Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  “There,” said Marshall, pointing across the snow to a collection of upright rectangles from which came plumes of smoke and steam.

  The train was going just as fast as ever when they took their haversacks and climbed outside, where the wind threatened to turn them to ice. In descending the side ladders they found that the steel was painful to touch with ungloved hands. They leaned out two or three feet above the ground, scared to jump. Al said, “Okay, this is like jumping out of a parachute,” and flung himself into the air, backward. When he hit, he made a cascade of rising snow like the rooster tail of a speedboat. Then Marshall used the same technique. When he landed, he bounced and came up with a mouthful of white powder; icy crystals covered him.

  Al had some blood on his lip. Otherwise, he and Marshall were intact. The train passed, and from the caboose came the scents of a hickory fire, beef stew, sweet carrots, and roast potatoes. They turned toward the town and began to make tracks in the thigh-deep snow. There was no wind. Clear sky, high sun, and their movement made them hot for the first time in days. “I’m hot, I’m hot,” said Al. “I love it. Let’s get to that town and eat.” They walked steadily for hours.

  On the outskirts of town they came to a little diner and went in. A lineman, two police officers, and a small businessman who walked on blocks were bent over the counter eating tomato soup and individually wrapped saltines. They turned to look at Al and Marshall. The police glanced at one another and went back to their soup, their brains and hearing ready to spring them into action should the strangers break a window, smash a plate, or talk dirty. The waitress said, “Whatayou-boy-swana-eat?”

  Al answered, “I’ll start off with a bowl of Hearty Beef Soup. Then I’ll have the Icy Cold Atlantic Shrimp Cocktail, and the Thick and Juicy New York Cut Gourmet Steer Beef, with Crispy French Fries and Garden Fresh Salad. With a side order of half a dozen fried eggs easy over, a loaf of toast, grits, and a pot of tea. I’ll have three beers, a sardine sandwich, four slices of Rich Fudge Cake, a piece of Homemade Apple Pie, and Hot Chocolate with Luxury Marshmallow.” The waitress wrote and calculated.

  “That’ll be sixteen dollars and eighty-five cents with tax,” she said, “and you can pay me now.” Marshall finished studying the slate.

  “I’ll have the same,” he said. As she began to cook, one of the police hopped off his stool, adjusted his holster, and walked over.

  “You boys sure are hungry, aren’t ya?”

  “You said it,” answered Al.

  “It makes me suspicious,” said the policeman. “It’s irregular like. It suggests.”

  “It suggests what?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Talkin’ back.”

  The other policeman came over. It took half an hour of detailed explanation of who they were and where they were going and where they had been and why, to prevent their arrest. At the end, when their mouths were dry and the food was in front of them, the second policeman said, “Just passin’ through?”

  “That’s right,” said Al, “on our way west to join the Marines, just like we told you.”

  “Come here to work?”

  “No, we’re on our way to California to join the Marines.”

  “You wanna work, or what?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Al. “We’re on our way to California, to join the Marines.”

  “Come here to work?”

  “Nope. We have this idea, see. We want to go to California. When we get there, we want to join the military and fight for our country.”

  The other policeman spoke up. “Tell me somethin’,” he said. “You boys come here to work?”

  “Yeah,” said Al. “We don’t want to go to California. California stinks. The Marines stink. We wanna work.”

  “You want work, huh?”

  “Sure. We want to work our guts out.”

  “After you eat, we’ll take you over to the factory. You’ll have to work with niggers, but they won’t mind.” They laughed as only sheriffs can, and sat down to watch the eating. An hour later, they led Marshall and Al to the back of their patrol car and drove them off toward the enormous complex of buildings that Marshall and Al had seen from the train—tall towers, many-storied quadrangles, grain elevators, tanks, silos, domes, rail sidings, a hundred miscellaneous sheds. As they made for the factory, Al said to the second officer, who had been belching as they sped through the quiescent snowbound town, “I don’t like to defame the animal kingdom, but you remind me of a tapir.”

  “What’s a tapir?” asked the second officer.

