The Snow Child (24 page)

“You’re too easy on him, Mabel. He’s got to get up and move. It’s the only way those muscles can start to work again.”

“But he’s in so much pain.”

“At some point his hurt is deeper than a sore back. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s a more terrible kind of hurt, a kind that opium and drink only make worse. He’s got to get on his own two feet. He’s got to see his land and help us make some decisions so that he knows it’s still his, even if he can’t get his hands in the dirt.”

So while Garrett showed Mabel how to cut seed potatoes so each piece had one eye, Esther spent the morning walking Jack around the fields. Mabel couldn’t bear to watch his slow shuffle. It was as if he had aged a century in a month. His face was gaunt and his back bent. When his foot caught on a root or rut, he would grunt and stand in one place, his eyes closed and his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching. She would have been ashamed to admit it to anyone, but she was glad to sit in the yard with Garrett, to cut seed potatoes rather than escorting her husband on his agonizing walk.

And the boy wasn’t such terrible company. Esther said he was chafing at the humiliation of having to work another man’s homestead with two old women. He thinks he wants to be a mountain man, Esther said, that farming is beneath him. But he’s a good boy. He works hard when he puts his mind to it.

Mabel observed Garrett’s resentment; he stomped in and out of the cabin and sulked when his mother ordered him around. But when she was alone with him, the boy was less petulant. He was, actually, patient and instructive, and did not patronize her. Never once did he say, “Now, watch that knife” or “Mind you don’t cut yourself.” He assumed Mabel could do the work, and so she could. Soon she was almost as fast as he was with the paring knife.

The sun climbed higher in the sky and warmed the top of Mabel’s head while she tossed the cut seed potatoes into the burlap sack between them. It was lunchtime, and she didn’t know where the morning had gone. The boy followed her inside and helped her fix a meal of cold sliced moose steak and yesterday’s bread. After Esther helped Jack back into bed, the three of them ate quickly while standing in the kitchen, Mabel’s hands still smudged with dirt and her dress sleeves pushed up.

When they went out to load the wagon with the seed potatoes, Mabel followed. It was only as she handed a heavy burlap sack to Garrett on the back of the wagon that she appreciated what she was doing—farmwork. The boy took no notice of her pause, but grabbed the bags and hopped down. As Esther drove the wagon toward the field, Mabel and Garrett followed behind.

“Maybe none of my business,” he said, “but that dress might get in your way. You don’t have any trousers or anything, do you? Mom always wears overalls when she’s working.”

“No, I don’t have anything like that. The dress will have to do.”

Garrett looked skeptical but kept walking.

Esther dropped sacks of seed potatoes up and down the field, then harnessed the horse to a cultivator to form the rows. Garrett and Mabel followed. The boy showed her how far apart to plant and how deep to dig the hole before dropping in the cut potato, following her to scoop dirt over the top and lightly pat. As they worked, they dragged the burlap sack along with them.

After a time the work became methodical and rhythmic, and Mabel’s mind wandered. She planted with bare hands and thought of soil, warm and crumbling between her fingers, and of sprouting plants and decaying leaves. She stood, shook out her skirts, bent again toward the earth, dug another hole, dropped in a potato, then another hole, another potato. She pressed her hand into the dirt mound, like a little grave.

Here in the potato field, the colors were too sharp and full of yellow sun and blue sky. Even the air was different than back in Pennsylvania, drier and cleaner. Time had passed, more than a decade. Yet as she knelt here, Mabel was back there. Pewter moonlight. The paths of the orchard. Rough ground beneath her knees. A dead child two days buried.

She remembered how she had left Jack asleep in bed to wander out of doors in her nightgown. Weakened and bruised by her long labor, she didn’t know what led her down the gravel drive to the orchard, where the trees stood brown and leafless in the blue moonlight.

That is where he would have dug the grave, in the ground his family had farmed for generations. She crawled between the trees, her knees and palms scraped. When she found nothing, she stood and felt a painful tingling in her breasts and suddenly milk trickled down her front, wet her nightgown, dribbled onto her belly, spilled uselessly to the ground.

I cannot survive this grief, she had thought.

“Are you OK?”

Garrett’s shadow fell across her face, and she didn’t know how long she had been there, kneeling in the dirt.

“Yes. Yes. I’m fine,” Mabel said. She wiped her dirty hands on her dress. “I was only recalling something.”

When she looked up at Garrett, the boy’s eyes widened.

“Are you sure you’re all right? Because… well, because you don’t look so good.” The boy gestured toward her face. A few tears must have run down her dirt-smeared cheeks, and the lines would look ghastly.

“Please forgive an old woman’s weepiness,” she said and began to search for something to wipe her face.

Garrett stood staring.

“Surely you’ve seen a woman cry before.”

He shrugged.

“No? Perhaps not. I certainly cannot imagine your mother blubbering about.”

“Should we go back? Do you need a rest?”

“No. No. Just something to wipe my face.”

The boy searched his pockets for a handkerchief, and finding nothing, he unrolled the sleeve of his work shirt and held up the cuff. “It’s kind of dirty, but you’re welcome to it.”

Mabel smiled and blotted her eyes with his shirtsleeve. “Thank you,” she said.

As the boy turned to reach for the burlap sack at his feet, Mabel caught his sleeve again and held his arm with both hands. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something, Garrett.”

“Yes ma’am?”

“Did you ever catch another fox, after that silver one?”

“No ma’am, never did,” he said. He studied her thoughtfully. “Are you wanting a fox ruff? Because if you are, I’ve got a few pelts left over from last year. I’m sure Betty could sew you something.”

But Mabel was already bending to the earth to dig another hole.

She had survived, hadn’t she? Even when she had wanted to lie down in the night orchard and sink into a grave of her own, she had stumbled home in the dark, washed in the basin, and in the morning cooked breakfast for Jack. She had put away the dishes and scrubbed the table and counters. She had baked bread. She had worked and tried to ignore the painful swell of her breasts and the empty cramp of her womb. And then she had done the unthinkable; she had entered the nursery and put her hands on the oak crib, the one Jack had slept in as a child, and his mother before him. She touched the pastel quilt she had sewn, and then sorrow collapsed her into the rocking chair, where she sat with her arms across her sagging belly and remembered how it had been to have another person growing inside her.

When she had the strength, she began to fold the tiny clothes and blankets and cloth diapers and put them into plain brown boxes. She didn’t stop working, but the sobs came and distorted her face, bleared her eyes, made her nose run. She didn’t hear Jack come to the door. When she looked up he was watching her silently, and then he turned away, uncomfortable, embarrassed by her unharnessed grief. He didn’t put his hand on her shoulder. Didn’t hold her. Didn’t say a word. Even these many years later, she was unable to forgive him that.

At the end of the row, Mabel stood, put her hands to the small of her back, and stretched. Her hem was soiled, her hands dusty and tired. She looked down the field and saw how much they had done. Garrett slapped his hands on his pant legs.

“One row down,” he said. “ ’Bout a thousand to go.” And the boy gave her a half smile, his eyebrows raised as if to ask “Are you still in?”

Mabel nodded.

“Onward ho?” she asked.

Garrett raised a hand, like a conquering explorer.

“Onward ho!”

As Esther rounded a row and headed back down the field, she slowed the horse and gave a wave to the two of them. Mabel waved back. A breeze stirred the loose strands of hair around her face and wicked away the sweat. The sky overhead was cloudless and brilliant. In the distance, beyond the trees, she could see the white mountain peaks. She lifted her skirts and stepped over the row they had just planted. Garrett pulled the burlap sack to her and they started again.

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.