But this hurricane had a solid eye, a calm center that would pa.s.s over the city in pressureless tranquillity, a shaft of silence with no upward limit. Its approach awakened Peter Lake in his dream, and he sat up with silver flooding his eyes. Athansor could hardly control himself. He was trembling and stomping as if his time had finally come. Frozen motionless, with his eyes at the roof of his soul, Peter Lake could feel Athansor"s inner powers as if they were huge engines and whining turbines.
The wind began to rage from the south. Trees bent and their leaves shuddered in prolonged rushes. Peter Lake heard garbage-can lids pop off and rocket away like artillery sh.e.l.ls. The garbage cans themselves were rolling at high velocity along the streets and smashing through store windows, like solid iron projectiles. The timbers of the house rocked and groaned as wind and light raced one another for dominance. Neither won, but the earth trembled as it was swept entirely clean. Then the howling wind stopped, and an all-encompa.s.sing calm surrounded the city and shut it down. Nothing moved, neither man nor animal. The waters were still, and all objects seemed rooted in place.
Now the light began truly to flood. It was frightening. It burst upon the harbor in a blinding beam, and tracked toward the city."It"s a dream, it"s a dream," Peter Lake told himself over and over even as he trembled."It"s a dream." The door to the cellar was lifted gently from its hinges and it flew up, disappearing silently. The silver beam washed down the steps into the straw-filled room and flooded it with cool light.
Suddenly, the light went out, and it was night. Still in the dream, Peter Lake sank back against the wall, able to breathe again. The short time he had to get his wits did him little good, for now he saw. Could it be, even in a dream? Glowing in white, silver, and blue, Beverly was standing at the entrance to the cellar, in a sphere of reverberating beams as round as the moon. She glided down the ramp of light that had brought her. In her hand was a horse"s bridle of what appeared to be chains of stars or sharp diamonds. She was the source of her own illumination, and, next to her, Athansor seemed like a small Shetland. Though he was calmed by her presence, as if he had been expecting it, Peter Lake of the dream fainted dead away. But Peter Lake the dreamer watched as Beverly, her hair plaited in the old fashion, curried Athansor and spoke to him unintelligibly. Her motions and expressions were not unlike those of a girl attending to her pony, but she radiated light.
Peter Lake the dreamer saw Peter Lake of the dream wake, and watch as Beverly finished with Athansor. Then she turned, looked at him directly, and moved toward him. When she was near, he closed his hand around the celestial bridle. Though she smiled and thoughher eyes danced, she withdrew the bridle. He gripped it so hard that it cut into his hands, but he was unable to hold it, and he felt himself awakening in the dark. He wanted to stay with Beverly in the strangely lighted room full of mysterious curling static and woolly amber tones, but the dream faded, the light was withdrawn, and the last he could remember was a feeling of unutterable pain and loss, and anger at his sentence of darkness.
AN hour before the natural light, a strange operation began outside the stable where Peter Lake had dreamed of Beverly. Almost in panic, the Short Tails, their allies, and the allies of their allies, arrayed themselves, their weapons, and their machines in military formations throughout the streets and on the squares. Pearly charged from place to place on a spotted gray horse, directing the order of battle. In Brooklyn, one of his lieutenants began to march a body of troops toward the Great Bridge. This was the last mobilization of the gangs before the war swept them away like dust in the wind.
It was a swan song, and the swan that sang it was all bent out of shape. In their decline, the gangs had become repositories for a strange set of criminals. Most of the two thousand soldiers busily a.s.sembling were under five feet tall. They did not dash from place to place with the grace of men born to arms, they waddled. Many of the fat ones had Cecil Mature"s slitlike eyes but not his redeeming sweetness. A third of their number was seriously lame, and hobbled about. Another third, or more, made strange "ticky-tacky" sounds. When they talked they sounded like corks popping from champagne bottles, chickens, garglers, and groaning dogs. The ones who were most ordinary were the ferocious-looking cutthroats who in the old days had been called "wild dogs," because they would recognize no friend, and turned upon one another more easily than could be tolerated by even the most anarchic gangs. Now they were the troops.
