Chapter 3: The Storm Coming
She prepared the way her mother had taught her and her grandmother before that, in the order that mattered: water first, then light, then heat. She filled the big kettle, both buckets, and the blue enamel pot, and set them along the wall where they would not freeze. She trimmed the lamp wicks and filled the lamps to their shoulders. She laid out the matches in three places β stove, table, and her own pocket β because a woman who has to hunt for a match in the dark has already lost an argument with the evening. She brought in wood until the box by the stove stood full and the ache in her arms had become a general condition, and then she brought in one armload more, because storms, like guests, always stayed longer than the invitation said.
She moved through the house the way a captain moves through a small ship. Windows latched. The shutter on the north side wedged with a length of kindling, Thomas's old trick, which had outlived Thomas. The soup pot emptied and set under the worst of the upstairs drips, on a folded towel, so the house would not have to listen to it all night. The hens got extra corn and a muttered apology for what was coming. The truck she left where it stood; there was nowhere it needed to be that it could get to, in what was coming.
Carol telephoned at noon, which meant the storm had been promoted, in Carol's private weather service, from news to concern. "We're opening the church hall," she said. "Cot's got your name on it, Agnes. Frank's bringing his generator. There's soup." It was, Agnes knew, a half-hearted offer in one respect only: Carol had her own house to worry about and her own sister coming down from Rutland, and the cot in the hall was a real thing offered in a hurried voice. But it was also, beneath the hurry, the village's one idea for her β that she should be gathered up somewhere warm and official, like a parcel, and kept.
"I'm obliged," Agnes said, "but I'll stay with my house."
"Agnes Holloway, you are eighty years old at the end of a dirt roadβ"
"I am seventy-nine until March, and the house is a hundred and forty, and between the two of us we have seen worse than weather." She said it warmly. She meant it warmly. She also meant it completely. A woman did not leave her house to a storm like a coat left on a train. "You look after your sister, Carol. I'll ring you when it's done."
She hung up before the argument could find its second wind, and was not sorry, and was also, in some folded-small place, a little sorry β because a cot among people is not nothing, and pride is a cold fuel, and she knew its price by heart.
Afterward she stood with her hand on the telephone a moment, as if it might reconsider. It didn't. The line hummed its empty hum, and she took her hand away and went on with the day, because the day, unlike the telephone, was going to happen whether she participated or not.
The snow began at dusk, politely at first: a few flakes rehearsing in the lamplight beyond the glass. By six it had committed itself. By seven the yard light showed a world being revised at speed, the fence going, then the maple, then the road itself, each subtracted in turn until there was only the white falling and falling past the window, closer than the glass, intimate as breath. The wind found the house's loose places and played them all at once β shutter, eave, the stovepipe's loose cap β a whole orchestra of small neglects, tuning up.
The power flickered at eight. The lamp flame leaned, recovered, leaned again, attentive as a dog. The radio gave a strangled sigh and came back on a station that was suddenly mostly static, and a cheerful voice from Burlington said the word blizzard now, without apology, and advised the whole listening region to stay off the roads, as though the roads were still a place a person could choose to be.
Agnes banked the stove for the night, set the lamp on the kitchen table, and laid out her supper β soup from a jar she'd put up in August, bread, the last of the summer's jam standing by like a memory of a warmer administration. She ate it sitting properly at the table, across from Thomas's chair, because a storm was exactly when a woman should keep her standards. Outside, the world narrowed to the reach of her lamplight. Inside, she was warm, and fed, and entirely alone in a way that had stopped being a fact and had become, simply, the shape of the room.
She was washing her cup when the lights went out for good, and did not come back.