Her door was locked. She went back to the window and thought at first to signal to the figure below but saw that there were two people dragging pieces of wood to what was now a considerable pile. The carcass of a huge, leafless cottonwood hung over the yard and the patterns of human activity below, patterns Evelyn could not begin to understand. Maybe the tree would come to life in the spring, but this did not appear likely. It looked dead, and its black trunk was textured in the seams of its bark by the flying snow that made crooked vertical lines almost up to the crown, where it turned black once again, perhaps above driven flakes, and was composed entirely of the frantic shapes of the leafless limbs. Somehow these arboreal corpses kept returning to life.
There was nothing in the room to read except an old Norwegian Bible next to the rustic lamp. Evelyn glanced at it and then made the bed, crossing from one side to the other to pull the gray blanket until it was quite as tight as a drum. She plucked out the corner of the pillow so that everything was perfectly symmetrical and turned to the dresser and washstand where she could see herself, her face somewhat interrupted by a fading BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY decal. A key lay on the dresser and when she moved it, she saw that its shape had discolored the wood beneath it in its own dark shape. There was a keyhole in the top drawer, but the key did not fit the lock. The drawer opened perfectly well without it and inside were advertising materials for a Packard automobile, a coin from Mexico and a flat carpenter’s pencil advertising a lumber company in Miles City.
A nice room but nevertheless she was locked inside it. Possibly this was a mistake that would painfully embarrass her gracious hosts. Or maybe she was enslaved.
Evelyn pulled a chair up beside the window, where initials were carved into the sill. Ice had formed around the upper pane in a smooth bluish arc suggesting the window of a church. The square of logs and branches had not gone further, and the people were no longer present. Into this emptiness appeared a dog whose face was divided black and white almost precisely down the middle. He had a tail that curved high over his back, and he sped around the yard sniffing the ground intently before departing from Evelyn’s view. She had begun to remember the cows, the ones in flight across the country in cattle trucks and the ones that circled her… when? Last night. Last night, after she’d run off the road, after the truck with the men had come up, the flash of light on opening doors. She had a great conviction that she’d been right to flee, though the flight and the sense of being overtaken by driven clouds of stinging snow, and then it all just not so gradually stopped. She had slept in a circle of cows and now she was here. Her anxiety had subsided and, hearing footsteps ascending the stairs, she became hungry, as if whoever was coming knew she needed food.
Evelyn watched for the door to open. She stood well away from it, in front of the window, which she was imagining as an exit without expecting to need it. When the door did open, she immediately recognized one of the figures from the snowy yard, a rather short and stocky woman, with a nose in the exact center of her face, bristly hair and a small round mouth. Her face was red, probably from the cold, and she had a very direct gaze. “Well, you’re up,” she said.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“And are you rested?” she demanded.
“I am, yes.”
“I’m Esther.”
“How do you do; I’m Evelyn.”
“You’re just lucky to be alive,” the woman said. “If Torvald hadn’t gone out with his bale feeder, you’d of froze. You was near froze as it is. Most of the time Torvald just spikes a round bale, cuts the strings and rolls it down a hill about a mile away. But the weather got so fearful he says he’s worried about the cows and goes out with the feeder, only this time the block heater come unplugged and the hydraulics was kaflooie. Had to use a can of ether — smell it clear to the house — and I’m thinkin’ Torvald was liable to blow hisself up. Took half the night, but lucky for you, you wasn’t clear froze yet, no more froze than Torvald. Well, how’d did you get there?”
“I went into the ditch. I was looking for help.”
“Should’ve stayed with your outfit and waited for help to come along.”
Evelyn decided not to say what it was that put her to flight and thought it was better and shorter to let Esther assume that she was foolish enough to try to cross a snowfield at night in search of rescue. No explanation for fighting a blizzard in a party dress seemed adequate. She was comfortable now and hungry and the old clothes were warm.
“I’d better feed you,” said Esther.
“Oh, that’s not necessary at all,” said Evelyn. “If I could impose on you for a lift into town, I’ll grab something there.”
“Impossible. We’re snowed in.”
“Oh.”
“We been waitin’ for this. We been hopin’.”
“To be snowed in?”
“You bet. Oh, you bet.” Esther went out the door. “Your food is ready when you are.” Evelyn thought about the couple in the yard, and marveled that there were people who actually longed to be snowed in, for whom there was never enough isolation.
Evelyn stepped tentatively out onto a landing that she could not remember and that produced an unsettling blank in her memory, which must have begun in the snowfield. Never before had she “passed out,” and the very notion made her queasy; too many friends had awakened to find some lummox toiling away over their bodies. Nevertheless, she went down the stairs she must have gone up, and on a table at the bottom found a meal prepared for her of bread and eggs and a drink, a cold liquid which referred to oranges. Esther began putting food on the table, nothing that looked particularly familiar.
“I wonder,” Evelyn said, “—this is very nice, mm—if I could borrow the phone?”
Esther was frowning before she’d even heard the question.
“No phone,” she said firmly. Evelyn couldn’t tell whether that meant there was no phone or that she couldn’t use it. Esther then pointed to the meat that was part of the breakfast array with subdued glee. “Moose,” she said. Moose ’n’ eggs, thought Evelyn. I must pray for an airlift.
The room where Evelyn sat had on one side a small kitchen and, on the other, a passageway in whose yellow, angled glow appeared a large, strangely dressed and rather shambling man, with a kind of boardinghouse anonymity and hardly a glance her way. Perhaps he, too, was snowed in. While Evelyn contemplated these things, picked at her eggs and considered creative disposal of the moose, Esther set another place beside her with a comparable meal. When Evelyn raised an inquiring and smiling gaze, Esther spat out the words, “Our son Donald!”
Donald strode into the room, a great big man with a remarkably bushy gray beard and piercing black eyebrows. “Hullo!” he said, sitting down with such force that Evelyn was afraid his chair would break. Except that his hair was in curlers, he looked like any other rancher. Peering closely at his breakfast, he offered a great paw in Evelyn’s direction. “I apologize for appearing before you déshabillé. Normally I am zipped up in my coveralls by now and making myself useful to Papa. But we are snowed in. And this is the weekend, when I do as I please especially on these exciting Saturday nights! Chores done, cows are asleep, sheep askew and th—”
“Donald, that’ll do!” This rough voice came from the kitchen but did not belong to Esther. Donald’s face compressed and his eyes narrowed as he took this in with unyielding fatalism.