Come here now you little boys and girls, come here and sit by the radiator and listen to an old man talk too much. That’s it, come on in – yes, you too there, big fellow. You’re all little boys and girls to me, eh?
That’s it, come here and listen. The chilly wind is blowing outside; you hear that? You feel that? Jack frost left his fingerprints all over the windows last night; you saw that? You felt that?
Now let me tell you a story then, about that same wind, about a time back when your father’s fathers were little boys.
Those were the days when Riverside was at its height! The men were real men, their pipes were real pipes, heaped high with authoritative soot! The women were real women, their smiles real plastic! The children were real children, obedient and sparkling clean under threat of wilting disapproval! Yes sir, those were the days of the days. But I digress, and what’s worse, I stray from the root of my tale.
You see, life in Riverside was not all that it appeared to be, at least not all year round. Oh the spring sparkled, the summer simmered, the autumn was lush with great feats of yardsmanship and lawnrakery – those were the days! The days, I tell you!
But this suburban community held a dark and terrible secret, a blemish upon an otherwise flawless apple – the sort of apple you might put in a good-old-fashioned one-hundred-and-ten-per-cent-American pie. And it was so shameful that they spoke of it to no outsider. Each newcomer to Riverside only learned the troublesome truth when the first signed of winter came to them, when the chilly breeze blew. And blow it did that one November day, when the frost spackled the windows of the squat little suburban home owned by the squat little suburban family that was the Hoovers. Short, sweet, always-smiling Helena; lanky, loutish, too-loud William; whiny, wimpy, bed-wetting Jack, and Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover might have had a first name, but if he did, no one dared speak it aloud. They might get a Stern Look. Some fathers would lecture you, but not Mr. Hoover – never Mr. Hoover. A single moment of paternal authority through eye contact and you would be begging to be thrashed.
But today Mr. Hoover’s thoughts were elsewhere. The chilly wind had blown. Last night, Jack Frost had crept across the windowsills of Riverside and left his handiwork glittering for the children to innocently coo at in the morning, little tykes. For them it was a seasonal wonder.
For Mr. Hoover, and every other red-blooded all-American man in Riverside, it was a warning.
Mr. Hoover looked out the window, brow furrowed in fatherly thoughts as he watched his neighbours go about their business, planning for the future.
“The tramp is nearly here,” whispered the Joneses across the road, as they boarded up their car tight as a drum.”
“Winter’s coming,” muttered the whippersnapper next door as he triple-reinforced the flimsy roof of his convertible with rolls and rolls of masking tape.
“Goodbye,” said an old man to his driveway, stroking its asphalt surface as he held back the tears.
Mr. Hoover’s looked at his own, brand-new car, the pride of the household, as it sat in his immaculate driveway, and his finely chiselled jaw moved. Calling it clenching may have been too hasty, but it most definitely tensed.
What Mr. Hoover said to his wife after that, well, no one knows what he said. Probably nothing, because Mr. Hoover never spoke, merely commanded with firm, authoritative gestures of tie-straightening, eyebrow-raising, and pointed-looking. Mr. Hoover never spoke because that would unclench the pipe from between his teeth, and that was something that would not do, would never do. It had been his father’s pipe, and his father’s before him, and his father’s before him, and Mr. Hoover would hang himself with his best tie before he would let that heirloom be taken from his living lips.
That’s why we don’t know what Mr. Hoover said to his wife on that fateful evening. We know only that he gave a manly and authoritative nod to each of his children, clucked her under the chin, and strode out the door with his hat and coat.
Mr. Hoover stopped in the garage on his way and stayed there for some hours, tinkering with his tools as the sun fell down along with the temperature. The neighbourhood emptied with quiet panic, every single suburbanite holding their breath, waiting for something they were all-too-familiar worth, a named, known fear that was even worse than the strange and unfamiliar. Probably. Maybe. If the strange and unfamiliar went to the right sort of parties and had the right kind of job and combed its hair properly.
The sun set. The curtains of every window in house on every street of Riverside snapped shut at once – bar one. And Mr. Hoover stepped out of his garage.
