The Winter People (4 page)

“What makes you so sure?” Martin asked, turning to look at Sara, who had sat down beside him.

“Did you ever think that perhaps all the adventure you could ever want is right here?”

He laughed, and she smiled indulgently at him, then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled something out. The Jupiter marble.

She tucked the marble back into her pocket, leaned over, and kissed his cheek. “Happy Independence Day, Martin Shea.”

He decided then and there that Sara had been right—she was the girl he would marry, and maybe, just maybe,
she
was the adventure he was meant for.

“Martin,” she’d whispered on their wedding night, fingers curled in his hair, lips tickling his left ear, “one day, we’ll have a little girl.”

And, sure enough, they did.

Seven years ago, after losing three babies still in the womb and then their son, Charles, who’d died at two months, Sara gave birth to Gertie. The girl was tiny, so small; Lucius said she wouldn’t live through the week.

He had passed his state boards and come back from Burlington
to work with old Dr. Stewart, who soon retired, leaving Lucius the only M.D. in town. Lucius closed his leather medical bag and put his hand on Martin’s arm.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

But Lucius was wrong: Gertie attached herself to Sara and sucked and sucked, growing stronger each day. Their miracle child. And Sara glowed with happiness, the tiny baby asleep on her chest, Sara looking over at Martin with an all-is-right-in-the-world-now smile. Martin felt the same way and knew that no adventure he might ever have gone on could have had a happier outcome than this.

Though she no longer sucked at her mother’s breast, Gertie had kept herself attached to Sara. They were inseparable, always intertwined, and they spelled secret words in each other’s palms with fingertips. Sometimes Martin was sure they didn’t need words to communicate at all—that they could read each other’s minds. They seemed to have whole wordless conversations with their eyes, laughing and nodding at each other across the supper table. At times, Martin felt a little spark of envy. He would try to be in on their secrets and little jokes, laughing in the wrong places and getting a poor-Papa look from Gertie. He understood, and eventually came to accept that they had a closeness, a bond, that he would never be a part of. The truth was, he believed he was the luckiest man on earth to have these two for a wife and daughter—it was like getting to live with fairies or mermaids, some breathtakingly beautiful creatures he was not meant to understand fully.

He did worry though, that the losses of their previous children had made Sara cling to Gertie in a way that seemed almost desperate. There were days when Sara would not let the girl leave for school, saying she was worried that Gertie’s nose was a little runny, or her eyes looked glassy.

In his darkest hours, Martin believed that, though she’d never say it, Sara blamed him for those dead babies that came before Gertie. Each miscarriage had nearly destroyed Sara—she spent weeks bedridden, weeping, eating only enough to keep a sparrow alive. And then Charles had been born healthy and strong, with a headful of dark curls and a face as wise as an old man. They’d found him
breathless and cold in his cradle one morning. Sara wrapped her arms around him, held on to him all day and into the next. When Martin tried to take the baby, Sara insisted he was not gone.

“He’s still breathing,” she said. “I can feel his little heart beating.”

Martin stepped away from her, frightened. “Please, Sara,” he said.

“Leave us,” she snarled, pulling the dead baby tighter, her eyes cold and frantic like those of a mad animal.

Finally, Lucius had to come and sedate her. Only when she was sleeping could they pry the child from her arms.

Martin believed the deaths were the fault of this place—the 120 acres that belonged to Sara by birthright. Other than her older sister, Constance, who’d married and moved out to Graniteville, she was the last remaining Harrison. He blamed the ledgy soil and barren fields, where almost nothing would grow; the water that tasted of sulfur. It was as if the land itself dared anything to stay alive.

N
ow, gun in hand, Martin moved east across the field as he pursued the fox, trudging along, his feet strapped into the bentwood-and-rawhide snowshoes. His breath came out in cloudy puffs. His feet were wet and cold, soaked through already. The fox tracks continued in a straight line, out into the orchard Sara’s grandfather had planted. The trees were unpruned; the few apples and pears they produced were woody, bug-filled, and spotted with blight.

