Light on Snow (13 page)

O
n the morning of Clara’s first birthday, my father took me down to the cellar, where we fitted colored balloons to a tank and filled them with helium that made my father’s voice, when he inhaled it, sound like Donald Duck. We brought the balloons upstairs, where they bounced around the various rooms and settled in clumps, depending upon the drafts. By nightfall they hovered two inches from the ceilings, and by noon the next day they had fallen onto the floors and chairs and behind the television, occasioning an impromptu lecture from my father on the nature of gases and air pressure and gravity. Before the accident my father was famous for his lectures, which he’d deliver in an earnest way, expecting earnest attention in return. Occasionally my mother would roll her eyes and say, with evident fondness,
Here we go again,
but I enjoyed them, being as I was, for the duration, the hot focus of his attention. Sometimes the lectures were about scientific or historic matters, but often they were moral in nature. I had the
You can do it
lecture a number of times, usually before a test or a game about which I was anxious. Memorably, I had the
Your reputation is priceless
lecture after I got invited to my first girl-boy party. And periodically I’d get the
Practice makes perfect
lecture when I complained about a math worksheet or a piece I was sick of playing on the clarinet. By the time I was nine, I could recite my father’s lectures in my head as he gave them, but I was still enough in awe of him then that I didn’t dare to be disrespectful. I have often wondered what would have happened to us had I reached the teenage years uninterrupted by catastrophe, at what point I’d have tried to convince myself that my father had nothing left to teach me.

The day before, my mother had driven me downtown to pick out a present for my sister. It was the first time I’d ever gone into stores by myself, and I was both excited and nervous. My mother recited a hundred rules and cautions and made me repeat the place and time we would meet three times. I was to buy the present with my own money, ten dollars I had taken from my piggy bank.

I started at a store my parents called the five-and-dime, even though nothing in the store could be purchased for five or ten cents. I wandered the aisles of the toy department, touching dolls and puzzles and board games. The problem with Clara, I decided, was that she couldn’t actually
do
anything except put blocks together or fit plastic rings onto a cone. I left the store and went into a children’s clothing store next door, where they sold smocked dresses and linen bonnets and where a single pair of socks cost six dollars. I tried the drugstore on the off chance there might be a terrific game in the baby aisle, but when that turned out to be a bust (save for a box of Good and Plenty), I went back to the five-and-dime. As I wandered the aisles, I began to develop the notion that what Clara really needed was a present she could grow into, something that would last and last, a toy that somehow I had missed along the way but that I could play with and then teach her how to use.

I was at the meeting place five minutes ahead of time, and so was my mother.

“What did you get?” she asked.

“Etch A Sketch,” I said.

My mother made a birthday cake in the shape of a train. She let me decorate the separate cars in yellow and green and blue frosting, saving the red for the caboose. The train had a marshmallow smokestack and Life Saver windows and rode on licorice rails along the dining room table. By the time we were done, it looked like a toy, and neither one of us wanted to cut into it after we’d blown out Clara’s single candle.

Clara had awakened that morning with an earache. She alternately shrieked or whined the entire day, fraying my mother’s nerves and causing my father to sigh heavily and repeatedly before the first guest had even arrived. As for me, I thought my baby sister a poor sport, particularly as I was mildly jealous of all the wrapped presents in a corner, one of which I couldn’t wait to get my hands on.

A birthday party for a one-year-old is never for the one-year-old. Clara was oblivious to both the festivity and the domestic angst. The party was for my parents and for me. I had not outgrown the need to be near the present that was being opened, to rip the paper myself in a kind of vicarious frenzy. Clara, immune to the excitement, had so exhausted herself with her fretting that she fell asleep as we sang “Happy Birthday” to her. My mother, reluctant to wake a cranky baby, said we should all carry on without her, an idea I approved of. Most of the photographs taken that day show Clara asleep, a cone-shaped hat on her head, her mouth parted, her nose running. I, in purple leggings and a My Little Pony T-shirt, look anxious and demanding, making sure I get my due. My mother, who that night admitted to having a toothache that later required a root canal, has frown lines between her brows. And in a picture taken by my mother long after all the guests had left, my father is asleep on the couch, crumpled paper wrapping like a small sea around his boat, Clara prone on his chest. In the photograph you can hear him snoring.

