Winterking (1987)

by Paul Hazel

would have sat as anxiously and as still and would, when he

  started, have begun to write with much the same ferocity and

  panic had he lectured on the E n cyclopaedia B ritannica. The

  windows along the sloping sides of the hall were opaque and

  emitted an uncertain light. I might as well lecture in a cave,

  Harwood thought; yet, in a way, it was almost pleasant, the

  air grown heavy and quiet. The world was shut out. Harwood

  felt a little flutter in himself.

  “Shall we begin?” he asked. His voice, like the voice in a

  cave, surprised him. He opened a book and then for several

  minutes did not look at it.

  “Even the smallest details are conserved,” he said, now

  in earnest. “However minor and distracting, I shall expect

  you to remember. I have prepared a list. . .”

  There was a groan.

  “. . . of birthmarks and certain articles of clothing, birds

  seen at midnight, objects as simple and as serviceable as

  china, isolated in aspect. And yet, gentlemen, reiterated.

  Infinitely recombined. Characteristic, I should think, of the

  obsessive nature of literary imagination.’ His voice became

  louder. He had forgotten his usual embarrassment. “But

  today,” he announced, “I shall ask you to take a broader view.

  1 shall ask you to stand back and to see, if you can, the beauty

  of the underlying pattern. . . .”

  The Duke, who had come in before the lecture had

  started, sat in the back. On the wall directly above his head

  was a painting of a clergyman, most probably one of the

  Mathers, giving a Bible into the hand of a muscular Indian.

  The plaque beneath it read A nsantaw ae, by the G race o f

  G od, R eceives the B o o k . The clergyman, his features hardened into a look of moral belligerence, is imbued nevertheless with a kind of wooden glory. But it is the Indian who is

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  bathed in light. He stands under it as unnaturally as under a

  lamp.

  It is the light that gives the painting its essential falseness.

  Its anemic shining reduces the ragged hills to a few cidtivated

  fields, the bend of the intruding river to the ordinary flatness

  of an English pond. Harwood, who each morning faced it

  squarely, had often wondered what purposes were served in

  presenting a Pequod chief with a Christian testament. “They

  could not speak together,” he had once told his students.

  “Ansantawae understood only Algonquin.” In fact, in this

  detail alone, the painting preserved the delicate relic of truth.

  It had been commissioned by Benjamin Church, who at

  the head of a militia of farmer soldiers had driven to their

  deaths the last remnant of the Pequod nation. Captain Church

  himself had supervised the final slaughter in the Fairfield

  swamps. He had shot three young men trapped between the

  water and the wood. Because of the cumbersomeness and

  delay in reloading, he had continued the killing with the

  stock of his gun. The corpses were muddied. It had been

  difficult to tell them apart. Nevertheless it had been the

  general opinion that Ansantawae was among them. It was this

  victory that the painting commemorated. The artist had been

  given a free hand. The captain, being well acquainted with

  John Bunyan, saw nothing amiss when a purposeful Mather

  was depicted in his place. In the darkening pigment of three

  centuries, his only contribution is now scarcely legible. Yet it

  is the one detail based on observation rather than religious

  bigotry.

  Almost from the first, Captain Church had felt a deep

  affinity with the Indians. The entries in his diary describe

  how, before he turned to murder them, he had lived in their

  villages and made expeditions with their young men into the

  Dutch territories across the Hudson. He had admired their

  bravery and their wisdom. “They know this Dark Land better

  than we ever shall,” he had written. As sympathetically as

  any of the English he had learned their ways and he had

  insisted, although now one must stand up very close to see it,

  that the Bible, its pages folded back to a passage in Genesis

  and given from the hand of a clergyman who clearly had not

  been there into the hand of an Indian who only may have

  been, be written in Welsh.

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  127

  The Duke leaned into his seat. His head pounded. The

  outside world was hushed. The windows were whitened by rain.

  “Reality— ” Harwood was explaining when he stopped.

  His tongue, as though waiting inspiration, pressed on the

  edge of his teeth. It was, he felt, his most potent effect. It

  gave the illusion of spontaneity, the impression of a mind

  poised on a knife-edge and conjuring with darkness. Harwood

  smiled with excitement. “— Is a Protean fog— ” he continued,

  “— into which we read—

  He paused. “— Not so much what

  is but what we have been led to expect.” He waited.

  “Consider, if you will,” he said, “the pre-Copernican

  universe: the earth at its center. Devils beneath.”

  l b ere came into his mind’s eyes a picture of angular little

  creatures with drooling mouths and leather wings.

