A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

  "He won't hurt you, honey!" Mr. Palmer yelled from the foyer. "His name is Hamlet. You know why I call him that?"

  "No, sir, I have no idea," I said, not wanting to spoil his fun. Guests came to the Glenmore to have fun.

  "Because he's a Great Dane! Ha! Ha! Ha! Get it?"

  I would have liked to tell Mr. Palmer just how old and feeble that joke is, but instead I said, "Oh, of course, sir! How clever of you!" because I had learned a thing or two during my time at the Glenmore. About when to tell the truth and when not to. And for my smiles and admiring words, I earned Mr. Palmers liking and an extra dollar a week to feed Hamlet and walk him. In the woods. Far away from the hotel. Because the filthy beast shits like a plow horse.

  I did not normally look forward to Hamlet's after-supper walk, but tonight I am glad for it. Try as I might, I have not been able to get near the cellar all evening, and Grace Browns letters are still in my pocket. I figured out a new way to get rid of them, though, and Hamlet is going to help me.

  I finish feeding the dog and bring the plate back into the kitchen. Supper ended over an hour ago. It's dusky now. The kitchen is empty except for Bill, the dishwasher, and Henry, the underchef, who is holding a carving knife in one hand and rooting in a drawer with the other.

  "Hamlet sends his compliments, Henry," I say. Henry's real name is Heinrich. He is German and started at the Glenmore the same week that I did.

  "Cooking pancake for dog," he grumbles. "For this I make journey to America? Mattie, haf you seen my vetstone?"

  He means whetstone. "No, I'm sorry, Henry, I haven't," I say, heading back out the door. I have told him over and over again that sharpening a knife after dark brings bad luck. He doesn't believe me, though, so now I have hidden it. There has been enough bad luck around here lately without him making any more.

  "Come on, boy," I say. Hamlet's black ears prick up. He wags his tail. I unloop his leash from the handle of an empty milk can. We round the back corner of the hotel, and Hamlet lifts his leg on one of the porch columns. "Stop that!" I scold, tugging on the leash, but he doesn't budge until he's hosed it down good. I look around anxiously, hoping Mrs. Morrison hasn't seen us. Or Cook. Luckily, there is no one around. "Let's go, Hamlet. You mind me, now," I warn him. He trots along. We cross the front lawn and head down to the lake. I look back over my shoulder. The Glenmore is all lit up. I can see people on the porch. The men's cigar tips glow like fireflies in the dark. The women look like ghosts, in their white lawn dresses.

  We get to the water's edge. "Wait, Hamlet," I say. He stands patiently as I scoop up a handful of stones. "Come on, now," I tell him, leading him onto the dock. He takes a few steps. His nails click against the boards, then dig in. He does not like the way the dock rises and sinks on the lapping water. "Come on, boy. It's all right. Let's see if there are some loons to bark at. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Come on, Hamlet ... there's a good dog...," I plead with him, but he won't move, so I play my trump card and pull a cold pancake out of my pocket. He follows me happily.

  I feel the letters bumping against my leg as we walk, nagging and badgering. I'll soon be rid of them, though. The end of the dock is only three yards away. All I have to do is untie the ribbon that's holding the bundle together, slip a few stones into one of the envelopes, tie the bundle back together, and throw it into the water. It's not exactly what Grace Brown asked of me, but it will have to do. The lake is twelve feet deep at the end of the dock—deeper still farther out—and I have a good arm. No one will ever find them.

  Finally, I'm there. Right at the dock's edge. I let go of Hamlet's leash and step on it to keep him from running off. I'm just reaching into my pocket for the letters when out of the darkness a voice says, "Going swimming, Matt?"

  I'm so startled that I cry out and drop all my stones. I look to my right and there is Weaver, still in his black waiter's jacket, his trousers rolled up to his knees, sitting on the edge of the dock.

  "Royal know you're two-timing him?" he asks, nodding at Hamlet.

  "Very funny, Weaver! You frightened me to death!"

  "Sorry."

  "What are you doing out here?" I ask, then realize I know the answer already. He comes here every night now to grieve. I should have remembered that.

  "I was looking at the boat," he replies. "The one that couple took out. The Zilpha towed it back."

  "Where is it?"

