Frozen

by Mary Casanova

  I scanned the bay for any sign of Owen. He said he had one more delivery and to meet him in thirty minutes. I didn’t wear a watch, but it couldn’t be so terribly long until he returned for me. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.

  Miles off, a low ripple of thunder sounded. I glanced to the west, where the clouds had built and darkened. A flicker of lightning lit through dense, charcoal clouds and then vanished. I turned away and followed the path. It wound along the shore, out to the edge of a peninsula, and then back north toward a tiny log cabin nested in the V of the protected harbor. It had to be the place.

  The trapper’s shack sat hunched near the rock harbor. The only boat in sight was a wooden flatboat near shore, turned upside down, a few hull boards missing. I kept my eyes on the water, waiting for a sign of Owen.

  Minutes passed.

  I lingered at a crook in the path, between moss-velveted boulders and wild iris on thin graceful stems. Tall cedars concealed me from boats, and when rain began to fall in droplets, the fragrant branches kept me dry. Small gnats crawled into the hair at the nape of my neck and behind my earlobes. I swatted at them, some blood-filled. What if something happened to Owen? What if he ran out of gas? I couldn’t return to the hotel and into the hands of Walter Worthington—no matter how great my ache was to be needed.

  When a gust of wind blew, I was grateful. At least the gnats would leave me alone. But within seconds, the wind turned to a gale, and twigs and leaves lifted from the ground and swirled past me. Trees creaked and groaned. Waves built and sloshed in the protected harbor. Soon, beyond the trapper’s cove, whitecaps formed waves that scuttled ahead of the wind. A commercial fishing boat bobbed up and down, bow into the wind, pointed in the direction of the dam and Kettle Falls, but still no sign of Owen.

  Like a sledgehammer, lightning cracked the slate sky, followed by a downpour. I ran for the trapper’s shack, hoping it was unlocked, as most of the region’s cabins were said to be. Better to let strangers enter and take shelter, people said, than to have them get angry and destroy your place. Bucketsful of rain poured down, soaking through my blouse and kitchen apron to my skin. I knocked on the squat door and then pushed on the wooden log handle, which gave way, and I rushed inside.

  “Hello?”

  But the one-room cabin, dimly lit by a tiny window, offered no reply. The wind howled at my back and blasted into the cabin. Dripping, I closed the door behind me.

  On the square kitchen table laid a local newspaper, a teal-blue kerosene lantern, and an empty bottle. A coffee mug and a dinner plate—the same white heavy plate with green trim as at the Kettle Falls restaurant—waited for their owner’s return. A barrel stove sat in one corner, sending off faint wafts of smoke from an early morning fire, its stovepipe bending at a right angle out the nearby wall.

  My attention was drawn, for reasons beyond my understanding, to the gray rumples of the old quilt on the bed. It was a faded wedding-ring pattern: a series of quilted overlapping circles. Like the one Mama and I once covered ourselves with at night in those early years, this one, too, was mostly pinks and blues—so at odds with this trapper’s shack. But unlike Mama’s white quilt, this one was gray and dingy.

  I felt nauseous.

  “Couldn’t be.”

  Of course it wasn’t Mama’s. Mama had been gone eleven years. Would I never stop looking for her in every corner? Stop, I told myself. Stop it. It was too old and musty with streaks of mildew. It was out here in a dank and seldom-used trapper’s shack.

  But there was something in my memory—something about the quilt’s edge.

  I couldn’t stop myself.

  I stepped toward the quilt. Gingerly, I turned back each edge of the rumpled quilt. First the edge near the nightstand, then both edges at the foot of the bed, and finally, I stretched across the bed—hoping not to pick up a batch of lice or bed bugs—and reached toward the head of the bed. The quilt was tucked firmly between the mattress and the wall. I yanked it free and held the corner in my palms.

  On its edge—the same neatly embroidered letters I’d seen as a small child—the bumpy stitching I once ran my fingers over, but of course, couldn’t then comprehend. Until that moment in the trapper’s shack—with lightning crackling overhead and rain finding its way into cracks in the cabin roof—I had completely forgotten the stitching on the edge of the quilt.

