The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

were left alone here. The snowfall thickened, the flakes like gobbets of soap froth, blown crazily by the wind, and piling in thin drifts halfway up the windowpanes. It didn’t matter how well a person knew his way—he could easily mistake it, with everything white and unrecognizable, and the darkening air so filled with the falling snow that you could hardly see your hand before your face. I used to like snowstorms in town, when I was a girl, the feeling of being under siege but safe within a stronghold. Out in the country it was a different matter, with so few light as landmarks, and the snow lying in ribbed dunes for miles that seemed endless. Here I felt cutoff from any help, severed from all communication, for there were times when we couldn’t have got out to the highway and into town to save our immortal souls, whatever the need.
    The wind grew worse until it was so loud that all the reassuring domestic sounds of clocks and hissing green poplar in the stove were lost entirely, and I could hear only the growl and shriek of air outside the house, and the jarring of the frames in our storm windows. I’d almost given Bram up, when he came back, opening the door suddenly and letting in a gust of night and snow-filled wind. His face was frozen, and both hands. He took his coat and boots off and sat down, rubbing his hands gingerly to work the frostbite out.
    “Did you find him?” I asked.
    “No,” he replied brusquely.
    Seeing Bram’s hunched shoulders, and the look on his face, all at once I walked over to him without pausing to ponder whether I should or not, or what to say.
    “Never mind. Maybe hell come back by himself, as the mare did.”
    “He won’t,” Bram said. “It’s blowing up for an all-night blizzard. If I’d gone any further, I’d never have found my way back.”
    He put his palms to his eyes and sat without moving.
    “I guess you think I’m daft, eh?” he said finally.
    “No, I don’t think that,” I said. Then, awkwardly, “I’m sorry about it, Bram. I know you were fond of him.”
    Bram looked up at me with such a look of surprise that it pains me still, in recalling.
    “That’s just it,” he said.
    When we went to bed that night, he started to turn to me, and I felt so gently inclined that I think I mighthave opened to him openly. But he changed his mind. He patted me lightly on the shoulder.
    “You go to sleep now,” he said.
    He thought, of course, it was the greatest favor he could do me.
    Bram found Soldier in spring, when the snow melted. The horse had caught a leg in a barbed wire fence, and couldn’t have lived long that night, before the cold claimed him. Bram buried him in the pasture, and I’m certain he put a boulder on the place, like a gravestone. But later that summer, after the grass and weeds had grown back, when I mentioned the rock curiously and asked how it got there, Bram only looked at me narrowly and said it had been there always. After that night in winter, we had gone on much the same as before—that was the thing. Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.
        “Come and sit down, Mother.” It’s Doris’s voice, hissing at me, and I see now that I am in the doctor’s waiting-room, standing here gawking at a picture of a river in spring. Have I been mumbling aloud? I can’t for the life of me say. The room is full of curious eyes. Nervously, I plunge back to the chair.
    “I only wanted to have a look. Just two pictures he’s got—fancy that. You’d think a man in his position could afford to do a little better, wouldn’t you?”
    “Sh—sh—” Doris looks embarrassed, and I wonder if my voice has been louder than I realized. “This isthe way he wants it, Mother. Both those pictures cost plenty, you can bank on that. People don’t hang up dozens any more.”
    She thinks she knows everything there is to know, that woman.
    “Did I say dozens? Did I? I