The Snow Child: A Novel (26 page)

They worked until dusk and arrived back at the cabin well past dinnertime. Jack had lit the lanterns and was frying steaks.

“What’s all this?” Esther said. She inhaled deeply and grinned. “Something smells mighty good.”

“Can’t do much. Thought the least I could do is feed my help.” He smiled like a man at fault.

The next days were a blur of potatoes, earth, sun, and aching muscles as each row of planting went by. Jack did what he could but mostly stayed in the cabin and fixed meals. In the evenings everyone was too tired to talk. The boy nodded off at the dinner table with his chin propped up on his dirty hands. By the time night fell, Mabel was numb with fatigue. She had never understood how Jack could fall asleep in a chair without washing up, talking to her about his day, or even removing his filthy boots. Now she knew. Yet for all the sore muscles and monotony, the days of working in the fields filled her with a kind of pride she had never known. She no longer saw the cabin as rough, but was grateful at the end of the day for warm food and a bedroll on which to collapse. She didn’t notice if the dishes went unwashed or the floor unswept.

“I think we’ve done it, Jack,” Esther announced one afternoon, hands on her hips. “I know you had plans to do more this year, to get some lettuce and such planted along with the potatoes. But I was thinking, we’ve got the potatoes in the ground and we’ll see what happens.”

Jack nodded in agreement. Maybe it would be enough to get them by.

“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you two.” His voice was gravelly and genuine, but there was a dimness behind his eyes that reminded Mabel of shame. “I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you.”

Esther waved him off impatiently, and said she planned on going home that evening.

“It’s been a hoot, but I’m ready to sleep in my own bed, snoring husband and all. You’re shaping up, Jack, and I think Garrett can manage the fields. Nope—no ifs, ands, or buts about it. George and I have talked it out. Garrett works better here than he ever did at home, and our planting’s done. You can fix him a place in the barn to get him out of your hair. Then you two can have your place back to yourselves.”

It was time, yet Mabel dreaded it. Jack was a different man, unsteady and unsure. She could not forget how, during the worst of it, he had cried and begged her to leave him. And then, while he hobbled about, she had gone into the fields and worked with a new strength and surety. With Esther and Garrett gone, she and Jack would once again share a bed, and she wondered if it would be like sleeping with a stranger. Jack looked at her sadly, as if he could read her thoughts.

After dinner Esther left and Mabel showed Garrett to the barn loft. He brought his bedroll, and she overturned a wooden box for him to use as a nightstand. There she set a lantern, as well as an alarm clock and a book.

“
White Fang
, by Jack London. Have you read it before?”

“No ma’am.”

“Please, just call me Mabel. I think you’ll like this one, but if it doesn’t suit you, I’ve got dozens of others to choose from.”

She was going to warn him to be careful with the lantern, but thought better of it. He had treated her as an equal, so she would try to do the same.

“Come inside if you need anything, even if it’s just company.”

“Yes ma’am… I mean, Mabel.”

“Garrett, there was one other thing I’ve wanted to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“When you were out there trapping last winter, did you ever
see anything unusual? Tracks in the snow? Anything you couldn’t explain?”

“You mean the little girl, don’t you? I heard about her.”

“And? Did you ever see any sign of her?”

The boy gave a slow, disappointed turn of his head.

“Nothing at all? Ever?”

“Sorry,” he said.

It was a cold night, and Jack had started a fire. The dirty dishes were left piled in the kitchen, and Mabel sat in a chair in front of the woodstove and stretched her feet to the warmth. She was more tired than she could ever remember being. Her muscles ached and hummed. When she closed her eyes, tilled rows stretched to the horizon. She drifted along the earth.

“Mabel. You’re falling asleep. Come to bed.”

Jack rubbed her shoulders. “This has been too much for you.”

“No, no.” She looked up at him. “It feels wonderful to share in the work, to feel like I’m doing something. Today might very well have been one of the best days of my life…” Her voice trailed off as she understood what she was saying. Jack nodded without speaking.

She put on her nightgown and got into bed. Jack, stripped to his long underwear, sat on the edge.

“Jack?”

“Hmmm?”

“We are going to be all right, aren’t we? I mean, the two of us?”

