Authors: Annie Proulx
Postcards (6 page)
The helper was a lumber-camp cook learning the refinements of carriage trade cuisine. He saw the bear in the dusk and ran shouting up to the Lodge for a ride. Hotelier McCurdy was in the kitchen talking
Toumedos forestier
with the cook and went to look at the bear for himself. He saw something in the hulking shoulders, the doggy snout, and told the Lodge carpenters to build benches on the slope above the dump. They set the area off with a peeled sapling railing to mark the limits of approach. The bolder guests walked twittering through the birches to see the bear. They touched each other’s shoulders and arms, their hands sprang protectively to their throats. The laughter was choked. The bear never looked up.
Through the summer the guests watched the bear flay the soft, fly-spangled garbage with his claws. The men wore walking suits or flannel bags and argyle pullovers, the women came in wrinkled linen tubes with sailor collars. They lifted their Kodaks, freezing the sheen of his fur, his polished claws. Oscar Untergans, a timber-lot surveyor who sold hundreds of nature shots to postcard printers photographed the bear at the summer dump. Untergans came again and again, walking along the path behind the cook, picking up any fetid rinds or dull eggshells thrown from the jouncing wheelbarrow. Sometimes the bear was waiting. The cook pitched the garbage with a pointed spade. He hit the bear with rotted tomatoes, grapefruit halves like yellow skullcaps.
Two or three summers after Untergans snapped the bear’s image they ran electric line to the Lodge. One evening the bear did not appear at the dump, nor was he seen in the following weeks and years. The Lodge burned on New Year’s Eve of 1934. On a rainy May night in 1938 Oscar Untergans fell in his estranged wife’s bathroom and died from a subdural haematoma. The postcard endured.
MERNELLE SLOGGED DOWN the steep road, the snow packing into her boots. The dog plunged into her tracks, up and out, like a roller coaster. ‘You’re knockin’ yourself out for nothin’,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s sendin’ you no letters or postcards. No penpals for dumb dogs. I can guess what you’d write. Stuff like “Dear Fido, Send me a cat. Wufwuf, Dog.”’
Later Mink would get out the snow roller that the town had sold him cheap when they went over to the snowplow and hitch it to the tractor. The roller was a slatted rolling pin of a thing that crushed the snow down into a smooth pack. After the roller went up and down the truck still couldn’t make it, even with chains. In November,
before the big snows came, Mink parked the truck at the bottom of the road. He hauled the forty-quart cream cans down every morning with the tractor.
‘Leave the truck up here, we run the risk of bein’ trapped for the winter. This way we got at least a chance if the place catches on fire or somebody gets hurt bad. Get down to the road, we got a ride.’ That was Jewell talking through Mink’s mouth. Jewell was the one afraid of accidents and fire, had seen her father’s barns burn down with the horses and cows inside. Had seen her oldest brother die after they pulled him out of the well, the rotten cover hidden by years of overgrown grass. She told the story in a certain way. Cleared her throat. Began with a silence. Her fingers interlaced, wrists balanced on her breasts and as she told her hands rocked a little.
‘He was smashed up terrible. Every bone in him was broken. That well was forty foot down, and he pulled stone on top of hisself as he was falling, just hit a stone and it’d come right out. They had to move eighteen rocks off him, some of them weighed more than fifty pound, before they could get him out. Those stones come up one by one, real careful so they wouldn’t jar no more loose. You could hear Marvin down there, “unnnh, unnnh,” just didn’t stop. Steever Batwine was the one went down in there to get him out. It was awful dangerous. The rest of the well could of caved in any minute. Steever liked Marvin. Marvin had did some work for him that summer, helped with the hayin’, and Steever said he was a good hand. Well, he was a good hand, only twelve but already real strong. The rocks they were pulling up could of come loose from the sling and beaned Steever.’ Dub always laughed when she said ‘beaned.’
‘Marvin’s the one you’re named after,’ she said to Dub, ’Marvin Sevins, so don’t laugh.
‘Then they put down a like little table with the legs pulled off it, put the table in the sling and lowered it down. The table only got halfway down when it stuck and they had to bring it back up and saw the end off before it could fit. Steever was down there expecting more rocks to come any minute. He picked up Marvin and laid him on the table. He screamed terrible when Steever gathered him up to put him on the table, then went back to moaning. Steever said
the only thing holding him together was his skin, he was like a armful of kindling inside. When Marvin come out of the well on the little table all black and blue and covered with blood and dirt and his legs twisted like cornstalks my mother fainted. Just swooned right down and laid there in the dirt. The hens come pecking over by her and this one hen I always hated afterwards, just stepped in her hair and looked in her face like it was thinking about pecking her eye. I was only five or so, but I knew that hen was a bad one and I got a little stick and took after it. So they brought Marvin into my mother and father’s room and the hired man, he was just a young fellow from the Mason’s place was the one that started to wash off the blood. He was real gentle about it, but he could hear this crackling like paper when he wiped off Marvin’s forehead, and he seen it wasn’t no use, so he put down the bloody washrag in the basin very soft and he went out. Took Marvin all night to die, but he never opened his eyes. He was unconscious. My mother never went into that room once. Just stayed out in the parlor fainting and crying by turns. I held that against her for years.’ And the mother’s brutal selfishness of grief again thrown up like a billboard for everyone to see and shudder. Grandma Sevins.
