When We Were the Kennedys Page 10

  Dad waited, he got chosen, he entered the deafening labyrinth, where he was told where to spend the next twelve hours of his one and only life. Maybe they sent him outside, into a throbbing cold, to heft logs cut in northern Maine and New Brunswick. He ended his working life in the woodyard; maybe it started there, too.

  Some of the logs back then still arrived by river, where pole men, stationed on the Androscoggin’s man-made islets, poled logs marked with the Oxford blaze toward the Oxford yard and directed the rest to float on to mills downriver. Maybe Dad spent that first shift hefting logs by hand from wood piles the size of houses, loading them into the barking drums. Or he might have been directed inside to cook wood chips in sky-size rooms, filling mighty steel digesters with chips from the chip loft, or else deeper inside still, to pump cooked pulp into massive washers or bleaching vats or storage tanks, adding dyes and clays and unpronounceable chemicals to make specific pulp stock for various grades of paper.

  Or maybe he worked in the beater room, beating the soupy pulp in twenty-foot tubs by raising or lowering a rotating drum, cutting and brushing the pulp fibers fine enough to make paper worth bringing home.

  Or maybe they assigned him to the paper machines themselves, astounding inventions the size of battleships, their parts alive and thrumming. At the wet end of a paper machine, Dad might have filled the head box with treated pulp, or opened the slices, dam-style, to release an even stream of pulp stock onto the “wire,” an immense wire-mesh screen that moved both forward and side to side, weaving the fibers and sucking out excess water, an inexorable motion that, at last, made a sheet of paper up to twenty feet wide.

  Dad was a short man, though brawnily built; did he feel shrunken, beholding for the first time this mechanized breadth and height and depth? If assigned to the dry end, he might have manned the press rolls, where the sheet was snaked through massive wringers; or the dryers, where the paper passed between temperature-controlled, steam-heated cylinders—an industrial version of the hot rollers his teenage girls would use to curl their hair long after his death. Or maybe he went to the calenders, lofty upright machines fed from the top, where the unrolling paper—now possessed of the proper color, brightness, character, and weight—undulated through pressurized drums made alternately of steel and felt, the soft-against-hard pressure creating a lovely burnish. If the paper had been treated with a coating, this would be the moment when it finally shone. Imagine Dad, who liked handsome things, watching this final miracle and thinking: Now that’s some desperate-handsome paper.

  Or maybe they put him on the rewinders, where the finished paper got wound again, the rolls neatly sliced, like a vanilla Yule log, into varying widths. Dad may have been charged with saving the trimmed edges, which went back to the beater room to be pulped again, another chance to become a finished page on which a man might read the news of his adopted country, or write a lonesome letter back home to his brother and sisters standing waist deep in thistle and jewelweed, heading out to harvest the season’s last tomatoes.

  What was in those letters? Money, and stories: the girl he had his eye on, the dances and picture shows, the mill’s munificence and mayhem. In those days, if you came to work with a flask in your pocket, if you squandered your shift glad-handing and blathering and paying half-attention, if you were slipshod in your comportment or temperament, if instead of watching roller speed you rolled your eyes at a Quebecois accent or at a Lithuanian whose cabbage-blyny lunch offended your nose, then your distraction cost you a finger or toe, an arm or leg, or lit an explosion that turned you and the Franco and the Lithuanian and the cabbage blyny into a cloud of smithereens hurtling above the Androscoggin valley from the mill’s churning gut.

  You proved yourself by not losing your temper, not losing your focus, not losing your life. Dad proved himself quick. Your father wasn’t afraid of work, Mum always said. After a few weeks, his first reward: a steady, six-day, twelve-hour shift in the blow pits.

  Did his heart leap or sink as he entered the malodorous maw of the sulphite mill? Surely his heart leaped; work was all. But as I imagine this scene forty-five years after his death, I want to pull him back from the threshold of the life he thought he wanted, this sunny, freckled boy of twenty who carried a permanent memory of chest-high blueberry bushes and red earth. How did he enter those clanking gates after a boyhood spent beneath cloudless skies, taking in great lungfuls of fresh air tinged with the smell of new grass and old horses and the nip of the nearby sea? Don’t go in there, Dad, I shout at his straight, long-gone back, that work will kill you, but of course he goes in there. He has to. He wants to. And if he doesn’t, there’s no work at all, no settling here, no Mum, no us.

