Driftless (24 page)

He looked away from the album and closed his eyes, as though protecting them from the unbearable glare of memory.

Her illness had driven a wedge between them, interrupting their sacred dialogue, the source of his joy. How he missed that vital center—talking, touching, and living one life in two parts. The disease persisted until what she most longed for she could not share with him at all, and their citadel against the outside world was finally breached, ruined. His final request—that she allow him to accompany her in death—was denied, and after the denial a pledge exacted, an animal resignation to continue, perhaps not fully, not well, but to go on, like a broken machine.

Everyone told him he would get over it. Time would heal. He believed it himself and pictured a future in which his endowment would be restored, his full inheritance come through. He would start living again and feel the resurgence of good things returning. He believed in this hope and, soon, this belief became a promise. Thoroughly convinced by the promise, he even began to imagine how grateful he would feel when it was fulfilled.

Months and years passed and he still did not get over her death, and Jacob began to feel not just broken, but violated. The promise made to him—by himself and others—had been broken. Each day betrayed him to the next as each minute nurtured the bitter root of
betrayal until the only trace of his earlier hope had been wrapped in an anger over its irrecoverable loss. And there were times, many in fact, when it seemed the only way to remain alive was to remain alive angry.

As the tobacco burned lower in the bowl, the smoke became less sweet, acrid. The stove insisted in an increasingly strident voice that he sit farther away from it, and when the pipe finally went out he did not bother to relight it. He scraped the ashes and charred tobacco onto a piece of paper, tossed the paper into the fire, and closed the cast iron door.

DESPERATION

A
T FOUR O’CLOCK BONITA AND CORA HUNG THE CLOSED SIGN in the front door of the Red Rooster restaurant. Cora passed through the same door fifteen minutes later, leaving Bonita, who lived in town, to finish closing up.

It was already dark. Despite the bitter cold, the truck started, and before she was out of town the defroster made inroads in the frosted windshield. Soon, an expanding dome of clarity allowed her to sit upright and the assiduously whirring heater granted her the privilege of taking off her thick wool gloves.

The pickup’s headlights did not penetrate very far into the blowing snow, a situation made worse by her inability to suffer the dizzy ing sight of warp speed interstellar space travel whenever she attempted to use the high beams. But traffic stayed light, the yellow lines along the side of the state highway were visible in spots, and road crews had recently plowed. Other cars, she noticed, also drove on low beams, and there was a ghostly, ship-in-the-fog quality when she met oncoming vehicles—a noiseless, ethereal encounter with floating lanterns.

Moving at about twenty-five miles an hour, it took Cora almost forty-five minutes to reach the county road leading to the farm. She turned off the state highway, drove a short distance, and stopped the truck. The road before her had not been plowed—or not recently enough to make any difference. The path before her was not a road at all but a rolling plane of snow with only two barbwire fences to break the vast white continuity. Between those two fences, somewhere, were two deep ditches and two miles of Sand Burr Road. She took a deep breath, checked to make sure the truck was still in four-wheel drive, manually shifted into low gear, and inched forward, hoping to be able to stay an equal distance between the fences.

A short time later she stopped again, deciding that this was insane. Fences could never be relied upon to tell where roads were. And her memory of the contour of the ditches led her to believe that when one tire found its way off the road the steep sides of the ditch would turn every effort to pull it out into an illustration of tar-baby futility. Her only chance, she decided, was to go back and continue down the state highway to Hutch Road in the hope that it had been plowed.

But just getting back to the highway presented a problem. She could not, of course, turn around, and the truck’s backup lights were useless. She climbed out to look behind her, only to climb back in and say, out loud, “What was I thinking?” She reconsidered her options: going forward, backing up, or staying where she was. The last option seemed the least attractive—freezing to death would happen as quickly in the ditch as sitting in the road. Might as well try something. Backing up seemed the better option, because if she got stuck it was better to be stuck closer to the highway.

She assumed the direction her tires were pointed in—if she didn’t turn the steering wheel—would lead her back along the tire tracks that had brought her here. Her headlights would hopefully show if she were following the tracks.

