When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
—JOHN BERGER
Grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends … Some sadnesses are permanent.
—THOMAS LYNCH
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Chapter 1
The knowledge of reality is a secret knowledge; it is a kind of death.
—W. B. YEATS
December 1980
Upon a vast, snow-covered plain in the Minnesota wilderness in the late hours of the night, Duncan Bright and Brother Canice sit by the woodstove in the monastery’s kitchen with the wind howling through the cracks in the stone and mortar, and the ancient oak and pine joists that hold the slate roof above their heads moaning like an old sleeping animal. The rest of the children will have long been bathed and placed in their beds; there may be an odd creaking or grumbling upon the ceiling wainscoting as they shift and shudder in their halfsleep, but they will be the only two awake, thin slivers of red and orange flame flickering from the woodstove’s grate and moving across both their faces in the dark. Brother Canice is a squat, rotund little man with wispy orange-red sideburns that cover the entirety of his jaws. The rest of his face is shaven so severely and stringently that it shines like a pink, polished stone and Duncan is often surprised he has not drawn blood. On a shelf lined with canned goods—Bristol’s peaches, Hammond baked beans, Labrador sardines—Brother Canice’s black Vulcanite transistor radio glows amber, humming lightly with static and the odd pip or squeak, as if it were searching out the void for some signal from the stars.
Tell me, Duncan asks him. Tell me again how I came to be here.
Brother Canice picks at something at the front of his teeth: the sunflower seeds he always seems to be chewing. The flameglow is orange on his yellowed caps, which replaced his front teeth a decade ago; he likes to say that he lost them when he challenged the bishop of St. Paul to a fight when they were both young prelates, but the truth is less rebellious and less heroic and perhaps more beautiful. After being bedridden with influenza for three weeks, he’d climbed the tower’s stairs to inspect the bells, to greet them, he says—he was responsible for their tone and timbre and when dust and grime built upon them they lost not only their luster but also their pitch. As he leaned forward—his face widening and shimmering familiarly in the ancient brass—a novitiate pulled on the heavily wound cottonstave ropes from below and the bell’s lip suddenly came up to greet Brother Canice’s face with a violent kiss, slicing into his gums and severing his two front teeth at the root. He laughs as he spits seeds. Just like that, he says, just like that. Two resin-stained teeth spiraling down into the darkness of the bell case. Like bloody yellow pearls.
Tell me what you remember, Duncan, he says now.
I remember being born, Duncan says, and God speaking to me.
And what did he say to you?
I can’t remember.
Shadows seem to find the narrow lines of Brother Canice’s weathered face, until only the regal cheekbones, the large, moist eyes, and his mouth are visible. His breath smells slightly of wood, a damp teak, as if he’s been chewing on bark. Duncan finds it a comforting smell.
And you have no memory of anything else? Brother Canice asks. Duncan shakes his head and Brother Canice grunts and pokes at the grate, stirring the coals with the ornate, cast-iron poker.
This, then, shall be your story.
Duncan looks at him questioningly and although Brother Canice cannot see the boy’s expression in the dark, he shrugs. Brother Canice runs his tongue along the gums of his front teeth and spits sunflower seeds into the stove’s grate with impressive accuracy. They watch the seeds boil and hiss and pop and then dissolve, and in the hiss of evaporation Brother Canice says: Until something better comes along, Duncan. Only until something better comes along.
Wood is splintering in the woodstove but the room grows cold and the light from the grate dims. Brother Canice shifts on his stool, opens the grate, and a square of orange-colored light pushes back the darkness. As he leans forward to poke the embers and lay another log on the flames, his pale arms and face are turned crimson by firelight. He closes the grate and the room is in darkness once more; slivers of amber light from the grate flickering on his face and sending shadows dancing around the room.
Brother Canice settles himself comfortably against the kitchen wall and sighs. It was the winter of 1970 and there was a terrible storm, he begins, and Duncan closes his eyes and listens to the wood crackling as it burns and the children murmuring in their dreamsleep in the coffin-dark above them. Brother Canice’s ancient voice box seems to wheeze in cadence with the wind beneath the window clasps and the sound of the frames shuddering and cracking with shifting splays of ice and the sense of morning still many hours away.
