The Snow Child: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the wind.

     
    Mabel recalled the afternoon, less than two years ago. Sunny and brilliant. The smell of the orchard in the air. Jack was sitting on the porch swing of his parents’ house, his eyes shaded from the sun. It was a family picnic, but they were alone for the moment. She had reached into her dress pocket and pulled out the folded handbill—“June 1918. Alaska, Our Newest Homeland.”
    They should go, she had said. Home? he asked.
    No, she said, and held up the advertisement. North, she said.
    The federal government was looking for farmers to homestead along the territory’s new train route. The Alaska Railroad and a steamship company offered discounted rates for those brave enough to make the journey.
    She had tried to keep her tone even, to not let desperation break her voice. Jack was wary of her newfound enthusiasm. They were both nearing fifty years old. It was true that as a young man he had dreamed of going to Alaska, of testing himself in a place so wild and grand, but wasn’t it too late for all that?
    Jack surely had such doubts, but he did not speak them. He sold his share in the land and business to his brothers. She packed the trunks with dishes and pans and as many books as they could hold. They traveled by train to the West Coast, then by steamship from Seattle to Seward, Alaska, and by train again to Alpine. Without warning or signs of civilization, the train would stop and a solitary man would disembark, shoulder his packs, and disappear into the spruce trees and creek valleys. She had reached out and put her hand on Jack’s arm, but he stared out the train window, his expression unreadable.
    She had imagined the two of them working in green fields framed by mountains as tall and snowy as the Swiss Alps. The air would be clean and cold, the sky vast and blue. Side by side, sweaty and tired, they would smile at each other the way theyhad as young lovers. It would be a hard life, but it would be theirs alone. Here at the world’s edge, far from everything familiar and safe, they would build a new home in the wilderness and do it as partners, out from under the shadow of cultivated orchards and expectant generations.
    But here they were, never together in the fields, speaking to each other less and less. The first summer he had her stay in town at the dingy hotel while he built the cabin and barn. Sitting on the edge of the narrow mattress that had certainly bedded more miners and trappers than Pennsylvania women, Mabel considered writing to her sister. She was alone. The ceaseless sun never gave her a moment’s rest. Everything before her—the lace curtains at the window, the clapboard siding, her own aging hands—was leached of color. When she left her hotel room, she found only a single muddy, deeply rutted trail beside the railroad tracks. It began in trees and ended in trees. No sidewalks. No cafes or bookshops. Just Betty, wearing her men’s shirts and work pants and issuing endless advice about how to jar sauerkraut and moose meat, how to take the itch out of mosquito bites with vinegar, how to ward off bears with a blow horn.
    Mabel wanted to write to her sister but could not admit she had been wrong. Everyone had warned her the Territory of Alaska was for lost men and unsavory women, that there would be no place for her in the wilderness. She clutched the advertisement promising a new homeland and did not write any letters.
    When at last Jack brought her to the homestead, she had wanted to believe. So this was Alaska—raw, austere. A cabin of freshly peeled logs cut from the land, a patch of dirt and stumps for a yard, mountains that serrated the sky. Each day she asked, Can I come with you to the fields? but he said no,you should stay. He returned in the evenings bent at the back and wounded with bruises and insect bites. She cooked and cleaned, and cooked and cleaned, and found herself further consumed by the gray, until even her vision was muted and the world around her drained