The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey Read Free Book Online

old for this,” he said.
    “Are we?”
    He reached down and pulled Mabel to her feet until they stood chest to chest, panting and smiling and covered in snow. Mabel pressed her face into his damp collar and he wrapped his arms, thick with his wool coat, around her shoulders. They stood that way for a while, letting the snow fall down upon them.
    Then Jack pulled away, brushed snow from his wet hair, and reached for the lantern.
    “Wait,” she said. “Let’s make a snowman.”
    “What?”
    “A snowman. It’s perfect. Perfect snow for a snowman.”
    He hesitated. He was tired. It was late. They were too old for such nonsense. There were a dozen reasons not to, Mabel knew, but instead he set the lantern back in the snow.
    “All right,” he said. There was reluctance in the hang of his head, but he pulled off his leather work gloves. He took her cheek in his bare hand, and with his thumb wiped melted snow from beneath her eye.
    “All right.”

     
    The snow was perfect. It stuck in thick layers as they rolled it into balls along the ground. Mabel made the last, smallest one for the head, and Jack stacked them one atop the other. The figure barely stood above his waist.
    “It’s kind of small,” he said.
    She stepped back and inspected it from a distance.
    “It’s just fine,” she said.
    They patted snow into the cracks between the snowballs, smoothed the edges. He walked away from the light of the lantern and cabin window, into a stand of trees. He came back with two birch branches, and he stuck one into each side of their creation. Now it had arms.
    “A girl. Let’s make it a little girl,” she said.
    “All right.”
    She knelt and began shaping the bottom into a skirt that spread out from the snow girl. She slid her hands upward, shaving away the snow and narrowing the outline until it looked like a little child. When she stood up, she saw Jack at work with a pocketknife.
    “There,” he said. He stepped back. Sculpted in the white snow were perfect, lovely eyes, a nose, and small, white lips. She even thought she could see cheekbones and a little chin.
    “Oh.”
    “You don’t like it?” He sounded disappointed.
    “No. Oh no. She’s beautiful. I just didn’t know…”
    How could she speak her surprise? Such delicate features, formed by his calloused hands, a glimpse at his longing. Surely he, too, had wanted children. They had talked about it so often when they first married, joking they would have a baker’s dozen but really planning on only three or four. What fun Christmas would be with a household full of little ones, they told each other their first quiet winter together. There was an air of solemnity as they opened each other’s presents, but they believed someday their Christmas mornings would reel with running children and squeals of delight. She sewed a small stocking for their firstborn and he sketched plans for a rocking horse he would build. Maybe the first would be a girl, or would it be a boy? How could they have known that twenty years later they would still be childless, just an old man and an old woman alone in the wilderness?
    As they stood together, the snow fell heavier and faster, making it difficult to see more than a few feet.
    “She needs some hair,” he said.
    “Oh. I’ve thought of something, too.”
    Jack went toward the barn, Mabel to the cabin.
    “Here they are,” she called across the yard when she came back out. “Mittens and a scarf for the little girl.”
    He returned with a bundle of yellow grass from near the barn. He stuck individual strands into the snow, creating wild, yellow hair, and she wrapped the scarf around its neck and placed the mittens on the ends of the birch branches, the red string that joined them across the snow child’s back. Her sister had knitted them in red wool, and the scarf was a stitch Mabel had never seen before—dewdrop lace, her sister called it. Through the broad pattern, Mabel could see white snow.
    She ran to a corner of