INSIDE THE HOUSE, Jeannot discovered that Martine had risen and toasted some bread on the stove. She sat at the dining room table, spread a little jam on a piece of toast, and then slipped it to Flaireur, who sat at her feet. Martine stood up and poured tea into a cup for Jeannot. “We’ll be housebound for a day or two, until the snow blows itself out?” she asked. Jeannot nodded. Martine sighed and put the teapot down. “At least we’ve plenty of food, though Xiaobo doesn’t seem to have the same sense of an early start that we do.”
Jeannot grinned and gave her a kiss. “I’m sure he’ll turn up when the snow lets up and he’s had a chance to let sleep erase some of the champagne. He’s a little man for as much as he drank.” He wife pushed him gently away and he looked up toward the kitchen.
“Smells like you left the toast on the stove,” Jeannot said, but as the words left his mouth he realized that the acrid smell was something deeper than burning bread.
When my grandfather told me this story, he had to stop for a minute and collect himself. We were sitting at my stepfather’s table over breakfast. I don’t remember where my mother was, but I know that Father Earl was already up at the church, preparing for a funeral for somebody who had been taken by pneumonia. My grandfather paused and then got up to pour himself more coffee. I remember thinking how unusual it was that he could not go on. My grandfather told me the stories, but did not editorialize upon them as I am now. I suppose the very act of telling the story was enough for him to help make sense of things. He did not have the same need to turn things over and over again as I evidently do.
As he poured himself coffee, he said, very quietly, “That was the end of things. Do you understand how something so small can be the end of things? It could have just as easily been a candle left unattended, a dropped lantern, it could have been a bird’s nest in the chimney.”
In our house now, we have a new electric stove, a convenience that my stepfather had installed for my mother only last year. My wife is pleased to have use of the electric stove, and I am pleased that she is pleased. My wife had grown used to an electric stove in Vancouver, and if there is one thing that I have learned in my years of marriage it is that an unhappy cook makes for an unhappy family. Still, I do miss the familiar bulk and warmth of the woodstove, and I wonder what became of the great iron beast that used to lurk in my stepfather’s kitchen.
As he spoke, I remember that my grandfather reached out to the stove and touched the stovepipe for an instant before cursing and dropping his hand.
“Stupid,” he said. “I know better than that.” He sighed, shook his hand, and sat back down at the table. “I don’t know if it was embers caught in the pipe or if the flu had been knocked loose during the party, if there was a gap between the metal flu and the planked wood of the ceiling,” he said. “But the result was the same. One misplaced spark was all it took.”
My grandparents crowded into the doorway of the kitchen. No flames were visible, but a thick, rolling smoke seeped from the ceiling. My grandfather pushed rudely backward, bumping against my pregnant grandmother, and rushed through the front door.
Martine grabbed a bucket of water from the counter and ran up the staircase. She looked into their bedroom, but aside from rumpled blankets, it was calm. She opened the door to the other bedroom with some trepidation, but the doorknob was cool in her hand, and had she not been looking for it she would not have seen the snaking wisp of smoke that curled from the floorboards near the wall. She took a step forward, holding the bucket with two hands, unsure of where she should throw it. The floor creaked beneath her feet and she stopped moving, listening now. Under the sound of the snow pelting the windows and the wind moving outside, she heard something rolling and crackling.
“Martine!” My grandmother nearly dropped the bucket at Jeannot’s voice. She had not heard his heavy boots on the stairs. He stepped past her and pushed her back toward the door. He had still unmelted snow in his hair, and he was holding the ax. Jeannot swung the ax over his shoulder and then smashed it into the floor near where the smoke crept into the air.
He unleashed a fury. Flames shot like a magic trick and Jeannot stumbled back, beating his free hand at his face like he himself was on fire. “It’s between the floors,” he yelled. “More water,” he said. Martine hesitated, but Jeannot handed her the ax, grabbed the bucket, and emptied it onto the flames. The water turned to billowing smoke but seemed to have almost no effect on the flames.
