Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (6 page)

It was a very big mirror, almost as tall as me. I pressed my fingers to the letters when Stepmama’s back was turned, as if I might puzzle out the meanings of the words that way. But once she caught me doing that and forbade me ever touch the mirror again.

“Will it bring bloat and scabies?” I asked.

She laughed. Her laugh was suddenly an unlikely fall of sound, like the tinkling of bells. “Why, child,” she said, “are you tetched? You have the strangest notions.” As if she’d forgotten the warning she’d given me before.

After that, Stepmama moved in all her perfumes and face paints, as well as a carved chair that had—so she told me—death and the maiden carved on one side. Then laughing, she added, “And taxes on the other.”

“What are taxes?” I asked.

Her fingers around my wrist drew me in and she whispered harshly, “A payment owed.”

“I don’t owe any payment,” I told her. “I haven’t any money. Papa doesn’t allow it.”

“There are many kinds of payment, Snow,” she said,

“and many ways to pay what is owed.” She was smiling with that red slash of lips as she spoke. It was a big but not inviting smile.

I thought about the poor old women who sometimes bartered with Papa for his vegetables and seed corn, giving him in exchange a family portrait or an old gold watch belonging to some dead relative. About once a year he took such barter over to Clarksburg to sell, sharing what he got with the families who’d paid him in that way, giving them the greater part and taking out only what the vegetables and seed corn cost.

“When times are hard,” Cousin Nancy had once told me when I asked where he was going and why, “it’s not the time to drive a hard bargain. Not with your neighbors.”

Remembering those barters, I nodded at Stepmama.

She took that as an understanding between us. But there was
nothing
between us. Not then. Not now. Though there has been a payment.

At first I wanted to be loved by Stepmama. Cousin Nancy had been forced out of my life, Stepmama insisting that she couldn’t visit the way she had before.

“It isn’t fit any longer that Cousin Nancy cooks your breakfast and brushes your hair, oversees your homework and puts you to bed,” Stepmama explained. “That’s my job as your new mama.” She smiled, and though the smile wasn’t particularly warm, I felt the warmth.

“And it isn’t fitting that she’s in and out of this house all times of the day and night like she did before, now that Lem is married.” She said it in a way that made it sound like what Cousin Nancy had done for us had been, somehow, wrong.

And yet . . . and yet, I was sure she was being fair. Cousin Nancy hadn’t been my
actual
mama. And there
was
a new woman in Papa’s house now, a legitimate one, married forever after. Truly, the only one who suffered from this new rule was Cousin Nancy herself, for Papa and I were happily under Stepmama’s spell.

So, at first I had what I really wanted. What a child wants is nothing more than unconditional love. I was too young to understand that Stepmama was not someone who gave that kind of love. Or any kind, as it turned out. What she did was to barter or trade for the outward signs of love—a hug, a stroke along the arm, a kind word. Each of these things came with its own price.

But those first days seemed like heaven. She cozened me and coddled me and fed me on lies. And I believed them all.

Stepmama talked about being impressed with the mountains, the music, the people. She mentioned places by name. Songs as well. And she heaped high praise on Cousin Nancy once she was well and truly out of my life.

“A good woman,” Stepmama said. “A caretaker.”

“And Papa?” I asked, looking up into her face, seeing what I wanted to see, missing the rest. “You love Papa?”

Her eyes gave nothing away but her mouth smiled. She gave me a hug and said, “Of course, your papa most of all.”

With that, I pushed closer to her than she was to me, my arms around her till I could feel her backbone stiffen. I thought it meant that she wanted me to hold her tighter. When I tightened as much as I could, she sighed.

“We have work to do, Snow,” she’d say, twisting out of my embrace. Though what she really meant was that I had to go outside and rake or hoe or bring in salad greens while she did her nails. “Because you know the garden so much better than I do and I might do it harm,” she told me. And I never thought to ask why she had all those seeds and plants in her room then.

