Six-Gun Snow White (4 page)

I hunted Mrs. H and I hunted her mirror. My father hunted the blue and the yellow down a long mountain range like a wrinkle in the world. I guess we’re pretty much alike when you think about it. Only he got clear of that house and it took me quite awhile to fix that for myself.

A house is a kind of box you put a girl in. Mrs. H and me, we rattled around in it like two old bullets. I looked in the basement for her mirror and I was not afraid of the spiders down there. I looked in the attic and I was not bothered by the mice. Mice have their own troubles with cats and whatnot, they do not mind a body. I looked while I cleaned. I looked while I cut up chicken and potatoes. I looked while I boiled linens. I looked in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. H and this did fear me something awful, for I would have caught a beating to end them all if Mrs. H found me worrying her things. I sat on their bed, which had red curtains and red pillows and red stairs leading up to it like the bed was a red tower in a white forest. I put my hands into the sleeves of her dresses and that made me shudder. It was like standing inside Mrs. H and wearing her and that is full uncanny, I can tell you. I sat at her lady’s table which had a mirror even though it was not the right mirror. This mirror had a frame like a sunburst with little carnelians and opals all over it. I saw myself in it, no more or less than myself: almost fourteen, all long bones, long hair and big black eyes. I did not know to say if I was pretty. I did not look like Mrs. H, so I guessed I was not.

I pulled the silk paper off her lipstick and rubbed it between my fingers. I knew how lipstick got itself made because Mr. H did a fair business selling low-grade garnets. Some fancy men in Paris crush them up into a powder finer than salt and stir the gems in with deer fat. They put a sweet scent on it but I could still smell the deer. When I put it on my lips I could taste it. The blood and the beating of the deer’s fright in the forest. I smelled her perfume. It gave me the oddest feeling, like I was smelling an emerald. But not a real emerald, which I imagine has no particular smell. Best I can explain is that stopper was soaked in a smell like the
idea
of an emerald, the idea of greenness and growing and wealth, a kind of fine light that could make a rock bloom.

Mrs. H smelled like jewels. Like the produce of the earth that Mr. H chased all over here and gone. She smelled like a perfect high-yield mine and I got out of that room on the quick.

I found the mirror on account of the paintings in my dime museum. Sometime in the autumn they changed to hunting scenes: Chinese men shooting arrows at an ugly black unicorn, Spaniards hauling harpoons at a giant squid with a whale in its ropy arms, sourfaced men sitting on top of stacks of buffalo like thrones of meat. Thompson the red fox did not like these paintings but I reassured him. I thought of the seagull with my bullet in her eye. I ran my fingers over Rose Red in her holster, the red pearls on her grip. Probably I did not please Mr. H anymore at all. I reckoned Rose Red could not kill a whale or a thousand buffalo but if a stunted black unicorn with an antler for a horn and tiger stripes on its rump got a hankering for red fox, I could handle the situation.

In considering my shootout with the unicorn, I came to see the corner of the painting was curling up away from the frame a little. A Chinese woman with gold ink in her dress covered her eyes so as not to see the skinning of the unicorn nor the sharing out of the liver and the heart, which I have heard hunters do to honor the dead thing, or else perhaps those parts are tasty. I picked at her a little and she gave way like she couldn’t wait to get out of the whole scene.

Underneath the weeping lady, Mrs. H’s silver mirror peeked out.

I rolled up the painting and rested it on the top of the frame—that familiar wooden frame like cold stone. I hadn’t recognized it. I admit that I am a damn fool sometimes. The mirror showed the same black starless sky as before. I looked into it for a long while. The sun in the world outside the mirror turned orange and then red like a leaf in a hurry but inside the mirror it stayed night. I set out my feelings on the matter in an orderly fashion, a poker hand on the table of my spirit.

Pair of Aces: this is my place and she has been here. She has left part of herself here. She has invaded the place where I am most myself and stuck a flag in it. Pair of Eights: this is my place and she has made it hers but that goes both ways. I have this piece of Mrs. H and it belongs to me. She put it in my kingdom.

Queen of Diamonds: she left part of herself here to watch me.

The moon came on in the mirror.

This time I did not run off. The mirror was an animal, like Thompson or the crocodile. You have to show it you’re not gonna hurt it, maybe feed it a little, before it stops thinking you’re prey or predator or both. I fed the mirror my face and the moon came on inside it like a huge white eye. I had already seen this trick. But I did not know how to make it do anything else. I just kept looking into it, counting craters, and I guess the mirror got fed up because the moon started creaking and spinning and before the dark side came around to the light it had turned into Mrs. H on her knees scrubbing a marble floor with pink veins forking through it.

