I put on my coat and boots and then bundled my mother the best I could in her blankets. When I picked her up I staggered a little. It was not that she was heavy, but rather the opposite: she was as light as one of my daughters in my arms. I had braced myself for the weight of an adult, but it was like carrying a child, and I wondered if my mother thought of the way our roles had been reversed, how I was the one carrying her.
The street was slick, but the mist fell star-bright, and I walked carefully down to the river. It was a short distance from my stepfather’s house, a hundred yards at most. My mother had her arm around my neck, and I think we both expected to see the same thing when we got down to the banks, the same thing we had seen thirty years earlier on the night of the freezing rain: the water frozen, ice shining like the river had swallowed the moon.
But even though there was a scrum of ice against the banks of the Sawgamet, the water ran fast and clear, the river open and dark in the night.
I waited a moment for something to happen, but nothing did. It was just me, standing on the banks of the river, my mother still almost weightless in my arms, the water pushing toward Havershand. I heard a noise and turned to see that Father Earl had crept down behind us, hanging back like he always held back, but close enough so that I could take strength in knowing he was there.
My mother looked out over the river and then, while looking back to me, saw Father Earl. She reached out to him. He hesitated, and then stepped forward and took her hand, and we just stood there, the three of us, on the banks of the Sawgamet, looking out over the water and the first pieces of ice. The mist fell over us, but the cold left us untouched.
BACK AT THE HOUSE, I covered my mother with dry blankets and then added a log to the fire.
I kissed her on the forehead and told her that I loved her. “I’m sorry.”
She may have already been asleep, and I said it so quietly that I was not sure if she heard me, but Father Earl did. He touched my elbow but did not say anything, and the two of us sat in the room together, not saying anything together, watching over my mother’s body.
She died just past midnight.
TEN
Binders
MY GRANDPARENTS THOUGHT A ghost haunted them that long winter. They did what they needed to get through—the meat from Gregory’s body was enough to sustain them, though my grandfather swore that every bite made him feel more hungry—but at times they thought they were going mad. Every creak of boards at night, every shifting of the hard-packed snow, every crack of a log in the fire seemed like the miner’s footsteps, his voice. They lost track of days, buried alive under snow so deep that there might as well not have been a sun. They subsisted on the flesh of a man they had killed and watched my grandmother’s pregnant belly round out as my father grew inside her.
When it finally stopped snowing that year, in July, none of the men or women in Sawgamet, including Jeannot and Martine, knew it; even the three-story buildings in Sawgamet were covered over. But by the seventeenth of July, winter had broken hard. The sun pushed the temperature into weather that would have called for short sleeves had any men or women been unburied.
In the brothel, Pearl was the first to notice the sound of water trickling off the snowpack. He had ended the night of Franklin and Rebecca’s marriage by paying for the touch of a woman—a woman who I suspect later ended up becoming Mrs. Gasseur, though that was only whispers—and when he found himself cut off from the rest of the world the next morning, he did not mind his plight.
The women had plenty of food stocked away—the madam ran a restaurant as a side business—and after the first few weeks they were as bored as Pearl was; it did not matter that he had run out of money. By the time the snowfall let up for long enough that he could have seen his way back to his cabin, it had piled high enough that he had no desire to try. Though he worked cutting trees for my grandfather, Pearl still lived at his old mining camp, a good mile away. Even if he had been able to return, he knew what he could expect. The men would be mining and sleeping, mining and sleeping, mining and sleeping. At some point they would slaughter their mules for meat, and if they had any sense—which he was not sure of—they would start digging through the snow in hopes of finding town and food. An unlikely miracle, given the distance. A mile of digging was much more difficult to navigate than a mile of walking, but it was worth trying. Anything rather than starving to death in the cold and dark.
In July, though, Pearl finally heard trickling water instead of the soft whisper of falling snow. He opened the window on the third floor and used his hands to dig out enough so that he could see through to the bright, clear sky. It took him nearly a full minute to understand that it had finally stopped snowing and that summer had come. He cleared enough snow that some of the light spilled into the room, and then he called for the women in the brothel to join him. They crowded around him, standing in the brilliance of light that did not come with the choking smoke of an ill-trimmed lantern wick or the dim flickering of a candle. Nobody knew who started laughing first, but the mirth infected them, and they laughed for hours, until the sun went down.
IN THE MILL, my grandmother woke my grandfather from a light sleep. A thin lick of water came in through the cracks in the wall, puddling on the floor. They listened quietly to the sound of the snow settling under the new heat. Working carefully from the doorway of the mill, Jeannot broke through the roof of the tunnel and dug upward. He took the cleared snow and packed it into steps, widening the hole as he went so that the snow would not collapse upon him. As he came nearer to the surface, he could first see a dim glow, and then a burning whiteness. It was blinding. Whiteness and light.
The sun reflected against the snow, bouncing the rays until it was so much brightness that he felt like his eyes would melt. With his eyes closed, however, my grandfather realized that along with light, sound had returned. During the snows, he and Martine had firewood and enough of a store of oil to see them through the winter, but still, they spent half of every day in the dark, trying to sleep away the winter. It was a darkness that could only be found underground, a complete absence of light. It was the sound during those months, though, that was harder to get used to. At first they had the wind and the pelting of snow against the sides of the building, but after a while even that had disappeared, leaving them with only a hush and the imagined whisperings of the man they killed; after butchering Gregory, neither Jeannot nor Martine found much to say.
