Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  Outside, Marshall climbed into a truck and breathed in relief, thinking that he was safe. But then he heard footsteps and the Hound of God appeared at the back of the truck. He was enraged, and he screamed at Marshall, who, like a trapped raccoon, looked back with a gentle poker face. “Get out of that truck. Who the hell do you think you are?” Marshall was afraid to answer. He didn’t know this man, and it was therefore especially terrifying. “You live in a world of people. Do you think you have the right to go in your garden and close the gate?”

  “Yes,” screamed Marshall. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “You don’t!”

  “Who says I don’t?”

  “God says you don’t.”

  “God can speak for himself,” said Marshall, “and you can go to hell.”

  That was it. The counselor boiled over. Marshall scrambled to the top of the cab. It was a true emergency. Hound of God threw himself over the tailgate at a bound. By the time he was on the roof Marshall was running over the meadow in panic. Even more enraged, Hound of God took some strides and caught him, and then, holding Marshall’s hands and arms behind his back in a grip so hard that it hurt him to do it, he hit Marshall again and again and again and again and again. The more he hit the harder and angrier his blows became. The ground got full of blood. Marshall dared not cry out, for he feared that then the people in church would know what was happening and it would be to his shame. He was battered and moaning. Hound of God said: “Get back in there.” Expecting to be murdered, Marshall bared his teeth and spit blood as his answer. Hound of God clenched his fist, and then suddenly strode away toward the church.

  It was a beautiful building in a beautiful place, and the music was magnificent as choir and congregation together sang the chorus: “Oh thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain,” and the lyrics reverberated throughout the valley. Marshall looked at the birds in the eaves and thought how small they were, how they could easily die by buckshot, an eagle, or the snow. They seemed ever alert, and devoted to the baby birds in the nests. He made his way back to the truck and sat in the corner. During the rest of the service he composed himself and cleaned off the blood, which had come mainly from his nose and mouth. His lower lip was swollen and there was a bruise on his face. He took comfort from the birds, the clouds, the mountains. When the church bells were ringing and the children came out he knew from their searching glances that he had lost his premier position. He said nothing.

  Lydia climbed on the girls’ truck and sighted him over the boards. He would not look back, and her truck drove away in the dust. She felt as if she would never see him again, as if he had died in the war, and this made a vast difference to her. She too had been taken there by mistake, and was furious that they had not considered her wishes. Marshall pained to be with her, but his truck was slow in leaving and he sat in the sunlight under a cascade of bells and blue air. All he could think was how much he loved Lydia, and how much he loved the gentle animals—the sheep, the birds, the moaning cows and pigs who hurtled down the New York Central tracks to their slaughter.

  3

  EVERY EVENING after dinner there was singing in an enormous room with a wall of windows through which the singers could watch night come upon the range and the lights of distant towns switch on. An older camper named Gaylord played the piano—he was something of a hero—and during the first few weeks the lyrics were displayed on large sheets of paper which two volunteers turned like spitted roasts. In this way Marshall learned about fifty songs of the “Marching to Pretoria,” “Road to Mandalay,” “Keeper Did A-hunting Go,” and “St. Louis Lantern Rag” genre. When it was finally dark they would walk in groups to their cabins on the hill. Though attendance was compulsory, one of the finest things in the world was to go up into the high meadow and watch the sunset and brightening stars while songs floated upward and the warm brass-colored light of the lodge made it seem like the best and most marvelous of Swiss music boxes, glowing in miniature on the mountainside below. When they sang frivolous lighthearted songs such as the “St. Louis Lantern Rag” or “Sixpence,” they stamped their feet on the wooden planks. From the meadow it seemed as if the glowing box might come apart and seed the valley with music.

  It did not take long for Marshall and Lydia to go up there together. In the lodge people were singing. Marshall and Lydia were in the meadow in balmy air clear to the highest stars. They had thought that when they would at last be alone it would be weighty and somber, but it wasn’t. They were almost whimsical, giddy, relieved. Everything was soft. Everything was flowing back and forth as if in a warm wave, the grasses, the trees of pine and fir and mountain ash, winds traveling invisibly over the great dark spaces which were the mountains. They were alone on the hillside with the earth spread before them. Marshall had always wanted to see the Northern Lights, and had mistakenly associated the Aurora Borealis with high altitudes rather than latitudes. Straining to see them, he finally imagined a crown on the horizon—fiery crystals undulating against the dark—but Lydia could see nothing save white stars, and when she realized that he was going a little away from her because he was drawn to the Northern Lights, she was saddened.

  But the night was too fine for that and she reached out with her arms and her eyes, and brought him back to her by saying, “You see the colors of my dress,” a gingham dress it was with a delicate frilly collar, and even in the dark he could see her face and that it was full of color, and in darkness he saw the stars sparkling in her eyes. For the first time, he was pulled away from light and solitude, by a soft and knowing smile and the proximity of the girl, feeling the heat of her body over the air, smelling her sweet hair and skin. They wanted to kiss, but were too shy. In her look and in her words, “You see the colors of my dress” (daring and intelligent words for such a young girl), they had awakened. She remembered Marshall running up the aisle, how she had admired his strength, and how in staying she had been confident of her own. It seemed that on the high meadow two types of affirmation were perfectly matched. They stayed until the moon rose and its blinding white light, moon-bright, caused them to laugh and walk down the hill, knowing that they had loved.

