One Night of Snow: The Widow and the Four Strangers

Chapter 1: The Widow of Hollow Road

Agnes Holloway woke at five, as she had woken at five for sixty years, before the alarm she no longer set and before the light she no longer needed. The house was cold in the particular way of old houses in Vermont, a cold that lived in the walls and came out to meet you. She lay a moment listening to the wind worry the loose shutter Thomas had meant to fix the autumn before he died, then got up, because lying still was a kind of giving in.

She dressed in layers in the dark. Wool socks. The blue cardigan with the mended elbow. She set the kettle on and stood at the kitchen window while it heated, watching the yard decide what color to be. November had taken the last of the leaves. The maple by the gate stood bare and patient, and the gate itself hung by one good hinge, leaning like a drunk she was too fond of to scold.

Thomas's chair sat where it had always sat, at the head of the table, and every morning she set her cup down across from it without thinking, and every morning the thinking caught up with her around the second sip. Six years. She had stopped expecting the grief to behave like weather. It behaved like the house: mostly sound, with particular leaks.

The stain on the kitchen ceiling had grown again. She measured it against the crack in the plaster and judged it a hand's breadth wider than in October; Emily's height marks were still penciled on the pantry door beside it, up to age fourteen. The roof wanted shingles. The roof had wanted shingles for three years, and the roofer from the valley had quoted a price that made her laugh in a way she had not enjoyed. She kept a soup pot upstairs for the worst of the drips and emptied it into the sink with the air of a woman performing a sacrament she resented.

Outside, she did the chores in whatever order the weather allowed. The woodpile by the shed was lower than she let herself say aloud. She counted cords the way other women counted money in a tight year: carefully, and with hopeful omissions. If she burned only the kitchen stove and let the parlor go cold, if December was kind — December was never kind, but a woman could plan around an unkind month. She carried in four armloads and stacked them by the stove, and her arms ached in the deep places, and she noted the ache the way she noted the stain: filed, not feared.

The chickens — three hens now, down from a dozen — regarded her with the bright suspicion of creatures who had known her all their lives. She fed them, broke the skin of ice on their water with the heel of her boot, and talked to them because the sound of a voice in the yard was a thing the yard ought to have. "Mrs. Bates," she told the eldest, "you are looking very well for a lady of your history." Mrs. Bates pecked at the frozen ground and offered no opinion.

The telephone sat on the hall table beneath a crocheted cloth, guarding the front door like a small black dog. It rang on Sundays, sometimes, when Emily remembered, and it rang when the church ladies were organizing a supper, and otherwise it kept a silence that had become one of the house's furnishings. Emily was forty-nine and lived in Oregon, in a city Agnes had visited once and found too far from any honest hill. Her calls had the rhythm of a duty kindly performed: news of grandchildren Agnes knew mostly from photographs, questions about the house that were really about whether she was managing, and beneath both, unspoken, the great question of the farm itself — whether she would sell, whether she would come west, whether she would stop being a worry. Agnes always said she was managing. She was managing. That was precisely the trouble: she was managing the way the gate was managing, by one hinge, in a leaning fashion, one more season at a time.

At dusk she lit the lamp in the parlor window, as her mother had done in this same house, and ate her supper standing at the stove more often than she sat down to it, because a table set for one is a sentence a woman can decline to read. Then the dishes. Then the radio. Then the long evening of mended socks and the news from Burlington and the weather, which that night used the word storm twice, in the level tone of men paid not to frighten anyone.

She went to bed at nine with the house ticking around her, and if she was lonely she arranged the feeling the way she arranged everything else: folded small, put away in a drawer, where it would keep until morning.