It was dark and quiet and cold. No dogs barked, and the wind was low and cruel, hissing through the bare branches of each and every one of the single trees permitted upon each lot. The sky was a dead black blot, without so much as the glimmer of a single star or the reflection of light from that horrible “Sputnik” thing that the godless commies had shot up into outer space a few months ago, god knew if they’d be launching atomic bombs up there next, the fiendish red bastards.
There was a new sound. A soft whirl and moan, the whisk of a thousand thousand little bits of cold hard water hitting a new surface every tidbit of a second, far away at first and getting closer imperceptibly quickly.
Nobody was brave enough to look out those windows, but if they had, they would’ve seen a tall, white figure at the head of the oncoming blizzard, a lady that walked the way a proper lady should: with prim, forthright, businesslike daintiness. Where her heels touched, the whiteness spread like wildfire. The street became a mire, the sidewalks hillocks, and at each and every driveway she stopped and knelt and planted a tiny seed of snowflakes. And as she turned her back, each of them blossomed into a snowbank that made the mightiest pile of October leaves look puny, engulfing cars, consuming steps, encroaching saucily upon the doorframes.
The white lady came to the Hoover’s driveway, and stopped. Mr. Hoover was standing in her way, coat frosted over with shining silver from the sky. His pipe was held in his teeth with firm will and steady jaws, with only the frantic weaving of its smoke to betray the strength of the biting wind. A strange instrument was loosely gripped by his right hand, something that wasn’t quite a spade, still bearing the fresh scratch marks of its creation. The snow seemed to slide away from its edge.
The white lady gestured imperiously. Surely a man might be so bold as to approach her, but only to kneel in her presence or at the very least hold open a door. She was of a class quite beyond that of these peasants, no matter how impressive the grades received by their two point five children of indeterminate sex, the lustre of their lawns, or the magnificent of their newly purchased automobiles.
Mr. Hoover stiffly tipped his hat, but nothing more.
The white lady slapped him.
The air cracked for half a block with the approach of her palm, and the smack struck with the sharpness of a honed thunderbolt, just high-pitched enough to make a dog yelp. Falling snowflakes for half a block froze into hail in midair and dropped like stones; the lake crusted over with two feet of ice; Mr. and Mrs. Joneses, who’d forgotten to turn on the heat before going to bed, woke up as frost formed on every surface in their bedroom at once.
Mr. Hoover did not flinch, although his tie was knocked quite askew by the impact. Slowly, carefully, he reached up with his left hand and readjusted the vital piece of attire. Then he eased both hands into a batter’s grip on his not-a-spade, wound up, and struck.
What happened next can’t be said, little boys and little girls – the window frosted over so fast and so hard that my nose – which was pressed up against it, as you can see – froze right up at the time and nearly fell off. The doctors made quite a fuss over it, but not nearly as much as I did at having to miss what happened out there that night on fifteen Maplerow Avenue, Riverside. The aluminium siding on our home nearly shook itself all to pieces with the thunder and fury of the night’s battle, and it wasn’t until nearly six in the morning that it fell quiet outside.
Past dawn that morning, Helena, Jack, and me got out of bed and walked outside. The strangest sight met our eyes: our driveway was completely empty of snow, spotless except for three things: a tattered and snapped high-heeled shoe (white), a battered old pipe, and a strange and miraculous wide-bladed shovel that looked to have been quickly hammered out of a spade, the likes of which we’d never seen.
The rest is history, boys and girls. Once we’d given that thing a try on the Joneses’s driveway and saw what it did, snowed-in cars became a thing of the past – especially once word of what had happened, or might have happened, the night before. Soon driveways were being cleared without fear, cars once abandoned tearfully for the whole winter scraped free of frost overnight in a matter of hours. Women sobbed in relief, men nodded with a hint of moisture in their eyes, and all the other kids at school gave me and Jack their chocolate milk all winter. Which almost made up for all the shovelling.
We haven’t seen the white lady since. And neither have we seen Mr. Hoover.
But we keep the shovels close to our beds, and we haven’t given away the pipe yet. Just in case.