NILS SCOOPS AWAY THE SNOW carefully at first, with a trench shovel, then desperately, finally getting down on his knees and scraping with his hands at the thick stratum of ice when he believes he’s found another body. Twice what he has uncovered has been not a body but someone’s luggage—the olive-green duffle of a soldier the first time, and now, an hour or maybe two hours later (time has become hard to measure out here in the dark and the cold), a lady’s brocade valise. He sits back on his heels and breathes the rimy air in ragged gasps. The fabric of the bag was so certainly a woman’s overcoat an instant ago, the round shape of it her curved back. He kicks at the bag with the toe of his boot and pulls off his gloves.
It is March, but there is no sign of spring here. Snow is still falling, and Nils’s fingers are still with the freezing temperature. He works at the buckles and the bag opens; when he shines the beam of his lantern inside he sees the cream colored satin of a woman’s under slip, a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses in a soft drawstring pouch, a silver compact with a clamshell design on its case and a mirror inside, the glass clean and unbroken. He snaps shut the clasp on the compact and drops it into his pants pocket, tosses the bag aside, and pulls on his gloves again to keep digging.
Here and there flares poked into the snow fizz and hiss, their sulfuric halos trembling and bright against the white drifts. In their odd, low light the wreckage of the avalanche seems imagined, too strange and awful to be real: trees snapped to raw splinters, and the whole, wide swath of the mountainside cleared; metal sheets ripped from the train car’s sides, the frames twisted and freed of their axels and carriages, shards of window glass and the steel cages from the train’s internal light fixtures tossed out onto the snow. Near the tracks, where the train had stopped to wait out the weather, the rotary plow and both engines sit mangled and half buried, wheels upturned to the sky. Two of the three passengers cars that were once hitched to one another have been flung apart and lie on their sides, farther down the mountainside—one only a hundred yards from the tracks, the other picked up by the tide of snow and ice and swept a quarter-mile downhill. Both look as if they’ve been exploded from the inside, the metal roofs blown out by the force of the snow, their wood siding broken and strewn. And everywhere precarious collisions of logs, evergreen needles, and bits of gravel and dirt churned up by the slide.
There is also what the searchers have uncovered as they’ve dug: a silver coffee carafe, and nearby, the book someone on board had been reading, its pages open and face down, the paper softening now. Nils comes across suitcases and purses; checked blankets and white pillows, stamped PROPERTY OF GREAT NORTHERN RAILROAD; and several shoes and boots somehow separated from their owners. As he walks, he spots a single seat ejected from the train and detached from its aisle mate in the accident, sitting upright between the shorn stumps of two fir trees as if waiting for a passenger to amble up and sit down.
The snow underfoot here is wet and dense and grainy. It was compacted in the rush down the mountainside, and a rigid crust has formed beneath the inches of loose, new snow, making it hard for Nils to keep his footing. There is a strange, mineral scent in the air too—stirred up by the slide—something like the smell of a river. Nils realizes he will smell this odor again when the thaw begins in the spring and this years will think not of new life, but of destruction.
He passes a new mound every few feet that looks the size and shape of a body. Sometimes he stops and digs. Sometimes he just plunges his shovel into the snow and hopes the blade won’t strike anything solid; he sighs his relief when it goes in cleanly, pulls it free again, and keeps walking. There are drifts taller than men, wider than the train cars, and the task of unburying whatever lies beneath them seems impossible and useless. This is already the second day of searching—it took Nils a full day just to arrive, with the tracks blocked by the avalanche and the only way to get up the mountain by foot. No one else will be found alive.
He recalls his mother telling him about the midwestern blizzards of her childhood. Cows out to pasture suffocated when their own breath froze in their nostrils. Farmers caught in a storm and lulled to their deaths by the monotony of white and the chill of hypothermia. He imagines children curled like rabbits in burrows beneath each mound of snow here, their eyelashes coated in tiny grains of ice, their lips sealed, their skin marbled blue.
“Here!” a man’s voice yells from several feet down the mountainside. “Here! Here!”
Nils lunges forward against the snow, breaking the ice shelled just below its surface. He feels as if he’s running through deep water; every step requires double the usual exertion. His boot tops fill and the snow melts with the warmth of his legs and soaks through the canvas of his pants, the wool of his long underwear. He sweeps the beam of his lantern across the white drifts, the kerosene inside the sloshing, and catches the shadowed columns of evergreen trunks, the shadowed bodies of other men straining to run. The men at his back holler to one another as they plod forward; one man in front of him carries an axe and a shovel, their blades clanging together as he moves.
“Where are you?” Nils yells in the direction of the voice. His exhalation is a bright cloud in the sphere of his lantern’s light. Snow whirls and kaleidscopes as it passes through the round of light.
“Down here!” calls man up ahead, and the other join him. They’ve been in a small meadow, Nils sees now for the first time; the railroad track is at the top of the short rise about them, and the voice hollering for help is thirty feet below, at least, down a steep incline.
He uses his shovel to steady himself. Some of the men use pickaxes they’ve brought, and there is the rhythmic pitch-and-stick sound of their blades cutting into the snow and holding, then dislodging as they make their way down the grade. The snow glints and shimmers inside the rails of light extending from their lamps. Overhead, most of the snow clouds have cleared, but there is no visible moon, and it is as if a lid has been screwed onto the jar of the world. The circle of sky is a hard, polished black, punctured only by the tiny, pale holes of stars.
