by Jane Yolen
Stepmama shepherded me toward him, and when we were close enough, she said, “Hunter, this is Snow.”
Hunter.
I went cold all over. Surely this was the one the mirror had warned me about. But why? He hadn’t any knife on him that I could see. And he didn’t look fierce, only fatuous, and that’s a word that means “silly in a self-satisfied way.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and spit out the toothpick, ran his hand back across his hair, and came down off the step, as eager as a pup in training.
He reached out to shake my hand, and his hand was large enough to entirely envelop mine.
I looked over at Stepmama and she crooked her finger at me.
I began to tremble, I’d no idea why, and tried to pull my hand away, but Hunter held it tight.
As he looked down at me, his big blue eyes seemed somehow comforting. The smile wasn’t so much fatuous as hopeful. A bit of wind from the east tousled his hair and pushed it across his broad forehead, softening how he looked.
“Hello, Snow,” he said. “We gonna be friends?” His voice had that soft lilt that some of the local boys have, but with a strange twang, too, as if he’d been studying from the radio or picture shows how to speak to girls.
I tried to smile back and couldn’t quite manage it, frozen as I was. But suddenly I felt my cheeks get hot and knew I was blushing in a way I’d never blushed before.
“When Hunter saw you last week in church, he asked me if you and he could walk out together,” Stepmama said. “And I told him you were just barely become a woman, but I would introduce you to him and see what happens.”
I could have asked why he should have said any such thing. After all, I didn’t think of myself as a great beauty. Or asked when he’d had time to ask her. Surely not after I’d passed out in church and then thrown up. Surely not then.
But I stopped wondering about that almost at once. And I conveniently forgot the mirror’s warning, forgot that I’d only just met Hunter, that Stepmama had made this promise without consulting me, that he must be five years older than me. Or more.
“Hello, Hunter,” I said softly, my voice nowhere near as loud as my beating heart. And at that very moment, I also inconveniently forgot to be afraid.
We stood in an attitude of talking, my right hand in his, but said nothing at all. I no longer needed his strength to keep my hand in his. It nestled there all by itself. And while we stood that way, hand in hand, my face got hotter, but his smile never changed. Still we couldn’t manage a word between us.
In the middle of all that stillness, I heard a sudden strange click. And then another, and then the roar of Stepmama’s engine. Before I could turn my head to see, she’d peeled out of Hunter’s driveway and left me to my fate.
My fate. All I could think of was that if I was deep into first love, it wasn’t sweet at all like the songs on the radio said, nor the stories in my books. It was like a knife in my heart. Perhaps that was what the mirror had meant.
Surprisingly, such an idea was both exciting and terrifying, painful and pleasant all at the same time.
Once the sound of Stepmama’s car was out of our hearing, Hunter cleared his throat. “Do you wanna come inside?” he said, his hand still clutching mine.
“Inside where?”
“Inside the house.” He looked at me as if I was stupid.
I thought for a moment, because suddenly—almost as if someone was whispering to me—I heard “Too quick. Too quick.” I shook my head.
“Can we . . . can we walk a bit? And talk?” I asked. I needed the air right now, to cool my blazing cheeks, so I could breathe.
He looked down at me. “Talk? What do you wanna talk about?”
About why you asked Stepmama if we could court, I thought, but didn’t say it aloud. I shrugged. “You could tell me something about you. All I know is your name.”
He smiled again, that melting smile. Then he shrugged back. “You can see me,” he said. “Not much to tell. I’m twenty-three and single. And you’re—what—sixteen or so. And single, too.” His hand was suddenly hot and moist.
“Not thirteen yet,” I said.
Something like a startled frown crossed his face, but briefly. “You’re mighty sophisticated for thirteen.” Only he said sir-fister-cated.
“Not quite thirteen,” I repeated.
“Whatever.”
I swallowed hard, tried again. Behind us there were birds calling. A crow, I thought. Several crows. I suddenly remembered that a group of crows was called a murder.
