Whiter Than Snow (8 page)

She ignored the deferential manner and said, in a businesslike way, “I’ve noticed you living out here in the meadow. That’s fine for summer, but cold weather’ll catch us soon, and you might want a warmer place to stay.”

“Houses are scarce and hard to find for coloreds. There is plenty of land here, but no houses. I expect we can fix up a tent, stay here till the new year.”

“No, you’ll be perished by then. By Christmas, the temperature’ll get to twenty below, and there’ll be snowdrifts as high as a house. A tent’s no place for you, and certainly not for your girl.” Joe started to object, but the woman went on quickly, “Mittie McCauley’s my name. I’m a widow woman, and I need somebody to cut my wood. I own a prospector’s cabin. It’s not big, just one room, but it’s tight, and there’s a good fireplace to it. If you’d just help me with my wood, I’d be pleased to let you live there.”

“How much wood you want chopped?” Joe asked. White people had tricked him before.

“Oh, I’ve got enough for this winter, I expect, but I’d like some help for the next winter.”

“People here might not like that. A white man here told me, ‘Uncle, you stay away from the white ladies.’”

“Nobody speaks for me.” The woman cocked her head and added, “I didn’t know you had a white nephew.”

Joe had to chuckle at that, and then Jane whispered, “I’d like to live in a house, Pappy.” So Joe guessed they could take a look.

Mittie led them to the cabin, which she had cleaned just that day, and let them look around at the beds, covered with quilts that the old woman had made—not new quilts, but they were clean—and two straight chairs that stood beside a homemade table. A kerosene lamp with a bright metal reflector hung from the ceiling. Jane looked at her father and smiled, then asked, “Can we stay, Pappy?”

Joe relaxed a little. If the old woman was tricking him, they could always move out. It wouldn’t hurt to stay for a little while. “I guess so.”

Mittie held out her hand. Joe stared at it a long time. He’d never shaken hands with a white person, especially not a white woman. “It’s a deal, then?” the woman asked.

Joe reached out his huge hand and barely touched the woman’s. “Deal.”

He moved their few things into the cabin that night, and when he returned from work the next day, he found that the woman had stocked it with flour and cornmeal, salt and potatoes and cans of beans. And she’d left a cake on the table, “a welcome-home present,” she told him when he returned the plate.

After Joe and Jane were settled, Mittie McCauley showed up at the cabin, asked Jane’s age, and was told the girl was seven. “Then she’s got to enroll in school,” the woman said. “You don’t want her to grow up in ignorance.”

Joe snorted. “I’d be glad for her to go, but there aren’t any colored schools in Swandyke.”

“Of course not. You’re the only coloreds here. We’ve got one school for everybody.”

“They won’t take her.”

“They’ll take her. You leave it to me.”

“She’s got nothing to wear. She’s got no shoes. Her feet are on the ground.”

“I have a plenty of clothes my daughter wore when she was a girl.”

“I’m not putting her anyplace white kids can beat her down.”

“And you think they’ll treat her better if she’s ignorant? This is not the South, Mr. Cobb.”

“I want to go,” Jane said, and so Joe let the old woman dress the girl in a red dress and a blue coat brightened up with brass buttons, and enroll her in the Swandyke school. There were some who did not like it. A few parents went to the school board and said God didn’t intend for black and white to mix. But when the principal said the only way he knew to separate them was to build a separate school just for Jane and assign her one of the teachers, they grumbled but said no more.

After he had lived in the cabin a year, Joe went to Mittie with a can of silver dollars and asked if he could buy the house. The old woman looked stern. “I’d have to have a hundred dollars for it,” she said. “Not a penny less. Don’t think you can cheat me, Mr. Cobb.” Joe tried not to let his surprise show, for the house was worth far more. He counted out the money and handed it to Mittie, who gave him a paper saying the house was his. Only later did Joe realize that the old woman had expected him to buy the house, had wanted him to, and that she knew better than he that the place was worth twice what she had charged. That evening, Joe went to the store and bought a bottle of Coca-Cola, and he and Jane celebrated their own home. Neither one of them had ever tasted Coca-Cola before.

Every year after that, Joe went to Mittie’s house and chopped her winter’s wood.

