Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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Copyright © 2011 by Jane Yolen. All rights reserved.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yolen, Jane. Snow in Summer / Jane Yolen. p. cm.
Summary: Recasts the tale of Snow White, setting it in West
Virginia in the 1940s with a stepmother who is a snake-handler.
[1. Fairy tales. 2. Stepmothers—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.
4. West Virginia—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ8.Y78Sn 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010044242

 

ISBN : 978-1-101-54588-1

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

To editor Jill Santopolo, who asked for this; to my daughter, Heidi Stemple, for the use of her birthday; to beta reader Debby Harris for plot conversations and good revision notes; to my beloved Webster County, West Virginia, in-laws for fiddly stuff; to my agent, Elizabeth Harding, for years of cheerleading; to my writers’ group for encouragement; and to all the Facebook friends who sent me information about cauls.

 

 

I read three books on snake-handling sects, which told me more than I wanted to know about that particular phenomenon: Dennis Covington’s
Salvation on Sand Mountain,
Thomas Burton’s
Serpent-Handling Believers,
and Fred Brown and Jeanne McDonald’s
The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

My short story “Snow in Summer,” © 2000, first published in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s anthology
Black Hearts, Ivory Bones.
It has served as the basis for this novel.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Addison, aka Webster Springs, West Virginia, is a real Webster County town on the Elk River. Nineteenth-century visitors flooded there to take the waters of the salt sulfur springs. My husband and his three brothers were all born and brought up there, and we spent a number of vacations in Webster Springs and at their cabin at Camp Caesar. Their mother and father gave the land behind their brick house to build the first Catholic church in town in the 1940s. I have put gemstone mining in the mountain region east of Webster though much of that was actually done in and around Seneca Rocks.

The real Addison/ Webster Springs has nothing at all to do with this story and the deplorable and magical events that happen in this book. They exist only in the author’s imagination, as do the folk herein, though I have borrowed local names, and for that I thank the good people of Webster Springs, friends and classmates of my late husband, David Stemple.

“Memory isn’t just mutable, it’s associative.”

 

—MIRA BARTÓK,
The Memory Palace

PHOTOGRAPH

I
have an old black-and-white photograph on my wall of all the things Papa loved. Its edges are curling and brown. In those days in the small towns of West Virginia, we didn’t h ave cameras that could take a picture in color. I’ve no idea who took that photograph, but I do know how it came into my hands. Cousin Nancy gave it to me years after this story happened.

Long after.

In the photograph, the mountains stand side by side, stiff and unyielding, like brothers who have given up talking to one another. Those mountains hold bears and coon, turkeys and partridge, as well as squirrels and greasy groundhogs that all made fine eating. “Nature’s larder,” Papa called it. These days, though, what with strip mining and clear-cutting of trees, nothing is like it was then. There’s some good in that—and a lot of not-so-good, too.

The picture was taken right before Christmas, and the snow stands knee-deep on the mountainsides. Knee-deep, that is, for a man. For a seven-year-old, it’s much higher.

Staring straight ahead, Papa is walking along the wintry track, oblivious to the softly falling snow or the girl beside him, reaching out to touch his cold fingers. She is awkward in her new dark blue coat and hat, unused to such finery, and has one booted foot held high to step over the snow.

Striding along on the other side of the child is Cousin Nancy, who’d been at school with Papa and married his cousin Jack. She’d been best friends with Mama. A recent war widow, she’s a woman with a kind face and kinder heart—though one cannot quite get that from the picture. Her best features are her eyes, the color of water rushing down a mountain stream, green and gray. She’s the one holding my right hand, warming it in hers.

Behind us comes a long line of our neighbors, somber as their clothes. They stare ahead as if what is to come is at least as awful as what is behind. These are the folk who had known me since before I was born. Some of them even knew Papa before he was born. Kinfolk if not particular kind folk. The ones who sit on the front porch and gossip. Storying, they call it. Our lives and our stories entwined.

