Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All

by Jane Yolen

  “Ow, you’re pulling. You’re a cruel old . . .”

  “Didn’t mean to, honey. But you gotta sit still and not wiggle.” She gathered up a hank of my hair again.

  I was in such a fidget that day. “If Papa can come and go as he pleases, why can’t I?”

  “Because you’re not quite eleven years old, that’s why.” She sighed. “And your papa isn’t doing this to spite you, child, it’s just that he’s partial to the way those graves look in the fading light.”

  I understood what she meant, how the dark shadows humped up, then slowly filled in all the little potholes and gullies. Dusk fit Papa’s mood. He was in no mind to share it with anyone else. And he’d gotten used to it. He didn’t care what anyone else thought of his grief, though surely he knew the town folk and his Morton kin thought he should move on.

  “There’s nowhere to move on to,” is what he said.

  “He should move on to you,” I’d told Cousin Nancy more than once, but she always shushed me, saying, “Some folk never move on from a grief like that.” And I didn’t know when she said it if she was talking about Papa or herself.

  The women at church where I went with Cousin Nancy whispered about Papa’s excess. One even went so far as to say, “He’s wallowing in his grief like a pig in a mud hole.”

  Cousin Nancy shushed her just as readily as she’d shushed me. “You can’t put a counter on True Love,” she told them, “even after death. The heart wants what it wants, even when it can’t have it.”

  True Love, I thought. Just like in the stories. Papa’s love for Mama was for all eternity. And then, uncomfortably, I thought: If this is real life, it’s much harder than anything I’ve ever read about.

  Winter had turned to spring, and the wildflowers marched across the mountains like an army of invaders. Once again Cousin Nancy tried to reason with Papa.

  I had just woken up in my little bedroom off the kitchen and I could hear Papa stirring in the living room, rousing up from the overstuffed living room chair where he’d collapsed in sorrow after coming down from the mountain, a thing that had become a usual sleeping place for him.

  Cousin Nancy was already in the house making us breakfast, which she did every morning excepting Sundays, when she collected me to go straight off to church. She wasn’t a Baptist like Papa and me but a Catholic and she worshipped in the tiny church down behind Main Street with only a handful of other folk. When Mama was alive, I’d never have set foot in Cousin Nancy’s church. Baptists just didn’t do that then. But by that time I was almost a member of the Roman religion.

  Truth to tell, I loved the beautiful window at Cousin Nancy’s church with the pretty painting of Jesus pictured on the glass. He held his heart in his hand. It reminded me a bit of Papa and how he sometimes looked at me with a gaze that held eternity. And the simple wooden crucifix and the statue of Mary roughly carved out of wood, and the handstitched altar furnishings that the Ladies Union had sewn, in white and blue for everyday masses, but in deep purple for the holy days.

  This morning, Cousin Nancy leaned in over Papa with a vase full of lupine as blue as church glass. Setting it in the middle of the end table, she said as casually as she could, “I can make the grave look real pretty, Lem. Ada Mae would have liked that.” It was the first time in months Cousin Nancy had asked. Maybe the spring had made her bold. Maybe it had given her hope.

  I stood at the door of my bedroom and held my breath, waiting to see if this time Papa would change his mind.

  He didn’t shrug or throw a black look in her direction. Instead he made a growling noise low in his throat, like a wounded animal. Then he shook himself all over. “I honor your intentions, Nan,” he said at last, “but nothing could be worse, knowing that everything will rise up in the spring but her.” He never said Mama’s name anymore, just she and her and my wife, as if naming her might somehow put a curse on her. Then he stood and walked out the door, turning for a moment to say, “I won’t hear a word more about it.” Then off he went to work in the gardens, to plow all his grief and longing into the soil.

  I shook my head and watched him go, then got myself ready for school, brushing my own hair and braiding it up the best I could. I didn’t want to hear a word more about it, either. If there was to be a war between the two people I loved most in this world, I wouldn’t take sides.