Sara and Gertie would be out of bed now, wondering where he was. There would be a pot of coffee, biscuits in the oven. But he needed to do this, to kill the fox. He needed to show his wife and daughter that he could protect them—that if a creature threatened their livelihood in any way, he would destroy it. He’d kill the fox, skin it himself, and hand the pelt over to Sara, a surprise gift. She was clever, skilled with a hide and needle and thread—she could make a warm hat for little Gertie.

Martin leaned against a crooked apple tree to catch his breath. The snow swirled around him, limiting his visibility, making him feel strangely disoriented. Which way was home?

He heard something behind him—the soft whoosh of footsteps moving rapidly through the snow.

He turned. There was no one there. It was only the wind. He bit down on his lip, touched the warm ring in his pocket.

Ten yards ahead of him, a gnarled old apple tree moved. He squinted through the blowing snow and saw that it wasn’t a tree, but an old woman hunched over. She was dressed in animal skins, her hair tangled like a nest of serpents.

“Hello?” he called.

She turned, looked at Martin, and flashed him a smile, showing pointed brown teeth. Martin blinked, and it was a tree again, gently swaying under a heavy coat of snow.

The fox darted out from behind it, half a chicken still in its mouth. It froze, looking at Martin, its gold eyes flickering. He held his breath, shouldered the gun, and sighted the fox, which now looked up and watched him, its eyes like little rings of fire.

The fox looked at him; suddenly, for two whole seconds, it wasn’t the animal’s eyes that gazed dispassionately at him, but Sara’s.

Martin Shea, you are the one I shall marry
.

One day, we’ll have a little girl
.

Martin blinked, trying to push this image from his mind—this was no trickster fox from a fairy tale. It was just his imagination, the result of a childhood spent absorbed in all those books.

The fox, now an ordinary fox with ordinary eyes once more, turned, dropped the chicken, and leapt away just as Martin squeezed the trigger.

“Damn it!” Martin shouted, realizing he’d missed.

He took off running in the fox’s direction and saw there was fresh blood on the ground. He’d hit the animal after all. Martin reached down; his fingertips brushed the snowy tracks and came away red. He raised them to his lips and tasted. It was sharp and salty and made his mouth water. Then, gun at the ready, he followed the trail through the orchard, up over the rocky ridge, past the Devil’s Hand, and down into the woods below, until he could only see a faint red every few paces. The beeches and maples, all stripped bare of leaves and shrouded in snow, looked unfamiliar. For an hour or
more, he moved on through thickets of dense growth, last year’s raspberry canes lashing out at him, home farther and farther away. The woods grew darker. He began to wonder if he had made the right choice, coming out here in the storm.

“Too late to turn back now,” he told himself, foot aching as he pushed himself forward.

He didn’t allow himself to think of the accident very often. When he did, it was at times like this—when he felt as if the world he inhabited was against him in some profound way.

H
e’d been up on the hill cutting firewood. It was a pleasant late-summer morning a year after he and Sara were married. He’d found a clearing full of deadfalls, already dried out, and was cutting them into stove-sized pieces and loading them onto the cart. He worked all morning, went home for lunch, then returned to the woods, pleased with how much he’d accomplished. He’d told Sara to keep supper warm—he’d work until either the wagon was full or it grew too dark. She’d frowned, never liking it when he was in the woods after nightfall.

“Don’t be too late,” she’d said.

But the work was going so well, with the wagon almost full, that dusk came and went, and Martin kept sawing. His shoulders and back ached, but it was a good kind of ache. At last, he could get no more wood on the wagon. He gathered his saws and ax, hitched the horse back up to the cart, and began the slow and careful descent of the hill. It was quite dark by then, and he walked beside the horse, guiding her around rocks, over roots and gullies. When they were just past the Devil’s Hand, the horse froze.

“Come on, girl,” he urged, pulling the reins and giving her a gentle swat. But she refused to budge, her eyes focused straight ahead, ears pricked up at attention. She took a step backward, whinnied nervously. Martin heard a twig snap in the darkness ahead of them. He gave the horse a reassuring pat on the neck.

“Steady, girl,” he said, then stepped forward into the shadows to investigate.

He never could say what had been out in the woods that night. When Lucius asked him about it later, Martin claimed that he hadn’t seen anything, that the horse had been spooked by a sound.

