Winter Evan Brand

The stillness of the day was broken only by the blurring motion of heat waves over the ground, playing games with the horizon. My plastic lawn chair creaked familiarly as I shifted my weight to retrieve the lemonade cooler from the ground. The cold liquid dribbled down over my sweaty chin before I smeared it off with the back of my hand. Candide was my latest attempt at accomplishing something this summer. Now it lay continually forgotten in the dry grass, open to page seven. Reading just didn’t do it for me anymore.

A fat black cricket blundered into my foot, startling me from my stupor. My little brother approached from across the lawn.

“You done lying here yet?” he didn’t realize yet how tiring being old could be.

“Huh?” I wasn’t quite awake yet.”

“Don’t you want to do something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know… baseball or something.”

“Oh” I released with a sigh. He stalked off impatiently. Sitting in the sweltering heat I pulled my hat farther down over my face. How could he want to do anything in this heat? Maybe later I would get up. I didn’t fall back asleep though. I just sat there restless and unmotivated. Bored. How could this be the summer I had looked forward to all winter. Maybe it would cool off soon and then I would play baseball. Later.

Sometime later that summer I did actually do something, or at least tried. There was a place down at the end of our dead end road. Our house was the last one on the road, but it kept going for about a quarter of a mile and then stopped in a field. I always felt that it was a kind of pointless road. Anyway, down at the end of the road after the field there was a forest where my brothers and I had started to build a fort years ago. I hadn’t been down there since. Somehow I mustered up the energy to get moving and I plodded down to the old place. The remnants of the fort had fallen down, and I decided maybe I would start the old project up again. I hadn’t brought any tools but wandered around looking for usable wood anyway. As I stepped out deeper into the woods, I stopped looking for fallen wood and started just walking aimlessly further. I stumbled down into a glade with a little pool of dark water in the bottom. It was cooler than up higher and the air had some moisture in it. I sat down on the damp ground and wished I had some lemonade. I was surprised at how hard I was breathing from just walking and it occurred to me that the sky above the trees was becoming dark already. The beaded sweat on my hair and the dampness under my shirt had taken on a little chill. It appeared autumn was coming.

I started abruptly for home, slipping on pine needles as I scrambled out of the little depression. Walking through the pines became a task in the low light when the bare lower branches blended to invisibility with the background, and gnarled roots protruded from the ground forming dangerous obstacles for unwary travelers. I was thoroughly expecting the fort to materialize in front of me, when I came upon a small brook. Slow moving like all Iowan waterways it meandered through the forest, void of any stones to cross on. Tracing it up river to find a narrow spot it came to me that I hadn’t crossed it before. I started to laugh out loud. I must have lost my sense of direction when I quit the Boy Scouts that spring.

I was picking my way along by moonlight by the time I stumbled across what used to be a road. At times it almost disappeared, but eventually it led to the edge of the field. It wasn’t a dead end road after all. I was tired but still restless that night when I slipped into bed. The sheets were constricting and I tossed and rolled until I was half out of them and tangled up well. I fell asleep with only one thought in my mind that night. I had lost my sense of direction.

The next day I sat in miserable restlessness, sweating under the summer sun.

My family had money. We had a nice house with some land, and there were very little expectations of me. When I failed my first class in school that year it was because I had “different interests.” It was a loose family. We all pretty much went our own way and whatever we did was accepted. This freedom however, brought no satisfaction to my life.

It was winter and the days were short. It was dark when I stumbled into school and down to the “hole.” That’s what we called it. It was an unfinished hallway that was built to connect the existing school to an addition that was never finished. It sloped down to a dark, stuffy end, that often smelled of smoke. The concrete wall slid up past my back until I reached the ground and sat in an uncomfortable slouch until school started. There were other sprawled bodies around but it was too early to talk. With my back to the wall, I could see people moving past the entrance to my dark passageway. The wall I was leaning against had been built crudely when the construction project came to an abrupt end. There was a small crack at the bottom. Cold outside air slipped through and I could feel it climbing up under my sweatshirt and creeping along my spine. I thought of going to join the happy bustling people outside of my dark hall, but the wind changed direction outside and the cold draft stopped. I grew lethargic again in my warmth and comfort.

The wind change brought a storm that would be a suiting start to one of the worst winters on record. It seemed to hit right when I stepped down out of the bus to begin the quarter mile trek to my house. And today I would have to make it alone. My brother stayed after for basketball practices these days. The wind howled over the flat fields, whipping snow and ice into my face and throwing back my hood to let the cold sting my ears. The cold got me moving. I wasn’t going to be outside any more than I had to today. At a stiff trot I headed for home, the packed snow and gravel crunching under foot.

The wind ripped the screen door out of my hands with unbridled fury as soon as I started to open it, first slamming it shut and then flinging it open, tearing it half off its hinges. I opened the inner door, and stepped inside, leaving the screen door mangled flapping in the wind. Glancing up after kicking off my boots I saw my mom crying on the phone. People generally didn’t cry in my family so I knew something bad had happened. I tried to slip by and get up the stairs so I wouldn’t have to face the news, but my mom grabbed me with the fierceness of the storm outside and pulled me to her. She had dropped the phone, and was telling me to get dressed again, that we had to go out.