But Hunter was smiling again and my knees went weak. I struggled to say something different, something original, something fetching, before coming up with, “Tell me about With Signs church. Why do you go there?” And immediately afterward I was embarrassed to have said it.
He let my hand go and then wiped his own hand on the side of his slacks. His hand had been sweating, or mine had, or both of ours had. But it felt somehow as if he was trying to wipe me off. He thought for a long time before speaking.
“I like the snakes,” he said at last. “And the girls who like snakes.”
“I . . . I don’t like snakes.” My voice had gotten so hushed he had to lean in to watch my lips.
“Oh, that’ll come. When you believe.”
I wasn’t sure I could wrap myself in that particular cloak, but didn’t say so. I wanted him to keep liking me, snakes or not.
“So—now you wanna come into the house? I got ice cream. And beer.”
I didn’t really want ice cream. My stomach was tumbling over and over, doing handstands, backflips, somersaults. And of course I’d never had beer. I was too young for it. “I don’t think so. Can’t we just walk a bit?” My hand, the one that bore the imprint of his, made a kind of waving motion toward the path.
“I guess . . . ,” he said, but didn’t manage to make it sound as if he thought it was a good idea. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out another toothpick, stuck it in his mouth, turned on his heel, and started to walk off into the woods ahead of me, moving so swiftly, I had to double-time to catch up to him.
It seemed an odd beginning to what was supposed to be a courtship. But as I’d had only the fairy stories and Anne of Green Gables to go by, I supposed it was going all right. After all, look at what Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty had to go through before they won their princes. And Anne and Gilbert managed to fall in love by being rivals first. So perhaps this was how true love was supposed to go in real life. Though deep inside, something was nagging at me.
We walked in silence into the woods, not the comfortable kind of silence I had with Cousin Nancy or the edgy, angry silences between Stepmama and me or the tragic silences that had become my only communication with Papa. This was a silence compounded of stranger-ness, where two people with absolutely nothing in common can’t think of a thing to say.
So I began to babble to fill the empty spaces. As we walked, I jabbered away at the things I knew: plants that Papa had shown me. Or wildflowers that Mama had loved. Or the wild herbs that Cousin Nancy knew. I pointed out a cluster of bloodroot, on the forest floor, with its scalloped leaves and white, daisy-like flowers. “I like the little white flowers and the yellow centers, don’t you?” And then I added, “Did you know, there’s a reddish juice in the stems and roots. She-roots, Papa calls them. You can grind the dried roots into a powder to be used for . . .” My voice trailed off.
“Yes,” he said. Or at least it was a grunt that sounded like yes.
We passed some yellow-belled flowers and I knelt down, trying to be as graceful as a princess. “Trout lilies, Papa calls these.” I didn’t tell him Papa hadn’t called things much of anything lately, not since Stepmama came. After all, Hunter and I weren’t yet close enough for that kind of confession. “Papa says it’s because they look like the coloring on a brook trout.”
“Not much like,” Hunter growled.
We walked about a dozen more steps in silence, but when we passed by a stand of high grass where some
busy spider had spun a web between two stalks, I said, “Did you know that spiderwebs can be used to stop someone bleeding, and—”
“Can it stop you talking?” He was no longer smiling that slow smile, and his lips had thinned down to a gash. For the first time, I saw something mean in his narrowing eyes. He was still chewing on that toothpick until he suddenly spit it out as if it—or something else—had left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Hunter?” My voice squeaked a little. It was as if we’d both suddenly fallen out of whatever spell had been placed upon us.
He bit his lip, realizing he was scaring me, and I saw him trying to rearrange his features so he could be attractive again. For a moment he looked like a little boy who’d had a scolding and knew he had to seem innocent and sorry at the same time. Running his fingers through his hair, he leaned toward me as if to tell me a secret. “So, Snow, you ready to go back to the house now?”
“I prefer to be called Summer.”
