Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All by Jane Yolen Page A

with her. She put a bowl over the top of Papa’s head to help shape the haircut, though she left his beard as it was, long and flecked with gray. And then for weeks he didn’t look like Papa till the hair on his head grew back again. By then he was as shaggy as an old beggar man.
    Old. Beggar man.
    Old .
    Maybe Stepmama was right. Papa was growing old even as we watched. And there’s not much a person can do about that.
    Strangely, Stepmama didn’t throw away the hair she cut from Papa’s head. I watched her stick it in her apron pocket, and then later on saw it on her mirror table in a little blue bowl the color of a robin’s egg when I went in to get her bed linen for washing and airing. I was only in her room because she was out hanging up shirts on the line, which was too high for me to reach, and grumbling about it like always though she could have just tied the line a little bit lower down. I didn’t tell her that. She’d sent me in to fetch the sheets and truth to tell, I was glad to go into her room. It drew me in as if I’d been pulled toward it with a magnet. We’d studied magnets in school that past year in science.
    I stared at the little bowl and tried to think why anyone would keep Papa’s hair.
    Maybe, I thought, it’s because she loves him so much she can’t bear to be parted from even the smallest part of him. I’d already seen how Papa was when Mama passed away. Grown-ups just acted different than kids. Different in unfathomable ways. Crazy ways. Just like they were tetched in the head. So, keeping someone’s hair in a bowl was just another mad adult thing to do.
    I put my finger into the bowl and stirred the hair around. There was a buzzing sound in the room as if bees had gotten in, and I suddenly got a short, sharp shock that ran up my finger, up my arm, up to the roots of my own hair.
    I turned and ran out of there screaming without collecting the sheets and once I stopped hollering, I had to tell Stepmama what had happened.
    She grabbed me by both arms and instead of giving me a hug and telling me there was nothing wrong and I was just fine said, “If you cannot go into my room without touching things, Snow, then you shall not be allowed to go into the room at all.”
    And for a year I didn’t.
    Wouldn’t.
    Couldn’t.
    My heart wouldn’t let me. Nor would my legs.
    When people came to call—it was a very small town after all and everyone wanted to meet the new woman if only to talk about her when they’d left—Stepmama would go over to Papa and whisper something in his ear. Then Papa would suddenly leap up and about, almost laughingly so, dancing and joking and calling Stepmama by a dozen different names like “Honey” and “Sweetsop,” and once even by my dead mama’s name, Ada Mae. Though right after they left, he’d flop back in the chair, dreaming through the rest of the day.
    Tetched, the both of them, I tell you.
     
     
    Cousin Nancy didn’t remark on Papa’s condition directly to me, but some of the ladies in church did when she brought me to Christmas service, the one time that year Stepmama couldn’t find an excuse for me to stay home.
    “Well, I never . . . ,” Miss Caroline said over my head, her one good eye all but sparking fire. “That man was so animated, why, it’s like he’d been drinking all day long, though I thought he was teetotal. Mourning can sometimes take a man that way.”
    “Lem is not teetotal, though he rarely drinks,” Cousin Nancy told her. “And certainly not to excess. And he’s no longer mourning, he’s married.”
    “Well, he surely was animated, ” Miss Caroline repeated, the fire in her good eye now banked.
    And her sister, Miss Amelia, added, “Itchy, I’d have said.” She pursed her lips.
    “Itchy and odd,” Miss Caroline shot back.
    “No odder than before, going up that mountain all the time and . . .”
    And from the other side, Miss Mae Morton, Papa’s old cousin, with white hair that was so patchy her pink