By the time Nils reaches them, the others have already uncovered the body of a man and are lashing it to a toboggan with rope. Nils looks on and feels nothing, and then is guilty for this nothing.
The man’s skin is gray with the cold. They’ve wrapped his body in a checkered wool blanket, his face and feet sticking out at the end of the sled. He’s still wearing dress boots and hand-knit socks. Someone takes off his own hat and puts it on the dead man’s bare head. The gesture seems ridiculous out here, an unnecessary show of warmth that can’t possibly matter. The man’s face is frozen in a grimace. His eyes are shut.
“Jesus,” someone from the back of the crowd says. “They’re all just icicles.”
Two men take hold of the toboggan’s ropes and start up the mountainside to the tracks. They’ll take the body into the station town to be counted and once the rails are cleared, onto the train, which will take it west, over the pass to the morgue in Everett.
The other’s stand for a moment. They pull flasks from their coat pockets and take off their gloves to slap their hands against their thighs, warming their fingers again before slipping gloves back on. Someone has brought a pail of sandwiches and passes it around. Nils takes one and eats quickly without tasting what’s between the bread. He crumples the waxed paper the sandwich was wrapped in and stuffs it into the top of his boot.
“It’s two a.m.,” the man next to him says, and so they pick up their shovels and startup the incline again, hiking with high steps, asking the beams of their lanterns up the rise, toward the blue-black stand of evergreens at the top of the ridge, and back and forth across the angle of the mountainside, looking impossibly for anything salvageable.
HE IS IN HER BED. Her sheets smell like summer to him. When he says this, she tells him she cut lavender from the garden in August and dried it for sachets to keep in the linen cupboard.
It’s October, two years earlier, and the house is chilled, though it is late afternoon and there is still sun behind the thin drape at the window, lighting the collection of potted plants she keeps on a side table beneath the sill—spider plants and ferns, a white-blossomed amaryllis on a lim stalk, a geranium with petals colored on oxidized red. On the floor sits a pot overcrowded with a spiny bed of hen-and-chicks. “I think you’d bring the whole yard inside if you could,” he says.
“Not the weeds. Not the bugs. I can honestly say I don’t miss a single aphid or wasp all winter.” She lays her head on the pillow beside his.
Iris grew up in California and winter here makes her homesick. “I remember the air at home smelling like persimmons. But maybe I”m misremembering. My memory is an optimist. In my memory of this moment you’ll be younger and I’ll be prettier.”
“I’ve never seen a persimmon,” he says.
“How can that be true?”
“Are they like apples? Because I’ve had my share of apples and yours too, probably.”
“Here I though you were worldly. What else have you missed?”
Iris is thirty-four—eleven years his junior—and plain, really. She wears her dark hair cut as short as a man’s, the bare stretch of her neck exposed even when she’s fully clothed. She was widowed suddenly last spring, after only nine month of marriage, when her husband’s appendix burst. He’d been the librarian in town, a fisherman on the weekends. He left her a very small savings, a wide bookcase of books, and this house—a one-bedroom bungalow a mile out of Wenatchee, with a little outhouse in back and a porch overlooking the river and mountains.
“What will you do in the winter here, alone?” Nils asks.
“I’ll be fine. There’s the stove, and I’ll buy wood.”
“You’ll have to walk them mile in the snow alone.”
“I’ve done it before. It doesn’t bother me.”
“What does bother you?”
“You pestering.” She chucks him on the chin and he pulls her toward him, kisses the flat of her chest.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “You love to worry.” Her body is warm against his. She lies still long enough that he wonders if she has fallen asleep, but then she sits up.
“Look away,” she says, and she reaches for her robe at the foot of the bed.
“I won’t. That’s ridiculous.”
“Fine. Have it your way.” She is thick across the hips and has a round, white belly into which the rose of her navel disappears when she bends to pull on her socks. Her breasts swing forward matronly. She’s never had a child. Now that she’s alone, she’s told him, she’s glad of this.
“I do worry about you,” he says. He wants her to meet his eyes, but she doesn’t. “I want to keep worrying about you.”
“Don’t,” she says. Then turning away: “Persimmons look like pale tomatoes. Orange, rot red. But they taste like apples, you were right. Nothing special, really.” She pulls a sweater over her head, swifts her fingers through her short hair. “You haven’t missed anything.”
AT FIVE THE SKY FLUSHES pink along the white and jagged eastern crests of the Cascades and a man dressed in a parka and holding a record book appears at the top of the ravine to call out that it’s time for a shift change. He’s brought with him a new crew of men—some of them company men, like Nils, dressed in winter coats with Great Northern patches on the breasts; and some members of volunteer search crews from Wenatchee and Everett and other surrounding towns. They start down the ravine as Nils and the others who have been out all night tromp up.
The man in the parka gives them a verbal report of the search, taking a small pad of paper from inside his coat to read off the numbers. Ten bodies recovered alive, eight of those injured, all ten recovered in the first hour after the wreck. Since then, thirty bodies recovered deceased. Various luggage and personal effects will remain on them mountain until the missing persons search has concluded. There are fifty-two bodies still missing, he tells them. And the third train car still hasn’t been found. “We’ll keep at it.” His voice turns falsely bright. “Thank you all for your efforts,” he says, releasing them. “Go get warmed up and rested.”
