Three days before the cold February morning when they buried his body, Albert Benson returned home from his weekly games of eight-ball at the Cottonwood Elk’s Club to an automatic-opening garage door that refused to open. He stepped onto the metal milk box to jimmy the door back on track. When he shifted his weight for a better reach, the box tipped and scooted out from under his feet. His head dropped onto the jagged corner of a brick planter and bounced two more times on the concrete driveway. Just before dawn the next morning a milkman found Albert’s body peaceful-looking and preserved, the head resting on the thinnest pillow of crystallized crimson. 

Albert was born on a farm near Trondheim, Norway. His wife Agnes was born one year later in Cottonwood, Minnesota, to Norwegian parents from Stavanger, Norway. The two met in the one-room school house a mile-and-a-half from Albert’s family’s farm. As they approached twenty years-of-age they courted for three months, married, then moved into the two-story farm house on the driveway of which Albert died. 

Every year over six decades, Albert planted corn and beans for cash, and alfalfa for livestock feed. He fattened cattle and hogs all year and sold them for cash. He kept chickens in a coop, and sheep in a fenced pasture. Sunday afternoons in the summer he rode his John Deere lawnmower around and around his acre of lawn. He tended irises and mums in plots around the perimeter of the house. 

From the day of his wife’s death, ten years before his own, Albert lived alone. He kept two electric blankets on the bed in his unheated upstairs bedroom and a loaded twenty-two caliber pistol in the dresser beside it. 

On by far the coldest day of a warmer than normal winter, the mourners pulled knitted caps to just above their eyes and wrapped scarves over their mouths and noses. Some of them turned to the north wind as if to say, Where have you been? 

As children most of Albert’s mourners walked on gravel roads to country schools. Some of their brightest memories of childhood were of coming in from the cold air to a warm farm house. Later in their lives they protected farm animals from the cold. Clearing snow from long farm driveways and chopping ice from walkways were off-season exercises that kept farm families in shape for planting, cultivating, and harvesting in the warmer seasons. Cold weather braced their lives and focused their attention as it froze the ground hard. Winter made a huddle of people who lived together in the country. Everyone bundled up and told what the temperature registered on their thermometers at home. Conversations were brief and courteous, a social pattern maintained in warmer months.

In another winter, Albert’s body might have been stored until March. This year, the sod opened to the backhoe and the shovels to receive one of its own, out of season, in mid-February. The four town employees who dug the grave and would fill it again when the ceremony was over stood in a respectful line, out of the way, gloved hands folded in front of their bodies. They waited for the pastor and the family to assemble and for the mourners to face them across the casket.

Albert’s children—William, Merle, Arlen and Delores—and their children were at the burial to say goodbye to their father and grandfather. They heard the peals from the bell pierce the air once for each of Albert's eighty-two years. Ice crystals hung from the trees and formed on the lashes of the mourners. Cold air was a friend to many of them, a source of pride and a seasonal partner. The blue surgical masks some of them wore over their faces that day honored the intensity of the cold and their stubborn partnership with it.

“Rest eternal grant our brother Albert, O Lord,” Pastor Hoot said, ending the service.

“And let light perpetual shine upon him,” the mourners replied.

Janet, Albert’s niece, had driven alone from Fargo. As she stood beside her uncle’s grave, her eyes dripping wind-whipped tears, she heard the pastor read a passage from John’s Gospel about places prepared for the disciples, and she imagined her uncle in the doorway of his new place, declining the weather angels’ offer to reserve the last frigid day of the year so that his mourners would not have to face it. In her mind she heard Albert speaking in his rounded Scandinavian accent: No, no, send it the day they bury my old body. I don't need any fine day for my last rite. 

