Touch (12 page)

Outside, the stars seemed so close that they were dripping from the sky. She looked at the quarter moon, its tip brushing against the mountains that rose up on the other side of the river, and for a moment she thought she felt waves of heat coming from the moon’s buttered glow. The tents and houses were silent, and as a light rain began to fall, Martine let her
gown slip from her body, thinking that in the unseen darkness between the cabin and the store a cool breeze might take away the growing sense that she was on fire, but each drop of rain sizzled and seemed to smoke as it hit her body, and she felt like something pulled her toward the slope and the forest.

If she had not been burning with such feverish intensity, my grandmother never would have walked naked through the sleeping village, but with every step she became hotter and hotter. The moon and the stars cast enough light for her to follow the path, but she could have walked blindfolded, so strong was the scorching feeling on her skin. When she finally came into the clearing, she saw my grandfather standing outside of his cabin.

He was turned away from her and his shirt was off, his back glistening from sweat and rain. He swung his ax heavily and swiftly, hacking at firewood like summer was already fading instead of just greeting Sawgamet. He had not been able to sleep, either, though the sensation of heat had not seemed to bother Flaireur. If the night would not let him rest, Jeannot resolved, it would not be wasted. But as he brought the ax down, my grandfather felt suddenly as if his back had been thrust into burning coals. He turned to face my grandmother.

Jeannot stood dumbly, unaware that he was still holding the ax, watching Martine come across the wildflower-strewn field toward him. At first she simply appeared to be trailing a cloud, but just as he realized it was smoke, she became enveloped in flames. He did nothing, simply watched, unable to understand what he was seeing. The fire did not seem to bother the girl, and after a moment, she stepped from the flames unscathed,
empty-handed and naked except for the gold chain that circled her neck.

My grandparents made love in the grass and the flowers of the field, and wherever they lay for more than a moment, the ground scorched beneath them. Afterward, Jeannot smoothed his hand over her body, and touched her neck and her breastbone with wonderment: the necklace had sunken into her skin. It had melted and become part of her, and it stayed part of her even after she died, even when the rat-eyed farrier who also served as the undertaker broke three knives trying to carve it from my grandmother’s body.

FROM THAT NIGHT THROUGH
the next few months, as my grandfather hired more men to cut and mill wood and to build a two-story house near where his small cabin already stood, both Jeannot and Martine slept easily and separately. Jeannot took his dinners with Franklin and Martine, and on Sundays they brought picnic lunches down to the banks of the river. For the two lovers, it was like the night in the meadow was only a dream, an imagined moment of abandon, one not to be repeated until their wedding night.

The house rose quickly—and beside it, a new mill on the creek—and Jeannot furnished the house with Franklin’s help, ordering glass windows, a bed, dressers and nightstands, settees and a table with seating for twelve. Franklin, unexpectedly easy with his gold, ordered china and silverware and a crystal chandelier for the house, saw blades for the mill, all of which had to be carried in from steamships off the coast.

By the time the house was finally finished and furnished, and the young Catholic priest, Father Hugo, married Martine and Jeannot, it was mid-September. They were both eighteen and they found that the first and only time they had made love was the way it felt every time. They were young enough that for the first few weeks of their marriage they did little more than luxuriate in each other’s company several times a day.

When they finally felt the need to leave the house it was to a summer that had lingered well beyond what it should have.

T
HE SUMMER AND FALL
of the year that he returned to Sawgamet, my grandfather told me, reminded him of the summer and fall of the year he was married: the heat lingered well past when the snows should have come. He thought the warmth was a welcoming. I thought the warmth was a mockery of the ice and cold and snow of the winter that had just gone by, the winter that had held my father and my sister under the ice.

I helped my grandfather build his cabin in the clearing, though my stepfather had grudgingly offered to let him stay with us. We worked side by side through the bugs and the unaccustomed warmth, but he did not say much during the days. Most evenings he took dinner with us, and it was at those times that he reminded me of my father.

At the end of that first week, my cousin Virginia, who was uncle Lawrence and aunt Julia’s daughter and only a year older than me, joined us for dinner. My grandfather did not seem to mind her continual questions.

“But how did the dog—”

“Flaireur.”

“Flaireur,” Virginia continued, “know where to lie down?”

“Providence,” my stepfather muttered, though he had already begun to warm a little toward Jeannot.

“He was simply tired,” Jeannot said. “Or it was magic. One or the other.”

“Uncle Jeannot!” She shook her finger at him.

I remember that the tone of her voice when she said his name, the good-humored protest, the same way that she shook her finger at him, reminded me so strongly of Marie that I had to leave the house, making the excuse of needing to relieve myself.

And so it was that I missed the grand entrance of my great-aunt Rebecca.

Later, Virginia told me that her grandmother had stormed through the door, not bothering to greet my mother or Father Earl before slapping Jeannot across the face.

“It was a great slap,” Virginia told me. “Like kindling broken over the knee, but there was a little wetness to it, and it wouldn’t surprise me one whit if Grandma had spit in her hand before hitting uncle Jeannot. And he seemed almost like he was expecting it. He just closed his eyes like he was in prayer and let her hit him. I’d sure like to see Grandma try to slap me like that. I sure as syrup wouldn’t just close my eyes and let her,” Virginia said, though we both knew that neither one of us—and for that matter, few men in the cuts—would dare to do anything other than turn our cheek to my great-aunt.

