Vandemark's Folly Part 41

This was my way of telling to myself what a scientist would have described as marked low barometer; and he would have predicted from his maps that we should soon find ourselves in the northwest quadrant of the "low" with high winds and falling temperature. It all comes to the same thing.

Instead of going to see Virginia before her school opened in the morning, I went to work banking up my house, fixing my sheds, and reefing things down for a gale as I learned to say on the Lakes. I made up my mind that I would go to the schoolhouse just before four and surprise Virginia, and hoped it would be a little stormy so I could have an excuse to take her home. I need not have worried about the storm.

It came.

At noon the northwestern sky, a third of the way to a point overhead, was of an indigo-blue color; but it still seemed to be clear sky--though I looked at it with suspicion, it was such an unusual thing for January.

As I stood gazing at it, Narcisse Lacroix, Pierre's twelve-year-old boy, came by with his little sister. I asked him if school was out, and he said the teacher had sent them home because there was no more fuel for the stove; but it was so warm that the teacher was going to stay and sweep out, and write up her register.

As the children went out of sight, a strange and awful change came over the face of nature. The bright sun was blotted out as it touched the edge of that rising belt of indigo blue. This blanket of cloud, like a curtain with puckering strings to bring it together in the southeast, drew fast across the sky--very, very fast, considering that there was not a breath of wind stirring. It was a fearful thing to see, the blue-black cloud hurrying up the sky, over the sky, and far down until there was no bright spot except a narrowing oval near the southeastern horizon; and not a breath of wind. The storm was like a leaning wall, that bent far over us while its foot dragged along the ground, miles and miles behind its top. Everything had a tinge of strange, ghastly greenish blue like the face of a corpse, and it was growing suddenly dark as if the day had all at once shut down into dusk.

I knew what it meant, though I had never seen the change from calm warmth to cold wind come with such marked symptoms of suddenness and violence. It meant a blizzard--though we never heard or adopted the word until in the late 'seventies. I thought I had plenty of time, however, and I went into the house and changed my clothes; for I wanted to look my best when I saw my girl. I put on new and warm underwear, for I foresaw that it might be bad before I could get home. I put on an extra pair of drawers under my blue trousers, and a buckskin undervest under my shirt. I thanked G.o.d for this forethought before the night was over.

As I stood naked in making this change of clothes, suddenly the house staggered as if it had been cuffed by a great hand. I peeped out of the window, and against the dark sky I could see the young grove of trees bowing before the great gusts which had struck them from the northwest.

The wall of wind and frost and death had moved against them.

2

The thought in my mind was, Hurry! Hurry! For what if Virginia, in the schoolhouse without fuel, should try to reach the place where she boarded, or any inhabited house, in that storm? As yet there was no snow in the air except the few flakes which were driven horizontally out of the fierce squall; but I knew that this could not last; for the crust on the blanket of snow already on the ground would soon be ground through wherever exposed to the sand-blast of particles already driven along the surface of the earth in a creeping sheet of white. As I hurriedly finished my dressing, I heard the rattle of a shower of missiles as they struck the house; and looking out I saw that the crust was already being cut through by this grinding process; and as the wind got a purchase under the crust, it was torn up in great flakes as if blown up by a thousand explosions from underneath. In an instant, almost, for these bursts of snow took place nearly all at once, the air was filled with such a smother of snow that the landscape went out of sight in a great cloud of deep-shaded whiteness. The blizzard was upon us. I should have my work cut out for me in getting to the schoolhouse.

I wonder if the people who have been born in or moved to Iowa in the past thirty to forty years can be made to understand that we can not possibly have such winter storms of this sort as we had then. The groves themselves prevent it. The standing corn-stalks prevent it. Every object that civilization and development have placed in the way of the wind prevents it. Then, the snow, once lifted on the wings of the blast, became a part of the air, and remained in it. The atmosphere for hundreds of feet, for thousands of feet from the gra.s.sy surface of the prairie, was a moving cloud of snow, which fell only as the very tempest itself became over-burdened with it. As the storm continued, it always grew cold; for it was the North emptying itself into the South. I knew what the blizzard was; and my breath caught as I thought of Virginia, in what I knew must be a losing struggle with it.

