"The Ice Harvest" - Short Fiction

It is before dawn on a Tuesday in the deep Winter of 1891. Sven Jaros is awake, pissing steam into a snowbank on the side of his rented property's outhouse while he plans the best way to murder the man who raped his daughter.

Today is the first day of the Sangamon River Ice Harvest. The rage inside him is snug against his rib cage like an insulating blanket. The glacier water runs deep into the Sangamon beneath the forgotten fourteen inches of ice that five days of four-degree clear sky weather has brought to Decatur, Illinois.

Despite his blood lust, the labor sentence of the next twelve hours looms large over Sven. The only thrill he feels more resounding than the rush of prospective murder is this nervous urination into a world so cold that it freezes yellow seconds after hitting the ground.

Most of the Decatur Ice Company's employees look forward to the work of the Ice Harvest, despite the freezing cold. There will be little heat to the labor that lay ahead of these men, and the weight of waiting doesn't make the prospect any lighter on Sven's immigrant sense of work pride.

His sixteen-year-old daughter, Sophronia, is still sleeping when he leaves, the moonlight painting her face silky blue through the sheer curtain of their crude cabin. He kissed her on the broad red birthmark of her right cheek, the same kiss he'd given her since she was an infant. A fire of shame and fury flares up his cheeks while he remembers what he let happen to her the last time it was warm outside.

Sven docked in New York City as an expatriate of Czarist Eastern Europe in 1885. He came to America the same year that the internal combustion engine was patented and produced. This new world has only accelerated in forwarding motion since then.

The seventeen days he dragged his eleven-year-old daughter around the muddy streets of New York City were desperate ones. He sought passage West, acting out a fable he dreamed of telling his grandchildren one day while they bounced on his knee. He will say these things a long time away from this freezing Ice Harvest at the cusp of a new century in America.

Many of those who work with him during these Ice Harvests will come to worship the Sangamon River's harsh wind and muted roar in their memories of these Winters gone by. When their smears in time run thin, many will cherish these years of labor more and more, each of them written by sweat and blood in the snow. 

This Central Illinois Winter has turned everything a brilliant, simple blue that chaps every face red. The Ice Harvest has almost become a religious event here in Decatur. When Spring breaks in late April, many ice farmers get on their knees beside their beds for an extra round of prayer. Some will cry tears of gratitude that they've made it through one more harvest with their bodies intact, their rent paid, and a few dollars for next Summer's stretch.  Many of them couldn't read or factor simple numbers, but these men lived like Lords of Illinois for three seasons of the year because they worked like the lowest slaves during the coldest one. When the fire goes out in the world, the Devil gets paid upfront.

Every year, at least five men lose one or more of their fingers, and a few lose their whole hands. A few of them will make a mortal mistake and leave their families without fathers and husbands. Every year, the Sangamon demands sacrifice. The others are left with gruesome memories to resurface years later in their loneliest moments, usually when alcohol overwhelmed apathy.

When the ice breaks and the Sangamon starts singing against the roots and rocks of its reedy banks, the ice farmers will find their places again in families and the city, like worn puzzle pieces, once lost, now found.

Carl Broker is the Cutter Foreman of the Ice Harvest, and the thumb of his left hand is missing. His job is to make sure the ice houses are filled and that the ice lines are cut straight.

Perpendicular lines are cut in the ice and then sawed through so the plowmen can move in with the horse team to detach and pull the sawed ice squares from the river's greedy hold.

The thick ice squares are then hauled by horse to the water channel, where Roscoe Bufford's drift team comes in to pole them downstream from the cutting shelf to the banks of the first ice house.

Henry Sifalees's team pole hooks them there onto the squelching cold mud. There, they get roped and harnessed to workhorses that haul dozens of sheets up the giant hill to a spiked conveyor belt.

Three four-foot ice squares are stacked on top of one another, side by side in layers, insulated by sheets of sawdust. Once filled, the Ice House is shut up for the Winter until the city's Summer comfort demands the ice, depleting the supply near the October harvest.

Eleven ice houses line the banks of the Sangamon, and all of them will be full by late March. Today is January 4th, and they were starting on the first house. As they fill, the production moves further upriver, and the men's muscles will grow carved and knotted in the stinging cold.

Harvest employees are a mix of Black, Irish, German, Slavic, and Nords. Many were dismayed to find they fled lesser persecutions than those they faced in this harsh Illinois Winter wind. 

Sven Jaros is the only Eastern European in Broker's crew, and he sticks out amongst the men like a whole potato in the stew. Sven has bundled himself up with every layer he could find in the cold cabin. Several hundred feet of the river have been sectioned off by monthly targets, each marked with bank flags to measure progress hourly. Carl Broker walks these sections every morning and picks up the flags blown out of the bank mud by the wind.

The company's production goal is three hundred fifty paces of river ice a day, yielding several hundred tons of ice each week. This speed and pace will fill all eleven ice houses on schedule by the end of Winter. 

