December in Milburn; Milburn moving toward Christmas. The town’s memory is long, and this month has always meant certain things, maple sugar candy and skating on the river and lights and trees in the stores and skiing on the hills just outside of town. In December, under several inches of snow, Milburn always took on a festive, almost magically pretty look. A tall tree always went up in the square, and Eleanor Hardie matched its lights by decorating the front of the Archer Hotel. Children lined up before Santa Claus in Young Brothers’ department store and put in their non-negotiable demands for Christmas—only the older ones noticed that Santa looked and smelled a little bit like Omar Norris. (December always reconciled Omar not only with his wife, but also with himself—he cut his drinking in half, and talked to the few cronies he had about “moonlighting down at the store.”) As his father had done, Norbert Clyde always drove his old horse-drawn sleigh through town and gave the kids rides so they would know what real sleighbells sounded like— and would know the feeling of skimming along through pine-smelling air behind two good horses. And as his father had done, Elmer Scales pulled open a gate in one of his pasture fences and let the town people come out to sled down a hill at the edge of his property: you always saw half a dozen station wagons pulled up alongside the fence, and half a dozen young fathers pulling Flexible Flyers laden with excited children up Elmer’s hill. Some families pulled taffy in their kitchens; some families roasted chestnuts in their fireplaces. Humphrey Stalladge put up red and green lights over the bar, and started making Tom and Jerries. Milburn wives swapped recipes for Christmas cookies; the butchers took orders for twenty-pound turkeys and gave away recipes for turkey gravy. Eight-year-olds in the grade school cut out trees from colored paper and pasted them to classroom windows. High school kids concentrated more on hockey than English and history, and thought about the records they’d buy with the holiday checks from aunts and uncles. The Kiwanis and Rotary and the Kaycees held a huge party in the ballroom of the Archer Hotel, with three bartenders imported from Binghamton, and cleared several thousand dollars for the Golden Agers fund; from this evening, and from all the cocktail parties the younger, newer residents of Milburn held—the people who still did not look quite familiar to Sears and Ricky, though they might have lived in Milburn for years—people came to work with headaches and queasy stomachs.

This year there still were a few cocktail parties and women still made Christmas cookies, but December in Milburn was different. People who met in Young Brother’s department store didn’t say “Isn’t it nice to have a white Christmas?” but “I hope this snow doesn’t keep up”; Omar Norris had to stay on the municipal snowplow all day long, and junior clerks said they’d get into his Santa suit only if someone fumigated it first; the mayor and Hardesty’s deputies set up an enormous tree, but Eleanor Hardie didn’t have the heart to decorate the front of the hotel—indeed she began to look so harried and lost that a tourist couple from New York City took one glance at her and decided on the spot to keep on going until they found a motel. And Norbert Clyde, the first time ever, didn’t take his sleigh out of his barn and grease up the runners: ever since seeing that “thing” on his land, he had gone into a funny decline. You could hear him at Humphrey’s or other bars on the outskirts of town, saying that the County Farm Agent didn’t know his ass from his elbow, and that if people had any sense they’d start paying a little more attention to Elmer Scales, who didn’t open up his gate to let the sledders onto his hill, but skipped dinners and scribbled crazy poetry and waited up nights with his loaded twelve-gauge over his knees. His tribe of children sledded on the hill by themselves, feeling ostracized. Snow fell all day, all night; the drifts at first covered fences, and then reached the eaves of the houses. In the second two weeks of December, the schools were closed for eight days: the high school’s heating system failed, and the board shut it down until mid-January, when a heating engineer from Binghamton was finally able to get into town. The grade school closed a few days later: the roads were treacherous, and after the school bus went into a ditch twice in one morning, the parents would have kept their kids home anyway. People of the age of Ricky and Sears—those who were the town’s memory—looked back to the winters of 1947 and 1926, when no traffic had come in or out of Milburn for weeks, and fuel had run out and old folks (who were no older than the present ages of Sears and Ricky) had, along with Viola Frederickson of the auburn hair and exotic face, frozen to death.

This December Milburn looked less like a village on a Christmas card than a village under siege. The Dedham girls’ horses, forgotten even by Nettie, starved and died in their stables. This December, people stayed in their houses more than they were used to, and tempers wore thin—some broke. Philip Kneighler, one of the new Milburnites, went inside and beat up his wife after his snow blower broke down on his driveway. Ronnie Byrum, a nephew of Harlan Bautz’s home on leave from the Marines, objected to the harmless remarks of a man standing beside him in a bar and broke his nose: he would have broken his jaw if two of Ronnie’s old high school buddies had not pinned his arms back. Two sixteen-year-old boys named Billy Byrum (Ronnie’s brother) and Anthony “Spacemaker” Ortega concussed a younger boy who insisted on talking through the eight-twenty-five showing of Night of the Living Dead at Clark Mulligan’s Rialto Theater. All over Milburn couples locked together in their houses quarreled about their babies, their money, their television programs. A deacon of the Holy Ghost Presbyterian Church—the same church of which Lewis’s father had once been pastor—locked himself in the unheated building one night two weeks before Christmas and wept and cursed and prayed all night because he thought he was going crazy: he thought he had seen the naked boy Jesus standing on a snowdrift outside the church windows, begging him to come out.

