Hand, Elzabeth - SS - Winter's Wife.pdf - Elizabeth Hand - przemosta

Winter’s Wife

ELIZABETH HAND

One of the most respected writers of her generation, Elizabeth Hand won

both the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award for her story “Last

Summer at Mars Hill,” and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy

Award on a number of other occasions as well. Her books include the

novels Winterlong, Aestival Tide, Icarus Descending, Image of Support,

Waking the Moon, Glimmering, and Black Light. She’s also written a

num-ber of Star Wars novels, including Maze of Deception, Hunted, A

New Threat, and Pursuit, and movie novelizations such as Twelve

Monkeys, Anna and the King, Cat-woman, and The Affair of the Necklace.

Her acclaimed short fiction, which has ap-peared in most of the major

markets in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, has been collected in Last

Summer at Mars Hill, Bibliomancy, and Saffron & Brimstone. Her most

recent book is the novel Mortal Love. Coming up is a new novel,

Generation Loss. She lives with her family in Lincolnville, Maine.

In the — appropriately enough — chilling story that follows, she

shows us what happens when all the money and influence and bright

shiny gadgets of the modern world come into conflict with ancient magic.

Magic old and slow and cold, and as immovable as rock.

* * * *

INTER’S real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas

County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him

Winter. He lived in an old school bus down the road from my house, and my

mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out

of her. It wasn’t even him that scared her, she hadn’t even met him yet; just

the fact that there was this creepy-looking old school bus stuck in the

middle of the woods, with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge

piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and

in the summer all kinds of chain saws and stuff, and in the fall deer and

dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a

gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pig’s head with

tusks, which my mother said was scarier even than the coy-otes. Which,

when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you can’t blame her for

being freaked out. It’s funny now because she and Winter are best friends,

though that doesn’t mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago,

where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker

Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.

The school bus, when you get inside it, is sweet.

Winter’s family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and

even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.

“I have Passamaquoddy blood,” Winter says. “If I moved somewhere

else, I’d melt.”

He didn’t look like a Native American, though, and my mother said if

he did have Indian blood it had probably been diluted by now. Winter was

really tall and skinny, not sick skinny but bony and muscular, stooped from

having to duck through the door of the school bus all those years. He

al-ways wore a gimme cap that said WINTER TREE SERVICE, and I can

remem-ber how shocked I was once when I saw him at Town Meeting

without his hat, and he had almost no hair. He’d hunt and butcher his own

deer, but he wouldn’t eat it—he said he’d grown up dirt-poor in a cabin that

didn’t even have a wooden floor, just pounded earth, and his family would

eat anything they could hunt, including snake and skunk and snapping turtle.

So he’d give all his venison away, and when people hired him to butcher

their live-stock and gave him meat, he’d give that away, too.

That was how my mother met him, that first winter fifteen years ago

when she was living here alone, pregnant with me. There was a big storm

going on, and she looked out the window and saw this tall guy stomping

through the snow carrying a big paper bag.

“You a vegetarian?” he said, when she opened the door. “Everyone

says there’s a lady from away living here who’s going to have a baby and

she’s a vegetarian. But you don’t look like one to me.”

My mother said no, she wasn’t a vegetarian, she was a registered

certified massage therapist.

“Whatever the hell that is,” said Winter. “You going to let me in?

Jesus Q. Murphy, is that your woodstove?”

See, my mother had gotten pregnant by a sperm donor. She had it all

planned out, how she was going to move way up north and have a baby and

raise it—him, me—by herself and live off the land and be a massage

thera-pist and hang crystals in the windows and there would be this good

energy and everything was going to be perfect. And it would have been, if

she had moved to, like, Huntington Beach or even Boston, someplace like

that, where it would be warmer and there would be good skate parks,

instead of a place where you have to drive two hours to a skate park and it

snows from November till the end of May. And in the spring you can’t even

skate on the roads here because they’re all dirt roads and so full of

potholes you could live in one. But the snowboarding is good, especially

since Winter let us put a jump right behind his place.

But this part is all before any snowboarding, because it was all before

me, though not much before. My mother was living in this tiny two-room

camp with no indoor plumbing and no running water, with an ancient

woodstove, what they call a parlor stove, which looked nice but didn’t put

out any heat and caused a chimney fire. Which was how Winter heard about

her, because the volunteer fire department came and afterwards all anyone

was talking about at the Shaker Harbor Variety Store was how this crazy

lady from away had bought Martin Weed’s old run-down camp and now she

was going to have a baby and freeze to death or burn the camp

down—probably both—which probably would have been okay with them

except no one liked to think about the baby getting frozen or burned up.

