Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (3 page)

And, after all, the country was deep into the Depression. West Virginia had never been a rich man’s place anyway. We all knew how to make do.

Of course, the hat and coat that I wore in the burial picture and the boots have long since been passed along to some other poor child in need. Not to any of the Morton cousins. They’d have thought that bad luck. But to someone way off in Cooleyville or Onego or Erbacon, or even farther, maybe all the way to Clarksburg.

 

 

Papa was so deep in his grief, he probably
would
have let me walk in my raggedy overalls behind the coffin. Or left me at home all alone to cry myself to sleep. And even though Cousin Nancy was still in mourning for her Jack, she didn’t throw herself into that grief the way Papa did.

“A woman hasn’t time for such,” she told me when I asked. “Life goes on.”

“Mama’s didn’t,” I whispered, “nor Cousin Jack’s.”

We both sat close for a quick cuddle and cry, the photo album put aside for later. Then we made a batter cake, which helped us both feel a lot better. I took a slice home for Papa, but he never ate a bite.

COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS

L
emuel Morton was the handsomest boy in our class in Addison even in elementary school. And the sweetest. When we all went up to Webster for high school, that sweetness only grew.

Of course, all the Morton boys were handsome in a way, but none of the rest of them could be called sweet. Not even my Jack. They were hunters and most of them were hard boys and harder men. They had to be, out in the mountains all day and half the night. They were never lost, though. Or as Jack used to joke about that, “Nope, never been lost, but I’ve been bothered for a day or two at a time.”

But Lem had plant dreams in his fingertips. And my, how those things grew. Sunflowers big as trees, melons you could play basketball with, pole beans that sagged heavy on their sticks. He sang to his plants, too, which seemed to make them grow in wild profusion: cressy greens and dandelions for both salad and wine, corn and squash, dock and cabbage, and more kinds of beans than you could shake a stick at.

I think most all the other girls in our class thought Lem was too soft. He didn’t hunt, he loved plants, and he read those books about aliens, starships, and faraway worlds that the general store sold, there not being a library in town. No one knew why he read such things, but I always figured it was because he wanted to find an explanation for the magic in his fingers. His wife, Ada Mae, said it was because he wanted to know why he was different, almost alien, from all the other boys in town. However, I loved him from the time we were six-year-olds at school.

Oh, I was plenty happy with my Jack. He’d the wryest sense of humor and was a loving man. I loved Lem in a different way. We four—Jack and Lem and Ada Mae and me—spent many hours singing and laughing and playing jokes on one another in front of their fireplace, while baby Summer lay sleeping in her cradle.

I didn’t change my mind about Lem Morton even when he went crazy from grief. I’d never expected anything to come of my love for Lem, though everyone else in town and certainly all his kin considered that we two—widow and widower—would soon be married. Instead I gave my love over to Summer, when she needed it most. I would have given my everlasting soul for the two of them.

And I guess I almost did.

BESOT

T
wo years later, when I was eleven, Papa had begun tending his garden again. His green fingers still held their magic, but he no longer sang to his plants.

He no longer sang to me. The only place he sang anymore was up at the old abandoned Morton church, sitting by Mama’s grave. He’d go there every evening, when Cousin Nancy and I began to wash the dinner dishes. Pushing his chair back from the table, he’d say with nary a smile, “Another fine dinner, Nan,” grab his banjo, and be gone.

I’d settle in to doing my homework, and Cousin Nancy would work a quilt on the dining room table till he returned. He never actually asked her to stay with me, but he never actually asked her not to, either. We were quiet company together. And Papa knew she’d keep me safe.

Now even with all his way with growing things, Papa never brought flowers up to Mama’s grave. That was Cousin Nancy’s business. And mine. She’d cut flowers from Papa’s garden but let me gather wildflowers like pokeweed and yellow foxglove and the pretty blue-rayed asters that grew along the borders of the fields. And we’d walk up every week in the growing season to put the flowers on Mama’s grave of a Sunday after church. But Cousin Nancy wouldn’t let me pick any of the fuzzy snow whites that grew all about the edges of the graveyard. “That’s snakeroot,” she warned me. “It brings on milk fever.”