  That evening Cousin Nancy set the vase with the lupines plumb in the middle of the dinner table, right next to the roast chicken, without saying a word. But she didn’t have to. He knew what she meant. And he’d meant what he’d said.

  He didn’t bother sitting down at the table. Just grabbed up a chicken leg in one hand, his banjo in the other, kicked open the screen door, and went out. He was going up the mountain as usual to sit on Mama’s grave, his back against the simple stone cross. We knew where he was going. He’d told us so before. His face would be turned toward the other graves, their stones patchworked with lichen over their long inscriptions. Papa never wanted more than Mama’s name and dates on her stone. No Rest with Jesus, or Beloved Wife and Mother, or any such. Just Ada Mae Morton 1920–1944.

  And there he’d stay, on her mound, playing his banjo and singing the old tunes, probably the ones she’d loved best. “Pretty Polly,” and “Tom Dula,” and of course “Shady Grove.” But he wouldn’t play for me anymore. Just played there, on the grave. Try explaining that to an almost eleven-year-old.

  Cousin Nancy tried, of course. She never stopped trying.

  But that evening, something got into me. Something devilish maybe. Or someone else watching over me. I jumped up, too, and ran out after Papa, leaving Cousin Nancy alone in the house with the dinner uneaten and that vase of blue flowers sitting accusingly on the table.

  The sun was about an hour from setting down behind Elk Mountain as I traipsed after Papa to the grave site. I didn’t need to hurry. I knew where he was going. Besides, he was a tall man with a long stride. I couldn’t have caught up to him had I tried.

  I didn’t want to chance him sending me home with another one of his black looks. So I stayed back out of sight and walked as quiet as I could. Night birds were singing around me, and there was a kind of buzzing in the air. Every now and again I glimpsed Papa a long way ahead of me. He never looked back to see me trailing him. It was enough that I’d soon be with him at Mama’s grave.

  When I got to the church, I made my way around to the back where the churchyard sat, but quietly. I could hear the thread of music coming from his banjo. He was in the middle of “Shady Grove.”

  I sneaked over to a place by one of the biggest gravestones and hunched down behind it, hidden in the shadows. Now that I was here, I’d suddenly gotten cold feet about showing myself to him, about sitting down at his side while he played on Mama’s grave. What could I say to him? Would he be as mad at me as he was at Cousin Nancy? I sank down onto the ground, it barely warm from the afternoon sun, and watched.

  His eyes were tight shut, and he sang along with the banjo: “Shady grove, my true love, I’m bound to go away.” His voice was low and confiding.

  Turned out, I wasn’t the only watcher that evening. I heard a small sound and saw a woman standing on the other side of the churchyard, the mountain side, right next to a tall gravestone. Tall and slender, almost bony, she was silent as a haint, a ghost. The skin stretched tight over her cheekbones—like parchment. But though she was slim, the woman wasn’t anywhere near gaunt as some of the women around here who’ve been eking out a hardscrabble life for years. This woman was thin but beautifully so, her hair shagged, not in the braids or the rolls other women hereabouts wore. Her mouth had been reddened with a slash of red lipstick that looked near black in the shadows thrown by the setting sun. Later, I’d see that she had one blue eye and one green. Not a word did she say to make herself known, she just stood there gazing deeply and longingly at Papa.

  At last, she came around the gravestone and sat down on a black slab gravestone close by him, still staring as if she could eat him
up. I knew then she wasn’t a haint but a real live person because black grave slabs keep in the heat of the sun. Everybody knows that. And a haint wouldn’t be able to stand the heat.

  Tucking her dark skirt up under her knees, she crossed her ankles. They were pretty ankles, covered in sheer stockings. None of the women in Webster County that I knew around here had such finery. They couldn’t afford it. They simply drew lines on the backs of their legs to make it look like stocking seams. Mama got to wear sheer stockings only on the day of her wedding.

  The woman never once showed by a single glance that she saw me watching her, but there was an unnatural awareness about her. It took me years to figure out that she’d known I was there even before I’d ever seen her. But at the moment, I was alert to her, all the while thinking myself well hidden.