Or she meant that I was to scrub her underthings till my knuckles were bruised on the washboard. “Because your hands are small and my big old hands would likely damage my underclothes, in which I want to look lovely for your papa.”

I truly wished at those moments that I could have called her “Mama,” as she demanded. But though I thought my heart was willing, my mouth revolted, becoming as serpent-like as hers, refusing to speak the word aloud, no matter how often she insisted.

Still, I like to think that—in the early days, for a short while—we were both reasonably content. Why shouldn’t we have been? We each had what we wanted, or at least what we thought we wanted. Me an attentive mother living in the house, she a biddable child who did all the work without complaint.

We had it then for a short while, but it was not to be what either of us would get for long.

The truth was: I was beguiled by Stepmama. That old word. It means “enchanted.” “Deluded.” “Cheated.” “Charmed.” Not besot like Papa, but close enough.

COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS

C
ould I have stopped Lem from marrying that woman? Sooner stop a runaway horse heading back to the barn. He had the bit tightly between his teeth. Besides, my own papa used to say that life is simpler when you plow
around
the stumps.

After all, Lem had married Ada Mae in the same feverish rush, and she turned into a sweet, lovely woman and an exceptional mother. Perhaps he’d just been lucky that time.

He was certainly unlucky now.

The new woman was as different from Ada Mae as could be. All hard, sharp angles where Ada Mae was soft curves. A slash where Ada Mae was a comma. All about herself where . . . You can see where I’m going with this. I didn’t like her. No, it was more than that. I distrusted her, feared her, even hated her. That simple sentence, true as it may be, will take me weeks in confession to work out, no matter what penance the priest gives me. Perhaps confession won’t help and it’ll have to work itself out the way a splinter does from the bottom of a person’s foot, leaving a scar that no one can see but the body always feels.

That woman.
She had a name, though it took me till the wedding to discover it. Even then the town clerk mangled it so badly in the ceremony that none of us quite knew what to call her. The name was a mouthful and foreign: Constanza Reina Maria Barganza. Tom Morton called her that Con woman, which stuck. You’d think with a name like that she’d have been a Catholic, but she refused to set foot in church, not mine or any of the others. Like a near man with a dollar, she kept the coins of her religion close and let none of us know what they were until it was far too late.

I asked the priest and he said, “Fallen away, most like,” meaning she’d been a Catholic once but chose a different path. A personal choice, and one I would have understood if only she’d owned up to it. But she didn’t. She didn’t own up to anything, leastwise to me.

And that wedding—a farce from beginning to end. There was no love, no cherishing, no obedience, no promises, no hope in it anywhere. All I could do was to hold Summer’s hand and let her know I was always there if she needed me. Strangely, she pulled away from me, so I had to hold on for both of us. But I did indeed hold on.

PHOTOGRAPH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
n their wedding picture, Stepmama is in a white suit. She said a long white dress reminded her of a winding sheet, meaning grave clothes. Mama had worn her wedding dress in her coffin and the baby my old christening gown. Shivering at the thought, Papa had agreed.

Not a hair out of place, Stepmama stares out at the camera. Her hands clasp each other in a way that shows off the simple gold wedding band she’d purchased herself. Her mouth is parted in a smile, but she doesn’t look particularly happy. She looks hungry, a mountain lion ready to pounce. That was about the time I heard Miss Caroline whisper, “She wants the earth and moon with two strands of bob wire around it,” and Miss Amelia adding, “And it whitewashed.” At that, Cousin Nancy turned around and held her finger to her lips, shushing the two of them. But that was after the picture had already been taken.

Papa looks hungry, too, only not like an animal, but hungry the way a starving man looks hungry: hopelessly and helplessly. His head is turned away from the camera, and he’s gazing at Stepmama’s face. He’s wearing his only suit, and one side of the collar of his white shirt is curling over, as if trying to get away from him, as if ready to fly to somewhere happier.

Off to the side stands Cousin Nancy, holding my hand and looking like she’s fearing I’m the one—not Papa’s shirt collar—trying to fly away. She’s in her navy churchgoing suit, which makes her look dowdy and sad.

