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TIES THAT BIND
Each evening for a month while they planned their wedding, Papa walked Stepmama back up the mountain as if he was walking her home. As if she could have a home up there amongst the gravestones. He never wondered where she lived. That’s how I knew he was thoroughly bewitched.
The wedding—such as it was—didn’t come quick enough for some and came much too quick for others. It took place at the Town Hall, that old pile of stones, an uncomfortable and uncomforting building, cold and echoing. Stepmama wouldn’t step foot in either Papa’s church or Cousin Nancy’s. And even besot, Papa refused to get married at the old Morton church amongst the gravestones. It was the only time he argued with Stepmama that I can recall.
The town clerk administered the wedding vows, in a husky voice more used to registering voters than binding lovers. He smiled at them with false teeth that looked ready to fall out of his mouth and clattered as he spoke.
Papa’s I do was swift and happy. Stepmama’s response just quick. But it was over in seconds, and Papa bent to kiss the bride, who turned her cheek to him.
There was a table of sweets laid out in the hall, mostly brought in by Cousin Nancy and her friends. Stepmama had supplied the drinks: last season’s apple cider, sharp and tangy, for the grown-ups, as well as iced sweet tea. She was minding that many of the town folks coming along to the wedding were teetotal. Of course there was milk for the children, though except for me and one or two of my school friends brought by their parents, there were few of those who attended.
Mr. Myerson of Myerson’s Studio in Cowan was called in to take the official wedding picture. There was to be only one. “Why would we need more?” Stepmama told Papa.
There was no dancing, no music. Stepmama said country songs hurt her ears. Everyone was sent home early.
It didn’t matter. Papa looked happy. Ecstatic. And that was what counted.
We three walked back to the house together and I was sent immediately to my room. It was only five in the afternoon, but Stepmama said they would see me in the morning and closed my door behind her with a sharp, final click.
I didn’t know exactly what newlyweds did besides live Happy Ever After. But clearly they did it without their children about. So I climbed up onto my bed, took out my fairy-tale book, and read a half dozen or more stories.
I must have fallen asleep at some point for I woke with a full moon shining through my window. Closing my book, I got into my nightclothes and slipped under the covers, where I was soon warm and cozy. This time when I fell asleep, I dreamed of Papa dancing along the garden rows, playing his banjo, and happy once more, singing loudly “False Knight on the Road.”
The first thing they did after the wedding was their honeymoon trip to Ohio. I stayed at Cousin Nancy’s the whole time. We waved as they drove off in Stepmama’s little green car. She drove.
“Not about to let Lemuel drive my baby,” she said. “And not about to go away in his smelly old produce truck.” She wrinkled her nose in a way that suggested she was joking, but I didn’t think she was.
They were gone over a week, staying in a hotel that had a ballroom and everything. Not that Papa could dance.
They came home by way of Charleston, where she had all her things in storage. When they got back, her car was jammed with packets of odd seeds and leggy, long-leafed plants in gray pots that Papa and I helped bring into the house. All in all, about seven boxes of stuff. This didn’t seem strange to me. After all, Papa was a gardener. Mama had loved flowers. Why shouldn’t Stepmama have an interest in growing things, too? At eleven it seemed to me just another form of the fairy tale of True Love: that the green plants they both loved had brought them together.
Then Stepmama brought in the boxes of tall bottles in which dark-colored potions sloshed. She warned me sternly away from all of them.
“They could make you very sick, Snow,” she cautioned, clinking a long red fingernail against the glass of the darkest bottle. Something almost seemed to stir in the depths, something with hands and feet and closed eyes. Something like a dead baby.
“Why do you have them, then?” I looked away from the horrible thing lurking in the bottle’s darkness and then back again, for it drew my eyes in a way I couldn’t explain.
“I do . . . experiments,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders and turning me around to face her.
I gazed into her differently colored eyes, the blue one on the right, the green one on the left. “We do experiments in school,” I said.
She laughed, though it didn’t sound as if she was particularly happy. “Probably not like these,” she told me. “I try to understand things. Learn to control them.” She said it in a whisper as if confiding in me.
“I understand,” I said, though I didn’t. Not then. I pulled away from her and turned back to the bottle, mesmerized by the dark, by what it promised, and put my hand to the bottle.
She pulled me back sharply. “Don’t even touch the bottle, child,” she said, voice suddenly coarsened, almost excited, “until I teach you the Way.”
“The Way?”
“The bottles themselves can turn a person blue. Bring on the bloat. Scabies. Black tongue.”
I wondered that they hadn’t made her sick as well, or at least given her the agonies. But of course she had to know the Way, whatever that was.
Suddenly I wondered why she’d brought the bottles into our house if they were that dangerous. Still, I heeded her warning and stayed away from the table on which the bottles sat though it took all my concentration to do so.
Next she opened a box that held a large mortar and pestle made of black stone, biggest one I ever saw. The one in our kitchen was tiny compared to it, and made of wood.
Big enough to crush whole bones, I thought, and shuddered, as if there was a tale there in the mortar, lurking behind its smooth surface, maybe a story about giants crushing humans and eating them alive. But I liked the smoothness of the mortar’s side and how shiny the tip of the pestle was and how it fit exactly in Stepmama’s hand. It was cool, sturdy, contained. I can take a lesson from that, I thought.
The rest of the boxes held Stepmama’s clothes.
“You can help me shake them out, Snow,” she said.
Summer, I thought. But Summer suddenly seemed very far away.
