Driftless

by David Rhodes

  Cora turned on Hutch Road and saw fresh tracks to follow. After a mile and a half without incident, she turned onto Wilson Road, which ran more or less parallel to the wind and had not drifted over, and later turned onto Sand Burr again. This time she only had a quarter mile to inch forward, emboldened by the possibility that she could—if she had to—walk the rest of the way down Q.

  Finally, she identified her snow- mounded mailbox, pulled into the drive and into the shed, and hurried through the deep snow to the house.

  The warmth of the kitchen soothed her. She took off her coat and boots, threw away the empty potato chip and cookie packages that were on the table, and the soda can. She assumed the children were in the barn and wondered what to make for supper. Even after staring into the refrigerator she had no definite ideas, so she decided to change out of her uniform and think about it in more comfortable clothes. Upstairs, while pulling a sweatshirt over her head, she wondered again about Seth and Grace, and she went down the hall to look in their rooms. No lights. She again assumed they were with Grahm in the barn and made a conscious decision to not be angry about the bag of cookies.

  In the kitchen again, she noticed the clock—six fifteen—and looked out the window. The snow blew so thick she could not even see the lights along the side of the barn or the vapor light on the utility pole. Her imagination filled with stories of farmers frozen to death between barn and farmhouse—lost in a blizzard, unable to tell which direction to go.

  She decided to go out to the barn. She took the foot-long flashlight from the tool drawer, but because of its inefficiency in penetrating the blowing snow, she went carefully from the porch to the tamaracks, from the trees to the fence, from the fence to the shed, from the shed to the milk house.

  Grahm was milking when she found him, wedged between the all-white Holstein and the one with only three milking tits. Though it was sixty degrees warmer in the barn, the breath from the cows still misted in front of their wide, wet noses.

  “Trouble getting home?” asked Grahm.

  “A little, and I’m glad I had the truck.”

  “Barn cleaner froze up again. Did you hear the weather?”

  “No. Where’re the kids?”

  “Haven’t seem ’em.”

  “They’re not out here?”

  “No. They aren’t in the house?”

  “No. Did they do their chores?”

  “I told you, I haven’t seen them. I thought they were in the house. I saw the school bus go by, around two o’clock. I was in the shop. They must be home.”

  “Grahm, they’re not in the house.”

  “Did you look in their rooms?”

  “Of course I looked in their rooms. They’re not in the house. Their coats and boots are gone.”

  “Maybe they’re in the haymow.”

  Cora climbed up but knew as soon as she stepped off the ladder that they were not in the mow. It was dark and cold.

  “Cora,” called Grahm, his voice anxious.

  He had found the sleds that Seth and Grace had abandoned in favor of the plastic saucer resting against the door leading to the pasture.

  They opened the back door and immediately the wind slammed it shut. They opened it again and with the aid of the barn lights and the flashlight saw the rounded trail leading away from the door, tapering and merging into level snow after several feet.

  Cora began calling into the blowing snow, knowing that even from fifteen feet away she couldn’t be heard.

  “They’re out there,” said Cora.

  “We’re not sure,” said Grahm. “Let’s look again in the house.”

  They went to the house, but did not find them. Cora called the police and ambulance, but neither gave assurance they could reach the farm before morning.

  On the way back to the barn they stopped in the shed, where Cora remembered, or thought she remembered, seeing the sledding saucers. Both were gone. They went through the barn to the machine shed, and to the shop. Cora was growing hoarse from calling into the blowing snow.

  Back in the barn, they stood again by the opened back door and looked out.

  “If they’re at the sledding hill we’ll never find them,” said Grahm.

  “They could have tried to get back,” said Cora. “They could be just a little ways away, lying in the snow.”

  “They could be almost anywhere,” said Grahm.

  “They’re out there,” said Cora. “I know it. I’m going.” And she started out.

  “Wait!” shouted Grahm. “Wait!” He ran through the barn, and when he returned he was carrying a hundred- foot length of hemp rope. He tied one end to the door and the other end around Cora’s waist.

