by Jane Yolen
For a while.
In fact, when we got inside, Papa didn’t look a bit anxious. He was sitting in his chair, staring at the wall, though he could just as easily been on a far shore gazing at a horizon he never expected to reach. His face, always long and a bit mournful-looking even when he’d been young and happy, seemed extra long now. Bony. He stared out of eyes that looked encased in bone.
Old, I thought, and reached out for Stepmama’s hand.
•11•
PAPA SINGS
A week or two later, I woke in the middle of the night and heard a strange sound, like a buzzing or humming. I tiptoed to my door and pulled it open. It hardly creaked at all.
A
The sound was coming from the living room and when I got halfway down the hall, I realized it was Papa. He was half singing, half chanting, and little of it made sense.
“I am the Green Man, the growing man, my mouth full of leaves,” he said. “I wake in the spring, am reaped in the fall, slumber all winter dreaming of green.” And then he sang out, his voice clear as in the past, “Do I live for Summer or die for Snow?
I cannot say. I do not know.”
I was about to go in when I heard Stepmama say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Lemuel, stop that caterwauling!”
And then the sound of a slap, and Papa stopped.
Did I run in to protest? Or run back to my room in fear? I know what Molly Whuppie would have done. What Gretel would have done. What Janet who loved Tam Lin would have done. But I just stood there stock-still, listening.
Papa began again but in a softer voice, little above a whisper:
“I curl like a fiddlehead, sprout like a ramp, rise tall as corn. How green I am. Green as grass, as leaf, as stem. All, all green.”
And then he sang: “Get your beans, green beans, and gold,
I am a has-bean, so I’m told.”
Another loud slap and then Stepmama must have gone back into their bedroom because I heard the door slam.
Only then did I tiptoe into the living room. And there was Papa in front of a blazing fire, dressed only in his nightshirt, dancing.
“Papa?” I whispered. “Are you all right?”
He turned around and stared at me, through me, and said quite clearly, “Green. That’s it. Green. I am the Green Man, the growing man, my mouth full of vines and leaves. I wake in the spring, am reaped in the fall, slumber all winter dreaming of green.”
And then he sank down onto the hearth and fell fast asleep.
I couldn’t move him, so I just lay down by his side and—listening to his soft snores—finally fell asleep myself.
Stepmama must have been worried about Papa, though, for the very next day she sent for Doc McCorry, a scruffy old man with trembling hands, near to retirement.
Doc McCorry scratched his thinning hair and pronounced himself baffled, and after two more visits and a lot of prescribed tonics to Stepmama, he never came back.
Did I believe something bad was happening? Of course. Papa was clearly sick, fading away. Did I believe that Stepmama was the bad thing happening? Not for a moment.
•12•
MIRROR, MIRROR
The day of my twelfth birthday, everything changed. Cousin Nancy was to come over to take me out for my treat. Stepmama had allowed it, but only begrudgingly. I thought it was T that she distrusted Cousin Nancy’s motives. That she wanted me close. Now, I believe, she just wanted me out of the house.
Everything I’d done that week had annoyed her—the clothes not washed clean enough, soft enough, fast enough. The greens in the garden bolting with the heat and me not quick enough to bring them in. Three jars of canned apple jam exploding in the root cellar and the smell of it making her stomach turn, even after I’d mopped it all up.
And when I’d reported back to her after doing all the cleanup, she dismissed me, saying, “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet,” just as if I was an old horse. I must have given her a particularly miserable look, I was so hurt, it being my birthday and all. But she sent me to my room for sassing her, which I never did.
I grabbed up the little shard of mirror, which was all I had, and stared at myself. Who was this pinched, hungry-looking child? Maybe Stepmama was right. My face was white and pasty, my hair needed washing. There was a smudge over my right eyebrow. Anger was scribbled across my forehead. Once as bright blue as Mama’s, my eyes now seemed bleached out, like a winter sky.
Of course Stepmama was angry with me, and not just for being too slow or too fast, for sassing her. She was a handsome woman and deserved a pretty stepdaughter. And Cousin Nancy was going to feel the same. So I did something I hadn’t done in a year. Once Stepmama was off at the beauty shop, having her hair shagged and her brows plucked, I went into her bedroom though I’d long since been warned off.
A year older—I thought—and a year bolder, like the girl in one of my favorite fairy tales, “Mr. Fox.” In that story the girl sneaks into Mr. Fox’s house—the strange man who’d been wooing her—where there is a saying carved over the door: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. So being a little bit bold, I went right in, forgetting the rest of the story with its vats of blood and skin and bones because it’s what Cousin Nancy calls a “cautionary tale” about walking out with wicked, murdering men, something no girl in her right mind would ever do, though lots seem to do it in the fairy tales.
I rummaged around in Stepmama’s drawer of beauty aids and found some powder in a pink flowered box. I touched the powder lovingly with one finger. It puffed up into the air, as sweet as roses. I spread some on my cheeks and chin, rubbing it deeper until my skin seemed to tingle.
There were scents in bottles with rubber puffers. I tried three of them, one right after another, till I must have smelled like a meadow gone mad. And then, finding a rouge pot with a rosy-colored substance, I scrubbed color into one cheek and then the other.
