They Called It a Rat’s Nest — Until the Coldest Week in American History

They Called It a Rat’s Nest — Until the Coldest Week in American History

In the fall of 1898 in Wheatley, South Dakota, a widow began hauling home the trash the whole county burned. Tumble weeds, Russian thistle, if you want the government name for it. The gray rolling weed that had crossed our fences every November since anybody could remember. We rad ours into piles and set them a fire the way you do.

 Liro rad hers onto a hay rack and drove them home. Her first load came into her yard the second week of October, heaped 9 ft high, and she went straight back out for another. You have to understand what October asked of that country, threshing to finish, corn to haul, houses to bank before the freeze. Nobody in Hand County had daylight to spend on trash.

 And here was a woman alone with a mortgage note at the bank, spending hers by the rackload. By Christmas, we had a name for the thing she built with it. By the second week of February, at 40 below zero, we would have traded a crop to be inside it. I say we because this story belongs to the town, and the town did not behave well in it, and the town has had a long time to think that over.

Ask anyone in Wheatley old enough to remember the cold of 99. They will all tell it the same way. They will all start with the burning. Burning tumble weeds was half chore and half holiday in that country. Every farm had its weed pile, and on still October evenings the piles went up one after another along the horizon.

 Quick orange pillars gone in minutes, and the smell of it drifted into town. It was the smell of tidiness. A man who burned his weeds was a man keeping ahead of things. So when Lita Row drove past the burning piles with her rack heaped full going the wrong direction, it was not just odd, it felt somehow like a criticism. Alvin Sperry said so first and said it best.

 Because Alvin Spar ran the bank and the implement lot and held the note on the row quarter, and a man like that gets the first word in a small town. He stood in front of the bank and watched her rack go by and said the row place was the only farm in Dakota being landscaped by the wind. Within a week he had improved on it.

 He called what she was building the rat’s nest and the name took the way names do and we all said it. That is part of the record too. At church the women were kinder and no more useful. A widow alone, two years now, hauling weeds while her neighbors hauled corn. It was spoken of as a worry. Worry is what mockery wears to church.

 Her people said their peace as well. Grant Row, her brother-in-law, farmed the next quarter east. A careful, square cornered man, the best judge of stock in the township, and nobody ever heard him laugh at her once. He drove over in the middle of the month and stood in her yard with his hat in his hands and made her the offer everyone knew he had made before.

 Sell the quarter to Sperry who wanted it. Come live with his family where there was room. She thanked him and went on unrolling secondhand poultry netting off the back of the rack. Grant looked at the netting a long while and drove home. And still the racks came in load after load, week after week. Some of us slowed our teams on the section road to watch.

 She had set a double fence of netting all around the cabin walls, two rows of it, and arms reach apart, staked and wired, and she was stuffing the space between with tumble weeds and treading them down like a woman packing wool around the cabin, around the hen house, around the little stable. By the end of October, a few of us had quit smiling on that road, and had begun to wonder privately whether the widow knew something Weedley did not.

 To understand why a woman spends October on trash, you would have to have stood in her kitchen, and almost nobody did. Those who did saw what there was to see, and I will set it down plainly, and leave it alone.” Tom Rose razor strop still hung on its nail by the door two years after the fever took him. His boots stood greased on the porch every fall, greased fresh by her hand, and nobody ever wore them.

 His coat held the third peg between her coat and the child-sized slicker of a boy who would have been 11 that winter, and did not live to be two. She dusted the peg rail every day of her life. No one in that house said one word about any of it, because she was the only one in that house. The idea itself she got from a cow, and she never pretended otherwise.

The March storm of 96 had caught the rose milk cow out, and Tom had hunted her for 2 days and given her up for dead. On the fourth day, the cow walked home. Tom backtracked her to a draw south of the place. A draw choked shoulder deep with tumble weeds. The wind had been filing away there for years, drifted over with snow into one white roof.

 The cow had bedded down inside that tangle, and her body heat had stayed in it, and there was a breathing hole melted up through the crust with frost feathers around it like a chimney. Tom told that story at the elevator, and we all nodded at the strangeness of things, and forgot it. His widow did not forget it.