Ahead of us is a flatbed cart, drawn by four big black horses with crow feathers twisted in their manes. Barrel-chested and heavy-legged, they’re being led along the track by Preacher Watson, his tall black hat spotted by the snow. We’re a sorry congregation, walking in the horses’ hoof-prints or the ruts made by the wheels of the cart. All the way up to the old cemetery where all us Mortons get buried—spring, summer, fall, or winter—the cemetery next to the old church, where only owls and crows worship now.

On the flatbed, in a pine box, lies Mama, cold and distant, who had always been warm and welcoming, with the dead baby in her arms. She’s wearing her wedding dress, white silk with a scattering of lace. I knew that, because I kissed her before the box’s top was nailed down. I didn’t kiss the baby. I hadn’t known him all that long. Just three days. Long enough for him to be baptized, long enough for him to die in Mama’s arms, long enough for Mama to be dead beside him. Papa took his picture after he’d died and kept that picture propped up on the mantel for some time: a thin, dead baby in a long white christening gown. The one I’d worn when I was an infant. The one he was buried in.

There are tears like black stains running down my cheeks for I must have rubbed my eyes many times in the long walk up the mountain. It looks as if the crow feathers had been used to paint streaks under my eyes. There are no tear stains on Papa’s face. If there are any on Cousin Nancy’s, I can’t tell for she is not looking up at the camera but down at me.

In that photograph, on that mountain ridge, heading toward the graveyard, were all the things Papa loved then.

And later.

SNOW IN SUMMER

T
he town of Addison lies between two high mountains. Those mountains were cut through by the Elk River many hundreds of thousands of years ago, and all that was left was a little bit of bottomland. But it was a fertile place. Everything you could ever want to grow there grew heartily: beans, cabbage, turnips, potatoes, greens, corn, squash as big as pumpkins. Even if you didn’t have a green thumb,
something
could grow. But if you had garden magic at your fingertips, life in Addison was a pleasant place indeed.

My grandpap five times removed had that green magic. He’d come over from Scotland and said that Addison reminded him of the mountains there. Of course, Grandpap was gone a long time before I was ever born, and I only know the stories.

I’d been born on July 1, 1937, ten pounds of squalling baby, with a full head of black hair. It was a hard birth that nearly killed Mama. Though the next baby, being even bigger, actually did.

Cousin Nancy, who’d been there to help with my birthing, told me all about it later, after Mama died. “White caul, black hair, and all that blood,” she said.

I shuddered at the blood part, but Cousin Nancy explained it was good blood, not bad.

“Not like later,” I said, meaning when Mama died, and Cousin Nancy nodded because nothing more needed to be added.

It was my ninth birthday when she told me the story. We were sitting on the old divan in her front parlor, the parlor that also served as the town’s post office, in the only brick house on Main Street. I was scrunched up next to her, my feet tucked under my bottom. She was in her black rayon silk print with its smattering of pink flowers and green leaves. She’d had it for as long as I could remember. Her hair was done up in braids across the top of her head like a crown because it was such a hot summer day. One long tendril had escaped.

She was showing me the photo album she’d rescued when Papa wanted to bury it with Mama and the baby.

“I looked your papa square in the eye,” she said, her right pointy finger raised. “Told him straight out, ‘You got one living child, Lem, and she’ll want to know her mama someday.’ ” She shook that finger at me as if I was Papa. Cousin Nancy rarely snaps at anyone, though she always looks them square in the eye, so I guess Papa listened up because there was the photo album in her lap.

Cousin Nancy showed me that album twice a year, on my birthday, as she was the only one who remembered when that was, and on Christmas. “We got to keep that album neat and clean, ’cause it’s all you’ve got left of your mama,” she told me. So I always had to wash my hands to handle it, with the little pink soap she kept in her bathroom that smelled of roses.

That was also the day she told me that I’d been born with the white caul over my head, like a little helmet. I know now that a caul is the membrane, a see-through bit of skin that some babies are born with over their heads and faces, but I didn’t know it then.