The Winter People

Deep down, I understand the true cause of these feelings: I blame Martin for what happened to Gertie. If she hadn’t followed him into the woods that morning, she would still be here by my side.

 

“We will see our way through this,” he tells me, squeezing my hand in his own, which is as cool and damp as a fish. He gives me a warm, loving smile, but behind it I see his concern.

 

I do not answer. I do not tell him that I no longer wish to get through it. That what I want most is to sneak away and throw myself down into the bottom of that well so I can be with my Gertie once more.

 

Even Reverend Ayers can offer no relief.

 

He came this afternoon to discuss the service and burial arrangements for Gertie. I had been putting off this discussion, but today Martin and Lucius announced that it was time, we had waited long enough.

 

We sat at the table over cups of coffee that grew cold before us. Reverend Ayers had brought a basket of muffins his wife, Mary, had made. There was some talk of burying Gertie up at the cemetery by Cranberry Meadow with Martin’s family, but I wouldn’t have it.

 

“She belongs here,” I said. Martin nodded, and Lucius opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. And so it was decided we would bury her in the small family plot behind the house, beside her tiny brother, my mother and father and brother.

 

As Reverend Ayers was leaving, he took my hand. “You must remember, Sara, that Gertie is in a better place now. She’s with our Lord.”

 

I spat in his face.

 

I did this without thinking, automatically, as if it were as natural to me as taking a sip of water when thirsty.

 

Imagine, me spitting in Reverend Ayers’s face! I’ve known the man all my life—he baptized me, married Martin and me, buried our son, Charles. I have struggled all my life to believe his teachings, to live the word of God. But no more.

 

“Sara!” Lucius said, looking alarmed as he pulled a clean white handkerchief out of the front pocket of his trousers and handed it to the reverend.

 

Reverend Ayers wiped at his face and stepped back away from me. He looked … not angry or worried about me, but frightened of what I might do next.

 

“If the God you worship and pray to is the one who brought my Gertie to that well, who took her from me, then I want nothing more to do with him,” I said. “Please leave my house and take your vicious God with you.”

 

Poor Martin was horrified and stuttered off excuses for me.

 

“I’m so sorry,” he said, as he and Lucius walked Reverend Ayers out. “She’s sick with grief. Not in her right mind.”

 

Not in my right mind.

 

But I am in the same mind I have had all along. Only now there is a piece missing. A Gertie-shaped piece cut from the center of my very being.

 

And perhaps, with this new grief, I am seeing things clearly for the first time.

 

I understand now that Martin has never known the real me. There is only one person who ever did—who saw all of me, all the beauty along with the ugliness. And it is that person I long for now.

 

Auntie.

 

For so long, I have done my best to push all my memories of her away. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to convince myself that she got what she deserved; that her death, terrible as it was, was the consequence of her own actions. But that’s never been what I truly believed. What I think about most is how I should have done something to stop it. If I had found a way to save her, I tell myself, maybe my life might have turned out differently. Perhaps all the tragedy and loss I have suffered is somehow linked to what I did that one day when I was nine.

 

It’s funny that she is the person I long for most in times like these, when my heart has been shattered and I see no sense in going on.

 

She is the only one who might know what to say to me now, who might be able to offer true comfort. And I know, I just know, she would laugh when I told her I spat in the reverend’s face!

 

She’d throw back her head and laugh.

 

 

Reverend Ayers says there is only one God,” I told Auntie once. It was only a few weeks after I’d seen Hester Jameson out in the woods and asked Auntie about sleepers. “And that it is wrong to pray to anyone or anything else.”

 

Auntie laughed, then spat brown tobacco juice onto the ground. We were bumping along in her old wagon, all loaded with animal pelts, for a trip to a dealer in St. Johnsbury. She made the trip four times a year, and he always gave her a fair price for the skins. This was the first time Father had consented to let me make the overnight trip with her. Before leaving, Auntie had sprinkled some tobacco on the ground around the wagon and said a safe-journey prayer to the spirits and the four directions.