 She said the lesson of it to Grant just once when he asked her straight out what she thought she was doing. Walls stopped the wind, she said. Only still air stops the cold. It sounded like a widow’s notion. It was a system. The netting rows stood a stride apart and were laced together with binder twine in a diamond pattern so the fill could not shift.

 The fill went in dry and was trotten tight, layer on layer, higher than the eaves on the north and west, window sill high on the south, where the winter sun was welcome. The whole coat stood clear of the stovepipe corner by a good gap, bare ground and bare wall, kept swept around the sill logs.

 Before one weed went in, she attacked a skirt of flattened tin cans, the way a careful man rat proofs a grainery. The netting was bought used off a man in town who was glad to be rid of it. Counting netting, staples, and twine, the widow’s coat cost her $4, and the fill was delivered free by the wind forever. The first trial came before the coat was half built, and it came the way trials do on the wind.

 The last week of October, a dry gale got in ahead of her. She had three days of raked weeds standing in loose piles waiting for the cage. And the gale took every pile and strewed them across two farms and the section road. And for one afternoon the row place was doing exactly what Sperry said it was doing, giving its trash back to the county.

 Men picked tumble weeds off their fences for a week and named the source. The widow’s trash is migrating, Sperry said, and the bank laughed and the elevator laughed harder. She did not explain and she did not stop. She changed her order of work. Cage first, stuff after. From that week on, not a weed came off the rack except straight into netting, and each layer was trotten before the next went in.

Grant drove past while she was treading down the northwest corner, and he looked at the new order of work the way he looked at a well set fence line, and neither of them mentioned it. But Grant Row had a case to make, and in November he came and made all of it, standing in her yard, quiet and orderly, the way he did everything.

I can give you his argument nearly word for word, because he made it again that winter at the elevator more than once to anyone who called her crazy. He did not think she was crazy. He thought she was wrong, and he was particular about the difference. First fire. Dry thistle burns like spilled kerosene, he said, all at once and reaching.

 She was wrapping her house, her hens, and her stock in 300 rackloads of kindling 10 ft from a working stove pipe. One spark. Second, wind. What the wind delivers, the wind can repossess, netting or no netting, and a Dakota northwester would strip that code off her walls by new year and scatter it into the next county. Third, vermin.

 A weed wall is a mouse hotel, he said, and mice do not stay in the hotel. They move into the house, into the grainery, into the seed corn. And fourth, the one that carried in that country seed. A single tumble weed ripens 20,000 seeds and more and sheds them wherever it rolls or rests. She had coralled maybe a million weeds.

 Come spring she would have planted her quarter and his quarter and half the township in Russian thistle, and there were weed laws now and fines under them. Every word of that was true. I wanted understood. The way the whole town came to understand it. Nothing Grant Rose said that day was foolish, and every item on his list came due before the winter was out, one way or another.

 She heard him to the end with her hands still. Then she said, “Green in October, ash in April.” And she picked up the fork and went back to stuffing the cage, and Grant drove home with an answer he could not use yet, because none of us understood it yet, either. His first item came due before Thanksgiving. A November dusk, dry and windy, no snow down yet, and a spark rode out of her own stovepipe over the swept gap and landed in the top course of the east wall.

 Weed smoke is white and quick, and she was in the yard, and saw it curl. What she did next was watched from the road by the Heartley Boys, and told all over town by supper, and it lost nothing in the telling, and for once the telling was fair. She ran at the fire, not from it. She drove a hayfork into the burning section and tore it out of the cage hole, two rods of finished wall, dragged it burning into the open yard, and let it go up there, and stood the stub of the wall off with snow shoveled from the shaded side of the barn until the cage

held nothing but char and steam. It cost her two rods of October. It could have cost the coat, the cabin, and the widow. Sperry had his best week since the migrating trash, but men who work with their hands heard the other half of the story. She had lost two rods and saved the rest because the fill was caged in sections, and a section could be sacrificed.

That was not luck. That was designed. What she built back was better than what burned. The gap at the stovepipe corner grew from 10 ft to a full 12, swept to bare dirt. The courses nearest the pipe were topped from then on, not with thistle, but with slooh hay dipped in the stock tank and frozen into a rind that would not take a spark any more than a wet shingle wood.

