Sara was gone. No trace. No trace forward. No trace backward. The young man inquired of the art teachers and was only able to discover that she had arrived late in the previous semester and had not actually enrolled at all. She had just been sitting in on their classes informally by their permission and kept to herself. When she failed to appear for the current semester, they weren’t surprised. They showed him a few projects she had started on canvas and had left them in various states of incompleteness. The young man had never seen any of her work except some of her sometimes elegant –sometimes frenetic doodling in a sketchbook that was always with her. The canvases were abstracts, and the young man thought they suggested her frustration with a fruitless search on some private inner plane and a fear of being pursued by something nameless on an outer plane of the common. Or maybe, he was just looking at himself. The young man had lost a best friend -maybe more than a friend. He had lost. He knew it. He felt it. For a week or two he went through the motions of school, always feeling he was dragging a huge burlap sack filled with a hundred pounds of feathers.
Winter came. In late January, it began to snow. It snowed almost everyday it seemed for weeks. It covered more and more of the muddled drabness and set the form of bare, mountain forests and voluptuous, hilly pastureland in sharp, pronounced lines that eluded to meaning without suggesting boundaries or awareness of desire. On a Friday morning when the forecast was “more snow, lots of more snow” the young man left school early and started across the mountain to see his grandmother. She was mostly alone now. His grandfather had died in late fall, but local friends and relatives checked on her regularly, and tried to help her with the farm when they could overpower her wide streak of independence. The morning of clear skies and temperatures struggling toward a thaw was an advertisement of deceit. By the time he had arrived in later afternoon, a dark and purple storm had flooded and drowned the western sun. Large pellets of wet snow started to blow in on a steady well-rehearsed wind.
The young man let himself in and called,
“Granny? Are you here?”
She didn’t answer, but he could hear her in the basement chipping on a lump of coal with her hammer. He went down and finished stoking the furnace. She went upstairs and started a fire in the cook stove for supper. Discreetly, he busted up enough coal small enough that she could just use a shovel through the next week. When he went upstairs she pretended to be unaware of what he had been doing.
In the time of their simple meal, darkness had set the night and all but hidden the storm of new snow. After supper, they sat in the front room and talked, the young man asking questions about the old days, about daily life before electricity, cars, and plumbing. She knew something was working in the young man’s mind and heart, but she pretended not to notice. Mostly, the young man just sat and listened. With her long wall of stories, she picked away at the evening like a miner following a seam of coal, pillaring along the way with nearly forgotten details of joy or hardship that hadn’t seen the light of memory in decades. Eventually, she would come to a place where words were too hard or the ceiling of memories too low to squeeze through and there would be a long silence until a gust of wind jarred and rattled door on the back porch.
The next morning saw no snow falling, just an exhausted gray sky hovering over her newest offspring. It was difficult to say if there was one foot, two foot, or three of new snow. The wind had modeled, scrapped, carved, and birthed a new landscape directly on top of the old one. In some places there were only a few inches and in others pure, creamy, foam drifts of six or seven feet. After the morning chores were done and things set straight as well as could be, the young man searched around on the back poach until he found his grandfather’s old mining light and a supply of carbide. He told his grandmother,
“Am going over to the cave, I’ll be back afterwhile.”
*****