“So, Summer,” his voice suddenly soft, low, as if softness would be more enticing, though in fact it made him all the scarier. “We go back to the house and you can have some ice cream, I can have that beer.” He smiled slowly, once again sure of his charm. There was a practiced element in his wooing, learned but not felt. As if someone had told him how to do it. “I got vanilla and chocolate.” This time the smile actually reached his eyes.
I wondered if the smile might have more to do with the possibility of that beer.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Look, we’re going to the house.” He was trying hard to hold on to his charm and failing. There was an edge to his voice.
“Trailer,” I said, not trying to be charming at all.
“Now, Summer, we can do this the easy way,” he said flatly, “or the hard way.” There was the smile again and now it seemed only sinister. Sinister—a word I’d read in stories but never heard said out loud, but the perfect word for how he looked. I was thinking about that as he finished his thought.
“I prefer this the easy way, though your mama—”
“Stepmama . . . ” I said automatically.
A small wind began puzzling through the trees. Something white floated off to the side of my seeing. I suddenly remembered a song of Papa’s about a little girl sleeping in the pines where the sun never shines and shivering the whole night through.
“I believe your stepmama prefers the hard way. Though she also wants it done far from home. Now there’s a woman loves snakes.”
“Stepmama is a snake!” I was surprised I’d said it aloud, surprised at the fierceness in my voice.
“Why,” he drawled, “I believe she is. Maybe that’s what I love about her.” That’s when he grinned mightily and bent down.
I watched as if mesmerized as he lifted his pants leg to reach into a sheath tied to his calf, a sheath where he’d hidden his knife. When he stood up again, knife in hand, I was already running as hard as I could down the long driveway.
About halfway, I looked once over my shoulder to gauge the distance between us and saw with astonishment that Hunter was down on his knees, hands over his face to shield it from the razor-sharp talons of a white owl that was beating its wings against his head.
I didn’t know owls did that. Not in the daylight. Not to human beings. But I whispered a prayer as I ran: “Thank you, God,” and wondered if I’d been saved by an angel, not an owl.
I knew I couldn’t count on Hunter being held off for long. And so I kept running as fast as possible, not down the driveway, where Hunter surely would have caught me, but instead plunging off to the left, into the darkening woods.
•22•
STEPMAMA REMEMBERS
I drove off and felt free—free at last—of that burdensome child. I’d tried my best with sweetness and with pain to bring her to the Craft. But you cannot make someone do what they will not do and expect them to thank you for it. Master knew that. Told me so often. I was the first and only apprentice he’d ever kept. The rest he sucked dry of their seven years and threw them out. But I had wanted what he had to give, wanted it passionately, and the years I gratefully gave him were the best ones he’d ever had.
Snow was no such creature. She had to be gotten rid of. I do believe if I’d tried to take her years, they’d have poisoned me.
My plan in place, I knew I’d a few weeks’ grace before she’d be missed. A few weeks to take her fading father to the hospital to die and to play the grieving widow. A few weeks till I could collect my widow’s pension. And a few weeks after that to sell off the land to the railroad bosses and go sorrowfully back to Charleston to start my life anew.
Charleston? Why, with the money I’d be getting, I could go to Ohio. Or even California, where the hankering after magic is mighty strong. It made me smile to think of all those movie folk, untouched by the recessions, ready for fleecing.
I made it back to Lemuel’s house—I’d never thought of it as mine—and there took a long bath with candles set out all around, the water freshened with rose petals and lavender from the garden.
Free.
Free!
The next morning, as I was brushing my hair a hundred strokes, I twitched the drape off the mirror.
The mirror’s dark mask of a face swam into view.
“Mistress,” it said.
Never Master, I thought, grinding my teeth in frustration.
“What is your question?”
“No question at all,” I told the thing. “Just wanted to let you know that the girl Snow is gone. Finished. Her heart cut out and stewed. Bones scattered. What do you think of that?”
