or Aunt Lucy to come quick with their car.”

The child nodded again, frozen on the seat of the bike, his feet barely able to keep pace with the frenzy of spinning pedals. He disappeared over the line of hill, like a bird falling. Vera knelt next to Little Vinal, who was now over the burst of pure adrenaline and in the midst of some very real pain. Vera pushed a handful of her bunched-up dress onto the gash to discourage further bleeding.

“You'd think,” she said to Little Vinal as her other children gathered quietly around her like sturdy weeds, “that of all the stuff Alphonse Gifford has stole in his lifetime, he could at least steal a telephone.”

Luck, knowing no prejudice, was with the Giffords. Vinal was indeed at his brother Alphonse's. The two men were in the backyard dividing up a cache of used car batteries when news of the catastrophe swooped down off the hill. Vinal drove home, leaving the helpless biker to huff and puff the cumbersome bike up the steep hill that had been his launching pad.

In the emergency room at the Watertown Hospital, Little Vinal was pale and shaking.

“You're not too big for a lollipop, are you?” a nurse asked as she slid a strawberry sucker into his trembling hand. Little Vinal clutched it to his side. No matter what degree of pain might be filtering through his body, he would eat the lollipop on the bumpy ride home. One lollipop, Little Vinal knew from experience, had a pauper's chance if tossed into the living mass of little Giffords waiting back at the house.

“I was playing ‘Look, no hands,'” Little Vinal told the doctor when asked the particulars of the accident.

It had taken Vera a great deal of mental concentration to summon forth motherly concern instead of anger. She could still taste the Green Stamps from the last mailbox. But she was in Watertown, and in the company of a doctor and a nurse. The last thing she needed was social workers sticking their noses in her front door and inquiring as to how she was treating her kids, instead of staying home and looking after their own.

“It was almost ‘Look, no arms,'” Vera said, and tampered as lovingly as she could with Little Vinal's prominent cowlick. Big Vinal was not so magnanimous. He didn't give a boot about what social workers had to say, and besides, he had been in the midst of a very important business transaction when the urgent plea for assistance had biked down to interrupt him.

“He rips the door off one more mailbox,” said Vinal, “and it'll be ‘Look, no teeth.'”

Little Vinal recovered much sooner than the doctor would have anticipated. Tired of seeing him with his legs drawn up and his face pouting, Vera encouraged him to experience once more the new spring days that April had so lovingly brought them.

“Get your ass off my couch and out into the yard,” she told him. “And you better be standing by the road with your hand stuck out when the mailman comes.”

Little Vinal sat in the warm sun for a few minutes, kicking one foot against the other and babying his sore arm. Then he threw several large rocks at Tinkerbell, the cat. Still bored, and with two hours to pass before Bond McClure would inch slowly around the turn in his mail car, Little Vinal went off to the garage to find his BB gun. It was right where he had hidden it from the younger children, behind the case of powdered welfare eggs and the large air compressor that said HENLEY LUMBER COMPANY in red letters. Standing in the garage door with a wounded left arm and sighting along the barrel at Tinkerbell, Little Vinal let a BB whiz across the yard. The cat yowled before it disappeared into the black open spaces beneath the garage. With no other wild game in sight and still an hour to pass before mail time, Little Vinal was beset with boredom until it occurred to him that a good, capable scout would trek out across enemy country, just to see what the scoundrels were up to.

It was a beautiful day, with a spring breeze wafting up from the river, so Goldie had taken her canary outside in its little wicker cage so that it could enjoy a panorama of Mattagash, Maine, and all the places it would never fly.

“Oo needs to shake-um off that old cage fever,” Goldie said, and tied the cage to the front porch clothesline. Feathers was the only pet she had ever owned, the only one she didn't have to share with others. Goldie's mother had never allowed pets: “If there's any extra food in this house, it ain't going into the mouth of a dog or cat.” Goldie used to stare at pictures in storybooks of little girls holding furry kittens on their laps or tugging well-groomed puppies about on fancy leashes. And she promised herself that one day, when she was in her own home, she would have a pet of her own. But it seemed the human babies came so quickly, pink and wrinkly and crying, that Goldie, still seventeen when she had her first one, forgot about the luxury of owning things just for pleasure. It was true that the senior Pike had dragged home a stray dog after the first kids were toddling along, but that was the
family's
pet. Then, the day her youngest baby started kindergarten, Goldie put down her usual cup of morning coffee, slung her purse over her shoulder, and drove Pike's old clunker all the way to the Newberry's in Watertown. She had no idea what she might buy as she stood there in the back of the store where they kept birds, white mice, hamsters, and big bowls of tropical fish. But when she saw Feathers, his tiny head canted, his round eyes focused on her, she knew the answer.

“This is the first pet I ever owned all by myself,” Goldie told the clerk behind the Newberry cash register.

“We got a big sale on them white mice,” the clerk had answered. But Goldie had the pet she wanted. On the way home, Feathers had flitted happily about his cage, singing sweetly. It didn't seem to matter a hoot that he was on his way home to Giffordtown. He didn't wish for a McKinnon or a Craft to come to his rescue, Goldie could tell. She would share the family dog with the kids, but Feathers was all hers.