Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (7 page)

Papa was just distant. And increasingly strange.

But perhaps,
my traitor’s mind thought,
no stranger than he was after Mama died.
At least now he stayed home instead of running off to the churchyard every evening. At least now I could sit on his lap and he didn’t throw me off.

Sometimes Stepmama led him by the hand out into the herb garden and sat him down on the wooden bench. Then she’d bend over and whisper in his ear as if she was aiming to have a conversation only with him. I could see her mouth moving as I sat by the kitchen window doing my homework. But what she whispered to him, I didn’t know. And didn’t dare ask. He rarely answered her; the few times he did, she would shake her head and her face got puckered like an old peach and her beauty fell away so that even I could see she was a different woman from what she ordinarily showed the world.

 

 

I should have relaxed, what with Stepmama taking care of Papa and her spending time talking to me and showing me how to grind things in her big mortar—nuts, herbs, flowers. Giving me hugs each time I did a good job. Calling me a beauty and a smart child.

However, little things made me wary. For instance, Papa stopped taking care of himself. His beard grew out long and scratchy, and I didn’t want to sit on his lap anymore, or even rub his head, or come close, because he also began to smell. He smelled of unwashed bed linen and pee. He smelled musty, like a closet that’s never been aired out. He smelled like the old stuffed bear at the hotel in Addison, the one that stands on its hind legs eight feet tall in the front greeting hall.

When Papa’s hair began to flop down across his face, Stepmama herself cut it short with a fierce-looking pair of silver shears she’d brought with her. She put a bowl over the top of Papa’s head to help shape the haircut, though she left his beard as it was, long and flecked with gray. And then for weeks he didn’t look like Papa till the hair on his head grew back again. By then he was as shaggy as an old beggar man.

Old. Beggar man.

Old
.

Maybe Stepmama was right. Papa was growing old even as we watched. And there’s not much a person can do about that.

Strangely, Stepmama didn’t throw away the hair she cut from Papa’s head. I watched her stick it in her apron pocket, and then later on saw it on her mirror table in a little blue bowl the color of a robin’s egg when I went in to get her bed linen for washing and airing. I was only in her room because she was out hanging up shirts on the line, which was too high for me to reach, and grumbling about it like always though she could have just tied the line a little bit lower down. I didn’t tell her that. She’d sent me in to fetch the sheets and truth to tell, I was glad to go into her room. It drew me in as if I’d been pulled toward it with a magnet. We’d studied magnets in school that past year in science.

I stared at the little bowl and tried to think why anyone would keep Papa’s hair.

Maybe,
I thought,
it’s because she loves him so much she can’t bear to be parted from even the smallest part of him.
I’d already seen how Papa was when Mama passed away. Grown-ups just acted different than kids. Different in unfathomable ways. Crazy ways. Just like they were tetched in the head. So, keeping someone’s hair in a bowl was just another mad adult thing to do.

I put my finger into the bowl and stirred the hair around. There was a buzzing sound in the room as if bees had gotten in, and I suddenly got a short, sharp shock that ran up my finger, up my arm, up to the roots of my own hair.

I turned and ran out of there screaming without collecting the sheets and once I stopped hollering, I had to tell Stepmama what had happened.

She grabbed me by both arms and instead of giving me a hug and telling me there was nothing wrong and I was just fine said, “If you cannot go into my room without touching things, Snow, then you shall not be allowed to go into the room at all.”

And for a year I didn’t.

Wouldn’t.

Couldn’t.

My heart wouldn’t let me. Nor would my legs.

When people came to call—it was a very small town after all and everyone wanted to meet the new woman if only to talk about her when they’d left—Stepmama would go over to Papa and whisper something in his ear. Then Papa would suddenly leap up and about, almost laughingly so, dancing and joking and calling Stepmama by a dozen different names like “Honey” and “Sweetsop,” and once even by my dead mama’s name, Ada Mae. Though right after they left, he’d flop back in the chair, dreaming through the rest of the day.

Tetched, the both of them, I tell you.