Jane loved that cabin, simple as it was, because it belonged to them, and her father said that nobody in the family had ever owned a house before. With Mittie’s help, the girl learned to cook a few things—stir up corn bread, boil beans, stew apples. Mittie supervised the girl in making curtains. In the summer, Jane filled a quart fruit jar with wildflowers for the table, and in the winter, she replaced the flowers with a basket of pinecones. Jane gathered them with Rosemary Bibb, her schoolmate.

One April day as he labored in the mill, Joe stopped to look out at the bright sunlight glaring on the white slope of Jubilee Mountain, and he reflected on the change in his life from only a few years before. He had a job in which he was paid as much as a white worker, a fine house next door to a white woman’s, and his daughter Jane had a white girl as her friend. Life had turned out pretty good.

Lately, Grace Foote had been thinking about the ghosts. When Grace was a little girl of seven or eight, the laundress, an old black woman who’d been born a slave, told her about ghosts as the two sat in the wash room, heavy wet sheets hanging around them like a spectral fog.

“I seen a little boy standing behind you just now, Miss Grace, dressed all up in one of them white suits young’uns wears back long years ago, and with pretty curls. Fine-looking boy,” the old woman said, staring past Grace. “He’s gone now. He walked through that wall easy as you please.” She fingered a charm on a string around her neck.

Grace knew the woman was talking about her father’s brother, who had died as a little boy in that very room, drowned in a washtub when he was three years old. Her father kept a picture of him. Even at that young age, Grace
knew
the old woman had not seen a ghost, had only seen the tintype of the little boy in the study, where it sat in a velvet frame on the library table, a black ribbon pinned across the corner to tell that the boy was dead. The woman had made up the story to scare her. But maybe it really was true, because Grace
had
been a little frightened. She had felt chills down her spine and something like a wisp of a breeze behind her when the old woman spoke.

Then Grace remembered that Father had dropped the picture and broken the frame and put it away in his desk until he could have it repaired. Well, maybe the woman, who had come to work for the family only that week, had been snooping. That was it. She’d found the old image and known the boy was someone in the family and saved up the knowledge to scare Grace. Maybe.

“
I’ve
never seen any ghosts. I don’t believe in them,” Grace said. If she said a thing out loud, she truly would believe it.

“You will when you see one. What time was you born?”

“At midnight. Mama heard the clock strike just as I came in the world, and they don’t know if my birthday is the ninth or the tenth of April. That’s why we celebrate two days.”

“Then you’s born between the lights, between dark and dawn. That means you ought to feel things other folks don’t. There’s things can’t be explained in this world, but they happen. I know it. I’m born in the dark, too. Once, I was sleeping, but I looked up when I heard a woman walking past the bed in high-heel slippers. I got up and went over that whole room, but she ain’t there. Another time, I hear somebody sweeping, but there ain’t nobody. And the worst time, I waked up in the night and knew there was a bird in the house. That’s a terrible thing, ’cause a bird in the house means death’s a-coming. But there wasn’t no bird.” She shook her head. “Didn’t matter. Next day, my sister’s youngest drowned in the river.”

Grace shivered. She hadn’t seen the little boy in the room, but she had to admit, if only to herself, that she’d sensed other things in her short life, things she’d never told anyone about, and they had scared her. Maybe the old woman was right about her sensing things you couldn’t see. She’d wake up in the night, sure that someone or something was beside her bed. She’d cry out, and her mother would come and shush her, asking where she got such ideas about spirits and creepy things, because there were no ghosts under creation. Grace had thought something was wrong with her then, because her mother was always right. So when the girl felt chills, she told herself that a window was open somewhere in that vast house, and when she sensed a presence, she believed it was her imagination. But now, here was this old Negro woman telling her that ghosts were real. Grace pondered that.

The laundress, sensing she had an audience, took her hands out of the laundry tub and dried them on her apron, then sat down on a bench. “Some say it’s my blood stop circulating that brings on spells. But they ain’t spells. I know what I see. Now I tell you some things, but you got to promise you won’t let on to nobody.” Grace wouldn’t tell anyone, especially her mother, who would chide the old laundress, maybe even let her go, for scaring the girl with such foolishness. Grace crossed her heart.

“First off, never eat nine persimmons in a row, or you’ll turn into a boy.”

