Only the snake.
•19•
AN UNWANTED VISITOR
I stayed home from school Monday because my legs were still trembling and my stomach threatened to empty again. I had what Stepmama called the cramps and she was—all unaccountably—nice to me. She brought me warm milk and buttered toast, leaving it outside my door for she still could not come in because of the rowan branch. She even dropped off a note at school saying as how I was going to take a few days off to recover from a “visitor” though there was no one visiting us at all.
When I protested the lie, she laughed without humor. “That’s what we call it in Charleston,” she said. “Your teacher will understand.”
But I didn’t. Not until later did I find out that “the visitor” was what more sophisticated girls called the monthlies. That and saying they’d “fallen off the roof.” And “Aunt Flo’s come to stay.” And even “on the rag.”
I felt listless and crampy, so I napped a lot and read—reread, really—all of the fairy tales in my books as well as A Girl of the Limberlost and Anne of Green Gables. I looked out the window of my bedroom at the sunny days going by. I did my homework, which Stepmama brought back from school for me.
All in all, I stayed away from school two days. The cramping came and went, as did the blood. The first day it was spotty, the next day not there at all.
Stepmama waited on me, which should have made me suspicious, but only gave me hope that the worst with her was finally over. Maybe she’d just needed that much time till she realized she loved me. Then Papa would get better and we’d be a real family instead of—what we were.
Of course, that kind of hope is just a parcel of magic thoughts without the actual magic to make anything happen.
By the third day, I went to school because at home it had begun to feel as if I’d been imprisoned. No bars on the door, but shut in nonetheless. Stepmama’s concerns now seemed as if the show was more important than her actually being there. What hope I had was gone. Somehow that made me even sadder than before.
Will it be this way each month? I wondered. Will she keep me in my room every thirty days, not by the force of her will but by my acquiescence? Acquiescence was a word I’d just learned in civics class. It means how a person acts when she knowingly and without protest lets someone else take her rights away. And that’s what I was doing with Stepmama. Letting her tell me what to do and say and believe, without saying a word against her power.
I excused myself because I was only twelve. Because I worried about Papa. Because I wanted a real mama. Because I was, somehow, all alone. But those were only excuses. I acquiesced, plain and simple.
No—I promised myself. If I am truly becoming a woman by this pain, I should act like one.
So, I got out of my nightgown, dressed, and went into the living room, where Papa drowsed in his everlasting dream. I was ready to tell Stepmama I was fine and wanted to go back to school. I would demand to go back. As for With Signs church, I would never, ever go there again.
But Stepmama was nowhere around.
I tapped lightly on her bedroom door, in case she was napping. When there was no answer, I peered out the window. The car was gone. She was gone. For a moment my heart lifted. But I knew she’d be gone only for as long as her chores took.
I went back to her room and carefully turned the handle of the door. It opened with nary a sound. The room was completely dark; the heavy curtains covering the two windows let in no light.
“Stepmama,” I said, “I’m feeling much better.” Then I asked, “Are you here?” Just in case.
A voice whispered out of the darkness, “Is that a true question for me, Snow in Summer?”
It wasn’t Stepmama’s voice, but it was a voice I knew though I’d heard it only once long before. Heard and tried to forget. But magic is hard to forget.
I slipped into the darkened room. “Mirror,” I said, “not that question, but another one.”
“Speak it then,” the mirror told me.
I’d had a question that had been tangling my brain ever since Stepmama had come to live with us. Till now, I hadn’t had a chance nor the courage nor the incentive to enter Stepmama’s room again to ask it.
“Mirror . . .” I hesitated, took a deep breath, got my courage up, and asked: “Who should I fear the most?”
I’d always thought that the answer was going to be that I had to fear Stepmama the most, so I hadn’t wanted to waste the question. But after seeing the snake in the preacher’s hands, I was no longer so sure which was worse—the witch or the serpent.
In the dark, something stirred. There was a shussshing sound. I shuddered. Did Stepmama keep snakes here? Even if they were in boxes, the sound was enough to make my knees go weak. If there were serpents in the house, as well as Stepmama, then both my greatest fears were realized together.
Suddenly the mirror turned on, lit up like a picture show. Years ago, when she was nearly ready to give birth to my brother, Mama had taken me to a picture show. It was called Mickey’s Garden. I remembered bits of it now: inchworms grown as big as snakes, trying to eat both Mickey and his dog.
“Fear the Hunter,” the mirror’s masked face said, startling me out of my memories.
“Fear the Hunter, fear the knife,
Fear the edge that takes a life.”
The mirror spoke as if Hunter was capitalized, like a name or a rank of some kind.
“The Hunter? Who’s that?” I asked, but the mirror had gone silent. In the silence I heard a car door slam right outside.
Stepmama was home.
I slipped back out of her room so fast my shadow had trouble keeping up, and I headed down the hallway as if going toward the bathroom.
That was where she found me. “Up on your feet at last,” she said, almost sneeringly.
“I’m feeling much better.” It wasn’t a lie.
“Good, because I’ve got a little surprise for you.” She smiled one of her discomforting smiles, then turned away and went into the kitchen. Watching her back—so straight, so confident—I shuddered. But the mirror had not said to fear her. Or the snake. It had said to fear the Hunter. So I relaxed my guard.
