“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.
•9•
COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS
Could 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
In 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.
•10•
CHORES
For 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.
Papa was just distant. And increasingly strange.
But perhaps, my traitor’s mind thought, no stranger than he was after Mama died. At least now he stayed home instead of running off to the churchyard every evening. At least now I could sit on his lap and he didn’t throw me off.
Sometimes Stepmama led him by the hand out into the herb garden and sat him down on the wooden bench. Then she’d bend over and whisper in his ear as if she was aiming to have a conversation only with him. I could see her mouth moving as I sat by the kitchen window doing my homework. But what she whispered to him, I didn’t know. And didn’t dare ask. He rarely answered her; the few times he did, she would shake her head and her face got puckered like an old peach and her beauty fell away so that even I could see she was a different woman from what she ordinarily showed the world.
I should have relaxed, what with Stepmama taking care of Papa and her spending time talking to me and showing me how to grind things in her big mortar—nuts, herbs, flowers. Giving me hugs each time I did a good job. Calling me a beauty and a smart child.
However, little things made me wary. For instance, Papa stopped taking care of himself. His beard grew out long and scratchy, and I didn’t want to sit on his lap anymore, or even rub his head, or come close, because he also began to smell. He smelled of unwashed bed linen and pee. He smelled musty, like a closet that’s never been aired out. He smelled like the old stuffed bear at the hotel in Addison, the one that stands on its hind legs eight feet tall in the front greeting hall.
When Papa’s hair began to flop down across his face, Stepmama herself cut it short with a fierce-looking pair of silver shears she’d brought with her. She put a bowl over the top of Papa’s head to help shape the haircut, though she left his beard as it was, long and flecked with gray. And then for weeks he didn’t look like Papa till the hair on his head grew back again. By then he was as shaggy as an old beggar man.
Old. Beggar man.
Old.
Maybe Stepmama was right. Papa was growing old even as we watched. And there’s not much a person can do about that.
Strangely, Stepmama didn’t throw away the hair she cut from Papa’s head. I watched her stick it in her apron pocket, and then later on saw it on her mirror table in a little blue bowl the color of a robin’s egg when I went in to get her bed linen for washing and airing. I was only in her room because she was out hanging up shirts on the line, which was too high for me to reach, and grumbling about it like always though she could have just tied the line a little bit lower down. I didn’t tell her that. She’d sent me in to fetch the sheets and truth to tell, I was glad to go into her room. It drew me in as if I’d been pulled toward it with a magnet. We’d studied magnets in school that past year in science.
I stared at the little bowl and tried to think why anyone would keep Papa’s hair.
Maybe, I thought, it’s because she loves him so much she can’t bear to be parted from even the smallest part of him. I’d already seen how Papa was when Mama passed away. Grown-ups just acted different than kids. Different in unfathomable ways. Crazy ways. Just like they were tetched in the head. So, keeping someone’s hair in a bowl was just another mad adult thing to do.
I put my finger into the bowl and stirred the hair around. There was a buzzing sound in the room as if bees had gotten in, and I suddenly got a short, sharp shock that ran up my finger, up my arm, up to the roots of my own hair.
I turned and ran out of there screaming without collecting the sheets and once I stopped hollering, I had to tell Stepmama what had happened.
She grabbed me by both arms and instead of giving me a hug and telling me there was nothing wrong and I was just fine said, “If you cannot go into my room without touching things, Snow, then you shall not be allowed to go into the room at all.”
And for a year I didn’t.
Wouldn’t.
Couldn’t.
My heart wouldn’t let me. Nor would my legs.
When people came to call—it was a very small town after all and everyone wanted to meet the new woman if only to talk about her when they’d left—Stepmama would go over to Papa and whisper something in his ear. Then Papa would suddenly leap up and about, almost laughingly so, dancing and joking and calling Stepmama by a dozen different names like “Honey” and “Sweetsop,” and once even by my dead mama’s name, Ada Mae. Though right after they left, he’d flop back in the chair, dreaming through the rest of the day.
Tetched, the both of them, I tell you.
Cousin Nancy didn’t remark on Papa’s condition directly to me, but some of the ladies in church did when she brought me to Christmas service, the one time that year Stepmama couldn’t find an excuse for me to stay home.
“Well, I never . . . ,” Miss Caroline said over my head, her one good eye all but sparking fire. “That man was so animated, why, it’s like he’d been drinking all day long, though I thought he was teetotal. Mourning can sometimes take a man that way.”
“Lem is not teetotal, though he rarely drinks,” Cousin Nancy told her. “And certainly not to excess. And he’s no longer mourning, he’s married.”
“Well, he surely was animated,” Miss Caroline repeated, the fire in her good eye now banked.
And her sister, Miss Amelia, added, “Itchy, I’d have said.” She pursed her lips.
“Itchy and odd,” Miss Caroline shot back.
“No odder than before, going up that mountain all the time and . . .”
And from the other side, Miss Mae Morton, Papa’s old cousin, with white hair that was so patchy her pink scalp showed through in places, looked straight at me. She lifted her finger, it all crooked from the arthritis, and said warningly, “Little pitchers . . .”
I knew what that meant. “Little pitchers have big ears.” Meaning me. Meaning I would probably report back to Stepmama every word I heard. Only I wouldn’t, though how were they to know?
At that warning, they all four sat straight-backed in the pew and began to sing “Away in a Manger” at the top of their lungs and all on different but interesting keys.
Cousin Nancy held tight to my hand, her face flushed and her hand much too warm around mine. I suppose I’d become accustomed to Stepmama’s cold hands by then.
I kept thinking about how warm Cousin Nancy seemed as the priest droned on and on in his Christmas sermon, talking about heresies and Pharisees and the like, none of which I quite understood except that they all happened a long time ago. All the while, Cousin Nancy was like a regular furnace. I felt almost burned up sitting beside her.
Then, when the congregation began to sing, I realized I’d forgo
tten the words of most of the carols. My neighbors seemed sudden strangers. All I had was Stepmama now. I shuddered and felt cold. Cold was comfortable. Cold was common. Cold was what I’d become used to.
Afterward, Cousin Nancy delivered me home from church, lifting me over the heavy snow plowed against the curb. Stepmama was waiting at the door, scowling, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Been long enough,” Stepmama commented. “I’ve been that worried. Lemuel has been asking after her and I didn’t know what I could tell him.”
“Tell him Merry Christmas,” Cousin Nancy said, smiling sweetly, but there was tartness in her tone.
“Thank you,” Stepmama said to Cousin Nancy, as if suddenly remembering her manners. “I’m certain Snow had a good time.”
“Summer certainly did,” Cousin Nancy countered.
I remember thinking that it sounded like some kind of contest between them, their own version of the Europe War. I didn’t quite understand it then, except that it made me uncomfortable.
Once Stepmama closed the door firmly behind us, I asked why she’d said I had had a good time.
“Form,” she answered. “Give them little to complain of. Did you have a good time, Snow?”
Suddenly I was not sure and took a while in answering. I had to think about the day in church. About how strange everything had seemed. How overly warm Cousin Nancy had been.
“I think so,” I said at last.
If she heard something else in my answer, she kept it to herself, but the scowl was gone. She looked satisfied, a snake just swallowing its kill.
Remember, I was eleven. Stepmama was all I had, the only one who paid the slightest bit of attention to me every single day. I thought that made her a good person, only just someone not able to give any more than that little. That little had become enough.