PART 1: Thirty-One Below
The cold wave reached us in the third week of January, rolling out of Saskatchewan on Tuesday night like a freight train. By Wednesday morning the Bismarck radio station was reporting thirty-one below along the roads east of Harvey, with a windchill of fifty-five below. It is the kind of air that seals your nostrils shut and stings your fingers when you touch a car door handle. In this corner of North Dakota, it can kill.
Mom didn’t pick up Wednesday evening. At first I wasn’t alarmed. At eighty-two, she often dozed off in front of Lawrence Welk reruns on public television, and sometimes she left her phone in the bedroom. I tried at nine, then again at nine-thirty. Nothing. On Thursday evening she still didn’t answer. I dialed six, maybe seven times, then tried the Schmidts, her closest neighbors two miles down the gravel road. Their line was busy, and it stayed busy when I called back. Standing in my Bismarck kitchen with the phone in my hand, I could feel my heart pounding.
My husband Steve drives a snowplow for Burleigh County. When a storm hits, the drivers stay on duty for days. Since Tuesday afternoon he had been clearing roads, grabbing short naps in his truck at the county shop between shifts. 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.”
I left Bismarck alone for the 115-mile drive, heading north on Highway 83 before turning east onto 200 through Turtle Lake and McClusky. Over the prairie hung an enormous black sky, glittering with stars like splintered glass. My headlights threw a blue sheen across the snow banked along the road. In the whole night I passed exactly one other vehicle.
Mom’s farm sits twelve miles east of Harvey, North Dakota, and the last eight of those miles are gravel section-line road off the pavement. In winter the county sometimes plows that stretch only once a week. Grandpa homesteaded the land in 1912, 320 acres of wheat, sunflowers, and pasture. A white two-story farmhouse with green shutters stands beside a red barn whose north roof has caved in. Grandma planted a windbreak of caragana and ash trees. Beside the house, on concrete blocks, sits a white 500-gallon propane tank shaped like an enormous pill. Natural gas has never reached these farms. Out here people burn propane, heating oil, or firewood, and co-op trucks creep along the gravel roads all winter delivering fuel. An empty tank means a dead furnace, and at thirty below a dead furnace means frozen pipes within hours. Soon after that, the people inside can freeze too.
I turned into the yard at eleven-twenty. The yard light was glowing, but the kitchen window was black. I parked by the back door, grabbed my blanket and flashlight, and climbed out. The cold hit me like a solid wall. Tears gathered and froze on my eyelashes before I’d taken three steps. The kitchen door was unlocked, as it had always been. I stepped inside and noticed at once what was missing: the furnace. It had been in that basement since 1987, and it usually growled like a sleeping animal, clicking on and off every few minutes all winter. Tonight there was only the old Westclox with the rooster on its face, which Dad had bought at the Harvey hardware store in 1970 and hung above the kitchen table. Its ticking was the only sound in the house. In the kitchen, I could see my breath.
I crossed toward the living room, tracking snow across the linoleum. There, beside the picture window, Mom lay asleep in Dad’s old brown La-Z-Boy, the one with cracked vinyl on the right arm and a reclining lever that stuck. Dad had sat in that chair nearly every evening for thirty-four years, and after he died, Mom took it over. She was wearing her long brown wool winter coat, the one with the big buttons and the imitation-fur collar that she’d worn to church every winter since 1995. It was zipped and buttoned up to her chin. A red-and-green knitted hat with a pom-pom covered her white hair, the one my niece had made two Christmases ago.
Grandma Heinz’s crocheted afghan from 1974 lay across her lap, its orange, brown, and gold stitches as familiar as my own childhood. Her gloved hands rested together on top of it. Frost covered the windows on the inside, not the outside. Ice crystals as thick as white feathers hid the yard light beyond the picture window.
I froze in the doorway, still wearing my red parka, car keys hanging from my fingers, melted snow dampening my shoulders, my flashlight aimed at the floor. For a moment I was sure she was dead. Then the afghan shifted, barely rising and falling with her breath, and I let out my own.
The thermostat in the hallway is an old round beige Honeywell with a pointer you turn by thumb. It was set to 58 degrees, but the mercury thermometer beneath it, which shows the real temperature, read 51.
