Authors: Meg Little Reilly
“We'll need to seal off the upstairs to retain the heat,” Pia said knowingly.
“But the downstairs is going to flood eventually,” I interjected. “Shouldn't we be moving this operation upstairs instead?”
“Sure,” she said sarcastically. “That would actually save us a lot of hassle because we'll die of hypothermia before things really get bad.”
We hated everything: the relentless cold, the smell of our ripening bodies beneath layers of dirty clothes, the knowledge that it was every household for itself at that point. Most of all, we hated the boredom. Hour after long hour went by with little to do but argue and stare out the window. We drank to stay warm and pass the time, but it only made us more morose.
The hailstorm that we'd heard reported from Cape Cod reached us that evening, rapping on the house like an angry lunatic demanding to be let in. By then, in my drunken haze, I could drift fuzzily into a childlike trance and watch the enormous ice balls outside with wonder. I didn't know nature was capable of creating such a weapon. I wanted to hold one in my hand, maybe keep it in our freezer for a while and take it out in the summer to impress August. I sat at the window, thinking these hazy thoughts and intermittently snapping back to reality, suddenly aware of the immeasurable damage the ice balls were invariably imposing on homes, businesses, cars, livestock, infrastructure...people. What was the world going to look like when we all got out of this, I wondered. Would we get out of this?
We fell into bed around eight, simultaneously disliking one another and grateful for the body warmth that each provided. With a winter hat, woolly socks and a heap of blankets, sleep was more comfortable than the alternative.
I dreamed that I was in a deep, rushing creek that came up to my waist. I was struggling to get out of the frigid water but couldn't move because my feet were stuck. The wildlife around me was frantic, tooâbirds, fish, chipmunks and a fox. Some were on the shore and some were flapping in the water with me, all rushing to get away from the creek. I made eye contact with a fox on the shore who looked terrified. I wanted to ask him for help and for some explanation of what was going on, but I couldn't find my voice. Suddenly, I thought I felt a fish chewing on my arm. I woke to find that it was Pia pinching me over and over.
“The hail stopped,” she whispered, careful not to provoke the weather gods.
I took a moment to realign myself with reality. My hat had slipped off in the night and my ears were freezing, but my feet felt sweaty under two sock layers. All was quiet; the sleet must have stopped.
“I'm going to pee,” she said.
The tone of her voice still sounded like she blamed me for The Storm, but I felt too hopeful to care.
I walked to the window and looked out the strip of exposed space at the bottom. It was snowing. It must have been snowing for hours because it was already so deep that our car was nearly buried and the contours of August's house could barely be detected through the trees. Somehow, in the nine hours we'd been asleep, several feet of snow had fallen and the temperature had dropped enough to freeze the wet ground beneath it. As always, the snow gave me comfort. It was quiet and insulating and somehow gentler. Vermonters knew how to traverse snow, I reasoned, which meant that we wouldn't be left to die in our cold, lonely house.
I fired up the woodstove and filled the kettle for coffee.
“This is a good start,” I said, determined to be optimistic.
“It's spooky, Ash,” Pia corrected me.
She was walking around the living room in an ankle-length nightgown of the sort I imagined Laura Ingalls Wilder wore on the prairie. “You think we're all gonna go outside and have a snowball fight? We don't have any idea what's coming. I think this is the calm before The Storm. I think it gets worse from here.”
“Well, then let's just kill ourselves now!” I snapped.
“Don't think I haven't considered it.”
She wasn't being facetious. I thought then and still think today that Pia probably had an end-of-the-world suicide plan along with every other emergency plan jotted down in her tiny notebook. But I couldn't go there, not then. And I didn't have much evidence to suggest that life was going to get better; it wasn't an argument I was prepared to lose. So I watched the flames grow through the iron pattern in the front door of the woodstove and stayed silent.
When it was warm enough in the living room to step away from the stove, I walked over to my post at the window. The snow would fall hard and fast for a few minutes and then appear to taper off, tossing aimless little flakes about before speeding up again. I craned my head around to see Peg's house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her puffing chimney, but there was no life coming from it. That didn't mean anything; she could be conserving wood. I could feel cold air seeping in through the old windows, but I held my face close, careful not to miss any movement that might be detected outside. I had a headache from all the wine we'd consumed the day before and the brisk air felt good on my lungs.
Pia turned the emergency radio on and we sat at opposite ends of the couch under two blankets, sipping French press coffee and clinging to every word the authorities fed us. States of emergency had been declared in every state in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Congress was considering for the first time voting remotely on a bill in order to free up relief funds and army reservists from around the country were being called to assist FEMA operations. It was satisfying to hear these institutions validate our experience, our life, but we didn't expect much from their response. Congress, relief funds...these things had no proximity to us. It no longer mattered that we lived in America, or even Vermont. We lived at 6 Chimney Hillâpopulation: 2. Our survival depended entirely upon the resources before us and our own grit. The US government wasn't going to rescue us; only we could do that.
I must have drifted off while we listened to the endless reports of mounting devastation because the next thing I heard was a
bang, bang, bang
on the door. I jumped to my feet and instinctively grabbed Pia in a protective hold. She shook me off and we walked to the front door.
“Ash! Ash! Ash! Let me in!” It was August, panicked and out of breath. “Ash, it's my dad!”
I jerked the door open, breaking the seal of ice that had hardened around it and letting a short wall of snow topple into the entrance of our house.
“August, what is it?”
“My dad got hit by a tree and he's bleeding!” August could barely get the words out. His face was flushed as he stared up at me, pleading for action.
“Oh God. Okay, I'm coming.”
I was already tugging on snow boots and looking for my coat. I could feel Pia bustling around me doing the same.
