by Mark Helprin
“No, Mother, only the wind.”
“I’ll bet the little warmkin hears them,” Mrs. Gamely said, referring to the baby sleeping soundly in its fat flannels. “There are creatures, you know,” she continued. “I’ve seen them. When I was a little girl on the north side of the lake (way before I married Theodore), we used to see them all the time. Of course, that was long ago. They ran in schools, and came to the shore near the house, just like tame dogs. Sometimes they would leap over the dock, and sink a rowboat. My sister and I used to stand on the pier and feed them pies. They loved pies. The Donamoula, who was about two hundred feet long and fifty feet around, loved cherry pies. We would throw the cherry pie into the air, and he would catch it with his forty-foot tongue. One day, my father decided that this was too dangerous, and he made us stop. The Donamoula never came by after that.” She knitted her brows. “I wonder if he would remember me.”
Ever challenged by her mother’s unorthodox views, Virginia thought of a means to answer the question that had just been posed. She looked at her mother and was pleased and amazed by the sly, robust intelligence in the old woman’s face, by her massive form which was neither fat nor tall nor thick, by the large strong hands, the shapeless velvet and muslin dress with a green yoke, the two sweet little eyes set close together in a glowing cheeky face topped with a haystack of soft white hair, and the purring white rooster (his comb was mandarin red) that she held in her arms and occasionally stroked.
“If Jack went away for fifty years”—Jack was the rooster, Quebec-born, originally Jacques—“and then came back, would he recognize me?” Virginia asked.
“Roosters don’t live for fifty years, Virginia. And besides, he would go back to Canada and probably never return. They speak French there, you know, and can never do anything right. They would probably turn him into a cocoa van, or use him as a mold for a weather vane.”
“Well, let’s just say he could go away for fifty years and then come back.”
“Okay. But where would he go?”
“To Peru.”
“Why Peru?”
Conversations like these, touching on every subject known to man, would often usurp a good part of the night. Mrs. Gamely had never learned to read or write, and used her daughter as a scribe, and as a researcher among encyclopedias, questioning her at length about everything she found. The old woman’s sense of organization was a miracle of randomness as illogical and rich as the branches of a blossoming fruit tree. She could easily discuss 150 subjects in an hour and a half, and Virginia would still finish awed and enlightened by what seemed to be a relentless and perfect plan.
Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone’s guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely’s vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely’s usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, liripoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow’s ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ten could not have kept pace with her, and half a dozen linguaphologists would have collapsed from hypercardia.
“Where did you learn all those words, Mother?” Virginia might ask.
Mrs. Gamely would shrug her shoulders. “We were raised with them, I suppose.” She didn’t always speak incomprehensibly. In fact, she sometimes went for months at a time strapped down firmly to a strong and worthy matrix of Anglo-Saxon derivatives. Then, Virginia breathed easy, and the rooster was so happy that had he been a chicken he would have laid three eggs a day. Or was he a chicken? Who knows? The point is, he thought he was a cat.
The wind rose even more, leveling haystacks, collapsing barns, driving the lake onto the fields. Mrs. Gamely and Virginia could hear a ferocious jingling as billions of ice fragments shuffled together on the swells, sounding like the lost souls of all the insects that had ever lived. The house groaned and swayed, but it had been built to weather storms, and was the work of Theodore Gamely, who, before he had been killed, had intended it to shelter his wife and daughter no matter what might happen to him. Now his youthful wife was an old woman, the daughter in her thirties; and they had been in the house alone for all that time, except when Virginia went off to marry a French-Canadian named Boissy d’Anglas, and came back three years later with a newborn son.
“Do you think the house will fall down?” asked Mrs. Gamely.
“No, I don’t think so,” Virginia answered.
“I’ve never known the wind to blow like this. The coming winter is going to be very difficult.”
“It’s always difficult.”
“But this time,” said the mother, “I think the cold is going to break the back of the land. Animals will die. Food will run out. People will get sick.”
In combination with the wind, such pronouncements sounded accurate. In fact, whenever Mrs. Gamely spoke solemnly, she was usually right. Whether or not what she predicted would come true, that night the wind reached almost two hundred miles an hour, and the temperature of the still air was minus five degrees Fahrenheit.
After an unusually bone-shaking blast, Mrs. Gamely got up and paced in circles about the center of the room. Wood burned in the stove, hot and bright. She circled the kitchen table, face upturned to the ceiling. Up there, it was a swirling purple, while the walls and floors were the color of warm rose, cream, and yellow. The roof rattled. Jack jumped into Mrs. Gamely’s arms, and she held him like a cat. “Is there snow, Mother?” Virginia asked, almost as if she were still a child.
“Not in this wind,” replied Mrs. Gamely. She threw some more wood into the stove, and went to the corner to get her double-barreled shotgun. She said that, on a night of great cold, bonds break, prisons open, lunatics are pushed over the brink, animals go berserk, and the monsters in the lake might try to come into the house.