Grace looked at the woman with wonderment. “It’s true as the Bible. I’ve seen it myself. There’s an old lady that died, and me and another woman laid her out, and we saw she’s a man. They say when she was a girl, she was awful fond of persimmons.” The laundress nodded to emphasize the truth of what she’d said. Then she got up and lit the fire under the wash water. “And here’s another thing: If you wear red when you’re a-carrying your child, you’ll have a boy.”

The old woman went on with a litany of superstitions, which the girl found to be queer and not quite believable, but she liked the laundress and liked sitting in the steamy wash room, where her skin felt cool and damp and her hair curled up into ringlets, so she listened. Of course, she did not really believe any of the stories. Her mother had said superstitions were for the ignorant, and the washerwoman could neither read nor write. But the superstitions went down into her subconscious, and after that, she never ate persimmons. And when she was pregnant with Schuyler, she bought a red dress, not that she especially wanted a boy, but she knew she didn’t want a girl, because girls had a harder time of it. She also put a knife under the bed when she went into labor—another of the old Negro’s superstitions, that a knife or pair of scissors left under the bed during childbirth would cut the pain. But Grace didn’t think that had helped much.

Now as she looked out at the everlasting snow on the godforsaken slope of Jubilee Mountain below her, Grace wondered why the thoughts of ghosts and superstitions had come on her again. She hadn’t remembered the laundress in years, the foolish old woman who’d both charmed and frightened her with stories of haunts and curses. She had warned Grace never to cut out a dress on Friday, or she wouldn’t live to wear it out, and said if tea leaves floated to the top of her cup, Grace would come into money. One time, the woman had taken Grace’s hand and started to tell her what lay ahead in her life. Then she’d stopped and wouldn’t go on, although the girl had begged and promised to give her a quarter.

“You best give me a quarter not to tell,” the old woman had said darkly, and Grace, frightened, had obliged. Sometimes, she thought that she should have made the woman tell her what she saw. Or maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she was already living the life the laundress had seen.

Once, the woman had put a little bag containing something that smelled frightful about the girl’s neck. When Grace’s mother discovered it, there’d been a row. “I’ve told you again and again not to pass on your ignorant ways to my daughter, Sabra. I’m going to have to let you go.” The laundress had pleaded, saying she had no family and would starve without the work, but Grace’s mother was firm. “I warned you twice before.”

The old woman stood then, the washing still in the tubs, and took a sprig of something from under her head rag and waved it around, shouting a curse with such vehemence that Grace’s mother blanched. After the laundress left, Grace’s mother laughed and said that the curse meant nothing and that in the future she’d hire only Irish girls to do the washing. Her mother, Nancy, had been right about the curse, because if anyone had led a blessed life (and still did), it was Grace’s mother. Oh, there had been that setback with Grace’s father and the Schuyler fortune, but the unpleasantness hadn’t lasted long, and her mother had married a man who was even wealthier.

Once again, as she shaded her eyes against the glare of sun on snow below the Fourth of July Mine, Grace wondered if the curse had been meant for her.

It was seeing the black man that brought up the memories of the laundress and made her restless, as though the witches were riding her, Grace thought. Her husband said the man had worked at the mill for nearly two years, but Grace had never encountered him. There was that dark little girl in the school, but Grace had assumed she was a Mexican. Then Grace had seen the girl and man together and known they were both Negroes. And when she asked, she was told there had been talk at the school that the girl ought not to attend. “But where else could she go?” Grace had asked, because she had a few virtues, among them a lack of prejudice. Besides, before long, her son, Schuyler, who was seven, would go east to school, so what did it matter who attended the grade school at Swandyke? Oh, Jim fought her over the idea of boarding school, and she couldn’t really blame him, since after Schuyler left, Jim would have only her for company, and she hadn’t been much of a wife. Perhaps the laundress had seen that in Grace’s hand.

She wondered if the Negro here in Swandyke had a wife. Grace would be curious to talk to her, find out if she believed the things the old laundress had told. Then she laughed out loud—not a laugh really, but a snort. What would people think if they knew that the wife of the superintendent of the Fourth of July Mine was swapping superstitions with an ignorant colored woman? That would give them something to talk about, those busybodies who gossiped about her over their quilt frames. Not that they hadn’t been friendly in their way. When Grace arrived, they’d brought their cakes and cobblers and told her about the beautiful summers, as if they were a reward for living through the hateful months of snow. They’d asked her to quilt with them. But Grace detested quilts, those ugly covers made from fabric leftovers.

