by Carré White
She gave the horses a quick brush, paying special attention to Ernie’s ears because he made the funniest chortling noise when she rubbed them, and then was back out in the cold. She’d already picked over the two closest farms for cured meat, canned foods, and whatever else there was to find, and even had a pleasant surprise when she happened upon a small stock of sugar and flour that would make a delicious Christmas bread. It was time to range farther afield though. The Jenkins farm, the last of the ones she intended to scavenge, was almost two miles away.
Under any sort of normal circumstance, such a trip was out of the question. But, with Colton in the house, she wanted to make something special for him and for her father. Something they’d both remember. And, her current menu of canned foods, cured beef and pork, and a section of bacon and beans still lacked.
Irma Jenkins was a jelly maker of some slight, county-wide renown. Lottie hoped that if she made her way to the farm, she might be able to scrounge up some preserves, some jellies, and whatever else might still be in the cellar. One good thing about the intense weather of the panhandle is that everyone stored their food in deep cellars that held their temperature. As long as no wandering animals got inside – and that was almost unheard of – anything properly saved lasted for an eternity.
Crunching through the snow, the going was harder than she imagined. What she thought to be a short journey stretched on and on until she began to wonder if there was any way she’d get back at all, much less in the hour she’d given herself.
“Just a little further,” she urged herself, gritting her teeth against another painful gust that froze her lips and the tip of her nose. “Little bit more, and then on the way back the wind will be behind me. Won’t be anywhere near as cold, at the least.”
Onward she trudged, sticking to the places with the thinnest snow, which luckily tended to be along the shrub trees sprinkled around the roadsides, which also worked to block out a little bit of the wind.
Just as soon as the Jenkins’s fence came into view, Lottie took a deep breath and wiped the beaded sweat off her forehead with a gloved hand before it could freeze to her skin. Taking a deep breath, she struggled around the last curve in the road, and almost fell to her knees when she saw the Jenkins’s farmhouse.
Without blocking nets, there was a drift reaching almost to the roof, completely covering the house’s front door. The chimney sticking stumpy and short out the top of the house was topped over with another, smaller drift that looked to have fallen down inside. She couldn’t imagine what sort of condition the interior of the house might be in, and breathed a silent sigh of relief that what she sought wasn’t in there.
She just had to find the cellar.
Vague memories took her around back of the house.
“Oh... oh, no,” she said. “Which one is it?”
Snowdrifts dotted the land behind the house, almost all the same size. Without knowing where to look, finding the cellar would take her around the entire perimeter of the property, which she knew she’d never be able to accomplish.
For a moment, a mixture of despair and confusion threatened to overwhelm Lottie. She shivered, she shook, but then her thoughts turned to the look that Colton and pa would have on their faces if she managed to cook them a beautiful meal. After so many months of nothing but the same biscuits, tiny shreds of ham, and occasional eggs that she and her father and Colton had eaten, they would be speechless.
With a grin on her face, despite the pain that burned in her cheeks and the frigid cold that stiffened her fingers, Lottie trekked to the first snow drift. The lump of white stood was of a height with her, and big enough around that she could imagine it hiding a cellar entrance.
She scrabbled at the drift with her hands at first, but even with the gloves on, the snow quickly soaked through to her fingers and, chilling her so deeply she couldn’t continue.
What am I going to do? Stick my foot through it?
As she gazed around in the dying yellow of the late afternoon sun, she caught a glimpse of a long-dead tree half-covered in snow. She broke off a branch.
“Hay,” she said with an exasperated voice when she stuck her stick into the first snow drift and worked through the drift deep enough to see half-rotten, yellow straw poke out. “Wish I’d come down here during the fall. Could’ve used this.”
One after another, she went between the drifts, scratching through the snow. And one after another, she found either bales of hay or chopped wood.
She knew that she needed to start back home sooner than later if she was going to make it before full dark. Looking up, she searched for the moon. Maybe if it’s bright enough, I’ll have some extra time.
The silver disc hung low on the horizon. Low and close and fat, it seemed like maybe this was to be her saving grace. Silently she thanked whoever was listening for the moon, and scratched away at two more piles, still finding nothing.
Aching, sore, freezing cold and almost despairing, she leaned against the bare spot in the snow she wiped off the most recent pile of hay.
“There must be some way to... hum,” Lottie mused into the dark and kicked a toe-full of snow up into the air.
The white flakes stopped for a time, and the orange of pre-dusk settled in. Low on the horizon, the sun looked warm and comfortable, though that didn’t do much to give Lottie any comfort. Gazing back at the house, something glinted vaguely behind a pile of snow against the back of the Jenkins house. Lottie approached at poked at it with her stick.
“Metal,” she said softly.
She thunked the stick against the door a couple more times. “Feels different... sounds...”
A million thoughts ran through her mind. What if the cellar was inside the house? What if she’d just wasted a half hour, possibly more, of time she desperately needed? She shook her head back and forth. It was almost too much, too unbelievable. She didn’t know anyone who had an indoor cellar, but then again, she’d never actually been inside the Jenkins house.
She approached the door and grasped the handle, turning it and hoping for the best.
