Every minute for what seemed hours they thought they’d reached the mansion, but it was never there. They walked side by side, holding Matilda between them, the younger boy in the road’s grassy middle, the older boy in his boots walking its uneven edge. His goal was to find the hard, flat driveway and to somehow distinguish it from one of the nowhere-bound roads it would kill them to take. He tripped often on stumps and into ditches. Several times he fell altogether, losing hold of the rifle and following his little brother’s fragile voice until they were together again. They huddled over the lighter, not speaking, memorizing each other’s faces. Neither boy wanted to think about what all this empty darkness meant to the uncle, lost in it alone. The older brother held the lighter to the sky as if to light their way but the wind blew it out. He put the lighter in his pocket, tapped his brother’s shoulder, and stepped forward into a beaver pond.
At first he was just waist-deep and gasping. That was it. He’d tugged Matilda from his brother’s hands and felt it sink past his leg. He didn’t reach after it. He tried to lean back toward the bank but the pond’s flooring was slimy sticks and his feet went skidding out and he sloughed farther into the pond, dunking his whole right side, his shoulder and chest, his head, foul grainy water spilling into his ears and mouth, a taste like dirt and bark and frog, very cold. He struggled to stand. Hey! he yelled. He was chest-deep, turning slowly, no idea where the shore was. The wind sounded like a furnace bellows. He tried to make himself stand still, stop sobbing, listen, and after a moment he managed to. Then he heard it: his own faint name. When he reached the bank the snow clung heavily to his sodden clothes. The air felt colder than the water and for a second he fancied going back in again. Then the younger brother was tugging him by the shoulder. The older brother felt the extra hat forced down onto his head. He felt his brother remove his wet gloves and thrust his numbing hands into the dry pair. Go! the younger brother was yelling. Let’s go!
They ran holding hands, linking arms, holding either end of Angel. They could feel themselves panting, but could not hear it. Their lungs burned. Their legs were heavy. Their open eyes saw nothing. There was no lighter. The lighter was wet. It was dead. And so was their backup plan: the final desperate fire under the skirt of a spruce tree. The younger brother’s attention was on the grass. If they lost the road even by a few feet they would be lost forever. But his feet in sneakers were losing feeling fast. They stopped to reorient, to reaffirm, to breathe, listen, holler encouragement, then they ran again. They began hearing things calling to them, voices in the wind. They began to see things in the blackness that were not there to be seen. Christmas lights. A lantern dangling under an upraised arm. Someone hollered their names in the way a search party might: a dividing into syllables, a pause, another dividing. But the boys ran on. They no longer trusted the appearance of anything they might want. When the grade increased and they could not run they walked fast, assisting their thighs with their hands. For a while they tried to sing but they didn’t like how the wind stole their voices. When the younger boy began to cramp, they stopped running. When the older boy couldn’t stop shivering, they started up again.
Then something clanging. A songlike metal on metal. They knew instantly that this was a real sound and that all those other sounds truly had been imagined. What is it? the younger brother said. They waited. Walked slowly on. Waited again. The sound brought no light with it. It clanged, then it didn’t, then it clanged. I think it’s a wind chime, the older brother finally said.
They left the road in pursuit, climbing over a smooth embankment and then shuffling across something level but soft. A lawn! The lawn? But since the chimes were played by the wind, its song seemed to echo off things, a chorus everywhere at once. It danced to the side and they veered to follow it. It began to fade and they backtracked. It came loud again but from a whole new direction. They jogged in pursuit, blindfolded kids chasing taunts in a pool, until the wind suddenly died and there were no taunts to follow. The boys stood listening to more distant winds. The older boy took the lighter from his pocket and tried and tried until it fell from his sharply numb fingers. They stood there, breathless, nowhere at all. Then chimes started up again. Loud. Right in front of them. The younger brother stepped forward and touched the edge of a porch.
