Blue Glass, Warm Stone
The wool of Sena's mittens had frozen stiff, and she rubbed it soft between her palms until it gave. Snow sat on the woodshed latch in a small white loaf. She knocked it off with her thumb. Behind her, Bram came up the path with his tin lantern swinging from one paw, and the wire handle knocked against the side as he walked. Tink. Tink. Tink. It was the sound of every winter evening in the village, as ordinary as chimney smoke. "You're early," Sena said. "Dark's early," said Bram. His stripes had gone white along the top where the snow had settled on him. The candle inside his lantern was not burning, and had not been burning for most of the way.
Sena cupped her hands around the lantern and looked at it properly. It had four sides, and three of them held glass. The fourth was an open square with a tooth of old putty in one corner. "Autumn," said Bram. "The woodpile leaned on it. My fault, really. I stacked it tall." He set the lantern on the step. "The wind finds the gap and that's that." "So you walk home dark." "I walk home dark," he agreed, "and I know the path, but I like to see the step before I meet it with my nose." The wind came along the lane just then, lifting loose snow, and the handle knocked twice against the tin. Tink. Tink.
Inside the woodshed the air smelled of resin and sawdust, and the cold was a quiet, indoor cold. Sena found the candle tin on the shelf and counted six stubs. She took two. Then her fingers, going back into her coat pocket, met something flat and cool that she had carried all winter. It was a pane of blue glass. It had come from the kitchen window the summer the frame was mended, and she had kept it because it was the colour of deep water and because it fit her palm exactly. One corner was worn round. She had rubbed it round herself, without meaning to, walking everywhere with her hand in her pocket.
She took it out and held it in front of the open doorway. The last grey light of the day came through it and lay on the snow in a soft blue square, and the square moved when her hand moved. Sena had done this a hundred times. She did it on the bridge, and on the schoolhouse step, and once through a gap in the clouds. Bram watched the blue patch slide over the sawdust and said nothing at all, which was his way of saying something. Sena looked at the glass. Then she looked at the lantern on the step outside, with its one black empty side waiting in the dark, and she felt her chest go tight and pleased at the same time.
She crouched and laid the glass over the gap. It covered it, and more. It stuck out past the frame by the width of a finger on one side. "Too big," she said. "Only just, though." "It's yours," said Bram. "It's a good thing, that glass. I've watched you carry it since the thaw." "I've had a whole summer of looking at it," Sena said. "I'd like a winter of looking through it." She turned the pane over and found the rough grey doorstep, which the whole village used for sharpening things, and she set the edge of the glass against it. The first stroke made a small gritty sound, nothing like a tink, and left a pale dust on the stone.
It took longer than she thought. She rubbed, and checked, and rubbed again, and the glass warmed in her hand while her fingers went cold around it. She tried it in the frame too soon. It caught, tilted, and would not sit down flat. "Slow is fine," Sena said. "We have all evening." Bram held the lantern steady with both paws while she worked, and his breath came out in slow clouds that drifted past the open side. Snow fell on the back of her neck and melted there. Somewhere up the lane a door opened and shut, and the sound arrived late and soft, the way all sounds arrived here, wrapped in snow before they got to you.
She went back to the stone and took the edge down a little more, turning the pane so it wore evenly. Then she wiped the dust off on her knee and tried again. The glass slid into the frame and sat flush, snug against the old putty, as if the lantern had been waiting its whole life for exactly that piece. Bram made a low pleased sound in his throat. He dug in his coat for a short length of wire, and Sena bent it with her thumbs into two small hooks and folded them over the corners to hold the glass in. "That'll hold until spring," she said. "That'll hold until I'm old," said Bram.
Sena struck a match and set the candle stub on the lantern's little spike, and the flame stood up straight. Three sides threw plain yellow light onto the snow. The fourth threw blue. They walked a slow loop down to the woodpile and back, just to see it, and the blue strip went with them like a dog that would not be left behind. At the corner the wind came, and the flame leaned over, and Sena's shoulders went up. The flame stood again. Nothing blew out. Nothing even flickered twice. Tink, tink, said the handle, and the two of them turned at the bottom of the lane and walked back with the light swinging between them.
At Bram's door he stopped and said, "Wait a moment," and went in. Sena stood with the lantern and watched her own blue square on the step. When he came out he was carrying two flat dark stones from the top of his stove, each one wrapped in a square of grey cloth, and the warmth of them reached her before he did. "I keep two," he said. "I only ever use one. The other sits there getting hot for nobody." He put one into her hands. It weighed about as much as a loaf and it was warm the whole way through, the deep kind of warm that takes hours to arrive and hours to leave.
Sena carried the stone home against her ribs, inside her coat, with the lantern out in front. The path was blue where the light fell and grey where it didn't. Bram walked at her shoulder, unhurried as always, his feet making the squeak snow makes when it is very cold. Tink, tink went the handle. The windows along the lane were orange, and one had a cat in it, and the chapel roof had grown a lip of snow that would fall off tomorrow onto somebody. Sena thought about the glass sitting in the tin frame and about the stone sitting on Bram's stove for nobody, and she walked a little faster for the pleasure of it.
In her room she put the lantern on the windowsill, where it threw a blue patch up onto the sloped ceiling and a yellow one onto the wall. She unwrapped the stone, felt it, wrapped it again, and pushed it down under the blankets to the cold end of the bed. Then she got in after it and found it with her feet. Bram settled on the rug by the little stove, the way he did on the long nights, with his chin on his paws and his back to the warm iron. The wire handle leaned against the lantern's side and did not move, and the room was so quiet that she noticed it not moving.
Outside, snow kept coming down, and the village took the sound out of everything. No cart, no bell, no voices. Just the stove ticking as it cooled and the slow settle of the house. The blue patch on the ceiling drifted a little whenever the candle flame breathed. Sena watched it the way you watch water. "Slow is fine," she said, mostly to herself. "We have all evening." "We have had all evening," said Bram, from the rug, in the voice of someone already half gone. Her feet were warm. They had not been warm in days, and she had stopped expecting them to be, and now they were.
The candle burned down to the last of itself. The yellow on the wall grew thin and the blue on the ceiling shrank to the size of a plum. Sena watched the flame lean, and stand, and lean again. It went small and clean and orange, the way they do at the end, and then there was a thread of smoke and no more light at all, only the shape of the window and the pale snow beyond it. The stone was still warm at her feet. Bram's breathing was slow by the stove. Sena closed her eyes in the dark room, and the dark was soft, and the night went on snowing over the whole quiet village.
