The image of frozen cattle would stay with David Weatherall long after the shock of Jacob Delaney’s death in the blizzard of 1948. David was only ten at the time, but he carried the memory of that November like a scar for half a century: there by the forks of Nebraska Highway 2 and U.S. 20, Walker Merritt’s blizzard-white cattle buried neck-deep, their bobbed heads a mole hunt, dominoes. They lowed something awful, that deep down bluesy wail, and men from all over—including David, his father, and Jacob Delaney—spent the day trying to dig them out and lead them one by one to neighboring barns. Walker Merritt had saved a dozen of them, as well as his chickens and swine, but the snow was now too heavy, his barn too small.
The storm came of a sudden after a warm and fruitful October, gray skies bleeding into the earth, the trees bare, the corn cut down and the grass of the plains angling north from the wind. The report came one morning mid-month that snow would soon plow into the fields. David’s father had taken work for the Department of Agriculture earlier that year, when Fort Robinson closed down, and the town siren went off at noon to signal shift’s end for inclement weather. People left work and began to dig in at home for the long days to follow. Men hurried home to where their wives waited patiently with the children. Last-minute purchases at the dry goods store, the tending of animals, full barns with feed out, firewood, the glow of lamplight in the shadowed, steel-gray afternoon. Then followed a hushed silence while the town waited, as if expecting fire and brimstone from a malefic god. The snow began around three, flurries gradually thickening and beginning to rain down, and the town breathed a collective sigh of relief, understanding that the worst was yet to come but glad for the anticipation to be over.
By nightfall, a thick carpet of snow frosted the ground and fires glowed in living room windows across town, small flares of gold in the black night. The Weatherall house was out on Mackinaw Road, three miles from town, north of where the old army base used to be. Shuttered up silos and tufts of grass peaked out of the snow in the gloaming.
David and his younger sister, Eileen, sat in the living room with their mother and waited, the hushed cadence of the snow tapping at the windows in the wind, their father outside barning the cattle and carrying armloads of chopped wood to the box near the hearth.
After his last trip he stormed in and shut tight the front door behind him. A big man, he towered over David and Eileen and their frail mother.
Mother of God, he said to no one in particular. My face is blistering up.
He stomped across the room, shedding his parka and hat and gloves, tromped snow through the dim living room as the oil lamps flickered, their wicks guttering with each tromp of his foot. A red-faced man, bad to drink heavily during the first snow. Never any other time of the year. He stayed sober all through the planting season and the harvest. Even though he hadn’t lived solely from farm work since his own youth, it was as though his biological clock still ticked to those ancient rhythms of agrarian man: work hard all year, but come winter his body needed a release. As the days shortened and the cold settled in, his body seemed to build up static that could only be sparked with a week-long bender, and for a week he would sleep ten hours a night, drink fourteen hours a day, and yell at anyone who would listen, on and on until something cured inside him—the spark fired off—and, consistently on the eighth day, he would wake and pour coffee, recharged for another year.
Everyone in the house breathed a sigh of relief.
David knew it was coming, could tell by the way his father hunched his shoulders, his body dragging. Sure enough, the man went straight to the kitchen, opened the top cupboard, and pulled out a bottle of Tennessee whiskey.
Al, is now the time? their mother asked.
Look at it out there. We’re not going anywhere for at least a few days, and what else am I going to do?
But in front of the children.
They don’t mind. Do you pal?
He looked at David, and David shook his head. His father was going to do what he was going to do, and dissent would just turn him against you. That’s what his mother didn’t understand. Always nagging the man as if that would change him.
