The Winter Room Read online

  First snow.

  Winter.

  And winter isn’t like any of the other parts of the year more than any other part isn’t. Spring is close to summer, summer close to fall, but winter stands alone. That’s how Uncle David says it. Back in the old country he said winter stood alone and now he says it stands alone here as well.

  Winter comes in one night and of course Wayne and I look out the window in the morning and there are a million snow things to do.

  After chores we take the grain shovels and slide down the river hill sitting on them, holding the handles up and trying to steer by pushing them. The first time they move kind of slow, but when the snow is packed they just fly down. We can’t really steer them at all but just snort and whistle down the hill until we get so wet that Mother makes us come in and change.

  Then we have to make snow forts and throw snowballs at each other. And the chickens. All fluffed and looking for a warm place to stand. If they come too close to the fort they get it, or Rex, or the cats, or anything.

  … All the snow things to do. Father feels it too. One winter he hooked Stacker to a singletree with a rope out the back, and we stood on a piece of old tin roofing with a rope tied to it and we rode and rode, the tin so slick Stacker didn’t know it was there. Big as he was the cold snapped him up and he acted like a colt, if colts can get as big as barns, just snorting and flipping his tail and making air, whipping that piece of tin and us all over the field in the snow until we were so cold and sopping that we were sticking to the tin.

  Winter is all changes. Snow comes and makes it all different outside so things you see in the other times of the year are covered and gone. In back of the house there is an old elm that has a long sideways limb and one warm day some of the snow melted a bit and slipped down and then refroze so it looked like a picture of a snake we saw once in a magazine, or so Uncle David said. At night I could look out the bedroom window and see the snake hanging in the moonlight, the white snake and it seemed to move. It wasn’t there in the summer or spring or fall but only in the winter. Like magic.

  But finally, when the snow play is done and the barn and animals are settled in and the wood for the day finished, when our mittens are drying on the back of the kitchen stove and we have eaten the raw fried potatoes and strips of flank meat with the Watkins pepper on them and had the rhubarb sauce covered with separated cream, sitting at the kitchen table with the lantern hissing over our heads, finally when our stomachs are full Father pushes his chair away from the table and thanks Mother and God for the food and moves into the winter room. The living room.

  Wayne and I have to do the dishes, and that includes washing the separator, which takes a long time, so when we get into the winter room the fire in the stove has been freshened with white oak and Mother is sitting knitting socks and mittens, and Father sits on one side of the stove and Uncle David sits on the other, with Nels next to him.

  While Father has been filling the stove Mother has lighted the kerosene lamp so there is a soft yellow glow in the room. Wayne and I sit on the rug that Mother sewed out of braided rags, the colors all wrapped together in the soft light so they seem to move.

  Father is working on his carving. I don’t know when he started it. Maybe before I was born. But for as long as Wayne and I can remember he has been working at it every night in the winter. It will be a carving of a team of horses and a sleigh and trace chains and harnesses and reins and a man driving with a full load of pulp logs on the sleigh — all carved out of one piece of sugar-white pine he cut from a clear log many years ago. All we can see is the two horses’ heads sticking out and part of one front shoulder, but Father can tell us where each thing is, pointing to where the links of chain will be and the logs and the man’s head, just like he can see them even when they aren’t there.

  He carves quietly, his face even and somehow gentle, looking down as the small knife he uses cuts into the soft pine to peel away shavings so clear they look like honey in the yellow light from the lamp.

  Wayne and I watch the fire in the stove through the mica windows in the door — all little squares — and the stove is like a friend. In the summer it is black and large and fills the corner of the room but now it is warm and part of us somehow. It is tall and narrow, and on top there is a silver ornament that looks like a big rose upside down. Around the side there is a silver rail that Wayne says is to put your feet on to warm them. But one night when nobody was looking I sneaked a spit on the rail and it snapped and sizzled like I’d spit on the top of the stove where it gets red, so I’m not about to stick a foot on that rail.

  Next to the stove, across from Father, sits Uncle David and right next to him sits Nels. The two old men have straight-backed wooden chairs and a couple of old coffee cans they use for spitting into. They both fill their lower lip with snoose after we eat, and they sit straight up in the chairs, and Nels doesn’t say anything except to slap his leg now and again when a story gets good.

  Every night in the winter it starts the same. Uncle David and Nels will fill their lower lips and Father will carve and Mother will knit and the yellow flames will make our faces burn, and then Uncle David will spit in the coffee can and rub his hands on his legs and take a breath and say:

  “It was when I was young….”

  Then he will tell the story of Alida who was his wife in the old country. Always it is the same. Always he tells the story of Alida first and it is the same story.

  “It was when I was young and was thought fit only to sharpen the tools of the older men. This was wrong, wrong then and wrong now, but that is the way they did things in the old country. So each day I sat in front of the cottage and drew the stone over the axes and filed the saws until there was only new steel and the axes could shave the hair off your arm.