I did wonder about that surprise she’d promised, but I wondered even more who that hunter might turn out to be. Then I thought that the mirror might actually have meant Stepmama was the hunter but didn’t dare name her. Certainly she hunted a willing partner. Or even an unwilling one. Or maybe the mirror meant the snake was the hunter? Its mouth surely hunted an exposed arm or leg or neck. Or perhaps the mirror meant I should fear the preacher, who’d clearly been hunting for my immortal soul. That’s the trouble with mirror answers. You can see more than one meaning in them.
At that, I laughed nervously. Foolish Summer. If you have to rely on answers from a mirror to guide you, you’re already lost.
I promised myself never to ask the mirror my third question. Not even if my life depended upon it.
I went off to school the next day and so had three full days to think about the hunter. But think as long and as hard as I might, no further explanations came to me.
I even looked up the Hunter in our classroom encyclopedia. The only listing was for Orion under Greek mythology. He owned two dogs and hunted lions. As far as I knew, there were no lions in West Virginia. Unless you counted painters, which is what people call mountain lions, though there are hardly any of those left in our county.
My teacher asked if I was feeling better, and I said, “Never better,” though that wasn’t entirely true. However, it was fear that troubled me now. My first monthly was over and gone.
And good riddance, I thought.
Saturday morning I woke up early. Tomorrow would be Sunday, and with it churchgoing.
I wrestled with how to get out of being hauled back to the snake church. I knew Stepmama was sure to insist on it, which left me but a day and a night to figure out how to escape.
Cousin Nancy had told me once that making a list of my do’s an
d don’ts and maybes could help me make decisions. Though this was more of a wills and won’ts.
So I tried it, but just in my head. I didn’t want Stepmama to get hold of any written list and task me with it.
Wills: Keep Stepmama sweet. Ask to go to Cousin Nancy’s church.
Won’ts: SNAKES!!!! Poison. Burning glasses. Crazy folk.
It was what I knew already. It was no help at all.
I could try and run away, but except for Cousin Nancy’s house, I’d nowhere to run. And Cousin Nancy’s would be the very first place Stepmama would look for me. If she wanted to find me, that is. I knew by now that she didn’t particularly like me. Maybe even hated me. I’d never understood why. I tried hard to make her love me, did all the chores she set me to, did well in school. And it was clear she wanted me for something, though maybe just to do the washing and the gardening or to keep Papa calm and sweet.
Papa! I’d almost forgotten Papa in all my fears. If I ran off, what would happen to him?
It was a puzzle. I’d never liked puzzles. I liked stories, ones that ended happily ever after. And I sure couldn’t wrap my mind about a happy ending to this one.
I planned and plotted all through the morning and came up with nothing. And in the afternoon, as she said she would, Stepmama surprised me.
The choices I made after that had as much to do with fear as love, more to do with the moment than any kind of a plan.
Stepmama knocked on my door and said in a voice that was happier than I’d ever heard from her that after I was done with any homework and chores, we were going visiting.
Going visiting—that was something we’d never done before.
“Oh—and wear that pretty blue dress.” She stood in the doorway and smiled at me. A plain, honest-to-goodness smile that even touched her eyes.
I dared to hope we’d be going to Cousin Nancy’s. With Stepmama in this new, almost giddy mood, perhaps we could all be friends. It worked in stories, like Anne of Green Gables. Maybe, I thought, maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough before.
“Yes, Stepmama,” I said, grinning back at her. “There’s not much left to do.”
The last of my chores was hanging out Stepmama’s washing on the line. It was a soft spring day, the sun bright overhead, and the wash would be dry by the time we got back from wherever the visit would be. I’d even offer to do the ironing for her. Normally ironing was the one thing she liked to do on her own.
My homework being long finished, I got dressed as she asked, in the blue dress that Cousin Nancy and her church ladies had gotten me out of the free box down in the town center. Cousin Nancy had sewn some old lace for a collar, which totally transformed the dress, and Miss Caroline and Miss Amelia had contributed a blue ribbon from their trousseau chests to go as a belt for my waist. I let my hair out of its braids and brushed it out, fifty strokes. It lay on my shoulders in soft waves.
Stepmama took me into her room on her own accord, tied a kerchief around my neck, wrong way around, like a movie cowboy I’d seen on a poster outside of the picture show. Then she dusted my cheeks and chin with some powder that made me sneeze and ran a bit of color over my lips. Not red like hers but a soft rose.
Taking away the kerchief, she held out a hand mirror so I could see myself. I looked like someone else, not me. Someone older. Someone sophisticated. Someone pretty.
“Better,” she said. “Like a Charleston girl.” She nodded.
Though inside I still felt like me.
I thought about being Anne Shirley at Green Gables, a bit prickly at first but later learning to speak sympathetically, and managed to say, “Thank you, Stepmama.” My voice was suddenly different as I said the words: lower, sweeter, friendlier.
“Much better,” she answered, and off we went. In the car. Not to Cousin Nancy’s, then, but quickly out of town and up the mountain again.
