This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  How far to Stockholdt, sir? Billy asks, and the ticket clerk jerks a ridiculously large thumb into the air and gestures behind him.

  ’Bout six miles or so, he says and laughs. You’ll need to put your walking shoes on if you plan to walk to Stockholdt. But Duncan is mesmerized by the thumb and stares at it until it disappears beneath the counter, and then Billy nods, thanks the man, and they settle onto a bench and wait.

  The freight bound for Omaha comes in an hour or two, over one hundred cars—they both lose count—stretching from the east and passing into the west, thumping the rails one after the other, so hard they should buckle and break, and after a while it seems as if they will. Duncan is lost in their passing, their heavy drumming and grinding and the incessant tap of metal clicking in the gaps.

  Then it is gone, the freight tapping into the distance and the air heavy with dust and black cinder and Duncan’s clothes stuck to him with sweat. The weight of the afternoon sun bears down. The air is heavy to breathe. Billy keeps his mouth open to it, and watches the sky as the eagle alights over the tree line. The light shimmers on distant, still lakes; bottle flies hop on and off their skin and gather on the empty barrels beneath the gutters. They wave at the bottle flies and wait in the shade for another freight train to pass through and then, after another empty hour, not knowing which way to go, Duncan asks Billy: Do you think you could walk? Billy wrinkles his brow in determination—Duncan has seen this look so many times before—and nods yes and they begin the walk to Stockholdt, their heads bowed and their eyes mere slits against the sun and the unfamiliar land stretching away in simmering nacre waves.

  They walk only half aware that they are walking and the hours pass and then twilight comes on quickly and Duncan realizes that he is no longer warm. In the distance the low-peaked mountains are dotted with flitting lights. Gray clouds sweep over flat tracks of land and small ponds that the bogged land spoons and about which vacant-looking trailer homes sit.

  Duncan reaches across to Billy and pulls him gently to him as they walk, and although Billy is no longer sweating, he feels feverish to the touch. Duncan pauses and they take long gulps from his water bottle.

  The skin on Billy’s face seems stretched and jaundiced and Duncan wonders if he is in pain but refusing to tell him. Are you okay? he asks. It’s okay, y’know, if you’re not. I don’t know if I can walk much more.

  I’m okay, Billy says, wiping water from his chin. I promise. Let’s keep going. It’s harder when I stop.

  It is dark when they enter Stockholdt. Everything looks squat and pressed down, even the town: square rows of flat-topped three- and four-story businesses, clapboard tiers, crumbling porches, and derelict row houses in which yellowed signs declaring ROOMS FOR RENT lay at skewed angles on the insides of grimed glass.

  A traffic light hangs over the Boulevard, the town’s single street that intersects a section of railroad tracks running north to south. To the northeast are vast straits of cold-looking lake and log-sheared forest and the gray nothingness of pastureland let to fallow, broken only now and then by a grain silo or a derelict farmhouse. The single traffic light sways from a fretted cable that stretches across the single intersection. It flashes red, on and off, on and off, throughout the night. And when the wind blows, the traffic lantern rocks back and forth from its cable like a pendulous eye. The 9:15 Northern Pacific, three hundred cars of livestock feed, trundles though, the boxcars metal slivers in the darkness as they catch the lambent light of the town’s flickering streetlamps.

  Duncan and Billy walk the streets and the dead children from the Festival of Lights Holiday Train follow them. When Duncan glances back, they nod and smile, their skin shining with beatific opales-cence, and he is filled with contentment; he senses that he has known them all his life, in the way that he knows Billy and Julie. Perhaps it is the affinity of abandoned children to know nothing other than a singular longing that transfigures all other needs and desires and makes them what they are, and, in this way, makes them kin to one another.

  For a moment Duncan almost expects them to break into song and for their song—the song of dead children—to echo and reverberate throughout the empty streets of Stockholdt. Would the sleeping adults hear them? What would their song sound like? Would it be joyous and elegiac or plaintive and soul-wrenching, a caterwaul and baying that would make men and women of the town sit up in their beds with their hearts thrumming in their chests in sudden fear for their young ones. But the dead children’s footfalls are silent upon the streets of Stockholdt and their voices are mute. Together, they move without sound from one street to the next.

