seat, going over in my mind all the terrible things about the blizzard which I had heard and read in New York. Thousands were obviously dying or dead below us. It would take a long time to find all the bodies, and there would be so much rebuilding to do. Midland City and Shepherdstown, when the snow melted, would look like French towns on the front in the First World War.
But Fred T. Barry, as cheerful as ever, said to me, “It’s nothing but a big pillow fight.”
“Sir—?” I said.
“Human beings always treat blizzards as though they were the end of the world,” he said. “They’re like birds when the sun goes down. Birds think the sun is never going to come up again. Sometime, just listen to the birds when the sun goes down.”
“Sir—?” I said.
“This will all melt in a few days or a few weeks,” he said, “and it will turn out that everybody is all right, and nothing much got hurt. You’ll hear on the news that so-and-so many people were killed by the blizzard, but they would have died anyway. Somebody dies of cancer he’s had for eleven years, and the radio says the blizzard got him.”
So I relaxed some. I sat up straighter.
“Blizzard is nothing but a great big pillow fight,” he said.
His mother laughed. Mother and son were so unvain and unafraid. They had such nice times.
• • •
But Fred T. Barry must have been temporarily regretful that he’d said that—when we got a good look from the air at the carriage house. We had circled over the city, so we approached the conical roof from the north. Wind had piled snow halfway up the big north window. The drift hid the back door, the kitchen door, entirely. Seeing it from a distance, I imagined that the drift would actually make the place cozier, would shield it from the wind.
But we were horrified when we saw the south side. The great doors, which had last been thrown open for Celia Hildreth in 1943, were agape again. The back door had blown open, we would find out later, and the gale it admitted had flung open the great doors from the inside. The enormous open doorway appeared to have tried to vomit the snow which had piled up inside. How deep was the snow inside? Six feet or more.
21
FRED T. BARRY and his mother were left off by the helicopter on a rooftop at Barrytron. Mr. Barry maintained the hoax that Felix and I were his employees, and he instructed the pilot sternly that he was to take us wherever we wanted to go, and to stand by until we were through with him. We had all been such great pals, and gone through so much together, and the mood was that we should really see a lot more of each other, and that most people in Midland City weren’t as amusing and worldly as we were, and so on.
But I would not see or hear from Mr. Barry for ten more years, and I would never lay eyes on his mother again. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s how it was with the Barrys.
So Felix and I used that Air Force helicopter like a taxicab. We went back to the carriage house. There were no footprints there. We had jackets and hats and gloves, but no boots. We were wearing ordinary street shoes, and these filled with snow as we wallowed and tumbled and writhed our way inside. Maybe Mother and Father were under all that snow. If so, they were dead.
We got to the staircase, whose bottom half was buried. Knowing our parents, we supposed that they had gone to bed when the blizzard hit. They wouldn’t have got out of bed, we surmised, even after all hell cut loose downstairs. So Felix and I entered their bedroom. The bed was empty. Not only that, but it was stripped of its blankets and sheets. So, maybe Mother and Father had wrapped themselves in bedding, and gone downstairs after all.
I went up one more flight to what used to be the gun room, while Felix checked the other rooms on the loft.
We were expecting to find bodies as hard and stiff as andirons. It was so cold inside. These words popped into my head: “Dead storage.”
I heard Felix call from the balcony: “Anybody home?” And then, as I came down from the gun room, he looked up at me, and he said,