I am true to my word. While my father is on the telephone to my grandmother, sorting out her travel arrangements to Lebanon (all her flights have been delayed or canceled), I bundle up in my parka, snow pants, hat, and ski gloves and set out to clear the path to the woodshed for my father. My grandmother’s trip will be a heroic one for a seventy-three-year-old woman, requiring driving herself to the Indianapolis airport, taking a flight from there to Newark, boarding another flight to Boston, waiting for a third flight to Lebanon on a ten-seater plane most twenty-year-olds wouldn’t get on, and then being driven in my father’s truck to Shepherd. Typically the trip will take her, door-to-door, eight hours. She swears that it’s worth it, but I have an idea that soon she won’t be able to make the journey, and that we’ll have to go to Indianapolis instead, a prospect I am looking forward to. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the prospect of three plane flights in one day seems like heaven.

The snow has turned to swirls of fine icy crystals that sting my face if I don’t keep my head lowered. The snow has covered the grasses and the small brush; it spreads in all directions with only the trees to break the panorama. Every pine bough and birch limb is covered with white, as is the woodshed that is my goal. Bushes make humpy shapes, and the forest has lost the spindly scratchiness of early winter. We are socked in. I think of the people who lived in the house when it was built in the late nineteenth century, when there was no town plow to make driveways and roads passable. And of the natives who lived on the land before there were any houses at all, who literally had to dig themselves up through the snow just to reach the air.

The sky seems to be clearing, and I guess that the thin snow shower is a sign of the end of the nor’easter. When the sun comes out, this same landscape will be blinding. Paralleling the drive up to the house is an open field that is long enough to make a sledding hill. Only when we’ve had a good snowfall, though, can I get a decent run without being slowed down by the tops of the brush. Sometimes I can talk my dad into getting out the round aluminum saucers we use for sleds and helping me pack the snow with a couple of runs himself.

I discover, as I make a few test digs, that the snow is heavy. The temperature is rising and the snow is packing itself. It could take over an hour just to reach the woodshed, and I am beginning to regret my generosity. I hope that when my father gets off the phone with the airlines, he’ll take pity and give me a hand.

I start shoveling in earnest and begin to sweat almost immediately. It takes a tremendous effort to lift a shovelful of snow high enough to overturn it. I shed the scarf and the hat and unzip my parka. After a few minutes I become predictably cold and have to put the clothes back on. I go through three cycles of dressing and undressing and have just about decided I should go in for a cup of hot chocolate when the back door opens.

“Hey,” I hear a voice say.

Charlotte is half in and half out of the door. Her hair, drying, spreads across her shoulders.

“Do you have a hat and mittens I could borrow?” she asks.

“Why?”

“I want to help you shovel.”

I shake my head. “You can’t. You’re . . .” I struggle for the word.
Sick
isn’t correct. “You’re, you know . . . tired,” I say.

“I’m fine. I need the fresh air.”

My father will be angry if he sees Charlotte outside shoveling the snow with me. Where is he, anyway? “The bench seat flips up,” I say. “We have mittens and hats in there.”

She slips back into the house and emerges a minute later. She takes three long breaths of air, as if she’s been cooped up for days. Maybe she has. She has her jeans tucked into the tops of her boots, which are leather and not at all appropriate for the snow. She has grabbed a pair of old leather gloves my father uses for cross-country skiing and a multicolored hat I made for myself when I was ten. It has mistakes in it and is unraveling at the top.

“Okay,” I say. “You start where I left off. I’ll get the other shovel and begin at the woodshed, and we’ll meet in the center.”

The snow has drifted against the barn and rises almost to my waist. I find the latch and lean against the door and take a fair amount of snow into the darkened barn with me. As always, the cavernous room smells sweetly of sawdust and pine. I don’t bother to turn on the lights; I know where the shovels are kept. My father might be sloppy in his bedroom, but he is particular in the barn. Each of his tools has its own place on the bench or on the Peg-Board over it. Larger tools, such as shovels and rakes, are lined up against the wall near the door.

