A Wedding on the Banks Read Online Free PDF Page B

attention, even if it came in the form of a slap, the Gifford progeny were happy to oblige. At school, one of Goldie’s tripped one of Vera’s on the playground. One of Vera’s pulled a hank of hair from the head of one of Goldie’s on the school bus. One tore up another’s homework. Mittens were stolen. Swear words filled the air like old medieval curses. But those first weeks of sheer holiday rage cooled a bit when 1969 brought in the coldest February to settle down on northern Maine in a hundred years. It’s difficult to stand outside, the Gifford first cousins soon realized, and cuss someone out when your nose is frostbitten.
    But not even a windchill factor of sixty below could assuage the painful need Vera had to wrap her fingers around her sister-in-law’s neck. By the time spring curled, doglike, about the crooked doorjambs, the peeling paint flecks, the weathered outhouses, the mud-filled driveways, Vera was still seething. Had Goldie found the time to plant a row of daffodils in front of the unsightly tires, Vera would’ve taken Vinal’s old .44 rifle and blown the heads off every one of them.
    Diplomats that they were, the two Gifford patriarchs managed to stay untouched and unruffled by what they considered female hysteria. A pile of new batteries might be a different story, but only women could get so emotional over glass bulbs that did little more than rocket electricity bills. So, when April came around with the ancient sound of water dripping from eaves, of car tires finally touching tarred roads, of rips rattling again in the Mattagash River, Pike Gifford lay on the porch sofa and listened to it all. God was in his heaven at times like this, when neither he nor Vinal was in jail. What more could a man crave than a comely spring, a little bit of freedom, and a daily diet of soap operas? And he could almost smell the disability check already in the mail, already on its sweet journey from Augusta to Mattagash. Pike lifted his head and gazed down to the bottom of the hill for a sign of his older brother Vinal. His eye caught the magnificent flash of hubcaps simmering in the warm sun, like a vein of silver dug up from all those early boomtowns he’d seen in westerns. He shifted himself onto his side and smiled when he heard in his pocket the soft sweet rattle of quarters and dimes and nickels that had, just the day before, been in a container for “Jerry’s Kids” at Craft’s Filling Station. He had also gotten some gossip from Craft’s, gossip that wedding bells would be ringing in the valley soon. Wedding bells, like sirens, meant excitement. From his hilltop view of Giffordtown, Pike knew that all was right with the world.

SPRING SLAPS PORTLAND IN THE FACE: THE IVYS CLING TO THE FUNERAL HOME
    â€œI’ve been so depressed lately that if it wasn’t for my little packet of birth control pills, I wouldn’t even know what day it is.”
    â€”Thelma Ivy, to “Dear Abby,” one of thirty-four letters written from January 1969 to April 1969
    Portland, Maine, like a favored heir and through some natural sort of special dispensation, had received its glorious spring a few weeks earlier. The ocean salt and sea breeze served to hasten winter into a quiet retreat, and already folks were tiring of the canary-yellow daffodils in their last death throes along the neat lawns and walks. Soon the rigors of summer mowings and prunings would replace all romantic notions of April, would push them back into the gray attics of people’s minds until they were needed again, when the first daffodils birthed themselves once more out of a thawing earth.
    At one particular yard, mowed and pruned to perfection, sprawled the brick Ivy Funeral Home, a structure more closely resembling an educational institution than a mortuary. Vines toe-hold their way across the gray bricks. Sagging, intelligent elms lolled on each side of the entrance, and shapely hedges