Pearly had a.s.sembled the remnants of the Short Tails, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Happy Jacks, the Rock Gang, the Rag Gang, the Stable Gang, the Wounded Ribs, the White Switch Gang, the Corlears Hook Rats, the Five Points Steel Bar Gang, the Alonzo Truffos, the Dog Harps, the Moon Bayers, the Snake Hoops, theBowery Devils, and many others. There were more than two thousand of them, including every independent dirk man, goon, and rougher-upper in the city.
The police had been bribed to evacuate the area south of Chambers Street. Pearly a.s.sured them that he was after only one man, and that no property would be damaged. He marshaled his armies of deformed waddlers and bristling mad dogs, like a real general-riding here and there, jumping his dappled gray over lines of his own men, and testing the deployments. He spoke to the Brooklyn side by telephone. It was ready."Is Manhattan ready?" they asked. Pearly answered in the affirmative. Sixteen hundred soldiers in Manhattan were fully armed and properly positioned. Though the cloud wall was unsettled, and had moved up the bay, it often did so in late September as the seasons changed, and Pearly was willing to bet that when the sun came up and stabilized the day, the cloud wall would recede. The sun did come up, and illuminated a ma.s.sive army of squat criminal beings, who could not resist talking loudly to each other, because they hoped for blood. They had real weapons, and they liked to use them.
Pearly waited for Peter Lake to emerge from the cellar where the innkeeper had sworn that he was hiding. Sparks flew from him as if from a big gray cat in a dry winter storm. He could hardly stay still, his head nodded up and down as if it were keeping time, and his razor eyes fixed on the open ramp of the bas.e.m.e.nt stable.
PETER Lake awoke with a start."Christ!" he said, and fell back against the straw. It was already half-light, and when he was either very happy or very unhappy he could never fall asleep again after awakening. He sat up, and saw Athansor, who looked as if he wanted to race. Peter Lake had seen other horses with the same urgent need to run, but it had always been at Belmont just before post time, when a syringe full of atropine was working its dangerous wonders. Athansor looked as if he could outrun ten of that kind of horse, one after another.
Peter Lake himself felt astoundingly strong and energetic. He was wide-awake, and he wanted only to ride Athansor."I"ll take himup to the country," he said out loud."We"ll run like h.e.l.l across the whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned state." He got to his feet and walked toward what he hoped would be the bucket of hot water that he had asked for, delivered early. It was only the water from the previous evening. When he looked down at it to see if it was steaming, he saw that his palms and fingers were badly cut, as if he had held onto a chain of sharp diamonds that was pulled through his hands.
He hadn"t time to reflect, and guessed that he would do well to hurry, for Athansor"s energy was now so intense that the walls of the stable vibrated like a station shed into which six locomotives had come in train.
Then Peter Lake heard the sound of the sixteen hundred men, now in their places, ready, and no longer required to mute their unusual voices."What the h.e.l.l is that?" Peter Lake asked himself, and then dashed up the ramp to face a phalanx of about eight hundred of them arranged in a crescent across an empty square, not more than fifty yards away. Pearly was mounted on his gray, smiling as confidently as a knife-thrower. Peter Lake smiled in recognition."You"ve done well, Pearly," he shouted across the gap."But it"s not over yet."
"No, Peter Lake," Pearly shouted back."It"s not over yet." "What do you think you"ll accomplish," Peter Lake asked after seeing Pearly"s army,"with these idiots and buffoons?" He didn"t wait for an answer, but went back inside and leapt upon Athansor, who shot away with tremendous force. Peter Lake intended simply to jump the ranks and be off. How could Pearly have been so stupid? Athansor emerged from the stable like an express train. The chubby little trolls had to catch their breath.
But he quickly wheeled to a stop. Peter Lake felt his blood beating. There would be no jumping, for this strange and pathetic army had raised a forest of sharp pikes thirty and forty feet long. They were too close for Athansor to clear their blades: he could not simply rise straight up in the air.