  “That’s an animal which can’t defecate unless it’s standing knee-deep in water. No water, it explodes.”

  “Where’d them tapirs live?”

  “Mainly in Africa.”

  “Africa!” said the officer. “You callin’ me a nigger?”

  Al leaned back in the seat and let some time pass before saying, precisely and contentedly, “That’s about it.”

  The officer tried to turn in his seat to strike, but his meal had been too rich. “Damn it, Otto,” he said, “stop this car so I can beat his brains out.”

  As the car was slowing, Marshall spoke up. “Hold it,” he said. “Wait a minute. My friend gets a little crazy after he eats too much. He didn’t mean it, really. I apologize on his behalf. Please don’t do anything.”

  “I want him to apologize,” said the fat policeman, pointing to the road ahead because he couldn’t bend his arm in Al’s direction.

  “No,” said Al.

  “Stop the car, Otto!” screamed the policeman, thrashing.

  “Hold it,” said Marshall again. “He’s crazy, insane. You can see that. I’ll take care of him. If you beat him it’ll give him fits, and then he might kill himself. Just don’t pay any attention to him.”

  All was quiet and the police were satisfied when Marshall broke the silence. “You know what?” he asked the second officer.

  “What?”

  “You’re a jerk.” By that time they had arrived. The second officer jacked himself out of the car. He ripped open the rear door and pulled Marshall from the back.

  “You bastard. I was doin’ you a favor and you called me a nigger and a jerk.” He held Marshall in the air and banged him against the roof of the car. Just then, a call came over the radio.

  “Breaker-One-Seven, Breaker-One-Seven. This is KN 8897 Control to Unit Eight. Give me integrity Unit Eight.”

  “Cut that out, Aldine,” said Otto. “You know damn well there’s only two radios in this town, and we talkin’ in ’em.”

  “Unit Eight, proceed to section A-2 on a 10–90.

  “10–90. That’s rape!”

  “Negative, Unit Eight. 10–90 means when a washer in the laundrymat is overflowin’.”

  “I thought that was 10–80.”

  “10–80 is if a rabbi comes to town.”

  “We’ll get right down to the laundrymat. KN 8897, Otto clear.”

  “10–4, Unit Eight. KN 8897 Control clear.”

  2

  THEY WALKED into a small brick building and found to their amazement that they had entered a great hall. Al stepped outside to survey dimensions. It was little more than a shed. But inside it was no less than an echoing cathedral, empty and dark except for a fire at the other end, burning bright with a heavy metallic flame. They walked over a smooth stone floor, their footsteps resounding in the unseen heights, until they approached the fireplace and a dozen men grouped around it. Some sat on rockers, some on barrels and boxes. All wore bloodstained white overalls. All were old. All were black. They stared at Marshall and Al as if they had been expected.

  “Where’s Monroe?" asked one.

  “He’s in the fire,” came the reply. “You want me to get him?”

  “No, no, I’ll get him.” He stood up and walked to the fire, shielding his eyes. “Hey Monroe,” he yelled into the flames. “Mon roe!” Al looked at Marshall, and then they both rolled their eyes. “Monroe, c’mo
n outa there. We got two new boys.”

  A man of at least a hundred years stepped from the fire. Partially blinded by the light, Marshall and Al did not see that he had come from a passage in the flue. “It’s warm back there,” he said, surveying the newcomers. “I go there ’cause I’m so old I can never keep warm in the winter. Now what do you want, if it’s not work?” He spoke with gentleness and benevolence, and they felt at ease.

  “We do want work.”

  “There’s plenty of work here. Do you know what we do?” They shook their heads no. “We kill animals. It’s a bad job, a bad thing. But someone’s got to do it. So we do it. We need help ’cause there’s lotsa animals around here—cows, pigs, sheeps—millions. You could help us for a time. Then you’ll go, but that’s all right,” he said, smiling. “It’s all right with us.”

  “What are the wages?” asked Al, leaden and serious.

  “When you leave, we give you seven hundred and fifty dollars. When you’re here you don’t have to worry about what to eat or where to sleep. You can go into town sometimes and go to the bar and see the whores. That’s paid up. When you leave, you’ll have seven hundred and fifty dollars in your pocket.”

