One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

sitting room, while his mother read aloud to him from Bleak House⁠—one of the few novels she loved. Poor Jo was drawing toward his end when Claude suddenly sat up. “Mother, I believe I’m too sleepy. I’ll have to turn in. Do you suppose it’s still snowing?”

He rose and went to look out, but the west windows were so plastered with snow that they were opaque. Even from the one on the south he could see nothing for a moment; then Mahailey must have carried her lamp to the kitchen window beneath, for all at once a broad yellow beam shone out into the choked air, and down it millions of snowflakes hurried like armies, an unceasing progression, moving as close as they could without forming a solid mass. Claude struck the frozen window-frame with his fist, lifted the lower sash, and thrusting out his head tried to look abroad into the engulfed night. There was a solemnity about a storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity. The myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite end. A faint purity, like a fragrance almost too fine for human senses, exhaled from them as they clustered about his head and shoulders. His mother, looking under his lifted arm, strained her eyes to see out into that swarming movement, and murmured softly in her quavering voice:

“Ever thicker, thicker, thicker,
Froze the ice on lake and river;
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper,
Fell the snow o’er all the landscape.”

XVIII

Claude’s bedroom faced the east. The next morning, when he looked out of his windows, only the tops of the cedars in the front yard were visible. Hurriedly putting on his clothes he ran to the west window at the end of the hall; Lovely Creek, and the deep ravine in which it flowed, had disappeared as if they had never been. The rough pasture was like a smooth field, except for humps and mounds like haycocks, where the snow had drifted over a post or a bush.

At the kitchen stairs Mahailey met him in gleeful excitement. “Lord ’a’ mercy, Mr. Claude, I can’t git the storm door open. We’re snowed in fas’.” She looked like a tramp woman, in a jacket patched with many colours, her head tied up in an old black “fascinator,” with ravelled yarn hanging down over her face like wild locks of hair. She kept this costume for calamitous occasions; appeared in it when the water-pipes were frozen and burst, or when spring storms flooded the coops and drowned her young chickens.

The storm door opened outward. Claude put his shoulder to it and pushed it a little way. Then, with Mahailey’s fireshovel he dislodged enough snow to enable him to force back the door. Dan came tramping in his stocking-feet across the kitchen to his boots, which were still drying behind the stove. “She’s sure a bad one, Claude,” he remarked, blinking.

“Yes. I guess we won’t try to go out till after breakfast. We’ll have to dig our way to the barn, and I never thought to bring the shovels up last night.”

“Th’ ole snow shovels is in the cellar. I’ll git ’em.”

“Not now, Mahailey. Give us our breakfast before you do anything else.”

Mrs. Wheeler came down, pinning on her little shawl, her shoulders more bent than usual. “Claude,” she said fearfully, “the cedars in the front yard are all but covered. Do you suppose our cattle could be buried?”

He laughed. “No, Mother. The cattle have been moving around all night, I expect.”

When the two men started out with the wooden snow shovels, Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey stood in the doorway, watching them. For a short distance from the house the path they dug was like a tunnel, and the white walls on either side were higher than their heads. On the breast of the hill the snow was not so deep, and they made better headway. They had to fight through a second heavy drift before they reached the barn, where they went in and warmed themselves among the horses and cows. Dan was for getting next a warm cow and beginning to milk.

“Not yet,” said Claude. “I want to have a look at the hogs before we do anything here.”

The hog-house was built down in a draw behind the barn. When Claude reached the edge of the gully, blown almost bare, he could look about him. The draw was full of snow, smooth⁠ ⁠… except in the middle, where there was a rumpled depression, resembling a great heap of tumbled bed-linen.

Dan gasped. “God a’ mighty, Claude, the roof’s fell in! Them hogs’ll be smothered.”

“They will if we don’t get at them pretty quick. Run to the house and tell Mother. Mahailey will have to milk this morning, and get back here as fast as you can.”

The roof was a flat thatch, and the weight of the snow had been too much for it. Claude wondered if he should have put on a new thatch that fall; but the old one wasn’t leaky, and had seemed strong enough.

When Dan got back they took turns, one going ahead and throwing out as much snow as he could, the other handling the snow that fell back. After an hour or so of this work, Dan leaned on his shovel.

“We’ll never do it, Claude. Two men couldn’t throw all that snow out in a week. I’m about all in.”

“Well, you can go back to the house and sit by the fire,” Claude called fiercely. He had taken off his coat and was working in his shirt and sweater. The sweat was rolling from his face, his back and arms ached, and his hands, which he couldn’t keep dry, were blistered. There were thirty-seven hogs in the hog-house.

Dan sat down in the hole. “Maybe if I could git a drink of water, I could hold on a-ways,” he said dejectedly.

It was past noon when they got into