Touch (3 page)

The sun seemed to have fallen from the sky, pulling the temperature down with it. In the dark, I could barely see the hole in the ice freezing back over, like a mouth that had briefly yawned open and was now closing again. Even though it was too late, another man, and then another, went into the river,
reaching beneath the water to feel for my father and Marie. As the last man was pulled from the water, the ice almost sealed shut around his legs, as if the river wanted one more.

It was Father Earl who brought my mother down to the river, and she found me sitting around the bonfire on the bank, near the men with the blue chattering lips. Boiling sap in a burning pine log popped, sending up a shower of sparks; a few embers floated out over the river before dying in the night.

Later, there were the other wives and mothers, quiet murmurs, Pearl sitting beside me, changed into dry clothes but crying, and then, finally, my mother and I turning home.

I HAVE TOLD MY
daughters—the two oldest, not the baby—this story, though perhaps not every moment of it. Even now, years later, I can still picture the way my sister looked skating out toward the tip of the channel, her legs wobbling, and I know that as we settle into Sawgamet, as the snow comes and the river finishes freezing, I’ll have to watch my own daughters trembling across the ice. A small mercy that the winter has come late to Sawgamet this year, giving me a few precious, extra weeks of knowing that my daughters have been safe on mud and dirt and rock. Still, after nearly two decades in Vancouver, I welcome the snow.

Up here, in my study—what used to be my stepfather’s study—I can look out the window and see down the streets of the village. The chromium lights of the train yards leak over the tops of the trees and the buildings three streets away; they are working into the night to load wood to be used for the new
war. Every man too old, too young, or too infirm to join the Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles regiment doing his part for the boys across the ocean. There are some women out there, too, in the train yard, working the cuts, driving trucks, handling horse teams. But it’s not the machinery of war calling my attention. Rather, I’m staring at the snow drifting down from the sky, held harsh against the artificial lights.

The snow is starting to stick, making the woods and the village appear fresh. There had been snow enough when we lived in Vancouver, but it usually stayed in the branches of the trees, or congregated as slush in the gutters, and even then only for a day or so. Much of the time it came simply as rain rather than snow, and that was a miserable dampness that I never learned to enjoy. Even with a coat and fingerless mittens I struggled to write my sermons during the dampest part of winter. The branch-snapping cold here, the sort of chill that takes all moisture out of the air—too cold to snow sometimes—is preferable to the barely freezing wetness of Vancouver. But I suppose I should be careful what I wish for: the cold in Sawgamet can break you.

The winter that Marie fell through the ice was that sort of winter. What little warmth there had been in October and November dropped completely away from us, and even with a constant fire in the stove, my mother and I took to wearing our overcoats in the house, hats and mittens to bed. Though there were no bodies, there was a funeral, and afterward my mother spoke little to the women who brought plates of food, little to my great-aunt Rebecca and great-uncle Franklin, my aunt Julia and her husband, Lawrence, their daughter, Virginia, little to Mrs. Gasseur, to Pearl, little to Father Hugo or
to Father Earl, who visited us even though we were not in his flock. She did not speak to me, even when I lifted my father’s ax from the wooden pegs over the stone lintel of the doorway and took it out behind the house. I split wood every morning, and the sound of the ax on the wood seemed to linger, floating through our house long after I had returned from school. Every evening I sharpened the blade, the rasp of the stone on metal making my mother shiver.

The winter punished us into December. Snow fell hard, our roof creaking until angry winds beat the white dust onto the ground. The same winds cleared a great swath of snow from the Sawgamet, until finally, between Christmas and New Year’s, the sun came out and the men and children, bundled against the cold, took their skates down to the river again. Except for the whip of the wind and the crackling of wood in the stove, our house was quiet.

The knock on the door sounded like a shot.

Pearl led us to the river, helping my mother down the snow-crusted steps cut into the hill next to the log chute, holding her arm as we walked across the ice to the small circle of men. The ice was smooth and clean after a month of scouring from the wind.

The hands were not touching. Even through the plate of frozen water covering them, we saw clearly that little more than the width of an ax blade separated my father’s two hands from my sister’s one. His mangled fingers on one hand, the smooth, alabaster fingers on the other hand, all stretched toward Marie’s small hand. The ice, like glass above their hands, thickened as we tried to look further out, to see the rest of their bodies and their faces. The lines blurred, only shadows, dark shapes.

There was talk of axes, of chopping at the ice, but my mother forbade it, as if they had suggested pulling my father and Marie from their graves, and then the men left, gliding away from us on their skates. Pearl touched me on the back and headed toward the bank, leaving my mother and me over the ghosts of our family. As the sun dropped below the peak of the hill, we turned from the ice and trudged back up the steps, holding the side of the log chute for balance.

