The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (5 page)

If one house was spared and others were destroyed, it was because that house had been favored by the spirits: when I first came across that claim, I closed the book and circled the library before returning to it. And those spirits rode astride such calamities as they thundered down the slope. Erstfeld’s town history recorded a spinster blown from her house who, still in her rocking chair, negotiated a wave of snow into the center of her village, and who, as she was giving thanks to Providence for her life, was carried to a clearing by her enraged neighbors, surrounded by a pyre, and burned alive.

How was my mother? I answered Ruth before I left to return to
my hut mates. My mother wasn’t doing so well. My mother, like everyone else in this drama, seemed determined to blame herself. My mother used to believe that we all could call the thunder down onto anyone’s head whenever we wanted.

“You’re just like Willi,” Ruth said in response, after a moment. And it was the first time that I saw something in her look like the admiration he must have enjoyed.

Those were the sorts of histories, reiterated for Haefeli and Bucher, that went a long way toward ensuring my success when I interviewed to join the group. Haefeli believes there’s much to be learned from such narratives, particularly when the phenomena described seem confirmed elsewhere. He collects his own and recounts them for us when he’s in the mood, once we’re swinging in our hammocks in the dark. They’re especially compelling when we reflect that we’re hearing them in an area that’s itself an avalanche zone. “I think our friend Eckel
wants
to be blown out of his hammock,” Bader complains about my appetite for them.

As a compromise, Haefeli promises us just one more for the time being. A sixteenth-century avalanche in Davos, just below us, was recorded to have generated such force that it smashed through the ice of the lake—measured at two feet in thickness—and scattered an abundance of fish killed by the concussion out onto the snow. But then he can’t resist adding two more: one of a porter he knew, an Austrian, who stepped momentarily off his line of ascent to adjust a shoulder harness and saw his three companions blasted out of their skis by a snow cloud moving with such velocity that its sound seemed to follow it. And another of an infamous pass called Drostobel, above Klosters, that came to be known as a death trap because of an extraordinarily large and steep catchment area that fed into a single gully. Drostobel, the French liked to say, was German for “your fate hurtles down at you.”

The following weekend we all ski down to Davos to resupply. I’m responsible for the sausage, bread, lemons, raisins, prunes, sugar,
and raspberry syrup. The entire way down I’m determined not to call on Ruth, and the instant I hit the valley floor I go to the rooming-house address she provided. I’m ushered into the breakfast room and watch her butter both sides of a biscuit before she glances toward me.

The breakfast room has a view of the Jakobshorn. Filaments of snow and vapor stream from its summit in the wind. It’s foreshortened here, as opposed to how it appears from nine thousand feet. Under overcast conditions the peak splits the clouds that pass over as though tearing fabric.

“I was always jealous of your mother,” Ruth remarks, once I’ve settled into my chair. The wicker seat’s seen better days and every movement occasions fusillades of pops and cracks.

“She and Willi had this tradition of summer walks,” I tell her, though she probably knows. “She called them revivifying. She told me a neighbor said to her once, ‘You have twin sons, yet I always see you with only the one.’ ”

“It was kind of your mother to have passed that along to you,” Ruth responds. No one’s come out of the kitchen to see if there’s anything I require.

“When I’ve dreamed of him, he’s always been with your mother and you,” she adds. She says that in the last one, he had a hold of her ear.

“Been with us in what way?” I want to know. She smiles as though at the practicality of my question. “Could you be any more Swiss?” she asks.

“You think I’m not forthcoming,” I tell her.

“I think some people don’t seem to
want
information,” she tells me. She’s crimping the lacework under the creamer and it reminds me how, even back at school, her brain and fingers were always at work.

“So do you know where the baby is now?” I ask.

“I should hope so,” she says, and more comes into focus with a jolt.

“You didn’t give it away,” I tell her.

“Her,” she says. “Marguerite. Why would I give her away? She’s with her grandmother. Probably napping.”

We both take a few moments to absorb the news. The housemistress brings a filled coffeepot.

