CHAPTER FIVE

The cold settled down over the farms in November, freezing the turf, so that the cows lingered about the feeding racks all day and were seldom seen off on the barren pasture. Ellen helped strip the tobacco, working in the dim stripping room where Henry kept a fitful fire in the little stove. The December cold was bitter with snow and sleet lying over the ground. Chill air gathered in the shady places and was never dispelled, and no green thing was left growing in the bare spots from which the snow had blown in its drifting. Cold came into the upper room where Ellen slept, a room which was now a mere place where her cot bed stood. The box where her clothing lay seemed very far from the bed; the distances in the little room were magnified by the crystal of the cold. The summer dress with its blue flowers was withered and blighted, crumbled flat, lying shrivelled and folded in the box under the petticoats. When she told Nellie how the dress had withered, she was assured that she might have another when warm weather came, ‘And anyhow it’ll freshen up a right smart against spring comes and you wash and iron it.’ The flowered dress with its sweet odours, then, would blossom again with the spring. Jonas stripped tobacco at Squire Dorsey’s place, four miles away, but he sometimes came on Sunday afternoon, or Ellen would meet him at Dorine’s home and they would walk back through the cold of the twilight, hurrying to be out of the frost, their thin coats buttoned close and their fingers numb. Ellen cut a strip from her shawl to make a muffler for him, winding it about his throat that had been bare to the wind and making him say that he would wear it whenever he went out.

But often the storm raged, sleet or wind or heavy snow, and Jonas did not come for several weeks at a time. The coldest winter in years, men said, the coldest in the time of man. An epidemic spread through the valley and over the hill farms, and the Turpins, ill of it, were scarcely seen all through the winter. Dorine coughed and grew wistful and thin and all the O’Shays, the Townleys, and the Prathers were afflicted, one after another, and Henry sat by the fire in misery for many days. Life waited for spring and Ellen waited. If Jonas came on Sunday afternoon he would take his horse to the barn and ask Ben for a stall or a bit of room, but often he walked the three miles from Dorsey’s and left his little mare in the barn all day to save her from the heavy roads. Ellen slept long, drugged by the cold, and in the moonlight the frost glittered on the window and the frost of her breath gathered on the outer quilt. The world was hard and impenetrable; the frost stood between herself and Jonas, the cold a barrier, and between herself and Dorine was the frost and the ice; between them also was Elmer. Between herself and Elmer was Dorine and also the frost, the latter barrier magnifying the first to a great and permanent size. She housed her yearling in one of the barns and saw that its food was ample. The tobacco, now neatly rolled into hands, was piled onto a wagon in a smooth high four-cornered mass and covered with an old carpet. Henry and John Bradshaw left at four in the morning on the day the crop was marketed, the wheels of the laden wagon crying out in a thin high tinkle on the frozen road. There were no gatherings in the cabins for fuel was scarce. When Erastus O’Shay went to see Maggie Turpin he carried a sack of wood to keep the fire all evening in the front room of the cabin.