by Eowyn Ivey
Garrett shook his head and exhaled sharply out his nose.
“Is there a problem with that?”
“No. No, sir.” It had been a long time since he had called Jack sir.
Jack walked toward the house.
“It’s just… there wasn’t really a girl, was there?”
Jack almost kept walking. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. He was tired. His evening had been disturbed, and he wished he had stayed put at home in front of the woodstove. But he faced Garrett.
“Yes. There was a girl. She raised that fox from a pup. It still comes around sometimes, and it’s never done any harm, only taken what we’ve offered.”
Again there was the shake of the head and the soft snort.
“There’s no way.”
“What? Raising a fox from a pup?”
“No. The girl. Living by herself around here, in the woods. In the middle of winter? She wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“You don’t think a person could do it? Live off this land?”
“Oh, somebody could. A man. Somebody who really knew what he was doing. Not many,” and he said it as if he were one of the few. “Certainly no little girl.”
Garrett must have seen a look pass over Jack’s face, because his confidence seemed to falter. “I mean, I’m not doubting what you think you saw. Maybe there’s just another way to account for it.”
“Maybe.” Jack walked slowly toward the house. He didn’t wait for Garrett to say more, but as he neared the door he heard him call out, “Good night. And tell Mabel good night, too.” Without turning around, Jack held up the back of his hand in a brief wave.
“Nice walk?” Mabel’s eyes were on her sewing. She had lit a lantern and in the weak light was bent close to the fabric. Jack eased off his boots and went to the basin to wash his hands. He splashed the cold water over his face, too, and then dried his face and the back of his neck.
“How’s the sewing coming?”
“Slow but sure. I just had to rip out a few seams, so I’m pulling my hair out right now.” She put down her work, sat back in the chair, and stretched her neck. “Did you two have a nice walk?”
“It was all right. Quieter on my own.”
“Yes. He’s become quite a talker, hasn’t he? But I do enjoy him. And he is a hard worker.”
“Yes. He is.”
Jack stoked the woodstove and added a log. Nights were cooler now as autumn approached.
“So what have you been sewing on over there?”
“Oh, just a little something.”
“A secret? A Christmas present, then, is it?”
“Not for you. Not this one,” and Mabel smiled up at him.
“Well, what then?”
“Oh, nothing really…” and he knew she wanted to tell him.
“Come on. Out with it. You’re like a cat with a goldfish in its mouth.”
“All right, then. It’s for Faina. A new winter coat. I think I’ve figured out how to do the trim.” Mabel stood and held the pieces of the coat in front of her, laying the blue boiled wool across her front and along her arms as if it were sewn together. Then she picked up a few strips of white fur.
“For Faina?”
“Yes. Isn’t it beautiful? This is rabbit fur. Snowshoe hare, actually. I asked Garrett for it. I told him I was working on a sewing project. He said this was the softest, and it is. Feel it.”
So this is what she’d spent her time on these past few days. This is what kept her up at night, sketching in her little notebook, smiling and lighthearted. He wanted to yank the thing from her hands and throw it to the floor. He felt sick, lightheaded even.
“Don’t you like it? You see, I noticed last time we saw her, how her coat was frayed and worn. And she had nearly outgrown it last winter. Her wrists were sticking out. I wasn’t sure about the size, but I tried to remember how tall she had been when she was sitting in this chair, and how narrow her shoulders were.”
Mabel spread the coat on the table and picked up some spools of thread. Her face was radiant. “It’ll be lovely. I know it will. I just hope I can finish it in time.”
“In time for what?”
“For when she comes back.” She said it as if it were as plain as the nose on his face.
“How do you know?”
“Know what?”
“For Christ’s sake, Mabel, she’s not coming back. Can’t you see that?”
She stepped back, her hands at her cheeks. He had frightened her, but then her temper flared in her eyes. “Yes she is.”
She folded the coat and began sticking pins in the little tomato pincushion, her movements quick and angry. Jack sat in the chair by the woodstove. He put his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands, his fingers in his hair. He couldn’t look at Mabel. He heard her in the kitchen, clattering dishes and slamming cups, and then walking to the bedroom door. There she stopped. He did not raise his head. She was out of breath, her voice hushed but sharp.
“She is coming back. And damn it, Jack, I won’t let you or anyone else tell me differently.”
She carried the last lit lantern with her into the bedroom, leaving Jack alone in the dark.
CHAPTER 26
Snow had come to Mabel in a dream, and with it hope. Her coat as blue as her eyes, her white hair flashing as she skipped and spun down mountain slopes. In the dream, Faina laughed, and her laughter rang like chimes through the cold air, and she hopped among the boulders and where her feet touched rock, ice formed. She sang and twirled down the alpine tundra, her arms open to the sky, and behind her snow fell and it was like a white cloak she drew down the mountains as she ran.
When Mabel woke the next morning and looked out the bedroom window, she saw snow. Just a dusting across the distant peaks, but she knew it had been more than a dream.
