Milo, though, he was too young to know better. He had been trained to obey voices like Missus Felder’s. He was stepping forward, he was stepping forward, and there – he was forward, he was just in front of her, and she was putting down the hat, she was resting it gently on his head, and she was tugging just so at the brim to set it straight.
And she was tugging at it.
And she was tugging at it.
And down came the hat an inch farther.
And down came the hat another inch.
She was still tugging at it, still smiling like she was doing a favour for Milo, but none of us could see his face any more. The hat was past his nose. The hat was past his mouth. The hat was past his chin, but Missus Felder just kept tugging it down and down and down. Now his shoulders were gone, and it was taking the boy up into it, Milo, he was just disappearing into the hat, disappearing to his knees and his shin and his ankles until the hat was resting on the ground.
Missus Felder blinked as if she was confused. She blinked as if she didn’t understand what had happened. Then she picked up the hat. Quizzical. She held it out to the audience, showed us all the inside and it was empty. Perfectly empty.
‘Well,’ she said, almost apologetically. ‘I guess that’s that, then.’
And she stepped off the stage.
The thing about magic is it only works when you let it. It only works when you believe in it entirely, when you give yourself over to it entirely. Magic can only give you a thing you want that badly, that desperately. No one can work magic over you. You can only work magic over yourself.
Cheryl Felder knew something about magic.
There were stories about Cheryl Felder, stories that poor Sandifer kid ought to have known the way that all kids know whose trees not to filch apples from and which backyards shouldn’t be ventured for Frisbees and baseballs. Some might say that these sorts of stories were nonsense and spoke only to the curmudgeonly tendencies of the grumbles who reside in any town block.
But those people would be dead wrong.
After Sayer disappeared not a single soul spoke, not a bird twittered, not a skirt fluttered in the breeze. You could see those faces, each of them white as snow, white as a snow-woman caught in a melt.
Lillian trembled, but she said nothing.
She watched Missus Felder pluck a crustless tuna fish sandwich off the platter and vanish it with three remorseless bites.
‘Could use some cayenne,’ she said with a sprung smile, ‘but all around, fine work, Lillian. Thanks for the show.’
Cheryl Felder knew something about magic, and the biggest trick she knew was that people don’t like messing with it. Messing with magic was like sticking your hand down a blind hole, you never knew if there might be treasure at the bottom or if it might be some rattler’s hole. And all those women, they had something to lose, they had sons of their own, they had husbands, they had pretty hair or blue cotton frocks – something they didn’t want vanished. So after a while each of them stood up and collected leftover plates still piled high with uneaten licorice strands or oatmeal-raisin cookies and then each of them filed silently past Lillian Sandifer with neither a glance nor a touch nor a whisper of comfort.
Don’t be too hard on them.
They had loved that boy. We had all loved that boy.
They tried to make up for it over the next couple of months, knowing as we all did what a bad time Lillian would be having with that empty room at the top of the stairs, the room filled with arithmetic workbooks and bottle rockets and adventure paperbacks. They dropped off casseroles. Their sons took over the raking of the lawn and the watering of the flowerbeds. Ellie Hawley brought over a fresh-baked apple pie every Sunday. But it was never spoken of, why this neighbourly hospitality was due.
And Missus Felder, she did the same as she had always done. She shopped at the grocery store, squeezing peaches and plums to be sure they were ripe. She got her hair done once a week at the salon at the corner of Broad and Vine.
The missuses of the neighbourhood never spoke to her of it. None could manage it. I wanted to. I did. That little boy had a way of being loved that seemed a brand of magic all his own, but if there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn’t meddle in this.
Once I saw Lillian try, but only once.
This was about three weeks after it had happened. Poor Lillian was looking wasted and fat at the same time, her cheekbones sharp as fishhooks but her chin sagging like a net. Joe had gone on one of his business trips out of town, leaving her by her lonesome for the big old holiday weekend. All the ladies of the Hollow were bringing out bowls of punch and wobbling gelatine towers filled with fruit and marshmallows, while the children lit up Burning Schoolhouses and Big Bertha firecrackers. There was a fizzy feeling to the air on those kinds of days, as it exploded with pops and whistles and sparks and the smell of hamburger sizzling on the grill.
