Story Excerpts
“Ice, ice, ice,” people shouted at the mayor of New York each time he appeared in public. The price had doubled over a year’s time, and voters were angry. They relied on ice to keep their food fresh in summer and to cool their fevers in winter. And beer. The ice kept the beer chilled and flavorful even when temperatures outside rose. In a generation, New Yorkers had come to expect a steady flow of ice from the rivers and lakes upstate.
None of which occurred to Jacob Walter as he skated across the Hudson River. Jacob cared only about the $1.50 he earned each day for scoring, cutting, and storing the ice. From January until April, when the ground thawed, the ice business paid the best wages in Rhineburgh, and many men who’d previously earned a meager living from farming had come to depend upon ice even more than the city dwellers. For that, Jacob felt grateful to God and his employer.
The ice harvest employed most of the men in town, who assembled en masse at the riverbank each morning before dawn as if for church services. Jacob teamed with ones he’d known since childhood, cutting long, straight seams into the ice. He skated behind a sled while his friend Ernest led him on horseback, tethered by only a rope. It reminded Jacob of when they were boys, pulling each other on a toboggan. All around them, other men cracked the seams into strips like glass and poled those sheets toward shore to be cut again into blocks. It was tedious and arduous work, much like farming, harvesting one row at a time. The damp soaked Jacob’s wool shirt, the moisture froze in his hair, the vapor cracked his lips. Even the horse sweated and strained to cut through ice a foot thick. And the ice reached as far as Jacob could see up and downstream. He’d be hard at it ten hours a day, seven days a week, until the Lord brought the thaw.
As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the men shifted to the icehouse. Conveyor belts lifted the blocks from the river into the warehouse, where men poled them into place just as they had done in water. Another crew padded the ice with straw to insulate it until spring.
By dusk Jacob’s gloves had frozen to rigidity and his breath came in short, shallow puffs which hurt if he inhaled too deeply. With all that ice around them, the warehouse felt colder than the river, insulated from even the thin warmth of the sun. A few oil lanterns burned inside to light the way, filling the space with the smoke and the smell of kerosene. In not long the interior would prove too dark to see even with these lamps. Once all his blocks rested in place, Jacob stepped outside. He breathed in the frosty, clear air until a gust off the water chilled him. To escape the wind, he moved behind the building.
A shadow there startled him. A man slumped against the wall. As Jacob drew closer, he saw the man’s face had turned an unnatural blue. His eyes were closed, and not even his chest moved. When Jacob reached down to touch his shoulder, it felt as cold and stiff as the ice itself, as though he’d frozen in place. Even so rigid, he looked familiar, with a woodsman’s flap hat and a heavy coat. On closer inspection, Jacob recognized the man, whose thick mustache was distinctive: Sean Flannighan.