“More water,” Jeannot said again.
“The water barrel’s empty from the last night,” she said.
“Snow, then.” He stepped around the burning hole in the floor and then pushed the window open. He reached out onto the roof of the side porch with the bucket and started scooping snow in furiously. The snow made the fire hiss and smoke, but it was almost like he had been shoveling sawdust: the flames grew.
My grandfather climbed out onto the roof so that he would be able to scoop the snow more quickly, but it was clear to my grandmother that the snow would not do enough. She ran downstairs and headed into the kitchen, thinking she could at least drag out some of the stored food. Thick dark smoke hung in the doorway of the kitchen. She held her breath and then started inside. She had taken only a step or two before she felt the heat against her face and she retreated, Flaireur following her. She ran back up the stairs. The smoke was thicker, nightmarishly solid in places, and through the door of the bedroom the flames and the smoke made it difficult to see to where Jeannot still shoveled snow through the window.
“Get out,” he called to her. “Get to safety.”
Flaireur followed her outside, where Martine shrugged herself into the coat she had grabbed as she ran through the house. She looked up, and though the snow beat at her, she could see traces of Jeannot still working with the bucket. Martine screamed to him, calling his name several times until he stopped and looked down at her. He stared at her, and Martine thought he was going to turn back to the fire, but then she heard the shriek and breaking of wood. He stumbled a little, and then jumped off the roof of the side porch.
He landed awkwardly in a billow of snow that would have, at a different time, made Martine laugh. He rose and waded through the snow to her. When he broke through to the path, he stepped gingerly, limping a little.
“My ankle. It’s fine,” he said, though she had not asked. “You’ve still got the ax.”
Martine glanced down at her hand, surprised to see the ax still in it. She handed it to Jeannot. “I couldn’t get into the kitchen.”
The two of them looked up at the sound of breaking glass. Through the blowing whiteness, the flames looked like some sort of illusion, and Martine tried hard to believe that they were not real. Soon enough they could feel the heat beating at them, however, and there was no denying the fire. Occasionally the wind would let up long enough for the house to appear before them in all of its burning glory, the snow melting as it touched the flames.
Martine was not sure how long they had been staring up at the burning house when Jeannot turned to her and said, “Xiaobo will be in for quite a surprise when he comes to start work.”
Martine could not help herself. She laughed. “That’s what you have to say?”
“There’s not much else to do, is there? If it was summer I’d be trying to rouse the town for a bucket line, but even if we had the men here right now, there’s not water available to us.” My grandfather turned and looked through the snow to where the creek would be if it was not already frozen and covered with snow. “We’ve still got the sawmill and we still have the cabin,” he said. “I’ve got my old worn-down jacket and some clothes still in there.”
The sound of burning pitched up a little, and then, with a loud cracking sound, the second story of the house sank in a series of staggering drops, disappearing as if it were sucked into the earth. A cloud of smoke shot up. A mesh of flame drifted up and into the air. Martine recognized it as a piece of lace. The lace burned and swirled up through the falling snow, lookin
g for a moment like it was dancing, and then the flames went out and the lace dropped to the ground; blackened gauze.
A gunshot came from inside the burning house, and then another.
“My rifle,” Jeannot said.
Martine turned to head toward the cabin, but Jeannot stopped her and pointed to the flat roof, already burdened with snow. “The mill’s better,” my grandfather said. “We won’t have to worry about the roof collapsing.”
“Then let’s get out of the snow,” my grandmother said, her voice straining over the wind.
Jeannot set himself in motion past the cabin toward the barely visible wall of the sawmill. By the time they made it, they were wet and exhausted and glad to be inside, even though the mill did not offer much shelter. The roof, at least, was solid and slanted enough that Jeannot thought it would shed some of the snow. The cabin, he knew, hastily constructed and ignored since he had built the house, would come down from the weight of the snow soon enough. The mill was built to last, though not necessarily to protect more than the saw blades and the wooden wheels: the walls were made with poorly fitted rough-cut lumber, and in many places my grandmother would have been able to stick her fingers through the gaps if she had wanted. They would be safe, if not exactly comfortable.
