Conrad's Winter

The horses had been put up, covered in wool stable blankets and surrounded with extra hay, their feedbags filled with oats and molasses. The barn was cold when he brought them in, but within minutes their body heat would press against the faded wooden walls and they would be warm during the night. The white egg yolk sun had promised snow tonight, and despite his long list of sins, neglect of his animals was not one of them.

He brought the dogs in, and they went straight to the woodstove to curl up, noses tucked into soft fur. He closed the curtains before the sun had set, since the wind always seemed to press a little too hard against the old glass and find invisible cracks to slip into.

He put stew on the stove, venison from the fall and potatoes from the garden. In the kettle, water rolled, waiting for tea.

He ate alone in front of the fire, the dogs rousing briefly at the smell of the cooked meat and then falling again into their slumber, paws twitching as they chased grouse through their dreams.

The snow started while he was washing the dishes. He heard the first flakes hit the earth, that’s how silent it was outside. Briefly, he looked outside. The sky was heavy and gray, not even a whisper of stars. He felt the cold in his bones, and hastened to close the front door, locking the deadbolt.

He felt her in the stillness out there. He couldn’t tell if she was already there, waiting by the barn, or if she was waiting until the snow thickened to brave the clearing where his cabin stood. He glanced at the dogs, still sleeping. He felt a sudden shock of envy for their simple lives, for their ignorance. An old anger rose in him, nearly forgotten but still familiar, tasting like bitter almonds and bourbon. His left ring finger twitched, and he closed his eyes.

Not now, not ever again.

From under his bed, he pulled the gun, then sat back down in front of the woodstove, the rifle balanced on his knee, a comforting weight.

She was coming, but he would be waiting.

Conrad had buried his wife beneath a hemlock deep in the forest where no trails cut through. He picked the hemlock because of their powers of protection, not for her spirit, but for his. It was December, and the ground was wet, a freeze coming any day. He didn’t cry while he dug down into the cold ground until his shoulders burned and his back ached. He didn’t cry when he lowered her down into the rough hewn grave. It wasn’t until he pressed the earth down over her head and covered the raw spot with dead leaves that the sobs came.

I’m sorry, Mary, he cried, I’m so sorry.

His grief sent blackbirds spiraling out of the trees, deer spooked and ran through the underbrush. He bowed his head and kissed the earth, tasting winter and pine and regret.

Conrad left his wife in an unmarked grave in a forest she had never seen. He covered his tracks with rocks and walked in circles for miles before he left. He sold their farm and moved into a cabin in another forest on the other side of a lake. He refused to speak her name, for fear she would hear.

Forty winters came and went and the ground stayed undisturbed. But Conrad still waited. He watched the skies and fought the cold and knew one day, Mary would find him.

When the clock on the mantle said half past ten, he checked on the horses. Outside, the snow was falling in great drifts from the sky, covering the ground in an icy blanket. His boots sank and left prints that were gone by the time he finished making sure the horses weren’t shivering, and that their water hadn’t frozen. He lingered in the musky warmth, feeding Elmer a sugar cube and Delilah a carrot. He received whickers in response and soft shoves with their velvet noses. Their eyes, framed with impossibly long lashes, were as dark and syrupy as the molasses on their breath. They looked at him with gratitude, and he felt, somewhere deep inside, a stirring.

Happiness was not something he could remember feeling in too many years to count, but sometimes, when his horses pressed their heavy hands against him and licked sugar from his palms he felt the resilient ghost of joy somewhere deep within.

Back outside, he gathered a few more logs from the woodpile that leaned against the north side of the barn. His lantern illuminated the snowy backs of the firewood, and he reached lower in the stack, hoping for something dry. His hand brushed something soft, and on instinct he pulled away, bringing his lantern closer to see. He was expecting the body of a mouse, who sought pointless refuge from the cold and froze between the poplar and hardwood. Instead, he saw tiny black eyes, a pink nose, and translucent miniature claws.

A kitten. It hissed at him, and its wet fur stood up along its spine, although he poised any greater threat than the freezing night that was descending on them. For a minute, he considered gathering his wood and going inside, leaving nature to decide the fate of the kitten. For one thing, he didn’t have a cat, which begged the question how this animal had gotten here in the first place. His mother, a superstitious woman, had always told him if you didn’t know where something came from, chances were it was from the Devil.