Years later, David would see traces of his father in himself. He too became bad to drink, but unlike his father—who at heart was a disciplined family man and could compartmentalize everything in his life, including his booze—David had no restraint and passed many years in a thick fog. When he was eighteen he joined the army, and at twenty-two married a woman much like his mother: docile, nagging. But in his thirties, when his drinking was at its worse, his wife found a spark inside her he’d never seen in his mother. She hit back, made him chase her around. They had an old grandfather clock in their living room, an heirloom from her side of the family, and on one occasion he bearhugged the clock—a big man, like his father—and pushed it to the ground. Chimes clanged and echoed up the stairs. Their children screamed from their beds, and David’s wife packed up and left him. This was the early 1970s. Women could do that sort of thing by then.
But back in 1948, they all grinned and bore it. The night of the storm she sat frozen in the living room chair while his father slugged a glass of whiskey and paced like an animal caged in the zoo.
Come, children. To bed, their mother said, and though neither David nor Eileen was tired they obeyed and followed their mother upstairs.
All night the wind tore at the house, as though trying to flatten the land of the prairie, nothing but a few trees and barbed wire fences and the occasional farmhouse between them and the north pole, and the wind blew like a speeding train trying to get home. At the crack of the bedroom door, David could see light filtering up from below and knew his father would stay downstairs until the better part of the whiskey was gone. He may even sleep down there. David curled up in the blankets and imagined the wind as an air raid, like he was hiding somewhere in Nazi territory and had to stay quiet and still or would be found out. Jacob Delaney, a neighbor, had gone to fight the Germans, and talked of the sound of airplanes whooshing overhead, the uncertainty of what it meant. David bet he would thrive in war, and fancied himself a soldier, tough and brave and winning. He dreamt.
Around seven the next morning, when the smothered dawn light had barely managed to set the land aglow, a knocked roused the Weatheralls out of their encampment. A pounding at the door, and David and Eileen sat at the upstairs railings and watched as their mother answered, as Jacob Delaney himself stepped in, covered in snow, his face ruddy and raw.
Mrs. Weatherall, he said. Is Mr. Weatherall in?
He’s still asleep, she said.
The living room chair was empty, so he must have gone to bed before passing out in the night.
Would you mind waking him? We could use all the men we can get.
He told of how Walker Merritt’s barn had been ripped apart by the wind, and how his cattle had wandered out and were freezing. All the men in the neighborhood were going over to help dig them out and lead them to neighboring barns to ride out the storm.
David jumped up and went to get dressed. Eileen followed, but he told her this would be men’s work, that she was too young and anyway a girl, so she couldn’t help. He left her crying in the upstairs landing and ran downstairs.
Hey, partner, Jacob Delaney said to him. You coming to help too?
Not without breakfast, he’s not, his mother said. From upstairs came the cries of his sister. What did you do? his mother asked.
Nothing. Told her this was men’s work.
Go wake your father.
His mother turned and went upstairs, but before she went he saw a look in her eyes that made him understand he’d been wrong. He couldn’t explain the look that morning, and in time would forget it altogether, but it was as if not just her mouth but her eyes as well were downturned, a kind of resignation that left him feeling empty inside.
You want some coffee? David asked Jacob Delaney, and Jacob said sure.
He set some on the stove to boil, then went to his parents’ bedroom, where his father lay in a heap of blankets, snoring like a rasp slowly carving away at a block of wood.
Pa, he said. Pa.
He pushed at the smelly heap, and his father stirred.
He told his father what was going on, and the man groaned and rose. The whites of his eyes were watered and pink, and a burst capillary made a spider pattern of blood around the left iris. He reached to the nightstand, where the quart of whiskey sat, a half-inch pool of amber liquid in the bottom, and he unscrewed the cap, drank it in one swig, then fumbled with his feet for his slippers.
Downstairs, David’s father cracked another bottle of whiskey while Jacob Delaney drank coffee and buttered a piece of toast David’s mother had made for him. David sat beside his sister, nervous with anticipation, ready for men’s work.
His mother told him to clear the table.
His sister sneered at him.
