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during his morning walk,” she said, “since I had such a terrible time with the frozen rain, and when he didn’t answer, I touched his hand.”
    I did not see Father Hugo, but Pearl told me later that the old man looked alive under the clear coating of ice, still holding the Communion cup full of the blood of Christ. The men had to build a small fire in front of the church, waiting until the ice melted to pull him from the bench. Pearl said that hethought Father Hugo might have passed before he was frozen, but with the wine he could not tell.
    They tried to dig a grave, but even with pickaxes, the ground was too hard. Father Earl said prayers over the body, and then Father Hugo spent the rest of the winter in the woodshed behind the church, wrapped in layers of oilcloth.
    At night, when the cold left the sky so clear that the stars were within easy reach, sap froze in the trees, breaking them open like the sound of river ice cracking. Many of the days, the men could not trap or even chop wood, the wind burning their skin, hands too cold to hold ax handles. During that winter, Father Earl visited my mother and me frequently and stayed for dinner many nights. He was a small man. He looked like I did when I wore one of my father’s coats, and I could not picture him taking down a tree. My mother said he had not seemed so small before his wife and unborn child died, during the winter before I was born.
    One night, when I should have been sleeping, I heard him ask my mother what she would do in the spring, when the company took the house back, when they gave the foreman’s cottage to Pearl and Mrs. Gasseur.
    “I can go back to teaching,” my mother said, though we all knew that Sawgamet did not need another teacher, and while we would have been welcomed at Franklin and Rebecca’s house, that was not a place we could stay indefinitely.
    “I have a house,” Father Earl said, but then his voice trailed off. He tried again: “I know it’s only been a few months, but if you’re willing.”
    I could not hear my mother’s response, but a few minutes later I felt the cold draft of the door and heard the latch drawingshut. And when he visited us later that week, they talked of the weather, of books and plays, of gossip about Father Hugo’s replacement, as if Father Earl had never offered marriage.
    Sometimes I saw him walking on the river, his hands in his pockets, and once I saw him walk to the clear circle of ice above my father and Marie, stopping to kneel, putting one hand flat on the ice the same way I had the night of the freezing rain.

    THE COLD FINALLY left in May, the trickle of water underneath the snow becoming a constant stream, the sound of running water a relentless reminder in our house of the coming breakup. The river groaned, and the sound of shifting ice replaced the clattering of skates and sticks.
    The morning the river opened, I pulled the ax down from above the doorway.
    My mother looked up from her sewing, pulling the needle and thread through the cloth of my father’s pants, mending the rips that she had not had time to attend to while he was alive, setting each pair aside for me as if I would wear them when I was older. “Where do you think you’re going?”
    “To the cuts.” I waited for her to speak, but she stayed quiet. “We need the money.”
    She kept sewing, not looking at me. I wanted to go. I had to go. Pearl and Mrs. Gasseur had not said anything, but this was the company house. This was their house now.
    “You’re not going,” she said finally.
    I ran my thumb across the blade of the ax and thenturned my hand over and scraped a white shaving from my thumbnail.
    “You can’t stop me.”
    She stood up and walked to me, and without a word, she slapped me. Then, carefully, she took the ax and placed it above the door again.
    I turned and walked out the door.
    At the cuts, Pearl looked at me for a moment and then handed me his ax. I bucked trees and stripped branches, the ache in my