“Of course it’s locked,” she grunted. “Well, not much choice, I suppose. And I doubt the Jenkins will be too upset with me, out there in Oklahoma.”
She cleared a small place for her feet on the porch and pushed her shoulder hard against the door. The thin metal gave more than the door at her house, but the pin and chain lock held. She tried to lever it with her stick, but when the branch started to crack, she gave up on that.
Daylight bounced off the snow. The last of the red sun bled along the horizon, and she knew that soon there would be none left. Whatever she did, whether it was to succeed or to quit, Lottie needed to do it quickly.
With gritted teeth, she slammed her shoulder into the door one more time, bending it a bit more, but still finding no give at all in whatever it was keeping it closed. Another shoulder butt made it creak, and a fourth gave her enough room to shove her branch inside to hold the bent flap open.
Sticking her hand behind the door, she immediately felt the heaviness of the air, almost oppressive, in the closed up interior. Twisting her wrist around in either direction, Lottie groped for the lock, but didn’t have quite enough room to maneuver. She did manage to feel what it was though – a thin chain – that kept her out.
She thought about her father, and then she thought about Colton. The way his arms felt around her, the way his lips tasted when he’d chanced a kiss.
And then Lottie turned back to the door, shoved her branch inside and wedged it against the chain lock. “I’m not... giving up...” she strained. Her stick cracked slightly. It wasn’t going to hold on much longer, but with the shoving and the twisting, she’d managed to bend the door back just a little more.
Lottie squeezed her arm through the opening and braced her log, pushing it harder against the chain.
If the stick shattered, she was hopeless. A vision of her arm getting caught when the door sprang back haunted her, but she blinked her eyes, clen
ching them tight for a moment.
“No,” she whispered, steeling herself. “I’m not going to be afraid. I’m not going to...”
She let out a heavy grunt, sucked a deep breath and pushed harder. The chain groaned. The door slid backwards slightly more.
Her stick cracked in two, splitting right down the middle, but not before she managed to get her fingers around the freezing cold metal of the chain. Bracing herself against one of the rails on the Jenkins’s back porch, she groaned with every ounce of energy she had left.
When she heard the chain creak and then pop, phantom pains shot through her hand, and she pulled it away just in time to crash through the door and land heavy on her shoulder. If she’d left her hand out just a second longer, she realized as she stood, it would have been caught on a bookshelf that was pushed near the door.
Lottie took only a moment to gather her thoughts and make sure she had her pouches and all of her clothing gathered. A heavy, dusky atmosphere hung around her. Inside the house, a year of being locked up and untouched by moving air left behind a smell of decay, and as cold air entered the house, the boards creaked like an old man standing up after a long time in a chair.
“Okay, Lottie,” she said into the darkness. Hearing a voice – even if it was her own – gave her some much needed comfort. “If you were a cellar, where would you be?”
In the day’s first good turn of fortune, she didn’t have to search long. Only a few feet from the crashed-in back door, she saw the telltale sign of brown pig-iron. Rough, heavy, sturdy, and almost unbreakable, the rough metal sent a thrill up her arm when she wrapped her hands around the handle, bent low and groaned when she wrenched it open.
A powerful, sucking gust of wind slid past Lottie when she broke the cellar’s seal. She stood atop the stairs that led down into the storage space for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the lack of light as best she possibly could. Deep inside it, she saw a sliver of silver coming through what must have been a window.
Advancing slowly, she avoided a cobweb and something that squished under her foot. She drew in a lungful of wet, cool, and yet somehow still dusty air before finally putting her feet on the floor of the cellar. Countless cans and jars lined the shelf in front of her.
In the shimmering moonlight, she could barely make out anything she grabbed, Lottie took one in her hand and tried to break the top, but with her frozen fingers and lack of sight, she couldn’t manage. Instead, she bashed it on the floor and dropped to her knees, dipped her finger in the sticky mess and smiled as the taste of sweet, jellied strawberries filled her mouth.
Moments later she emerged from the house and stared at the moon. Day was fully gone, but just as it gave her a glimpse of the cellar, the moon lit her way as far as the road. Once she was there, it was only a matter of will and strength that she made it home.
“Well Ernie,” she said as she pushed open the barn door and began stashing her jars along with the rest of the scavenged goods she’d found and lugged back in secret over the past few days. “This looks to be quite a feast after all.”
She stacked jars of beans, potatoes, other savory vegetables, and a wide array of sweets as well. Softened sweet potatoes, several cans of the strawberries she’d tasted, and even apple and some cherry that had probably been purchased elsewhere. Just as she finished, and arranged straw up over the gathered items, she heard a noise in the doorway behind her.
“How have you not frozen to death?” Colton said, helping her to her feet and warming her arms by rubbing them. “You’ve been out here quite some time, young lady.”
“Oh,” she said with a sly grin. “I must have lost track of time. Talking with the horses can do that to me. Is pa all right?”
“Of course,” Colton said as he wrapped his arm around Lottie’s shoulder. “He took a nip of whiskey and went to sleep about an hour ago. I was waiting up for you, decided to come out here and see what you could possibly be up to.”
