by Haven Kimmel
With everyone asleep I imagined Melinda’s relief, the silence from the backyard. Melinda had a child, she was pregnant. It remained a shock. I could remember so clearly the nightshe’d had a slumber party and the whole cast was there, all her friends. They’d had a séance in the living room, gathered in a circle on the floor right next to the couch where I was trying to sleep. In the middle of it I’d looked at one of the tall, narrow windows and seen Jesus floating many feet off the ground, in the arms of the trees. I had seen him — I could not be argued out of it. But I hadn’t seen him since.
It occurred to me that there might be nothing more hysterical in all the world than if I suddenly began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the sun rose. I wouldn’t sing it loudly, but with reverence, as if I’d been waiting all night and this was my job, to comfort the troops. I opened my mouth but it wastoo funny and I began to laugh in that silent, organ-shaking way. I let some moments pass and tried to get ahold of myself, opened my mouth again. I laughed even harder and had to curl up in a little ball inside my sleeping bag and bite my knees. The third time I skipped directly to crying, tears ran down my face in streams, collected in my ears in little pools. I was on the verge of sobbing, so I buried my face in my pillow and held my breath. I waited for it to pass. My friends were so silent, sleeping sound, that with my eyes closed and pressed against my pillow’s dark, I wondered if they were there at all.
Blizzard Baby, 1978
In Indiana, weather was considered avery interesting topic of conversation. It was talked about off and on all day, every day. No one simply stuck a hand out the door and made decisions accordingly, oh no. The local television news was consulted, as was the radio, and for good measure it never hurt to call Time & Temperature, in case your hand was lying. Hoosiers have always put stock in meteorologists; if, for instance, Bob Gregory — the best of all weather people — said bundle up you bundled up and if you were slightly overdressed then thank you, Bob, because that’s better than freezing into a log person. If Bob said it looked like we were going to get heavy rains and we did, thank you, Bob, and if we didn’t, thank you, Bob. Better, always, to be prepared for the emergency thatdoesn’t arrive than to be found thumb-twiddling and half starved when rescued from the one thatdoes.
My sister was pregnant with the New Baby and I was part excited and part opposed, because there was nothing wrong with the Old One and I just didn’t see how the whole thing was going to work out. The world, as far as I could tell, was Josh’s world and we were just hanging around getting in the way, which he was sweet about. I knew my role, which was to serve, an assignment that would have earned a spitting from me if anyone had told me ahead of time but thankfully no one did. The summer between my tenth and eleventh birthdays I dreamed all of Mooreland was deserted and I had been left there alone with Josh, who needed an emergency appendectomy. The only car in town was a stick shift and I didn’t know how to drive it, as the only truck I’d driven in real life had a gearshift on the column, a kind of transmission not much in demand even then. I woke up in a panicky sweat, called Melinda, and said, “All right. You better take me out and teach me to drive a stick shift.” We went out on the Messick Road and she let me grind the gears and murder the clutch 757 times and eventually I figured it out and drove us home. So that was taken care of. What was a second baby going to do to my life and where would we put it? Melinda’s house was simply not big enough and anyway I was tired.
I’d managed to avoid thinking about “the baby” as “a baby” until about mid-December, when someone pointed out that Melinda’s due date was in early February, and how isn’t it the case that January is the month with the average greatest snowfall and the lowest temperatures, ha ha what if Lindy went into labor early at home or in a car during some severe weather, I guess everyone should keep towels and boiling water handy. Ha ha. It was then I realized Melinda was going to have ababy, like Josh was ababy, and it was a rather bleak Christmas for a few reasons not least of which was I was so nervous I was all but twitching and I believe I developed a holiday facial tic.
