“Let us do something,” I say. “Even if it is a small thing.”
It is an easy thing to take a handful of snow and fashion it into a boy, easier than most anyone would believe. Snow longs to be something else. Bread does not wish to be flesh, water does not wish to be wine, stones do not wish to bleed—but snow, snow wishes always to be the thing that is not, a thing that might survive the spring thaw and live out its days whole and untouched. And a boy, a boy who is loved, well, what finer shape is there?
And so we two fashioned it into a shape, and we set the silver dollars for its eyes and we wrote its name upon its forehead. Then, of course, it was not a thing of snow any longer but a thing of flesh: a thing with Milo Sandifer’s bright blue eyes, barely nudging five-feet, and still as tongue-tied as any boy ever was.
“Missus Suh-s-sabatelli,” he whispered, trying out that fresh new mouth of his.
“Yes, boy,” I allowed with a sigh. “That I am. Now get you home to your mother, she’s been calling after you, and don’t you bother her with what you’ve been getting up to. Just give her a kiss, you hear?”
“Right,” the boy said, “Yes, of course. I’ll do that. Thank you, ma’am.”
Already his tongue was working better than poor Milo’s ever did. But it wouldn’t matter none, I reckoned. Missus Felder unwound the scarf from around the king snowman’s neck. The hole in its chest where we had dug out the boy yawned like a chasm. Like Adam’s unknit ribcage.
“Here,” she said, and she wrapped the scarf around Milo. “You ought to keep warm now. Little boys catch cold so easily.”
He blinked at her as if trying to remember something, but then he shrugged the way that little boys do. Then he was off, scampering across lawns and driveways, home to his mother. I looked on after him, staring at the places where his feet had touched the ground, barely making a dent in the dusting of white over the grass.
“What do you reckon?” I asked Cheryl. She’d gone to patting away at her snowman and sealing him up again, eyeless, blinded, a naked thing without that scarf, only the hat on him now, only that gorgeous silk thing to make him a man and not just a lump.
“He’ll last as long as he lasts,” she said with a sniff. “Snow is snow. Even if it wants to be a boy.”
“And Lillian?”
She didn’t speak for a time, and I had to rub at my arms for warmth. For me it had already gone February and the little snowflakes that landed upon my cheeks were crueller things than the ones the other missuses would be feeling as they took their sons and daughters to church.
“Maybe it’s a kindness you’ve done here, and maybe it isn’t.” She wasn’t looking at me. Cheryl couldn’t ever look at you when she was speaking truths. She smoothed the freeze over the place where she drew out the boy, and her fingers were like twigs, black and brittle, against the white of it. “You can’t ever know the thing a person truly wants, but you keep on trying, don’t you? I hope your husband is a happy man, I hope you give him children of your own one day.”
“Well,” I said, but I didn’t know what more to add to that.
She was right, of course, she always was about such things: maybe it was a blessing and maybe it wasn’t, but the boy came home to find his mother curled up in his bed surrounded by arithmetic workbooks and bottle rockets and adventure paperbacks. And he kissed her gently on the forehead, and she looked at him and smiled, her heart giving out, just like that, at the joy of seeing him once again. But the boy had been made good and sweet, and so he wrapped himself in her arms, and he lay next to her until the heat of her had faded away entirely.
That heat.
Poor thing didn’t know any better. But snow is snow, even when it is flesh. A thing always remembers what it was first. When Joe Sandifer came home it was to find his wife had passed on, and from the dampness of the sheets he knew she must have been crying an ocean.
Joe was a good man and a strong man; his fingers were long and graceful. He pulled up the sheet around his wife, and he kissed her gently, and he buried her the following Tuesday. Perhaps it was hard for him for a time; it must have been, for he had loved his wife dearly, and he had lived only to see her smile, but the spring came and went, and then a year, and then another year, and he was not the kind of man who needed wait long for a partner. It was Ellie Hawley in the end, childlike and sweet, whose husband had brought her the blue dress with the raglan sleeves, whose husband had left her behind when he found a Boston widow with a dress that didn’t make it past the knees and legs that went all the way to the floor. Ellie was the one who managed to bring a smile to Joe’s face and to teach him that there were still beautiful things left in the world for a man who had lost both wife and son.
And so it goes.
And it goes and it goes and it goes.
Until one day Milo came back.
“Missus Sabatelli,” he said when I opened the door to him, that bright June Tuesday with the scent of fresh-mown grass drifting through the neighbourhood, nine in the morning, just like he used to.
He was a grown man then, the height of his father, with his father’s good looks and easy smile. A handsome man. The kind of man you’d fall in love with, easy, but the kind of man you’d never know if he loved you back.
“Milo,” I said, and I had to hold on to the doorframe. I was half expecting him to be wearing that star-spattered cloak of his, to chew on his words as if they were gristle in his mouth. But he didn’t.
“Thank you for that kindness,” he said, “but I’m not Milo any longer. I’ve learned a thing or two since then.” I saw then that he was right. Whoever he was, he wasn’t little Milo Sandifer.
“You’ve come back,” I said. I shivered. For him it was June, but for me the wind was already blowing crisp and cool, carrying the smoky scent of September with it. Time was running faster and faster ahead of me.
“Yes,” Sayer said, lingering on that “s” with a lazy smile as if to show me he could do it now and easily at that. “I’ve come home again. Would you mind if I stepped inside, Marianne? I’m not one to gab on porches, and if it’s not too impertinent I could use a cup of coffee something fierce.”
“Of course, boy.”
He chuckled, and the sound was rich and deep and expansive. I stepped aside, and he took off his hat as he came in. Not the hat, of course. The one he wore was an expensive, grey Trilby that matched his expensive, grey suit and his expensive, leather shoes. He followed me into the kitchen: I regretted that I hadn’t had time to clear up properly that morning, but he didn’t seem to mind so much. He said nice, polite things about the colour of the curtains and about the state of things in general, and when he sat it seemed as if he were too big for the chair, as if that chair wanted to hold a small boy in it but had now discovered a man instead. The coffee’s aroma was thick in the air, and I found I could use a cup myself so I poured for both of us, and served it plain. He seemed the sort to take his coffee black.
I was nervous. It had been some time since there had been a man in my house.
“You found your way then?” I asked him.
“I did, ma’am. I surely did.”
“And you know about your mother?”
He smiled, but this time there was something else to the smile. “I do,” he said. “Missus Felder told me of all that, and I’m sorry for it, I suppose. She whispered it to me while I was gone. She cajoled, she begged, and she pleaded. She has a tongue on her could scald boiling water, Missus Felder does, could strip paint off a fence.”
His eyes were bright blue, and surprisingly clear. I wondered if he was lying to me. I could see he had learned how to lie. Like lying was easy and beautiful.