Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All

I reached the house. The doorknob turned. I flung the door open and slammed it closed behind me. I could feel the heavy thud as the bear hit the door a moment after.

I My heart was chugging painfully in my chest at the close call. Frantically, I glanced around for something to prop up under the doorknob, something strong enough to keep the front door closed against the weight of that enormous fierce beast.

To my right stood a chair, high-backed and sturdy-looking, with a needlework seat. Afraid to move from the door, I managed to angle my foot around one of the chair’s rungs and slide it over with my foot. Then I turned and quickly jammed it under the knob. It seemed to hold. But just in case, I looked about for a back door, somewhere I could use to escape if the bear broke in.

Across the crowded room, stuffed with sofas and chairs and a large table piled high with papers, I could see several doors. I chanced racing across.

One door led to a tidy kitchen, another to an inside privy. A third opened inward to a bedroom cluttered with seven beds. Six were on the small side, hardly larger than a child’s bed. The seventh was regular-sized. If there was a mother or father here all alone with six small children, surely I could be of some help.

The six small beds were each neatly made up, with sheets, a pillow in a pillowcase, and a hand-pieced quilt. The largest bed had no bedding on it at all, only a handsome wedding-ring quilt folded at the bed foot. Everything was too neat for it to be a father and children. It had to be a mother. When they got home, I’d explain everything to them.

But what if they came home to a house where a fierce bear lay in wait? Had I led them, poor mites, into a trap?

There were four windows against the far wall. I could use one of those for escape should I need to get out to warn the family.

Closing the bedroom door quietly behind me with a soft click so as not to alert the bear, I turned and put my ear to the door. I listened hard for any houghing or growling or heavy steps, anything to indicate the bear had gotten in.

I pushed the big bed against the door to hold it shut before I felt in the slightest bit safe.

Then, curled up on the bed, I listened for about a half hour longer, straining to hear anything that could mean the bear had gotten in through the front door or the mother and children had returned home. After a time, I let my fear go and my exhaustion creep in. With the quilt held tight around me with my left hand, the caul bag even more tightly in my right, I closed my eyes. Before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep.

When at last I awoke, it must have been hours later, for what I could see of sky through the window was late afternoon. There was a sound like someone at the front door, pushing it open: the chair falling on the floor and many great shouts.

Not a bear, then, I thought sleepily, but got no further with that thought, because suddenly the door to the bedroom starting moving inward, which meant the bed I was on was moving, too.

I heard men’s voices, angry voices—three, four, five of them. They were cursing in some foreign tongue. Not children at all.

Had I fallen into a robber’s den? Ali Baba and the thieves? A murderer’s home like Bluebeard’s castle? Had I escaped from one sure death into the path of another? Frying pan into the fire, Cousin Nancy would have said. I could all but feel the flames.

Throwing the quilt to one side and leaping off the bed, I raced to the bank of windows, now my only means of escape. I stood on the bed closest to the wall and pushed open a window. Clambering onto the sill, I stuck my feet out, readying myself to leap. I’d take my chances outside rather than be found here sleeping, like Goldilocks in the Three Bears’ house.

As I glanced over my shoulder, the door opened a crack and then was shoved wide, the bed squealing in protest as it slid along the floor. To my amazement, three rather small, wiry men stumbled in.

“Hold!” one of them called to me as I gathered myself to jump from the window ledge. He had, I noticed almost calmly, a long graying beard.

Only then did I turn and look down. Just as the third had warned, a huge chasm yawned beneath my feet. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the bottom of it. There was only about a foot between where I’d planned to jump down and the edge. If I’d leapt without knowing, I’d most probably have tumbled in and been dead from the fall.

I looked back at the men who’d called out the danger. Who no doubt had chased off the bear. Then I turned again and looked at the gulf below my feet. Clutching the caul bag, I measured one danger against another—an unknown frying pan against certain fire.

“No one shall harm you,” said the second. He was almost completely bald, his head shining like Mama’s white teapot.

“Gott im Himmel,” said the third, “it’s a girl.” He had reddish hair and flyaway eyebrows.

I looked at the three of them. For all that they differed in coloring, there was a sameness about them: same height, same broad shoulders, same sky blue eyes. Their voices didn’t have the twang of a Webster County man’s, and some of their words were strange, but they were comforting all the same.

I let myself fall back onto the bed, sat up, stood. But I gave no one my hand, all the while thinking about that strange phrase: Gott im Himmel. It sounded like no words I knew.

“Are you aliens?” I asked at last, thinking about the pictures of the odd creatures from outer space on the covers of Papa’s paperback books.

All right, I thought, I can deal with aliens. After all, I’d already endured two years of a witch stepmother, encountered a snake-handling preacher, run from a knife-wielding hunter, and just now eluded a charging bear. How could I be afraid of these small creatures?

I held out my hand. “My name is Snow-in-Summer Morton,” I said. “Welcome to West Virginia.”

I folded up the wedding-ring quilt carefully and set it at the foot of the bed, while the little creatures nodded in an approving way. Baldy and Gott im Himmel moved the bed back to its rightful place. And Graybeard closed the window. Only then did they escort me into the living room, where three others were waiting, as small and as broad-shouldered and as blue-eyed as they. Graybeard showed me to a chair and then they all made a loose circle around me.

I suppose I should have been afraid, but they weren’t scary at all. Even when they began questioning me, I felt instantly that they did it because they wanted to help.

“And look at you, poor child,” added Baldy, “you’re filthy. Vat a terrible time you must have had.”

Their sweet concern broke down the wall around me and tears began to fill my eyes. I scrubbed at them with one fist, which only made things fuzzy.

Gott im Himmel offered me a large white handkerchief, rather the worse for wear. It had dark smudges on both sides, but then—I supposed—so did I. I took the handkerchief and dabbed at my eyes.