  4

  THE MOST sophisticated penetration of Columbine was the sunshine. The town was surrounded by borders of dark green pine and valleys which dropped to ice-cold streams. It was a decade after the Second World War and the men of the town had nearly all been soldiers. Fishing was the great preoccupation. Wooden station wagons and winch-laden surplus jeeps parked up and down the main street, and in the theater Martin and Lewis chattered like monkeys in a technicolor tattoo. Marshall went into town in a camp truck. He had blond hair and he wore his characteristic denims and a plaid shirt with holes in the elbows, which didn’t matter because he rolled up the sleeves, and didn’t matter anyway. He had to ration out 50<. It could go for an ice cream soda and a silver lure, or two magazines, or two rubber-band airplanes. He chose the ice cream soda and the lure—one to be enjoyed cold, sweet, and immediate, the other to shiver at the end of his line in the dark lake.

  Afterward, he sat by the truck in the parking lot, holding his face to the sun. Great dark clouds were visible down range. He knew when it would rain and how it would feel. He knew what the forests would smell like before the rain, how wild droplets would be propelled in vanguard winds and strike only several at a time, how the sun would clear it all up again. From beyond the town came the whine of a chain saw. Marshall’s friends emerged from the drugstore with new baseball cards. He knew the complicated values for this currency and the subtleties of trades and flipping. It was satisfying. There were so many good things to feel and think about, and it was good to lean against the rough plank bumper and feel warm in the sun. In these mountains he could sit absolutely still, concentrating for many hours on the color of the sky. He loved the landscape and the country so deeply that even though he was only ten he thought to himself that it would not matter if he died at that moment, for he had seen so much that w
as beautiful.

  Then he was swept up again in the society of his fellows, something which invariably he regretted. Pleasant sociability made time fly happily, but when it was over he felt that he had been cheated. It was the same in the games they played. At the end he looked back like a man who has been asleep, and it seemed that he had been carried unconscious in the group, that he had learned nothing, felt nothing. But he did acquire a certain daring and roughness, which he questioned. For it seemed to him that it was daring but not true courage, roughness but not true endurance. Often in groups he found himself taking the lead—doing awful things of which he was later ashamed.

  They were surprised. Instead of going back to camp they were to climb a mountain. Unknown to them, packs and equipment had been placed in the cab of the pickup. Spirits soared, for there was nothing better than ascent to a place from which they could scan over the tops of mountains that customarily were the borders of their sight. So when the truck pulled away they were jumping up and down, singing, stamping their feet like soldiers who have just had a victory and are leaving the battlefield for home.

  On their way they leaned out dangerously and when they passed someone they waved a newspaper and screamed, “War! War! War is declared! World War Three!” They had always taken it for granted that when they reached the age of conscription, a major war would break out and they would fight it. Their grandfathers had done so. Their fathers had done so. They would do so.

  In the bedstead-sized towns and little junctions, some smiled, some were indifferent, some scowled. But when the joke was almost finished and their throats hurt from shouting so that they wished they would arrive at the mountain or pass no one else, they rounded a bend near a beautiful rapids.

  On the shoulder was a station wagon, elegantly polished and well looked after. An old man, one of those old men of the mountains, with light tortoise-shell glasses, a tall lean frame, and silver hair, was fly-casting into the stream. Even from the truck at speed Marshall could see the beauty of the hypnotic black water flowing and ebbing. Surrounded by fine equipment, obviously a lord of the mountains, one who was part of the country, one who had come through, the old man turned and looked straight into Marshalls eye with a sadness which could have been saying only that he had seen war himself and was puzzled and distraught at the vitality of the death-head, rising as it did in the vigorous cries of young children riding through his green summer country.

  The momentary grief on the old mans face told Marshall not to lie, that lies were bad not in themselves, but in the awful contrast they made with the truth. Then they went up on a high peak, reaching it after many hours, and the whole world was stretched out before them. Because of the perspective and the difficult route by which they had come, they crouched down and stared over the distances in complete and utter silence.

  5

  AFTER THEY had been on the meadow in moonlight, Marshall and Lydia felt comfortable about exploring different places together, though not about the unrealized prospect of sharing an embrace or a kiss. Too young to know the unsurpassed communication of intimate settling in one another’s arms, they chased through the beautiful landscape, making it surrogate to their yearnings. Small lakes and outcroppings of dry rock over rapids, silent groves, and heraldic pine forests were the sword between them as they moved from place to place with the swiftness of animals in a soft unstressful mating season.

  In doing so, they forged a commitment. As children ineloquent and unable to frame exactly the sharp edge of their thoughts, even they knew that casual and joyful meetings can cast out heavy anchors. And they were ready for this. They knew little about one another except what they had seen and felt on the borders of the wilderness which approached the camp. They believed very hard in pure and beautiful things. For example, they were convinced that when they became older they would marry, that though separated by years and time, they would be brought together by the power they sensed in the woods and on the mountain pastures. It made no sense according to the rationality they were growing into and were taught in school, but it was infinitely sensible as they spied in their differently colored eyes a determination and recognition untenable in all but the strikingly vivid world everywhere around them.