They make their way along the railroad grade. Usually the tracks would have been plowed already, but there were smaller avalanches to the east and west that have blocked the pass from both sides. In some spots the tracks are buried beneath twenty-foot drifts. The temperature is still frigid, and Nil’s fingers and feet, knees and hips have long since numbed. He seems to moving forward without willing it, and has a sensation of dislocation from his own body that makes him question for a moment if he is not maybe among the dead.
“You look dazed, Riis,” the man walking beside him says and slaps Nils on the back. The man’s familiarity startles him. He’s seem him at the rail yard in Wenatchee—he’s a mechanic, maybe, but Nils can’t think of his name. He offers his flask, but Nils declines.
“I’m fine. Just a long day.”
“Long night, you mean.”
“That’s right. That’s what I meant.”
“You need a hot plate and a warm bed.” The man takes a swig from the flask himself and nils can smell the alcohol like a tremor of heat on the cold air.
The town is small, and they arrive at the west end, the railroad tracks suddenly opening into a wide valley in the crotch of two ridgelines. Slaggy cliffs rise up on either side of the town, and a narrow creek with water so emerald green it looks like flowing paint runs parallel to the railway on the other side of the one paved street. It’s a company town, run by the railroad, with one grocery, one hotel, a post office in the railroad station, a single building to stand as both schoolhouse and church, and a few saltbox houses lining the few dirt roads off of Main Street. The avalanche swept into the far end of town, plowing through a set of barracks set up to house railroad crews. Five men asleep inside at the time of the slide were killed.
With the barracks gone, search teams have taken over the hotel, the injured being tended to in first floor rooms, and the crews sharing beds upstairs. When they arrive, Nils and the other men stand on the front porch stomping snow from their boots and lining their tools along the wall before entering the dark lobby.
There’s a crowd filling the dining room already, and the noise of conversations and the clatter of dishes being passed seem chaotic and louder than usual after so many hours in the cottony quiet of the snow. Nils finds one of the few free seats in the room, next to a man still wearing gaiters and scarf. “Pardon me,” he says. The space is tight, the chairs pushed close to one another along the table so that Nils has to ask him again to make room when he pulls out his chair to sit.
“You gentleman have left me no place to eat.” A tall woman still dressed for the outdoors stands near the table with a bowl of stew and a mug of beer in her hands. Melted snow has beaded on the wool of her coat and large leather gloves gape from her pockets where she has stuffed them.
A man across the table from Nils looks up. “You can have my seat, Sister.” He hunkers over his bowl and shovels the last spoonfuls of stew into his mouth in rapid succession, then pushes back. “I’m done anyway.”
She walks the long way around the table and the man hold the seat, nodding at her as he lifts his coat from the chair and leaves.
When she takes off her own coat, she’s wearing a man’s sweater beneath it, the brown wool loose on her narrow frame and the cuffs rolled. Her face is ruddied with the night’s work in the cold air, her hair straying in gray-blond wisps from the braid that circles her head. Around her neck is a wooden cross on a leather cord.
“Morning,” she says, brightly greeting the table of men, and then she bows her head and says a silent grace before taking up her spoon.
“WHAT DO YOU DO when you’re alone?” Iris asks.
“What do you mean, what do I do? I eat and sleep and read and work—what everyone else does.”
“No. I mean, do you ever get tired of yourself? Do you ever say anything? Just to keep yourself company. I do, sometimes. Not because I mind being alone, but because it just seems so quiet.”
“I never feel obligated to talk.”
“I’ve noticed. It’s one of your faults.”
He laughs at this.
They sit at the table in her small front room, eating the doughnuts Nils has brought from the bakery downtown.
In his mind, he places this moment earlier than the memory from the bedroom. This is September, not long after they met. He recalls with certainty the doughnuts, the dark and butter perfume of coffee in the room. Through the cracked bedroom door he can see just the foot of the bed, the yellow and blue quilt hanging lopsided as if she never pulled up the blankets after waking.
Most of the specifics of the morning are frustratingly foggy though—what she is wearing, what she does with her hands when she speaks—and trying to force his memory to clarify is like trying to draw an object and then looking down at the paper to find the image vaguely familiar but also lacking the shadows or peculiarities that make the real thing real. And so Nils fills the gaps with what is likely: Her shirt is blue, big—probably one of her husband’s. Her hair is uncombed, wild still from having slept on it, and she touches it again and again, tryign to smooth it down as they talk. A novel lays facedown on the laptop, still opened to the page she was reading when he appeared at her front door. He wasn’t invited, but she doesn’t seem surprised to have him across the table from her now, her face as placid and content as it has been each time he’s seen her.
“I wouldn’t know what to say to myself,” he tells her. “What do you say when you’re in here yakking to your shadow?”
She runs her thumb along the rim of her plate, collecting the sugar crystals that have fallen from the doughnut, then touches her thumb to her tongue. “Me and I, we talk about the weather. The cost of flour. Sometimes I complain about men. We have a wonderful sense of humor.” She grings at this. “No, actually, I mostly just sing.”
“I bet you do whole routines. Where are your tap shoes?”
