The furnace had not just quit. Helen could smell it. Hot metal and something burning, coming up through the old floor grate.
She found the flashlight in her coat and went to the basement door and opened it. A thin gray haze hung in the stairwell. She did not go down. She had been a schoolteacher for thirty-six years, and she knew what to do when you smelled smoke. You go out, and you call.
She went out into the snow and called the volunteer fire department from her car.
Then she called Dale the furnace man, who said a word she had never heard a Lutheran say.
Then she sat in her car in the dark with the heater running and looked across the county road at the light in the Olson milk house.
The fire department came in nine minutes. They found the old furnace's heat exchanger had cracked and scorched the floor joist above it. They put it out with an extinguisher, opened the windows, and stood around in the snow with their flashlights.
"No real damage," the chief told her. "You caught it early. But you can't heat this building with that furnace again, Mrs. Brekke. Not for a program. Not with kids."
"The program is in six days."
The chief was sorry. He said so twice.
Helen thanked them. Then she got in her car and drove across the county road and knocked on the milk house door.
Arvid opened it. He had seen the trucks. He looked at her face in the porch light and stepped back to let her in.
The milk house was warm and smelled of bleach and steam. She stood by the bulk tank in her coat and told him about the furnace.
He listened. When she was done, he did not say anything for a while.
"Thank you for the fingerings," Helen said.
Arvid looked down at his boots.
"Karen would have been at that program," he said finally. "Front row. She'd have brought bars for after." He swallowed. "I've been sitting in my kitchen since February, Helen, waiting to feel like playing again. I thought maybe if I wrote it out for you, I could stay home and still be some use."
"You were some use."
"It wasn't enough." He rubbed his face. "That furnace was my fault, you know. Dale told me in October it was shot. I told him to just get it running for you. I didn't want to come over there and see it."
Helen looked at him for a long time. A widower in a milk house, in his barn coat, with tears standing in his eyes.
"Arvid," she said, "do you still have the old woodstove from your granddad's house?"
He did.
It had been sitting in the back of his machine shed since 1974, a big cast-iron parlor stove with nickel trim and a cracked mica window. His grandfather had brought it from Norway in pieces.
It took Arvid, Dale, two firemen, the FFA boys, and a borrowed hay elevator to get it across the county road and up the schoolhouse steps. It took two more days to run new stovepipe out through the old chimney hole, which was still there behind a tin plate on the wall, exactly where the potbellied stove had stood in 1961.
The fire chief came out and inspected it himself. He stood in front of it for a long time with his hands held out to the heat.
"My grandma went to school in this building," he said. "I'll sign it."
On December twenty-third, at seven o'clock, the Spring Prairie schoolhouse was full.
Not twenty chairs. Ninety people. Every chair in the township hall and the Lutheran church basement, set up in rows, with people standing along the walls and in the cloakroom and out on the steps with the door propped open. The old stove glowed red. The windows fogged.
Gary Lund stood at the back with his arms folded and did not say anything at all.
Behind the bedsheet curtain, fourteen fourth graders waited in bathrobes and tinfoil halos. Helen stood with them, holding her breath.
Then the curtain opened, and Arvid Olson sat down at the old upright piano in his good wool suit.
He had tuned it himself, over three nights, with a borrowed wrench and his ear. It was not perfect. It did not need to be.
He played the first chord of Silent Night. The children began to sing.
They sang in one key, this time. Arvid's hands kept them there, steady and gentle, the way a good organist holds a congregation together on a long hymn. In the second verse, the old people in the back rows began to sing along. By the third, the whole schoolhouse was singing, ninety voices and a woodstove and a piano that had not been played in front of a crowd since Eisenhower.
Helen stood beside the bedsheet curtain and watched Arvid's hands.
In January, the township board met again. Gary Lund made the motion himself. The schoolhouse would stay. The township would fix the roof properly in the spring. The program would happen again next Christmas, and the one after that.
Arvid played the organ at Our Savior's on the first Sunday in February, on the anniversary of Karen's death. Helen sat in the third pew.
Afterward, on the church steps, he asked her if she would like to come out to the farm on Thursday to practice for next year.
"Next Christmas is eleven months away, Arvid," she said.
"I know," Arvid said, and for the first time in a year, he smiled. "With your hands, it'll take every day of it."
