The Snowfly Read Free

rattle windows and freeze the most facile minds with terror, but she could also modulate to a tone as soft as cumulus, pat a cheek with love tender enough to melt the hardest skin, then backhand it black and blue in a wink. We simultaneously loved her and feared her, praised and cursed her, emulated and scorned her, followed her and fled her, but we never messed with her. She believed in matriarchal power, meaning raw female force, fully exercised. She did not suffer fools or pay heed to any view but her own. As would be said of such individuals in later years, she walked the talk.
    Only the old man would stand up to her and sometimes Lilly and I, cast as spectators, would watch and with certainty know the old man had carried the day, but Queen Anna would never cave to defeat. I once thought I heard her tell him that perhaps they both had valid points. I no longer remember the subject being debated, but the Queen’s admission was tantamount to conceding defeat and I headed for cover. A draw with the old man presaged a burning need for a victory elsewhere and I didn’t care to be a conquest of convenience.
    She was not cruel, just unpredictable. She would catch houseflies midflight between her forefinger and thumb, then catapult them carefully out the kitchen window. She would not kill until food was at issue and then she would kill with the steady hand of a practiced assassin. She raised chickens and named them, but when it came time to eat she would helicopter them and take the cleaver to the remains. Whatever name the bird had worn would never be used again, her way of paying homage, I supposed.
    When I was six or thereabouts, she shot a spikehorn through the kitchen window. The old man was off hunting and the buck had wandered under the clothesline and she popped a slug in the .16-gauge and blew out the windowpane, dropping the animal and severing the clothesline all with one round. This happened without warning and gave Lilly and me nightmares for days afterward. By the time the old man got home, the venison was gutted and hung, the lines and pane replaced.
    â€œLike the damn Queen of the Amazons,” the old man had declared proudly.
    The name stuck.
    Queen Anna was partial to long-bladed sharp knives and could dice and chop and slice and hack while she scolded and lectured. Talking was important to her. At meals she’d take a portion of everything, cut it up, and mix it all so that she didn’t have to look at what she was eating or make choices. She didn’t want anything to interfere with her monologues.
    We were a family of few means, meaning we lived on the margin, but the old man and Queen Anna were frugal and clever and Lilly and I never truly went without. The old man never had a steady job; I doubt he could tolerate laboring for the same person for too long. But he always had work, especially when we needed something. Queen Anna shopped the way a trophy hunter passed up bucks in anticipation of finding the biggest, and she made it clear that our poverty did not demean us. “There is no shame in being poor, as long as you are clean.”
    I used to go along with the old man to hunt, but he always carried the weapon. He had taught me to shoot and said I had a real knack, but the killing part never set well and he did not press it. I gladly ate whatever he managed to get, but I could not shoot at living things.
    One autumn he shot three deer, a buck and two does, and as we cleaned them he lit a smoke and looked troubled. The law entitled him to one deer.
    â€œOrdinarily, I follow the rules,” he said. “But the winter ahead feels like a bad one and we’ll be able to use this meat.”
    â€œWhat will Queen Anna say?”
    â€œShe’ll huff and puff and say a prayer for me leading you astray, but she knows our need as well as I do, and in the end she will take the meat and move on. Your mother has some strong notions about right and wrong, but she’s not the kind