Free When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood Page B

humility,” Sister says. But she’s laughing, too. “No success without failure, children. First you have to fall flat down.”
    Hugh got up from that frozen ground and spent the next decade secretly buying all the land along the river. And lo, it came to pass: A city in the wilderness did indeed rise up, year by year, dam by dam, canal by canal, turbine by turbine, mill by mill, block by block—blocks like ours, filling with workers now coming in by the trainload.
    In they went, over the footbridges to mills flourishing on Chisholm land. “To the Rumford Falls Paper Company, which made—?”
    â€œNewsprint!”
    â€œAnd the Rumford Falls Sulphite Company?”
    â€œSulphite pulp!”
    â€œAnd the International Paper Company?”
    â€œManila, envelope paper, newsprint, and writing paper!”
    â€œAnd the Continental Paper and Bag Company?”
    â€œBags and envelopes!”
    And finally, on the land where the river made its elbow bend into Mexico, the Oxford Paper Company, Hugh’s ruby of modern papermaking, an innovation that eventually enfolded its sister mills and met what its founder rightly predicted as an exploding twentieth-century demand for books and magazines. With the modern century barely under way, our once drowsy, vacated valley had been fully remade as an industrial powerhouse of more than ten thousand lucky, multitongued, deeply grateful souls, their fortunes tied forever to a Canadian immigrant and his headlong dreams.
    â€œAnd at some point along the way,” Sister tells us, “your own fathers stepped onto a Rumford train platform and joined their number.”
    She waits for the ending to sink in, a little twist we haven’t heard before. All year Sister has told this explorer story and others, their embedded lessons accumulating thusly: Be brave. Set goals. Use your imagination.
    But today the lesson is this: We live in a town made remarkable by the work of our fathers. Today she tells this story just for me.
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    A few mornings later, Mum picks up the ringing phone as we get ready for school.
    Only two days left of our nun-dictated routine; the looming of summer, that upcoming season of free time, feels for the first time ever like a saddling weight. Too many hours to fill, and the only foreseeable balm is our big sister hearing our prayers at day’s end. How many days does summer hold? I’ve tried to count them out but they’re too abundant to hold in my head, just as the count of Dadless days has at last gotten away from me. Fifty-four days, fifty-six days, the numbers piling up too fast now, relentless and unruly. I have to count by weeks instead—nearly eight of them so far, a smaller sum that makes Dad seem a little less far away.
    â€œIs it just talk?” Mum says to someone on the line. She means the strike talk wildfiring around town: contract negotiations coming up, three unions suddenly battling for the right to rep the rank and file.
    Cathy snatches up the parakeet and swings him around by the tail, which he never seems to mind, but her laughter, and Betty’s, makes it hard to hear. “Shh,” I tell her. “Put him back. Get your skirt on.”
    â€œIt’s probably just talk,” I hear Mum say again. “A few flapjaws stirring up trouble.” Who is she talking to? Our brother? Is he worried about a strike?
    My family is collapsing like a pile of sticks because we can’t believe Dad’s gone; why wouldn’t the mill, where Dad spent so much of his time, be doing the same? Because I am nine years old and willing to believe anything, I believe Dad’s death has changed Hugh Chisholm’s mill. Its constant sighing finds me in my bed at night; in the daytime I lift my chin, avert my gaze. I can’t bear to look at it, to smell it, to hear its heavy breath. With Dad not in it, the Oxford suddenly looks like a factory.
    Mum hangs up but doesn’t look worried.