  She cleared her throat and Papa looked up. She crooked her pointer finger at him, the nail as reddened as her lips.

  Did Papa fall in love that instant? I was never to know for real. But that woman radiated a power, or so Cousin Nancy would say later. The kind of magic that wraps a man around her finger and drives him to the brink of madness. I don’t know if it was True Love, but Papa was plumb crazy from that moment on.

  He stopped singing and was struck dumb. Simple as that. It was as if he’d drunk a whole jug of Hank Gregory’s moonshine down in one long swallow. Fuddled. That’s what he was.

  “Stupefied,” Cousin Nancy said when she saw him. “With the emphasis on the stupe.”

  The woman smiled at him, those red-black lips opening like a snake’s. She showed no teeth. And then, without speaking, she disappeared.

  Disappeared.

  I gawped at the slab where she’d been sitting. I hadn’t even seen her stand up. Yes, maybe I’d blinked once. Even twice. But no true human could have moved that fast. One moment there, then gone.

  Once again I thought: a haint! But why a ghost who looked like that should have been walking about the Elk Mountain churchyard, I’d no idea. She wasn’t any Morton I’d ever known.

  Papa was too fuddled to see me, and he tried to start playing his banjo again. But one of the strings had broken in two, and neither of us had even heard it twang. So he stood, shouldered the instrument, and, as if walking in a dream, started back down the mountain. But after three steps, he stumbled, going down heavily onto his knees.

  Only then did I rush forward to put my arms around him, hauling him backup to his feet and crying out, “Papa! Papa!”

  He hardly noticed it was me. Didn’t say my name or ask why I was up there in the first place. I pulled his free hand around my shoulder and he left it there. And supporting him as best I could, we managed one difficult step at a time to get down the mountain and home.

  Cousin Nancy had cleared away the uneaten dinner and was sitting on the divan, her fingers twined together, when we came in. She jumped up, then gathered Papa in her arms.

  “Take the banjo, child,” she told me, “and set it against the wall.”

  I did as she said, putting it right where Papa always kept it, next to his big chair, while Cousin Nancy hustled him off to his bed. He was like a dead man walking. So she just plunked him down, still in his clothes and boots.

  When she came back into the living room, she didn’t ask me what had happened up there on the mountain. I think she knew I’d tell it in my own time. All she said was, “I’ll be by in the morning. If he’s no better, send for the doctor.”

  But I knew he was just enchanted, and by then, I was the real sick one. My throat was on fire, whether from the cold air or the fear or the strangeness of the evening, I didn’t know. But it hurt so bad I’d begun to cry.

  “Can’t hardly talk,” I told Cousin Nancy, pointing to my throat. So she had me gargle with honey and vinegar and put me right to bed without even nagging me about my homework.

  “I swear,” Cousin Nancy said, more to herself than to me, “it’s as if this family is as broken as that banjo string.” And shaking her head, she went out to the living room to read until she thought that Papa and I had both fallen asleep, before she was willing to go off home.

  I didn’t think she was happy about leaving even then, but she wasn’t worried that Papa was crazy enough to do something wicked. Besides, it wasn’t really her house and it wasn’t really her place to be there, and if she’d stayed overnight, tongues would surely wag in town about it. That’s how it is in a small place like Addison. But still—as she told me years later—she didn’t sleep a wink that night, just paced up and down until the morning light.

  Papa didn’t actually sleep a wink, either. I heard him tossing and turning all night. And the one time I got up to check on him, he was back in the living room, sitting gazing into the hearth. He wasn’t singing or reading his books, just staring at the cold coals and mumbling, his fingers picking at an invisible banjo because the real one was still against the wall beside the chair.

  He never took up the banjo again till years later.

  When I woke, starving for my breakfast, my sore throat was all gone. I was well again, or well enough, but Papa wasn’t. He was still staring into the coals and playing music on something he didn’t have in his hands.

  The kids at school might have called him a jake, but I knew better.

  Just like in the old stories, he was caught in a woman’s wiles. He was well and truly besot.

