The Winter Kitchen
The pipes froze the second week of January, and for seven nights we slept on the kitchen floor beside the stove, the four of us in a row like loaves. That was Mama’s word for us. The first night she stood over the blankets with her hands on her hips and said, “Well, look at that. Four loaves in a pan.” Mama, me, my brother and the baby, our coats piled on top of us and our feet toward the range.
We moved to Cleveland the winter I turned nine. It was so cold the milk froze on the step, and my father left before light for the mill. We had come up from Kentucky that fall, from my grandmother’s farm, and none of us knew a thing about cold like that. The cream froze in the bottles on the step and pushed the little caps right up off the top, like hats. My brother thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen, and he would run out in his socks to look until Mama called him in.
Daddy got on at the steel mill in October. We rented half of a double house, four rooms with the kitchen at the back, and the kitchen had the big coal range, black and heavy and older than any of us. It was the only warm room we had. In the others you could see your breath in the morning, and I learned to get dressed under the covers.
Then the pipes froze, and there was no water at all. Mama shut the doors to the other rooms, laid the blankets down by the stove, and that was where we lived. Daddy was on the early turn and had to leave at four, long before it was light, so he slept sitting up in his chair by the back door, where he wouldn’t step on us going out. He kept his boots on. Some nights I woke in the dark and the first thing I saw was those boots. Then I would see Mama, kneeling at the range, shaking down the grate and feeding it coal so quietly that nobody else woke.
She kept the oven door open. Just an inch, propped with a wooden spoon, so the heat came out low along the floor where we lay. When the house was settled she told us stories about the farm until we went to sleep, and the baby always went first. They were the same stories every night, and we never got tired of them. Back home there was a mule that would not pull unless you sang to him, and every night, whatever she started with, we wanted the mule.
“Tell the mule,” my brother would say.
“You know the mule,” she’d say. “You could tell it yourself.”
“Tell it anyhow.”
So she told it anyhow, low, so the baby wouldn’t wake. When she got to the part where somebody had to sing, she sang too, very soft, the way you would have to sing to a mule that had made up his mind. I lay there with the heat from the oven on my face and her voice going on above me, and I wanted that week to last.
My birthday is the twelfth of January, so I turned nine right in the middle of it, on the kitchen floor. Mama made me a cake anyhow. But you can’t bake with the oven door open, so she shut it, and that was the coldest hour of the whole week. The cold came straight back into that kitchen, as if it had been waiting outside the door all along. The four of us stood around the range in our coats, the baby on Mama’s hip, and watched that oven door as if it might do something. My brother said afterward it was the longest hour of his life. It was the only hour all week that the oven door was closed, and she spent it on me.
I did not know then that she was frightened. I only knew that it was the warmest I had ever been.
She told me years later, when I was grown. She said she was scared to death that winter. We didn’t know a soul in Cleveland, Daddy hadn’t been at the mill long, and she was afraid that if the landlord found out about the pipes, he would put us out. She never let on. Not once, not with a word or a look, not even in the hour the oven door was shut. All that week I thought the stories were for us. I think now some of them were for her.
Years later, when I had a kitchen of my own, I would leave the oven door open an inch on the coldest nights and not tell anyone why. My husband used to come in and say I was heating the whole street. I never told him. I still do it. On the coldest night of the year I find a wooden spoon and prop the oven door, just an inch, and for a minute I am one of four loaves in a pan again, warm on a kitchen floor, waiting for the mule.