They sat there all night, not bothering to go to bed. Although Christmas was some weeks off, it felt like Christmas Eve, and Virginia swayed slightly back and forth with her baby in her arms, dreaming and remembering. Their house was stocked with enough dry wood for two winters, and the pantry was packed up to the ceiling with smoked meats, fowl, and cheeses; dried beef and vegetables; sacks of rice, flour, and potatoes; canned goods; preserves; local wine; and things that the two women needed for their prodigious skills in cooking and baking. The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one’s soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule. On the beds, unused that night, were goosedown quilts as light as whipped cream and three feet thick. Virginia had had some difficult times, and there would undoubtedly be more hard times ahead. But now she was home, in a bay of tranquillity, and it was pleasant just to dream.
Canada: the name itself was as flat and cool as a snow-covered field. It took Virginia and Boissy d’Anglas two days on his sleigh to get to the Laurentians, and what pleasure to watch the moon swell up from the horizon amid the gaps between snow-bound trees. Her years in Canada were difficult to recall, but the memory of the journ
ey there was clear, and all she really needed.
They started out one afternoon, when the sun was low and gold. The snow that day had been warmer than the air, and had shone with a yellowish glow like that of evening light against a brick wall. Two horses, one brown and one nearly red, had pulled north into the wilderness at an even canter which they might have sustained forever, and did sustain deep into the night—through which they traveled as if in daylight, thanks to a blinding moon reflected by the snow.
The horses loved the fresh track before them, and ran across open fields and between stands of pine as if they were racing. Boissy d’Anglas and the young woman that he had nearly abducted were possessed. Their faces were on fire and their eyes were alight. Minute by minute, shadows were transformed into mountains or groves as they closed upon them and could see the winter-etching in ledges and leaves. Lakes and leaping streams appeared and disappeared on both sides of the road, and as they took the hills and curves the landscape seemed to roll as if it were the ocean. The perfectly round and frozen moon was as bright as ice. The horses were so happy to be running under the aurora that they probably could have gone all the way to Canada without stopping.
But they were made to halt when they arrived at the edge of a frozen lake that stretched north like a highway between lines of hills and jagged mountains done in bristling silver. “I don’t know if we should camp here and start out tomorrow, or drive until the horses drop. This is the road we follow for two hundred miles. If I set them off within the hour, they’ll die sooner than not finish.”
“Can you sleep?” Virginia asked, implying that she could not. “Do you think the horses could sleep?”
“No,” he said, snapping the reins, and, as the sleigh thudded onto the snow-covered surface of the lake, they were off.
They crossed rivers, railroads, and roads; they passed lighted settlements and whining mills; they penetrated high cold forests, lighting their way with lanterns when the moon was obscured by the trees. Virginia did not know if she were on the sleigh, racing through a freezing and dark pine forest and dreaming of home, or at home by the fire, dreaming of how she had once been taken up completely by the muffled pounding of horses’ hooves on the snow.
Morning came to Mrs. Gamely and Virginia the way it comes to a sick and feverish child—slowly, overheated, and stale. Mrs. Gamely threw open the door and looked out. As a cold river of blue air came to redeem the hot room, she said, “Not one flake of snow fell in all that wind. What good was it? All it did was steal away the heat and make us burn a lot of wood.”
“What about the lake?” Virginia asked.
“The lake?”
“Did the lake freeze?”
Mrs. Gamely shrugged her shoulders. Virginia got up and put on a quilted jacket. The baby was placed gently into a cocoon of the same stuff, and they went down to the lake. Even before they rounded the corner of the house, they knew that the lake had frozen, for they heard no lapping or breaking waves, and the wind was even and shrill instead of being divided into a hundred different sounds, like birdsong, as it hit the whitecaps.
The lake had frozen in one night, which meant that a harsh winter was due. Just how difficult it would get could be forecast by the smoothness of the ice. The finer it was, the harder would be the succeeding months, although—in the days before it snowed—ice-boating would be unlike anything on earth. Mrs. Gamely had seen the lake in its smooth state before, but never like this.
It lay there almost laughing at its own perfection. There was not a ripple, streak, or bubble to be seen. The terrible wind and the incessant castellations of foam had been banished and leveled by the fast freeze of heavy blue water. Not a flake of snow skidded across the endless glass, which was as perfect as an astronomers mirror.
“The monsters must be sealed in tight,” Mrs. Gamely said. Then she grew silent in contemplation of the winter to come. The ice was airless, smooth, and dark.
FOR TWO weeks the sun rose and set on Lake of the Coheeries Town, low and burnished, spinning out a mane of golden brass threads. A steady and gentle breeze moved from west to east on the lake, sweeping the flawless black ice clean in a continuous procession of chattering icicles and twigs that fled from wind and sun like ranks of opera singers who run from their scenes gaily and full of energy in a stage direction stolen from streams, surf, and the storms which fleece autumnal forests.