Shovel hoisted, I drag my legs through the drifts. I round the corner and see Charlotte’s arms pumping, the snow spraying to one side. She works with the strength of a man, and I can see that she’s made more progress in the short time I’ve been gone than I made the whole time I was shoveling.

She tosses off the hat, and her hair swings rhythmically from side to side. She is breathing hard but not gasping.

Challenged, I bend to my task and try to match her speed, but my arms simply aren’t strong enough. I have determination, but when I check out Charlotte’s progress, I can see that she’s making more headway than I am.

We meet closer to my end than hers. Charlotte takes the last swipe. She bangs the shovel hard against the ground to shake off the rest of the snow. “There,” she says with satisfaction.

“It wasn’t a race,” I say.

“Who was racing?” She draws off her gloves. The snow has all but stopped.

“I’m going in,” I say.

“I’ll be right with you.”

Inside, I sit on the bench and kick off my boots. I slip the suspenders of my snow pants off and stand in my long underwear and sweater. My hair is matted to my head and my nose is running. My mouth is so cold I can’t make it work right.

“What’s she doing?” my father says behind me.

I didn’t hear him come down the stairs. “She was helping me shovel a little bit.”

“She’s shoveling?”

“Mostly she just stood there. I think she wanted some fresh air. I was about to make us some hot chocolate.”

My father examines my face.

“To warm us up,” I add quickly.

My father walks into the kitchen, and I think he means to pour himself a cup of coffee. Instead he stops at the counter. He puts his hands on the lip of the Formica and bends his head. Is it just coincidence that he’s hovering over the telephone? Is he thinking about calling Detective Warren or Chief Boyd? He stands up and rubs the back of his neck. “I’ll be in the barn,” he says.

I make the hot chocolate, but still Charlotte hasn’t come inside. I set the mugs on the bench in the back hallway and poke my head out the door. She has walked, or crawled, some forty feet beyond the house and stands looking into the woods. Her leather boots will be ruined.

I call her name, but either she doesn’t hear me or she’s so absorbed in the view that she can’t acknowledge me. She has her hands in the pockets of her parka and gazes as if out to sea, as if waiting for a husband to return from a long voyage, as if searching for a child who has just wandered out of sight.

“Charlotte!” I call, my voice louder, more insistent.

She turns her head.

“Come in!” I yell.

For a moment I think she’ll ignore me. Then, as I watch, she twists her body in my direction and begins to retrace her steps, aiming each foot into a boot track, much as I saw Detective Warren do just days earlier. She stumbles once, picks herself up, makes some progress, then begins to hop through the snow like a child does through the surf at the beach. She is winded when she reaches the back door.

“I made hot chocolate,” I say. “Your mug’s on the bench.”

“Thanks,” she says as she slips past me through the door.

“You weren’t even looking in the right direction,” I say to her back.

She sits on the bench; I’m on the stairs. I can hear her, but I can see only her boots. I want to tell her to take them off—her feet will warm up faster that way—but I hold my tongue. I imagine her cupping the mug, warming her hands, her nose and cheeks red from the cold. I can hear her blowing over the hot chocolate and then taking a sip. “Will you show me the place?” she asks.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“I can’t see the harm in it.”

“There’s plenty harm in it,” I say, though if pressed I’m not sure I could explain precisely what the harm might be.

“I just want to see,” she says.

“Why? What possible good will that do?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I say.

She is silent. I set down my mug. I put my head in my hands. “The hike would be wicked,” I say after a time. “And dangerous. You’ve probably never even used snowshoes.”

I hear her blowing her nose. “I certainly have,” she says.

She has? I know so little about her life. “I’m not sure I can even find it,” I say. “The snow has probably covered all the tracks.”

Actually I am pretty sure I
could
find the spot. I’ve done the trip, back and forth, twice now and am confident I could recognize the configuration of the trees in tandem with the slope. I certainly know in which direction to head.