The Snow Child (48 page)
Authors: Eowyn Ivey
Faina’s delicate, childhood face, framed by her marten-fur hat. Faina at their kitchen table, chin resting in her hands. Then there were the drawings of Faina as a young woman, a newborn baby at her breast. They were studies, each from a different perspective, some closer and others farther away. Faina’s hand on the sleeping infant. The baby’s tiny fist. Closed eyes. Open eyes. Mother. Child.
In the soft pencil marks something was captured that he had sensed but never could have expressed. It was a fullness, a kind of warm, weighted life that had settled into Faina during her last days, and a generous tenderness that poured down upon her infant son like golden sunlight.
When Mabel called out to him, asking when he was coming to bed, he had carefully folded the drawings back among the pages of the book and returned it to the shelf, where it remained, unmentioned.
Jack became aware that he was standing, uninvited, in the middle of Garrett’s cabin.
“Garrett?” he called out again, knowing there would be no answer. He left and closed the door.
He wasn’t far down the trail, walking at his slow, awkward gait, leaning on his cane, when he heard the boy calling through the trees.
“Papa! Papa!”
Jay ran down the trail toward him, and not far behind him lumbered the old dog. With no name to come to, Faina’s husky roamed freely between the two cabins, but whenever her son was outdoors, the dog was at his side.
“Papa! Look what I caught.” The boy held up a willow branch with one small, dusty grayling hanging from it.
“You caught it?”
“Well, Maime helped. But I set the hook all by myself.”
“Well done. Well done.”
“And Maime said we could eat it for dinner.”
Jack took the stringer from the boy and inspected the fish.
“As I recall, Grandpa George and Grandma Esther are coming for dinner, too.”
“And Daddy?”
“And your father.”
“Did you find him?”
“No. He’s still out riding. But he’ll be home soon.”
“He likes the mountains, doesn’t he? He goes riding there a lot. He says this year I can come on his long trapline, and maybe we’ll catch a wolverine.”
“That would be fine, wouldn’t it?”
But the boy was already dashing ahead.
“Jay?” Jack called to him. “Do you think we might catch a few more fish, to make sure there’s enough for everyone?”
“Sure, Papa. We can catch some more.”
The boy disappeared around the next bend in the trail, sprinting back toward Jack and Mabel’s cabin.
“Just me and you, old man,” Jack said and patted the dog’s graying muzzle. “Think you’ll find my pace suits you better.”
The autumn day was chilly, and the trail was littered with yellow birch leaves. Along the mountains, clouds gathered.
“Smells like snow,” Jack said, and the dog held its nose to the air as if in agreement.
Jack made his way past their cabin, through the brush and down to the stream in time to see Mabel reel in a grayling as it splashed through the shallows. The boy pranced excitedly on a nearby boulder.
“Maime caught the biggest one ever! Look, Papa. Look.” The boy jumped to the shore, unhooked the fish from the line, and held it up.
Mabel smiled at Jack, the fishing rod still in her hand. Her hair had gone completely white now, and wrinkles folded softly around her eyes and mouth, but there was a youthfulness in her gaze.
She spent many an afternoon out of doors with the boy, teaching him to catch fish and listen for birds and watch for moose. How easily she talked with the boy. Some days she would tell Jay about his mother, how he had her blue eyes and how she had come from the mountains and snow and knew the animals and plants as if they were her own hands. And sometimes she would open the locket at her throat to show the boy the twist of blond hair and tell him about the lovely swan-feather wedding gown his mother wore that day.
“Little Jack could have had that big fish,” Mabel said and kissed the top of the child’s head. “He just let it get away.”
Little Jack. That’s what she always called him. Garrett had asked permission, nearly a month after Faina was gone and the baby was still unnamed. Would it be all right if I named the boy after you? He’s your grandson, after all.
“Jack? Did you hear me? I think you’re losing your hearing in your old age,” Mabel teased as she handed him the stringer. “Or were you just ignoring me because you don’t want to clean the fish?”
“Doesn’t seem right,” Jack said, and winked down at the boy. “A man doesn’t get to catch the fish, but he has to clean them.”
“Can I help, Papa? Please?”
Mabel left the two of them at the creek to go back to the cabin and stoke the fire. Jack leaned heavily on his cane as he shuffled to the water’s edge. The boy lined up the fish in the yellowing grass. Jack took his fold-up knife from his pants pocket. With a hand on his cane, Jack was lowering himself to a crouch when he felt the boy’s small hand on his arm.
“Here, Papa,” the boy said, and though he was too small to be of help, somehow the child’s touch made the pain in Jack’s old bones seem like not much at all.
The boy gave him a grayling, and Jack held it in the palm of his hand as he slid the knife blade beneath the silver skin and sliced open the belly. He showed the boy how to hook a finger in the lower jaw and pull free the glistening entrails. When they tossed them into the clear running water, young salmon darted and nibbled at the strings of intestines. Jack reached into the fish and slid his thumbnail along the spine to break free the line of kidney like a slender blood clot, and he rinsed the blood into the creek water, until his hands ached in the cold.
The boy waited, crouched beside him.
“Last, the scales,” he told the boy, and he showed him how to run the knife blade against the grain. When Jack rinsed the fish in the creek, the small, iridescent scales shimmered and scattered in the water, drifted on the current, and washed up against the rocks like transparent sequins.
