Flapping my arms and legs like a fool, I felt melting snow soaking into my clothes as I carved a space, a heavenly figure with wide wings. Sighing, my body relaxing when I stilled, knowing that the hardest part about making a snow angel was not falling backward into the snow, but getting up without ruining the effect.
I paused, looking up at him. He’d not moved.
“Snow angel,” I said again, as if those two words would explain the whole concept.
There was an exact moment when the memory came back to him; I saw it on his face.
It was a memory from childhood, perhaps, though when it was from I was unsure, since the part of Virginia he was from didn’t get a whole lot of snow. Neither did Cape Girardeau.
I’d never seen more than an inch of snow on the ground at one time in my whole life. I’d learned about snow angels from Ricky Patterson, in South Dakota, right after I’d gotten out of prison, and nothing had more amazed me than an older man with arthritic hands and a serious air laughing as he fell back into drifts of snow to make something whimsical that would vanish in the first hard wind. He’d told me that’s how life was. You existed, you created, and then the world moved on, and I’d better get used to it.
“Okay,” Blue said. He turned his back to me, spread his arms wide, and fell into the snow as if he’d been doing it every day for a million years. No fear. I watched him out of the corner of my eyes as he flapped his arms and legs, a glimpse of boot tip, a flurry of snow.
I heard his voice ask, “Are we making girl angels or boy angels?”
“Neither,” I said, then, because I didn’t know, I added, “Or either.”
I was raised Southern Baptist, so I didn’t believe in angels. But, as I eased myself to standing and looked down at Blue, his arms and legs wide, the snow behind him scraped into wings and a long, white, flowing gown, I decided that maybe I did know.
Blue was beautiful in the snow. His toque had come off, and his blond hair trailed across the whiteness beneath his head. His blue eyes glowed, and the smile across his face would forever mark the day as something special. Blue, smiling. Happy. Darkness erased. And in my mind, I decided angels were young men with blue pea coats and brown boots.
I held out my gloved hand and pulled him up, and together we admired our snow angels. My wings were wider. His etherealgown was longer. The wind around us grew, and I thought we’d turn back, but Blue looked down the slope to the river, as though he wanted to go see.
“Okay,” I said. I could not resist those eyes.
We slogged through the snow, melting patches sinking us up to our knees, wind-scoured slates of ice making us slip and reach for each other. Finally, we arrived at the Yellowstone River, where the sandy banks made narrow places completely free of snow and ice.
The river itself was clogged with both, and chugged slowly past, chunks of ice, a broken tree branch, bare of leaves. Above us the cottonwood branches stirred, wind sifting snow onto our shoulders.
In the middle of winter, the river would be solid and could be crossed on foot. Someone else owned the land on the other side, but I didn’t think he’d mind when I crossed at Christmas to gather pine boughs to make the house smell nice.
I wondered if Blue would be here with me when I crossed the ice to gather stolen boughs.
“This is beautiful,” he said.
I turned to look at him, at his blue eyes looking out over the half-frozen water, his nose nipped pink with cold, hair trailing around his face, blond lace on his dark blue toque.
“It is,” I said. “Part of the reason why I picked this spot.”
“I can see why,” he said, and I believed he meant it.
The wind picked up, hurtling through the cottonwoods, making their branches shake off the last of the snow in preparation for more snow, which there would surely be. A scarf of cold air looped around the back of my neck, a biting kiss of invisible ice on my face.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
Blue followed in the tracks I made as I went up the slope, and by the time we were halfway to the cabin, the sky haddarkened, and snow snakes slithered across the surface of the snow, freezing it, making it hard.
The wind bit at the backs of our knees; I pulled Blue ahead of me so I could take the wind. We were on the path I’d made before, which made the going easy. At the cabin, I opened the door and ushered him in before me.
“Stew,” I said as I stomped snow from my boots and shook the snow from my coat.
“Okay,” said Blue easily, as though my thoughts for what to have for dinner were a promise of good things and not just a simple meal. Making a moment I could keep with me when he went.
We made the stew together, browning squares of chuck, peeling and slicing vegetables, using butter and bacon grease for flavor. Halfway through the cooking, I made biscuits to go on top, covering the pot with a lid to let the stew bubble and the biscuits rise. Smells filled the air, and when we sat down, the stew filled our bellies.
All the while the howl of the wind grew, pressing against the doors and windows, turning from an invisible force to one lathered in white, slashing sideways through the air. The temperature dropped. I built a fire.
It was not my first winter in the north, but it was my first one in this cabin. Maybe I would not have to spend the coming winter alone, as I had planned. But if Blue got his memory back, there was no way I’d ask him to stay. Not for my sake.
