I
GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late
November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer
was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter
is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the
householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save
asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were
seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows
and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott
put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and
begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his
mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth.
The universal sign of winter was the town handyman—
Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated
atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children
loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them
improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears.
The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He
was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass
the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their
first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered
slightly insane.
Bjornstam could do anything with his hands—solder a pan,
weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a
clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into
a bottle. Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of
Gopher Prairie. He was the only person besides the repairman
at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody begged
him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed
from house to house till after bedtime—ten o'clock. Icicles
from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown
dog-skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the
house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were
cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar.
But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the
furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and
hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do."
The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of
Miles Bjornstam were a luxury—which included the shanty
of Miles Bjornstam—were banked to the lower windows with
earth and manure. Along the railroad the sections of snow
fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden
tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent
drifts from covering the track.
The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with
bed-quilts and hay piled in the rough boxes.
Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost
to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen
socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the
plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the
blazing chapped wrists of boys—these protections against winter
were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and
tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squealing,
"Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my shoe-packs!"
There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and
the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered
with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of
an Artic explorer.
Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the
topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your
heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in
motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black
dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon
ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for
his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral,
steel-tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from
the fur.
Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria.
Her finger-tips loved the silken fur.
Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in
the motor-paralyzed town.
The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more
evident the social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had
also enfeebled the love of activity. It was so rich-looking to
sit and drive—and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid"
and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance
of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed
for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in
neglecting coasting as St. Paul—or New York—in going
coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in
mid-November. Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of
gray-green ice, ringing to the skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds
clattered in the wind, and oak twigs with stubborn last leaves
hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock did figure-eights,
and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life.
But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up
a moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away
from their radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of
the city. She had to nag them. They scooted down a long
hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their necks
they shrieked that they would do it again immediately—and
they did not do it again at all.
She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted
and threw snowballs, and informed her that it was
such fun,
and they'd have another skiing expedition right away, and
they jollily returned home and never thereafter left their
manuals of bridge.
Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott
invited her to go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded
down stilly cloisters between burnt stump and icy oak, through
drifts marked with a million hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse
and bird. She squealed as he leaped on a pile of brush and
fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged there,
masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night
she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced
electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept
twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave
land.
She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she
trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored
like flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting
were loud in the thin bright air, and everywhere was a
rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It was Saturday, and the
neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel. Behind walls
of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in
depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The
frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued
steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks—poplar, maple, ironwood,
birch—were marked with engraved rings of growth. The
boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl
buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy
brown.
Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow
to Howland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost
from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it
were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise
Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.
So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the
house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table,
every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy
in the pyrotechnic dimness. When her eyes had recovered she
felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life. The world
was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in
the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than
"The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be
another storm.")
In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called
into the country. It was Bea's evening out—her evening for
the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till midnight.
She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines
and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.
Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.
