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

clutching his cherished stuffed horse.
    She spent more time with me as her preoccupation intensified. There was no one else. Her daughter had grown into a long, thin adult with a glum capacity for overwork and no interest in the business of the world. We had few visitors, but if one overstayed his welcome my sister would twist her hair and wonder audibly, as if interrogating herself, “Why doesn’t he leave? Why doesn’t he leave?”
    One early morning I found my mother on my bed. When she saw I was awake, she remarked that Willi’s shoulders had been so broad that it made him appear shorter than he was. “And mine, too,” I said. “And yours, too,” she smiled. Somewhere far away a dog was barking as if beside itself with alarm.
    I told her I thought I might have started the avalanche. She said, “You didn’t start the avalanche.” I told her I might have, though I hadn’t yet explained how. She reminded me of the farmers’ old saying that
they
didn’t make the hay; the sun made the hay.
    “I think
I
made the avalanche,” she finally suggested. When I asked what she was talking about, she wondered if I remembered the Oberlanders’ tale of the cowherd whose mother thought he’d gone astray and, in a rage at having been offered only spoiled milk by his new wife, called on ice from the mountain above to come bury her son and his wife and all of their cows.
    How old was I then? Seventeen. But even someone that young could be shocked by his own paralysis in the face of need. My mother sat on my bed picking her heart to pieces and I suffered at the spectacle and accepted her caresses and wept along with herand fell asleep comforted, and failed to offer my own account of what might have happened, whether it would have helped or not. The subject was dropped. And that morning more than any other is what’s driven me to avalanche research.
    Bucher’s a good Christian but even he gave up the long ski down to services after a few weeks, and instead we spend our Sabbaths admiring the calm of early morning in the mountains. The sun peeps over the sentinel peaks behind us and the entire snow-covered world becomes a radiance thrown back at the sky. The only sounds are those we make. On our trips to Davos for supplies, Bader and I for a few months held a mock competition for the affections of an Alsatian widow who negotiated the burden of her sexual magnetism with an appealing modesty. Then in February I slipped on an ice sheet outside a bakery and bounced down two flights of steps. “So much for the surviving Eckel brother,” Ruth Lindner said in response from across the street.
    What was she doing in Davos? She’d been reassigned to a new school district. How did she like teaching? She hoped the change of scene would help. What did her parents make of the move? They’d been against it. But lately she’d started to feel more in prison than at home. We arranged to meet for coffee the following weekend, and the group, back at the hut, made much of my announcement of my withdrawal from the Alsatian sweepstakes.
    I’d lost track of Ruth after Willi’s service had concluded. My last words to her had been “I blame myself,” and her response had been “I blame everyone.” Then she’d gone on holiday to her maternal grandparents’ farm near Merligen. That holiday had extended itself and my two letters to that address had been returned unopened. When I’d pressed her father for an explanation, he’d assumed that the postmaster must have found them undeliverable. When I’d protested that he was the postmaster, he lost his temper. My parents had been no more help. Her few friends claimed to be equally mystified.
    Over coffee she asked how I was finding Davos and then moved on to Willi: his poor grades and how he liked to present himself as indisposed to exertion indoors, and the way outside he had no time for anything except his skis. She became misty-eyed. She asked if he’d ever told me that the high summits were