A Northern Light (6 page)

I bent down and picked up a stone. I was just winding up to throw it at Pleasant's behind when I heard a voice behind me say, "Peg him with that and you'll scare him. He's like to run. Take himself, that plow, and you across the field and through the fence."

I turned around. A tall blond boy was standing at the edge of the field, watching me. He was taller than I remembered. Broad-shouldered. And handsome. Handsomest one out of all the Loomis boys. He had the rim of a wagon wheel resting on his shoulder. His arm poked through the spokes.

"Hey, Royal," I said, trying to keep my eyes from roosting on any one part of him for too long. Not his wheat-colored hair, or his eyes that Minnie said were hazel but that I thought were the exact color of buckwheat honey, or the small freckle just above his lip.

"Hey."

The Loomis farm bordered ours. It was much bigger. Ninety acres. They had more bog than we did, but Mr. Loomis and his boys had managed to clear forty acres. Wed only got about twenty-five cleared. The best land, where we pulled stumps and rocks, we used for crops. Hay and corn for our animals, plus potatoes—some to keep and some to sell. Places where the stumps were still charred and rotting, or where it was rocky or boggy, Pa used to pasture the cows. The worst patches were planted with buckwheat, as it is not particular and will grow most anywhere. Pa had hoped to clear another five acres over the summer. But he couldn't without Lawton.

Royal looked from me to Pleasant and back again. He let the wagon wheel slide to the ground. "Let me have him," he said, taking the reins. "Giddyap, you!" he shouted, snapping them smartly against Pleasant's rump. Much harder than I had. Pleasant budged. Boy, did he. Tommy, Beth, and Lou cheered, and I felt as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Royal was the second-eldest boy in his family. There were two younger ones. Daniel, the eldest, had just gotten engaged to Belinda Becker from the Farm and Feed Beckers in Old Forge.
Belinda
is a pretty name. It feels like meringue in your mouth or a curl of sugar on snow. Not like Matt.
Matt
is the sound of knots in a dog's coat or something you wipe your feet on.

Dan and Belinda's engagement was big news. It was a good match, what with Dan so capable and Belinda sure of a nice dowry. My aunt Josephine said there was supposed to have been a second engagement. She said Royal had been sweet on Martha Miller, whose father is the minister in Inlet, but he broke it off. Nobody knew why, but Aunt Josie said it was because Martha's people were Herkimer diamonds—which aren't diamonds at all, only look-alike crystals that aren't worth a darn. Mr. Miller has a nice pair of grays and Martha wears pretty dresses, but they don't pay their bills. I didn't see what that had to do with engagements, but if anyone would know, it was my aunt. She is an invalid and has nothing to entertain herself with other than gossip. She is on every scrap of hearsay like a bear on a brook trout.

Dan and Royal were only a year apart, nineteen and eighteen, and they were forever in competition. Whether it was a baseball game or who could pick the most berries or chop the most wood, one was always trying to outdo the other. I hadn't seen much of them over the last year. I used to visit with them when they came to fetch Lawton for fishing trips, and we all used to walk to school together, but Dan and Royal left school early. Neither one was much for book learning.

I watched him as he plowed a row, turned at the end of the field and came back. "Thanks, Royal," I mumbled. "I'll take him now."

"That's all right. I'll finish it. Whyn't you follow along behind and pull the stones?"

I did as he said, traipsing after him, picking up stones and roots, carrying them in a bucket until I could dump them at the end of a row.

"How are you doing back there?" he called after a few rows, turning to look at me.

"Fine," I said. And then I tripped and dropped my bucket. He stopped, waited for me to right myself, then started off again. He moved fast and it was hard to keep up with him. His furrows were straight and deep. Much better than the ones I'd done. He made me feel clumsy in comparison. And flustered.
Flumsy.

"Soil's good. Dark and rich."

I looked down at it. It was as black as wet coffee grounds. "Yes, it is," I said.

"Should get a good crop out of it. Why you call your mule Pleasant? He's anything but."

"It's a misnomer," I said, pleased to be able to use my word of the day.

"You call your mule Miss? Miss Pleasant? It's a boy mule!"

