A fictional tale based on a true story

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                During the early evening of Valentine’s Day, two young women dressed in red frocks stood in the side door of Gram’s farmhouse. They’d heard something outside, and chattered like crickets.

                “There’s somebody . . . in that tree!”

                “That’s just a cow that got out of the feed lot.”

                In the dark, neither wanted to investigate and the men were in the back room sprucing up.

                Next Monday, Uncle Budd would be leaving for the Navy and Uncle Rollo, the Marines. Tonight, they were taking their girlfriends to a dinner-dance.

                A light snow had fallen since noon, whitening the trees, garden, chicken yard and outhouse. The lane to the main road was still safe enough, Gram said, for Uncle Budd to drive.

                Because the women said something was outside, I crawled into Gram’s lap. She rocked fast and hummed loudly. It would be morning before I knew why.

                I slept with Gram. The front door of her old unpainted house opened into her bedroom, and every night, she forced a table knife into the door frame for protection. Grandpa had died years ago.

                I awoke to breakfast smells. Bacon sizzled, and Gram’s coffeepot stuttered on the wood stove. Biscuits baked. Gram was humming a song I had learned in Sunday school: “If I have wounded any soul today; if I have caused one foot to go astray . . . dear Lord, forgive.”

                A sob grabbed her voice. Tears rippled down and dripped onto her apron. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and turned away when she saw me looking. I drank my cocoa and bit my lip, trying not to cry myself, hoping it wasn’t anything I had done.

                From the kitchen window, I could see my uncles out by the oak. They bent down, pointed, and then tracked through the snow out to the lane.

                The women came out from the back room, bundled for a trip to the outhouse.

                When the grownups came back in, Uncle Budd was carrying a pair of snowy shoes with holes in the soles. Someone HAD been in the tree, and he’d left his shoes on the back porch.

                Gram couldn’t hold her secret any longer. “When you were getting ready last night, Mr. Ubergang came to the door hoping to get warm. He was in such a state he could hardly talk. I was afraid and shooed him away.”

                The old dairy farmer must have walked from his home in the woods, across the nearby creek, past Gram’s, up the lane and then down the highway to Tucker’s Grog Shop. A neighbor said the owner had closed down before the weather turned bad, and that Tuck had sent his customers home.

                Mr. Ubergang had stopped at Gram’s and when she refused him entry, he lay down on the lowest tree limb. Sometime during the night, he must have found a spot on the back porch out of the wind, taken off his shoes and lay down.

                At daybreak, Mr. Ubergang had trudged home in his stockinged feet. My uncles followed his footprints to the low-water bridge.

                We heard later that his feet had frozen and had to be amputated. 

We never told Gram.