They felt along its perimeter until they found a set of steps. On the porch they collided with a hillock of tarped furniture. They patted their way around the furniture until they reached a wall, then patted along the wall until they found a window to break. The older boy was deliriously hoping that, electricity or no, the McIntyres had thought to install one piece of modern equipment to protect their valuable things: an alarm that when the window shattered would hurl through buried phone lines a plea to the outside world. But when Angel smashed the window nothing happened. No cry, no tinkle of outgoing dismay. The younger brother used the rifle to clear the leftover glass from the frame but when the older brother climbed through he still cut numb gashes into his hands. He found himself a desk or table that had been pushed up against the window. Its surface was covered with oblong shards of glass and wooden lengths of sash bar and also with paper and books. He could see absolutely nothing. Had no idea which room they’d found. Swinging his legs around, he smashed a lamp to the floor, a tremendous porcelain crash. It was warm inside, warmer than he’d remembered, and hushed. He used his frozen sleeve to clear the desk of glass and then helped the younger brother through. They groped along walls, colliding with furniture, opening whatever drawers they found and feeling through the contents. In doorways they felt for light switches though they knew that there were none. When he found a drawer full of what seemed like tablecloths, the older brother tried to strip off his frozen clothes but couldn’t. His buttons were frozen in their holes and his clothes were sheathed in ice everywhere except the joints. He whispered for help, his voice eerily loud in the dark room, and the younger brother carefully, blindly, cut him free, sliding his hunting knife down the older brother’s jacket neck and sawing outward down his chest through the fabric. Hold still, he said. I’m trying. But the older brother couldn’t stop shivering. His teeth were hammering at each other. His thighs and knees felt like stilts. He hadn’t realized he’d been so cold. When his jacket and pants had been cut away, the older brother threw off his soaked underclothes and wrapped himself in a tablecloth.
The rooms and halls went on and on. They found lamps and candles but nothing to light them with, no way to orient themselves. They blundered into a set of stairs and climbed them. The animal room was nowhere to be found. The storm outside sounded like an interstate highway and the house kept moaning and flinching in its winds. On a small landing where the stair took its mid-ascent turn, the younger brother’s fingers found a wool blanket draped over a spindly wood chair. Come here, he said. No, over here. He wrapped his shivering older brother in the blanket and then began rubbing him, arms, back, chest, rubbing his brother like you rub your hands together or kick your feet warm in a cold sleeping bag. Wh-wh-where are we exactly? the older brother slurred. The blanket smelled of mothballs and dust and a woman’s antique perfume. I think the servants’ side, the younger brother said.
In a tiny bathroom on a wooden toilet tank the younger brother found a box of strike-anywhere matches. He stood blinking in the yellow light, watching the match burn toward his fingers, mesmerized by the flames, by the rediscovered mystery of his own eyesight. The matchstick glowed, thinning, turning black, curling in brittle segments. He dropped the dying match into the sink and in a panic lit a second. The bathroom had walls of waxy beaded board. A faded purple towel hung on the doorknob. There was pink antifreeze in the toilet bowl. He turned the sink’s taps but of course they were already turned. The mirror above the sink was splattered with dried toothpaste. He inspected his wind-seared face in it, his shoulders and hat still covered in snow.
Match by match the younger boy proceeded across the second floor until he found his brother in a large bunkroom with unmade metal beds in th
e narrow dormers. The older brother was sitting on one of the beds, shivering violently. I found matches, the younger brother said, but the older boy barely looked at him. We need to call Mom, the older brother said. His words were loose, slurring together. How about we go light a fire? the younger brother said. Mom’ll be worried by now, said the older brother. Is there a phone? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the older brother said, fuck off. The match seared at the younger boy’s fingers and he blew it out and hastily lit another. The older brother brightened with delight. You found matches! The younger boy threw up an arm and turned a quick confounded circle. Jesus Christ, he told the room. Then he added, He’s just cold. You’re just cold, right? He knelt again and lit up his brother’s face. He was blue lipped and pale. The ice that had formed in his hair hadn’t melted. In the leather steamer trunk at the end of the bed the younger boy found a down comforter. Then, in darkness again, he wrapped his brother in it. OK, he said, let’s get a fire going. He’s dying, the older brother said. The younger boy froze, hands in the lift position below his brother’s shoulders. I close my eyes I can see him out there, the older brother continued. He’s walking in circles. He’s waiting for his body to figure out it’s dead. No, the younger brother said, no, he’s in the truck, he’s on his way here. A gust outside and the windows rattled in their sashes. You want me to say something to him? replied the older boy.
