Sister Emily's Lightship (2 page)

And then one day Papa said something at the dinner table, his mouth greasy with the chicken I had cooked and his plate full with the taters I had boiled. And not a thing on that table that my Stepmama had made. Papa said, as if surprised by it, “Why Rosemarie…” which was my Stepmama's Christian name… “why Rosemarie do look at what a beauty that child has become.”

And for the first time my Stepmama looked—really looked—at me.

I do not think she liked what she saw.

Her green eyes got hard, like gems. A row of small lines raised up on her forehead. Her lips twisted around. “Beauty,” she said. “Snow,” she said. She did not say the two words together. They did not fit that way in her mouth.

I didn't think much of it at the time. If I thought of myself at all those days, it was as a lanky, gawky, coltish child. Beauty was for horses or grown women, Miss Nancy always said. So I just laughed.

“Papa, you are just fooling,” I told him. “A daddy
has
to say such things about his girl.” Though in the thirteen years I had been alive he had never said any such over much. None in fact that I could remember.

But then he added something that made things worse, though I wasn't to know it that night. “She looks like her Mama. Just like her dear Mama.”

My Stepmama only said, “Snow, clear the dishes.”

So I did.

But the very next day my Stepmama went and joined the Holy Roller Mt. Hosea Church which did snake handling on the fourth Sunday of each month and twice on Easter. Because of the Bible saying “Those who love the Lord can take up vipers and they will not be killed,” the Mt. Hosea folk proved the power of their faith by dragging out rattlers and copperheads from a box and carrying them about their shoulders like a slippery shawl. Kissing them, too, and letting the pizzen drip down on their checks.

Stepmama came home from church, her face all flushed and her eyes all bright and said to me, “Snow, you will come with me next Sunday.”

“But I love Webster Baptist,” I cried. “And Reverend Bester. And the hymns.” I didn't add that I loved sitting next to Miss Nancy and hearing the stories out of the Bible the way she told them to the children's class during the Reverend's long sermon. “Please Papa, don't make me go.”

For once my Papa listened. And I was glad he said no. I am feared of snakes, though I love the Lord mightily. But I wasn't sure any old Mt. Hosea rattler would know the depth of that love. Still, it wasn't the snakes Papa was worried about. It was, he said, those Mt. Hosea boys.

My Stepmama went to Mt. Hosea alone all that winter, coming home later and later in the afternoon from church, often escorted by young men who had scars on their cheeks where they'd been snakebit. One of them, a tall blonde fellow who was almost handsome except for the meanness around his eyes, had a tattoo of a rattler on his bicep with the legend “Love Jesus Or Else” right under it.

My Papa was not amused.

“Rosemarie,” he said, “you are displaying yourself. That is not a reason to go to church.”

“I have not been doing this for myself,” she replied. “I thought Snow should meet some young men now she's becoming a woman. A
beautiful
woman.” It was not a compliment in her mouth. And it was not the truth, either, for she had never even introduced me to the young men nor told them my true name.

Still Papa was satisfied with her answer, though Miss Nancy, when I told her about it later, said, “No sow I know ever turned a boar over to her litter without a fight.”

However, the blonde with the tattoo came calling one day and he didn't ask for my Stepmama. He asked for me. For Snow. My Stepmama smiled at his words, but it was a snake's smile, all teeth and no lips. She sent me out to walk with him, though I did not really want to go. It was the mean eyes and the scars and the rattler on his arm, some. But more than that, it was a feeling I had that my Stepmama wanted me to be with him. And that plum frightened me.

When we were in the deep woods, he pulled me to him and tried to kiss me with an open mouth and I kicked him in the place Miss Nancy had told me about, and while he was screaming, I ran away. Instead of chasing me, he called after me in a voice filled with pain. “That's not even what your Stepmama wanted me to do to you.” But I kept running, not wanting to hear any more.

