South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [17]
“Damn good.” Mary took the spoon back. “I sell out every year, got people asking after it’s gone, but now they want to get rid of me.”
“Who does?”
“Folks at the grocery. They don’t like me peddling my stuff. Cuts into their trade.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t believe me but it’s true. Gladys tell you they cut me off my credit?”
Madeline nodded.
“They don’t want my fish no more, either. I been supplying that grocery with all I could get for fifty years. Smoked, fresh, you name it. Now they don’t want it. Don’t want the fish or the syrup or the berries I get in the summer. It ain’t hygienic, they said, and I’m not licensed. Damn right I’m not licensed, I never had to be. Says right on my deed I got the right to farm my property, I can show you. They don’t want me to set Up and sell it myself, either, no more than they do the fruit man, and he’s been coming here since sixty-six. Bah.” She made a gesture of disgust and changed the subject.
It was good to have company. Mary showed Madeline all over her place that afternoon—the sugar shack and maple grove, the smokehouse, the root cellar and woodshed, the pump in the yard for water and further back the outhouse, the little old camping trailer she’d bought for a good deal years ago now but then never done anything with. “This here was my house,” she told Madeline, waving at a burned-out structure.
“Oh—what happened?”
“Chimney fire. Been meaning to rebuild. But Higley give me them old tool cribs and I’m okay there.”
“When did it happen?”
“Been fifteen years ago or so now, I guess. Time gets by.”
Madeline nodded.
They walked across the yard to a small barn and pasture in which stood one cow and a handful of sheep. “I got forty acres,” Mary said. “I cut my wood from the property, got all the heat you could ask for. Well, folks help me now I’ve got older, but still, this place keeps me going. I got all I need.”
Mary felt compelled somehow to show Madeline everything—her old truck stowed in its tiny shed, the earrings she made of beads and porcupine quills, the boxes of paperbacks people brought her out to read, the wool she had clipped from the sheep and not yet spun into yarn. She even showed Madeline the family plaid, for she was a Scotswoman, the great-great-granddaughter of one of the earliest white settlers in the Upper Peninsula, or the U.P. as everyone in Michigan called it.
“Was this his place then?” Madeline asked and Mary frowned with impatience—of course it wasn’t!—forgetting in a way that Madeline hadn’t grown Up here and had no reason to know one way or the other.
“I bought it myself, years ago. Saved my money hard to get it. Always did like it Up here near the big lake. I was born down in Crosscut. My mother run a hotel there when I was young.” Same as Glad and Butte’s ma and dad did here, she had been about to say, but got distracted by the look on Madeline’s face.
“I was there today, in Crosscut. I saw my grandfather’s house. It was pretty awful.”
Pretty nice, is what Mary would’ve said. Gas heat, indoor toilet, two bedrooms Upstairs if she recalled right, a good many closets and cupboards, which is something she felt the lack of. But of course to this girl it mightn’t look like much. “I know the house. I knew Joe.”
Madeline looked startled, alarmed even. “You did?”
“Of course I did. He played a mean fiddle. Always played at the fiddle jamboree they hold in Crosscut every summer, you should have heard him.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yup. Nobody could play ‘Sally Barton’ like your granddad.”
Madeline nodded, seeming speechless.
“You play?”
“What? Me? Oh, no. I don’t play anything.”
“I’ll bet you can draw.”
“What?”
“Joe was a dab hand at drawing. Used to do these little cartoons at the jamboree. You paid him a dollar, he give you a drawing of yourself. Did it in about two minutes flat, I never saw the like.”
“Oh,” Madeline said, looking shaken. Mary would’ve bet the farm the girl was good with a drawing pencil.
“You look