Even to the strongest man, there was terror in this storm, the breath of which came with a roar and struck with a shiver, as the trees creaked and groaned, and the paths and roads were obliterated. As the tumult grows hills are leveled, and hollows rise into hills. Every shed-roof is the edge of an oblique Niagara of snow; every angle the center of a whirlpool. If you are caught out in it, the Spirit of the Storm flies at you and loads your eyebrows and eyelashes and hair and beard with icicles and snow. As you look out into the white, the light through your bloodshot eyelids turns everything to crimson. Your feet lag, as the feathery whiteness comes almost to your knees. Your breath comes choked as with water. If you are out far away from shelter, G.o.d help you! You struggle along for a time, all the while fearing to believe that the storm which did not seem so very dangerous, is growing more violent, and that the daylight, which you thought would last for hours yet, seems to be fading, and that night appears to be setting in earlier than usual.

It is! For there are two miles of snow between you and the sun. But in a swiftly moving maze of snow, partly spit out of the lowering clouds, and partly torn and swept up from the gray and cloud-like earth, in a roar of rising wind, and oppressed by growing anxiety, you stubbornly press on.

Night shuts down darker. You can not tell, when you try to look about you, what is sky and what is earth; for all is storm. You feel more and more tired. All at once, you find that the wind which was at your side a while ago, as you kept beating into it on your course toward help and shelter, is now at your back. Has the wind changed? No; it will blow for hours from the same quarter--perhaps for days! No; you have changed your course, and are beating off with the storm! This will never do: you rally, and again turn your cheek to the cutting blast: but you know that you are off your path; yet you wonder if you may not be going right--if the wind _has_ changed; or if you have not turned to the left when you should have gone to the right.

Loneliness, anxiety, weariness, uncertainty. An awful sense of helplessness takes possession of you. If it were daylight, you could pa.s.s around the deep drifts, even in this chaos; but now a drift looks the same as the prairie gra.s.s swept bare. You plunge headlong into it, flounder through it, creeping on hands and knees, with your face sometimes buried in the snow, get on your feet again, and struggle on.

You know that the snow, finer than flour, is beating through your clothing. You are chilled, and shiver. Sometimes-you stop for a while and with your hands over your eyes stand stooped with your back to the wind. You try to stamp your feet to warm them, but the snow, soft and yielding, forbids this. You are so tired that you stop to rest in the midst of a great drift--you turn your face from the driving storm and wait. It seems so much easier than stumbling wearily on. Then comes the in-rushing consciousness that to rest thus is to die. You rush on in a frenzy. You have long since ceased to think of what is your proper course,--you only know that you must struggle on. You attempt a shout;--ah, it seems so faint and distant even to yourself! No one else could hear it a rod in this raging, howling, shrieking storm, in which awful sounds come out of the air itself, and not alone from the things against which it beats. And there is no one else to hear.

You gaze about with snow-smitten eyeb.a.l.l.s for some possible light from a friendly window. Why, the sun itself could not pierce this moving earth-cloud of snow! Your feet are not so cold as they were. You can not feel them as you walk. You come to a hollow filled with soft snow.

Perhaps there is the bed of a stream deep down below. You plunge into this hollow, and as you fall, turn your face from the storm. A strange and delicious sense of warmth and drowsiness steals over you; you sink lower, and feel the cold soft whiteness sifting over neck and cheek and forehead: but you do not care. The struggle is over; and--in the morning the sun glints coldly over a new landscape of gently undulating alabaster. Yonder is a little hillock which marks the place where the blizzard overtook its prey. Sometime, when the warm March winds have thawed the snow, some gaunt wolf will snuff about this spot, and send up the long howl that calls the pack to the banquet.