 After the burial, Albert’s sons and their families drove together from the cemetery to the house where their father died. Delores and her two sons arrived first. She set the table and plugged in a percolator borrowed from the church. The ladies of the Martha Circle sent four platters of food with Pastor Hoot, two piled with sandwiches—ham and chicken salad—and two stacked with cake—chocolate with sour-cream frosting, angel food with lemon frosting. A cardboard box held two large bags of potato chips and a jar of pickles. Delores arranged the platters on Albert's red and white checked plastic-clothed kitchen table, set out paper plates and napkins, plastic forks in a row, and a gallon of lemonade and paper cups. The family came in stomping their feet and clapping the cold away, milling in the warmth of the kitchen.

      Arlen loaded a plate with three ham salad sandwiches and a piece of chocolate cake, poured a glass of lemonade, and sat down in the living room to watch a basketball game on television. His new girlfriend, Sandy Trebesch, an administrator at Cottonwood Health, followed and sat beside him.

      The sky was covered with clouds. Darkness fell early. Faint lines of snow showed up in the yard lights, brushing against the ox-blood barn. 

Hoot took a plate and found a dining room chair next to Sandy. She kept turning her head away from him to the television for its familiar, undemanding warmth. 

“Is this game college or pro?”  she asked Arlen.

      Arlen grunted, shook his head, and kept his eyes fixed on the screen.

“I don’t care one way or the other, do you, Pastor? Oh, I’m sorry. You might have played basketball in college. Did you?” 

      The warm, happy contests mesmerized the roomful of people with food on their laps—crowds of people together and cheerful on the screen with delighted announcers presiding and pointing out meaning in the action.  

      “Is the one who just scored their star?” Sandy asked Arlen, the second of two shots at conversation.

     “He's one of their stars. You assume every team has a star. Not every team has a star. Some teams have more than one star. Some players are defensive stars, some are offensive stars. Sometimes all the players on a championship team are stars. Okay?”

      “Okay. Calm down, Arlen,” Sandy said. “I was just asking. It's just a diversion, right Pastor? Basketball and all sports, I mean. I don’t watch sports much. I can’t follow most of them. I guess because I never played. I’m sure you did. What did you play?” 

Delores wiped the Formica kitchen counter with a wet dishcloth. The rest of the family lined up at the table and tore down the piles of food. Television trays snapped into place in the living room. Merle's three children and Bill's boys sat on the floor with plates in their laps. They lifted chocolate frosting and popped ham salad sandwiches into their mouths. Delores’ sons stood close to each other, glancing in at their mother in the kitchen.

Bill sat on the left arm of the overstuffed chair where his wife, Norma, sat with a plate of ham and cheese. With food on her lap and her underwear lines covered up she felt held and content.  

When the broadcast went to a commercial, Bill muted the sound.

“It was good to see Janet this morning,” he said. “She had to get back to Fargo for work. I guess that's why she didn't come out to the house. I hope someone invited her. It's a long ride back there, especially this time of year, with all the drifting on those roads.”

Delores stepped out from the kitchen: “I thought Dad looked good. Thank you so much for the beautiful service, Pastor.” 

“Turn the sound back on, Bill.” Arlen said, blocking his sister's shot at decency.  

Arlen had played high school basketball, point guard on the district championship team from Cottonwood High in 1976. In the semi-final round of the state tournament, Cottonwood played a city team from St. Paul. Arlen was a ball hawk, quicker than most of the farm boys he played against during the regular season, but the city players ran over him and swooped around him the way swallows sometimes buzzed Albert's old sheep dog, Bonzo. 

“She froze to death,” Arlen said.     

“What did you say?” Norma demanded, standing in for her husband Bill, the eldest son, who had stepped out for more food. 

“Janet. I meant Janet. She nearly froze to death. That's why she didn't come out here. Didn't the rest of you see her shivering in that little building where they keep the bodies? I thought for sure we’d get a bill for structural damage the way she was shaking in there.”

Flakes hit the windows of the house like grains of sand. The stone fireplace showed glowing embers at the families’ backs, gaping black, a charred mouth of metal offering a mouthful of warmth and visual relief should any of them happen to turn from the television. 

“I suppose Mom and Dad are happy now that they're together,” Delores said.  