A BLIZZARD IN A CITY is a different thing altogether. When I lived in Vancouver we only had one true blizzard—even with the closeness of the streets and alleys, we still could not see from our parlor window to the house across the street—and it was something of a holiday. This was when we only had our first daughter, before she’d turned a year, and the temperature had dropped enough that instead of the wet, aching snow I never became used to, we were covered over in the sort of lightness that I remembered from Sawgamet. The winds threw the snow around and brought drifts against the edges of my church and other buildings, piled around newsstands and in the alleys. I call it a blizzard, but it wasn’t much of anything compared to the snow I remembered from my childhood in Sawgamet. Still, it was enough to make Vancouver come to a standstill for half of a day, enough to cover over the dirt and the gutters.
A few days ago, my mother told me that the winters have changed in Sawgamet since I was a child. She said that the snows and the cold had not been the same since I’d left, as if the woods had decided to give mercy to Sawgamet with the last of my grandfather’s blood gone. I laughed and told her that I’d finally become old enough to realize that I’d be telling my own daughters that the winters had gotten easier, and they’d tell the same thing to their daughters. “A parent’s childhood is always harder,” I said.
My mother smiled and started to laugh, but it turned into a retching cough that seemed to tear at her, her entire body shaking in the bed. When she finally stopped coughing there were tears on her cheeks from the pain, and she shook her head. “There was the long winter of your grandfather, and then the cold winter of your sister and father. Everything else has been a mercy.” She reached over and touched my hand. “I’m glad you’ve come back, Stephen. Glad to see you here with your wife, the girls. This is where you belong.” Then she closed her eyes and presently I could hear her breath turn into the evenness of sleep.
Tonight, now that it’s too late for me to tell her that I, too, am glad that I have come home, I also wish I had told her that she was right about the winters. The winters in Sawgamet have become something that people joke about, something that breaks the spring and fall, rather than something to be endured, to be survived.
I’ve heard that the men in the cuts work through the winters now. It’s not just that the need for the wood is greater with the war, or that they have trucks and portable kerosene heaters, or that they can do some of their work from inside the cabins of their machines. The winters themselves have become lighter, less treacherous. When my grandfather first came to Sawgamet, when my father worked the cuts, men didn’t take to the woods because they couldn’t. Some men ran traplines, but even that was a different task than standing in the cuts, swinging an ax into the iron freeze of the trees. And that’s what I was born into, those sort of winters. It was only when I left Sawgamet that I learned that in other places men floated the logs in the spring to take advantage of the melts, that the winter didn’t have to be something to be afraid of.
I’m not scared of the winter now, though. Despite the fact that I expect my mother to die tonight, in concert with the winter’s first snows, it’s different somehow. I’m no longer afraid of what comes with winter. Or of what is waiting in the woods.
MY GRANDFATHER HAD just lit a fire in the mill’s small stove when Flaireur started barking. The dog crouched down in front of the door of the mill and began to growl, the hackles of his fur on end, his teeth bared and a trail of spittle leaking to the floor. Jeannot stepped toward Flaireur to calm the dog, but then the door of the mill swung open. The wind gusted hard enough to make the flames in the stove flare up, and snow pushed across the floor. My grandmother started to stand, but my grandfather stopped her.
“Wait,” he said, and then he picked up the ax and stepped to the door. Flaireur stayed behind my grandfather, his growl turned low and constant, stone rubbed on stone. My grandfather peered out into the whiteness, the snow attacking and biting his face, the wind cutting through his clothing. There was nothing, he thought, but as he reached for the door, suddenly the man stood before him.
