Never Fear (43 page)

“
I appreciate that Alma, I
really do. But we’ll be over in the morning to return
it.”

*

Just before sunset on
Wednesday evening, about four weeks after they returned Hannah
Briggs’s green sunstone Indian necklace, Paulette was checking her
recipe book for a dressing with
marrons
—chestnuts—to give the damn
turkey some French flair, and Robin was nattering a series of
kindergarten-gleaned facts about Abraham Lincoln and how because of
him Thanksgiving was celebrated the fourth Thursday in November,
when the phone rang.

“
Bouchard residence, this
is Robin.” Pause. “Mommy, it’s for you.” Robin held the receiver
outstretched, and Paulette took it up.

“
Paulette, this is Alma. I
hate to disturb you—with the holiday practically on top of us, I
know you must be getting things ready…but,” she hesitated, then
cleared her throat. “But we think Mother died a little while ago in
her sleep. And, well, I hate to ask—but, you being a
nurse—Paulette, could you come over?”

“
Certainly, Alma. I’ll be
right there.”

“
Robin?” she
began.

“—
Luc came home early; she
won’t be here alone.”

Paulette put on her wool coat and a
fringed scarf for the short walk around the block, thinking just
before she rang the bell that, under duress the three remaining
Briggses had reverted to behavior typical of their prior farming
life out on the prairies: when illness or death came, you relied on
your nearest neighbors for help, you didn’t automatically summon a
town doctor, who might be—who most likely lived—an hour’s long,
hard ride away.

*

Upstairs, alone in the old woman’s
darkened bedroom, she found more signs of
last-century-homesteaders’ customs and rituals: Evidently Alma and
Myrtle had worried that rigor mortis might set Hannah’s jaw agape
and, in a time and place where there was no embalming, the
undertaker might have to break the ancient bones to close up her
mouth for the viewing in her casket. The sisters-in law had torn an
old white sheet or timeworn pillowcase into strips, knotted the
bandages on top of her head to bind the age-shrunken mandible
firmly shut.

Paulette understood, but
she also knew tying up the old woman’s jaw was completely
unnecessary; she turned on the bedside lamp and began to unwind the
cloth. Then, all at once, beneath her schooled fingers she felt the
faint, thready beat of Hannah’s pulse
. My
god
, she thought,
they were wrong—she’s alive
. She
unwrapped the bandages quickly, then began rubbing the old woman’s
hands and patting her cheeks. Her eyes fluttered open and she
whispered, “Ah. Thank you, Missus—that’s ever so much better…”
Paulette fluffed the pillow behind the frail shoulders so Mrs.
Briggs could sit higher and breathe a bit more easily, announced
she’d be right back, and then went to tell Miss Alma and Howard and
Mrs. Myrtle that Hannah was alive and Paulette would stay with her
for a while. In turn, they each took Paulette’s hands, told her how
grateful they were for her help.

“
It won’t be long,”
Paulette said, turning to climb the stairs again. “I can nurse her
through the end…”

*

“
Gif-f-f-t-s-s-s,” the old
woman hissed softly. Her eyes, white and filmy beneath the
half-closed lids, were crescent moons lying sideways, twinned in
heavy mist. She nodded slowly. “Gifts,” she said again. The sound
of that weak voice was, to Paulette’s ears, both hideously
plump—fulsome—and sibilant. “Legacies… and gifts… all of
them
traps
.”
Hannah’s mouth—the grayish lips now drawn inward and
sickle-thin—trembled as she exhaled; Paulette, sitting next to the
iron bed, her palms lightly riding Hannah’s bony fingers, felt that
low cool breath on her own hands and she shivered.

