Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  When L. H. Triggers pulled up to the crossing he stopped his truck, according to the rules, and stared at the two frenzied dancers. It seemed as if they were drunk, and yet it was afternoon and they were children. He turned off the engine and got out to investigate. Marshall and Semyon kept on dancing until they got a full view of the detective. He was six feet four and weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. He was dressed in a black three-piece suit with a black bow tie and an enormous black hat with a brim as wide as a buzz saw. On the vest was a badge of silver which shone so bright and big that it was blinding. Across his middle a gold chain, almost as if of office, proceeded from Spain to Hawaii, where a gold railroad watch was half visible setting into the black Pacific. He had a great leather belt filled with bullets. A large pistol hung from it professionally, the wooden grip oiled from many years of handling. He smelled of tobacco and he walked regally.

  Marshall felt like a dance-hall drunk staring down the barrel of a gun. But L. H. Triggers was only curious, and asked, “What are you boys doin’, dancin’ by the side of the tracks?”

  Marshall answered, “Oh, we’re just happy, sir.”

  L. H. Triggers leaned against the crossing gate and patted it with his detectives hand, saying, “You boys wouldn’t try to swing birch this gate, would you?”

  “No sir.”

  “You better not. The gears are delicately aligned. Any weight knocks them off kilter. Why, in the winter with all that ice, we have mechanics out day and night. It costs the railroad about a hundred dollars each time a gate needs fixing.” Looking satisfied, he paused and started to turn, when Lad suddenly hiccuped. L. H. Triggers looked up. “Do you know him?” he said to Marshall and his friend.

  Semyon Gurkapovitch answered, “He’s my brother and his name is Lad. We were walking by. He got caught. Then the gate lifted and he went with it.”

  L. H. Triggers looked at Lad, a mass of blond curls, and at Semyon, as dark as mahogany with perfectly straight black hair and almond eyes because he had been born while his parents were in Singapore. “You say he’s your brother? That’s funny. You look like a colored boy. He’s not.”

  “I was born in Singapore,” said Semyon. L. H. Triggers went over to a telephone box, unlocked it, and rang up Harmon asking them to lower the gate. They did, and Lad was lifted off. He was so little that he paid no attention to Triggers, and just staggered down the road to the restaurant.

  That was the beginning. L. H. Triggers warned Marshall and Semyon never to be caught again on railroad property. Semyon went away to boarding school and was not seen by anyone ever again, but Marshall remained in Eagle Bay, where the railroad was his playground. Not only was he fond of climbing signal towers and riding crossing gates, but he got hold of a key to the telephones and used to talk to trackmen all around the country. “Patch me over to Utah,” he would command, and it would be done. But it was only when he was older and started to hop freight trains that he ran into L. H. Triggers enough to hurt. Until then it sufficed Triggers to chase him through the woods, firing the woodenhandled pistol in the air. Marshall always escaped.

  9

  IN THE town of Eagle Bay every other grown man called himself by his former military rank; that is, everyone down through sergeant. One man was left from the Civil War. Too old to talk, he sat in a blanket-covered wheelchair at the Methodist home and watched over the river. On Memorial Days they put a Union cap on his head and wheeled him in the parade. The poor old man drooled and trembled, and Marshall was saddened to think of the meadows in his memory, to imagine his recollections of a hundred years of hot days and quiet snows in Eagle Bay and in Virginia, where he had fought—only to grow old in the snap of two fingers while the world passed by in mercantile frenzy, the Brooklyn Bridge was built, roads came through the Hudson Valley farmlands, and the ones he loved died and were buried in the ground.

  Marshall’s nearest neighbor was the Colonel. He raised trotters and was a dangerous old fool who owned an enormous printing combine. When he discovered that he had outranked Livingston he tried to order him around, and received in return not obedience, but a famous gesture of Italian origin. In an Eisenhower jacket bedecked with half a dozen store-bought medals, the Colonel rode several times daily in a sulky from his estate to the town and back, the way paved with music from a portable radio tied to the graceful chariotlike frame. The horse left an astounding trail of manure, and the old man spit and gasped for air. Witnessing this pageant from behind a bush, Marshall once heard the Colonel bark like a dog and say: “Sit right here honey. Let me reach in your dress. Oh Jehoshaphat!” After that, Marshall tried to stay out of the Colonel’s sight, but he was not always successful.