 And over the flu itself went a cap of hardware cloth, a spark artor, so the stove could throw nothing bigger than a firefly. The repair cost her days she did not have. It also improved the system. December came in gray and hard, and the widow began to keep her accounts, though it took us a while to see that was what they were. Her accounts were eggs.

 Every Saturday she drove to town and set her basket on Ferris Cobb’s counter at the general store. And Ferris Cobb, a man who wrote everything down, entered the credit in his book. Now every farm in that country kept hens, and every farm knew the arithmetic of hens. Hens pay in the warm months and quit in the cold.

 By December, a Dakota hen house goes quiet, combs freeze, and the egg basket stays home. Hers did not. Week upon week, her line in Cobb’s book ran on. Four dozen, five dozen, steady as rent, out of a hen house, wearing a weed coat with a south window. Sperry heard about the eggline and said the rat’s nest had gone into banking and asked what interest a hen paid.

 Ferris Cobb, who owed Sperry nothing, said out of his own doorway that it paid better than some notes he could name. The season had begun keeping its own accounts by then. The papers out of Huron ran cold talk all through January, and old men read the sky and shortened their halls. Dogs came in wool thick. Ice on the river ran two feet and did not soften at noon.

 And down at the depot the agent had his flags ready, the cold way flag among them, white with the black square in its heart, which the weather bureau flew when something worse than winter was coming. The signs were small, and they all pointed the same direction. Something was coming that would take the measure of every wall in the county.

 There was one more flaw in the coat, and no one in Wheatley found it for her because it could not be seen from the road. She found it on her own ceiling. In the middle of January, she noticed frost feathering the boards of the cabin ceiling along the north wall, a thin silver line up where wall met roof inside the house above the reach of the coat.

 She read that line the way Grant read a lame horse. Heat was walking out over the top of her wall, up under the eaves, where the coat stopped and the cold began. So she did what by then we should have expected and still did not. She tore the finished top course off the whole north side. good work, dry work, treaded and laced and paid for in October daylight.

 And she built the cage up past the plate line and over the eaves themselves, hooding them. So the coat lapped onto the roof edge like a collar turned up. Grant came by while the north side stood torn open and asked what had failed. Nothing had failed, and it looked to him exactly as it had looked before, and he said so.

She said, “Heat leaves by the attic.” And that was the whole of the conversation. And he thought about it all the way home because it was true of his house, too, and he knew it. By the middle of January, the coat was finished, and I will tell you honestly what it looked like from the section road, because most of us saw it only from there.

 It looked like a hay stack that had swallowed a house. A shaggy gray mound taller than a man on the north and west, sloping to the sills on the south, with a stove pipe standing up out of a swept bare corner and a wisp of smoke on it, and one small south window looking out of the shag like an eye. There was no beauty in it that any of us could see that winter.

 sat beside the trim white farmhouses of Wheatley with their painted porches and their banked snow. It was an embarrassment and we said so, and Sperry said it loudest and got the laugh every time. Winter was 3 weeks from settling the question. February came in mild and false. Then the signs turned loud all at once.

 On the 9th, sun dogs stood beside a weak sun the whole short day, cold and bright. On the 10th, the depot agent ran the cold wave flag up his pole and left it there, and the wire out of Hiron said a mass of Arctic air was coming down off the plains of Canada, the like of which the bureau had not measured before. On the 11th, the air went still and yellow gray and wrong, the way it does when something very large is drawing breath.

On the 12th of February, Grant Row hitched his best team and drove not to town, but to his sister-in-law’s yard. And this is a thing Wheatly chewed on afterward for a long time. He did not come to argue. He walked the coat all the way around once, slow, the way a man walks a house he means to buy. He put his hand into the fill on the north side, and felt how tight it was trotten.

