Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

“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, above him, and flumphed my uphill ski down into a drift.

There was a deep cutting sound like shears through heavy fabric. The snowfield split all the way across the bowl, and the entire slab, a quarter of a mile across, broke free, taking Willi with it. He was enveloped immediately. Ruth shrieked. I helped her pole herself farther back out of the bowl. The tons of snow roaring down caught the skiers below and carried them all away. 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 snow mass once it had packed in on itself. We called for Willi to not lose heart, not even sure if he was down there. 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 I questioned him in private he peered at me strangely and looked away. On the third night when we put out the lamp he seemed suddenly upset and asked not to be left alone. I said, “You’re not alone; I’m right here.” He cried out for our mother and began a horrible rattling in his throat, at which he clawed. I flew down the stair-steps to get her. By the time we returned he was dead.

The doctor called in another doctor, who called in a third. Each tramped slush through our house and drank coffee while he hypothesized and my mother trailed from room to room in his wake, tidying and weeping until she could barely stand. Their final opinion was contentious but two of the three favored delayed shock as the cause of death. The third held forth on the keys to survival in such a situation, one being the moral and physical strength of the victim. He was thrown bodily out of the house by my father.

How should our mother have survived such a thing? The inquiry into the tragedy held that the group leaders-the schoolmistress and dead Jenny-were blameless, but the parents of the children swept away decided otherwise, and within a year the miserable and ostracized schoolmistress was forced to resign her post.

Our mother had always seemed to carry within herself some quality of calm against which adverse circumstances contended in vain, but in this case she couldn’t purge her rage at the selfishness of those whose blitheness had put the less foolhardy at risk. She received little support from my father, who refused to assign blame, so she took to calling our home “our miserable little kingdom,” and mounting what questions she could at the dinner table as if blank with fatigue.

By May, scraps from the two missing children poked through the spring melt like budding plants, and in the course of a day or two a glove, a scarf, and a ski pole turned up. Renewed digging recovered one of the little girls, her body facedown, her arms extended downhill, her back broken, and her legs splayed up and over it.

Our mother talked to everyone she considered knowledgeable about the nature of what had happened, and why. From as early as we could remember, she’d always gathered information of one kind or another. I’d never known anyone with a more hospitable mind. My sister often complained that no one could spend any time in our mother’s company without learning something. She was the sort of woman who recorded items of interest in a journal kept in her bedroom, and she joked to our father when teased about it that it represented a store of observations that would someday be more systematically confirmed as scientific research. Why did one snowfall of a given depth produce avalanches when another did not? Why was the period of maximum danger those few hours immediately following the storm? Why might any number of people cross a slope in safety only to have some other member of their party set the disaster in motion? She remembered from childhood a horrible avalanche in her grandmother’s village: a bridge and four houses had been destroyed and a nine-year-old boy entombed in his bed, still clutching his cherished stuffed horse.

She spent more time with me as her preoccupation intensified. There was no one else. Her daughter had grown into a long, thin adult with a glum capacity for overwork and no interest in the business of the world. We had few visitors, but if one overstayed his welcome my sister would twist her hair and wonder audibly, as if interrogating herself, “Why doesn’t he leave? Why doesn’t he leave?”

One early morning I found my mother on my bed. When she saw I was awake, she remarked that Willi’s shoulders had been so broad that it made him appear shorter than he was. “And mine, too,” I said. “And yours, too,” she smiled. Somewhere far away a dog was barking as if beside itself with alarm.

I told her I thought I might have started the avalanche. She said, “You didn’t start the avalanche.” I told her I might have, though I hadn’t yet explained how. She reminded me of the farmers’ old saying that they didn’t make the hay; the sun made the hay.

“I think I made the avalanche,” she finally suggested. When I asked what she was talking about, she wondered if I remembered the Oberlanders’ tale of the cowherd whose mother thought he’d gone astray and, in a rage at having been offered only spoiled milk by his new wife, called on ice from the mountain above to come bury her son and his wife and all of their cows.

How old was I then? Seventeen. But even someone that young could be shocked by his own paralysis in the face of need. My mother sat on my bed picking her heart to pieces and I suffered at the spectacle and accepted her caresses and wept along with her and fell asleep comforted, and failed to offer my own account of what might have happened, whether it would have helped or not. The subject was dropped. And that morning more than any other is what’s driven me to avalanche research.

Bucher’s a good Christian but even he gave up the long ski down to services after a few weeks, and instead we spend our Sabbaths admiring the calm of early morning in the mountains. The sun peeps over the sentinel peaks behind us and the entire snow-covered world becomes a radiance thrown back at the sky. The only sounds are those we make. On our trips to Davos for supplies, Bader and I for a few months held a mock competition for the affections of an Alsatian widow who negotiated the burden of her sexual magnetism with an appealing modesty. Then in February I slipped on an ice sheet outside a bakery and bounced down two flights of steps. “So much for the surviving Eckel brother,” Ruth Lindner said in response from across the street.