  “Very real devils, it would seem,” he went on, “for they

  had a very real place— the vast basement of the universe—

  and could and therefore did tempt us to perdition. Only

  Nicolaus Copernicus— ” He seized the book he had put

  down, from which in a moment, although it had nothing to do

  with Copernicus, he intended to read a long passage. “One

  man,” he said, “one man learning to look some other way,

  feeling, though none before him had felt it, the apparently

  fixed and solid earth, our oldest foundations, begin to slip, to

  slide beneath his feet, to— ”

  Someone coughed.

  Harwood could feel his words creeping cold and friendless over the hall. No more than a handful were still listening.

  The lines deepened on the Duke’s forehead.

  “Truth, gentlemen, particularly literary truth,” Harwood

  persisted, “must be encountered suddenly.” He opened the

  book.

  There was only the ignorant murmur of rain on the

  windows. The Duke tapped his long fingers. He considered

  the old woman buried on the grounds of the school in Bristol,

  the young man dead in New Awanux.

  “Imagine a table,” George Harwood was saying.

  The Duke rose quickly and went to wait in the corridor.

  There was a moment’s hush and then the clap of spring

  seats snapping shut. The young men pushed past him. The

  Duke scowled. Harwood gathered up his books and his coat

  and came up the aisle. Until he saw the coat the Duke had

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  W IN TER IN G

  not truly recognized him. His clerk had made certain inquiries of the Dean. In the space of a few hours the Duke had learned that Harwood had been Wykeham’s advisor, the one

  man at the college with whom, if it could be said of anyone,

  Wykeham had been intimate. The Duke had written straight


  off requesting a meeting. He had not troubled himself to

  think who the man was. He had cared only to discover what

  Harwood knew, what, if anything, he could explain about

  Wykeham’s behavior. He had not stopped to wonder what

  effect Wykeham might have had on him. The Duke had only

  half listened to the lecture. Perhaps it had been clever. He

  was no judge. Certainly there was little else to recommend

  him. Harwood’s figure was stout, his face without delicacy.

  Ordinarily, having learned what he could, the Duke would

  have left him abruptly in the emptied corridor. It was surprising, and even foreign to his nature, that instead His Grace had taken the man by the shoulders.

  T shall need two hours of your time,” he had said. “If

  you can spare it. Afterward, my driver will drop you wherever

  you like.”

  He felt the perspiration on the man’s heavy shoulder.

  “I hope I can drag you away,” he continued, though now

  he had not the least doubt. He had seen the expensive coat

  Harwood carried. He remembered the little lighted windows

  of the train into which Wykeham had vanished, leaving them

  both on the platform, both stranded and, for a moment,

  unable to walk away.

  The street was mobbed with students running to get out

  of the rain. It was several minutes before the college towers

  slipped grudgingly behind. For the better part of a mile they

  crawled beside the long snaking wall of the First Settlers

  Cemetery, past the statues of Protestant saints, centuries old,

  crumbling back toward the shapelessness of the original

  stone. It was not until East Bridge, after they had emerged

  from under the railroad trestle, that they were able to pick up

  speed again. By then the unfamiliar street had narrowed.

  Between the poor row houses they caught a glimpse now and

  then of the river. Backed up by the wind, the estuary had

  swollen and was flooding the weirs. The traffic had thinned.

  The wipers thudded dully on the windscreen.

  F a ce s in the Earth

  1 2 9

  "H e told you something of his travels?” The Duke asked

  finally.

  Uneasy in the Duke’s presence, Harwood rearranged his

  coat. “Very little,” he acknowledged. “I gather he had seen

  much of the empire. Certainly wherever there were any

  number of English.” Looking out at the river, Harwood was

  reminded, unhappily, of all the places he had never been.

  “Though who can say,” he added depreciatingly, “what exactly

  he remembers. He was, I believe, Your Grace, quite young.”

  The Duke watched Harwood carefully.

  “He isn’t,” he said.

  Harwood turned.

  “Isn’t English,” the Duke said.

  This one point, at least, although he had been slow

  himself to see it, was indisputable. The ledgers, of course,

  had been in the vault. He had devoted his life to them, to

  records which in themselves were a kind of history, repeating

  not only Wykeham’s existence but, in a sense, his own. Yet

  strangely, until the past evening, he had not brought them

  all, not one after another to his desk. And even then,

  knowing them too well, he had not known where to start and

  at first he had looked in all the wrong places. He felt his heart

  sink.

  “It is, I should have thought,” Harwood protested, “the

  most English of names.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” The Duke nodded. Somehow the

  topic had gotten away from him. His head still ached. He had

  been thinking of women.

  It was not the first time. More than once he had found

  himself worrying over a mere few hundred invested yearly in

  a Norwegian bank. But the amounts had been so trivial he

  had let them pass. Nevertheless, he had gone on his own to

  visit the young women’s academy. He had been a young man

  himself when he had walked over the lawn, stopping at the

  edge of the open pit where the new building would go up.

