"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow..."
The Snowman, Wallace Stevens
"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow..."
The Snowman, Wallace Stevens
Snowman
Will Yellow was puzzled by the light in his room when he woke. It was a cold, silent, solid brightness. It was a light without solar clemency. It was snow. The white blanket that the night had dropped upon the land. Still falling from the sky’s forbidding blankness of lilac. Will Yellow realised that it was snow. Snow. Snow! He stirred and gouged the sleep out of his eyes, releasing a large yawn, and stood himself up, a small blonde head on a spine on legs. Looking over the whiteness of snow and ice, the soft fall of flakes from the sky, the icicles paused in their motion of inevitable downwardness from the windowledge, listening to the secret quiet of the padded thicket and woods, and touching the chill freshness with his tongue, Will Yellow decided that the snow was a fortunate and felicitous event and that he would act upon this meteorological rarity accordingly. He must build a snowman. A magnificent snowman. It had been almost three years since he had experienced snow, descended the steepest street in his toboggan and nearly blinded a girl called Susan Pink with a snowball that had a stone in it. He was a different person then.
Will Yellow’s mother Willa Yellow, and his father William Yellow Senior, were shuffling about in the kitchen, moving through their routine of adult things: Sertraline, Progesterone, coffee, paper, news, cigarette, shave, floss with not much avidity but Will Yellow was avidity itself as he careered across the perfectly white lawn in his yellow raincoat and wellingtons, stifled in his flight in the usual way by the stymying lumps of snowfall in which he kept stumbling. He whooped breathlessly, began a snowangel, and caught some crystals of falling snow on his tongue. He looked at his parents in the kitchen. His mother’s face looked at him without lucidity. She was lost in a cloud of steam from the kettle. Will Yellow waved at his mother. She didn’t respond. Will Yellow shrugged and set about building a snowman. He bent down, crouched and began to author a sphere of snow out of the ground. Gradually the thick white ground responded to his hands, and what they etched. A chilly, white ball of snow began to grow. Will Yellow rolled it about, nurturing the compacting cold globe as it evolved. He wanted to lengthen it out and then sit it pointing its length upwards, like a stump, a proud strong torso. But it was no use. The beginnings of Mr. Snowman had been very promising. There seemed to be a sort of sympathetic communion between the touch of Will Yellow’s gloved hands, and the snow of the earth. It was between these two things that Mr. Snowman had been gradually given his conception, like a flower, coaxed into the beginning of being between the sun and the earth. But snow and boy did not seem to understand each other, trust each other, after a while. The big foundational snowball was malformed and Will Yellow was not satisfied. He sat on the ball, pale with despondency. If I can build Mr. Snowman, and he looks good…maybe mummy and daddy will come out and play, he thought. He resolved to build Mr. Snowman, he would be called Father White, and he would be marvellous. Just as Will Yellow rose up onto his feet with renewed determination, Susan Pink came by. She stumbled by with a quite playful shambling gait in her chequered mac and little blue beret. She saw Will Yellow beginning work again on his white snow being, noticed it was in fact Will Yellow and was rather cold with him. She knew it was an accident with the snowball, and the stone, and her eye, but she still didn’t think he deserved absolution for his sin of snowplay. Will Yellow wasn’t really sure what to do, he didn’t like to confront situations of social unease, and he looked around desperately for his mother, searching rather feverishly for rescue, as Susan Pink said hello.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Building a snowman. He’s going to be called Father White,” Will Yellow replied.
“Can I help?” she piped fervently, already setting about helping without waiting for an answer.
“Um…No,” Will Yellow finally ruled. He didn’t like girls. He thought they possessed something in their nature, in their individual component and as a race, quite singularly malevolent.
“Please pleaseplease!” Susan Pink, a girl of only seven, ejaculated. Grimacing, and pounding her scrunched fists rather forcefully and uncouthly on her legs.
Will Yellow sighed. “Alright. You can help. But please don’t muck about, this is very important to me. Father White has to be stupendous. For my mother. I want to cheer her up”.
Susan Pink looked down at the misshapen and lumpen sphere of snow that Will Yellow had rolled. She laughed: “That’s not very good, is it!”
He was really starting to loathe Susan Pink. “How would you do a snowman then?” he questioned, quite crossly.