My pink dress with its heavy smocking, new bought by Stepmama for the wedding, shows up only as dirty white in the photograph. I’m glancing down at my new shoes because they’re scuffed and I know already I’ll have to answer to Stepmama for that later. She’s very particular about such things. She has told me that how a woman carries herself on every part of her person is magic. So, each scuff will mean a separate tongue-lashing. And another piece of hard work traded for betraying Stepmama’s generosity. Of course after each scolding, I will get hugs and cold kisses. In those days I would eagerly take the tongue-lashing just to have those.

CHORES

F
or the longest time I didn’t begrudge doing chores for Stepmama. Hadn’t Cousin Nancy and I tackled the gardens during the time Papa was so buried in his grief? Hadn’t

 

 

F we worked stooped over day after day? Children in those days worked hard both indoors and out. If I was doing different things for Stepmama, it was simply a part of the work we all did on the farm.

Stepmama worked hard, too. In fact, she took infinite care with Papa, feeding him up, making him his “
po
-tency drinks,” as she called them. And at first he seemed to thrive under her care.

I watched as into the mortar she would put the leaves and seeds she’d brought with her, grinding them fine. All her concentration was on the work, and her tongue, like a little cat’s, every now and then slipped out between her thin lips and moistened them. When she was satisfied at last that the mixture was as fine as it could get, she poured it into a glass canning jar and mixed it with fresh apple juice.

I reasoned, as an eleven-year-old does, that the drink wouldn’t hurt a grown-up. Only a child. It must be—I told myself—like strong coffee, which, Cousin Nancy said, “when made right could float an iron wedge.” But I thought it smelled and tasted more like the iron wedge itself. A rusted iron wedge.

Or maybe,
I thought,
the po-tency drink is more like the moonshine the Morton cousins make and then drink until they act silly. But us kids are never allowed a bit of it.

After a while, Stepmama let me do the grinding, though she measured out the amounts. That way I never touched them.

Stepmama,
I told myself,
is just keeping me safe. That’s what
real
mothers do.
Though of course since I was seven, I’d little enough knowledge of
real
mothers except what I read about in the fairy stories, where stepmothers and grandmothers and even fairy godmothers don’t always show up in the best of lights.

Certainly I couldn’t have sworn then that Papa was hurt by the apple concoction. Just that he became distant from the moment he began drinking it, no longer responding to any of my questions. Not hugging me, even when I hugged him first. And of course he didn’t sing again except in my dreams, though to be fair, he hadn’t actually sung to me in years.

But he was still a powerful man. Didn’t he go out into the gardens every morning and work until dark, Stepmama bringing him out the lunch she’d made with her own hands, so he didn’t have to stop to come inside?

And didn’t his heart still beat strongly? I could feel it pounding away when I snuggled into his lap of an evening, putting one of his arms over my shoulders like a woman adjusting a shawl. At these times a strange smile would flit across his face, like a mule eating saw-briars. Then his mouth moved as if to speak, though not a word fell out. And he’d shuffle his feet as a hound does, chasing after a deer or a rabbit in its dreams. It felt at those moments as if Papa was coming back to me when he was really moving on to a farther place.

After a full summer of this, even I couldn’t ignore the fact that Papa was a changed man. Here and gone. Here and gone.

“What’s wrong with him?” I finally asked Stepmama. It was on one of those wind-driven, rainy days when I couldn’t go outside to play and Papa couldn’t go outside to work in the garden and so he sat dozing in his big chair, fretting in his sleep.

She sighed. “Child, child, he’s growing old is all!”

I knew he wasn’t
that
old. Pop Wilber, the sawyer who lived up the nearest holler, was old. Nearly ninety, he still chopped wood for a living. Miss Skidmore, who lived a little way farther along, was eighty-seven and she still made quilts that won the top prizes at the county fair. Papa wasn’t like them, white-haired, with lines like cursive writing up and down their faces. He didn’t walk hunched over. His hands weren’t all crabbed and cramped with time.