“There’s . . . there’s an awful lot to tell.” My voice was suddenly quite shaky. “And a lot of it is awful.”

Then Graybeard introduced them all to me. He was Jakob, Baldy was Karl, Gott im Himmel was really Philip. Redbeard was Friedrich, called Freddy. The short one was Klaus. And the dark-bearded one was George. Hardly the kind of alien names in Papa’s books. Which had too few consonants and a lot of apostrophes.

I thought a minute. “Since yesterday morning? A bit of lamb’s-quarters and a handful of ramps.” I pulled the last couple of ramp bulbs out of my pocket. The leaves were broken and wilted, the bulbs crushed. A pungent garlic smell filled the air.

“Get the child some tea,” Jakob ordered, and Klaus wandered off at once, I guessed going into the kitchen.

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what küchen was but hoping it tasted good, though at that moment anything would have tasted good. Even more ramps.

The küchen turned out to be a little apple cake, very moist and sweet. And along with it came bread and butter, sausage, and mashed potatoes. A feast.

“I’m not so little,” I explained. Then, not wanting to be impolite, for I was taller than the six of them, I added quickly, “After all, I’m nearly thirteen. And I can shift for myself.”

That’s when I told them the whole story as I knew it, starting with Mama’s death and going right up till that very moment. It took a better part of an hour in the telling, even though I left loads of it out. The bread and sausage and küchen kept me going, and the teapot seemed as endless as the cooking pot in the old fairy tale.

“Yah,” added Klaus, “she must have seen you needed help and shooed you into the house. Then she came and got us from the mine.”

“Now that she has your scent and ours together, she’ll be on the vatch for you, too,” Jakob told me. “Just in case Stepmama . . .” He left the rest hanging, but I knew what he meant.

However, I told myself, Stepmama will never think to look for me here, on the far side of Elk Mountain, in a small house, with a bunch of little men, and guarded by a bear!

Of course, once I was fed and safe, and fully delivered of my tale the way a mother is delivered of a difficult child, I realized how truly filthy I was. The little men—for now I thought of them that way, not aliens at all—drew out a metal tub from under the kitchen sink and heated up water in the kettle though it took some twenty kettles to fill it up to the top. Then they gave me three towels and a bar of pinkish soap.

“These were Mutti’s clothes,” George said. “Mama, you vould call her. She is no longer vith us. Perhaps they fit you.”

“I know how to alter dresses,” I said, for we’d learned that in home ec. “If you have a needle and thread.”

“Ve haff even better—ve haff Mutti’s sewing machine,” he said. “Do you know how to use a treadle?”

They gave me my choice of three outfits. My favorite was a sweet little red and white dress they called a dirndl that had a full skirt, gathered waist, and fitted bodice just my size. The other two were floral cottons, one with blue flowers, the other with yellow, and they were both just right, only needed a bit of hemming. Their mutti must have been tall, for all that they were tiny men.

“I think these are beautiful,” I said, “but this one”—I pointed to the dirndl, not daring to touch it with my filthy hands—“is much too pretty for me to wear.”

A music party! I tried to imagine such a thing and failed. I’d not been to a party that I could remember, except when Papa married Stepmama, in seven years or longer. But I was not here for a party.

“You vill look wunderbar in it, child,” Jakob said. “But you need not choose. They can all be yours. Mutti needs them no more.”

The little men had also set out some of Mutti’s underthings on the rack, though they seemed ill at ease handling them. They left a pair of their mother’s shoes as well. Luckily, they fit me and that was a blessing since I’d no idea how to alter shoes. Especially not such sturdy brown leather shoes, which would be perfect for walking up and down mountains. All the way to Virginia.

“Which of you is Villy?” I looked around. Then I put my hand over my mouth. What if Villy had died just as our baby had died and been buried with his dear mama?

I didn’t know what either of those things were but filed the words away in my mind to unpack later. But then I thought—if Villy was at the university, he must have been born at least eighteen years ago. More and more mysterious.

“He’s a true American,” Klaus added. “Not born in the old country, but here in the big bed.”

I wondered where the old country was, wondered about Villy, whether he was short like his brothers and bearded. Whether he had red hair or black hair or no hair at all.

“Just as I loved my mama, too, but I had so little time with her. Only seven years.” I thought a minute. “What about your papa?”

“Ah,” I said, nodding with understanding. I was thinking that my papa would have been the same if Stepmama hadn’t put him under her wicked spell. And wasn’t that odd, then, for in a way she’d saved him. I knew she hadn’t meant to. I thought she’d be horrified if she knew. And that made me smile.

They went outside and waited for me to take my bath. I soaked for a long while, eyes closed. I could hear the men chatting away and smell the smoke of their pipes through an open window. I felt the dirt and the fear being washed away. As ever, my caul in its little bag lay close at hand . . . just in case.

Opening my eyes, I got down to the hard business of giving myself a real scrub before the water went cold, soaping up my hair, then ducking under to rinse the soap out. At last I got out, smelling wonderfully minty. Drying myself thoroughly, I put on Mutti’s blue cotton dress before calling the little men back inside. I could hem it later.

“If I can stay just a night or two, I’ll get your house sparkling clean and then be on my way. I’m a good worker. Really I am. I did all the housework at my house.” I smiled again at them. I think I’d smiled more in those first few hours with them than I had in the last six years. “You seem to have an extra bed . . .”

Jakob smiled. “He is not due back from uniwersity till sometime next month. Und he can alvays stay on the couch if Summer is still here.”

“Oh,” I said, looking around at the cozy, comfortable cottage with a bit of regret. Already I knew I’d miss these gentle little men. “I’ll be long gone by then.”