  “It was when I was young and a day came when a girl walked by as I was sharpening tools and she was so beautiful she made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth and I could not speak. Yellow hair she had, yellow hair like cornsilk mixed with sunlight. It was so long she had it coiled in a braid at the back of her head. And her eyes were clear blue. Ice blue. She was carrying a towel filled with loaves of bread to take to the cutters in the woods and she stopped and said good day to me and I could not answer.

  “Could not answer.

  “And that was Alida. She became my wife and let her hair down for me in great coils in the light from tallow candles. I could not live without her. We were married there in the old country and I put the handkerchief on my head to show I would be a good husband. I grew from sharpening tools to using an ax and a bucksaw and we planned to come to America, planned and saved. But soon Alida was with child and we had to stay and when the child came it was a wrong birth and the child died and Alida died and I died.

  “I wandered into the woods along Nulsek Fjord, walked in the snow and wind and would not have come back except that my brother Nels came for me and found me and brought me with him to America to work where there was new wood to cut and woods that go to the sky. But I never remarried and never looked at another woman and my heart has never healed, and that is the story of Alida.”

  * * *

  Uncle David always starts with the story of Alida. He has told it so often that when it comes out there aren’t many stops except that his voice always hitches when he talks about Alida letting her hair down in the light from the tallow candles and I can see her so plain, so plain, and Mother always cries.

  Father makes a small cough like there was something in his throat and Wayne takes a deep breath and Nels looks at the floor and doesn’t move and Mother always cries and it is quiet — so quiet when he finishes the story of Alida that it seems as if time has stopped and we are all back with her and the bread in towels and Uncle David sharpening the tools of the older men.

  Then Uncle David sighs and rubs his hands on his trouser leg and leans over to spit in the can and starts the second story of the night. The other stories are all different, always different night after night t
hrough the winter, so many stories I can’t know them all or say them all.

  But three of them I know.

  Three of the stories make cuts across all the stories the way a bucksaw cuts across wood so you can see all the rings and know how old the tree is, so you can know all about the tree.

  Three are the stories like rings and show how it was that Wayne, and maybe me a little, came close to ruining it all, killing it all.

  So Uncle David sits and he spits in the can and rubs his legs with hands callused so thick they look like bone or wood and he sighs and starts each one the same.

  “It was when I was young that Siggurd came to me and told me the story of Orud and the house under the sea.

  “The story was from old times, when men went off in long boats and many did not come back and those who did had blood on their bodies and blood on their swords and blood in their hearts.

  “Men took then, and did not give so much but took what they wanted. The man who took the most was Orud. Orud was tall and wide in the shoulder and had a helmet made of steel hammered to a point but soaked in salt until it was red, red like blood. They called him Orud the Red when they went a-viking and he was so terrible that it was said even the men in his boat feared him, and these men feared nothing.

  “So it came that on one voyage they went to far shores where they had not been before. They found small houses along the shore which were not rich in gold but all had much in livestock and wool and flax and wheat, and Orud and his men went among them and took and took and killed and killed until their arms were tired with it and they had to stop.

  “Orud had never taken a wife. But on this voyage in one of the houses along the sea his men found a woman of beauty and her name was Melena. Orud decided to claim her for a wife, which was his right as he was captain of the boat.

  “But such was Melena’s beauty, with long, red-gold hair to match the color of burnished steel and a straight back and long arms, such was her beauty that the man who found her wanted her as his own wife and claimed her, and that was his right as well.

  “But Orud would not have Melena go to another man. So they fought and the other man was weaker, as all men were weaker than Orud, and the other man lost and was slain. Orud put his head on an oar to boast and would not even bury the man as his station demanded. It was an awful thing then, to kill one of your own men and not even give him a Viking funeral, but they set sail with good wind to head home. Orud tied Melena in the bow of the longboat so she could not escape.

  “But she was more than beautiful. Melena was smart and strong, and she waited until the boat was entering the fjord of Orud’s home village and they could hear the horns sounding, waited until all could see the boat and see her. Then she stood on the side and used her magic to release her bonds and threw herself into the water rather than be wed to Orud.

  “Such was Orud’s rage when she leaped that he forgot himself and jumped after her, to bring her back.

  “But he forgot he was wearing armor and his sword and helmet to be welcomed with his new wife. The weight took him down into the deeps and he was not seen again.

  “Except that much bad came to the village. The people had sickness and their crops died and when they tried to go a-viking to make up for it their boats sank again and again.

  “It was said that Orud had found Melena and taken her to be his wife though she did not want it, and that they lived in a cottage under the sea at the mouth of the fjord but that Melena had not forgiven the village for sending the boat which carried Orud to take her. It was said she cursed the village into sickness and waste and when she looked up and saw the village send out a boat she would spread her hair up from the bottom in long strands and catch the boat and sink it in vengeance and laugh at Orud, and the wind and waves were her laughter, and that is the story of Orud and Melena and the house beneath the sea.”

  * * *

  The night of that story we sat quietly and thought of the cottage under the water and Melena’s hair streaming up to gather in the boats, and Orud’s terrible rage. Then Uncle David sighed and spit again and held his hands to the stove for the warmth. Mother shook her head thinking of the horror of Orud, and Nels coughed, and Uncle David gave a little chuckle and told the story of Crazy Alen.