  One of the children, a young girl with wide, bright eyes and thick strawberry blonde hair, which is woven into two braids that swing from each side of her head like whips, points to a glowing light that spins nebulae-like above the town at the black edge of the tracks, the abandoned stockyards, and the plains beyond: the undulations of the aurora borealis, and at its center a fully formed new moon surrounded by a fine nimbus of phosphorescence. In the strange, shifting light, the moon’s cratured and shadowed surface seems to move and coalesce until a face takes shape, and Duncan gasps because he knows it is the face of his mother.

  An angel, the girl says and smiles, and Duncan smiles also and takes Billy’s hand, and the face of Duncan’s mother smiles over them as they move on through the streets of Stockholdt, the dead children of the Holiday Train skipping at their heels.

  There is a rectangle of four streets surrounding the railroad depot, and six cross-streets intersect these. The street that runs alongside the tracks is lined with wooden row houses from the turn of the century. Most of the steps leading to the front doors are crumbling. The posts are rotted and the foundations cracked and shifting. Each house caves and presses into the other and, in this way, the brick and mortar settles and secures one house to the next and the next all along the street. Duncan imagines that if one house were removed from the center, all the others would topple to their sides. Many of the houses still have Christmas decorations: sun-bleached brown-plastic reindeer and soot-stained potbellied Santas balance precariously on the small, slanted awnings over their porches.

  It begins to rain and they move toward a porch, but before they step upon the broken wood slats, Duncan looks up at the plastic Santa peering down and it is as if they have been transported to the Home’s chapel and from the apse he is staring toward the altar and the body of Christ. From above Santa and the peak of the roof, the moon briefly pushes its ghostly, milk-white head through a black cloud.

  A car’s tires hiss through the rainwater close to the curb, its engine motoring slow and heavy, and Billy tugs on Duncan’s arm and they begin to walk quickly down the sidewalk. Duncan keeps his attention on the buildings to the left, but there is nothing there but empty, peeling, and withered storefronts and boarded and abandoned textile warehouses. He pulls his hood tight against the rain. His boots are swollen with rainwater. The car keeps pace with them and before the voice calls to him, he knows it belongs to a cop. I’m not going back, Duncan, Billy hisses, his head lowered against the rain. I’m jumping the next train out of here.

  Duncan stops as Billy yanks his hand free and the cruiser flashes its light in their eyes. Fuck you, coppers! Billy shouts and is off running down the street with Duncan caught in the cruiser’s spotlight and not knowing what to do as the car door opens and Billy is a small, hunched shape scrambling toward the darkness of the rail yards with a cop in a shimmering black slicker chasing after him. Beyond is the blackness of unlit pastureland stretching out toward the plains, and when Duncan looks about him, the dead children are gone.

  That night in the Stockholdt County Children’s Facility, Duncan and Billy lie in beds next to each other as a storm moves across the country. Duncan listens to the sound of a dozen boys breathing, pulls the blankets about him, and cranes his head to look out at the storm building in the distance and then the wind and rain as it presses against the glass. It is cold. He glances at the sle
eping shapes around him, the small bulk of them huddled in the darkness. The top of a head, a tuft of ratty hair, pokes out here and there but faces are mostly covered, hidden. The room collects and holds their mist-breath; it fogs the air and the glass. A boy groans and then farts wetly in his sleep.

  We almost made it, Billy says, and when Duncan looks over at him, Billy is grinning, but his voice is thick with phlegm and his breathing sounds shallow. Duncan watches as his chest slowly rises and falls.

  He smiles. We almost did.

  After a moment: Thanks for taking me with you.

  Duncan shrugs. I wouldn’t have made it without you.

  A flame flickers in the dark; there is a raspy breath followed by a cough and the flame is extinguished. At the far end of the room, at a desk in a small wire cage that separates the room from the hall and the bathrooms beyond, sits a figure smoking. The cigarette flares and dies, its tip glowing amber, and the smell of cigarette smoke carries the length of the room.

  Sorry that we have to go back, Duncan says.

  Billy closes his eyes and his head nods. It’s okay. That’s what happens. It’s like the astronauts and the moon.