Oh she was very pregnant by January 23.The weather had been completely manageable up to then, so she could have gone ahead and gotten the whole thing over with and let me get some rest. The town began to stir; it was pointed out that the last baby born in the town limits had been Bucky Gard who was full-grown, and there formed a little band of supporters for having the New Baby right in town somewhere. I thought they were out of their minds. Ohreally, I wanted to say. Where did the crazies think it should happen? At the drugstore? On the fairgrounds? Such charges were answered by Jack and Marianne Halstead, who belonged to the Friends Meeting and who knew our family well. In Jack’s case I’d say he knew metoo well, as every time he saw me he turned just slightly as if to avoid being hit by imaginary arrows. I’d say, “Hey, mister,” and he’d say, “Don’t shoot!” even though I’d hadyet to shoot him with anything. I loved those people. Jack and Marianne announced they would be delivering the baby, and they carefully devised a plan for getting Melinda from her house to theirs (a straight walk down an alley and across Broad Street) and even hung a sign above their guest-room door: MATERNITY WARD.When I said, “Who’s the doctor in this picture?” Jack reminded me that Marianne worked at the hospital and I said okay then.
On January 24 it rained. What’s rain? It’s nothing is what it is. Somewhere in there, January 23 or 24, just usual weather, nothing to get in a fuss about, there began to be talk about a high-pressure overhead thing meeting an ungrounded low-voltage outlet from Nova Scotia. These two catastrophes would be converging over the Midwest, like a weather system association that chooses Chicago for its convention.
The news of the proposed disaster caused much grumbling and radio tuning and preparedness checking, especially in my house. My fatherloved an emergency; it brought out the best in him in many ways although I have to say I doubt emergencies felt very good to him until they were barely survived. His anxiety was its own sort of storm cloud hovering over the house — the pacing, the listening to the radio and television at the same time, the measuring of provisions. He’d tell me to count the blankets and I’d start to say I’d already counted them but then I’d get very nervous and not know what the number was so I’d go count the blankets. He’d say check those canned goods again and make sure the can opener is where we can see it and I’d think I’d already done that but when I looked at the mental canned goods section it was sure empty. Fuel canisters for the Coleman stove? Check. Gallons of water? Yes, twenty gallons in four five-gallon containers. Blankets? Didn’t I already go over the blankets?
Now we got to add, as if I needed to add anything, CALL YOUR SISTER. So we called my sister and asked about her progress as people from Indiana will do, which is to say we asked nothing outright because the whole situation is a bit juicy for a Hoosier. Instead we’d inquire about herfeelings. How are you feeling, are you feeling anything, like that, right up until Melinda threatened brutal violence against us if we called her again. I’d hang up, pace, check the rain, listen to the radio, watch Dad smoke and pace and listen to the radio.
Early on the twenty-fifth the temperature seemed ominous. The high that day was 36 degrees (balmy) but then the temperature dropped to 19 (still rather warm, all things in balance), and the rain turned to snow. Four inches fell that day, and Dad stepped up our exercises until I began to see blurry shapes at the edges of my vision. And the weather people! This was their Shangri-la! Finally they got to say what they’d always wanted to, which is that we can neither run nor hide, because atmospheric conditions will prevail in the end. We arenits compared to the weather, and at last there would be proof.
But even the specter of nationally respected television personalities weeping on the air, even their tooth-gnashing and hair-pulling, didn’t cause me to turn the corner into outright terror. That didn’t happen until Melinda called to say that Dr. Heilman had said only a Lifeline helicopter could reach her if she went into labor, because it certainl
y appeared we were about to be stranded and the New Baby was almost forty weeks cooked. Dr. Heilman was the least alarmist man I ever knew, so in essence the Beast had taken over the White House and revealed his tattoo of sixes. And who knew if Henry County Hospital evenhad a helicopter? And what did they do with it when there weren’t emergencies? And how could I finagle a ride? I wondered in my more lucid moments. I told my parents I was going to stay with Rick and Melinda, and Dad said absolutely not, he wasn’t letting one more of his children out of his sight, if we died we were all going to die together, and had I checked the fuel in the Coleman stove? Lying on my cot by the stove that night, certain I would never sleep on my last night alive, I had a glimmer of an idea. It was the closest I would ever come to a scientific hypothesis: in the same way water seeks its own level (one of my mother’s favorite things to say, though no one knew what it meant),the anxiety level of a home will rise to meet the requirements of the most anxious person in it. Or at least that was how it worked in my house. Against immense odds, I fell asleep, and it was snowing.
