Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (15 page)

STEPMAMA REMEMBERS

I
drove off and felt free—free at last—of that burdensome child. I’d tried my best with sweetness and with pain to bring her to the Craft. But you cannot make someone do what they will not do and expect them to thank you for it. Master knew that. Told me so often. I was the first and only apprentice he’d ever kept. The rest he sucked dry of their seven years and threw them out. But I had
wanted
what he had to give, wanted it passionately, and the years I gratefully gave him were the best ones he’d ever had.

Snow was no such creature. She had to be gotten rid of. I do believe if I’d tried to take her years, they’d have poisoned me.

My plan in place, I knew I’d a few weeks’ grace before she’d be missed. A few weeks to take her fading father to the hospital to die and to play the grieving widow. A few weeks till I could collect my widow’s pension. And a few weeks after that to sell off the land to the railroad bosses and go sorrowfully back to Charleston to start my life anew.

Charleston?
Why, with the money I’d be getting, I could go to Ohio. Or even California, where the hankering after magic is mighty strong. It made me smile to think of all those movie folk, untouched by the recessions, ready for fleecing.

I made it back to Lemuel’s house—I’d never thought of it as mine—and there took a long bath with candles set out all around, the water freshened with rose petals and lavender from the garden.

Free.

 

 

The next morning, as I was brushing my hair a hundred strokes, I twitched the drape off the mirror.

The mirror’s dark mask of a face swam into view.

“Mistress,” it said.

Never Master,
I thought, grinding my teeth in frustration.

“What is your question?”

“No question at all,” I told the thing. “Just wanted to let you know that the girl Snow is gone. Finished. Her heart cut out and stewed. Bones scattered. What do you think of that?”

The mask turned, became sharper, the edges of the black more defined. Then it said,

“Best of
me,
you stupid mirror, no one has ever gotten the best of me. Not the Master, not lovesick Lemuel, not that puling Nancy, and certainly not the girl. She’s dead and gone by now. I’ve made sure of it. Besides, I didn’t even ask a question of you.”

I threw the brush at the mirror as hard as I could. Even as it hit and shattered a corner of the glass, I realized that in fact I
had
asked. And the mirror had answered.

Only the answer made no sense at all.

NIGHT ON ELK MOUNTAIN

I
’d no hope of simply outrunning Hunter. He was bigger than me, had longer legs than me, knew these woods better than I did. Heck, I didn’t know them at all.

All I had was fear, which is a great motivator. And I was small, so I could hide. I had to make use of the present of time that the white owl’s intervention had given me, the present of a good head start.

Lucky for me I was wearing a dark-colored dress, not pink or yellow, either of which would have shone like a beacon against the green and brown of the woods.

“Thank you, Stepmama,” I whispered, and really meant it this time because it had been Stepmama who’d insisted I wear the blue dress. Possibly she thought because it made me look quite a bit older. But whatever her reason, it might just save my life.

Then I heard Hunter behind me, calling out.

“Snow,” he shouted, “come back. It was a joke.”

Summer,
I thought.
No joke
.

I kept on running.

And then a little later, a bit farther away, as if he’d gone looking for me down the rest of the driveway, out onto the road, “Snow, damn you, come back.”

But Snow wasn’t my name and I wouldn’t answer to it.

 

 

I headed
up
the mountain, something else Hunter wouldn’t expect. He’d think I was going to head down into town, maybe hoping to catch a ride along the way. But there was no hope for me in Addison. Not with Stepmama there. Instead I plunged into the deepest woods in the hopes that it would offer enough brush to hide me whenever I needed to lie down to catch my breath. If I could avoid Hunter for the next hour or two, the sun would set behind the mountain. I doubted he’d keep up a search for me after dark.

Unless he had hounds.

Hunters usually had hounds, didn’t they? But then, his
name
was Hunter, not his work.

For a few minutes that thought comforted me, till I realized I didn’t
know
if he had hounds. Or if he actually worked as a hunter. I didn’t know
anything
about him, except that he had a knife and a bow and arrows and that he would do whatever Stepmama told him to do. He, too, was besot.

So I kept running. Running uphill, leaping logs, hurtling around tree trunks, sliding across muddy places, tripping over unseen tree roots, picking myself up off the ground and running again until I was out of breath and my sides hurt horribly.

Somewhere along the way, I lost one of my shoes. Somewhere I’d been hit on the left arm by a branch or briar, for there was blood running down toward my fingers. Somewhere . . . I didn’t know where . . . there was a man trying to kill me for love.

For love of Stepmama, not for love of me.

“Think, Summer,” I told myself, giving myself permission to stop when all I really wanted to do was to keep running.

And so I stopped, thought, listened, hearing something loud nearby, as if a drummer had entered the woods and was sending signals to whoever was following me. It took me a moment before I realized it was only my own hard breathing and the drumbeat of my heart.

I can’t go home. If I go home, Stepmama will kill me herself. Hunter all but said that
.
Poor Papa is on his own now
.

Tears welled up for the first time, not for me and what I was going through, but for Papa. I hoped Cousin Nancy would look out for him.

As for me, my only chance was to get over the mountain, far enough away so that Hunter—even with dogs—couldn’t find me. I was almost thirteen and strong for my age. Doing all those chores for Stepmama the past few years had toughened me. Maybe I could pass for older and find work.

But first I had to stay alive and out of Hunter’s reach.

I ran.

 

 

Later that evening, too tired to move another step, I found a climbable oak and went up as far as I could manage in the dark. There, in the fork of the tree, I settled myself for the night. Yes, a bear could climb up if it wanted. But I hoped I was far enough up to discourage a bear from bothering me.

There was a pair of owls singing back and forth for a while.
Maybe,
I thought,
maybe the white owl and its mate.
Though really, the soft
hoo-hoo-ho-ho-ho-hoooo
sounded more like a great horned owl.

