My Son Said My Old Retriever Couldn’t Stay At His House During The Ice Storm Because His Wife Is “Deathly Allergic,” So We Rode It Out In My Father’s Hunting Cabin. On The Third Night, Headlights Came Up The Lane, And His Wife Got Out Holding A Puppy

The weather radio started squawking on a Monday morning in January, and by noon every station out of Springfield was saying the same thing. Freezing rain from Tuesday night into Thursday. An inch to an inch and a half of ice across south-central Missouri. Widespread power outages. Travel not advised.

I am seventy-four years old and I have lived through enough Ozark ice storms to know what an inch and a half means. It means the trees come down. Not a few limbs. Whole oaks, split right down the middle like somebody took an axe to them. It means the power lines come down with the trees, and the co-op crews come from four states away, and out here on the gravel roads south of Licking you are last on the list, because there are eleven of us on our road and three thousand people in town.

My house is all electric. My late wife Winnifred and I put in a heat pump in 2009 because the propane man had raised his prices for the third time in a year and Winnie said she was done giving that man her grocery money. It was a good decision for fifteen years. It is a bad decision in an ice storm. No power means no heat, and no power means no well pump, which means no water, which means you are an old man in a cold house melting snow on a camp stove.

And then there is Gunner.

Gunner is a Chesapeake Bay retriever. He is eleven, which is old for a big dog, and he has the wavy chocolate coat and the yellow eyes they all have, eyes that make strangers nervous until they get to know him. Winnie picked him out of a litter in Arkansas the year before she got sick. She used to say he was the only male in the house who did what she asked. Since she passed, three years ago this March, he has slept on her side of the bed. I have never had the heart to move him.

“You Know Mckenna Is Deathly Allergic”

My son Kody called Monday evening. Kody is forty-four and lives up in Rolla, about an hour north, in a big new house in a subdivision with a three-car garage and a standby generator on a concrete pad out back that kicks on by itself when the power goes. He sells medical equipment to hospitals. He is a good boy, mostly. He calls on Sundays.

“Dad, you can’t stay out there for this one,” he said. “Come up tonight. We’ve got the generator. Kaden and Haley would love it.”

I said that was kind of him and I would be up first thing in the morning. “I’ll bring Gunner’s bed,” I said. “He won’t be any trouble.”

There was a pause on the line. I had heard that pause before.

“Dad. You know Mckenna’s allergic.”

Kody’s wife, Mckenna, has been deathly allergic to dogs for eight years. That is how long they have been married. In eight years Gunner has never once set foot inside their house. At Thanksgiving and Christmas he waits in the cab of my truck in their driveway with the windows cracked and a blanket, and every hour or so I go out and sit with him, and Mckenna watches me through the front window with a look on her face like I am doing something embarrassing in public.

“I’ll keep him in the garage,” I said.

“The garage connects to the house. The dander gets in the vents.” I could hear him turn his head away from the phone and then I heard her voice, close, like she had been listening the whole time.

“Zebulon.” She is the only person alive who calls me by my full name. “Can you board him? There’s that place out on Highway 63.”

I had already called it. The place on 63 was full. Every kennel between Rolla and West Plains was full, because every person in south Missouri who owned a dog and a generator-less house had the same idea at the same time.

“Then he’ll have to stay at your house,” Mckenna said. “Dogs are fine in the cold. They have fur. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to end up in the emergency room because of a dog. It’s a dog, Zebulon. You can’t put a dog ahead of your own safety.”

I thanked her for the invitation. I told Kody I would figure something out. He said, “Dad, don’t be stubborn,” and I said, “I’m not being stubborn, son, I’m being a man who doesn’t leave his wife’s dog alone in a dark house for three days,” and that was the end of that conversation.

My Father’s Cabin on the Big Piney

My father built a hunting cabin in 1961 on forty acres of hardwoods along the Big Piney River, about six miles back from my place on a road that was gravel in good years and creek bed in bad ones. One room, sixteen by twenty. A cast-iron woodstove he bought used from a church in Houston, Missouri. A hand pump at the sink that pulls from a shallow well. A sleeping loft. A kerosene lantern hanging from a nail by the door. No electric line has ever come within two miles of it.

Winnie and I spent our honeymoon there in 1973 because we could not afford anything else, and every fall for forty-some years after, we went back for a week. She called it the only place in Missouri where nobody could find her.

I spent Tuesday hauling. Two loads of split oak from my woodpile into the bed of the truck. Five gallons of kerosene. Canned soup and coffee and a sack of dog food and Gunner’s orthopedic bed, which cost more than my first car. Winnie’s old wool blankets out of the cedar chest. My father’s chain saw, in case the road needed clearing on the way out.

Gunner rode up front with his head out the window into the cold, which is what he does, and when we came around the last bend and he saw the cabin he started talking, those low happy grumbles Chesapeakes make. He had not been up there since the fall before Winnie died. He went straight in and lay down on the braided rug in front of the stove, the same spot he used to lie when she sat in her rocker and read.

I had a fire going by four. The rain started at six.

The Sound Trees Make When They Give Up

If you have never heard an ice storm in the hardwoods, I do not know how to describe it to you except to say it sounds like a war going on somewhere just out of sight.

