Ice Storm (15 page)

The strangers were washing their hands. Each had a small, old-fashioned milking stool and a pail. Frowning, Sophie began the process of hosing down the cows and cleaning their teats. Surely they weren’t going to try to hand-milk the cows, were they? There were too many!

But that is exactly what the strangers did. When the cows were ready, the strangers sat down on their little stools and began to milk. Now Sophie understood why they couldn’t use the milking parlour. There, people worked in the pit so the cows’ udders were at the right height. The cows would have been too high for the hand-milkers to reach.

Sophie watched the strangers work in awe. She had never seen anything like it. Their hands were big and strong. With every squeeze they were able to get more milk out of the teat than she could with ten squeezes. They finished a cow almost as fast as the milking machine could. Sophie, Sébastien and Papa kept busy leading cows back and forth from the maternity pen and cleaning them for milking. The soldiers kept busy taking the full pails and dumping the milk in a ditch away from the barn. Maman kept busy making hot drinks and insisting the strangers rest and eat every so often. It was like an assembly line. Sophie felt like she was part of something very important. For the second time that day she felt tears come to her eyes. This storm was making her feel so happy and so sad, all at the same time, that her head was whirling.

Hours later, the bawling stopped. The cows were milked. Every last one. The strangers’ hands had never cramped, never frozen in place. They were magical. As the men loaded their tiny stools back into the army trucks, the whole family stood side by side to thank them.

“No need,” said the strangers quietly. “We are all farmers. We all care for our animals the best way we can. And if our neighbour needs help, it is our duty and our pleasure. Godspeed.”

The army drove the strangers away, but none of the four of them moved out of the wind. It blew all around but didn’t seem to touch them. It was as if the strangers had left a protective arm around them.

“Who
were
they?” asked Sébastien.

“Mennonites,” said Papa. “They are dairy farmers just like us. They are also religious people and one of their beliefs is that they should depend on themselves, not on electricity. Not because electricity is bad, but because community is more important. And it is that sense of community that we just witnessed, even though they are from Ontario and we live in Québec.”

Sébastien thought about that. “If we didn’t depend on electricity, we wouldn’t be in so much trouble,”
he mused.

Papa looked at him. “Nor would we have all the things that we have. It’s a tricky problem, isn’t it?”

They went inside for a snack and a warm-up. Papa had a short nap. Sophie tried to read a book. Sébastien played with his video camera, taking shots of icicles through a window. All of a sudden, the phone rang. It seemed such a strange and alien sound that no one thought to pick it up.

“Phone!” shouted Sophie, finally, as she came to her senses. She ran to get it.

“Allo, bonjour?”

“Sophie, it’s Uncle Pete. How are you all doing?” It was Alice’s dad!

With a big grin, Sophie told him all the news, about the generator and the neighbours and Sébastien’s schedule and the Mennonites.

“Wow,” chuckled Uncle Pete. “You have certainly been having some exciting times! I have too, although I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even had a chance to go home. I’m sleeping in a tent, can you believe it? Right now I’m at the Hydro office, though, so I’m finally able to charge my cell. Now, may I speak to Alice, please? I miss my little girl!”

Sophie’s smile faded. “No, Uncle Pete, you can’t,” she said seriously. “Alice isn’t here.” Maman looked up sharply and went to wake Papa.

“What?! I thought your papa was going to pick her up and bring her to the farm! What happened?” he said anxiously.

Papa came hurrying into the room, holding his hand out for the phone. Sophie handed it to him, eyes wide. Quickly, Papa explained how close he’d come and about the bridges being closed. “Our phones were out by the time I got back to the farm,” he said. “I don’t know where I could have reached you anyway. Don’t worry, Pierre, Alice is smart. She will know what to do, how to look after herself.”

The two fathers talked a little longer, and then Papa hung up the phone. “I told him to go home,” he said. “Alice will either be there, or she will have left a note.” They were all quiet. Alice and Uncle Pete were their family.

