The Wind Chill Factor Read Online Free PDF

smells, coffee and tobacco, began to fill the house, along with the dry burning wood, getting rid of the closed-up dead smell. I poured a cheese glass of brandy and toasted my homecoming.
    It was something past midnight when I took a cup of coffee into the bedroom. I brought with me Blandings Castle by Wodehouse, a dog-eared copy which had probably been in the wicker bookcase for forty years, my brandy, and my pipe. I bunched the pillows up behind me and pulled the covers up to my chin. There was a dim bedside lamp and the shadows from the fireplace crackled, danced on the walls and ceiling. I listened to the wind as I read and sipped my coffee and brandy and smoked my pipe and I felt safe and secure, the way I’d felt as a child in the cottage.
    I wasn’t wondering where Cyril was and I wasn’t thinking about the man in the sheepskin coat. It would all be all right and in the morning I’d get it all straightened out.
    Then, exhausted, I turned off the lamp and slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Seven
    T HE MORNING WAS GOOD. I felt cold and clean and rested. My head ached only slightly as I stood in front of the glowing embers in the grate. I put my underwear and socks in a bureau drawer, put on corduroy trousers, high-strapped cavalry boots, and another pullover with no bloodstains on it.
    The air outside was crisp, triggering an avalanche of memories as I stepped onto the porch. The sky was the same eerie white as the landscape, divided by a ridge of firs in the distance like a piece of abstract art. There was no sound but the wind, no movement but wisps of snow skidding across the crust. The thermometer by the door told me it was exactly zero where I was standing and after a moment I went back inside and put on my sheepskin coat and heavy, fleece-lined gloves.
    The Lincoln sat quietly in the snow, graceful, dignified, wounded. Its tracks and my own from the night before were completely filled in by the new snow. It cracked and squeaked as I walked, following the driveway as best I could, circling around the lawn away from the house, past the gazebo and the trout pond toward the other set of stone gates closer to the town.
    Standing in the shelter of a grove of firs, I stared back at the house. For a moment I thought I saw a wisp of smoke curl up from the chimney. But no, it had to be snow swirling off the slate roof. When I looked again it was gone, a curtain of blowing snow separating me from the house.
    It was nine o’clock and I was going to walk to town. It was dry and cold walking along the road, protected by the thick trees on either side of me forming a natural corridor. Above me snow circled, lashed into the trees. At ground level, it was quiet and the walk of a mile went quickly until I was standing by the great square park at the edge of town. I hadn’t seen a car or another human being.
    Holidays in summer had been spent at the park. Cyril and I had grown up saluting our fallen war dead and the nation’s loftier principles in the park, sweating in the summer sun and drinking frosty bottles of beer from ice-filled washtubs and listening to the town band in the tiny, exquisite shell. Behind the band shell I had made love to a girl from the high school, my first time, tugging at her clothes, full of urgency. In the center of the park stood a bronzed doughboy of the Great War, gesturing countless invisible comrades onward with an arm raised, clutching his rifle. On the base of the statue there were tablets with names of the boys from Cooper’s Falls who had died over there, over there. …
    Walking on, I came to the corner of the park nearest the business district, which lay oddly quiet in the snow. There were perhaps a dozen cars parked along the curbs and finally one passed me stealthily, quietly in the snow. Standing in the corner of the park was a tall nineteenth-century figure, lean and stem and bearded, holding a book in one hand: the first Cooper of Cooper’s Falls—one of my ancestors frozen