Winter Is Not Forever (10 page)
When the day was over and I headed for the house with a full pail of milk, I was exhausted.
The kitchen had never looked or smelled more inviting. The warmth from the cookstove spilled out to greet me, making my face sting with the sudden heat after the cold. The aroma of Uncle Charlie’s hot stew and fresh biscuits reminded me of just how hungry I was.
Grandpa took the pail from me and went to strain the milk and run it through the separator. I didn’t argue, even though it was normally my job.
Pixie pushed herself up against me as I fought with coldnumbed fingers to get off my heavy choring boots. She licked at my hands, at my face, anywhere that she could get a lick in. I guess it seemed to her that I had been gone for a very long time.
When I went to wash for supper, Uncle Charlie spoke softly from the stove where he dished up the food.
“Your face looks a bit chilled, Josh. Don’t make the water too warm. You might have a bit of a frostbite there.”
I felt my nose and my cheeks. They seemed awfully hard and cold. I heeded Uncle Charlie’s advice and pressed a cloth soaked in cool water up against them. Even the cold made them burn.
Over the meal we discussed the storm and all I had done to try to prepare for it. I noticed that the woodbox was stacked high. Grandpa had been busy, too.
“Looks like it could be with us for a while,” commented Grandpa. “Sky is awful heavy.”
I didn’t know much about reading storms, and I hoped that Grandpa was wrong. One day of this was enough.
We listened to the news on our sputtering radio while we warmed ourselves with coffee. The forecast wasn’t good. According to the man with the crackling voice, the storm could get even worse during the night and wasn’t expected to blow itself out for at least three days.
I could sense even before I awoke the next morning that the radio had been right. The storm was even worse than the day before.
When I went out to face the wind and the cold, the range cows were pushing tightly around the barn, bawling their protest against the storm. I knew that they needed shelter; I also knew that they could not all fit inside. The barn was reserved for the milk cows and the horses. I felt sorry for those poor animals. We really needed some kind of a shed to protect them against such storms.
That’s one thing I’ll do first thing next summer,
I vowed to myself.
The next day was a repeat of the two that went before it.
All day the wind howled. Then, near the end of the day the wind abated and the snow slackened. The temperature dipped another five degrees.
Even in the farmhouse we were hard put to keep warm. Uncle Charlie lit a lamp and put it down in the cellar to keep Aunt Lou’s canned goods from freezing. We added blankets to our beds and set an alarm so we could get up in the night to check the fire.
The next morning arrived clear and deathly cold. The water in the hand basin in the kitchen was skimmed with ice. I lit the lantern and started for the barn, hating the thought of going out to face the intense cold. My breath preceded me in frosty puffs of glistening white. Even the moon that still hung in the west looked frozen into position.
Now that the wind had died down, I really had work to do. The animals outside hadn’t really eaten properly since the storm had begun. It had been just too hard to fight the wind. Now they stood, humped and bawling, hungry and thirsty, and nearly frozen to death.
By the time the storm had passed and the temperature was back to normal again, we had lost three of the piglets, two of the older cows, and half a dozen chickens. Three cows had lost the lower portions of their tails to frostbite, and our winter supply of feed had already been seriously depleted. If the winter continued this way, we would find it difficult to continue feeding all of the stock. Even so, we fared much better than some of our neighbors. The storm had killed a number of the animals in some herds.
As Christmas approached, I was eager to spend time with Aunt Lou and Uncle Nat. Little Sarah was sitting by herself and even attempting to pull herself up. And the opening of the Christmas gifts was, of course, even more fun with a baby in the house. We all had a gift for Sarah, and we took her on our laps and pretended that she was taking part in the opening of the present. We also pretended that she was excited about each new rattle or bib. She wasn’t; in fact, she liked the rustle of the wrapping paper better than anything else.
I even brought Pixie with us. In the colder weather I usually left her at home when we went to town, but today I tucked her inside my heavy coat and she managed just fine. Sarah loved her, and I put Pixie through all of her tricks just to make Sarah squeal and giggle. She seemed to like it best when Pixie “spoke” for a little taste of turkey. Then Sarah would wave her chubby arms and squeal at the top of her voice. We all had a good laugh over it.
In the afternoon I slipped out and hurried over to the Foggelsons’. I wanted Mrs. Foggelson to know that I was thinking about her—still praying for her, too. Besides, I was a little anxious to hear any news about Camellia.
Before I went up their walk, I could see that there was no one home. The heavy curtains were pulled shut and no one had cleaned the snow from the walk for several days. The shovel was leaning up against the back porch, so before I headed home again I decided to clear the snow from the walk. I didn’t know when the Foggelsons would be back again or if it would even be evident to them that someone had been there, but I did it anyway.
I wondered if there was some chance that Mr. Foggelson had changed his mind and they had gone together to see Camellia. I hoped so. It would be a lonely Christmas for both Mrs. Foggelson and Camellia if they were to spend it apart.
I thought of Willie, too. I had received a letter from him just a few days before Christmas. “I really miss the family and friends,” he wrote. “As exciting as my studies are, I’m lonesome, even weary. But I’ve been invited home with one of the guys from the college who lives nearby.” I was glad that Willie had somewhere to go.
