Six-Gun Snow White (3 page)

He married her.

I knew I was not to attend the wedding, but I scrapped up a black oak tree and saw the whole thing start to finish. It all happened at sunset under a tent with silver stars painted on it. I never saw so many lanterns or so many flowers. I thought:
nobody else in the whole world must have any roses now.
Mr. H wore a black suit and looked just as fine as rain. A pack of fancy folk arrived in coaches. The ladies wore dresses like springtime and egg whites. The fellows wore velvet and other fabrics I was not aware of. Some of them had long bright guns I would have liked to get a better look at. Little girls and boys threw violet petals on the grass. They were somebody’s children, I cannot say whose. I thought to myself that I could throw petals better. The littlest ones dumped half their baskets in one spot. I wanted to throw violets, too. I would throw them so good Mrs. H would give me a kiss.

When the bride came out of the house everybody sighed. She had a dress on all lace and silk like a snowflake and pearls all over her head. Around her neck was a necklace of Colorado diamonds so luxurious I didn’t want to look at it, like if I looked at it, I had already stolen it.

After, they danced together. Violins and harps and horns and drums played to wake the moon. Mr. H never stopped smiling. He kissed her seventeen times. I know because I counted. Mr. M danced with a girl in a pink dress and only got two kisses. The violet-tossing children ate too much cake and fell asleep on the grass.

There was a fountain of champagne and it looked like starlight you could drink.

I fell asleep in the black oak tree.

My father and Mrs. H took their honeymoon in Peru where Mr. H intuited the good blue waited for him. I will observe that not even the softness of a bed containing Mrs. H could cool his lechery for silver. The only word I received from them was a painting that appeared in my dime museum. It appeared as suddenly and without warning as if a ghost hung it up. I looked at it a long time. It showed a kind of pyramid with sides like staircases and a flat top. That is how they build pyramids in South America, which I know from reading a great number of books. Jaguars live in South America also. I would like to see a jaguar someday, but probably I will not. In the painting, a person stood on the top of the pyramid. It looked like a woman, but the figure was very tiny and I am not artistic. She held her arms straight up, toward the moon rising over the pyramid. I could not help but think of the mirror. I had not been able to find it again once they moved Mrs. H’s things into the house. Maybe the moon had gotten out of the mirror and decided to live in my painting instead.

I was a child and when you are a child you think things like that.

Mr. H sent word by telegraph that I was to stay in my rooms so as not to make worry for Mrs. H once they returned. If I liked I might spend my days on the boardwalk once my lessons were done, but at night I must obey Miss Enger, eat what is left over, and look after myself. Surely I had enough toys and books to amuse any girl. Miss Dougall minded me like a pot of boiling water. The housemaid locked my door at night and kept me out of the front rooms with the end of a broom. Miss Dougall was the sheriff of my father’s law and every night I wished she would fall down the stairs and bust her big curly head. She did not oblige me. Miss Enger patted my hand in sympathy but did not unlock my door or bring me anything extra to eat.

I sat at my window. I spun the chamber on Rose Red and ran my fingers over the pearls in the grip. There were a lot of them by then. I had pleased Mr. H often, but it had been a good bit since he’d given me any new pearls. If I obeyed Miss Dougall perhaps I would get another. This idea cheered me up some.

Things began to happen all in a row: I knew my father and Mrs. H had come home, I could hear them laughing and walking and banging forks against plates. But I was not called for. My food was brought. My linens seen to. Miss Enger did not come to see me anymore. Mrs. H sent her on her way with a fair clutch of money and a reference. A new Irish hall girl drew the chore of my lessons. She was called Moira Daly and could not herself read. She was very apologetic, however, and I took it on myself to teach her letters so that somebody between the two of us could learn a thing. Still, no one called for me. Miss Daly was not nearly brave enough to take my questions downstairs.

In the evening, I could hear Mrs. H playing the pianoforte. She was very good at it. She sang as well, and was particularly fond of strange old songs like
Hymn to the Evening Star
and
Fairies of the Hill.
I lay against the floor and listened every night. I drank her voice up like milk.

I had never heard a woman sing before. Only the coyote in his cage and the seagulls crying.

