The Opportunity

He can feel the cold and wet soak through his trousers from where his knees press into the frozen ground. Before him are rows of two-inch corn stalks, dark green, withered and covered in frost. It is July 5th and his crops should be tall and green and vibrant. This is his third failed crop this year and it feels like the weight of all the world is pressing down upon him.

He becomes aware of footsteps coming up behind him in the frosty soil, soil that had been fresh and tilled just five days ago, but frozen and frost-covered today. He knows without looking who approaches. A pair of hands settle gently upon his sagging shoulders.

“Dearest Jonathan, I hope you are not sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.” Her voice is like the proverbial songbird, soft and sweet. Even in despair, the finds himself thinking that a man could fall in love with her simply for the sound of her voice.

“I just don’t understand why I am being tested me in this way. Am I not a good man? Do I not struggle to live beyond reproach? Have I not been worked hard and tried to do well by others?”

“Jonathan Spaulding!” her voice turning firm. “Your words are hubris and you know it! Has this cold also made it hard for the woodland creatures? Have they done something to deserve starving? It is frozen from here to Philadelphia, yet it is you that is being tested? In all things, there is opportunity. The successful are those who search for it and find it.”

The sudden change from sweetness to rebuke in her voice stings and strikes hard and shames the man. They have known each other for onto thirteen years and have been married for five and have never once had cross words with one another. Today will be no different as he knows she is right and he can offer no argument to it.

“I was on my way to the brook to gather water. Since you have nothing to do today but kneel upon the frozen ground, perhaps you would like to fetch it for me?” A wooden pail drops to the ground beside him.

The man nods but does not look up. He hasn’t the strength to let her look upon his face or for the truth that might be revealed. Tears well and stream from his eyes.

The crunching resumes, fading towards the house. He rises and picks up the pail by its rope handle and trod towards the brook.

“Opportunity?” he thinks, “how can there be opportunity? It has frozen or snowed every month since September! How can he feed the three of them? Or the animals? How will they meet the coming winter?” He fears that every year will be like this and the two of them will have to abandon all this and move back to Exeter, back to civilization.

A brook crosses their land and carries water fit for drinking only for about nine months of the year. To provide year-round water, the man had dammed up the brook creating a small pond. It will provide a constant water supply until he is able to dig a well. Today, however, it is frozen over.

He trudges to the pond’s edge, near where he had put in a small dock, and pounds his foot against the ice. The white surface wafer of ice breaks but not the black ice beneath. He steps out a bit further and his feet go out from beneath him. He falls to the ice before he knows he had slipped, his head striking hard on the ice. He lays on the ice for a moment, frustration, despair and anger all building inside. In a fit of rage, he rises to his knees and takes the bucket in both hands and strikes the ice with it. Roaring like a man possessed, he strikes the ice over and over and over until the bucket splinters and comes apart in his hands.

Spent from outburst, he picks the rope up with the two side slats at each end and rises to his feet. As soon as he stands, the ice beneath him gives way and he plunges into the icy water. The water isn’t deep but it is cold and it knocks the wind from him, his head spins from the sudden cold and, for a moment, he feels as though he will pass out. Struggling to the dock, he climbs up. Soaked through, water drips and freezes to the wooden platform. He hunches over and hunts for his breath before heading back the house, back to warmth.

Sullen and feeling ashamed, he enters through the shed into the kitchen where his wife is preparing biscuits for baking. He stands there pitifully, dripping onto the kitchen floor.

She eyes him for a moment, struck by the humor in what she sees. “Well, Mr. Spaulding, had I known you were in the mood for a swim, I would have put together a picnic lunch.” She always calls him ‘Mr. Spaulding’ when she is having sport. “Whatever made you decide to bring me water by the pocketful?”

Without meeting her gaze, he holds up the rope with the two slats tied to either end.

“Oh, I see. Your bucket has a hole in it.”

He desperately wants to be mad. To wallow in grief and frustration. To be pitiful. To find someone to blame, himself, this land, the decision to move here, God, anything. He wants to be anything but playful and happy. She is making it darn hard though. He stands there stupidly, violently shaking and shivering, his head hanging towards the floor.

