Snow

It snowed in the night, and in the morning the Axis was white from the north wing door to the river.

Frederick saw it from his window at half past six, before he had turned on the light: the two lines of lamps still on, going away east in the dark, and between them, where the grass and the road and the pavements had been, nothing, an unbroken whiteness, faintly blue, with the lamplight lying on it in pools; and the white buildings at the far end with snow on their roofs and their ledges and the tops of their columns, so that they looked as though somebody had drawn them in pencil and then gone over the top edges again in chalk. It was still falling. Slowly, in large flakes, straight down, without any wind, the way it falls when it has decided to stay.

He stood at the window in his pyjamas for a long time.

It was the first snow. He had seen snow before; on Öland once in a winter, for Christmas, when he was nine, and in London on King’s Day most years, wet and grey and gone by lunchtime. But he had never seen the first snow fall on the capital from the window of the north wing on a school day, and found that he was going to go out in it, to a yard, with other people.

At breakfast Bridget said, without turning round from the range, “Boots.”

“I haven’t got boots.”

“You’ve got boots. I bought them in October. They’re by the door.” She put the egg in front of him. “And the scarf. Your mother’s finished it.”

He looked at her.

“She finished it last night,” said Bridget. “At eleven. In the small sitting room. I took her up a cocoa and she was sitting there with it on her knee, done, holding it, looking at the fire.” She turned back to the range. “She’s left it on the hall table. With a note. Eat your egg.”

---

The scarf was on the hall table by the north wing door, folded, with a note on top of it in his mother’s hand, in Swedish, which said: For the first snow. I knew it would be today. M.

It was green and white. It was long, longer than he was, very long, with a broad band of dark green at each end and then a band of white and then a band of green and then a band of white, all the way along, in a thick soft wool that was not quite smooth, that had small places in it where the stitches were tighter or looser than the ones beside them, which was how you could tell somebody had made it with their hands and not a machine; and at one end, in the last band of white, very small, in green, she had knitted an F.

He put it on.

It went round his neck twice and still hung to his knees. Castellanos, at the door, in a dark overcoat over the grey suit, with snow on his shoulders, looked at it and did not say anything at all.

“My mother made it,” said Frederick.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s the school colours.”

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos. “It’s a very good scarf.” He opened the car door. “Seat belt.”

---

The transit authority had a rule, Theo said, on the wall at ten to eight, that the first snow on the capital always fell on a school day.

“It’s not a real rule,” said Theo. “It’s not written down. But Dad says it’s true. He says in nineteen years of Milwaukee and one winter here he’s never once seen the first snow on a Saturday. He says it waits.” He was sitting on the wall in a coat that was too big for him, a dark red one that had clearly been somebody else’s first, with the sleeves turned back, and a woollen hat with a bobble on it, and his trainers, which were soaked. “He says it waits till everybody’s left for work and then comes down on the buses.”

He looked at Frederick’s scarf.

He looked at it for about five seconds, the whole length of it, round Frederick’s neck twice and down to his knees, green and white and green and white, with the F at the end.

“Did your mum make that?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Since October.”

Theo looked at it a moment longer.

“That’s the school colours,” he said.

“Yes.”

Theo nodded slowly, as though a great many things had been explained to him at once, and looked across the yard at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, where Castellanos was sitting with his coffee in the dark overcoat, and lifted his hand, and the finger came up off the cup.

“She’s finished,” said Theo. “Your mum. I saw her knitting. On the half. In the kitchen, after the cake. She had it on her knee. It was this long.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “I didn’t know what it was.”

“Neither did I. She wouldn’t say.”

“She was waiting,” said Theo, “for the snow.”

---

The yard was white.

It was white from the steps to the gym and from the bike racks to the fence, about four inches deep and still coming down, and it had been walked across already from the front gate to the steps by the people who had come in early, so that there was a sort of trodden path through it, grey and churned, and on either side of the path it was smooth, and blue in the shadows, and perfect.

Nobody had touched it. Yet.

