It might have been that God heard, and took mercy: lucky for mother and daughter, the culvert was solid ice at its base, not water. The car upended and came slowly to rest and there was silence save for the wind and the sifting-hissing sound of the snow that was like something alive, and malevolent. Corinne saw that her mother’s mouth was bleeding, and her black wool cloche hat, her only good hat, was crooked over one eye, its sprig of shiny red holly berries askew. Later, Mrs. Hausmann would discover that two of her front teeth had loosened, where she’d been thrown against the steering wheel, but she didn’t notice now, she had no time. She panted, grunted like a man forcing the driver’s door open, and outward, then crawling out, with much difficulty into the freezing snow, her heavy skirt hiking up revealing lardy-pale thighs and thick-mesh beige stockings in such a way Corinne had never seen before. Corinne! Take my hand! Hurry! she cried. Corinne grabbed her mother’s gloved hand and climbed, for all the terror of the situation, monkey-nimble out of the car into a roaring of snowflakes so fierce she could barely see her mother only a few inches away.
Then on their hands and knees they crawled back up the incline to the road now so drifted in snow it was hardly recognizable as a road. Ice-rivulets began to form on their faces; snowflakes caught in their eyelashes like living, lashing cobwebs. It was a cold beyond cold, you couldn’t register it, fingers and toes going numb, faces chill and brittle as ceramic. Mrs. Hausmann shouted to Corinne that they’d go to the Gorner farm close by—wasn’t it close by?—though she seemed confused about which direction it was. She set out one way, crossing the bridge, then suddenly halted and reversed, gripping Corinne’s hand. She removed her woolen scarf from around her neck to wrap it around Corinne’s head, to protect Corinne from frostbite. Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid! Momma will take care of you.
It would seem afterward that they walked, trudged, for many miles, heads bent against the wind. Yet they could not have gone very far at all. Were they walking in circles? It wasn’t clear which side of the creek they were on, Mrs. Hausmann couldn’t remember. It was not even clear where the road was, exactly. There was a high ringing sound in the air, above the tolling of the wind. Like a voice, the words so drawn out you couldn’t hear them. Like high-tension wires, except of course there were none along the Ransomville Road, electricity had not yet come to this remote part of the Chautauqua Valley. Corinne, don’t give in! Stay with Momma! Mrs. Hausmann pleaded. She had never been a demonstrative mother, still less a warm mother, she’d had four or five babies before Corinne, of whom only two had lived, and who knew how many miscarriages, “accidents” as they were elliptically called, never clearly distinguished from other species of “female troubles,” yet now, in the blizzard, she seemed to Corinne so loving! so loving! hugging Corinne tight, scolding and pleading, blowing her warm desperate breath into Corinne’s face. Corinne was so sleepy, her eyelids wanted to shut. Her knees inside her thick wool leggings were like water—boneless. She wasn’t afraid now and wasn’t even cold, wanting only to lie down in the shelter of a snowdrift and cradle her heavy head in her arms and sleep, sleep. But her mother kept shaking her, slapping at her cheeks. Her mother’s swollen mouth glistened where blood had coagulated into ice. God help us! Mrs. Hausmann prayed. God help us! I’ll never drive that car again, nor any car I swear to you God.
There came then an eerie smoldering-red glow as if the dying sun had slipped its moorings and sunk to earth, buffeted by the terrible wind. It splintered into a myriad of fragments, glowing-red sparks, tiny as fireflies. And in fact—they were fireflies! Mrs. Hausmann saw with dazed eyes what could not be, but was. Corinne, look! A sign from God! Mother and daughter stumbled in the direction of the fireflies which led them not as they would have gone (so Mrs. Hausmann swore afterward) but in another direction entirely, and so saved their lives. For within five minutes something dark hulked above them in the blizzard: the schoolhouse! The single-room schoolhouse that was in fact Corinne’s own school, closed for Christmas recess. Mrs. Hausmann had no time to wonder how they had found their way to the school, for hadn’t she been headed in the opposite direction?—but the fireflies led them on, winking, almost invisible, dancing several yards before them, emitting too (for so it seemed) that strange melodic high-pitched sound that must have been a voice of God, too pure for human ears. At the school, Mrs. Hausmann lifted a rock, and threw it clumsily into a window, so the glass shattered; and she and Corinne crawled through the window, in their numbed, distracted states tearing their clothes on the jagged glass in the frame, but at last they were inside, in a sheltered place, panting and sobbing with relief. Inside it was freezing cold, and dark as the interior of a cave, but Mrs. Hausmann located the woodburning stove, and Corinne found the tin box containing her teacher’s kitchen matches, and Mrs. Hausmann was able with her stiffened, shaking fingers to start a fire, and so—they were saved.
They would not be rescued for nearly twenty-four hours, by a sheriffs rescue team accompanying a snowplow along the Ransomville Road, but from that point onward as Mrs. Hausmann would say they were in the bosom of the Lord.
Another, less fortunate traveler on the road that day, a neighbor of the Hausmanns, froze to death when his pickup stalled and he tried to walk to shelter. On a county highway, a young couple abandoned their car to the storm and set out bravely on foot, lost their way and crawled into an irrigation ditch to escape the wind, the man lying on top of the woman and so saving her from freezing; he survived, too, but only barely, both legs having to be amputated at the knees. And many head of cattle died in the Valley, trapped outside when the storm swept upon them. Canada geese were said to have dropped like shot out of the air, transformed to ice. Even in the towns of Ransomville, Milford, Chautauqua Falls, and Mt. Ephraim there were deaths and near-deaths. The Yewville River froze so solidly it didn’t thaw until late April. Snow endured for months, well into spring, hard-crusted unnatural snow it seemed, acrid and bitter on the tongue, hiding the bodies of numberless wild creatures, revealed only in the thaw. But Mrs. Hausmann and Corinne were spared, the spirit of God dwelling forever afterward in their hearts.
That’s why I love fireflies so, Corinne would say, her eyes shining like a seven-year-old’s, they saved Momma’s life and mine.
And some of us would be laughing. Oh Mom!
And Mom would flare up, quick as a cat might turn on you and hiss, her fur stroked the wrong way, “Don’t you ‘Oh Mom’ me! I remember that day as clearly as if it was last week, not thirty-eight years ago. Yes, and I can see those fireflies as clearly as I see you.”
Dad, Mikey-Junior and Patrick would try to keep straight faces. The story of Grandma Hausmann and Mom as a little girl of seven, lost in a blizzard on the Ransomville Road, was one of the oldest Mulvaney family stories, and a favorite, but as we got older one by one (except Marianne, of course: she always defended Mom) we came to wonder how accurate it was.
Most embarrassing was when Mom told the story to people she hardly knew like my eighth-grade math teacher Mr. Cole, or some lady she’d run into at the A & P, or friends of ours spending the night at the farm—how God watches over us all, how Mom’s life was changed forever by an act of “providence.”
Just the way Mom uttered that word: providence. You saw a tall black marble column with a cross at its summit. You saw a blue sky so vast and deep you could fall into it forever.
So Dad couldn’t help commenting behind his hand, with that wink that squinched up half his face, it was surely an act of providence that his mother-in-law Ida Hausmann never drove any vehicle ever again—“That was a blessing of God’s, yessir!”
To us kids, who’d known her only as a nervous-skinny, querulous, gray old woman with thick eyeglasses, the thought of Grandma Hausmann driving any vehicle