In her heart, Abbey knows that if this were any other household and Jonathan any other man, she would ‘catch a hand’ for her ‘insubordination’. But Jonathan has never treated her any less than his equal in all things, at home and in public and she loves him all the more for that. Having had her fun, she suddenly feels pity for ‘the poor thing’.

She puts another couple sticks of rock maple into the cook stove. “Strip off your wet clothes and I will hang them up. The extra wood will make the stove too hot for biscuits for a while but it’ll be good for getting the chill out of you.”

She disappears into another room and reemerges with their wedding quilt in hand. He has stripped, letting the we clothes clump onto the pine floor, and is sitting in a chair facing the stove. Usually, in July they would be using the summer kitchen but this year hasn’t been warm enough for that.

She wraps the heavy blanket around his shoulders, feeling his body quake with cold. She puts her arms around him and squeezes, placing her head upon his.

She rubs his arms and rights herself. Putting on a heavy jacket she steps towards the shed door. “Watch Samuel for me and get warmed up and I will be right back with water.”

He picks up the rope from the floor and holds the two slats out in mock helpfulness.

“I will be using one of the other buckets, if it is all the same to you, Mr. Spaulding.”

He sits there listening to the fire crackle and the iron creak as it gets hotter, head hung in defeat. His mind ruminates on the question, ‘how will they get through the winter with no food?’ ‘Game meat will only get them so far’, he thinks.

The morning sun strikes the wooden kitchen floor. He sticks his naked foot into the ray. His brow furrows as someone waking from a deep sleep. He then pulls his hand out from under the blanket and sticks that into the beam, watching his shadow as he splays his fingers. It is, of course warm. It is always warm by the south windows. He gets up and walks to each window, feeling the warmth of the sun under his feet. He notices that Abbey had put Samuel’s cradle in one of the sunbeams. He glances outside. Frost still covers the ground, except in the three or four feet closest to the south side of the house. His mind starts rolling over and over this.

Just then, the shed door opens and Abbey enters with a full pail of water. “I don’t understand what the problem with the water was, Mr. Spaulding. There is, after all, a man-sized hole in the ice right beside the dock.”

“You don’t say. What size of man do you reckon made that hole, Mrs. Spaulding? A pitiful man or a man who understands opportunity? Perhaps it was an eternally grateful man?”

Sensing a change in him, she sits the bucket down on the washboard and turns and looks him in the eyes, tipping her head as if in contemplation. “I reckon it was a great but humble man,” slightly nodding her head, “one never fails to rise to any occasion.”

He steps towards her and places her head in his hand, strands of her golden hair falling between his fingers, his thumb studying the contours of her cheek. Her big blues eyes stare back at him. He feels his heart break as he looks upon her. He finds himself feeling incredibly weak and very powerful at the same time.

“If it be hubris or not, Abbey,” his words fetching up in his throat, “I have been blessed above all others by having you in my life, and it is as good as Gospel that I would be a far, far lesser man without you. I would truly be a lost soul.” And then he lightly kisses her forehead and then lightly kisses her lips. Tears fill both their eyes. For a moment they are lost.

Finally, she turns, regaining her composure. “Really, Mr. Spaulding?” the words choking in her throat, “right in front of the baby!” She wipes the tears from her eyes.

Over the course of the next few days, he puts his ideas into motion, building large wooden buckets and placing them in front of the southern window. He fills them with dirt and plants potatoes, peas, beans, cabbages and tomatoes. Outside, against the south side of the house, he turns the soil and plants corn, making sure to cover the plants every night to protect them from frost.

Snow and frost continue every month until late October, when winter decides to come and stay. By this time, they have managed to raise a small supply of every plant, enough to last through the winter, if used sparingly, Abbey, able to can much of it.

A lack of berries during the spring and summer had made the bear in the area bolder and, consequently, a large portion of their winter diet.

Late April, the man sits in a rocker in front of a fire roaring in the hearth, Samuel sound asleep on his lap. The man softly strokes the boy’s head. Opposite of them sits Abbey, reading as she rocks Sarah, who is now a month old.

Jonathan looks over at his wife, tears fill his eyes. She is the most beautiful soul he has ever seen and he feels blessed by her and their little frontier family.

The year without a summer has passed and, although they were tested, it was not a test, as Abbey said, but an opportunity, and they rose and they met it together.