Steven Peterson
The Snow Fortress
We ask: What caused him, one of ours, to kill?
Was it that he was he and we were we?
Snow, snow, snow—so much snow in ’67
our suburb piled it in our grade-school field,
out where we played touch football in the fall.
The school was closed for days and every night
we heard the grinding gears and back-up sounds
of trucks dumping their loads, bulldozers too.
When school reopened, there it was, like heaven,
thirty feet high, two hundred feet long—snow.
For those of us in sixth grade, top of school,
we claimed it ours, climbing its snow plateau
to view—through thick-trunked, bare-branched elms resembling
the nervous system in our science books—
suburban streets lined with big boxy houses
where mothers spent their insulated hours,
commuter tracks where fathers boarded trains
to jobs down in the Loop, and our Great Lake.
Before we slid back down, we were surprised
to hear from Richard, our own bully boy.
He stood up tall atop a chunk of snow
and called to us to go home after school
for shovels, spades, some picks for chopping ice,
and every kind of wheelbarrow we could find.
Come back, he said, and I’ll put us to work!
We had our doubts but followed his command.
Like winter gloom his elemental moods
had shadowed us through all our grade-school years.
We almost grew accustomed to his blows,
our tears, our snot, another bloody nose.
We speculated endlessly: Was he
big for his age? Old for being in our grade?
Why did he beat us up? We finally saw
he did it just because he felt like it.
But now a mountain large as all his rage
stood as a challenge to his schoolyard pride.
He organized us into teams to dig
according to his plan. Snow tunnels led
to snow-lined rooms with snow stairs to the top.
No one got beat; he didn’t have the time.
Instead, our Richard looked to us serene
as it took form. He dubbed it, The Snow Fortress.
He then directed us to furnish it
by raids we made on attics, basements, sheds—
all we could grab that wouldn’t soon be missed.
Old chairs were hauled up to our snowy rooms,
old carpets served as flooring, and old lamps
without their bulbs lent domesticity.
That weekend found us living in a bliss
of snow inside a stronghold all our own.
As you can guess, authorities took heed.
On Monday, village workers came. We watched
from classroom windows as they staked a fence
around our fortress. For your good, they said.
What should we do? We looked to Richard now,
but all he said was something muttered low.
If he had led us out to storm that fence
we would have charged. He didn’t. The fence stayed.
March came: a thaw, a freeze, and one more snow.
April’s sun took its hold; the plateau slumped.
As May began, our mountain was reduced
to dirty mounds of ice and here and there
a chair, a lamp, a curl of tattered rug.
We’d see our Richard leaning on the fence,
just staring at his fortress almost gone.
We steered away not knowing what to say.
That summer, everything accelerated.
Older brothers, older sisters came home
from colleges with marijuana bags,
spun Sergeant Pepper, and at dinnertime
spit words our moms and dads had never heard
outside of locker rooms or army days
or books they read but said that we could not.
Our girls grew up; our boys grew out their hair.
Our Richard seemed to melt away from us
in junior high and through our high school years.
We heard he had encounters with the law.
Some juvenile thing? The rumors flew.
Yet we were busy with our lives and off
to college and beyond. We knew we came
from what is called a good place to grow up,
the kind of place you leave and don’t come back.
Forty-two years from that big snow, the news
of Richard came online: We learned he stayed
in our hometown, had troubles, served a stretch
in prison, got paroled. And then he met
a woman who was kind to him, her son
in need of fathering. But something happened.
He took a gun and shot her dead, then killed
the boy, then turned the gun and killed himself.
Our high school’s fiftieth reunion’s here.
We fly in from afar. Our ranks have thinned.
Our talk comes round to Richard and his deed.
We ask: What caused him, one of ours, to kill?
Was it that he was he and we were we?
That’s our best guess; the rest is mystery.
We’d rather talk about that fortress made
of snow, that year of snow, and share a laugh.
Steven Peterson is the author of
Walking Trees and Other Poems (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in early 2025). His poems appear in
Alabama Literary Review, The Christian Century, Dappled Things, First Things, Light,
the ever-popular
Elsewhere, and in the anthology
Taking Root in the Heart (Paraclete Press). His plays have been produced in theaters around the USA. He and his wife divide their year between downtown Chicago and the northwoods of Wisconsin.