The Snow Child (30 page)

CHAPTER 30

M
abel would reduce the child to the shabby clothes and slight frame of a flesh-and-blood orphan, and it pained Jack to watch. Gone was Mabel’s wonder and awe. In her eyes Faina was no longer a snow fairy, but an abandoned little girl with a dead mother and father. A feral child who needed a bath.

“We should inquire about schooling in town,” she said just days after Jack had told her the truth. “I understand the territorial government has assigned a new teacher to the area. Students meet in the basement of the boardinghouse. We’d have to take her by wagon each morning, or she could stay there for several days at a time.”

“Mabel?”

“Don’t look at me like that. She’ll survive. If she can spend months alone in the wilderness, she can certainly stay a few nights in town.”

“I just don’t know if…”

“And those clothes. I’ll get some fabric and sew her some new dresses. And some real shoes. She won’t need those moccasins anymore.”

But the child was not so easily tamed.

I don’t want to, she said when Mabel showed her to the tub of hot water.

Look at yourself, child. Your hair is a mess. You’re filthy.

Mabel pulled at the ragged sleeve of the child’s cotton dress.

This needs to be washed, maybe just thrown out. I’m making several new dresses for you.

The child backed toward the door. Mabel grabbed her by the wrist, but Faina yanked it free.

“Mabel,” Jack said, “let the child go.”

The girl was gone for days, and when she returned she was skittish, but Mabel took no heed. She pinched at the girl’s clothing and hair, and asked if she had ever gone to school, ever looked at a book. With each prying question, the child took another step back. We’re going to lose her, he wanted to tell Mabel.

Jack wasn’t one to believe in fairy-tale maidens made of snow. Yet Faina was extraordinary. Vast mountain ranges and unending wilderness, sky and ice. You couldn’t hold her too close or know her mind. Perhaps it was so with all children. Certainly he and Mabel hadn’t formed into the molds their parents had set for them.

It was something more, though. Nothing tethered Faina to them. She could vanish, never return, and who was to say she had ever been loved by them?

No, the child said.

Faina’s eyes darted from Mabel to Jack, and in the quick blue he saw that she was afraid.

I will no longer allow you to live like an animal, Mabel said. Her movements were sharp around the kitchen table as she stacked dishes, gathered leftovers. The girl watched, a wild bird with its heart jumping in its chest.

Starting right now, you will stay here with us. No more running off into the trees, gone for days on end. This will be your home. With us.

No, the child said again, more forcefully.

Jack waited for her to fly away.

“Please, Mabel. Can we talk about this later?”

“Look at her. Will you just look at her? We’ve neglected her. She needs a clean home, an education.”

“Not in front of the child.”

“So we let her go back into the wilderness tonight? And the next, and the next? How will she find her way in this world if all she knows is the woods?”

As far as Jack could see, the girl found her way fine, but it was senseless to argue.

“Why?” Mabel pleaded to him. “Why would she want to stay out there, alone and cold? Doesn’t she know we would treat her kindly?”

So that was it. Beneath her irritation and desire to control was love and hurt.

“It’s not that,” Jack said. “She belongs out there. Can’t you see that? It’s her home.”

He reached up to Mabel, kept her from picking up a bowl. He took her hands in his. Her fingers were slender and lovely, and he rubbed his thumbs along them. How well he knew those hands.

“I’m trying, Jack. I am. But it is simply unfathomable to me. She chooses to live in dirt and blood and freezing cold, tearing apart wild animals to eat. With us she would be warm and safe and loved.”

“I know,” he said. Didn’t he want the child as a daughter, to brag about and shower with gifts? Didn’t he want to hold her and call her their own? But this longing did not blind him. Like a rainbow trout in a stream, the girl sometimes flashed her true self to him. A wild thing glittering in dark water.

Mabel let go of his hands and turned to the child.

You will stay here tonight, she said.

She took hold of the child’s shoulders, and for a moment Jack thought she would shake her. But then Mabel smoothed her hands down the girl’s arms and spoke more gently.

Do you understand? And tomorrow we will go to town to ask about school classes.

The girl’s cheeks flushed, and she shook her head no, no.

Faina, this is not your decision. It is in your best interest. You must stop running around like a wild sprite. You will grow up some day, and then what?

No, she said.

Quickly, quietly, the child was nearly away, already wearing her hat and coat. Mabel stepped toward her.

It’s for you, don’t you understand?

But the child was gone.