At that, my stomach clenched. My hands wrangled in my lap. She hadn’t said where we were going. But it wasn’t a Sunday. We were too dressed up. She had on her bright red lipstick and her nails were freshly painted.
But With Signs might have services on Saturdays, too. Some churches did. Maybe at their Saturday services people dressed properly.
Maybe it all depended on the snakes’ handlers.
And the snakes.
I stared out of the car window as the trees whizzed by, bands of green and gold. I was much too afraid to ask where we were going. Too afraid I already knew. I couldn’t leap out with the car speeding along. So I said nothing, not in my new friendly voice nor in my old scared one. But my stomach hurt so much, it was like I was getting the monthlies all over again.
•20•
COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS
That Saturday was a day I’ll always remember. I’d just closed the post office and was pulling down the shades when that witch drove by going hellbent. Normally I wouldn’t have cared, but she had Summer with her and they were heading out of town.
Curious, I thought. Except for last week when she’d taken Summer off to church, I didn’t remember that child having a ride in her stepmama’s precious Chevrolet in a coon’s age. Not even when it was raining or snowing and Summer had to slog her way up the hill to go to school and back down again to go home, poor mite.
The car was a dark green, like sludge in water near a coal mine, and I’ve never liked that color or make of car since.
I wouldn’t have thought any more of it, excepting Summer didn’t drive back with her when she returned. I saw that plain as plain. And when had that woman ever left Summer off with friend or foe excepting me, and even then she did it begrudgingly.
In fact, it turned out Summer didn’t come home that night or the next—her teacher told me some story about her taking sick and not being to school for a full week, but she hadn’t looked sick in the car. And she wasn’t at home being cared for. I knew because the next day after church, I went by the house when Summer’s stepmama was out, peered in the windows since I still refused to go inside. Besides, it wouldn’t have been polite. And the door was locked tight. From the outside.
Except for seeing the top of Lem’s head as he dozed in his chair, I couldn’t spot a soul in the house. I looked in every single window. I reported this to the police. It took them days to believe me, over another week to check it out. Not that I’d ever pestered the police before. But the chief took me for an addled widow of a certain age. Mind you, I’m barely twenty-nine. Well, thirty-three on a bad day.
“She’s my goddaughter,” I said in exasperation. “She’s not thirteen yet. Not for another two months.”
It didn’t help that I called her stepmama a witch. Or that the chief, Charlie Hatfield, who’d been in my class in school and was a fat little oinker then as now, said, “Nan, everybody knows you’ve always been sweet on Lem . . .”
As if that mattered at all when a child is missing.
Then he smiled conspiratorially at me, which made his cheeks plump up even more and his eyes squint so tight, they became like slits. He looked right ready for the slop bucket, did Charlie. “Some girls run off to be with a boy when they’re thirteen,” he said, “and there ain’t a law in our whole state says we have to try and get her back.”
“She doesn’t know any boys,” I told him.
“Of course she does,” he retorted, ending the conversation.
•21•
HUNTER
We went up the mountain, rounding that same scary hairpin turn going out of town. If anything, the trees overhead seemed to bend over us even more than the last time. I felt sick to my stomach with fear and the car’s sliding about the curves of the road. I opened my window, hoping to suck in some calming air. It wouldn’t have done me any good to beg Stepmama to slow down. It might have even encouraged her to go faster.
“Close your window,” Stepmama said, keeping her eyes on the curving road and not even looking in my direction from the corner of her eye.
For once I disobeyed her.
I guessed that convinced he
r that if I didn’t keep the window down, I might throw up in her car again. She didn’t say a word more.
If I thought that was a victory, I was mistaken. But then I was always mistaken when it came to Stepmama.
We drove for maybe a half hour more before she abruptly turned off onto a country lane. It wasn’t the lane I was expecting, the one that led to the With Signs church. Instead it was a narrower, longer drive, lined with birch trees that were so tightly planted and so large, they made an archway and almost seemed to glow in the dark made by their own leaves.
I let out the breath I hadn’t known I was holding. My stomach suddenly relaxed. No snakes, then.
Ahead was a shabby yellow trailer parked in the exact center of the clearing in the middle of a stand of pines. To the right was a small, badly tended garden going to weed and seed. I couldn’t see a thing in it that wasn’t too small, too hard, or rotten.
Nailed to one of the pine trees to the left of the house was a target. There were three filthy arrows sticking in the bull’s-eye.
Stepmama slowed, then stopped the car and only then said, “Roll up your window and get out.”
This time I obeyed her.
The minute we were out of the car, the door of the trailer opened and someone came out and stood on the concrete step, hands on his hips. Blond, heavy-lidded, he was as blandly handsome as one of the princes in the pictures of my fairy-tale book, though not wearing armor but more conventionally dressed in tan slacks and a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His hair was slicked back. He rolled a toothpick in his mouth and smiled around it.
And then I knew him. He was the older boy from the With Signs church, the one who’d nodded at Stepmama. The one who’d looked so satisfied with himself. He was still looking satisfied, though why anyone who lived in such a run-down trailer with such an unkempt garden should feel that way escaped me.