Armistice Day, 1940 is remembered as the day a fierce storm altered the lives of hundreds of families living near the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota.
The ducks hadn’t flown down from Canada as they usually did each fall, flocking to the soggy islands and inlets of the Mississippi on their way south to avoid the bitter cold of the north. After weekends rowing their skiffs in vain through the currents of the river, hunters came home empty-handed. Instead of golden-breasted ducks for Sunday dinners, wives substituted farm hens or smoked sausages from the icebox.
There was talk, though, that on Armistice Day, the ducks were coming. Leon heard it from his friends at the Brom Foundry. After church on Sunday, it was the main topic of conversation.
The night before November 11, Leon cleaned his shotgun and packed a lunch of three bologna and cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. The next morning, he dragged his skiff away from the dock of his boathouse at Minnesota City and paddled over to an island near Twin Creeks before the sun slit the horizon.
Hundreds of other men joined him. They wedged their canvas-protected bodies in sand pits and damp gullies. Gusts of wind and promises of the ducks’ imminent arrival blew in from the south and west.
About eleven that morning, the ducks came, their forms propelled by the wind as they soared over the hunters’ heads. Thousands covered the sky like a swarm of disturbed bees.
The men pointed their shotguns at the flocks, took aim, and fired repeatedly. They hardly contained their joy as masses of plumage fell to the ground. Leon was so preoccupied, he didn’t notice, at first, how fierce and cold the winds had become.
By early afternoon, his hands were so stiff, he couldn’t hold his rifle, much less point the barrel and shoot. He started to pick up the dozens of ducks around him, but lost interest as the winds threw him to the ground and curled down his neck into his bones.
Within hours, temperatures dropped more than 50 degrees and winds reached 80 miles per hour. Water skated over the great river like sheets of glass and soaked Leon and other hunters on the unprotected island. Angry waves beat the men’s canvased bodies and gripped them with a hurtful cold. Their fingers numbed; their noses and cheeks became frost-bitten.
Leon, his friend, Gerald, and three other men used their boats as shields against the wind. They squatted behind the tin defenses, ducking their heads and scrubbing their gloves together. Leon shouted out to Gerald about lighting a fire. Gerald shook his head, his eyes filled with fear.
Finally, Leon poked his head over the rim of his upturned boat, awkwardly aimed his gun, poked a numb finger in the trigger, stiffly pulled it back, and shot at the branches of a dogwood tree. Again and again, he volleyed until a branch fell, lifted by the gale on the way down. At first Gerald watched, then he aimed and shot, too, and after about twenty minutes, several more branches had collapsed to the ground.
Leon and Gerald gathered the branches while the other men huddled behind their boats. Leon waved to instruct the men to create a circle with their boats, the open sides facing inside. Leon and Gerald then arranged the branches in the center of the circle and lit a fire, Gerald using the lid of an ice chest to buffer the lit match against the wind.
Outside the circle of boats, winds blew snow into steep drifts as the daylight waned. Between the trunks of trees and knives of rain, Leon saw other hunters crouched near the ground, their arms crossed against their chests, their heads bent so low that their necks looked broken. One man was layingh with his back against a stump, his head thrown back, his mouth open. His hair was stiff in the rain. His eyes were closed.
The sky darkened quickly. Leon no longer could see the men among the trees. The rain turned colder and hit his face like steel pins. Even the darkness felt frozen.
Between slices of rain, Leon saw shadows crawling on their hands and knees toward the black river. They moved like crabs, their arms and legs clumsily dragging across the mushy ground and one by one tumbling over the banks into the gloomy abyss of water.
Leon’s group of men huddled around the fire inside the circle of skiffs, beating their hands until they were bruised and blue. They lost feeling in their limbs. Sometime in the middle of the night, they pulled the boats closer together for more protection and waited in bleak darkness.
The hours of fear and oblivion dragged on and on, and, when Leon could barely stand the cold, he howled into the wind like a wolf. His voice, unheard by his companions, warmed his chest. He squatted, then sat, then laid inside the rim of the boat, hoping that movement would keep his blood from freezing. When he could focus his thoughts, he pictured his wife—Lily’s face as she peeled cucumbers over the sink, her farm apron hitched around her thick waist. He imagined the blonde heads of his five children. Their faces bobbed in his mind like balloons, and then they were lost again.
Finally, daylight touched the eastern side of the river like a glimmer of hope. As the sky brightened, the icy rain unfroze. The gale-force winds relaxed, and the men felt their bodies unthaw like slabs of beef. They let the rain put out the fire, then crawled out of their makeshift hut of skiffs and started for home.
As soon as the sun came up along the Mississippi River, relatives gathered at boat docks for news of their men. Planes droned overhead searching for life and dropping packages of sandwiches, whiskey and matches where they found it. Parties of men in boats with broken motors paddled with difficulty out to the islands. They returned with chilled and shriveled hunters, breathing, but frozen with dreams of death.
Leon rowed up to the Minnesota City boat dock by himself. From the riverbank, his eleven-year-old son, Paul, watched him guide a strange boat alongside the pier, stiffly throw its rope around the post, and crawl onto the ledge. Once safe, Leon laid face up on the wood, his arms and legs askew. He didn’t move for a full five minutes.
Finally, Paul ran down the bank and down the pier until he reached his father. “Dad, Mom was scared. She prayed the rosary all night. Us kids fell asleep, but when I woke this morning, she was still sitting in her rocking chair, praying.”
Leon looked up at Paul’s face. His blonde hair was covered by a wool cap. He wore a parka and gloves. His cheeks and nose were red. Even dressed for winter, he was skinny.
Slowly, Leon positioned himself on his hands and knees. He put one boot down, and stood up by pushing himself up, first on his elbows, then his hands, then knees, and finally to his feet.
When he put his arms around Paul’s 11-year-old body, his heart thawed.
He had made it home.
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