Gus slept on his pallet, the icy glow of the walls making a blot of his face until he looked something like a stand of fir trees heaped with snow. I hovered over him, sleepless as death, observing the nervous saccade of his eyes beneath the lids. At the same time, I was back in my own cottage, rolling out biscuit dough. It was the thought of snow that had returned me to that particular memory: the windows showed a seethe of white.
I don’t suppose I was older than eleven in the memory; my mother’s strength was already failing then and I’d taken over cooking for the family. And Gus sat watching my flour-caked hands. He’d brought along a volume of fairy tales purloined from his father’s library, but it annoyed him if I divided my attention while he read aloud, and the book sat closed beneath his elbow.
“If your mother can’t cook anymore, why can’t Anna?” Gus asked. “School is wasted on her. She ought to stay home and do the work, and free you for”—and here Gus’s gaze swung about, as if seeking a suitable object for my freedom—“higher things.”
“Anna is clever in her own way. And she must learn to read!” I said. I did not admit that I enjoyed cooking, as that would evoke disapproval on Gus’s part. “She’s much too little to manage everything at home, but I can get our meals ready and study besides.”
But I lowered my face to hide my smile as I argued the point. I was shamefully dependent on Gus’s opinion of me as somehow out of the ordinary. While my father and our teacher Miss Gryson observed that I was quick enough, they did not share my ideas of my own distinction. Why should they? The implied insult was none too subtle: I wanted to be distinct from them.
Should I blame that girl-child and all her febrile yearnings, then? After all, it was longing that made her vulnerable.
Oh, why? There are plenty of people eager to condemn girls such as I was without my contributing to the chorus.
Gus fell silent, which surprised me, for he was not one to readily relinquish a quarrel. I’d begun to cut the biscuits into the diamonds Anna preferred, waiting the while for Gus to insist on my general superiority. When he did not, I looked sharply at his knitted hands and drawn brows. He glanced back, then closed tight his eyes.
“Gus? What’s wrong?”
“I know I’ve sometimes told you tales. I meant nothing by it, no harm, only—sometimes the truth didn’t seem good enough to tell.”
“I know,” I said indulgently. Gus tended to embroider rather brighter tapestries where he found the underlying cloth too plain. “I’m used to picking out what parts to believe.”
“That’s the trouble!” Gus was nearly shouting, and he jumped up, lip quivering. “Now, when I have something important to tell you, you’ll—pick away at it, and say it’s true and not true, until there’s nothing left! Why can’t you just believe everything?”
It struck me as a somewhat unjust demand, coming after he had confessed to habitual lies. But seeing his agitation, I fell back upon habits of my own. I soothed.
“Of course I will, Gus, if you tell me you’re serious. What is it?”
Gus bit his lip, but he sat down again. His flaxen tufts stood outlined on one side by the chill daylight and on the other by the fire’s ruddy blaze, and when he nodded those tufts bobbed comically. I was glad he could not observe the effect.
“Old Darius.”
“What of him?” Old Darius was a vagrant who sometimes appeared in our town, flaunting a knowing air which made him seem quite mad. He claimed to have been an actor and liked to recite from King Lear, which did nothing to diminish the impression. He hung about on the bridge by the mill and stole the occasional cake or cheese, and was sometimes chased away, sometimes tolerated, depending on inexplicable shifts in the town’s mood. For my part, I preferred it when he was absent, though I would not have cared to admit that he frightened me.
My childish wish was that Darius should be afraid of me. The certainty that he was not made the mention of him galling.
“I saw—I don’t think he noticed me, but what if he did? I’m sure he didn’t want to be seen, not doing—something no one can do! Oh, Catherine, what if he comes after me? What if he can hear me telling you this right now?”
I was sorry to have pledged Gus my belief, for this was just the sort of dramatic flight I most distrusted in him.
“Even if he’s hiding outside there’s no way he can hear you, not with the wind the way it is. Did you see him stealing? Everyone knows that he does that sometimes.”
“I saw him burn the snow.”
There was a pause as I tried out possible interpretations of that unlikely phrase. I found none that suited me.
“Burn it? How do you mean?”
“I mean—I was on my way home yesterday when it was getting dark, and I’d just come around that clump of willows where you can see the bridge? Darius was there, looking down at the ice spinning in the current. And you remember, the snow was starting in earnest then.”
I’d been inclined to doubt the story when Gus began it, but there was something in the telling that changed my mind. A staggered rhythm of hesitations, as if he were afraid to come to the point. When Gus lied, he lied with vigor and enthusiasm.
“It was terribly cold last night,” I agreed, in tones newly hushed. Gus leaned closer.
