It was a pitiless cold day to be crunching outside in the brittle-topped snow. The men were gathering again at Jenkins’s store after the day’s search, and they were a little earlier than the day before without meaning to be. It was bitter enough to kill the hope of finding Benjamin Dawson safe. So they drained back into town, the skin on their cheeks burned pink, limbs stiffening. Icicles along the eaves of the store flashed in the setting sun, like bared fangs.
In twos and threes they came in, clapping their gloves together trying to bring the thaw into their hands, pulling their scarves down to let the warmer air tingle their lips. They stood around looking at one another, expecting news to break between them, then silently turning out to consider the shelves in case there was something their wives had wanted, something they’d forgotten.
George arrived with Sam, both of them stamping their boots against the floorboards, George blowing on his palms even though they could no longer feel his breath. He looked at the faces circling him and saw his friends, and even the men he did not like so well. They all stood like dogs at attention, gazes shifting up at him and then away, as if they’d failed to learn some new trick but were hoping for kindness anyway. He was thinking he wouldn’t ask them to continue on, not much longer, even though he couldn’t stop looking himself. Maybe when spring arrived, when it was time to plow the fields and drop the little seeds into their secret places and he had work to do again, real work, or if Evie asked him to. Until then he didn’t know how to return to her again empty-handed, without their boy. He stood there dumbly with his frozen brain dawdling, trying to thaw, trying to figure out how he had lost him.
When Cora Jenkins entered from the storage room, he saw. She kept her head down while she walked through the room of men, and he was thinking how Cora never did that. She always looked up and around so she could show off her pretty neck and eyes. She liked to take in the admiration of all who saw her, the way water would take the sunlight and glint it giddily back at the sky. Now she scuttled, pulling the end of her long copper braid forward over her shoulder. The men all turned instinctively toward her. They all knew that braid so well and had followed the woven trail of it many times with their eyes, down to where it ended at her waist. Now she was stroking it like a stray animal she’d picked up and must protect from them.
When Cora looked up, they could see that her eyes were outlined with pink, and the flirtation that usually flashed inside them was flattened now and dead. George walked over to the counter and placed his hand on hers. He meant to be helpful, but the cold of it made her start.
“Mr. Dawson,” she rasped, cleared her throat. “Mr. Bachmeier was here.”
He nodded. He clutched her hand and petted it.
“That’s all right, Cora,” he told her. “That’s all right.”
No other word made it into the air through the tightly closing silence, but they all understood that the search had been called off now, and they could go home and they would have to tell their wives to take out their black suits and brush them off, check for the small moth holes and mend them. They let their heads fall prayerfully forward because that’s what you did, and you kept your eyes down. This was out of respect, but also because no one wished to look George Dawson in the face.
As George shuffled home with Sam through the stubborn whiteness, he was surprised to feel some tears trying to slither out from his eyes, but they froze in his lashes. It was too cold even to snow, too sharp for that kind of softening, and part of him was relieved to know now that Ben did not suffer this cold. And part of him could not even grasp that Ben was beyond the winter, beyond the world, would never feel it tugging at his body ever again. He was able to freeze and thaw and be immune, could be eaten, even, by pale, patient grubs curling underground and would nevermore feel a thing.
The men arrived home, and George found himself looking at his own door in a way he never had before. He had painted it green because that was Evie’s favorite color, but when he entered there, his mind’s eye always leaped forward to what was inside, the beautiful form of his wife turning toward him and the impish laugh of his son.
Now he could not cross over. For the first time in his life, he did not want to enter here, and he noticed how the rain and the damp of the bay had slunk under the paint and blistered, lifting it up in places from the underside. He pressed the handle and went in. The first eyes he saw there were Rose’s, dark and dry.
“Upstairs,” she told him.
He lifted each knee steadily over the risers of the stairs, hearing the thud of his foot dropping onto each one.
He looked into his own bedroom, where Evie was lying on the bed, curled onto her side. She seemed unaware of him, though her eyes were open and staring out the window where the snow was trying to emerge again, its white thoughts skimming out of the night’s dark mind and wheeling back. He paused in the doorway, watching her, then went to the next door, which was his son’s. Ben, too, was lying in his bed, and someone had covered him up to his chin with the blanket. George went over to him and looked down at the closed face. The skin was no longer a natural color, but the features were the same, the round bump of nose, the curved seams of mouth and eyes. He touched the cold hair, and it was still damp. He sat on the edge of the bed and drew back the blanket enough to take the small hand in his own. When he was done holding the hand, he replaced it gently by the hip where it had lain and pulled the blanket up carefully. It was only the stillness that was strange. He had visited Ben many times before like this, brushing the hair away from his eyebrows and sometimes bending to the peaceful forehead with his own lips, but always there had been that breath, the measured rise of the belly under its covers, the whispered release of air as it went down again, more of a warmth of life in the room than a fully formed sound.
After he tucked Ben back in, he went to his own bed. He sat on it to remove his boots but did not bother to undress. He opened his side of the bedclothes and jostled in next to his wife. He wasn’t sure if she would want him to put his arms around her, but he did it anyway, pressing his face into the hair at the nape of her neck. It smelled familiar, like baking and smoke. She said nothing but covered his hand with her own, her sign of welcome. With his arms around her, he cried into her back, tears and tears until her hair was wet like their son’s.
Evie lay awake listening. The house flexed its joints one by one, and George shuddered the bed around her with his soundless sobs. When the tremors subsided, she knew he slept, and eventually she heard his soft snore behind her. That snore had made her crazy with rage many nights. It was such a small noise, so unassuming, as if even in his sleep he would not have disturbed her, would do anything, in fact, for her comfort. Yet it didn’t matter how small it was; it could keep her own sleep at bay for hours, as if sleep were a timid animal circling, giving a wide berth to the slightest sounds. She had seethed, wanting to clamp her hand over his face. Whenever she shoved him and rolled him over, the sound would cease, but it was only a matter of time until it resumed. It was like pushing a bar of Ivory soap underwater again and again only to watch it resurface, unsinkable.
Tonight she was grateful for the snuffle at her back, this familiar something to listen to. The darkness stroked her for hours, the snoring sucked at her thoughts until she was hollowed out, and she stretched into senselessness. She felt a prayer welling up from her heart that the night would go on, and the sounds of George breathing be the only thing she would ever hear, and the light never come again to her eyes and make them see. But at the edge of the bare, blackened trees, the sky began to flush, its first low streak spreading upward slow and sneaking, until the waking face of the world was a reddened sadness burning. She sat up.
Yes, she thought to it. That is the way of you. This is your shame.