Ice Storm (12 page)

They were shocked. But it was clear from the look on Maman’s face that she wasn’t making it up. “Why were
you so late?” asked Sébastien. “We were so worried.”

“I’m sorry,
mon petit,”
said Maman. “We took the generator for a detour to the Champlain farm.”

“Why?” asked Sophie curiously. “They don’t have cows, they have pigs. Pigs don’t have to be milked.” Sébastien giggled. Milk a pig?!

“It is worse for the pig farmers, Sophie,” explained Maman wearily. “They need more ventilation in their barns than we do. If they don’t have ventilation, even for an hour, the pigs start to die. Monsieur Champlain called us when his generator broke down. We finished at Farm C as fast as we could and took the generator over, but he’d already lost a good number of animals.”

This was even more shocking than the wood story. Geneviève Champlain was in Sophie’s class at school. She was going to be devastated.

“We cleared his barns as best we could, but I couldn’t leave the generator, not with our cows waiting. He called the army. They’re going to try to get him help. But he’s not the only one in trouble.” Maman sighed wearily.

Sophie looked closely at Maman. She looked nearly as tired as Papa. “Why don’t you go to bed too, Maman?” said Sophie. “Everything’s running. Sébastien and I can look after things for a bit.”

“Mais non!”
cried Maman. “There are too many cows to be milked. It will take all three of us.”

“We can do it, Maman,” said Sophie earnestly. She looked at Sébastien, who nodded vigorously. “Really we can.”

“C’est sûr?”
asked Maman. She sighed. “
Merci, mes enfants. Je suis très fatiguée.”
Maman stumbled off after Papa. Sophie looked at Sébastien.

“I’m worried,” she said. “They’re too tired to work. They might have an accident with the machinery or
something. We’ve got to let them sleep as long as they can. Can you arrange for the milk truck?”

“Mais oui,”
agreed Sébastien. “I’ll make my voice deep, so they think it’s Papa calling!”

Sophie looked around the milking parlour. Everything was running smoothly. The cows were content. She wandered up and down the rows, speaking softly to the animals. What would she do if she lost them? She couldn’t imagine having a disaster like the Champlains. She would just want to die.

Sébastien came tearing into the barn, hatless and coatless.

“The phones, the phones,” he panted. “They’re not working! And the cell is dead. I plugged it into the charger but it still won’t work. I can’t get through to the milk truck!”

“Slow down, Sébastien, breathe, for heaven’s sake,” said Sophie, but her mind was racing. No milk truck meant no pickup meant spoiled milk. Not a disaster. Not worth waking her parents because there was nothing they could do. The truck would come or it wouldn’t. If the milk spoiled, so be it.
Don’t cry over spilt milk,
Sophie told herself. The important thing was keeping the cows healthy.

Sophie went back to murmuring to the cows and her soft voice served to soothe Sébastien as well. When the first ten cows were done, the two of them put their milking gloves on to give the teats their final clean. Sophie pushed the button to release the finished cows. Sébastien was already herding the next ten into the milking parlour. As the cows took their places, Sophie and Sébastien worked as hard as they could to clean all the teats and hook up the cows by themselves.
When the milk started flowing, Sébastien gave Sophie a high-five.

They’d done it – no parents required! Sophie had to smile at his enthusiasm. He wasn’t such a bad little kid, not really.

All of a sudden, the whine of the generator got louder. They looked at one another in alarm. The ventilator fans hesitated.

Slowly, Sophie raised both hands in front of her and crossed all her fingers for luck. Solemnly, Sébastien did the same. They crossed their arms. They crossed their legs. They crossed their eyes and it wasn’t even funny. The generator could NOT break down. It just couldn’t.

But it did. The whine reached a feverish peak then went silent. The fans stopped turning. The milking machine ground to a halt. With the suction gone, the machines dropped away from the cows’ udders. The cows began to bawl, confused.

This couldn’t be happening. Sophie was paralyzed for almost a whole minute. When she could move, she grabbed Sébastien’s hand and raced for the house shouting, “Papa! Maman!” at the top of her lungs.

But there was nothing to be done, nothing at all. Papa tinkered with the generator for a while and determined
that a part deep inside the mechanism had broken.

“Overuse, probably,” he said. “Nothing we can do.”

“But our cows!” cried Sophie.

Papa pulled the truck keys out of his pocket. “I’ll go into town and see if anybody’s got the part, or anything even close to the part that I can cobble up. And I’ll register with the army for a new generator. I heard they’re flying in generators from all across the country to help us. Evie, Sophie, see if you can finish milking this lot by hand. Take note of which ones got milked and which ones didn’t. We can’t possibly do them all by hand!” he added, shaking his head. “Sébastien, call the others and tell them what’s happened. Tell them I’m trying my best to get another generator but they should try to make their own arrangements as well.”

“But Papa,” said Sébastien in a very small voice. “The phones are out too.”

Papa put his face in his hands.
“Mon dieu!
Can anything else go wrong? I will drive to the other farms on my way home and tell them myself.” He turned to go.

“Henri,” Maman touched him on the shoulder. “Remember, the truck is almost out of gas.” They were all four silent, standing around the carcass of the generator.

“Get the hand pump,” Papa said finally, to no one in particular.

After Papa finished hand pumping more gas into the truck, he got into the cab without another word and drove away. The rest of the family stood out in the freezing rain and watched him go. This storm wasn’t fun any more, not one bit.