  “I’ll lead the way,” he said, “but don’t let go of me.”

  They waded into the dark squall.

  Deeper behind the barn, the snow was well above their knees, mid-thigh in places. The flashlight was good for only about eight feet, and Grahm moved it from side to side as they waded forward. The wind bit through their clothes, and ice covered the front of the scarves wrapped around their heads. Both tried not to think, focused narrowly on a shared belief that at any moment the flashlight beam would discover the hooded forms of Grace and Seth walking toward them out of the cold.

  The blizzard hissed, groaned, and roared in the sky.

  Cora felt the rope tighten around her coat. She pulled Grahm backwards and he almost fell on top of her. They’d come to the end of the run. It seemed hopeless. Seth and Grace could have been standing close to them, ten feet to either side, and they would have walked past them.

  “We can fan out, move to the sides!” shouted Grahm into the ice covering Cora’s scarf. “Let me take you back first. You’ve got to keep your strength up.”

  “No!” she shouted back.

  Together they walked in wide arcs, judging their position relative to the door by the direction of the cord leading away from Cora’s waist. After completing each arc, they came toward the barn another two yards, coiled another loop of rope, and headed in the other direction.

  By the time they were back inside the barn, the flashlight had gone out and Cora could no longer feel her feet. They closed the door, shook the ice from their scarves, and sat, exhausted, on bales of straw. A short time later Cora got up again, the rope still around her waist, and said, “I’m going back.”

  “It’s no good,” said Grahm.

  She went out. Grahm fell in behind her, leaving the barn door open so the light would shine out ten feet. Without the flashlight, they could barely see their hands before their faces. They slogged forward and Cora continued calling into the howling wind. At the end of the rope, Cora called again, listened, and called again.

  Grahm had a bad feeling and was quickly getting an even worse one. They were exhausted, their feet and hands numb. Each effort proved more difficult, every motion less sure, less controlled. They were stumbling, falling. As they lost strength—and they were losing it quickly—their mental faculties would also fail. Soon they wouldn’t be able to keep thoughts in their proper places. Their sense of hope was becoming linked with their physical desperation. They thought—Cora thought—that as long as they kept floundering through the snow there was hope. The obvious conclusion was to continue until they fell over and froze. They were losing the ability to make reasonable judgments about the risk involved, the likelihood of succeeding, and the possibility that their children had not gone sledding at all.

  “Let me try to find another length of rope!” shouted Grahm.

  And then what Grahm had been afraid would happen, happened. Cora fought with the cinch around her waist, pulled the loop of rope up over her head, and placed it in Grahm’s hands.

  “No!” he shouted, and she turned and walked into the snow. A moment later she was gone, replaced by blizzard.

  Grahm was alone, with nothing but a frozen rope that attached him to his barn.

  COMPLETING THE CIRCLE

  GRAHM STOOD ALONE IN THE BLIZZARD, HOLDING THE FROZEN rope
connected to the barn, to safety, and to everything he had known prior to this moment. His hands and feet were completely known prior to this moment. His hands and feet were completely numb. In a clear, calm, and unified vision, he saw his past life—not only everything he had done but everything he had hoped to do. He saw his goals and his dreams in perfect detail. He saw his beliefs, things he could not know for certain but still held true, as clearly as pictures drawn on paper. He saw how his personality had been formed, how he had taken what he had been given and with the help of both longing and loathing fashioned from it a way to be. He saw how he had failed at, succeeded in, avoided, and delayed the challenges he faced. He saw his old friend Fear standing near him, protecting him from both real and imagined harm. He saw his parents and understood how they were a part of him and he a part of them. He saw his sister’s fierce spirit burning out of their childhood like a wild torch. He saw his land when his parents and grandparents farmed it, and before it was a farm, when the Singing People walked across it on their way to the river, carrying their children. He saw everything he had ever known and ever hoped to know. He held his life in his hands, let the rope fall away, and rushed headlong into the blizzard. The void welcomed him, and three or four steps later his gloves found the back of Cora’s coat and he pulled her toward him. They fell backwards into the snow and got back up.

