The Snow Child: A Novel (12 page)

He dusted the snow from a stump and set the biscuit down, wondering if the same curiosity was driving him. The child was not a raccoon to bait and trap. He worried about her. He’d felt foolish to admit it in front of the Bensons, but the little girl had come again and again to their homestead, and he did not know what brought her. Maybe she was in need but too shy or too frightened to knock on their door. Perhaps she was lonely and sought only companionship, but maybe it was something
more urgent. Shelter. Clothing. Food. Help of some kind. The thought preoccupied him, and so he reached out to her the only way he knew how. For the next several hours, Jack worked outdoors, stacking wood and shoveling paths. All the while he watched out of the corner of his eye, but the biscuit went untouched and the forest remained quiet.

The next morning, he saw where tracks approached the stump, wove this way and that where the girl must have hidden behind a spruce tree, a bush. The biscuit remained on the stump.

That evening, he searched the cabin, looking for other possible bait. He picked up tins and opened boxes until Mabel finally asked what he was up to.

“Nothing,” he mumbled, guilty with his lie. She would disapprove of his efforts, or make suggestions of her own, but he must do it his own way. As a youngster, he had never had a deer or wild bird come within reach when his friends were milling about.

More than that, talk of the child seemed to upset Mabel. She had some spirit these days and a brightness in her eyes that eased Jack’s heart. The time she spent with Esther was good. But whenever they discussed the little girl, she became agitated. He often caught her looking out the window.

The same traits that as a young woman had made her so alluring now made her seem unwell. She was imaginative and quietly independent, but over the years this had settled into a grave melancholy that worried him. Until he knew more about this little girl and her situation, he felt it best to keep it under his hat.

When the sourdough biscuit, bits of peppermint candy from town, even a piece of one of Mabel’s pies that Jack had pilfered, had all failed, he was at a loss for what to try next. He thought
back to the scarf and mittens the girl had taken and wondered if she was cold and in need of more clothes. His brief glimpses of her made him doubt this. She seemed at home in the snow in her furs and wool.

Then, on a trip to town, he saw a miniature porcelain doll on a shelf in the general store. The doll had long, straight blond hair, not unlike the girl’s, and it wore the brightly colored dress of a European villager, perhaps Swedish or Dutch. It was too much money for something so frivolous, but he ignored his conscience, bought it on credit, and hid it in his coat pocket. When he got home, he found he couldn’t wait until the next morning, so although it was after dark, he took it with him when he went to feed and water the animals.

He brought the lantern from the barn and walked to the stump where the other offerings had gone untouched. He took the doll from his pocket. Maybe he and Mabel had truly lost their minds. Cabin fever—wasn’t that what Esther called it?

Jack raised his voice to the cold night and called out as gently as he could manage.

“This is for you. Are you out there?”

His voice was soft and croaky. He cleared his throat, and called out again.

“I don’t know if you’re out there or if you can hear me, but we want you to have this. Just something I picked up in town. Well, then, good night.”

He hoped he might see her, or hear a birdsong from the trees, but there was only the cold and dark. He shifted from one foot to the other, shoved a hand into his coat pocket, and at last turned his back, leaving the porcelain doll propped in the snow on the stump.

When he returned to the cabin, Mabel had warmed water on the stove for him to wash. Steam rose as she poured the water into a basin. Jack took off his shirt, put a towel over his shoulders, splashed water onto his face, and soaped up his beard. Behind him he could hear Mabel bustling in the kitchen.

“Oh,” she said quietly.

Jack brought his head up from the basin and wiped his face with the towel.

“What is it?”

“The window. Do you see?”

As they watched, thick frost unfurled in feathers and swirls across the glass, slowly spreading from the center toward the corners. Lacy white vines grew in twists and loops and icy flowers blossomed. Within seconds the window that had been clear glass was covered in patterns of overlaying frost like fine etching.

“Maybe it’s from the steam,” Mabel said in a near whisper. She pressed the palm of her hand against the glass, and her warm skin melted the ice. She curled a fist, rubbed a small circle in the center of the window, and looked through.

“Oh. Oh,” she gasped and leaned closer.

“What, Mabel? What is it?”

“It’s her.” She turned, her hand at her throat. “Her little face, right there in our window. She had fur all around her head, like a wild animal.”

“It’s her hat. Her marten hat, with the flaps tied under her chin.”

“But she’s there now. Go look.”

“She runs fast, even on the snow,” he said, but Mabel was handing him his boots and coat and opening the door.