 

 

Cousin Nancy didn’t remark on Papa’s condition directly to me, but some of the ladies in church did when she brought me to Christmas service, the one time that year Stepmama couldn’t find an excuse for me to stay home.

“Well, I
never
. . . ,” Miss Caroline said over my head, her one good eye all but sparking fire. “That man was so animated, why, it’s like he’d been drinking all day long, though I thought he was teetotal. Mourning can sometimes take a man that way.”

“Lem is not teetotal, though he rarely drinks,” Cousin Nancy told her. “And certainly not to excess. And he’s no longer mourning, he’s married.”

“Well, he surely was
animated,
” Miss Caroline repeated, the fire in her good eye now banked.

And her sister, Miss Amelia, added, “Itchy, I’d have said.” She pursed her lips.

“Itchy and odd,” Miss Caroline shot back.

“No odder than before, going up that mountain all the time and . . .”

And from the other side, Miss Mae Morton, Papa’s old cousin, with white hair that was so patchy her pink scalp showed through in places, looked straight at me. She lifted her finger, it all crooked from the arthritis, and said warningly, “Little pitchers . . .”

I knew what that meant. “Little pitchers have big ears.” Meaning me. Meaning I would probably report back to Stepmama every word I heard. Only I wouldn’t, though how were they to know?

At that warning, they all four sat straight-backed in the pew and began to sing “Away in a Manger” at the top of their lungs and all on different but interesting keys.

Cousin Nancy held tight to my hand, her face flushed and her hand much too warm around mine. I suppose I’d become accustomed to Stepmama’s cold hands by then.

I kept thinking about how warm Cousin Nancy seemed as the priest droned on and on in his Christmas sermon, talking about heresies and Pharisees and the like, none of which I quite understood except that they all happened a long time ago. All the while, Cousin Nancy was like a regular furnace. I felt almost burned up sitting beside her.

Then, when the congregation began to sing, I realized I’d forgotten the words of most of the carols. My neighbors seemed sudden strangers. All I had was Stepmama now. I shuddered and felt cold. Cold was comfortable. Cold was common. Cold was what I’d become used to.

Afterward, Cousin Nancy delivered me home from church, lifting me over the heavy snow plowed against the curb. Stepmama was waiting at the door, scowling, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Been long enough,” Stepmama commented. “I’ve been
that
worried. Lemuel has been asking after her and I didn’t know what I could tell him.”

“Tell him Merry Christmas,” Cousin Nancy said, smiling sweetly, but there was tartness in her tone.

“Thank you,” Stepmama said to Cousin Nancy, as if suddenly remembering her manners. “I’m certain Snow had a good time.”

“Summer certainly did,” Cousin Nancy countered.

I remember thinking that it sounded like some kind of contest between them, their own version of the Europe War. I didn’t quite understand it then, except that it made me uncomfortable.

 

 

Once Stepmama closed the door firmly behind us, I asked why she’d said I had had a good time.

“Form,” she answered. “Give them little to complain of.
Did
you have a good time, Snow?”

Suddenly I was not sure and took a while in answering. I had to think about the day in church. About how strange everything had seemed. How overly warm Cousin Nancy had been.

“I
think
so,” I said at last.

If she heard something else in my answer, she kept it to herself, but the scowl was gone. She looked satisfied, a snake just swallowing its kill.

Remember, I was eleven. Stepmama was all I had, the only one who paid the slightest bit of attention to me every single day. I thought that made her a good person, only just someone not able to give any more than that little. That little had become enough.

For a while.

In fact, when we got inside, Papa didn’t look a bit anxious. He was sitting in his chair, staring at the wall, though he could just as easily been on a far shore gazing at a horizon he never expected to reach. His face, always long and a bit mournful-looking even when he’d been young and happy, seemed extra long now. Bony. He stared out of eyes that looked encased in bone.

Old,
I thought, and reached out for Stepmama’s hand.

PAPA SINGS

A
week or two later, I woke in the middle of the night and heard a strange sound, like a buzzing or humming. I tiptoed to my door and pulled it open. It hardly creaked at all.