He looked at the frozen rind on the courses by the pipe and the hardware cloth on the flu and the tin skirt at the sills and the collar hooding the eaves. Then he asked her one question, the mockery all gone out of the township for that one moment. How warm does it hold? She told him. He stood a while. Then he got back in his wagon and drove home and moved his own family and his best stock into his soundest building and nailed slow hay over the north windows, and he never said aloud what had turned him. But he had put his hand

in the wall, and the wall told him. The cold came down on the county on the 13th of February, 1899, and it is in the record, so you need not take an old town’s word for it. It is the coldest air that ever crossed Dakota in the memory of the weather bureau. The thermometer at the depot fell through zero on the evening of the 11th and kept falling, and by the deep of the storm, it stood at 40° below, and stayed below 30 for the better part of a week.

 and the wind out of the northwest ran with it the first two days and drove the snow flat so a man could not see the barn from the house. Trains stalled in the cuts. The mail stopped. The whole northern country locked up solid as an anvil, and every family in Wheatley shut its door on the 12th and waited to see what its walls were worth.

 The cold did not care what any wall cost or who had laughed. Now I will tell you about the worst night in two houses because the town keeps both stories and it kept the second one out of Ferris Cobb’s book. Alvin Sperry had the finest house in Wheatley and I say that plainly because it did not save him from a bad week. Sawn lumber machine siding a proper seller lath and plaster the best that his money and the lumberyard could raise.

 The cold walked through all of it. It came in around the sash and the fine fitted doors in thin white threads. Frost climbed the parlor windows till the glass went blind, and then it climbed the nail heads inside the plaster, each one growing a white star. Sperry fed his two stoves day and night and burned better than a ton of the hard coal he sold, and the far corners of his rooms stood at freezing anyway, and the water pale skinned over 8 ft from the kitchen stove.

 He and his family lived that week in two rooms in coats, and his fine parlor stood cold as the yard. The good house held life. It did not hold much comfort, and it held it at the cost of a ton of coal. A mile west, inside the haystack that had swallowed a house, the widow row was having a different February. I know it the way the whole town came to know it, and it shamed us to learn it.

Her one small south window took the low sun each short, bright day, and gave it back into the room. Her stove drew clean and easy through its capped pipe, and she fed it slough hay and cow chips and a little coal, and it did not have to fight the wind, because the wind never reached her wall, because the still air trapped in a million dead weeds does not carry cold across itself.

 The frost line never came inside. The water pale did not skin over. And in the little stable hooded in the same gray coat, her cow and her horse stood warm. And in the caged hen house, the hens went on doing the one thing that convicted the whole town. They laid. On the coldest morning of that week, the morning the depot glass read 40 below, the widow row drove her team into Wheatley through snow to the hub, because the wind had dropped, and she set a basket of eggs on Ferris Cobb’s counter, and Cobb wrote the date and the

count in his book, and the men around the stove stopped talking. There was a page in that book, and men who doubted everything else went and looked at it later with their own eyes. 40 below out of the county and one hen house in Hand County laying four dozen. Cobb did not say a word. He turned the book around on the counter so the stovemen could read the line and turned it back.

 And that was the loudest thing anybody said in Wheatley all winter. I promised I would explain it. And here is the place. Because a cold like that is what finally taught the lesson to a town too proud to hear it any softer. There is no witchcraft in a weed. You have known the reason your whole life if you have ever pulled on a wool coat.

Cold does not mostly come through a wall. It comes on the wind and it comes by the wind hunting out the warm air against your walls and carrying it off over and over faster than your stove can make more. Stop the wind and you have done half the work. But moving air inside a thick, loose, dry material, cannot go anywhere.

 A million tumble weeds, caged and trotten, are almost all air, and that air cannot stir. And still air is the finest blanket God ever made. It is the whole secret of wool, of feathers, of new snow, of the double window, of the fur on every animal that lives through a Dakota winter. Lighter had not built a warm house. She had wrapped a thin cabin in 2 ft of trapped motionless air and closed the wind out of it.

 And after that her stove was not asked to fight 40 below. It was asked only to warm a room the wind could not steal, and any stove alive can do that on hay. mind. The weeds gave nothing free, and Grant Row had been right to name the costs. Fire was a real danger, and it took its two rods before she mastered it.