First the rain ticks on the tin roof like somebody tapping a pencil. Then it stops ticking and starts hissing, because it is freezing as it lands. By midnight every branch on every tree is wearing a glass sleeve, and the whole forest starts to groan under the weight. And then, a little after two in the morning, the first big limb lets go somewhere down by the river, and it goes off like a rifle shot, and Gunner lifted his head off the rug and looked at me.

“I know, buddy,” I said. “Just the trees.”

They went all night. Crack, and then a long tearing sound, and then a crash and a kind of tinkling like a chandelier coming down. Sometimes three or four in a row. One went close enough to the cabin that I felt it through the floor. I fed the stove and sat in Winnie’s rocker with Gunner’s head on my foot and the lantern turned low, and I will be honest, I did not feel like a stubborn old man who had made his point. I felt like an old man who might have made a mistake.

By Wednesday morning the world was made of glass. The sun came out for an hour and everything blazed so bright I could not look straight at it. The power was out across nine counties. The radio said it could be ten days.

Winnie’s Log Book

On the shelf above the woodstove, where it has always been, there is a green clothbound ledger book. My father started it in 1961. Every time anybody stayed at the cabin, they wrote a line. The date, who came, what the weather did, what they shot or caught or saw. My father’s handwriting for the first twenty years, then mine, and then, starting in 1973, mostly Winnie’s.

I took it down Wednesday afternoon and read it by the window.

“October 1987. Zeb, me, Kody (age 7). Kody caught his first bass and would not let us cook it. It is in a coffee can of river water in the truck. God help us all.”

“November 2004. Zeb and me. Rain all week. Best week in years.”

“October 2014. Zeb, me, and our new boy Gunner, 10 weeks old. He ate a mouse and part of Zeb’s boot.”

And then, in October 2017, in Winnie’s handwriting, a line that I had read before but never thought about:

“Zeb and me and Gunner. Kody and M. were supposed to come with the kids. M. says the dog. I don’t believe it. I think she just doesn’t want to come. Saw a picture on the computer of her holding her sister’s cat. Cats are worse. Not saying anything to Kody. It isn’t worth it.”

I read that line three times. Then I closed the book and put it back on the shelf and fed the stove, and I sat down with Gunner and told myself what Winnie had told herself. It isn’t worth it.

A Lineman at the Door

Thursday a little after noon I heard a truck grinding up the road in low gear and Gunner went to the door with his hackles up. It was a young man named Tremaine Waddell, whose grandmother lives two places down from me on the county road. He is a lineman for the electric co-op and had been working thirty hours straight. He said his grandmother had made him promise to check whether “Mr. Halcomb went and froze to death out at that cabin.”

I gave him coffee. He sat by the stove with his hands around the cup and his eyes half closed and told me it was the worst he had seen in eleven years. Rolla was out. All of it. Most of Phelps County. “Even the folks with those big standby generators are hurting now,” he said. “Propane trucks can’t get up the hills. People been running them since Tuesday night, and a lot of those tanks were low going in.”

I thought about Kody’s generator on its concrete pad. I thought about the time last fall when he had complained, at Sunday dinner, about what the propane company wanted to fill the tank, and Mckenna had said they would get it filled “after the holidays.”

After Tremaine left I tried to call Kody. There was no signal out there. There never has been. It is one of the things Winnie liked best about the place.

Headlights on the Third Night

The third night was clear and bitter cold. The rain had stopped and the stars came out sharp the way they only do after a storm, and every tree in the forest was still hanging with ice, glittering in the dark whenever the wind moved.

I was just about to bank the stove for the night when Gunner got up off the rug, walked to the window, put his front feet up on the sill and stood there, looking down the lane, stiff as a pointer.

I picked up the lantern and went to stand beside him.

Way down at the bottom of the hill, where the lane comes out of the trees, there were two headlights. They were moving very slowly. They would come forward ten feet and stop, and slide a little sideways, and come forward again. Somebody was trying to get up my father’s road in the dark on an inch and a half of ice, and nobody who knew that road would ever try such a thing unless they were desperate or a fool.

It took them almost twenty minutes to make the last quarter mile. I stood in the doorway with the lantern the whole time. When the vehicle finally slid to a stop beside my truck I saw it was Kody’s big gray SUV, with a downed limb still caught in the roof rack.

The back doors opened first. My grandson Kaden, who is thirteen, climbed out in his winter coat with a sleeping bag under his arm, and then Haley, who is ten, with her hood pulled down over her eyes. Then Kody got out from behind the wheel, and he looked about ten years older than he had at Christmas.

And then the passenger door opened, and Mckenna stepped down onto the ice, very carefully, holding something against her chest wrapped in a pink fleece blanket. Gunner pushed past my legs and went down the steps to see what it was.

It was a puppy. A curly-coated, cream-colored puppy about ten weeks old, one of those doodle dogs that cost more than a used car. It saw Gunner coming and started wiggling and yipping inside the blanket.

Nobody said anything. The only sound in the whole world was the ice ticking in the trees.