“I’m too old to get milk fever,” I told her.

“That’ll only make it worse,” she said. Her voice was firm and I learned, once Cousin Nancy put her foot down, it stayed flat on the floor and she could not be budged.

Papa always cleared the flowers we left on Mama’s grave the very next evening. He said he couldn’t stand to see them curling up, growing black at the tips and dying so quickly, cut off from the sod.

Cousin Nancy kept telling him that if he’d give her permission, she’d plant something on Mama’s grave for him. “So there’d be
something
growing there.”

But Papa gave her a black look whenever she proposed it, though otherwise he was still a sweet-natured man. “If
she
can’t be growing beside me,” he said, meaning Mama, “then I want that grave to be stark.”

And stark it was. Even grass didn’t grow on it. It looked like a scar on the churchyard’s green mantle, just as Mama’s death was a scar on Papa’s heart.

Cousin Nancy didn’t give up, though—not for the longest time. I loved her even more for that. “A climbing rose might be nice,” she offered once, “or a bunch of early snowdrops. Little purple crocuses come fall?”

Another black look from Papa. A shrug. A grunt instead of a kind word in return. It made me wonder about True Love.

Oh, we knew where he was going when he went out after dinner, and we let him get on with it. There was no stopping him anyway, not even the time I had influenza bad and Cousin Nancy had to bathe me in lukewarm water to get my fever down. He had his banjo and his sorrow, and he was away.

There were still sweet times with him out in the garden, where he showed me how to coax snowdrops out by pulling away the heavy pack of snow from their roots. And days when he taught me how to pick the green cabbage caterpillars and aphids and caterpillar eggs off the leaves and squash them. We even made up a squashing song with a chorus of “Squish, squash, ugh! Go away, bug!” that had me howling with laughter and Papa smiling a little.

And there were times he would look at me and sigh. “You do so look like your mama, Summer.” And then he would touch the top of my head as gentle as could be, as if he feared I might break at his touch.

But mostly he was distant.

Not mean.

Not cold.

Just not there.

 

 

About that time, I began starting fights with Cousin Nancy, being sassy to her, not heeding a thing she said. And when she told me to “Mind your manners, missy,” I’d snap back, “You don’t tell him to!” Meaning Papa.

“He’s a grown man and a sorrowing man,” she said.

“Well, I’m still sorrowing, too,” I shouted at her, though I wasn’t. I ran into my room and slammed the door. She didn’t come in for long minutes and when she did, she sat down beside me on my bed and said, “He’ll come through it, Summer. I promise he will. And so will you.”

But I thought I had nowhere to come
to
. Papa was
that
far away.

 

 

Only one day Papa came down from the mountain with a woman none of us had ever met and only I’d clapped eyes on her before. He was set on marrying her, even given her his grandmother’s diamond ring, the one that was too big and gaudy for Mama, though she’d kept it in her jewelry box, letting me play with it every now and then.

“Too soon. Too soon,” Cousin Nancy said, though it wasn’t all that soon, not really. It’d been almost four years since Mama’s death, since we’d walked up to the mountain graveyard and set her down. Everyone else in town thought it was well beyond time.

I know that everyone, me included, had been expecting Papa to marry Cousin Nancy after he left off grieving. I think Cousin Nancy expected it, too. Though we hadn’t known he’d left it off till he came down the mountainside with that woman.

“Your poor mama hardly stiff in her grave, and that . . .” Cousin Nancy hesitated. “That
witch.
” I think she had a different word in mind, though back when she said it, I wouldn’t have known what the other word was anyway. Or would’ve taken it instead for a hound dog’s mama. “That
witch
has him besot.”

It was a long time before I understood the true meaning of that word.
Besot
means “muddled.” “Fuddled.” “Bewitched.” “Charmed.” A fairy-tale word for a terrible condition, one that about killed him and me, too.

 

 

While I hardly remembered Mama and the baby or the burial excepting as it is in the photograph, I surely recall how the rest all fell out and will till my dying day. It happened this way.

As usual Papa went to the graveyard after dinner. He’d been at it for more than three years and didn’t look like he was ever going to change.