With the way blocked except for a small opening on the left, Peter Lake spurred Athansor and made for the breach. Closing behind him, Pearly"s army came alive with a shout. It had been carefully planned. As soon as Peter Lake was clear, a hundred little menappeared in the opening of a side street and blocked the way with pikes. Nets had been hung from booms and spars mounted on buildings, and a dozen vicious dogs were unleashed to harry Athansor. He trampled them easily, or sailed over them, but they slowed him down. Not a single shot had been fired. Pearly"s soldiers were too busy funneling Peter Lake onto the bridge ramp. Peter Lake could see what they were trying to do, but he had no escape. The closer he got to the bridge, the more nets there were, the more pikes, the louder the cries of his pursuers.
Finally, with nowhere else to go, and a hundred sharp pike heads jabbing at him, Athansor sidled reluctantly onto the ramp. His mouth frothed. He showed his teeth. He looked for an opportunity either to fight or to soar over his enemies, and found none. They had hung heavy nets along the suspension cables all the way out to the towers. He had no choice but to try for Brooklyn.
As Peter Lake expected, the Brooklyn side, too, was all netted up, its cables choked with heavy hawsers and trawler nets. The walkway was filled with pikemen marching toward him. Athansor could have cleared the pikes, but the cathedral-like arches were blocked with weighted nets that reached down to within a few feet of the pike-heads.
Peter Lake galloped east and west, trying to find a way out. He knew that many horses in many battles had been wheeled around and spurred in just the way he was directing Athansor, made to imitate pacing tigers, while their riders were breathless with fear. They had nowhere to go, so they went back and forth. The city shone in a bed of autumn blue to the north and west. Brooklyn was still asleep. The river had black wind lines penned across its face. And to the south was the open harbor, across which stretched the cloud wall, furious and close, buckling in the middle of the bay, sucking at the water and creating a line of breakers that rolled from its base.
High above the river, hundreds of feet above the water, all they could do was rush to and fro as the enemy closed. The only way out that Peter Lake could see was in the conjunction of the two forces. During the fighting, he might be able to get to the rear and escape. He had no weapons. Athansor breathed hard.
Both lines stopped. Pearly was too smart to create the confusionfor which Peter Lake hoped. They halted in place, fixed their pikes close to the nets, and stood their ground. Only then did groups of fighters pa.s.s through the two main bodies. There were about a hundred. They had shorter pikes, swords, and pistols. Pearly knew that a mob could not be a tight enough seal, so he set them still and had the best men step forward to kill Peter Lake and his horse.
"We have no choice," Peter Lake said to Athansor."This time, we fight."
The first group closed. They were timid, as well they should have been. Athansor reared and pushed the pikes aside. He charged into the soldiers and knocked them over. He bit and trampled them. But he was in a forest of pikes, and they cut him on the flanks and chest. When a second group saw his blood, they joined the fight and fired their pistols. A swordsman lunged for Peter Lake and slashed him across the back. Peter Lake felt no pain. He took the sword. Now he had a weapon, and he flailed angrily and hard.
Anthansor reared and placed his hooves deep into the chests of the attackers. The sound was of underbrush breaking. As sword struck sword it became clear to Peter Lake that he was going to die. They fired into Athansor"s face, and their bullets smashed into his bones and tattered his ears like flags above a fortress. Lead pierced his muscles, and lodged in his gut. Peter Lake, too, was cut and bleeding everywhere. He felt cold. Then Pearly commanded his fighters to fall back. Peter Lake was left with the dead scattered all around him. He and Athansor were shaking from their wounds. They moved about meaninglessly. Then Peter Lake saw that Pearly had a second and yet a third wave ready to do battle. This could not be borne.
He looked at the river below. It was very far, too far. But it was a lovely blue, and a much better way to die, if he had to, than upon the bloodstained boards of the Great Bridge. There was nothing to lose. They would jump.
The wind whistled through nets and cable. Peter Lake gave one last glance to the city, and turned south to the marshes. As the second wave started to close, Athansor began the tiger pacing, but this time it was north-south, across the narrow walkway of the bridge. They thought he was crazed. Trying for the kill, they fired their pistols. But he ignored them. When he was ready, he leaned backon his haunches. Pearly"s men stopped, for they had never seen such a sight. Athansor arched on visible waves of power. He compressed himself into something almost round. Then, with a roar, he unfolded in a long white silken movement, and flew into the air, parting a thick steel cable that had been in his way, and clearing the nets with ease.