  "There." He points to the far end of the dock. A skiff is tied there. Its cushions are gone and its oarlocks are empty. "I went into the parlor after supper. To look at her." He is staring out at the lake. He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, his cheeks are wet.

  "Oh, Weaver, don't," I whisper, touching his shoulder.

  His hand finds mine. "I hate this place, Mattie," he says. "It kills everything."

  wan

  I used to wonder what would happen if characters in books could change their fates. What if the Dashwood sisters had had money? Maybe Elinor would have gone traveling and left Mr. Ferrars dithering in the drawing room. What if Catherine Earnshaw had just married Heathcliff to begin with and spared everyone a lot of grief? What if Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale had gotten onboard that ship and left Roger Chillingworth far behind? I felt sorry for these characters sometimes, seeing as they couldn't ever break out of their stories, but then again, if they could have talked to me, they'd likely have told me to stuff all my pity and condescension, for neither could I.

  At least, that's how it looked to me midway through April. A week had passed since my letter had arrived from Barnard College, but I was no closer to figuring out a way to get myself there. I would have to pick an awful lot of fiddleheads and a wagon load of spruce gum to make enough money for train fare, and books, and maybe a new waist and skirt. If only I could raise my own chickens and fry them up for the tourists like Weaver's mamma, I thought. Or keep the egg money back like Minnie's husband lets her do.

  A blue jay flew overhead, screeching at me, pulling me out of my thoughts. I looked up and realized I had walked past the drive to the Cliff House on Fourth Lake and was nearly at the turnoff that led to my friend Minnie Simms's house. Minnie Compeau, rather. I kept forgetting. I neatened the bunch of violets in my hand. I'd picked them for Minnie. To cheer her up. The baby was only a month off and it was making her tired and weepy. Tired and weepy and wan.

  Wan, my word of the day, means having a sickly hue or an unnatural pallor. Showing ill health, fatigue, or unhappiness; lacking in forcefulness or competence. It has parents: the Old English warm, for "dark" or "gloomy," and the German wahn, for "madness." Wan shows its breeding; it has elements of warm and wahn in it, just like the new kittens have elements of Pansy, the barn cat, and Shadow, the wild torn.

  Halfway down the turnoff—a dirt road that was corduroyed here and there with logs laid side by side to make it passable—Minnie's house came into view. It was a one-room log house, as low and squat as a hoptoad. Minnie's husband, Jim, had built it from trees he'd felled. She would have liked a clapboard house, painted white with red trim, but that called for money and they didn't have much. Planks laid end to end over the muddy ground served as a walkway. Charred tree stumps stuck up in the front yard, as black and random as an old man's teeth. Jim had cleared a plot for a vegetable garden in back of the house and fenced a field for their sheep and cows. Their land was on the north shore of Fourth Lake, and they were hoping to take in boarders one day when they had more acreage cleared and a better house built.

  Jim liked to say that we were all sitting on a gold mine now and that any man with a strong back and a modicum of ambition could make himself a fortune. My pa said the same, and Mr. Loomis, too. And it was all because Mrs. Collis P. Huntington, whose husband owned Camp Pine Knot at Raquette Lake, was possessed of a delicate constitution and an even more delicate backside.

  Used to be that anyone coming up to Fourth Lake had to take a train from Grand Central to Utica, switch to another one to get to Old Forge, then get onboard a steamer and come up the F
ulton Chain of Lakes one by one until he got to Fourth. If he wanted to go on from there, he had to take a long buckboard ride to Raquette Lake or hike to Big Moose, but that all changed when Mr. Huntington decided to bring Mrs. Huntington to his new camp. She found the journey so hard that she told her husband he could build a railroad to take her from Eagle Bay to Pine Knot or he could spend his summers by himself.

  Mr. Huntington knew a lot about railroads—he'd built one that ran all the way from New Orleans to San Francisco. He had wealthy friends with camps near his, and they put themselves behind his plan. They got the state to approve it by saying the railroad would bring prosperity to a poor, rural area, and the first train had come through six years ago. Pa brought us down in the buckboard to see it. Abby cried when it arrived and Lawton cried when it left. Shortly after, tracks for the Mohawk and Malone line, which heads north out of Old Forge instead of east, were laid. The workmen cut wagon roads through the wilderness so that ties and spikes could be carried through. Those roads allowed men like Mr. Sperry to build hotels in the woods. Tourists came, and suddenly Eagle Bay and Inlet and Big Moose Lake were no longer just places where woodsmen and homesteaders lived. They were fashionable summer destinations for people wanting to escape the heat and noise of the big cities.