“Nothing much,” Lottie said with a smile. “Just getting some things together, ordering the barn some.”
As they made their way back to the house, Colton shivered visibly. Wearing nothing more than long-johns, a flannel shirt and denim trousers, he was terribly unprepared for the cold he found outside.
“You might have to warm me up if I go out in that weather again. I don’t know how you do it. Guess my blood’s too thin for these sorts of winters.”
The two of them walked the rest of the distance in silence, but Lottie couldn’t stop grinning. She didn’t know if she’d manage when she started gathering all the things she could find for a Christmas dinner, but as she finally entered the warmth of the house, she knew she’d done it.
Chapter Ten
“Have you seen Lottie?” William asked Colton, turning around in his chair that faced the window. “Still off with the horses?” He blew on his coffee and took a sip.
The three days leading up to Christmas were busy for Lottie. She was forever going in and out of the house, even in the worst weather. Her excuse was always the same, “I’m going to tend the horses” though after the third trip to brush them before noon, neither her father nor Colton were convinced.
Two of the drift nets had failed, leaving huge mounds of snow between the house and the barn, but Lottie never seemed bothered by them. She’d traveled back and forth so many times in the past few days that she had cut her own path.
Colton shook his head. “I was up early today. I got myself all twisted up in my blankets or some such thing and bumped into the—”
Snorting a laugh, Will tried his best to calm himself before he hyperventilated.
“Laugh and laugh,” Colton said with a grin. “I’ve got no regrets. I myself don’t find the humor in other people’s pain.”
The feigned offense got Will laughing even harder, and before long he was doubled over, squeezing his knees and almost turning purple. Colton watched, open mouthed, at the spectacle of this normally collected, dignified old farmer absolutely honking at him.
“Glad I could entertain, I suppose,” he said.
Just then, the back door clanged against the kitchen wall, and both men were up to their feet in an instant.
“Stay out there!” Lottie shouted. “I’m fine! Don’t come back here, I’ve got a surprise for you two!”
The two men looked at one another, and when William finally stopped chuckling, they shrugged and returned to their seats. Shortly after, a smell of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and something else neither of them could name wafted from the kitchen.
“What in the world is that, you suppose?” Will asked Colton as he dealt a hand of poker. “Aces wild, by the way.”
“Who plays with wild cards?” Colton laughed. “But to the point, I haven’t any idea what that smell is, though it certainly is making my mouth water something fierce.”
“I hope you’re both thirsty,” Lottie said from the kitchen. “Or at least cold.”
A tray with two small mugs on it rattled as she entered.
“What’s all this? Oh wow,” Colton said, swooning. “That smell is so—”
“Wait until you taste it. I had a little myself, but... well, you’ll see.”
Colton and her father both took a sip. Will whistled, the way he does when he’s too impressed to say anything useful.
“How did you,” Colton took another sip. “What is this?”
“Spiced wine,” Lottie said. “I found it in the Jenkins’s cellar. That’s where all the cinnamon and everything else came from, too. Well, most of it. Some came from other farms, but... Oh,” she added. “Stir it with the stick. Just like that, take the cinnamon and...”
“Lottie,” William said, “I can’t believe this. You just found all this? When?”
She grinned. “It doesn’t take that long to brush horses. Besides, I promised a nice dinner, didn’t I? I wanted to celebrate,” she trailed off. “Well... you two,” she said, blushing.
Her father smiled, and Colton just stared, clearly amazed. H
e took another sip, and then set his cup on the table. “I want to,” he chewed on his bottom lip. “What I mean to say is that I do too.”
Lottie and William stayed silent, waiting for him to gather his courage. She’d never seen Colton so flustered before. William had, but only once.
“I can’t... thank you both kindly for not laughing,” he said. “This has been the year of my life that’s never seen equal. Everything that happened, from my brother to everything else, it seems like it came to a point.”
He coughed and soothed himself by draining his cup.
Colton’s nervousness came out in a laugh. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not much one for speeches.”
Lottie walked across the room and put her hand on his arm, squeezing softly. “Take your time,” she said.
William cleared his throat. “If it helps anything, I can offer a little bit of a toast. Lottie, why don’t you get Colton another fill and some for yourself while you’re at it?”
When she returned, she had only the one mug of wine. “I better hold off for right now,” she said. “I’d hate to be muddled while I cooked.” She smoothed down her pleated apron and stood close enough to Colton that she felt his heat against her side.
“Hum, well, all right then,” William said. “I want to make a toast to you two. Without Lottie, my life would be horribly empty, and without you, Colton, I wouldn’t have seen my dear daughter smile anywhere near so much this year.”
The two men clinked their glasses together then drank.
“I don’t know about all that,” Colton said, looking down.
“It’s true, it really is. No reason to be bashful about anything,” Lottie said. She felt so warm that she forgot she hadn’t been drinking. A wave of comfort slid down her back that she quickly realized was Colton’s hand.
He nodded. “Well, I suppose what I want to say is that I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve never had two people just take me in for no good reason and make sure I was fed and warm. I don’t quite know what to say that is equal to what the two of you have done for me.”