He rested inside the hut for a few minutes to regain his breath before heading back to the pickup for his trusty transistor radio and bottles of Jack Daniels. The radio was his only connection to the world and his beloved jazz music, and the whiskey was to prevent his blood from freezing. He ambled back along the gouges left by the auger to where the ski marks deviated wildly from his intended path. Here, he paused to reflect on this year’s foolishness, smiled with satisfaction at having averted disaster and was about to move on when he heard the sound behind him.
Anyone who has lived their life next to a frozen river knows that sound, what it means, and what it could mean if ignored. Leroy knew what it meant for him and that there was absolutely nothing he could do to prevent it. He did not turn, his face gave up its smile and he moved on towards his pickup. As he walked and listened, he recalled the cheerful clicking and cracking sound of ice cubes when they are dropped into a glass of Jack Daniels – but the sound from behind was not so gentle. It was more like the sound of the Council front-end loader ten years earlier, when they tried to use it to build the ice bridge instead of waiting for the much lighter bobcat to arrive. The front-end loader remained in the river until the following summer when the locals shamed the young engineer into removing the eyesore.
Leroy didn’t need to look back at his ice hut to confirm what was generating the sounds. So he failed to witness something, both beautifully balletic, and yet profoundly sad. In concert with the sharp cracking and cleaving noises of the failing ice, he would have seen the initial tilt towards the south bank, the reverse lurch back to the north and the drunken lunge to the west. Finally, after a brief but futile righting to vertical, the hut sighed slowly and gracefully beneath the ice until it came to rest on the bottom of the river. All that remained in view was just one foot of Ted’s gleaming flue with its top hat swinging back and forth in the breeze, dismayed and abandoned.
Leroy never looked back. He walked past his pickup truck with its open tailgate, onto the road and up the hill. He didn’t want to be anywhere near his disaster, but he did want to own up to it, like a man should. He walked around the hill, out of sight from the town, and made his way resolutely up to the town cemetery on the summit.