Sven stomps his way through this dark Winter morning in his heavy boots, cracking bare branches and stepping down frail fallen limbs that lay moored between the reedy trees. He makes his way to the river while snow swirls around him like stinging dream fragments, and the river pulls him in like a magnetic attraction. The Sangamon looms in his thoughts constantly. It became the backdrop of his life while he's planned murder over the Christmas holiday, praying to the river every day, deepening faith in its cycle.

By nine-thirty, the sun has risen boldly into the Eastern sky for the rest of Decatur. However, it feels low and glazed to these Ice Farmers like the watery leftovers in a soup pot. In one half-hour, Sven will get his first fifteen-minute break. During this break, he will set his plans in motion.

He wipes his forehead with the back of a gloved hand and looks North up the river. It is a hell of a thing to sweat in the freezing cold. Still, the sensation has become second nature to them over five seasons. This crew has carved the Sangamon up into squares of ice, robbing the river every year, paying by the mile with their health and lives.

Break time has come, and Sven moves North through the frozen brush like a high plains panther, looking behind him every few seconds to ensure he isn't being followed. He stops when he sees the bank flag marking the end goal of today's cut. Sven scans the tree line, lost in thought, then walks three hundred paces beyond the day's goal flag and sits on the cold, muddy ground. His boots squelch in the thin bog slush. He boils in memory and schemes for tomorrow.

A few minutes pass, and he hears cheers from half the men playing their never-ending break time game of Slide Stick on the river's ice. Years from now, people will call a form of this game Hockey. Still, it is now a feud played for its own purpose, where victory drifts from side to side every day like a wind-whipped in their faces from every weak point of exposure. Slide Stick is played with branches, and whatever small object is big enough to chase and crash into one another over. It keeps the men from fighting and killing each other, mostly.

Sven surveys a spot on the river bank where the shallow ice meets water less than six inches down.  During his afternoon break, he finds the site again. He's brought a filched knife shovel, a spade sharpened on both sides, brought to a final point, the reaping tool of river harvest. Sven looks back down the river again to ensure he isn't being watched. His chosen spot is a good one, lying in a small cove, nestled between the hill banks of trees that hide the view from anyone downstream walking up. But sound carries long waves over this ice, so he waits to strike with the blade until the Slide Stick players score and yell. Sven draws up with resolute purpose, feet planted square in the frozen mud of the riverbank, and he strikes down with a fissure of fury that never seems to leave his heart anymore. He is sick from the spirit, and murder for him might feel at first like a preserver thrown to a drowning man; this is what he hopes for most in his life right now, to be saved.

Two more blows against the ice, and the hole is now the width he needs to jam the freezing shovelhead into the frozen water of the Sangamon. He lets the handle fall to the winter grass and kick-covers it with fallen branches.

Carl Broker surveys each day's cutting in the dark of the morning. He meets the river every day before any of his men do. It is the kind of ritual that a man with many enemies could find more than inconvenient. But unfortunately, Carl Broker has made many enemies during his thirty-seven years of life, most of them during the last ten.

Broker taught himself to read and factor numbers at age nine, never shying away from a hard day's sweat in his father's cornfield, unlike his younger brother. The latter turned out to be a bookish prig, now locked away in a vine-covered classroom of an upstate New York University.

Carl had bedded dozens of women by the time he reached thirty, some of them wives and daughters of men he had taken into his confidence. He is a quick wit with a keen eye for figuring out the actual state of things. He knows where a man's heart is by his gestures with his hands and how his eyes change shape when he speaks, by the intonation the man uses when his voice fills with emotion. There are signs on the trail to every human heart, easy to read for a man like Carl Broker. The Preacherman says that the signs we don't read in the hearts of others are why we walk blindly into the errors of terror wrapped around human Love and Hatred. He says that where one exists, the other cannot be.

When he was twenty-seven years old, Broker had an epiphany that destiny was a thing to be seized and never granted by providence. So he learned to watch what people do. He ignores what they say. He makes his stand only when forced. Instead, he seeks to think like the people around him, mimic what they say, and know what they feel because he reads their emotions like a map of the constellations inside us all.

Carl Broker has been in love a few times during his life but never felt consumed by emotion enough to alter the course of his ambition until now. He came to Decatur, Illinois, from the Western Coal company late in 1883—a reformed company man. He was an inventor, patenting the conveyer belt that first carried coal and later Decatur ice sheets to the third stories of the filled-up ice houses.

During the warm late summer of 1882, Carl fled state tax debt and charges of lewd and indecent behavior from the cuckolded husband of a young debutante he wooed into intercourse and then left her with a shattered reputation in the middle of a scandal. That was a fateful exit for Carl Broker, a fateful press of luck that would be difficult to replicate.

He drifted to the coal mines of Eastern Ohio that Winter and then left them after losing his thumb in a blasting accident in the early Spring of '83. A friendly telegram from the mine owner to the owner of the Ice Company in Decatur started the bidding process that brought him to Central Illinois as a Foreman for the Ice Harvest. Since then, Carl Broker has gained and maintained a reputation for acting in the owner's best interest and his men, a valuable reputation to possess in these salad days of manmade empires of American wealth. 

