The Gingerbread Men: in which a questionable lady comes bearing gifts.

Mr. Wood saw Mrs. Mock to the door, patted her on the fanny, and closed it behind her.

She’d had a big time. She’d gotten a big reward. Now, she had a big assignment.

Mr. Wood pulled out his lap drawer. He withdrew a black remote studded with multicolored buttons. He pressed a big red one in the center. 
 

Fort Rogers: in which the kids visit Snake Creek.

Timmy Wragg pulled down a hatchet off the wall of his daddy’s workshop.

Will Rogers chopped down pine and sweetgum saplings.

Mary Rogers dragged the trimmed poles and stacked them high.

The Black Warrior: in which Kelly Rogers takes a dive.

Someone watching from the distant riverbank could have sworn she slipped. 

A light shower started only minutes before the green Beetle noisily appeared and bounced along the bumpy crossties.

Mist fell so lightly the Volkswagen didn’t even use its wipers. 

Jolly Holiday: in which in which Mr. Wood doles out “gifts”.

Sheriff Neeley and Fire Chief Wragg showed up on time. Precisely. 

Just the way the boss liked it.

On the video wall, one of his empire’s countless surveillance cameras had recorded their entry into the lot of the lumber yard eight minutes early.

A Little Dead Thing: in which mama disappears.

Will materialized in front of Elmore, a jumping jack. 

“Daddy! Come look! It’s something horrible!”

Elmore wore a wilted white towel, just out of the bathtub. Self-consciously, he made sure the ratty old Cannon covered the worst of his scars, the ones on the right abdomen, the right thigh. A noisy box fan, full power, blew his wet hair straight back. He smelled like Right Guard.

Skaters Away: in which Mr. Wood develops his tastes.

Mr. Wood loved figure skaters.

On the May morning he moved into the Castle, Mr. Wood programmed his six satellite dishes to find and record any broadcasts anywhere in the world of that graceful winter sport. Ice-rink events funneled out of the sky from Japan and Norway and Steamboat Springs. Unlike Alabama, those distant places always seemed to have snow and cold. 
 

That Friday Feeling: in which Elmore sees a turn in his fortunes.

The orange sun to the west glowed like a hickory coal. 

Hot Friday. 

Elmore muscled the wheel of the panel truck onto County Road 5. He worked through the gears down a lonely stretch of paved road. Alabama sweetgums and pines drooped limbs over the two-lane.
 

Blue Christmas: in which we meet Santa’s elves, dressed in blue.

The squad car braked hard in the Rogers’s driveway, blue lights blazing, tires cracking crusted snow.

Two policemen in heavy jackets emerged from the vehicle. They trudged like mountain climbers through the snowy yard and onto the slick little concrete front porch slab in front of Elmore Rogers’s front door.

Champions: in which Mr. Wood places a hot special barbecue order.

Mr. Wood switched off his white Chevy pickup. 

Hank Williams Jr. died with the engine.

The truck cooled down in front of a wooden shack not much bigger than an outhouse. Orange coals glowed in the dark interior of the splintery structure, and gray smoke puffed from a small tin chimney.

Sav-More: in which we learn the truth about holidays and bicycles.

Two summers earlier, Elmore Rogers and the children spent a Saturday afternoon with heads bowed and necks burning. 

lmore owned a pickup then, a clunker paid off with the I.V. trickle of green the Army gives a wounded warrior. He drove the truck out to a hard red field off the Montgomery Highway where Choctaw arrowheads washed up after big rains, gleaming like bone among sandspurs and scabs of grass. Sometimes, an actual human bone, brown as honeycomb after centuries in the cakey clay, rose to the surface of Alabama.

Abominable: in which we meet a stranger all in white.

Mr. Wragg mysteriously came and went, slipping into the open garage, shuffling out again. Each trip, he weaved across the snowy yard a bit more.

No one paid much attention. The kids had a snowman to worship.

Stumbling in a drift, the fire chief arrived again.

Night Shift: in which Kelly’s phonograph plays until it can’t.

Kelly carefully Scotch-taped a nickel to the top of the cheap plastic stylus of a 20-year-old turntable. 

There. Play now.

Without the added ounces of weight, the stylus drifted free of the grooves of the 33⅓  Firestone Christmas album, its diamond needle randomly floating from song to song. Perry Como suddenly joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer jumped gracelessly into the midst of The Hallelujah Chorus.

Frosty: in which Will and Mary make a snowman.

Will and Mary raced. They tore past ragged nandina bushes at the lot line, scattering red berries in the snow. The crimson dots filled their footprints.

“We’re gonna make his nose out of a carrot,” yelled Timmy Wragg, far across the broad snowscape next door.

Hot Day in Iraq: in which a white light confounds Elmore.

The Big Boom. 

Lights flickered. Lights went off. Lights came on.

Elmore sensed something new.

No rules existed in this new place.

The Morning After: in which Elmore lets his twins play in a wonderland.

Bang! Bangbangbang!

Morning.

Loud morning.

The fisted blows on the thin front door cruelly woke Elmore. Startled, he suddenly relived for the hundredth time a rooftop tumble, a long fall, and a moment his body slammed hard against the ground. All night long, he’d fallen from a roof and broken, over and over and over. The bad re-runs and his throbbing rib had left him mostly sleepless.

Mr. Wood: in which a rich man entertains a well-dressed guest.

The desk phone rang once.  

Mr. Wood knew the signal. He’d waited for hours, working very late in his office, passing the time.  

The fringed arm of his jacket stretched across a vast executive desk, its surface a polished mirror. The reflection of a gold-nugget button on his sleeve flashed somewhere deep in the dark walnut.  

The glint of a firefly.

His huge right hand pressed a button.  

Her voice sounded odd, distant, on this snowy night. A wasp trapped in a bottle.

“Why, Mr. Wood. What a nice surprise on this cold, snowy evening…”

Kelly: in which the Black Warrior River sirens a song

Kelly Rogers – she had kept his name – guided the green Volkswagen Beetle foot by slippery foot up the driveway. What a ragged noise the engine made on such a still, strange night. Like a giant sewing machine under a turtle shell.

The VW wheels slurred in the snow and lost purchase at the very top of the unpaved steep place that crested out onto the county road. She pressed the accelerator sharply. After a moment, the little vehicle valiantly eased ahead, tires catching on what should have been blacktop. Tonight, it was whitetop. An unblemished carpet of snow completely covered County Road 11.

It crossed Kelly’s mind to turn back, just reverse down the drive, kill the engine, yank the parking brake, retrace her path to the concrete-block steps, and reenter the cheap metal mobile home. That would be easy, safe. She could put something in the toaster. She could listen to the record player. She could take a pill and go to sleep. 

Again. 

But tonight she wanted to see the river. 
 

Will and Mary: in which twins watch Alabama turn white

The twins pressed almost identical faces to the icy windowpanes of Mrs. Mock’s imprisoning house. 

Snow would be general all over Alabama tonight. But to Will and Mary the only snow that existed in all the world fell just there, almost within reach – on the distant side of a cold window glass.  

The storm hit hard and fast, a shock to Alabama towns and people that only witnessed the white miracle every five years or so. 

Who knew what to do?

Lafayette: In Which Elmore Rogers Has a Great Fall.

Elmore Rogers stared in disbelief, through stinging tears.
A blurred, bloody mess at the end of his left hand made his heart thud. Numb with shock, he closed his eyes and exhaled a soundless cloud of white vapor into the cold late afternoon.