“I can tap,” she says. “You’d be surprised. Come over for dinner sometime and I”ll do a little soft-shoe for you while I cook.”
“I’d like to hear you sing now.”
“What would I sing? You’ll just laugh.”
“I won’t. Sing something I’d know. Sing ‘Oh! Suzanna.’ Everyone knows that.”
“No, I’ve never liked that one. It’s too sad. I’ll do ‘Red River Valley.'” And then she signs a few lines, keeping the rhythm against the table, waving him onto join in. Her voice is high and round and clear.
After this he notices her singing all the time—as she makes coffee in the mornings, as she leans over the washbasin to rinse her face at night. Once he catches her singing as she works in the yard, her figure bend toward the gound, a pail of pulled weeds at her knee.
“Come on,” she says. “Don’t leave me out here on my ow. Join in.”
His voice is a buzz in his throat. He hasn’t sung in ages.
She drops off a few beats before him, letting him hum the last notes of the song alone, the claps when he’s finished. “Bravo! Well done!”
“I never sings,” he says.
“I can tell.” She picks up her novel, and he sips his coffee, and they sit at the table together in quiet.
HE WATCHES THE SISTER as she eats. She is ravenous. She gets up to refill her stew bowl and returns also with another hunk of bread in her hand, a slice of apple pie on a plate balanced on top of the bowl. A man down the table offers her the glass of veer in the pitcher, and Nils is surprised when she accepts. The men pass the pitcher down, hand to hand, and she takes it and fills her glass quickly so that a thick white froth forms at the top. She licks this, the drinks in gulps. He has never seen a woman eat so much as so hungrily. The other men seem to find it just as startling, as they pause in the midst of their conversations to look at her.
“You worked up quite an appetite,” Nils says.
“Didn’t you?”
“Of course.” He refills the coffee cup in front of him from a carafe on the center of the table. “I’ve just rarely seen a woman enjoy her food so fully. That’s all.”
“Maybe you’ve known only joyless women.”
“I’ll give you that,” Nils says. “You’re mostly right about that.” He nods. “You’re part of the search?”
“I’m a trained nurse. Though it turns out nurses outnumber patients up here three to one. They’re stumbling all over each other trying to be useful.” It’s true: Nils has noticed several young women in nurse’s uniforms darting in and out of the lower hallways and lobby. “It’s wonderful to see so much compassion when there is a tragedy,” she says. “But too many ladles in the pot ruins the soup, if you see what I mean.”
She forks the last bite of pie into her mouth, stacks her plate and bowl, and sits back. “That was good,” she says. “The cold did make me hungry.”
“You’ll acclimate. And you can always stay in if it’s too much—the cold. There are plenty of us out there.”
“I’m here to help. I volunteered. And, as I said, another nurse is the last person needed, so I’ll go out again, cold or not, where I might be at least a little useful.”
“What order?” Nils asks.
“Sisters of the Holy Names. You’re Catholic?”
“My mother was.”
The sister nods. “It’s not for everyone.”
“I’m surprised you’d say that.”
“If anyone could have turned your mind, it would have been your mother, would it not?” Her face softens when she smiles. “But I’ll pray for you if you like.” She pushes back in her chair and collects her dishes.
“No, that’s fine. Thank you.”
She leaves, and in a moment Nils gets up too and goes to the desk in the lobby to inquire about a bed. The men are taking shifts, and when he gets to his room upstairs, he finds the last man has left the bed unmade, a pair of damp socks hung over the foot rail. The sheets smell like kerosene. He lifts his hands to his nose and finds that he smells kerosene on his fingers too. Everything smells like kerosene and wet wool and that gray, elemental scent of snow. He’s losing his mind up here. He shakes his head at himself, tucks under the quilt, and is quickly asleep.
SOME DREAMS COME IN SCENES: He is a character of his own mind, and watches himself. Here he’s walking around the orchards just beyond his childhood home. Or here, he’s at work in the rail yard office, bent over a record book; it’s any routine day. Sometimes he’s back in her bed, her body just a warmth beside him. In another dream, it’s his childhood bedroom: he is sick and his mother is in the chair beside his bed knitting, the quiet tick-tick-tick of her needles registering in the deep nautilus of his ear as he dreams, so that when he wakes he actually sits up and looks for his mother in the room with him. He is both inside the dream and very definitely outside it, sleep separating him from himself like an orange peeled of its skin.
But in many dreams there is no double, no order. Sometimes there is just chaos, the wreckage of fuller memories washing up against the short of his mind. The heavy metal scoop of his trench shovel slicking again and again into the snow with a metered, pitching sound. A white teacup whose reassuring weight he can feel in the palm of his hand, though there is no hand, no palm, no him. That bucket of her weeks. A windowsill piled in an inch of snow. The disembodied smell of his childhood house—so strong!—like soil and clean linens and fresh ashes in the fireplace—but no accompanying vision of the house. In one dream, the pincushion on her night table, stuffed with hair pulled from her dead husband’s brush.
And today: twenty flares, lit and hissing like a nest of snakes burning up the dark landscape of the dream, burning red against the ceiling of his head, burning up the backs of his eyes with their ed incandescence.
THE SISTER AT THE FRONT DESK when he returns to the lobby at two o’clock. He’s slept only five hours, the exertion of the search leaving him strangely too tied to sleep well.