The kitten was shivering violently. If this was from the Devil, then he felt confident whatever angels he still might have, or at the very least, his dogs, would protect him if it came down to it. Reaching out, he lifted the kitten into his palm. At first, the tiny claws dug in like needles, and then, when he tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat , he felt the tiny body surrender to the warmth and curl up, a tiny hummingbird purr vibrating against his heart.

Inside, he added logs to the fire and let the dogs sniff the smell of the kitten on his hands. Toby seemed interested for a minute, and then they both curled back up, too thankful for a night inside and not on guard duty in the barn to care for long.

He set the kitten on the oak countertop, and watched it waver slightly on his feet. Inside, it wasn’t the black he had initially thought. As its fur dried, he saw it was pale gray, almost white actually. Its nose was as pink as the inside of a rose.

Where did you come from?” He asked, and his voice cracked from disuse. He rarely spoke, the dogs were familiar with commands given through hand signals, and the horses, he knew, understood a gentle touch far more than spoken direction.

Cautiously, he extended a hand again, one eye on its paws, aware that in a flash those tiny claws could be out and deep in his palm. Instead, the animal pressed its face into the cradle of his open hand, accepting him without doubt as its savior.

Conrad brought Mary home a white kitten. She was baking bread, and he stood in the kitchen door, waiting for her to see him. In the rare moments when Conrad caught Mary unaware, he was always struck with the dizzying clarity of her beauty.

There was something in the way she moved that made him think of queens from long ago; the grace of her bowed head over the dough, blonde curls that refused to stay pinned. He knew without seeing that there would be flour on her jaw, and her eyelashes would cast shadows on her cheeks.

Sometimes Conrad wondered how an angel like her had ever agreed to spend her days on Earth with him.

He stepped forward, the white bundle cradled in his arms. Mary heard the creak of his feet on the floorboards and turned to face him, a smile splitting her face.

“You’re home early- oh!” She exclaimed, her eyes widening as they fell on what he was holding. She wiped her hands on her apron, flour puffing from the fabric like a cloud. She rushed forward, hands outstretched. Carefully, he placed the kitten in her hands, and she brought it up to her face, pressing her nose into the snow-white fur.

“Thank you, Conrad,” she breathed, her eyes closed with happiness. “I love her.”

“It’s a boy,” Conrad said, but his wife had closed her eyes again and was nuzzling the kitten, whispering little nonsensical coos in his flower petal ears.

“No matter,” Conrad said, and gently stroked the curve of Mary’s face, where the bruise bloomed like shame across her cheekbone. “He can be anything you want.”

At a quarter past eleven, he loaded his gun. The cat was curled up like a comma in his breast pocket, where, (she, he had discovered), had deemed the warmest and most comfortable place to sleep.

He could hear just how much snow had fallen outside by the way the wind sounded like it was muffled by cotton, the creaking of the elms behind the barn the faintest whisper. Inside, a log popped in fire, and he felt his skin prickle with unease.

For the first time he found himself thinking about the battered leather bible in his night stand drawer. Habitual obligation and perhaps a slight bit of holy fear had influenced him to leave it there throughout the years, despite his neglect to ever actually read it. He was not naive enough to think that if he prayed for forgiveness now, after years of silence, God would think him worthy to save.

He felt a sudden wave of fear, so sharp and distinct amidst his usual numb, dreamlike thoughts and feelings that it made the dogs wake up. They looked at him balefully, and Ella growled, as though with the realization he was afraid somehow his scent had changed and made him unfamiliar. Only the kitten curled tighter against his chest, a warmth directly above his heart.

He stood up, resting the gun against his chair and went to his bedroom, taking the bible from the nightstand. Its weight felt unfamiliar in his hand, and he stood with it for a moment, contemplating its power. He had never gone to church of his own accord, only when the women in his life made him accompany them, first his mother, and then…

He turned and strode purposefully to the kitchen with the bible still clutched in his hands. He pushed aside the heavy curtain that covered the window over the table, and looked out into the night. The sky was still dark as coal, but all the snow that had fallen made it so he could see the outline of the barn, the trees, the woodpile.

He should go outside and shovel, clear a path to the barn so in the morning he didn’t have to fight through waist deep drifts to get to the animals.

For a second, he considered putting on his coat and going out, but then he looked at the clock. Nearly a quarter to twelve now. He pushed aside thoughts of going out, and went back to the woodstove. The coals burned brightly, and the warmth pushed out so strongly that the dogs had moved back from it a few paces. He knew it was plenty warm enough in the cabin, but still he added more logs, letting the flames flare up again. He moved his chair closer until he felt sweat bead along his hairline, and the metal of the gun felt hot in his hands.

