Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (11 page)

When I got home, she was waiting for me, the bottom sheet in her hands. She didn’t want to see the 100 percent I’d gotten on the arithmetic test or the A+ on the English paper that I’d labored over for three nights though usually that’s the only part of my schooling she was interested in.

“So, you’re a woman now,” she said abruptly, holding up the telltale sheet, which to my eyes was white as snow, white as the name she called me.

“I’m thirteen. Almost. That’s hardly a grown woman.”

But it was merely her way of letting me know that
she
knew. And my snappish answer, usually bitten off before I ever dared speak it aloud, let her know all.

“On Sunday you’ll come to church with me.” She didn’t touch me. She hadn’t touched me since I’d come home from my birthday celebration wearing the caul around my neck. But there are subtler ways to practice abuse. “May’s the perfect time to celebrate.”

Perfect time for what
? I wondered.
Celebrate what?
But I didn’t ask. Instead, looking down at the ground, I asked, “Which church?”

I tried to speak casually, as if the question didn’t matter, but she’d guessed in a moment. Smiling that serpent smile, she waited for me to look up and notice, and only then turned away.

It should have been a warning. It certainly was a sign. But I didn’t recognize it until later. Much later.

 

 

Stepmama’s church was far enough away that we had to drive to get there. It was rare that I was allowed in her car. I’d been in it only twice in my life, once when I’d had a toothache so bad my cheek swelled up to twice its size and I had to be taken to the dentist out in Cowan, fourteen miles away; once when I’d had a tonsillitis attack that was so bad, Stepmama took me to the hospital in Richwood, over an hour on the twisting road.

If I’d been looking for signs, the weather was bright and the sky still shining, the color of apricots. The roads were clear as we made our way up the mountain. It was warm enough that we had the windows down. Anyone watching us might have thought they were seeing a girl and her mother driving off into the evening in companionable silence. A girl dressed in a modest long skirt, her mother with a face scrubbed clean of lipstick and powder and a navy blue scarf covering her hair. I thought it a peculiar way to dress for church. Cousin Nancy and her friends always wore their finest. But there we were, in the dowdiest of clothing, and Stepmama was looking decidedly unlike herself.

Well, at least the silence was real.

The night birds were already singing. One had a high-pitched squeak that sounded like a door that needed oiling:
Aek-aek, aek-aek.
And then the whip-poor-wills started up. I tried to pretend they were angels following me, just in case, but it was just the ordinary kind of birdsong you hear on a spring night.

Soon enough, I knew, the sky would be full of stars. Sometimes on the mountain, they seemed close enough to touch.

When we rounded the hairpin turn going out of town, the trees closed in overhead like curtains, and cold air suddenly rushed in through the open windows.

“Close your window tight,” Stepmama said. It was to be the only thing she said to me until we reached the church.

 

 

We drove for maybe a half hour more along the curving road, then suddenly turned off the blacktop onto a country lane. Another few hundred yards and I saw an old building backed up against the tall, dark trees. Once upon a time it had probably been somebody’s house, but now it had a plywood steeple tacked up over the second floor, the top of it reaching above the roof like a hand signaling for help.

There was something carved over the front door. As we got closer, I could read it:
With Signs Holy Church.

I said the words out loud, then turned to Stepmama. “What does that mean?” But she didn’t answer.

We drove nearly up to the church door, and I was afraid we were going to drive right in, but at the last moment she turned the wheel sharply and landed us up on the grass. There were about a dozen dark-colored pickups parked close by.

Only one man was outside the church, standing by the front door. He was sucking hard on a cigarette as if to get it all smoked down before the service began. When he saw Stepmama, he let some of the smoke drift back out through his nose, suggesting a banked fire.

“We’re here,” said Stepmama to me.

I didn’t say, “Obviously.” Stepmama never said anything obvious. There had to be a reason that she told me.
Maybe an emphasis,
I thought. Like underlining something in an essay, which my teacher said was one way of letting the reader know you really mean something.

We got out of the car and walked to the door.

“Evening, Miz Morton,” the smoking man said. “Things are about to start. Reverend Fred has some new—”

Stepmama stopped him with a hard glance.

“Some news,” the man said, flicking away the cigarette. I watched as its little red light fell into the short grass like a shooting star. “He has some news.”

I didn’t think that was what he meant to say, but like Papa, he was under Stepmama’s charm.

Now I could hear singing through the closed door. It was nothing like the singing in Cousin Nancy’s church, which is quiet and often off-key. This was a rollicking, hand-clapping version of the old union song “We Shall Not Be Moved.” I could feel the beat of it beneath my breastbone.

Suddenly touched by the song, I began humming along.

“Enough,” Stepmama warned, hand raised.

Even though I knew she wouldn’t hit me—not while I was wearing the caul, and not in front of this man—I stopped humming.

She pushed through the door and we went in.

I was used to the beauty of Cousin Nancy’s church with its simple pews and the single lovely stained glass window. Even the plain Baptist church I remembered going to with Papa—long before Stepmama came into our house and our lives—even that church was pretty compared to this. And the one time Mama had taken me into the abandoned church on the mountain, it was peaceful; the very stones seemed to breathe.

But here in With Signs Holy Church the main room was no more than two or three rooms of the old house knocked together, the walls separating them having been removed. I could still see where the old walls had been. The low ceiling made me feel pushed down, not lifted up as I did with the high vaulting of Cousin Nancy’s church. Besides, I could see where the paint was peeling off. The curtainless windows were closed against the cold of the night. In fact, several of them had been painted over with black paint.

There was little in the church sanctuary but three rows of wooden benches, a long table at the front, and a stove in a corner, already lit. It’s not for nothing the mountain is nicknamed “Freeze Your Heart Mountain” and “the Ice Maiden.” That stove was pumping out a stream of heat. A stack of cordwood lay right beside it and every now and then, one of the men would slip another log in.

