Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

  He's looking at his hands while I figure out loud, fingers as big around as a baby's wrist, opening and closing a fist as if limbering it up. "Hunerd n' sixteen," he muses. "Hell, it had to be at least that. Had to be." He studies at it a second, clenching, releasing, clenching, then shoves back in his chair, ready to get up and do something.

  When it hit, the house bent and shrieked, a sound like nails pulled from damp wood. In the bedroom on the northwest corner of the house, my father woke, his breath visible in the air over his head. Cold enough to freeze pipes. He turned on the light long enough to find his jeans and socks. The window on the north wall rattled steadily, the curtains trembling, panes plastered with snow. The stove in the living room ran on fuel oil, #2 diesel, but there were no thermostats to kick on when the temperature dropped. In the dark, he made his way to the kitchen to hit the overhead light switch, then back to the oil heater. He turned the dial to "high" and pawed the litter of mittens and boots to one side. High meant cherry-red. The stove in the kitchen ran on cottonwood, a couple of logs ready on the floor beside it, a couple of days' worth stacked in the porch. He fed fires, turned on faucets, opened bedroom doors, made the necessary rounds with tense efficiency. The noise seemed impossible. Stovepipes hummed, beams creaked, snow blasted against the north windows like birdshot. Overriding it all was the wind, an urgent moaning under the eaves that rose in sustained shrieks, like a cat fight.

  He turned off the light, leaned over the cookstove and rested a hand against the kitchen window, trying to see movement in the wall of solid gray outside. Was the house drifted under? The frigid draft leaking through the frame said not, but there was no light, no shape of trees by the house, no way to judge the speed of the blowing snow. The illusion was one of stillness, a dark blanket held up to the glass. The window looked south, toward the feed ground, the stackyard. He stood a moment with the sound of the storm settling in his gut, trying to imagine his cows huddled against the fence, sheltered by the long row of haystacks. He might get them into the lot by the barn. He reached for the coffeepot, lifted the basket of used grounds, then stopped and leaned against the stove again. The wind was all wrong, north and west. The cattle were gone. He found his way back to bed in the dark. My mother's voice lifted in a question, and he answered her, "tougher than hell out there." He lay back, listening to the roar. Nothing he could do until daylight.

  As what passed for dawn approached, only the prairie birds and children slept on unaware of the storm. Inside our house nine people curled closer to bedmates, drawing quilts over their noses against the chill. The boys had camped out on the living room floor, their bed given over to Granddad, our mother's father. Two neighbor girls were crowded into the cot-sized bunk beds with Gail and me, stranded at our house since school let out the day before. Their mom had buried her pickup in a drift trying to get them and had to dig out and turn back.

  My parents rose early, before true light. The smells of bacon and coffee and backdraft smoke drifted through the house, sharpened by the nip of frost. Cold radiated from the bedrooms where the outside walls sandwiched a thin insulation of tar paper, old newspapers and Depression-era Saturday Evening Posts, and the household gathered as it woke, driven toward the roar of the woodstove. Outside the windows the air turned white as the sun rose, lighter but no less dense, no quieter. Breakfast occurred in shifts as places cleared at the table, adults tense, preoccupied, children hushed with excitement. As we planned our unexpected vacation from school, Dad dressed for morning chores in layers of long Johns, coveralls, lined buckskin mitts, his cap pulled low over his eyes, earflaps secured by a wool scarf. Another scarf covered the back of his neck, a third wrapped the bottom of his face. He tucked his coveralls into the tops of his overshoes and buckled them down, finishing as Mom filled the milk pail with hot water for the chickens.

  The barn lay a hundred yards south of the house, the low, red granary and chicken house a bit west of there, all of it lost in blowing snow. Stepping away from the porch, Dad aimed east for the yard gate, and then south, guided by the built-in compass of a man who has walked the same path at least twice a day for ten years. A big man, over six feet tall, over two hundred pounds centered in his chest and shoulders, and still it was difficult to stay grounded. The wind cut through the back of his coat as he braced against the storm and fought to keep his feet in the unfamiliar sea of hard drifts, digging in with his heels at every step.

