A Christmas Blizzard (11 page)

She wanted to tell him the story of how she got started telling Ojibway tales and he got up from the table. “Back in a minute,” he said, and headed for the door.

“It’s cold out there!”

“I know. Gotta start the car.”

“Scooter’s going to come and start it.”

He pretended not to hear her. He got into the parka and barreled out the door. It was brutally cold. He checked WeatherX on his phone and it said
Minus 38.
His big boots crunched in the snow like walking on cornflakes. The painful sound of cars being started who only wanted to die. But she was right. He had come here to find himself. The bears were in their dens, the honeybees in their hives, the rabbits were browsing in the snow along with the squirrels, their hieroglyphic tracks were everywhere, and he belonged here as much as any of them.

Forty-two years ago, in Fargo, his mother was nine months, two weeks, and ten minutes pregnant and his jittery father thought she should head for the hospital just in case, since the radio was talking about a blizzard, but she said no, she wanted to watch “The Dupont Christmas Cavalcade with Milton Berle, Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on their old Muntz TV and besides, the hospital was only thirteen blocks away, so she got herself comfy on the couch with a big bowl of buttered popcorn and a gallon of Dad’s root beer. When the blizzard rolled in, Daddy got in a royal panic, charging to and fro and hollering about how nobody ever listened to him around here, and that brought on the labor pains. He walked her to the car and a wave of pain hit her and she screamed, which unnerved Daddy so that he drove the wrong way through the blizzard, and thirty-seven miles later, realizing his error, he made a U-turn right into the ditch. He ripped off his car door and lay Mother on it and slid her through the storm to a farmhouse where James Monroe Sparrow arrived, delivered by an old farmwoman with a basin of hot water and some clean rags, shouting at Mother in Polish to squat over the clean towel and
push
, meanwhile the farmwoman went out and strangled a chicken with her two knobby hands and made chicken soup. Mother groaned and tiny James wailed, the midwife cut the umbilicus with a paring knife and taped it with duct tape, and then she looked around for Daddy, he had gone to the cellar to get away from the yelling and gotten into the slivovitz and now, three sheets to the wind, he was on his way to shovel out the car, wearing only a white shirt and trousers. She clubbed him with a rolling pin and barricaded him in a closet and likely saved his life. The story was in the news and they were too embarrassed to go back to Fargo so they went to Mother’s home-town of Looseleaf and Daddy got a job with Uncle Earl at the power plant. He was the bookkeeper.

Winter made James feel like a child.
Trapped.
In Looseleaf, winter came hard and fast; in a few days the world turned brown and gray and the house creaked as it shrank. Snow fell, then more and more. And more. The lake froze over and it sounded like gunfire, the ice hardening. Blizzards blew down from Canada and came in suddenly and unexpectedly. There was no weather forecasting, just a strong sense of foreboding—old Great-Aunt Cooter sitting by the wood stove, an old snaggle-toothed crone wrapped in tattered quilts, grizzled, rheumy-eyed, gumming her food, tobacco juice dripping down her chin, listening to the wind in the chimney, and she’d hoist herself up and roll her blue-gray eyes and croak like a tree toad,
It’s a gonna be a bad one, chillun
. That was the forecast. And it always was a bad one. The town lay on flat open prairie, no windbreaks, just barbed wire, and the sky turned a metallic gray and got very low overhead and two or three feet of snow fell for a day or two and the wind blew it horizontally so that you could not see your hand in front of your face. And then the temperature dropped. To the manly men of North Dakota, winter was a challenge. Zero was considered a mild chill. Twenty below was cold. Forty below was darned cold. At sixty below you had to take precautions. They bundled up and went out to start the car which was frozen solid in the driveway. They put on a great mackinaw and four-buckle overshoes and cap with earflaps and out into the storm they went and when they raised the hood it screeched so loud the icicles fell off the house, huge forty-five-pounders like giant daggers of ice crashing and splintering.

