Summary
While hanging blankets, Steven continues to assure Ann that John wouldn’t leave his father in such a storm. She insists that he would. But Steven persists in a softer, kinder voice. She meets his appraising smile for a moment before sitting tense and silent, careful to avoid his eyes. Eventually she looks up at him again. His insolent smile has changed: his eyes are full of a warmth and sympathy that quickens and encourages her. It is as if the storm has lulled, and she has found calm and shelter.
A thought seizes Ann: it isn’t his smile that has changed but she. His smile simply has drawn out the brooding, unfulfilled woman that has been waiting in her for seven years. A woman she had rejected through a routine fidelity she has outgrown. Steven and Ann look into each other’s eyes. Ann repeats that John always comes home and Steven repeats that there’s never been such a brutal storm.
The narrative jumps ahead in time, to when Steven is asleep and Ann lies listening to the storm. Through the open bedroom door she watches shadows from the fire in the kitchen dance on the walls. She dozes, woken by the shadow of John advancing toward her. She lies still, paralyzed. John is over her, so close she could touch him. It seems a deadly tightening hand is on her throat. She tries to scream but her lips are locked. Steven sleeps on beside her. Suddenly a gleam of light reveals John’s face: in it there is no trace of threat or anger, only a stone-like hopelessness. John begins to withdraw. She tries to call him back, saying, “It isn’t true.”
Ann sits up startled and awake. John had seemed so real and vivid that she hadn’t understood she was only dreaming. Despite feeling that he had been in the room, she convinces herself that he must be at his father’s. She tells herself it was only the shadows on the wall, distorted by the dread of him coming home, that had made her dream up John’s presence. But Steven was right: John wouldn’t come in such a storm. She and Steven were alone, and no one would ever know about them sleeping together.
Ann feels guilty about what she has done. She thinks of John’s face, the face that watched her from the darkness with stone-like sorrow. She weeps until the fire is out and goes to light it again. The wind sneaks through the cracks in the house, striking her face. She holds her stiff limbs before the catching fire. She remembers the shadow version of John. She considers the seven years they have spent together and in retrospect finds them to be years of worth and dignity.
She stands close to the door and realizes that he has always come to her, no matter how bad the storms. She wonders how she could have deceived herself into thinking he wouldn’t reach her. He is strong and has crossed the mountains since boyhood. It was madness to wait for him. She decides to wake Steven and hurry him away. But she hesitates when she sees Steven’s softly sleeping body. She imagines what he would say about the certainty that John wasn’t coming. She resolves to be as sane as Steven is.
She touches Steven’s shoulder and considers how there had been for him no passion or guilt and so there could be no responsibility. She realizes John is her man: with John lies the future. For years to come, she would try slowly and contritely to make amends for her betrayal tonight. Ann goes back to the door where the bitter draft comes through. The house creaks, the chill creeps in, and the clock ticks on idiotically.
The narrator comments that John is found the next day less than a mile from home. The people who tell Ann say he had run into his own pasture fence and frozen with both hands clasping the wire. Ann tells them how he had come across the hills and the people say John actually was found south of the house. They figure he must have missed the buildings. They say the wind was coming every way and there was a double wheel around the moon. They say he shouldn’t have tried. Ann looks past them and, as if speaking to herself, says that, if you knew him, you knew John would try.
The story ends with Ann later being left alone with John’s body. She kneels and touches his hand. Her eyes dim. His hand is still strong and patient. Her eyes become transfixed, growing wide and clear. She sees a little smear of white paint on John’s frozen palm.
Analysis
In the final third of the story, Steven’s disarming confidence wears Ann down. Again her perception changes as she sees his smile in a new light. Looking up at him while they hang blankets, Ann sees Steven’s insolent and condescending smile is gone. Rather, his face is full of sympathy and reassurance. Ann feels her attraction to him quickened and encouraged by the look he gives her now. No longer isolated by his suggestive presence, she feels a sense of calm, as though Steven will be her shelter from the storms that haunt her.
Ann then becomes aware of her own changeable perception. She realizes that Steven’s smile and presence are the same as they have been the whole evening. What has changed is something in her. She has finally stopped denying herself the desire to break free of her fidelity to John and the dispiriting routine they follow. She realizes she has outgrown John and her marriage to him. Steven has merely activated these feelings in her—feelings that have been present ever since she danced with Steven at the barn.
Ross moves the narrative forward in time to when Ann and Steven are in bed together. The implication is that they have acted on their mutual attraction and have had sex. In a dreamlike passage, Ann experiences a shadowy version of John entering the room and advancing toward her. She feels the threat of his presence, believing that he is holding her throat. She wants to explain herself and tell him that what he sees isn’t true. However, she says nothing, simply looking into his face. In an instance of situational irony, a gleam of light illuminates the sorrowful expression of John’s face. Instead of being angry at her infidelity, as Ann had assumed, John looks upon her with an expression of hopeless acceptance.
When Ann wakes again, she discovers that John is not in the room. She convinces herself that she had merely dreamt up his presence because of the guilt she feels for having cheated. Ann sadly reflects on John’s fidelity, knowing he has always come home to her no matter what. She thinks she should send Steven away in anticipation of John coming home. However, before she wakes Steven, she imagines how he might convince her she is wrong. Once again she looks upon Steven in a way that changes her perception of him. Now that they have satisfied their lust, she understands that he is not what she wants. She wants to stay with John, and she privately renews her faith in their marriage, hoping to make amends to John in the years to come.
However, Ann’s change of heart is swiftly undermined by a twist of situational irony. Although she wants to recommit herself to John, her neighbors find John dead. She assumes at first that he had gotten lost in the snow after coming over the mountain, but the neighbors say he is south of the house, while the mountains are to the north—a detail that foreshadows the revelation that John had found his way home and gone back out in the blizzard.
Ann goes to see John’s frozen corpse. Kneeling next to him, she sees a smear of white paint on his hand. The paint is from the still-wet bedroom door. In the story’s last image, Ann sees the evidence that John had come home to her after all. But when he did, he found her in bed with Steven and, feeling betrayed and heartbroken, went back outside to die. With this revelation, Ross makes it evident that Ann hadn’t hallucinated John’s presence in her bedroom. He had held her face to look upon her one last time before he proved his fidelity in a final gesture of sacrifice.