Mabel lowered herself into a chair, hands clasped in her lap.

“Doesn’t she understand that we love her?”

Jack went to the open door. It was a clear, calm night, the moon shining through the branches. He saw the child at the edge of the forest. She had stopped and was looking back at the cabin. Then she turned away and, as she began to run, she shook her hands out from her sides in a gesture of frustration. Snow began to swirl.

Snow devils. That’s what they had called them as children. Wind-churned funnels of snow, almost like white tornados, but these had sprung from the child’s hands.

The girl vanished into the forest, but the snow devils circled and circled and grew. Jack watched in wonder, fear even. The snow churned toward the cabin, growing and circling, until it consumed everything. The yard darkened. The moonlight disappeared. The wind howled and the snow whipped at Jack’s pant legs.

Into the night, the snowstorm beat itself against the cabin, and sleep would not come to Jack. He lay staring at the log ceiling of their bedroom and felt Mabel’s warm body against his. He could wake her, slide his hands beneath her nightgown and kiss the back of her neck, but he was too distracted even for that. He forced his eyes closed and tried to stop his brain from spinning. He rolled from one side to the other, then climbed out of bed. He fumbled until he was in the kitchen. He lit a lantern, dimmed it as far as he could, and took the book down from the shelf. At the table, he turned the pages of illustrations and foreign letters.

He did not notice Mabel until she sat down in the chair opposite him. Her hair was loose and untidy and her face creased from where it had pressed into the pillowcase.

“What are you doing awake?” she asked.

He looked down at the book. “It is strange, isn’t it?”

“What?” she asked, her voice hushed as if there were others to wake.

“The child we made out of snow. That night. The mittens and scarf. Then Faina. Her blond hair. And that way about her.”

“What are you saying?”

Jack caught himself.

“I must still be half asleep,” he said. He closed the book and gave her a small smile. “My brain’s muddled.” He hadn’t convinced her, but she stood, straightened her nightgown, and returned to the bedroom.

Jack waited until he heard her crawl into bed, pull the covers up, and then, after some time, breathe the deep, slow breaths of sleep. He opened the book again, this time to a picture of the snow maiden among forest animals, snowflakes falling through the blue-black sky above them.

He had said too much, but not as much as he could have. He hadn’t told Mabel about the snow devils, or about how Faina had scattered a snowfall like ashes on her father’s grave. He didn’t tell her how, as she stood over the grave, snow fluttered against the child’s skin as if she were made of cold glass. The flakes did not melt on her cheeks. They did not dampen her eyelashes. They rested there like snow on ice until they were stirred away by a breeze.

CHAPTER 31

T
he boy’s brought you something, Mabel.”

Jack opened the cabin door wider so Garrett could follow with his bundle, wrapped in leather and tied with a string of rawhide. It tucked easily under the boy’s arm, and it didn’t look to have the stiffness or bulk of a dead animal. All the same, maybe he should have asked before letting Garrett bring it inside.

“Well, good morning. Come in. Come in.” Mabel wiped her hands on her apron and tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. “Would you like something hot to drink?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“So how’s trapping?” Jack asked.

“I’m just getting the sets out now. But Old Man Boyd said I could have his marten line. He’s retiring down to San Francisco.”

“Is that so?”

“I guess he found a small run of gold in a creek up north, and now he’s set. Says he wants some warm sun for his old bones.”

“Are you running his line, then?”

“Not yet. But it won’t be long. He’s got all the poles in place. And he’s selling me his number-one long-springs. Says he won’t be trapping anything but good-looking women in California.”

Mabel was taking coffee mugs out of the cupboard and didn’t seem to be listening, but the boy flushed a sudden red. “I mean… that’s just what he…”

“Is it a long trail, his trapline?” Jack asked.

“It’ll take me two days to check it. I’ve got a wall tent I’ll put up so I can stay overnight when the weather’s bad.”

“Are you frightened?” Mabel asked from where she stood at the window.

The question seemed to confuse the boy.

“When you’re out there, alone in the woods,” she said, “aren’t you frightened?”

“No. I can’t say that I am.”

Mabel was quiet.

“I mean, I suppose I’ve been scared a few times,” Garrett said. “But not for no reason. Fall before last, I had a black bear act like he was hunting me. Followed me all the way home, but I couldn’t ever get a clear shot at him. I never saw anything like it. I’d holler at him, try to chase him off, and I’d think he was gone. But then I’d see the top of his head through the shrubs. All the way home it was like that.”