  “The tree,” he yelled. “The oak tree at the top of the hill! It should be straight ahead.”

  They plodded forward, side by side, connected to each other at arm’s length, Grahm’s right glove holding Cora’s left, with their other hands extended into the black blowing. The cold was now numbing their whole bodies. They fell, got up, staggered forward, and fell again. Their sense of time became distorted as eternity wrapped around them. Their thoughts blurred. They went on and on until they could no longer feel the cold. Then Cora screamed. Her right hand had brushed against the side of the burr oak. She guided Grahm toward it and they felt their way around its thick, gnarled trunk. Cora tripped and fell away from Grahm. Grahm reached down for her and found a plastic saucer; under it was one of his children, then the other, lying at the base of the tree. A renewed strength whistled through Cora and Grahm as they lifted their children’s limp bodies over their shoulders.

  Freezing now seemed inconsequential. The storm lost its inner strength and seemed to only be pretending to be cold, faking fury. They had found the tree, found their children, completed the circle. If they died now they would die together, which was not like death at all. Death was separation—living while their children froze. That possibility no longer existed. It was gone. What they had now bore no resemblance to death, no matter what happened. Only life extended beyond them. Together they could live in the void if need be, forever. Together they could do anything.

  They began walking toward what they hoped was the barn, carrying their children over their shoulders and clinging to each other with their free hands. The wind, Grahm noticed, was now behind them, no longer blowing crystals of snow into their eyes.

  They tried to keep in the trail they had made on the way out, but this was impossible. The best they could do, Grahm decided, was to keep the wind blowing against their backs, and though blizzard winds could not be depended upon to blow consistently in one direction, it provided their only compass.

  Apparently it was not at all good, and once again Cora encountered something solid. A barbed wire along the fence separating the pasture from last year’s cornfield ripped open the sleeve of her coat. At the end of the fence, they knew, waited the machine shed. Once again, a bugling strength sang inside them—a soundless sound that communicated with the numbness in their limbs—and Grahm carried both children as Cora guided their way along the fence until they came to the wooden post at the corner.

  From here they continued to the machine shed, from the shed to the barn, to the toolshed, from the shed to the wooden fence, from the fence to the tamaracks, and from the tamaracks to the house.

  Cora stumbled upstairs and returned with blankets while Grahm peeled the coats, boots, and frozen clothes from Seth and Grace. Both were listless, their speech slurred. Grace could hardly keep her eyes open, and could not stand on her own. Cora wrapped blankets around them and set them side by side on the couch next to the space heater, like human cocoons.

  Standing over their children and beginning to relax, Cora and Grahm took off their own coats and boots and unwrapped the ice-encrusted scarves from their faces. Their hands shook. Holding her head, Cora began to cry and could not stop. Grahm sat on the floor next to the sofa and realized he couldn’t feel any part of his body. When Cora stopped crying she sat beside him. Their limbs hurt as feeling slowly returned. They looked at each other like people who had just found hell’s door ajar and walked out, and did not know what to say. Nothing seemed adequate.

  “Not bad for two people who can’t take hold of the tools of new technology,” said Cora.

  Grahm looked at her. Then he smiled. Then she smiled. They began laughing. They laughed until they could feel jabbing pinpricks in their hands and feet. They laughed until it seemed they couldn’t breathe. Then Grahm sobbed for several minutes, blew his nose, and they laughed some more.

  “That’s funny,” said Grahm, and they laughed again.

  The family thermometer still did not register the temperature of the children, though both Cora and Grahm hit the lowest rung, ninety-four degrees. Outdoors, the wind stopped blowing. The weather station said the storm had moved southeast, toward Chicago. Cora commanded her body to stop shaking, and she began to move around. The home health manual explained that two degrees an hour was as fast as a body could raise its own temperature and carbohydrates were the best things to eat for quick heat. She warmed some fresh milk, boiled water for tea, and began frying doughnuts, the children’s favorite.

