Future Home of the Living God(88)

Glen remembered when the lake froze in linear figures. Wind-whipped waves had frozen in the air, shattered, and welded smoothly into the ice floor as they fell, creating jagged puzzles, mathematical labyrinths, furies of intersecting lines. The lake was entirely composed of crazy hatchmarks. Every inch was an original design.

And how did it change? They told me that, too.

First the cold didn’t burn your lungs, said Sera. The cold didn’t freeze the snot in your nose, didn’t frost your eyelashes, didn’t hurt, said Glen. And the snow didn’t squeak underneath your footsteps or against the car’s tires. Soon the cold stopped pinching, stopped running its fingers up your back, stopped numbing your face, your fingers. The snow still came down in fluffy flakes sometimes. Once or twice it was finely suspended in the wind and we tried to call it a blizzard. But it was only here a moment. Next winter, it rained. The cold was mild and refreshing. But only rain. That was the year we lost winter. Lost our cold heaven.

But I remember. The snow came one last time.

The snow is what I think about as I recover, and as I wait in my cell for my next pregnancy. The bulletin board is plastered with new baby pictures. If we starve ourselves they will force-feed us. One woman hanged herself in the stairwell, using a merciful vine. The front wall of the cafeteria is nearly filled. After Estrella’s photo went up, I stopped looking at the wall. I don’t know what happened to Jessie, if she’s still here. No message. (I dream she has taken you away. That she’s keeping you safe for me.) I sing your song. My guardian spirit has returned.

I stay quiet, alone.

And I remember how I was there the last time it snowed in heaven. I was eight years old. I can feel it now. The cold seizing my body, its clarity. The snow poured out of the sky. Come! Sera cried. Glen shouted, Snow! We ran outside and stood on the dull green lawn, transfixed. The snow swirled around us, falling and falling faster. And there were birds, excited birds, a nuthatch clicking up and down the trees. Cold robins trilling as flake by flake snow collected. The air went still and still the snow kept falling. People drifted by like white shadows and their voices were the cries of lost children. Snow filled the air and kept on coming, like ecstasy, in shifting curtains. It didn’t stop. It didn’t melt into the grass. The snow built up on every surface. And I can feel it now, so heavy. Each twig bore a line of snow. Each birdbath became a cake and the lattice and the dried husks of summer flowers wore white frills. It snowed on each pine needle, on the tips of pickets, on the cars. In the streets, over sidewalks, in the gutter, it snowed. And I am in it, falling down in it, shoveling snow into my mouth and throwing snow up in the air, pelting snow at my mother and my father. Whiteness fills the air and whiteness is all there is. I am here, and I was there. And I have wondered, ever since your birth. Where will you be, my darling, the last time it snows on earth?





Acknowledgments



Thank you to my daughters—Persia, who listened to this book’s beginnings on a road trip in 2001 and kept up with the many changes; Pallas, who read drafts, gave invaluable advice, and rescued this manuscript after I had abandoned it for years in the memory of a Mac G4 Cube (and thanks as well to Keith Kostman for resurrecting portions of this manuscript from an even older turquoise iMac); Aza, who consulted with me on the progress of this book and gave me visual ideas for Cedar’s magazine, Zeal, which will appear at the end of the paperback edition; and Kiizh, for kindness, honesty, and startling insights.

I would also like to thank my sister Heid Erdrich and my brother-in-law John Burke for sharing speculative theories, which unnervingly came true. As ever and always, thank you to my editor Terry Karten, for critical wisdom and impeccable literary instinct. And thank you, Trent Duffy, master copy editor, for our ongoing conversation contained on tiny scraps of paper. The spirit of the whole is always in the details.





About the Author



LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of sixteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her most recent novel, LaRose, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, while The Round House received the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction and the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She is a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and lives in Minnesota with her daughters. She is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

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