The Winter People Read online

  “Have some more, Martin,” she would always say, smiling as she spooned more gravy onto biscuits. “There’s plenty.” And he would nod and have a second helping, going along with this myth of abundance Sara had created.

  “I love biscuits and gravy,” Gertie would say.

  “That’s why I make them so often, my darling,” Sara told her.

  Once a month, Sara and Gertie would hitch up the wagon and ride into town to pick up what they needed at the general store. They didn’t get extravagant things, just the basics for getting by: sugar, molasses, flour, coffee, and tea. Abe Cushing let them buy on credit, but last week he’d pulled Martin aside to tell him the bill was getting up there—they’d need to pay it down some before buying anything more. Martin had felt the sour creep of failure work its way from his empty stomach up into his chest.

  He jerked his bootlaces tight and tied them with careful knots. His bad foot ached already, and he wasn’t even out of bed. It was the storm.

  He reached into the right pocket of his patched and tattered work pants and felt for the ring, making sure it was there. He carried it everywhere he went, a good-luck charm. It warmed in his fingers, seemed to radiate a heat all its own. Sometimes, when he was out working in the fields or woods and he knew Sara wouldn’t see, he slipped the ring onto his pinkie.

  Every spring, Martin plowed up enough rocks to build a silo. But it wasn’t only the rocks that came up—he’d found other things, strange things, out in the north field, just below the Devil’s Hand.

  Broken teacups and dinner plates. A child’s rag doll. Scraps of cloth. Charred wood. Teeth.

  “An old settlement? A dumping ground of some sort?” he’d guessed when he showed Sara the artifacts.

  Her eyes darkened, and she shook her head. “Nothing’s ever been out there, Martin.” Then she urged him to bury everything back in the ground. “Don’t plow so close to the Devil’s Hand. Let that back field lie fallow.”

  And he did.

  Until two months ago, when he found the ring out there, glowing like the halo he sometimes saw around the moon.

  It was an odd ring, hand-carved from bone. And old, very old. There were designs scored into it, a strange writing Martin didn’t recognize. But when he held it in his hand, it seemed to speak to him almost, to grow warm and pulsate. Martin took it as a sign that his luck was about to change.

  He brought the ring home, cleaned it up, and put it in a little velvet bag. He left it on top of Sara’s pillow on Christmas morning, nearly beside himself with anticipation. There had never been money for a proper gift, a gift she might truly deserve, and he couldn’t wait for her to see the ring. He knew she was going to love it. It was so ornate, so delicate and somehow … magical—a perfect gift for his wife.

  Sara’s eyes lit up when she saw the bag, but when she opened it and looked inside, she dropped it instantly, horrified, hands trembling. It was as if he’d given her a severed finger.

  “Where did you find it?” she asked.

  “At the edge of the field, near the woods. For God’s sake, Sara, what’s the matter?”

  “You must take it back and bury it again,” she told him.

  “But why?” he asked.

  “Promise me you will,” she demanded, placing her hand on his chest, gripping his shirt in her fingers. “Right away.”

  She looked so frightened. So strangely desperate.

  “I promise,” he said, taking the ring in its bag and slipping it into his trouser pocket.

  But he hadn’t buried it. He’d kept it hidden away, his own little good-luck charm.

  He stood now, ring carefully tucked into his pocket, and walked over to the window. In the half-light of dawn, he saw it had snowed all night. That meant shoveling and hitching the roller up to the horses to make the driveway passable. If he got that done early enough, he’d get his rifle and go out into the woods to do some hunting—the fresh snow would make tracking easier, and with snow this deep, the deer would head where the woods were thickest. If he couldn’t get a deer, maybe there would be a turkey or grouse. A snowshoe hare, even. He pictured Sara’s face, lit up at the sight of him carrying in fresh meat. She’d give him a kiss, say, “Well done, my love,” then sharpen her best knife and get to work, dancing around the kitchen, humming a tune Martin never could name—something that sounded sad and happy all at once; a song, she’d tell him, that she learned when she was a child.

