We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

were inside, in a sheltered place, panting and sobbing with relief. Inside it was freezing cold, and dark as the interior of a cave, but Mrs. Hausmann located the wood-burning stove, and Corinne found the tin box containing her teacher’s kitchen matches, and Mrs. Hausmann was able with her stiffened, shaking fingers to start a fire, and so— they were saved.
    They would not be rescued for nearly twenty-four hours, by a sheriff’s rescue team accompanying a snowplow along the Ransomville Road, but from that point onward as Mrs. Hausmann would say they were in the bosom of the Lord.
    Another, less fortunate traveler on the road that day, a neighbor of the Hausmanns, froze to death when his pickup stalled and he tried to walk to shelter. On a county highway, a young couple abandoned their car to the storm and set out bravely on foot, lost their way and crawled into an irrigation ditch to escape the wind, the man lying on top of the woman and so saving her from freezing; he survived, too, but only barely, both legs having to be amputated at the knees. And many head of cattle died in the Valley, trapped outside when the storm swept upon them. Canada geese were said to have dropped like shot out of the air, transformed to ice. Even in the towns of Ransomville, Milford, Chautauqua Falls, and Mt. Ephraim there were deaths and near-deaths. The Yewville River froze so solidly it didn’t thaw until late April. Snow endured for months, well into spring, hard-crusted unnatural snow it seemed, acrid and bitter on the tongue, hiding the bodies of numberless wild creatures, revealed only in the thaw. But Mrs. Hausmann and Corinne were spared, the spirit of God dwelling forever afterward in their hearts.
    That’s why I love fireflies so, Corinne would say, her eyes shining like a seven-year-old’s, they saved Momma’s life and mine.
    Â 
    And some of us would be laughing. Oh Mom!
    And Mom would flare up, quick as a cat might turn on you and hiss, her fur stroked the wrong way, “Don’t you ‘Oh Mom’ me! I remember that day as clearly as if it was last week, not thirty-eight years ago. Yes, and I can see those fireflies as clearly as I see you. ”
    Dad, Mikey-Junior and Patrick would try to keep straight faces. The story of Grandma Hausmann and Mom as a little girl of seven, lost in a blizzard on the Ransomville Road, was one of the oldest Mulvaney family stories, and a favorite, but as we got older one by one (except Marianne, of course: she always defended Mom) we came to wonder how accurate it was.
    Most embarrassing was when Mom told the story to people she hardly knew like my eighth-grade math teacher Mr. Cole, or some lady she’d run into at the A & P, or friends of ours spending the night at the farm—how God watches over us all, how Mom’s life was changed forever by an act of “providence.”
    Just the way Mom uttered that word: providence. You saw a tall black marble column with a cross at its summit. You saw a blue sky so vast and deep you could fall into it forever.
    So Dad couldn’t help commenting behind his hand, with that wink that squinched up half his face, it was surely an act of providence that his mother-in-law Ida Hausmann never drove any vehicle ever again—“ That was a blessing of God’s, yessir!”
    To us kids, who’d known her only as a nervous-skinny, querulous, gray old woman with thick eyeglasses, the thought of Grandma Hausmann driving any vehicle on the road was hilarious.
    But Mom held her ground. Mom was stubborn, and eloquent. She said, in a hurt, dignified tone, that her mother was a country woman of the old days, German-born and brought to America at the age of less than a year; she’d always been a commonsense Lutheran, not given to flights of religious fancy; when such people are confronted by a truth they know to be true they never change their minds, ever. Mom said you have to experience certain things to