Chapter 20: The Cold Snap
The crew left on a Monday, in the rain, with the church roof finished, the scaffold down, and the yard swept cleaner than the crew had found it, which Marcus said was the whole of the law and the prophets.
A week later, the second cold snap came down out of Canada like something with a grudge.
It was sharper than the blizzard snap β not more snow, but a still, iron cold, the kind that finds the one uninsulated elbow in a village's whole plumbing and leans on it. The temperature stood at nine below for three days. Pipes burst at the Ostrom house and at the library. The school closed. In the old days β and by old days Agnes meant any winter before this one β the village would have endured it the way it endured everything: separately, behind doors, each house an island of worry.
This time there was a relay.
Carol, from the post office, organized it on the second morning, standing on a chair in the grange with a clipboard and the moral authority of a woman who had delivered mail through the ice storm of '98. There would be a list. There would be times on it. Frank Delaire had the truck and would run wood and kerosene; the Barlow boys would take the north road; Mrs. Ostrom, whose own pipes had burst, announced she was an expert now and would take the south. Every house with an elder, a baby, a wood stove, or a worry got a name beside it and a time, and the list went up on the grange door and in the store window, and people checked themselves off with a pencil, like a congregation signing a card.
Agnes's name was on the list. She discovered this from the Barlows' eldest, who arrived at ten on Tuesday with a face muffled to the eyes and a thermos of soup from his mother and instructions to inspect her pipes, check the wood box, and not take "I'm perfectly fine" for an answer, as it was not on the approved list of answers.
"Your mother is a tyrant," Agnes informed him, letting him in.
"She said you'd say that, and to write it down as cooperation."
Her pipes β the ones Tommy had wrapped, in the wall Darnell had shown him how to open and close β held. Her wood box, filled by Frank on the Monday run, stayed filled. Her soup supply, she reported to Carol, was a matter between her and her freezer and not the business of the United States Post Office, but she said it while signing the sheet, and Carol counted it as love in its local dialect.
She also made one telephone call of her own that afternoon, to Carol at the post office.
"I am calling," Agnes announced, "to put myself on the working side of your list, before you finish the thing and make it awkward. I am not helpless, Carol. I am a woman with a full wood box and a piano, in a house that no longer admits the weather. Put me down for the telephone round. I can tell from a voice whether a person is warm enough, which is more than your Barlow boys can do."
A pause, in which Agnes could hear, distinctly, a pencil scratching.
"You're down for the east road telephones," Carol said. "Agnes. Thank you."
"Don't be absurd," Agnes said, warmly, and hung up before either of them could make it a moment.
On the coldest night, Agnes sat in her kitchen β warm, lamplit, the house ticking with heat the way a house does when everything in it is working β and listened to the wind work at a roof that no longer let the weather in. On her table lay the relay list, with every box on it checked in a dozen different hands.
Thomas used to say that a village was just a machine for keeping people alive that had learned to sing. She had laughed at him, in their kitchen.
She thought about the night of the blizzard, and her cold house, and a knock she had almost not answered. She thought about how close the whole thing had come to going the other way β how a winter, endured separately, might have ended with an empty house and a piano nobody played. And she understood, sitting there with the list under her hand, that the blizzard had changed more than her roof and more than four men's reputations.
The village had remembered how to look in on its own.
That was the repair. The roof was just where it showed.
She got up, put the kettle on for whoever the eight o'clock round brought to her door, and β because the house was warm, and the list was signed, and there was time β sat down at the piano first, and played, alone and for no one, with the door unlocked.