  One night they went out during the singing, exiting secretly by different doors, meeting underneath the lodge as the other children stamped the floorboards above them in the singing of “Sixpence.” From there they rushed across an open field to the beginning of a deep pine forest which seemed to lead all the way west to the Pacific. They ran silently over the pine needles, sometimes losing one another in the tangle of black columns, but always uniting after a mazelike traverse in fumes of resin.

  They thought they heard a nightingale, but were not sure. Through the net of needles the sky was dark blue. Thunder could not have penetrated that green canopy. The forest floor was as soft and clean as they could have wished. They settled by a large and perfect pine. From beyond the rim of the woods they heard the campers’ songs—hundreds of innocent voices.

  They faced a dilemma, but the solution was provided. The problem was obvious—how to last through years of change intercepting love and loyalty, how to conquer the lock of powerlessness put upon children, how to be united in the imagined future with the same graces they had found in the Rocky Mountain forests. Well they knew that other children were drawn into the breathless maneuvering of first loves, that others there were committed and caring as if they had been three times their real age, but they knew also that time and distance would break apart these lovely connections, and they did not want that. How then to overcome that which made others believe that children do not forever love? They would have had no idea, had their backs not been resting against it.

  The pine, a thick-trunked black column standing in a sheath of green, would be their emblem, for it in itself was perfect and exemplary. In nature study they had learned that it prevented erosion, manufactured oxygen, held back avalanches, and made good black soil. It provided resin, rosin, and turpentine. Its lumber was invaluable, one of the pillars of Western Civilization, and it did all sorts of odd miscellaneous things, from serving as the essence of cough drops to providing an essential and savory ingredient in Japanese cooking.

  But mercantile uses were slight compared to the life of the pine. It was ever so splendid. It grew tall and straight as a rule, courteously pruning its lower branches to make a forest gallery as extensive and lighthearted as a Roman bath. Its symmetrical branches were better than a ladder for climbing to the very top, which though thin and supple was strong enough to hold Marshall and Lydia neatly counterbalanced high above the valley. The trunk was smooth and black, as if an artist had perfected his painting. It created a carpet on the forest floor, soft, clean, and fragrant. It was fragrant in itself, perfuming the wilderness with resinous draughts and clean air. When the wind passed through it a sound was created which made strong competition for ocean breakers or the hypnotic rapids sound. Its needles were soft and the boughs made lovely beds. A crackling pine fire was one of the joys of the world. And then, most important, it was evergreen and did not lose life or flex, in even the coldest most desolate of winters. When the snow came, there it stood, an essay in constancy and power, green, alive, continuing, forever.

  They hardly knew one another: they could not have. But they took the pine as their symbol, and it brought them together in the strong solid way to which children are not normally accustomed, but which to the pine is first nature.

  6

  ON A clear day at the end of August autumn began like a storm. The shadows were almost cold: only fat children stayed in the lake more than an instant. They prepared for the descent to White Horse junction, to Chicago, to Washington, where, they knew, it would be hotter for a long time, and where the edge of the season then in the Rockies would not appear until mid-october. By December, the camp would be covered with snow and not a soul would return until the next May, when the owners came up from Kansas. Marshall and Lydia had won their battl
e, and on Sundays they stayed alone at the camp, with Madame Zaragoza, and the cooks.

  Lydia became more and more beautiful as the summer passed and she was darkened by the mountain sun, so that in contrast to her smooth skin, the green of her eyes and the whiteness of her teeth became more apparent. She and her family were going to France the next summer to visit her older brother, who lived in Paris. She would not return to the camp. Nor would Marshall, for he was to attend a naval school on the Maine coast, and had registered the previous year for its grueling and popular sailing and survival program.

  Marshall and Lydia were on the dock by the fresh cold lake, and Lydia was reading to him from a book about France. They wore shorts and dark blue T-shirts, and sneakers without socks. France, she guessed, was the first test. “And Maine,” he added. “Two different things.”

  “It might be ten years,” she said, “or more.”

  “Yeah,” said Marshall. “I don’t care.”

  At the finish of the season, activities dissolved into anarchy. They had several painfully clear cool days; then they were on the train riding over the heat-soaked prairie.

  The men and women of the land in between were tall and gaunt. They looked too quiet, as if they had been placed in the stations and on the roads directly from photographs of the Depression. It was because they were filled with the land. The land held them from all sides. It was a singing, locust place, a sea of which they farmed the waves, foils of gold and blue light, a constant horizon which brought them far from themselves and made them quiet and unartful. Time was still and far too fast. Every movement there had satisfaction or countersatisfaction. The sameness made them elegant observers. Anyone observing them observe was filled with envy. And to them it was nothing, like the way they moved and talked—slow and loose with inimitable dignity. Outside themselves they were not much. In themselves they were more than good: they were magnificent.