The boys, their parents' flesh and blood, stared at a commercial about pick-up trucks. Sandy and Norma nodded their amen to Delores' benediction. The men weren't much for church talk or sentiments around death. When they weren't working, the television had them locked in. Television and tractors—even lawnmowers—were relief to them. There was the basketball game, bits of cake and sips of coffee. Their father Albert was dead, and the score was thirty to thirty-four.

      “Dad never liked basketball, did he?” Arlen asked the room. “He thought it belonged on a city playground where no self-respecting man would ever be seen playing it. It was a game for kids. Grown men didn’t run around in shorts trying to throw a ball through a hoop.”  

Merle nodded. “That’s true. That’s what he thought.” 

To Albert, the other major sports were men's games. Football was war.  Outdoor hockey was a northern man's game of grace and hard knocks. Baseball was the cow-pasture summer game. To Albert’s mind there was something suspicious and foreign about basketball. It was a game that must have been thought up at a party somewhere, probably alcohol induced: throw a ball into a bushel basket or a peach crate with a hole cut in the bottom. Put it up high and add a few rules. Albert never set up a basketball hoop on the farm for his boys, even though Arlen asked him for one many times.         

Janet slid off a secondary road just before the North Dakota state line. She texted Bill and asked if he or one of his brothers could drive out in a four-wheel drive and pull her out of the ditch. 

“You sure you want to, Bill?” Merle asked. “The cows are going to need attention in a few hours. I could run out there in the Bronco and try to get her out.”   

Everyone except Arlen was up and moving. The sandwiches and frosting couldn't hold them. The light cloud of mourning that hung over them was lifting. 

“Why don't you all pile in the Bronco and go out there?”  Norma said.  

The women picked up the plates and consolidated the leftovers. Merle and Bill and the kids were already in their boots and coats when Arlen called, “Holy fucking hell! We got a fire!” 

He ran into the kitchen for the grease-fire extinguisher, but a kerosene dragon was already loose in the living room. It had been a jump shot from the top of the key with a purple sofa pillow, by Arlen, that knocked a hurricane lamp from an end table onto the floor where it shattered fuel toward the fireplace. Kerosene lashed out from the spill into flame that spread out and clawed the old wood floor. 

The Bensons fought the fire. Delores called the fire department. The others tried to beat it down with rugs and brooms, and douse it with dishpans of water from the kitchen sink, but when the fire got a taste of the century-old oak walls, seasoned with layers of oil paint and varnish, garnished with straw insulation, it lapped as if it had ordered the feast. Instructions Merle and Bill shouted to each other were mutual assurances of the other's presence at the ceremony. The flames were persistent as a swollen mountain stream eating its way to the river.

When the volunteer fire department arrived, the house was a furnace. A tank truck carried enough water to flood the town skating rink but nowhere near enough to put out the Benson house fire. Sandy and Norma sat in the front seat of Bill's Bronco, agreeing that they had never seen anything like it and that they wouldn't have expected it to burn so fast. The Benson brothers and the children stood close enough to keep warm.  

Spectators from town and surrounding farms followed the smoke and sirens and stood with the family.    

“Nothing to do at this stage but get as much water as we can on it. We’ll soak it and get as close as we can to save the structure,” Chief Johnson said to Hoot. “It's a shame, a damn shame. I've seen 'em burn this hot before. We'll spray water into it but that ain’t gonna make a speck of difference, not when she's roarin' like this one. I'll bet a guy could see it on the state line.”

After two hours in the ditch, with snow piling all around her, Janet called Bill again. When the call went to voicemail she cursed the family for its frigid carelessness.

Delores sat alone in her car. Snow melted on the windshield in front of her face, refracting her view of the house as flames rose above it like a wild crown. She watched the frame of one corner buckle and give way to a riot of sparks. Heat from the flames warmed her windshield. She felt it with the back of her hands and watched the snowflakes turn to water drops, streaming down. 

JEFFREY L. JOHNSON has published two books of non-fiction, two collections of poems, and edited a book of essays. He lives in Massachusetts.