"Northern Forest" continued ...

Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, had told her that her grandmother had probably been dead for a few days before anyone had found her. It was the maid who stumbled upon the body, sprawled across the bed, apparent heart attack, four days’ worth of Berlin Daily Suns stacked on the doorstep. But even knowing all that, even hearing the gruesome specifics that Mary’s mother wanted to, needed to talk to someone about but couldn’t mention to her husband, couldn’t bring herself to force him to think of his own mother that way, even those details didn’t prepare Mary Beth for the way her grandmother looked at the wake. Mary Beth hated wakes, an unfortunate Catholic tradition that the Frasers happily upheld, because there was her grandmother: face and hands tan with makeup, looking like a plastic mannequin empty version of herself, long nails painted a pearled pink, clutching a wooden rosary and a creased, black leather notebook. Unrecognizable. Mary Beth and Jack knelt together in front of the casket and Mary Beth stared at her folded hands for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, trying to avoid looking up at her grandmother’s body cocooned in white satin.

Later, Mary Beth caught her mother’s elbow at the mourning meal—buffet style roast beef, herbed carrots and potatoes, salad, rolls and bottles of Sam Adams at the Country Tavern special events room—to ask about the book she’d seen.

“Mom,” Mary Beth whispered, leaning against an exposed wooden beam near the staircase, where her parents were shaking hands and murmuring thanks to sorry for your losses and we’ll miss hers and she was a great lady’s, “what was that notebook Grammy was holding?”

“Oh, it was your Grampy’s journal,” Elizabeth replied. “Uncle Bill found it in Grammy’s nightstand when they were packing up her jewelry and they thought it would be nice to bury her with it.”

“Did they read any of it?” Mary Beth had been just fifteen when her grandfather died, a quiet funny old man who Arthur had never wanted to spend much time around, always nervous and overly formal, shaking his own father’s hand until the day he was gone. Mary could count on one hand the number of times she’d been alone with either of her grandparents and had never known much about their lives before her, let alone before Arthur.

“Of course not,” Elizabeth replied, mildly horrified, as she turned back to embrace Mrs. Harrendanks from St. Teresa’s knitting circle and coo a thank you back to her I’m so sorry. Mary Beth turned from her mother back toward the room to find Jack. He stood by the buffet, laughing with her Uncle Bill: Bill’s meaty fist clutching a beer, face red from the laughter or the alcohol or the crowd. Jack’s smile still cut across his face like a wide gorge, just like in high school, his tousled brown hair ruffled against his forehead and Mary Beth smiled to see him so comfortable at a Fraser family gathering. Jack had always been closer to Bill and Mary Beth suspected it was construction that did it, men who worked with their hands understanding each other on a physical level. Jack was a framer, worked in the skeletons of future houses, and had a scar on his left hand from the place a nail gun had pierced straight through, pinning his palm to a two-by-four. Mary’d had to squirt the antiseptic fluid into the hollow wound for a week, Jack’s friends holding his shoulders down so he couldn’t thrash, roaring and wild against the pain. And Bill was a contractor, the Fraser family’s version of blue collar, who spent every day at his job site, blueprints balled in his fists and yellow hard hat teetering on his massive, balding forehead. But more and more frequently there was no job site to visit. Plenty of land up here to build on, Bill would say, thanks to the once-booming business of the pulp mill clearing out most of Berlin’s northern pine forest, but not many people left who can afford to build on it. The second half of that sentence went: since Arthur Fraser closed down the pulp mill last year but that was the part nobody said unless Bill’d been drinking.

Mary Beth watched Jack bob his head respectfully, his mouth pursed in that tense way men have when discussing serious business, as Bill’s voice lowered.

“No, it’s been a long time since Fraser Paper was that kind of company,” Bill said gravely, “the kind that cared about their workers, knew their faces and made sure they had food on their tables.” Jack shook his head and studied his feet hard. He didn’t have to ask how long or what happened, because he knew. Mary Beth knew. How long it’d been was since Arthur Fraser bought the Berlin Paper Company, ten years before Mary Beth was born, parlaying an MBA from Harvard Business into the title of youngest CEO and his own name on the sign at the gates.

“Berlin Paper used to own the pulp mill, ‘dya know that?” Bill asked, and Jack nodded politely, glancing around for his wife and Mary Beth made her way over to rescue Jack from the awkward rant he’d heard more than once before. “Yup, owned the pulp mill and paper factory and still they made that kind of effort to know their own people. But not anymore. Now it’s cutbacks and cost-effectiveness research reports and Fraser Paper, like the name mattered more than the place!” Mary Beth slid her arm through Jack’s and leaned in to kiss her uncle on his hot cheek just as he slammed his bottle down on the edge of the buffet table and swore under his breath. Mary’d seen it before. Bill would drink too much, his hometown pride mixed with what must’ve been jealousy at the brother who’d made it in the big city and come home to work his little town into shape and he’d start to bubble over. First the rant, then the bottle-slam, the quiet cursing and then,

“God DAMN it, Arthur!” Several heads snapped over to Bill then away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught judging one of the grieving sons. Others never looked up, having heard Bill’s tirade before. Arthur’s head snapped over to his younger brother and didn’t look away, his eyes narrowing, his chest moving with the deep inhale that meant you were just another burden on his already laden shoulders, as he moved towards them.

“Show some respect, William,” Arthur hissed, his hand clamped down hard on Bill’s shoulder, “this is your own mother’s funeral.”

“Respect!” Bill replied, swerving around to face his brother. “Like the respect you showed shutting down the pulp mill, putting all those folks out of work, folks just like your own father? The last tie we had to him, Art!” Bill poked his finger into his big brother’s chest, then stalked away, muttering, “the last damn thing we had left,” straight out of the room, straight down the stairs and straight out of his own mother’s mourning meal early. Arthur took another deep breath and looked up at Mary Beth, their matching grey eyes meeting for the first time since she’d set foot back in Berlin last night and gave her a curt nod, same for Jack, and went back to shaking hands with the crowd.

Mary Beth exhaled slowly, rubbing the creases between her eyebrows with one hand, willing away the headache she could feel working its way into the foreground. Jack rubbed her neck gently and leaned in to whisper,
“What was that about your grandfather?”

“I don’t know,” Mary Beth replied, glancing up at her husband, sagging slightly against his chest. And she really didn’t. Mary Beth remembered her grandfather in fragments: she remembered he wore bow ties to mass and his great, shaking laugh, belly full and spreading like syrup. She remembered his pressed blue jeans and his gnarled, scarred hands that she’d love to run her little-girl fingers over, riddled with arthritic bumps like the knots of a tree stripped of its bark. She remember his string art of the sailboat hanging over his drafting table and how he’d always microwave her a can of spaghetti-os and him holding the pencil, feet up in the recliner, filling out the weekly crossword. But she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said to her and she’d never known he had any connection to the pulp mill or Fraser Paper.

“I don’t know,” Mary Beth repeated, headache throbbing like the dull shine of fork against ceramic sink, but preoccupied now with memory. “Do you know that was his journal Grammy was holding in the coffin? Wish I could get a look in that and find out,” she murmured absent-mindedly.

Jack leaned in and kissed his wife’s forehead, sensing her tension. “Mmm, not unless you dig it up. All that’s down in the dirt, now.”