  He shuffled down the narrow stairs to the living room, cleaned out the fireplace, and lit a fire. Then he started one in the kitchen stove, careful not to bang the iron door closed. If Sara heard him, she’d come down. Let her rest, warm and laughing under the covers with little Gertie.

  Martin’s stomach clenched with hunger. Dinner last night had been a meager potato stew with a few chunks of rabbit in it. He’d ruined most of the meat with buckshot.

  “Couldn’t you have aimed for the head?” Sara had asked.

  “Next time, I’ll give you the gun,” he’d told her with a wink. The truth was, she’d always been a better shot. And she had a talent for butchering any animal. With just a few deft strokes of the knife, she peeled the skin away as if slipping off a winter coat. He was clumsy and made a mess of a pelt.

  Martin pulled on his wool overcoat and called for the dog, who was curled up on an old quilt in the corner of the kitchen. “Come on, Shep,” he called. “Here, boy.” Shep lifted his great blocky head, gave Martin a puzzled look, then laid it back down. He was getting older and was no longer eager to bound through fresh snow. These days, it seemed the dog only listened to Sara. Shep was just the latest in a line of Sheps, all descended from the original Shep, who had been chief farm dog here when Sara was a girl. The current Shep, like those before him, was a large, rangy dog. Sara said the original Shep’s father had been a wolf, and, to look at him, Martin didn’t doubt it.

  Dogless, Martin opened the front door to head for the barn. He’d feed the few animals they had left—two old draft horses, a scrawny dairy cow, the chickens—and collect some eggs for breakfast if there were any to be had. The hens weren’t laying much this time of year.

  The sun was just coming up over the hill, and snow fell in great fluffy clumps. He sank into the fresh powder, which came up to his mid-shin, and knew he’d need snowshoes to go into the woods later. He plowed his way through, doing a clumsy shuffle-walk across the yard to the barn, then looped around back to the henhouse. Feeding the chickens was one of his favorite chores of the day—he enjoyed the way they greeted him with clucks and coos, the warmth of the eggs taken from the nest boxes. The chickens gave them so much and asked for so little in return. Gertie had given each bird a name: there was Wilhelmina, Florence the Great, Queen Reddington, and eight others, although Martin had a hard time keeping track of the odd little histories Gertie created for them. They’d had a full dozen before a fox got a hen last month. Back in November, Gertie made little paper hats for all the chickens and brought them their own cake of cornbread. “We’re having a party,” she’d told him and Sara, and they’d watched with delight, laughing as Gertie chased the chickens around trying to keep their hats on.

  He came around the corner of the barn and felt the air leave his chest when he saw a splash of crimson on white. Scattered feathers.

  The fox was back.

  Martin hurried over, loping along, dragging his bad foot through the snow. It wasn’t hard to see what had happened: tracks led up to the henhouse, and just outside was a mess of blood and feathers and a trail of red leading away.

  Martin reached down, took off his heavy mitten—the blood was fresh, not yet frozen. He inspected the coop, saw the small gnawed hole the fox had gotten through. He hissed through clenched teeth, unlatched the door, and looked inside. Two more dead. No eggs left. The remaining hens were huddled in a nervous cluster against the back corner.

  He hurried back to the house to collect his gun.

  Gertie

  January 12, 1908

  “If snow mel
ts down to water, does it still remember being snow?”

  “I’m not sure snow has much of a memory,” Mama tells me.

  It snowed hard all night, and when I peeked out the window this morning, everything was covered in a thick fluffy blanket, all white and pure, erasing everything else—footprints and roads, any sign of people. It’s like the world’s been reborn, all fresh and new. There will be no school today, and though I love Miss Delilah, I love staying home with Mama more.

  Mama and I are curled up, pressed against each other like twin commas. I know about commas and periods and question marks. Miss Delilah taught me. Some books I can read real good. Some, like the Bible, are a puzzle to me. Miss Delilah also told me about souls, how every person has one.

  “God breathes them into us,” she said.

