South of Superior (15 page)

“Hard to believe it's come to this. But I don't know what else to do.”

Their feet scuffed on the pavement. After a while Madeline said (not sure why she did, but led into it by their unaccustomed camaraderie, the dark, the quiet), “I went to Pine Street that day. You know, that day you told me where he—Joe—lived.”

Gladys nodded. “I supposed you did.”

“It was awful.”

“Lots of poor people down in Crosscut. Real poor. Joe sold that house.”

Madeline waited for Gladys to add more and when she didn't, she said, “I don't know how to ask you about him.”

There was only the sound of their shoes on the sidewalk Until at last Gladys said, “And I don't know how to tell you. He wasn't a bad man.”

Objection rose in Madeline, from her marrow. “But I was his granddaughter.” She felt so much about it still, after all this time, after all that Emmy had given her, and wished she didn't. She couldn't seem to stem the tide of protest, though. (And maybe the protest was in a way impersonal. It wasn't so much that this abandonment had happened to her; it was that it had happened at all. It was a philosophical question. Maybe one she should ask Paul, who seemed to be posting each one of Nietzsche's seemingly endless aphorisms on his chalkboard a day at a time. Today it had been,
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
) “I was only three. What kind of a person can do that, just—refuse someone? A child.”

Gladys kept her eyes on her shoes. “People do what they have to. It's different Up here. Hard. People don't know, out in the rest of the world, what it's like.”

“But he didn't even consider it.”

“He couldn't consider it,” Gladys said softly. “He just didn't have it in him.”

Unexpectedly, tears filled Madeline's eyes. This was so final, so damning in one way but exonerating in another. Maybe it was the only real answer, and if so, then her search for meaning in the situation would be over. And then what?

Gladys went on. “I met him at the fiddle jamboree. Well, met—it's not like we didn't know each other. But we started sparking at the jamboree. It was July of 1977. My Frank had been gone for years, and Joe—He sure could play. And a man playing a fiddle the way he did?” Gladys put a hand to her heart. “Oh my.”

Despite herself, Madeline smiled.

“He was always good to me,” Gladys said simply.

Madeline realized, really realized for the first time: Gladys had loved him. She was both touched and infuriated. “So why wasn't he good to me?”

Gladys shook her head, seeming either not to know or not to know how to say.

“He abandoned me. He and Jackie both did. She at least was young and all screwed Up. He was old enough to know better. And no one cares.”

“It's not a matter of caring. It's a matter of the way things are. It's over and done. Here you are, you're fine. And I'd think you were better off as you were.”

The truth of this was Undeniable, even though it resolved nothing.

They came to a stop in front of McAllaster Crafts, which had opened the weekend before. Even though it was well after midnight there was a woman inside. She was heavyset, with long black hair that cascaded down her back. Madeline had seen her riding an old bicycle around town, or driving a rusting truck sometimes. She worked at a table by the glow of a lamp, weaving reeds around a frame to make a basket. They watched as she picked the half-made basket Up and turned it in one hand to check its balance, then bent over the work again. After a moment, they continued on.

The woman lingered in Madeline's mind. She was making art, of course that had caught her attention, but it was something else too. The innocence of it, maybe, the lack of expectation. She was so engrossed in her work, seemed satisfied to be where she was. The basket might sell for twenty dollars, or it might not. The shop never seemed busy and the things in it weren't sophisticated. The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch.

Maybe Madeline hadn't missed so much, skipping art school, after all.

Lately she'd been working on a picture of Gladys and Arbutus at their morning coffee. She yearned to show their sisterness, their northernness, their old-fashionedness, the Unearthly remoteness of it all. She wanted to paint Arbutus's sweetness, Gladys's resolution, their devotion to each other. Was it possible? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not, but what harm would there be (except to herself, in disappointment and frustration and the stirring Up of old dreams) if she tried? How long had it been? Fifteen years at least. How was that possible?