Walker Merritt’s farm began a half-mile up the road, and in the early-light haze David could see others trudging through thigh-deep snow toward his land. No car could pass along these roads, and under three feet of snow the entire landscape had changed, a sea of white with dark crags of leafless hawthorns and willow oaks clawing through like witch’s hands. The worst was the wind. It ripped up from the south and churned up the snow, which didn’t fall so much as billow and swirl in a thick cloud until it gradually accumulated. Snow slid up his pants and down his shirt, and his limbs already felt numb. He knew that as soon as he stepped inside, all of it would melt and leave him soaked, and that his frozen hands would hurt as though smashed with a hammer, but for now he tried to brush the powder off with each step.
Then Walker Merritt’s farm.
Snowdrifts reached eight feet against the barn, the snow fences. The shadows of men and cattle, their hoarse death-wail.
God damn, his father said.
God damn, he echoed, and no one said anything to him.
How the cattle had wound up in this position was anybody’s guess, the herd of them spread across the farmscape, the face of the barn behind them ripped away, planks of wood beating against each other in succinct repetition, Satan’s drumbeat. The cows themselves lowed, only their tops poking out above the drifts of snow. Ice hung from their flesh and fur, their noses and eyes frozen over, their wail a deep rumbling that syncopated across the land, and neighbor men were at work with shovels, trying to free them, three men to a cow. One held the cow by a rope around its neck while two men shoveled at the snow to create a path, and together, slowly, they shuffled toward a neighboring barn. No way they would get them all, the cows already half-dead from the cold. David felt like he might follow suit. But they were here to try, and had their day’s work cut out for them.
I reckon we can aim to get three in our barn, his father said, and Jacob Delaney nodded.
They reached the first cow, a brown Jersey with mottled black spots near her mouth. His father pulled out a rope and lassoed it over the cow’s head, but rather than acquiesce she bellowed out and tried to shoulder her way past the men, but she was caught in two feet of snow, anchored.
She’s a live one, Jacob Delaney said. Hey oh!
David’s father growled in reply, said, Just start digging.
David and Jacob Delaney alternated with swipes of the snow shovels. He dug at the hardened snow below the soft powder, had to put his foot on the lip of the shovel to loosen the snow with each swipe—Krrch. Krrch. Krrch—and with one kick he broke the cow’s front leg.
The leg had to have been frozen under all that snow, and though he hadn’t meant to cause harm, there it was, and there she howled, and leaned, and tilted into the snow, the leg collapsing beneath her and what appeared to be a bone jutting out from where the shovel had struck. Time stopped while she tilted, propped up against the snow, bellowing and kicking and thrashing her head, a sharp, fierce swing that yanked the rope out of his father’s hands, and finally she crashed to the ground with a crunching thud.
The men stared at her, laying there and thrashing against the bank of snow beneath her, blood beginning to congeal like oil below her leg, muscles flexing in the solid flanks of beef.
For a moment no one spoke, and then David’s father said, Well, she’s lost.
He trudged toward the farmhouse, yelling, Walker, hey Walker.
David and Jacob Delaney stayed where they were, a coldness reaching deep into David that he’d not felt before, a part of his spirit as numb as the ends of his fingers, and he didn’t feel it when Jacob put an arm around him. And he didn’t feel anything when his father returned, holding Walker Merritt’s rifle—a Remington 30.06—held the barrel up to the cow’s head and squeezed the trigger.
The shot seared into the morning air, and blood and brain matter spattered into the white snow. David doubled over and threw up.
You want to go home, you go ahead, his father said.
Walker Merritt’s wife had come out with a mug of cocoa for him, the liquid already cold though it had been boiling a moment ago when she left the house. The blood smelled of iron, like a freshly cooked liver that has just been cut open, the soft bloody steam rising out of the hole in the cow’s head like breath.
We got to move on, his father said.
He and Jacob Delaney grabbed the shovels and the rope and left David there with Mrs. Merritt and a cold mug of cocoa, his head throbbing and the corners of his eyes frozen from where tears had welled and begun to leak out.