Carl Broker blew into Decatur in September of 1883 like a trumpet blast. He came into town a man at the mercy of his passions, with no convictions carved in granite, a growling cat on the move to mark its next victim to hunt in the night. Sex was a thing to be seized for him then. Now, he thinks that sex is something to be won together every day, like the games his men pursue on the ice during their breaks. The purpose of the sacred act is to continue for as long as it will last. The Preacher would recognize this revelation as the merciful light of God pouring from the holy heart into a world of darkness and pain.

Carl Broker met Sophronia Jaros at a library function. She caused him to straighten his posture when he spoke to her. He started reading the Greek classics because it's what Sophronia constantly talked about, attempting to impress her instead of seducing her. Love was no longer something abstract for him the first time she touched his hand and let it linger a moment longer than politeness allowed.

Broker is a man in love walking in the frozen moonlight in the early morning Winter, planting flags for today's cut. He stops after sticking each one in the ground and pulls a glass engagement ring out of his pocket to admire how it reflects in the Moon.

Broker will slip this ring onto the finger of the most beautiful girl in his world, Sophronia Jaros. He will speak to her father today about her hand in marriage. Broker has been planning this for months.

And here it is, their secret spot, where her hair first fell from its pinning, floating down to cover his thumbless hand on her shoulder. The moonlight painted the wide crimson birthmark on her cheek like a target for his lips, and his lips found new places to bless her body. She opened up for him like a budding flower in the sun of Spring. He opened up for her in drips and pools like melting ice in the sun of Spring. They became one together that night, right here on this ground, far enough away from the city of Decatur and their other commitments. Marriage would be a sacrament for what happened here that day. He stares down at the ring in his hand, now falling to the ice, now soaking up his blood.

Carl Broker's decapitated head falls from his body. He is pulled down with greater gravity than he's ever known, drowning in a whirlwind pyramid that dissolves space and time, spiraling out into absolute black.

Sven Jaros stands over the beheaded body of his foreman, holding the knife shovel in both hands, blood dripping onto the ice from its blade. He walks around the corpse to pick up Carl Broker's head and drags his body to the water's edge. Heavy snow is falling now, and Sven must work fast. He hasn't slept well in so long.

Looking for a place to dump the body into the river, Sven sees one of yesterday's bank flags in the moonlight. He imagines Carl Broker placing that flag into the mud with his dirty hands. Those same hands were tight around his daughter's throat, behind the Mud Hen stall, between the empty beer barrels, in the waning hours of last Fall's Macon County Fair. Broker's thumbless hand pulled and hoisted the petticoat under Sophronia's dress, his stubbled face pushed into the hemline of her neck. Sven Jaros saw all of these things, and he remembers a waxy, stretched grimace frozen on her face like a smile of terror. What bothered him most was that the look on her face could have passed for pleasure instead of torture, which is undoubtedly what it was. Carl Broker assaulted his daughter, and he had to die.

The last memory Carl Broker moves through is Sophronia's looping curls pouring off her shoulders in the moonlight. Here is where they built a secret that they hoped would become a life together. Here is where that dream dies for them both.

Sven Jaros hid in the brush for two hours with the thick rope he is now using to wrap Carl Broker's head to his gut in a gruesome girdle. Sven waited for Broker to arrive and walk the river while his stomach made hungry noise that echoed on the ice. His stomach is rumbling now while he drags the headless body of his foreman across the frozen Sangamon. 

Neither Carl nor Sophronia saw Sven seeing them or suspected that he knew about what they were getting up to down by the river last Fall. The stilled pond of his silence and inaction stings Sven despite the satisfaction of taking possession of this corpse he now holds in his hands.

He pushes Carl Broker's body into the Sangamon water channel, fed by frozen freshwater from the Bloomington Moraine. He uses an ice pole to steer Broker's corpse a mile and a half upstream where the channel ends, but the river still flows underneath a foot of solid ice.

He pushes Broker's body under the ice sheet, where it carries away into the frozen roll of the river. Broker may be found later downstream, half-eaten by some slithering thing, one more corpse rising from the belly of the Sangamon.

Jaros returns to scrape the blood from the ice, covering it with a thin layer of hand scattered wet snow. It will be a brutal day for cutting because the wind is picking up.

The Sangamon rushes under him for the first time in months. The ice will break soon. The weight in his heart has lifted a bit, and the blood-filled Sangamon River inside him slows to a trickle. He will now prepare for a great forgetting and a long day of good labor. Surveying this scene of murder for the last time, Sven thinks about Carl Broker's body turning white from blue, now pushed under and rushing up the Sangamon River, bleeding out the neck into black.

He looks up to the moonlight and then scans the riverbank at the spot of his justice, looking for the knife shovel. Finally, something catches his eye, a sparkle on the white. He walks over, bends down, and brushes his fingertips across the ice to pick the object up and sees that it is a beautiful ring. He dusts the snow off it and holds it up to the sinking purple moonlight, arrested in the beauty of such an odd thing to find here on the banks of the Sangamon River at this time of day.

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