And as usual, I was not allowed to go along. He said he liked the lonely walk up the mountain. His mood matched the owls’ and other night birds’ mournful calling. “Like a long, sad song,” he said.

Cousin Nancy was brushing my hair a hundred strokes, till it seemed my hair was a-crackle with little lightning bugs. Then she yanked at my hair a bit too hard. I pulled away, my upset with Papa turning into an upset with her.

“Ow, you’re pulling. You’re a cruel old . . .”

“Didn’t mean to, honey. But you gotta sit still and not wiggle.” She gathered up a hank of my hair again.

I was in such a fidget that day. “If Papa can come and go as he pleases, why can’t I?”

“Because you’re not quite eleven years old, that’s why.” She sighed. “And your papa isn’t doing this to spite you, child, it’s just that he’s partial to the way those graves look in the fading light.”

I understood what she meant, how the dark shadows humped up, then slowly filled in all the little potholes and gullies. Dusk fit Papa’s mood. He was in no mind to share it with anyone else. And he’d gotten used to it. He didn’t care what anyone else thought of his grief, though surely he knew the town folk and his Morton kin thought he should move on.

“There’s nowhere to move on
to,
” is what he said.

“He should move on to you,” I’d told Cousin Nancy more than once, but she always shushed me, saying, “Some folk never move on from a grief like that.” And I didn’t know when she said it if she was talking about Papa or herself.

The women at church where I went with Cousin Nancy whispered about Papa’s
excess.
One even went so far as to say, “He’s wallowing in his grief like a pig in a mud hole.”

Cousin Nancy shushed her just as readily as she’d shushed me. “You can’t put a counter on True Love,” she told them, “even after death. The heart wants what it wants, even when it can’t have it.”

True Love,
I thought. Just like in the stories. Papa’s love for Mama was for all eternity. And then, uncomfortably, I thought:
If this is real life, it’s much harder than anything I’ve ever read about.

 

 

Winter had turned to spring, and the wildflowers marched across the mountains like an army of invaders. Once again Cousin Nancy tried to reason with Papa.

I had just woken up in my little bedroom off the kitchen and I could hear Papa stirring in the living room, rousing up from the overstuffed living room chair where he’d collapsed in sorrow after coming down from the mountain, a thing that had become a usual sleeping place for him.

Cousin Nancy was already in the house making us breakfast, which she did every morning excepting Sundays, when she collected me to go straight off to church. She wasn’t a Baptist like Papa and me but a Catholic and she worshipped in the tiny church down behind Main Street with only a handful of other folk. When Mama was alive, I’d never have set foot in Cousin Nancy’s church. Baptists just didn’t do that then. But by that time I was almost a member of the Roman religion.

Truth to tell, I loved the beautiful window at Cousin Nancy’s church with the pretty painting of Jesus pictured on the glass. He held his heart in his hand. It reminded me a bit of Papa and how he sometimes looked at me with a gaze that held eternity. And the simple wooden crucifix and the statue of Mary roughly carved out of wood, and the handstitched altar furnishings that the Ladies Union had sewn, in white and blue for everyday masses, but in deep purple for the holy days.

This morning, Cousin Nancy leaned in over Papa with a vase full of lupine as blue as church glass. Setting it in the middle of the end table, she said as casually as she could, “I can make the grave look real pretty, Lem. Ada Mae would have liked that.” It was the first time in months Cousin Nancy had asked. Maybe the spring had made her bold. Maybe it had given her hope.

I stood at the door of my bedroom and held my breath, waiting to see if this time Papa would change his mind.

He didn’t shrug or throw a black look in her direction. Instead he made a growling noise low in his throat, like a wounded animal. Then he shook himself all over. “I honor your intentions, Nan,” he said at last, “but nothing could be worse, knowing that everything will rise up in the spring but her.” He never said Mama’s name anymore, just
she
and
her
and
my wife,
as if naming her might somehow put a curse on her. Then he stood and walked out the door, turning for a moment to say, “I won’t hear a word more about it.” Then off he went to work in the gardens, to plow all his grief and longing into the soil.