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THE FIRST STORM: NOT JUST THE GROUND IS BARREN
Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.
-Isaiah 54:1 (more illogic from the Good Book)
As Amy Joy Lawler waited by her mailbox, several fat flakes of snow winged softly out of the sky. She wiped them from her face but did not notice the ones that landed soundlessly on the strands of her hair and disappeared there. She stared down at the A. J. Lawler on the mailbox. The snow had already clung about the letters that spelled Sicily Lawler, the second name painted on the box. As Larry Monihan swept by with the town plow, Amy Joy Lawler stared at the lettering with interest. It was as if some cosmic penmanship had erased her mother from the world, had wiped her out. Amy Joy stared at it as though there were meaning to the act before she slid a mitten across the letters and brought the name back to life. Sicily Lawler. The mailman was late again today. Maybe it was snowing even harder in St. Leonard. "It will be all snowflakes soon," Amy Joy thought. "Tons of it for months." What had she always promised herself, each year when autumn's dead foliage bent in the wind and then broke beneath the weight of winter that would cover the Mattagash Valley for six full months? What had she dreamed of? Warmth, somewhere, and long strings of brown sand between her toes, and green-yes, green. How Amy Joy missed that color all during the time when things were white: rooftops, black spruce, automobiles, fences, the frozen river. It wasn't that the color white bothered her really, except the town seemed drained of color, all the green seeped away.
Amy Joy shivered inside her woolen coat and waited for old Simon Craft to finally nose his way around the turn in his mail car.
"A bill from J. C. Penney's," Simon said. "A card from your kin down in Portland, a wedding invitation from Tom Henley's girl-I must've delivered fifty of them already today-and a flyer from the Women's Legion Auxiliary for the Thanksgiving Day Co-op Dinner." With one hand holding a used handkerchief, he wiped his bulbous nose. With the other hand, he passed Amy Joy Lawler her mail.
"Thanks, Simon," Amy Joy said. "What's a Thanksgiving Day Co-op Dinner?" she asked as she studied the home computer flyer. It used to be that the Women's Legion Auxiliary printed their flyers by hand. Technology was apparently rampant.
"The Women's Auxiliary decided to cook up a bunch of turkeys and trimmings and just have the whole town come to the gym for their Thanksgiving dinner. All for four ninety-five and no cleaning up the dishes afterward. That's what my better half likes most about the idea. She said she can just get up and walk away like she never even ate there. They're gonna have all kinds of contests and prizes and even a play afterward. My two grandchildren been dressed up like little Pilgrims all week. And what money they bring in above their expenses will go to Ernie Felby's wife." Simon sniffed a runny nose as he spoke. "She's got all them kids, you'll remember."
"What's wrong with Ernie?" Amy Joy flipped through the mail in her hand. It would be nice, one day, to get mail and be surprised by the origins of it, by the senders. But Simon Craft had believed for almost forty years that the mail belonged to him, that he was kind enough to let other folks handle it, open it, read it.
"I'd say a lot is wrong with him," Simon declared. "He died three months ago. Cancer."
"No kidding," said Amy Joy. She had opened the card from Portland. It was from her relatives there. How could she have, even for a second, doubted Simon's telepathic abilities?
"The Felbys might be hippies, but they still got feelings," Simon said. "And it looks like they had a bushel of friends. I bet that man got almost fifty get-well cards. One even come from England. I gave up counting." Simon waved his hand to pshaw the foolishness of having tried.
"A book of stamps," said Amy Joy. "Please." She placed a five-dollar bill on the stack of Bangor Daily newspapers inside the car.
"You need to get out more, Amy Joy," Simon said. He selected the stamps, all Jack Londons, and gave them to her. "Seems like I been harping to you almost twenty years about the bird being on the wing, as they say. Even that bird is getting old."
"Thanks, Simon," said Amy Joy. "I do remember hearing about Ernie. I guess I just forgot."
"Oh, yes," he said, and pointed a bony finger. "If you look beneath that flyer on the bottom of the stack, your electricity bill came. Probably your last low month before winter."
Amy Joy looked. It was there, of course, one of Simon Craft's children, one of his little white homing pigeons.
"I got it," she said. "Thanks." She pulled her mitten back on and glared up at the sky. It was dull gray with snow, the mountains dark whales beached on the horizon.