Frederick could feel it. It was the feeling of the second before something; the whole yard full of people, the tall ones by the steps and the new ones by the gym, standing in the snow in their coats and hats with their breath going up white, talking, but not really talking, waiting; looking at the smooth snow on either side of the path, and at each other, and at the snow; the way a room looks at a cake before anybody has cut it.

At five to eight somebody by the steps bent down.

Frederick did not see who. He saw a movement, an arm going down and coming up, and then something white going through the air in a long arc across the yard, slowly, turning; and it hit a boy from the eighth grade on the shoulder, thup, and burst, and there was a silence of about half a second.

And then the yard went to war.

It went all at once, in every direction, from every side; the whole seventh and eighth grade and half the ninth, bending and scooping and throwing, so that the air above the yard was suddenly full of white things going every way at once, and the noise came up off the tarmac like the noise from the swimming bath or the station, but higher, and louder, screaming and laughing and you’ll pay for that and GET HIM; and the smooth blue snow on either side of the path was not smooth or blue any more, it was being torn up in handfuls and thrown; and Lucía was in it, at once, throwing two-handed, shrieking; and June, methodically, from behind the flagpole, on principle; and Gallagher, and Grant, scarlet, and Priya, small and silent and lethally accurate; and Devon Price, behind somebody, throwing over their shoulder.

Frederick stood by the wall.

He stood in the snow by the wall, at the end of the bike racks, with his bag, in his mother’s scarf, and watched it.

Nobody threw at him.

He watched it not happen. He watched it the way he had watched the looking happen on the first morning, the ring going out from him across the yard; except that this was the opposite of a ring, it was a hole. A clear patch, round him, about twenty feet across, in the middle of the yard at war, into which nothing came. Snowballs went past it on every side. Snowballs went over it. People ran past it, laughing, with their arms full of snow, and swerved round it, without thinking, the way water goes round a stone; and he stood in the middle of it, by the wall, untouched, in four inches of perfect snow that nobody had picked up, and watched the whole of his year throw the first snow of the winter at each other, and not at him.

It was not unkind. He knew that. Nobody was leaving him out. Nobody had decided anything. It was just that nobody in the yard had ever been told whether you were allowed to throw a snowball at the Prince of Columbia, and so nobody did; the way nobody fetched a ball that went into the clear patch round Castellanos at the corner of the gym, in September, before Mr Pavlik’s office. It was the shape of the day. It was the weather.

He had stood in a great many clear patches in his life. He had not known, until he stood in this one, in the snow, that it was possible to mind.

---

Something hit him in the middle of the back.

It hit hard. It hit squarely, between the shoulders, with a soft heavy thup, and burst, and he felt it go cold through his coat and the snow from it go down inside his collar, under his mother’s scarf, against the back of his neck, freezing, and run.

He stood very still.

He turned round.

Theo was standing on the wall.

He was standing on the flat stone top of the low wall by the bike racks, in the dark red coat with the sleeves turned back and the woollen hat with the bobble, with his arm still out from the throw and a second snowball already in his other hand; and he was not laughing. He was looking at Frederick with great seriousness, and a sort of concentration, the concentration he brought to an apple, as though he had just done something difficult and important and was waiting to see whether it had worked.

“Never the head,” said Theo.

Frederick stared at him.

“That’s the rule,” said Theo. “In Milwaukee. You never throw at the head. Never. Not at anybody. It’s the oldest rule there is. My granddad told my dad and my dad told me.” He weighed the second snowball in his hand. “Anything else. Not the head.”

Frederick stood in the snow with the cold running down his back.

He could feel the yard turning. The nearest of them had seen. A boy from the eighth grade had stopped with his arm back. Lucía, ten yards away, had stopped with a snowball in each hand and her mouth open. June, by the flagpole, had stood up very straight. All round the clear patch the war was going on, but at the edge of it, where it was nearest, it was stopping, in a ring, the way the looking had gone out in a ring on the first morning, people turning, stopping, staring, at the boy on the wall and the boy in the scarf with snow down his neck, to see what would happen.