I ran and ran even deeper into the woods, long past the places where the rhododendron grew wild. Into the dark places, the boggy places, where night came upon me and would not let me go. I was so tired from all that running, I fell asleep right on a tussock of grass. When I woke there was a passel of strangers staring down at me. They were small, humpbacked men, their skin blackened by coal dust, their eyes curious. They were ugly as an unspoken sin.

“Who are you?” I whispered, for a moment afraid they might be more of my Stepmama's crew.

They spoke together, as if their tongues had been tied in a knot at the back end. “Miners,” they said. “On Keeperwood Mountain.”

“I'm Snow in Summer,” I said. “Like the flower.”

“Summer,” they said as one. But they said it with softness and a kind of dark grace. And they were somehow not so ugly anymore. “Summer.”

So I followed them home.

And there I lived for seven years, one year for each of them. They were as good to me and as kind as if I was their own little sister. Each year, almost as if by magic, they got better to look at. Or maybe I just got used to their outsides and saw within. They taught me how to carve out jewels from the black cave stone. They showed me the secret paths around their mountain. They warned me about strangers finding their way to our little house. I cooked for them and cleaned for them and told them Miss Nancy's magic stories at night. And we were happy as can be. Oh, I missed my Papa now and then, but my Stepmama not at all. At night I sometimes dreamed of the tall blonde man with the rattler tattoo, but when I cried out one of the miners would always comfort me and sing me back to sleep in a deep, gruff voice that sounded something like a father and something like a bear.

Each day my little men went off to their mine and I tidied and swept and made-up the dinner. Then I'd go outside to play. I had deer I knew by name, grey squirrels who came at my bidding, and the sweetest family of doves that ate cracked corn out of my hand. The garden was mine, and there I grew everything we needed. I did not mourn for what I did not have.

But one day a stranger came to the clearing in the woods. Though she strived to look like an old woman, with cross-eyes and a mouth full of black teeth, I knew her at once. It was my stepmama in disguise. I pretended I did not know who she was, but when she inquired, I told her my name straight out.

“Summer,” I said.

I saw “Snow” on her lips.

I fed her a deep-dish apple pie and while she bent over the table shoveling it into her mouth, I felled her with a single blow of the fry pan. My little man helped me bury her out back.

Miss Nancy's stories had always ended happy-ever-after. But she used to add every time: “Still you must make your own happiness, Summer dear.”

And so I did. My happiness—and hers.

I went to the wedding when Papa and Miss Nancy tied the knot. I danced with some handsome young men from Webster and from Elkins and from Canaan. But I went back home alone. To the clearing and the woods and the little house with the eight beds. My seven little fathers needed keeping. They needed my good stout meals. And they needed my stories of magic and mystery. To keep them alive.

To keep me alive, too.

I
WAS YOUNGER THAN
my cousin Michael by a year and a half, always content to follow where he led, but never content to stay at home like a good southern girl. Even at six, two years away from New York City where I had lived until war had brought us all back to my Grandma's old brick house, I hung on to the obstinacy that was bred, or so my grandmother always said, in the stone bones of the north.

“She's her daddy's girl, not yours, Belle,” she told Mamma. “She's got that stone mind. Once made up it never moves.”

But Mamma always laughed when Grandma said that. “I've got the same stone mind, then, Mom. I married him,” she reminded her mother.

“And against my better judgement, too,” Grandma said, though she always liked Dad, flirted with him in that way Virginia women have that promises much but means nothing at all. She'd even flirted with him as he went off on the big boat, his second lieutenant's khakis the color of dog poo. That's what Michael had said, with his hand over his mouth so he could deny having said it. Dad went off to win the Big War; he'd promised and we all pretended to believe him.

We were huddled in the house that day, marooned on the settee. Mama was reading George Macdonald to Michael and me, and we were all trying not to notice the wind. A hurricane had come through, rattling the windows for hours, moaning down the chimney like a sick woman. The sky had been black at midday, and if there had been any eye to the storm, Mama said, it never blinked over Hampton Roads.

“Why can't we just ride on its back,” I asked, pointing to the book. “Like Diamond does.” I half believed, half didn't believe the story.