The younger boy half dragged half carried his quivering brother down the stairs. At the bottom the older boy said he was OK. He could walk on his own, thanks, so the younger brother let him go and lit a match. Their breath rose in great steamy shudders. The darkness at the edge of the match’s light was like the red and shifty shadow of a glass. The clock above one of the ovens read 10:45. The older brother’s bare feet left clammy footprints on the cold tile. They pushed through the chef doors to the dining room, where the shudder of their feet registered in the table’s fine dinnerware: a gentle applause of glass and silver. The younger boy lit one of the thin ivory candlesticks and unbolted the door. Ready? I’m really cold. Stay with me. When the wind blew out the candle, a slush of hot wax fell onto the younger boy’s wrist. He pushed his brother across the breezeway in the dark, huddling against the roar and the snow, encountering drifts and stretches of bare planking. The older boy began thrashing confusedly, trying to turn around, but the younger boy held him firmly by the shoulders.
The door to the great room was locked, so the younger boy put his brother’s bare hand on its handle and told him to stay put. I’ll be back. The older brother stood in darkness. He let go of the handle and sank in his blankets, face tucked downwind. He was confused and tired. He kept coming in and out of the present tense. A slurred voice in his head was telling him to get up and run. And suddenly he knew that the voice was his father’s voice. That his father, like his brother and his uncle and himself, was likewise astray in this darkness: each man trying to fare for himself and faring poorly. Next thing he knew he was staggering blanketless through thin snow. Dad! he heard himself holler. Dad! Then, somewhere in the blizzard, a window shattered. He stopped. One of his hands was holding a railing. You’re a fucking idiot, he told himself, and he sat down where he was. He felt the ground with his fingers, the cracked paint, the snow-dusted boards, the nails with their square heads. You’re on the porch, he said. Take care of your brother, he said. He heard Angel’s butt clearing shards from the window frame.
When the match flared, a hundred glass eyes snapped awake. Fuck you, the younger brother told the eyes, terrified. You’re dead. Moving fast he lit several of the tall candles arrayed in sconces along a wall and then opened the door. His brother had wandered halfway across the breezeway. The comforter had fallen off him and he was sitting naked in the snow, barefoot. You’re all right, the younger brother said, lifting him. Here we go. Next to the gigantic fireplace stood an iron hoop stacked full of white birch rounds, ornamental but real. A copper basket held panes of brittle newspaper and a palisade of fatwood. The older brother sank onto the rug before the fireplace. The younger brother wrapped him in yet another blanket, this one made of scratchy mouse-gnawed wool, and then laid a hasty fire. The birch was so dry it weighed almost nothing. Even so he uncorked one of the glass lamps and doused the fire with its kerosene. Then he knelt, holding a match ready against the stone floor, and regarded his brother. He wasn’t shaking anymore. He seemed tired, sluggish. I’m the boss from now on, the younger brother said. The older brother looked at him. Say it, the younger brother said, say I’m the boss. You’re the boss, boss. But the younger brother did not light the fire. Say it again, he said, but mean it this time.
The blaze was gigantic, explosive, scattering embers across the floor until the younger brother put up the screen. He paraded around the room, lighting oil lamps as his uncle had taught him. He felt elevated, proud. A part of him was even thankful for what was happening to them. This was a day plucked from the stories and delivered to him—it was a bedrock day upon which all his life’s future uncertainties could rest. There would always be this. His name and deeds would be forever connected with this place: he would be the boy who saved his brother at the McIntyre Preserve. The lamps burned an amber color, rich and smoky. The golden titles of the books on the shelves joined the eyes of the animals in wakefulness. The room seemed different to the younger boy now, the animals timid, cowering in shadows, the whole idea of the place at once more ambitious and shabbier, sadder, less successful than it had been. This was the house of a man who’d never proven himself in a brave and simple way. It was dust and shoddy taxidermy. It was a setting for other, realer deeds.
