An Excerpt from
The Snow
James Najarian
There was no one to pick Darryl up at the bus stop that day. School had let out an hour early because of the snow, a slow fine-flaked fall that seemed as if it could go on for days. Soon after the snow had started the rumors of a "snow day" spread over the eighth grade. Officially, the school closed early so that the buses could make their way home before the Pennsylvania hills got too slick. At any rate, it was pointless to keep the children in class past midday, as all they could think of was the thickening sheet of white.
As it was, the children lost, or rather gained, only an hour. But the wind was kicking up and the bus ride home was very slow: the chains on the bus tires sounded like distant bells. Darryl and a few other children were let off at on a porch of a vacant shopfront in Wessnersville. At one time there had been four or five shops in the little village – what the shops had sold, only the most elderly could remember -- their big panes of glass were now occluded with fabric or paper. Wessnersville had only a general store and an antique shop now. The white frame houses were set close to the road, some decorated with a chaste selection of gingerbread woodwork.
The other children scattered in a snow-muffled slow motion through the village. But Darryl faced a mile home. Since Jonathan started to go to the elementary school in Wessnersville, the two of them usually walked home together: Jonathan was usually waiting for Darryl when he got off the bus.
The two boys lived at the foot of the Blue Mountain. The township had long since abandoned the narrow dirt road that led to the few farms there. In the morning, quite early, his father sometimes dropped them off in the village. Evenings, his mother sometimes picked them up in a car-- though far less often in recent months, and only in the worst weather. Mere snow did not qualify as worst weather. Knowing he would eventually have to walk, Darryl waited anyway, hoping his mother might have made an exception this one time. He nibbled at the last few of a handful of Swedish fish he'd bought in the general store in the morning. He ate each fish slowly, first biting off the head, and then working his way down to the two shards of tail. Still no car. She might come in the Volkswagen beetle, he thought. She must have picked up Jonathan earlier. He hoped he would not have to walk home. He tried to make out what car might come up through the white gauze in his vision; in the snow she might borrow the neighbor's Willys, a vast rattling vehicle that had the single advantage of four-wheel drive.
It was about ten minutes before the Willys actually did arrive. Darryl heard it long before he saw it, and when it clattered into view he saw it held not his mother, but Mr. and Mrs. Landis. They were an older farm couple who lived next to the Ritters, on land they had plowed for decades
"Come on in," said Mr. Landis, yelling above the roar of the vehicle. He proffered a broad smile and took Darryl's daypack. The Willys only had seats in the front; the Landises had piled rugs and horse blankets in the back to serve as seats for the kids. Darryl made out his brother Jonathan, who was seven, pasty-faced and silent, wrapped in an old brown blanket as if he were a package. Darryl perched on the stack of rugs, poking his dirty blond head up between the Landis' own. He didn't want to ask why the Landises were picking him up. It was just the sort of kindness they might do.
Mr. Landis offered a welcome in a thick Pennsylvania German accent – the accent everyone called "Dutch." "Now, your mother asked me to take care of Jonathan here. You see, the lane to your place is snowed in and all, and she's very busy taking care of the stock. And your father will have to stay in town tonight on account of the snow. So we thought we'd just come and pick you up once. You boys can stay with us tonight till the snow lets up in the morning. We picked up Yonny and took him with."
"Not that he seems to like the trip or nothing," Mr. Landis said with a grin – this was the Dutch idea of a joke -- heavy on the personal sarcasm.
"He don't talk much, " said Darryl, which was the truth.
He'd had this conversation before about Jonathan – only the Landises and Darryl's grandparents called him Yonny-- every part of it was a kind of ritual, down to having it in front of its subject. Jonathan was pale, with blue-black hair and icy blue eyes. It was true that he didn't talk much, and that he had odd reactions. The first time Darryl took him to see Mr. Landis's one horse, an ancient nag named Ginger, Jonathan had run away screaming. The incident had been difficult to explain to Luther Landis, and Darryl did not understand it much more than he did.
The Ritter boys were at the Landis farm all the time. Darryl helped with the bailing this past summer, and he would probably spend his first full summer working there this year. Luther and Ivy Landis had started their farm decades ago, just a few years after electricity had come through the valley. It was good land, better than that of Darryl's parents'. The Landises owned a wide stretch of about 150 acres that only gradually sloped to the woods and the mountain. Luther was in his sixties, tall and wiry, and his clothes, which always seemed to be dark green or gray, hung loosely on him. His hair was still black and he combed it straight back from his forehead. Ivy was short and neat and quite muscular. She drove the tractor almost as much as Luther did and cultivated a vast garden -- she called it a "truck patch" -- full of horseradish and chard, kale and salsify. She wore severe skirts and tied her silvering hair in a bun.
The Landises spoke Pennsylvania German with each other. They spoke English now mostly for Darryl's benefit, though, from having been around them so often, he understood more than he let on. Their English was still mixed with the dialect. Luther's accent was stronger than Ivy's, and for many hard to understand. Often Darryl's mother would have to ask Luther to repeat whole sentences, or she would covertly quiz Darryl after a conversation to make sure she had heard Luther right.
The Ritters were newcomers – or technically, returners -- to this part of the county. Darryl's grandfather said he had been born on a farm, but both he and his sons had grown up near Reading – they were engineers by training. Darryl's family had moved to the land a few years after he was born. Marie Ritter, his mother, was not of farm stock at all, but from a prominent family in town. Somewhere in the house there was a stash of stationery from her family; it even had a crest.
The Ritters had gradually acquired the skills that Mr. Ritter's family had let go of and that Marie's family had never known. Darryl's father had restored the stone farmhouse, one of the oldest in the valley: part of the house had been built by the first settlers, the Moravians, before they had moved on to more hospitable pastures. When the Ritters had moved there, it was nearly a wreck, with starlings living in the attic, ancient hams hanging in what had been the kitchen, and an outhouse. Darryl's parents has restored it in a way that preserved what it must have looked like in the eighteenth century, down to reproducing the original cold blues on the inside moldings. Darryl's father still traveled to town to work several days a week. The family acquired the easiest to-care-for livestock one year at a time; first chickens and pigs in the summers, and in the last couple of years goats and beef cattle, and lately Darryl's 4-H projects: rabbits and some ducks. The beef cattle were Mr. Ritter's idea; they were pretty much fed and ignored; they would find themselves disregarded even in rain or snow. The dairy goats, Darryl's mother's project, were much more work, needing twice-daily milking, constant veterinary care, and unvarying looking-after to see that they weren't getting into mischief. The family raised almost all its own meat and milk, and Marie Ritter gardened on an ever-larger scale. [...]
From Issue 1, Number 1
To read the rest of The Snow order Watershed, Issue 1, Number 1.
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