Touch (4 page)

“I have a house,” Father Earl said, but then his voice trailed off. He tried again: “I know it’s only been a few months, but if you’re willing.”

I could not hear my mother’s response, but a few minutes later I felt the cold draft of the door and heard the latch drawing
shut. And when he visited us later that week, they talked of the weather, of books and plays, of gossip about Father Hugo’s replacement, as if Father Earl had never offered marriage.

Sometimes I saw him walking on the river, his hands in his pockets, and once I saw him walk to the clear circle of ice above my father and Marie, stopping to kneel, putting one hand flat on the ice the same way I had the night of the freezing rain.

THE COLD FINALLY
left in May, the trickle of water underneath the snow becoming a constant stream, the sound of running water a relentless reminder in our house of the coming breakup. The river groaned, and the sound of shifting ice replaced the clattering of skates and sticks.

The morning the river opened, I pulled the ax down from above the doorway.

My mother looked up from her sewing, pulling the needle and thread through the cloth of my father’s pants, mending the rips that she had not had time to attend to while he was alive, setting each pair aside for me as if I would wear them when I was older. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To the cuts.” I waited for her to speak, but she stayed quiet. “We need the money.”

She kept sewing, not looking at me. I wanted to go. I had to go. Pearl and Mrs. Gasseur had not said anything, but this was the company house. This was their house now.

“You’re not going,” she said finally.

I ran my thumb across the blade of the ax and then
turned my hand over and scraped a white shaving from my thumbnail.

“You can’t stop me.”

She stood up and walked to me, and without a word, she slapped me. Then, carefully, she took the ax and placed it above the door again.

I turned and walked out the door.

At the cuts, Pearl looked at me for a moment and then handed me his ax. I bucked trees and stripped branches, the ache in my arms familiar from a winter of chopping firewood. At lunch, Pearl gave me a few biscuits and shared some water.

The next morning, my mother told me to wash and put on my Sunday suit, and after the wedding, instead of going into the cuts, I helped my mother and Father Earl—my new stepfather—carry our belongings to his tidy house.

The furniture belonged to the company, so there was only our clothing and my mother’s books, pots and pans, drawings, the toys my father had carved, my skates and stick. My mother left my father’s mended clothes. “For Pearl,” she said, though I knew that Mrs. Gasseur would not keep the clothes of a dead man. After three trips, when all that was left were some jars of summer berries in syrup and a few bundles of clothes, Father Earl reached over the door to take down my father’s ax.

“No.” He stopped at the sound of my voice, his hand almost touching the handle. He moved aside as I stepped past him. The ax felt heavier than it had the day before. When I pulled it down, the blade struck against the lintel stone, the sound ringing and clear, like the sound of my mother chopping at the ice. But the last sound I heard in the house was that of my mother’s voice. “No more to the cuts,” she said.

But the last sound I heard in the house was that of my mother’s voice. “No more to the cuts,” she said.

THAT WAS THE SUMMER
that my grandfather finally returned to Sawgamet. He was too late to see my father, of course—and I thought of him a little bit like a sinner trying to repent only after he was already burning—but that wasn’t what had caused him to return to Sawgamet.

And maybe because I did not ask my father how he felt about his hand and lost my chance to do so, I asked my grandfather why he had returned. He had been in the house less than five minutes, clearly weary from traveling. When I think about it now, it is almost funny: the picture I have of him in my mind, sitting at the table in my stepfather’s house, is that of an old man, though he would have been not much past fifty. Here I am, past forty years myself.

My grandfather kept his hat in front of him on the table, and he alternated between running his thumb around the brim of his hat and occasionally picking up his cup of tea and blowing on it before putting it back down without taking a sip.

I gave him a moment, and when he did not answer, I asked again. “Why are you here? Why did you come back?”

He spun the hat around once, and then did it again. “Do I need a reason, Stephen?”

I felt my mother put her hand on my shoulder and then she reached past me to put a plate of warmed biscuits on the table. “Your son grew into a man and then had a son of his own. It’s been nearly three decades since you left, Jeannot. And
just now you come back, asking if you need a reason? You’ve missed him. You’re too late. Your son is gone,” she said, and then she paused only slightly as she put a jar of preserves on the table, before going on. “And my daughter’s gone.” I recognized the jar of preserves. I had carried them down to my stepfather’s house from the foreman’s cottage.

“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. He said it firmly, but he dropped his head like he could not look at my mother, and for the first time I decided that I liked him.

I felt like I knew him already. I’d heard so many stories. I still hear the stories, even now, when they are just things that have been handed down. When I was a child there were men and women in Sawgamet who had known Jeannot—not in the beginning, of course, not when it was just Jeannot and his dog, when Sawgamet was simply an idea, an uncleared swath of trees waiting to be created by my grandfather—but men and women who had known him after that, in the early days, before the gold gave out, before the land started trying to reclaim what had been taken from it.

