When we came in Adah stopped her singing and got up to greet Molly. Everyone was very polite — Jenks pulled at his cap when he said hello and the ladies gave Jimmy a greeting although, since he stood by Molly’s side, they stayed their distance. There was only one lantern on the table and the room was in shadows, but Zar got up to light another and at Adah’s signal he started to pour out a drink for Molly. She held up her hand, very ladylike, and smiled and shook her head. She had drunk her share in the old days and it wouldn’t have hurt her now, but it gave her more pleasure to refuse, it set her apart from the ladies although she knew them better than they thought she did.
All at once, as we were standing around, nobody had anything to say, we were all embarrassed we’d made an occasion. I lifted my cup: “Well here’s to Christmas and better times for the world.”
“Amen,” said Miss Adah. Then she sat down at the melodeon and began her hymn again. Everyone was quiet and drinking listening to her sing it through. She had a deep voice but she meant what she sang. When she finished she started another and it was one Isaac recognized, he stepped up in back of her and looking straight at the wall he joined right in, tenor.
Well the whiskey was warm going down and it spread over me like sun. There was this churchly music going; Molly, with Jimmy at her side, was sitting on a chair listening; Zar was stepping around offering the bottle; and I thought why this is what Isaac Maple had in mind, just to celebrate the fact that all of us are here. And I asked myself whether these weren’t already better times: here was some people and we had a root on the land where there was nothing but graves a few months before.
After a while the liquor began to have its effect on everyone. Jessie and Mae, who had been cowed by Molly’s presence, made a show of forgetting she was there and began to enjoy themselves. Jessie went over to Jenks, sitting in a chair, and stuck her thumb under his fur cap.
“Is that you under there, Dead-Eye?” she said.
Jenks slapped her hand away, stealing a glance at Molly at the same time: “Get on!”
“Why Jenksy!” said Mae plunking herself down on his lap. “Ah’ve never seen you so outdone. Didn’t you get yore sleep t’day?”
“If’n hew please, ladies,” Jenks said pushing Mae off. Holding his drink high he walked away to the bar. Jessie and Mae giggled. Jenks was being uncommon dignified but pieces of dry dung were stuck to the seat of his pants.
When the hymn was ended Adah turned in her seat and put her hand on Isaac’s arm: “You sing right nice, Mr. Maple,” she said.
“Thank ye, I like a good hymn,” said Isaac.
Zar was clapping his hands: “Holy, holy, holy! That’s vary good.”
“Ye have a true gift Miss Adah,” Isaac said.
“A gift?” said Zar. “Together you and she — two coyotes howling at moon.”
Isaac turned to him: “Say what?”
“Sure!” Zar began to laugh. “Such music I have heard on the steppe at night. Just the same as that: Howly, howly howly!” He doubled up with his own joke. “Jassie, Mae, you hear?” And he repeated what he’d said.
But the girls were busy working on Jenks, they had followed him to the bar.
“What’s botherin’ your friend tonight, Mae,” said Jessie.
“He’s jes shy,” Mae said digging Jenks in the ribs.
“I smelled o’ horseshit I’d be shy too,” Jessie said.
“I’ll tell you frand,” Zar walked up to Isaac. “Not only your singing is not human, but your way of doing business. A man would trade for my liquor. A man would have need for my girls.”
“Ain’t nobody can tell me how to run my business,” Isaac said turning red in the face.
“Cash cash!” Zar threw his head back: “Caaash!”
“Nobody forcing ye to buy!” Isaac shouted over the Russian’s roar.
Adah thought things were getting out of hand, she glanced once at Molly and turned around to play another hymn. But it only added to the noise. Zar walked away from Isaac with a gesture of disgust and poured himself another drink from the bottle on the table. The storekeep was following him, well aroused.
“Did I not pay ye cash for the use of yer tent? I deal fair and square, always have, always will. All’s I look fer is an honest profit and that’s more’n some can say!”
“Who needs you,” said Zar.
“God knows I didn’t ask to stay here, I was asked!” By this time the smiles were gone from Mae’s and Jessie’s faces.
“I b’lieve Mr. Jenks here has gone fancy on us Mae.”
“Listen you no-chinned, gun-polishing deadhead,” said Mae, “the next time you come along with yo’ tongue hangin’ out don’t look for us. Jes keep agoin’ down to her place and see what she’ll give you.”
“You bucktooth son of a bitch,” said Jessie pushing her face up to Jenks. For a second I thought Molly had heard, but the melodeon was blowing loud and Isaac Maple was shouting over it.
“I was horse-traded! Yessir,” he looked right at me, “I’ll say it. Horse-traded! Paid out good money to settle in this Hell. ’Tweren’t fit country fer Ezra and ’tain’t fit fer me!”
“Didn’t it never snow in Vermont, Isaac?”
“It did, yes it did. But you could reckon it, you didn’t spend yer days and nights beatin’ the sag out of a tent to keep from bein’ buried!”
“Why this is a gentle winter, Isaac,” I said.
“That may be but it’s m’ first and last in this hole, I’ll tell ye.”
“Than go and farewell,” Zar screamed.
“I’ll go, I will, don’t ye fret. When that stage comes I’ll be on it when it goes—”
At that moment Miss Adah stopped her song. And in the sudden silence Isaac looked around and cried: “But that stage’ll never come. We’ll all be dead before that stage comes again!”
Those were the lonesomest words I nearly ever heard. Not a night had passed lately when I hadn’t thought the same thing; but I’d never said it out loud and neither had anyone else. Isaac took the fear in all our minds and put it in the air. A chill ran through the room and in the quiet we heard the wind outside blowing desolate across the earth. I saw a wilderness of snow-crusted flats between us and the rest of the world, and not a track on it.
A moment later Isaac left. Then Molly got up and went off quickly. Mae leaned against the bar and fingering her hair said: “See you next Christmas, honey,” softly, as to herself. Zar slumped down at a table and put his head on his hand. Our gathering didn’t make any more sense, each of us was alone as himself, I wrapped up the boy and we left too.
The forlorn feeling of that Christmas night grew as time went on. There were days of such pure cold that it was like swallowing frost to take a breath out of doors. The weather had us holed up good, almost in spite it seemed like, and if I thought about the spring it was as a lost possibility. How could you remember the warmth of the sun when through one bleak day after another the winter danced around you with every fancy step it knew? We huddled in that cabin, bent grey sticks with eyes in them, I couldn’t even worry that one day we might not have what to eat or make a fire with: it was a worse dread to feel so lost on the earth, a live creature in a lifeless land.
What I’m trying to do now is account for the way things went, this winter had a lot to do with it. Under such conditions even the plain doings of a day had no reason. It was foolishness to eat just to stay alive inside that room; it was foolishness to lie down for the night since you would only wake up to the same day again. Once Molly looked at the door and said: “We’re buried as sure as those people frozen in the ground out there! Oh Christ but we know it, that’s all the difference.” And Jimmy, with that picture of his father, jumped up hugging her and crying as if to make it not true.