“It’s Hypoallergenic, Dad”

Kody spoke first. “The generator ran out Wednesday night,” he said. “The propane company can’t get to us till next week. The house got down to forty-one degrees. Every motel between here and St. Louis is full of utility crews. Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t know where else to go.”

I looked at the puppy. Then I looked at Mckenna.

“It’s hypoallergenic,” Kody said, quietly. “Dad. It’s a hypoallergenic breed. They don’t shed.”

Mckenna did not say anything at all. She stood on the ice in a white puffy coat holding that puppy like a shield, and her face in the lantern light was not angry, the way I had expected. It was ashamed. I have been married, and I have raised a child, and I know the difference.

I want to tell you that I said something wise. What I actually said was, “Get those kids inside before they freeze,” and I held the door.

What We Said by the Woodstove

That cabin was built for two people and a dog. That night it held five people and two dogs. The kids went up in the loft with flashlights and sleeping bags and Haley’s voice came down every few minutes saying things like “Grandpa, there’s a wasp nest up here, is it alive?” Gunner lay on his rug with the puppy, whose name turned out to be Nugget, climbing all over his head, and he put up with it the way he put up with everything, with a deep sigh and a look at me.

Kody sat on the woodbox. Mckenna sat in Winnie’s rocker because it was the only chair left, and I let her.

She talked first, which surprised me. She said they got Nugget in December. Her sister’s dog had puppies and she had always wanted one. She said she was not allergic to dogs. She said she never had been.

“Then why,” I said. It was all I could manage.

She looked at the stove for a long time. Then she said that the first Christmas after she married Kody, she came out to our place and Winnie’s old dog at the time, a big hound named Buster, jumped up on her with muddy feet and ruined a new white sweater, and everybody laughed, and Winnie said, “Well, honey, you’re on a farm now.” And she said she felt like a city girl who would never fit in with us, and she said the allergy was a thing she said once, to get out of a Sunday dinner, and then she could never figure out how to take it back.

“Eight years,” I said.

“I know.”

“He sat in a truck in your driveway every Thanksgiving for eight years.”

“I know, Zebulon.” She was crying now. “I know. I used to watch you go out there. Every hour. I knew exactly what kind of person I was being.”

Kody had his face in his hands. He said he had known, more or less, for a long time. He said he had told himself it was easier, keeping the peace. He said, “You and Mom never needed anything from me, Dad. Mckenna did. So I picked the one who needed me.”

I thought about Winnie’s line in the log book. It isn’t worth it.

Winnie was a wonderful woman, but she was wrong about that one. It was worth it. All of it was worth saying, eight years ago, out loud, at a dinner table, before it set up hard like ice on a power line.

Four Days on the Big Piney

They stayed four days. The road was not passable until Monday, and Tremaine came back up on Sunday with his grandmother’s chicken and dumplings in a slow cooker, which we heated on the woodstove, and he looked around at the five of us and the two dogs and said, “Well, now. Mr. Halcomb, you got a full house.”

I taught Kaden to split kindling. I taught Haley to work the hand pump, which she thought was the greatest invention in human history. Kody and I walked down to the river on the second morning with Gunner, slipping and grabbing at saplings, and stood on the bank where he caught his first bass, and he said, “I don’t remember this,” and I said, “You wouldn’t let your mother cook it,” and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on a rock.

On the last night, Mckenna asked me if she could write in the log book. I took it down for her. She sat at the table by the lantern a long time, and when she was finished she closed it and handed it back to me and asked me not to read it until they were gone.

They left Monday afternoon when the county got a grader up the road. Gunner stood on the porch and watched them all the way down the lane, and Nugget barked out the back window of the SUV the whole way.

That night I opened the green book. Under my wife’s line from 2017, in round careful handwriting I had never seen before, Mckenna had written:

“January. Zebulon, Gunner, Kody, Kaden, Haley, Nugget, and me. Ice storm. I told a lie for eight years and an old dog let me sleep on his rug anyway. Winnie, you were right. I’m sorry I didn’t know you better.”

A Dog Bed at Thanksgiving

The power came back on at my house nine days after the storm started. Tremaine’s crew did the last of our road himself and honked twice going by.

This past Thanksgiving I drove up to Rolla with Gunner in the front seat like always, and I pulled into Kody’s driveway like always, and before I had the engine off the front door opened and Haley came running down the walk yelling, “Grandpa, Mom got Gunner a bed!”

She had. It was beside the fireplace in the family room, an orthopedic one, big and brown, with a little cream-colored doodle already asleep in the middle of it. Gunner walked in that front door like he had been doing it his whole life, sniffed at the turkey smell coming from the kitchen, stepped carefully around Nugget, and lay down with a groan right beside him.

Mckenna came out of the kitchen with flour on her hands and looked at the two of them, and then at me, and she did not say anything. She did not have to. I hung my coat on the hook by the door, and for the first Thanksgiving in eight years, I did not go back out to the truck.

If there is a little lie sitting between you and somebody in your family, the kind that was easier to tell once than to take back, maybe this is the winter to say it out loud. And if this story reminded you of an old dog or a stubborn parent you love, please pass it along. Somebody out there is still waiting in a truck in the driveway.

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