Mrs. H was young. You could tell she wasn’t Mrs. H yet. Her whiskey-colored hair was braided up tight and I could see dirt under her fingernails. She scrubbed and scrubbed and my hands tingled where I had rubbed them raw scrubbing just that morning. Young Mrs. H looked up at a fine lady in a primrose dress and I heard her say something real quiet like the mirror was a muzzle.

Why do I have to work on my knees? We have more maids than books in the library.
Mrs. H held out her hands. Lye burns slicked them like shiny snail-tracks.

The woman in the primrose dress answered:
this is what it means to be a woman in the world. Work until you die and work again after. Your only choice is whether you scrub the vaults of hell or the halls of heaven. Anyone who tells you different is a huckster with his hand in your pocket.

The brush in Mrs. H’s hand blinked out and with a quickness she was bent over in the hearth in a yellow apron, picking out hard little peas. Her face was full of ash like a Catholic in spring. The same fine lady wore a cornflower dress.

Why do I have to comb the grate? We have charwomen and sculleries as plentiful as water
. Mrs. H held out her hands. Ash turned them dead and grey.

The woman in the cornflower dress answered:
this is what it means to be a woman in the world. Obey until a man gives you permission to die and keep on obeying after. The tasks you’re handed make less sense than a rooster in a Sunday hat, but if God wanted us to have a say he’d have made us men
.

The hearth hissed away like steam and young Mrs. H stood in a forest blacker and older than any white pine I’d shot a squirrel out of. She was crying. Up until then I had never seen anyone cry but me, and suspected I was the only one who could do it. I was the only body weak enough. Everyone else had a strong thing inside them where I had tears, and that strong thing protected them against sadness. But young Mrs. H was crying and no mistaking. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her laces and stepped naked out of her skirt into the night. The same terrible eyeball of a moon that lived in the mirror shone down and turned her blue. I had never seen a naked woman before. I could not breathe right and my heart ricocheted all over the inside of me like a misfired bullet. Mrs. H looked like a person come to visit from another planet. Her breasts and her belly glowed aquamarine, her muscled legs moved like I imagined that striped, antlered unicorn in the painting moved, graceful as a star coming up in evening. That hair like a long, stiff drink covered her hind parts which made me sorry. I wanted to look at her forever.

Mrs. H dropped to the ground and hit that forest with both fists. She cried and she screamed and she grabbed at the mud, smearing it all over her and scratching herself bloody.
Get me out
, she said into the earth.
Get me out
.

Well, I guess in New England there’s things living under the world that answer when you holler at them like that. Two arms bigger than stovepipes came up out of the loam and the grime, and the arms were loam and grime and leaves and roots, and they wrapped around Mrs. H like the tenderest husband ever born. A stony hand stroked her hair I heard a quiet voice like it was a long way off, but so close it whispered right in my ear:

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

The loamy arms gathered Mrs. H close in. A still pool opened up under her body like a bloodstain. The water shone clear and perfect as a mirror. For a second she floated on top of the pool, then it flowed around her, up over her skin and into her mouth, filling up all the empty places in her body and pulling her down into the starry slick of it. Under the surface, her face looked so happy. But that’s not what I mean. I mean her face
was
happiness. Like her perfume was an emerald. Every time I seen a body take on joy in my life, it’s only been a shiver of that blue face in the dark wood, a little piece of her smile or her tears. When the water let Mrs. H go, she came up dry as a prairie, wearing a dress the color of dirt. Green jewels like moss crowded the silk, silver jewels like rivers ran through it, red gems like poison berries wound around her hips and Mrs. H was wearing the forest. She didn’t have a speck of mud on her. She had a ring on her finger with a chunk of rough green stone fixed into it.

A distant music picked up and my stepmother moved toward it, starting to dance in time to the mandolins, the lights of some grand ball waltzing already on her skin.

Now, I have had a long time to cogitate on this. I guess I know something about magic after everything that’s happened, enough to know you don’t go talking about it when it’s not around. But I think back east they have Puritan magic and out west we have animal magic and I’ll tell you the truth for nothing, those goodies and goodwives and poppets and dark woods scare me worse than any crow with the sun in her mouth.

Mrs. H bathed me in milk on Sundays. She poured ice into that milk like sugar and the cream got so cold it burned me like fire. I lay in there trying not to quake or shiver none as Mrs. H called that a weakness. My toes got so you could stick pins in them and I’d never know it. The bathtub was black, from Hungary which is a place I only know the name of. White milk and black stone and me in the middle of it like a cork.

Mrs. H said it would turn my skin white. She said it would wash out my dark parts and better than any soap. Milk had power in the formulation of Mrs. H’s mind. Milk comes from creatures that eat only grass and drink only water and do not pollute their bodies with death. Milk comes from mothers. You can see from this that she did teach me things. When she started on this kind of talk my heart toppled over. If she was in a teaching mood she wasn’t in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn’t do both at once.

