The Winter People(3)
I tossed a handful of dark-green fiddleheads into the basket.
“Tell me, Auntie, please,” I begged, “can the dead come back?”
Auntie looked at me a long time, head cocked to the side, her small, dark eyes fixed on mine.
“Yes,” she told me at last. “There is a way. Few know of it, but those who do, pass it down to their children. Because you are the closest I will ever come to a child of my own, the secret will go to you. I will write it all down, everything I know about sleepers. I will fold up the papers, put them in an envelope, and seal it with wax. You will hide it away, and one day, when you are ready, you will open it up.”
“How will I know I am ready?” I asked.
She smiled, showing her small teeth, pointed like a fox’s and stained brown from tobacco. “You will know.”
I am writing these words in secret, hidden under covers. Martin and Lucius believe I am sleeping. I hear them downstairs, drinking coffee and discussing my prognosis. (Not good, I’m afraid.)
I have been going back in my mind, thinking over how all of this began, piecing things together the way one might sew a quilt. But, oh, what a hideous and twisted quilt mine would be!
“Gertie,” I hear Martin say above the clink of a spoon stirring coffee in his favorite tin mug. I imagine the furrow of his brow, the deep worry lines there; how sad his face must be after he spoke her name.
I hold my breath and listen hard.
“Sometimes a tragedy breaks a person,” Lucius says. “Sometimes they will never be whole again.”
If I close my eyes even now, I can still see my Gertie’s face, feel her sugary breath on my cheek. I can so vividly recall our last morning together, hear her saying, “If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?”
Martin
January 12, 1908
“Wake up, Martin.” A soft whisper, a flutter against his cheek. “It’s time.”
Martin opened his eyes, leaving the dream of a woman with long dark hair. She’d been telling him something. Something important, something he was not supposed to forget.
He turned over in bed. He was alone, Sara’s side of the bed cold. He sat up, listening carefully. Voices, soft giggles across the hall, from behind Gertie’s bedroom door.
Had Sara spent the whole night in with Gertie again? Surely it couldn’t be good for the girl, to smother her like that. Sometimes he worried that Sara’s attachment to Gertie simply wasn’t … healthy. Just last week, Sara had kept Gertie home from school for three straight days, and for those three days Sara doted on her—plaiting her hair, making her a new dress, baking her cookies, playing hide-and-seek. Sara’s niece, Amelia, offered to take Gertie for the weekend, and Sara had made excuses—she gets homesick so easily, she’s so frail—but Martin understood that it was Sara who could not bear to be without Gertie. Sara never seemed whole unless Gertie was by her side.
He pushed the worried thoughts away. Better to focus on the problems he understood and could do something about.
The house was cold, the fire out.
He peeled back the covers, threw his legs over the side of the bed, and pulled on his pants. His bad foot hung there like a hoof till he shoved it into the special boot fashioned for him by the cobbler in Montpelier. The soles were worn through, and he’d stuffed the bottoms of both boots with dry grass and cattail fluff, all layered over scraps of leather, in a futile attempt to keep the dampness out. There was no money for new custom-made boots now.
Blight had ruined most of last fall’s potato crop, and they relied on the money they got from selling the potatoes to the starch factory to get through the winter. It was only January, and the root cellar was nearly bare: a few spongy potatoes and carrots, some Hubbard squash, half a dozen jars of string beans and tomatoes Sara had put up last summer, a little salt pork from the hog they’d butchered in November (they’d traded most of the meat for dry goods at the general store). Martin would have to get a deer soon if they were going to have enough to eat. Sara had a talent for stretching what little food they had, for making milk gravy and biscuits with a bit of salt pork into a meal, but she couldn’t create something from nothing.
“Have some more, Martin,” she would always say, smiling as she spooned more gravy onto biscuits. “There’s plenty.” And he would nod and have a second helping, going along with this myth of abundance Sara had created.
“I love biscuits and gravy,” Gertie would say.
“That’s why I make them so often, my darling,” Sara told her.
Once a month, Sara and Gertie would hitch up the wagon and ride into town to pick up what they needed at the general store. They didn’t get extravagant things, just the basics for getting by: sugar, molasses, flour, coffee, and tea. Abe Cushing let them buy on credit, but last week he’d pulled Martin aside to tell him the bill was getting up there—they’d need to pay it down some before buying anything more. Martin had felt the sour creep of failure work its way from his empty stomach up into his chest.
He jerked his bootlaces tight and tied them with careful knots. His bad foot ached already, and he wasn’t even out of bed. It was the storm.
He reached into the right pocket of his patched and tattered work pants and felt for the ring, making sure it was there. He carried it everywhere he went, a good-luck charm. It warmed in his fingers, seemed to radiate a heat all its own. Sometimes, when he was out working in the fields or woods and he knew Sara wouldn’t see, he slipped the ring onto his pinkie.