The Collected Stories of William Humphrey by William Humphrey

Author:William Humphrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504006316
Publisher: Open Road Media

A Fresh Snow

IT WAS silly and a waste of time. School was not even out yet. She could not expect him for half an hour at least. Still she sat at the window watching the corner of the block.

Snow, dingy with soot, lay thick upon the window ledge. The street ran with slush and through the gray light hovering in the street the mass of buildings opposite looked black and close.

As she watched, a few large flakes began to fall. They lighted on the window ledge, and bending forward to look at them, her breath condensing on the glass, she thought of the thrilling, rare snows of her childhood.

She had been five years old when she was wakened in the night to see her first snow. Wrapped in quilts, she and her brother had stood at the window wiping away the steam of their breaths and peering into the blackness, while their father told of the snows he had seen. Two inches fell that night, a good fall, and in the morning the grown-ups were gay and happy for the children’s sake. After breakfast everyone went out with soup bowls. Each looked for a drifted spot to fill his bowl; even so, they had to scrape lightly to keep from picking up dirt. They ate it sprinkled with sugar and flavored with vanilla extract. Her brother came home in midmorning, for school had been let out to celebrate, and through the afternoon they watched the snow disappear. By night it was gone. She was eight before she saw her next.

Otherwise the winters there were fitful times, days of pale sun followed by days of slashing rain. How often she had sat looking out at the dripping trees and the colorless, sodden fields. Seven years before she had sat all day for weeks at the parlor window in her brother Leon’s house. Then she was waiting for Donald to be born. Leon had taken her in when she grew too big to work in the confectionery or climb the three flights of the boardinghouse in town. She had had to stay behind when George was transferred from the camp. There was no housing in California and George was expecting to go overseas any day. Donald was three years old before his father saw him.

She had met George in the confectionery where she was the cashier. The soldiers from the camp were mostly Northern boys and the town mistrusted girls who went out with them. She always rang up their bills and counted out their change with a quickness which discouraged conversation. But George never tried to say more than “thank you.” Perhaps it piqued her that her distance suited him that well. In time he grew friendly and she did not remember his former silence against him. One thing right off stood in his favor: he was not an officer. She mistrusted even Southerners who were officers. And once you got to know him George turned out to be a regular tease.

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