That first day, he and Martine spent several hours simply standing at the top of their snow-packed staircase, but neither of them could figure out how to hoist themselves on top of the snow. Each time Jeannot tried, the snow crumbled under his weight, and he feared being buried. Finally, they simply retreated back inside the mill. By the next day the sound of water came louder, and a thin veil flowed constantly across the floor. Every few minutes the mill crackled and groaned, nails squeaking against the weight of the shifting and settling snow.
On the third day after Jeannot had broken through, the treetops melted clean, and from the top of the staircase they were able to see green pines. They stood on the stairs and watched birds dart from branch to branch, and a squirrel came close enough to the hole in the snow that Jeannot was able to hit it with the shovel. They had a different kind of stew for dinner that night. The sun shone down warmly enough that Jeannot and Martine stripped off their clothing while they stood atop the staircase, until they realized that the sun was baking them red with unforgiving intensity.
Day by day they climbed to the top of the stairs and watched the snow melt, still unable to exit from their burrow. They were not prepared, however, at the end of July, when they heard a voice calling to them. At first they thought they were hearing things again. In the long darkness of the winter, with only each other for quiet company, they had often imagined the sound of another person’s voice—usually Gregory’s, though sometimes that of a person who they were less intimately acquainted with—and though it broke their sleep, they had mostly lea
rned to ignore the phantom callings. But this time, at the sound of the voices, Flaireur perked his head up. The dog, as if he, too, had been hearing voices that he could not believe, stood warily, and then, with something approaching a great joy, he began to bark.
Jeannot and Martine, feeling like prairie dogs peeking their heads from the ground, greeted the man at the top of their staircase. He stood above them, his feet strapped into crudely fashioned snowshoes that appeared to have been made with a frame taken from chair backs and webbing from ripped silken undergarments. He wore only light pants and an undershirt, but a scarf swaddled his head; they could barely see his eyes behind the thin slit that he peered out of. Only when he lowered the scarf did Jeannot recognize Pearl Gasseur.
Jeannot brought out scrap lumber to make his own poorly constructed snowshoes. Pearl hauled him to the surface, and then he and Pearl together helped Martine emerge from beneath the snow. They had to move slowly; not only were the planks unwieldy, but Martine’s enormous, pregnant girth made it difficult for her to keep her balance. The sun beat down upon them with a welcome warmth. Thin streams of water ran across the surface of the snow at frequent intervals, and they could hear a powerful rushing sound.
“It’s a river,” Pearl said.
“It’s unfrozen already?” Though they were in the woods, Jeannot stopped and tried to peer through the trees, as if he might see the river.
“No, not the Sawgamet. A new river made of meltwater. It’s a churning madness. The water is running over the snow and cutting its own path.” Pearl shrugged. “Maybe it is above the Sawgamet, following the same channels, the same furrows in the earth, but I would not be able to tell.” He gestured to the trees that they walked through, the tips and branches that lay at their feet. “Even with this furious melting, there is still fifteen, twenty feet on the ground. I would have walked by you if the roof of the mill had not been peeking from the snow, and if I hadn’t seen your burrow and your grand staircase.”
When they came out of the trees, they stopped to look at the water. Like Pearl, neither Martine nor Jeannot could tell if the raging water followed the path of the Sawgamet, or if it followed some different course of its own choosing. The water ran wide, one hundred feet across, and frothed and churned like they had never seen the river do, even in the violent spring melts. Broken trees and boulders swam by them, heading down and away with no remorse.
“Look,” Martine said, taking Jeannot’s attention away from the water. They could see hints of the village before them. It appeared as though there were only a half-dozen houses, their third-stories resting on the snow like buildings of only a single floor. They could see two scantily clad women sitting on what must have been a porch roof, and further down, the first appearance of a shelter near the mines.
THEY SPENT SEVERAL HOURS digging and looking for Franklin’s store before they finally came upon it, Jeannot’s shovel bouncing off the rooftop. He banged the handle of the shovel against the roof several times, and after a short pause he heard a muffled yell and a knocking return. While Jeannot shuffled back to the mill to get his ax, Pearl brought Martine over to the brothel. The whores greeted her with hugs and wonderment at the size of her belly. They made her sit in their overstuffed chairs, bringing her soup with a slice of fresh-baked bread, and rubbing scented lotion into her swollen feet. She was so firmly ensconced in her comfort that she did not even realize Jeannot had returned and was hacking at the roof of her brother’s store.
The roof surrendered quickly to the blade of Jeannot’s ax. When he smashed through, opening a hole the size of a dinner plate, he saw Rebecca and Franklin’s upturned faces. They stood beneath the gap staring up at him, blinking like owls astonished to see the day.
“You put a hole in my roof,” Franklin said, a note of confusion in his voice, as if that was all he could think of to say after so many months buried beneath the snow.
