Touch (20 page)

I’m not scared of the winter now, though. Despite the fact that I expect my mother to die tonight, in concert with the winter’s first snows, it’s different somehow. I’m no longer afraid of what comes with winter. Or of what is waiting in the woods.

MY GRANDFATHER HAD
just lit a fire in the mill’s small stove when Flaireur started barking. The dog crouched down in front of the door of the mill and began to growl, the hackles of his fur on end, his teeth bared and a trail of spittle leaking to
the floor. Jeannot stepped toward Flaireur to calm the dog, but then the door of the mill swung open. The wind gusted hard enough to make the flames in the stove flare up, and snow pushed across the floor. My grandmother started to stand, but my grandfather stopped her.

“Wait,” he said, and then he picked up the ax and stepped to the door. Flaireur stayed behind my grandfather, his growl turned low and constant, stone rubbed on stone. My grandfather peered out into the whiteness, the snow attacking and biting his face, the wind cutting through his clothing. There was nothing, he thought, but as he reached for the door, suddenly the man stood before him.

My grandfather told me that he was so startled—“I had just decided it was the wind, nothing more, no witch from the woods, nothing to be afraid of”—that he almost swung the ax. My grandmother screamed. Flaireur’s growl grew stronger.

Then the man moved forward, out of the snow and the wind, coming from nowhere and stepping into the shelter of the mill. And once he was inside the mill, once he separated himself from the vast emptiness outside and entered the building, the man no longer seemed like something my grandfather should be scared of, and even Flaireur—who still seemed wary—let his growl fade away, his canines tucked back into his mouth.

The man gave a wide grin that showed several blackened teeth, tapped his own chest, and said, “Gregory.” My grandfather repeated the name, and the man gave a happy yelp. He said it again, “Gregory,” with almost a compulsive pleasure, and then said it a third time before lowering his pack. He took out a hunk of bread and bit into it. He was a gaunt man, like
he had not eaten for years, and he ate the bread as if every bite made him hungrier.

My grandfather eyed Gregory’s lumpy, half-full pack warily. My grandfather thought he must have been one of the miners beating a retreat from the coming winter, a Russian, but the man’s load did not seem commensurate with the long distance he would need to cover. Jeannot thought that once the snow broke he would take this Gregory to Franklin’s store and buy the man some dried beans and dried meat; he would not want to be haunted by the thought of the Russian starving to death on the trail.

They huddled around the small stove and took turns feeding scrap wood into it. Occasionally the wind gusted and sent snow piling through the gaps in the walls. For a while Martine swept the floor clean of snow, and then Jeannot and Gregory took some of the sawn boards that were stickered in piles and nailed them up against the wall. The mill was not cozy, but despite the high ceiling, by the time they were finished covering the gaps it was more of a shelter than it had been. The wind still touched at them, but the heat from the stove started to keep. Near midafternoon Gregory unpacked a few hard biscuits and they melted snow on the stove. Periodically, Martine, Jeannot, or Gregory would step outside to see if the snow had slackened, but always they returned, shaking their head to let the others know. Alone among them, Flaireur seemed content, curled up around his own tail and sleeping by the stove.

They passed the night uncomfortably, with Jeannot waking regularly to feed the stove, but apart from Martine waking
and screaming that the roof was on fire, morning came without incident. It also came without any letup in the snow.

“Two feet since daybreak yesterday,” Jeannot told Martine. He held up his hands to show Gregory, and though he knew the man did not understand, he said, “You won’t be making it to Quesnellemouthe before spring. Well, we can go into town and bunk with Franklin and Rebecca once the snow slows down enough that we can see our way.”

Gregory nodded in vigorous agreement, and responded like Jeannot had asked him a question. He pulled out rolled oats, a small container of sugar, and a blackened pot.

The smell of the food was surprisingly intense inside the mill, and even my grandmother found herself with an appetite despite the morning sickness that she had been feeling for the past few days. Jeannot fashioned a table of sorts out of a log end and some scraps of wood, and after Martine ate her fill from the blackened pot, the miner and Jeannot shared the rest of the oatmeal and then gave the scraps to Flaireur.

