Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  Peter Lake stayed until he was almost fully grown. Though he was a slave, he was in paradise, this because of the third force in the equilibrium of the Overweary Home—Reverend Mootfowl.

  THE DAY that Peter Lake was seized in the machinery hall, Reverend Mootfowl had been in charge of the sweep. To the irritation of the police who accompanied him, he had insisted upon visiting the exhibition because he was unable to resist any display of technology, engineering, or machinery. He had been among the very first to staff the home, when things had not been so well organized, and prior to his “ordination” Overweary had sent him through a bunch of technical colleges. Mootfowl seemed to have no emotions, desires, or concerns, except those of metalworking, smithing, machine building, pump design, beam raising, cable spinning, and structural engineering. He was forever at the forge or workbench, crafting, cutting, designing. He lived steel, iron, and timber. He could fabricate anything. He was a mad craftsman, a genius of tools.

  Peter Lake soon became one of the elite half-hundred that worked day and night in the glare of the forge. Brought to the subject early and hard, they became master mechanics, and they and Mootfowl were the right people in the right time, for the city had just begun to mechanize. Engines had come alive, and lighted every corner, crowning themselves in plumes of smoke and steam. Once they had been started, slowly, surely, there would never be an end to their rhythmic splendor. They added to the body of the city not just muscle and speed, but a new life for the tireless ride to the future. A staggering number of disparate things had to be strung together. Electricity was being introduced throughout—a savage, speedy, sparkling gleam. Steam in a honeycomb of tunnels, great engines to drive the dynamos, trains underneath the streets, and buildings built higher and higher, were a new world of and for mechanics. As the machines began their ascension, when the city itself became a machine, millions worked day and night in a fury to attend the birth, to make sure that the right things were done, to provide the steel and stone and hard tools with which the pulsing heart would be sustained.

  Builders and machinists came from everywhere to layer the city in new steel. They were able to use materials as fast as the materials could be produced. Pennsylvania, an entire wilderness, became their smoking hearth. They stripped the forests just for frames to help the ironwork. They mined, logged, and blasted, and brought everything to the city to be put in order. Not surprisingly, they had a never-ending need for skillfully crafted small pieces. These were the things of steel that Peter Lake learned to mill and forge—gaskets, bolts, rocker arms, seals, platens, spokes—parts that had to be drawn from seething fires or machined straight and true. He had to learn as well how to tend the engines that powered the machines, to master the construction of the turbines that kept his fires white-hot, the intricate cam action of the automatic stokers, electrical systems, gears and transmissions, gasoline engines, pressure boilers, metallurgy, stress engineering—in short, the vast traditional physics of those who called themselves mechanics.

  They worked in a huge shed that roared and glowed with dozens of fires and was littered with oily blackened tools of heavy steel. As the machines and flames sang together, they sounded like a percussion orchestra gone wild. The boys wore black leather aprons and heavy gloves. They had their own society among the fires and anvils, and they stayed on the job sixteen hours a day. Mootfowl himself worked twenty hours or more. The income from their skilled industry was substantial, but they cared only for the work. They traveled about the city on jobs and were known by their black aprons, their uncanny skills, and their insane devotion to their crafts—at which they became better and better, fulfilling the demands of the age.

  He, Mootfowl, wore a Chinese hat to protect his hair from being singed by the forge when he knelt down on the oily floor to inspect the readiness of an excited piece of steel. The way he handled hot metal was a marvel of tenderness and dispatch. He could strike the precise and necessary blow needed to create a strong thing from a seething moltenness. Mootfowl was quite tall. Even when Peter Lake was fully grown, he felt half Mootfowl’s size. And Mootfowl had a rugged face of many handsome planes, sooty and shining, in which rested two sparkling owl’s eyes. Each time he saw those eyes, Peter Lake was reminded of his days with the Baymen, when he would sometimes have for breakfast a hot roasted owl, buttered and sizzling. But those days were long over. Under Mootfowl’s tutelage, he learned to read and write, to use mathematics, to bargain skillfully in the matter of jobs and commissions, and to know the city well enough to find his way about. Since half the boys were Irish, Peter Lake learned to speak in a flexible and true Irish dialect. He liked it well enough—it was like riding the waves—and he found after a few years that he could speak in no other way, except to recall slowly articulated phrases from lays in Bay. Still, he was often saddened by the loss of his original self, whatever that had been. He was not really a Bayman, not really Irish, and only partly one of Mootfowl’s boys, since, unlike the gamy five-year-olds who were to be seen in a corner of the shed, learning to work with miniature tools, he had been apprenticed relatively late. He was not sure to what he had to be loyal. But he assumed that this uncertainty, like the other torments suffered by his fellow “lunatics,” would someday vanish.

  Meanwhile, Mootfowl and his group were ever at work as the city’s structures took their places one upon the other, faster than reef-building corals. Each tower had a minute of free view, after which it would spend the rest of eternity contemplating the shins of its competitors. Not so the great bridges. They flowed out over the rivers, and would have airy views and be alone forever. Mootfowl worshiped bridges. He had worked on several, and when he heard that another was to be flung over a wide bend of the East River, toward Brooklyn, he was all feathers and wine for days, since he knew that a bridge of that length would require specially forged components and expert repairs. One of his more holy moments was when he told his boys about the time that he mended some broken ferris joints for Colonel Roebling after the four main cables of the Brooklyn Bridge had been spun across the river. Mootfowl had hung high above the water, as dizzy as a bird in a storm, with a forge hanging by his side. There he did the work, to the delight of thousands crossing below on the Fulton ferry.