“That old mare you’ve got is as steady as they come,” Lucius had said. “Must have been a bear. Or a catamount. There had to be something that frightened her like that.”

Martin nodded, and didn’t tell his brother, or even Sara, what he’d really seen: a flash of pale white, like an owl, only much, much larger. It had been in a low branch and swooped down onto the forest floor, making a strange sort of hiss in flight. It had looked … almost human. But no person could move that way—it was too quick, too fluid. And there had been a smell, a terrible burning-fat sort of reek.

This was too much for the horse, who instantly bolted straight ahead, right for Martin. He saw her coming, knew what he had to do, but his brain was spinning in circles from fear, and he couldn’t seem to make his body move. His eyes were locked on the horse’s eyes, which bulged with panic. At last, Martin dove to get out of her way, but not in time, not far enough. The horse knocked him down and trampled his legs, breaking his left femur with an audible snap. His temple caught the edge of a large rock on the way down, and the world got darker and his vision blurred. The cart ran over his left foot, crushing it from the ankle down. He could feel the bones grinding under the wheel. The pain, though excruciating, felt far away, almost as if it were happening to someone else. Behind him, a twig snapped. He turned, and saw the pale figure move off into the shadows just before he lost consciousness.

The cart broke apart halfway down the hill, and the horse arrived back at the barn, dragging what remained of the shaft and front axle, the wheels smashed to pieces. Afterward, he learned that when Sara saw this, she gathered a lantern and went looking for him.

“I was sure I would find you dead,” she told him later. “I almost couldn’t bring myself to climb the hill. I didn’t want to see.”

She found him alive but unconscious, crushed and bleeding. Sara managed to lash together a stretcher from two saplings and Martin’s coat and dragged him down the hill by herself.

In the weeks of Martin’s recovery, during which Lucius reset his
bones as best he could and Sara wrapped his leg and foot in poultices to speed the healing, he would ask her again and again how she, so tiny, had managed to get him down the hill.

“I suppose God helped me,” she told him.

O
n he trudged, following the animal’s small tracks, unsure of where he was or how much time had passed. He searched for the sun in the sky, but there was too much snow, too much gray, for him even to see it. Though he knew the woods around the farm well from his years of hunting and gathering firewood and maple sap, he didn’t recognize a single landmark. The trees around him seemed gangly and monsterlike as they fought their way up toward the light. The snow was falling too hard, too thickly, covering everything familiar. He followed the tracks, the only thing he was sure of, and was relieved when they circled back toward the rocks. He was exhausted. Hungry. His foot ached, and his mouth was dry. He sucked on clumps of snow, but it did little to quench his thirst.

Crisscrossing what remained of his footprints from earlier, he climbed back up the hill, slipping and sliding on the steep parts, grabbing hold of poplars and beech trees, and came, at last, to the Devil’s Hand—a collection of enormous rocks that seemed to reach straight upward, wearing a fresh glove of pure white snow. But there, in the shadow of the center finger, right where the tracks led, the snow had been pushed away, and there was a little opening he’d never noticed before. The small mouth of a cave.

Martin crept to the entrance. It was quite narrow, barely large enough for a man to crawl through, and didn’t appear to be very deep. It seemed a cozy little alcove. The fox rested against the wall, panting, thinking perhaps that it was hidden in the shadows. Martin smiled. She’d been hit in the left flank, the fur blown away, flesh exposed. He could smell the rich iron scent of her blood. Her whole body seemed to tremble as she watched him, waiting.

Martin raised the gun and pointed the barrel into the cave.

He aimed for the head, not wanting to ruin the pelt.

W
here’s Gertie?” Sara was running toward the barn as Martin came out. He’d skinned the fox and nailed the pelt up to dry against the north wall of the barn. He’d done a messy job, nothing like what Sara would do, but, still, it was done. He’d succeeded.

Martin blinked at her, the bright snow overwhelming after the darkness of the barn. “Not here,” he said. He was tired. Cold. Impatient. Killing the fox should have left him feeling satisfied, but instead it had unsettled him, perhaps because at the end it hadn’t been a fair fight, the animal cornered and frightened.