When he was seventeen my brother Sam got lost up the mountain. That year winter came late and all at once, like it had been bunching up behind them hills before it arrived. That’s what trapped Sam. The storm surrounded him. Owens went up to look for Sam and he got lost, too. It was a long time for them to be gone. Almost two weeks. And the snow was deep. We could see it from down where we was in the valley.
Mama, she said they was dead. But I thought Mama was wrong. I imagined I could feel Owens up there wading around in the deep snow, foggy breath coming from his mouth. Staying in one of them little huts. I liked to think he was alive. I thought maybe Sam wasn’t, but I felt Owens was.
Where we was the valley swooped right up the mountain, and the winter would bring mists what rolled down, cold and thick, and they turned and hovered like clouds, and them trees and everything changed colour to dark and glistening from them mists. I’m sure it spooked the animals: Becky, our dog, and them two horses, Cotton and Domonique. Then there was the colder nights what came with them mists, and the snow. Little Sasha (Sam’s twin brother), three years older than me (and called little because he was so tall); anyway, he promised he would take me up there so we could have a look. But it was a hollow promise. The winter was too big. Every day for a week Sasha and me went up to the edge of them trees. But each time we came back. We could see it had closed out past the escarpment. I pestered Sasha to go farther, and once he took me up with him, when Mama was in town. We knew she wouldn’t allow it, us going up them mountain paths. Too dangerous, she said – the mountain in a freak winter. No use losing good people after dead ones is what Mama said. But we went up, slipping on leaves what was almost mud, past the tree-line and into the damp shadows as far as the broken gravestones and the edges of the thick snow. We went up till we thought we could hear the stream. But most times it started raining and Little Sasha and me turned back.
So, I kept my hope by remembering the times when Owens was at home. Him cooking fried eggs with dark beans. Him at the table, with his hands out in front of him. His missing finger, from the war. I thought of him once showing me a blister on his heel the size of a coin. I thought of the sun in his eyes and his squint, and him sitting waiting on the bench outside the back door, then standing and shielding his eyes and scuffing the dirt on the path with his boots. I thought of him walking back to the blossom grove – he would usually pull ahead and I’d watch his limping and think again of the war. It was Sam who told me Owens had been a soldier. But I never believed that, cause Owens never told me about it, neither did Mama.
It was also Sam I thought about at that time. I didn’t understand why he’d gone up the mountain. There was something to it, is what Sasha said. But he never talked to me about it. He said something about Mama and the outlaw Wallace. But that’s all he said. I had to figure the rest out for myself. And to be honest with you I wished I never had. Cause that’s what took me into the end of winter all twisted and angry. That’s what made me think I would kill the outlaw Wallace if ever I got the chance. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I couldn’t do that until he took things from me. I don’t want to talk about it, so let’s just leave it at that.
A Cold Season can be found here.