In thirty seconds, we were running behind August along the snow-covered path that connected our homes. There was a thin trail where his legs had pushed through the snow, interrupted by imprints of his body falling over in various places. The snow was so deep that it was inside our boots with the first step and soaking through August's jeans up to his waist, but we were too distracted to feel it.
When we emerged from the trail, I could hear the muffled sound of August's mother talking on the far side of their tiny house. We ran toward the voice and found her kneeling in the snow beside her husband, who was slumped on his side. The snow around his head was crimson, though it was hard to tell precisely where the blood was coming from. I could see the contours of a small tree under fresh snow just above his head.
“He came out for more wood and this tree must have fallen on him!” she shrieked to us. “The lines are still down. Do you have cell phones?”
August's mother was crying and screaming all at once. She must have been out there for a while because her flannel pajamas were soaked and her lips were turning blue. I could tell by her slurred speech that she was on something and had to fight off my anger.
“I have one, Liz!” Pia exclaimed, pulling her phone from a coat pocket and dialing 911.
“Thank you, Pia.”
“It's a recording saying that the networks are overloaded,” she said. “I'll just keep calling.”
“August can do that,” I said, aware of the petrified look on his face. He needed something to focus on. “August, this is your job now. Can you handle it?”
He nodded and Pia passed him the phone. She ran into the house looking for something.
I knelt down beside John and put my face close to his. He was breathing and alive, though I had no way of knowing just how alive he was. Pia emerged from the house and wrapped a blanket around Liz. Her teeth were chattering now and the color was leaving her face. Snow collected on our shoulders.
“We can't leave him out here,” Liz said. “He could die in this cold.”
Oh God, he could die either way, I thought. This man could die before us...before August.
No. I vowed not to let that happen and felt a surge of something sharp rise in my throat that I chose to believe was not vomit, but courage.
“She's right,” I said. “Let's move him inside.”
“I don't think you're supposed to move people in this state,” Pia said. The tone of her voice was kinder than anything I'd heard in a while. At that moment, all animosity between us was lost and we were a team working to save a human. “What if he has a spinal injury or something?”
“You're probably right, but what choice do we have?” I said. “If we move him, we might make things worse. But if we don't move him, he will definitely...not be okay.”
Death was all around us, but no one wanted to say the word again, not with August standing there.
Everyone nodded and we each moved in to take a part of the limp body. I slid my arms under each shoulder and hoisted his torso while the women each took a leg. He was a middle-aged man of average height and only a small gut, so I was shocked by just how heavy he felt in our arms. August bustled around us, opening the screened porch door and then the interior one. We shuffled inside, right up to their woodstove, and released his body gingerly onto the cold floor.
Pia ran around the house, pulling blankets from each bed and piling them high on August's father. She instructed his wife to crawl under the covers with him and speak continuously to let him know that she was close. This startled me in its tenderness and I will never forget how graceful she was in those terrifying moments.
I could see now where the blood was gushing from the side of his forehead, staining the blankets around them. I tore up a bedsheet and fastened a makeshift bandage around his head, which was soaked red within seconds, but it did seem to slow the bleeding. I raced through every medical memory in my past, searching for useful information.
“Let's elevate him,” I said, remembering the time I'd split my left eyebrow open in a grammar school sledding accident.
Pia looked around and pointed to couch cushions that we could use to help prop up his top half.
Liz was still talking softly to him, whimpering, really. She spoke about the day August was born, vacations they had taken, moments in their past that sounded embarrassingly small to me but held some meaning in their little family.
“It's ringing!” August yelled, holding the phone out for someone to take it.
I jumped and grabbed the phone just as a distant female voice finished her greeting.
“Hi, thank God,” I said into the receiver. “We're at 8 Chimney Hill in Isole. A tree fell on a man and he's losing a lot of blood from his head.”
“Okay, stay calm while I ask you a few questions,” the voice said.
“Can you send someone out here in this weather? You have to send someone!” I was yelling at the woman, afraid that I sounded as distant to her as she did to me.
“Sir, we do have a few emergency vehicles on the road at the moment. They can probably get to you, but it might take forty-five minutes to an hour.”
“No, we need someone here sooner!” I yelled. I was relieved to hear that it was even possible to send someone, but I wanted to impress upon her the urgency of the situation.
“He's not conscious,” I said, “and he has a head wound that's still gushing blood.”
I looked at August, who was fighting back tears.
“Okay, sir,” the tiny voice said. “If you can apply pressure to the wound and keep the body warm until they arrive, we will have someone there as soon as possible. Don't move him any more than you need to. May I have your name?”
I walked through a series of administrative questions with the small voice, which seemed designed to keep callers like me occupied until someone arrived to help. Finally, I told the voice that I was going to put her on hold and begged her not to hang up. We needed to keep the line for as long as the network would support it or Pia's phone would stay powered.
I set the phone down and joined the other three on the floor around the body. August's father stirred a little and we all gasped with hope. Then we lost him again. He seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness.
“August,” his mother said, “tell your father how much you love him.”
Pia and I looked at August, who began to cry.
“He's going to be just fine, August,” I said, unsure of whether his mother's assignment was a good idea. “Help is coming. But it might be nice for him to hear your voice right now.”
August nodded and wiped tears from his dirty face with dirtier hands.
“Daddy, I love you because you have funny jokes and we went fishing that one time.”
We all laughed and I blinked twice to keep the sting from my eyes.
Please don't die, please don't die, please don't die.
I hated this man for the father he'd been to August, but his death would be the final, cruelest act of neglect, and August didn't deserve that. I wanted him to live because August loved him and because he was a human trying to survive. We were all under assault in those hours of The Storm and we were all going to fight to survive. It required no thought at all.