Even though the air temperature never went above ten degrees, the weather was mild because the wind was light and the sky cloudless. With their wells freezing up and their world nearly still, the inhabitants of the town took to the ice in a barrage of Dutch pursuits that saw the sun rise and set, and gave the village the busy and peculiar appearance of a Flemish winter scene. Perhaps they had inherited it; perhaps the historical memory deep within them, like the intense colors with which the landscape was painted, was renewable. A Dutch village arose along the lake. Iceboats raced from west to east and tacked back again, their voluminous sails like a hundred flowers gliding noiselessly across the ice. Up close, there was only a slight sound as gleaming steel runners made their magical cut. A little way in the distance, they sounded like a barely audible steam engine. Miniature villages sprang up on the lake, comprised of fishing booths ranged in circles, with flapping doors and curling pigtails of smoke from stovepipe chimneys. Firelight from these shelters reflected across the ice at night in orange and yellow lines that each came to a daggerlike point. Boys and girls disappeared together, on skates, pulled into the limitless distance by a ballooning sail attached to their thighs and shoulders. When they had traveled so far on the empty mirror that they could see no shore, they folded the sail, put it on the ice, and lay on its tame billows to fondle and kiss, keeping a sharp eye on the horizon for the faraway bloom of an iceboat sail, lest they be discovered and admired to death by the younger children who sailed boats into the empty sections just to see such things.
Blazing fires on shore ringed inward bays and harbors like necklaces. At each one, there was steaming chocolate, or rum and cider, and venison roasting on a spit. Skating on the lake in darkness, firing a pistol to keep in touch with a friend, was like traveling in space, for there were painfully bright stars above and all the way down to a horizon that rested on the lake like a bell jar. The stars were reflected perfectly, though dimly, in the ice, frozen until they could not sparkle. Long before, someone had had the idea of laying down wide runners, setting the light-as-a-white-wedding-cake village bandstand on them, and hitching up a half-dozen plough horses with ice shoes to tow the whole thing around at night. With lights shining from the shell, an entire enchanted village skated behind it as the Coheeries orchestra played a lovely, lucid, magical piece such as “Rhythm of Winter,” by A. P. Clarissa. When the farmers all along the undulating lakeshore saw a chain of tiny orange flames, and the shining white castle moving dreamlike through the dark (like a dancer making quick steps under concealing skirts), they strapped on their skates and pogoed through their fields to leap onto the ice and race to the magic that glided across the horizon. As they approached, they were astonished by the music, and by the ghostly legions of men, women, and children skating in the darkness behind the bandshell. They looked like the unlit tail of a comet. Young girls twirled and pirouetted to the music: others were content just to follow.
This carnival used up much of the stored reserves of firewood, food, supplies, and feed. It was a foolish thing to do, but the people of Lake of the Coheeries were not able to ignore the perfect weather, which got them rolling at fever pitch. They were careless and crazy. Squandering their gains in the relaxation of their souls, they danced, they sang, and they damned the hard winter to come, affirming their trust in nature by following to the letter its paradoxical orchestrations. Even Mrs. Gamely, a paragon of conservation, gave freely of her stores and participated in the ruthless cooking of a dozen feasts and the fearless baking of a hundred pies. She and Virginia skated behind the bandshell. They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous ree
ls in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and, most of all, to trust. No one could be blind to this lesson after seeing Mrs. Gamely, a widow upon whom the years had come down hard, dancing and laughing on the soft shore, or even on the ice.
BY THE middle of January, no one had enough food. They were stretching it out, hoping that it might last until summer (which was impossible), and everyone was disastrously fat and unhealthy from the wild eating in December. “The icicles have come home to roost,” declared Mrs. Gamely, slightly subdued, but not yet melancholy. “The way I figure it,” she said, sweeping the pantry with her motile and patibulary eyes, “we have enough food to last until about March. So what. March is cold. Lamston Tarko and his dog froze to death on the last day of March, thirty-seven. How are we going to eat? That’s the question.”
“Don’t the other villages have food that they can give us?” asked Virginia.
“No. Their harvests were ruined by hail. Ours weren’t, and we did so well that we gave them enough to survive on. We didn’t even sell it, we gave it. But now we’re all on the same goat. The way the wind blows in winter, no one will come to help. Besides, we’ve always done for ourselves. I wish Antoine Bonticue were here. He could think of something, and so might have Theodore.”
“Who was Antoine Bonticue?”
“He died before you were born. He used to live between Coheeries and the march-lands. He was Swiss, and he went around in a spider cart.”
“He was Swiss and he went around in a spider cart?” repeated Virginia.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gamely. “Spider carts are wonderful. They’re very quiet, and you can’t drive them on busy roads, because the spiders tend to get crushed. They’re also somewhat slow, but they’re quite economical, especially for light loads. As you might be able to tell from his name, Antoine Bonticue weighed less than a hundred pounds. He was some sort of engineer, and he used to stretch cables and pulleys from one place to another. Evidently, rigging cables is therapy for the Swiss: or part of their theology. What was it that he used to say? ‘A balanced arc between mountain rows / as servant to his master shows / the power of besieged belief / in something something something, something something something—something to do with ducks, or rainbows.’