It worked, though she climbed out five times to check behind her. She reached the place where the road widened and intersected with the highway and then found herself moving again to the left of the comforting yellow markers, meeting the friendly sight of fellow travelers carrying lanterns.

Cora turned on Hutch Road and saw fresh tracks to follow. After a mile and a half without incident, she turned onto Wilson Road, which ran more or less parallel to the wind and had not drifted over, and later turned onto Sand Burr again. This time she only had a quarter mile to inch forward, emboldened by the possibility that she could—if she had to—walk the rest of the way down Q.

Finally, she identified her snow- mounded mailbox, pulled into the drive and into the shed, and hurried through the deep snow to the house.

The warmth of the kitchen soothed her. She took off her coat
and boots, threw away the empty potato chip and cookie packages that were on the table, and the soda can. She assumed the children were in the barn and wondered what to make for supper. Even after staring into the refrigerator she had no definite ideas, so she decided to change out of her uniform and think about it in more comfortable clothes. Upstairs, while pulling a sweatshirt over her head, she wondered again about Seth and Grace, and she went down the hall to look in their rooms. No lights. She again assumed they were with Grahm in the barn and made a conscious decision to not be angry about the bag of cookies.

In the kitchen again, she noticed the clock—six fifteen—and looked out the window. The snow blew so thick she could not even see the lights along the side of the barn or the vapor light on the utility pole. Her imagination filled with stories of farmers frozen to death between barn and farmhouse—lost in a blizzard, unable to tell which direction to go.

She decided to go out to the barn. She took the foot-long flashlight from the tool drawer, but because of its inefficiency in penetrating the blowing snow, she went carefully from the porch to the tamaracks, from the trees to the fence, from the fence to the shed, from the shed to the milk house.

Grahm was milking when she found him, wedged between the all-white Holstein and the one with only three milking tits. Though it was sixty degrees warmer in the barn, the breath from the cows still misted in front of their wide, wet noses.

“Trouble getting home?” asked Grahm.

“A little, and I’m glad I had the truck.”

“Barn cleaner froze up again. Did you hear the weather?”

“No. Where’re the kids?”

“Haven’t seem ’em.”

“They’re not out here?”

“No. They aren’t in the house?”

“No. Did they do their chores?”

“I told you, I haven’t seen them. I thought they were in the house. I saw the school bus go by, around two o’clock. I was in the shop. They must be home.”

“Grahm, they’re not in the house.”

“Did you look in their rooms?”

“Of course I looked in their rooms. They’re not in the house. Their coats and boots are gone.”

“Maybe they’re in the haymow.”

Cora climbed up but knew as soon as she stepped off the ladder that they were not in the mow. It was dark and cold.

“Cora,” called Grahm, his voice anxious.

He had found the sleds that Seth and Grace had abandoned in favor of the plastic saucer resting against the door leading to the pasture.

They opened the back door and immediately the wind slammed it shut. They opened it again and with the aid of the barn lights and the flashlight saw the rounded trail leading away from the door, tapering and merging into level snow after several feet.

Cora began calling into the blowing snow, knowing that even from fifteen feet away she couldn’t be heard.

“They’re out there,” said Cora.

“We’re not sure,” said Grahm. “Let’s look again in the house.”

They went to the house, but did not find them. Cora called the police and ambulance, but neither gave assurance they could reach the farm before morning.

On the way back to the barn they stopped in the shed, where Cora remembered, or thought she remembered, seeing the sledding saucers. Both were gone. They went through the barn to the machine shed, and to the shop. Cora was growing hoarse from calling into the blowing snow.

Back in the barn, they stood again by the opened back door and looked out.

“If they’re at the sledding hill we’ll never find them,” said Grahm.

“They could have tried to get back,” said Cora. “They could be just a little ways away, lying in the snow.”

“They could be almost anywhere,” said Grahm.

“They’re out there,” said Cora. “I know it. I’m going.” And she started out.

“Wait!” shouted Grahm. “Wait!” He ran through the barn, and
when he returned he was carrying a hundred- foot length of hemp rope. He tied one end to the door and the other end around Cora’s waist.