“I’m trying to get you out.”
“Wouldn’t digging have done less damage?”
Jeannot rested the ax head on the lip of the hole and then let out a laugh. “You’ve got me there, Franklin. I got so excited at the sight of the roof that I didn’t even think of trying to find the door. Martine will be glad to see you well. And speaking of which, step back a ways. I’ve already put a hole in your roof, I might as well make it big enough for you to come out of.”
He swung with his ax, smashing and broadening the opening, and then, more gently, smoothing it out. When he was finished, Franklin pushed his counter under the hole, stacked a crate on top of that, and while he pushed from below and Jeannot pulled from above, the men helped Rebecca out.
At the sight of Rebecca—pregnant, though not quite as large as she herself was—Martine broke into tears. She was, she said to her sister-in-law, relieved to not have to give birth while buried under thirty feet of snow. She had been expecting the baby at any moment for the past few weeks, and in the overstuffed chair, with the soup finished and her brother’s wife before her and bearing the same bloated belly that she had carried for far longer than she had expected, she felt like she had experienced some sort of salvation.
Jeannot, Franklin, and Pearl decided that it made the most sense for them all to move into the brothel while the snow kept receding. Jeannot did not say anything about the pernicious limitation of the almost-depleted food supply at the mill—though I am sure that he and my grandmother were not the only people in Sawgamet to resort to eating human flesh to survive that winter—but he did agree that it would be nice to have some company for a while. That night, they had a festival of sorts, with cakes and a roasted goose that Pearl brought down with a shot from his rifle.
The next day, Franklin opened the store to Pearl and the women in the brothel, helping all of them crawl through the hole in the roof. They bought thread and needles, silk, bottles of ink, and toilet water. Though it nearly broke his heart to do so, my great-uncle charged them barely more than it had cost him to bring the supplies in, and he freely shared his flour, sugar, canned fruit, and tea with the women of the brothel. In return, over the next several weeks, they cooked for and pampered his sister and wife.
Franklin, Jeannot, and Pearl spent their days helping to dig out the five mining camps that showed signs of life. Where a roof still stood over the pit mines, Jeannot chopped his way through. The men usually came out slowly and warily, pale and blinking like moles, scared of the brightness of the day. Their clothes hung off them and their cheeks were hollowed out, like they had spent the winter carving at their own flesh rather than the ground. The miners were weak and smelled so badly that the madam insisted that they bathe in a large copper washtub set on the porch roof before they be allowed to enter the brothel. Each man took his turn, stripping and adding his clothing to a pile to be burned, then scrubbing himself in fresh hot water that the women from the brothel carried pot by pot up the stairs and passed out the window.
By the time they had dug out all five camps—nearly forty men in all—Jeannot, Franklin, and Pearl had heard the same story many times. The men working to exhaustion in their mines, at first not even realizing the direness of their situations, too excited by the idea of gold. Then, later, after it was too late to flee, rationing beans and biscuits, then resorting to butchering mules—or worse—and sucking on ice to create the illusion of fullness. The miners came out with such little strength that they often allowed themselves to be carried to the brothel like infants, and for the first few weeks the women treated them as such; it was not until near the end of August that they became paying customers again.
Most of the miners came back to health well enough, my grandfather told me, though one man never recovered his sight. He was part of a syndicate of five men who had been kept warm underground by the presence of a hot spring that they had accidently uncovered. They had no fire and only enough candles and oil to see them with light through to January. They had spent nearly six months in complete darkness, eating uncooked beans and hardtack, learning that they could not trust
the sound of each other’s voices. It quickly became commonplace among them to lay their fingers upon a speaker’s face, trying to divine intent and emotion through feel. Aboveg-round again, the first four men kept their eyes tightly closed against the brightness, only opening them slowly and gradually over the course of a week, but Alfred alone among them had opened his eyes to greet the sun immediately upon leaving the mine. Alfred’s eyes, so used to being without light, did not distinguish between the blindness of the dark and the blindness of the sun, and his eyes turned milky and forever sightless. Though he was an agreeable man despite his blindness, my grandfather said he could not stand to be near him, and was glad when the man went east to be with family; Alfred’s frosted eyes brought back the memory of the rancid meat smell and the fish-pale flesh of the hag who had temporarily stolen Flaireur’s voice on my grandfather’s first night in Sawgamet, the gagging taste of Gregory’s flesh in his mouth.
They unearthed a sixth mine as well, but there were no men left alive, only a fat and bored mule and the picked-clean skeletons of nearly a dozen miners. Though Pearl suggested they shoot the animal and leave the whole lot in their mine as a tomb, Jeannot convinced him that they might need the animal in the coming months.
After they finished digging out the mines, they saw a wisp of smoke past where they thought any man might be, and they came across the rooftop and stovepipe of a small cabin barely sticking out from the melting snow. When they dug out the door enough to open it, they found Xiaobo, the Chinaman who had been hired to work for Jeannot and my grandmother. He seemed as if he had lost his senses; he was naked and yelled at them, trying to push them away. They forced him into clothing and brought him back to the brothel, and though he calmed down and stopped slapping at them, it was a few days before he spoke English.
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