  Now I could read the words on the quilt, so finely stitched with needle and threads of blue and green:

  Joined in Blessed Union

  Frank and Sigrid

  July 1, 1904

  Chapter 23

  I yanked the quilt off the bed and gathered it in my arms. It was evidence of Mama; proof of my memories; the only artifact of her I had left. Had it read “Frank and Bella” I would have understood completely. But who was Sigrid?

  And then I recalled my last visit with Franny. She said all the girls changed their names. Maybe Mama, too, had changed her name when she started working for Darla. Why else would she have kept this quilt with another woman’s name?

  “Sigrid.”

  It was possible.

  I replayed last night’s conversation with Caveman. He had been telling me the truth. I said aloud, “My name is Sadie Rose Ladovitch, daughter of . . .” A sob built in my chest. I wanted to give in to it and let out all my years of questions and fears and aching to belong—but instead I swallowed hard. I stepped over to the small square window, rubbed dust away with my thumb until it turned black, and peered out.

  Waves hit the rocky shore of the little bay and sent plumes of water into the air. Trees flailed in the high winds, which built to a deafening roar. There wasn’t a chance Owen could pull into the harbor now. He was—if he had a working brain—taking shelter along with every other fisherman on the white-frothed water.

  I clutched the quilt and drifted . . . floated back. . . .

  Above snowbanks and endless white, I floated outside the community building, watching, disconnected from my body below. In the pale dawn light, the sky and snow merged as I watched a man toss his shovel aside and then drop to his knees in the snow. He yanked at the oversized boots, which came free in his gloved hands. Then he tugged at the legs and out came layers of the navy wool coat and cotton flannel nightdress, all intertwined with tiny legs, and the body of a girl. Waves of dark hair fell around her face. With his gloved hand, he brushed back her hair, then scooped her up in his arms and raced into the town hall.

  Strange as it was to be watching him carry my body, I followed with curiosity from somewhere above.

  The man murmured to himself, shouldered the door open, and stepped inside the town hall.

  Inside, I floated above and observed a long table that held stacks of papers and empty strewn chairs. The man holding me yelled, “Somebody get the doctor!”

  A few yards off, a half-dozen men gathered near another body—that of a woman with pale blue skin. Her body was frozen and propped upright in the corner, standing beside the American flag. Her hand clutched an empty bottle.

  The group of men spun away from the woman.

  I jumped back.

  Across my vision at the tiny window, a bone-thin man walked by under the awning of the cabin roof. He was so close it felt as if he’d touched me. He was soggy wet, narrow-shouldered, with his head bent under a workman’s cap. I’d seen him before. He was at the train depot when the Worthingtons had returned. Bigler. Bigly. Bigby—that was his name. Within a second, he was at the door and pushing it open. It opened with a creak, and I didn’t have a moment to hide.

  “Holy crap!” He slammed the door behind him, unaware of me. He pulled off a long-sleeve shirt and hung it on a peg, and then pulled a ladder-back chair toward him from the table. With a gray long-sleeve undershirt, he sat down heavily and yanked off his wet leather boots—then his cap, revealing greasy white hair. This was one of the men who’d me
t Mr. Worthington at the train station. The smell of well-seasoned body sweat—rank and sour—met my nose.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted, starting from my post by the window toward the door. “The storm. I needed shelter.”

  Eyes saucer-wide, the man jumped up.

  The bed, the table, the man . . . were nearly within arm’s reach. I held the dingy quilt tight to my chest, dreading being stuck inside four walls with this stranger. He was closer to the door than I was. If he tried to harm me, I would have to get past him to escape. I should run for the door and not take my chances with this lunatic, but something made me hold my ground.