My grandfather told me that he was so startled—“I had just decided it was the wind, nothing more, no witch from the woods, nothing to be afraid of”—that he almost swung the ax. My grandmother screamed. Flaireur’s growl grew stronger.
Then the man moved forward, out of the snow and the wind, coming from nowhere and stepping into the shelter of the mill. And once he was inside the mill, once he separated himself from the vast emptiness outside and entered the building, the man no longer seemed like something my grandfather should be scared of, and even Flaireur—who still seemed wary—let his growl fade away, his canines tucked back into his mouth.
The man gave a wide grin that showed several blackened teeth, tapped his own chest, and said, “Gregory.” My grandfather repeated the name, and the man gave a happy yelp. He said it again, “Gregory,” with almost a compulsive pleasure, and then said it a third time before lowering his pack. He took out a hunk of bread and bit into it. He was a gaunt man, like he had not eaten for years, and he ate the bread as if every bite made him hungrier.
My grandfather eyed Gregory’s lumpy, half-full pack warily. My grandfather thought he must have been one of the miners beating a retreat from the coming winter, a Russian, but the man’s load did not seem commensurate with the long distance he would need to cover. Jeannot thought that once the snow broke he would take this Gregory to Franklin’s store and buy the man some dried beans and dried meat; he would not want to be haunted by the thought of the Russian starving to death on the trail.
They huddled around the small stove and took turns feeding scrap wood into it. Occasionally the wind gusted and sent snow piling through the gaps in the walls. For a while Martine swept the floor clean of snow, and then Jeannot and Gregory took some of the sawn boards that were stickered in piles and nailed them up against the wall. The mill was not cozy, but despite the high ceiling, by the time they were finished covering the gaps it was more of a shelter than it had been. The wind still touched at them, but the heat from the stove started to keep. Near midafternoon Gregory unpacked a few hard biscuits and they melted snow on the stove. Periodically, Martine, Jeannot, or Gregory would step outside to see if the snow had slackened, but always they returned, shaking their head to let the others know. Alone among them, Flaireur seemed content, curled up around his own tail and sleeping by the stove.
They passed the night uncomfortably, with Jeannot waking regularly to feed the stove, but apart from Martine waking and screaming that the roof was on fire, morning came without incident. It also came without any letup in the snow.
“Two feet since daybreak yesterday,” Jeannot told Martine. He held up his han
ds to show Gregory, and though he knew the man did not understand, he said, “You won’t be making it to Quesnellemouthe before spring. Well, we can go into town and bunk with Franklin and Rebecca once the snow slows down enough that we can see our way.”
Gregory nodded in vigorous agreement, and responded like Jeannot had asked him a question. He pulled out rolled oats, a small container of sugar, and a blackened pot.
The smell of the food was surprisingly intense inside the mill, and even my grandmother found herself with an appetite despite the morning sickness that she had been feeling for the past few days. Jeannot fashioned a table of sorts out of a log end and some scraps of wood, and after Martine ate her fill from the blackened pot, the miner and Jeannot shared the rest of the oatmeal and then gave the scraps to Flaireur.
By their fourth day in the mill, they had stopped eating Gregory’s food with such frivolity. At night the snow seemed to lessen, but with each break of light the wind picked up and they could barely see ten paces in front of them. The snow piled high enough that the path my grandfather dug from the mill toward the house had walls that soon outstripped his height. Jeannot struggled over to the burned-out hull of the house twice, but aside from a stuffed chair that sat miraculously untouched in the middle of the ashes, there was nothing left to salvage, and even the ashes quickly became covered in snow.
MY GRANDFATHER KEPT WAITING for the snow to slow enough that they could see to make their way to the village, but it did not stop snowing. After a week, Gregory kept pointing to the roof of the mill, an anxious look on his face, and finally he hammered together a ladder and went out with a shovel to clear off the roof. When he returned, Jeannot took the shovel from him and dug a tunnel between the mill and the stack of firewood on the side of the cabin, the whiteness now high enough that there were both walls and a roof in the snow.
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