He knew what they were waiting for. They were waiting for the man in the window.

He did not look at the window. He did not need to. He knew, the way he knew where the fire exits were, that in the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, behind the moved geranium, Castellanos had put down his coffee, and stood up.

“Freddie,” said Theo, from the wall, with the second snowball. “Are you going to throw one back, or are you just going to stand there being a church?”

---

He did not know how to make a snowball.

He realised it as he bent down. He had never made one. Not once. On Öland, at nine, at Christmas, Elsa and Nils had made them and thrown them at each other across the yard by the caretaker’s house, and he had stood by the door and watched, and nobody had thrown one at him, because the caretaker had said something to them in Swedish, quietly, at the start, that he had not heard. In London on King’s Day the snow was always wet and grey and on a balcony. He had never in his life bent down and picked up snow in his hands to throw it at somebody.

He picked some up.

It was very cold. Colder than he had expected, through his gloves, which were leather, and new, and not meant for this. He held it in his two hands and looked at it, a heap of loose white snow with bits of something in it, a leaf and some grit, and he did what he did with everything, which was to work out how it was made.

It was a sphere. You had to make it a sphere. You had to press it, from all sides, evenly, so that it held together; not too hard, or it would turn to ice, which was the head rule, he supposed, or a version of it; and not too soft, or it would fall apart in the air. You had to press it in your two hands, turning it, a quarter turn at a time, pressing each time, so that every side had been pressed the same number of times. He pressed it. He turned it. He pressed it again. He turned it. He did it carefully, the way he did the loops for Mrs Forsythe, all the same, and he could feel the yard watching him do it, the ring of stopped people round the clear patch watching a boy in a long green and white scarf crouching in the snow by the bike racks making a snowball as though he were following the instructions on the back of a box.

“Freddie,” said Theo, from the wall, in a voice of deep and terrible patience. “It’s a snowball.”

“I’m making it properly.”

“It’s not a cake.”

Frederick stood up.

He had made it. It was a sphere. It was a nearly perfect sphere, white, smooth, about the size of an orange, pressed evenly from every side in eight quarter turns, with the leaf in it, and he held it in his right hand and looked at Theo on the wall in the red coat, and at the ring of stopped people, and did not look at the window, and thought about the rule. Never the head. Anything else.

He threw it.

He threw it badly. He threw it the way he did everything physical, which Mr Kaminski said was like a boy who had read about throwing in a book and not yet been told it was different in real life; with his whole arm stiff, from the shoulder, overarm, and too much behind it, so that it went too high, and turned over twice in the air, in the falling snow, in a long slow arc, over the clear patch, past Lucía, past a boy from the eighth grade, and came down, quite slowly, almost gently, in the end, from a great height, and hit Theo, on the wall, squarely, on the very top of the woollen hat, on the bobble.

The bobble went flat.

There was a silence in the yard.

Frederick stood in the snow with his arm still out.

“That’s the head,” said Theo, from under the hat.

“It’s the bobble.”

“The bobble’s on the head.”

“The bobble’s on the hat,” said Frederick. “The hat’s not your head. The rule’s the head.” He heard himself. He heard his father in his own voice, the voice for New Wessex, explaining in right of which Crown. “A hat’s a separate thing. You can take it off. It’s not part of you. It’s an article of clothing, worn over the head, and the bobble’s an ornament on the article.” He considered. “It was in right of the hat.”

Theo stood on the wall and looked at him from under the flattened bobble with snow all over the top of the hat and running down the sides of his face, and his mouth open.

Then he laughed.

He laughed so suddenly and so hard that he sat down on the wall, in the snow, backwards, and nearly went over the other side into the bike racks; he sat on the wall with his legs in the air and the second snowball still in his hand and laughed until he could not breathe, in right of the HAT, the HAT; and round the clear patch the ring of stopped people looked at each other, and at Frederick, and at the boy on the wall, and somebody started to laugh, and then somebody else; and Lucía threw both her snowballs at once, at Frederick, two-handed, and they hit him in the chest, thup thup, and burst, and she screamed IN RIGHT OF THE HAT and ran; and June, from behind the flagpole, on principle, threw one at his legs; and Gallagher; and Grant, scarlet, at his arm, very gently, as though apologising; and the clear patch was not clear any more.