  •6•

  UP AND DOWN THE MOUNTAIN

  After he saw the woman that first time, and sat up all night staring into the coals, Papa was up the mountain a lot longer each night. Cousin Nancy had to stay with me later and later.

  A She didn’t complain about that because there was a spring in his step that had been missing for a while, missing ever since Mama had died.

  I thought about how the strange woman had crooked her finger at Papa. Though I wanted to tell Cousin Nancy about it, and even tried once or twice, I couldn’t seem to form the words. It was as if I, too, had been bewitched somehow.

  As for Cousin Nancy—she didn’t ask.

  It was a huge gap between us. Like the place between mountains. Our first gap, but not our last.

  Cousin Nancy’s friends said that time had done its worst on Papa, but he was through now to the other side.

  Through to the other side. They also said that about someone who’s died. But maybe they weren’t far wrong. He was on to another side. Only it wasn’t the one they thought it was, nor me, either.

  Papa began working the garden with renewed vigor. He got the market garden hoed and rowed and planted, seeded and weeded. He simply raced across the acres.

  Cousin Nancy smiled to see him work that way and said to me out of his hearing, “I told you he’d come to his senses, Summer.”

  I smiled back and wanted it to be true. I loved Papa. I’d missed Papa. But he seemed too frantic to me. He barely ate, he hardly slept, and still he raced around. It seemed to me there was something almost unnatural about Papa’s attention to his plants.

  Still, when Miss Caroline and Miss Amelia, friends from Cousin Nancy’s church, sat in her parlor one Sunday after Mass, they were all amazed at Papa’s renewed energy. We ate the cookies I’d helped Cousin Nancy make the day before. I got to pour the tea, my favorite part, tipping the pot just right till the hot dark umber liquid came shooting out the spout.

  Miss Caroline said, “That Lemuel, he sure can work.”

  Holding her cup out for me to fill, Miss Amelia added, “He sure can. Dancing down the rows!” She said it all admiring.

  After four years of sorrow, I’d become used to Papa’s silent brooding. I thought I’d finally come to understand it. Was I the only one to worry about him being so unnatural?

  Cousin Nancy passed the cookies. “God’s mysterious ways,” she said.

  So I put my worries out of mind.

  The seeds sprouted well before their catalog time. Perfect green thrusts in every row. And what did it matter that I hadn’t recognized the newer things he planted or that they spread
so fast, they seemed like invading armies? Papa was back with us and that was all that mattered.

  God’s mysterious ways indeed.

  No one—not even Cousin Nancy or me—knew what was truly happening until a month later, with the garden all abloom with dark green shoots, and Papa stayed away from home till the next morning.

  Cousin Nancy had slept all night in the chair in our living room, waiting for him to come home so she could go to her own house and bed. I found her there when I rose in the morning and went out to the privy first thing before sunrise.

  Papa returned when Cousin Nancy was making me toast with jam, and with him was the woman, the haint who’d disappeared before my very eyes that night. In broad daylight she looked more like a model in one of Cousin Nancy’s Life magazines. Papa walked with her down from the mountain and all the way—so it was said by one of the Morton cousins who’d been out jacking a deer and saw them—she sashayed like she belonged by his side.

  And that’s when Cousin Nancy and everyone in town found out the thing I already knew—Papa was besot.

  He’d gone up the mountain that May night a widower and come down a tied man. Seems he’d given the woman with the red slash of a mouth Great-Grammy’s ring to bind her to him. And bound she seemed to be, holding on to his arm as if she owned it and him along with it. Owned his body—and maybe something more.

  Though who was the most bound, it was hard to say.

  When they came to our little house, they unaccountably stood outside the door. Cousin Nancy and I could hear Papa laughing, the kind of deep belly laugh we hadn’t heard since Mama and the baby died. And then another laugh, a softer, secret sound, full of something whispery.

  Cousin Nancy was busy making our breakfast, so she said, “Summer, get the door.” There was something tense in her voice, something angry, too.