Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (2 page)

“Caul?” I said it as if it was the word
cold.
“But it was July.” There was a fan wheezing overhead trying to keep us cool, and failing.

She pronounced it for me again. We both loved odd words. “You’re one of the veil born, child.” She made a sign with her hand, the one with the two outside fingers standing up, like horns to ward off any evil. “Destined for greatness. You’ll be able to see dead folk. Least, that’s what
my
auntie told me, and she was born with a caul herself.”

“I want to see
Mama,
” I whispered. Mama had been dead almost two years at that time, short enough for the ache to still run deep, long enough so I’d already begun to forget her. I understood about death, knew I wasn’t going to see her again. Not then at any rate. Not for a long time. Not till heaven.

But the sad fact was that there were some days I hardly remembered Mama. Sometimes I even believed Cousin Nancy was my mama. My
other
mama. Even though she didn’t live with Papa and me. After all, she was the one who fed me and bathed me. She was the one who brushed out and plaited my long dark hair each day before I went to school. And while Papa still occasionally told me stories when I went to bed, or looked over my homework, Cousin Nancy always came to our house before dawn so Papa could go out to work in the fields. She came just to make sure I was properly turned out for school and then went back to her own house to open up the post office.

I think that day I said I wanted to see Mama because Cousin Nancy wanted me to. She was my godmother and I tried to please
her
since I couldn’t seem to please Papa, who felt as far away as Mama, only not shut away in a box.

Cousin Nancy quickly told me the rest of the story about my birth, guessing how the story was gonna make me forget my troubles. And hers. She recalled that while Mama was birthing me, Papa was out in the garden throwing up.

“Throwing up!” I couldn’t quite believe it.

She put her arm around me, adding, “Poor man was so scared he might lose her. And when he came back inside, called by the midwife, he was so relieved that Mama hadn’t died, he let her name you.”

“Snow in Summer,” I said.

She nodded. “Snow in Summer. Like the white flowers that cover the front yard.” She patted the divan, with its floral poplin covering. “Like this.”

Then she gave me a hug. “Your daddy laughed and said, ‘We gonna call her all that?
Snow in Summer?
Don’t you think she’s too tiny for such a big name?’ ‘We gonna call her Summer,’ your mama told him. ‘It’s warm and pretty, just as warm and pretty as she is.’ ”

“I am,” I said. “Warm.”

“And
pretty,
” Cousin Nancy said, drawing me closer. “Just like your mama.”

That made me smile, of course. Everyone needs someone to tell them they look pretty. Especially at nine.

“You’re pretty, too,” I said to her, touching her cheek. Anyways, she was to me.

She smiled back. “And then your mama told your papa: ‘Don’t you worry, Lemuel . . .’” That was Papa’s full name and Mama always said it that way though everyone else called him Lem. “ ‘She’ll grow into the rest.’ ”

And so I was known as Summer, as long as Mama was alive. As long as Papa could remember I was alive after she died.

DO-LESS

A
fter she died.

After Mama died and spring came again, and then summer, Papa became do-less. He hadn’t the energies to tend our gardens and they all began to run to weed and seed, the greens bolting like horses let out of an open stable door.

He hardly ate anything that wasn’t put in front of him, and even then he seemed to forget it, his spoon left sitting in the porridge or his fork sticking up in the greens.

Cousin Nancy tackled the house garden early morning before opening the post office and again mid-morning when she closed the post office to take a mighty long lunch. And when I’d get back from school, I helped best I could. But I was only seven, and then eight and now nine, and though I was strong enough and willing, there was just so much I could do, that and no more.

Papa had never let anyone work in his gardens before. He was, everyone said, the spit of the old man, meaning Scottish grandpap. In fact, he was the only Morton cousin around who didn’t go off hunting. They’d be out for hours, days even, coming home with deer and rabbits and partridge and coon, so many they had to be hauled back on sledges. No one went hungry in those days. The woods was a larder.