It was full. It was full of snow, going every way at once, and people, and noise, and he was in the middle of it, in his mother’s scarf, being hit, from every side, in the chest and the back and the legs and the arms and never once in the head, by the whole of the seventh grade at once; and he bent down and picked up snow in his two hands and did not make it a sphere at all, this time, did not press it or turn it, just threw it, at whoever was nearest, which was Devon Price, who was behind somebody, and it went over the somebody’s shoulder and hit Devon Price in the stomach, and Devon Price looked at the snow on his coat with an expression of total, transfigured astonishment, as though he had been knighted.

---

He looked at the window once.

He did not mean to. In the middle of it, with snow down his neck and up his sleeves and in his boots and the scarf soaked at the ends, he turned his head, for a second, and looked across the yard, past the gym, at the low brick building on its eighteen inches of rise, and the window beside the green door.

Castellanos was standing in it.

He was standing very straight, in the dark overcoat, with his hands at his sides, close to the glass, looking at the yard; at the whole of it, at the war; and at the middle of it, where a boy in a long green and white scarf was being hit by thirty people at once and hitting back. He had been standing, Frederick understood, since the first snowball, the one between the shoulders. He had stood up and stayed up. He had not come out. He had not moved.

As Frederick looked, he sat down.

He sat down slowly, in the chair, behind the moved geranium, and picked up his coffee, and looked at the yard, the way he always did, the yard and the steps and the bike racks and the gate. And the forefinger of his right hand came up off the side of the cup, about an inch, and stayed up, for about a second, and went down.

Frederick turned back to the yard just in time to be hit in the chest by June, on principle.

---

At eight the bell went, the long flat electric bell from inside the building, and nobody went in.

Mr Abernathy had to come out. He came out of the double doors at the top of the steps in the brown jacket, without a coat, and stood there in the snow with his long face and his scarred hand and looked at the yard, at three hundred children covered in snow, at the torn-up white and grey of it from the gym to the fence; and he did not shout. He stood there. And the yard, slowly, from the steps outwards, stopped, the way the field of wheat had stopped in history, row by row, until there was nobody in it moving except the snow, which went on coming down.

“Inside,” said Mr Abernathy. “Now. In the order of the list.”

They went in, in the order of the list.

Frederick went up the steps behind Grant. He was soaked. He was soaked from his collar to his boots, and the ends of the scarf were sodden and heavy and dragged on the steps, and his ears were burning and his hands, inside the new leather gloves, had stopped being hands and become something else; and halfway up the steps Theo came up behind him, out of the order of the list, without asking, and put his arm round Frederick’s neck.

He did it from behind. He put his arm round Frederick’s neck, over the wet scarf, in the dark red coat with the sleeves turned back, the way you would put your arm round the neck of somebody you had known all your life, and pulled him in, and walked him up the rest of the steps like that, laughing, with snow still on the flattened bobble of his hat and on his eyelashes and in his hair, saying in right of the hat, Freddie, in right of the HAT; and Frederick, who had never in his life had anybody’s arm round his neck who was not his mother or his father or a doctor, walked up the steps of Ellicott High School with his head held in the crook of Theo’s elbow, laughing too, helplessly, so that he could not see where he was going and missed a step and Theo held him up.

The three tall boys were by the doors. They were standing in the doorway in the snow with their hands in their pockets, as they always stood, and they watched the two of them come up the last of the steps, the boy in the long scarf with the other boy’s arm round his neck, and Frederick saw them see it, and look at each other.

One of them stepped aside to let them through.

Theo did not let go. He did not let go through the double doors or along the corridor that smelt of floor polish and something older underneath it, or up the stairs to the first floor; he walked Frederick all the way to the door of Room 14 like that, with his arm round his neck, both of them dripping on the parquet, and only let go at the door, because Mr Abernathy was standing in it.

