The Most Miserable Winter Read online

  “Probably” because no doctor worth his salt would give such a patient a clean bill of health after what she’d just been through. The heart didn’t appear to have suffered any permanent damage, despite the abuse it had suffered over the previous few days.

  But then again, the heart is a funny thing.

  Not “ha ha” funny, but funny in that sometimes what appears to be a healthy heart can just give up the ghost.

  And sometimes a severely damaged heart can go on for years.

  “Now that your innards are well-lubricated,” Doc said in the way of the old country doctor he was, “We can assess your organs. Hopefully they’ll recover fully. If they don’t we’ll deal with that on a case by case basis.

  “I’m going to let you rest now. We’ll wake you up in four hours and draw some more blood. That’ll tell us a lot of what we need to know.”

  He gave her a mild sedative.

  She probably didn’t need it. As exhausted as she was she could have dropped off almost immediately.

  But Doc was a big believer in the healing power of sleep. And it was most beneficial when it was restful.

  It was a full six hours since she was wheeled into Doc’s office.

  She was in another world then. A groggy, foggy world where faces were blurred and words were jumbled and she didn’t have much of a clue what was being done to her.

  She was too far gone to be worried, so Dave worried for her.

  He silently prayed almost non-stop, for he honestly believed she was too broken to survive.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t have confidence in the doctor. He just had more faith in God’s healing hands.

  When Red pulled him away from his family, out of the treatment rooms and into the lobby, he had only one question of her: “Do you think she’ll make it?”

  “I believe so. Doc might not look like much compared to big city doctors with bleached white coats and ten medical assistants. But in my book he’s one of the best there is. And he did everything he could do. He left nothing on the table.”

  Dave seemed satisfied. Satisfied enough, at least, to have no more questions about either patient.

  Red, on the other hand, was an inquisitive soul.

  And she had a wealth of things she was curious about.

  “What are your plans, now that you can’t make it back to San Antonio before winter sets in?”

  “What do you mean, we can’t make it? We’re within spitting distance. Another thirty days and we’ll be there. Piece of cake.”

  Red shook her head.

  In her experience all men were hard headed. Some, like Dave, was harder-headed than most. He was one of those guys who thought he could just bull his way through life. If he was willing to keep his head down and keep forging ahead, he believed, there was no mountain too high, no desert too wide.

  And no road to San Antonio too long.

  Men like Dave sometimes had to be set straight by someone with better reasoning skills.

  And better math skills too.

  Especially when the numbers just didn’t add up.

  “Dave,” she started with the very precise words one would use with a petulant child. “If you had a working vehicle, like you did when you came through here the first time, you could transport your wife and daughters easily. You’d make it back long before the first freeze.

  “But you’ll leave here the same way you got here from Kansas City. On foot. And it’ll be a very long time before they’ll be strong enough to walk ten miles a day.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing. Lindsey’s leg was fractured in three places. She won’t even be able to put all her weight on it for six weeks. And it’ll be at least a couple months after that before she can build up to a ten mile a day walk.

  “Unless you plan on pushing Sarah in a wheelchair she’ll need at least that much time as well. For God’s sake, Dave. She almost died. And she still could have complications.”

  She noticed then that Dave had a pitiful look on his face. He was crestfallen, faced with the hard fact that he wouldn’t make it home for the winter as he’d hoped.

  “If we can’t make it back to San Antonio, what are our other options?”

  “Well, the obvious choice would be Mrs. Montgomery’s boarding house. It’s clean and comfortable and she serves three hot meals a day.”

  “Sounds too pricey. We’re down to our last few silver coins. The gold coins and jewelry all went to buy provisions and ammo.”

  “In that case I can talk to the city council to see if they’d be willing to put you up in one of the suicide houses.”

  “The what?”

  “Clean out your ears, Dave. Suicide houses. And they are exactly what they sound like. There are eight of them. For a small town I think it’s a horribly high number. Eight families decided they didn’t have the strength to go on.

  “It’s an awful shame. With no known relatives to take over the properties the town took ownership.

  “And don’t worry. Whatever messes they left behind have been cleaned up by their friends and neighbors. No more brain matter on the walls or blood stains on the carpet. There’s nothing to indicate anybody died there. And in all cases the houses were left the way they were. They’re still furnished, they still have linen and dishes and everything you’ll need to get you through the winter. We can even loan you a working generator. The town’s got several of them they bought off a prepper.”

  Dave hesitated.

  He was okay living in a death house. But Sarah and the girls were more sensitive. They might be freaked out, knowing people died in the very chairs they’d sit in every day. Even with no bloodstains visible, they’d still know.

  “I don’t know if that would be a good idea…” he said.

  “Good. That takes us to the third and last option, and where we should have started with first.

  “You’ll be my guests for the winter.”

  Chapter 4

  Robert was a walking, talking waterfall. Never before in the history of tears had one boy shed so many.

