I could shoot that gun easy as spitting. The tin gallery-geese, the apples off the orchard trees. I named my gun Rose Red for them fancy cranberries nubbling up against my palm. It was some years before I understood that pearls were more usually white. My main observation on the matter of the opal was that it changed the weight of my gun, which did not please me. If I was not shooting the pea-rifle at tin buffalo on the boardwalk, I spent the better number of my afternoons shooting bottles on my father’s high fences, also rabbits, black squirrels, and opossums which I gave to the groundskeeper. He took the meat and returned me the pelts and I judged that a sound bargain. On occasion I shot big black rats which I gave to the coyote, as I do not prefer rat fur. He crunched their skulls between his jaws. He watched me with yellow eyes while he did it. When he howled he sounded like a body dying.
Once, I took a bead on a seagull and shot it plumb out of the sky. I did not expect to come close to it. As soon as it dropped down toward the sea my heart fell through a hole in my chest. I looked for the bird all over the meadowy grass, crying miserable. The sun set my tears to boiling. I talked myself into the notion that I would find the seagull wounded through the wing and keep her and mend her and teach her to love humans and live in a house. She would help me and bring me fish and be my companion. She would sleep in my bed with her soft head against my shoulder.
I found the poor bird down at the bottom of a green hill. I had put my bullet straight through her black eye.
Snow White
Is Instructed
By Heron
and Lizard
Mr. H paid wages to these folk, though I am not accounting for the men he employed in San Francisco, Sacramento, Chicago, and New York as I never met them. Most all got some extra scratch for keeping quiet about my person.
Mrs. Maureen Whitney, Housekeeper
Miss Marie Andersen, Kitchen Maid
Miss Annie Dougall, House Maid
Miss Mary Duffy, Laundry Maid
Mrs. Catherine Kenny, Cook
Miss Beatrice Criscone, Scullery Maid
Mr. Thomas Button, Butler
Mr. George Button, Valet
Mr. Simon Paget, Hall Boy
Mr. Garland Clague, Groundskeeper
Mr. Linus Healy, Stablemaster
Mr. Peter Fjelstad, Stablehand
Mr. Henry Fredrik, Useful Man
Miss Christabel Enger, Governess
I had nursemaids and the like but I do not remember any of them.
Snow White’s Father
Replaces Arrows
With Bones
I was eleven years of age when Mr. H married the daughter of Mr. M.
The wedding occurred at high summer in the castle by the sea. A whole mess of new people suddenly tramped all over my private kingdom, tying gardenias to every damn thing and building silk tents in the golden grass. The Mr. Buttons were so fussed I thought their heads would fly off and Mrs. Kenny hollered something fierce at the sculleries. The cream was too feared to whip.
The new Mrs. H was a stranger to me. I knew the following interesting items concerning her: Mr. M was a railroad baron and owned most everything Mr. H didn’t. She had grown up in Boston and gone to a fancy Paris school for girls. She knew French and Spanish and Latin. Some kind of scandal worried her back east. I heard the wedding people say Mr. H was good to take her after all that business. But I also heard them say the only reason she would marry a man with no family name at all was because of her lowered station.
They all said she was beautiful. It hurt to look at her sometimes, if the wine stewards were to be believed and I did not. Who ever heard of a person so pretty it pinched to set eyes on them? Probably they were drunk, I reasoned.