James hid in a little nest in a crawl space up over the kitchen. It was warm in there and he ran an extension cord to plug a lamp in and he lay on old car cushions under Army blankets and read books from the library, pounds of them, books about Africa and India and the Amazon, and sailing on a tramp steamer to New Guinea and Czarist Russia and the Count and Countess Ouspenskaya in their palace and the lovely Ludmilla with her high cheekbones and Prince Sergei with the flashing blue eyes awaiting the revolutionaries who will attack in the morning and interrupt their beautiful romance, but tonight Ludmilla in her diaphanous white gown is playing Chopin in the drawing room for the young man in the cavalry uniform whose blue cigar smoke drifts through the candlelight and he steps out onto the terrace and snow is falling all across Russia, snow is general, and the delicious summer and fall have ended and now the grim winter of terror and desolation has begun, and outside he could hear Daddy calling his name, angry, demanding that he come downstairs immediately and start shoveling and help start the car.

And now here he was, thirty years later and two blocks away, feeling pretty good despite wind chill of minus eighty. He got in Faye’s old Buick and it started right up and her radio came on. Public radio. A psychologist talking about feelings of alienation experienced during cold snaps and how people can combat this by dressing warmly. While the engine ran, James swept the walk, and then stood, the sting of cold air in his nose, and felt exhilarated. Especially when he spotted the old pumps in the yard next door. The man collected antiques and he had six pumps, their handles at five o’clock, waiting for someone doomed by fate to put a tongue on them but James was no longer that man. He was free. He went back into the house.

“I met the wolf and he’s Ralph, my old friend who drowned duck-hunting when he was twenty-five. I am hoping to see him again. And I am on a twenty-four-hour pass from the spirit world to make my peace with everyone, and I have no idea what happens after that.”

Faye hugged him. She held him close. Nothing she said had ever made much sense to him and yet there was some sort of fundamental goodness in her that appealed to him, much as he had always made fun of it in the past. She was a good woman in her own fogbound way. “I love you, Faye,” he said. She thought about that for a long moment, perhaps waiting for him to say more, maybe something about global wholeness. Then she said, “I love you, James.”

 

 

H
e left Faye’s and passed Uncle Boo’s house and remembered the smell of peppermint schnapps and across the street was Uncle Sherm’s who sat on that porch night after night, stone-faced, smelling of moth-balls, his hair matted, and all he said was “Is that so?” and “How ’bout that?”

Second Coming was this morning, Uncle Sherm.
Is that so?
Jesus came and took all the believers to heaven for an eternity of bliss.
How ’bout that?
Everyone in the family except you and me, Uncle Sherm.
Is that so?
But meanwhile we can drive their cars and eat all their frozen steaks.
How ’bout that?

Through the falling snow, he saw Uncle Earl’s little red-roofed bungalow nestled in big drifts with narrow canyons where the walks had been shovelled. Heavy plastic was nailed over the storm windows for extra insulation. A few lights were on inside and on the front porch was a jumble of electrical cables and fuse boxes and generators. Earl liked to keep his hand in. James opened the front door and a wave of warmth rolled out and the smell of baked chicken. But not ordinary chicken. This had special spices in it. The living room seemed more orderly than he remembered. The antimacassar on top of the old upright piano was spotless and the busts of Schumann, Chopin, Bach, and Mozart had been shined up. The red throw on the old green sofa was straight, the copies of
North Dakota Geographic
were neatly stacked, the fish tank bubbled away, the goldfish maneuvered through the plastic vegetation, and the carpet where Uncle Earl liked to strew his books was clear—the books were lined up on the bookcase, a sure sign that the occupant of the house was no longer in charge. Aunt Myrna’s collection of china birds had been dusted. From the kitchen came a wave of wonderful chicken aroma—someone, he guessed it might be Oscar’s wife, had opened the oven door and squirted butter on it. He called out, “Hello?” and a dark woman’s face peered around the corner. She was short and fat and wrapped in red silk and wore large thin loops of gold around her neck. Her black hair was tied into two braids with a silver thread braided into it. Silvery shapes of sheep and goats were woven into the red silk wrap. She wore gilded sandals.

“I’m James Sparrow, I’m Uncle Earl’s nephew from Chicago.”

She bowed. “My name is Rosana,” she said. “I am his caregiver. He is all excited about you coming. He’s in the toilet now.”