 Mice moved into the coat by the hundred, exactly as he said, and she fought them all winter with tin and traps and two barn cats, and never fully won. And in the spring the seed came due, and that is part of the honest telling of it. It was arithmetic, not magic. and some of the arithmetic was owed to the wrong side of the ledger. The wind fell on the 16th, and the cold let go slow over the days after, and Wheatly dug itself out and counted what it had.

 We had all lived, but we had not all lived the same week. The Boyd family, north of town, had burned their fence rails and two chairs, and come through with frost ruined feet on the old man. Every hen house in the county but one stood silent, combs black, and folks who had laughed at a weed wall in November drove past it in February with their eyes front and their mouths shut.

And here is the part the town has to tell on itself, or the story is a lie. Alvin Sperry, who held the note and the name and the loudest voice, drove out to the row place the last week of February. He did not go to gloat. He went, he said, on bank business, but he stood in that warm, bright kitchen with his hat in his hands next to the peg rail he had no way of understanding, and he felt the ease of the air in a room that had no right to it, and something went out of him.

 He asked her finally and quietly how she had known. And Lita Row, who had taken a winter of it from him and never answered once, set down her egg basket and said the only hard thing she ever said to any of us. She said, “You saw the same cow tracks I did,” Alvin. She turned back to her work and Alvin Sperry, who never in his life admitted an error in front of a teller or a farmer, said the thing this whole town remembers him by now, instead of the names he made.

 He said it low to the room to all of us through the one of us who was there. We were wrong about her. That was the only crowing there ever was, and it came from the wrong mouth, and it was not crowing at all. It was the town saying it through him. Grant Row never made a speech. What he did was better. He looked at the one true weakness the winter had shown, the fire, and he spent the next fall building his sister-in-law a proper cage of woven wire and iron posts, fireproof to the sills, with the thistle held 2 ft off every pipe by a frame of his own

design, so a spark had nowhere to land. She helped him raise it, and between the two of them, without a soft word ever passing, they made the ugly thing safe. He built one on his own north wall the year after that. Sperry did the thing men like Sperry do. He went quiet, and his ledgers made the apology his pride would not.

 He never called it the rat’s nest again, in the bank or out of it. He carried her note two more years at a rate he carried no one else at. And when it was paid, he marked it in the book himself. And a man who saw the page said he wrote under the last line in his own hand, paid in full. And then below that, warm.

 Nobody ever asked him what the second word meant. Everybody knew. The name wore out like an old coat. Nobody in Wheatley said the rat’s nest anymore. They said the weed house and then when there were four of them and then nine they said a thistlebanked house the way they said a saw house or a snug house a plain word for a plain good thing.

 Folks came from two counties over to see how it was laced and caged. And light a row showed every one of them patient as October and never once told them about the cow or the razor strap or the small greased boots that stood on her porch every fall of her life and were never worn and never explained. I am an old woman now and I was one of the ones on the road who quit smiling early, which is the most I can say for myself. The weed houses are gone.

cardboard and rockwool do the work now and do it without the mice. But the physics she used out of a burning trash pile is the same physics in the wall of every warm house standing in this county tonight. And not one of those walls knows it owes a debt to a widow we called crazy. People ask me what the hard winters taught.

 They expect something about endurance. I tell them what lighter row told the bank instead. Walls stop the wind. Only still air stops the cold. And then I tell them the other thing, the thing the town learned the harder way, which she was too kind to ever say to us. The wind blows the same trash past every door in the county.

 It only builds a wall for the one who stoops to gather it. Now, the people in this story are ours. But here is what is true. Russian thistle, the tumble weed, came into South Dakota in the 1870s in flax seed, carried by German Russian immigrants, and by the 1890s, it had rolled across the northern plains and was hated and legislated against as a noxious weed.

Loose, dry, caged plant material really does insulate by the same trapped still air principle as wool, feathers, and fresh snow. which is why banking a house with weeds, hay, or cornstcks was common practice on the treeless plains. A single Russian thistle can carry more than 20,000 seeds.

 So Grant Rose warning was a real one and the cold wave of February 1899 was real and it remains the coldest and most widespread Arctic outbreak in the recorded history of the United States with 40 below and worse reaching down across Dakota. The characters are imagined. The weed, the cold, and the still air between them are