Such thoughts as these were a part of our lives then, and with such thoughts my mind was filled as I stepped out into the storm, my trousers tied down over my boots with bag-strings; my fur cap drawn down over my eyes, my blue military overcoat flapping about my legs; the cape of it wrapped about my head, and tied with a woolen comforter.

3

Through these wrappings, a strange sound came to my ears--the sound of sleigh-bells; and in a moment, so close were they, there emerged from the whirl of snow, a team of horses drawing a swell-body cutter, in which sat a man driving, wrapped up in buffalo robes and blankets until the box of the sleigh was filled. The horses came to a stop in the lee of my house. There had been no such rig in the county before I had gone to the war.

"Is this the Vandemark schoolhouse?" came from the man in the cutter.

"No, Captain," said I; for discipline is strong, "this is my farm."

"Ah, it's you, Mr. Vandemark, is it?" said he. "Can you tell me the way to the schoolhouse?"

Discipline flew off into the storm. I never for a moment harbored the idea that I was to allow Buck Gowdy to rescue Virginia from the blizzard, and carry her off into either danger or safety. There was none of my Dutch hesitation here. This was battle; and I behaved with as much prompt decision as I did on the field of Shiloh, where, I have the captain's word for it in writing, I behaved with a good deal of it.

"Never mind about the schoolhouse," I said. "I'll attend to that!'

"The h.e.l.l you will!" said he, in that calm way of his. "Let me see. Your house faces the north. These trees are on the section line.... The schoolhouse is.... I have it, now. Sorry to cut in ahead of you; but--get up, Susie--Winnie, go on!"

But I had Susie and Winnie by the bits.

"Vandemark," he said, and as he shouted this to make me hear I could feel the authority I had grown to recognize in drill, "you forget yourself! Let go those horses!"

"Not by a d.a.m.ned sight!"

I found myself swearing as if I were in the habit of it.

Now the man in any kind of rig with another holding his horses' bits is in an embarra.s.sing fix. He can't do anything so long as he remains in the vehicle; and neither can his horses. He must carry the fight to the other man, or be made a fool of.

Buck Gowdy was not a man to hesitate in such a case. He carried the fight to me--and I was glad to see him coming. I had waited for this a long time. I have no skill in describing fights, and I was too much engaged in this to remember the details. How many blows were exchanged; what sort of blows they were; how much damage they did until the last, more than a cut lip on my part, I can not tell. Why no more damage was done is clearer--we were both so wrapped up as to be unable to do much.

I only know that at the last, I had Gowdy down in the snow right by my well-curb; and that without taking time to make any plan, I wrapped the well-rope around him so as to make it necessary for him to take a little time in getting loose; I wrote him a receipt for the team and rig, which N.V. Creede tells me would not have done me any good; and I went out, very much winded, shut the door behind me, and getting into the cutter, drove off into the blizzard with Gowdy's team and sleigh, leaving him rolling around on the floor unwinding the well-rope, swearing like a trooper, and in a warm room where there was plenty to eat.

"And in my opinion," said N.V., "no matter how much girl there was at stake, the man that chose to go out into that storm when he could have let the job out was the fool in the case."

It was less than a mile to the schoolhouse, which I was lucky to find at all. I could not see it twenty feet away; but I was almost upset by a snow fort which the children had built, and taking this as the sure sign of a playground, I guessed my way the fifty or sixty feet that more by luck than judgment brought me to the back end of the house, instead of the front. I made my way around on the windward side of the building, hoping that the jingle of the bells might be heard as I pa.s.sed the windows--for I dared not leave the horses again, as I had done during my contest with Gowdy. Nothing but the shelter in which they then found themselves had kept them from bolting--that and their bewilderment.