Suddenly she was back in memory on the
day of the dismissed premonition last summer. Time folded in on
itself …and then it was Halloween night. Mrs. Briggs, her mouth
slippery and wet with milky oyster stew, was telling Paulette
hideous things—things Paulette had stubbornly blocked from her
conscious thoughts till now:

“
Of course you know about
this gift—hah! Goddamn curse I call it—you have it, too, and so
does Robin. Oh, that knowing,” Mrs. Briggs had said. “Terrible….
But what could anyone do?
Anyone
, even an adult—much less a
child—living in a sod hut or a weather-beaten cabin on those
endlessly empty, sky-crushed plains….
Nobody in my world could’ve done a single thing.
Still, I saw it. Six months, maybe a year before
it happened. Saw the actor fellow—that Booth—creep into Ford’s
theater, put the gun to the back of Lincoln’s head and pull the
trigger,” she said. “That sound in my skull—deafening. I never
stopped hearing it.” She shook her head slowly. “Same thing when I
was twenty—already married to my Robert and living back east out
Connecticut way. Yes. I was older and closer the second time. But
not close enough to the rail station in Washington, D.C. to be able
to stop Garfield’s assassination….There’s no worse feeling than
that sense of being completely
helpless.
” Hannah turned her head
toward the flames and Paulette had seen the firelight glinting here
and there on her scalp through her thin white hair. “Ask Alma—she
knows what it is to carry the burden of knowing, to heft the worse
burden of being powerless. Her time of knowing first came when she
was fourteen, maybe fifteen—she felt it black and bristling for
five long years. But she couldn’t stop it either. Buffalo, New
York. The Pan-American exhibit...and McKinley was felled in 1901.
You never get over it.
Never.
Time doesn’t heal those deaths,
Missus.”

Paulette said nothing.

“
Every gift carries an
obligation—to be gracious, kind, grateful. Always a dilemma,
Missus, minor though it be.” Her hands curved, clenching the arms
of the worn rocking chair. “But these dark gifts are traps.” The
fire gave off a loud, sharp
crack!
and Paulette heard the embers shift and tumble.
“You wouldn’t think just knowing a thing can wound you—that seeing
the future can pierce your mind and crumble your soul….but it’s
so.”

Now, in the old woman’s narrow bedroom
on this Thanksgiving eve, there were the sudden sounds of three
desperate, pained breaths, and Paulette was startled from her
unsettling reverie. This time, she did not see the death angel, but
the old pioneer woman, Hannah Briggs, born in 1860, age 101, was
gone.

West Chester, New York:
December 1961

First snowfall of the season: the fat,
drifting flakes huge and desultory—and destined to melt quickly in
the southern New York climate. Caroling and the Nativity play. Mama
Estelle made Robin’s angel costume and tinsel crown. In the rushed
weeks preceding Christmas, Paulette—shopping, decorating the house,
baking cookies and wrapping gifts—had no time to think about
Hannah: a dying woman maundering about visions and portents and
death.

It was, she thought,
perhaps the last year that Robin might believe in Saint
Nicholas—every kindergartener with older siblings was on fire to
spread the joyfully desolate tidings:
There is no Santa! Your parents
buy
the gifts!

Luc was a practical man,
and Paulette bought her daughter a sampling of useful presents: a
cozy flannel nightgown sprinkled with tiny blue sheep; a red wool
beret and matching mittens;
The Cat in the
Hat Comes Back;
Bartholomew and the
Oobleck; Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose.
On impulse in Macy’s, she picked up a pair of beginner’s ice
skates with leather straps Robin could fasten over her brown rubber
boots. Paulette was most excited though, at the thought of seeing
her daughter’s face when she tore the wrapping paper from a most
impractical gift: A blond, pony-tailed Barbie clad in a black and
white striped bathing suit, black high heels, minute pearl
earrings, and tiny white sunglasses. She splurged on a second
outfit; Estelle, as thrifty as Luc, began to seek out material and
patterns for doll clothes to expand Barbie’s wardrobe beyond
pedestrian beach wear—to the cocktail hour and the cruise line.
Paulette, oohing and aahing over the teeny red chiffon dinner
dress, the pleated tennis outfit, and ski togs Estelle had sewn,
could hardly wait.