  “How long do we have to stay?”

  “You stay for a time, just a time. You won’t know how long, no one does, but everyone who leaves thinks the money was good. I promise that.”

  “When can we leave?”

  “You leave at the end.”

  “When’s the end?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  “Sounds like a good deal to me,” said Al. “What if you get someone who leaves after a day?”

  “Don’t got days here.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well,” said Mornoe, shrugging his shoulders, “when you start to work, you can’t feel time. But don’t worry, we wont take anything much from you.”

  They accepted, and were led into a room of clean white work clothes. They put on overalls, hats, knee-high rubber boots, and gloves. They were given blue and gray sweatshirts with hoods, and told that sometimes it got very cold. Then they were led outside, where it had gotten dark and they could see blinding stars in clear frozen air, and they could hear the black ether rushing above them between the stars and earth. At times, Marshall thought that he could see it waving like a black scarf, agitating above them. The cold pushed them down as they padded in their rubber boots over the snow past many buildings. At one of the buildings, certainly the largest, they paused before entering. Mornoe said, “What you see, you never have seen. When its over, it’s best to forget. While it happens, make yourselves as dead as the winter sky. Never think of the ones you love, not here. When you leave you’ll see how good it is to work a day. But now, don’t think of children, or womens, your fathers, your mothers, or anyone. Move without thought. Survive.”

  An eternity after they had started, Al turned to Marshall and said, “Are we in Denver? Is it winter? Is it night? Has time passed? Has it been a million years?” Then he wiped his sweaty blood-soaked brow, and grasped a wood grappling pole. He and Marshall pulled until they thought they would die, eviscerating a steer, with snaps and crushings like a bulldozer moving through brush, as the innards were severed from the carcass. The animals head lay on its shoulder, bobbing in death with wide-open eyes as the two of them pulled the carcass apart. Its stomachs, intestines, kidneys, bile, bladder, heart, and blood forever spewed from it. When the cows were led inside from the cold winter where they had languished in darkness, they mooed in delight. Then they were penned, a man with a heavy hammer walked up to them, bent his frame, showed his teeth, and struck with all his might. They lurched backward before the blow, pulling in their forelegs with bent joints, banging the iron walls. Then they fell forward with an exhalation and sigh, folding their legs, turning their heads strangely upward. A chain was attached to them, and they were dragged, sometimes with their lives flickering, and an eye open despite a crushed skull and spilling brains, to Marshall’s and Al's pit.

  Because Al was tall, he cut open the belly as Marshall turned a blood-covered winch. Then they pulled it apart, shoveling flesh and fluids down a sucking chute. They heard from Monroe, that pigs were sawed in half while still alive, and they did not know about the sheep. They themselves moved dreamlike, not eating, not sleeping. And time passed as if they had been riding drunk on a cross-country train bombarded by the sight of a hundred thousand houses and enough corrugation and ditches to choke the world. They never caught their breaths. It stayed night and absolutely cold. A great furnace provided heat. It was behind them and it sounded like a waterfall of oranges. They saw it each time they turned, or reflected and glowing in the orbs of the cows’ eyes—fire by night to fight the freezing, blasting in tongues to drown the nonlingual animal moans.

  Every cut and pull drove them down and yet strengthened them. They thought of how in the East their rich clean friends had spoken pridefully of necessities, of how it was merely sentimental to care about animals, of how man was pre-eminent and all that mattered. If they could only stand here knee-deep in warm blood, thought Marshall, and pull out the occasional fetal calf hardly dead itself; if they could only hear the cries, and see the expressions, then they would say how wrong they were. Sentiment implied weakness. Marshall grit his teeth, bloodstained, as the blood splashed his eyes, and felt the great power in his arms and chest as he worked the winch and cut. Let them be hauled in here and winched up, he thought, if they think this particular compassion sentimental, the bastards.

  They wound in and out of moods as if they were running a river with bends. Al said, “You work all your life playing by the rules, honest and fair, trying to be good and to achieve excellence. Then a law is made and the whole damn thing turns upside down and you have to turn around and start upward again, from the bottom.”