At dusk the sky above the farms and pastureland of Stockholdt, Minnesota, roils as if it were a living thing, twisting and writhing toward the northeastern horizon, where, briefly visible are small towns, windows glinting nacre in the tallow light, and black ash, yellow birch, and evergreen-lined slopes upon which rust-colored buildings
, tin mining shacks, logging camps, and pyramids of dead timber bloom. Above the glacial Iron Range, the sky is a sheet of flat gray steel and the mountains merely an outline stamped upon this background: a picture taking shape, trembling momentarily, and then becoming fixed in its bath of silver halide. Animals, sensing the storm, are still. Not a thing moves. And then at the farthest edges of the sky, a slight undulation begins like a wave far out at sea, and with it comes a slow, rushing blackness as of night. A great wind rises up from the north, and from the deep, leaded bellies of clouds, it begins to snow.
The annual Festival of Lights Holiday Train, a vintage 1928 Great Northern Railway Empire Builder steam engine, leaves Holdbrundt with the first strakes of snow drifting across the tracks, white billows of steam venting from the engine’s exchange as the hydraulic rods and pistons stretch and contract and, in ever shortening revolutions, turn the great wheels, and move them forward toward the wide plains of St. Paul.
During the last leg of its four-hundred-mile journey across Minnesota, the train tows two flatbeds upon which bands and other performers have played, three boxcars filled with donated food, clothes, and children’s toys, and ten red-and-green turn-of-the century Pullman railcars decorated with wreathes and lit by a hundred thousand miniature Christmas lights. It is two days before Christmas, and meteorologists in St. Paul and Duluth predict a few inches of festive snow covering for those leaving school and work, with heavier snowfalls in the distant mountain and valley ranges of Stockholdt and Thule.
Father Magnusson, who attends this pilgrimage every year from the Capuchin monastery, the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy, in Thule, settles into a wide horsehair chair aboard the tenth Pullman and watches the land stretching into darkness beyond the lights of the train, the snow spiraling gently down in shimmering electric, incandescent light. He imagines how this train must look to children and adults waiting on various closed station platforms along the Holiday Train’s route: mere way-stations now, boarded-up grain sheds for local villages and towns, gone the way of the train age itself but for this one night, as the Holiday Train, burning coal from its tender at a rate of one hundred pounds per mile, steams along the old Great Northern Railroad, a hundred thousand miniature lights aglow about its fifteen trailing cars like the bright curving tail of some glorious Christmastime comet hurtling across the snow.
For a moment the sound of a transistor radio playing Handel’s Messiah occupies the stillness and the measure of the train’s wheels striking the divides. A young boy bedecked in a Great Northern service coat from another century dims the lamps in the carriage. Father Magnusson says a prayer to the patron saint of his Capuchin order, a benediction for those less fortunate and in need of God’s blessing, and finally, because he is away from home and because his mother always made him do so before his bed hour as a child, he says the Lord’s Prayer.
From within the darkened glass, the reflection of the lamps: flames flickering in miniature, twisting and bending with the rocking of the train. Peering from his window Father Magnusson recognizes nothing, the distance of the plain foreshortened by falling snow so that not even the lights of nearby Lac qui Parle can be seen.
He leans his head, with its tonsure of white hair, fine as a dandelion clock bristle, upon his pillow. Snow taps the glass, wind moans beneath the windows, and the engine’s whistle sounds out the long depths of the dark Minnesota countryside. Father Magnusson closes his eyes and sleeps.
Where the wind abates and the shifting drifts momentarily cease, the land—hills and valleys and mountains—becomes visible, and against it, the small outcrops of the living: pinpricks of light flickering and fading abjectly upon the plain as the storm pushes and heaves its indeterminate way across the Northland. Throughout the night the storm buries the land and the people with it. The temperature continues to plummet until, at Mount Cascade, it is the lowest recorded since the great blizzard of 1908. Winds, gusting at eighty miles per hour, press snow into drifts fifteen feet high. The newspaper accounts of that winter will describe tragedy after tragedy, of man and woman and animal lost and frozen in the worst winter blizzard in seventy years.
At Madelia, Alice Walker goes in search of her husband, Gerald, and both succumb, alone, to the cold, never having found each other.
Thomas Johnson, a farmer tending to his cows, freezes to death near Evansville in the north. His two hundred Holsteins freeze as well. In all, some twenty thousand head of livestock will be lost during the storm.
At New Ulm, Robert Kitchner ventures the storm seeking a doctor for his wife, Bonnie, and newborn baby boy, Joshua Michael Kitchner. All three freeze to death on the road to Perdition.
Sixteen schoolchildren, four parents, and a bus driver freeze to death on a bus stranded between Fort Ridgely and Beaverton Falls. The bus is headed toward Raleigh, one of the last way stations from which they can view the Holiday Train’s passing.
No one will know the final death count of the storm until the first thaws two months later, when dozens more bodies are recovered in the snowmelt, like the drowned bodies of swimmers emerging from the sea.