He groaned as he eased his feet onto the bed. He rolled on his side to face Mabel, reached to her, and ran his hand down her unbraided hair, again and again, without speaking. Mabel
saw tears in the corners of his eyes, and she propped herself on an elbow. She leaned to him and kissed him on his closed wet eyelids.

“We will, Jack. We will be all right,” and she cradled his head in the crook of her arm and let him cry.

T
hat summer was a farmer’s blessing. Even Jack could see that. At perfect intervals the skies rained and the sun shone. Of his own accord, Garrett planted rows of vegetables to supply the railroad, and the plants flourished in the fields.

Jack’s back still gave him trouble, and there were mornings when he had to slide out of bed to the floor and crawl to the bureau to pull himself to a standing position. His hands and feet sometimes went numb, and other days his joints swelled and ached. He suspected a morning would come when he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed at all.

But in the evenings, when the snow-capped mountains went periwinkle in the twilight of the midnight sun, he would walk the fields alone, and his step was lighter. He would go down the perfect rows of lettuce and cabbage, their immense leaves green and lush. The earth was soft beneath his boots and smelled of humus. Often he would scoop some of the soil in his hand and run his thumb over it, marveling at its richness, and sometimes he would pull a radish, rub it clean on his pants, and bite into it with a satisfying crunch, then toss the greens into the trees. From there he would walk down to the new field
where the potato plants had grown thigh high and had just begun to flower. It hardly seemed the same stretch of lifeless, bone-bruising ground the horse had dragged him across last winter.

He owed this to Esther, he knew, and the boy. Garrett staggered the lettuce and radish crops so they were ready when the railroad needed them week to week. He weeded and hilled the potatoes. He knew which kind of fertilizers worked and which didn’t, so Jack didn’t have to trust the salesman in Anchorage but could go on real experience.

Even at fourteen the boy was a dependable farmer, but his heart wasn’t in it. With permission, Garrett would leave for days at a time, taking his horse, a rifle, and a knapsack. Sometimes he returned with the pack full of rainbow trout or spruce grouse for dinner. Once he brought Mabel a beaded moosehide pouch sewn by an Athabascan woman upriver. Other times he came back with stories of a mountain waterfall he had discovered or a grizzly bear he had seen playing on a patch of snow.

“That bear was just like a little kid, running to the top and sliding down, then back up to the top.”

One evening, the summer sun glinting down the valley, Garrett asked to join Jack on his stroll around the fields.

“I’ll bring a gun. Maybe we’ll run into a grouse or two.”

Jack was self-conscious about his slow pace and disinclined to give up his solitude. Also, he didn’t care much for the boy shooting game on the farm. Jack had spooked a grouse or two on his walks, and he enjoyed the burst of excitement it gave him when the bird flapped noisily up from his feet and then
settled, plump and ruffled, on a spruce branch. He said nothing in hopes the boy would take the hint, but Garrett dashed to the barn to get his shotgun.

“We’ll be back in a bit,” Jack said over his shoulder as he walked out the door, but he doubted Mabel had heard. She was bent over the table, working on the sewing project that had consumed her evenings, and he felt a rush of affection for her.

It humiliated him at first, knowing she was working the farm in his place. Now, with summer mostly gone, he knew his step was lighter in part because of her. She was no longer a lost soul—she was right there beside him, the same dirt on her hands, the same thoughts on her mind. How many rows of reds should we plant next year? Do we need to lime the north field? When the new hen starts laying, should we let her hatch a dozen or so? The fate of it all, the farm, their happiness, was no longer his alone. Look what we’ve done, she said to him one morning as she pointed to the rows of radishes, cabbage, broccoli, and lettuce.

Shotgun in the crook of his arm, Garrett trotted down the dirt road and caught up with Jack. “We’ll probably never see another year like this,” the boy said. He shook his head in disbelief as he looked out over the field. “Can you believe it? We want rain, it rains. We want sun, the sun shines.”

“It’s been good.” Jack bent and pulled two plants. He handed a radish to Garrett. They both wiped them on their pants and silently ate them.

“Can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done here.” Jack tossed his greens into the trees.

“It’s nothing.”