  “Jackson Mead,” Mootfowl said with reverence and admiration, “has come from beyond the Ohio with a hundred good men and tons of money and steel from God knows where, to start another bridge. They arrived after a storm. The white wall had imprisoned the countryside for days and days. Just as it was lifting, out charged their train, parting the mist on the Erie Lackawanna tracks. It was a great surprise to the farmers, who said that the train hit the bottom of the curtain. They say, boys, that the top of the train was scraped and torn, that it shone from contact with the underside of the wall.

  “Be that as it may, Jackson Mead is here, and the bridge will be going up. We should say prayers for it.”

  “Why?” asked one of the forge boys, a small adenoidal fellow who was always very skeptical.

  Mootfowl glared at him. “A bridge,” he proclaimed, “is a very special thing. Haven’t you seen how delicate they are in relation to their size? They soar like birds; they extend and embody our finest efforts; and they utilize the curve of heaven. When a catenary of steel a mile long is hung in the clear over a river, believe me, God knows. Being a churchman, I would go as far as to say that the catenary, this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance between rebellion and obedience, is God’s own signature on earth. I think it pleases Him to see them raised. I think that is why the city is so rich in events. The whole island, you see, is becoming a cathedral.”

  “Does that leave out the Bronx?” someone asked.

  “Yes,” Mootfowl replied.

  They put down their tools and bent their heads, and with the fires singing behind them, they prayed for the new bridge. As soon as they finished, Mootfowl sprang up like a steel spring. “Work,” he commanded. “Work through the night. Tomorrow we’ll apply for
employment on the new bridge.”

  Not much was known about Jackson Mead except that he had placed many fine suspension bridges over the great rivers of the West, some of which had taken years to complete and had been built to span nearly bottomless canyons and gorges. He was quoted in the newspapers as having said that a city could be truly great only if it were a city of high bridges. “The map image of London,” he had lectured during a press conference in the offices of the bridge company, “and of Paris, too, compared to that of San Francisco or New York, is boring. To be magnificent, a city cannot resemble a round cradled organ, a heart-or-kidney-shaped thing suffocated by a vast green body. It must project, extend, fling itself in all inviting directions—over the water, in peninsulas, hills, soaring towers, and islands linked by bridges.” The press had wondered why he included San Francisco in his examples, since there were no bridges there; and he had said, with a smile, “My mistake.”

  The papers, and the ladies, made much of his physical appearance. He was six feet and eight inches tall, but not skinny. He had snowy white hair and a mustache to match, and he wore white vested suits with a platinum chain to tether his watch, which was almost as big as a clock, but which, in his large hand, did not seem so. His excellent health and physique made it difficult to reckon his age. People said that he was so tremendous and robust, and that his eyes were so blue, because he ate raw buffalo meat, bathed in mineral water, and drank eagle urine. When publicly confronted with this, he said, “Yes, of course it’s true,” and then burst out laughing.

  There were those who loved him, and those who did not. Peter Lake was awed when he, Mootfowl, and the forty-nine others were trooped into a sparsely furnished office, and there was Jackson Mead, like an oversized painting. Next to him, Mootfowl seemed like just a statuette. The image that came to Peter Lake was of Jackson Mead as bridegroom, and Mootfowl the representation of him soon to stand upon a cake. The young apprentice had to close his mouth, for he found it hanging open in wonder. And he made a conscious effort to narrow his eyes, which, as if to match his mouth, had become the size of half-dollars.

  He couldn’t see how anyone could hate this man, or report that he was hard and cruel. After all, there he was in white, his hair and mustache as fluffy as down, a soothing, balanced countenance, a satisfied man, a study in calm. Precisely this, Peter Lake discovered, was why people hated him. He got things done, and there was no hesitation about him. Others, weighted by ambivalence and uncertainty, envied someone who knew what he was meant to do and why—as if he had had a few centuries to solve the normal problems of existence and had then turned his attention to bridge building.

  After Mootfowl explained their reason for being there, Jackson Mead said that it seemed like an attractive proposition, that he needed skilled smiths, mechanics, and machinists. But, he said, he was not convinced that these boys, eager as they were, were equal to the task.

  “In anticipation of that, sir,” replied Mootfowl, “I have designed a test. Choose, if you will, any of my boys, and assign them as difficult an operation as might be encountered. We are willing to be evaluated in such a manner.” He stepped back, nervous and proud.

  Jackson Mead said that he would hire them all if the boy that he chose could forge a heptagonal ferris piece without appreciable distortion. When he stood up to survey the applicants, it was as if he had climbed into a tower. They, in turn, felt a collective adolescent chill that turned to ice when the snowy-haired bridge builder pointed directly at a little fat boy huddled in the back, and said, “Him. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and that looks to me like the weak link.”

