The Long Winter (18 page)

He was considerably shaken up, but not hurt badly enough to mention.

"'Where's the superintendent? What happened to him?' they asked the engineer. All he said was, 'How the dickens do I know? All I know is I'm not killed. I wouldn't do that again,' he said. 'Not for a million dollars in gold.'

" The foremen were shouting to the men to come on with their picks and shovels. The y dug the snow loose from around the second engine and shoveled it away. The engineer backed it out and down the track out of the way, while the men dug furiously into the snow ahead, to come at the first engine and the superintendent. In hardly any time at all they struck solid ice.

“That first locomotive had run full speed, head-on into that snow, its full length. It was hot with speed and steam. It melted the snow all around it and the snow-water froze solid in the frozen snow. There sat the superintendent, madder than a hornet, inside the locomotive frozen solid in a cake of ice!”

Grace and Carrie and Laura laughed out loud. Even Ma smiled.

“The poor man,” Mary said. “I don't think it's funny.”

“I do,” said Laura. “I guess now he doesn't think he knows so much.”

'“Pride goes before a fall,'” said Ma.

“Go on, Pa, please!” Carrie begged. “Did they dig him out?”

"Yes, they dug down and cracked the ice and broke a hole through it to the engine and they hauled him out. He was not hurt and neither was the locomotive.

The snowplow had taken the brunt. The superintendent climbed out of the cut and walked back to the second engineer and said, 'Can you back her out?'

" The engineer said he thought so.

'"All right, do it,' the superintendent said. He stood watching till they got the engine out. Then he said to the men, 'Pile in, we're going back to Tracy. Work's shut down till spring.'

“You see, girls,” said Pa, “the trouble is, he didn't have enough patience.”

“Nor perseverance,” said Ma.

“Nor perseverance,” Pa agreed. “Just because he couldn't get through with shovels or snowplows, he figured he couldn't get through at all and he quit trying. Well, he's an easterner. It takes patience and perseverance to contend with things out here in the west.”

“When did he quit, Pa?” Laura asked.

"This morning. Thenews was on the electric telegraph, and the operator at Tracy told Woodworth how it happened,“ Pa answered. ”And now I must hustle to do the chores before it's too dark."

His arm tightened and gave Laura a little hugging shake, before he set Carrie and Grace down from his knees. Laura knew what he meant. She was old enough now to stand by him and Ma in hard times.

She must not worry; she must be cheerful and help to keep up all their spirits.

So when Ma began to sing softly to Grace while she undressed her for bed, Laura joined in the song:

"Oh Canaan, bright Canaan,

I am bound for the . . ."

“Sing, Carrie!” Laura said hurriedly. So Carrie began to sing, then Mary s sweet soprano came in.

"On Jordan's stormy banks I stand

And cast a wishful eye

On Canaan's bright and shining strand

Where my possessions lie.

Oh Canaan, bright Canaan,

I am bound for the happy land of Canaan. .

The sun was setting so red that it colored the frosted windowpanes. It gave a faintly rosy light to the kitchen where they all sat undressing and singing by the warm stove. But Laura thought there was a change in the sound of the wind, a wild and frightening note.

After Ma had seen them all tucked in bed and had gone downstairs, they heard and felt the blizzard strike the house. Huddled close together and shivering under the covers they listened to it. Laura thought of the lost and lonely houses, each one alone and blind and cowering in the fury of the storm. There were houses in town, but not even a light from one of them could reach another. And the town was all alone on the frozen, endless prairie, where snow drifted and winds howled and the whirling blizzard put out the stars and the sun.

Laura tried to think of the good brown smell and taste of the beef for dinner tomorrow, but she could not forget that now the houses and the town would be all alone till spring. There was half a bushel of wheat that they could grind to make flour, and there were the few potatoes, but nothing more to eat until the train came. The wheat and the potatoes were not enough.

That blizzard seemed never to end. It paused sometimes, only to roar again quickly and more furiously out of the northwest. Three days and nights of yelling shrill winds and roaring fury beat at the dark, cold house and ceaselessly scoured it with ice-sand. Then the sun shone out, from morning till noon perhaps, and the dark anger of winds and icy snow came again.