“They’re kind of pretty, aren’t they, Papa?” the boy said, a single scale pasted to his fingertip.
“I suppose they are,” Jack said.
George and Esther arrived before nightfall, and as always Esther was talking even as she came in the door and her arms were loaded with jars and towel-wrapped goodies. As they were flouring the grayling and frying them in a buttered cast-iron pan, Jay ran to the window.
“It’s Daddy! Daddy’s here!”
Jay was in his arms before Garrett could take off his coat and hat.
“What did you see, Daddy? What did you see?”
“Well, let me think. Oh, yes. I saw… a wolverine.”
“Don’t tease the boy,” Esther admonished as she flipped the sizzling grayling.
“No teasing. I was way up high, above the tree line, in this little valley I once visited a long time ago. There used to be a wolverine there, but there hasn’t been for years.”
“But you saw one?” the boy asked.
“I did. I’d tied the horse off to a tree and was hiking up over these rocks when, on this ridge, a wolverine was looking down at me. I thought it might jump on my head. He had claws this long.” Garrett held up his index finger and thumb to indicate several inches.
“Were you scared?”
“No. No. And he didn’t jump on my head. He just looked at me with his yellow eyes. Then he turned, real slow, and sort of loped away and over the ridge.”
“What else did you see, Daddy? What else?”
“I guess a wolverine’s not enough,” Esther said and chuckled.
“Well, not much else. Except for those clouds over the mountains. Looks like snow.”
The boy looked out the window, then back to his father, with a disappointed expression. “It’s not snowing.”
“Don’t worry. Bet you anything it’ll come tonight,” Garrett said.
All through dinner, the boy could hardly stay in his seat, even as they commended him on the good-tasting fish he had helped catch.
“Settle down, Jay,” Esther said. “You know a watched sky never snows. Go sit with Grandpa George. Maybe he’ll share his piece of cake with you.”
George playfully scowled at the boy, then grabbed him in a bear hug and tickled him.
“Good God! Watch out for the dishes,” Esther said. “You’re going to knock the whole table over.”
After dessert, George and Esther began to gather their belongings and talk of going home, and the boy looked crestfallen. He always protested when these gatherings ended, and he once said they should all live together in Jack and Mabel’s cabin so that no one would ever have to leave.
Mabel helped Esther put on her coat, Jack shook hands with George, and Garrett said he and Jay would come out to get the horses and hitch the wagon.
“Put your hat on, Little Jack,” Mabel called after him, but the boy had already run out the door.
Jack was stacking dishes on the table when he heard the wagon begin to creak down the dirt road, and then he heard another sound—yips and laughter. Mabel was at the kitchen window.
Jack peered over her shoulder. At first he could see only their reflections in the windowpane, but then he began to see past their two old faces to make out the figures in the night.
Garrett stood near the barn with a lantern in his hand, and nearby the boy was leaping and throwing his arms up to the sky. Even from inside the log cabin, Jack could hear the boy’s whoops and cheers. The dog bowed playfully beside the boy, barked, then jumped and ran in circles, too.
As Jack’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw the ground covered in white and, in the light of Garrett’s lantern, snowflakes spinning and falling.
He took hold of Mabel’s hand, and when she turned to him, he saw in her eyes the joy and sorrow of a lifetime.
“It’s snowing,” she said.
First and foremost, thank you to Sam, who, always believed. To my daughter, Grace, whose incredible imagination fed my own. To my mother, Julie LeMay, a poet who taught me the magic of words and the power of empathy. To my father, John LeMay, who taught me to love wild places, wild creatures, and, always, books. And to my baby brother, Forrest LeMay, who first taught me a child’s love.
Immense gratitude to my editors, Andrea Walker and Reagan Arthur, and my agent, Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management—there are not enough pages to describe all the talent, enthusiasm, and diligence you put into this project. Thank you to everyone at Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company, especially Amanda Tobier, Marlena Bittner, Terry Adams, Tracy Williams, Karen Torres, Heather Fain, and Michael Pietsch. Thank you to the publishers, booksellers, and readers around the world who have welcomed Faina. And to Alessandro Gottardo and Keith Hayes, thank you for a book cover I want to frame and hang on my wall.
To my first, kind readers—John Straley, Victoria Curey Naegele, Rindi White, and Melissa Behnke—your encouragement and advice were invaluable.
Several books influenced my writing—
The snow Child
as retold by Freya Littledale and illustrated by Barbara Lavallee;
Russian Lacquer, Legends and Fairy Tales
by Lucy Maxym, in particular the story of “Snegurochka”; and “Little Daughter of the Snow” from Arthur Ransome’s
Old Peter’s Russian Tales.
Many people throughout my life have taught, inspired, and supported me as a writer as I worked toward this first novel: James and Michele Hungiville, Jacqueline LeMay, Michael Hungiville, Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, David Cheezem and my friends and customers at Fireside Books, Andromeda Romano-Lax and 49 Writers, and the Baers. To the Betties—the first six out of the box are yours.
And the parting glass I raise in memory of our dear friend Laura Mitchell McDonald (November 26, 1973–January 1, 2007).
Eowyn LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She received her B.A. in journalism through the honors program at Western Washington University and worked for nearly ten years as an award-winning reporter at the
Frontiersman
newspaper. She is a bookseller at Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska. This is her first novel.