“It was. I was shaking; I wanted to rush home. But when I saw Darius I knew I couldn’t pass over the bridge.”
A detour to the next bridge down would have added nearly three miles to Gus’s walk.
“But—burning the snow? You can’t mean he lit a bonfire on the bridge! It would catch.”
“I don’t mean that!” He was fitful again, his voice a dangerous whine. “I mean the falling snow, the flakes all around him. They were alight! Everything else was dim, but he stood in a sort of cone—or an upside-down whirlwind—made of spinning flecks of fire. None of them touched him, I don’t think, or the bridge. In all that whirling white, there was this terrible golden interval.”
Were those really the words he used, a terrible golden interval? That is how I remember his speech, even now, and he was precocious in his use of language. Say then that this eleven-year-old boy vented such overheated poetry.
“That doesn’t sound”—I mulled the word possible, then flipped it over to look for a different one beneath—“natural.”
“No. Obviously not. I’ve thought about it all day, and it must have been”—and here Gus quite palpably rejected a word of his own—“something else.”
Witchcraft. Sorcery. Neither of us said it aloud, but the thought fired between us.
It was not a thought I wished to entertain. “What?” I said, and my voice lightened into something nearly mocking. “Just to stay warm? He must have known someone could happen by.”
Gus scowled. “It was very cold. And there are holes in his coat.”
He might use magic to mend it, then, I thought. Of course, I had no way to know at the time how very specialized sorcerers tend to be, or how often they scorn to put their magic to uses they deem beneath them. Gus now goes about in tattered clothes as well.
“So what did you do?” I asked instead.
“What do you think?” He was still angry with me. “He was turned away from me, but I thought—if he could do that, who knew what else he could do? I almost thought I could feel him looking at me with his back, a spot near the shoulder blade. I crept away as softly as I could, and then I ran. Oh, if he knows I know, what will he do to keep me quiet?”
In theory, we lived in a rational era, its heartbeat tapped out by telegraphs. In theory, the execution of suspected witches had been relegated decisively to the past. But the past has a way of circling back. Of haunting.
“Nothing,” I said. At once, I was surprised that Gus couldn’t see it. “He’ll think it’s funny to watch you pull away from him, that’s all. It’s not a story anyone would believe. Not coming from a child.” And noted liar. I skipped that amendment.
“Oh—but you’re right. They’d all be too stupid to believe me if I tried to warn them.”
“But in this case it works to your advantage! You don’t need to be afraid that Darius will try to hurt you, even if he did somehow know you were there. There’s no reason you should speak to him again.”
I’d meant to be comforting, but Gus sighed and tipped his head into his hands.
“No—I must! Even if he kills me for it.”
If I did not consciously believe in Gus’s strange account, my body seemed to believe it. Dread coiled in my stomach. “Why would you approach him? You got well away.”
“Catherine, don’t you see? If we’re meant to be different, different together, this could be our chance!”
Alarm quickened inside me at this intention—I wanted to throw my arms around Gus, pull him back from some sickening danger—but I had no time to challenge him. The door flew open with a spray of white and my two little brothers tumbled into the room, snow-cakes splitting at their elbows and crumbling from their limbs. I leapt up to herd them just outside and brush them off before they could soak the whole house.
Anna was crouched under a tree nearby, pressing pine cones and needles, dead leaves and twigs, into the snow. Her tiny reddened fingers wove a design of branching, radial lines, and she’d cast aside her mittens for precision’s sake. I paused to watch her. So absorbed was she in her task that she seemed not to notice the cold.
By the time I turned back to Gus, he was shrugging on his coat. He never spent time with my family if he could help it.
“Gus!” I said, with too much emotion for an ordinary goodbye.
“I must get home. I have a new piece to learn before my lesson tomorrow.” Already Gus displayed a striking gift for the piano. I both loved and envied him for the readiness with which music came at his call.
I wanted to argue, but none of the things I meant to say were allowable in my brothers’ hearing. Gus and I were constrained to an exchange of meaningful looks, and who can say if they meant the same things to both of us?
I walked back to Anna and observed her for a moment. Her design evoked something, some ragged-edged memory, but I couldn’t place it. Loose channels of white meandered between patches of bursting lines sketched in woodland debris.
“What is that pattern?” I asked her. “How did the idea for it come to you?”
Anna bit her lip. “I saw it,” she announced, halfway between bashful and defiant.
“Where? Do you mean you saw it in your mind?” But then I realized that she was pointing silently upward, and I looked to see the spreading crowns of trees separated by just such white channels, only made of sky instead of snow. It moved me in a way I could not name, and I knelt down and embraced her. Her warm little head leaned against my cheek.
If school was wasted on her, it was not at all in the sense Gus meant!