The big mirror was covered with a black velvet cloth and I twitched it aside to take a look at myself. Expecting my own image to stare back at me, I was surprised. The mirror was so cloudy I could see only a large, filmy mass in the center of the glass. How could Stepmama possibly do her face while gazing into that cloudy old thing?
I leaned forward until my nose touched against the mirror’s surface and a big splodge of powder rubbed off onto the glass.
“Oh, oh,” I whispered, trying to rub it clean with my hand, which only made things worse. Stepmama would surely know I’d been in there. I turned to go out of the room and get some water to clean it off before she came back home.
“Oh, oh,” the mirror said behind me.
I jumped and spun around, stunned, and as I did so I overturned one of the scent bottles. It crashed to the floor, spreading its oils everywhere.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice tight, the broken bottle and the powerful smell ignored.
“Who are you?” the mirror responded.
“Snow,” I said. “Snow in Summer.”
“Snow in Summer,” the mirror said, “ask and I will answer.”
“Ask what?”
The cloudy mass grew larger, filled the mirror from side to side. “Is that your question, Snow in Summer?”
“No. No. No.” I knew the fairy tales. Mama had read them to me. Papa had sung them to me. Cousin Nancy had given me the books. I still regularly took a fairy-tale book to bed, reading till I fell asleep. I knew the stories by heart. Oh yes, I knew all about magic mirrors. The wicked queen in “Snow White” had one. And I knew all about magical questions, too. I would get only three of them. They shouldn’t be wasted or I would end up with a sausage on my nose—or worse.
Did I wonder if the mirror was some trick that Stepmama had set up to catch me in her room?
Not even for a minute.
Did I think that this was some awful witchcraft?
It seemed too harmless for that.
A game perhaps?
I gave this a great deal of thought. Questions—ten of them, even a hundred o
f them—spun about in my head: questions about Papa’s health, about Stepmama’s desires, about Cousin Nancy’s heart. Questions about who I was and what I would be when I grew up. Questions about whether Jimmy McGraw, who was in my class, liked me or if Wally Shaver, who was a year ahead of me, liked me better.
But at last I settled on the one question I most wanted an answer for. It was not a question that could possibly have a good answer. Still, I had to ask it.
“Mirror,” I said carefully, “will I ever see Mama again?” The great mass in the mirror changed into a mask of a face, not a real one. There were no eyes, just a dead, black space where eyes should have been. The mask smiled, or rather the sides of the mouth turned up, which was not at all comforting.
“Yes,” the mirror said.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
The mirror paused, then in a different, deeper, more thoughtful tone said: “You will see your mother twice, tears and laughter,
But you will not know her until . . .”
The door behind me opened with a great whooshing sound and Stepmama, newly shorn and polished, pounced on me, screaming, “Ungrateful child, hideous imp, you have touched what is mine without permission. You shall be punished for this . . . for this plundering.”
The mirror whispered, “Long, long after.”
They both spoke the truth.
The punishing times quickly followed. They began with a spanking, hard and fast with the back of the hairbrush on my bottom for the mess I’d made of her dressing table. And for the broken scent bottle. And for using her powders and paints without permission. A spanking, and me twelve years old, practically a teen. It seemed horribly unfair. And absolutely right.
Nothing was said about the mirror. Stepmama probably didn’t think me capable of asking it any questions. And she’d been shouting so loud, I’m sure she never heard it speak. In return, I didn’t tell her what I’d seen. Or what I’d asked. Or what I’d heard. Besides, I was too busy howling to say anything.
When finally the spanking stopped and the howling stopped, I cried out, “It’s my birthday.”
“Double digits always are a bother,” Stepmama said, as if she’d had children of her own and knew this already. I thought that if she’d had any, she’d probably drowned them like unwanted puppies at birth.
She made me clean the room while she stood over me, made me sop up the floor with my new birthday dress, a moss green one with little matching ribbons for my hair that Cousin Nancy had sent over.
And then she forced me to toss the ruined dress into the burn barrel while standing out behind the house in my underthings for all of Addison to see. I had to light the barrel, too, with matches she doled out one at a time, until the contents caught fire. Though my face felt as if it had broken into a thousand pieces, my heart lay frozen in my chest. The dress went up in flames, until the bits of it rose up into the air like filthy dark green fireflies, filling the air until there was nothing left.
Next I had to write a letter saying I wouldn’t be going out for my birthday, this one or the next, a letter dictated by Stepmama. And then I had to tack it to the front door for Cousin Nancy to find.
Lastly, Stepmama forced me to sit silently by the door and listen as Cousin Nancy found the note with her name on it. Listen while she opened it, read it out loud in a small whispery, weeping voice. Yes, I could hear her weeping and hear as she walked away how she said my name.
I didn’t dare call out to comfort her for Stepmama had warned, “If you do any such thing, there will be nobody left alive in the house by nightfall to look after your papa.”
Did I believe her?
Oh yes, I believed her.
Did I obey her?
Absolutely.
