Keep-Full
Part One: Thirty-One Below
The cold snap hit the third week of January.
It came down out of Saskatchewan on a Tuesday night like a freight train. By Wednesday morning, the radio in Bismarck was saying thirty-one below on the farm roads east of Harvey. Fifty-five below with the wind. The kind of cold that freezes your nostrils shut on the first breath and makes your car door handle burn your bare fingers.
The kind of cold that kills people out here.
Mom didn’t answer her phone Wednesday evening.
I didn’t worry much at first. She’s eighty-two. She falls asleep in her chair watching Lawrence Welk reruns on the public station. Sometimes she leaves the phone in the bedroom and can’t hear it ring from the living room.
I called again at nine. Then at nine-thirty.
Nothing.
Thursday evening, she didn’t answer again.
I called six times. Seven. I called the Schmidts, her nearest neighbors, two miles down the gravel road. Their line was busy. I called again. Still busy.
I stood in my kitchen in Bismarck with my phone in my hand and my heart pounding.
My husband, Steve, drives a plow for Burleigh County. During a cold snap, they don’t come home. He’d been out since Tuesday afternoon, sleeping in the cab of his truck at the county shop between shifts, keeping the roads open.
I called him.
“Go,” he said. “I can’t get away. Take the Suburban. Fill the tank in Washburn. Take the emergency kit and the extra blanket. Call me when you get there.”
“Steve—”
“Go, Connie,” he said. “I’ll pray the whole way.”
So I drove out from Bismarck alone.
A hundred and fifteen miles. North on Highway 83, then east on 200 through Turtle Lake and McClusky. The sky was black and enormous and full of stars so sharp they looked like broken glass. The snow on both sides of the road glowed blue in my headlights.
I passed one other car the whole way.
Part Two: The Farm
The farm is twelve miles east of Harvey, North Dakota. Eight miles off the blacktop on a gravel section-line road that the county plows maybe once a week in winter.
My grandfather homesteaded it in 1912. Three hundred and twenty acres of wheat and sunflowers and pasture. A white two-story farmhouse with green shutters. A red barn with the roof caved in on the north end. A shelterbelt of caragana and ash trees my grandmother planted against the wind.
And next to the house, a big white propane tank on concrete blocks.
Five hundred gallons. Shaped like a giant pill.
There’s no natural gas out here. There never has been.
Every farmhouse in Wells County heats with propane or fuel oil or wood. The co-op trucks drive out on the gravel roads all winter long, filling tanks. If your tank runs dry, your furnace goes out. If your furnace goes out at thirty below, your pipes freeze in a few hours.
And then you do.
I pulled into the farmyard at eleven-twenty.
The yard light was on. That was something. The kitchen window was dark.
I parked by the back door. I grabbed my flashlight and the blanket. I got out.
The cold hit me like a wall. My eyes watered and the tears froze on my lashes before I’d taken three steps.
The kitchen door was unlocked, the way it always is out there.
I pushed it open. I stepped inside.
No furnace hum.
That’s the first thing I noticed. That farmhouse has had the same furnace since 1987. It’s loud. It rumbles in the basement like a sleeping animal. You hear it every few minutes all winter long, kicking on and off.
It wasn’t running.
Just the clock.
The old Westclox on the wall above the kitchen table. The one with the rooster on the face that Dad bought at the Harvey hardware store in 1970. Ticking.
That was the only sound in the house.
I could see my breath in the kitchen.
Part Three: The Recliner
I walked through the kitchen into the living room. My boots left snow on the linoleum.
I found her in the living room.
She was asleep in Dad’s old recliner.
The brown La-Z-Boy by the picture window. The one with the cracked vinyl on the right arm and the lever that sticks. Dad sat in that chair every evening for thirty-four years. After he died, Mom started sitting there instead.
She was wearing her long brown winter coat.
The wool one. With the big buttons and the fake fur collar. The one she’s worn to church every winter since 1995. Zipped and buttoned all the way to her chin.
She had a knit hat pulled down over her white hair. Red and green, with a pom-pom on top. My niece made it for her two Christmases ago.
The crocheted afghan was over her lap. The orange and brown and gold one Grandma Heinz made in 1974.
Her hands were folded on top of it. In knit gloves.
There was frost on the inside of the windows.
Not on the outside. On the inside. The big picture window behind the recliner was covered in white feathers of ice, so thick you couldn’t see the yard light through it.
I stood in the doorway in my red parka.
Car keys still in my hand. Snow melting on my shoulders. My flashlight pointed at the floor.
I couldn’t move.
For a long, terrible moment, I didn’t know if she was breathing.
Then I saw the afghan move. Just a little. Up and down.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
I looked at the thermostat on the wall by the hallway.
An old Honeywell. Round. Beige. With the little arrow you turn with your thumb.
It said 58.
That was the setting. The arrow pointed at 58.
The little mercury thermometer under it, the one that shows the actual room temperature, said 51.
Mom is eighty-two.
She has lived alone out there since Dad passed four years ago. She won’t move to town. She won’t move in with any of us. She says she was born in that house, married in that house, raised four kids in that house, and she’ll die in that house.
I stood in her living room at fifty-one degrees and thought, Not like this. Not tonight. 