  What is?

  Getting there, that’s what’s important even if you can’t get back. They knew that and they went anyway. It’s why they went on those other space missions as well, the ones we never hear about. Them and the Russians. If we’d jumped on a train, there’s no way we’d be coming back—we’d be just like the astronauts, like Michael Collins and the rest of them.

  Billy continues to smile with his eyes closed. Imagine if we had made it, Duncan, he murmurs. Just imagine that.

  Duncan watches lightning flashing beyond the wire mesh of the windows and thinks of Michael Collins alone aboard his fiery coffinship hurtling farther out into the dark, forever chasing the curve of the earth and already emerging into daylight upon its far side.

  Goodnight, Billy, he says.

  Goodnight, Duncan.

  Duncan waits until Billy is asleep and then slowly he lowers himself into the bed, lies awake staring at the ceiling and the walls. He listens to the thrum and sigh of boys breathing as the storm lashes at the trees outside, shakes the window grates in their posts, while the lone figure in his cage wheezes and chokes slowly on his cigarettes and holds his vigil through the long hours of the night.

  The next day, when the police car pulls up to the monastery gates, Father Toibin is standing there, waiting, his brow deeply furrowed as he squints into the sun, the wind whipping his black pants about his legs. And in this moment he seems to Duncan old but as immutable as the Iron Range beyond, with its hills of hardwoods, conifers, and spruces. Duncan slides down in his seat, wishing to be invisible, and Billy begins to cry softly, now that they are back, so Duncan takes his hand and squeezes it tenderly and tries to smile to comfort him. But when Father Toibin’s blue eyes scan the car as it turns sharply in the courtyard, they catch Duncan and hold him with their silent power. And then Father Toibin smiles and nods almost imperceptibly.

  Officer Perry opens the door and Duncan and Billy step out, blinking in the light. Billy wipes at his eyes as Duncan walks toward Father Toibin slowly, and when he reaches out his hand, Duncan feels the weight of the journey home, and he is suddenly exhausted. He stumbles and Father Toibin wraps his arms about him, and holds him close, and then beckons for Billy to come to him as well.

  Ah, Duncan, Billy, you’re home now. It’s all right. Everything will be all right.

  When he releases Duncan, he turns and looks at Officer Perry standing by the door of his cruiser. Red clay cakes his long black boots and spots the gray jodhpurs above.

  I apologize for the trouble they’ve caused you, Officer.

  Not a concern, Father. Just glad to have helped. Officer Perry tips his hat and stares at Duncan and Billy. He has already told them that he has a three-year-old boy and a girl Duncan’s age at home, and if they were ever to do what he and Billy had done, he’d be worried to death until they were safe and sound and home again. Clouds move across the lens of his black sunglasses; he chews on imaginary cud, as if he is weighing a serious problem in his mind.

  I know we’ve already talked about this some, he begins, but it doesn’t hurt to put it to you again. Men need to know where they stand with one another. Will I have to come looking for you two again?

  No sir! Billy and Duncan say together, and standing straight, push back their shoulders.

  Good boys, Officer Perry says, his face pinched in such stoic reserve that it is hard not to smile. And the next time I see you, make sure you’re old enough to pass the police exam in Stockholdt, yeah? We need more men like you.

  Officer Perry climbs into his cruiser, speaks briefly into his CB, and then his dusty ’69 Chevy Impala, with duel exhausts, rumbles slowly down the rutted road, its police light turning in slow amber-red revolutions on the roof, and Duncan nods toward Billy, who smiles, knowing it is for them. Father Toibin asks Brother Wilhelm to take Billy in for lunch and then to the hospice. We’ll talk in a little while, okay, Billy? he says, and Billy nods, glances toward Duncan, and then follows Brother Wilhelm up the path to the gate.

  Father Toibin grasps Duncan’s shoulders and looks at him. Look at you. You’ve grown two inches, I swear. Our Lord, Jesus, went into the desert and came back having resisted the temptations of the Devil. What have you done on your journey? What beasts have you seen? What demons have you fought? I gather quite a few, no?

  I saw my mother, Duncan says. It was a full moon and I saw my mother in the face of the moon.