He tossed the cocoa into the snow, and it left a muddy ring as it sunk into the slush. He shuffled along through the snow to where his father and Jacob Delaney were already shoveling at another cow, a bull this time. Two horns swiped at the air around them.
Watch yourself, his father said. Neither he nor Jacob Delaney seemed surprised that David had remained out. He grabbed a shovel and began digging at the bull in the snow. Carefully, so as not to splinter the animal’s leg, they unzipped him from the snow, sloughed the powder and ice to the side, and tugged the bull through a narrow path along Mackinaw Road, twenty feet per minute, fifteen minutes to the Weatherall barn. Snow ripped through the air and tore at their exposed skin, a cloud of it twisting through and through. A wave, a burn, all the way to the barn. There cattle lowed and the horses neighed.
David’s father heaved the barn door open, and the ripe heat of feces and hay wafted out like a dust cloud, and he and Jacob Delaney tugged at the bull while David held the door. The wood creaked and rocked in the wind, shutters banging and the clatter shaking in waves across the darkness inside. Slats of light sliced at tufts of hay, and black shadows clashed in the stalls, hair and muscle, meat.
Come on, you bastard, David’s father said. The stubborn bull had locked its legs at the barn door.
Jacob Delaney walked around and smacked its rump, said, Git, as if it were a horse, but all that happened was the bull flared its nostrils, its eyes glowering like hot flames settled deep in smoldering coals. The bull stomped its hooves and David watched as it yanked its head, the rope around its neck tugging his father forward before he let go.
Seemingly out of shame and anguish for its lot, the bull howled and turned on Jacob Delaney, twisted its head and gored him in the side, lifted him like a scarecrow, and shook him to the ground. Then the bull tromped back into the snow, an apparition now as it disappeared into the blizzard.
Lying on the ground, his body half in the barn, Jacob Delaney coughed and rolled over. Blood pooled from his side the same as if a tooth had been ripped from its socket.
David watched it happen, and at that moment realized he could not feel his hands. Frozen up to his wrists, like they’d been amputated. His father stumbled and knelt over Jacob Delaney, pulled the whiskey bottle from his coat pocket, proffered some to the wounded man. But Jacob Delaney turned his head to the dirt, pressed his face to the ground, and died.
The funeral was the following week, and all the neighbors came. Snow still blanketed the community, farmers lay shuttered up in their homes with their wives and children, Department of Agriculture workers off for three days before someone from the county plowed the major roads. Mackinaw Road was still under a sheet of impacted snow, stained piss-yellow and rutted from traffic. Half Walker Merritt’s herd had died, and the other half remained in neighboring barns until he could get his own repaired. The repairs would take until well into the spring. That winter there was another blizzard, though not nearly as damaging as the first, and snow coated the landscape until April. All the plains one white sheet, Nebraska through the Dakotas to Canada, a table between the Appalachians and the Rockies.
Years later, David would return here in winter to bury his father. For the remainder of the man’s life, he always drank on that week after harvest, at the first of the snow. David’s sister and mother still lived in the house, still tended the animals. His father’s funeral was much like Jacob Delaney’s, though fewer people braved the cold. His father was well liked and respected by the community, but there was something special about Jacob Delaney, and the way he died. Perhaps because he died in service to someone else, or perhaps because he was so young and died so violently, that the town needed to grieve. David’s father was elderly, it was his time. And by then the world was already changing, young folks moving on—east to Lincoln, west to Denver, anywhere so long as it wasn’t Crawford. David was in the midst of middle life anxieties, and the trip did him good. To see his mother, his sister, his home like an anchoring. And on the chill February day they buried his father, he would remember Walker Merritt’s cattle, but would not be able to picture the cut of Jacob Delaney’s face. Too much time lost, the end of something. The bone-chill of the wind as it coasted north across the plains, or the thin layer of cracked ice skittering across the land.
This story originally appeared in South Dakota Review and has been republished with permission of the author.
Jon Sealy is the author of The Whiskey Baron. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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