He kept the bible in his lap too, under the gun, and silently began to recite any prayers he remembered.

Our father, who art in Heaven….

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

He should have prayed every day, gone to church and confessed his sins. He should have counted rosary at every dawn and knelt on embers at night in penance. He should have put a statue of the Virgin at the foot of his bed and asked God for forgiveness each waking minute.

Instead, all he had was a lifetime of silent sorrow, and regret, that although as powerful as any prayer, would not be enough to save him in the end.

Conrad married Mary when they were nineteen in a meadow filled with buttercups. She wore a simple white dress and he promised to protect her for as long as they both lived. Six months later, he went to war to protect her from the unknown threats of the world and two weeks after he came home he hit her for the first time.

Conrad blamed the war for changing him. He truly believed that the things he’d seen and the things he’d had to do damaged him beyond repair, and made it so all the brightness of his beautiful wife only reminded him of the shadows inside him. He justified it that her happiness was indecent in a world where so much evil could happen, where children could die in the streets and their mothers would throw themselves in front of rifles because they didn’t want to live in a world without them.

Conrad told Mary that he was still lost somewhere in a field where the gunshots were so loud it hurt, and men fell like leaves in autumn.

She believed him, and cradled his sorry head and forgave him again and again because she believed he was still at war, and one day he would really come home.

Conrad knew the truth. He knew that this man had always been him. There had always been a rage that burned under his breastbone, contained there until war had ignited it. He knew that every day he laid his hands on his wife, he was really punishing himself. In a world that had become unfamiliar, he pushed Mary away just to know she would always come back.

Until one day, he really did push her too hard. He held her in his arms and willed her to wake up, and when she didn’t he felt the grief grab a hold of him with an immeasurable and eternal force, and he knew with complete certainty it would never let him go, it would become his constant in the ungovernable world.

At midnight, he sat up straight. Somehow, unbelievably, he managed to doze off. The fire was roaring, and the kitten had climbed out of his pocket to escape the heat.

The minute and hour hands stood together, pointing accusingly at the twelve. He felt his heart skip a beat, and one hand wrapped around the rifle, the other clutched the bible. He counted his breaths.

When the knock came, at two minutes past midnight, he felt relief wash over him. His heart, which had been pounding without him realizing it since he smelled the snow on the air yesterday, slowed in his chest. He took a deep breath, and smelled woodsmoke and dog and the cedar planks of his cabin. He tried to memorize these smells, the comforts that he surely did not deserve, but had been allowed anyway.

Then he stood up, and went to the door, leaving the rifle and bible sitting in the chair. Surprisingly, his fear had gone away.

When he opened the door the winter blew in, snow landed in his beard and he tasted frost and cold and something strange that maybe was stardust.

He blinked into the night, his eyes adjusting to the dark, and saw her on the doorstep. Snowflakes were caught in her eyelashes, and when she stepped over the threshold, the cold came with her. In the other room, he knew the fire had gone out. The dogs began to howl, although they stayed where they were.

When she touched the lines in his face, he was suddenly self conscious of how he’d aged, while she was still young and beautiful.

“I would have grown old with you,” she breathed, as though she’d heard his thoughts, and the tears came then, falling silently down his face and running into the open cup of her hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said, although he knew the time for forgiveness was long gone.

“I waited for you,” she said, and her voice was like church bells and music he’d forgotten. “I waited for you to come back for me.”

“Take me with you,” he said, a willing surrender. “I’ll come now.”

And suddenly he wanted nothing more than to go with his bride into the cold night, to let her take him from his sorrow and hold him against her frozen breast.

And in the morning when the December dawn broke onto the snowy hills, he would promise to protect her in the next world, although he had failed to do so in this one.

In the morning, when the dawn did break, Conrad’s house would be fully covered in the snow. It wouldn’t be until January that someone came upon the cabin. They would find the barn doors open and the horses gone, and twelve paw prints, eight large and four tiny, leading away from the house, preserved in the snow.

They would have to clear feet of snow away from his front door, and when they finally opened it they would find Conrad sitting in an armchair in front of a long dead fire, a rifle and bible resting in his lap. His head would be pointed toward the clock on the wall, where they would find both hands stuck just past twelve.

It’s like he was waiting for something, they would say, or maybe someone. It's like he was waiting for the exact moment to let go.