Missus Felder, she came out too for the block party and she brought with her a bowl of plump, red strawberries. She set them up at the end of her driveway on a little wooden table with a lace cloth thrown over, and she handed them out to kiddies as they whizzed by.
Now she was trimming the hats off them, one by one. Snip! A little stalk and a flourish of leaves went skidding onto the sidewalk. Snip!
And there was Lillian standing in front of her, trembling, thin-boned, in a yellow print dress that made her skin seem old as last year’s newspaper.
‘Please,’ Lillian said. Just that. Just that word.
‘Careful,’ said Missus Felder, never looking up, her fingers dusted white to the knuckle as she pinched strawberries out and laid on the confectionary sugar. ‘You’ll spoil your makeup if you keep up with that. You’ve too pretty a face for tears and if I’m not wrong there’s others around here that’d be willing to hook that husband of yours. A nice man, Joe. A handsome man. He deserves a pretty wife.’
Lillian didn’t say anything. Her lips trembled. They were chapped and unrouged, and maybe she was wondering why she hadn’t put a touch of red on them. Missus Felder plucked up another strawberry and she looked at it carefully.
‘You’re a beautiful woman, Lillian, and children wear you out. They trample the roses of youth, leave a woman like some tattered thing hanging out on the clothesline. Let the boy go. He was ungrateful, selfish. Have another one if it’s in your heart to do so, but let that one go.’
‘But he’s my son, Cheryl. Please.’
‘Son or no son.’ Now Missus Felder sighed a worn-out, old sigh as if the weather had gotten into her bones and really, she was just an old woman, why was she being troubled with this? ‘Do as you like, Lillian. But I’ll tell you for nothing that some children are best let go.’
And that was that.
The last flickers of September’s heat burned out in the flood of a ravenous, wet November that shuttered the windows and played havoc with the shingles; by the time December whispered in, we were all thankful for it. All of us except for Lillian Sandifer.
There were some women who could take a loss and find their own way through, but Lillian, bless her, had had an easy life. Joe was everything you ought to have in a husband. He treated her gently. He brought her back fine cotton sheets from Boston, dresses and trinkets, a music box, a tiny wind-up carousel. Lillian loved all beautiful things. She had come as close to a life without loss as one can. But when December blew in – an easy December, full of light snows and bright silver days – it was like she took all the harshness, the cold, the cutting, fractured freeze into herself, and she let it break her.
And then we all saw the snowman in Missus Felder’s yard.
The snows had been light, as I said, barely enough for a footprint, really, but there it was: round as a turnip at the bottom; a thin, tapering carrot for a nose; two silver dollars for eyes; and a fresh knitted scarf in green and gold hung beneath its hawkish, polar jowls. It was a
king snowman, the kind of snowman that children dream about making before their arms give out from pushing the ball around the yard, the kind of snowman that wouldn’t melt until halfway through May.
And on its head was a black chimney-pot hat, creased somewhat at the brim with a red silk ribbon drawn around it to set off its colouring.
A beauty, that hat; gorgeous to the eyes of a child and pure pain to his mother.
I could never do a big thing with magic, and that has always been both a blessing and a curse to me. Oh, there are ways and there are ways, and I know this is true, but the ways have never worked for me. It’s an easy thing to change a boy’s name. It’s a little thing, particularly if it is a thing done kindly, if it is a thing that might be wanted. Then the change comes easily. But I cannot get blood from a stone, nor flesh from bread, nor make healthy a woman who wishes she were sick.
That is the province of my sister. And if it is none of mine to meddle with that greater magic, then it is at least something of mine to meddle with her.
It was a month into the hard end of winter I finally broke my silence.
