Touch (22 page)

“Soon enough,” his wife said. “I’ll put the bread up and then I’ll get it lit. The girl ought to be able to wear her gown without having to keep a coat on top of it.”

Father Earl smiled at her, but she was already turned back to the table. They were not so old that she could casually call another woman a girl, he thought. He supposed that was her way of playing the role of a minister’s wife.

He closed the door carefully, making sure that the latch shot home. The wind’s fingers were already clawing at him. He did not want the door to blow open, the cold and sudden gust of air swirling the fire in the hearth, his wife spinning to find the intrusion. At least the house was chinked up solidly; whoever had built it had been meticulous, fitting each log with care, setting the door flush and tight.

As he stepped behind the back of the house, by the woodpile, he heard whistling and saw my father—though he was not my father yet—moving down the trail that ran past the church and headed toward, as my stepfather’s wife often said, “what passed for town.”

I AM NOT SURE
if I thought of this last night, but now I wonder if part of the reason my stepfather never told me this story before was because of that exact moment. Such a small one, really, this interaction between the man who was to become
my father and the man who was to become my stepfather, but it would have been enough to make my stepfather hesitate in telling it to me when I was younger.

And that makes me wonder if I am doing justice by my stepfather, if when I tell these stories to my own children they will understand what a fine man Father Earl was.

It is easy enough with my grandfather and my father. They were, as I’ve said before, like gods among the forest, a sort of living folklore. Something that I in particular, as a man of the cloth, should know better than to believe in.

And yet. And yet. And yet, of course, how can I not believe in them, how can I separate the raw, natural—supernatural—Sawgamet that was already dying when I was a child from the settled land which I now occupy?

And how do I place my stepfather among that mythology so that my daughters can understand that despite the fact that he did not settle the land, did not work the cuts or run the river, he was, nevertheless, very much part of my own story?

But it is not that simple. Nothing ever is. My daughters can just as easily look at me and see the ways in which I did not follow my stepfather’s path, the ways in which I am much more like my grandfather or my father. Or maybe if I can figure out how to untangle these stories, how to tell them properly, my daughters will be able to understand the things that brought me to where I am now: in the study of my stepfather’s house, waiting for the moment when my mother will breathe her last.

One of the things I do know is that on that first day of winter in Sawgamet for my stepfather and his wife, Father Earl cannot have known how entangled his life was to become with the threads of my grandfather’s and my father’s lives.

AS MY FATHER MOVED
closer to the woodpile, he looked up and saw Father Earl. “Morning, there,” my father said. “How you doing, Father?”

“Well, thank you,” Father Earl said, glad to see it was my father and not one of the other Catholics. So many of the loggers kept their distance, as if he could not possibly understand them as men because he did not speak their bastardized French. My father was not that kind of man, or perhaps it was because he thought of Father Earl as the man who had married him to my mother. Either way, Father Earl had found it hard to believe that a Catholic would allow him to perform a marriage; while he knew that it was necessary for survival, the men of Sawgamet showed a certain moral flexibility that he sometimes found to be uncomfortable. He supposed he might begin to understand it with time.

My stepfather told me that, as he looked at my father, he thought that my parents would start having children soon. A presentient thought, though looking back I can count the pages of the calendar and realize that my mother would already have been early in her pregnancy. My stepfather did not know this, of course, but he could read the seasons; in Sawgamet, with the snow and the cold, he thought it would be that time of year, and there would be many families that would have children sometime in the fall.

Now, though, the men were frantic. There was little time between the end of logging and the float and the beast of winter for them to prepare for the months of short days. Father
Earl’s own wife had been anxious, canning and sewing, making him a new pair of gloves from thick leather and fur.

He wondered if his wife was anxious enough. When they had left her parents’ house, when she had agreed to come to Sawgamet, he could not make her see why she should favor thick-spun cotton over lace, why an extra quilt was more important than an extra gown. She had been pleased when she discovered that Franklin kept some canned foods. She thought Father Earl had been too narrow with their needs: wood, flour, salted meat, and beans. “It will be a longer winter than necessary if you do all our provisioning,” she told him.

My father motioned with his ax toward the woodpile. The handle had a burn scar and he gripped the ax with a sureness that my stepfather was beginning to think of as something that was necessitated by the woods and the brutality of Sawgamet. “Would you like me to help you split some more wood, Father? There’s a snow coming, that much I’m sure of,” he said, and then he raised his ax, as if he were challenging God to prove him wrong.

“Thank you, Pierre, but I’ll be fine. I’ve got plenty of wood split. I just need to move some to the porch. Besides,” my stepfather said to my father, trying a clumsy wink, “I can always borrow from the woodpile at the church if I need.”