It might have been the simple sound of Dad’s lighter, the power of his attention that woke me up, or it might have been because I heard Mom say, “My God.” And then, “Snow is general over Ireland.”
I sat up. “Are we in Ireland?!?” It was a shocking idea, but feasible.
“No, no,” Mom said, continuing to stare out the door that had once led to the back porch and erstwhile laundry room (the porch had been torn off when the house was bathed in vinyl siding and also I’d never known laundry-doing to be accomplished there) and now looked out directly onto the backyard. “It’s from the end of a story by Joyce.”
She was forever quoting someone, I can’t describe how powerfully vexing it was. And here it turned out that Joyce Dick from the bank had started writing stories, too, which meant the whole town was lost. I got up and could feel it, the hum of the low-voltage outlet, general over Mooreland. There was the wind, which first pounded the house like a fist, then backed off, choosing to thread its way through the doors and windowpanes and the walls without insulation. But it was the sound under the wind that I think we could all feel, staring out the small window into the backyard. There wasnothing in that sound. No one was moving or closing a car door or calling out the back door for the dogs to shut up. There were no dogs, no birds, no grinding buggy noises. I remembered a story by Jack London, something Dad loved; at the end a man is dying, freezing to death with his dog. That was all I recalled of it. When I’d read it the first time I cared only about the fate of the dog — people seemed rather expendable compared to animals. But now I could imagine the entire scene, the world and all of us in it brought to our knees, and it was thrilling in a way, and I could see how it would take a gigantic will to endure it.
“It never really got dark,” Dad said, and I realized he’d been standing right there for a long time. I felt as if I’d seen it with him, the snow falling so hard and fast it carried its own light and illuminated the sky as it covered the ground.
“How’s Melinda?” I asked, slightly breathless even though I’d only taken a few steps.
“Phone’s out,” he answered, not looking at me.
On the twenty-sixth, the temperature dropped to zero with wind gusts reaching fifty-five miles an hour, lowering the windchill to sixty below. By the end of the day seventeen inches of snow had blown into drifts that ranged from ten to twenty feet high, and still it continued snowing. Dad had to move to the window in the kitchen; the back door was completely covered. The radio was never turned off, and the more I listened the worse things got: the announcers were stranded at the station and sounded happily crazed, desperate. There was no topic other than the blizzard and the same things were said again and again until it seemed we’d all been at it for weeks, undertaking this event. A few times Dad said he was going to try to start digging us out, that he would find a way to Melinda’s, but even I could see that he wasn’t going anywhere. I wondered if we’d hear the helicopter over the wind, but I didn’t dare ask for fear Dad would tell me the truth: Melinda couldn’t call for the helicopter, and even if she could, no one could fly under such conditions. She couldn’t call; they wouldn’t come; they couldn’t find her anyway.
I lay on my cot near the stove, in my sleeping bag, for hours at a time. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the sad facts. It wasn’t just Melinda and the baby — everyone I loved, everyone in the world to me, was buried as we were. Mom Mary and Donita, my brother and his wife and daughters, my aunts and uncles and cousins, Rose and her family, Julie and hers, and the animals at their farm — I couldn’t think straight when I considered the possibilities. Why hadn’t Dad and I called them all, why hadn’t I gone to Rose’s and counted her blankets and checked her water supply? I could have comforted myself with the memory of the many freezers Rose’s family kept filled with everything from venison to last summer’s vegetables, along with bread and milk. Instead I concluded she was probably living on Velveeta cheese and those peculiar sandwiches she made with butter and sugar. That poor girl, I hated those sandwiches. And she was also most likely being made to readJane Eyre again, just to escape her siblings. My eyes filled with tears and I ducked down inside my sleeping bag so Dad wouldn’t see.
On the twenty-seventh, the temperature stayed between zero and eighteen degrees, with a windchill still in double-digit negatives. The average wind speed for the day was twenty miles an hour, and twenty inches of snow had fallen.
On the twenty-eighth, when I woke up, it was three degrees and snowing. The phone was still out.
