The Snow Child: A Novel (18 page)

C
ouldn’t we keep just one?” Mabel pleaded. “The red hen. She’s such a dear, and we could feed her table scraps.”

“Chickens aren’t solitary creatures,” Jack said. “They like a flock. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Won’t Mr. Palmer allow us a little more credit, just to buy some feed for the rest of the winter? It wouldn’t cost so much, would it?”

Jack’s shirt collar tightened at his throat, and the cabin was too warm and too small. Chicken feed, for Christ’s sake. What kind of man can’t afford chicken feed? They had already run out of coffee, and the sugar wouldn’t last much longer.

“It’s got to be done.” He went to the door and had nearly shut it on his way out when he heard Mabel.

“Esther says it’s best to dip them in boiling water to pluck them. Shall I heat a pot?”

“That’d be fine.” And he closed the door.

Jack took no pleasure in slaughtering the chickens. If he’d had his choice, he would have kept them alive and plump in the barn for all the days of their lives. During the summer, they
were good layers, most of them, and he knew Mabel had some attachment. But you couldn’t let an animal starve under your care. Better to kill it and be done with it.

He eyed the ax by the woodpile as he walked to the barn. He wished now that he’d thought to ask George for some advice as well. His grandmother had been known to strangle a chicken with her bare hands, but mostly he’d heard of cutting their heads clean off and letting them bleed out. An unpleasant task, no matter how it was to be done.

A dozen headless chickens, and soon he would be bringing them into the kitchen to poor Mabel, who had doted on them. She would do it, though. She’d gut the birds and pluck the feathers and never once complain, just as she hadn’t complained about the dwindling supplies or the endless meals of moose meat and potatoes. The past few weeks, she had gathered frozen wild cranberries and rosehips and jarred some jam, and she’d figured out how to make an eggless cake that wasn’t all that bad. She was making do, and somehow it suited her. She had a rosiness to her cheeks and laughed more than she had in years, even as she served yet another plate of fried moose steak.

She’d picked up her books and pencils again, too. Jack took note of that. The child was always bringing something new for her to draw—an owl feather, a cluster of mountain ash berries, a spruce bough with the cones still attached. The two of them would sit at the kitchen table, the cabin door propped open “so the child won’t get too warm,” their heads together as she drew. It was good to see.

But it also scared him how much the girl was growing on Mabel. On him, too. He could admit that. He might not watch out the window, but he waited just the same, and hoped for her. Hoped she wasn’t lonely or in danger. Hoped she would appear out of the trees and come running, smiling, to him.

Sometimes he wanted to tell Mabel the truth. It was a burden, and he wasn’t sure he carried it right. He wanted to tell Mabel about the dead man and the lonely place in the mountains where he had buried him. He wanted to tell her about the strange door in the side of the mountain. The knowledge of the child’s suffering sat heavy and cold in his gut, and sometimes he could not look at her small, wan face for fear of choking.

He had promised the girl, but maybe that was just an excuse. The awful truth of what the child had witnessed would wrench Mabel’s heart, and the last thing on earth he wanted to do was cause her any more sadness. Her capacity for grief frightened him. He’d wondered more than once if she had ventured onto the river ice in November knowing full well the danger.

Jack grabbed a hen by her feet and carried her, squawking and flapping her wings, out to the chopping block by the woodpile. The racket didn’t stop for some time, even well after the head was cut off. Only eleven more to go, Jack thought grimly as he laid the dead bird in the snow.

He hadn’t planned on helping with the plucking, but then he saw what a long, unpleasant chore it would be for a person alone. Side by side at the kitchen counter, covered in feathers and their sleeves rolled up, Jack and Mabel took turns dipping a chicken in the boiling water, then pulling handful after handful of feathers. They tried to gather the red and black and yellow feathers into burlap sacks, but soon more were stuck to the floor and floating around the cabin than in the bags.

“Maybe we should have done this outside,” Mabel said as she tried to wipe a wet feather from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Jack chuckled.

“I’d get that for you, but I’m afraid I’d only leave more,” he said and held up his feather-coated hands.

“And this horrid smell,” Mabel said. The steam that rose from the boiling water smelled of scalded feathers and half-cooked chicken skin.

“I was thinking—maybe we should have chicken for dinner,” Jack said, trying to keep his face stern.

“No, no. I couldn’t bear… Oh, you’re teasing me,” and she flicked a feather in his direction.

As he began plucking another bird, Mabel sighed beside him.

“What is it?”

“It’s dear, sweet Henny Penny,” she said and looked sadly down at the dead hen in her hands.

“Told you it was best not to name them.”

“It’s not the names. I would have known them no matter what I called them. Henny Penny used to follow me about while I gathered the eggs, clucking like she was giving me advice.”

“I am sorry, Mabel. I don’t know what else to do.” He flexed his hand, felt the tendons give and take, and wondered how he could again and again disappoint her.