After Miss Daly’s lessons each morning, I crept out of
my window and shimmied down the olive tree. I came away
yellow with olive pollen and ran up to my boardwalk where Thompson the fox waited for his bowl of sarsaparilla. Florimond wandered around his paddock on his hind legs, looking for a trainer to praise him. I gave him the apples from my breakfast. I do not care for apples.

I played cards with Thompson in my saloon. He had lost the trick, but I suspected he had the Queen and I was done for already. Thompson chewed on the seven of spades.

A shadow moved over the saloon-door. It was not a groundskeeper’s shadow. It was not a bear’s shadow. I looked up and I will confess I was angry. No one was allowed up there but me. Miss Enger, Miss Bornay, even rotten Miss Dougall knew they had no power here. They had the whole house and the world on top. The saloon was my place, and whoever it was would not get any sarsaparilla. But it was not Miss Enger or Miss Bornay or Miss Dougall.

Mrs. H stood in the doorway. She wore a vermillion dress. With the sun behind her she looked like a planet on fire. Her heart-shaped face was blank. I suddenly felt very shabby and small in my playdress. She was ever so much taller and prettier than I would ever be. Wherever they invented women like that, it was country I could never even visit.

Thompson leapt away from the table and skittered under the bar. Mrs. H moved in her greyhound way, her heels clicking on the floorboards. She sat down and took up the red fox’s cards, fanned them out like an old gambler. She slotted the seven of spades into her hand, bending back the chewed-up part. Her fingers had nail paint on them which I had never seen before, not being acquainted with many fine women. I stared. The paint looked like blood. Was she sick? She was so pale and her nails so red. Did she hunt, like me, and dress her own kills? Had she killed something today and forgotten to wash herself? Mrs. H said nothing. She drew a card from her hand laid it down between us. I could see the green ring better. It was an uncut emerald the size of a man’s knuckle with fiery flaws winking down at the bottom of it like fish in a pond.

Mrs. H laid down the Queen of Spades. I’d lost. The Queen of Spades has black eyes and black hair, like me, but her gown is red, like Mrs. H’s.

“So you’re the little Indian child,” she said, and those were Mrs. H’s first words to me. She looked all around the room. Looking at her felt like drinking something harsh and strong. It woke you up and made you dizzy all at once. Her eyes were green like her ring.

“I can see we have a lot of work to do,” she sighed.

My whole body felt like I had when I touched the mirror under the muslin. Like a candle melting into icewater.

“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t be mean to me. I’m good. I promise I’m good.” That sounded babyish and nonsensical out of my own mouth. I tried again. I spit in my hand and held it out like I’d seen Mr. H do with horse-breeders. “If you love me, I’ll love you back,” I bargained.

Mrs. H laughed. The wind picked up outside. I did not think she would shake on it but she did. Her fingers were cool on mine. She avoided my spat-upon palm and wiped her hands on her skirt afterward.

Mrs. H reached over the card table and smoothed my hair between her fingertips. “You are not entirely ugly, but no one would mistake you for a human being. That skin will never come clean. And that hair! Black as coal, and those lips, as red as the hearts your savage mother no doubt ate with relish. That’s all right. All women have a taste for hearts. But you will discover that I am a gentle soul. If you do as I say and imitate me as best you are able, perhaps you will find yourself gentled as well. It is not beyond possibility that God will overlook your coarser half and take you to His bosom at the end of days.”

Mrs. H stood up. Her dress rustled like breath. She walked over to the slot machine and pulled the arm without dropping a coin into its mouth. The reels spun. Four red apples whirled up, glossy and dark. I had spun that beast a thousand times and never seen one apple. Silver dollars exploded into the pan like rifle-fire. Mrs. H left them there. She left the door swinging. She left me alone.

From that day forward she never used my name. Eventually I forgot it. Mrs. H called me something new. She named me cruel and smirking, she named me not for beauty or for cleverness or for sweetness. She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White.

I do not believe any person is born knowing how to be human. Everyone has to learn their letters and everyone has to learn how to be alive.

A is for Alligator. B is for Beauty.

Maybe it’s not a lesson so much as it’s a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that’s left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you’re lucky. If that’s what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what’s said to you, doing what’s done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you’re all alone you keep on cawing
hello pretty bird
at the dark.