  I asked her about animals, and she said no, but I think she’s wrong. I think everything must have a soul and a memory, even tigers and roses, even snow. And, of course, old Shep, who spends his days sleeping by the fire, eyes closed, paws moving, because he’s still a young dog in his dreams. How can you dream if you don’t have a soul?

  The covers are tented up over me and Mama’s heads, and it’s all dark, like we’re deep underground. Animals in a den. All warm and snuggly. Sometimes we play hide-and-seek, and I love to hide beneath the covers or under her bed. I’m small and can fit into tight places. Sometimes it takes Mama a long, long time to find me. My favorite place to hide is Mama and Papa’s closet. I like the feeling of their clothing brushing my face and body, like I’m walking through a forest thick with soft trees that smell like home: like soap and woodsmoke and the rose-scented lotion Mama sometimes uses on her hands. There is a loose board in the back of the closet that I can swing out and crawl through; then I come out in the linen closet in the hall, under the shelves with extra sheets, towels, and quilts. Sometimes I sneak through the other way and go into their closet and watch Mama and Papa while they sleep. It makes me feel strange and lovely and more like a shadow than a real girl—awake when no one else is, me and the moon smiling down on Mama and Papa while they dream.

  Now Mama reaches around, takes my hand, and spells into it with her pointer finger: “R-E-A-D-Y?”

  “No, Mama,” I say, wrapping my fingers around hers. “Just a little longer.”

  Mama sighs, pulls me tighter. Her nightgown is worn flannel. I work my fingers over its soft folds.

  “What did you dream, my darling girl?” she asks. Mama’s voice is as smooth as good linen.

  I smile. Take her hand and spell into it “B-L-U-E D-O-G.”

  “Again? How lovely! Did you ride on his back?”

  I nod my head. The back of it bumps against Mama’s chinny-chin-chin.

  “Where did he take you this time?” She kisses the back of my neck, her breath tickling the little hairs there. I told Miss Delilah once that we all must be part animal, because we have little bits of fur all over our skin. She laughed and said it was a foolish thought. Sometimes when Miss Delilah laughs at me I feel tiny, like a girl just learning her words.

  “He took me to see a lady with tangled hair who lives inside an old hollow tree. She’s been dead a long time. She’s one of the winter people.”

  I feel Mama stiffen. “Winter people?”

  “That’s what I call them,” I say, turning to face her. “The people who are stuck between here and there, waiting. It reminds me of winter, how everything is all pale and cold and full of nothing, and all you can do is wait for spring.”

  She looks at me real funny. Worried-like.

  “It’s all right, Mama. The lady I met isn’t one of the bad ones.”

  “Bad ones?” Mama asks.

  “Sometimes they’re angry. They hate being stuck. They want to come back but they don’t know how, and the more they try, the more angry they get. Sometimes they’re just lonely. All they want is someone to talk to.”

  The covers fly off our heads, and the cold in the room hits my body and makes my skin prickle like it’s being poked by a thousand tiny icicles.

  “Time to get up,” Mama says, her voice higher than it should be. “After chores and breakfast, maybe you and I can bake.”

  Mama’s up now, smoothing the covers, fluttering around like a busy bird.

  “Molasses cookies?” I ask, hopeful. They’re my very favorite food on earth. Shep’s, too, because now that he’s so old he gets to lick out the bowl. Papa says we spoil that dog, but Mama tells him Shep has earned it.

  “Yes. Now go find your papa and see if he needs help feeding the animals. Bring in the eggs, too. We’ll need them for the cookies. And, Gertie?” she says, turning my face so that I’m looking right at her. Her eyes are bright and sparkly, like fish in a stream. “Don’t mention your dream to him. Or anything about the winter people. He wouldn’t understand.”

  I nod real big and leap to the floor. Today I’m a jungle animal. A lion or a tiger. Something with sharp teeth and claws that lives in a place far across the ocean where it’s hot all the time. Miss Delilah showed us a picture book of all the animals Noah took with him on the ark: horses and oxen, giraffes and elephants. My favorites were the big cats. I bet they can walk real quiet, sneak around at night, just like me.