  He had chosen young Cecil Mature—five foot one, two hundred pounds, a face packed with untenable fat, and two black smiling slits where his eyes were supposed to have been. He was a squash cook at the home, who had begged to be made a mechanic. He wore a crenellated beanie that fit in perfect roundness over his waxed crew cut. His arms were like sausages, and when he waddled around quickly in his black apron he looked like a cannonball come alive. He had arrived fairly recently at Overweary’s, his origins a mystery, though he claimed to have vague memories of life on an English herring boat. He was fourteen, and seemed not to know much of the world.

  When made to understand that he had been chosen for the test, he broke into a joyous smile and ran out to the forge. Everyone followed, wondering what would happen. They liked him, it was true, but in the way that you like an awkward dog that loses its footing and skis down the stairs. Mootfowl had yet to draw out the fine strands of Cecil Mature’s intelligence. The boy was eager, but seldom did things right. So, when he heated up a ferris piece and took it to the anvil, they winced. Each blow was more damaging than the one before. After five minutes, the ferris piece was badly mangled, but still capable of salvation. Cecil Mature put down his hammer and took a step backward. He adjusted his hat and peered through his slitlike eyes at the half-dead ferris piece. Then he stepped back to the anvil and really began to do it in. The ferris piece had been at one time a complicated jointure that looked like a cross between a carriage wheel and an arch. After being pounded for fifteen minutes by Cecil Mature, it was once again a rocky ore, something that looked, in fact, just like a newly fallen meteorite. When he was finished, Cecil Mature delicately stepped back into the group of boys and was quickly hidden among them. Jackson Mead thanked a whitened and speechless Mootfowl (who had not known that Cecil was along), and departed in his carriage to inspect a new shipment of steel braces.

  Their single-file walk back to the workshop was taken by many to have been a funeral procession without a corpse. Mootfowl dismissed them, and they remained idle for a week. During this time, Mootfowl became deeply despondent, and lay all day, dejected, on top of his enormous tool trolley, staring at the skylight ablaze with the sun. Then he summoned Peter Lake.

  Overjoyed, because he knew an active Mootfowl was indomitable, Peter Lake rushed to find his mentor furiously working on a framelike contraption which he had built in the middle of the workshop. Peter Lake thought that it was a new machine that they would show to Jackson Mead, and so redeem themselves.

  He helped Mootfowl with some adjustments, but still did not understand what he was building, or why Mootfowl seemed crazed with excitement. “That’s it,” said Mootfowl, “only one last thing left. When I give the word, hit this bar with a sledgehammer, as hard as you can. I have to make one last measurement, one last fastening, and it is a matter of precision.” Mootfowl disappeared behind a wooden shield through which ran the steel rod, and said, “With all your strength, Peter Lake, strike now!” Peter Lake struck an enormous blow, and waited for further instructions. He waited and waited—and when finally he looked behind the shield, he saw Mootfowl, smiling alertly, unusually still, serene, pinned through his heart to an oaken log.

  “Oh Lord,” Peter Lake said, too shocked to feel any grief even for a man he had loved so much. He had stuck Mootfowl like a butterfly.

  You could not drive an iron stake through the heart of a man of the cloth, and expect to go unpunished. So Peter Lake went over the wall (there was no wall, actually), and those years were ended. He left his apron, but he took his sword.

  COURSING THE streets, swifting up and down the avenues, feeling the fire of his own strength, Peter Lake reflected upon his position. He was just short of twenty, and had recently affected a modest but thick blond mustache tinged with red and silver. His hair was beginning to thin over his forehead, which made him look older, and elevated his brow—a pleasant circumstance for a pleasant face. He was disarming, friendly, kind, and full of good humor. He looked a lot like every good man, and he saw sharply and in minute detail. Had he been an aristocrat, he would have gone far. As it was, he had the world before him, and he moved confidently through the city, well aware that he was an excellent mechanic, a strong young man with a trade. True, the police would be after him. But, unencumbered as he was, that would be no problem.

  That is, he thought he was unencumbered, until he
turned around and saw Cecil Mature. Cecil broke into a face-filling smile, which he now and then twitched off to unslit his eyes so he could see. “Damn it, Cecil, did I say you could come?”

  “No, but I did.”

  “You have to go back. The police will be after me.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I care. Go home!”

  “I wanna come with you!”

  “You can’t come with me. Now get out of here. Go home, Cecil.”

  “I can go anywhere I want.”

  “Do you realize that if you come after me they’ll find me in half a day? When I go into the business of towing wide loads, I’ll let you know.”

  “It’s a free country. I can go anywhere I want. That’s the law. A judge said that.”

  “I’ll cut off your head.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “I’ll just lose you, that’s all.”

  “No you won’t. I can move fast. Besides, I can help. I can get vegetables, like in the school. They taught me to be a squash cook. I can cook squash good.”

  “That’s exactly what I need, isn’t it, while I flee on a murder charge—a squash cook.” They were walking very fast through the Bowery. In fact, Cecil was trotting to keep up. “Jessie James had a squash cook; everyone knows that. Butch Cassidy had a squash cook. It’s de rigueur.”