I pulled up before the door and shouted Virginia's name with all my might, over and over again. But I suppose I sat there ten or fifteen minutes before Virginia came to the door; and then, while she had all her wraps on, she was in her anxiety just taking a look at the weather, debating in her mind whether to try for the safety of the fireside, or risk the stay in the schoolhouse with no fuel. She had not heard the bells, or the trampling, or my holloing. More by my motions than anything else, she saw that I was inviting her to get in; but she knew no more than her heels who I was. She went back into the schoolhouse and got her dinner-basket--lucky or providential act!--and in she climbed.

If I had been Buck Gowdy or Asher Bushyager or the Devil himself, she would have done the same. She would have thought, of course, that it was one of the neighbors come for her; and, anyhow, there was nothing else to do.

As I turned back the rich robes and the jingle of the bells came to her ears, she started; but I drew her down into the seat, and pulled the flannel-lined c.o.o.nskin robe which was under us, up over our laps; I wrapped the army blanket and the thick buffalo-robe over and under us; and as I did so, a little black-and-tan terrier came shivering out from under the c.o.o.nskin robe and jumped into her lap. I started to put it down again, but she held it--and as she did she looked at my blue sleeve, and then up at the ma.s.s of wrappings I had over my face. I thought she snuggled up against me a little closer, then.

4

I turned the horses toward her boarding-place, which was with a new family who had moved in at the head of the slew, near the pond for which poor Rowena was making the day of the prairie fire; and in doing so, set their faces right into the teeth of the gale. It seemed as if it would strip the scalps from our heads, in spite of all our capes and comforters and veils. Virginia pulled the robe up over her head. I had to face the storm and manage my team; but before I had gone forty rods, I saw that I was asking too much of them; and I let them turn to beat off with it. At that moment I really abandoned control, and gave it over to the wind and snow. But I thought myself steering for my own house. I was not much worried; having the confidence of youth and strength. The cutter was low and would not tip over easily. The horses were active and powerful and resolute. We were nested down in the deep box, wrapped in the warmest of robes; and it was not yet so very cold--not that cold which draws down into the lungs; seals the nostrils and mouth; and paralyzes the strength. That cold was coming--coming like an army with banners; but it was not yet here. I was not much worried until I had driven before the wind, beating up as much as I could to the east, without finding my house, or anything in the way of grove or fence to tell me where it was. I now remembered that I had not mounted the hill on which my house stood. In fact, I had missed my farm, and was lost, so far as knowing my locality was concerned: and the wind was growing fiercer and the cold more bitter.

For a moment I quailed inwardly; but I felt Virginia snuggled down by me in what seemed to be perfect trust; and I brushed the snow from my eye-opening and pushed on--hoping that I might by pure accident strike shelter in that wild waste of prairie, and determined to make the fight of my life for it if I failed.

It was getting dusk. The horses were tiring. We plunged through a deep drift under the lee of a knoll; and I stopped a few moments to let them breathe. I knew that stopping was a bad symptom, unless one had a good reason for it--but I gave myself a good reason. I felt Virginia pulling at my sleeve; and I turned back the robes and looked at her. She pulled my ear down to her lips.

"I know you now," she shouted. "It's Teunis!" I nodded; and she squeezed my arm with her two hands. Give up! Not for all the winds and snows of the whole of the Iowa prairie! I disarranged the robes while I put my arm around her for a moment; while she patted my shoulder. Then, putting tendernesses aside, when they must be indulged in at the expense of snow in the sleigh, I put my horses into it again. A few minutes ago, I gave you the thoughts that ran through my mind as I conjured up the image of one lost in such a storm; but now I thought of nothing--only for a few minutes after that pressure on my arm--but getting on from moment to moment, keeping my sleigh from upsetting, encouraging those brave mares, and peering around for anything that might promise shelter.

Virginia has always told of this to the children, when I was not present, to prove that I am brave, even if I am mortal slow; and if just facing danger from minute to minute without looking further, is bravery, I suppose I am--and there is plenty of good courage in the world which is nothing more, look at it how you will.