“I’ll lead the way,” he said, “but don’t let go of me.”

They waded into the dark squall.

Deeper behind the barn, the snow was well above their knees, mid-thigh in places. The flashlight was good for only about eight feet, and Grahm moved it from side to side as they waded forward. The wind bit through their clothes, and ice covered the front of the scarves wrapped around their heads. Both tried not to think, focused narrowly on a shared belief that at any moment the flashlight beam would discover the hooded forms of Grace and Seth walking toward them out of the cold.

The blizzard hissed, groaned, and roared in the sky.

Cora felt the rope tighten around her coat. She pulled Grahm backwards and he almost fell on top of her. They’d come to the end of the run. It seemed hopeless. Seth and Grace could have been standing close to them, ten feet to either side, and they would have walked past them.

“We can fan out, move to the sides!” shouted Grahm into the ice covering Cora’s scarf. “Let me take you back first. You’ve got to keep your strength up.”

“No!” she shouted back.

Together they walked in wide arcs, judging their position relative to the door by the direction of the cord leading away from Cora’s waist. After completing each arc, they came toward the barn another two yards, coiled another loop of rope, and headed in the other direction.

By the time they were back inside the barn, the flashlight had gone out and Cora could no longer feel her feet. They closed the door, shook the ice from their scarves, and sat, exhausted, on bales of straw. A short time later Cora got up again, the rope still around her waist, and said, “I’m going back.”

“It’s no good,” said Grahm.

She went out. Grahm fell in behind her, leaving the barn door open so the light would shine out ten feet. Without the flashlight,
they could barely see their hands before their faces. They slogged forward and Cora continued calling into the howling wind. At the end of the rope, Cora called again, listened, and called again.

Grahm had a bad feeling and was quickly getting an even worse one. They were exhausted, their feet and hands numb. Each effort proved more difficult, every motion less sure, less controlled. They were stumbling, falling. As they lost strength—and they were losing it quickly—their mental faculties would also fail. Soon they wouldn’t be able to keep thoughts in their proper places. Their sense of hope was becoming linked with their physical desperation. They thought—Cora thought—that as long as they kept floundering through the snow there was hope. The obvious conclusion was to continue until they fell over and froze. They were losing the ability to make reasonable judgments about the risk involved, the likelihood of succeeding, and the possibility that their children had not gone sledding at all.

“Let me try to find another length of rope!” shouted Grahm.

And then what Grahm had been afraid would happen, happened. Cora fought with the cinch around her waist, pulled the loop of rope up over her head, and placed it in Grahm’s hands.

“No!” he shouted, and she turned and walked into the snow. A moment later she was gone, replaced by blizzard.

Grahm was alone, with nothing but a frozen rope that attached him to his barn.

COMPLETING THE CIRCLE

G
RAHM STOOD ALONE IN THE BLIZZARD, HOLDING THE FROZEN rope connected to the barn, to safety, and to everything he had known prior to this moment. His hands and feet were completely known prior to this moment. His hands and feet were completely numb. In a clear, calm, and unified vision, he saw his past life—not only everything he had done but everything he had hoped to do. He saw his goals and his dreams in perfect detail. He saw his beliefs, things he could not know for certain but still held true, as clearly as pictures drawn on paper. He saw how his personality had been formed, how he had taken what he had been given and with the help of both longing and loathing fashioned from it a way to be. He saw how he had failed at, succeeded in, avoided, and delayed the challenges he faced. He saw his old friend Fear standing near him, protecting him from both real and imagined harm. He saw his parents and understood how they were a part of him and he a part of them. He saw his sister’s fierce spirit burning out of their childhood like a wild torch. He saw his land when his parents and grandparents farmed it, and before it was a farm, when the Singing People walked across it on their way to the river, carrying their children. He saw everything he had ever known and ever hoped to know. He held his life in his hands, let the rope fall away, and rushed headlong into the blizzard. The void welcomed him, and three or four steps later his gloves found the back of Cora’s coat and he pulled her toward him. They fell backwards into the snow and got back up.