In the worst moment of her life, Mary Ann Collins’s father held her and did not let go. That was the thing she carried longer than the loss of her right arm, longer than the memory of the winter that took it from her. The winter of 1843 was called the killing cold in Lucas County, Ohio, because there were no other words for it. It was not simply cold.
It was a cold that seemed alive, a cold that made trees burst in the night like rifleshots, splitting and falling in the frozen forest. People died that winter. A neighbor, the old father of the Horn family, went out to check the livestock and was found in the morning ten yards from his own door. The Wells family lost two children to illness they could not fight off in such cold, and the doctor could not reach them for three days because the road was buried and the horses refused the wind.
Mary Ann was seven years old, the eldest of four children. Her father, Edward Thomas Pratt, had come to Ohio from Pennsylvania in 1829 with eight dollars and a carpenter’s axe, clearing forty acres of forest by hand to build a log house, a barn, and fields. Her mother, Sarah, was a loud, quick woman who sang old Welsh songs while she worked. They had prepared for winter as they always did, firewood laid up since summer, food salted, the livestock in the barn.
In January, that preparation was not enough. On the evening of January 12, 1844, the night before her sister Bessie’s fourth birthday, Edward went to the barn to check on the cow, the two pigs, and the chickens as he did every evening. It was a routine he had followed all winter. When he did not return after an hour, Sarah stood at the window and looked into darkness so thick that the lantern in the glass could not cast light two yards out.
She made a decision without saying a word. She dressed in everything she owned, two dresses, two shawls, mittens, heavy boots. Mary Ann asked to go with her. Her mother said no, told her to stay with the children, close the door behind her, and not open it.
Then she told her daughter that if they were not back by morning, she knew the road to the Horns’, a mile to the east. Mary Ann closed the door and waited. James was sleeping, Bessie was dozing by the stove, little William was in the cradle. Nearly two hours passed before the door opened.
Her mother came in holding her father by the arm. He had slipped on the ice near the barn, hurt his leg, and could not get up. He had lain on the ice in forty below temperatures until he heard Sarah calling for him. The two of them had taken an hour to cross a yard that was a minute’s walk in ordinary weather.
Sarah sat him by the stove and began pulling off his boots. Then she saw Mary Ann’s bare feet. The girl had been standing on the frozen wooden floor in wool stockings for most of the time her parents were gone, waiting at the door. She had not noticed, had not felt it.
Sarah brought a basin of cold water, not hot, and set the girl’s feet in it. Then she took her daughter’s right hand. Mary Ann had not been thinking about her hand. She had been thinking about her feet.
But her mother took the hand, looked at it, and raised her eyes to meet her daughter’s. The hand was white like wax. The girl had gripped the metal door handle with it when she closed the door behind her mother, bare skin on iron at forty below zero, and pulled it free. She did not remember this clearly.
The fingers stood straight and would not bend. Her mother lowered the hand into the basin of cold water and asked if it hurt. Mary Ann said no. Her mother nodded and turned away.
The absence of pain was a bad sign. When frostbitten flesh thaws, it hurts terribly. Mary Ann’s feet hurt by morning, turned white, then red, then blistered, and came back to life. The hand never did.
The doctor, Nathaniel Hobbs of Toledo, reached the house on the third day. It had taken him that long because the road was impassable, which was fast for that winter. He examined the hand, and then went into the other room and spoke with her parents. When her mother came back, she told the girl that the doctor needed to do something with the hand, that it would hurt, and that she needed to be brave.
Her father sat behind her and held her with his arms and his whole body, and did not let go for a single second. Her mother held the hand against a wooden board. Doctor Hobbs told her to look at the wall. She looked at the wall.
When it was finished, the doctor bandaged what remained. There was no infection. Within a month, the wound had closed. Mary Ann was left without her right arm below the elbow.
The first thing she remembered thinking, after it became clear she would live, was: How will I sew now? She had loved sewing since she was five, sewing dolls from rags. Then she thought of writing, of combing her hair, of tying her laces. The list grew longer the further she went with it.
Her mother told her she would learn, with her left. Mary Ann did not believe her at first. But her mother was a practical woman and did not pity her, because pity would have made the child stop trying. As soon as she could sit at the table, her mother placed pen and paper in front of her and told her to write.
Her first letter M looked like the drawing of a drunken infant. She wrote it again. Every day, letter by letter, she learned to write with her left hand. She learned to tie laces with a method her mother invented, a loop through the boot hook, then through another loop.
She learned to comb her hair by pressing the comb against her knee and tilting her head through the teeth of it. She learned to sew by pressing the fabric against the table with her stump and pulling the thread with her left hand. Awkward, slow, but possible. By the time she was twenty, she sewed better than some women with two hands.
She learned to milk the cow with the pail gripped between her knees, to chop wood by locking the ax handle under her stump, to cook, to wash clothes, to harness a horse, to count money, to pitch hay. The only thing she never managed was the violin, which her father had been teaching her before it happened. Afterward, he never played in her presence again, and neither of them ever spoke of it. She returned to school in the autumn of 1844.
The teacher, Mrs. Aldridge, looked at her stump, then at her left hand holding the pen, and said only, Sit down. We will begin the lesson. She never said another word about it, not once in all the years Mary Ann studied with her.
The children were different. Some looked, and some said aloud what others thought in silence. A boy named Henry Barnes called her hook once. He never called her that again, and spent several days with a bruise beneath his eye.
Her best friend, Agnes Mortimer, never changed, never once looked at the arm with that look, and talked to her the same as always about birds and books and clouds until Agnes died of typhus in 1871. When Mary Ann was twenty-two, Robert Collins came to ask for her hand. He was a farmer from the neighboring county, three years older than her, plain-spoken with large working hands. He sat at the table on a Sunday evening and talked with her father about the weather and the harvest for a full hour before saying why he had come.
Her father told her afterward that he had warned the young man plainly about the arm. Robert said he knew. He had seen her at the market in Toledo many times, had watched how she bargained and packed baskets and did everything that needed doing, and had never once seen her complain or ask for help. That was exactly what he was looking for in a wife.
She married him because she liked him. They lived together forty-one years. Robert died of pneumonia in 1899, at sixty-five. Mary Ann was beside him.
It was the hardest thing that ever happened to her, harder than that winter, harder than the operation, because when she lost the arm she did not yet know what loss truly meant. They had five children. Three survived. Their son Edwin went to war at seventeen in 1863 and did not come back.
Their daughter Clara died in the same typhus epidemic of 1871 that took Agnes. Two sons and a daughter grew up and made their own families. Mary Ann lived to seventy-four years with one arm, with a dead husband, with two dead children, with the memory of a winter that did not release her for a single day. In time, she learned to clap with her left palm against her stump.
The sound was strange, but it existed. She never got used to people looking, but she learned not to notice, or to pretend she did not notice. Her mother died in 1888 at fifty-eight, and before she died she took her daughter’s left hand in both of hers and held it for a long time. Neither of them said anything.
Her father died before her, in 1880, working until the end, plowing and sowing at seventy-one. At his funeral, she thought of the night he held her with his hands while Doctor Hobbs did what he did, and did not let go for a single second. That was what a life was made of, she decided. Not of what you lost, but of what remained, and of the people who remained beside you.
Her name was Mary Ann Collins. She was born in 1836 in Lucas County, Ohio. She was seventy-four years old.
And she had something to say.