  For example, one day Marshall was ambling down the road, lost in thought, trailing a stick in the dirt and singing, “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho—Hi-Ho Hi-Ho Hi-Ho. Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho—Hi-Ho Hi-Ho Hi-Ho,” when the Colonel swept from behind in his sulky and scooped Marshall up as if Marshall had been a mailbag waiting for the trains silver hook. The Colonel explained that it was time for Marshall to pull his weight and serve his country, time to become a man, time to learn courage and bravery. With a lump in his throat, Marshall was resigned to the fact of impressment in the Eagle Bay firefighters, where he was conscripted into the Twenty-second Regiment as a hose boy.

  Eagle Bay was a strange town, and its inhabitants were obsessed with firefighting. A population of just over 6,000 sustained thirty fully complemented fire companies and ten ambulance corps. The dominant sound in Eagle Bay was sirens. Each company had an average of five or six engines and auxiliary vehicles. Each of these had a siren, and on top of company headquarters was always a bull moose blaster, underneath one of which was a little sign which read: FOR T.R., AFFECTIONATELY. If burning leaves were wet and gave off some white smoke, three or four pumpers and an ambulance would arrive within ninety seconds. A grass fire meant thirty or forty vehicles. A forest fire would summon more than a hundred.

  However, a fire in the Eagle Bay Schools first, second, and third grade annex was cause for an apoplectic ingathering of fire engines and other vehicles. There were 180 engines, pumpers, hook and ladders, and command cars, 30 ambulances, and more than a thousand automobiles with sirens and flashing lights. By the time the alarm was properly received nearly 2,000 sirens and moose horns were blasting. The 2,500 firefighters, medics, and police submerged their equipment in a sea of uniforms and rubber coats. Twenty times as many people rushed into the burning building as had rushed out. Then they too came out, carrying their injured, while flames burned 300 feet in the air and the building was wracked by gas explosions. But when the engines (co-ordinated masterfully by the commander-in-chief from a special loudspeaker van) finally directed their full capacity at the inferno, the flames were extinguished in about two minutes, the building was completely washed away, and several unwitting dogs were drowned in the rushing river, which finally found the Hudson and made Eagle Bay itself the color of ashes for about a week.

  Marshall had been impressed as a hose boy and boot cleaner. He quickly rose to hose inspector, and then hose cleaning chief of the Twenty-second Regiment, or Black Rock Hose. In high school he transferred to the Eighth Regiment, or River Street Hose, an outfit which specialized in fighting forest fires and had 200 Boy Auxiliaries who dressed for the woods in leather hunting boots, fatigue pants, and plaid shirts, and fought brush and forest fires with shovel, axe, brush hook, and galvanized pumper tanks strapped on their backs. Marshall was quite early put in charge of his own 1,000-acre sector, which had fires at least five times a year. Sparks from passing trains caught in the dry grasses, sometimes kindling hundreds of acres. By fourteen, he had become used to fighting fires for days at a time without relief. He used an axe with incredible skill and strength for a boy his age, and learned the strategy and tactics of containment, cutting momentum, breaking up main thrusts, encirclement, and just dogged holding of ground. For years, Marshall was unaware that other towns did not share Eagle Bay’s spirited defense against flame, or its
resemblance to Allied headquarters for the Normandy invasion.

  In this garden of former officers and passionate firefighters one was outstanding in his quality and in his effect on Marshall and scores of other children. He was an old man who wore thick glasses and had almost olive-colored skin and a ring of white hair. To Marshall, he had always looked a little like a fish with powerful jaws, since his face was squared off from biting the bullet and the big lenses magnified his eyes. His name was Major Pike, and he was married to the fifth grade teacher in the Eagle Bay School, where he himself was in charge of shop and legend. A Marine major from Norfolk, he had served in the Spanish-American War, World War I, Nicaragua, and the Second World War. Unlike the Colonel, who had been in charge of the Armys toilet paper, Major Pike had attained his rank in a lifetime of battles. An enlightened official of the Eagle Bay School had provided him with a large building, a budget, and a steady stream of students starting with grade two and ending with the sophomores of the high school.