The mask turned, became sharper, the edges of the black more defined. Then it said, “Oh, Mistress, that she’s lost is true,
But still she’ll have the best of you.”
“Best of me, you stupid mirror, no one has ever gotten the best of me. Not the Master, not lovesick Lemuel, not that puling Nancy, and certainly not the girl. She’s dead and gone by now. I’ve made sure of it. Besides, I didn’t even ask a question of you.”
I threw the brush at the mirror as hard as I could. Even as it hit and shattered a corner of the glass, I realized that in fact I had asked. And the mirror had answered.
Only the answer made no sense at all.
•23•
NIGHT ON ELK MOUNTAIN
I’d no hope of simply outrunning Hunter. He was bigger than me, had longer legs than me, knew these woods better than I did. Heck, I didn’t know them at all.
All I had was fear, which is a great motivator. And I was small, so I could hide. I had to make use of the present of time that the white owl’s intervention had given me, the present of a good head start.
Lucky for me I was wearing a dark-colored dress, not pink or yellow, either of which would have shone like a beacon against the green and brown of the woods.
“Thank you, Stepmama,” I whispered, and really meant it this time because it had been Stepmama who’d insisted I wear the blue dress. Possibly she thought because it made me look quite a bit older. But whatever her reason, it might just save my life.
Then I heard Hunter behind me, calling out.
“Snow,” he shouted, “come back. It was a joke.”
Summer, I thought. No joke.
I kept on running.
And then a little later, a bit farther away, as if he’d gone looking for me down the rest of the driveway, out onto the road, “Snow, damn you, come back.”
But Snow wasn’t my name and I wouldn’t answer to it.
I headed up the mountain, something else Hunter wouldn’t expect. He’d think I was going to head down into town, maybe hoping to catch a ride along the way. But there was no hope for me in Addison. Not with Stepmama there. Instead I plunged into the deepest woods in the hopes that it would offer enough brush to hide me whenever I needed to lie down to catch my breath. If I could avoid Hunter for the next hour or two, the sun would set behind the mountain. I doubted he’d keep up a search for me after dark.
Unless he had hounds.
Hunters usually had hounds, didn’t they? But then, his name was Hunter, not his work.
For a few minutes that thought comforted me, till I realized I didn’t know if he had hounds. Or if he actually worked as a hunter. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he had a knife and a bow and arrows and that he would do whatever Stepmama told him to do. He, too, was besot.
So I kept running. Running uphill, leaping logs, hurtling around tree trunks, sliding across muddy places, tripping over unseen tree roots, picking myself up off the ground and running again until I was out of breath and my sides hurt horribly.
Somewhere along the way, I lost one of my shoes. Somewhere I’d been hit on the left arm by a branch or briar, for there was blood running down toward my fingers. Somewhere . . . I didn’t know where . . . there was a man trying to kill me for love.
For love of Stepmama, not for love of me.
“Think, Summer,” I told myself, giving myself permission to stop when all I really wanted to do was to keep running.
And so I stopped, thought, listened, hearing something loud nearby, as if a drummer had entered the woods and was sending signals to whoever was following me. It took me a moment before I realized it was only my own hard breathing and the drumbeat of my heart.
I can’t go home. If I go home, Stepmama will kill me herself. Hunter all but said that. Poor Papa is on his own now.
Tears welled up for the first time, not for me and what I was going through, but for Papa. I hoped Cousin Nancy would look out for him.
As for me, my only chance was to get over the mountain, far enough away so that Hunter—even with dogs—couldn’t find me. I was almost thirteen and strong for my age. Doing all those chores for Stepmama the past few years had toughened me. Maybe I could pass for older and find work.
But first I had to stay alive and out of Hunter’s reach.
I ran.
Later that evening, too tired to move another step, I found a climbable oak and went up as far as I could manage in the dark. There, in the fork of the tree, I settled myself for the night. Yes, a bear could climb up if it wanted. But I hoped I was far enough up to discourage a bear from bothering me.