Emmy always said she must've been born drawing. Madeline still remembered the picture she'd been coloring the day Jackie left: Winnie the Pooh with a jar of honey. Emmy'd encouraged her right from the start: sketch pads, crayons, finger paints, watercolors. And then, on her eighth birthday, a crow-quill pen and a bottle of Higgins ink. It had made her feel so grown-up. Emmy must've gone to an art supply store and asked what to get. The crow-quill pen was great. The nib was flexible, so more pressure gave you a thicker line; less, a thin one. Madeline remembered realizing that, experimenting with it. She could see herself sprawled on her stomach on the Oriental rug in the living room, drawing thick lines and thin ones, over and over.

Emmy always took her seriously. She didn't even get mad when Madeline knocked the ink bottle over on the rug—one of the few expensive things she owned. She looked at the stain, frowning for a long moment, and then said, “You like working down there on the floor?”

Yes, Madeline said. She did. It was where she did her best thinking.

“That's where you have to be, then. The stains will wash out.”

They had washed out, more or less, every time, because of course that wasn't the only ink to spill or seep through the paper. If you turned the rug over you could see the stains on the other side.

At first Madeline kept drawing when she turned down her scholarship to art school, but not for long. Emmy's cancer was slow-moving but insistent, and art didn't seem to matter anymore. Working the busiest shifts at Spinelli's to bring home as much money as possible mattered. Taking care of Emmy, going with her to all her doctor's appointments, trying to beat the monster that was living inside her—that mattered. Remembering to keep living, to let themselves forget for hours and sometimes whole days that she had a disease that was killing her. That mattered, and it took everything Madeline had to do it. There had been nothing left for art. But now—now maybe things could be different.

Gladys shoved her hands deeper into her coat pockets and Madeline thought she looked cold. “Are you ready to go back?” she asked, and Gladys nodded.

T
he next afternoon Madeline popped the Buick's hood and wiggled the battery cable, a trick Arbutus had suggested, saying she'd never owned a car Under twenty years old in her life and knew all the tricks. The engine turned over and Madeline felt a rush of satisfaction. She shut the engine off again and headed across the empty lots to see Mary.

Mary was lounging beside her display, her feet propped on a crate, carrying on a conversation with a man Madeline had waited on at lunch. He was an investment banker from Manhattan who'd come north for the trout fishing. “Pull Up a stump,” Mary told Madeline, pointing at a spare lawnchair. “You want a pop, there's some in with the fish. Jack, you keep away from there.”

All perfectly illegal
, Madeline thought contentedly. No way was it USDA approved to sell home-caught fish from an iced-down cooler you had to swat your dog away from, but one good thing about McAllaster was, nobody cared, or almost nobody. The tourists loved the local color, and the locals would live and let live, mostly. The Bensons and people like them, people who wanted things more modern, more homogenized, more like wherever it was they'd come from, well, to Hell with them. Maybe they were within their rights—and Madeline had to admit she still thought that cutting off credit on delinquent accounts was not Unreasonable, no matter what Gladys said and no matter how much she herself disliked them personally—but the Bensons' influence didn't extend this far, at least. Not yet.

Maybe McAllaster could resist gentrification. The north side of Chicago hadn't, as Madeline knew from Emmy's own experiences struggling to stay in their apartment as the price of everything soared. A working-class neighborhood went Upscale and pretty soon the people who'd made it what it was had to leave, Unable to afford the cost of living and the homes they'd grown Up in, homes where they'd raised families of their own. But here—maybe the harshness of the landscape and weather and economy would stop some of that, or slow it down. And besides, it wasn't all bad. She
liked
pesto and hummus, and if Gladys hadn't been at war with the Bensons, she'd have been in there buying those things.