Mernelle was sweating inside her woolen snowsuit when she reached the bottom of the hill. The town road was plowed and empty, the snow corrugated with patterns of tire treads and chains. The mailman’s track, an old Ford sedan with the back end sawed off and a plank bed and slatted tides added on, left a distinctive pattern. You could hear it coming a long way off, the loose links clacking and rattling. Mernelle could tell if the mailbox was empty, just the disappointing gnaw of hinges, when the tire tracks ran down the middle of the road without slewing in.
Usually she walked all the way down, anticipating something, maybe a mysterious buff envelope addressed to her father, and when he slit it open with his old caked penknife a green check for a million dollars would slide out onto the table.
There was mail. Loyal’s
Farm Journal
that kept coming even though he was gone, a cattle auction flyer, a postcard for her mother that the Watkins man was coming the first week in February. At the bottom he’d scrawled ‘whether permiting.’ Another bear postcard for Jewell,
written in Loyal’s handwriting, so small it was a nuisance to read it. There was a postcard for her, the third piece of mail of her life. She counted them. The birthday card from Miss Sparks when Loyal was going out with her. The letter from Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum. And this.
She hadn’t told her mother that Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum wrote that she should send him a picture, a snapshot, he wrote, ‘in a cute two piece bathing suit if you got one but one piece is ok. I know your cute by your cute name. Write to me.’ She sent a bathing suit picture of her cousin Thelma rummaged from the tin box in the pantry where letters and photographs curled. Thelma was fourteen in the snapshot, her arms and legs like rakes. She squinted, looked Mongolian. The Atlantic Ocean was flat. It was a tan bathing suit, sewed at home by Aunt Rose. When it was wet it sagged like old skin. In the photograph it was wet and sandy.
This postcard showed a white-columned building behind trees swathed in angry green moss. ‘An Old Southern Mansion.’
Dog was running up and down the plowed road, digging his toenails in and racing for the bend, then turning on a dime, kicking up a spurt
of snow in the tight circle and racing back to Mernelle again. His happiness matched up with her getting a postcard. His fur was yellow against the snow. The snowplow had cut the banks far back and leveled them off in two tiers, ready for February and March storms. The blade had pulled up thousands of sticks and leaves like pieces of bat wings. Dog raced off again, around the bend this time.
‘You get back here. I’m goin’ home. Milk truck’ll run over you.’
But she walked toward the bend herself for the pleasure of feeling the firm road underfoot after a mile and a half of wallowing. ‘Juniata Calliota Homa Alabarna’ she sang. Dog was rolling in the novelty of leaves, sweeping them with his gyrating tail. He looked at her.
‘Come on,’ she said, slapping her thigh. ‘Let’s go.’ When he ran willfully away from her in the direction of the village, she turned back without him, the mail in her coat pocket. She was almost to the culvert, the brook frozen inside, when he caught up with her. He had brought her something, but didn’t want to give it up, like a child bringing a birthday present to a party. She wrestled it out of his wet jaws. It was a woman’s shoe with a strap, a pale lilac color, stained and half full of leaves, the silk wet where Dog had mouthed it.
‘Dog. Dog, look!’ Mernelle made to throw the slipper, feinted. Dog’s eyes got the deep hunting gleam. He stiffened, watched her hand with everything he had. She threw the slipper and he marked where it fell, then plunged into the snow for the prize. It took them all the way home and she threw it for the last time, up onto the milk house roof. And went in singing.
‘How come he don’t put no return address on these things,’ asked Jewell, turning the postcard over and frowning at the bear. ‘How does he expect us to answer him? How are we supposed to tell him anything that’s went on?’ Jewell asked Mink. This question could not be asked.
‘Don’t mention the son of a bitch’s name to me. I don’t want to hear from him.’ Mink jerked on his extra socks. His shoulders sloped in the stiff work shirt, the mark of the iron on the smooth sleeves. His hairy hands came out of the cuffs and grasped.
‘You can send it to General Delivery of the place that’s postmarked,’ said Dub.
‘Chicago? Even I know that’s too big a place to send General Delivery.’
‘You gonna gas all day or can we get on with the milkin’?’ said Mink. His arms were in the barn coat, he slotted the buttons through the stretched holes. ‘I want to look over these cows, decide which ones we’re goin’ to sell to get down to where we can manage. If we can manage. Right now there’s not enough money in the damn milk checks to do more than buy shoes and tractor gas.’ The feed cap, greasy bill tilted at the door.
Dub gave his foolish smile and thrust into barn boots. The laces trailed. He followed as close behind Mink as a dog.
In the barn sweet breath of cows, splattering shit, grass dust sifting down from the loft.
‘Them cows has got to pay the taxes and the fire insurance. And your mother don’t know it, but we are a long way behind in the mortgage department.’
‘What’s new,’ said Dub, burying himself in the dark corner, wrenching the pump handle until the water shot out. Began to fill buckets. ‘ “Oh the farmer’s life is a happy life.” ’ He sang the old Grange song with the usual cracked irony. Had anybody ever sung it another way?