"I better get the mail put out before this storm comes down on us full blast," Simon declared. "I don't believe in that hail-or-sleet-or-snow slogan, you know. That was written in warmer climes. I believe in sitting out a storm."
"I don't blame you," said Amy Joy. Once, during a blizzard, he had sat out for four days. But so had everyone else. Sometimes the world needed a little cuff on the ass from Mother Nature, a warning to slow down.
"I wanna see you at that Thanksgiving dinner," Simon warned sweetly. "There'll be lots and lots of eligible bachelors, mark my words, and four ninety-five is quite a deal."
Eligible bachelors in Mattagash. Amy Joy considered this. He must mean Nolan Gifford, Oliver Hart, and Moss Fennelson.
"Be still, my heart," thought Amy Joy.
"The women even put up a poster at The Crossroads," Simon added. "And you know how they feel about that place. I hear they're trying to call an emergency town meeting to get the dry vote back. Just between you and me, I think some of them women watch 60 Minutes too much. They're always sneaking up on an issue. But this co-op dinner ain't a bad idea, and I think you oughta shake a leg and come down there."
"I'll see," said Amy Joy.
"And remember, it's for a good cause," Simon reminded her. "That poor woman ain't so much as gotten a sympathy card from her folks down in Boston. But she gets her share of bills, I can tell you that much."
"I'll try, then," said Amy Joy.
"She's still paying Cushman Funeral Home for the burial," Simon whispered, a delicious secret he saw fit to share with Amy Joy Lawler.
"In that case, I'll really try," Amy Joy lied.
"Oh, by the way..." Simon raised his voice again, away from the soft tones of gossip. "Did you hear that Paulie Hart won a thousand dollars in the state lottery? The lucky numbers was eighteen, twenty-two, five, seventeen, and seven. Ain't that the luck of the Irish?"
"He's been spending over a hundred dollars a week for the past three years on tickets," said Amy Joy. "It sounds more like the luck of the stupid."
By the time Simon Craft's tires caught the remaining tar and spun back onto the road, snow was buzzing about Amy Joy's head in fat flakes. She watched as his taillights became bleary red eyes in the storm, then winked out. When she pivoted on her heel for the short walk back to the house, both names on the mailbox had been leveled over with snow.
"I must call Conrad Gifford to come and shovel the porches," Amy Joy thought. The yard had become a sea of snow. For that she would need to call someone with a plow. Several high school boys made extra money that way, on Saturdays, with their fathers' four-wheel drives. Using as many of the same footprints as she could, Amy Joy followed the crooked path back to her front porch. It had been only a few hours since the first darkening of the horizon, and now nearly four inches of snow lay on Mattagash.
Amy Joy stood in the doorway to her mother's bedroom and cleared her throat a few times until Sicily came awake and said, "What? Tell me what you asked me then, and I'll answer you."
"I didn't ask you anything," Amy Joy said. "We'd been talking and you fell asleep, so I went out for the mail."
"What come?" asked Sicily. She pulled herself up a bit on shaky elbows as Amy Joy reached to help her.
"Don't," Sicily said stiffly. "I ain't helpless, you know, like some old piece of driftwood."
Amy Joy sighed, so that Sicily would not hear. "The electric bill," she said. "J. C. Penney bill. A flyer Simon says is for a Thanksgiving Day Co-op Dinner."
"I wish Simon Craft would pay our bills instead of read them," said Sicily. "That man is a better gossip than any woman I ever knew."
"And you've known the best," Amy Joy thought. "All gold medalists."
"That all?" asked Sicily.
"An invitation to Junior Ivy's retirement party," Amy Joy said, reading.
"You mean that big lug is old enough to retire?" Sicily asked. "My God, where does the time go?"
"He must be just over sixty," said Amy Joy. "But with his money, I suppose he can retire whenever he wants to." She tossed the card onto the kitchen table.
"We only hear from them people when they want a gift," said Sicily. "The last hint we got along them lines was that graduation card this spring from one of his granddaughters. I tell you, in my day, we considered ourselves lucky just to go to school. They didn't have to give us a money order to do it." She swung her feet out of bed and her legs dangled there, too short and thin to touch the floor. "Amazing how we hear from near strangers every time there's a graduation or a wedding or a baby born."
"And not necessarily in that order," said Amy Joy. "Besides, Junior's got enough money to buy what he wants. I think he's just being friendly. I'm gonna send him a congratulations card. He is my first cousin, after all."
