WHEN JUSTICE WOKE before dawn and felt the cold in the air, deeper and crueler than it had been the day before, she considered not getting out of bed. The old house, the old blankets, her tired old bones, they were no protection against a cold so deep, and the long years of her life stretching behind her no shield against what it meant.
It was too cold, too early. The fruit had only just ripened on the trees, and already it was frozen. There would be no harvest this year. It was only the first of September, but winter was here to stay.
The year was 1919, and in the span of half a decade Justice’s family had shrunk from a noisy, boisterous crowd of daughters and sons and husbands and wives to a small, quiet knot, barely enough to fill the house anymore. The most recent to pass had been her niece Charity, gone in her sleep a few days ago, now buried beneath the first early frost.
With Charity gone they were three: Justice, her daughter, her granddaughter.
Today the morning was even colder.
Justice dressed in the half-light of a gray dawn, pulled on an overcoat patched at the elbows, and stepped outside. There was a line of footsteps already scraped through the frost, and when she saw it despair washed over her again, thicker and blacker now, a fog as heavy and dark as a midwinter storm. She had not heard her daughter Faith rise from her bed in the night. She had not heard her walk down the creaking stairs and through the door that squeaked on its hinges. If she hadn’t been so tired, her back so sore from wielding a shovel the day before, she might have heard. They had buried Charity yesterday, although she had been slipping away for much longer, ever since three telegrams had arrived, one cruel blow after another. All three of her sons, barely old enough to be called men but old enough to go to war, were gone.
Justice was an old woman, and she felt old in every limb, every joint, but until that summer she had not thought herself old enough to see her grandsons die. They were only boys. Boys with uniforms and guns, but still children in her heart. Neither had she thought herself old enough to hold Charity while she wept, to watch her grow pale and silent as summer turned toward fall, to see the moment her spirit failed, to count the days until her last breath.
It seemed so very unfair that the longer she lived, the more grief clung to her like long evening shadows, a weight no new dawn could chase away.
She followed Faith’s path, although she knew where it led and what she would find at the end. She plucked apples as she walked and found every fruit on every tree, and all those fallen to the ground, frozen solid, bitter pale flesh turned hard as stone. She flung the first few into the orchard with furious force, but dropped the last one, tired, feeling foolish for her outburst, impotent in her anger.
They had gathered only three bushels before Charity died and the first frost came.
Three bushels. Justice walked through the orchard in old shoes worn thin at the soles, and in her mind she counted: jars in the root cellar, strips of meat drying in the shed, goats in the pen, firewood stacked beside the barn, what she could ask of neighbors and what would be offered, coins in the metal tin on the shelf, and three bitter bushels. It did not add up to much.
The ground dipped into the hollow, the cold deepened, and the cemetery grove was just ahead.
Justice and her twin, Righteous, had given birth within days of each other, and they had mixed up their babies long ago, laying them side by side in the same crib one night. It was said a mother ought to know if the child suckling at her breast was her own and not her sister’s, but they hadn’t, and they had laughed about it. Their grandfather, old and forgetful by then but still doting on his great-granddaughters with a white-whiskered smile, had fashioned tiny bracelets for each girl, a single glass bead on a leather tie. Red for Charity, blue for Faith, and a laughing hope the right baby had got the right bead. The girls had grown up as though they were a second set of twins, sisters rather than cousins, and they had married a pair of brothers and raised their own children as siblings—Charity’s three boys, all killed near the German border before Armistice, and Faith’s daughter Joyful, the one who remained, once spoiled as a beloved little sister, now an only child, prone to singing and talking too loud to fill the silence her brothers had left behind.
When Righteous had died, Justice had thought she could not survive without her twin, her other half. She had been killed in what all claimed was a hunting accident, never mind that it had happened in broad daylight, on a clear day, not half a mile from the border of the Abrams farm.
But somehow, achingly, tiredly, as though her bones were hollowing out with every passing year, Justice had endured. She had lived when her sister could not. She had their daughters to care for, and an orchard to protect.
Faith had not been able to do the same. She lay now on her sister’s grave, atop the mound of soil not yet settled. She was wearing only her nightdress, and her feet were bare. Her hair was as dark as polished wood, her skin the same pale blue as the ice-cracked dawn sky.
Justice stood beside the grave for a long, long moment, looking down at both of her girls. One curled like a child on the ground above the grave, the other buried below, and she thought: If a single bird dares loose a song, I will shatter. If a single breath of wind disturbs the crackling dry leaves, I will begin to scream and I shall never stop. The silence was her armor, its reaching tendrils snaking through her ribs to turn her tired old heart from muscle to stone. If it broke, she would too, and the pieces would be too scattered to ever come together again.
She knelt beside her girls, knees cracking, and brushed the frost from Faith’s skin. The flesh was still soft, still pliable. Faith’s eyes were open, her face angled upward, as though she were gazing at the ash tree she had, only yesterday, planted for her sister. She looked older in death, waxy and hollow.
Justice’s knees ached and the sting of frost crept through her old dress and overcoat. She could stay, if her body did not find the strength to rise. The blood could grow sluggish in her veins. Her breath could crystallize. The ground was frozen. They would not be able to bury Faith until spring, and the orchard would mourn. The winter would be long and bitter. How many deaths, how much grief would it take to bring about a winter to last forever? How cold could the orchard become before tears turned to ice, carving tracks down cheeks?
She could stay with her girls.
But in the house her granddaughter, Joyful, would be rising to set a fire in the stove and heat yesterday’s porridge, and she would be singing, singing like the first brave robin to emerge after a snowstorm, singing though her heart was broken, and Justice could not make her eat breakfast alone.
Justice wiped the tears from her cheeks—almost scalding on her fingers—and rose.
Three bushels of apples would last longer with only two mouths to feed.