“Martin, your dad’s had an accident. He’s at the hospital, but he’s OK they say. They say he’ll make it, but I think it was bad, but anyway come on get dressed, let’s go.”

There was fear in her voice. It was an emotion I’d never really experienced before, but it crept through me now. It stole up into my throat and choked me with its icy grasp; a grasp colder than the weather outside and much harder to escape.

Back outside I didn’t notice the stinging cold as I fumbled to open the car door. It was frozen shut, so I tried the back door. It came grudgingly open, and I ducked in. A frantic scramble followed and I was up riding shotgun. My mom came out, her hair tossed wildly about by the wind. I opened her car door and noticed again that she was crying. I felt a new jolt of fear course through me, but with that fear came a new sensation. With that fear came energy, resolve and a heavy yet strengthening sense of duty and responsibility. As the car pulled forward underneath me, I knew where I was going.

A week later my dad came home from the hospital, but wouldn’t be fit to work again for months. He had broken both of his legs, an arm, and some ribs, but somehow remained jovial whenever my brother or I was around. It was only when he and mom were alone that they discussed what was going to happen. A week after my dad came home, both my mom and I got jobs. She worked in a restaurant, and I worked at the school. It turned out they were going to finish the addition after all, and I was going to help build it. It was hard work every day after school, and cold, but the men were nice and laughed a lot, even if most of the time they laughed at me. I carried things around to the workers and often had to stand holding something for a long time waiting for somebody to come take it from me. It was miserable at first, but after I got my first paycheck and heard my dad tell me I was a man now, I knew it was worth it.

The strangest thing about this time was that my grades started to pick up. I had less time everyday and usually came home tired and yet I worked harder at home and grew close to my brother again. We started spending more time together and I was happy.

It was a Friday in early May after school, and I was walking through the addition wearing my oversized toolbelt and carrying a hammer, looking for something to do. Tom, my favorite coworker, who took me under his wing from the start came walking down the hall.

“How would you like to do the honors and finish this job up?” he asked.

“Huh?” I wasn’t sure what he meant, so he told me to follow him. He took me up to the passage that connected the addition to the old school. The wall was still there dividing the two, but I could picture the “hole”, dark and stuffy just on the other side.

“All we have to do now is take down this wall, and we’re done here.” Tom said, as he handed me a crowbar.

“Oh, yeah!” Now I understood. The crack at the bottom was just big enough to get the crowbar in and get started, and I went to work.

An hour later I stepped out of the front doors of the school, covered in concrete dust, with my sleeves rolled up and a bit of sweat dripping down over my brow. The last of the snow was melting, and the weather was just warm enough for some lemonade.

I got home that day at the same time as my dad. He was just getting back from his first day back to work, me from my last. Somehow though, I didn’t feel as if it would be my last. That night I thought how my life had changed from last summer, and my thoughts came back to the night I spent out in the woods, down by the fort. The next day I started out early to discover where my road actually led. There was mist rising from the fields in every direction, leaving a sort of path over the gravel road I was following. The sun came up behind me as I was walking and started to burn away the mist, revealing the new grass springing up in the fields, and the forest ahead. I followed the road down to where it had always previously ended for me, and then went further. It faded out for a little while, but then started up again. At times it was hard to follow, but it ran pretty straight, and with the sun still warm on my back I found what I was seeking. The road led to a small clearing, filled with overgrown wildflowers and surrounded by a dilapidated wooden fence.

I walked out into the flowers and tall grasses and found a large stone lying on the ground. It was covered in moss and hard to read, but there was writing on it. I scraped off the moss and cleaned the dirt out of the chiseled letters until I could make out what was inscribed there. It read:

“Here lies John Mutch

Devoted Father, Husband and Farmer

May you be forever at peace in the ground that you loved.

We must cultivate our gardens.”

Items of Interest or Quality

My story is about work and happiness. Although the story jumps around in time and place, each section is tied together through the use of a few reoccurring symbols and themes, and each section adds to Martin’s progression or digression as a person. The first paragraph brings into play the weather as a major factor in the book. At the start of the book, when Martin is in his depression, he has very few troubles in his life, and the weather is really nice. As trouble comes into his life, the weather changes. The storm comes on the same day as his father gets in the accident. Then at the end, when his father is better and he doesn’t have to work any more, it is Spring and the weather is beautiful again. When Martin is sitting down in the “hole” he feels the cold air and only then he thinks about breaking out of his lethargy, because I based the whole story around the concept that only through hardship and working to overcome that hardship, do people overcome human corruption.

The allusion to Candide in Martin reading the book, the naming of Martin, and in the last quote on the gravestone, serve to reinforce the idea that through work comes happiness.

The dead end road and the dead end hallway both serve the same purpose: to show how Martin had no future ahead of him without the motivation of the adversities he faced later in the story. In the end, through working he broke through both barriers, and broke free of his depression and eternal tiredness.

What makes this story of high quality is the way in which the story is tied together and wrapped up with the end of the story tying back into the start in the allusion to Candide, and you know that Martin has become wiser and realizes that work is necessary for happiness.