A Wedding on the Banks Read Online Free

saying,” Pike Gifford had answered, his eyes on the disappearing rear end of the nurse. “I can’t hear a thing for pain.”
    Goldie Gifford, Pike’s wife, had a better eye for the scenery around her yard than did Vera, Vinal’s wife, at the bottom of the hill. Goldie had coaxed then threatened her children to help pick up all the pop bottles and candy bar wrappers. She would try to manage it alone, if she ever found time, but she rarely did. Beseeching Pike to transport the flowering black hill of tires to a secluded spot out under the back field poplars had been for naught.
    â€œThey’re an eyesore, Pike,” she had nagged.
    â€œBeauty’s in the eye of the beholder,” Pike had answered her. “That goes for tires, too.” Of all of Hodge Conrad Gifford’s many sons, Pike, the youngest, had turned out the most poetic.
    â€œThere ain’t a sight from here to Bangor prettier than that right there,” said Pike, studying the snaky mass of tires until his eyes grew misty with appreciation. “And there’s no smell on earth like a fresh pile of rubber just thawing out from the winter,” he assured Goldie. Then, forgetting to limp in case Henley had a spy out from the insurance company, Pike trotted briskly to the tilting garage and began counting his trove of hubcaps.
    ***
    The two plots of land that Vinal and Pike owned had been given to them by the old man, Hodge Conrad Gifford. His huge acreage had been passed down through many generations, from Old Joshua, the first Gifford to settle the land in 1838. On his deathbed, Hodge Conrad Gifford divided the three-hundred-acre plot among his eight children. Four of the Gifford sons and two daughters still remained on their plots, scattered up and down the road in country-style proximity and forming what the rest of Mattagash called Giffordtown.
    Vinal Gifford had received the flat hay field plot and built his house there when he married Vera. When Pike Gifford built his house across the road from Vinal, he cleared away trees along the hill that bordered directly on the river. This would afford him the prettiest view of the water, at the spot where the river turned sharply and seemed to disappear. It would also give him an unobstructed view of the forever burgeoning homestead of his brother Vinal, only four hundred feet down the hill. Goings and comings could be monitored by both sides, which proved useful when a childhood spat between Goldie and Vera, involving who had jumped up and down on whose pencil box, grew in later years to monstrous proportions. By then, the sisters-in-law had become dread enemies. Their husbands didn’t mind this tinderbox situation; they rather encouraged it. It wouldn’t be to either man’s benefit if Goldie and Vera joined forces. “You can fight the Japs, or you can fight the Germans,” Pike often philosophized to Vinal. “But you can’t fight the Japs and the Germans.” But the tinderbox finally erupted into full flame on December 26, 1968, when the Watertown Weekly advertised the biggest sale of Christmas tree lights ever to befall the J. C. Penney Company in northern Maine. Never before had the manager seen such an overstock, and so he marked the lights down in his after-Christmas sale to pennies, to mere shadows of their former prices. Goldie’s oldest daughter, Irma, who wore thick eyeglasses, was a part-time clerk at J. C. Penney’s, and so had inside info about the sale two days before the newspaper officially announced it. Irma had come home for supper on Christmas Eve, worn to a holiday frazzle, and told her mother.
    â€œIt’ll be in the paper day after tomorrow,” Irma had said, as she blew on one of her thick lenses to clean it. So, after a busy Christmas Day, Goldie had risen before anyone’s alarm clock rang in Mattagash. She had pulled the pink sponge curlers from her hair and brushed the little blond humps into