What Became Of The Apple? John Barrie

John Barrie

You already know the first part of the story. A jealous queen, a poisoned apple. A kiss that broke death’s spell. But magic doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are ripples. A mouse who becomes a carriage man doesn’t see the cat in the same way he used to. The merchant who trades away magic beans is forced to reexamine the way he does business. And so, as Snow was taken from her home among the Dwarves to be encased in glass and gold until the fateful moment the prince would find her and free her from the evil queen’s spell—what became of the apple? To know that, we must first look to Cole, the sleepy little village at the edge of the Seven Mountains. In this city, there lived a butcher, Per Alouette, and his wife, Mary, who was as timid as an unmagical mouse. She possessed no fairy-blessings, no sign in the stars, no hidden royal blood. The only thing she had in her life was a beast, and alas—he was but the ordinary kind. The kind who filled his gullet with drink and flew into a rage, the kind who could smile so sweetly to his customers but said such awful things with his fists. Per Alouette worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week, and then fell into the bars along Main Street. He came home just before the witching hour, redolent of cheap ale and the stink of the butchery and crawled into bed to take what he took to be his, and that was if he was in a good mood. Some days he would drink so much he’d get into fights with the Dwarves from the mines— “Let them stay under mountain where they belong,” he’d say. More often than not, these were fights he’d lose, until he came home to his wife to reenact them. Their marriage had gone on this way for years, and Mary anticipated that it would continue so until one of them was dead. It had been the same for her own mother, until the sickness had taken her. She had always counseled Mary to remain obedient to her husband, for, “What is a husband but a king unto the home?” On the worst days, Mary thought of her mother, and prayed to the creator for her wisdom and strength, though she felt certain those prayers were unheard. She was thinking of her mother again on that fateful morning, as she made her way to the market, until her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the greengrocer, crying into his 60

asked. “Oh, Monsieur Blanchette, whatever is the matter?” she

“It is Snow,” he said. “She has been poisoned with a tainted apple.” “That’s terrible,” Mary said. She did not know the girl who tended to the Dwarves’ homestead, but she saw her from time to time in the street, a sweet, sad looking thing. Per would talk about her from time to time; speculate what must be going on behind closed doors in the cottage. “It isn’t right,” he’d rant, poking Mary in the forehead with a finger still encrusted in dried calves’ blood. “Pretty lass like that, she could be making someone quite the wife.” The grocer continued to set the scene. The previous attempts on Snow’s life. The Dwarves coming home and finding her dead on the stoop. “They say it’s the doing of a witch,” the man said, blowing his nose into his sleeve. “That she was some kind of deposed princess.” Mary hardly heard the man. An idea had come over her, a wonderful, terrible idea. She placed her basket on the counter. “You know, I just realized that I forgot my coin at home,” she said. “I’ll have to come back later.” It was nearly evening when she reached the Dwarves’ cabin. It had been too much to wish for—for who was she to have her wishes granted—but the tainted apple was still on the ground by the door. It was the reddest apple Mary had ever seen, a vision of perfection except where Snow White’s teeth had pierced the skin and revealed the corruption underneath. There, the apple was black, and the flesh looked less like fruit than an infected wound. She crept forward, picked it up. How could Snow not have felt its power, she wondered. Even she, a lowly butcher’s wife, could feel the way it pulsed with malice. Or maybe the greengrocer was right, and the dead girl really was that sweet, that innocent, that she could not conceive of such hatred. Mary lifted the apple to her lips. Her stomach roiled at the thought of what she was about to do, but she knew that this was it. The answer to her prayers. She was about to bite into the fruit when the cottage door opened. One of the dwarves—she didn’t know which one—stared down at her. His eyes were red from crying. “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I wasn’t—”

“Hold,” he said, and went back inside. She sat on the stoop, heart beating fast. It took all her power not to drop the apple and run into the darkening woods. She expected him to return with his brothers, to scold her or even blame her for what had transpired that day. Instead, he handed her a box. “These were Snow White’s,” he said. “You should have

them.”

She pulled open the lid and saw a glass baking dish. A tin of flour. Nutmeg. Fresh goat’s butter. “Thank you,” she said, but he’d already gone back in-

side.

Mary Alouette went home, trembling the entire way. She put on a pot of beans for supper. And, singing for the first time since her father had given her to this man, she baked a pie. She did not rush. She rubbed the butter into the dough with her fingers. She cut little bluebirds out of the scraps of dough, and placed them on top of the lattice, and washed them with egg. Bluebirds in cages on one side of the pie, and bluebirds in flight on the other. And if Per Alouette noticed, in his drunken stupor, that the apple had gone darker than the caramel surrounding it, it didn’t stop him from tucking into a great big slice. Per Alouette’s death was ruled a consequence of heavy drink, and—since he had no children or living male relatives— his shop went to Mary, who went on to have a long and successful life. In fact, it was she (long after the dwarves had gone back under the mountain and magic began to dwindle in the lands) that recounted the tale of Snow White to the traveling storytellers, and she told it true, except for one bit. There was no true love’s kiss, or at least not until Snow had already been revived. She wasn’t dead at all, just put into a deep sleep, and if it hadn’t been for the Dwarves’ decision to display her above ground, the witch queen’s true plan would have come to fruition. The fairest of them all would have awakened to find herself buried alive, unable to claw her way through six feet of earth. But that didn’t happen. The traveling prince heard her cries, the pounding on glass, and he came to her and set her free. And everyone lived happily ever after.