‘You must let the boy go,’ I told Cheryl, stepping in out of the cold, stamping my boots off to shed them of the slush that had begun to freeze around the edges. Winter always followed the two of us, winter and spring, summer and autumn, they had their own way about us whether we willed it or no.
‘I will not, Minnie . . .’ She paused like the name was bitter to her. ‘Minnie, they call you. Ha. They have a way with names, don’t they? Marianne. No, Marianne, I cannot.’ She closed the door quickly. She hated the cold, kept a thin blanket wrapped around her in the winter. I could see her curved fingers clutching at the edges. Winter turned her into an old woman as surely as summer made her a young one.
I gave her a look. It was not the dark and hooked scowl that came so easily to her face, no, it was a look entirely my own.
‘It’s time. It is long past time.’
‘Too skinny, and what has that husband of yours got you doing with your hair? I could never abide him, you know.’ Her mouth twisted as she looked me up and down
‘I know. You could never abide any of them.’
‘I abided my own well enough,’ she said. ‘The poor duckling. The little lamb. Let me fetch you some cake.’ She did. Tea, as well, the heat of it warming through the bone china cup. Her movements were quick and sharp as a bird’s.
She settled us at the kitchen table. I remembered this house, I knew the ins and outs of it. The gold December light filtered softly through the window, touching a lace cloth, a badly polished silver candle holder. She never had an eye for the details, no, and this was what came of it.
‘Where is the boy, Cheryl?’
She touched her tongue to her lip, scowled something fierce. ‘You know as well as I do.’
‘Let him out.’
‘No.’
‘They will come to hate us.’ I knew she knew this. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she twisted at the lace cloth, but she could be a stubborn old biddy sometimes. ‘He was a good boy, and it was a small thing,’ I said.
‘It was not a small thing!’ she cried so harshly it took me by surprise, that her voice could go so ugly. So sad. I looked at my sister, and I saw then the thing that they all saw. That missus of nightmares and twisted stories, the hooked woman, the crone; she who devoured baseballs and Frisbees and footballs; she who stole the bright heart of summer and cursed the strawberries to wither on the vine; the son-stealer, the child-killer.
‘It was,’ I said gently. ‘You know as well as I do that it was, and it is only spite and pride that keeps you from letting him go.’
‘You are a meddler too, Marianne, so mind your tongue,’ she muttered but the words stung nonetheless. ‘No,’ Cheryl whispered, chin curved down, and she was retreating, drawing in upon herself. ‘I know it as well. It was a mistake, all of it, nothing more than that.’ She cupped the bone china in her hand and blew on the tea to cool it. ‘I did not mean for it to happen, you know I did not, I would not do such a thing to a child. To his mother.’ She paused, took a sip, eyes hooded, lips twisting. ‘I know that the woman is dying. I know she will not live through the winter, but I cannot touch her, don’t you see that? Don’t you see, sister? I cannot heal the mother, I cannot summon the child. I cannot force a thing that is not wanted, and the boy will not come out!’
I could see the truth of it written on her face.
She was not a monster, she had never been a monster, and how I wished I could take her in my arms, her frail bones sharp and splintering as a porcupine; how I wished I could whisper the words of comfort to her. But she did not wish to be comforted. Her spine was made of sprung steel. She would not break herself upon this, for she knew what loss was and what mistakes were and the hardness of carrying on anyway. My sister knew this. She had buried a husband she loved. She had cried tears for her own lost boy, and knitted a scarf for him in green and gold, and hung it upon the cold reminder of his body in the yard.
Her fingers twitched, knuckling the bone china cup. I wanted to take her hand, but I knew something of her pride, the pride and the grief and the love of all of us missuses of the Hollow.
‘Let us do something,’ I say. ‘Even if it is a small thing.’
It is an easy thing to take a handful of snow and fashion it into a boy, easier than most anyone would believe. Snow longs to be something else. Bread does not wish to be flesh, water does not wish to be wine, stones do not wish to bleed – but snow, snow wishes always to be the thing that is not, a thing that might survive the spring thaw and live out its days whole and untouched. And a boy, a boy who is loved, well, what finer shape is there?