By their fourth day in the mill, they had stopped eating Gregory’s food with such frivolity. At night the snow seemed to lessen, but with each break of light the wind picked up and they could barely see ten paces in front of them. The snow piled high enough that the path my grandfather dug from the mill toward the house had walls that soon outstripped his height. Jeannot struggled over to the burned-out hull of the house twice, but aside from a stuffed chair that sat miraculously untouched in the middle of the ashes, there was nothing left to salvage, and even the ashes quickly became covered in snow.

MY GRANDFATHER KEPT WAITING
for the snow to slow enough that they could see to make their way to the village, but it did not stop snowing. After a week, Gregory kept pointing to the roof of the mill, an anxious look on his face, and finally he hammered together a ladder and went out with a shovel to clear off the roof. When he returned, Jeannot took the shovel from him and dug a tunnel between the mill and the stack of firewood on the side of the cabin, the whiteness now high enough that there were both walls and a roof in the snow.

My grandfather had gotten his old clothes and coat from the cabin on the first day, and by the time he dug the tunnel the cabin’s roof had collapsed, but he was glad to be able to bring in the firewood. He did not want to burn up his good lumber if he did not need to. Though he was afraid it might collapse, he carved the tunnel out big enough so that he could stand in it, passing the snow to Gregory, who brought it to the stove so they could melt it down, pouring it into barrels. They worked slowly, with no particular sense of hurry, matching the pace of the digging to how quickly they were able to melt down the snow. Martine and Jeannot talked idly of tunneling to the village, but what was a short walk would have been a vast, blind distance underneath the snow.

One of the days, Martine took some of the extra water, wet down a rag, and glazed down the walls of the tunnel between the cabin and the mill. It was pitch-black because of the snow above, but she pulled Jeannot in with her, carrying a lantern, just so that he could see the gleaming in the ice. The reflection made it seem like they were walking through the stars.

I’VE BEEN THINKING
of heaven recently. Not the heaven of avarice—a heaven full of mansions and streets of gold—but heaven as a real, physical place. There is something about clear nights in the winter, the perfection of snow and ice in the light from the stars and the moon that always reminds me of the existence of God. When it’s cold enough, the sky seems to empty, and there is an infinite darkness, a sense that there is something unreachable and never-ending, something past the idea of heaven.

I’ve been thinking of heaven for the obvious reason—the approaching death of my mother—and perhaps the less obvious reason, which is that if my grandfather were here, if he somehow burst through the doors in a gust of wind, he’d tell me that I was wrong in my conception of heaven.

I think that the tunnel that my grandmother washed down with water, ice smooth enough to make it seem like they were among the stars themselves, is close to heaven. I want to believe that when I die I’ll find a place where my mother and my father and Marie are all together, where what we have on this earth does not simply end, but my grandfather would have argued that I already had what I wanted within my grasp. That if I only went deep enough into the woods I would be able to find him and my grandmother, to find my father and Marie and, in a short while, my mother. And yet, if my grandfather were here, I am now old enough that I would have to ask him what he thought of hell, if that was a place that was also within my grasp.

Of course, if my grandfather were to come blowing
through the doors of my stepfather’s house again, I know that he’d hover over the body of my dying mother and then look at me and say, you just have to believe.

AFTER NEARLY FOUR WEEKS
in the mill, Martine and Jeannot’s cheeks sucked in, and they drank water to fill their bellies. Only Gregory, who had started his residency in the mill with his bones already pushing through his skin, did not seem to be melting away.

Still, the tall Russian became less forthcoming with the food in his pack, and once or twice Jeannot woke to the sound of what he suspected to be chewing. He was feeling weak, though he tried not to let Martine see; he had been doing his best to slip her some of his share of food, but still, she spent most of her time lying on the hard wooden bunks that he and Gregory had made during their first days in the mill. Even Flaireur became ill-tempered.

The dog had gone mute again, and my grandfather began to imagine that this was just another prelude for a miracle, that at any moment Flaireur would begin to sing and that salvation would come to them. He waited and waited, but it did not happen. The only time Flaireur opened his mouth was to snap at Gregory when the miner stepped too close to the dog. The first time it happened, Gregory jumped back, but the second time, the miner held his ground, and Jeannot knew that if the man could speak to them he would say that the dog would be put to better use in the soup pot.