“Keep a lantern lit,” my father said.

“Oh, it’s not so dark as that, at least not yet.”

“In the window,” my father said. “If you’re going to be out in this, keep a light going so you can find your way home.”

“It’s only a few feet,” Father Earl said.

“Men get turned around easy,” my father replied. “Don’t let
the qallupilluit call you down. Don’t listen to them if they call for you.”

Father Earl started to smile, and then he realized that my father wasn’t joking. “I thought they lived in the sea ice.”

He shrugged. “It’s an old tale, and we hear these things only the way we want to hear them. I don’t know that they tell us all of it. But you’d best stay away from the river in weather like this. They don’t look like witches all the time, the qallupilluit.”

“I’m a man of the cloth, Pierre.”

“One with a wife,” my father said. “Keep a light.” He waited until my stepfather nodded in assent and then he gave a brief nod himself and started down the trail again.

MY STEPFATHER TOLD ME
that when he watched my father walk away, it seemed as if my father towered over him, though he knew that my father was not a particularly tall man. Perhaps it was the solidness of him, the knotted sinews, the implicit availability of violence. Father Earl finally allowed himself to smile once my father was out of sight. The Indian children’s stories that were told throughout Sawgamet did not scare him, though he understood the allure of the qallupilluit; sea witches were more effective than any parent’s warnings.

Father Earl carried an armful of wood onto the porch and then looked up at the sky again. It had gotten darker, dark enough that he was not sure how long it would be before he was willing to be tricked into believing it was already night. Through the window he saw the shadow of his wife moving
through the house, or at least he thought it was the shadow of his wife; the fire in the hearth cast light and darkness with equal measure. He brushed some bark and dirt off his sleeve and then opened the door. Whatever else he might wonder, Father Earl believed that my father seemed to understand the weather in some way that Father Earl did not.

“That was quick,” his wife said. “Would you light the fire in the church for me, then? I still haven’t put the bread up.”

“No,” he said, “I’ve still to put wood on the porch. I’m just putting a lantern in the window.” He did not say why, and as he moved the lantern to sit on his desk, his wife did not ask him. Even after less than a year of marriage, she was used to him by now, understood that he had a reason for everything he did. That’s not to say that she did not disagree with him, did not read through his sermons and mark them up. If he was honest about it, he knew that she was smarter than him, had certainly had a more rigorous education, alternating between the tutors and the girls’ school where he had briefly taught and she had picked him to be her husband.

“That’s fine, then,” she said. “I’m thinking I might try to hurry down to DeBonnier’s, to buy some sugar. I’d meant to do it yesterday. If this storm is really to be all that we’re making it out to be, I’d rather be stuck in here with a pie or two.” She stepped over to him and grabbed his open coat with her hands, pulling him toward her. He bent down and let her kiss him lightly on his lips, rubbed his nose against hers. “And that way I won’t have to listen to you complain about how bitter the tea is.”

They had argued about it once, during the first week or two after they had come to Sawgamet. He did not think it
right that they use her father’s money. “I’m given enough for us to live on,” he said.

“No,” she said, “enough not to die on. There’s no shame in it. My father came to it honestly, and besides, I don’t think an extra sack of flour, a bolt of cloth, is anything to get up in arms about. I said I’d live with you in Christ, but I’m not living with you in rags.”

If he were a different man, he would have settled the issue, would have insisted, but if he were that kind of man, she never would have married him. And she was not that kind of woman. She did not say any of it with the bite or malice that he had heard other women use, and he knew that she was right. It was only that she did not limit it to an extra sack of flour or a bolt of cloth. She had bought up much of DeBonnier’s expensive canned foods, had ordered a new mattress and bureau to be brought in from Vancouver.

“I saw Pierre just now,” he said. “He warned me of the qallupilluit.”

“He believes in them?” She shook her head. “Why a Christian would believe in witches is beyond me.”

“He says that they’ll promise anything to get a man under the water.”

“Even sugar?”

“We can go without sugar for a few days,” my stepfather said, turning away. The tea they had been able to get was almost unbearably bitter without the soft cut of sugar, but it bothered him that she could not do without it for a short time. “Light the fire in the church and then stay inside the house.”

“We need candles, too. I’m happy enough for an excuse to spend time in bed with you,” she said, and then paused to
smile, though she knew it discomforted him when she spoke so openly. “But I don’t relish sitting in the dark and just listening to the wind and the brush of the snow on the roof.”

“You can pull your chair a little closer to the fire, that’s light enough,” he said, but he smiled and touched his finger to her cheek to let her know that he was joking. “After the storm we’ll go down to DeBonnier’s.”