The shift in weather is distinct—grass hardening, creeks freezing, Brine Lake thickening with slush. Along Main Street, children in crimson jerseys decorate shop windows with snowflakes and snowmen. Many adults wear their old crimson basketball or cheerleading uniforms, whichever half still fits. The high school band sets up their music stands in front of Vinter’s grocery, and a clarinet player squeaks out a scale.
I watch from the house as families set up stalls and unfold tables on Crooked Hill Road and Main Street. The closest fill up with canned goods, sausage, fudge, food that’ll save. Others hold crocheted blankets, sweaters, and even a selection of Doris’s paintings. I wonder how long they will live in Petroleum homes after she’s gone.
Neighbors load still more tables with secondhand supplies: hand-crank lights and hand-crank radios, shovels for the front and back doors, flashlights, weather seal tape for drafts, portable power generators and extra gas, chain saws, bags of salt and sand, gas-powered snow throwers, matches. Another table displays hand-me-downs: skates, snow pants, parkas, bedding. There’s even a fix-it corner where you can bring busted snowblowers, televisions, anything at all, and someone will get it working for you again. The festival is less a celebration than a day to prepare for the upcoming snowstorms. Today neighbors will weatherproof homes, share tools, supplies, and labor.
Under light flurries, Slim climbs a ladder, carrying a large artificial snowflake. Several of the students who ride his bus mill below, looking up as he attaches the ornament to the top of a pole. They have a love-hate relationship with Slim, spending so many hours ogling the back of his strange head, and yet he is the man who rolled an oil drum full of rattlers through town, the man who safely delivers them to school and home each day. You see all of this in their hesitant waves good-bye.
Because this is the other reason for the annual Blizzard Festival. It’s the move-in date for students who live on the outlying ranches. These children, like generations before them, will stay in what has become known as the winter dorm until the school bus can be certain of making the journey to and from their homes again.
Their families move through the crowd toward the hotel with suitcases and boxes full of bedding. Each year, the Blizzard Festival falls on a different date. This year’s is fortunate. Because of the mild beginning to winter, families could be together over the holidays.
Fritz stands at the entrance, ready to receive his new boarders. They will now be under his care except for when they’re in school. To look at his stooped, wiry frame, you wouldn’t think he could control the kids, but they fear his temper and his cane, so they keep their rooms clean, study (or at least stay quiet) for two hours after dinner, and are in bed by nine o’clock.
He lines the kids up in front of the hotel as they arrive, and I step on the front porch to count.
“One more,” Fritz shouts. “Don’t dawdle.”
I recognize the long periwinkle coat I’ve seen draped over the back of our kitchen chair. Without it, I might not have recognized Martha, her face appearing older without the flirtatious smile or the cheeks red with passion and shame. Her husband, in jeans, oilskin jacket, and felt Stetson carries a suitcase, and Minnow carries a basketball and a pillow.
“Line up,” Fritz tells her.
In years past, every room would have been filled to capacity with cots lining the walls, but this year there are only sixteen boarders: five girls, eleven boys. Martha reaches out to squeeze her daughter’s shoulder and Minnow shrugs it away, joining the line of students.
I pay special attention to this girl named for the wine-stain birthmark near her forehead. I’ve overheard Martha talking about this stain quite a lot, sharing how she and her husband decided it looked like a small fish, and fishing was the one thing that each of their families had in common. Thinking up fish-themed names was something she and her husband bonded over, a mercy, since they had struggled for most of their marriage to remember what they liked about each other.
Minnow sweeps her hair over the birthmark and holds it in place with her hand. And I’ve heard Martha talk about this too, how she cut bangs for her daughter when she was teased by classmates, and later tried to help her feel more confident so that when the wind tossed her hair aside and exposed the mark, she was not ashamed.
I wonder if Minnow knows our parents are having an affair, if she sees her mother’s red truck left too long in the school parking lot, her mother sneaking through the back alley to our house. For a moment, I catch the teenager’s eye, and she scowls in a way that seems to indicate she knows.
Pete’s white Ford pulls into our driveway, and by the time I head inside, he’s already come through the back door.
“You missed some excitement outside the Pipeline,” Pete says, nodding hello as I step into the kitchen.
“What’s happening?” Pop asks.
“Larry Rogers—you know, with the long beard,” he says for my benefit. “He lost a finger working yesterday. This morning he’s walking around, giving everyone a look.”
“Did he bring it in a jar or something?” I ask.
“Nope,” he says. “He unwrapped the bandages and showed off the stump.”
“They couldn’t reattach it?” Pop asks, setting his toolbox on the kitchen table.
“By the time he got to Agate, all they could do was tidy it up and make sure it didn’t get infected.”
“That’s a shame,” Pop says, checking through his tools.
“Oh, he’s all right,” Pete says. “Probably never had so much attention.”
“Let me grab a tape measure,” Pop says, “and then I’m ready to get to work.”
He and Pete have a big day of labor ahead of them, helping to prepare the Purvis’s home for storm season while Mrs. Purvis spends the day at the hospital with her husband.
“You’re welcome to join us, Mary,” Pete says.
“I’ll probably just wander around,” I say, as if I’m not watching the clock for my coffee date with Robert. I’m dressed in the same flannel and jeans as a normal day, but I’ve slipped on a silver bracelet that was my mother’s, which I turn round and round at the cuff of my shirt.
My father returns with the tape measure and a knit cap.
