Read The Snow Child for Free Online

world around her drained of color.

     
    Mabel smoothed her hands across her lap, chasing the wrinkles in the fabric again and again, until her ears caught a few of the words around her. Something about the mine north of town.
    “I’m telling you, Jack. Don’t give it another thought,” George was saying. “That’s a quick way to leave this world.”
    Mabel kept herself calm and seated.
    “Did you say a coal mine?” she asked.
    “I know times are tough, Mabel, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of,” George said and winked at her. “You just keep your man at home and hang in there. It’ll all work out.”
    When George and his sons began to talk about the many gruesome ways a man can be maimed and killed underground, Mabel turned to Jack and whispered fiercely, “You were thinking of leaving me to work in the mine?”
    “We’ll talk of it later,” he said.
    “All you folks have got to do is get a moose in your barn and save your money for spring,” George said.
    Mabel frowned, not comprehending. “A moose?” she asked. “In our barn?”
    Esther laughed.
    “Not a live one, dear,” she said. “Meat. Just to keep you fed. We’ve done it years past ourselves. You get mighty sick of mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, boiled meat, fried meat, but it’ll get you through.”
    “Pretty late in the year for moose,” the youngest boy mumbled from where he stood in the kitchen, his hands shoved in his pockets. “He’d been better off getting one just before the rut.”
    “They’re still out there, Garrett,” George said. “He’ll just have to work a bit harder to find one.”
    The boy shrugged doubtfully.
    “Don’t mind him,” Esther said, thumbing in the boy’s direction. “He thinks he’s the next Daniel Boone.”
    One of the older sons laughed and punched him in the arm. The younger boy clenched his fists and then shoved his older brother hard enough to cause him to bump into the kitchen table. A noisy scuffle commenced, and Mabel was alarmed, until she saw George and Esther taking no notice. Finally, when the ruckus became too much even for the Bensons, Esther hollered, “That’s enough, boys!” and they settled down again.
    “Garrett might be too big for his britches, but I tell you, Jack, he is a hand with a rifle.” George jutted his chin proudly toward the youngest boy. “He shot his first moose when he was ten. He brings home more game than all the rest of us.”
    Esther leaned toward Mabel and said, “Including all those blessed ptarmigan.”
    Mabel tried to smile, but her thoughts were unspooling. He was going to abandon her. Leave her alone in that small, dark cabin.
    Now the men were all talking of hunting moose, and once again she had the unsettling sense that they had all conversed on this topic before, and, once again, she was the ignorant stranger.
    “You got to carry your rifle with you, even when you’re just working in the fields,” she heard the youngest son tell Jack. “Get up in the foothills. Most times, the snow’d already pushed ’em down to the river. But it’s late in coming, so they’re still up high, eating birch and aspen.”
    The boy barely managed to conceal his disdain for Jack. “Too bad you didn’t shoot one in the fall,” he said. “You’re going to have to hunt hard. Moose only herd up during the rut. They’re different then. Bulls go crazy through the woods. Knock their bloody antlers into the trees. Roll in their own piss. Bawl for cows.”
    “I heard something, month or so back,” Jack said. “I was out splitting wood, and something started grunting at me out of the woods. Then ‘Thwack. Thwack.’ Like somebody else was chopping wood.”
    “Bull moose. Calling to you, smacking his antlers against a tree. He wanted to fight you. He thought you were another bull.” The boy almost smirked, as if Jack were far from the stature of a moose.
    Esther saw Mabel’s discomfort but misunderstood it.
    “Don’t worry, dear. You’ll get used to