When Mrs. H said I was not human she meant I was not white. She was wrong about the reason but not about the thing. I wasn’t
human. I was a small device who knew only how to shoot a gun, play the slots, and dress up in fancy clothes to please a rich man. Nobody had ever loved me proper and if there’s a boring story in this world, that’s it. I want to skip this part. I want to pull on the arm of my slot machine and let the rolls flip over until they show a green tree in the summertime, and me away from that house, walking tall under a blue sky. I want to skip this part but I am here to tell you: a stepmother is like a bullet you can’t dig out. She fires true and she fires hot and she fires so quick that her metal hits your body before you even know there’s a fight on. I didn’t even know what white was.

So here’s the truth of it: there was blood and some of it came from between my legs and some of it came from my face where Mrs. H struck me over and over, because I was bad, because I looked like my mother, because I smelled like an animal, because I did not show her any human feeling or sweetness and that made me wicked. It is my understanding that when you start bleeding you are a woman so I guess that’s what I was.

She put jasper and pearl combs in my hair and yanked them so tight I cried—
there, now you’re a lady
, she said, and I did not know if the comb or the tears did it. She put me in her own corsets like nooses strangling my waist til I was sick, my breath gone and my stomach shoved up into my ribs—
there, now you’re civilized
, she said, and I did not know if it was the corset or the sickness that did it. She forbade me to eat sweets or any good thing til I got thin as a dog and could hardly stand I was so damn hungry—
there, now you’re beautiful
, she said and I did not know if it was my dog-bones showing or my crawling in front of her begging for a miserable apple to stop my belly screaming that made me fair.

For myself I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.

I worked hard to be as human as possible.

She dismissed Miss Marie the kitchen maid and Miss Mary the laundry maid. She dismissed Miss Bea the scullery. Mr. H gave up the house to her. He did not bring me a pearl for obeying Miss Dougall. The house was hers to lord over, was the word of Mr. H. Children are the province of women and none of his nevermind now, thank God in heaven.

When she hit me, she said she loved me. When she scratched my face, she said she loved me. And let me tell you, Mrs. H loved me most of all the day she locked me in my room with no lamps or candles because I looked too long at a groomsman and that’s the mark of a whore, a slattern with a jackal for a mother, hellion trash with an animal heart. For a week I had no bath or books, no light and no food, but she loved me the whole time, whispering through the door that her love could burn the whore out of me. Love could make me pure again.

On account of all of this I had some peculiar ideas about love. I’ll tell you what I thought on the subject back then: it’s about as much use as a barrel with no bottom. When I fed the pigs and two of them got to scrapping over an old soft onion, I thought: that’s love. Love is eating. Love is a snarling pig snout and long tusks. Love is a dress like the sun. Love is the color of blood. Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.

I said I loved her back. I put my hand on the door and I said I loved her back and when I said it I thought of kissing her and also of shooting her through the eye.

Mrs. H dismissed Mrs. Whitney the housekeeper and Mrs. Kenny the cook. She dismissed Miss Daly who could write her name by then and did not seem sad to go. The men servants she left, excepting the groomsman I looked at. There were no ladies left but us.

How will we keep the house?

You will keep it. A clean house creates a clean soul and you have work to do. This is what it means to be a woman in the world.

When Mrs. H locked me up in the dark that time, I cobbled up a second notion. Love was a magic fairy spell. Didn’t the girls in my books hunt after love like it was a deer with a white tail? Didn’t love wake the dead? Didn’t that lady love the beast so hard he turned into a good-looking white fellow? That was what love did. It turned you into something else.

For this reason, I forgave Mrs. H. I tried to be near her all the time. She only meant to scrub me up and fix me. At any moment, she might take me in her arms and kiss me and like that beast with a buffalo’s body I would fill up with light and be healed. Love would do what it did best. Love would turn me into a white girl. If I did everything right, one day I would wake up and be wise and strong, sure of everything, with skin like snow and eyes as blue as hers. It would happen like a birthday party. One day the girl in the mirror would not look like me at all, but like my stepmother, and nothing would hurt anymore forever.