  “What in God’s name?” With a sharp nose, stubble-haired face, he made the sign of the cross a second time. “Are you—are you—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  I had no plan for the conversation that followed. “I’m certainly not any of them. I was supposed to meet—”

  He fell back toward his chair, missed it, and hit the floor with a grunt, his big toe protruding from his fraying sock. And then, like a crayfish scurrying backward, scrambled to the wall—not taking his eyes off me—and drew his legs up to his chest. “You’re a goddamn ghost, then? Here to haunt the crap outta me?”

  Either he was a lunatic or entirely too drunk to remember me. All I had to do was run for the door now, open the handle, run out.

  “I should have left well enough alone,” the man ranted. “Never shoulda got involved with that whole goddamn mess!” He wrapped his arms and veiny hands around his legs and body. He reached inside his undershirt and pulled out a rosary of brown beads and a brown wooden cross. He let the small cross dangle between us as he fingered the beads, one by one. His chest rose and fell quickly, like bellows working hard over embers.

  Rainwater fell steadily in holes through the roof, leaving growing puddles on the cabin’s uneven wood floor. My brain was so busy assessing my predicament that I almost missed what he’d asked.

  “Haunt you?” I said. “Why do you think—” Then I glanced at the quilt in my arms. “This was Mama’s quilt.”

  “Your mama?” he whispered.

  “Yes, and I want to know,” I started to ask, tears building unexpectedly. I forced myself to sound more commanding of the situation than I felt. I glanced at the quilt in my arms, then back at the man. “I want to know how her quilt ended up here.”

  He glanced at the floor, then back up at me. Dark circles gathered beneath his eyes, and white flecked the hairs at his chin and at the sides of his face. He had to be nearly fifty or sixty years old.

  “Ohhh, holy crap.” He leaned his knees to his elbows and rested his chin in his hands. Second by second, the lines in his forehead dissolved as he appeared to rationalize his situation. He let his gaze leave me and studied the floor for a moment before looking back up. “So you’re not her. At first, I mean, you look so much like her. There was a child.”

  I nodded.

  He peered at me, as if his vision was failing. “No, wait.” He studied me. “So you’re the girl the mayor took in?” Then a mixture of embarrassment and relief crossed his face. “Oh. Wait. Huh.” He shook his head. “I gotta cut down on the booze. Now I remember. I seen you . . . the other day . . . with the Mayor.”

  I watched him, not answering. Everyone for years had called Mr. Worthington “Senator” but never “Mayor” after he left that tiny post for a grander political career.

  “Sure,” Bigby went on, “you’re her, but when I first met you, you was nearly dead. It was like pulling a calf from a cow, just as I used to do on the farm as a boy. But you was no calf. I didn’t expect to find a girl, half-dead in the snow.” He shook his head. “And ever since, I’ve regretted . . .”

  I listened without moving.

  He swung his head slowly back and forth, dropping his gaze to the floor. “I thought it would be the best joke—just a prank. But all these years since . . . seems I can’t go a night without seeing her staring at me, those eyes! Looking straight at me—straight through me! Bigby, I say to myself, you dumb-ass fool. The joke, you see, has been on me ever since.”

  I counted on my silence to prod him on.

  Then he glanced up at me, like a man who has been serving a sentence for many years. “I was the handyman for the village. I showed up early that morning, after a big storm blew through, cuz I knew I better get going on shoveling sidewalks. You see, that storm had dumped a bundle. The council members were meeting that morning. So I was just doing my job when I came—”

  With the rosary woven between his fingers, he swiped his palm down the length of his face. “I came upon this woman—in the snow. Frozen. With an empty whiskey bottle in her hand. I knew that many of the red skirts around Ranier used to end their own lives. Some jumped off the high tower by the mill. Others drank themselves to death. I figured, that’s what happened. She was already dead, you see, and that’s when I figured no harm would be done if I played a little prank.

  “So before anyone arrived, I hauled her inside—and she kept gripping the neck of that bottle—and I stood her up in the corner. Thought it would be a big joke, you see, because there had been plenty of heated talks at those meetings then about things being too corrupt. About too many fancy ladies bold in broad daylight. And so, I thought a few laughs would come of it. You know, something they’d tell over and over for years at the saloons.”

  Quilt to my chest, I closed my eyes, flooded with memories.