Stepmama also had a huge packet wrapped in black linen and tied securely with long pieces of twine. It was carted in, over the mountain. When the carters were paid and sent on their way, she unwrapped the thing and I saw it was a framed mirror on a large stand, a cross hanging down from the bottom, and with words carved and painted in gold on the wood surround, words I couldn’t read. Even though I loved books and had a whole shelf of them—the Blue and Green and Orange Fairy books, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Just So Stories, The Secret Garden, and a whole bunch of Raggedy Ann and Andy stories—I couldn’t quite read what was carved in the mirror’s wood frame. The sentences were in some foreign tongue. The two I remember best were Acta est fabula and Corruptio optimi pessima. I could almost make them out, but not really.
It was a very big mirror, almost as tall as me. I pressed my fingers to the letters when Stepmama’s back was turned, as if I might puzzle out the meanings of the words that way. But once she caught me doing that and forbade me ever touch the mirror again.
“Will it bring bloat and scabies?” I asked.
She laughed. Her laugh was suddenly an unlikely fall of sound, like the tinkling of bells. “Why, child,” she said, “are you tetched? You have the strangest notions.” As if she’d forgotten the warning she’d given me before.
After that, Stepmama moved in all her perfumes and face paints, as well as a carved chair that had—so she told me—death and the maiden carved on one side. Then laughing, she added, “And taxes on the other.”
“What are taxes?” I asked.
Her fingers around my wrist drew me in and she whispered harshly, “A payment owed.”
“I don’t owe any payment,” I told her. “I haven’t any money. Papa doesn’t allow it.”
“There are many kinds of payment, Snow,” she said,
“and many ways to pay what is owed.” She was smiling with that red slash of lips as she spoke. It was a big but not inviting smile.
I thought about the poor old women who sometimes bartered with Papa for his vegetables and seed corn, giving him in exchange a family portrait or an old gold watch belonging to some dead relative. About once a year he took such barter over to Clarksburg to sell, sharing what he got with the families who’d paid him in that way, giving them the greater part and taking out only what the vegetables and seed corn cost.
“When times are hard,” Cousin Nancy had once told me when I asked where he was going and why, “it’s not the time to drive a hard bargain. Not with your neighbors.”
Remembering those barters, I nodded at Stepmama.
She took that as an understanding between us. But there was nothing between us. Not then. Not now. Though there has been a payment.
At first I wanted to be loved by Stepmama. Cousin Nancy had been forced out of my life, Stepmama insisting that she couldn’t visit the way she had before.
“It isn’t fit any longer that Cousin Nancy cooks your breakfast and brushes your hair, oversees your homework and puts you to bed,” Stepmama explained. “That’s my job as your new mama.” She smiled, and though the smile wasn’t particularly warm, I felt the warmth.
“And it isn’t fitting that she’s in and out of this house all times of the day and night like she did before, now that Lem is married.” She said it in a way that made it sound like what Cousin Nancy had done for us had been, somehow, wrong.
And yet . . . and yet, I was sure she was being fair. Cousin Nancy hadn’t been my actual mama. And there was a new woman in Papa’s house now, a legitimate one, married forever after. Truly, the only one who suffered from this new rule was Cousin Nancy herself, for Papa and I were happily under Stepmama’s spell.
So, at first I had what I really wanted. What a child wants is nothing more than unconditional love. I was too young to understand that Stepmama was not someone who gave that kind of love. Or any kind, as it turned out. What she did was to barter or trade for the outward signs of love—a hug, a stroke along the arm, a kind word. Each of these things came with its own price.
But those first days seemed like heaven. She cozened me and coddled me and fed me on lies. And I believed them all.
Stepmama talked about being impressed with the mountains, the music, the people. She mentioned places by name. Songs as well. And she heaped high praise on Cousin Nancy once she was well and truly out of my life.
“A good woman,” Stepmama said. “A caretaker.”
“And Papa?” I asked, looking up into her face, seeing what I wanted to see, missing the rest. “You love Papa?”
Her eyes gave nothing away but her mouth smiled. She gave me a hug and said, “Of course, your papa most of all.”
With that, I pushed closer to her than she was to me, my arms around her till I could feel her backbone stiffen. I thought it meant that she wanted me to hold her tighter. When I tightened as much as I could, she sighed.
“We have work to do, Snow,” she’d say, twisting out of my embrace. Though what she really meant was that I had to go outside and rake or hoe or bring in salad greens while she did her nails. “Because you know the garden so much better than I do and I might do it harm,” she told me. And I never thought to ask why she had all those seeds and plants in her room then.
Or she meant that I was to scrub her underthings till my knuckles were bruised on the washboard. “Because your hands are small and my big old hands would likely damage my underclothes, in which I want to look lovely for your papa.”
I truly wished at those moments that I could have called her “Mama,” as she demanded. But though I thought my heart was willing, my mouth revolted, becoming as serpent-like as hers, refusing to speak the word aloud, no matter how often she insisted.
Still, I like to think that—in the early days, for a short while—we were both reasonably content. Why shouldn’t we have been? We each had what we wanted, or at least what we thought we wanted. Me an attentive mother living in the house, she a biddable child who did all the work without complaint.
We had it then for a short while, but it was not to be what either of us would get for long.
The truth was: I was beguiled by Stepmama. That old word. It means “enchanted.” “Deluded.” “Cheated.” “Charmed.” Not besot like Papa, but close enough.