Mr Abernathy looked at them.

He looked at Theo, with the flattened bobble and the snow on his eyelashes. He looked at Frederick, with the scarf. He looked at the trail of melting snow along the corridor behind them, all the way back to the stairs.

“Hanover,” he said.

“Sir.”

“Hartigan.”

“Sir.”

“Sit by the four,” said Mr Abernathy, and stood aside.

They went in. The radiators were on; it was December; and of the six radiators under the windows in Room 14, two were stone cold, as they always were, and four were very hot, as Mr Abernathy had said in September they would be; and the desk by the window three from the back, Frederick’s, was beside one of the four. He sat down at it, soaking, and put his gloves on the radiator, where they hissed, and his mother’s scarf, which steamed; and Theo sat down beside him, by the aisle, and put his hat on the radiator too, the woollen one, with the bobble, which was flat, and which steamed, and did not come back up.

“You flattened my bobble,” said Theo.

“It was in right of the hat.”

Theo put his face in his hands on the desk.

“Abrams,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here.”

---

The letter was waiting for him on the hall table at four, when he got home, on top of where the scarf had been, small and white and cheap and addressed in green to Frederick, Columbia Palace, New Westminster, second class, as predicted.

He opened it in the hall, in his wet boots, with Castellanos standing by the hard chair, taking off his overcoat.

Dear Frederick,

Thank you for your letter. You do not need to be sorry about not knowing how not to write back. Nor do I. It is a thing that happens to people who were brought up properly and it cannot be helped.

Kate ate yours. She says to say thank you and that they were very good and that you should not have them, ever, because they are hers now. This is a joke. I think.

Peter says to tell you that the first snow is always on a school day. He says it is a rule of the transit authority. It is not. But it is usually true.

Theo says you have never been hit with a snowball. I do not know if this is true. He says a great many things. If it is true, I expect he will put it right.

Yours sincerely,

Anneliese Hartigan

P.S. Tell Theo to wear his hat.

Frederick stood in the hall of the north wing in his wet boots with the letter.

He read it again. If it is true, I expect he will put it right. It was postmarked Wednesday. Canal Street. Second class. She had written it on Tuesday night, at the counter, standing up, in green, two days before the snow, and posted it on Wednesday on her way to work, before anybody in the city knew that it was going to snow at all.

He looked up.

Castellanos was hanging his overcoat on the peg by the door. He had snow on the shoulders of it still, melting.

“Sergeant Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“Did you stand up? In the window? This morning?”

Castellanos hung the coat on the peg. He brushed the snow off the shoulder of it with his hand, slowly.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Why did you sit down?”

Castellanos looked at the coat for a while.

“Because he said never the head, sir,” he said. “I could see his mouth. From the window. I can read a mouth at forty yards; they teach you.” He turned round. “And then you threw one back. And it hit his hat.” He looked at the letter in Frederick’s hand. “And I thought, he’s not in any danger. He’s in a snowball fight.” He went to the hard chair and sat down in it, by the north wing door, with his hands on his knees. “And I’d never seen you in one, sir. So I sat down to watch.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Will it go in your note?”

Castellanos thought about it.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s unusual.”

“What will you put?”

Castellanos took out the small black notebook from his jacket pocket, and opened it, and took out his pen, and wrote something, short, in small square capitals, and Frederick could see it this time, because Castellanos did not turn the notebook away. He held it on his knee where Frederick could read it.

Snow. P. in snowball fight in schoolyard 0755-0800. Approx. 30 participants. Rule observed: not the head. P. struck one boy (H.) on hat. Ruled by P. to be in right of the hat. No injuries. P. went in with H.’s arm round his neck.

He looked at it. Then he wrote one more line underneath, and Frederick read that too.

First one.

He closed the notebook and put it in his pocket.

“Go and get dry, sir,” he said. “And put your mother’s scarf by the fire. Not too close.” He looked at the door. “She’ll want to see it’s been used.”