Sometimes in the night, half-awake and cold, Laura half-dreamed that the roof was scoured thin. Horribly the great blizzard, large as the sky, bent over it and scoured with an enormous invisible cloth, round and round on the paper-thin roof, till a hole wore through and squealing, chuckling, laughing a deep Ha! Ha!

the blizzard whirled in. Barely in time to save herself, Laura jumped awake.

Then she did not dare to sleep again. She lay still and small in the dark, and all around her the black darkness of night, that had always been restful and kind to her, was now a horror. She had never been afraid of the dark. “I am not afraid of the dark,” she said to herself over and over, but she felt that the dark would catch her with claws and teeth if it could hear her move or breathe. Inside the walls, under the roof where the nails were clumps of frost, even under the covers where she huddled, the dark was crouched and listening.

Daytimes were not so bad as the nights. The dark was thinner then and ordinary things were in it. A dark twilight filled the kitchen and the lean-to. Mary and Carrie took turns at the coffee mill that must never stop grinding. Ma made the bread and swept and cleaned and fed the fire. In the lean-to Laura and Pa twisted hay till their cold hands could not hold the hay to twist it and must be warmed at the stove.

The hay-fire could not keep the cold out of the kitchen but close to the stove the air was warm.

Mary's place was in front of the oven with Grace in her lap. Carrie stood behind the stovepipe and Ma's chair was on the other side of the stove. Pa and Laura leaned over the stove hearth into the warmth that rose upward.

Their hands were red and swollen, the skin was cold, and covered with cuts made by the sharp slough hay. The hay was cutting away the cloth of their coats on the left side and along the underneath of their left coat sleeves. Ma patched the worn places, but the hay cut away the patches.

For breakfast there was brown bread. Ma toasted it crisp and hot in the oven and she let them dip it in their tea.

“It was thoughtful of you, Charles, to lay in such a supply of tea,” she said. There was still plenty of tea and there was still sugar for it.

For the second meal of the day she boiled twelve potatoes in their jackets. Little Grace needed only one, the others had two apiece, and Ma insisted that Pa take the extra one. “They're not big potatoes, Charles,” she argued, “and you must keep up your strength. Anyway, eat it to save it. We don't want it, do we, girls?”

“No, Ma,” they all said. “N o , thank you, Pa, truly I don't want it.” This was true. The y were not really hungry. Pa was hungry. His eyes looked eagerly at the brown bread and the steaming potatoes when he came from struggling along the clothesline in the storm. But the others were only tired, tired of the winds and the cold and the dark, tired of brown bread and potatoes, tired and listless and dull.

Every day Laura found time to study a little. When enough hay was twisted to last for an hour, she sat down by Mary, between the stove and the table, and opened the school-books. But she felt dull and stupid.

She could not remember history and she leaned her head on her hand and looked at a problem on her slate without seeing how to solve it or wanting to.

“Come, come, girls! We must not mope,” Ma said.

“Straighten up, Laura and Carrie! Do your lessons briskly and then we'll have an entertainment.”

“How, Ma?” Carrie asked.

“Get your lessons first,” said Ma.

When study time was over, Ma took the Independent Fifth Reader. “Now,” she said, "let's see how much you can repeat from memory. You first, Mary.

What shall it be?"

“The Speech of Regulus,” said Mary. Ma turned the leaves until she found it and Mary began.

'“Ye doubtless thought—for ye judge of Roman virtue by your own—that I would break my plighted oath rather than, returning, brook your vengeance!'”

Mary could repeat the whole of that splendid defi-ance. '“Here in your capital do I defy you! Have I not conquered your armies, fired your towns, and dragged your generals at my chariot wheels, since first my youthful arms could wield a spear?'”

The kitchen seemed to grow larger and warmer.

The blizzard winds were not as strong as those words.

“You did that perfectly, Mary,” Ma praised her.

“Now, Laura?”

“Old Tubal Cain,” Laura began, and the verses lifted her to her feet. You had to stand up and let your voice ring out with the hammer strokes of old Tubal Cain.

"Old Tubal Cain was a man of might, In the days when the earth was young.