When I was younger, I had always thought that as soon as Christmas had come and gone, we should be working our way toward spring. I hoped that it would be true this year. I had loved winter as a boy, but then I hadn’t had the responsibilities of seeing that everything and everybody made it through without mishap or suffering. Winter had simply been a time of sport— sleigh rides, tobogganing, ice skating, snowfalls and snowmen. I had loved it. Now winter was a time of struggle against the intense cold, the biting wind, the deep snow, the shortened days. The weather made it harder to chore, and the supply of winter feed and cut wood seemed to evaporate before my eyes.
Thinking of all this as I walked back to Aunt Lou’s, I began to feel rather dejected. Then, it began to snow again—huge, soft, gently falling flakes. I looked up toward the sky to see the snow drift toward my face and marveled anew at the beauty of it. It might not be easy to live with winter, but it certainly was beautiful when I just took the time to look closely at it.
I
MAY HAVE BEEN READY
for spring as soon as Christmas was over, but I guess no one thought to tell Mother Nature. She stormed and fretted and gave us a hard time all through the month of January. I looked forward to February—surely things would improve!
But they didn’t. When we couldn’t get to church a couple of Sundays, I missed the church service, the good dinner, and the brief visit with little Sarah.
And the bad weather didn’t help Uncle Charlie improve, either. His arthritis seemed to twist his fingers off to the side more and more each day. I inwardly ached for him when I watched him trying to accomplish some simple task. But he was independent and needed to feel that he was carrying a full share of the workload.
About mid-February, Grandpa came down with a bad cold.
He struggled along trying to treat himself for several days but got no better.
“Grandpa!” I insisted. “You’re just getting worse. I’m gonna fetch Doc to take a look at you.”
“Bah!” he sputtered. “Doctors can’t do nothin’ I’m not already doing.”
When it got worse and he had a hard time breathing, I saddled Chester and headed for town—over Grandpa’s protests.
“Sure enough,” Doc murmured. “Pneumonia. You get that girl of yours out here to take care of you ’til you get back on your feet.”
So Aunt Lou and Sarah moved out to the farm to nurse Grandpa back to health. Doc had sent him to bed with orders that he was to follow; Aunt Lou and I both knew he wouldn’t obey if she wasn’t there to insist.
I was sorry that Grandpa was sick, but it sure was a treat to have Aunt Lou and Sarah. Uncle Nat came out as often as he could. He missed his “two girls,” as he called them, but he was awfully good about it.
It took Grandpa a couple of weeks before he was out of bed, and even then he had to lie down often because he was too weak to do much. In that time Sarah, crawling incessantly, had learned how to stand by herself. One morning I came into the kitchen, and she deserted her toy to crawl to me and pull herself up by my pantleg.
“Hey! You’ll be running footraces soon!” She laughed, bouncing up and down on pudgy baby-legs.
I was really sorry to see Aunt Lou and Sarah leave for town again. The house would seem strange and empty with them gone.
By March, winter had still not given up, and we were short of feed for the livestock. I worried about it each time that I doled out the hay and oats.
Grandpa must have sensed it, mentally measuring the feed each time I went out to chore. I didn’t say anything to him about it but one morning at breakfast he surprised me.
“About enough for two more weeks, eh, Josh?”
I nodded silently.
“Can you cut back any?”
“I think I’ve already cut back about as much as I dare.”
“Any chance of buying some feed off a neighbor?” Uncle Charlie asked.
“I’ve asked around some,” I admitted. “Nobody seems to have any extra.”
“We’ll go out an’ take inventory and see—” Grandpa started to say, but Uncle Charlie cut him short.
“You’ll do nothin’ of the sort!” he snorted. “Doc says yer to stay in out of the cold fer at least another two weeks.”
“But Josh needs—” Grandpa began and Uncle Charlie waved his hand, sloshing coffee from his coffee cup.
“I’ll help Josh,” he said. “Nothin’ in here that needs doin’ today anyway.”
Grandpa didn’t argue any further, and after Uncle Charlie had washed up the dishes and I had dried them and set them back on the cupboard shelf, we bundled up and set off to take inventory.
It didn’t take much figuring to know that we’d be short of feed. Uncle Charlie said what we were both thinking.
“If spring comes tomorrow it won’t be in time.”
By noon we had completed our calculations and headed back to the warmth of the kitchen. Grandpa had fried some eggs and sliced some bread. That, with cold slices of ham and hot tea, was our noon meal. I inwardly longed for Lou’s full dinner meals again.
While we ate, Grandpa and Uncle Charlie juggled numbers and shuffled papers until I felt a bit sick inside. I wasn’t sure where this all was leading us. I had never remembered a time when Grandpa and Uncle Charlie had had a tough time making it through the winter—but maybe it had happened and I just hadn’t known.
In the end I was dispatched on Chester to take a survey among the neighborhood farmers. If there was any feed for sale, our dilemma would be solved.
But it wasn’t that easy. Everywhere I stopped I found that the other farmers were in the same fix as we were. There just wasn’t going to be enough feed to make it through this extrahard winter.
With a sinking heart I headed for home. I decided to stop at the Turleys’ on my way, more to see how Mary and her mother were doing than to check for feed. Mr. Turley fed several head of cattle and he didn’t raise much more feed than we did.
When Mary opened the door, she looked genuinely glad to see me. I was even a bit glad to see her.
Mrs. Turley was busy darning some socks, and she sat there near the fire rocking back and forth as she mended. She seemed quite content and peaceful, even though she must have known that her husband, too, was facing a tough time.