  So he goes in. Before Local 900. Before “air-quality index.” Before mandatory safety glasses or hardhats or steel-toed boots or automatic shutoffs or safety guards or bright yellow signs telling you to tuck in your shirttail, for God’s sweet sake! No OSHA no EPA no Clean Water Act. Rumford-Mexico in 1926 is an enviable axis of industry, the Oxford the largest book-paper mill in the world under one roof, a thriving moneymaker that can turn the most ordinary man into a breadwinner, a marriage prospect, a safe bet.

  That was Dad, in the healthy bloom of his young manhood, sweating out his shift in the blow pits, where men young and old cooked pulp in a foul and dangerous liquor of sulphurous acid. Dad and his crewmates pressurized toxins and then released them, over and over, separating pulp from water, water from steam, steam from swill, making strong, beautiful pulp that would become strong, beautiful paper. Back then nobody troubled to collect all this poison; they saved the good stuff, flushed the rest. That was Dad’s job, to open the valve and flush a toxic broth into the ancient Androscoggin River, our lifeblood river, its banks lined with ailing willows, houses disfigured with curdled paint, rooftops and windowpanes and flapping laundry blackened by pulp waste and fly ash, a deep, wide, legendary river scummed with yellow foam and burping up bloated fish as it made its eons-old pilgrimage to the sea.

  As Dad filled our river with swill, Mum was sitting in civics class at Stephens High School, her hands folded on her desk behind her classmate Edmund Muskie, our future governor, senator, presidential candidate, secretary of state, and architect of the Clean Water Act. She wasn’t much interested in a boy like Ed, who “always had his nose stuck in a book.” Their classroom windows faced the river, and I imagine her staring out there, daydreaming about the hardier boys crossing the footbridge with their lunch pails. One of them, the one they call “Red,” by now an older man of twenty-seven, will take her to a dance, and on this first official date, in an uncharacteristic burst of whimsy, he will declare to her on the jouncing wooden dance floor of the Mechanics Institute, “We’ll bring up our children in the house of God!”

  They did. They could. Because Dad eventually won a job as a wood scaler, a job that kept him in contact with the sky. He met trucks that came in all day long, directing the drivers to the proper wood piles after measuring the load (how high, how wide, what kind). Logs came in from Oxford-owned land in Maine and eastern Canada, but also from area farmers or woodlot owners who knew Dad for a fair deal. He must have been happy—a family man now, with a wife and a first child, his redheaded boy.

  Dad scaled wood for about thirty years of shift work, until he went on salary in the mid-fifties as a foreman in the woodyard. A union man by then, he suffered a stab of regret for leaving his hourly-paid brethren. He’d now have to hire and fire, he who could not say no to a nine-year-old. But with three surprise children gracing his middle age, he had to jump at the chance.

  On certain spring days the woodyard resembled brush strokes on canvas, wood gathered into glowing pyramids, their shapes shifting as sun and shadow drew out their living colors. In winter, under a pitiless midday light, the entire mill complex could appear almost fragile, its myriad shapes exposed here, snow-muffled there, its breathing presence open to the elements. In summer, at dusk, it laid bare its bones, a bleak and soulless silhouette against a
dying sky. The truth behind these tableaux lay in the artless reality of industry, a pact between man and machine, management and labor. But I like to think that on certain mornings of low light, in certain seasons or turns of weather, Dad saw the mill in that other way, the mill as a living being, a bestower of pride and bounty, real as a father: benevolent, trustworthy, unfailingly present.

  His shift in the woodyard usually started in the scaler’s office, where he assembled the day’s crews, gave the day’s first orders, maybe told the day’s first joke. He had crews in the yard who loaded and unloaded, and a yard crew inside, too, charged with feeding logs to the barking drum and the chipper. Outside, the wood sat in named piles. Number ten: peeled spruce. Number nine: rough hardwood, still barked. There was a pile called Bay City, named for the make of the fixed conveyor its logs would be loaded into. Dad had four, five, six crews sometimes to keep track of, new men to train, a large physical area to monitor; sometimes he drove his distances in his Pontiac (or, during his final months, in his new Chrysler) if a man had to, say, scale a delivery at the lower gate.