So Winter came by and gave my mother the venison and looked at

her woodpile and told her she was burning green wood, which builds up

cre-osote, which was why she had the chimney fire, and he asked her who

sold her the wood, so she told him. And the next day the guy who sold her

the wood came by and dumped off three cords of seasoned wood and

drove off without saying a word, and the day after that two other guys came

by with a brand-new woodstove, which was ugly but very efficient and had a

sheath around it so a baby wouldn’t get burned if he touched it. And the day

after that, Winter came by to make sure the stove was hooked up right, and

he went to all the cabin’s windows with sheets of plastic and a hair dryer and

covered them so the cold wouldn’t get in, and then he showed my mother

where there was a spring in the woods that she could go to and fill water

jugs rather than buy them at the grocery store. He also gave her a chamber

pot so she wouldn’t have to use the outhouse, and told her he knew of

someone who had a composting toilet they’d sell to her cheap.

All of which might make you think that when I say “Winter’s wife” I’m

referring to my mom. But I’m not. Winter’s wife is someone else.

Still, when I was growing up, Winter was always at our house. And I

was at his place, when I got older. Winter chops down trees, what they call

wood lot management—he cuts trees for people, but in a good way, so the

forest can grow back and be healthy. Then he’d split the wood so the

peo-ple could burn it for firewood. He had a portable sawmill—one of the

scary things Mom had seen in his yard—and he also mills wood so people

can build houses with the lumber. He’s an auctioneer, and he can play the

banjo and one of those washboard things like you see in old movies. He

showed me how to jump-start a car with just a wire coat hanger, also how to

carve wood and build a tree house and frame a window. When my mother

had our little addition put on with a bathroom in it, Winter did a lot of the

car-pentry, and he taught me how to do that, too.

He’s also a dowser, a water witch. That’s someone who can tell where

water is underground, just by walking around in the woods holding a stick in

front of him. You’d think this was more of that crazy woo-woo stuff my

mother is into, which is what I thought whenever I heard about it.

But then one day me and my friend Cody went out to watch Winter do

it. We were hanging out around Winter’s place, clearing brush. He let us

use the hill behind the school bus for snowboarding, and that’s where we’d

built that sweet jump, and Winter had saved a bunch of scrap wood so that

when spring came we could build a half-pipe for skating too.

But now it was spring, and since we didn’t have any money really to

pay Winter for it, he put us to work clearing brush. Cody is my age, almost

fourteen. So we’re hacking at this brush and swatting blackflies, and I could

tell that at any minute Cody was going to say he had to go do home-work,

which was a lie because we didn’t have any, when Winter shows up in his

pickup, leans out the window, and yells at us.

“You guys wanna quit goofing off and come watch someone do some

real work?”

So then me and Cody had an argument about who was going to ride

shotgun with Winter, and then we had another argument about who was

going to ride in the truck bed, which is actually more fun. And then we took

so long arguing that Winter yelled at us and made us both ride in the back.

So we got to the place where Winter was going to work. This field that

had been a dairy farm, but the farm wasn’t doing too good and the guy who

owned it had to sell it off. Ms. Whitton, a high school teacher, was go-ing to

put a little modular house on it. There’d been a bad drought a few years

earlier, and a lot of wells ran dry. Ms. Whitton didn’t have a lot of money to

spend on digging around for a well, so she hired Winter to find the right

spot.

“Justin!” Winter yelled at me as he hopped out of the truck. “Grab me

that hacksaw there—”

I gave him the saw, then me and Cody went and goofed around some

more while Winter walked around the edge of the field, poking at brush and

scrawny trees. After a few minutes he took the hacksaw to a spindly

sapling.

“Got it!” Winter yelled, and stumbled back into the field. “If we’re

going to find water here, we better find a willow first.”

It was early spring, and there really weren’t any leaves out yet, so what

he had was more like a pussy willow, with furry gray buds and green

show-ing where he’d sawn the branch off. Winter stripped the buds from it

until he had a forked stick. He held the two ends like he was holding

handlebars and began to walk around the field.

It was weird. Cause at first, me and Cody were laughing—we didn’t

mean to, we couldn’t help it. It just looked funny, Winter walking back and

forth with his arms out holding that stick. He kind of looked like

Franken-stein. Even Ms. Whitton was smiling.

But then it was like everything got very still. Not quiet—you could hear

the wind blowing in the trees, and hear birds in the woods, and someone

running a chain saw far off—but still, like all of a sudden you were in a

movie and you knew something was about to happen. The sun was warm, I

could smell dirt and cow manure and meadowsweet. Cody started slapping

blackflies and swearing. I felt dizzy, not bad dizzy, but like you do when the

school bus drives fast over a high bump and you go up on your seat. A few

feet away Winter continued walking in a very straight line, the willow stick

held out right in front of him.

And all of a sudden the stick began to bend. I don’t mean that

Winter’s arms bent down holding it: I mean the stick itself, the point that

stuck straight out, bent down like it was made of rubber and someone had

grabbed it and yanked it towards the ground. Only it wasn’t made of rub-ber,

it was stiff wood, and there was no one there—but it still bent, point-ing at a

mossy spot between clumps of dirt.

“Holy crap,” I said.

Cody shut up and looked. So did Ms. Whitton.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Hand, Elzabeth - SS - Winter's Wife.pdf

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