  I floated above the man who held me . . .

  “Somebody get the doctor!” the man with the beak nose shouted.

  In suspenders over a crisp shirt, a mustached man pointed over his shoulder at the woman in the corner. “Bigby! You oughta know! How the hell did this woman get here?”

  I hovered, strangely distanced from Bigby, and the limp five-year-old body he held in his arms. “I dunno, Mayor!” Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. “But this kid here’s nearly dead!”

  While the council members drew closer to Bigby—a thud!—and the sound of glass shattering came from the corner. They glanced toward the frozen and lifeless woman.

  I drifted toward her.

  Now her hand gripped at empty air. Around her bare feet lay pieces of a shattered glass bottle. I didn’t feel sad, glad, anything then.

  Mama.

  Bella Rose.

  Frozen stiff.

  And all in that suspended second, I knew it wasn’t her, wasn’t the voice that had called to me. It was merely her body, upright but tilted, wearing a silk nightdress. She stared out somewhere beyond. Glassily. Accusingly. I wanted to follow her voice then, to go where she was . . .

  But like a hooked fish speeding away, I was reeled back . . . back against my will, back toward the men now clustered around the man who’d found me.

  “Damn, Miss. I’m sorry now, I really am. You’re not getting sick now, are ya? The way you’re drooping there, I better get ya a basin if you’re gonna puke.”

  I felt numb—suspended between the past and present—and watched as he rose slowly to his feet, let out a sigh, and then grabbed a bottle from behind the cookstove. He lifted its amber contents to his lips and chugged until the bottle was half empty. Then he lifted it in the air toward me. “Want some?”

  I shook my head, not sure what I needed anymore. “You stood her body up?”

  “That, I’m ashamed to say, I did. But it wasn’t me who put her out in the snow. God, no,” he said with a snort. Then he grabbed a washbasin and slid it across the table toward me. “Just in case,” he said, dropping in his chair. He pointed to another chair. “Please Miss. Sit. I won’t harm you. I promise. Don’t go yet. I need to get this out. I’ve been carrying this ’round too long as it is.”

  I sat with the quilt over my lap. I hardly needed the extra layer for warmth; sweat dampened the curve of my lower back.

  Bigby took another
swig, then continued. “That mornin’ when the men came to their meetin’—many who I know for a fact frequented those cathouses themselves—anyways, I was hiding in the coatrack, you see, and waitin’ for the moment when they’d notice . . . And they were sure surprised. She was almost saluting them from beside the flag.”

  This man, Bigby, I realized, was now talking more to himself than to me.

  “So this was the joke,” I said beneath my breath, “that you told through the years? Told it from barstools?” My anger simmered and heat built behind my eyes. “How could you?”

  He met my eyes, winced, and took another drink. “I’ve prayed to God about what I’ve done so many times, but I can’t change what I did. See, Miss, first, that was my plan back then, to tell it as a big joke.” He leaned onto his elbows and peered at me, hard. “Until I found you.”

  I stopped breathing.

  “So durin’ that big hullabaloo at the meetin’, I slipped back outside and returned to shovelin’. I didn’t want the prank traced back to me, you see. Just told around town, like a legend of sorts. Stupid.” He closed his eyes, and I worried that he was going to doze off.

  “And then you found me,” I prompted, sensing that the liquor was starting to soften him, and I didn’t want him to forget any details.

  He chugged another gulp of booze and continued. “That’s right. And then nothin’ about it was funny at all. You see, I couldn’t figure out what you were doin’ out in the snow. I mean, what child runs after its mama in a snowstorm? I was sure certain you were deader than dead. But when I pulled you out, those tiny legs in those ladies’ boots, and then I heard a breath. And you weren’t dead after all.”

  Beyond Bigby, a few pots lay on a wood shelf. I had to move, do something. I stood up, left the quilt in the middle of the table, and grabbed a few pots and set them one by one under the holes allowing the rain to pour inside. At first the droplets tinked like cymbals against the steel pots. Then the sounds shifted.