New Stories from the Midwest by John McNally

Author:John McNally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The morning brought very little light to the windowless shanty, while outside the storm continued, undiminished. Despite Little Carl’s warning the night before, Frances realized by her disappointment that she had expected the worst to be over. Little Carl had already emptied the coffee pot, fed Dan from one of the cornmeal sacks, and now was fashioning hard cakes of cornbread, flour, and water. Throughout the day, Frances attempted to engage Little Carl in conversation to help the time pass, but the forced intimacy of space was slowly lessening the ease that had developed between them over the years in the cookhouse. When Little Carl did talk it was to tell stories of past blizzards he had lived through, complete with details of how those who had not been so fortunate had met their deaths. Several of his tales were about men and women who were found in snow banks within feet of their houses, having fallen down and given up without knowing that they were so near to safety. Then there was the story of the entire herd of cows that had frozen to death standing up, and had remained standing in the subfreezing winter weather for two more months until they thawed and dropped one by one in the spring. Most disconcerting to Frances was Little Carl’s account of a settler near Fort Thompson who, stranded unprepared in his claim shanty during a five-day blizzard, had slowly begun tearing down the studs of his home to burn, and was discovered after the storm huddled frozen into the northwest corner that was all that remained of his shack. This is when Frances learned that Carl was about to begin breaking boards from the wagon, now that there remained nothing inside Cooligan’s shack to burn except the pine coffin. Despite Frances’s insistence that she, too, could sleep wrapped in the buffalo robe next to the stove, Little Carl appeared to have taken it as a matter of personal pride that she not.

Not long after a second meal of cornmeal and flour cakes, while Little Carl dozed before the stove wrapped tightly in the blanket that had become pungent with the stove’s heat, Frances lifted her head from her arms where she had been sitting in her box, aware that the sound of the storm had changed. She was about to speak, but then decided not to wake Little Carl, who had settled into a series of regular whimpers while asleep, but no longer shivered. A thump and scrape against the side of the shanty brought Frances to her feet and to the door. It opened inward, revealing a waist-high hard bank of snow. The snow had stopped and the wind had subsided dramatically and Frances looked out upon an expanse of frozen waves of white. Another loud thud from the other side of the shanty sent Frances scrambling over the bank in front of the door and around the corner, where Dan was doing his best to get free of the wagon.

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