It wasn’t long before the flies began to thaw. They fell spasming from unseen perches, landing amongst the dead of their kind below the windows, twitching, buzzing, half alive. The warming camp shifted and ticked, groaning awake. Weather systems battled each other, warm air and cold air, their thrusts and parries geologized in the billowing candle wax. The warmth hurt both boys. They sat together on pillows, grimacing, squeezing their feet. To remove his shoes the younger boy had to cut his frozen laces off. His toes were the same pale as the candles. His brother’s toes were even paler, shrunken and hard. The younger boy leaned his shoes up against the inside walls of the fireplace and soon they began to steam. He cut strips from a couch cover and wrapped his brother’s bloody palms. When he was done, the older brother said he was too hot and tried to scoot away from the fire. You’re just cold. My feet. If they hurt it’s a good thing, it means you aren’t gonna lose the toes. The older brother was dazed. He knew where he was, but had lost the causes, the whens and whys that led to here. He could feel hot blood toiling with the cold inside him, ribbons of chill slithering up his arms and thighs. He began to cry. To disguise this from his brother he began to yell.
The younger boy, feeling watched as if by a movie camera, set off in search of the phone. His voyage was lit by a glass lamp, which he balanced on his palm. Its light shone downward through the bowl of pink kerosene and threw a sloshing bloody circlet at his feet. He studied every wall, every surface. He saw ancient dusty spiderwebs and walls covered in gigantic hand-drawn topographical maps. He opened drawers, not sure what he hoped to find, and found pens, half-cent stamps, a napkin ring. He found an ancient military flashlight without batteries. In an otherwise empty closet he found a posh fur coat, foul smelling, ratty, powdered with dead moths. He found batteries in a fishing creel but the wrong kind for the flashlight. He moved messily and fast, leaving doors open, strewing contents across the floor, startling at vaguely humanoid pillows and hatstands, lighting every lamp and candle he came by.
In the room of portraits there were no phones on the desks or mounted on the walls, just men in costumes with traveling eyes, men in coon hats and spectacles, kings of industry posing with flintlocks in romantically hued terrain. The camp sighed and creaked. He lit more lamps. Maybe a window was open or there was a hole in the eaves, because the wind was moaning somewhere above him. He found a portable candle sconce, lit the candle it held, and
followed Angel’s candlelit barrel through the house. No one here, dipshit, he told himself. But he kept the safety off, and his finger on the trigger guard. Wallpaper in the hallways. Ancient calendars on the bedroom walls. Children’s readers on the windowsills. Everything on this end of the house was cold and blue and dormant. President Taft’s gigantic bed wore a blanket of dead flies. On the bedside table a book lay open, a gold-rimmed monocle keeping its bleached-out page. Next to the book was a little round clock, somehow still ticking, giving the time as 10:13. In an otherwise empty dresser he found three wool socks of different colors and thicknesses. He stood in the portrait room and threatened the portraits with his rifle. Where’s the phone? he asked them.
The older boy woke to his younger brother shaking him. Everything was blurry. What the fuck are you doing over here? the younger brother said. The older brother was sitting on a stuffed chair as far from the fire as the room allowed. A blanket lay on his lap. The younger boy pulled him to his feet, led him back to the fire, and wrapped a ratty fur coat around his shoulders. Then the younger brother disappeared out the door. The older brother lay there. The fire purred and snapped. Its warmth felt good now but he was worried about his vision. To him the lights looked like lights at the bottom of a pool, double and triple edged, alive with currents. God he was tired. His chin fell to his chest and eventually he just lay back, head on his pillow, and found himself standing in a kinder version of the night outside. The darkness was penetrable and blue. There were spruce trees rimed in snow. There was no wind, no cold, nothing awful at all until suddenly the uncle—panting, haggard, covered in snow and spruce needles, a slash of blood on his cheek—trudged into his field of vision, rifle slung dutifully over his shoulder. Thigh-deep in snow, using his sleeved hands like paddles, the uncle plowed around spruces, stumbled once, and then disappeared into a small thicket of bent white birch, slapping their brittle understory out of his face. The boy stood there, in his mind, in the forest. It grew peaceful again. The snow fell vertically. The trees gathered it on their long fingers. It was beautiful. Then, from a different direction, the uncle came slogging back. His breath sounded like an unhealthy engine, catching and grinding, interspersed with moans, pleas, clung-to disbelief. He passed through his own trail in the snow without noticing it.
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