After all, she was punishing me for the bad things I’d done. And I had done them. I’d gone into her room, touched her private pots and paints and scent. I’d broken bottles on her floor. There were no excuses. It was her right to punish me. I was a sneak. An ungrateful child. No credit to my dead mama or fading papa.
So I believed her and obeyed her. I was just twelve years old. What other choice did I have?
And did I ever go into her room to speak to the mirror again? Not for a very long time. Fear—of both Stepmama and the mirror—kept me from it. After all, the daily punishments for that one mistake reminded me to stay away till it was almost too late.
The abuses came every day or two for weeks, all for infractions that only Stepmama noticed.
I ate too slowly or too fast. I ate with my mouth open, or not open enough. I didn’t answer her in full sentences. I kept the light on in my bedroom to read at night. I cuddled with Papa, even when he didn’t respond to me. I didn’t do what she asked. Or I didn’t do it quick enough. I left the door open, or closed it. I used too much water or too little. I forgot some chore.
And worst of all, I think, was that I didn’t cry. Not when she hit me again with the hard side of the brush or with the bristle side or with the ruler I used for homework or a wooden clothes hanger or a ladle whenever the mood took her, though she was always careful not to raise a bruise where anyone could see.
And I didn’t cry when she made me stand out in the garden, nearly naked, where a person walking by—even kids from school—might catch a glimpse of me in my underthings.
Nor when she forced me to scrub the kitchen floor with my toothbrush.
Nor when I had to rake out the still-warm coals from the stove with my fingers.
Nor when she gave me only the scraps left over from her dinner.
No, the only time I wept was late at night in my bed, when I was certain she was asleep and not standing silently at the door listening. Every night for a week, a month, two months, three . . . until it all seemed normal and proper that I should be treated that way.
Was my spirit broken? I no longer had a spirit to break.
•13•
STEPMAMA REMEMBERS
When I first apprenticed to the Master, I worked hard, both day and night. He taught me little in those first months but the value of hard work. Not the Craft, which was all I wanted. Instead I swept floors, scrubbed counters, set out potions and flowers and seeds whose names I didn’t know and whose secrets I couldn’t figure out on my own.
When I was too slow, he hit me. When I was too slipshod, he yelled. He used a belt and a switch and a ruler on my knuckles, though I understood what he was doing and never complained.
And when he thought my spirit broken, and I biddable enough, he began to teach me down in the cellar, but only the smallest bits of the Craft.
He showed me how to tease out the future from an apple peeling, how to make a witch cake, how to curse a cow. He taught me skin on skin how to use my body as a gift, as a tool, as a weapon. He taught me giving and withholding. But the Deep Magicks he kept from me, and when I asked, when I begged, he looked at me crookedly and said formally, “When you are ready and not before.”
He meant when he deemed me ready. I didn’t want anyone—and certainly not any man—to have that power over me. And yet he had that power and more for I had fallen in love with him. That awful, gut-wrenching, knee-weakening love that makes true what is false, and mockery of any wish to be strong.
Finally, when he believed me ready, he taught me some of the Deep Magicks. How to poison and how to heal. How to put to sleep and how to awaken. How to strengthen and how to take away strength. He taught these to me by doing them to me. So I sickened and got well, died and came to life again. Over and over he did these things to me until I understood them down to my very bones.
I learned well and forgot nothing. I didn’t have to write down the secrets, though I did so in a code of my own devising. But I had them secured in my head and knew I’d never forget a bit of what he taught me.
Then one day, when the Master had stayed out late into the night and came home to sleep in a stupor marked by his dark rattling snores, I decided I’d both the time and knowledge to do some snooping. Only I didn’t call it th
at, of course; I called it “some growing” and “some learning” and “some searching for enlightenment.” But calling a pig a princess doesn’t lift it out of the sty. I was snooping all right, sneaking and stealing secrets. I was marking territory like a dog in its yard. And I was coming into my own.
Off to the side of the main cellar room where the Master had taught me most things was a small room, but it was always kept locked. Master wore the key to the lock around his neck and never let me in, not even to clean, though he went there whenever he felt like it and locked the door behind.
Aren’t forbidden doors the most alluring? The old stories point that out surely. Even the greatest heroes and heroines fall under the spell of a locked door. And so did I.
That room—I was sure of it as I was sure of anything—held the final secrets of the Craft. The ones that would make me a Master in my own right.
I had managed to get an impression of the key as I toweled Master dry after a long, leisurely bath. Not trusting any locksmith with my desire, I’d made the key myself, pouring molten silver into a mold I’d created in secret. It had lain in my jewelry box, in a hidden compartment. And I waited—oh, I am good at waiting—till it was the hour of my fulfillment.
Checking once more that the Master slept the sleep of the not-quite dead, I crept down to the cellar, took out the silver key, and opened the door of the forbidden room. It squawked at the intrusion. I hesitated, ready to shut it quickly and be at work in the main room should I hear his steps on the stairs. But then once again his stentorian snores from two floors above floated down the stairs. I pushed open the door completely and went in.
There I found three things that I knew at once I had to make mine.
The first was a book of secrets written in a large readable hand that even a child could pick out. Master had no need of writing in code. He had never expected anyone but himself to ever read his magic book.