The first storm of December, it snowed. It was a real pleasure to sit in our warm house and look out the window at the flakes drifting silently through the trees. Pa looked over my shoulder. “It’s going to be a hard winter.” I didn’t agree. We had enough food, even if it was fish, and more firewood was being dried in the bathhouse every day. After all the rain I was happy to see snow just for the way it looked, for the way it fell!—so slowly it didn’t seem real, at first. Then to run outside, and hop white drifts, and slap snowballs together to throw at neighbors… I loved the snow. The day after, the sun came out under a high pale blue sky (fishbone clouds smack against the highest part of it), and the snow melted before midday. But the next storm brought more snow, and colder air, and a thicker tail of high clouds, and it was four days before the harsh sun came out and the white dusting melted and ran into the river. That got to be the pattern: valley first white-green under black skies, then black-green under white skies. Week by week it got colder.
Week by week my story got harder to write. I got lost in it—I stopped believing it—I wrote chapters and had to take a walk over the soggy leaf carpets in the woods, distressed and angry at myself. Still, I wrote it. The solstice passed, and Christmas passed, and New Year’s passed, and I went to all the parties and such, but it was like I was in fog, and afterwards I couldn’t remember who I had talked to or what I had said. The book was the only thing for me—and yet it was so hard! Sometimes I wore out pencils faster biting than writing.
But the day came when the tale was on the page, pretty much. All the action done, Mando and Steve gone. I stopped then, and took one still day to read what I had said. It made me so mad I damn near burned the thing. Here all those things had happened, they had changed us for life, and yet the miserable string of words sitting on the table didn’t hold the half of it—the way it had looked, the thoughts it had engendered, the way I felt about it all. There was no more of last summer in that book than there is of the tree in an old scrap of driftwood. And the work I had put in on it—well, it was discouraging.
I went out for a walk to try and recover. A few tall white clouds sailed above like galleons, but mostly it was a sunny day, and dead still, though the air had a bite to it. Wet snow lay on everything. Cakes of it were balanced on every branch, dripping and sparking the various colors of the rainbow. On the ground the snow crumbled to big clear grains under the sun’s glare, and the grains turned to drops of water that beaded the white blanket. Suncones melted through to tufts of grass, and snowbridges over the streams filling the paths collapsed, leaving dirty chunks of ice in the mud, and snow hummocks to each side, black with pine needles. I walked between these hummocks and over the remaining bridges (the ones in shadow) to the cliffs, thumping my boots in puddles and knocking snowcakes on branches into much and spray.
Out on the point of the cliff overlooking the river I sat down. No swell whatsoever: tiny waves lapped the strand as if the whole ocean was shifting a hand’s breadth up and down. There wasn’t any snow left on the beach, but it was wet and bedraggled, with blue-and-white puddles dotting it everywhere. The scattered galleon clouds didn’t hinder the sun much, but gave its light a tint so that the long stretch of cliff was the color of ironwood bark. No swell, still air, the ocean like a plate of blue glass, the galleons hovering over it, holding their positions.
I noticed something I had never seen before. On the flat blue sea were perfect reflections of the tall clouds, clearly shaped so you could tell they were upside down. It looked like they were floating underwater, in a dark blue sky. “Will you look at that,” I said aloud, and stood. Ever so slowly the clouds drifted onshore over the valley, and their upside-down twins disappeared under the beach. I stayed and watched that all day, feeling like oceans of clouds were filling me. Later the afternoon onshore breeze ruffled the mirror clouds, and the sun got too low and glared off the water. But I went home satisfied.
In the winter the scavengers hole up in some of the big, shattered old houses—a dozen or more of them to a house, like dens of foxes. At night they use the neighboring houses for firewood, and light big bonfires in the front yards, and they drink and dance to old music, and fight and howl and throw jewelry at the stars and into the snow. A solitary man, gliding over the drifts on long snowshoes, can move amongst these bright noisy settlements without trouble. He can crouch out in the trees like a wolf, and watch them cavort in their colored down jackets for as long as he likes, undisturbed. Their summer haunts are open to his inspection. And there are books up there, yes, lots of books. The scavengers like the little fat one with the orange sun on the cover, but many more lie unattended in the ruins around them—whole libraries, sometimes. A man can load himself down till his snowshoes sink knee-deep, and then return, a scavenger of a different sort, to his own country, his own winter den.
At the end of January a particularly violent storm undermined the side of the Mendez’s garden shed (they called it a barn), and as soon as the rain stopped all the immediate neighbors—the Marianis, the Simpsons, and Pa and I, with Rafael called in for advice—got out to give them a hand in shoring up that wall. The Mendez garden was as cold and muddy as the ocean floor, and there wasn’t a patch of solid ground to set beams on, to prop up the wall while we worked under it. Eventually Rafael got us to tie the shed to the big oak on the other side of it. “I hope the framing was nailed together good,” Rafael joked when we were back under the sagging wall. Kathryn and I worked one side, Gabby and Del dug out the other, and we practically drowned in mud. By the time we got beams set crosswise under the wall for foundations, all four families were ready for the bathhouse. Rafael had gone before us, so when we got there the fire was blazing and the water steamed. We stripped and hopped in the dirt bath and hooted with glee.
“My suggestion is you leave that rope there,” Rafael said to old Mendez. “That way you’ll never have to find out if those beams will hold it up or not.” Mendez wasn’t amused.
I rolled over into the clean bath and floated with him and Mrs. Mariani and the others. Kathryn and I sat on one of the wood islands and talked. She asked me if I was still writing. I told her I was nearly done, but that I’d stopped because it was so bad.
“You’re no judge of that,” she said. “Finish it.”
“I suppose I will.”
We talked about the storms, the snow, the condition of the fields (they were under tarps or cover crops for the winter), the swells battering the beach, food. “I wonder how Doc is doing,” I said.
“Tom goes up there a lot. They’re getting to be like brothers.”
“Good.”
Kathryn shook her head. “Even so—Doc’s busted, you know.” She looked at me. “He won’t last long.”
“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. After a long pause looking at the swirling water, I said, “Do you ever think about Steve?”