44 pages • 1 hour read
The Snow Child
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BetaPart 3, Chapters 45-52Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 45 Summary
Mabel frets that Faina and Garrett are spending too much time together. When Faina tells Mabel that she has decided to spend the summer with them, however, Mabel is certain Faina has fallen in love. Jack says nothing, but later he sees the two making love in the woods. When Jack confronts Garrett, he punches the boy in his rage.
Part 3, Chapter 46 Summary
Faina and Garrett share moments of tenderness in the woods. They anticipate the summer and making love in the wild. They take every opportunity to kiss, to hold each other and “taste each other’s lips and eyes and hearts” (323).
Part 3, Chapter 47 Summary
Jack is sure that Garrett will not be back to help plow. Garrett, however, returns with the late spring to help with Jack’s field per their standing agreement, but the two men do not talk.
Part 3, Chapter 48 Summary
Mabel senses something is wrong with Faina, who confides in her that she had been bleeding and that now she is not. Mabel struggles to explain the menstrual cycle, and she understands that Faina must be pregnant. Mabel is ecstatic. Years after she dreamed of holding her own child, she has been given this second chance. She cautions Faina that she can no longer keep running to the woods and that she must tell Garrett.
Part 3, Chapter 49 Summary
When Garrett asks Jack for Faina’s hand in marriage, Jack understands that Garrett sees him and Mabel as Faina’s parents. He is impressed by the boy’s humility and commitment. That night, Jack dreams of a beautiful cabin for the couple in the woods. When he wakes, he tells Mabel that he will build it for them.
Part 3, Chapter 50 Summary
Part 3, Chapter 51 Summary
Weeks later, Jack shows Garrett the foundation of the cabin. Together the two work to finish it before the wedding. Faina still disappears for stretches of time, sensing how completely her life is about to change. When Garrett shows Faina the cabin, her gaze is distant, and then wordlessly she slips off to the woods.
Part 3, Chapter 52 Summary
Esther tells Mabel she is uneasy over the girl her son is marrying, saying, “She’s a wild thing from the mountains” (343). She worries Faina will not stay. Mabel worries too; in a nightmare, she watches helplessly as Faina drowns in a river. But the outdoor wedding goes off beautifully. Mabel is overwhelmed by Faina’s resplendent dress made from elegant feathers. In a teary embrace, Faina whispers to Mabel, “I wish to be the mother you are to me” (351). Cottonseeds shower the wedding party like a delicate dusting of snow.
Part 3, Chapters 45-52 Analysis
These chapters reveal how the real world cannot be simply happy, cannot give us joy uncomplicated by sorrow or love or anxiety. Even as Faina and Garrett experience love, that love becomes the subject of puritanical concerns, even objections, by both Mabel and Jack.
When Garrett adheres to the long-standing agreement and helps Jack with the farm in early spring despite their angry confrontation over Faina, Jack sees the young man’s integrity. And when Faina confides in Mabel that she is pregnant, Mabel, now a de facto grandmother, embraces the opportunity to become part of a baby’s life nearly two decades after the loss of her child. The four become at last what Jack and Mabel have dreamed of since their blackest days in Pennsylvania: They are a family, supportive and encouraging, committed and joyous. As Mabel thinks, maybe this fairy tale can end in joy.
But the narrative counters that simplistic wish-fantasy—even as the young couple moves toward their summer nuptials, even as Faina’s love for her unborn child makes her radiant, even as Garrett and Jack work to complete the cabin, something disturbs. Esther’s intuition detects the problem. Faina, she argues, cannot be easily domesticated.
Faina grows discontent. When Mabel recalls setting a simple box trap to capture a fairy she believed flitted about her family’s garden only to trap a terrified songbird, that foreshadows Mabel’s attempt to capture Faina. But we are not immune to fantasy. As the narrative moves toward that wedding under that radiant summer sun, we are tempted to believe momentarily in the tonic possibility of a fairy-tale ending. But Faina’s wedding dress so elaborately decorated with feathers reminds us that she is that trapped songbird. We then understand what Mabel does not: There is painful irony in Faina’s comment to Mabel, “I wish to be the mother you are to me” (351). She wishes, certainly, but understands even then that she cannot fulfill this role.
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