"No, not 'Miss Pleasant,'
misnomer.
It means a misapplied name. Like when you call a fat person Slim. Misnomer. It comes from
mesnommer,
which is French—old French—for 'to misname.' It's my word of the day. I pick a word out of the dictionary every morning and memorize it and try to use it. It helps build vocabulary. I'm reading
Jane Eyre
right now and I hardly ever have to look up a word.
Misnomer,
though, that's a hard one to use in conversation, but then you asked about Pleasant and there it was! My perfect chance to..."

Royal gave me a look over his shoulder—a wincing, withering look—that made me feel like the biggest babbling blabberer in all of Herkimer County. I closed my mouth and wondered what it was girls like Belinda Becker had to say that made boys want to listen to them. I knew a lot of words—a lot more than Belinda, who giggled all the time and said things like "swell" and "chum" and "hopelessly dead broke"—but not the right ones. I kept my eyes on the narrows for a while, but that got to be boring, so I stared at Royal's backside. I had never really noticed a man's backside before. Pa didn't have one. It was as flat as a cracker. Mamma would tease him about it and he'd tell her the lumber bosses worked it off him. I thought Royal's was very nice. Round and proud like two loaves of soda bread. He turned around just then and I blushed. I wondered what Jane Eyre would have done, then realized Jane was English and proper and wouldn't have gone around eyeing Rochester's backside to begin with.

"Where's your pa, anyway?" Royal asked.

"With Daisy. Who's calving. And Abby. Who isn't. Calving, I mean." I wished I could stitch my mouth shut.

There were more questions. What was Pa using for fertilizer. How many acres was he going to clear. Was he planting any potatoes this spring. What about buckwheat. And wasn't it hard for him to run the farm alone.

"He's not alone. He has me," I said.

"But you're still in school, ain't you? Why aren't you out yet, anyway? School's for children and you're what ... fifteen?"

"Sixteen."

"Where's Lawton? Ain't he coming back?"

"You writing a column for the paper, Royal?" Lou asked.

Royal didn't laugh. I did, though. He was quiet after that. Two hours later, he'd finished the field entirely. We sat down for a rest, and I gave him a piece of the johnnycake I'd brought and poured him switchel from a stone jug. I gave pieces to Tommy and Lou and Beth as well.

Royal watched Tommy eat his piece. "Hubbards is always hungry, ain't they? Can't never seem to fill 'em up," he said. "Why you here, Tom?"

Tommy looked at his johnnycake, crumbly and yellow in his dirty hands. "Like to help Mattie, I guess. Like to help her pa."

"Whyn't you help your own mamma plow her field?"

"We ain't got a plow," Tommy mumbled, a red flush creeping up his neck.

"Guess you don't need one, do you? She's always got someone plowing her field, ain't she, Tom?"

"Cripes, Royal, what's Emmie's field to you?" I said, not liking the hard look in his eyes or the miserable, cornered one in Tommy's. The Loomis boys were always agitating with the Hubbards, like a pack of hounds after possums. Lawton had gotten between the younger ones and Tommy on many occasions.

Royal shrugged, then took a bite of his own cake. "This is good," he said. I was about to tell him that Abby made it, but then his honey-colored eyes were on me, not the johnnycake, and the hardness in them was gone and I didn't.

He looked at me closely, his head on an angle, and for a second I had the funniest feeling that he was going to open my jaws and look at my teeth or pick up my foot and rap the bottom of it. I heard a shout and saw Pa waving from the barn. He walked up to us and sat down. I gave him my glass of switchel. "Daisy had a bull calf," he said wearily, and then he smiled.

My pa was so handsome when he smiled, with his eyes as blue as cornflowers and his beautiful white teeth. He hardly did anymore, and it felt like a hard rain letting up. Like Mamma might come up from hanging wash and join us. Like Lawton might come out of the woods any second, his fishing pole over his shoulder.

Beth, Lou, and Tommy chased off to see the new calf. Pa finished the switchel and I poured him some more. Switchel is easier to drink than plain water when you are hot and thirsty. Mixing a little vinegar, ginger, and maple syrup into the water helps it to digest.

Pa looked at Royal, his shirt soaked with sweat, and my hands, dirty from the stones, and Pleasant unhitched, and put it all together. "I'm obliged to you," he said. "It's a son's work, planting. Not a daughter's. Thought I had a son to do it."

"Pa," I said quietly.

"Don't understand why he left. Couldn't tear me away from land like this," Royal said.