But Papa was the one Morton who didn’t go out hunting. He had Grandpap’s green fingers and everything he planted grew so tall it was like one of those stories people told at night around the fireplace when the kinfolk got together.

So Papa got to farm all that good bottomland, because no other Morton really wanted it. And if anyone complained, they did it to themselves, because he was generous to kin and anyway he did all the work. In between plowing and fertilizing and planting the rows, he sang to the plants. He said it was the singing that made the green grow.

But after Mama died, his green fingers seemed to shrivel up, too, as if she’d been the one with green magic and not him. All to once, he gave over the gardens to Cousin Nancy and me. In fact, he didn’t seem to notice we were there at all, on our hands and knees, trying to corral the runaways, weeding between the drooping plants. It was a drier-than-usual summer, the sun beating down on us without mercy.

While Cousin Nancy weeded and hoed, I was in charge of bringing water from the garden pump, a job that two summers earlier I’d begged Papa to let me try. Now I did all the pumping without Papa’s permission or help. I hauled it in a tin bucket to wherever Cousin Nancy needed it, and my shins were black and blue for the whole of that summer where the full bucket banged against them.

My hands developed blisters that grew round, sore, and gray, then popped. Cousin Nancy put a lemon bee balm poultice on my hands at night and I slept with them wrapped up in white handkerchiefs soaked in the stuff until the blisters hardened into little calluses.

Often I simply dumped the last of the water from the tin bucket on myself to cool my fevered head. But neither the plants nor I were prospering in the heat.

“I know you’re tired and hot, Summer,” Cousin Nancy said, shaking her head at me as I stood with the water dripping down. “But without this garden, you and your papa will have little enough to eat and nothing put up for winter.” Then she gave me a hug and called me her big girl, her young heroine. “Like Molly Whuppie,” she said, “who saved her sister and herself from the wicked giant.”

So between telling me the truth of my family history and telling me fairy tales, between praising me and cozening me, Cousin Nancy and I worked the house garden. And with just the two of us we about managed. But neither of us was prepared to work on the big market garden out back. And without that garden, Papa and I would have nothing to sell down in Addison or Webster, nothing to go to Cogar’s Grocery or to the big hotel on Main Street, where people came to take the waters of the salt sulfur springs.

Cousin Nancy pushed Papa as much as she could, as much as she dared, but he hardly listened. Or he was listening to some voice other than hers.

The few vegetables she coaxed from the big plot were nowhere near as good as Papa’s. No one’s were. He’d a genius for growing. Or he did once. But like his mind, like his heart, that genius was gone, buried in the grave with Mama.

By the fall, our neighbors were wondering instead if he’d gone sick, pining for Mama. “He’ll be dead by winter,” they said.

By the next year, they were worried silly about him. “He can’t go on like this,” they said.

By the time I was nine, they were calling him names. “Maybe he’s turned queer in the head,” said someone down at Cogar’s. That diagnosis quickly made its way all around the town.

The kids in school, of course, took their ideas from their parents’ gossip. Travis Cogar, who was in my class and sweet on me, told the third-grade boys that his mama said that Papa had been howling at the moon. And later that day I found a crudely drawn picture of Papa sitting on his haunches, head thrown back, clearly baying like a hound. Underneath it said,
Lemyule, the niht houler.
I knew Travis had written it since he’d been sending me badly spelled love notes since the start of second grade. Spelling—like the definition of words—had always been my best subject and I was very particular about it. I crumpled the picture in my hand and dropped it in Travis’s lap where it belonged.

“Traitor!” I said. “Polecat!” I spoke the last loud enough for all the kids to hear. I actually sort of like the little critters though they stink something fierce if you bother them, raising that tail and stamping their little feet and throwing that smell over everything good. Just like Travis had just done.

At recess someone else called him a polecat, too, and pretty soon all the kids in school—all forty-seven of us in grades one through eight—held their noses when he went by, though I didn’t encourage it.