“You think I blame you?” she said.

“Nobody else to. It’s on my shoulders.”

“How is it that you always arrive at that conclusion? That everything is your fault and yours alone? Wasn’t it my idea to come here? Didn’t I want this homestead, and all the hard work and failure that would come with it? If anything, I’m to blame, because I’ve done so little to help.”

Jack still looked at his hands.

“Don’t you see? This was to be ours together, the successes and the failures,” Mabel said, and as she spoke she gestured
grandly as if to encompass everything, the plucked chickens, the wet feathers.

“All of this?” he said, and couldn’t help a smile.

“Yes, all of this.” Then she too smiled. “Every blasted feather. Mine and yours.”

Jack leaned over and kissed her on the tip of her nose, then stuck a chicken feather behind her ear.

“All right then,” he said.

When they had finished the last chicken, they attempted to sweep the feathers out of the cabin, but the impossibility of the task left them both laughing, until Mabel gave up and collapsed in a kitchen chair, legs stretched out in front of her. Jack used his forearm to wipe sweat from his forehead.

“Who would have thought it would be so much work, getting chickens ready to eat?” Mabel fanned herself with a hand. Jack nodded in agreement, then took the birds to hang in the barn with the moose meat. They would stay frozen until they could bring themselves to eat them.

When he returned, he saw that Mabel had set one aside.

“We were joking, weren’t we? About cooking one for dinner tonight?”

“It’s not for us.”

“Then what?”

Mabel put on her coat and boots.

“I’m taking it to a place in the woods.”

“What place?”

“Where you left her the treats and the doll.”

So she’d known all along.

“But a dead chicken?” he asked. “For the child?”

“Not for her. For her fox.”

“You’re going to feed one of our chickens to a wild fox?”

“I need to do this.”

“What for?” Jack’s voice rose. “How in God’s name does it make a bit of sense, when we’re just barely getting by, to throw a dinner out into the woods?”

“I want her to know…” and Mabel held her chin up, as if what she said took some courage. “Faina needs to know that we love her.”

“And a chicken will tell her that?”

“I told you, it’s for her fox.”

As Mabel carried the naked, dead bird into the night, Jack wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Instead he found himself thinking of what Esther had said about a dark winter’s madness.

A
s he neared the cabin, Jack heard the chatter of women’s voices, and when he came through the door with an armload of firewood, he found Esther with her feet propped indecorously on a chair in front of the woodstove. She wore men’s navy wool pants with the cuffs tucked into long red-striped socks. A big toe stuck out through a hole in one sock, and as Jack loaded more wood into the stove, she wiggled her toes toward the heat.

“I was just telling Mabel, I hope that boy of mine don’t pester you too awful much. I know he’s coming around a lot this winter, talking your ear off I’m sure,” she said.

Mabel handed her a cup of tea and she slurped at it.

“No. No.” He tried not to look at the bare toe. “Not at all. Truth be told, I kind of enjoy his company. I could learn a lot from him.”

“Don’t you dare tell him that. It’ll go straight to his head, and we’ll never hear the end of it. That boy knows a lot, but not half as much as he thinks he does.”

“Ah well. Suppose that was true about most of us at that age.”

“He’s taken a liking to you, though. He’s always talking about you. Jack says this and Jack says that.”

Mabel handed Jack a cup of tea. “There are johnnycakes, too. Esther brought them.”

The two women had spent most of the day sharing recipes and patterns, and even out in the yard he had heard their laughter. He was glad for Mabel to have the company.

Esther stood and stretched and took a johnnycake from the plate.

“I was also dispensing a little advice. I told Mabel here she’s got to get out of the cabin more. All this talk about little girls running around in the trees. Next thing you know she’ll be holding tea parties in the front yard, wearing nothing but her skivvies and a flowered hat.”

Esther nudged Mabel with an elbow and winked, but Mabel did not smile.

“Oh look at you, white as a ghost. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. This is nonsense, all this talk about a little girl.”

“I’m not crazy, Esther.” Mabel’s voice was tight, and she caught Jack’s eyes with her own.

“So you do have some fight in you, my girl.” Esther hugged her waist. “You’ll need every bit of that to survive around here.”

Jack expected Esther to find some reason to leave then, but either she took no notice of Mabel’s cross silence or she had more strength in the face of it than he could ever muster. She plopped herself into a chair at the table and swished tea around in her mouth.

“Good tea. Real good tea,” she said. “Did I ever tell you about the grizzly tea?”

“No. Can’t recall that you did,” Jack said. He had intended to work outside for another hour or two, but he pulled up a chair across from her and Mabel and took another johnnycake.

“Danny… Jeffers? Jaspers? Ah hell, my mind’s going. Anyway, Danny carried around a nasty-smelling burlap bag filled with—well, let’s just say the less-than-desirable parts of grizzly bears. He swore you could brew a tea with it that would improve your love life.”