  “It strengthens you,” said Marshall, straining.

  “Or kills you.”

  “No. Strengthens you. I’m not going down on that, never. The bastards can swivel the glass a hundred times and I’ll start up again, by my rules, for what I love.” He was hoarse. “Nothing is going to keep me down, nothing." He pulled at an enormous spilling carcass, tears in his eyes, sweat coursing down his temples, an expression of horror, fighting, and live battle on his face. “Not until I’m still in the grave, not until there isn’t a breath left, not until I’m dark dock dead—damn.”

  It is hard to imagine how thin they became, how gaunt, and how ridiculous. They could never understand why night continued on, why the stars and furnace were unceasing and unbending. Nor could they always fathom Monroe, or heed his advice. Sometimes they did think of the ones they loved. And then it was a blazing pain, as if the cows they butchered were themselves. Al almost quivered at the thought of Wendy, sweet and tall, far away in another world. The ride west over the same land that he and Lydia had used to forge themselves together had caused in Marshall a sudden and almost frightening upwelling of her image. He was shaken and surprised, and he dreamed of her, frustrated and angry that he had never seen her as an adult. When they thought of those they loved, it almost killed them, and they entered a band of numbness, doing their work with only the hope that they would survive.

  “If I could pick up my father and hold him in the air, and pinch Alexa until she attacked, I’d be so happy,” said Al. “This is a mean trick in time.”

  Marshall could only agree. Lydia was too distant for anything other than deep memory. But in the cries of the cows, in blasts of fire, in the thundering doors which rolled open to reveal a winking black sky, in defiance and tension, in blood and reduction, in lack of time, in Mow roes slow gentle talk, in the brightly colored flags Marshall sometimes imagined that he saw, and angels descending to comfort the cows, in the inescapable flatness of plains and sky through which time skipped and pivoted without control, skidding across the countryside, in the elements of the place, and in his exposed memory and heart as if he too had been torn and opened to the air in the high, giddy,
beam-filled shed—he found that he loved Lydia (even if he could only imagine what she had become), that he was directed to her, and that his resolution in the station would be the backbone of his life, as steady and sure as a steel rail. America was spread about, round like a compass rose, and though it was winter, spring was somewhere. In his anonymity among the steaming carcasses Marshall thought that spring would come to shatter the prison. Monroe had said in his slow speech, “Never talk down the power of gentle things. They come from underneath and open up the earth, like shoots and flowers.”

  3

  AFTER WHAT seemed like several lifetimes, Monroe came and called them to the furnace, where he stood next to the open door. “It’s half over,” he said, “and now you can go outside and walk on the snow. The top is frozen and will hold you.”

  “But why?” they asked.

  “Simple,” he answered. “Your time here is half over, and you have something to show for it. It’s like a clock. They turned the furnaces outward so the air above the ice won’t be cold. Don’t stay long, but climb the little hill and look to see spring. This is the night it makes itself known in the mountains. I think you should see.”

  They started to put on their sweatshirts, but he stopped them, saying, “Look. Look at the furnaces.” He took them to the door, from which they saw an orange glow over the factory grounds. Manifolds had been directed to the outside, and currents of warm air flew about the courtyards. They found it delightful as they walked slowly in the dark toward a small hill. Looking back, they saw the factory, which stretched for miles. They had not imagined its great size. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of chimneys steadily gave off smoke. At their bases were licking rondels of beating flame. The line of these lights stretched to picket half the horizon. Black and silver towers were just visible against the sky because they blocked out stars. It remained busy; the fires burned with a pounding noise.

  Having turned from the factory, they continued to the hill and arrived at its top. A flat plain fled for hundreds of miles, interrupted only by the factory. As if they had been in the center of a round card, they saw around them a perfect circle. Along the entire perimeter were low mountains, jagged and full of visible angles, like the mountains of Mars. Across their peaks, in a full circle, rose-colored fire was strung in lines of spark. It appeared as if the world’s rim had caught in warm flame. Garlands of it made the mountains glow.