Came a night she put me in the milk bath and I thought I’d die of the cold. The hairs on my arms tried to stand up and run off. She dunked me in and shoved my head under the cream and kept it there. I thrashed a good bit but Mrs. H was strong. I couldn’t see nothing but white.
Shhhh
. Mrs. H could sound so soft when she wanted.
Shhhh. Let it happen. Take it in.
It’s inside you, that’s the trouble. You don’t speak Crow, you don’t paint your face. For Heaven’s sake, I know more about your mother than you do. It’s inside you. Drink it in. What’s inside you needs cleaning. Swallow it down and you’ll come out pure.

I choked. I drank it. It went up my nose and I stopped breathing. I hit her across the breast and the chin trying to dig up from that milk that stunk like perfume. The white in my eyes started to go dark and she let me up all the sudden like my skin burned her.

After I squinted real close at the mirror but I didn’t look no different.

You may not know it but the keeping of a large house by one girl is the hardest work going on earth. I heard there’s fire in hell but I’ll bet the Devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.

I could not say exactly how Mrs. H managed to catch pregnant. Mayhap Mr. H fired a baby into her from Peru with a better gun than mine. Probably he came home and performed his husbandry and left again before the sun could surprise him at it.

More to the point, I could not say exactly whether or not Mrs. H
was
pregnant. Her belly did not get bigger nor did she let out her dresses. She said nothing more about it after the announcement which was reported in all the newspapers. I was coming up on seventeen and some noise was made about the necessity of marriage, but Mrs. H did not feel I was fit to entertain suitors and anyway I would not be getting my hands on any of the H money, so there seemed little purpose in it.
I’ve half a mind to dump her over the border in Crow territory and let them kill her or marry her or whatever those heathens do with beasts less useful than a horse but prettier than a cow.

Well, at least I knew my worth.

Mrs. H came pretty often to the dime museum. She rolled up the painting of the Chinese unicorn and looked at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she talked to the mirror like it was a person. Sometimes she asked it questions. I never heard it answer but it must have or she wouldn’t keep asking. Sometimes she pressed her cheek to her reflection in the glass.

The woman in the mirror was pregnant.

The reflection of Mrs. H got big in the belly day by day as the winter wore on. Mrs. H stayed slim as a pen. She moved her hand over her flat stomach; in the mirror Mrs. H cradled her roundness in both arms. The paintings in the museum changed to Madonnas, women in blue on seashells and star-points and sitting on silver thrones. The parrots died. I found them with frost hardening on their beaks. I said goodbye to them in French but that is all I know how to say so it was a short eulogy. Whenever I looked in the mirror after Mrs. H left, all I saw was the copy of her, humming a song while she let the waists of her dresses out with a quick, clever needle. Once she looked at me, looked out of the mirror and into me. She put her hand on her stomach and whispered:
soon
.

I ran.

The baby came at night. I watched it happen from my hiding place and if I live a hundred years I will not see anything stranger. Mrs. H stood stock still while the reflection in the mirror cried and struggled and bled. The blood coming from between her legs wasn’t red. It was the color of a mirror, like mercury beading out of her. She looked like she would die and the baby would choke on her. Drown in her like a dress. Mrs. H just folded her hands in the museum and never made a sound. She watched. She didn’t even fidget. Finally the child spilled out of the woman in the mirror, mirror-blood gushing and a rope of that terrible black wood like stone connecting them. The woman in the mirror cut it with her teeth. The child was a boy.

He did not look very much like Mr. H.

But then, neither do I.

Mrs. H laid her hand on the glass. The baby didn’t cry. Sticky silver stuff covered his skin. The woman in the mirror put the baby to her breast and the mirror flowed out of her body, overflowing his tiny mouth and trickling down his cheek. The woman in the mirror smiled and knuckled the drop away.

And that was it.

The boy did not come out of the mirror, which was what I expected to happen. Mrs. H came to see him often enough, but he was born in the mirror and looked fit to stay there. I came to visit him, too. I wanted to see my brother. The woman in the mirror tilted him up in her arms so I could get a better look. He got big fast—after a week or two he was walking around in there and running up to the glass when I came in, putting up his hands like he wanted to touch me. He liked me to put both my hands up against his, ten fingers and ten fingers.

I guess he was a nice baby. I don’t know much about them. He had small pink fists. He was a healthy white baby who would own the whole world if he could get out of that mirror. The newspapers said Mr. H had a son and heir. But my father never came home to shake his son’s little fist and welcome him into the world that had been made to fit him like a good suit. He never came home much at all. I thought to myself that Mr. H was not his father and I was not his sister but that Mrs. H got a baby from the pool in the forest and he came out in the mirror. But I did not like thinking that. The baby smiled when he saw me. That was nice. Nobody did that before.

I wished the mirror would just show the damn moon again. The rest of it put me in a black mood and that’s the truth.