The Snow Child

  There. There. Is that better?

  Faina nodded and took Mabel’s cold, damp hand and held it to her cheek.

  Thank you.

  She closed her eyes and rested her head against Mabel’s arm. Only after Mabel was certain she was asleep did she slide her hand out from under her cheek. She smoothed back Faina’s hair, gently pulled it away from her sweat-dampened neck, and brought the bedsheet up over her shoulders.

  It was three in the morning when she heard Jack putting more wood into the stove. The two men had alternated sleeping in chairs and busying themselves with contrived chores. The baby woke for his feeding then, and Mabel carried him in to Faina.

  Your little one is hungry, dear.

  Faina rolled to her side but never seemed completely awake, even as she slid her breast from her nightgown and held the baby against her. Once again her skin was hot and blotchy, and she brought her knees up in pain as the baby nursed.

  Not until the baby was back in his cradle, fed and changed and fast asleep, did Faina awake and begin to plead with Mabel.

  Please, she whispered. Take me outside.

  No, child. You must stay in bed and rest.

  Mabel spoke without conviction. Perhaps there was hope there, in the winter night. But what would Garrett and Jack say?

  I am so hot, and I feel as if I can’t catch my breath. Please?

  “She wants to go outside.”

  “What? Now? In the middle of the night?” Jack said.

  “She’s so warm, and it’s so stuffy in here. I think she feels as if she’s suffocating. She just wants to take in some of the cold night air.”

  “We could prop the door open,” Garrett suggested.

  “She wants to be outside, under the night sky,” Mabel said, and Garrett nodded, understanding.

  “OK,” he said finally. “We’ll take her outside.”

  “Are you two mad?” Jack said. “It’s twenty below zero out there. She’ll freeze to death.”

  “No she won’t,” Garrett said. Then he turned to Mabel. “Will you help her dress?”

  Mabel eased Faina into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. She laced the girl’s moccasin boots and pulled her blue wool coat on over her nightgown. Then she took the red scarf and mittens Garrett had handed her, and as she wrapped the scarf around Faina’s neck she recognized her sister’s dewdrop-lace stitch.

  I’ve always meant to ask you…

  But she stopped herself and slipped the mittens over Faina’s hands.

  You must promise me, child, you won’t go wandering off into the night. We’ll bring a chair outside, and you can sit in it for a few minutes.

  It hurts too much.

  Sitting?

  The girl nodded.

  Mabel helped her lie back on the bed. When she explained to Garrett about the pain, he said he knew what to do. A short while later he returned to the bedside and he and Mabel helped Faina to her feet. Garrett put her marten hat on her head and tied the straps beneath her chin.

  Come and see the bed I’ve made for you under the stars.

  Faina smiled up at her husband as he helped her walk outside. Not far from the cabin, he had laid several logs side by side, and on top of these he had piled caribou hides and beaver pelts until they formed a thick mattress.

  The night was calm and cold, perhaps the coldest Mabel had ever known. The snow squeaked beneath her boots, and the air was sharp. It was the kind of deep freeze that penetrates the thickest wool and strangles the lungs, and Mabel hesitated. Perhaps this was a mistake. But then she heard Faina’s long, easy breaths and imagined the cold air against her feverish brow. With each of them holding one of her arms, Mabel and Garrett led her the short way from the cabin to the makeshift bed, where Garrett helped her lie down. She let out a long sigh as he spread a beaver-pelt blanket over her. Mabel had brought the wedding quilt from their bed, and she laid this on top, too.

  Look at the stars, Garrett whispered. Do you see them all?

  Yes. They’re beautiful.

  He stayed with her, sitting in a kitchen chair at her side, while Mabel went into the cabin. A short time later, when the baby awoke wanting to be held, Mabel asked Garrett if he would like to come indoors for a while. She could sit with Faina.

  Do you want me to stay? he asked Faina. Maybe you should come in now, anyways?