“Hello again,” she says. She has combed and re-braided her hair, pinned it up wreath-like around her head.
“Can’t sleep either?”
“We keep a routine of prayer at home. The day begins at five a.m.”
“Well, it’s not exactly morning, but I’m looking for coffee, if you’d like some.”
“I would, thank you. I can’t seem to get warm.”
“Sit by the fire. I’ll bring you something.”
Nils fills two mugs from a carafe in the dining room and brings them to the lobby, where the sister perches on the stone ledge of the fireplace hearth, her back to the fire. She thanks him and takes the cup, holding it between both hands and closing her eyes for a moment before taking the first sip. “Thank you,” she says again.
“I found a photography while I was out there last night,” she says. “It was of a man with a heavy mustache, and beside him a little boy holding a toy drum.” She smiles. “He must have been carrying it in his pocket.”
“Sometimes you can almost see their lives from their things,” Nils agrees. He remembers the mirror and nearly takes it from his pocket to show to her, but doesn’t.
The sister raises her cup to her mouth and drinks. Steam is still rising from the coffee, and she looks contented, the way she pauses after swallowing. “I’ve ridden this train route,” she says. “Have you?”
Nils shakes his head.
“You feel every jostle of the tracks. It’s unsettling.”
“I haven’t traveled much.”
“You should. Just the going changes you.” She looks at him. “That sounds romantic, but I believe it. You are changed.”
“We’re changed even staying as still as possible.”
“Yes. Stillness is important. That’s true, but it’s not exactly what I mean.”
“That’s not what I mean either.”
“Tell me what you do mean then, Mr. Riis, if I’m getting it wrong.” She sets her coffee cup down on the hearth and looks at him. Her expression is so earnest for a woman who has known him only a few hours.
“Sister, I’m not young. Neither are you, if you don’t take offense to me saying that. And in my experience, most of the life just happens to us. It’s not as if you have to go out looking for it.”
“You sound grizzled. I think your mother would have told you to remember Providence.”
“Providence. Of course.” Nils puts down his cup and buttons his coat, fishes his gloves from his pockets and pulls them on too.
“I can see I’ve upset you,” she says.
“No, but we’ve come to the fork in our agreement.”
“You are upset.”
“Sister, I’ve finished my coffee. Any more standing around next to the fire would look like idleness. You’ll have to excuse me now.”
Outside the temperature has risen slightly and the light is thin and tinny, the sky over the mountaintops the color of water in a glass pitcher. Icicles hanging like stalactites from the edge of the porch roof drip hollows into the mound of snow below. Nils stands on the porch taking deep breaths, then collects a shovel and lantern from the line of them leaning against the porch wall and, feeling steady again, starts back toward the wreck.
SPRING NOW—March maybe, or early April, and the weather not bad for walking. He’s still far from her house when he hears the dead thuds of the axe. It’s a heavy violent sound, and he can’t place it exactly, though it sets hi heart racing, turns his stomach over. “Iris?” he calls.
The sound continues. He is running now, and in a moment he can see her. She swings the axe again and again at the tree, cracking heavy blows into its trunk, her body bending with the weight and motion of her swings. The bare branches above her quiver.
“What are you doing?” he hollers, picking up his stride. He cups his hands to his mouth and yells again. But she doesn’t hear him. Her face is pinked with fury and she pulls back again, swings a loose, wobbly arc at the tree. The triangular head of the axe embeds itself again and she yanks to wrest it free.
“Whoa!” Nils calls as he jogs into the yard. “What are you doing?” He reaches for the axe when she swings back again and the force of her motion nearly knocks him to the ground.
“Let it go,” she says. “I’ve got it done already.” He steps back and she lunges with the next swing so that the noise of the axe in the wood resounds around them. In two more blows she’s cut through. There’s a sound like bone breaking, the fraught pause as the tree sways then crashes. Its branches snap and splinter as the tree hits the dirt. It’s a crabapple, and there are berries everywhere softening, leaving behind their rust-colored pits in the dirt.
“I’ve hated this tree since I married him,” she says. She swipes the back of her wrist across her face. Her cotton housedress is stained with a deep V of sweat. “And I’m sick of its mess. The crabapples attract the birds.” She drops the axe and stands catching her breath. “And then the birds get into my garden.”
“You could have waited for me. I would have done it.”
“I couldn’t look at it anymore.”
She’s barefoot, he sees now. The last of the winter’s snow has just melted and the earth is soft and wet, the pads of her feet caked in mud. She wears a dishcloth around her waist as she does when she’s cooking.
“What were you doing before I got here?” Nils looks towards the house. The front door is open.
“What does it look like I was doing?” Her face is still flushed, and she flashes him a look.
“This is crazy.” He reaches to put his arms around her, but she walks away from his embrace adn back toward the house.
“If you want to do something for me, cut that into firewood,” she says over her shoulder. “Or don’t It doesn’t matter. I just wanted that tree gone.” She disappears into the house and the door slams at her back.
Nils picks up the axe and begins cutting away the branches, piling them to burn. It takes him all afternoon to chop and stack the wood, and by the time he’s finished and knocks on her door, she is herself again, her dress changed, her face washed, a fire going in the cook stove and a pot of potatoes boiling furiously on the stovetop for dinner.
“WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?”