“Are you bringing the baby here?” I ask.

“I’m going to try my hand at homemaking,” she tells me. “Don’t the French have a word for a cow that at the end of the day just gives up on its own desires and returns, without being herded, to the stable?”

“A little girl,” I say to myself.

“Maybe I’ll end up as one of those women you see tossing hay in the upper fields,” she jokes.

“Willi’s little girl,” I say.

“Your mother and father both have met her,” she tells me.

“Of course they have,” I tell her back. One of Haefeli’s most insistent bromides concerning snow safety has to do with the way, at certain altitudes, nothing might be less like a particular location than that same location under different conditions.

Everyone’s all bustle and efficiency in the hut when I finally labor up to it in midafternoon. While I unpack the provisions, Bader informs me that we’re going on a rescue. Down in town the group discovered that a pair of Germans had gotten themselves in a fix on the south face of the Rinerhorn, just over the ridge. From below it was apparent that they were in some sort of distress and that the easiest route to them was from our hut. Haefeli and Bucher’s silence while he relates all of this is unsettling.

Once we’re ready we set out. Haefeli straps on to each of us one of his innovations: what he calls avalanche cords, thin red ropes eight meters long that will trail behind us like long tails. Each has a fisherman’s float on the end and the hope is that those, at least, would be visible on the surface should the slope let go. They’ve never been tested. He still hasn’t spoken and now he’s taken the
lead. Bader, who tends to chatter when frightened, is behind me in the column and tells me more than I want to know. The south face is a vast bowl that catches the sun from all angles and channels avalanches from each side into its middle. Climbing that bowl in heavy snow will be like climbing up into a funnel. Haefeli has in Bader’s presence called that face “self-cleaning” because it avalanches so often. In the summer smashed trees and boulders spread out from its base like a river delta. Bader’s from the flat-lands and not one to panic easily—for some weeks he thought the White Death the villagers referred to was a local cheese—but even his eyes are glittery with apprehension. And the sudden rise of temperature around midday will have softened the snow.

We follow Haefeli’s thigh-deep track through the heavy drifts and enter from our ridge halfway up the bowl. The Germans are lodged on the face only a couple of hundred meters above us. One waves and the other has perhaps broken his leg. None of us speak. Who knows why the Germans do what they do.

We keep a gap of fifteen meters between each of us. We put our boots only in one another’s tracks. With each step we listen for the sound that indicates our weight has broken the layer between strata and that the ball bearings of the depth hoar are about to start into motion. It never comes. Haefeli has us traverse laterally, once we’ve reached the Germans, across the face to get out of the bowl as quickly as possible. Bucher and I take the injured boy’s shoulders and Bader his good leg. His broken one we bind with his snowshoe.

The sun is setting by the time we return from having guided them down to a part of the slope from which a sled can carry them to Davos. We’d traded off hauling the boy but we’re all still exhausted, and fall into our hammocks after barely stripping off our outer garments. No one’s even lit the lamp.

“We should have stayed down in the village,” Haefeli says out of the darkness, thinking of the slopes around and above us. Eight inches have fallen in snowstorms in the last three days, and temperatures
have dipped and climbed with a kind of cheerful incoherence. Bader was the last one in, and on almost his last step before regaining the hut, triggered a slab release that carried away below us a piece of the slope the breadth of a city block. It swept off an outcropping to the southwest and then was lost to sight.

Now everything has settled into a quiet. The night is windless and no one stirs in their hammocks. There’s no sound of snoring.

Eventually I hear Bader’s breathing, and then Bucher’s. A hammock eyelet creaks. The mountain makes subtle, low-frequency sounds, like freight shifting.

I ask Haefeli if he’s awake. He responds so as not to disturb the others. He says that an avalanche’s release depends on a system of factors so complicated that prediction involves as much divination as science. I offer as rebuttal that we do know some things, and he says of course: we know that gravity and temperature fluctuations together propel the settling and creep that create the stress within the layers. And that those stresses are greater or smaller depending on the slope’s steepness and the snowpack’s weight and viscosity. And that the snow’s ability to resist that stress is measured by its cohesion, or the friction between its crystals.