  Both the Eagle Bay Hotel and the Glenmore had steam heat, sanitary plumbing, telegraph machines, and even telephones. It cost anywhere from twelve dollars to twenty-five dollars a week to stay at them. Their guests ate lobster bisque, drank champagne, and danced to music made by an orchestra, but we didn't even have a schoolhouse in Eagle Bay. Or a post office or a church or a general store. The railroads had brought prosperity, but prosperity didn't seem to want to stay. Come Labor Day she packed up and departed with the rest of the tourists and we were left to our own devices, hoping we had earned enough from May through August selling milk or fried chicken, waiting tables or washing linens, to feed ourselves and our animals during the long winter.

  I turned onto Minnie's drive, feeling in my pocket for the letter from Barnard. I'd brought it to show her. I'd already showed it to Weaver, and he'd said I had to go no matter what it took. He said I must move every mountain, brave every hardship, vanquish all obstacles, do that which is impossible. I thought perhaps he had taken The Count of Monte Cristo too much to heart.

  I wanted to see what Minnie thought about Barnard, for she was clever. She'd made her wedding dress from an aunt's castoff, and I had seen her recut a frumpy woolen overcoat into something stylish and new. If there was some way to fashion myself a ticket to New York out of nothing, she would know it. I wanted to ask her about promises, too, and see if she thought you always had to keep the ones you made just the way you made them, or if it was all right to alter them a bit.

  I had so much I wanted to tell Minnie. I thought I might even tell her about my wagon ride with Royal, but I didn't get to tell her anything that day, because as I was halfway up the plank path, I heard a scream. A terrible one, full of fear and pain. It came from inside the house.

  "Minnie!" I shouted, dropping my flowers. "Minnie, what is it?"

  All I got for an answer was a low, trailing moan. Someone was killing her, I was sure of it. I ran onto the porch, grabbed a log from the woodpile, and dashed inside, ready to bash that someone's head in.

  "Put that down, you damn fool," a woman's voice said from behind me.'

  But before I could even turn around to see who'd spoken, another scream pierced the air. I looked across the room and saw my friend. She was lying in her bed, drenched with sweat, heaving and arching and screaming.

  "Minnie! Min, what is it? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing's wrong. She's in labor," the voice behind me said.

  I whirled around and saw a hefty blond woman stirring rags into a pot of boiling water. Mrs. Crego. The midwife.

  Labor. The baby. Minnie was having her baby. "But, she ... she's not due," I stammered. "She's only eight months gone. She has another month. Dr. Wallace said she has another month."

  "Then Dr. Wallace is a bigger fool than you are."

  "You building a fire, Matt?" a weak voice rasped.

  I turned again. Minnie was looking at me and laughing, and I realized I was still holding the log aloft. Then quick as it came, her laughter stopped and she groaned, and the fear came back into her face. I saw her twist herself against it, saw her hands clutch at the bedsheets, saw her eyes huge and frightened. "Oh, Mattie, it's going to tear me apart," she whimpered.

  I started whimpering right along with her until Mrs. Crego yelled at us, telling us we were witless and useless, the pair of us. She put the pot of rags down near the bed, next to a milking stool, then she took the log out of my hands and pushed me toward Minnie. "Since you're here, you might as well help," she said. "Come on, let's sit her up."

  But Minnie didn't want to sit up. She said she wasn't going to. Mrs. Crego got into the bed behind her and pushed, and I pulled, and between the two of us, we got her up and over the edge of the bed. Her shift was all up around her hips, but she didn't care. Minnie, who was so modest she wouldn't undress in front of me when she stayed at our house.

  Mrs. Crego crawled out of the bed and knelt down in front of her. She pushed Minnie's knees apart, peered up between them, and shook her head. "Baby won't make up his mind. First he wants to come early, now he don't want to come at all," she said.

  I tried not to look at the crimson streaks on Minnie's thighs. I tried not to look at the blood in the bed, either. Mrs. Crego squeezed the water out of a steaming rag and put it on Minnie's back. It seemed to ease her some. She had me hold it there and went to dig in her basket. She pulled out dried herbs, a knob of ginger, and a jar of chicken fat.