  I imagine him as a calm-natured border collie, patiently herding all day, counting heads. When he caught a new man sneaking back over the footbridge after drinking away most of his maiden shift, Dad gave him another chance. Men got second chances, thirds. If he had a temper, we kids never saw it. When he did let someone go—even border collies have an end to their tether—he did plenty of heavy brooding. It hurt his heart to let a man go, because these years were the ones the survivors would later call the Good Old Days of the Oxford, a time when you had no desire to work anyplace else, and no reason to think you’d ever have to.

  Mum wondered later whether those heedless men hastened his end; heedless men, and long hours, and poisons that found a way into his big pumping heart. Sulphur dioxide. Calcium bisulphate. Hydrogen sulphide. Methyl mercaptan. Dimethyl sulphide. “The man lived in that place,” she often said, which meant that he’d also died in that place, bit by bit, no matter how much joy he took from the work.

  The woodyard of Dad’s foreman years was a shrine to automation, with cranes and loaders and conveyers moving in a mechanized dance of progress. But much of the labor was still manual and Dad didn’t mind it. If a crew went short a man, Dad was the one who stepped in, shouting, “Two doors . . . one door . . . half a door . . .” at the boxcar operator lining up with the conveyor. It was Dad who might take the big hook and start scooping logs straight from the car. This was the first stage of papermaking, and Dad meant to get it right.

  The assistant foreman was a hale young man they called Bunny. Bunny and Red: They were friends. Bunny worked with Dad for eight years, until that cool April morning when word came down from the gate.

  It’s nearly eight and Red’s not in.

  Red’s not in? Every man within earshot knows: something deadly wrong.

  They assemble in the scaler’s office but nobody seems to know what to do. The supervisor, whose former job is the one Dad has now, calls around to different parts of the mill. Anyone seen Red?

  Where the hell is Red?

  They confer some more, as the trucks idle in the yard.

  “Well, somebody should go up there. Find out what’s wrong.”

  “Worthley Avenue. The Norkus block, right?”

  “Third floor.”

  The supervisor sends his son, Jim, a truck foreman. If Jim came to our door I don’t remember, but somebody told him something, for he’s back in fifteen minutes with news.

  At first nobody says anything. Then everybody at once:

  “Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  “Just like that.”

  “He’s got them little girls.”

  “His wife—”

  “Oh, Christ. Somebody go tell his boy. He works in the pipers. Did somebody tell his boy?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “How old was he? Fifty-what? Somethin’ like that?”

  Dad was nobody’s drinking buddy, nobody’s card partner, nobody’s godfather or surrogate uncle or bowling-team captain. When he wasn’t in the mill, he was home with us. His friendships, executed entirely inside the mill gates, spanned years, decades. They were real.

  “Oh, goddammit. Goddammit. Red gone.”

  “I can’t believe it. I gotta sit down.”

  “And Jack, too. Somebody tell Jack Mooney. They came here together from the Island.”

  “I’m gonna tell you, I can’t believe it. I gotta sit down.”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t it just make you—? Goddamn, ain’t it a thing?”

  “It’s a thing. A fearsome goddamn thing.”

  But they have work to do. The trucks are lining up, the boxcar tracks hum like a summons. The conveyor makes its gimme-gimme groans. Is it worse to lose a coworker when your work involves such size, such scale, when it feeds and floats two towns?

  Today is Thursday, last Thursday of the month. At day’s end Dad’s men will collect their paper and take it home to their own kids, who will draw upon it picture after picture of their lively, humming town.

  I never thought to ask: Who replaced him? I hope it was Bunny, to whom Dad was an old reliable—twenty years older, a man who didn’t dog Bunny’s steps or doubt Bunny’s decisions. Bunny had to get back to work that morning with everybody else; he had to stop himself a dozen times that day, squint into the sun pouring into the woodyard, and say, “I can’t believe it.” With contract time looming, there was a bit of unease in the air, and now this. He had to attend the wake on Friday, and then the funeral on Saturday, and then go back to work for the next twenty-five years without Red, years in which things happened to the good old Oxford that, Bunny knew, woulda broke Red’s heart clean in half.