The Swandyke women were a queer lot. She remembered the fat woman with the ridiculous curls like Mary Pickford’s, and another, her estranged sister (or so she’d been told), who read books and newspapers and might have been somebody to talk to, except that she kept to herself. Grace hadn’t known how to be easy with the women, and she’d told Jim that she thought it wasn’t her place as the superintendent’s wife to mix with them. So she’d been aloof, not because she’d wanted to be, but because she didn’t know how to be friends—with them or with just about anyone else, because she’d never really had friends. They probably had been hurt, those well-meaning Swandyke women, thinking her “airish,” and gradually they’d left her alone. Grace had only herself to blame for her loneliness. But she was used to it. She had been born lonely.

She encountered the women in the store and on her long walks, and remarked about the weather, asked about families she couldn’t keep straight and didn’t care about, and in recent weeks, she had shown a curiosity about mining superstitions. One miner had told her that women were bad luck in the mines. Another mentioned it was bad luck to kill a rat underground, because rats, like canaries, served a purpose, letting miners know when deadly gas was accumulating. But most of the miners didn’t pay attention to that particular superstition. Some miners ran from a mine when they heard a peculiar knocking, believing the Cornish Tommyknockers, or mischievous spirits, were warning them of a cave-in.

The superstitions fascinated her. She couldn’t seem to hear enough of them, and she wrote down the snippets of information whenever she heard them. She realized others had noticed her obsession the day she encountered Mittie McCauley in the post office and sought to engage her in a conversation, because the woman had lived in Swandyke since its beginning in the 1860s. She inquired how the old lady was feeling.

“I’m doing very good, except I’m all stiffed up,” the woman replied, looking a little surprised, because pretty nearly every time she went to the post office, Grace ignored her.

Grace remarked on the snow, and then in an off handed way, she said that she had heard that the woman always kept a bed turned down. “Is that for good luck? I mean, do you believe that if you’re prepared for an accident, it won’t happen?”

Mittie looked bemused, as if she understood that Grace was pumping her for information, and replied, “No, it’s in case somebody’s hurt and needs a bed.”

“Oh.” Grace tried then to look as if she were only making mail-time conversation.

“But if you’re interested in superstitions, I know a plenty of them, although I never put much stock in them, or conjurations, either. They say if a hawk flies over your house, there’ll be a death, but then, there’s some people thinking that waking up in the morning means death, and who can argue with the truth of another day putting you closer to the end? You could come and talk to me sometime. I’d welcome a visit.”

“I’ll do that,” Grace said, hoping her tone told the old woman not to expect her.

But why not talk to her? Grace thought now. She could claim she was writing a book, or, if that sounded too pretentious, a magazine article, and who knew, maybe she would write one, because she was good at writing, better at it than at conversation with those people. She liked the idea of being an author. Besides, writing would be something to do, and God knew, talking to the old woman would be more interesting than making needlepoint seats for her eight dining room chairs. That was boring work, drone labor that caused her to dwell on her life too much as she stitched.

She would ask about mining superstitions, but perhaps she would learn others, something that would explain her own life. And that, she decided, was the reason she was so taken with old wives’ tales. Perhaps there was something that explained what had happened to her, why she felt things. Grace had always blamed herself for making bad decisions, but maybe it was “in her stars,” as people put it. She wondered if the laundress had indeed seen something in the little girl’s hand that foretold an unhappy life.

Has it been an unhappy life? Grace asked herself, stopping and reconsidering. There were some who thought her the luckiest girl in the world, married to a successful mining executive and the mother of a bright little boy. Perhaps her life had not been all that unhappy. Still, there was little joy in it.

Of course, Grace’s life had begun well enough, because the family was wealthy beyond most people’s dreams. Her grandfather had started the family lumber business in Saginaw, Michigan, by acquiring vast tracts of timberland just after the Civil War. As the money flowed in, he built an enormous three-story house with turrets and long, narrow windows, a porch that wrapped around three sides, and trim that dripped from the eaves and corners of the house like wooden lace. There were two parlors with huge crystal chandeliers, a music room, a billiards room, study, five bedrooms (not counting the servants’ rooms), and five white-tiled bathrooms, one so large that it was turned into a delivery room, where Grace’s mother gave birth to her only child in 1892.