  No, she said gently. Go inside. Hold our son.

  Mabel leaned over Faina and tucked the wedding quilt around her sides and pressed the fur flaps of her hat against her cheeks. Then she wrapped herself in a blanket she had brought from the cabin and sat in the chair.

  Are you well, child?

  Oh, yes. Out here, with the trees and the snow, I can breathe again.

  It was like an extraordinary dream: Faina’s quiet sighs and the occasional pop and crack of river ice and tree branches snapping in the cold; the stars everywhere in the broad, deep night, broken only by the jagged horizon of the mountain range. Illumination behind the peaks shot up into shards of light, blue-green like a dying fire, rippled and twisted, then spun circles into ribbons of purple that stretched up and over Mabel’s head until she heard an electric crackle like the sparks from a wool blanket in a dry cabin at night. She looked directly up into the northern lights and wondered if those cold-burning specters might not draw her breath, her very soul, out of her chest and into the stars.

  “Jesus, Mabel, you’re buried in snow. Where’s Faina?”

  She did not remember falling asleep. Who could doze in such cold? But she was warm in her cocoon of wool and blanket, her nose nuzzled down into her coat, and she did not wake until she heard the men’s voices.

  Faina. Aren’t you here, at my side?

  But she wasn’t.

  “She must be in the cabin, tending the baby.”

  “No. She isn’t there.”

  Stiff and sore, Mabel stood and wondered at all the snow covering her blanket. The night had clouded over, the stars were gone, and it had snowed several inches. How much time had passed? She went after the men, could hear Garrett calling in the cabin.

  “Faina? Faina?”

  “Where is she, Mabel?” Jack turned to her, nearly accusing.

  “She was just there, beside me. She must be near. Isn’t she in the cabin?”

  “No. I already said she’s not there.” Jack called into the trees, “Faina! Faina!”

  Garrett came from the cabin with a lantern.

  “Where is she?” There was no anger in his voice, only desperation, and he ran toward the river. “Faina! Faina!”

  Among the caribou hides, Mabel saw the wedding quilt buried in snow. How could she be so negligent? She picked it up to shake the snow off, and caught sight of blue wool.

  “Jack?”

  He came to her side, looked down where she pointed, then knelt and with his bare hands swept away the snow. Faina’s blue coat, embroidered with snowflakes. Her scarf. Her mittens. Her moccasins. He picked them up one by one, shaking off the snow.

  “Oh, Jack.” There, still buttoned inside the coat, was Faina’s white nightgown. “What does this mean?”

  Silent, Jack draped the clothes over his arm and carried them inside. Mabel followed with the snow-dampened quilt, and they set them all on the table.

  “I’ll go after Garrett. Care for the baby,” he said.

  “But Jack… I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “She’s gone?”

  He nodded.

  “But where?”

  Without answering, he left the cabin.

  When the baby woke, crying for his mother’s milk, Mabel was at a loss. She dipped the end of a clean cloth into warm, sweet tea and put it to his mouth. He sucked frantically, then turned his head and cried. She walked him back and forth in front of the window until he cried himself to sleep, and all this time she saw no lantern light, no sign of either Garrett or Jack. She sat in the chair and swayed side to side with the sleeping baby and prayed this night was not real,
that indeed it was a nightmare. But then Jack came through the door and didn’t speak. Behind him, winter dawn was breaking pale. She raised her eyebrows at him, and he shook his head.

  “Nothing?” she asked.

  “Not even a set of tracks.”

  “Where’s Garrett?”

  “He won’t come in. He says he’ll find her. He’s gone to saddle his horse.”

  “Oh, God, Jack. What have we done?”

  He didn’t speak for some time, but sat to unlace his boots and pull the snow and ice from his beard. He stoked the woodstove and then reached to Mabel, to take the baby. Surprised, she stood and gently slid the bundle into his arms. Jack swaddled the blanket more firmly and ran a finger along the baby’s cheek, his head bent so low to the newborn that at first Mabel could not see the tears streaming from his eyes.