"You notice we don't hear from someone who's just hit the lottery."
"Get back in bed!" Amy Joy ordered, suddenly noticing Sicily's posture.
"I ain't an invalid," Sicily insisted. "A little cold is all that's wrong with me."
"Nobody said anything different," Amy Joy said, pushing her mother gently back onto the bed. "No one said you were helpless, or an invalid."
"I ain't too old, either."
"Who said you were? But you are contrary. Now get back into bed until that cold passes, or you'll be asking for pneumonia. It's snowing so hard outside that you won't be able to stare out the window anyway. I'll bring you the new crossword puzzle."
"You don't like for me to do the crossword puzzle," Sicily said. "You say I just mess it up so you can't do it."
Amy Joy took a deep breath and stared at Sicily. "I believe I said that once, in 1972 or 1973. It's now 1989. Can you let it go?" Amy Joy could see, before her eyes, the countless, useless fill-ins she'd had to erase over the years, when her mother was finished with the puzzle, so that she could jot in the proper answer herself. What had one of the many been yesterday? A five-letter word for "City of Light." Sicily had scrawled Tampa instead of Paris. When Amy Joy asked her why, she had replied, "Ain't that where Disney World is? There must be plenty of lights."
"Well, it seems like just last week you said it," Sicily said. She slid her legs under the covers and lay back on the pillow.
"Maybe to you, Mother, 1972 seems like last week. But believe me, it was a long time ago."
"See!" Sicily said, shaking a finger. "That's what I mean! You're trying to make me believe I'm senile! Oh, what did I ever do to deserve an end like this?"
"Do you want a list?" thought Amy Joy. She threw the crossword puzzle onto the foot of Sicily's bed, but Sicily kicked it off quickly with her foot.
"Suit yourself," said Amy Joy as she gathered up the mail.
"You just read the Bible and see what it says about daughters trying to pack their poor old mothers off to nursing homes," Sicily said. "You'll do an about-face, I tell you."
"What does it say?" Amy Joy stopped at the doorway to ask.
"You know very well."
"No," said Amy Joy. "Tell me. What does the Bible say about nursing homes?"
"Lots," said Sicily. "That I can assure you."
"Well, assure me by telling me a little, never mind lots. What does it say?"
"For your sake," said Sicily, "I hate to even think of it. It makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like a picnic." Sodom and Gomorrah. Sicily's favorite twin cities.
"And just what is it you're referring to?"
"The punishment God wields down to unloyal children," Sicily said. "That's what."
"Mother, I mentioned once, one time, uno, that you might like the social atmosphere at the St. Leonard nursing home, what with your good friend Winnie Craft down there entertaining legions daily with her gossip."
"Now listen to you," said Sicily. "What's poor Winnie ever done to you? If the Lord was to come to St. Leonard tonight to take Winnie Craft to heaven, how would you feel?"
"If the Lord comes to St. Leonard tonight, he'd better have snow tires," Amy Joy said, her eyes staring out beyond the pane of Sicily's bedroom window, to the snow falling over Mattagash. "Besides, Winnie Craft has never been a focal point in my life, so I probably wouldn't notice if the Lord bundled her up and took her."
"No," Sicily said. "And that's just the problem. You ain't got any focal points. Not even one or two."
Amy Joy sighed. "We're back to me not having any children and therefore you no grandchildren, aren't we?"
"You did it out of spite," said Sicily.
"Shit," thought Amy Joy. "She'll be banging this drum even after I go through menopause."
"You did it out of spite just to keep me from them." Sicily tugged at the lace border of her pillow. Amy Joy looked away from her mother's spotted hands. She remembered when they had been smooth and white.
"Maybe I did it out of love," said Amy Joy. "Maybe I kept them from you."
"It ain't like you're barren or anything." Sicily ignored the remark. "Besides, God can cure barrenness. ‘He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children.' You'll find that in Psalms."
"One of these days I'm gonna look all that stuff up," said Amy Joy. "I swear you write most of it yourself."
"And I'll bet you something else," Sicily went on. "When I'm laying out flat next to my sister Pearl and my sister Marge, right here in the Mattagash Protestant graveyard, I hope you'll realize then how you've treated me."