*

Christmas morning and all cheer had
fled. Instead, a brief moment of surprised delight turned almost
instantly to harrowing sobs and tears; the Barbie doll still lay
untouched in its bright Mattel box, still wrapped in gold ribbon
and white paper with stars.

Robin, sitting cross-legged by the
fireplace, had gleefully—at first—pulled out nuts, oranges, hard
candy and a plastic blow-up bubble kit. She rocked the red felt
stocking back and forth, then squeezed, searching for further
tell-tale lumps.

“
Any coal?” Luc
teased.

Robin pushed her small hand all the
way inside down to the toe, yanked, and then upended the stocking
to shake out the prize. What clattered on to the rug shocked
Paulette, but she knew instinctively, Robbie hadn’t stolen it and
no one had put it there: Gleaming in the tree plights, lay the
green sunstone Indian necklace.

“
It’s Mrs. Briggs’
emerald,” Robin began to say, catching it up in her hand and
closing her fingers around it.

Then all at once she moaned, her eyes
rolled up, and she swayed toward the carpet.

“
Catch her,
Luc!”

“
Are you all right? What
happened? What happened, Robin? What’s wrong?”

Paulette could not console her
daughter; she picked Robin up and carried her to bed.

“
Tell me, Robbie. Tell me
what’s wrong—please!”

“
Life
magazine,” she cried. “
All the
pictures
. There’s blood on a pink skirt,
and a little boy saluting, and oh, Mommy, they’ve killed him,
they’ve shot our president. Soon—next year or the year after, a man
with a gun is going to shoot that boy’s daddy dead.” She covered
her face with her hands. “Texas. President Kennedy,” she
wept.

“
Ssh, ssh…ssh, now, honey,
it will be okay.”

But of course, Paulette knew it
wouldn’t be all right.

No, not any more right than the
necklace that held an emerald for the gypsy girl named for a green
gem; bright gleam winking in the light when she danced on the worn
stone steps of Notre Dame before all of Paris: beggars and poets
and nobles. Sad green-gemmed girl touched the hearts of a
hunchback, an archbishop, and the king himself. Fell in love with
shining Phoebus, captain of the guards, god of the sun—

Sun…

Sunstone. In its brilliant blinding
glare, you could see things clearly.

Perhaps, too clearly.

A FAMILY CHRISTMAS
TERROR

CHAPTER 13

“
I didn’t think that was
going to happen. Did you, Mom?” Nancy said, rolling out the
dough.

“
No, I was surprised. Make
sure the dough is evenly spread out. I don’t want lumps in my
slices. Your father will never forgive me.” Judy went back to
stirring the gravy.

“
No lumps in the gravy,
either,” Dan said, entering the kitchen. He stumbled against the
counter and his mug fell to the floor and shattered.

“
God damn it!”

“
What’s wrong? Are you
okay, Dan?” Judy rushed over to her husband who was on his knees
picking up the broken glass shards.

“
I’m fine. I just tripped.
Ow! Look what you made me do!”

“
Dad, you’re bleeding,”
Jack said.

“
I’m fine. Your mother
made me cut my finger on the broken glass,” Dan said,
standing.

Judy’s face hardened. “Jack, get your
father a Band-Aid.”

“
You got it.” Jack left
the kitchen. “Don’t start the next story without me.”

“
Nancy, pour me another
eggnog,” Dan said while holding a paper towel over his
wound.

Grandpa touched Nancy on the arm.
“Maybe hold off till dinner.”

“
Really, Dad?” Dan gave
his father a scowl. “I’ll get it myself.”

“
Here you go, Dad,” Jack
handed the Band-Aid to his mother, who put it on her husband’s
finger, saying, “Okay, disaster averted. Everyone back to their
chores. Grandpa, continue.”

“
Ah, let’s see...” He
cleared his throat. “
Sleigh
Me
.”

SLEIGH ME

ELLE J ROSSI

“
There are some people who
want to throw their arms round you just because it’s Christmas.
There are other people who want to strangle you just because it is
Christmas.”
—Robert Staughton
Lynd