“I hardly think of him anymore. He seems like someone else’s husband, not mine. Or I was someone else then, maybe.”
“I’m trying to see you life then. What did he look like?”
The room is sunk in the blue of midnight. There’s ice on the window glass, and the thin strains of moonlight coming through it are wobbled and distorted. He shifts to reach the water she left on the bedside table and pulls long sips from the cup. She brings water to bed every night; there is a white ring on the table’s surface.
“Not like you. Is that helpful?”
He gets up, walks across the room. There’s a mirror the shape of a large egg mounted to the wall and he stands before it. In his reflection, he can see his breath coming from the dark hold of his mouth in gray bursts. “Then I guess this: full head of hair, and body wide as a tractor. Or else he had red hair. Soft guy. Piggish eyes.” He turns around to face her. “Which is it?”
HE can’t see her but he hears her sigh. “Your either laughing, or I’m wearing you down,” he says.
“It’s both,” she says. “Come back.”
He gets in bed and she puts her hand on his face so he knows she’s looking at him. “Don’t ask me again.”
“We’ll see.”
She falls asleep curled into him beneath the weight of the blankets, her knees in his stomach, her nighttime breath a little sour on his face.
BUT BEFORE IT ALL, there is this:
She is sitting at a back table eating a plate of roast and mashed potatoes, wearing a yellow blouse, a book open on the table in front of her.
He is in his usual spot.
The waiter brings him his sandwich, his coffee. He eats dinner here after work most nights before going home. He has a newspaper rolled in his bag to read over eating, but doesn’t reach for it. Instead, he catches her turning her pages, stirring the potatoes on her plate. He sees her close the book and sit for a long minute with her hand on top of its cover and her eyes fixed in thought, as if the story is still unspooling in her head.
He argues with himself, then just gets up and carries his plate to her table. He’s never so forward, he tells her—she’ll have to forgive him—but he’d like to sit down.
“Go ahead,” she says. And he does.
IT HAS TAKEN only this small rise in temperature to start a thaw, and the mountain groans and creaks as it warms. Snow sloughs from the boughs of the evergreens in wet slumps. The branches still under mounds snap and sigh with the burden. Far off, at a higher elevation and across the valley, there is the muffled thunder of the snow tumbling down the mountainside: another slide. Nils finds himself digging faster. The sun slips from behind a raft of clouds flares one last time as the clouds part, then falls behind the mountains, bleeding a spill of bright yellow light, like an egg yolk broken across the lower reaches of the sky and gilding the mountains’ edge and the boat-bottom undersides of the clouds.
Nils stops and fishes a match from the box in his pocket, strikes it until it sparks, and lights his lantern.
The search has focused now on finding the third train car. He hears voices farther down the incline and starts moving toward them, his heels gouging deep holes int he snow as he descends.
It’s a long way down, and at the bottom the ground levels out again. Through the blue stalks of tree trunks the beams of other lanterns flicker and shine.
“You again,” the sister says. “I wondered if I’d see you.” She stops working to lean on her shovel, wipes the back of her glove across her wet nose.
“Any luck?”
“No. We’re at the end of it. They’ll call us in soon and end the search until spring. Whatever is still under the snow will have to stay that way until then.”
“I don’t like the idea of that.”
“Of leaving it unfinished? Some of these searches turn up nothing, ever. This one’s been productive, really.” Nils uses his teeth to pull his gloves from his stiff fingers, then cups his hands around his mouth and blows onto the blanched skin. There’s that kerosene smell again in his nose; it’s begun to make him sick. He takes a deep breath to quell the twinge in his stomach. He’s lost felling in his fingertips already, and his knuckles ache when he bends and straightens his fingers to get the blood moving again.
“No, of bodies staying lost. I don’t want to abandon them here.”
“I don’t quite see the difference. They’re buried in here or someplace else. Someone somewhere will miss them, whether we find the bodies now or not.”
“Why are you here then? If it doesn’t matter?” She looks angry for a moment, and Nils nearly apologizes, but he’s too tired to start in with her again.
“I work for the railroad,” he says. “I do what they tell me to do. But I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.”
The sister sniffs at this answer. “Well, you do as you wish, Mr. Riis, but I’m going to keep moving.”
“Don’t get proud and go wandering off. I never said I was quitting.” He looks toward the other lights, still a fair distance away. “If you want to follow me, it’s probably better we stay a pair. The temperature’s going to drop again, and it’s already dark.”
“I’m sure I’m fine.”
“I’m telling you not to go alone.” He works to stuff his dull fingers back into the gloves. “Please. Just follow me.”
As he works his way horizontally down the side of another slope, he hears her a few paces behind, her breath coming hard. She doesn’t speak though, and he doesn’t turn to look at her.
MAY—OVER A YEAR AGO NOW, unbelievably. When she tells him, she’s already sold the house. “This has never really been my home,” she says, and when he presses, when he says he’ll go with her and they’ll make a new home together somewhere else if she likes, she says only no.
“I have money saved,” he says. “I’ve been saving all these years for something without knowing what.” But, no, she tells him. No. She’s made up her mind.
He lies beside her on her bed. The bedroom window is open. Outside, the goldfinches and robins in her garden chirrup and flit, singing at one another, squabbling over scraps and seeds. The river down the hill is overfull with runoff from the mountains. It moves with a sound like boiling water. It turns up all sorts of flotsam onto its banks, spits out a bubbly brown froth that rides on top of its current.