  7. Three Vanillas

  ONE OMINOUS NIGHT, my mystery book begins, a titian-haired sleuth received a very ominous message. I write in secret—top secret—on Dad’s paper, heaving in with the gusto of Carolyn Keene, whom I imagine as a Jo March type: long dress, quill pen. I have no idea that in real life Carolyn Keene is a committee of work-for-hires, a literary assembly line, the writing equivalent of a paper mill.

  “What are you doing?” Cathy asks.

  I snatch the paper away. “Nothing.” The Mystery of the Missing Man is mine alone, an inexplicable balm, the slow-dancing B-side to my other waking hours.

  “Let me see.”

  “No.

  “Gimme that!”

  “No! It’s none of your business!”

  Yes it is no it isn’t yes it is!

  Mum calls out from our bed: “Are you two looking to get us evicted?”

  We’ve made it through the Fourth of July. First, too many Dadless days to count; then too many weeks; now I’m counting by months. Two going on three.

  I’d rather be at the Vaillancourts, where the landlords are nearly invisible and I’ve been thoroughly absorbed into the family routines, which are rulish but not Norkusy. No shoes indoors, dear. No food away from the table, hon. No animals in the house, please.

  Mr. Vaillancourt pats my head. He looks me in the eye. He calls me dear. Mrs. Vaillancourt pats my head. She looks me in the eye. She calls me dear. They ask, How’s your mother? They always ask, How’s your mother?

  Good, thank you. She’s very good.

  I don’t say, She sleeps a lot.

  I don’t say, In our bed.

  I don’t say, If Anne left I think we would die.

  I don’t say, I’m afraid my mother might be shrinking.

  I don’t say, She does everything the same but she’s not here.

  I don’t say, Sometimes I pretend I live here with you.

  I don’t ask Mr. and Mrs. Vaillancourt, who have brightened my days like an apology from heaven: Why did God forget the rest of my family?

  Mum wants to know: What’s it like over there? No shoes, really? Even in summer? It’s as if with Dad gone she’s lost her knack for mothering and is featuring how to get it back without having to leave home. I deliver stagy rep
orts in the style of Dad’s old PEI neighbor Mrs. McCarn, clearing our kitchen counter of bread wrappers to replicate Denise’s mother’s pristine kitchen, which, like ours, must be endlessly swabbed against the myriad assaults of children. Mum nods and squints, taking mental notes, intensely interested in how this other, mother-father Catholic family operates. She’s grown fond of Denise, a dimpled child with large, trusting eyes and impeccable manners, to whom our household is a revelation of broken rules: cupboards unlatched, the TV on whenever we want, cats parked on tables and chairs, a talking bird lolloping from room to room and landing on mirrors and bedposts and our own heads. Mum takes in only small breaths of comfort in these suffocating weeks, and one of these comforts is Denise, who makes no secret of her wonderment.

  But lately, as I head to the Vaillancourts’ at afternoon shift change—the better to catch a father coming home in his dusty clothes—Mum says, Why don’t you stay here? Softly, not sternly. Stay here, she says. My insides open to a flood of love and I stay.

  Today it’s raining anyway, a steady pelting. I fill pages and pages, working on a “setup” scene, undiscouraged. Sometimes I depart from the story to write a single word over and over, a discipline Sister Ernestine had insisted on, the better to practice our spelling and penmanship. Certain words become little obsessions, containing not only meaning and sound but an irresistible physical loveliness. I like shapely words like coop or loop or good, all those connected circles. In one of Anne’s books I find the name Oona, a word I write twenty-six times: thirteen times down one side of the page, thirteen times down the other. Words like tatter or letter or kettle resemble forest ridges in miniature, sudden peaks of l’s and t’s jutting up from a horizon of e’s and a’s and o’s. Words like ominous or sneer or simmer, their letters all the same size, look like bridges between spiky words like the or but. What satisfaction, to know how to read, to write, to spell these words; to admire them, to pronounce them, to define them; to arrange and rearrange them; to commit them to a sheet of paper made to last.