They Laughed When She Buried Pumpkins in the Snow — Until the Famine Came That Winter

In the autumn of 1872, the people of Otter Hollow watched a young widow bury forty-two pumpkins in the snow.

Not slice them for drying.

Not stack them in a cellar.

Not feed them to hogs before frost ruined them.

Bury them.

Whole.

One by one.

Catherine Vail was twenty-six years old and had been alone for seven months.

Her husband, Adam, had died of fever in the spring. His coat still hung beside the cabin door. His pipe still sat above the stove. His razor remained in its little wooden box because Catherine had not yet found the strength to decide where a dead man’s ordinary things belonged.

She had no children.

No brother nearby.

No father living.

Only a thin gray cat named Pim that followed her through the first November snow while she worked behind the cabin.

Before the ground froze, Catherine had dug a trench six feet long and three feet deep into the slope.

She lined it with dry pine needles.

Then straw.

Then sedge grass cut from the creek bank.

Each pumpkin went down separately, cushioned so its rind touched neither earth nor another pumpkin.

Then she covered the row.

More straw.

More grass.

And finally snow.

A thick white blanket she repaired every time the wind disturbed it.

People passing on the road slowed to stare.

Frank Holloway stopped his wagon outright.

Frank owned the gristmill and, because nearly every family in the valley passed through his doors, his opinions traveled quickly.

His seven-year-old daughter Pearl sat beside him on the wagon seat.

“What are you doing with those pumpkins, Mrs. Vail?” he called.

Catherine straightened.

“I’m keeping them alive.”

Frank stared at her.

Then shook the reins.

By the time he reached the mill, he had decided grief had damaged her judgment.

“She’s addled,” he told the men waiting for flour. “Addled by grief.”

The phrase spread.

Catherine heard it days later at the trading post.

She bought half a pound of salt, thanked the storekeeper, and walked home without reacting.

Under the snow behind her cabin, forty-two pumpkins waited.

The idea had not been hers.

It belonged to her grandmother.

Catherine had been five the first time the old woman showed her a winter pit.

Her grandmother had come to America from near Smolensk as a child and had carried with her habits the Wisconsin neighbors considered strange.

Cabbages stood upright in damp sand.

Cucumbers fermented in oak barrels beneath cherry leaves.

Apples disappeared into straw-lined pits.

And winter squash went beneath the snow.

Catherine still remembered one January evening when her grandmother dug through blue twilight snow and lifted out a golden squash as firm as if it had just come from the field.

The old woman had held it beneath the lantern.

“The cellar fights winter,” she said. “The pit lets winter do the work.”

Then she gave Catherine the sentence she would remember twenty-one years later.

“Snow is not the thief, child. Snow is the cupboard.”

At five, Catherine had understood none of it.

At twenty-six, widowed and alone, she understood.

Snow trapped air.

Deep enough beneath it, temperatures changed slowly.

The food did not suffer the wild freeze-and-thaw of an exposed shed or shallow cellar.

Cold became preservation instead of destruction.

So Catherine had dug.

The rest of Otter Hollow prepared in the ordinary way.

It had been a good harvest.

Cellars filled with potatoes.

Smokehouses with bacon and ham.

Lofts with onions and apples.

Pumpkins were eaten lavishly.

Pumpkin soup.

Pumpkin pies.

Pumpkin mashed with butter.

Pumpkin fed to hogs because there seemed to be more than anyone could possibly need.

By mid-November, orange had disappeared from the fields.

Catherine had eaten one pumpkin.

The rest slept beneath the snow.

Then winter arrived early.

Three days of snow buried the valley beneath nearly two feet.

The temperature fell below zero and stayed there.

Older men began looking at the sky differently.

The Little Hemlock River froze completely across before December.

No one living there could remember that happening so early.

Then a rider came from Pine Crossing with worse news.

The final freight wagon of the season had been lost forty miles south.

The drivers survived.

The cargo did not.

No coffee.

No dried fruit.

No beans.

No salt pork.

No replacement until spring.

Frank Holloway laughed when he heard.

“We’ve got our harvest.”

And, at that moment, he was right.

The valley had food.

What no one understood was how quickly the cold would destroy it.

December settled over Otter Hollow and refused to leave.

Temperatures stayed far below zero.

Frost penetrated cellar floors.

Potatoes blackened.

Apples bruised from within.

Onions split.

Garlic softened into slime.

Families hurried to eat what was failing before it became completely useless.

Every week their winter stores shrank faster than planned.

Catherine’s cabin was cold too, but she had prepared differently.

Snow was banked against the foundation.

Moss was packed into chinking.

Straw covered the loft floor.

She filled her kettles before the well rope froze.

She ate sparingly.

Cornmeal.

Beans.

A little ham.

Broth.

The pumpkins remained untouched.

Until December twentieth.

That morning Catherine found the hickory marker at the end of the buried row.

She paced carefully.

Then began digging with a wooden trowel.

Snow.

Straw.

Sedge grass.

And finally orange.

She lifted one pumpkin from the pit.

The rind was firm.

The stem sound.

No black spot.

No soft patch.

It had spent more than two months beneath Wisconsin snow and looked almost freshly harvested.

Catherine carried it inside.

When she cut through the rind, the smell filled the cabin.

For one moment she was back in October.

Adam alive.

The kitchen door open.

Warm soil outside.

She put the knife down until the memory passed.

Then she saved the seeds for spring.

The pumpkin would last seven days.

That was the rule.

One per week.

Catherine had calculated everything before the pit was dug.

She had forty-two.