Even with all of these stories making him a part of my life well before he returned to Sawgamet, as I watched my grandfather sit at my stepfather’s kitchen table, Jeannot was a stranger to me in all of his flesh and blood. But the way he said, “I’m sorry,” so simple, so clear, made me feel like he
was
sorry, not just about my father, not just about my sister, but about all of the things that had driven him from Sawgamet.

And then, in the next instant, he looked up and his face transformed, and I could see that however deeply those sorrows weighed upon him, no matter how deeply he wished he could change what had happened, he had not come back
to Sawgamet in sorrow. He had not come back to mourn my father, to mourn Marie. He had come back with some thought that all of the things that had happened—the deaths and the destruction—all of the things that he had thought he could leave behind by leaving Sawgamet behind, were now things that he could change.

I think my mother saw it, too, saw the same transformation in his face, the same hope, because, like me, she was still, silent, almost holding her breath to wait for him to speak.

Of course, I say this now, with the weight of the years sitting upon me. I speak as if I
knew
, as if I, not quite eleven years old, really knew what had brought my grandfather back to Sawgamet. I understood grief, but even then, parts of my sister and my father had started to fade forever away from me, and I had yet to learn what it meant to carry that loss with me year after year after year. Still, I want to think that with all of the stories I had heard, I knew of Sawgamet both as a place and as an idea, and I knew that my grandfather had returned with some sense of the magic that the woods still contained and all of the possibilities that entailed.

My grandfather lifted the cup of tea, blew on it again, and stared at it. We were waiting for him to speak, and like any good storyteller he savored the anticipation, letting us dangle for just an extra moment. Finally, he put his cup back on the table, looked at my mother, who still stood with her hand resting on my shoulder, and then looked down to me.

“I came back,” my grandfather said, “to introduce Stephen to his grandmother.”

“What?” My mother stared at him as if he had lost his mind.

“Revenez à moi et je reviendrai à vous, a dit l’Éternel des armées,” my grandfather said. He paused for a moment, looking at my mother’s blank face, and when he realized she did not understand him, that she did not speak French, he spoke again. “Return to me and I will come back to you, said the Lord.”

“Malachi 3:7,” my stepfather said. He stood on the threshold of the house, dressed as he usually was during the week in the same kind of work clothing that the other men in Sawgamet wore. He had been at the church when Jeannot came to our house, and I could see that he seemed a little short of breath, like he had come running at the news of my grandfather’s return. I wondered what busybody had gone to the church to find him. “Welcome. I was told you’d come back.”

“You must be the boy’s new stepfather. Anglican, I hear,” Jeannot said. “A priest.”

“And weren’t you meant to be a priest yourself? When you were a boy?” My stepfather said this with a casualness that even I understood to be deliberate, taking a moment to run his boots across the edged rock we had by the door for that purpose.

“That’s how the story goes, I suppose,” my grandfather said.

“The story also goes that you left the Bible and all it entails behind you when you came to Sawgamet. I’m surprised to hear you quoting scripture.”

“Some things never leave you,” Jeannot said.

“Our
Bible is a little different,” Father Earl said. “Perhaps something was lost in the translation.”

My stepfather was a kind man. He was always gentle and
giving with me, but I thought he meant this as a rebuke to Jeannot, and I was startled by his coldness. Now, with the benefit of being able to look back as a father, I realize that my stepfather was trying to stake his claim on my mother as his wife, on me as his son. He was afraid of Jeannot. Afraid that my mother had not yet come to love him, afraid that the return of my grandfather might upset the delicate balance in his house.

His house. I would be remiss if I did not point out that his house is now my house. This study in which I am pacing, the study in which I will soon need to write a eulogy for my mother, is the same study in which my stepfather worked for forty years. I still think of the small foreman’s cottage by the mill as my parents’ house—it was my parents’ house—but it was not my mother’s only house.

I know that my mother was happy here, in this house, with Father Earl. Still, it startles me, the sudden thought of just how long she was married to my stepfather, how long she lived in this house. This house—as much as the cottage where I was born, and maybe more so—was my mother’s house as well. She was married to my father eleven years, but she was married to my stepfather for nearly three times as long.

She lived in this house, she will die in this house, and she remains in this house, at least for one more night. Soon, of course, our own furniture and effects will arrive from Vancouver. I do not know how long it will take before I start to think of this house as my own. But that morning, when my grandfather returned to Sawgamet, it was still very much my stepfather’s house.

Father Earl moved fully into the house, shutting the door behind him. “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith
the Lord of hosts,” my stepfather said to Jeannot, and then he stepped behind my mother, putting his arm around her waist. “And I suppose you fancy yourself the Lord in all of this?”

My grandfather looked surprised, and I thought that even though I had just met the man, the look of surprise did not fit his face. He seemed like a man who met everything with a sense of equanimity—something that I remember from my father, and that I have tried to cultivate in my own life as a pastor—but this question had taken him unawares.

“The Lord? No. You have things backwards, Earl.”

I saw the glance that my mother stole at my stepfather and realized that he had bristled at the use of his name. It sounded odd to me, the name Earl coming unencumbered by title from Jeannot’s mouth. Most people in Sawgamet, even the Catholics, called him Father Earl, or even just Father.