Finally Maman spoke. “I thought that Pierre would have known the bridges were closed, that we couldn’t get her. I thought he would have gone home by now.”

Papa nodded his head. “I thought so too. And he thought we had picked her up before the bridges closed. He was sure she was with us so he didn’t go home.
C’est terrible!”

Sophie was horrified. They had all believed that Uncle Pete was home with Alice. Quickly she dialed Alice’s number, just in case. The phone rang and rang and rang. What did that mean? Was her phone not working, or was Alice not there to pick up? If she wasn’t there, where
was
she?

After that, none of them could sit still. Papa decided to go into town to get a news update and ask again about a generator. Maman took one look at Sophie and Sébastien and waved them off. “Go, go,
allez avec papa,”
she said. “I’ll mind the animals.”

In no time, Sophie, Sébastien and Papa were driving slowly along the concession road that led to town. The roads were awful; much worse than Tuesday when Maman had taken them to school. Had that been only four days ago? It seemed like a year. Since Tuesday, their whole world had changed. Papa drove straight to the Town Hall. It was the centre for all information and collection of supplies. Striding into the hall, Papa headed directly for a cluster of farmers he knew.

“Bonjour, bonjour,
Henri,” they said.
“Comment ça va?”
The men exchanged stories. The pig and poultry farmers were badly off. Many pigs and chickens had been lost. The dairymen were desperate. Tens of thousands of animals’ lives were at stake, not to mention the lost milk. And it wasn’t just the milk that was being poured into ditches and drains all over the region that was lost. Cows that weren’t milked went dry. They would stop producing milk until they gave birth to another calf, and that took nine months. What would happen to the milk supply until then?

Sophie crept close to the knot of men, listening to all they said. Sébastien backed away, filming the animated discussion from a distance with his ever-present camera. Sophie wondered what kind of a movie her brother was going to make with all this footage. A disaster flick? A story about the end of the world? Sophie bent her ear to listen some more. The farmers’ organization, the
Association des Producteurs Agricoles,
was in charge of finding and distributing generators. There were still many farms in need. Sophie saw Papa frown. When would they get theirs?

The Red Cross was in town, helping out at the shelter. That surprised Sophie. She hadn’t known that Saint-Hyacinthe had a shelter. Didn’t everybody have a wood stove to keep them warm?

“There are two thousand people at the shelter,” said M. Champlain. “It’s over at the high school, the
Polyvalente Hyacinthe Delorme.
They say the lineup for the shower is more than two hundred people long!”

Another man jumped in. “The police are going door to door, forcing people from their homes. They say many would rather freeze than leave. The Prime Minister of Canada even went on the television to encourage people to go to the shelters. He said that people are more important than belongings, and staying safe is most important.
‘Your community stands ready to make you safe and warm.’
That’s what he said. But who wants to go to those places?”

All the men began to speak at once. Sophie felt so confused. She thought about the Mennonites. Their community was standing ready. Hers didn’t seem to be doing as good a job.

Papa spent some time negotiating with other farmers about the loan of a generator. But everyone was struggling. No one had any generator time to loan. Someone turned up a radio, and the Town Hall quieted to listen.

There are now 7,500 troops working in the disaster zone, the largest peacetime deployment on home soil in history. A hundred thousand people are now living in shelters. Damage estimates are in the billions of dollars. Water and sewage is failing in a dozen communities. It may be weeks before power is back on. And now the weather report: the freezing rain has stopped. But tomorrow’s forecast is minus fifteen degrees. Those who are cold will get much colder before power is restored.

|||||

No one in the Town Hall spoke.
What was there to say? Papa motioned to Sophie and Sébastien and they followed him out to the truck. There was nothing for them in town except bad news. Papa turned the truck towards home and Maman.

Six more cows had died. Sébastien ran to his room and Papa pounded the kitchen table in anger. Sophie did nothing. She couldn’t let herself feel anything or she would feel too much. Maman had dumped the carcasses in the lower meadow. The rest of the herd was beginning to bawl. It had been hours since the Mennonites had milked them and their udders were filling once again. There was no generator on the way, and without the team of hand-milkers there was so little they could do. Sophie wanted to get as far away from the distress in the barn as she could. She decided to walk to the sugar bush.