  The chickens met the cold by roosting with their feet drawn up, their feathers fluffed like chickadees. Dad fed them, poured water in their bucket. He left the eggs in one nest, their shells split lengthwise, the frozen whites bulging through like scar tissue. The milk cow, a thin-skinned Guernsey/Angus cross, could stay in the barn until the storm let up, he decided. The lack of water wouldn't kill her for one day. She was almost dry anyway, set to calve in March. The feeder calves would be huddled in the open-faced shed, safer there than if he tried to lure them out for grain. He saw no sign of the range cows. He could do no more.

  Coming home meant walking into the storm, and within minutes his compass failed in the face of the wind. Eyes slitted against the stab of ice crystals, he breathed in shallow grunts, his airway clamping down as it would for a draft of pure ammonia. He couldn't get enough air. Every few yards, he swung his back to the blizzard and stopped to catch his breath, then turned into it again, walking blind for what seemed like too long. He corrected to the right and back to the left, trying to find northwest by feel, knowing he might have passed arm's length from the yard fence without seeing it. Sweat chilled on his ribs. A few more minutes and he would let the wind carry him south again. The windbreak or corrals would stop him and guide him back to the barn.

  As he blundered left a last time, a single strand of No. 9 wire caught him across the chest and sprang him back in his tracks. He'd stumbled into the clothesline. He was halfway home. Keeping the wire in his left mitt, he bent his head into the wind and followed it until the end of the old house trailer, our bunkhouse, loomed out of white air in front of him. From there, another giant step west to the yard fence, the woven wire buried halfway to the top. Downwind from the house, he stopped a last time to strain air through a cupped mitten, then walked toward the light in the kitchen window.

  Mom took the pail from his hand and set it hissing on the woodstove to thaw out. The milk had slopped up and stuck to the sides, coating the inside with a thick rime, white ice on stainless steel. Above the scarf, Dad's face had turned the same blue-gray shade. The headgear had frozen together and came off in one piece. Under the scarf, the skin had stiffened in deep furrows that reddened quickly in the heat of the kitchen. I watched him as he thawed out, ice dripping from lashes and brows, his lips limbering to sip coffee. But his cheeks stayed rigid for a long time, stuck in a grimace or a scream. Over the course of the afternoon, the welts softened into frown lines as he passed from window to window, stepping around the card table where Granddad tried to keep us settled to a game of pinochle. They reappeared as he bared his teeth and squinted through the glass into the storm. We stayed out of his way.

  Mom rattled pots and peeled potatoes, working at the logistics of three meals, nine mouths, descending with swift justice whenever our quarrels overrode the drone of the wind. Cramped up in the living room to stay warm, we six children grew quickly tired of cards, tired of board games, tired of each other. As a last resort, she hauled boxes of ornaments from their hiding spot and let us squabble over decorating the Christmas tree we'd hauled from the Breaks over the weekend. When the water pipes froze in the middle of the day, Dad grabbed the torch and headed for the basement like a man bent on tunneling out of prison.

  That evening, he kept to his place at the table, drinking more coffee, feeding the woodstove, while Mom worked after supper. Their voices circled the kitchen, undercurrents of worry. The cattle were now more than twenty-four hours from their last full stomach, their last drink of water. They were heading into their second night of trying to breathe in che god-awful wind
, their metabolism kicked into full gear, burning on high like the fuel-oil stove. When the tanks ran dry, then what? My parents knew

  In the years that followed, the ranchers in the path of the blizzard endured the second-guessing of those who were not, those on the edge of the storm, those favored by the early Chinook. Where the snow had melted off, the wind and cold were fierce, but visibility remained good enough to see where you were going. The ones who weathered that version of the storm still insist my father and his neighbors might have tried riding out and bringing the cattle in. Why didn't they haul hay to them, or cut the fences to keep them moving like the antelope, keep the blood circulating? Half question, half accusation. The wound of them shows on my father's face, his defense arranging itself quietly across his features. The ferocity of the storm defies description, beggars the imagination of those who were not there. A part of him still wonders if he might have done something, the part that refuses to admit helplessness, refuses to be beaten. The rest of him sags with the burden of reality. It was just flat impossible.