So far, the cutter and team of which I had robbed Buck Gowdy, had been a benefit to us. They gave us transportation, and the warm sleigh in which to nest down. I began to wonder, now, as it began to grow dark, as the tempest greatened, as my horses disappeared in the smother, and as the frost began to penetrate to our bodies, whether I should not have done better to have stayed in the schoolhouse, and burned up the part.i.tions for fuel; but the thought came too late; though it troubled me much. Two or three times, one of the mares fell in the drifts, and nothing but the courage bred into them in the blue-gra.s.s fields of Kentucky saved us from stalling out in that fearful moving flood of wind and frost and snow. Two or three times we narrowly escaped being thrown out into it by the overturn of the sleigh; and then I foresaw a struggle, in which there would be no hope; for in a storm in which a strong man is helpless, how could he expect to come out safe with a weak girl on his hands?

At last, the inevitable happened: the off mare dove into a great drift; the nigh one pulled on: and they came to a staggering halt, one of them was kept from falling partly by her own efforts, and partly by the snow about her legs against which she braced herself. As they stood there, they turned their heads and looked back as if to say that so far as they were concerned, the fight was over. They had done all they could.

I sat a moment thinking. I looked about, and saw, between gusts, that we were almost against a huge straw-pile, where some neighbor had threshed a setting of wheat. This might mean that we were close to a house, or it might not. I handed the lines to Virginia under the robes, got out, and struggled forward to look at my team. Their bloodshot eyes and quivering flanks told me that they could help us no longer; so I unhitched them, so as to keep the cutter as a possible shelter, and turned them loose.

They floundered off into the drifts, and left us alone. Cuffed and mauled by the storm, I made a circuit of the stack, and stumbled over the tumbling-rod of the threshing-machine, which was still standing where it had been used. Leaning against the wheel was a shovel, carried for use in setting the separator. This I took with me, with some notion of building a snow-house for us; for I somehow felt that if there was any hope for us, it lay in the shelter of that straw. As I pa.s.sed the side of the stack, just where the ground was sc.r.a.ped bare by the wind, I saw what seemed to be a hole under and into the great loose pile of dry straw. It looked exactly like one of those burrows which the children used to make in play in such places.

Virginia was safe for the moment, sitting covered up snugly with her hands warmed by the little dog; but the cold was beginning to penetrate the robes. I could leave her for the moment while I investigated the burrow with the shovel. As I gained a little advantage over the snow which was drifted in almost as fast as I could shovel it out, my heart leaped as I found the hole opening out into the middle of the stack; and I plunged in on my hands and knees, found it dry and free from snow within ten feet of the mouth, and after enlarging it by humping up my back under it where the settling had made it too small, I emerged and went to Virginia; whom I took out with her dog, wrapped her in the robes so as to keep them from getting snowy inside, and backing into the burrow, hauled the pile of robes, girl and dog in after me, like a gigantic mouse engaged in saving her young. I think no mouse ever yearned over her treasures in such case more than I did.

And then I went back to get the dinner-basket, which was already buried under the snow which had filled the cutter; for I knew that there was likely to be something left over of one of the bountiful dinners which a farmer's wife puts up for the teacher. Then I went back into the little chamber of straw in which we had found shelter, stopping up the mouth with snow and straw as I went in. I drew a long breath. This was far better than I had dared hope for. There is a warmth generated in such a pile, from the slow fermentation of the straw juices; even when seemingly dry as this was: and far in the middle of the stack, vegetables might have been stored without freezing. The sound of the tempest did not reach us here; it was still as death, and dark as tar. I wondered that Virginia did not say anything; but she kept still because she did not understand where she was, or what I had done with her.

Finally, when she spoke it was to say, "Unwrap me, Teunis! I am smothering with the heat!"

I laughed a long loud laugh. I guess I was almost hysterical. The change was so sudden, so complete. Virginia was actually complaining of the heat!