Chapter 5 The Storm Descends
It came in the night.
Clara heard it before she fully woke — the wind arriving first, moving through the spruce on the hill with a sound that started low and built, and then the change in the house itself, the way the boards tightened against the cold, the rattle of the kitchen window in its frame.
She lay in the dark and listened and understood, with the certainty of someone who had grown up with New England winters, that this was not a passing inconvenience.
She got up and went to the window. The world had disappeared.
Not invisible so much as replaced by white — a white so total and moving that there was no longer any distinction between sky and ground and air.
The barn, fifty feet from the house, was gone.
The rope Elias had shown her on the tour — the guide rope for when a man could lose his direction and freeze to death — was visible for perhaps six feet before the storm swallowed it.
She stood at the window for a long time.
There was something terrible about it. And something magnificent.
She had thought, when Elias told her about the rope, that it was the kind of story Westerners told to dramatize their hardships.
But looking at this — the completeness of it, the way the storm simply erased the world and replaced it with itself — she understood that he had been stating a plain fact.
"It's bad."
She turned. Elias was in the hallway, dressed, which meant he'd been up already or hadn't slept. He was looking past her at the window with an expression that was not alarmed — nothing about him was easily alarmed, she was learning — but was serious in the way of a man running calculations.
"How much?" she asked.
"Already a foot and a half. It won't stop today." He came to the window and looked north. "Might not stop tomorrow. Reverend Hobart won't be able to ride out from town."
Clara absorbed this.
"How long have you been awake?" she asked.
"Since two. I went to the barn at three to check on the horses." He said this matter-of-factly, as though sitting in a barn in the middle of a blizzard at three in the morning was simply part of the ordinary arithmetic of ranch life.
"Are they all right?"
"Fine. Horses don't mind cold the way people do. They've got more sense about it."
Clara looked at the rope disappearing into white. "Well," she said. "I suppose we had better have breakfast."
* * *
The day that followed was unlike any day Clara had spent in her previous life, which had been organized around the fundamental assumption that you could go outside whenever you needed to.
The storm made the house its own world. By midmorning the snow was past the lower panes of the kitchen windows and the light inside had taken on an underwater quality, filtered and diffuse.
Clem had made it from the bunkhouse to the back door by means of the guide rope and sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and said, with satisfaction, "Don't see it like this every year," as though this were a point in the storm's favor.
Nora took the situation entirely in stride.
She had her father's equanimity about weather — it was a condition to be managed, not a catastrophe to be mourned.
She occupied herself through the morning with the patient, interior life of a child who was accustomed to her own company: her horse, a small collection of painted stones she kept in a tin box, a primer she read with the air of someone who had read it many times and found it satisfying in the way of a familiar thing.
After lunch she asked Clara to read to her.
"What would you like me to read?" Clara asked.
Nora went to the shelf beside the fireplace without hesitation and came back with a Bible.
Not a children's Bible — a proper one, worn at the spine, the pages soft with handling.
Clara took it and registered, from its weight and its smell and the way the pages fell open, that this was a book that had been loved for a long time.
She looked at the front page. In a woman's hand, looping and warm: Ruth Caldwell, from her mother, on the occasion of her marriage. December 14, 1874.
Clara looked up. Elias was across the room at the table, working on a length of leather that needed mending, and he was not looking at her. But she had the sense, from the quality of his stillness, that he knew exactly which book Nora had brought her.
"Where would you like me to start?" Clara asked Nora.
"Isaiah. Mama always read Isaiah."
Clara found Isaiah and began to read aloud, and the house was quiet around her voice except for the wind.
But now, thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
She read it straight through, letting the sentences fall the way they were meant to fall, not performing them but simply saying them.
When she finished, the room was very quiet. Nora was leaning against her side, and at some point Clara had put her arm around the little girl without noticing she'd done it.
She heard, from across the room, the sound of a chair being pushed back.
She looked up. Elias was not at the table anymore. The back door opened and closed, and a breath of cold air moved through the kitchen, and then he was gone.
Clem, from his corner, did not look up from his coffee. "He does that," he said. "It passes."
Clara sat with Nora and the open Bible and the wind outside, and she thought about grief — about how it moved through people like water through stone, finding every crack, and how the cracks were not weakness but evidence of all the pressure that had been survived.
She thought about a woman named Ruth who had read Isaiah in this house, in this chair perhaps, to this child, with this Bible whose pages smelled of her hands.
She thought about being called by name. She thought about not being overwhelmed.
She closed the Bible carefully and held it in her lap, and after a while Nora fell asleep against her shoulder, and the fire burned, and the storm came on.
* * *
Elias was in the barn.
He stood with his hand on Jupiter's neck and waited for the feeling to pass the way Clem said it passed and tried to do the thing Pastor Elmore was always telling him to do: let the grief move through rather than building a wall against it.
He had never been good at this. Building walls was something he understood.
He had built a considerable number of them in the last two years, and they were sturdy and kept the cold out. Mostly.
Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
Ruth had read those words to him the night before Nora was born, when he had been sitting beside her bed unable to sleep, frightened in a way he hadn't admitted to anyone including himself.
She had opened her Bible in the lamplight with her great belly and her composed face and read him that passage, and when she finished she had said, "Elias, go to sleep.
The Lord's got us," and he had somehow slept.
"She reads well," he said to Jupiter.
Jupiter moved his ears.
"I know," Elias said.
He stood there until the feeling had changed from sharp to bearable, and then he went back inside.
Clara and Nora were asleep by the fire, the Bible on Clara's lap and Nora tucked against her side.
He crossed the room quietly and put two logs on the fire.
He took the quilt from the back of the chair and laid it over Nora without waking her.
He stood there for a moment, looking at his daughter's face, peaceful in sleep, and then at Clara's — at the composed, particular face of the woman who had come twelve hundred miles and was sitting in his house reading Isaiah to his daughter in a blizzard as though she had always lived here.
He went to his room. He sat on the edge of his bed. He opened his own Bible, which he read every night as a discipline if not always as a pleasure, and the page it fell open to was Proverbs 31.
He read: Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.
He sat with that for a long time. Then he closed the Bible and went to sleep.