Two had not been included in the number she told the neighbors.

Those two were reserve.

For what, she had not known.

Only that a careful household should leave room for the winter to be worse than expected.

By Christmas, Frank Holloway began discovering what “worse” meant.

His wife Martha came up from the cellar carrying three potatoes.

“We lost the back barrel.”

He went down himself.

Almost all of it was black.

Then he counted the smokehouse.

Four hams.

Two sides of bacon.

Some sausage.

Five mouths in the family.

And Eli Pratt, the mill hand, depended partly on Frank’s meal.

For the first time that winter, Frank stopped laughing about Catherine’s pit.

January came.

Hunger followed.

Eli Pratt’s wife was pregnant and sick.

Their preserves ran out.

Eli came to the mill one morning with his hat in his hands.

“Could I draw against spring work?”

Frank looked toward his own children.

Then gave him five pounds of cornmeal.

More families followed.

Frank helped some.

Turned away others.

Not because he had become cruel.

Because he was afraid.

He began locking his smokehouse.

He had never locked it before.

February was worse.

Children stopped running.

Church attendance thinned because walking through deep snow cost calories people could no longer afford to spend.

Old Mrs. Penn died during the second week.

Seventy-eight.

The cold and hunger simply asked more than her body had left.

Men used picks and hot coals to soften the cemetery ground enough for her grave.

At the funeral, Pearl Holloway stood beside her father wearing two coats.

She was thinner.

So were her brothers.

That night, Frank counted everything remaining.

A quarter ham.

Eight pounds of cornmeal.

A little lard.

No potatoes.

No onions.

No apples.

Maybe two weeks of food.

Spring was at least two months away.

Martha sat across from him.

“Frank.”

He did not look up.

“We have to ask her.”

He knew who she meant.

His pride fought the idea until morning.

Then Pearl could not get out of bed.

She had no fever.

She was simply too weak.

When Martha offered porridge, the girl turned away.

Frank stood in the doorway and watched his daughter.

Then he went for his coat.

The coat he found was Adam Vail’s old wool coat, borrowed months earlier and never returned.

Frank put it on.

He walked two miles toward Catherine’s cabin carrying Pearl against his chest.

The thing he remembered afterward was her weight.

She weighed almost nothing.

In October she had filled the wagon seat.

In February he could carry her through deep snow without effort.

Big, Frank understood now, meant fed.

It meant safe.

It meant a father who had planned correctly.

By noon he reached Catherine’s gate.

Smoke rose thinly from her chimney.

The long mound behind the house lay smooth beneath fresh snow.

Frank stood there trying to remember the speech he had rehearsed.

Nothing came.

He knocked.

Catherine opened the door.

She saw Adam’s coat.

She saw Pearl in Frank’s arms.

She saw the face of the man who had called her addled before half the valley.

She said none of it.

“Come inside.”

The warmth hit Frank immediately.

Catherine took Pearl and set her near the stove.

Then she brought a bowl of thick orange soup.

One spoonful.

Then another.

Pearl swallowed.

By the seventh, she reached weakly for the bowl herself.

Frank stood watching.

His eyes filled before he realized he was crying.

Catherine finally glanced toward him.

“There’s another bowl on the stove.”

He ate standing.

Pumpkin.

A little fat.

Salt.

Warmth.

It tasted almost impossibly rich.

When he finished, Catherine put on her shawl.

“Come with me.”

They went behind the cabin.

Catherine stopped beside the hickory marker.

“You called me addled, Frank.”

His face tightened.

“I know.”

“I’m not telling you that because I want an apology.”

She looked toward the buried row.

“I’m telling you because what I’m giving you has a price, and I want you to understand it.”

She dug.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Then lifted a perfect pumpkin out of the snow.

Then another.

Frank stared at them.

“There are forty in the row,” Catherine said. “I’ve eaten eight. Thirty-two remain.”

She brushed snow from her gloves.

“At one each week, that is far more than I need. The garden will return before they are gone.”

Then she looked at the two pumpkins beside him.

“I told everyone forty because I buried two more that I did not count.”

“Why?”

“For a winter I did not know was coming.”

She paused.

“And for a neighbor I did not know would ask.”

Frank lowered his head.

“Take them.”

He could not answer.

“They won’t carry your family to spring,” Catherine continued. “But they will carry you to the next conversation.”

“What conversation?”

“Next autumn.”

Frank looked up.

“When the harvest comes, you’re going to teach every family in this valley how to build one of these pits.”

She pointed beneath the snow.

“You’ll go to the houses between here and Pine Crossing. You’ll show them the straw. The drainage. The depth. The snow cover.”

She looked him directly in the eyes.

“You’ll tell them you learned it from the winter.”

Frank swallowed.

Catherine’s voice softened.

“My grandmother used to say the cold is the cupboard.”

She touched one pumpkin with her boot.

“Next year, I want every child in Otter Hollow to have one.”

Frank looked at the pumpkins.

Then toward the cabin where his daughter was eating.

He knelt in the snow.

Not before Catherine.

Before the food he had mocked.

He wrapped both arms around the pumpkins and bowed his head against their cold rinds.

His shoulders shook.

Catherine let him cry.

Then she turned toward the cabin.

Pearl would be ready for another bowl.

Behind her, beneath the white Wisconsin earth, thirty-two pumpkins waited quietly in the dark.

They had survived because a young widow remembered an old woman’s lesson.

And because when everyone else had treated winter as something to fight, Catherine had understood what her grandmother had known all along.

Sometimes the thing that threatens to take everything from you can also be taught to keep something safe.