  "I was on my way up the road to visit Arlene Tanney—she's due in a week—and I thought I'd just stop in to check on your friend here. Even if she ain't my patient," Mrs. Crego said. "Found her on the porch steps, helpless. Said she'd been having pains off and on for two days. Said she told the doctor, but he said she shouldn't worry about it. The jackass. Like to see him have pains for two days and not worry about it. She's lucky I came by. Luckier still you did. It's going to take two of us to get this baby out of her."

  "But ... but Mrs. Crego," I stammered, "I can't help ... I ... I don't know what to do."

  "You'll have to. There's no one else," Mrs. Crego said matter-of-factly. "You've helped your father bring calves, haven't you? It's the same thing. Pretty much."

  Oh no, it isn't, I thought. I loved our cows, but I loved Minnie so much more.

  The next six hours were the longest of my life. Mrs. Crego ran me ragged. I built a fire in the hearth to warm up the house. I rubbed Minnie's back and her legs and her feet. Mrs. Crego sat on the milking stool and rubbed Minnie's belly and pressed it and put her ear against it. Minnie's belly was so big it scared me. I wondered how whatever was in it would ever get out. We gave her castor oil to speed the contractions. She threw it up. We got her up and made her walk around and around the room. We sat her down again. We made her kneel, we made her squat, we made her lie. Mrs. Crego had her eat some gingerroot. She threw that up. I stroked her head and sang "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?", her favorite song, only I changed Bill Bailey to Jim Compeau, which made her laugh when she wasn't moaning.

  Toward afternoon Mrs. Crego took another herb out of her basket. Pennyroyal. She made a tea out of it and made Minnie drink a big cupful. Minnie kept that down and the pains got worse. She was in agony. She suddenly wanted to push, but Mrs. Crego wouldn't let her. She pushed instead—on Minnie's enormous belly—and rubbed and pummeled and kneaded until she was panting and the sweat was streaming down her face. Then she wrenched Minnie's knees apart and peered between them again. "You son of a gun, you ... Come on!" she yelled, kicking the stool away. Minnie sank back against me and cried weary, hopeless tears. I put my arms around her and rocked her like she was my baby. She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine, and said, "Mattie, will you tell Jim I love him?"

  "I'm
not telling him any such mush. Tell him yourself when the baby's out."

  "He's not coming out, Matt."

  "Hush. He is, too. He's just taking his time, that's all."

  I started to sing "Bill Bailey" again, but my heart wasn't in it. I watched Mrs. Crego as I sang. She was heating more water. She dunked her hands in it, then soaped them up, and her wrists and arms, up to her elbows. Then she rubbed her hands with chicken fat. I felt my insides go rubbery. I didn't want Minnie to see what was coming, so I told her to close her eyes and I rubbed her temples gently, singing all the while. I think she slept for a few seconds. Or maybe she passed out.

  Mrs. Crego shoved the milking stool back in place with her foot and sat on it. She placed her hands on Minnie's belly, and moved them all around. She was very quiet. It seemed to me that she was listening with her hands. She frowned as she listened, and for the first time I saw fear in her own eyes.

  "Is he coming out now?" I asked.

  "They."

  "What?"

  "She's got two babies. One wants to come out feet first. I'm going to try and turn him. Hold her now, Mattie."

  I threaded my arms through Minnie's. Her eyes fluttered open. "What's going on, Matt?" she whispered. Her voice sounded so scared.

  "Its all right, Min, it's all right..."

  But it wasn't.

  Mrs. Crego put her left hand on Minnie's belly. Her right hand disappeared under Minnie's shift. Minnie arched her back and screamed. I thought for sure Mrs. Crego would kill her. I held her arms tightly and buried my face in her back and prayed for it to end.

  I'd never known it was like this for a woman. Never. We'd always been sent to Aunt Josie's when Mamma's time was near. We would stay there overnight, and when we came back, there was Mamma smiling with a new baby in her arms.

  I have read so many books, and not one of them tells the truth about babies. Dickens doesn't. Oliver's mother just dies in childbirth and that's that. Bronte doesn't. Catherine Earnshaw just has her daughter and that's that. There's no blood, no sweat, no pain, no fear, no heat, no stink.