And so we two fashioned it into a shape, and we set the silver dollars for its eyes and we wrote its name upon its forehead. Then, of course, it was not a thing of snow any longer but a thing of flesh: a thing with Milo Sandifer’s bright blue eyes, barely nudging five-feet, and still as tongue-tied as any boy ever was.
‘Missus Suh-s-sabatelli,’ he whispered, trying out that fresh new mouth of his.
‘Yes, boy,’ I allowed with a sigh. ‘That I am. Now get you home to your mother, she’s been calling after you, and don’t you bother her with what you’ve been getting up to. Just give her a kiss, you hear?’
‘Right,’ the boy said, ‘Yes, of course. I’ll do that. Thank you, ma’am.’
Already his tongue was working better than poor Milo’s ever did. But it wouldn’t matter none, I reckoned. Missus Felder unwound the scarf from around the king snowman’s neck. The hole in its chest where we had dug out the boy yawned like a chasm. Like Adam’s unknit ribcage.
‘Here,’ she said, and she wrapped the scarf around Milo. ‘You ought to keep warm now. Little boys catch cold so easily.’
He blinked at her as if trying to remember something, but then he shrugged the way that little boys do. Then he was off, scampering across lawns and driveways, home to his mother. I looked on after him, staring at the places where his feet had touched the ground, barely making a dent in the dusting of white over the grass.
‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Cheryl. She’d gone to patting away at her snowman and sealing him up again, eyeless, blinded, a naked thing without that scarf, only the hat on him now, only that gorgeous silk thing to make him a man and not just a lump.
‘He’ll last as long as he lasts,’ she said with a sniff. ‘Snow is snow. Even if it wants to be a boy.’
‘And Lillian?’
She didn’t speak for a time, and I had to rub at my arms for warmth. For me it had already gone February and the little snowflakes that landed upon my cheeks were crueller things than the ones the other missuses would be feeling as they took their sons and daughters to church.
‘Maybe it’s a kindness you’ve done here, and maybe it isn’t.’ She wasn’t looking at me. Cheryl couldn’t ever look at you
when she was speaking truths. She smoothed the freeze over the place where she drew out the boy, and her fingers were like twigs, black and brittle, against the white of it. ‘You can’t ever know the thing a person truly wants, but you keep on trying, don’t you? I hope your husband is a happy man, I hope you give him children of your own one day.’
‘Well,’ I said, but I didn’t know what more to add to that.
She was right, of course, she always was about such things: maybe it was a blessing and maybe it wasn’t, but the boy came home to find his mother curled up in his bed surrounded by arithmetic workbooks and bottle rockets and adventure paperbacks. And he kissed her gently on the forehead, and she looked at him and smiled, her heart giving out, just like that, at the joy of seeing him once again. But the boy had been made good and sweet, and so he wrapped himself in her arms, and he lay next to her until the heat of her had faded away entirely.
That heat.
Poor thing didn’t know any better. But snow is snow, even when it is flesh. A thing always remembers what it was first. When Joe Sandifer came home it was to find his wife had passed on, and from the dampness of the sheets he knew she must have been crying an ocean.
Joe was a good man and a strong man; his fingers were long and graceful. He pulled up the sheet around his wife, and he kissed her gently, and he buried her the following Tuesday. Perhaps it was hard for him for a time; it must have been, for he had loved his wife dearly, and he had lived only to see her smile, but the spring came and went, and then a year, and then another year, and he was not the kind of man who needed wait long for a partner. It was Ellie Hawley in the end, childlike and sweet, whose husband had brought her the blue dress with the raglan sleeves, whose husband had left her behind when he found a Boston widow with a dress that didn’t make it past the knees and legs that went all the way to the floor. Ellie was the one who managed to bring a smile to Joe’s face and to teach him that there were still beautiful things left in the world for a man who had lost both wife and son.
Best British Short Stories 2015 Page 17