Day Six

Saturday, January 10, 1998

The Shelter

A
lice spent another almost sleepless night.
Almost, because she reckoned she must have dozed off at some point in the wee hours or she wouldn’t be feeling as groggy as she was. Even though this shelter was better than the last one, all night there were still hundreds of people talking, going to the bathroom, moaning, crying, snoring and all kinds of other things that most people do in private. Alice was pretty sure that given a choice she’d pick loneliness over the chaos she was enduring now. Mrs. Hartley didn’t agree. She’d made friends with the nurse and some of the volunteers and one of the ladies who had a cot near her. She was a lot less cranky when she had somebody to talk to, that was for sure. As Alice
wiped the sleep from her eyes, she wondered what would happen today. It felt so strange to have absolutely no power over what was going to happen next.

Maybe she could read to the kids again. Yesterday, it had been fun while it lasted. But after an hour, most of the kids got tired of listening. They started to poke each other and act silly. Alice had to stop being a librarian and return the books to the bookstore. After that, the only thing to do was sit. Sit and stare. Sit and listen to all the fighting and the laughing and the arguing and the crying. Some of the grown-ups tried to organize games for the kids to play but the kids all said the games were lame. It was almost as if they had forgotten how to play any games that didn’t include a video screen. So they just ran around and got into trouble, fighting over what program to watch on television. Alice sat and got frustrated. She had never felt so lonely in her life.

Breakfast was a weird combination of food. For dinner the soldiers trucked in food cooked at the big hospital kitchens. That was okay. But the other meals had a little bit of about a million different things. Lots of people were bringing the contents of their freezers to share around when they came to the shelter, rather than leave it at home to spoil. This morning, the menu consisted of scrambled eggs, sausage links, tuna casserole, lasagne, cabbage rolls, fish sticks and frozen peas. The volunteers were trying to heat stuff up in the tiny lunchrooms on each floor of the office tower, but that meant mostly everything was microwaved. Alice wished St-Viateur would show up with bagels, but they didn’t. After breakfast, Alice helped Mrs. Hartley back to her bed. The old lady was more comfortable getting around with the cane that had been found for her, but the nurse wanted her to stay off her leg as much as possible. Alice plunked down on the end of her bed for the morning news update. Not only was it interesting, it was the one time of day that almost everybody in the shelter kept quiet.

Canada’s second largest city is in serious trouble!
intoned the tv announcer dramatically.
Millions of people are struggling in the freezing darkness!

The good news: the rain has stopped for the time being and some areas will see sunshine today. The bad news: a cold front is coming and temperatures are expected to drop below minus ten overnight with winds gusting to forty kilometres per hour. This will hurt Hydro workers’ efforts to repair downed lines, as the cold temperatures will force them to clear ice from lines by hand rather than machine to prevent further damage. Not to mention the increased discomfort they will suffer from spending long hours outside.

Alice bit her lip. Her poor dad.

Here’s where we are today: there are now eleven dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, hypothermia and falling ice. In addition to the three million previously without power, tens of thousands more in the Maritimes are now also in the dark. Montréal’s two main pumping stations have lost power, so parts of the city have run out of water. If you have water, please boil it before using from now on to prevent disease. Emergency shelters are running out of beds and supplies, so if you have to go to a shelter bring your
own sleeping bags and lawn chairs.

An ice jam in the St. François River has caused flooding in St. Nicéphore. Two hundred people had to be evacuated. The Ministry of Natural Resources has a plan to fly in chainsaws and the Federal Defense Department is setting up a winter tent camp in Vankleek Hill for a thousand hydro workers while they work on the downed lines. VIA Rail workers are walking along the rail lines, trying to clear debris and ice from the tracks.

Dramatic stories are pouring in from all over the disaster zone. One man, who was driving along Highway 20, had this to say, “I saw a pylon in front of me twist like it was plastic. It twisted in two, and then became a ball, and crumbled. The lines were all over the highway. After the first one fell, three others behind it collapsed. It was pretty scary.”

Hydro-Québec is no longer talking about repairing the system. They will have to build it all over again.

The Premier of Québec has just called the United States to ask for a loan of beds and generators. “The situation has aggravated,” he said. “I would ask Québecers to keep showing their solidarity and capacity to endure these trials.” But out in the icy cold, Québecers are getting angry. People are asking why Hydro-Québec insisted everybody switch to electric heating. “If I’d kept my natural gas, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” said one man. “Like idiots, we did what we were told. Now look at us.”

On a lighter note, some people are complaining about not enough ice. When power was lost at indoor skating arenas throughout the disaster zone, ice-making equipment quit. The rinks have all melted.

Alice didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she heard that one. Mrs. Hartley wouldn’t let it pass.

“How does that make you feel, Alice girl?” she asked. “Happy? Sad? Relieved?”

Why, oh why, did she always ask the hard questions?
The old lady was worse than Aunt Evie for extracting the truth. This was none of her business.

“Don’t glare at me, girl,” said Mrs. Hartley fiercely. “I don’t need to know the answer, but you do. Think about it.”

Alice sat motionless on the end of the bed. “Relieved,” she finally admitted, slumping her shoulders. “There, I said what you wanted me to say.”

“Believe me, girl, I don’t care what you say. Now go away and leave me in peace.” With that, Mrs. Hartley turned on her side to take a nap.

Oh, how that old lady made her mad! Having a few friends to talk to hadn’t made Mrs. Hartley less cranky at all.