  “Grrr,” I snarl, pawing my way out of the room. “Look out, Papa. Here comes the biggest cat in the jungle. Big enough to eat you up, bones and all.”

  Martin

  January 12, 1908

  Martin had known Sara all his life. Her people came from the farm on the outskirts of town, out by the ridge. The Devil’s Hand, people called it, the ledge of rock that stuck up out of the ground like a giant hand, fingers rising from the earth. Haunted land, people said. A place where monsters dwelled. The soil was no good, all clay and rocks, but the Harrisons eked out a living, trading the few things they could coax out of the ground—potatoes, turnips—for flour and sugar in town. The Harrisons were thin, almost skeletal, with dark eyes and hair, but Sara was different somehow—her hair auburn when the sun hit it; her coppery eyes danced with light rather than shadow. She seemed otherworldly to Martin, a siren or a selkie—a creature he’d read about in storybooks but never imagined might be real.

  Sara’s mother had died when she was born. It was just old Joseph Harrison caring for Sara and her older brother and sister, alone. But folks said he once had a woman who came around. She’d done the laundry, cooked the meals, nursed the children. People even said she’d bedded down with Joseph Harrison, lived with him for a time like a wife. She was an Indian woman who rarely spoke and wore clothes made from animal skins—that’s what people said. Some said that she was half animal herself: that she had the power to transform into a bear or a deer. Martin remembered hearing about her from his own father; he said she used to live in a cabin up beyond the Devil’s Hand, and people from town would go to see her when someone took sick. “When the doctor couldn’t help, you went to her.”

  Something had happened to her—an accident? a drowning? Something had happened around the time Sara’s brother died. Martin couldn’t recall the details, and when he asked Sara about it after they were married, she shook her head, told him he must be mistaken.

  “The stories you heard, they’re just stories. People in town love their stories, you know that as well as I do. It was just Father, Constance, Jacob, and I. There was no woman in the woods.”

  Back in grammar school, Martin had been shooting marbles with a group of boys in the schoolyard. His older brother, Lucius, was there, furious because Martin had just won his favorite marble after knocking it out of the ring: a beautiful orange aggie that Lucius had named Jupiter. Martin was holding up his prize, thinking about the orbits of planets, when Sara Harrison came sauntering over, her bright eyes glittering and catching the light much like his new marble. She looked so startlingly beautiful to him then that he did the only thing he could think of—he handed her the marble.

  “No!” Lucius shrieked, but it was too late. Sara tightened her fingers around it and smiled. />
  “Martin Shea, you are the one I shall marry,” she said.

  Lucius snorted with laughter. “You’re mad, Sara Harrison.”

  But Sara had said the words with such sureness, such conviction, that Martin never doubted the truth of them, even though he’d laughed at the time, surrounded by his friends and his brother, as if she’d told a joke. And it did feel like a joke, that a girl as pretty as she would choose Martin.

  He’d been an odd boy—arms too long for his sleeves, face always stuck in a book like The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He longed for adventure and believed he had the heart of a hero. Unfortunately, there were no pirates to battle in West Hall, no shipwrecks to survive. Only the endless monotony of chores on the family farm: cows that needed milking, hay that needed to be cut. One day, he promised himself, he’d leave it all behind—he was destined for bigger things than being a farmer. Until then, he was just biding his time. He did poorly in school, daydreaming when he should have been studying, while his brother, Lucius, got top marks in the class. Lucius was stronger, faster, braver, even better-looking. Lucius was the one all the girls dreamed of marrying one day. So what, then, did Sara Harrison see in Martin?

  He didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of Sara’s great gifts—the ability to see the future in these tiny pieces, like she had a special telescope.

  “You won’t leave West Hall, Martin,” she announced at the Fourth of July picnic when Martin was twelve. Most of the town was gathered on the green, around the newly built bandstand. Some were dancing, others spread out on picnic blankets. Lucius was in the gazebo, playing the trumpet with a few men from town who made up the West Hall town band. Lucius, who would be going off to Burlington in the fall—his high marks had earned him a full scholarship at the University of Vermont.