When he stepped outside, his wet beard and hair stiffened with ice. He walked around the side of the cabin but saw only
what he expected—snow and trees and night. The child was gone.

The next morning Jack nearly stepped on the small basket outside their door.

“Jack? What’s that you—”

“I’m not sure.” He set it on the table, and he and Mabel stood over it. It was made of birch bark, its seams crudely sewn with some kind of dried plant root. The basket fit perfectly in two cupped hands, and it was heaped with purple berries. Jack took one, rolled it between his finger and thumb, sniffed it, then put it to his tongue.

“Oh, Jack, you don’t know what it might be.”

“It’s a blueberry. Tastes like a blueberry.”

She frowned, but he put one to her mouth and she hesitantly tasted it.

“You’re right. They’re wild blueberries. Frozen like little marbles,” she said.

She sat at the table and touched the bark edges tentatively, as if the basket might break beneath her fingers. “Was it her?” she asked. “Did she bring these for us?”

“I guess she knew we were having pancakes for breakfast,” Jack said. Mabel did not smile.

“I’ll get some wood for the fire,” he said.

Jack followed his old tracks past the woodpile to the stump at the edge of the forest. The doll was gone. The child’s small footprints came toward the stump, went once around, and then straight back into the trees. Each track barely dented the snow, as if she weighed no more than a feather.

When he brought an armload of wood inside, Mabel was cooking pancakes. She dotted a few of the wild blueberries in
each one, and they ate them at the table, the small basket between them. They did not talk about the child, not until the table was cleared and Jack was preparing to go back outdoors.

“I’m going to haul some wood from the east field. Everyone says we’ll have a cold spell soon.”

“How can you?” Mabel’s voice was hushed and trembling. “How can you eat your breakfast and go into the day as if none of this has happened?”

“It’s winter, and we need firewood.”

“She’s a child, Jack. You might not be able to admit it to the neighbors, but you’ve seen her, too. You know she’s out there.”

He sighed. He finished lacing up his boots, and then went to Mabel and put his hands on her shoulders.

“What can we do?”

“We must do something.”

“I just don’t know what…. I think she’s all right.”

Mabel narrowed her eyes. “How can she be all right? A child, wandering around in the middle of winter?”

“I think she’s warm. And she must know how to get food. Look at the berries, and that little basket. She knows her way out there, probably better than either of us.”

“But she’s just a child. A little girl.”

He thought Mabel would cry, and he wanted to be anywhere else. It was wrong and cowardly, and he’d done it before—when Mabel lost the baby and shook with grief, when the relatives whispered harsh words, when the Bensons asked about the child in the woods. But it was like the need to take a breath. The urge was too strong, and without saying another word, Jack left the cabin.

S
nowflakes and naked babies tumbled through her nights. She dreamed she was in the midst of a snowstorm. Snow fell and gusted around her. She held out her hands and snowflakes landed on her open palms. As they touched her skin, they melted into tiny, naked newborns, each wet baby no bigger than a fingernail. Then wind swept them away, once again just snowflakes among a flurry of thousands.

Some nights she woke herself with her own crying. Others, Jack gently shook her. “Wake up, Mabel. You’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”

In the light of day, her dreams were drained of their nightmarish quality, and they seemed whimsical and strange, but the taste of loss remained in her mouth. It was difficult to focus on her tasks, and she often drifted aimlessly through her own mind. A faint memory emerged again and again—her father, a leather-bound fairy-tale book, a snow child alive in its pages. She couldn’t clearly recall the story or more than a few of the illustrations, and she began to worry over it, letting her thoughts touch it again and again. If there was such a book, could there be such a child? If an old man and woman conjured a little girl out of the snow and wilderness, what would she be to them? A daughter? A ghost?

She had sought reasonable explanations. She asked Esther about children who lived nearby. She urged Jack to inquire in town. But she had also taken note of those first boot prints in the snow—they began at the vanished snow child and ran from there into the woods. No tracks came into the yard.

Then there was the frost that crystallized on the window as she and Jack had watched, and the snowstorm that had blown her back toward home when she found the dead bird. Most of all, there was the child herself, her face a mirror of the one Jack had sculpted in the snow, her eyes like ice itself. It was fantastical and impossible, but Mabel knew it was true—she and Jack had formed her of snow and birch boughs and frosty wild grass. The truth awed her. Not only was the child a miracle, but she was their creation. One does not create a life and then abandon it to the wilderness.