My brother claimed I had my mother’s laugh. My sister said that my mother had been the best dancer in the county, that she was the envy of all the other girls.
Auntie’s people came from up north, in Quebec. Her father had been a trapper; her mother, an Indian woman. Auntie carried a hunting knife, and wore a long deerskin coat decorated with bright beads and porcupine quills. She spoke French, and sang songs in a language I never did recognize. She wore a ring carved from yellowed bone on her right pointer finger.
“What does it say?” I asked once, touching the strange letters and symbols on its surface.
“That life is a circle,” she answered.
People in town were frightened of Auntie, but their fear did not keep them away from her door. They followed the well-worn path to her cabin in the woods out behind the Devil’s Hand, carrying coins, honey, whiskey—whatever they had to trade for her remedies. Auntie had drops for colic, tea for fever, even a little blue bottle that she swore contained a potion so powerful that with one drop the object of your heart’s desire would be yours. I knew better than to doubt her.
There were other things I knew about Auntie, too. I’d seen her sneak out of Papa’s bedroom in the early morning, heard the sounds that came from behind his locked door when she visited him there.
I also knew better than to cross her. She had a fiery temper and little patience with people who did not see things her way. If people refused to pay her for her services, she’d call on them, sprinkle their homes with black powder pulled from one of her leather pouches, and speak a strange incantation. Terrible things would befall those families from then on: sicknesses, fires, crop losses, even death.
I tossed a handful of dark-green fiddleheads into the basket.
“Tell me, Auntie, please,” I begged, “can the dead come back?”
Auntie looked at me a long time, head cocked to the side, her small, dark eyes fixed on mine.
“Yes,” she told me at last. “There is a way. Few know of it, but those who do, pass it down to their children. Because you are the closest I will ever come to a child of my own, the secret will go to you. I will write it all down, everything I know about sleepers. I will fold up the papers, put them in an envelope, and seal it with wax. You will hide it away, and one day, when you are ready, you will open it up.”
“How will I know I am ready?” I asked.
She smiled, showing her small teeth, pointed like a fox’s and stained brown from tobacco. “You will know.”
I am writing these words in secret, hidden under covers. Martin and Lucius believe I am sleeping. I hear them downstairs, drinking coffee and discussing my prognosis. (Not good, I’m afraid.)
I have been going back in my mind, thinking over how all of this began, piecing things together the way one might sew a quilt. But, oh, what a hideous and twisted quilt mine would be!
“Gertie,” I hear Martin say above the clink of a spoon stirring coffee in his favorite tin mug. I imagine the furrow of his brow, the deep worry lines there; how sad his face must be after he spoke her name.
I hold my breath and listen hard.
“Sometimes a tragedy breaks a person,” Lucius says. “Sometimes they will never be whole again.”
If I close my eyes even now, I can still see my Gertie’s face, feel her sugary breath on my cheek. I can so vividly recall our last morning together, hear her saying, “If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?”
Martin
January 12, 1908
“Wake up, Martin.” A soft whisper, a flutter against his cheek. “It’s time.”
Martin opened his eyes, leaving the dream of a woman with long dark hair. She’d been telling him something. Something important, something he was not supposed to forget.
He turned over in bed. He was alone, Sara’s side of the bed cold. He sat up, listening carefully. Voices, soft giggles across the hall, from behind Gertie’s bedroom door.
Had Sara spent the whole night in with Gertie again? Surely it couldn’t be good for the girl, to smother her like that. Sometimes he worried that Sara’s attachment to Gertie simply wasn’t … healthy. Just last week, Sara had kept Gertie home from school for three straight days, and for those three days Sara doted on her—plaiting her hair, making her a new dress, baking her cookies, playing hide-and-seek. Sara’s niece, Amelia, offered to take Gertie for the weekend, and Sara had made excuses—she gets homesick so easily, she’s so frail—but Martin understood that it was Sara who could not bear to be without Gertie. Sara never seemed whole unless Gertie was by her side.
He pushed the worried thoughts away. Better to focus on the problems he understood and could do something about.