  Father Toibin nods and smiles.

  Do you think that was God’s doing? Duncan asks.

  I prayed that He would look after you and bring you safely back to us.

  But you believe I saw her? You believe God spoke to me when I was born?

  Of course. Duncan, wherever you and Billy were and whatever you saw, you can be sure God had a hand in it. Look out there. Father Toibin points toward the range and the valleys and the great hardwoods and firs in the north. Through the gifts of the Holy Spirit we are granted the knowledge, the wisdom to see and understand, to perceive the divine in all things. And it is this ability to see which lifts us from de profundis—out of the depths. De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. Quia apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio.

  This, Father Toibin says and opens his palms to the vista before them—a simple gesture, a mere turning of his wrists that stills Duncan’s breath and makes him aware of the warm, charged air in this place where they stand. A wind comes down from the hills, clouds moves above the prairies, and something glitters momentarily in the wide swaths of burn upon the distant slopes, like a space ship falling from the stars—and Father Toibin smiles.

  De Profundis, Duncan repeats in his head. De Profundis. They are words without end.

  Chapter 16

  They are in Billy’s room in the Home’s hospice and Billy is packing his small duffel bag, the one with the picture of Muhammad Ali on its sides. He seems thinner somehow, and when he places his specially laundered and folded shirts upon the wax paper in their drawer, he moves slowly and stiffly, and when he is done, he rubs his hips tenderly and winces. Their trip to Stockholdt took so much out of him, Duncan knows, and he cannot but help feel guilty. He glances out the window at the sound of crunching gravel and sees the small white Ford Econoline van that has come to take Billy to the Children’s Cancer Institute at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, two hundred miles away.

  It’s here, Duncan says, and Billy nods, smiling, watching him.

  We almost made it, didn’t we? he says.

  Just like the astronauts.

  Billy reaches toward him and Duncan hugs him, feels his frail bones trembling against him, then he takes Billy’s bag and they make their way slowly out of the room and down the stairs to where Julie is waiting for them.

  It is a clear morning without a cloud in the sky. The monastery is bleached with sun, the light so strong and
bright that Duncan’s and Billy’s eyes can only close to it. There is an odd silence on the flagstone walk—even their footfalls are muted as they walk to the van. The silence is deepened and magnified by the flickering black shape of an eagle soaring wide-winged above the range and by the sound of its faint distant cry.

  In the courtyard the wind ruffles Billy’s thin hair, and Duncan sees some of it floating away: little white puffs of flax drifting over the grounds toward the prairie. Duncan stares at the ground, and only at the last moment, when Billy has climbed into the van, does he look up, and it appears as if the fragile bones of Billy’s face are bursting out of him and might shatter at any moment: the glowing frontal eminence, the raised sockets about the eyes, the sharply defined zygomatic bones and the tender nose—all pushing against his parchment-thin skin. But Billy smiles reassuringly, and says under his breath to Duncan and Julie conspiratorially: If these bastards think they have me, they’ve got another thing coming!

  Duncan grins and Julie puts her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh.

  They could never stop you, Billy, Duncan says.

  Father Canice accompanies him, sitting on Billy’s right, while Billy turns in his seat to look out the rear window at Duncan and Julie waving farewell. The sun glares momentarily upon the glass as the van makes its turn, and Billy’s face is a white, sun-shocked orb at the window’s center, blinking into the light, and searching—desperately it seems—for them.

  Duncan and Julie continue to wave goodbye as, spitting gravel and red clay, the van turns in the roadway before the Home. Sunlight shudders on the rear window and Billy is momentarily irradiated by its glow so that only the hollow orbits of his eyes and the black line of his mouth are visible. For a moment Duncan sees him as he often does, without disease: His skin is soft and supple, and upon his head a mass of thick blond-white curls, then Billy raises his hand, worsted and speckled and crippled by arthritis, and waves farewell. Duncan knows that even this simple gesture can cause him pain, but that for Billy there is also a certain comfort in this pain—it reminds him that he is still here, waiting in much the same manner as Julie, waiting for someone to return and claim him. The van briefly canters to the left on the rutted track and then straightens and weaves down the monastery’s dirt road.