The pump freezes and it takes an axe to fill a bucket at the spring.
Some of the horses have to be sold. This includes Fanny’s foal. They can no longer afford to pay Ann Hall and the snow is so deep, she would struggle to reach Tudor Hall anyway. No one is braving the roads; they haven’t had a guest in more than a month. Still, Rosalie wants to bring Joe home. Mother says no. She’s behind in his school fees, but he’s being fed where he is. A growing boy needs food.
Asia has a cage of pet partridges. There is no eating them as they all have names, but there is no feeding them either. Asia lets them go, watches them pick and scatter across the white ground. “They were too pretty to eat,” Rosalie says and Mother says, “This is what comes of giving a name to every creature that wanders onto our land.”
Asia decides to go with John into the woods to check on some traps that he set the day before, traps for animals without names. More snow in the night, so she opens the front door to a world of blinding white. The porch steps have disappeared.
John must take a stick when he walks, stabbing it into the drifts to be sure of the solid ground beneath. In this way, he finds the snake fence at the perimeter of the property, vaults over it. “Come on,” he says to Asia. “One leap will do it.”
Surely she would have made that leap on another day when her belly was full. Instead, she lands short, sinks into a drift up to her neck. She can’t move her arms or pedal her feet and by the time John has managed to pull her out, adrenaline has her heart hammering. Snow sticks like burrs to her skirts and she can’t shake it all off. “I was drowning,” she says. “I nearly drowned.” We thought he’d never open those big eyes for us again, she hears Jesse Wharton say.
“I doubt a person drowning would have managed the squawking you did.” John is laughing at her panic. He adds, more gently, “I never lost you. I had you safe.” She’s shivering uncontrollably so he suggests that she go back to the house; he can find the traps himself, but she’s too frightened to go alone. The way home now seems to her one continuous and all-too-likely grave.
In the woods, under the trees, the snow thins and they can more easily make their way forward. They’ve caught two animals, a possum and a squirrel. Whatever horror these animals felt when the traps first sprang has been spent. Both are limp, eyeing Asia with resignation. Both are more starved than the Booths.
John lets them go. “They wouldn’t have been a mouthful anyway,” he says. “Poor miserable creatures.” And then, changing his mind when it’s too late, “But they were quite prepared to die. How stupid of me!”
Asia is numb by the time they make it home. The return of sensation in her arms and legs is fiery and painful. She trembles so hard it seems she might break a tooth.
Eventually, she is warm again. But still hungry.
* * *
—
John sells some livestock and finds a distant neighbor, Mr. Parker, who lets him purchase a lactating cow. John sets off on foot to fetch her. The snow is falling at a slant when he leaves, there is an icy wind, and Asia has a terrible premonition as she watches his figure blur and disappear. She runs after him, but only makes it as far as the family graveyard, where the crosses barely clear the snow, the dead lying deeper and colder than ever.
They expect him back that afternoon, but night comes and he hasn’t returned. The wind has stopped, but not the snow, which now falls straight and white from the black heaven. Asia lights the lamps, sets one against each of the chilled windows so that John can find his way home. Branches of frost blossom on the glass.
She retires to the settee and, in the lamplight, tries to pick up the story she was reading . . .
The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides moral man to evil . . .
But the words are meaningless on the page. Mother has set down her sewing and rocks in her chair, her arms tight around her own body. “My boy, my boy, my boy,” she says. “My own, my darling boy.”
The long night is unendurable. The women grow quiet. No one goes to bed. Asia wraps herself in a quilt and thinks again of the cocoon of snow, how it pinned her arms. She might have died if John hadn’t been there to pull her out. She would probably have died. People do die in the dangerous cold, only steps from their own front doors. She hates the cow he’s gone to buy. She hates the Parkers for offering her. She thinks that if something has happened to John, she will never get over it.
“I remember,” Rosalie says suddenly. “I remember when Henry died.”
“Stop that,” Mother tells her.
“I remember it perfectly.”
“Not another word. I warn you.”
It’s been years since anyone mentioned Henry’s name in Asia’s presence. She knows about these dead brothers and sisters, but the world they lived in is an imaginary one, the world before her. They don’t feel dead to her; they feel like something in a book or a dream.
“You can’t have him,” Rosalie says.
“What?” Asia asks, but Rosalie isn’t talking to her.
“I won’t listen to this.” Mother’s voice is shaky but shrill. She rises, staring at Rosalie. Then she leaves the room, her shoes scraping against the wood floor as if she can’t even lift her feet, as if she’s forgotten how to walk.
“You can’t have him,” Rosalie repeats, talking to the air, and Mother returns, wringing her hands together. She barely makes the doorway before she leaves again. Again returns. Asia can see that if John doesn’t come home, all three of them will go mad. They will die of starvation here, in the house that Father built, each one madder than the next.
* * *
—
In the morning, the snow is no longer falling. The sun rises and that pink and yellow is reflected on the clean, white page of the yard. Icicles hang like teeth from the window frames. Asia is leaden with exhaustion. She melts a bowl of snow on the parlor fire, takes it upstairs to wash the night from her face. When she brushes her hair, a knot of it remains in the bristles. She feels as listless and limp, as resigned and hopeless, as the possum they’d trapped. She tries to think of the very last thing she’d said to John, but it was too ordinary to be memorable. Nor can she remember what he’d said to her. What she remembers is how he’d once said that she’d marked him for a martyr’s death. Would this be that, frozen to death while trying to feed his family?
She goes into John’s bedroom, lies on his bed. She can smell his muddy, smoky scent in the quilt she herself made for him. The antlers, still dripping with their weaponry, hang above her, casting shadows like bony fingers against the wall. She should get up. She should put on her riding clothes, saddle Fanny, and ride out to the cabins, get the men to go and search. But she’s too afraid of what they’ll find.
She makes it as far as John’s window. From there she has the best view in the house of the buried lane. She sees John, tamping down the snow as he comes, leading a cow and making his slow way home. She waits just long enough to be sure that he’s real, before running, sobbing, calling for Mother and Rosalie, downstairs to meet him, shoeless out into the snow.