At the Bay Tree Market, Rhoda Flagler pulled a clump of blond hair out of the scalp of Bitsy Underwood because Bitsy had challenged her right to the last three cans of pureed pumpkin: with the trucks unable to make deliveries, all the stocks were getting low. In the Hollow, an unemployed bartender named Jim Blazek knifed and killed a mulatto short-order cook named Washington de Souza because a tall man with a shaven head who dressed like a sailor had told Blazek that de Souza was messing around with his wife.

During the sixty-two days from the first of December to the thirty-first of January, these ten citizens of Milburn died of natural causes: George Fleischner (62), heart attack; Whitey Rudd (70), malnutrition; Gabriel Fish (58), exposure; Omar Norris (61), exposure following concussion; Marion Le Sage (73), stroke; Ethel Bin (76), Hodgkin’s Disease; Dylan Griffen (5 months), hypothermia; Harlan Bautz (55), heart attack; Nettie Dedham (81), stroke; Penny Draeger (18), shock. Most of these died during the worst of the snows, and their bodies, along with those of Washington de Souza and several others, had to be kept, stacked and covered with sheets in one of the unused utility cells in Walter Hardesty’s tiny jail—the wagon from the morgue in the county seat couldn’t make it into Milburn.

The town closed in on itself, and even the ice skating on the river died out. At first, the skating went as it always had: every hour of daylight saw twenty or thirty high school students, mixed in with kids from elementary school, dashing back and forth, playing crack the whip and skating backward: a print by Currier and Ives. But if the high school juniors and seniors who swept off the ice never noticed the death of three old women and four old men and did not much mourn the passing of their dentist, another loss hit them like a slap in the face as soon as they glided out onto the frozen river. Jim Hardie had been the best skater Milburn had ever seen, and he and Penny Draeger had worked out tandem routines which looked to their contemporaries as good as anything you saw in the Olympics. Peter Barnes had been nearly as good, but he refused to come skating this year; even when the weather paused, Peter stayed at home. But Jim was the one they missed: even when he showed up in the morning with bloodshot eyes and a stubble on his cheeks, he had enlivened them all—you couldn’t watch him without trying to skate a little better yourself. Now even Penny did not show up. Like Peter Barnes, she had drifted away into privacy. Soon, most of the other skaters did the same: every day more snow had to be shoveled off the river, and some of the boys doing the shoveling thought that Jim Hardie was not in New York after all; they had a feeling that something had happened to Jim —something they didn’t want to think about too much. Days before it was proven, they knew that Jim Hardie was dead.

One day during his afternoon break Bill Webb picked up his battered old hockey skates from his locker behind the restaurant and walked over to the river and looked dully at the two untouched feet of fresh snow blanketing it. For this winter, the skating was dead too.

Clark Mulligan never bothered to book the new Disney film he always brought in at Christmas, but ran horror movies all through the season. Some nights he had seven or eight customers, some nights only two or three; other nights he started up the first reel of Night of the Living Dead and knew he was showing it only to himself. Saturday’s matinee usually brought out ten or fifteen kids who had already seen the movie but couldn’t think of anything else to do. He began letting them in for free. Every day he lost a little more money, but at least the Rialto got him away from home; as long as the power lines stayed up, he could keep warm and busy, and that was all he wanted. One night he walked down from the booth to see if anybody had bothered to sneak in through the fire door, and saw Penny Draeger sitting beside a wolf-faced man wearing sunglasses: Clark hurried back up to his projection booth, but he was sure the man had grinned at him before he could turn away. He didn’t know why, but that frightened him —badly.

For the first time in most of their lives, Milburn people saw the weather as malevolent, a hostile force that would kill them if they let it. Unless you got up on your roof and knocked off the snow, the rafter beams would crack and buckle under its weight, and in ten minutes your house would be a frigid ruined shell, uninhabitable until spring; the wind chill factor sometimes brought the temperature down to sixty below, and if you stayed outside for much longer than it took to run from your car to your house, you could near the wind chuckling in your inner ear, knowing that it had you where it wanted you. That was one enemy, the worst they knew. But after Walt Hardesty and one of his deputies identified the bodies of Jim Hardie and Christina Barnes, and word got around about the condition of their bodies, Milburn people drew their drapes and switched on their television instead of going out to their neighbor’s party and wondered if it was a bear after all that killed handsome Lewis Benedikt. And when, like Milly Sheehan, they saw that a line of snow had worked in around the storm window and lay like a taunt on the sill, they began to think about what else might get in. So they, like the town, closed in; shut down; thought about survival. A few remembered Elmer Scales standing in front of the statue, waving his shotgun and ranting about Martians. Only four people knew the identity of an enemy more hostile than the murderous weather.