  The Major had assembled a collection of tools, materials, and mementos, with the object of instructing Eagle Bay students in technology, history, crafts, mechanics, and geography. His instruction hall was 200 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 40 feet high. A random and partial listing of its contents follows (these things stood on the floor; hung from walls, beams, and ceilings; were displayed in cases, on shelves, and in cabinets; and were spread about on tables): lathes; jigsaws; bandsaws; drills; milling machines; welders; a forge; grinders; polishers; sanders; winches; derricks; cutters; torches; automotive, cartographic, woodworking, aeronautical, and gunsmithing tools; a laboratory for quantitative and qualitative analysis; an astronomical telescope; ship’s instruments; a sword collection; a rifle and machine gun collection; ship and plane models; kayaks; a wooden igloo; a collection of Moro weapons; buffalo, moose, and elk heads; hundreds of patent models; a printing press; a 1910 Ford; kites; a steam engine; an aircraft engine from a trimotor; wings and wind tunnel models; rockets; gas masks; bayonets; electrical models; photographs and paintings of subjects diverse and miraculous, ranging from full-color portraits of Jesus and Black Jack Pershing and Sitting Bull to ship paintings, a photograph of FDR, countless pictures of Marine units assembled in tropical places, a Japanese screen, Remington prints, a diagram of the Titanic, and a picture of an alligator; dozens of colorful flags; and a thousand other things such as stuffed birds, Confederate money, a Van de Graaff generator, Magdeburg Discs, an aquarium, prisms, skins, arrowheads, clocks, bells, etc., etc., etc., etc. The most notable object was a Wright Brothers flying machine which hung from the beams fully intact and maintained. Every May Day, to counteract Communism, the Major flew a hundred feet across the girls’ athletic field, a fine tan-colored Cuban cigar in his mouth, and American flags flying from both the top wings.

  He had the place fully systematized. It started with second-graders who learned to work with wood on banks of jigsaws and drills. The Major moved from student to student, watching all. Anyone who made what was called a “basic operational safety mistake” (or, as the Major would say to mortified little girls, “a BOSOM”) was condemned to chew a coffee bean. These were kept in an open box with a picture of a coffin on the side. In the beginning of his career Marshall chewed many beans, but the number decreased each year until he found himself to be a competent mechanic. As they advanced, the students dissected machinery of increasing complexity, starting with telephones and simple electric motors, and ending up in the last year with complete dis-assembly and re-assembly of the 1910 Ford.

  Classes were suspended before each holiday, and the Major would appear in his uniform to tell stories of tropical and European wars; of decades of civilian administration in tiny republics; of the building of the Panama Canal; of the defeat of Yellow Fever; of Dewey’s flagship Olympia at Manila Bay, where the Major had seen Gridley commence fire. So expansive was the Major’s life in these and other areas that he never told the same story twice, and Marshall was to remember every detail of every one. The Major brought in his cronies—nonagenarians, visual encyclopedists, links to the past, upholders of tradition, liars, fabricators, and spellbinders. One old Irishman had been a boy making hay in the field when, in the searing light of the afternoon, a man had come running to report breathlessly that Lincoln had been shot. A railroadman of over a hundred was trooped in to tell about his friendship with Walt Whitman. He carried a conductors leather bag in which were autographed editions and letters from Whitman to him, and he quoted the scandalous poetry (no matter, he said, he too was a bohemian) to the assembled children, who were electrified and en-wrapt in the giant hall of machinery.

  One of the Major’s guests had spent the winter at Valley Forge, and was sought after by Lincoln during the Civil War because of his friendship with George Washington. “I’m going to see Eisenhower tomorrow,” he said. “All the Presidents always ask me what to do. And I tell ’em. I just am real happy that George Washington saw me one day at the well and cast a charm over me.”

  It did not sound that unreasonable. After all, Teddy Roosevelt had gone to school in Eagle Bay, FDR had lived not far away, Melville had grown up within a stones throw, and Audubon had drawn many a bird on Brandreth Hill.

