By Joseph M. Schuster

As near as we could tell, five souls perished in the storm that Christmas. At least this was the case for those of us in Grover. Elsewhere, out among the shacks and farms, there were likely other tragedies we know nothing about. But, for us, there were five:

**Thomas Whitlatch, thirty-seven, husband of Gloria, and father to Thomas Jr., Cynthia, and Bridget: perished when he went to check on his mother who lived next door and broke his ankle likely stepping into a gopher hole. If he cried for help, no one heard. Gloria found him two days later when she went out into waist-deep snow, one end of a clothesline tied to her wrist and the other to a post on her porch, and came upon an odd mound in the yard. His mother, Veronica Whitlatch, who spent the day reading Middlemarch beside her hearth, lived another thirty years. Among them, his children eventually gave Thomas Whitlatch seven grandchildren he was not alive to meet. However sometimes Gloria talked about the boy that Bridget had as her last, who died the day he was born. It gave her comfort, she said, to imagine Thomas in the hereafter crooning to the infant as he had to his own children.

**Andrew Leslie, twenty, who, despite his mother’s pleading, set out for Beatrice Panetta’s home. It was a quarter mile and he’d walked it often, ever since he became smitten with her when they were thirteen. For a long while, Beatrice thought he was a foolish boy, as did we all. He was gawky, with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed below his pointed chin when he spoke. But Bea’s innate politeness prevented her from sending him away once and for all, convincing Andrew he’d won her over and that he ought to ask her to marry him that Christmas. “It can wait,” his mother said. He replied that he’d pictured himself doing it on Christmas so often that not to do so seemed a failure. Some days later, Andrea Middleton went to investigate what her dogs were pawing at across the road from her house and found Andrew curled beneath the snow. Beatrice Panetta confessed to her sister Vivian that, as terrible as it sounded, she felt relief when she heard what had happened, as it saved her from marrying him. She knew she would’ve been unable to say no, and that inability, rather than real affection, would have been the reason she became his wife. The next March, she married a dry goods drummer who was not from here and moved with him to Louisville. In her later years when they fell on hard times, she wrote Vivian that she sometimes thought about how life might’ve been with Andrew Leslie. In her imaginings, he was still twenty, though he would’ve been an old man by then just as she was an old woman. She pictured him coming through the door bearing flowers and then he’d sit as he had when they were at school, his sharp chin cupped in his palm, listening to her describe her day as if she were the most fascinating woman he might ever encounter.

**Jane and David Parrish, seven and five, who walked out of their home without their mother or father noticing. For a week, their parents, Julian and Denise Parrish, hoped they’d found a warm place to wait out the storm, and that they’d soon return – tired and hungry, but alive. However, when the snow receded, Julian found them huddled in a culvert near the road. It was an image that stayed with him the rest of his life: his son and daughter curled together, partly exposed by the retreating snow, his daughter with her eyes closed, but his son with his left eye open, as if squinting into the bright white winter light to see whoever had found them. He passed away twelve years later when his heart stopped while freeing a dog snagged in fishing line near Miller’s Creek, and then some of us said to Denise, “At least he’s with your little ones.” Unlike the solace Gloria Whitlatch took in picturing Thomas dandling Bridget’s dead infant on his knee, she wanted none of it: “Why would you say that?” she said. “Is it supposed to make me feel better that the three people I loved best are gone?”

**A man no one knew whom Albert Corning found in his shed, huddled beneath a painter’s tarp. Some argued he deserved a decent burial, no matter that he was a stranger, but a dispute arose over what sort of service we should provide as we’d no notion about his persuasion. Because of the rules of his faith, the Catholic priest did not offer his parish, but the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian pastors drew lots to see who would bury him in their church yard, and it fell to the Presbyterian. Some of us said we should give him a stone, though we’d no idea what name should go on it, and we took up a collection. When it came up far short, the Presbyterian pastor put up a wooden cross. For a time, the pastor’s wife brought flowers to the grave every week as she felt the dead man no one knew shouldn’t be forgotten, but when a storm knocked over the marker and sent it tumbling across the churchyard, we couldn’t recall precisely where he lay.

***

It might’ve been worse, we knew. More could’ve perished, but because it was Christmas, we looked outside and decided to stay home. Patrick Heller didn’t go to his sister’s in Sullivan. Matt Poole didn’t conduct his annual Christmas bird census in Fuller Woods. Annie Brock didn’t pay her usual visit to bring knitted scarves to the orphan asylum in Silex where she grew up. So many of us had similar stories of how a change in plans spared us, and we congratulated ourselves on our wisdom, on deciding to stay home and watch the snow stream down on the other side of our windows, rising to meet our porches, collapsing shed roofs, breaking the branches of trees. 

***

 On September 24^th the following year, Flora Turner and her twin sister, Fiona Turner, each gave birth to twin girls on the same day. The two sisters, who’d been born Clostermans, were, in turn, married to twin brothers, Edward and Theodore Turner. Those of us who did the calculation remarked on the timing, but any more specific contemplation of how the two sets of twins had passed the days while they were snowed in, we kept mostly to ourselves.

The coincidence of the births earned notice from Joe Ely, who ran the Gazette, and he wrote up a page-one item about it on the day after the four infants came into the world. As stories sometimes are, it was picked up by other papers, though compressed to a few lines to fill spaces that otherwise might’ve stood empty, and the story meandered its way around the country. For a time thereafter, if someone we knew saw a paragraph about the twins married to twins delivering twins on the same day, they’d send it to us. Our brief fame was enough for Joe Ely to do a write-up about that as well, reporting that clippings had come from Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, and even one from Alberta, Canada. Because Joe Ely had been rushed to get his initial story to press, he hadn’t remembered the storm and so hadn’t mentioned it in his article, meaning that none of the out-of-town papers did either.

~~~

Joseph M. Schuster is the author of the novel The Might Have Been (Ballantine 2012), as well short stories that have appeared in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and Missouri Review, among other journals. He has contributed two non-fiction titles to the Gemma Open Door series for literacy programs.