  “It was when I was still young but I had come to the new country and I was cutting in the woods.

  “We were cutting in a camp called Folter, on the line between two counties then. I had a way with a file so they paid me extra to sharpen the saws at night and at times during the day. Because of that I was in camp many times when the other men were out cutting and so I knew more of the story of Crazy Alen than many of them.

  “Alen came years before I did, came on a boat from the old country just as I did but long ago when they had to sail. He wasn’t crazy at first but cut wood better than many men and was fast. He used a bucksaw and would pull so hard he often pulled the man on the other end off his feet, and the sawdust would fly out in a plume.

  “But a day came when he started to play jokes on the other men in the camp. They were not bad jokes, didn’t hurt anybody, and many laughed at them and that made him do all the more. He would put pepper in their snoose or sew their stockings closed or nail a board over the hole in the outhouse.

  “He was finally known for his humor and the jokes became larger until one day he waited until the foreman — he disliked the foreman then — was in the outhouse and Alen dropped a Norway pine so big you couldn’t reach around it, dropped it right in front of the door so close the foreman couldn’t get out. It was the best of all his jokes, dropping the tree that close to the door, and took great skill. Trees don’t always drop where they are supposed to drop. Everybody thought it very funny.

  “Everybody except the foreman, who saw only the danger in it. Had the tree dropped a little to the side it would have crushed the whole outhouse with the foreman inside it.

  “And so it came that the foreman fired Alen — they called him Crazy Alen by this time, because of his jokes — but Alen didn’t mind. He was getting old by then and had decided to stop work and watch things for a while. He made himself a small cabin on the side of a narrow trail back in the forest.

  “In the way these things work Alen and the foreman then became good friends. Part of it was that the foreman was also old and most of the rest of the crew was young; and part of it was that the foreman missed Alen’s jokes and humor. He could not hire Alen back to work, because somebody might be hurt, but the foreman began to like Alen’s jokes himself and one day he walked into the cabin with some honey in a bucket he’d stolen from the camp cook and a checkerboard.

  “Soon he was walking back along the narrow trail once a week to play checkers and drink tea with honey and this went on through part of a winter, a spring, a summer and fall and into winter again. The two men would sit and drink tea and play checkers and speak of things they’d done when they were young, and not so young, in that small cabin in the forest.

  “Of course Alen’s jokes hadn’t stopped. Every time the foreman came to play checkers Alen would have a new one, a bigger joke. He would have a bucket of water over the door with a trip lever set to drop when the foreman came in. Or he would loosen the rungs in the foreman’s chair so it would collapse when he sat down. Or he would put salt in his tea. Since all of these jokes were aimed at the foreman you’d think he would get mad but things were different then, different and maybe a little rough, and so men didn’t mind rough jokes and the foreman didn’t mind Alen.

  “Nobody can know how long it would have gone on, but that winter Alen felt death coming and decided to play his best joke of all. As a young man he had been big, big and heavy. Alen stood six-and-a-half feet and weighed two hundred and seventy pounds at least in his prime and his arms were long and heavy as well. He had come in and down with age, but the frame was still there and it was a big frame.

  “In the middle of that winter when it was so cold you could spit and it would bounce, when steel ax heads broke
if they weren’t warmed before you chopped, in that cold Alen saw his death coming.

  “Nobody knew how he could have done it, but just before he died he opened the cabin door to let the cold in and lay down on the floor on his back with his arms and legs stretched out as wide open as he could get them. And then he died.

  “He died with a wide smile on his lips and his arms and legs out and his eyes staring wide open at the ceiling.

  “And it was in the middle of the week and four days passed before the foreman came to play checkers. Four days with the door open Alen lay and the cold came into the room and the cold came into Alen and froze him as hard as granite. Then the foreman came and found him spread and solid on the floor.

  “Alen knew these things. He knew the cabin had a small door and that the trail down through the woods was narrow and winding and he knew the foreman. He knew the foreman wouldn’t be able to bring himself to break Alen’s arms and legs and he knew the foreman would not dare to thaw Alen because of what would get soft with the thaw.

  “He knew these things, Alen did, and he knew one more thing, knew the foreman would not leave the body. Could not leave the body.

  “And so it was his greatest joke on the foreman because Alen would not fit through the door. The foreman had to use an ax to cut the door opening wider and then try to get Alen — spread and hard and smiling — get Alen down the trail. It was nearly impossible. He tried to carry Alen but he was too heavy. He tried to drag him. Finally he tried to roll him, cartwheel him, and where tree limbs were too low he used an ax to chop a way through.

  “Two days and a night it took him to get Alen’s body back to the camp. Two days wheeling and dragging and carrying the spread-eagled man and when he finally got to camp they put Alen in the back of a sleigh and it took two more days to get him to town and an undertaker. It was said that as the sleigh went down the road all those who saw Alen thought he was waving and they would laugh and wave back.