AS SOON AS the cold came, the lake began to freeze. Jon Ehrlich rose and dressed in the faint warmth from the stove and went quietly out from the cabin and tested it every day. When the ice was four inches deep it was capable of holding a man. He walked from one side of the lake to the other, staying close to the shore at first. Lily watched him diminish in the distance, tall and thin, the limp growing smaller.
A fierce wind blew across the bankside snow, kicked small eddies into the air. The trees made a dark run into the flat distance. He brought his oldest sons out to join him.
Father and sons turned and turned, testing the strength of the ice. Falconing, he called it. They circled closer to the center of the lake. Each time they reached the end of a spiral, Jon Ehrlich raised his boot and stamped to check the thickness. Lily watched the two older boys, Adam and Benjamin, do the same thing. The clean thud of their boots broke the silence. She thought they might disappear under at any time, that the lake would take them and ice over, swallow their scarves, their hats, their face wrappings. But they circled inwards, meticulous in their patterns. They knew the depth of the ice by the sound of their boots.
They went out the next morning to begin sinking the lake. Jon Ehrlich used a long thin auger to bore the holes. Steel with a sharp point. When he turned the handle, it looked to Lily as though he were churning butter. Small sparks of ice rose from the surface. He went across the lake with the boys, sinking hole after hole in the ice, three feet apart. They made a checkerboard of the lake. They stood over each hole and inserted a thin stick to make sure the drill had gone all the way through. The water gurgled up and spread. Layer upon layer. The spill from each drill hole met its neighbor, a spreading sheet of freeze.
As the days wore on, they followed their own footsteps back across the lake and rebroke the mouth of ice on each of the holes. The water rose again. Lily brought them lunch on the lake: hunks of bread and ham, bottles of milk corked with toweling and string. Jon Ehrlich drank and drew his sleeve across his mouth. Adam and Benjamin watched their father and did the same. Soon Lawrence, Nathaniel, and Tomas joined them on the lake.
They came inside to the cabin where Lily had built up the fire. Jon Ehrlich washed in the basin, then sat down by the light of a lantern. A man of two lives. He slipped on his spectacles, and read aloud from the Book. Late in the evening, he and Lily walked out together to see how much the ice had deepened. They wore no skates. They did not want to score the ice although Jon Ehrlich knew they would be planing it later on.
They rebored the ice and it deepened, day after day, season after season. When it snowed the process was quicker, and there were nights when the ice could deepen by a full three inches.
The dark of their figures moved over the enormous white. When the lake was thick enough, they drew a heavy wooden frame behind them. The frame was shod with a sleeve of steel. The snow built up and collected in furrows. Row upon row of them appeared on the western edge of the lake. They looked to Lily like so many white eyebrows.
When the snow was cleared, Jon Ehrlich and his sons planed the ice down. They measured out large squares, each the size of a half door. They cut into the lake with an ice plow. The blades were set in grooves and the plow was drawn by the draft horse. Particles of ice shot up in the air. When the lake was deeply scored, they bent into the work of sawing along the plowed lines. The best ice was the color of crystal. Hard and pure.
THE FLOORS OF the storage sheds were covered with tanbark. No windows. Double-walled. The spaces between the inner and outer walls were filled with sawdust to insulate what lay inside. The ice cakes were packed high and so close together that they could hardly slide a blade between them.
It was to Lily one of the great mysteries: how the ice could hold out against the weather, even through the spring.
The cold fell. They farmed the lake. After a while even the youngest, Emily, went out to help them lift the cubes. They used longhandled hooks to slide the cakes across the lake towards the draft horse waiting, patient for its chores. One quick flick of the wrist could send the cake of ice spinning twenty yards across the lake. Lily liked to watch Emily guide the cakes across the surface, the elaborate motions the young girl made with the cubes.
WHEN THE TRIBUTARIES thawed, they floated the ice all the way to St. Louis on a barge that complained under the weight. The cakes were packed in crates and covered in straw to keep from melting. Elk bugled along the riverbanks. Peregrines soared in the blueness overhead.
Jon Ehrlich guided the barge past the sandbanks into port and packed the wares in an underground cellar along the riverfront. An ice dealer from Carondelet Avenue came and inspected the work. Crisp bills were counted out. It was good business. It was as if Reconstruction itself knew how to make things work. Hotels. Restaurants. Oyster shops. Rich men in fancy homes. Even sculptors who wanted to carve from giant ice blocks.
He bought a new lease on a small upstate lake. Experimented with new methods of insulation. Developed a toboggan system. Floated the cakes along a series of intricate canals. He drew up plans for a series of levers and pulleys for the storage sheds. There was a call to float ice down the Mississippi to cities as far away as New Orleans. They built a new house on the far side of their lake, open to morning sunlight. A smokehouse, too. Hanging from hooks were sides of bacon and cured ham. Medicinal plants: spikenard, snakeroot, senna, anise. Bins filled with sweet potatoes. Deep barrels of butter. Apple jelly. Peaches in preserve.
Lily had never seen such stores of food. She moved among the full shelves in a daze.
On Sundays they loaded their horse cart with spare provisions and drove them to church, early, so that they could be distributed quietly amongst others. Jon Ehrlich guided the reins down gently on the backs of the horses. His breathing was labored. Age was beginning to catch him. As if his body had taken on some aspect of the ice. Still, he unloaded the stores of food. Lily felt little call for the church, except as a moment away from her chores, but it gladdened her to give food away. She had seen worse hunger before, long ago. She did not care to see it again. Irish and German and Norwegian families lined up at the back door. An air of hammered pride about them, as if they would not need it long.
Jon Ehrlich came home one mild evening in the spring of 1876 and parked the horses down by the storage sheds. It had been a long journey. A week on the road. He came up through the newly cobbled yard, carrying a large canvas in an ornate frame. He called her name. She did not respond. He walked in the door and kicked off his boots, called her name again. She came from the kitchen at the back of the house. Shuffling her slippers on the floor.
— What in the name of God is the commotion?
He held the painting up for her to see. She thought at first it was a box of some sort. She stepped closer. She glanced at Jon Ehrlich, then at the box once more. A riverside in Ireland. An arched bridge. A row of overhanging trees. A distant cottage.
Lily did not know what to say. She reached out and touched the framed edge of the painting. Looking into it was like looking out another window. Clouds. Fast water. Geese gunneling through the sky.
— It’s for you.
— Why?
— I bought it in St. Louis.
— Why?
— It’s your country, he said.
He had bought it, he said, from an artist who was reputed to be famous. They had told him so at the marketplace.
— Your own people, he said.
Lily stood back from the painting. Her hands shook. She turned away.
— Lily.
He watched her walk out the door, towards the lake. The early insects of spring gathered around her. She sat down on the lakeside with her head in her hands. He could not understand it. He placed the painting against the table by the door. Said nothing more about it. He would, he thought, get rid of it tomorrow.