"You know," Alvin said, "kids are always getting up to some caper and you get all hot and bothered and it's nothing."
It was the last thing anyone said on the ride home.
The snow came harder as they drove, slowing them down. Michael watched it fall. He thought of the man with the deer in his wheelbarrow. By gad, sir, you present a distressing spectacle. If he could make it up somehow. His thoughts had all been mean and low. What he did not want in his mind's eye now was his son's face, the face on which he so doted. But it was there after all and the boy under snow. Hang in.
"Did I pass out?" he asked them.
"You were sleeping," Norman said.
How could he sleep? He had slept but forgotten nothing. His boy had been there the whole time. Prayer. No. You did not pray for things. Prayers, like Franklin's key on a kite, attracted the lightning, burned out your mind and soul.
When, hours later, they drove into town there were dead deer hanging from the trees on everyone's lawn. The lawns were wide in that prairie town. They supported many trees, and almost every bare tree on almost every lawn in front of almost every house had a dead deer or even two, slung over the low boughs. There were bucks and does and fawns. All fair game, legal. There were too many deer.
A police car was blocking Michael's driveway. Norman parked the Jeep on the street, across the lawn from his front door. Everyone got out, and when they did the young town policeman, whom Michael knew, whose name was Vandervliet, climbed out of his cruiser.
"Sir," Vandervliet said, "they're not here. They're at MacIvor."
MacIvor was the tri-county hospital on the north edge of town.
Norman put a hand on his shoulder. Michael climbed into Vandervliet's Plymouth cruiser.
"What?" Michael asked the young cop. "Is my son alive?"
"Yessir. But he's suffering from exposure."
And it did not sound so good because as they both knew, the cold, at a certain point, was irreversible, and all the heat, the fire, the cocoa, hot-water bottles, sleeping bags, down jackets, quilts, whiskey, medicine, nothing could make a child stop trembling and his temperature rise.
"Your wife is injured, Professor. I mean she ain't injured bad but she fell down trying to carry the boy I guess and so she's admitted also over there at MacIvor."
"I see," Michael said.
"See, the boy was looking for the dog 'cause the dog was out in the snow."
On the way to the hospital, Michael said, "I think I'm going to shoot that dog."
"I would," said Vandervliet.
At MacIvor, they were waiting for him. There was a nurse whose husband ran the Seattle-inspired coffee shop in town and a young doctor from back east. They looked so agitated, he went numb with fear. The doctor introduced himself but Michael heard none of it.
"Paul's vital signs are low," the doctor said. "We're hoping he'll respond. Unfortunately he's not conscious, and we're concerned. We don't know how long he was outside in the storm."
Michael managed to speak. "His body temperature…?"
"That's a cause of concern," the doctor said. "That will have to show improvement."
Michael did not look at him.
"We can treat this," the doctor said. "We see it here. There's hope."
"Thank you," Michael said. Above all, he did not want to see the boy. That fair vision and he kept repelling it. He was afraid to watch Paul die, though surely even in death he would be beautiful.
"We'd like you to talk to… toyour wife," the doctor said. "We're sure she has a fracture and she won't go to x-ray." He hesitated for a moment and went off down the corridor.
At MacIvor the passageways had the form of an X. As the doctor walked off down one bar of the pattern, Michael saw what appeared to be his wife at the end of the other. She was in a wheelchair. The nurse followed him as he walked toward her.
"She won't go to x-ray," the nurse complained. "Her leg's been splinted and she's had pain medication and we have a bed ready for her but she won't rest. She won't let the medication do its thing."
Kristin, huge-eyed and white as chalk, wheeled herself in their direction. But when Michael came up, the nurse in tow, she looked through him. There was an open Bible on her lap.
The nurse went to take the handles of Kristin's wheelchair. Michael stepped in and took them himself. Do its thing? He had trouble turning the wheelchair around. The rear wheels refused to straighten out. Do their thing. He pushed his wife toward the wall. Her splinted right leg extended straight out and when its foot touched the wall, she uttered a soft cry. Tears ran down her face.
"There's a little trick to it," said the nurse. She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Let me."
Michael ignored her. The wheelchair resisted his trembling pressure. Oh goddam shit.
"Take me in to him," Kristin said.
"Better not," the nurse said, to Michael's relief.
If he could see himself, futilely trying to ambulate his wife on wheels, Michael thought, it would be funny. But hospitals never had mirrors. There was a discovery. In the place of undoings, where things came apart, your children changed to cadavers, you spun your wife in wheelies, no mirrors. The joke was on you but you did not have to watch yourself.
When they were in the room she said, "I fell carrying him. He was by the garden fence — I fell in the snow." He could picture her carrying Paul up from the garden, tripping, slipping, stumbling. He took her icy hand but she withdrew it. "He was so cold."
"Lie down," he said. "Can you?"
"No, it hurts."
He stood and rang for the nurse.
Kristin took up the Bible as though she were entranced and began to read aloud.
"'Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge.'"
Closing his eyes, he tried to hold on to the words. Listening to her read in her mother's strange featureless tone, he could imagine Luther's Bible the way her mother out on the plains must have heard it from her own parents. A psalm for fools in the snow. Really expecting nothing but cold and death in the shadow of those wings. Odin's raven.
"'Until these calamities be overpast, I will cry unto God most high.'"
Michael sat listening, despising the leaden resignation of his wife's prayer, its acceptance, surrender.
"'My soul is among lions,'" she read, "'and I lie even among them that are set on fire.'"
His impulse was flight. He sat there burning until the nurse came in. For some reason, she looked merry, confidential.
"I think we turned a corner," she said. "Michael! Kristin! I think we turned a corner."
Then the doctor entered quietly and they got Kristin into bed and she went under the medication. Even unconscious, her eyes were half open.
The doctor said you responded or you didn't, and Paul had responded. His temperature was going up. He was coming up. He would even get his fingers and toes back and his ethical little Christian brain going, it appeared. The doctor looked so relieved.
"You can have a minute while we get the gurney. We've gotta get her x-rayed pronto because she's got a broken leg there."
"You can see Paul," the nurse said. "He's sleeping. Real sleep now."
The doctor laughed. "It's very exhausting to half freeze to death."
"It would be," Michael said.
While they got the gurney, he looked into Kristin's half-open, tortured, long-lashed blue eyes and brushed the slightly graying black hair from them. With her long face and buck teeth she looked like the Christus on a Viking crucifix. Given her, he thought, given me, why didn't he die? Maybe he still will, Michael thought. The notion terrified him. He had stood up to make his escape when the orderlies came in to take Kristin away. Michael rubbed her cold hand.
The chapel was down at the end of the corridor. It had a kind of altar, stained-glass windows that opened on nothing, that were inlaid with clouds and doves and other fine inspirational things.