Blizzard–Grover, Missouri, Christmas 1893

As near as we could tell, five souls perished in the storm that Christmas. At least this was the case for those of us in Grover. Elsewhere, out among the shacks and farms, there were likely other tragedies we know nothing about. But, for us, there were five:

**Thomas Whitlatch, thirty-seven, husband of Gloria, and father to Thomas Jr., Cynthia, and Bridget: perished when he went to check on his mother who lived next door and broke his ankle likely stepping into a gopher hole. If he cried for help, no one heard. Gloria found him two days later when she went out into waist-deep snow, one end of a clothesline tied to her wrist and the other to a post on her porch, and came upon an odd mound in the yard. His mother, Veronica Whitlatch, who spent the day reading Middlemarch beside her hearth, lived another thirty years. Among them, his children eventually gave Thomas Whitlatch seven grandchildren he was not alive to meet. However sometimes Gloria talked about the boy that Bridget had as her last, who died the day he was born. It gave her comfort, she said, to imagine Thomas in the hereafter crooning to the infant as he had to his own children.

**Andrew Leslie, twenty, who, despite his mother’s pleading, set out for Beatrice Panetta’s home. It was a quarter mile and he’d walked it often, ever since he became smitten with her when they were thirteen. For a long while, Beatrice thought he was a foolish boy, as did we all. He was gawky, with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed below his pointed chin when he spoke. But Bea’s innate politeness prevented her from sending him away once and for all, convincing Andrew he’d won her over and that he ought to ask her to marry him that Christmas. “It can wait,” his mother said. He replied that he’d pictured himself doing it on Christmas so often that not to do so seemed a failure. Some days later, Andrea Middleton went to investigate what her dogs were pawing at across the road from her house and found Andrew curled beneath the snow. Beatrice Panetta confessed to her sister Vivian that, as terrible as it sounded, she felt relief when she heard what had happened, as it saved her from marrying him. She knew she would’ve been unable to say no, and that inability, rather than real affection, would have been the reason she became his wife. The next March, she married a dry goods drummer who was not from here and moved with him to Louisville. In her later years when they fell on hard times, she wrote Vivian that she sometimes thought about how life might’ve been with Andrew Leslie. In her imaginings, he was still twenty, though he would’ve been an old man by then just as she was an old woman. She pictured him coming through the door bearing flowers and then he’d sit as he had when they were at school, his sharp chin cupped in his palm, listening to her describe her day as if she were the most fascinating woman he might ever encounter.