  The rough exterior he wanted to convey when his mother died shattered like an eggshell.

  He cursed God and cancer and everything and everybody else he could think of.

  His mom was gone and so, pretty much, was his world.

  Amy held herself together a bit better, holding her weeping until Monica was in the ground and covered with soil.

  It was only then that it really sunk in.

  The most important person ever in her young life was gone. She’d never see her again. Never feel her touch. Never again close her eyes while her mother brushed her long raven locks. Never again have a place to run when she was frightened.

  Never again have a cuddle buddy on cold dark nights.

  They had to shoo the rabbits away, for they wanted to start digging in the loose soil as soon as the grave was filled.

  Robert chased the little buggers away while Amy dragged the heavy door, removed from an upstairs closet weeks before and left leaning against the side of the house. There it stood sentinel over the open grave. Guarding it until the day everyone knew would come but dreaded mightily.

  Once the door was in place the rabbit problem was done. Sure, they could tunnel into the grave from another point in the yard, but they were lazy by nature. Amy reckoned that tunneling in from beside the grave would be a lot of work just to satisfy their curiosity.

  She reckoned they wouldn’t waste a lot of effort before realizing there was nothing to see here. A rotting corpse wrapped in a favorite blanket.

  “You can go first,” Amy told her little brother.

  “What do you mean?” he said through sobs.

  “Momma wanted us to decorate her grave marker. She wanted us to make it pretty. You can go first, draw whatever you want on it, and I’ll fill up whatever space is left over.”

  It was a kind gesture under such dire circumstances.

  But Robert took the high road.

  “No,” he in
sisted. “You go first.”

  That surprised her. Robert wasn’t one who normally granted any concession to his sister. Almost never.

  He explained.

  “I know you wanted to draw Momma’s picture on the door. I know because I’ve seen the papers you were practicing on.

  “Your drawings are very pretty. They look just like her. That should be the center of the marker. You draw her face, and then I’ll draw some little things around it.”

  “Little things like what?”

  Now was not a time to dictate what he could or could not draw. And she wouldn’t try. He had just as much right to express his grief in the manner he chose as she had.

  No, she wouldn’t coach him. She was just curious.

  “Things like some daisies. Her favorite flower. And hearts. And the cross she always wore around her neck. I can draw real good crosses.”

  It wasn’t often Robert surprised her, but he certainly did on this occasion.

  Although he was a pile of mush emotionally, broken hearted as he was, he obviously put a lot of thought in what would be his final gift to his mother.

  He’d make sure his final tribute would be something she’d be proud of as she looked down from heaven.

  Amy, who’d be his de-facto mother from now until he was grown, felt a rush of pride for him as well.

  By the end of that day Robert’s tears stopped.

  No, he wasn’t finished grieving. His world as he knew it was crushed forever.

  He just ran out of tears.

  They’d be back. He’d cry many times for his dead mother in the coming years.

  But he’d survive her passing.

  Monica made sure of that.

  You see, her husband Ronald wasn’t much of a father. Or a husband either, for that matter. He was a dirt bag, a thief and an abuser.

  When he went out to rob someone of their food a few months earlier and never came back, all agreed they were better off without him.

  Monica didn’t need him. She was an excellent mother, and a far better father than he ever was.

  From the time she learned she was dying of cancer she began their preparations.

  In a way, even though she departed this earth, she would continue to be their life guide.

  Chapter 5

  “What’s this word?”

  Amy looked over at the journal her brother was reading.

  It was one of four his mother had prepared for him, to help ease his way into manhood. A compilation, if you will, of all the bits of wisdom and knowledge Monica had collected in her thirty one years of life.

  Cliff notes for a boy’s journey into adulthood and beyond.

  “Puberty,” Amy said.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “She didn’t explain it?”

  “No. She just wrote that in my twelfth or thirteenth year, I’d go into preberty… probity…”

  “Puberty,” Amy said again.

  “Yeah. Whatever. She just wrote that I’d go into it and my body would start to change.

  “She said my body would start growing hair in weird places. And that my voice would get deeper. And I’d start liking girls and start wanting to be with them instead of chasing them off and calling them names.”

  He looked his sister directly in the eyes.

  “She even wrote that someday I would want to hold their hands and kiss them.

  “She was wrong about that part. That’s never gonna happen. No way, Jose.”

  Amy smiled a knowing smile.

  At eight years old, almost nine, she was only a year older than her brother.

  But she knew in her heart she was so much wiser to the ways of the world. Thanks again to Monica.

  “She wrote that you’d go through prebberty too,” Robert continued. “But she said your body would change in different ways than mine. That I needed to be sensitive to your feelings, because you might have some days when you’re extra miserable. She said to go out of my way to be extra nice to you, on account of you’d have a much rougher time of it. Whatever that means. Does that make any sense at all to you?”

