The Snow Child: A Novel (22 page)

W
inter had been a foolish waste of time. He had tinkered in the barn, sorted tools, plucked chickens, played in the snow. He should have done more in the cold months to prepare, but what? It was true what they said about this land—all the work was done in a few frenzied months. The only reason a man could farm here at all was because the sun lasted twenty hours a day during the height of summer, and vegetables grew overnight to enormous sizes. George said he’d seen a cabbage come out of the fields at nearly a hundred pounds.

But here it was May, and Jack couldn’t till a row without the horse nearly drowning in mud. Back home the crops would already have been in the ground a month. As he waited for the soil to thaw and dry, he heard a ticking clock, not just the one marking the minutes of each day but another, more resounding thump that counted down his own days.

This season the homestead had to support itself. He was banking on the fact that several farmers had given up, walked out on their land, even as the market seemed to open up with the railroad expansion. He would throw everything into this year. He’d plant not just potatoes but also carrots, lettuce, and
cabbage, and sell vegetables throughout the summer to the mining camps.

He and Mabel talked little, but when they did, they argued. He mentioned that he needed to hire a crew of boys from town to help plant, but they had no money for it.

“We’ll have to find some other way,” Mabel said, absently staring at her hands.

“What way? How, in God’s name?” His voice was angry, too loud. “I’m not a young man,” he said more gently. “My back aches, and I can hardly make a fist in the morning. I need help.”

“Who says you have to do this alone? What am I?”

“You’re not a farmhand, Mabel. And I won’t let you become one.”

“So you’d rather beat yourself to death out there, and leave me in here, so we can each suffer alone.”

“That’s never been what I wanted. But the truth is, it’s just the two of us. Someone’s got to care for the home, and someone’s got to earn us a living.” So once again it circled back to the void between them where a child should have been. A girl to help Mabel with the housework. A boy to work in the fields.

“What about the hotel? Maybe I can bake for Betty again.”

“I thought we came here to farm, not to peddle pies and cakes like gypsies. This is it. If this land is ever going to support us, this is the year we’ve got to do it. And I just don’t see how I can do it on my own.” He walked out, but kept himself from slamming the door.

Even as a boy Jack had loved the smell of the ground softening in the thaw and coming back to life. Not this spring. A damp, moldy dreariness, something like loneliness, had settled over
the homestead. At first Jack did not know its source. Maybe it was only his own mood. Perhaps it was the spring weather, with overcast skies and freezing rain that soaked through the cabin walls. Mabel, too, seemed beset by a morose restlessness.

Then Jack counted the days—nearly three weeks since the girl’s last visit, the longest absence since she’d come into their lives. He tried to train his thoughts on the planting season before him, but he was troubled.

The child’s name had gone unspoken. Her chair sat empty, and Mabel no longer put a plate in front of it. Jack worried as much for his wife as for the girl. Mabel no longer watched out the window for her, and he often found her gazing into a basin of dirty dishwater as if she’d lost track of the hours. Sometimes she didn’t seem to know he’d entered the cabin until he put a hand on her arm.

The past winter had been so different. Jack had looked forward to their meals together, even when Faina wasn’t there. He and Mabel had talked, then, of their plans for the homestead and their future. Jack did not fall asleep right after dinner but helped clear the table. The first time he stepped in and began to wash the dishes, she had pretended to swoon, the back of her hand to her brow, peering through half-closed lids until he kissed her smile. They laughed and danced and made love.

That joy was gone with the child.

He walked past the barn toward the new field. Mud sucked at his boots. He stepped off the trail to walk on the moss and grass of the unbroken ground. Tiny green buds were just beginning to open on the birch trees. Something moved through the forest.

“Faina?”

Movement again, dark and quick, but it was too deep in the trees for him to make out anything more. A path led away from
the field, and he followed it. Three days ago he had seen bear tracks in the mud and scat in the trail. He didn’t have his rifle, but he wouldn’t turn back now.

A week could be explained; she could have gone hunting. Three weeks—that was something different. Illness, an avalanche of wet spring snow, rotten river ice. Jack ticked off the grim possibilities as he strode through the trees.

The land was naked without snow or summer greenery. At his feet, fiddlehead ferns unfurled and tiny shoots pushed up through last year’s dead leaves. He climbed as fast as his old heart would allow him. After some time, he arrived at the cliff face and realized he had veered off course and missed the creek. He followed a game trail along the base of the cliffs, ducking under alders, until he heard rushing water. The sound led him to the creek, swollen with spring runoff. It was deafening.

He walked up the creek until he crested a rise and saw the familiar stand of large spruce. There was the stump of the tree he had cut and burned. A heap of rocks had been arranged on the man’s grave. Faina must have brought them from the creek bed.

“Faina? Faina! Are you here?” His shouts were lost to the roaring water. “Faina? It’s Jack. Can you hear me?”

He recalled the door in the mountain where he had watched the girl disappear. He scanned the hillside several times before he saw it. It was like any other cabin door, made of rough-hewn boards, except it was cut short enough so that a grown man would have to stoop to enter, and it wasn’t hung in the frame of a cabin but set into a grassy knoll. He saw no tracks leading in or out. When he rapped with his knuckles, the door swung inward on leather hinges.

“Faina? Dear child, are you here?”

