The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 Read Online Free Page A

itself. We called for Willi to not lose heart, not even sure if he was down there. Ruth dug beside me and I was taken aback by the grandeur of her panic and misery. “
Help
us,” she cried at one point, as if I weren’t digging as furiously as the rest.
    He was under the snow for two hours. When his face was finally cleared, it was blue and he was unconscious but the guides revived him with a breathing tube even as he still lay trapped. And when someone covered his face with a hat to keep the snow from falling into his mouth and eyes, he shouted for it to be taken away, that he wanted air and light.
    He was hurried home on a litter and spent the next two days recovering. I fed him oxtail soup, his favorite. His injuries seemed slight. He asked about Ruth. He answered our questions about how he felt but related nothing of the experience. When I questioned him in private he peered at me strangely and looked away. On the third night when we put out the lamp he seemed suddenly upset and asked not to be left alone. I said, “You’re not alone; I’m right here.” He cried out for our mother and began a horrible rattling in his throat, at which he clawed. I flew down the stair-steps to get her. By the time we returned he was dead.
    The doctor called in another doctor, who called in a third. Each tramped slush through our house and drank coffee while he hypothesized and my mother trailed from room to room in his wake, tidying and weeping until she could barely stand. Their final opinion was contentious but two of the three favored delayed shock as the cause of death. The third held forth on the keys tosurvival in such a situation, one being the moral and physical strength of the victim. He was thrown bodily out of the house by my father.
    How should our mother have survived such a thing? The inquiry into the tragedy held that the group leaders—the schoolmistress and dead Jenny—were blameless, but the parents of the children swept away decided otherwise, and within a year the miserable and ostracized schoolmistress was forced to resign her post.
    Our mother had always seemed to carry within herself some quality of calm against which adverse circumstances contended in vain, but in this case she couldn’t purge her rage at the selfishness of those whose blitheness had put the less foolhardy at risk. She received little support from my father, who refused to assign blame, so she took to calling our home “our miserable little kingdom,” and mounting what questions she could at the dinner table as if blank with fatigue.
    By May, scraps from the two missing children poked through the spring melt like budding plants, and in the course of a day or two a glove, a scarf, and a ski pole turned up. Renewed digging recovered one of the little girls, her body facedown, her arms extended downhill, her back broken, and her legs splayed up and over it.
    Our mother talked to everyone she considered knowledgeable about the nature of what had happened, and why. From as early as we could remember, she’d always gathered information of one kind or another. I’d never known anyone with a more hospitable mind. My sister often complained that no one could spend any time in our mother’s company without learning something. She was the sort of woman who recorded items of interest in a journal kept in her bedroom, and she joked to our father when teased about it that it represented a store of observations that would someday be more systematically confirmed as scientific research. Why did one snowfall of a given depth produce avalanches whenanother did not? Why was the period of maximum danger those few hours immediately following the storm? Why might any number of people cross a slope in safety only to have some other member of their party set the disaster in motion? She remembered from childhood a horrible avalanche in her grandmother’s village: a bridge and four houses had been destroyed and a nine-year-old boy entombed in his bed, still