  “Not really. Maybe a little. When I read it the first time I asked Momma for specifics.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said don’t ask.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah. But I persisted, and finally she gave me some of the details.”

  “Well, what are they?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Robert shrugged his shoulders. Apparently puberty was one of those topics parents didn’t like to discuss, like how come vomit is usually green and where babies come from.

  He’d learn about puberty in time, he supposed, and in the meantime there were lots of other things he had to worry about.

  He skipped forward a few pages and found the passage he was looking for:

  How to kill, dress and skin a rabbit.

  He’d seen his mother do it a hundred times, of course.

  They were happy to find, when they moved into the Spear house, the handful of rabbits hopping happily around the back yard.

  Their mother immediately saw them as a food source. She’d read somewhere that a single pair of adult rabbits would multiply and provide a wealth of over six hundred offspring a year. She saw the potential immediately for a never-ending supply of meat.

  The kids, of course, saw them as pets and playthings.

  Until they’d been bitten a few times and scratched more times than they could count.

  After that they saw them not as friends but as pains in their derrieres, and enjoyed the days when they helped Monica cull the herd and place a few of the critters over the fence to share with the neighborhood.

  Monica hoped her neighbors captured the rabbits and bred them, believing firmly they were a gift from God. In her mind, there was little difference here from the old proverb: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

  Most people thought the old Chinese proverb was quoted directly from the Bible, but Monica knew it wasn’t. There were several passages in the Good Book which referred to the value of fishing, but that wasn’t one of them.

  Monica was a fervent believer in the Bible and a regular churchgoer before Ronald forbade her from doing so.

  It was just one of the many ways he helped ruin her life.

  Ronald was gone now, killed a few months before Monica’s cancer caught up with her.

  It was for the best, because she wouldn’t have been able to trust him to care for the children in her absence. He was a hothead, and a selfish one at that. He’d have blamed the kids when things went wrong, probably beating them for things that were no more their fault than his own.

  If things got really bad he’d have chosen his own well being over theirs. Monica knew deep down inside he’d let his own children starve to death to save himself.

  And that, in no one’s definition, was how a father behaved.

  In light of that she’d allowed herself to consider shooting him herself, rather than leaving him behind and hoping for the best.

  An unknown sniper’s bullet took that option away from her, but it was for the best.

  No reason for her children to think of their mom as a murderer if someone else was willing to fill that role for her.

  It was ironic that father Ronald could be replaced with a handful of colored spiral notebooks, obtained from the local dollar store and stored in the bottom drawer of young Beth Spear’s desk.

  All totaled, the handful of notebooks couldn’t have cost more than a few dollars.

  But they’d do a much better job, once Monica’s extensive notes were scribed into them, of getting her children through the rough times than their so-called “father” could.

  Good riddance to him. They hadn’t needed him for years.

  Monica wasn’t the only one glad he was gone.

  They all were.

  Chapter 6

  Robert had seen his mother kill a lot of
rabbits, and in her last weeks of life had been called upon to help her.

  He’d held the furry creatures down, on the foot-high oak tree stump in the back corner of the Spear family’s yard.

  He always wondered, in a little boy’s way, if they’d grown the tree there specifically. So that they could use it to kill rabbits one day when the power went out and the earth went cold.

  She’d have him hold the animal with both hands, applying his weight to stop it from struggling. That was a part he had trouble with, for his instincts told him not to hurt the helpless critter. Yet his actions told him he was doing just that.

  He made peace with himself in a way, by telling himself that he’d cause the rabbit discomfort but not pain, and that it would be over very quickly once he settled down and became still.

  Once the rabbit became still Monica hit him deftly with the dull end of a single-bladed hatchet. The skull would be crushed and the body would be stilled permanently after a couple of twitches.

  “You’ll be tempted,” she wrote in Robert’s journal, “to save a step and just chop off the rabbit’s head. It’s very important that you don’t. And here’s why…

  “Ninety nine times out of a hundred, when chopping the head off a live rabbit, your aim will be true. The blade of your hatchet will slice through his neck and he’ll be instantly killed.

  “But everyone misses their mark occasionally. No one is perfect. Ninety nine times you’ll hit your mark.

  “But on that hundredth time the rabbit might twitch in a last second effort to avoid his fate.

  “He may summon his strength to move his body just as the hatchet is coming down. And he may move your hand, or the hand of someone who is holding him for you, directly into the path of the coming blade.

  “That one time out of a hundred, you may hit your hand or Amy’s hand instead of the rabbit’s neck.

  “The way you can prevent that is to use the blunt end of the hatchet to crush the rabbit’s skull. After he’s dead and not moving, then you can move your hands back a little further and swing the blade.

  “There’s still a chance of hitting a hand occasionally. But a broken bone or two will heal a lot easier than a severed finger.”