When the Festival of Lights Holiday Train is found, an hour or so before dawn, rescuers see the train from far off in the night, its ten vintage Pullman cars outlined by the hundreds of thousands of glittering Christmas lights, the flickering light from the carriage windows casting a hazy and uncertain light through the swirling snow.
As they draw closer, they see the dark bulk of the train and its carriages, its roof and sides bristling with cables and wires that hold still burning bulbs, and the engine stack outlined against the unmoving gray sky.
Narrow bars of amber light spill from the carriage windows and curve across the high rounded snowdrifts pressed against the doors. The engine is cold and has been for most of the night. Everyone appears to be in a slumber, bodies knitted together and joined wherever space allows, beneath the dining car’s tables, in the wide berthed carriage seats, their hands clasped in final rigor and in seeming prayer. Father Magnusson lies curled in his seat, his ligature contracted and rigid, his body pulled into itself in the position of a newborn. The transistor radio continues to play, its static, tinny music sounding hollowly throughout the silent carriages.
The thousands of Christmas lights continue to burn, powered by the four Cat diesel generators in the final boxcar, and only in the hours after the rescuers’ grim discovery, as more rescuers arrive aboard mechanized snowcats and make their way toward the train from Shilo and Eden, do the generators fail. The lights flicker and then extinguish themselves, blinking out slowly, car by car, until only one car remains illuminated. And then that too fails and the rescuers are plunged into the skipping, fragmented darkness and shadow of their own slashing flashlights and broad headlights, disembodied shapes, voices, hollers, and cries. The absence of wind is broken at intervals by a sudden soft sobbing as a rescuer discovers, among the frozen bodies, a family member, a relative, a friend.
In Thule, at the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy, a bell tolls the hour of five A.M., the morning hours of the Divine Office, and a woman appears through the snow. Where Duncan’s mother has come from or what roads she has traveled to reach the Capuchin monastery alive, no one knows. This in itself some call a miracle. A portent of something divine amidst the human tragedy.
She rings the night watchman’s bell, and then when there is a stirring from within—through the leaded windows a hazy light illuminating the hall—she lays the baby upon the flagstone. The night watchman catches only a glimpse of her through the swirling snow, and if there is a car waiting for her, he sees no sight of it. She is simply gone, lost in the swirling white; the wind is shearing the frozen surface of Lake Cunburnt and howling across the sound and this baby, bundled and protected in a vast layering of sheepskin blanket, is bawling ferociously at his feet.
There is a moment of cessation, when the storm momentarily abates and the sky clears, and the stars begin to fall from the heavens. Brother Canice say
s that on the night Duncan’s mother arrived with him bundled in her arms, he witnessed from the chapel’s tower a meteor shower flaring brightly over the Iron Range, and so distinct and singular was its effect that he swears that he heard each meteor’s tail hissing—startling chromatic colors momentarily so brilliant that, when he closed his eyes, he saw them still.
The observatory in St. Paul confirms this. There is a meteor shower this night—a Leonid meteor shower; the dust grains of Comet Jacobs-Stein, which, in its return to perihelion, has created a meteor storm the likes of which will not be seen for another thirty years. And for those who might look skyward in the one brief moment when the storm pauses, the stars are falling from the heavens and arcing, fluorescent tails flickering, toward the north and a horizon upon which seems to burn a bright golden ring of incandescent fire. Then the night sky collapses back into itself, the stars disappear, and the blizzard rages once more.
Brother Canice leans back his chair, as if considering the narrative, and Duncan does the same. Two myths entwined together and inseparable from the other. Something akin to the Holy Trinity, yet absent the missing part, that part that contains his parents.
Wind moans in the pipe, breathes upon the embers so that they grow bright. Brother Canice sighs, chews loudly on his sunflower seeds and together they watch the glowing embers of wood in the stove pulsing like a heartbeat in the dark.
…
When Duncan tells this story to other children in the Home, Julie says that he’s got it all wrong, that it was, in fact, her mother who arrived amidst a snowstorm, the worst storm of the century. And Julie says that her mother didn’t lay her at the feet of just any watchman; rather, it was Bishop O’Connor himself who answered the door and into whose arms her mother pressed the small bundle that he would take as one of his own, before she ran off to her world-famous and final performance at the Humboldt Theater in New York City, never to be heard from again. Julie reminds Duncan that he has no memory and that, in his made-up life, he never knows truth from fiction. Billy shakes his head at the both of them and says they’ve watched Olivia de Havilland in Whose Baby Are You Now? one too many times.
But Duncan’s not so sure. He doesn’t ever remember seeing Whose Baby Are You Now?
This Magnificent Desolation Page 1