By the twenty-ninth of January, thirty-five inches of snow had fallen on South Bend, forty on some other parts of northern Indiana. In Chicago, snowfall totaled 74.5 inches for the year, setting the record for the city’s history. At our house we saw the sky for the first time in days, and by the time I got up Dad was pacing and waiting.
“We’re going to your sister’s,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette.
I rubbed my eyes, thought about it. “You’ve got a plan, I hope.”
He nodded. “First we’re going to dig, and as soon as we can open the door we’re going to walk.”
Well, there it was. I would die like Jack London, or Dad would, and eventually one of us would have to eat the other. Snow was drifted up against every window on the ground floor, and from the upstairs it appeared the specifics of the world had simply been erased — the cars were gone, the fruit trees in the garden were completely consumed, Dad’s little toolshed was just a roof floating on a white sea.
“I made us snowshoes,” Dad said, and pointed to the floor. He had cut the bottoms out of four clothes baskets, poked holes in a shoe shape in the middle, and lashed our boots to them with the long strands of leather I bought every year when we went to Friendship, Indiana, to watch the muzzle loaders and the people dressed up as cowboys and Indians. I always imagined something very crafty for those leather strips, something involving beads and perhaps feathers. I also talked my way into a deer hide and some rabbit fur most years, and my ultimate dream was to marry the leather, the beads, the feathers, and the fur in a grand design, after which I would truly understand Mother Earth and Father…something. Julie would know.
“Nice work with the leather,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“I probably ought to take my deer hide.”
“Probably should.”
We worked our way out, starting by digging around the door. In some places it seemed the snow went on forever, and in others we’d dig through to open air — the drifts undulated like dunes. By the time we actually strapped on the snowshoes and stepped out, I saw doom, even with the progress we’d made. We tested our shoes and for the most part they worked. The plastic was very stiff and held up even under Dad’s weight. They worked except for my left one, for which Dad had used a sort of flimsy basket. When I stepped on it too hard, the ends curled up and down that leg went, and I’d not only have to work my foot out, I’d have to drag up sixty-s
even pounds of snow with the plastic spoon I was wearing.
“This is my truck,” Dad said, standing on what seemed to be snow. “And I think the car is right there.”
I couldn’t really take in what I was seeing, so I just followed behind him, mostly on my right foot. There was a lot to say but I kept quiet. The town continued to be silent and unmoving in a way that caused a winged feeling in my stomach; even through my hat, my hood, and the deer hide wrapped around my head I could hear Dad’s breathing as plainly as my own. If he hadn’t been leading the way I would have gotten lost, or at least confused. I had thought the trees would serve as markers but they didn’t. Weighed down with snow, its trunk buried, every tree looked the same, and the sunlight, weak as it was, was blinding.
“There’s Reed and Mary’s house,” Dad said.
I squinted. “Oh. You’re right.”
We trudged onward, and at some point Dad knew to turn on Jefferson Street. After that, it was a long, cold walk for him and a long, gamey hop for me.
I proceeded by looking down, but Dad looked in all directions. He paused in front of Max and Adeline’s house, but went on. He paused a few times, but kept walking. After what seemed to be days and days, just at the point I was going to start begging him for beef jerky and to justlet me sleep, like in the movies, he said, “There’s smoke,” pointing at the roof of Lindy’s house.
I was quite certain he meant Melinda had burned the house down, but in fact there was just a ribbon of smoke curling out of the chimney. We stared at it a moment, both thinking that if the worst had happened Rick wouldn’t blithely be heating the living room. Surely not. We took a few more steps and I saw something, Dad saw something. It was a little Rick-shaped thing with a shovel, working like a mole, as we had. Dad called out and Rick looked up, yelled back that Melinda was fine, no baby yet. We broke the skin of that storm and set the world moving again. In New Castle, snowplows were already warming up, and all over the county men with big trucks were searching for door handles and some ground to stand on, most of them carrying flasks they would sip from throughout the day. I understood — it was a hard business. We would eventually help Rick, who had a terrible toothache, and we’d make our way inside where I would strip off my coat and deer fur and laundry baskets and swoop up Josh as if I’d just returned from ten years at sea. But first we stood there, on the top of a car or a well house or a chicken coop, and looked around.