A breeze rustled the leaves around me. It was already cold this far up on the mountain, and the breeze only made it colder. My thin dress didn’t offer much warmth. But even so I fell asleep at once, the owl song almost a lullaby.

 

 

Sometime before dawn, I heard hounds baying quite far away, but near enough to be troubling. I supposed they could have been some men out jacking deer or hunting coons. The boys in our class had talked about such goings-on after Jimmy McGraw’s papa took him out all night hunting and his mama had sent in a note excusing him from school on account of his needing his sleep. But just in case, I shinnied down that tree and headed on out, hoping to find running water. Dogs can’t track you through running water. Bears nor painters neither.

When I found a stream, I took off my one shoe and waded in. My, that water was cold! Like sticking your feet in an icebox. But I stayed in it, going downstream as long as I could bear the cold before clambering up the other side. Along the way, I washed the blood off my arm and examined myself for ticks and scratches. I never heard the dogs again.

Was I hungry by then? Not so I noticed. But I was still tired and scared, a bad combination. It can make you careless. And the foot without the shoe seemed to find every stick and stone around. I lost track of the times I tripped and fell, banging one knee or the other.

I sat myself down for a moment to give myself a good scolding. “Summer,” I said, though not aloud of course, “you need to be even more careful now.” Because I’d no idea where I was. I could even have come in a big circle back near Hunter’s trailer.

And I still didn’t know if he had dogs.

The sun had risen up high enough that I could see it through the canopy of trees overhead, so I knew I was going east now. East would get me to Virginia and eventually the coast. I decided that would be my goal.

I kept to the shady forested areas, startling a doe and her fawn, who was all speckled and tiny. I stood still and watched them go, the mother far ahead and the baby wobbling after her.

Gray squirrels chittered out warnings from the trees. Crows followed me, scolding. A good hunter, even an ordinary hunter, would know from the noise where I was. But how could I stop squirrels and crows from giving me away?

Nervously, I brushed the hair out of my face and then thought about tying my hair back with the blue ribbon from around my waist. But when I reached down for it, it was gone.

Did I lose it early or late?
I thought.
What if Hunter and his hounds found it? Or the lost shoe. Tracking me would be easier then.

“Don’t think about it,” I whispered. “Keep going.” And I kept on.

 

 

Now, in full daylight, I could see all around me, the trees no longer black trunks, but browns and grays and white. I noted oaks and pine and birch and others I couldn’t name.

But if I could see the trees clearly, then
I
could be seen, too. So I stuck to a thicker part of the woods, skulking from tree to tree.

Skulking.
Another book word I’d never said aloud before, but the perfect word for what I was doing.

Along the way I grabbed hold of a tree limb that had fallen off a big old oak. It might not scare away anything really dangerous, but it made me feel a lot safer, and that counted for something.

I thought about eating. I hadn’t had anything since lunch the day before and, judging by the sun, that was twenty-four hours earlier. Too soon in the spring for berries, and as I didn’t trust harvesting mushrooms without someone who knew the bad ones from the good, I was worried there might not be anything for me to eat at all. My stomach growled.

Nobody ever died from a one day’s fast,
I told myself. So on I went.

Soon I came upon a small spring bubbling up into a marshy place, and that gave me an idea. I looked about for a patch of wild ramps somewhere on the tea-colored woodland floor. They love to have their feet in damp soil.

After about fifteen minutes of searching, I spotted a patch of the thin emerald-green leaves. Pulling up a bunch to expose about twenty small ramp bulbs, I dipped them into the pool to clean off the dirt that clung to them, then munched down a half dozen. Though I’d had ramps before—cut up in salads or fried up and served with rice—I’d never eaten a whole bunch of them raw. Very sharp and garlicky, but in the end quite filling. The rest I jammed into my pocket to eat later on. I knew that my breath would stink from them, but since there was no one around to smell me, I figured it didn’t matter.

Nearby I found some lamb’s-quarters in a small clearing. We had plenty of that growing in our garden, and they are good to eat, cooked or raw, so I knew that would be safe. And close to, I found wild mint as well, which finished off my small meal and made my mouth taste fresh again.

Not exactly a hardy lunch, but enough to stop me from considering my belly every step of the way. Just as well. I had a lot more important things to think about: Hunter, dogs, bears, painters, Papa, and above all Stepmama.

By then it was mid-afternoon and I’d come to a large meadow with very few trees on either side. I sat down with my back against the last tree to consider what to do.

Be a fox,
I told myself.
Be sly and thoughtful.
Foxes in the fairy tales could always out-think the other animals.

Walking straight across an open meadow in broad daylight seemed a crazy chance to take. Anyone might see me. So I melted back into the forest and climbed a tree to wait for nightfall. Or the sound of hounds. Whichever came first. And lucky I did because soon as I was settled on a branch, my legs wrapped around it for safety, my right hand over the caul bag for strength, I heard a woofing sound below me.

I moved slowly, quietly till I could see what was making the sound. A big black bear and her cub walked right under the branches of my tree, heading toward the meadow. The woofing was the mother’s way to get her baby to follow. And follow he did, though not without circling around her, running ahead, then frantically backtracking till he reached her side again. It was so funny, I almost laughed out loud.

Almost.

As they went across the meadow, they left a wide trail of crushed grass. I watched till they were long out of sight. Then I fell asleep, dreaming about bears all living together in a little cottage in the woods, with rocking chairs and beds and bowls full of tasty porridge.

 

 

When I woke, it was near dark. I made my way back to the edge of the meadow and realized that it was much larger than I’d first thought. But the bears had left such a huge path as they’d rambled across the high grass, I thought that it would make easy walking for me.