The child did not have to die. Maybe she wasn’t gone from them forever. She could have gone north, to the mountains, where the snow never melts, and she could return with winter to her old man and old woman in their little cottage near the village.
Mabel only had to wish and believe. Her love would be a beacon to the child. Please, child. Please, child. Please come back to us.
No matter how she turned it over in her mind, Mabel always traced the child’s footsteps back to the night she and Jack had shaped her from snow. Jack had etched her lips and eyes. Mabel had given her mittens and reddened her lips. That night the child was born to them of ice and snow and longing.
What happened in that cold dark, when frost formed a halo in the child’s straw hair and snowflake turned to flesh and bone? Was it the way the children’s book showed, warmth spreading down through the cold, brow then cheeks, throat then lungs, warm flesh separating from snow and frozen earth? The exact science of one molecule transformed into another—that Mabel could not explain, but then again she couldn’t explain how a fetus formed in the womb, cells becoming beating heart and hoping soul. She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable?
You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.
And so, as autumn hardened the land and snow crept down the mountains, she sewed a coat for a child she was certain would return.
Mabel ordered several yards of boiled wool, and then in a giant kettle dyed it a deep blue that reminded her of the river valley in winter. The lining would be quilted silk, and the trim white fur. It would be sturdy and practical, but befitting a snow maiden. The buttons—sterling silver filigree. They came from a shop in Boston, and she had saved them for years in her button jar, never finding a purpose for
them until now. The white fur trim she would sew around the hood and down the front of the coat, along the bottom, and around each cuff. Snowflakes, embroidered with white silk thread, would cascade down the front and back of the coat.
She retrieved her sketchbook and a copy of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. It was one of the few natural history books of her father’s that she had brought with her, and she thought of it one evening as she worked on Faina’s coat. The old book contained illustrations of magnified images, and as a child Mabel had been particularly enamored of the foldout copperplate engraving of a louse with all its spindly legs. But she remembered, too, that there had been drawings of snowflakes.
“Exposing a piece of black Cloth, or a black Hatt to the falling Snow, I have often with great pleasure, observ’d such an infinite variety of curiously figur’d Snow, that it would be as impossible to draw the Figure and shape of every one of them…” and beside these words Hooke had included his sketches of a dozen snowflakes, looped and feathered, stars and hexagons. Mabel copied several of the designs. Then, from memory, she tried to re-create the one she had seen on her coat sleeve the night she and Jack made the snow child.
She followed a simple coat pattern she had ordered from a catalog. In the evenings, even when it was still bright outside, the trees and roof eaves kept the sunlight from coming in through the small cabin windows, so she lit a lamp and unfolded the fabric on the table. Following the pattern offered a kind of comfort, a quiet balance to working in the fields during the day. The farmwork was coarse, exhausting, and largely a matter of faith—a farmer threw everything he had into the earth, but ultimately it wasn’t up to him whether it rained or not. Sewing was different. Mabel knew if she was patient and meticulous, if she carefully followed the lines, took each step as it came, and obeyed the rules, that in the end when it was turned right-side out, it would be just how it was meant to be. A small miracle in itself, and one that life so rarely offered.
As much as she enjoyed the sewing, it was in the embroidery that she would express her new hope, each stitch a devotion, each snowflake a celebration of miracles. The first she chose to create was Faina’s, the one the child had held in her bare hand—a star with six perfect points, each with an identical fern pattern. Between the ferns the points of a smaller star overlapped, and at its center, the hexagonal heart.
Mabel was bent over the embroidery hoop in her hands, her nose a few inches from the fabric, when Jack came in from feeding the horse. She didn’t mind that he stayed out later and later each evening, though she wondered why he avoided her. It was his irritability that gave her pause.
“Is everything all right?” she asked as she looked up from her needle and thread.
He nodded in her direction.
“I see it frosted last night,” she said. “Will we get all the potatoes out of the ground soon enough?”
Another brusque nod.
“Is Garrett off to bed? I had meant to give him another book to read. I was thinking of another Jack London, or perhaps Treasure Island. If he doesn’t finish it in time, he can always take it with him.” Mabel bit the thread in half and held the embroidered snowflake at arm’s length to inspect it. She could show it to Jack, but it would only make him angry. The coat, the snowflake sketches, all talk of Faina caused him to tighten his shoulders and stop speaking. She could have asked why, but she feared the answer. Leave it be, he was fond of saying, and so she did.
A week later, the last of the potatoes were in burlap sacks, and they woke to a skiff of snow across the land, but it was early and thin. By midday it would be gone, and Mabel was certain it would be several weeks before winter came to stay. All the same, the sight of it delighted her. She quickly fixed breakfast for Jack and Garrett and then put on her coat and boots.
“Where are you off to?” Jack asked as he scraped the last forkful of egg and potato from his plate.
“I thought I’d go out for a walk, just to see the snow.”
Jack nodded, but in the tired creases around his eyes, she saw his misgivings. That she was soon to be disappointed. That Faina would not return. That the child wasn’t the miracle Mabel wished her to be.