“Shhh,” he instructs, though I haven’t made a sound.

For an avalanche to occur, then, he murmurs, something has to either increase the stress or decrease the cohesion. The process by which the ratio changes can be gradual, or some kind of incident.

And then we’re silent. Does he know I’m weeping? I do my best to remain discreet, and he makes no indication that he’s heard.

A boy makes a happy gesture in the snow: a gesture meant to signal
We’re so close
. Fractures streak away from his ski at the speed of sound, find the stress lines beneath the surface, and generate the ruptures that cause the release.

I once refused to sit still for one of my mother and brother’s walks. I was twelve. He explained I wasn’t invited. I’d been once again baffled and once again unwilling to explain that I was upset.
“Leave him alone,” my father counseled, indicating me. He felt as left out of my mother’s plans as I was. In his last letter to me, after I arrived at the hut, he wrote
My memory is going! I’ll devote the rest of my energies to digging potatoes and other pursuits suitable to a second childhood
. My sister wrote soon after
Your mother now has nothing to do with him, or with me. I’ve always been the one ignored. You always were the one who shed suffering and went off to your life
. I wanted to write back that in our family the most exacting labor had been required to obtain the bleakest of essentials. I wanted to confide to her my devotion to Ruth. I wanted to ask her what it meant when women did the sorts of things Ruth had done outside the coffee shop. I wanted to tell her the story our father had told us about how old Balmat, having conducted the empress Eugénie around a glacier, kept for the rest of his life the piece of chocolate that, upon their return, she’d broken in half to share with him. I wanted to tell her that I was like the man who after a cataclysm tethered his horse in the snow to an odd little hitching post that revealed itself the next morning to be the top of a church steeple.

But in the end I wrote nothing. Because mostly I wanted to write to Ruth. Because my sister was right: I had what I thought I required. I had my resentments, and my work, and I made my choices with even more ruthlessness than the rest of my family.

Haefeli is asleep now, as well, his breathing uncertain, as though awaiting that offstage tremor. We’ve learned more than any who’ve come before us what to expect, and it will do us less good than if we’d learned nothing at all. Tonight, or tomorrow night, or some night thereafter, the slopes above us will lose their patience and sound their release. We’ll be overwhelmed with snow as if in a flume of water, the sensation of speed fantastic. We’ll none of us cry out, for our leader has instructed us, in or out of an avalanche, to keep our mouths shut, whatever our impulses to open ourselves to the snow’s power. We’ll be uncovered, months later, gingerly, because no one likes to touch the faces when recovering the bodies. Bucher will appear as though he’s come to rest in
midsomersault, Bader as though he were still swimming freestyle, downhill. Haefeli will have his arms extended, as if having embraced what the mountain would bring. And I’ll be discovered petrified as though lunging forward, flung far from my companions’ resting place, my eyes open, my shoulders back, my expression that familiar one of perpetual astonishment.

February 12, 2040
. My thirtieth birthday. G. gave me this little spiral-bound notebook and a Biro. It’s a good present, hardly any rust on the spiral and no water damage to the paper. I’m going to start a diary. I’ll keep my handwriting tiny to make the paper go further.

February 15th
. G. is really getting me down. He’s in his element. They should carve it on his tombstone:
I WAS RIGHT
.

February 23rd
. Glad we don’t live in London. The Hatchwells have got cousins staying with them—they trekked up from Peckham (three days). Went round this afternoon and the cousins were saying the thing that finally drove them out was the sewage system—when the drains backed up, it overflowed everywhere. They said the smell was unbelievable. The pavements were swimming in it, and of course the hospitals are down, so there’s nothing to be done about the cholera. Didn’t get too close to them in case they were carrying it. They lost their two sons like that last year.

“You see,” G. said to me on the way home, “capitalism cared
more about its children as accessories and demonstrations of earning power than for their future.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said.