It had been nearly two years since they'd buried Aunt Pearl. Amy Joy remembered the snowy day when she went to the graveyard, months after Pearl died, and stood before the best tombstone Junior Ivy could find for his mother, the Ivy Funeral Home super deluxe. And she had watched as the snowflakes ate away at the letters, Pearl McKinnon Ivy, 1909-1987, until the engraving disappeared in a swirl of snow. Like Sicily's name on the mailbox earlier, like her own name. Amy Joy knew that nature eventually takes back everything it has loaned to the temporary world. 1909-1987. It took it back quickly too. "We're all disappearing," Amy Joy had thought that snowy day in November, the first snowfall of 1987, when she had finally gone to the graveyard to say good-bye to Pearl. She had found a solace in her aunt Pearl, which was unusual for two people who had begun their acquaintance on such terrible terms. But Amy Joy had grown up, and Pearl had discovered in her the daughter she never had. She had given Amy Joy the knowledge of the old settlers, the McKinnon ancestors, who had come up the Mattagash River from Canada and founded the town. She had passed the torch on to Amy Joy and now-Sicily was right-Amy Joy had no children waiting behind her to take it up for themselves.
"The Bible says to honor thy parents no matter what." Amy Joy realized Sicily was still quoting. "It doesn't say unless they're old."
"I asked you once," Amy Joy said, "after we first visited Winnie at the home, if maybe you'd like to live there."
"That's like a posse of men coming up to you with a rope and asking you what you think of hangings, and then never mentioning it again," said Sicily. "That rope gets to preying on your mind."
Amy Joy again stared out the big picture window that overlooked the Mattagash River. She wondered how many more days before it froze over and then immersed itself in the endless white of the fields, the ridges, the footpaths. She could almost feel the house being covered in snow, each feathery flake causing little goose pimples to spring up on her arms. This was the McKinnon homestead, the house that Marge, oldest of the sisters, had left to Sicily and Pearl. Pearl had stayed on in it after her husband, Marvin Ivy, died, and had allowed Amy Joy to move in. That was in 1969.
"I need to get away from Mother," Amy Joy had told Pearl. "I love her, but she's driving me crazy."
It was only a matter of a year before Sicily moved in.
"I'll just stay until after Christmas," Sicily assured her stunned relatives as she bounced past them to claim Marge's old bedroom.
"Who would've known she meant Christmas 1999?" Pearl remarked two years later, when it was more than obvious, even to the dog, that Sicily intended to stay. But now Pearl was gone, and soon the earth would be coming for Sicily, and Sicily was all that stood between her daughter and the fate even McKinnons must bow to.
"And I have no intentions of getting onto that senior citizen bus neither," Sicily threatened. "Wipe that out of your mind. If you can't take me to Watertown to shop, I guess my shopping days are over."
"Why won't you ride in the bus?" Amy Joy asked.
"I know what you're going to say next," Sicily prophesied. "You're going to say that even Winnie Craft rides on the bus."
"I'm surprised she's not driving it," said Amy Joy, remembering with chilling certainty Winnie Craft's domineering personality.
"There you go again with your knifelike tongue," Sicily said.
"Forget about the St. Leonard nursing home," Amy Joy told her mother. "It was only a suggestion to begin with."
"That's good news," said Sicily. "I feel like I just got a last-minute pardon from Governor McKernan."
"I thought you'd enjoy being around folks your own age instead of me," Amy Joy said.
"You keep me young." Sicily smiled.
"I'm almost forty-five, Mum," Amy Joy said. "We're both going to run out of luck one of these days."
"You'll manage," said Sicily. Her cold was suddenly better, she herself rejuvenated. Amy Joy was not surprised. She watched as Sicily buried a pretend sniffle in her handkerchief.
"Albert Pinkham is there too, you know," Amy Joy went on. "And so is Betty."
"If Betty's Grocery hadn't burned to the ground, she'd still be going strong," Sicily predicted. "She would've kept busy."
"Claire Fennelson is there."
"Lordy," said Sicily. "There's a strike against going. I hope they keep their piano locked up. Claire thinks she's Liberace."
"Well, maybe one of these days you'll change your mind," said Amy Joy. In the year that Winnie Craft had been at Pine Valley, the St. Leonard nursing home, she and Sicily had made a dutiful monthly visit. "You might even be lucky enough to get a room near Winnie. Wouldn't that be nice?"
"What's a three-letter word for ‘chemical suffix'?" Sicily asked, ignoring her daughter's question.
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