Mabel buttoned up her coat to the neck and pulled on a hat and work gloves before stepping outside. It was warmer than she had expected. Already the clouds had cleared and the sun was coming through the trees. The cottonwoods and birches had lost their leaves, and the new snow lay along the branches in thin white lines. Her boots tracked the snow as she walked, uncovering dirt, browned grass, and yellowed leaves. Past the barn and the cottonwood, the fields were unbroken white. She thought she would walk to the river or follow the wagon trail to the far fields, but then she remembered it was Garrett’s last day. He was going back with his family for the winter, and although they would surely see him during the next months, it still seemed a goodbye of sorts. She meant to let him choose a book to take with him.
When she returned, Garrett was washing the dishes.
“No. No you don’t. Not on your last day.” Mabel hung her coat on the hook beside the door. “What will we ever do without you, Garrett?”
“I don’t know. I could stay instead.”
“I don’t think your mother would agree to it,” Jack said, stacking the plates beside the washbasin. “She’s ready for her youngest to come home.”
Garrett looked doubtful but seemed to bite his tongue. He had grown and changed these past few months. He had taken on much of the responsibility of the farm, and in the evenings they talked about crop varieties and weather patterns, books and art. Mabel no longer sat outside the circle of conversation. She was as eager to discuss the type of turnips they would plant as to describe the museums she had visited in New York.
Who would think that an adolescent boy would have anything to teach an old woman? But it was Garrett who had led her into the fields and closer to the life she had pictured for herself in Alaska. She could think of no way to explain that to him. With a mother like Esther, surely he could not imagine a woman doing anything against her will, or worse yet, not knowing her own will. It was as if Mabel had been living in a hole, comfortable and safe as it might have been, and he had merely reached down a hand to help her step up into the sunlight. From there she was free to walk where she would.
“Garrett, I was thinking you could borrow a book to take home with you. Only if you would like to, of course.”
“Could I? You wouldn’t mind? I’ll be real careful with it.”
“Of course you will. That’s why I’m offering.” Mabel led him into the bedroom and knelt on the floor to pull out the trunk.
“Here, I can get that.” He easily tugged it out from under the bed. “This is full of books? This whole thing?”
“That one, and a few others as well.” She laughed at Garrett’s surprise. “You should have seen my father’s library. A room nearly the size of this whole cabin, lined with shelves and shelves of books. But I could bring only a few of them with me.”
“Do you miss ’em?”
“The books?”
“And your family? And everything else? It must be real different than here.”
“Oh, sometimes I wish I had a certain book or could visit with a certain friend or relative, but mostly I’m glad to be here.” Mabel opened the trunk and Garrett began pulling books off the stacks inside.
“Take your time. Your mother isn’t expecting you until dinner.” She stood and dusted off her skirt. She was at the door when she heard Garrett say, “Thank you, Mabel.”
She thought of expressing her own gratitude, of trying to explain what he had done for her.
“You’re welcome, Garrett.”
CHAPTER 27
Dearest Ada,
Congratulations on your new grandchild. What a blessing! And to have them all so near. It must be wonderful to hear the pitter-patter of all the children’s feet on the old wooden stairs when they come to visit. I was so so
rry to hear of Aunt Harriet’s passing, but it sounds as if she left the world the best way any of us can, quietly and at an old and respectable age. All your news of the family was a precious gift to me.
We are well here, and I truly mean it. I know you thought us mad to move to Alaska, and for some time I wondered that myself. This past year, however, has made up for it all. I have begun to help more with the farmwork. Imagine me—the one they always called “timid” and “delicate”—in the fields digging up potatoes and shoveling dirt. But it is a wonderful feeling, to do work that really seems like work. Jack has transformed this untamed stretch of land that we call home into a flourishing farm, and now I can claim a small hand in it as well. Our pantry shelves are stocked with wild berry jams and jars of meat from the moose Jack shot this fall. Oh, I do sometimes miss “Back East,” as they call it here, and certainly my heart longs to see you and everyone else in the family, but we recently decided we are here to stay. It has become our home, and Jack and I have a new way of life here that suits us well.
I am sending you a few of my recent sketches. One is of the strawberry patch I am so proud of and that filled many a strawberry pie this past summer. The other is of fireweed in bloom along the riverbed. In the background you can see the mountains that frame this valley. The last is of a snowflake I had the pleasure of observing this past winter. Several times I have redrawn this single snowflake, as I never seem to tire of its infinitesimal elegance.
Tucked among these pages is also a pressed cranberry bouquet. The small white flowers are easily overlooked now that they are dried, but they are so lovely when they fill the woods in the spring. And I am sending a pair of booties for Sophie’s new baby daughter. The fur trim is from a snowshoe hare a neighbor boy provided to me. I hope they reach you before she has outgrown them altogether.
I expect we will soon have snow. The mountains are white and the mornings have a chill, and I look forward to its coming.