THE NEXT MORNING
, when I woke, my mother was sitting in her chair by the stove, rocking slowly, staring at the fingers of flame that showed through the gaps in the metal. I dressed slowly for church, waiting for her to pin back her hair, to put on her gray Sunday dress. But she stayed in the chair.

After a little while she looked up at me. “Go on, then.”

I thought about taking Communion, the wafer melting in my mouth like a chip of ice, the wine, diluted by Father Hugo, more water than blood. Then, instead of going to the church, I walked down to the river, the ice and snow screeching under my boots. In the sun, the winter felt like it had flown away, and I began to sweat during the short walk.

I knelt down above them, waiting to see them move. I put my hand on the ice above my father’s fingers. I wondered if Marie had known how close my father’s hands had been to hers. I waited for something to happen, for my father to reach out and bridge the gap separating him from Marie, but neither of them moved. Finally, as I heard the first yells of the other children rushing down to the river after church, I rose and returned to the house.

My mother had not moved from her chair by the stove. She kept shivering, even with the blankets wrapped around her, even with the surprising heat of the day, so I fed more logs into the fire. And then, as the screams and laughter drifted up from the river, the slaps of sticks on ice, my mother startled with every sound. My skates hung from their laces on a rusty nail half driven into the corner post of the mill, and I thought of taking them down to the river, of skating over my father and Marie, of carving the ice above them, but I did not want my mother to ask me where I was going.

I WOKE IN THE MIDDLE
of the night, thinking I heard Marie calling me. Out the window, something looked wrong, as if the entire world were underwater with my father and Marie, and I realized that thin sheets of rain were falling from the sky, icing the trees, turning all of Sawgamet into a frozen river. I went to check the fire in the stove, remembering my mother’s shivering, and I saw that the ax no longer hung above the door.

The steps beside the log chute were slick, and the mist was star-bright, neither water nor ice—diamonds falling from the sky. When I reached the river, my mother was swinging the ax. The ice shone below her, as if the river had swallowed the moon, and the sound of the ax hitting the ice was ringing and clear, like metal on metal.

I walked closer to my mother and almost expected the river to shatter under the sharp, oiled blade, the ice to cleave beneath our feet. The river would take us and freeze us alongside my
father and Marie. Or my father would step from the open ice himself, pulling Marie behind him, holding her hand, the four of us walking to the house, where we could sit in front of the fire and he could tell us stories about fish made of ice.

My mother kept swinging the ax, and between the pings of the blade skittering off the surface of the ice, I heard her crying. She stopped when she saw me and fell to her knees, shaking. I knelt beside her. The ice was still smooth and clean, as if she had never been here with the ax, and when I put my hand flat on the ice it was warm against my palm, like bread cooling from the oven. Then the light beneath the river disappeared, leaving us on the ice, the film of rain covering us.

In the house, my mother covered me with my blanket and kissed me on my forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly that I was unsure whether she had really spoken or I had only imagined it.

I lay in bed, falling asleep listening to her sharpen the ax, the rhythmic grind of metal on stone.

The next morning, when Mrs. Gasseur, who was, as usual, the first to morning prayers, found Father Hugo frozen on the bench outside the church, she did not realize right away that he was dead.

“I asked him if he had been well during his morning walk,” she said, “since I had such a terrible time with the frozen rain, and when he didn’t answer, I touched his hand.”

I did not see Father Hugo, but Pearl told me later that the old man looked alive under the clear coating of ice, still holding the Communion cup full of the blood of Christ. The men had to build a small fire in front of the church, waiting until the ice melted to pull him from the bench. Pearl said that he
thought Father Hugo might have passed before he was frozen, but with the wine he could not tell.

They tried to dig a grave, but even with pickaxes, the ground was too hard. Father Earl said prayers over the body, and then Father Hugo spent the rest of the winter in the woodshed behind the church, wrapped in layers of oilcloth.

At night, when the cold left the sky so clear that the stars were within easy reach, sap froze in the trees, breaking them open like the sound of river ice cracking. Many of the days, the men could not trap or even chop wood, the wind burning their skin, hands too cold to hold ax handles. During that winter, Father Earl visited my mother and me frequently and stayed for dinner many nights. He was a small man. He looked like I did when I wore one of my father’s coats, and I could not picture him taking down a tree. My mother said he had not seemed so small before his wife and unborn child died, during the winter before I was born.

One night, when I should have been sleeping, I heard him ask my mother what she would do in the spring, when the company took the house back, when they gave the foreman’s cottage to Pearl and Mrs. Gasseur.

“I can go back to teaching,” my mother said, though we all knew that Sawgamet did not need another teacher, and while we would have been welcomed at Franklin and Rebecca’s house, that was not a place we could stay indefinitely.