  The wind battered through the afternoon and into the night, and we rose the second morning nearly immune to it, voices pitched a notch louder to be heard over the steady scream. Midmorning, the air brightened and the gray shadow of Cottonwood trunks appeared outside the kitchen window, then the fence posts further out. By noon, we could see the blurred outlines of the barn and outbuildings. Our voices rang loud in our own ears. In another hour the wind lifted and was gone like a curtain rising on an empty stage. Outside, the temperature held at a crystal thirty-five degrees below zero.

  Nothing moved in the silence. Nothing showed above the hazy peaks of snow, no horizon appeared where the transformed landscape met the sky under a white December sun.

  Dad organized with the urgency of someone held down too long. The shop door, a wide steel panel hung on rollers, had to be shoveled free to get the four-wheel-drive pickup. He picked his way around the worst of it getting to the stackyard for hay, but where the gates had plugged bumper-deep, he hacked the drifts with a spade, breaking the solid pack into chunks he could lift to one side with the bigger scoop shovel. The haystacks had made a perfect snow fence, capturing ten feet of snow on the downwind side, so he shoveled and floundered his way to the upwind side. The pitchfork crunched into the stack. In later years he would have a tractor with a hydraulic grapple fork, and perhaps those huge steel jaws could have taken a bite from the north side of the stack. But the wind had pounded snow so deeply into the hay and frozen it so solidly that one man heaving at a pitchfork could not free a wisp of it. It would take all day to shovel in from the drifted side. Climbing a stack of small square bales, he wrenched a few free and loosed them like toboggans down the steep slope toward the pickup.

  Sound carries for miles in still air. He stood atop the stack and looked south, calling his cows, listening for the answering bawl. Silence snapped shut behind his voice. The winter pasture is relatively small, half a mile wide and a mile long, really more of a holding pasture than a grazing pasture, but rolling hills hide the south half from view The county road borders the east fence line, and from the stack he could see the darker stripe of the raised grade, blown clear in some spots, covered in others.

  Mom and twelve-year-old Kenny were bundled and waiting when he pulled up at the house, and they struck off for the county lane. Low drifts held the weight of the pickup; the deep ones tapering toward the ditch could be avoided. Within minutes they spotted the first of them, four cows pressed against the east fence, just across the ditch. All four were down and drifted over, two dead and frozen stiff, the other two only half dead, unable to rise. They grabbed shovels to scoop the snowpack away from their heads, broke a bale and tucked squares of hay within reach, temporary measures. A minute later, they piled back in the pickup, fueled by a new sense of urgency.

  Topping a low rise, the pickup slowed as the herd came into view The cab was silent except for the warm blast of the defroster against the windshield. The fence corner was drifted full. One cow hung dead near the corner post, her hind legs twisted in the brace wires where she had walked up a drift and fallen through over the fence line. A few had made it out, pushing forward and stepping over the bodies of cows that had fallen and been buried against the wire. Some stood belly-deep in the ditch, others on the road. One had floundered on across, walking with the wind until her front feet slipped through the grate of a cattle guard. She had frozen standing up, still heading southeast. Forty head were still alive, the bulk of them gathered in the vee of the fence corner.

  Dad turned the pickup around so it faced toward home and stepped out, his face flat and unreadable. Leaning back in to grab the fencing pliers from behind the seat, he started across the ditch, walking easily over the drifts. At the fence, he cut top wires and dug under the snow to get the rest, coiling the loose ends like a lariat and hanging them on the posts, out of the way. He needed a gate to get them to the road where they could follow the pickup home, a longer route, but faster than breaking trail across the dunes. At the sound of the engine revving, the horn blast, the cattle sheltered by the road shifted slowly, testing their strength against the drifts. Those in the pasture stood like a wedge of plaster statues, still posed as the storm had left them, heads low, backs humped, tails to the wind.