  Livingston himself had worked for Franklin Roosevelt, and had met Churchill, Einstein, William Jennings Bryan, Calvin Coolidge, James Joyce, Gary Cooper, T. E. Lawrence, King Farouk, and the Pope. Marshall could hardly imagine what this could have been like, for when the Mayor of Eagle Bay came to speak at the school, he shook Marshall’s hand and saw an awestruck child almost bent in two with reverence and shock.

  10

  ONE COULD look across the lawns, fields, and orchards of Eagle Bay and choose whichever part of the previous hundred years one preferred. History was quite alive, and had not been harried and compacted by a present which ranged totalitarian, usurping complete recognition, seeking out illogical will-o’-the-wisps to stamp into revision and conformity. The ice house was still there. Though not used, it could have been revived. Unassassinated royal families and splendid inventions were allowed to live their last days gently. There was room and time and quiet. It seemed to Marshall that the old furniture in his house and the view across sunlit snowfields into a tranquil winter landscape of ivory would last for eternity.

  Thus, he dreamed in wide dreams encompassing every place and time, as if his life were gray and uneventful. He dreamed with love and longing of the corn-yellow towns on the flatlands in the Midwest, their silence broken only by singing locusts; of ships and islands; of the Arctic and Pacific, where he traveled in his imagination the trusted protege of Perry, Parry, Peary, and Cook. Partly due to the Major’s influence he fell into the habit of designing ships, fortresses, outpost towns, self-sufficient ranches, undersea chambers, and various utopias replete with geared and electrical mechanisms which would have made the Major numb with pleasure. These he put not on paper but in his mind’s eye, designing in meticulous detail all his projects before he slept, so that he was lulled to sleep by a parade of unfeasible engineering masterworks and the slow unraveling of expansive imagination. He was quite willing to be drawn away from Eagle Bay, and he watched those who left and listened to those who had left, with admiration, taking note of the means they had employed to travel.

  One day he was atop the cliff where he had fought the eagle, which rested below undisturbed. Marshall’s feet hung over the edge and he stared at the mountains to the north and the horizon to the west. Often he came to watch the river, on which moved barges and tankers, sailboats, and the gleaming white yachts of rich men and senators traveling up to Albany. There was a channel, but north of the Tappan Zee the river was a hazardous route for big ships, which pushed on anyway. Suddenly emerging from around a bend, an enormous warship came steaming down the river. He had never seen such a tall or sleek ship. The weapons were angled and high; water was lifted in a roll off the bows; the ship’s numbers shone in white; masts and radars in sky-touching black sailed far above the river. It was trim,
fast, intent, such an athlete of a ship, like a great champion passing through city streets influencing children with the grace of his gait, tearing young boys a little away from their peaceful fathers forever. It passed without acknowledgment, buckling history in its path, gliding away as fast as it had come, the quickest teacher, a siren missionary pulling after it the love and loyalty of a boy on a cliff over the Hudson at midcentury, a boy who in later winters would look with wary eyes at the Victory ships in their shrouds towed downriver in fog and ice, heading for Vietnam; these prosaic wheat carriers were drawn in the slipstream of the beautiful warship years before. When a champion passes through the town in all his power and earned dignity, the children change.

  Perhaps because he was immobile, Marshall not only dreamed of distant places, but found that he was susceptible to haunting. Images and thoughts, music, pictures, would flash before him compounding their original power by repetition and resonance. One of these haunting images was that of the mirage, which danced in front of his eyes and made him catch his breath long after it had vanished from the shining river. That night at dinner Livingston had described it in detail to Mrs. Livingston. It had grain elevators, old black cars, and many farm trucks. They believed that they had seen a wide main street stretching into an infinity of flat yellow fields. That which struck Livingston the most was the appearance of a clearly discernible checkerboard feed sign. In discussion they had dared to conclude that this vision had been lifted whole from the Midwest; Livingston had seen a thousand towns like it and not one east of Indiana. By the rules of physics it seemed unlikely, but its origin must have been other than the fields and rolling hills on either side of the Hudson. No one dared to speak, though, about the old cars which moved inside the glowing picture, and the resemblance it held to a town of twenty or thirty years before. No one dared, but the idea hung over the table in a silence as momentous as the mirage itself.