“Because that's the North Wind in the book, stupid,” Michael said. “Not a hurricane.”

I was so used to accepting whatever Michael told me, I didn't question his reasoning. Or lack of same.

The time the hurricane punished us seemed like days, though it was only a single long morning, and then the thing finally passed. But there were still high winds squealing over the bay and upturned boats bobbing about like bathtub toys. Waves splashed against the sea wall as if the old storm were still making angry feints at the town. The air was electric with the tail end of the storm and we all felt it.

“Very dangerous still,” Mamma said and coming from New York City we understood danger.

As soon as the storm subsided, we piled into the car and Mamma drove us to back to Michael's house. There the grownups made endless lists of storm damage, arguing over what had to be attended to first.

Michael was the first to leave that boring parley, going outside onto the ruined lawn and calling me to follow.

I let myself out while Mamma and Grandma continued to quarrel good-naturedly, Aunt Cecily helping first one side, then the other with her sharp answers. No one even noticed when I was gone.

Michael didn't greet me. It wasn't necessary. He just turned and ran and I ran after him.

If I had given thought to it, I would have said that I would follow Michael forever. He was my knight, my champion, closer to me than any brother.

We galloped along the crumbling sidewalk, split by years of grass intrusions, like young colts let out of the barn. Then we cut across Miz Marshall's lawn, and slipped through the back yard of the Parson house where we could hear Joshua Parson, the one whose head was too big for his body, calling out in his high genderless voice—“Mama-papa-baby-o,” the only sentence he knew.

The sycamores' heavy sighing covered any noise we made and the Parson's dog, used to our daily incursions, did not bark but whined as if he would go with us.

And then we were entirely free, spitting ourselves out onto the road that led to the sea wall. When we were close enough to see the spray and the gray misty bay beyond, we stopped, considering.

“Let's walk on the wall,” I said, the wind tearing the words from my mouth and forcing my lips into a kind of grimace. I suddenly loved the hardness of that wind against my face, enjoyed the way it molded my little print dress to my body and tore the red ribbons out of my hair.

Michael hesitated.

It was only a moment, really. But in that moment I suddenly understood how different we were. His hesitation wasn't a lack of courage but rather an older child's calculation of odds. He knew we'd be punished if we did what I wanted and he was figuring out whether it was worth the spanking. Michael understood many things I did not. He'd already guessed that my father would not come home whole. But I still had a young child's faith in the persistence of youth, in the promise of magic, in the inconceivability of change.

And yet it was a moment of change nontheless.

“Come on,” I said.

But still he stood, hesitating, as if it was not my place to make suggestions, only his.

I gave him a disgusted look and ran head down into the wall of wind till I managed to get on to the stone wall overlooking the bay.

As I climbed onto the gray rock, my red sandals gave me little purchase. My right knee scraped painfully on the stone. And once I was standing up, I was almost swept backward into the street by the force of the wind. If it had not been coming off the bay, but rather blowing toward it, I would probably have fallen in and drowned, for the tide was full and great gray-white waves beat time after time against the wall. They drenched me, as if a monstrous animal was spitting in my face.

I licked my lips. My tongue tasted salt from the spray. Laughing, I turned to look behind me.

Michael was still across the road his face puckered with anger and something else. Perhaps it was concern. Perhaps it was fear. I couldn't read his expression. All I knew was that he suddenly looked like a little old man. He didn't move.

For the first time ever, I turned my back to him, and opened my arms wide to the wind. I spoke to it as one talks to a cat—softly but with authority, yet ever mindful of the claws. I made it some promises, promises that were couched in the grammar of the day, in the vocabic lapses of a six year old.

In that instant the wind beast grabbed me up, its claws momentarily sheathed, and blew me out over the ocean. I was not guiled by its gentleness. At any minute it could change.

Below I could see boats straining at their anchors, and waves like catspaws making runnels along the green water.

“Higher,” I crowed with delight. “Higher!”