What the Snow Brings
In Sheboygan, toward the end of eighteen months spent stevedoring before disillusionment put him back on the boats, one of the men Tom worked alongside was crushed by a crate when a crane’s strapping gave way and the cargo had swung loose. Mose, the man’s name was, or what he was known by. “I’m Irish too,” he used to say, over coffee ahead of their shift starting, shoulders hunched against the sleety cold, his scowl at the thought of the waiting work softened by a helpless smirk, speaking half in fun, half seriously. A great-grandmother back along on his mother’s line had come across from Mayo, a small fishing village called Cleggan. All on her own, too, so the story went, and at hardly more than a girl, running to get away, probably, because who’d have come here otherwise, especially back then. Mose’s mother, who’d never had so much as a glimpse of Mayo, not even as a picture in a book, but who’d been most of the way raised by her grandmother, had talked of nearly nothing else the whole of his childhood, and because of that he often wondered what that place, Cleggan, was like, whether life there would have been much different, even allowing for the time difference, than what Tom had left behind him. He’d been a drunk, he’d told Tom at some point, not even confiding but simply stating the fact. The worst kind of a one, not giving a damn who he hurt, or how badly, until Jesus picked him up from the gutter and set him on a better if not an easier road, and he felt sure that all of that was probably the Irish in him, too, the one thing and the other, the whiskey and the faith, his fingertips out of habit and in some need of reassurance reaching to trace and feel the shape of the small silver cross that he wore around his neck on a piece of butcher’s twine. So, Irish then, even that far back—the grandmother of his mother—being still no distance at all, really, though to look at he seemed nothing less or more than full-blown Indian, which he mostly was, his father nearly entirely Chippewa on one side and pure Potawatomi on the other and his mother at least half Métis. That mid-December morning on the docks, the swinging crate had broken loose and pinned him to the ground, crushing his legs and torso to mid-chest, and he’d lived on for maybe a minute before bleeding out, not speaking but trying to, his lips, teeth, and chin crimson with the blood that came in gouts as his heart ran down, his eyes wide and hard against the trance of sky. Snow fell in scuds and stuck, until his long jet hair seemed flecked with blossom, and then a kind of shadow had passed across him, and his face shifted and turned slowly stiff, and even as the one hand that had been spared the impact of the crate raised itself some inches and spread open from a fist, the last of his breath bubbled darkly from his mouth and he was dead.
Five days after that, at the beginning of Christmas week, Tom stood alongside a few other longshoremen at the back of the St. Thomas the Apostle church some fifteen miles of slow driving up along the shore in Newton, his mind fighting to resist the insistent tide of prayers, mainly out of shame for having so abandoned the habit of believing but with anger, too, at the senseless cruelty and brutality of what had happened. Later, at the cemetery, the snow lay thick on the ground, knee-deep in places, the earth that had been torn by some backhoe from the plot was piled in a frozen black heap just behind where the priest and the few mourners who’d bothered to brave the conditions were gathered in a tight yet disparate pack, and no one had cried, not even the woman who was obviously Mose’s wife. Darker-skinned than Mose and of an ethnicity harder to specify, she was short, broad-faced and round-set, young-looking, he’d have said, possibly deceptively so, and probably on better days even pretty, and she stood closest to the grave, holding the hands of their two young children, one on either side of her, a boy on her left, and on her right a girl, as if out of some need to keep them apart. Halfway through the prayers the snow began to fall again and within minutes was coming down so hard that visibility in every direction became limited to just a few steps, and by the time the undertaker’s men set about lowering the coffin even the dark gape of the open grave existed only as mere suggestion. Afterward, once the crowd began to break for the small lot where the cars had been parked, he’d approached the woman. The children continued to stand as they’d been, confused-seeming, knocked stupid with shock, and he’d shaken their hands, each of them in turn, their mother last, and offered mumbled condolences, and the woman had stared at him, her dark eyes set to shining from tears that had frozen across them, not having the least notion of who he was or why he had bothered to come. “We worked together,” Tom said, understanding that this was neither the time nor place for conversation. “I knew him. A little, I mean. We were friendly. He talked a lot about his faith, about how it had saved him.” Even as he spoke it was clear that he was saying the wrong thing because the woman’s mouth twisted hard, and just for a second her teeth bared in a grinding clench. Anger flared but seemed to as quickly ebb away, and then a sob jarred loose from her and she hung her head and surrendered, though only a little and for no more than a few seconds, to her grief. In response, the children stepped closer, one first, the boy, and then, as if in mimicry, the other, and tightened themselves against her legs, and Tom, a pace back from them all and not knowing what else to say or do, slipped a hand into his coat pocket and withdrew an envelope with the name ‘Mose’ penned in blue ink across its back. The woman looked at it and hesitated before accepting it, again seemingly not understanding, then slipped it open to expose the bundle of notes, a few hundred gathered dollars. After several seconds she nodded, assuming this was money that had been collected from among her husband’s workmates, and Tom cleared his throat and muttered again how sorry he was for her trouble, and without further delay turned and started back in what he hoped was the direction of the cemetery’s main gate, to where his workmates awaited in the relative warmth of the site truck. The snow was still intense, crushing what light there was in the early afternoon to an eerie, veiled dimness that always for him seemed to define the year’s shortest few days, and the path which had been cleared ahead of the funeral was already again completely obscured and crunched underfoot with that exact odd cringing dryness that he recalled abruptly from a particular time of his late boyhood, the week ahead of Christmas that one year when through most of December it had snowed on their island viciously and without