  “Jack?” Mabel reached up and held his face in her hands. “Oh, Jack.” She took the baby from his arms and set him in the cradle, rocking it slowly until she was certain he was still asleep. When she stood, Jack was behind her. Mabel went to him and pressed her face into his chest, and they held each other like that for some time.

  “She is gone, isn’t she?”

  Jack clenched his teeth and nodded as if his entire body pained him.

  Grief swept over Mabel with such force that her sobs had no sound or words. It was a shuddering, quaking anguish, and she only knew that she would survive because she had once before. She wept until there was nothing left in her, and she wiped her face with the tips of her fingers and sat in the chair, expecting Jack to go out the door and leave her alone. But he knelt at her feet, put his head in her lap, and they held each other and shared the sorrow of an old man and an old woman who have lost their only child.

  Maybe it was only the wind, or her own terrible grief, but Mabel was certain she could hear Garrett’s voice. Sometimes it was like a shout, down by the river. Other times it was a deep, mournful cry that seemed to come from the mountains themselves.

  She and Jack stayed with the baby that night, waiting for Garrett to come home to his cabin. Mabel dozed beside the cradle where the infant slept quietly, but again and again she was jolted awake.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  Jack stood beside the woodstove, his face drawn.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Wolves, I think.”

  But she knew differently. She knew it was Garrett, riding and searching and crying into the starless night sky. Faina. Faina. Faina.

  EPILOGUE

  Hello. Anyone home?” Jack rapped on the cabin door, and then slowly opened it. “Hello?” Using his cane, he stepped up into the cabin. He stood for a moment in the doorway and listened to the silence. He had come looking for Garrett this autumn day but instead stumbled on memories. There, on a shelf near the woodstove, was Faina’s porcelain doll, its blond hair still in neat braids, its red and blue dress as bright as the day Jack had set it on a stump and called out, “This is for you. I don’t know if you’re out there or if you can hear me, but we want you to have it.”

  Jack did not leave the doorway, but his eyes wandered. Folded neatly on the arm of a chair was the wool blanket Mabel had sewed from Faina’s childhood coat. When Jack saw a collection of photographs hanging on the far wall, he did not close the door behind himself or even notice he was crossing the threshold as he walked to them. Most were of Garrett with his brothers, and of Esther and George on their wedding day. But the one that caught his eye was of a woman holding a tiny infant swaddled in a blanket. The only other time he had seen that photograph was nearly fifteen years ago, when he discovered it in a hut dug into the side of a mountain. It was Faina as a baby.

  Somewhere in the cabin, perhaps folded in a trunk or hanging in a closet, were a feathered wedding dress and a blue wool coat embroidered with snowflakes. Garrett would have kept them, even as he kept these other tokens of her life. But how little there was. This struck Jack as he looked around the cabin. These were the few earthly belongings Faina had left behind.

  It happened like this, the grief. Years wore away the cutting edges, but sometimes it still took him by surprise. Like the night just a few weeks ago, when he had spotted the blue leather-bound book on their shelf. It was always there, yet his eyes had passed over it daily without catching. He was fairly sure that for years it had gone unopened. All the books Mabel lent Garrett to read, but never that one. He was certain Garrett didn’t know it existed, and neither Jack nor Mabel ever talked of it.

  Mabel was in the bedroom brushing her hair when he pulled the book out from the others and, standing at the shelf, flipped through the pages. He touched the colored illustration of the fairy-tale girl, half snow and half child, with the old man and woman kneeling beside her. When pages cascaded to the floor he thought he had broken the binding. Glancing over his shoulder toward the bedroom, he quickly gathered them. They weren’t pages from the book; they were Mabel’s sketches, and he looked through each of them and marveled at the skill and detail.

  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 ag
reement.

  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?”