Chapter 20

Winter's first big snow began on a Friday afternoon and continued into Saturday, the last Saturday of that January, the 28th. It snowed all day, big fat, heavy flakes that stuck to everything. By Sunday morning, Polly and Sammy could look out at a crystalline desert of snow, nothing but snow in all directions.

Absolutely no traffic moved on Rockville Pike which might as well not have existed. Their hedge had almost disappeared; the fences barely poked above the drifts; pine trees were bent by the weight and limbs broken from many of the hardwoods. A six-foot drift barricaded the privy. They could see light in the farmhouse across the way so they assumed everything was fine there. Sammy kept his iron stoves glowing with wood from his sheltered back porch, and he went out three times in the afternoon to shovel a path to the store and to clean off the apron in front of the cement porch where the gas pumps stood. He wished he had remembered to buy chains for the truck.

On his third venture out, as he stuck a yardstick in the snow and it disappeared in one place and showed it was two-feet deep in another, he heard the phone in the store ringing, but ignored it. The snow was very dense, but the weather was not very cold. It was amazingly quiet: no birds, no trains, no streetcars, no traffic, just the whirring of the wind and the creaking of the trees.

"We got more than two feet of snow," he told his wife as he peeled off his crusted gloves. "You ever beat that in Wisconsin?'

"Oh sure," she said with a smile, "when I was a little girl, it was clear over my head some winters." She held her hand as high as she could reach. He kissed her grin.

On Monday morning, after shoveling his way through an overnight drift that almost buried his truck and nearly reached the roof of their back porch, he got a fire started in the store's pot-bellied stove and was warming his hands when the phone rang.

"Williams Store," he answered brightly, "sorry, no deliveries today."

"Mr. Williams," said a woman's trembling voice, "is this here my Polly's husband?"

'Yes, that's me." His forehead wrinkled; he could not place the high-pitched voice.

"This is Elvira, the Dovers' maid. We done met." She sounded very nervous, Sammy thought, despite the sing-song nature of her speech.

"Sure, I remember," he said, seeing the lean black women with the wide smile.

"They's dead, Mr. Williams, Polly's momma and daddy, oh Lord, they's dead, bof a'them, stone cole dead." He could hear her crying, her voice strangled out the words.

"What? Say that again, please. Did I hear you right?" Sammy sat on his stool and gripped the receiver tightly. His stomach knotted as the taste of poison gas came up in his throat.

"They's dead, Mr. Williams, yes sir, all them folks. They went out to the theater, uh huh, movie show. I told 'um it was snowing, but they said they thought the storm was over. So they went to the picture show with some a'their friends, all dressed up and everything."

"Last night was it?" Sammy asked.

"No. No, sir. Saturday night, and the roof caved in, it did, fell down right on 'um, and I-don't-know-how many people was killed, a hundred is what I heard from the doorman. It's in the newspaper."

"Oh my," said Sammy. "That's awful."

"I knows my little Polly's going to have your baby so you be real careful when you tell her, you hear?"

"Yes, yes, I'll be careful. Thank you for calling. I'll be careful."

"Yes, sir," she said, sniffing, "please do that."

Sammy sat looking at the telephone, the ear piece buzzing in his hand. Maybe I dreamed that, he thought. But the snow certainly was heavy enough. She wouldn't lie about such a thing.

He hurried across to his house, opened the front door and told Polly he was going over to see if his mother and father were all right. Even though he was wearing his heaviest boots, two pairs of britches and his thickest stockings, he was wet nearly to the waist and cold to the bone by the time he stomped his feet on the back porch noting that someone had dug out a narrow corridor to the barn, nearly a tunnel in places.

Sammy found his mother in the kitchen, accepted a cup of coffee, warmed his hands at the iron stove and told her what he had learned.

His mother shook her head and said, "I'll get my coat and scarf. You broke a trail I know, saw you coming across there. My galoshes are by the door."

She followed him back over the snow-covered field, the wind searing her cheeks and numbing her ears. When they got to Sammy's house, they went in the front way since the drift almost covered the back porch.

"That you Sammy?" Polly called from the kitchen.

"Yep," he said, pulling off his boots on the doormat. "Ma's come to visit."

Polly appeared in her new apron, a paring knife in her hand. "I was about to make my first apple pie," she said.

"Sit down, dear," Sammy said, crossing to her in his stockinged feet. "I've some bad news, some real bad news."

"Oh," she said, sitting on the arm of a chair, blinking, looking back and forth, "your father's not, I mean?"

"No, dear Polly," Sammy said, wondering if he should take the knife from her hand, "your maid called, Elvira, on the telephone."