 

 

A

The sound was coming from the living room and when I got halfway down the hall, I realized it was Papa. He was half singing, half chanting, and little of it made sense.

“I am the Green Man, the growing man, my mouth full of leaves,” he said. “I wake in the spring, am reaped in the fall, slumber all winter dreaming of green.” And then he sang out, his voice clear as in the past,

I was about to go in when I heard Stepmama say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Lemuel, stop that caterwauling!”

And then the sound of a slap, and Papa stopped.

Did I run in to protest? Or run back to my room in fear? I know what Molly Whuppie would have done. What Gretel would have done. What Janet who loved Tam Lin would have done. But I just stood there stock-still, listening.

Papa began again but in a softer voice, little above a whisper:

“I curl like a fiddlehead, sprout like a ramp, rise tall as corn. How green I am. Green as grass, as leaf, as stem. All, all green.”

And then he sang:

Another loud slap and then Stepmama must have gone back into their bedroom because I heard the door slam.

Only then did I tiptoe into the living room. And there was Papa in front of a blazing fire, dressed only in his nightshirt, dancing.

“Papa?” I whispered. “Are you all right?”

He turned around and stared at me, through me, and said quite clearly, “Green. That’s it. Green. I am the Green Man, the growing man, my mouth full of vines and leaves. I wake in the spring, am reaped in the fall, slumber all winter dreaming of green.”

And then he sank down onto the hearth and fell fast asleep.

I couldn’t move him, so I just lay down by his side and—listening to his soft snores—finally fell asleep myself.

 

 

Stepmama must have been worried about Papa, though, for the very next day she sent for Doc McCorry, a scruffy old man with trembling hands, near to retirement.

Doc McCorry scratched his thinning hair and pronounced himself baffled, and after two more visits and a lot of prescribed tonics to Stepmama, he never came back.

Did I believe something bad was happening? Of course. Papa was clearly sick, fading away. Did I believe that Stepmama was the bad thing happening? Not for a moment.

MIRROR, MIRROR

T
he day of my twelfth birthday, everything changed. Cousin Nancy was to come over to take me out for my treat. Stepmama had allowed it, but only begrudgingly. I thought it was T that she distrusted Cousin Nancy’s motives. That she wanted me close. Now, I believe, she just wanted me out of the house.

Everything I’d done that week had annoyed her—the clothes not washed clean enough, soft enough, fast enough. The greens in the garden bolting with the heat and me not quick enough to bring them in. Three jars of canned apple jam exploding in the root cellar and the smell of it making her stomach turn, even after I’d mopped it all up.

And when I’d reported back to her after doing all the cleanup, she dismissed me, saying, “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet,” just as if I was an old horse. I must have given her a particularly miserable look, I was so hurt, it being my birthday and all. But she sent me to my room for sassing her, which I never did.

I grabbed up the little shard of mirror, which was all I had, and stared at myself. Who was this pinched, hungry-looking child? Maybe Stepmama was right. My face was white and pasty, my hair needed washing. There was a smudge over my right eyebrow. Anger was scribbled across my forehead. Once as bright blue as Mama’s, my eyes now seemed bleached out, like a winter sky.

Of course Stepmama was angry with me, and not just for being too slow or too fast, for sassing her. She was a handsome woman and deserved a pretty stepdaughter. And Cousin Nancy was going to feel the same. So I did something I hadn’t done in a year. Once Stepmama was off at the beauty shop, having her hair shagged and her brows plucked, I went into her bedroom though I’d long since been warned off.

A year older
—I thought—
and a year bolder,
like the girl in one of my favorite fairy tales, “Mr. Fox.” In that story the girl sneaks into Mr. Fox’s house—the strange man who’d been wooing her—where there is a saying carved over the door:
Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.
So being a little bit bold, I went right in, forgetting the rest of the story with its vats of blood and skin and bones because it’s what Cousin Nancy calls a “cautionary tale” about walking out with wicked, murdering men, something no girl in her right mind would ever do, though lots seem to do it in the fairy tales.