The Snow Child (15 page)

“You recall him having any children?… Or a wife? I was just thinking Mabel might want to get to know her.”

“Can’t say that I do. Seemed a pretty solitary type to me.”

A tired sadness settled over Jack as he rode back to the homestead. The horse trotted sharply and tossed its head, as if invigorated by the brisk weather. Jack’s hands stiffened in the cold as he held the reins. He thought of the girl on the side of the mountain with her dead, frozen papa and wondered if he was doing the right thing. She had made him promise not to tell anyone, especially Mabel, and Jack understood. Most any woman wouldn’t allow a child to stay in the wilderness alone with her father’s corpse. The girl feared being yanked away from what was familiar. Jack had watched when Mabel once or twice reached out to brush hair away from the girl’s eyes or to help button her blue wool coat. The girl flinched and pulled back. She clenched her teeth and pursed her lips as if to say, I can take care of myself.

Jack was fairly certain it was true. The girl knew the woods and trails. She found food, shelter. Was that all a child needed? Mabel would say no. She’d say the girl needed warmth and affection and someone to look after her, but Jack had to wonder if that didn’t have more to do with a woman’s own desires than the needs of a child.

Besides, he had promised the girl. He made few promises, but those he made, to the best of his abilities he kept.

The secret clung to Jack in the scent of black woodsmoke and melting snow. At night, Mabel pressed her face into his beard and touched his hair with her fingers.

“What have you been burning?”

“Just some of those stump rows from last summer. Good weather to burn. Not too windy or dry.”

“Yes. I suppose so.” She didn’t seem altogether convinced.

The ground was taking longer to thaw than he had predicted. He dragged the dead man out from under the tree and cut it down. Then he cut up the wood where it lay, and built a fire from its tinder-dry branches. The girl watched the tree burn. She stood well back and the flames flickered in her eyes. Jack asked her if she could tend the fire while he was gone, but she shook her head. So when the short day ended and night fell, he piled the wood as high as he dared and then climbed down the mountain. Behind him, the fire crackled and popped and flamed in the night.

The next day he scraped at the frozen earth beneath the smoldering wood, digging as far down as he could with a shovel. A December grave was hard-earned in this place, but it would come. He left the man beneath a tarp, far from the fire. It was a gruesome thought, but he didn’t want the body to thaw. It was keeping well frozen.

On the third day, Jack trudged home covered with soot and weary to the bone. Mabel was waiting.

“George came by,” she said. “I told him you were out in the new field, burning stumps.”

“Oh?”

“He said you weren’t out there. He couldn’t find you.”

“Hmm.” He didn’t look into her face.

She took hold of his forearm and squeezed gently. “What is it? Where have you been?”

“Nothing. I’ve just been working. George must have missed me somehow.”

The next morning Jack returned to dig in the softening earth and build the flames back up. He was drenched in sweat and coated in dirt and charcoal from the half-burned logs. The girl was nowhere to be seen, but at times Jack felt something watching him from the trees and wondered if it was the girl or the red fox he had seen slip now and then between snow-covered boulders.

By midafternoon the pit seemed deep enough to bury a man. Jack scraped the last coals out of the hole and then leaned on the shovel, his cheek resting on his hand. This wasn’t the first grave he’d dug alone. He thought back to a small grave, a tiny lifeless body, not much bigger than a man’s heart.

Jack called for the child. It’s time, he said. Time to put your papa to rest.

She appeared from behind one of the spruce trees.

Is it gone? she asked.

You mean the fire? Yes, it’s gone.

There was no coffin. He didn’t have the lumber to build one and didn’t want to attract too much attention by inquiring in town. The tarp would have to do. Jack shoved and pulled at the canvas until it broke free of ice, and then he dragged the body across the snow to the grave.

Have you said your goodbyes?

The girl nodded. Jack felt ill. It could have just been the long day of sweating and freezing and no stomach even for lunch. But it didn’t seem right, burying a man without notifying the authorities or signing some piece of paper or at least having a man of the cloth read something from the Bible. He didn’t see a way out. The worst that could happen to this child, besides her father dying in front of her, would be for the authorities to get involved. She’d be shipped off to some orphanage far from these mountains. She seemed to him both powerful and delicate, like a wild thing that thrives in its place but withers when stolen away.

Without another man to help him lower it slowly, Jack shoved the tarp-wrapped body into the hole, where it fell with an ungodly thump.

Shall I cover him up then? he asked.

The girl nodded.

He began shoveling in dirt and black, dead coals. He wondered if he had the strength to finish, but he kept at it, shovelful after shovelful, the girl silent behind him. Occasionally he stamped his feet on the dirt to settle it and the girl joined him, hopping up and down on the grave, her small face frowning, her marten-fur hat hanging down her back by strings tied at her neck.

So it’s done, then, Jack said.

He scraped a few last piles of dirt over the grave.

The girl came to Jack’s side. She closed her eyes, then flung her arms into the air. Snowflakes lighter than feathers scattered across the grave. It was more snow than a child could possibly hold in her arms, and it filtered down as if from the clear sky above. Jack was silent until the last flakes settled.

When he did speak, his voice was hoarse from the smoke.

In the spring, he said, we can put some pretty rocks here, maybe plant flowers.

The girl nodded and then wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her face into his coat. Jack stood motionless for a moment, awkward with his arms at his sides, and then he slowly reached around her and patted her softly on the back, smoothed her hair with his rough hand.

There, there. All right. It’s going to be all right. It’s done now.

Then one morning, when the last of the snow had melted, she came to the old couple and kissed them both.

“I must leave you now,” she said.

“Why?” they cried.

“I am a child of the snow. I must go where it is cold.”

“No! No!” they cried. “You cannot go!”

They held her close, and a few drops of snow fell to the floor. Quickly she slipped from their arms and ran out the door.

“Come back!” they called.

“Come back to us!”

—
The Snow Child
, retold by Freya Littledale

CHAPTER 14

I
t was unexpected, to look forward to each day. When Mabel woke in the mornings, happy anticipation washed over her and for a moment she would not know its cause. Was this day special for some reason? A birthday? A holiday? Was something planned? Then she would remember—the child might visit.

Mabel was often at the window, but it wasn’t with the melancholy weariness of the previous winter. Now she watched with excitement and hope that the little girl in the fur hat and leather moccasins would appear from the woods. The December days had a certain luminosity and sparkle, like frost on bare branches, alight in the morning just before it melts.

Mabel tempered herself. She imagined running to the girl when she appeared at the edge of the trees and throwing her arms around her, spinning her in circles. But she didn’t. She waited patiently in the cabin and pretended not to notice her arrival. When the child came indoors, Mabel did not scrub her clean, brush the leaves and lichen from her hair, wash her clothes, and dress her anew. It was true—she sometimes pictured the child wearing a lovely ruffled dress and pretty bows in her hair. Sometimes she even daydreamed about inviting Esther over for tea to show off the girl as if she were her own.

She did none of these things. They were silly fancies that had more to do with her own romantic ideas of childhood than with this mysterious girl. The only real desire she had, once she stripped away the vain and the frivolous, was to touch the child, to stroke the girl’s cheek, to hold her close and deeply breathe in her scent of mountain air. But she contented herself with the child’s smiles, and each morning she watched at the window, hoping this day she would come.