A Wedding on the Banks by Cathie Pelletier

Author:Cathie Pelletier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

BABY JESUS RETURNS TO MATTAGASH: LET THE GAMES BEGIN

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,

Everywhere you go…”

—sung by Bing Crosby

The last week of April turned into a cold one, with the ground reluctant to shake loose the embedded icy veins. Then, to no one’s surprise, a heavy wind decided to get involved. The last week of April was not heralding wedding weather, by any means, and the fact that Amy Joy Lawler was having hers on May first suggested a hurriedness to the entire town that left it purring with gossip. Both clans of Giffords had passed the notion that something was afoul around the supper table since they first heard of the quick wedding. It did not occur to anyone in town that Amy Joy’s head was in a rush for the wedding, not her belly.

It was not wedding weather that followed the Gifford kids out to the school bus on the last Friday of April. Cold still clung to the mammoth cakes of ice that lay like white Roman walls along the Mattagash River bank. Snow still peeked out from beneath the trees at the edge of the woods, and during the nights, the dead grass in the fields crusted with frost so that the morning sun careened off it in glittering bounces.

The last Friday of April found a school bus full of rambunctious children, with MATTAGASH CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL DISTRICT #12 on its side, winding its way along the main road, dropping off all the modern descendants of the old loyalist settlers. That daily bus ride home from school had been a ride of terror for everyone on board until Fred, the driver, grabbed Little Pee and Little Vinal and knocked their heads together. He then assured them that if they so much as breathed loudly on his bus again, they would become acquainted with the two-by-four he had stashed beneath the driver’s seat.

“If you two don’t want the Watertown mortician visiting your mothers,” Fred had said, “you’d better sew up them lips.”

Although Little Pee and Little Vinal had quieted during rides, Fridays always contained an excitement that stirred up the whole busload. Freedom from school, and the elusive joy that creeps in as the weekend is about to roll around, precipitated a kind of People’s Revolution on board. When the lumbering school bus pulled to a halt in the heart of Giffordtown that Friday, all the school-age Giffords except for Little Vinal, who was enjoying the final days of his suspension, raced down the steps and out into the chilly air wafting up from the river. Vera’s kids went left, across the road to their house, and Goldie’s climbed the hill as the bus pulled away in a cloud of exhaust. Among the mountaineers was Miltie, Goldie’s baby, who had been so congested during the notorious cough season that Goldie insisted he wear his mittens even before April turned cold on them. Preferring to tough the nippiness, as the big kids did, Miltie perpetually lost his mittens.

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