relent, and he and his sister Bríd, wrapped in all the warmest clothes they possessed, set out slowly together, laughing and afraid, into the morning of the solstice, the darkest point of the season and the year, the day never doing better than a few hours of thin glow between one nighttime and the next. Holding tight to one another’s hand out of a dread of falling but also making a tether of their touch against slipping loose and just drifting away, it had been Bríd’s idea to walk out to the standing stones, remembering something she’d once heard their father say, about how the ancients had set down their ritual sites, great stones and passage tombs aligned to catch and keep onto, like hoarded gold, the first glimmer of a solstice dawn, feeling within it perhaps the whisper of an Almighty. It didn’t even matter, she’d said, that true dawn had been hours before, because the place would still have the feel of magic about it, and with the snow and the dimness of the light they’d have no difficulty imagining how the old times had been. That afternoon in the Sheboygan cemetery, he couldn’t recall whether they’d actually made it out as far as the stones or if, as was most likely, the searing bleakness of the conditions had stopped them some way short; but what remained with him was the specific memory of the snow, the feel of it against his face and the sheer obscuring blanket hail of it, frightening in some small but felt way in how it caused the air to crawl and churn, the sting of it in his eyes, and how thick and cold it was to inhale. Because his sister had pulled on a spare pair of their father’s socks over her hands in lieu of gloves or mittens, he retained that coarse wool sense of her grip against his palm, its oddness promoting that to a permanent part of the moment, along with the gasping whimpers of her talk, and possibly his own, too, the frozen onslaught of the morning that severe. Making his way back through the cemetery among the stubbed and jutting shapes of headstones, and having to estimate only by the instinct of some inner compass the rough lay of the by now entirely smothered path, he again felt himself scarcely a breath apart from Bríd, and certain in his mind that by simply reaching out with his left hand he’d have found hers waiting to be held.
The envelope of cash amounted to just under five hundred dollars, everything he’d put by from months of work after setting aside what rent he owed and enough to keep him fed and for a few nights’ drinking. Christmas didn’t matter, not as it might have had his life gone differently with Áine, and not like it would for those two newly half-orphaned children, poor as they’d already been on what Mose was able to earn and considerably worse off now, even if the union could manage to get them something in the way of compensation. When he reached the truck and sat into the passenger seat, desperately glad of the shelter, nobody said much beyond the usual small talk about how heavy the weather was getting and how they should really be moving because on days like this, with the wind whipping in off the lake like it was starting to, the road back down to Sheboygan could quickly become impassable. They had to go carefully, probably not getting above thirty the entire way, the most the truck, an old Ford flatbed, could reasonably be pushed to in such conditions, and the radio, set to a station playing nothing but carols, drifted in and out of tune, causing the singers—“like choirs of angels,” someone in the back seat said, ridiculously, during one of the purer moments—to lose their way again and again beneath sweeping hailstorms of static, and when that happened the fourth or fifth time, one of the men, maybe the one who’d already spoken, and possibly feeling the void unbearable, started up in place of the lost voices, Shepherds quake at the sight / Glories stream from heaven afar, the hack of his grizzled tone, even out of key and only barely in tune, somehow managing to catch the prayer in either the words or its melody and within three or four bars had them all joining in, softly, while the windshield wipers swept at the gathering clods of snow and the blue air dimmed ever more intently toward full dark.
Tom had remained on the docks for only a short time after that, as part of the skeleton crew that raised their hands for the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day shifts, taking all the hours that were going, as much for the distraction of the work as for the extra pay, but whatever good there’d been in stevedoring was gone for him and by early January he’d handed in his cards and collected what was owed him. Another period of drifting followed then, some unmarked span of weeks and longer spent bumming around, drinking in dives and bedding down in flophouses, alone in every way except for what seemed intent on following him in and out of dreams, those faces glimpsed in crowds or slipping around corners: Áine always; often Bríd and his father too. These, and other reminders, some wanted, even in their bitter sweetness, more still desperately not, shaping themselves for half a heartbeat, there and as suddenly gone, except never gone, too embedded for that. Some nights, before a thorough drunkenness could set in, he’d get up from the bar with his glass and find a quiet corner in which to sit, where he could close his eyes and better envision home, the cottage, the people, the life he’d left behind, down to the perfect evenings spent walking the roads with Áine beside him, sometimes with her hand in his but even without that, close, with the air between them electric and each of them heightened to everything there was about the other, and strolling along at a saunter until she’d feign some reason for stumbling and they could use the collision to come together and kiss. Out of necessity, whenever his money ran low or he felt the ache for physical sufferance, he took what employment was going, mainly those jobs nobody else wanted—drudge work, mostly: digging or hauling, clearing sites, a few days here and there, a month sometimes, until eventually, invariably, ending up for a season or two on the water, fishing or transporting cargo or oil back and forth across the lakes, the winter months deathly cold, the summers, what he could bear of them, on fire, a veritable cauldron below deck, stripped to the waist against the stifling furnace of the engine room, scarred from canon blasts of steam, armpits greased against chafing; or up top, hauling nets and line rope, the kind of work more familiar to him, more a part of who he has always been. That, until he could bear no more of it, but even after it only variations of the same, stints of work, hard laboring on land or sea broken up by wandered miles of road in any direction, before some pull brought him back to where he’d first begun.