  Snow had frozen a crust across each back, down each side, smoothing away evidence of the dark hair beneath. Pounds of ice sheathed their heads and hung in cones from their noses to the ground, breath grown solid in the bitter cold. What scant air they could draw whistled and puffed from slim vent holes half a foot from the tips of their noses. It was the only noise the cows made as Dad walked among them, struggling to find his own, some feature he recognized under the white cast. They stood motionless, though his steps creaked and squawked against the snow inches from their lowered heads. Eyes sealed tight under an inch of milky ice, they waited, blind and dumb, rigid with shock.

  There was, he would say later, nothing to be done but what they did, an act both vicious and loving, desperate and calm. Pain, their pain, his pain, had reached the cold plateau that allows no more. The cattle couldn't hurt any worse. He could no longer do nothing. Raising the pliers in a wide arc, he swung them flat across a cow's face, shattering the ice that sealed her eyes, again across the bridge of her nose. Now there was motion, noise, as the animals fought to escape the crack of steel against their heads, grunting as their nostrils broke free and air rushed into their lungs. Mom stepped across the ditch where the fence was opened, a piece of board she had wrenched from the pickup bed clenched in both hands. Together they moved through the herd, the forty head of cows and both bulls still alive, and beat away the ice that was killing them, battering against the shields until the eyes jarred open, and again, until the whites rolled in fear and tongues hung from gaping mouths, until the cows began to struggle and live.

  As the pickup crept home, my parents and my brother took turns driving, two following behind the staggering herd. Cows straggling to the side bogged down in the drifted ditches, and the procession would stop while someone fastened the log chain around the cow's neck and hooked it to the bumper of the pickup. The pickup eased the slack from the chain and kept going, dragging one after the other out where they could stand again. They lined out behind the hay, blood pumping warmth through their chilled muscles. The weakest formed a line to the rear where shouts and the slap of buckskin gloves kept them moving. These were animals whose eyes were glazed with something deeper than cold, the cows whose brittle hocks clattered like dry sticks as they swung their feet to keep up, the bulls walking gingerly, straddling the strange bulk of their frozen testicles.

  Trailed to the buildings, the cattle spent their first day crammed together in the shed connected to the barn, the combined heat of their bodies melting the ice pack and revealing the gaunt frames beneath. Half a dozen went down as their feet thawed and began to swell. With the help of a neighbor, Dad drove back to rescue the two along the fence line still lying in their untou
ched hay They winched them onto a stoneboat and dragged them home. They died that night, the Angus bull the next day. It took my father and two neighbors all of that afternoon to shovel out the calves, forty head of feeder steers and replacement heifers trapped in a straw-covered shed in the feedlot, another day to drag out the dead and treat the sick.

  School started up and ran for a few days, but before Christmas vacation another storm dumped six inches of fresh snow atop the old drifts, and the wind had something new to play with. Once a week, plows cleared fifty miles of county roads from Highway 191 south, then cleared them again coming back north the next day The Christmas play at the school was canceled. No company came for Christmas Eve dinner. On Christmas Day the milk cow died.

  Technically, the blizzard blew itself out in thirty-six hours. The immediate marks were made in those first hours, while ranchers paced behind the vibrating windows of their houses and listened to it happening. But the worst of the storm lay hidden for weeks and months. The ranchers shoveled and fed and chopped water. They hacked trails into the haystacks, piled warm beds of straw on the prairie beside the feed, tending the sick and lame with single-minded intensity, as if making up for those hours of helplessness. Dad counted ten dead the first week. When the ground thawed, he would bury more than thirty.

  Some of the stories that come down from that storm are framed in black humor, the polite way of stating something painful or horrible without burdening the listener. Even the cattle that regained their health turned black around the edges, as if scorched by fire instead of ice, and for months the dead pieces curled and dropped off. Made for extra chores, Gene Barnard remarked dryly, having to shovel the ears out of the feed bunks before he poured the grain every morning. And they found humor in the stories of neighbors like Sandford Barrett, blindsided by his own cleverness as he picked his way cross-country with a load of hay looking for live cattle, counting fifty head of dead ones. Wise to the ways of wind, he stuck to the high spots, breaking trail along the ridges where grass and sage showed above the drifts like a yardstick, going along fine until he mistook the tips of some four-foot willows for grass and sank his pickup to the windows.