CW: none.
The hearth is a trope of holiday songs and stories. It’s a warm place in a cold time, and families gather around it—for love, laughter, storytelling, a cup of cheer. This short story is an attempt at redefinition. I’m taking the familiar and approaching it from an unfamiliar, upsetting angle. The hearth is instead a place of ashes and shadows. It has a cold dead throat that whistles and moans. A reminder of gaping loss. The seed of the story first came to me when I was hiking through the woods one winter and came across an old farmstead that was mostly gone and decayed—except for the hearth and chimney—the graying spine of someone’s lost dream.
1898. Red River Valley. Minnesota.
It was the first thing Frederick built after he finished the foundation. A great open hearth that rose into a chimney. The polished stones were harvested from a river and a roughly planed oak plank served as the mantle. This was Astrid’s idea. His wife wanted the hearth for cooking, yes, but also for gathering. The light and comfort of the fire—especially in the depths of winter—would keep their marriage in good spirits, she said. It would be the heart of their home.
And its backbone too. That’s what it looked like—a great gray spine—that the construction grew around all summer. Frederick felled oaks and maples, and these became the lumber for the two-story farmhouse. The stumps were burned and the ground leveled for the wheat and corn they would plant in May.
But first they had to endure the cold. It arrived in October as a frosty gust that tore the leaves off the trees and whistled down the throat of the chimney. The winter that followed felt familiar. Frederick and Astrid came to Minnesota from Norway, like so many others before them, and the biting wind and snow drifts and failing light were not so different from what they knew.
Frederick had hair so blonde it was almost white. Astrid’s was the yellow-red you can find in certain honeys and at the edge of a candle flame. Both were tall, but he had a bulk to him that creaked the wide-plank floorboards. He said little, but she spoke or sang constantly, filling up the silence between them.
“Aren’t you glad for the hearth?” she said to Frederick when they sat by the crackling fire to read the Bible, to practice their English, to play cribbage, to make love, to manage their accounting and draw up plans for a barn and silo and corncrib and chicken coop, and of course to eat and drink.
Here, as at their old home in Svalbard, food helped them survive the long dark. They ate rømmegrøt and sunbuckles and krumkake and it warmed their bellies. They ate lefse smeared with butter and sprinkled with sugar, and it bent their mouths into smiles. They augered holes in the lake ice and the northerns and smallmouth bass they pulled from the dark water made for good fish balls and fish soup and lutefisk.
It was a time of waiting. The dormancy allowed them to dream. They spoke constantly about the future. The crops they would plant. The animals they would buy. The outbuildings they would construct. The children they would have. They could almost see their vision of what would come to pass in the swirling dream of snow out their windows.
But then the minister—at the Lutheran church, on the first Sunday of Advent, during the lighting of the wreath—began to cough. And the coughing blew out the beeswax candle. And the coughing lasted through the hymns and the sermon and the benediction. And the coughing followed Frederick and Astrid home.
Tuberculosis had spread through the state and now it spread through their lungs. After two weeks, Frederick felt bruised but better. Astrid was not so lucky. Sometimes she coughed so long and so hard she lost her breath and her body shuddered in choking silence. Sometimes fever baked her skin and sometimes she shivered beneath five quilts. She had no appetite, not even for the lefse she loved, but even when Frederick demanded she eat, she couldn’t keep anything down. Her glands swelled. Her bones ached from the bacteria in her marrow. And then the coughing stopped.
There was a funeral service, but Frederick could barely remember it. Instead of the future, he was now thinking only about the gift of the past, when they were together. She did and did not feel as if she were gone. And he was ungrounded, existing between continents and lives. The ground was frozen, so she could not be buried until spring, the time when they had planned to plant their fields. She was not really gone then—that was what it felt like.
He sat beside the hearth. He could not bring himself to start a fire and the split wood sat there graying like a stack of bones. When the wind rose, a cold draft found him and tightened his skin. There was a whistling and moaning, even a songlike babble to it. He was certain he heard her voice. She spoke of the sweater she had knitted for him as a Christmas gift and of the whipped cream and cloudberries she would make for him that night. She spoke of all the work they had to do and all the love they had to share and all the years they had yet to spend together. She spoke of their future together in this new place they had traveled so far to claim.
First he leaned forward in his chair to listen. Then he squatted in the ashes dirtying the hearth. And then, finally, when the wind rose again and she called out brightly to him, he climbed up the chimney to join her.