He get’s up and stands looking at her. “Are you afraid of me?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
He picks up her hairbrush with the silver handle and throws it at the mirror. The mirror breaks. The glass scatters in shards across the wood slats of the bedroom floor.
“You knew all along you’d leave,” he says.
“I didn’t know. I stayed longer that I might have if I hadn’t met you.”
“Are you in trouble? Are you not telling me everything?”
“There’s not child.”
“How can I trust you?”
“I’m not a liar.” She meets his eyes. “Sometimes there’s no reason. I need to leave this place, and that’s all. You can’t understand that?” She is crying now, but quietly. She gets up from the bed and kneels on the floor, sweeping the bits of glass into her palm.
“You’re running away from a dead man, is what I think.”
“Stop it,” she says, her voice even. “you’ve never been cruel. Why are doing this now?”
“It’s not meanness. It’s fact. I should have seen it earlier.
“Fine, then.” She raised her far to him. “You need a reason? You’re too much. You and this place. You need too much.”
“You’re all excuses.”
“Stop it now, I won’t argue with you. I’m tired.” She sits back on her heels. “It’s decided. And you should go now.”
He gets his clothes and begins pulling them on. He tries to keep his balance, but stumbles puttin this leg into his pants, steps back and feel needles of broken glass embedding themselves on his bare foot. He curses under his breath.
“I’m sorry it’s all turned out so badly,” she says. “I am.”
“You’re making your choices.”
His foot is bleeding; he pulls his socks and shoes on anyway. He leaves the buttons of his shirt undone.
When he goes, he slams the front door hard enough that the windows rattle at his back.
I’M ASKING YOU TO RECONSIDER. I want you to say something. I want you to stay. He writes this on a piece of paper, slides it under her door, and walks back to town.
HE ALLOWS HIMSELF TO WALK past the house once, after she is gone. The stump of the crabapple is there, but the new owners till over the garden. They put up a chicken coop where she planted strawberries and squash. The white and red chickens stalk around their fenced square scratching at the dirt, bobbing their heads at each other.
As he stands watching, two of the birds take up a fight. They circle and charge each other. They flap their wings and kick sprays of dust that rise from the ground then shower back down on their heads. In only a moment the scuffle is over, the dispute—whatever it was—settled, and the two amble away from each other. The other chickens, who paused to watch the fight, resume pecking at the ground as if nothing has happened, though their patch of yard is littered with shed feathers.
For the rest of the day he thinks of. how she would hate the ugly coop, hate the chickens and all their mess.
HE IS UNUSED to sleeping alone then. He stares at the wall of his bedroom until the square of light from the window brightens, brightens, and finally goes white with morning. He gets up and his thoughts float like fluffs of cotton through his mind. He feels like a sleepwalker, lurching through the day. He goes to work in the railway offices, comes home. There is summer and then fall again. A fine crust of first first frost on the bedroom window glass and the color of morning pale blue now, or gray. Snow then. A new year. Winter. The river calcifies with ice. A flock of starlings roost on the roofline of the building across the street—so many dark bodies all in a line. They rise all at once and circle overhead, once, twice—a knot tying and untying itself in the sky—before they are gone. He taps the window with his forefinger and beads of condensation slide down the glass. Everything comes at him as if he is lodged far beneath the surface of his own perception. His body is layers of bundling, and somewhere beneath skin and muscle, bone and gristle, he is half awake and listening for what?
IT IS NEARLY SEVEN O’CLOCK—long past dark—when the third train car is found a quarter mile down the mountain and far to the west of where searchers expected it might be. There is hollering, cheering and clapping, and Nils and the sister raise their heads and move toward the noise. Far off, the lights of many lanterns throw a faint halo around the site where the other men are digging out the car.
The sky is clouded over again. The clouds are heavy and big-bellied, full of more snow and looking less like tufts than like something wet and solid. Like soggy newspaper, Nils thinks. Or sacks of wet feathers. He says this to the sister, and she makes a sound that is something between a chirp of laughter and snort.
“I have an awful memory of plucking the ducks my father raised one winter, so we could all feast on Christmas Day,” she says.
“We kept geese and chickens. I remember it being awful.”
“My mother saved all the feathers to stuff bedding and pillows. But she wanted to wash them first, to get rid of dust and mites. There were wet feathers stuck everyplace. My hair, my sister’s arms, all over the the dirt. We had to throw them out. There was no good way to dry them.”
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” Nils says.
“No. She’d been raised in the city. But my father let her do it. HE didn’t tell her it wouldn’t work. It was better she find out by experience, or she’d never have let it go. She’d have gone on worrying about mites in the beds ’til kingdom if he’d told her she wasn’t to was the feathers.”
“And you didn’t have Christmas ducks the next year?”
“No, we did. But Mother and Father did the work themselves. We children got in the way, they said. And I don’t know what happened to the feathers, but they weren’t washed, I know that.”
“Do you miss them? Your family?”
“My parents died years ago.”
“But when you first left.”
“Of course. Isn’t that true for you too? Don’t you miss your mother since she died? Your dad? Sometimes I get nostalgic and even miss the girl I was when I was young. As if she was someone not me. That’s silly, yes?” She pauses in her walking and Nils stops to wait for her to catch her breath.