I had assumed that everyone in the village knew of Jeannot’s
plans to find my dead grandmother wandering in the woods. By the end of that first week, it seemed as if most people knew, and they eyed Jeannot with wariness at what they took to be a touch of madness. But only a touch of madness, for anybody who had lived in Sawgamet for any length of time knew that the woods were deeper than they could imagine. Apparently, however, Great-Aunt Rebecca had only heard of Jeannot’s plans that very evening, and Great-Aunt Rebecca, alone among the men and women of Sawgamet, seemed outraged.

It was at that point that I returned to the house, having missed the great slap that Virginia later described for me, but arriving in time to see Great-Aunt Rebecca point her bony finger in my grandfather’s face.

“I buried your wife’s body,” she said, her hand shaking. “She is dead and gone to heaven. You can argue that the woods took her from you, but you won’t find her out there in the trees. You won’t find her other than in a box in the ground in the cemetery.”

“She’s out there, Rebecca,” Jeannot said simply, as though he were used to having women shouting at him as he ate his dinner.

“I carried the stink of burnt flesh in my nostrils for longer than I care to remember,” Virginia’s grandmother shouted, and she continued shouting until my mother rose from the table and gently ushered her out. There was a moment of silence in the room, and then Virginia began to speak with forced cheer of the elegant cake that she planned to bake for Jeannot’s birthday, and how much she looked forward to making it. Despite what had just happened, I had to smother a laugh at the lie. Even now the thought makes me smile. We joined
Virginia for dinner last week; after twenty years of marriage and five sons, she has grown to be a serviceable cook, but as a child, she no more enjoyed spending time in the kitchen than my oldest daughter does.

AS THE WEEKS WENT BY
and my grandfather and I finished building the cabin—it was small but light and airy, a serviceable building, tightly chinked against the coming winter—I took to walking in the woods with him, ostensibly helping him look for my grandmother, but mostly just enjoying spending time with him.

Though I was not in school during the summer, my stepfather required me to spend my mornings reading and working on my letters. I think that was the time when I first started to seriously consider his entreaties that I attend seminary; it was certainly the point when I first discovered a facility for books, if not a love for studying.

In the afternoons, once I was done with my letters, on the days I did not spend with my grandfather, I was sent up to the mill to do work for the company. Out in the cuts, boys my age and younger were already taking off branches and helping to shape the fallen trees into something that could be skidded through the woods and stacked near the mill, but my mother had forbidden me to go into the cuts, and that injunction still held, regardless of the return of my grandfather. I would have much preferred the cuts—limbing trees, running tools, cleaning chips, and hitching the chains for the skid teams, even taking care of the horses—but still, I enjoyed the solitary nature
of the work at the mill. I suppose I’ve always enjoyed my own company.

Once September struck, my birthday already come and gone and school begun again, it was only a few weeks before Pearl set the men to sending logs down the chute. When they floated the logs I was left on the banks, watching the men and the wood disappear down the Sawgamet, the first float that I could remember leaving without my father.

The night of that float, a Friday, I spent dinner with my mother and stepfather, but Jeannot, who had not been at the float, either, was absent. Afterward, I took a walk in the woods, stopping by his cabin and then heading toward the cuts, but he was not there nor elsewhere that I could find him. The next morning I rose earlier than I wanted and went to the mill, spending a few hours straightening, cleaning the worst of the wood chips, and placing tools on their pegs so they could be found for sharpening over the winter. I am willing to admit that I swore when I gouged my hand on a saw that had been left carelessly under some stripped branches, but though the blood pooled freely, the cut was not so bad. I fed the horses and mules as I had been asked by Pearl, mucked the stables, and then thought to check the chute to see how it had held during the push of trees the day before.

Then, still unable to locate my grandfather, and with nothing else to do and not interested in spending one of the last fine days of autumn inside with a book, I went to find my cousin. Virginia was a capable fisherwoman, could shoot well enough for a girl, and paid little heed to her grandmother’s strictures. All in all, a perfect companion when I was looking to whittle away a few hours.

Virginia was in the kitchen, an unusual enough sight, and I could not stop myself from laughing when I saw my cousin’s flour-dusted hair, the smeared mess of her apron, and what looked like a berry stain on one of her cheeks.

“Have you and Aunt Julia been throwing flour at each other?”

Virginia looked up, a smile at the ready. She’d smile at me no matter what I said. She’d been this way since my father and Marie died, and the thought made me feel ashamed for a moment, as if my coming to spend time with my cousin were a sort of charity.

She had put together the semblance of a cake; there was something wrong in the way it slumped in the middle and an ooze of liquid seemed to dribble from the side. “I wanted to make it for special for Jeannot.”

I rolled my eyes and theatrically struck my hands to my chest. “If you really wanted to make it special, you’d have left well enough and let your mother bake the cake.” She grimaced at this. Aunt Julia had never been much of a baker, either. “Well, she’s gotten better,” I said charitably, though we both knew it was not true. Only the week before she had forgotten to add sugar to a pie, and then scorched it badly enough that only Uncle Lawrence was willing to eat any.