The family sugar bush was one of Sophie’s favourite places. She loved to visit it in summer, when
she would take a book and read in the shade of the beautiful maple trees. She loved to visit it in autumn when the maple leaves turned fiery crimson. She particularly loved to visit it in spring when the sap started to run in the trees. The whole family worked together to collect the sap and make it into maple syrup. They loaded up their gear on a sled that Papa’s grandfather had made: a drill, a hammer, spiles, hooks, buckets, and lids.

Once in the bush, Papa selected the trees for tapping. Then he picked a spot on each tree about three feet from the ground, over a large root or under a big branch where the sap was running. He drilled a little hole. Sophie got to tap the spiles into the hole. The spile was like a tube that let the sap run out of the tree. Sébastien always called it a tap and it was sort of like that, except you couldn’t turn it off and on. Then Sébastien put a little hook on the spile and hung a bucket from the hook to collect the dripping sap. The buckets had special lids to keep the sap clean.

Every day she and Sébastien would collect the sap and pour it into big containers that were dug into the snow beside their sugar shack. Then one special day when Maman determined they had collected enough sap, she would have Papa build the great outdoor fire that let them make maple syrup. Maman boiled the sap in a big flat pan over the fire. It took forty gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup, which meant a lot of boiling. That’s why they did the cooking outside. Maman said if they did it in the kitchen the wallpaper would probably peel right off the walls from all the steam.

Sophie liked maple syrup just as much as the next person (which was a lot) but it wasn’t her favourite maple treat. Sometimes Maman made maple sugar candy. To make that, Maman had to keep boiling the sap past the syrup stage until it got really thick. At exactly the right moment, Maman would take the pan off the heat and start to beat it with a wooden spoon. She would beat it and beat it until the colour got lighter and lighter and the consistency got thicker and thicker and she couldn’t beat it any more. Then they poured it out on waxed paper to cool. It was just like fudge and so delicious it made Sophie’s mouth water just thinking about it. But sugar candy wasn’t her favourite maple treat either.

Sophie’s absolutely most favourite maple treat was sugar on snow. That’s what her family called it anyway. After Maman had boiled the sap to syrup and they had poured it into bottles for storage, sometimes she would leave a little syrup in the pan. She’d boil it a little longer until it stuck to the spoon. Then, quick as a wink, Maman would pick up the pan with her hot mitts and pour the thick syrup onto a clean patch of snow. It would melt into the snow, capturing tiny ice crystals as it hardened. Quickly, Sophie and Sébastien would take a stick or a spoon and wrap the thick, toffee-like candy around it before the syrup hardened completely. They’d stick it into their mouths where it would be hot and cold all at the same time, thick and sweet and filled with cold ice crystals. Sophie liked to put a big piece in her mouth and just leave it there to melt slowly, slowly down her throat. It was heaven. Sometimes she needed to eat a pickle after, it was so sweet, but it was worth it.

As she walked towards the sugar bush, Sophie thought about the way her family collected sap. Other people said their way was old-fashioned. Other people used tubes and lines and vacuum pressure to make the work easier. Sophie smiled to herself. This year, if the power was still out by the time the sap started to run, maybe they’d be the only ones who would be able to collect the sap, the only ones who didn’t need electricity!

Sophie was still smiling to herself as she walked past the last equipment shed and turned towards the sugar bush. She stopped in horror. Her sugar bush was gone.

Where there had been tall, stately trees, now there was nothing but a pile of broken limbs. Some trees had split completely in half. Others were weighed down with so much ice that the tops of the trees touched the ground. They looked like giant ice cubes, not trees. And the rest had lost all their branches. The trees were over a hundred years old and not a single one was left untouched. The ice had completely destroyed the sugar bush, the bush that had given her family maple syrup for three generations.