“Not silly,” Nils says. “I’ve had a similar thought. I’ve come across shed snake skins before and have thought what a thing it would be to do that—get outside your old skin as easy as taking of a jacket.”
“We’re saying different things again, I think. I’m talking about nostalgia, not regret. But maybe that’s the gift of my life: my devotion keeps me in the present. For that I’m still grateful, even all these years later.”
She shifts her weight and clasps her gloved hands together. Nils pulls his hat down over his ears.
“I’m ready,” she says, and starts ahead of him. “It’s getting cold standing here, and I”m talking too much for you again, I can see by your silence.”
“I was rude earlier.”
“You were,” she says over her shoulder. “But it’s fine. We’ve made up now. Let’s go.”
Nils lifts the lantern and follows her.
They don’t get far before the sister stops him again. “Have I been out here too long, or am I seeing something there?”
Nils treads through the snow towards the spot she’s pointing out. The slide seems to have come to a stop down here, and there are more trees still standing. They are not far now from the others. The sounds of the med shoveling out the inside of the train car have grown louder, and just ahead there is debris from the car still on top of the snow—what looks to be a piece of siding, a strip of metal from the car’s undercarriage, bent and curled up at an odd angle.
Nils stops near a fir tree and tilts his lantern so that it illuminates the sunken round of shadow beneath the tree. He gets down on his knees and moves snow aside with his hands.
“What is it?” the sister calls. “Is it anything?”
Nils hesitates. “It’s a dog,” he says.
They clear the snow away from the animal’s body. The dog ism ale. His white fur is matted with ice, his legs folded close to his abdomen in awkward, unnatural angles. The pink pads of his feet have gone gray-blue, and his nose is spongy, his eyes open and their stare waxy. When Nils lifts the dog’s body a dark blot of blood is revealed in the snow beneath him; the dog’s right ear is gone, sheared off completely, and that side of his face is crusted brown with frozen blood.
“Oh, no,” the sister says. She puts her hand over her mouth as if she may be sick.
“Someone’s pet,” Nils says. He sets the body back down and begins to cover it with snow.
“What’re you doing?”
“They’re not going to haul a dog out. There’s enough to do with human casualties.”
“Don’t do it yet.” the sister says. “Please.” She’s crying quietly, and Nils looks away from her. “I’m going to pray.”
Nils sits back on his heels and waits as she bows her head. She keeps her voice low, her words materializing as a continuous strand of chilled exhalation. When she finishes, she leans over and touches the dog’s face with her own, puts her hands on its flank, her forehead to its ribs.
“I’m starting to feel like everything I’ve ever lost is under here,” she says. “Like if we looked long enough we’d find the brooch my grandmother gave me when I turned seventeen, and those ducks, and my parents. Maybe they’re all here.” She turns to Nils. “When I was young, a neighbor woman lost a baby in the middle of a very long winter and then drowned herself when the pond between our farms thawed in the spring.”
“My mother was sick in bed for several days before she died,” Nils says. “Her priest came at the end to perform the last rites, and when she went, he told me she was needed more about than there on earth. ‘She’s been called by her maker to join Him in heaven. Take solace in knowing that her Redeemer needs her now more that you do.’ I remember he said that.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say to someone in grief. He should have known better.”
Nils smiles. “I can’t say I appreciated it much.”
“They try to be reassuring. I’m sure that’s what he meant to do. But he should have thought better of it and said something else.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted him to say nothing, I wanted every noise to stop without her there to hear it.” He pushes back and stands . “But that kind of thinking is as useless as his consolation.”
“She wouldn’t want you to stop your life.”
“She wouldn’t have, but that hardly matters. What you’d will doesn’t matter. There’s no stopping. And that’s all. I didn’t see that then, but now I do.”
Nils buries the dog, digging first beneath the snow to bare ground, then a couple of feet deeper into the frozen dirt. The soil comes up in solid chucks, and he’s clumsy with the shovel. The exertion warms him though, slowly, and soon his hands and feet tingle with sharp needles of pain as they begin to come back to life. When he lifts the dog, he brushes the snow from its flank, fingering its leather collar for a moment and rubbing his thumb over the mirrored oval of its tag before lowering the body into the hole and covering it.
“We should see how the others are doing and then head back for the night,” he says.
They walk without speaking toward where the others are still digging out the third train car in the growing dark. Several more flares are lit, poked into the snow and throwing a low, trembling light on the wreck; some of the men have also strung their lanterns from the limbs of the evergreens and these sway and bob as the breeze moves the boughs, their warm glow bouncing against the trees and drifts, their long files of light stretching across the shadowed mountainside.
Nils takes off one glove and tucks his hand into his pocket to feel for the compact. Still there. It’s a heavy, round weight in his palm, its solid heft and curve reminding him of nothing so much as the skipping stones he collected as a boy. He’s not sure now why he took it, nor what he thought he’d do with it, this token of so much lost; but it would seem wrong to toss it away, into the snow, where it would be just another thing gone. And so he holds onto instead.
“Are you okay there, Sister?” Nils asks.
“I’ll be fine,” she says.
He nods to himself and keeps walking through the snow, toward the noise and the lights just ahead.
