And each morning the sun came up weaker and whiter, like an old man rising from his bed, and each morning’s chill was slower giving up the ground. Till finally I stood one day with the sun at its height and there was no warmth at all, but a shuddering breeze running down the neck and up the legs and lifting the clothes from the body. The winds were light but they brazed the flats with their cool blow and we hadn’t much time till winter.
6
The stable was not roofed before the true cold came, we drove the horses into the enclosure of the four high walls and while they snorted so you could see their breath and turned from one corner to another we took the corral apart and got some of the shaven logs up for joists. There was no good way of keeping warm except by moving. When the roof was up tolerably we made a railing of the remaining corral poles to go along in front of all the buildings — from the doors of the stable past Isaac Maple’s tent and past Zar’s place and the windmill to the door of the cabin I had built for Molly and Jimmy and me. A Dakota blizzard will freeze your eyes shut and drive you from your direction faster than your senses realize. I have known men to die in a drift a few feet from their doors because they had no rail to go by.
All during this hurried-up preparation against the winter I kept thinking how much we could use a good carpenter like Fee. A skilled man like that and it would not matter so much that the nails we had were soft and the lumber rotten. I worried what a blizzard might do to the stable roof. I took down the blades of the windmill to keep the water in the ground. Winter is a worrying time, you have to tuck your chin in and burrow down somewhere and hope there will still be something when the spring comes.
I had no clothes but the ones I wore, Molly had only her white dress and Jimmy had not even a hat. His pants didn’t cover his ankles and I had to tie a bit of rawhide around one of his shoes to keep the sole from flapping. We were not fit to meet the winter out of doors, and I knew when it set in in earnest we would have just our roof and each other to keep us from freezing. And that would be no comfort in a real blow.
For one week running the sun didn’t show through at all, the skies filled up grey and then snow began to sweep in on the wind. If you stood the bite long enough to take a look there was no more line between earth and sky. The flats were grey, the rock hills were grey and the wind, thick with snow, flew around your face in gusts so that you could even doubt your own balance, you could not be sure you were standing on ground or rising, without breath, in the sky.
The cabin I had built onto the dugout was not good against such weather. The door shook against its latch and snow came through the wall and settled in the corners. I moved the stove back to the dugout and we retreated there to sit with blankets around our shoulders and watch the glow of the fire in each other’s faces.
These were strange quiet moments. We didn’t have much to be proud of but I had to allow we were better off than we might have been. I could take satisfaction from the thought that bitter as she was, Molly had never made to leave the place I offered her; and that Jimmy might have done otherwise than jump to work at my side and heed every word I told him. A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.
But I looked at Molly sitting near the stove, her head was turned to the side and her hands were folded in her lap and she was gazing at nothing and her eyes were lost listening to the wind and snow outside — and in that quiet moment it was plain to me if she didn’t up and leave the first chance she had it was because no other place could she so savor the discouragement of her life. And Jimmy, who worked so willingly, the first day I came to the old town I saw Fee planing a board and his son holding one end for him. I had never once seen the boy linger at something useless the way most children will. He had watched his Pa stumble out of the Silver Sun and he had taken him by the belt — and that was work too. Jimmy was a child fitted to the land, using all his senses to live with what it gave him, and if he did his share and did as I told him why it was because he knew no other way.
Therefore where were my good signs? This green-eyed woman and brown-eyed boy sitting here had never done but the only thing they could do. And if I felt like believing we were growing into a true family that was alright: if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way.
I remembered that half-burnt old almanac we had and I thought it might be the right weather for teaching the boy to read. I could put a point on a stick and show the letters by scratching them in the floor. So we began to do that, working at it a little each day, I would have him study a letter as it was printed and then say its name and then watch me write it with the stick. Sometimes Molly watched, no expression on her face, maybe she was learning something too.
But the weather was ornery. A storm would blow up for a few days until the snow was banked high enough to keep the inside of the cabin warm. Then the sun would break through for a morning, warm winds would come down from the rocks, and soon everything was melting like a sound of crickets and water was running off everywhere. At night the ground iced up, every roof was hung with ice and the cabin walls were exposed again to the cold winds. It went on like that, every snow bringing its chinook to devil the skin, one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let you settle.
Molly said one evening: “Here you’re going on and on with those damn letters and you don’t even see the boy is sick.”
Jimmy had coughed once or twice that I’d heard, but I hadn’t thought about it. I said: “You’re alright aren’t you Jimmy?”
“I’m alright.”
But the next day he was coughing a lot. Even in the dugout the ground was damp, at night I folded my blanket and put it under him and then sat up listening to him cough and shiver in his sleep. Molly lay on her side on the other side of the stove, I could tell by her back she was wide awake and listening each time the boy coughed.
The next morning Jimmy couldn’t get up. He was shuddering under his blanket, his teeth chattered and there was a wheeze to his breath. His face was flushed and his eyes glittery. Molly looked at me like it was my fault he had come up sick.
Straightaway I went to the Russian’s. It was a grey cold morning and there was ice all along the railing and a muddy crust of snow on the ground. Inside his place Zar was pacing up and down and Adah and the three girls were sitting on the meeting chairs and making a breakfast of flour-cakes and sardines. It was cold in there but they all had coats.
“Zar,” I said, “I’ll trouble you for some whiskey, the boy has caught something on his chest.”
“So?” He waved his hand as he paced. “Take, take, there will be no miners again this week, what for do I need whiskey?”
Adah wanted to know what Jimmy’s symptoms were like. I told her he had a powerful cough and the chills and fever.
“Well it’s the weather for it,” the tall girl, Jessie, said, “I’m feeling poorly myself.”
“Ain’t the weather’s your trouble, honey,” Mae said to her, “jes the moon.”
Adah told me to wait a bit and she went into another room. Zar had built this place not much wider than a railroad car, and there were two rooms at the end of the public room, one in back of the other.
“No customers, only that deadhead Jenks,” Zar was saying. He was vexed the way the weather closed off the trail to the mining camp.