“No crimson pride, Allen?” Pete asks, offering my father his choice of the scarf he’s wearing or the school flag jammed into the band of his sheriff’s hat.
“I’ll have the flag,” Pop says.
Pete takes off his hat, his hair pressed flat and a pink indentation circling his forehead. He detaches the flag with Petroleum School written on it, and my father looks for a place to pin it on his blue suit. Finally, he lets it peek out of his breast pocket.
“All right,” Pop says and grabs his equipment.
Pete places the hat back on his head and it settles into the pink groove. Once they leave, I shut the door and watch from the front window again as they emerge from around the corner, arms full of tools and a couple of sawhorses. I’ll bet that crimson flag has fallen out of my father’s pocket already.
I slip on my parka and gloves, ready to head to the diner for coffee. Do I dare call it a date? I weave my way into the crowd. Most of my neighbors roam about the displays, sipping hot chocolate and chatting, when I spot something out of place. Black in a throng of crimson. Clipped pace when everyone else saunters. Staring ahead while others socialize. Empty hands when others are working, carrying, purchasing.
The high school band plays “Let It Snow,” while the mascot for the Petroleum Oilers, wearing a hand-sewn oil drip suit that many say looks a lot like a Hershey’s Kiss, mingles with the crowd. Whenever the oil drip turns toward me, trying to shake my hand, I change direction.
Greetings between neighbors are enthusiastic. For many who live farther out of town, the festival is the last guaranteed day before spring thaw to see friends. But an enthusiasm of a different nature is also building. It’s the children who voice it first. “Is that him? Is that the younger brother?” These kids weren’t even born when Robert lived in town, and still they watch with a sense of suspicion. “Why’s he come?”
Neighbors who are perfectly decent on other days scowl and refuse to step aside so he can pass. There are taunts and bumps, and I’m reminded of our game inside the grain elevator, the joy of pointing our fingers at whoever played Robert. I’m afraid to approach him.
Down the road, my father unpacks tools. Pete senses the tension—I know this because he seems to follow the black jacket through the crowd. He measures a wooden board, then looks up again.
What makes Pete so popular in this town is that he has an instinct about when to step in and when to let things go. Marital and parenting disputes. The scrape running across Robert’s truck. This is the kind of business he avoids. He famously turns a blind eye to thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds taking a practice drive through town. It’s how most of us learned. And he doesn’t take a hard stance against what residents set on fire during open burn season. He understands how hard it is to get rid of trash—from dried Christmas trees to construction waste to animal carcasses—and he doesn’t harp on choices made by practical folks on tight budgets. Pete steps in only when he thinks someone’s actions hurt the safety or dignity of the community.
“Look at that,” someone says loud enough to call attention. “Leaves his mother alone while he goes to the festival.”
Several turn toward Robert, and others toward Doris, painting in her window.
“Can’t even take his mother out for hot chocolate.”
I’m close enough to call hello to Robert, but not with everyone watching. I pause at a booth about fire safety and carbon monoxide poisoning. I pretend to study a child-made poster as Robert tries to cut a path to the diner. He seems to find an opening, when a large man clips his shoulder.
“Watch it,” Robert snaps.
He is tangling with the wrong man.
Years ago, on that fateful day at the elevator, three boys stood in front of our house sharing details of the accident. The one with the camera, the one talking to Robert right now, isn’t someone you want to mess with.
I’m sorry for Robert, but I need to leave, turning quickly into a back alley. I wind through backyards until I’m near the Purvises’ house. Pete measures and marks one board while my father saws at another. They talk and laugh, though it seems impossible that they’d be able to hear each other over the electric buzz.
I walk closer until my shadow crosses over Pete’s work. He looks up and motions to my father to shut off the saw.
“Hey there, Button,” he says. “Nice to see you out and about.”
“What are you working on?”
“Right now? Making storage shelves for their basement,” Pete says. “Later? Stabilizing a column on the porch, changing lightbulbs, checking smoke detectors.”
“A ways to go, I guess.” I turn back toward the crowd. “People are getting kind of worked up near Vinter’s. Did you see?”
“Well, the guy’s wearing a getup that makes himself a target,” Pete says.
“It seemed like all he was doing was walking.”
“Best to just let him be,” Pete says. “He’ll leave town soon enough.”
“Ask Mary about her mystery man,” my father says, lifting his safety goggles. “I can’t get more than a couple words out of her.”
“Pop, don’t.”
“Just a name,” he says. “Or the town he’s from.”
“You don’t need to tell anything you don’t want to tell,” Pete says and grins at my father. “If she gave you one piece of information, you’d still want another.”
“Fair enough,” Pop says, smiling hard.
It hurts how a lie is the happiest I can make him.
My father lowers his goggles and starts the saw again, and I watch Robert open the door to the diner and go inside. I feel sick that I’m breaking my promise to meet him, and he doesn’t even know it yet.
Teachers and elementary students begin to march through the streets, dinging musical triangles and tapping wooden blocks. Martha, who tutors remedial readers after school, marches among them, chin lifted with the day’s pride.
“Parade’s coming,” I say, as if I needed to announce it. “I better cross while I still can.”
My father and Pete put down their tools. They stand tall. A show of respect. Behind the musicians, older students carry a large wooden board with “The Wall of Heroes” painted in large letters across the top. Just before the procession passes, I slip back to my side of the street. I turn to wave to my father, but his eyes have wandered toward Martha.