The kitchen had been scrubbed and polished way beyond the norm. The wood floor shone and two red rugs had been laid down by the breakfast nook. For years, the nook had been a holding area for stuff in transition, but now it was back in business again. Two thin blue tapers in silver holders, two red woven placemats—it was as if he had found a new wife.

Rosana was of indeterminate age. Indian, apparently. She was doing a fine job of making a martini, chipping the ice cubes, chilling the glass in the freezer, as she said, “Oh my, yes. I have heard very much good about you. All of it good. A very very rich man, are you not. Oh yes. He talks of you many many times. Many times. How you fly around to all the places in your aeroplane and go to a place and stay there and then to another and another. Goodness, yes. Much traveling you do. Yes, of course, because you must oversee your many business enterprises. That is very good. Very important. Oh my yes. How very very lucky for us that you include us in your busy travels, Mr. Sparrow.

“But I talk too much. Here I am zipping my mouth with the zipper of silence and I am locking it shut and now I am putting the key in my pocket until you tell me to talk.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Please converse with your dear uncle, Mr. Sparrow, knowing that you shall have the silence you require. I am being still now.”

“Thank you.”

“Rosana will be quiet until you tell me to talk. Then I will talk. But now I am quiet. I will observe your wishes in the matter. And would you also wish a martini?”

It was ten A.M. Early for a martini. But why not? “Of course.”

So she chilled a second glass and chipped more ice, and then there was a rustle and a low chuckle and Uncle Earl appeared, in blue bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers, thinner and paler but moving forward on his own power. A bad case of bed hair but the moustache was trim and the pajamas were clean. James stepped up and put his arms around him. He had shrunk somehow; the towering figure of James’s youth had become dwarflike, but he still twinkled like the good old uncle of old. And he was carrying a plastic bag with a tube that seemed to be stuck in his abdomen.

“So you met my new girlfriend then?”

“You’re a lucky man, Uncle Earl. She’s taking good care of you.”

“Eighty-six and I’m still attractive to the ladies, James.”

Rosana poured the gin into the shaker and a dash of vermouth and put the cap on and shook it, and Uncle Earl twitched his hips in a sort of mambo. The plastic bag in his hand made a squoshy sound.

“I heard you were at death’s door, Uncle Earl.”

“They were all set to put me in the ground, James. They bought the charcoal briquets to make the fire to heat up the ground so they could dig the grave. The coffin was on order from Grand Forks. The doctor had his death certificate all filled out except for the date and time. And then the county welfare office told us we were eligible for home hospice care and Liz was telling them no and I raised my head up off the pillow and said I wanted to die at home, and so they sent Rosana. A miracle worker. She got here and drove the death squad out and made me a martini and I’ve been in tall clover ever since.”

“It is as God wills it to be,” she said, ducking her head modestly, smiling, and she poured the liquor into the two glasses and put them on a tray with a dish of chips and a greenish dip and led the way into the living room.

“I’ve got a plane at the airport, Uncle Earl. Soon as this storm blows over, we could fly you out to Hawaii. I’ve got a place out there.”

“I saw Hawaii when I was in the service. Honolulu. Gyp joints and dance halls and girls hanging on you begging you to dance with them and buy them a $50 bottle of $5 champagne. No need to go back and see it again.”

“Or we could fly you to the Mayo Clinic and see if they can’t address some of your health issues.”

“I’m eighty-six years old. I used up my time. But I made up my mind I want to go out with a big party. And here you are. So we’re going to put away the black crepe and have us a big Christmas. And maybe a New Year’s. And then I’m ready to go.”

The old man followed Rosana into the living room and sat down in his big green armchair and she spread a comforter on his lap and turned an electric heater on his feet and lit a couple of candles and handed him his martini.

“What’s in the plastic bag, Uncle Earl?”

“What? This?” The old man looked down at the bag in his hand as if he’d forgotten all about it. “It’s my liver and pancreas, James. They were going to do a transplant, but they discovered, after they got it out, that the other liver wasn’t the right shape, so they’re waiting for another donor, and meanwhile, got my liver here in the bag, along with the pancreas, and they’re working okay. Not great, but okay.”