Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

We were both in secondary school, and sixteen. I’d selected the science stream and was groping my way into physics and chemistry, while he’d chosen the literary life and went about fracturing Latin and Greek. Even this surprised me: when had he become interested in Latin and Greek? But given the kind of brothers we were, the question never arose.

I claimed to be interested in university; he didn’t. Our father, to whom such things mattered, called us his happy imbeciles, took pride in our skiing, and liked to say with a kind of amiability during family meals that we could do what we pleased as long as it reflected well on him.

He styled himself an Alpine guide, though considering how he dressed when in town, he might as well have been the village mayor, complete with watch fob and homburg. He always spoke as though a stroke of fate had left him in the business of helping Englishmen scale ice cliffs, and claimed to be content only at altitudes over 3,000 meters, but we knew him to be unhappy even there. The sole thing that seemed to please him were his homemade medicines. Willi considered him reproachful but carried on with whatever he wished, secure in our mother’s support. I followed his moods minutely, even as disinterest emanated from him like a vapor. We had one elder sister who found all of this distasteful and whose response was to do her chores but otherwise keep to her room, awaiting romances that arrived every few months via subscription.

Willi’s self-absorption left him impatient with experts. On our summer trek on the Eiger glacier the year before, we’d been matched for International Brotherhood Week with a hiking group from Chamonix. They spoke no German and we spoke no French, so only the teachers could converse. At one point the French teacher brought the group to a halt by cautioning us that any noise where we stood could topple the ice seracs looming above us.

Willi and I had been on glaciers since we were eight. While everyone watched, he scaled the most dangerous-looking of the seracs and, having established his balance at the top, shouted loud enough to have brought down the Eiger’s north face. “What’s French for ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’?” he called to our teacher as he climbed back down.

We were to base our day around one of the ski huts above Kleine Scheidegg. The village itself, on a high pass, consists of three hotels for skiers and climbers and the train station and some maintenance buildings serving the Jungfraubahn, but our group managed to lose one of our classmates there anyway — a boy from the remote highlands where a cowherd might spend the entire summer in a hut, with his cows and family separated only by a waist-high divider — and by the time he was located we were already an hour behind schedule. We were led by one of the schoolmistresses who held a ski instructor’s certificate and her assistant, a twenty-year-old engineering student named Jenny. They had as their responsibility fourteen boys and ten girls.

In summer, the ski run to which we were headed involved a steep climb along the edge of a dark forest broken by occasional sunlit clearings, before the trees thinned out and there were meadows where miniature butterflies wavered on willowherbs and moss campion. Immediately above sheep and goats found their upland pastures. Above that were only rocks and the occasional ibex. An escarpment above the rocks was ideal for wind-sheltered forts. We’d discovered it on our ninth birthday. Willi said it was one of those rare places where nothing could be grown or sold, that the world had produced exclusively for someone’s happiness. In winter storms the wind piled snow onto it, the cornices overhanging the mountain’s flanks below. And the night before our Sport Week outing brought strong westerly winds and a heavy accumulation on the eastern slopes. Avalanche warning bulletins had been sent to the hotels an hour after our departure.

We spread ourselves out around the bowl of the main slope. Some of us had climbed in chaps for greater waterproofing and were still shedding them and checking our bindings when our schoolmistress led the others down into the bowl. The postmaster’s daughter, Ruth Lindner, of whom Willi and I both retained fantasies, waited behind with us while we horsed about, setting her hands atop her poles in a counterfeit of patience. She had red hair and pale smooth skin and a habit, when laughing with us, of lowering her eyes to our mouths, and this we found impossibly stirring.

The skiers who’d set off were already slaloming a hundred yards below. We’d been taught from the cradle that however much we thought we knew, in winter there were always places where our ignorance and bad luck could destroy us. A heavy new snowmass above and an unstable bowl below: in this sort of circumstance our father would have cautioned us, if uncertain, to back away.

“Race you,” I said.

“ Race me?” Willi answered. And he nosed his ski tips out over the bowl edge.

“See if you can stay on your feet,” I teased him from above, flumphing my uphill ski down into a drift.

There was a deep cutting sound, like shears tearing through heavy fabric. The snowfield split all the way across the bowl, and the entire slab, half a kilometer across, broke free, taking Willi with it. He was enveloped immediately. Ruth shrieked. I helped her pole herself farther back. The tons of snow roaring down caught the skiers below and carried them away in seconds. One little girl managed to remain upright on a cascading wave but then she too was upended and buried, the clouds of snowdust obscuring everything else.

Guides climbing up from the hotels spread the alarm and already had the rescue under way when Ruth and I reached the debris field. The digging went on for thirty-six hours and fifteen of our classmates, including Willi and the schoolmistress, were uncovered alive. The young assistant Jenny and seven others were dug out as corpses. Two were still missing when the last of their family members stopped digging three weeks later.

My brother had been fifteen feet deep at the very back edge of the run-out. They found him with the sounding rod used for locating the road after heavy snowfalls. He’d managed to get his arm over his face and survived because of the resulting air pocket. A shattered ski tip near the surface had aided in his location. One of the rescuers who dug him out kept using the old saying “Such a terrible child!” for the difficulties they were encountering with the shocking density of the snowmass once it had packed in on itself. Not even sure if he was down there, we called for Willi to not lose heart. Ruth dug beside me and I was taken aback by the grandeur of her panic and misery. “ Help us!” she cried at one point, as if I weren’t digging as furiously as the rest.

He was under the snow for two hours. When his face was finally cleared, it was blue and he was unconscious but the guides revived him with a breathing tube even as he still lay trapped. And when someone covered his face with a hat to keep the snow from falling into his mouth and eyes, he shouted for it to be taken away, that he wanted air and light.

He was hurried home on a litter and spent the next two days recovering. I fed him oxtail soup, his favorite. His injuries seemed slight. He asked about Ruth. He answered our questions about how he felt but related nothing of the experience. When we spoke in private he peered at me strangely and looked away. On the third night, when I put out the lamp, he seemed suddenly upset and asked not to be left alone. “You’re not alone,” I said. “I’m right here.” He cried out for our mother and began a horrible rattling in his throat, at which he clawed, and I flew down the stairs to get her. By the time we returned he was dead.