By the fierce red light of his furnace bright, The strokes of his hammer rung...."

Pa came in before Laura reached the end. “Go on, go on,” he said. “That warms me as much as the fire.”

So Laura went on, while Pa got out of his coat that was white and stiff with snow driven into it, and leaned over the fire to melt the snow frozen in his eyebrows.

"And sang, 'Hurrah for Tubal Cain!

Our staunch good friend is he;

And for the plowshare and the plow

To him our praise shall be.

But while oppression lifts its head

On a tyrant would be lord,

Though we may thank him for the plow,

We will not forget the sword.'"

“You remembered every word correctly, Laura,”

Ma said, shutting the book. “Carrie and Grace shall have their turns tomorrow.”

It was time then to twist more hay but while Laura shivered and twisted the sharp stuff in the cold she thought of more verses. Tomorrow afternoon was something to look forward to. The Fifth Reader was full of beautiful speeches and poems and she wanted to remember perfectly as many of them as Mary remembered.

The blizzard stopped sometimes. The whirling winds straightened out and steadied, the air cleared above blowing snow, and Pa set out to haul hay.

Then Laura and Ma worked quickly to do the washing and hang it out in the cold to freeze dry. No one knew how soon the blizzard would come again. At any moment the cloud might rise and come faster than any horses could run. Pa was not safe out on the prairie away from the town.

Sometimes the blizzard stopped for half a day.

Sometimes the sun shone from morning to sunset and the blizzard came back with the dark. On such days, Pa hauled three loads of hay. Until he came back and put David in the stable Laura and Ma worked hard and silently, looking often at the sky and listening to the wind, and Carrie silently watched the northwest through the peephole that she made on the window.

Pa often said that he could not have managed without David. “He is such a good horse,” Pa said. “I did not know a horse could be so good and patient.”

When David fell through the snow, he always stood still until Pa shoveled him out. Then quickly and patiently he hauled the sled around the hole and went on until he fell through the snow crust again. “I wish I had some oats or corn to give him,” Pa said.

When the roaring and shrieking winds came back and the scouring snow whirled again, Pa said, “Well, there's hay enough to last awhile, thanks to David.”

The clothesline was there to guide him to the stable and back. There was hay and still some wheat and potatoes, and while the stormwinds blew Pa was safe at home. And in the afternoons Mary and Laura and Carrie recited. Even Grace knew “Mary's Little Lamb,” and “Bo-peep Has Lost Her Sheep.”

Laura liked to see Grace's blue eyes and Carrie's shine with excitement when she told them:

"Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year. . . ."

She and Carrie both loved to repeat, in concert,

“The Swan's Nest”:

"Little Ellie sits alone

'Mid the beeches of a meadow,

By a stream side, on the grass,

And the trees are showering down

Doubles of their leaves in shadow

On her shining hair and face...."

The air was warm and quiet there, the grass was warm in the sunshine, the clear water sang its song to itself, and the leaves softly murmured. The meadow's insects drowsily hummed. While they were there with little Ellie, Laura and Carrie almost forgot the cold.

The y hardly heard the winds and the whirling hard snow scouring the walls.

One still morning, Laura came downstairs to find Ma looking surprised and Pa laughing. “Go look out the back door!” he told Laura.

She ran through the lean-to and opened the back door. There was a rough, low tunnel going into shadows in gray-white snow. Its walls and its floor were snow and its snow roof solidly filled the top of the doorway.

“I had to gopher my way to the stable this morning,” Pa explained.

“But what did you do with the snow?” Laura asked.

“Oh, I made the tunnel as low as I could get through. I dug the snow out and pushed it back of me and up through a hole that I blocked with the last of it. There's nothing like snow for keeping out wind!”

Pa rejoiced. “As long as that snowbank stands, I can do my chores in comfort.”

“How deep is the snow?” Ma wanted to know.

“I can't say. It's piled up considerably deeper than the lean-to roof,” Pa answered.

“You don't mean to say this house is buried in snow!” Ma exclaimed.

“A good thing if it is,” Pa replied. “You notice the kitchen is warmer than it has been this winter?”