  Grahm sat at the table, watching Cora. The dough fizzed and crackled when she placed in the hot oil.

  “You did it,” said Grahm.

  “We both did it,” said Cora.

  “It was you,” said Grahm. “It was you.”

  Grahm felt his strength return as he warmed up, and at a little after midnight, worried he could hear the cows bellowing from the pressure of milk against their udder walls, stepped outside. By then the air was almost calm. He could hear his cows bellowing. He put on his coat, stepped off the porch, and headed toward the barn. In the distance, a siren. From the windows in the milk house he watched as the township snowplow, followed by an ambulance with lights flashing, came up Sand Burr Road and onto Q.They pulled in the drive and four men and three women ran into the house.

  The children were fine, with only frostbitten ears and fingers.

  That night Grahm and Cora both slept, without dreaming, like stones.

  The following morning, temperatures climbed above zero. After milking the cows—two hours later than usual—Grahm looked out the back door of the barn at the expanse of snow leading into the pasture. No signs remained of the trails they had made, no trace of what had happened the night before except the end of the rope attached to the barn door. It ran a short distance and disappeared into high, level snow.

  In the machine shed he cut a length of snow fence, carried it through the snow, and placed it in a circle around the oak at the top of the hill. To the fence he wired a wooden sign: WARNING: NO-ONE HARM THIS TREE, GRAHM SHOTWELL.

  Then he went to the toolshed.

  Grahm found the pipe bomb he had made but not yet found a way to use, set it in the vise, pulled out the fuse, unscrewed the end cap, and poured the powder out on the shed floor. He struck a match and tossed it onto the dark pile of powder. Lacking containment, it flared briefly in a bright, white phooost, filling the shed with smoke and the smell of sodium nitrate, carbon, and sulfur.

  Outside, he could hear cars moving along the road at an almost-normal speed. The storm had passed.

  FAMILY

  MAXINE DROVE TO THE MADISON AIRPORT AND RETURNED in the afternoon with her sister a
nd mother. The trip took longer than expected because the flight had been delayed due to hazardous winter weather. Rusty met them in the driveway, took the walker from the trunk, and helped his mother-in-law fasten onto it.

  “How does it feel to not farm anymore, Russ?” asked his sister-in-law Marjorie as she walked carefully along the path shoveled through the frozen yard in her heels.

  “I keep busy,” said Rusty.

  “Yes, Maxie tells me you’re quite industrious. Do you still have all those dogs?”

  “Only one.”

  “Did you paint the house or something?” asked the old woman, looking hard through her thick glasses.

  “A while back,” said Maxine. “Be careful there, Russell. Watch her hands going through the door.”

  “Nobody paints anymore,” said Marjorie. “Vinyl siding has done away with all that. I don’t think there’s one painted house in our whole division. Vinyl’s cheaper in the long run and much nicer.”

  “Did you remember my bags?”

  “Yes, Mother, we’ve got them in the car. Russell will bring them in.”

  “Doesn’t smell quite like I remember,” said Marjorie.

  “The animals are all gone,” said Maxine.

  “Well, thank goodness for that. With all the other inconveniences you put up with, you should at least have fresh air.”

  As they entered the kitchen, the old woman asked again about her bags and Maxine reassured her that her bags were in the car. Rusty parked the walker next to the table and Maxine set out glasses.

  “We have fruit juices, milk, and soda,” she said. “What would you like, Mother?”

  “Fruit juices?”

  “Yes, orange, grape, grapefruit, and vegetable juice.”

  “What kind of soft drinks do you have?”

  “Just about any kind you can name.”

  “Oh my, I’m afraid I can’t name many. Nothing for me.”

  “Nothing for me either,” said Marjorie. “I’d forgotten what an older kitchen this was. You don’t even have a microwave.”