He dreaded finding her huddled in a bed, sick or starving or worse. Inside it was not as dim as he’d anticipated. Daylight came from somewhere overhead.

“Faina?”

There was no answer. His eyes adjusted. The walls around him were made of logs that had been squared off with an ax. Above him was a wooden ceiling, with a square opening to the sky not much bigger than a stovepipe. Directly below this hole a large fire pit held the cold, charred remains of a few small logs. The fire pit was also square, set into dirt but framed by the wooden planks that formed the floor.

The builder had dug into the side of the hill and framed the room inside, then replanted sod over the top. The effect was that the small cabin looked like a grassy knoll, just another part of the mountainside. It probably provided better insulation, particularly in winter when the hill was covered in snow, but it didn’t seem solely a practical matter. There was something foreboding about the structure. Whoever lived inside these walls would dwell in darkness and secrecy.

The air was musty, like that of an abandoned attic, but as he walked around the small room he caught specific scents—wood, dried meat and fish, tanned furs, and wild herbs. Overhead, dried plants hung in bunches from the roof frame. When Jack stood upright, his head was less than a foot from the ceiling.

The door behind him swung shut with a thump.

“Faina?”

He pushed it open again, but no one was there.

Now that he was in this dank, lonely place, he was more anxious about the child. He paced the small quarters. If he hadn’t seen her go through the door, he wouldn’t believe a young girl had ever lived here. There were no toys, no dresses
or child-sized clothes of any kind. Perhaps she had gone somewhere and taken all that with her—it was impossible to know what had been here and now wasn’t. He kicked at the charred wood in the pit. No sparks, no smoke. The fire had been out for days, if not weeks.

There was a bunk made of peeled spruce logs. Instead of blankets and sheets, the bedding was caribou hides and other tanned furs. One corner formed a makeshift kitchen of sorts, with a counter and shelves lined with odds and ends—jars of beans and flour, but not much food to speak of. The opposite wall held wooden pegs from which hung snowshoes, axes, saws, woodworking tools, things a grown man would use. The tools were grimy and beginning to rust. There were also a few items of clothing, including a fur-ruffed parka that would have been too large even for Jack. He took it off the peg and heard a clinking sound. In the pockets were half a dozen empty glass bottles. He held each to his nose. Some smelled of animal urine and glandular lures, others of a potent moonshine. Peter’s water, the child had called it. He shook his head to clear his nostrils and hung the parka back on its peg. In another corner, Jack spotted a stack of dried pelts: beaver, wolf, marten, mink.

He headed toward the door, then remembered the doll. It could be here somewhere. He tossed aside the furs on the bed, but found nothing. Then he noticed a wooden box under the bunk. He got on his knees and pulled it out.

Inside was a pink baby blanket, worn and dirty but neatly folded. Beneath it were scattered a few black-and-white photographs. Jack picked them up. One showed a nicely dressed couple standing on a dock, suitcases and trunks stacked beside them, as they embarked on a journey. He didn’t recognize the man at first—in the photograph he was much younger, with a dapper haircut and clean-shaven face. The woman beside him
wore a stylish dress, and in her fine-featured face and blond hair Jack saw Faina. These must be her parents, perhaps leaving Seattle on a ship for Alaska. In another photograph, the woman held an infant swaddled in a blanket that looked new and clean, but Jack was fairly certain it was the same one folded in the box. Another showed the man posing with snowshoes, parka, and a lopsided grin. He barely resembled the grizzled corpse Jack had pushed into a hole in the ground, but it was him.

Jack clenched his jaw. How could a man abandon his young daughter to the wilderness? He put the photographs and blanket back in the box and slid it under the bed. Standing up, his knees creaked and he felt old and afraid. The child was gone. This place had swallowed her.

He thought again of the doll and took one last look around the room, but knew he wouldn’t find it. It was small comfort. Faina was lost to them, but wherever she was, whatever had befallen her, the doll had been with her.

When he stepped outside, he blinked hard against the daylight and fumbled to close the door. He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here. He could see across the entire river valley, could almost make out their homestead far below.

T
he next day, when afternoon came and went and Jack did not return from the fields, Mabel was only vaguely puzzled. He must have worked through without a break. When evening came and dinner sat cold on the table, she knew something was wrong. Panic constricted her throat, but she dressed calmly in her coat and boots. At the last minute, she took the shotgun down from the wall and filled her pocket with shells. She vowed to learn to shoot it.

Her hem dragged in the muck as she followed the trail to the fields. Her father-in-law had died in the orchard of a heart attack, and Mabel pictured Jack collapsed in a field. She would be left alone, with little choice but to return to her parents’ home where her sister now lived, or go to Jack’s family.

Her eyes scanned the first field she came to, but she saw no sign of Jack or the horse. Evening shadows darkened the edge of the forest, and in the sky a handful of stars were scattered across the pale blue. A flock of sandhill cranes rose up from a meadow, their calls as ghostly as their gray, slow-beating wings. The mud was beginning to stiffen in the cold. Mabel followed the trail and trembled uncontrollably.

Through the trees she heard the horse whinny. The trail circled around to the new field, and there she could see the silhouette of the horse, lifting one hoof, then another, still harnessed to the overturned plow.

“Jack? Jack?” she called.

She made out only shapes in the gloomy half-light, but she walked toward the horse. There was a muffled groan.