Mom was eighty-two and had lived alone since Dad died four years earlier. She had refused to move into town and refused to live with any of us. Her answer never changed: she was born in that farmhouse, married there, raised four children there, and intended to die there. Standing in that fifty-one-degree living room, I knew only one thing. It was not going to happen this way. Not tonight.
I didn’t phone my sister from that doorway, and there is a reason. I’m Connie Weber, fifty-four, the second of four children: Pam, me, Rob, and Dean. Pam, the eldest, lives in Harvey, twelve miles from Mom, where she has spent her whole married life working reception at the clinic. Her husband Mark drives a truck for the grain elevator. Because she lives closest, Pam handles most of Mom’s care. I’m a school-district payroll clerk in Bismarck. Rob farms near Rugby, an hour north, and Dean sells agricultural equipment in Fargo. We are scattered, juggling jobs, mortgages, children, and grandchildren. Pam takes the daily burden because she’s nearby.
Every October, Rob, Dean, and I send Pam $250 apiece for propane. We settled on it after Dad’s funeral, at the lunch in the church basement. Pam volunteered to handle the co-op account, and Rob said everyone should contribute. Dean asked, “Two-fifty each? Pam puts in the same?” She nodded. Four shares made $1,000, enough for a fall filling and another after Christmas. We had done it for four years, and I had never asked to see a receipt. Pam was my sister. She drove out on Sundays, took Mom to appointments in Harvey, bought groceries, and picked up pills. She was there when the rest of us weren’t.
So I didn’t call her that night, and not because I distrusted her. If I rang near midnight to say Mom was freezing, Pam would tear out onto treacherous roads at thirty-one below. She would arrive crying and apologizing, an argument would erupt, and Mom would still be cold when it ended. There was another reason too, though I wouldn’t understand it for another ten minutes.
I let Mom sleep and went back through the kitchen with my flashlight to look at the propane tank. Snow came up to my knees, and the wind off the fields cut like knives. Soon I couldn’t feel my face. A gauge sits beneath a metal lid on top of the tank, a round face like a speedometer numbered zero to one hundred, showing the percent full. Snow and ice had buried it. I brushed it clear with my glove and chipped the ice off the glass with my car key. In the flashlight beam, the needle sat at five percent, just above the red zone.
On a 500-gallon tank, that meant twenty-five gallons. In that cold, with an aging furnace, it might last a day, perhaps less. At that level the pressure drops, the furnace starves, and the flame flickers out. That explained the chill indoors. My hands shook as I stared at the needle, and not only from the cold.
Back in the kitchen I searched the refrigerator, which Mom covers with grandchildren’s school pictures, church bulletins, a Harvey Farmers Elevator calendar, and unused coupons. Under a corn-shaped seed-corn magnet I found a pink carbon-copy delivery ticket from the Harvey co-op. It was dated October 19. It recorded 200 gallons delivered, customer Pamela Ruff for Elsie Heinz, with the tank at 47 percent afterward. I read it twice. Two hundred gallons.
They fill a tank only to eighty percent, leaving room for the propane to expand, so a full delivery from empty would run about 350 to 400 gallons. Two hundred was roughly half. Propane had cost around two dollars a gallon in Wells County the previous October. Four hundred gallons would be $800, and another $200 could cover a post-Christmas top-off, so our $1,000 should have covered both. But 200 gallons had cost only $400, and I could find no later ticket anywhere among the bulletins and coupons.
I went back to Dad’s recliner, knelt in front of it, and laid a hand on Mom’s knee over the afghan.
“Mom,” I said. “Mom, wake up. It’s Connie.”
Her eyes opened slowly. She looked confused, then blinked at me.
“Connie?” she said. Her voice was thin and hoarse. “What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”
“You didn’t answer your phone,” I said. “Two nights. I got worried.”
She glanced at the frosted windows, then at the breath hanging in the air. Finally she looked at my face. I don’t know whether she saw fear, anger, or the pink delivery ticket in my hand. Her expression changed. Her gloved fingers closed tightly around my wrist.
“Don’t you start with your sister,” she said.
I stared at her.
“Mom—”
“Don’t you start with Pam,” she said again. Her grip on my wrist was shockingly strong. “She’s got enough going on.”