Madeline shucked off her shoes. It had been busy today, challenging, and she felt pleasantly worn out. She smiled at the banker but didn't join in the conversation. Working at Garceau's, she was seeing that McAllaster was nowhere near as remote as she'd thought. There'd been a movie star out on Desolation Bay the other day, holed Up on his oceangoing yacht. He hadn't gotten
off
the yacht, but still. Today alone she'd waited on a tiny indie rock band from Detroit, an elderly Japanese woman who spoke no English, and a rodeo clown from Wyoming, as well as this Manhattanite.

He and Mary were delighted with each other. Watching him lean toward Mary, his eyes bright with appreciation of the story she was telling, Madeline wished she'd brought her sketchbook. Maybe she could've shown how they were the same and different all at once. She half-drowsed while Mary talked to a couple of retired schoolteachers from Detroit who remembered her from last year. They bought two gallons of syrup and three fillets of fish, and Mary tucked seventy dollars into the front snap pocket of her overalls. “I gave 'em a break for getting two gallons at once,” she said when they'd gone. “I could've got eighty for that and the fish but it don't hurt now and then in business to give a good deal.”

Madeline agreed. Their conversation wandered from there, from fishing and making maple syrup to Mary's memories of the old lumber camp days. Madeline loved hearing about that. This was turning out to be a perfect afternoon. After a while she thought about having a ginger ale. She sat Up to pull one from the cooler just as Mary said, “Listen, now. I've been thinking, and I've been going to tell you—” A county sheriff's truck eased to a halt in front of them and Mary didn't finish. A tall man in a brown Uniform approached with languid steps.

“What do you want?” Mary asked in her road-gravel voice.

“I'm afraid I've got to ask you to pack Up and leave, ma'am.”

“Is that so.”

“This is Village property, Mrs. Feather, and you haven't got permission to peddle here.”

“I ain't a missus as you well know,” she said, looking Up at him without moving. “And as far as I know, it ain't Village property, either.”

“The Village is responsible for the Upkeep of this parcel in the absence of the deeded owner.”

“In other words, Lillian Frank ain't bothered to mow these lots in thirty years and don't give a damn what happens on 'em. Isn't that what you mean?”

“In the absence of the deed-holder, the Village may elect to perform certain Upkeep.”

“Running me off, that's Upkeep?”

“Ma'am, regardless of ownership, the Village has an ordinance barring Unlicensed peddlers.”

“Oh for God's sake, Jim, stop calling me ‘ma'am.' Since when do they have this so-called ordinance?”

“Since the fifteenth of May, as I believe you've already been informed by letter.”

“I ain't gotten no letter.”

“I've been informed that a letter was duly written and sent.”

“Well I ain't duly received it, you young son of a pup—”

“Let me see that ordinance of yours in writing.” Madeline felt shaky with anger. Here they were, enjoying the day, selling a little syrup, a little fish, visiting with the tourists, and along comes this jackass to ruin things.

The man barely glanced at her. “I don't need it in writing.”

“You're going to have to do better than that,” Madeline began.

“Ah, don't bother,” Mary said.

“Mary—”

“Give me a hand packing Up, Madeline.”

“I appreciate your cooperation, Mary.”

“I knew you when you was a snot-nosed kid couldn't balance a bike and don't you forget it, Jim Nelson. Don't you Mary me.”

“Well, I'm sorry that you feel that way,” he said.

He drove to the fruit man's stand, all of a hundred feet or so, to deliver the same news. Madeline stood with a gallon of maple syrup heavy in each hand, watching. Albert threw his hands Up in the air and his face flowered into anger. He shook a finger in the sheriff's face, and the sheriff leaned forward and put one hand on the butt of his gun. Gus came around from the back of the van and began to shout. Madeline couldn't hear his words, just the nasal whine of his Uplifted voice. She saw how ludicrous he looked—the bandy-legged old reprobate in his pointy-toed oxfords and silky windbreaker probably out on parole for some Unsavory activity. The breeze lifted a plume of Gus's hair Up and held it there. The sheriff advanced and suddenly, a balloon pricked with a pin, Albert subsided. His shoulders sloped and his big hands fell to his sides.