She pondered the question with a rather vapid and mischievous pondering face. “I know a way,” she said. “You’ve got to stand like this,” she said, standing very erect… “then I build the snowman around you.”
Will Yellow thought about this. He didn’t see any downside. Oh…yes he did:
“I want Father White to be a mansize…I’m small. It will be too small. It’s not going to work.”
“Get your dad to do it.” Susan Pink said.
So he went indoors to ask. He tugged at his father’s dressinggown cord.
“Daddy. Can you stand outside in the snow so I can build a snowman around you. It will take a while but it will be very good when it’s finished…”
“You want me to stand outside in the freezing cold for an indeterminately long period of time, while you heap me in freezing snow and rub me in snow…wise up, Will Yellow. Go and play sensibly. Build a normal snowman like normal children do…”
“But I want my snowman to be better than theirs. I want it to be as big as a man.”
“Sorry, son. I can’t help you…”
Will Yellow returned to Susan Pink, relaying the negative answer his father had given.
“It will have to be you then,” she cried. She really was awfully eager. A breeze surged stiffly through a caked oak tree and dislodged a large clump of snow, upheld in the still boughs. More snow. More material.
“Do it! It will still look like a man. Just stand here. You can tell me what to do” Susan Pink urged coaxingly.
Reluctantly, crest-fallenly, Will Yellow agreed. He stood, like a soldier, or a Scots Guard, stock still and quite erect. And Susan Pink began to rub him in snow, caking him in a covering of fresh chill white. It was terribly cold though.
“It’s too cold in my mouth,” Will Yellow said.
“Oh we can’t have that,” Susan Pink assured. She unfurled her scarf and shook out the flakes. Then she put a bit of the scarf in Will Yellow’s mouth so he’d be protected. She wrapped his neck tightly in the scarf’s remaining length so it wouldn’t dangle unhelpfully. He protested unintelligibly about not being able to talk, and therefore not being able to instruct Susan Pink how to build Father White, and he was finding it hard to breathe. But he couldn’t make himself heard through his gag.
She worked, worked, rubbed, sculpted, piled, shovelled, spread, moulded, covered. And it was a perfect specimen. Naturally, Will Yellow’s heart stopped with the cold, and the exposure. But he was the perfect model, the perfect guide to the male form around which Susan Pink wrapped the white garment, folded the snow, in a deathly tight and chilly hug. You could still see his open eyes, a congealed stare through the mask of snow in which a pale personality lingered. He stood there, encased, encompassed, a snow statue, a boy inside a frame of ice, like a case of glass, with such a look! Frozen. In clothes of frozen snow. The sculpted covering of snow about him, topped with the beret from Susan’s own head. A little white snowman, turning bluely glassy, in a beret. Father White didn’t work as a name really. So Susan Pink decided that he would be called David Blue and went home.
“Bye, David!” she cried out as she trotted home for tea. The little taut iced figure, glassy, erect, and unblinking, stood out in the cold before the house, on the lawn, near a tree, as the snow continued to fall, as the breeze continued to blow, animating the snowfall almost into a white blizzard, and the chill in the air plummeted and every lake and puddle turned stiff with a bulging, fattening film of evening ice.
Willa Yellow looked out at the snowfigure before the house from the kitchen window. It was darkening.
“William Yellow Senior!” she cried summoningly. Her husband came rather sluggishly.
“What?” he enquired tiredly.
“Look at Will Yellow’s snowman. Isn’t it grand!” the warm marmalade glow of the kitchen illuminated the still figure. A darkened peach. The eyes almost had life. He seemed to be looking at them.
“It’s very small,” William Yellow Senior said.
“But it has personality! Almost as if there’s something living inside it.” she returned, almost retortingly.
“He wanted to build it around me, you know. He wanted to turn me into a snowman. I said No,” William Yellow Senior said.
“Oh, how sweet. He’s a sweet little thing, Will Yellow. Where is he anyway?” the mother finished, looking about, as though her son were the sugar, sugar temporarily misplaced. Then his father’s look changed, and he regarded the snowfigure deeply, deeply, he looked into its eyes, and at its glassy form, illumined glitteringly by the kitchen light, and the pallor and perforation of its gaze, its stare, staring its thousand-yard stare at him through the swirling snow,
“He’s at rest,” his father began. “He’s at rest from his labours. He gave everything to that snowman.”