  The woman had trailed behind him from the house. He had

  not conversed with her. At the time he had not even been

  troubled. Surely there woidd be women. He had expected

  that. The trust could well afford the expense. His own habits

  were regular. He was not himself much given to foolishness.

  It all seemed so long ago.

  In the morning he had awakened at his desk. The

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  ledgers had been scattered in front of him. On the borders of

  sleep he had seen her, a dark-haired woman in a blue dress,

  sweeping across the green lawn. She had almost stumbled.

  The brightness had been in his eyes. Until she was quite

  close to him he had not noticed that she wept.

  His head still pounded.

  "You shared, one would imagine,” he said quietly, “certain confidences.” He tried to calm his mind, to remember that the dead woman, however he felt bound to her, was

  Wykeham’s. “You were his teacher,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you talked?”

  “We traded books." Harwood smiled. He meant to be

  honest. “I may have given him one or two,” he said. “He

  gave me dozens. Late in the evenings he would come to my

  rooms and we would talk.”

  “Of?”

  Harwood thought he had been clear. “About books,” he

  said. He was puzzled. The Duke was watching him strangely.

  “He may have mentioned acquaintances.”

  “Your Grace?” Watching him in return, Harwood realized

  that the Duke was drunk. Not alarmingly so. But there was a

  gauntness about the Duke’s eyes, behind his deliberateness,

  the clear possibility of panic.

  Harwood frowned.

  “Did you gather— ” the Duke continued. “Forgive me,

  these questions are necessary.” His large, veined hands shifted

  uncomfortably in his lap. “There were women,” he said. “I

  know for a fact there were several. Not that I find that

  astonishing. But afterward.”

  For a moment he was unnaturally conscious of the sound

  of the rain. He waited until his head had stopped buzzing.

  He said: “There had always to be something new, don’t you

  think? To distract him. Something to worry over.” His eyes

  shone. “Something,” he said, “to stir up all the wells of

  thought and feeling at once— ”

  His head tilted awkwardly. A strand of his dark, parted

  hair fell abruptly over his forehead.

  The Duke sank again into his seat. He was tired. Since

  he had seen the photograph, he had barely slept. He had

  been drawn up short, suddenly, without reason. He knew

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  131

  that much. It was no help. Reason, he had decided, was of no

  help.

  "May I ask,” His Grace began once more. He stopped.

  It was all too long ago. When Wykeham had abandoned Willa

  Brelling, Harwood had yet to be born. "There were others,”

  he said. “Probably more than I know. You are quite certain he

  never— ”

  “Your Grace?”

  “Women,” the Duke said, a bit sh
arply.

  “No,” Harwood answered. “Not to me.”

  On the outskirts of New Awanux there was more open

  land. Grimly, the Duke stared at the patchwork of meadows.

  Harwood kept his gaze resolutely forward. Still His Grace

  was not without hope.

  “Would you remember,” he asked, “if Wykeham ever

  spoke to you of horses?”

  Harwood shook his head dismally.

  Crossing the trackbed, the car jerked twice. The driver

  cut the wheel sharply. A cluster of blurry shapes appeared

  out of the rain. At the end of the lane there were five

  rectangles of gray stone. Two of the mossed roofs had already

  fallen. The house itself was set back and to the left, its few

  small windows broken, its side porches rotted. The Duke felt

  an immediate twinge of displeasure. It was no longer a

  working farm. That it had been preserved at all was due to

  the rent he paid one year to the next, at Wykeham’s direction, for the use of the barn.

  Beyond the rusted front gate the car halted. The rain

  went on clinking on the hood. The sky, which until that

  moment had held a slight glow, had darkened. Harwood

  could see little but the two phosphorescent circles the headlamps

  cut in the fog and, even less perfectly, in snatches, the track

  that went up to the doors of the barn and, seemingly, under

  them. He rubbed at the glass.

  The barn was unusually large, perhaps three stories. Its

  high eaves appeared and disappeared in the mists. Harwood

  peered up at it doubtfully.

  “Is this what you wished me to see?” he asked.

  The Duke did not answer. Without a word, he swung the

  door open. Suspicious and yet not wanting to be left behind,

  Harwood followed.

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  WINTERKING

  The yard, blocked up against the foundation, spread

  before him like a deepening pool, Harwood ran. But by the

  time he had reached the old, closed doors his shirt and

  trousers were soaked. Sheets of water rolled down his face.

  The Duke grunted. He was trying, unsuccessfully, a set of

  large keys in a padlock. For what seemed a very long time

  Harwood stared at his hack. The air was much cooler. The

  rain was so heavy that neither heard the splash of the tires on

  the stones.

  The cab ran onto the gravel and stopped. The small man