He never sent me notes again.

 

 

I told Cousin Nancy what was being said in school, and she acknowledged it was being said elsewhere as well.

“Rumor,” she told me dismissingly, “runs faster than truth. But truth gets there in the end.”

However, rumor had run right up and deposited its stinking message on my desk. Truth didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

DANCES AND SONGS

N
ot only did Papa sing to the plants. Once upon a time he sang to me, too.

“So you can grow like a little weed,” he’d say.

And Mama would answer just as quick as quick, “Not a weed but a flower.”

“Not a flower but a pumpkin.”

“A daisy.”

“Cabbage.”

“Bloodroot.”

“Runner bean.”

“Violet.”

“Ramps.”

“Rose,” I’d finally interject into my parents’ long list.

Nobody ever won these arguments since we all fell about laughing the minute I said
rose,
though I never knew why. Then Papa would pick up his banjo again and play us some of the old tunes. And once in a while, he’d pick out a new tune he’d written just for Mama and me. One I specially recall had lines that went:

That’s what I remember most about the old days, when we were three. Stories, jokes, music, and laughter.

Then of a sudden, it was all, all gone.

 

 

Papa and Mama had known each other from high school and got engaged the same time as Nancy Clarke got herself hitched to Papa’s favorite cousin, Jack Morton, who later was one of the first men killed on a beach somewhere in France right before I turned seven.

Cousin Nancy told me, “You were not expected but hoped for.”

I recalled the wildflowers that Mama had loved, their names and what they were useful for. Her favorites had been bloodroot and trillium and wild violets.

Papa had loved wildflowers because of her. But he tended garden flowers and vegetables so they could be sold down at the Addison town market or carted off to Webster or even Clarksburg and Morgantown for the city folk who’d no bottomland of their own.

Twice a week, he’d pack the old truck full of vegetables and drive through the night to get to those far places in time for the farmer’s market, coming home that evening with not a thing left to sell, dollars stuffed in the pockets of his overalls. And even though on market days he’d come home so tired he needed toothpicks to keep his eyes open—or so he said—he’d take out his banjo and sing to us while Mama and I danced all around the living room.
Heel and toe and away we’d go!
She and I held hands and swung till my feet left the ground. I remember that, too.

I recalled some of Mama’s songs, too, like “All the Pretty Little Horses.” Especially the part where Mama sang:
“Blacks and bays, dapples and grays . . . all the pretty little horses
.
”

Oh, and,
“Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

Of course
that
never happened. He didn’t buy
me
a diamond ring or anything else. He was now, Cousin Nancy said, a “man of constant sorrow” like the old song goes.

 

 

Back then, it was Cousin Nancy who’d bought me the navy blue dress with the white bib and the navy blue coat with the matching hat that I wore as I trudged up to the grave site alongside Papa. That and the big boots. She got them all at a church tent sale down in Webster. Because I hadn’t any decent enough clothing to wear to Mama’s burying, all the rest being pinafores and overalls and sack dresses in bright flowered prints that Mama had made on her old Singer sewing machine with the foot treadle.

I reminded her of that dress, those boots.

“Couldn’t have you going up to the graveside with your fanny hanging out of those old overalls,” Cousin Nancy said, and I laughed, suddenly recalling those overalls. My, how I’d loved them. They were fourth or fifth hand by the time I got them and Mama had sewn little pink flowers all up and down the legs. She used to decorate all my clothes with hand-sewn embroidered flowers.

I pranced around the post office room pretending that my bottom was stuck out till Cousin Nancy was laughing along with me. We laughed a lot together. It was better than crying. We’d already done a whole lot of that.

 

 

Each year that I grew bigger and taller, Cousin Nancy got clothes for me, though always secondhand. Some were hand-downs from children of the town, others from the church charity shops. As she said of herself, “I was never much for sewing, not like your mama. But I can always find a bargain.”