I bristled at that. I was angry at Lawton for leaving, too. But Royal was not family and therefore had no right to speak against him. Thing of it was, I didn't understand why my brother had left, either. I knew they'd had a fight, he and Pa. I saw them going at one another in the barn. First fists and then Pa had gone for his peavey. Then Lawton had run into the house, thrown his things into an old flour sack, and marched out again. I'd run after him. Me and Lou both, but Pa stopped us.

"Let him go," he'd said, blocking our way down the porch steps.

"But, Pa, you can't just let him walk out. It's the dead of winter," I pleaded. "Where's he going to go?"

"I said let him go! Go back in the house, go on!" He pushed us inside, slammed the door, and locked it, as if he were afraid we would leave, too. And afterward, he was so changed, it was as if we'd lost our father as well as our mother and brother. Some days later I asked him what the fight was about. But he wouldn't tell me, and from the anger in his eyes, I knew better than to press.

Royal and Pa talked farming for a bit and milk prices and who was building yet another camp on Fourth Lake or up the hill at Big Moose Lake and how many guests it would hold and how the market for cream and butter ought to go through the roof this season and why would anyone buy the slop that came up on the trains from Remsen when they could now get fresh milk right here.

Then Royal picked up his wagon wheel and said he had to get along to Burnap's. The iron tread was loose and George Burnap was the only one nearby with a forge. After he left, I thought I might get a talking-to for sitting and drinking switchel with him, but I didn't. Pa just gathered Pleasant's traces and walked him back to the barn, asking the mule if he had any idea why Frank Loomis had four good sons and he didn't have one.

"In the pantheon of great writers, of profound voices, Milton stands second only to Shakespeare," Miss Wilcox said, her boot heels making
pok pok
noises on the bare wood floor as she crossed and recrossed the room. "Now, of course one may argue that Donne deserves..."

"
Pssst,
Mattie! Mattie, look!"

I slid my eyes off the book I was sharing with Weaver, toward the desk to my left. Jim and Will Loomis had a spider on a piece of thread. They were letting it crawl back and forth on its leash, giggling like idiots. Bug taming was a Loomis specialty. First, Jim would pull a piece of thread from his shirt hem and painstakingly fashion it into a tiny noose. Then Will would snatch up a spider or a fly when Miss Wilcox's back was turned. He was quicker than Renfield in Bram Stoker's
Dracula,
though mercifully, he did not eat what he caught. He would hold his victim in cupped hands and shake it until it was stunned. Then as Will held the bug, Jim would slip the noose over its head. When the bug regained its senses, it became the star attraction in the Loomis Brothers Circus, which, depending on the time of year, might also feature a three-legged bullfrog, a half-dead crayfish, an orphaned blue jay, or a crippled squirrel.

I rolled my eyes. At sixteen I was too old to be attending the Inlet Common School. The leaving age is fourteen, and most don't make it that far. But our old teacher, Miss Parrish, told Miss Wilcox about Weaver and myself before she left. She said that we were smart enough to earn high school diplomas and that it was a shame that we couldn't. The only high school in the area, though, was in Old Forge, a proper town ten miles south of Eagle Bay. It was too far to travel every day, especially in winter. We would have had to board with a family there during the week, and neither of us could afford to. Miss Wilcox said she would teach us the course work herself if we wanted to learn it, and she did. She had taught in a fancy girls' academy in New York City, and she knew plenty.

She had come to my house last November to talk with my parents about my getting a diploma. Mamma made us all wash before she came—even Pa—and had Abby make a gingerbread and me do the girls' hair. Mamma couldn't get downstairs that day, and Miss Wilcox had to go see her in her bedroom. I don't know what Miss Wilcox said to her, but after she left, Mamma told me I was to get my diploma even though Pa wanted me to leave school.

Weaver and I had spent most of the year preparing for our exit examinations. We were going to take the hardest ones—the Board of Regents—in English composition, literature, history, science, and mathematics. I was particularly worried about mathematics. Miss Wilcox did her best with algebra, but her heart wasn't in it. Weaver was good with it, though. Sometimes Miss Wilcox would just give him the teachers guide. He would puzzle through a problem, then explain it to me and Miss Wilcox.

The Columbia University is a serious and fearsome place, and a condition of Weaver's acceptance is that he earn B-pluses or better on all of his exams. He'd been studying hard, and so had I, but that day in the schoolhouse, struggling with Milton, I wasn't sure why I'd bothered. Weaver received his letter back in January, and though it was now the beginning of the second week of April, no letter had come for me.