She had to agree. There was night everywhere and snow, under a big moon. Beyond the few lights of Gilead the great white nowhere that the wind had all to itself, the frozen ponds and stricken cornfields and the ragtag sheds and shacks. The wind would be clapping shut and prying open everything that was meant to keep it out, bothering where it could, tired of its huge loneliness. Had she ever seen a windmill that hadn’t lost half itself to the wind, like a blown milkweed? Maybe Doll was out there in some place so much the same that it was like dreaming to remember she was far away, far beyond any number of places with different names but all just the same. And that boy. And Mrs. Ames with her baby. And here were the two of them together in this warm light, the same dread feeding on the same hope, married.
* * *
There was snow on the ground when the baby came. It will snow in April sometimes, so there’s nothing surprising about a blizzard or two in March. Still, it gave them a scare. One day they heard spring peepers, those same two notes, again and again, one higher, one lower. Then in the middle of the night it began to storm, and the next day they sat in the kitchen for the warmth and played gin rummy and listened to the wind howling. No one came to look in on them because the drifts were too deep to walk through and the wind was fierce. People can get lost in a storm like that and just die in the road outside their own gate the way they might if they were wandering through a country they’d never seen before, where nobody knew them at all, nobody was waiting for them. The old man would pretend he wasn’t praying, and then his head would sink down on his chest and she would have to wait until he remembered to deal the cards. The deck would just spill out of his hands as if he’d gone to sleep or died. Then he’d say he ought to clear a path to the road and even get up from his chair, but the road was so deep in drifts there’d be no point in it. There’d be nowhere to go if he ever got to the road. The telephone wires were down and the electrical lines, too, but they had the woodstove and a kerosene lamp and Mrs. Somebody’s meat loaf to warm in the oven. It would have been nice except that she was so pregnant and he was so old.
She said, “I guess you better discard.”
“Yes, I guess I’d better. Sorry.” But then he’d be studying her face, as if he’d never seen her before and there she was in his kitchen, and he had no idea what she might do next.
She said, “I feel fine. We’re both just fine.” And every time she took a breath she thought, when she was almost at the bottom of it, Will I tell him if it hurts, if there’s some new kind of pain? Could he stand to know it, when there was almost nothing he could do? And then she’d breathe again, deeply, carefully, hoping he would not notice. You always seem to need to touch the place it might hurt to touch. And not just once, either. Well, of course she felt different. Every day she felt different from the day before. There was somebody crouched under her ribs, shifting and fidgeting, growing. It was strange if you thought about it. She’d seen sows and ewes carrying young and birthing them. Hooves. That would be something. This was like a burden that had shifted and rubbed too long in one place. If there wasn’t quite room for her to breathe without an elbow being in the way of it, then a little pain wouldn’t mean a thing, especially since she would breathe again, then again, feeling for it. The old man was watching her.
She said, “I guess it’s my turn.” It was a little bit like a stitch in her side from running. It would go away if she stopped thinking about it, sooner if she could lie down. “Gin,” she said. “I don’t think your heart is in this card game, Reverend.”
He said, “I wouldn’t mind it if the wind died down a little. I never imagined it would be this bad. Just yesterday I saw crocuses coming up alongside the house.”
She thought, He’ll be worrying about old Boughton, too, wondering if he’s trying to look after Mrs. Boughton all on his own, hobbling around in the cold with all his joints froze up till he can’t strike a match. His children, except the one, were probably stuck in drifts along every road from wherever they lived to Gilead, trying to get to him, and he’d have that to worry about. The first break in the storm there’d be men and boys with shovels digging people out, but with the wind the way it was, they’d have to wait.
That wasn’t pain, she thought. The child just arched his back.
The old man said, “I’m not too sure about Boughton’s roof. He loses track of the time, the years. There must be three feet of new snow. I’m not sure it’s good for that much weight. I hate to think of him trying to light a lamp. Trying to deal with kerosene. Cold is such a torment for him.”
She meant to ask him sometime how praying is different from worrying. His face was about as strained and weary as it could be. White as it could be.
He said, “I thought once we made it to March we were probably all right.” Then