On the walls were cutout magazine pictures of Jesus with his hands on the heads of different small children, all of them white, ragged, and adoring. Also three handmade quilted banners hung from the ceiling by ropes. One said:
Jesus Saves.
The second proclaimed:
Welcome to With Signs Holy Church.
The third stated simply:
Mark 16:16–18.
I was pretty sure that last referred to the Bible, but as to what verse I had no idea.

In one corner of the hall stood a knot of women, all of them maybe Stepmama’s age or a bit older. They wore print dresses that came down well below their knees. The women chattered together though not in a prayerful way. More like crows cawing.

In another corner several men in overalls were huddled, talking in hushed tones, their hands making strange signs in the air.

Just then, four men marched in from a door at the back of the sanctuary, carrying wooden boxes they set down on the table in front of the benches. The boxes all had sturdy tops.

There was no one my age at all in the church, though several boys who looked like they were already out of high school stood together in the far back, jawing. And one girl who might have been anywhere from fifteen to twenty, heavily pregnant, was a row behind us, pointedly not looking at any of the boys. Of course in those days, it wasn’t unusual for mountain girls as young as fourteen to get married. My own mama had me when she was barely sixteen and she and Papa had been married for over a year at that point.

Every now and then, the boys looked over at Stepmama, and the tallest, blondest one nodded at her. He was handsome in a heavy-lidded way, his hair combed straight back to show off his broad forehead, which served to emphasize his eyes and those heavy lids. He tried to act as if he didn’t know he was being watched, but of course the satisfied half smile gave him away.

Stepmama nodded back at him with one hand raised, and with the other, she pushed me toward the front of the room.

I could only wonder at this church and these people. However did Stepmama find it in the first place, and what possibly kept her coming back?

It was all terribly strange.

And about to get stranger.

STEPMAMA REMEMBERS

N
ow we come to the moment that my plan unfolded. I had waited with the exquisite patience of the serpent. Snow would either accept me and the Craft, accept that I would take seven years from her life in exchange for knowledge, or she would die—but not at my hand. Her father would slip away in sorrow. The land would then become mine by marriage right, with no shares to any other person alive. The dead have no rights in this country.

And with that money, I would find some other young person just on the cusp of adulthood. I was still a young woman myself. There was no rush yet. Master had made many servants of the Craft before me. I would make many in my turn.

And hadn’t I earned my widow’s portion these past few years, stuck out in this forsaken mountain town, tied to a man whose silent fight against my potions has all but maddened me; his daughter’s small, insignificant rebellions only proving an irritation.

The mirror has promised me everything I asked for and more. Or at least it seemed that way:

Days, weeks had gone by. I wondered if I had misread the answer.

But when I found the With Signs church, everything came together. Everything I wanted, I found in this one dismal place: fear and hope, rage and renewal, poison and antidote.

The boy teetering on manhood is my linchpin.

My stepdaughter just entering womanhood brims with magic and years.

I tremble in anticipation. The mirror has made promises. I will work to make them come true.

The serpents are to hand.

The serpents are to hand.

Hush—the charm’s wound up.

MARK 16 : 16–18

I
didn’t know why, but even in that hot room, I was shivering and on the edge of my seat as the preacher and two of the other men motioned everyone to sit. The preacher’s two help-I ers drew up chairs from somewhere and sat on either side of the table where the wooden boxes had been set.

The man on the right had hair the color of a night sky, and the little black hairs on his well-scraped chin had already started coming through again, like a shadow on his otherwise unremarkable face. The man on the left was his exact opposite, one of those white blonds we have throughout the county, his cheeks reddening noticeably in the heat of the room.

Then the preacher came around in front of the table, Bible in hand. He was a thin man with a long face, like a vulture’s, and black, watery eyes. He nodded right and left at the members of his congregation but didn’t say a word. There was something compelling about him, something that his congregation might have called holiness, but what looked to me more like hunger.

The preacher was waiting, I think, till everybody was focused directly on him. Then, without warning, he suddenly turned and pounded his fist on the table, which set up a strange racket from the boxes. I must have been the only one surprised, because no one else jumped at the noise. I gave a little hiccupy shudder that threatened to turn into full-blown shakes.

Stepmama’s hand reached out for mine. Not to comfort, but to silence me.

“Be silent, child,” she hissed, “and be ready to learn.”

I turned to her. “Learn what?”

She smiled and I bent my head under that uncomfortable grimace. Her voice came hissing again toward me. “The Craft,” she said.

“What craft? Knitting? Needlework?”
And why,
I thought,
would I learn it here in this strange church?

She snatched her hand from mine. “Stupid girl. The Craft that shapes the world.”

I couldn’t think what she meant and shook my head.

“It starts here. Open yourself to it.”

I couldn’t speak but shook my head again.

“Stupid. Child.” Then she leaned forward and watched, totally transfixed, as the preacher took a little hop-step toward us holding his Bible in one hand; his face was full of a kind of happiness and yet sad, too.

The preacher stared at the congregation, saying, “There is death in those boxes. But life as well. As it was promised to us. If we believe. If we are strong enough to believe.” He opened the Bible and thrust his finger down at a passage. “Mark chapter 16, verses 16 to 18,” he said.

Mark chapter 16, verses 16 to 18.
I sure wished I knew what those verses were about.

A soft rattle of
amens
sounded all around me. I said
amen,
too. Just in case.

A woman behind me began crying out, “Lord, God . . .” And then what followed was a long line of nonsense words, or foreign words, sounding like “La-la-lal-bam-balling-ing-star-randle” and so forth. Gibberish. I started to turn around to look at her, but Stepmama grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back.