Momentarily suspended over the bay, Peter Lake expected tofall, and would have been satisfied with what he expected. But there was no fall. Athansor rose, and sped outward, stretching his wounded forelegs before him as the air whistled past. The horse and rider were headed for the white wall. Peter Lake looked back and saw that the city was small and silent, and seemed no larger than a beetle. As they broke into the cloud wall the world became a storm of rushing white mist that screamed and shrieked like a choir of shrill and tormented voices.
They flew for hours; it got harder and harder to breathe and more and more difficult for Peter Lake to hold on. As Athansor"s speed increased, the clouds rushing by whited out in a blur. Peter Lake thought of the city. A shelter from the absolute and the lordly, it now seemed like such a loving place, even though it had been so hard. Bright images came before his eyes now that he was snow-blind, and he ached for the color, the softness, and the sheen of the city that was an island in time.
Finally Athansor tore through the roof of the clouds. They found themselves in a black and airless ether. What Peter Lake saw was what Beverly had described, and he was awed beyond his capacity for awe. He couldn"t breathe, and he knew that if he stayed on the horse he would die. So he touched Athansor gently, and threw himself off to fall back upon the field of clouds. That was the last he saw of the high clear world, for his fall became clouded and tumbling and timeless. There were lakes in the clouds that simply gave upon the sea, and there were deeper, longer columns that curved through whitened air. He fell, and he fell, and he had no will. His arms and legs flailed. His neck was like the soft neck of a baby.
Peter Lake tumbled through the world of white. And then, entirely forgotten, he vanished deep into its infinite fury.
FOUR GATES TO THE CITY.
EVERY city has its gates, which need not beof stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pa.s.s through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and bluesa"wild and freea"that stopped at the city walls.
In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more ma.s.sive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them, Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort,their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery.
To enter a city intact it is necessary to pa.s.s through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever.
LAKE OF THE COHEERIES.
THE upper Hudson was as different from NewYork and its expansive baylands as China was different from Italy, and it would have taken a Marco Polo to introduce one to the other. If the Hudson were likened to a serpent, then the city was the head, in which were found the senses, expressions, brain, and fangs. The upper river was milder, stronger, the muscular neck and smoothly elongated body. There was no rattle to this snake. Albany sometimes tried to rattle, but failed to emit an audible sound.
First of all, the Hudson landscape was a landscape of love. To reach it by sea, one had to have a series of glorious weddings, crossing the sparkling bands that were the high bridges. Then one sailed into tranquil, capacious, womanly bays, the banks of which were spread as wide and trusting as any pair of long legs that ever were. Thenbegan an infinity of pleasant convolutions. There were whole valleys on tributaries, each with many thousand well-tended gardens. Towns along the banks were entirely subsumed in their devotion to one great view, or in the memory of one portion of one century in which they enjoyed a seemingly endless spell of clear weather. There were old opera houses, great estates, hidden root cellars and spring enclosures, gray churches built by the Dutch, wharves that stretched a mile into the river and were hung on some days with dozens of sturgeon each of four hundred pounds or more and bursting with roe. The skating was unparalleled, except perhaps in Holland, for the early Dutch had built several hundred miles of ca.n.a.ls through wilderness, swamp, field, and village, upon which a skater could glide all alone under the moonlight for a long winter"s night, and hardly know that he had been out ten minutes. Often boys or girls would come home in the blare of early morning, after a night of racing the moon, having fallen deeply in love.
On the Hudson, infatuation was a great and complicated phenomenon. It was sometimes ridiculous and endearing: that is, to see adolescents caught painfully in the pleasant traps into which they eagerly jump. They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves."I love you," they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate. The valley seemed to have run on love. But, luckily, commerce and farming were richly endowed, and the seasons were intense and fruitful (ice and maple sugar in the winter; sh.e.l.lfish and flowers in the spring; vegetables, grain, and berries in summer; everything at fall harvest; and lumber, minerals, whale products, beef, mutton, wool, and manufactures all year-round), for if they were not, there would have been chaos.
On the Hudson, there was always the opportunity to be educated deeply in the heart. The beauty of the landscape did the rest, along with the magic of the moon, the river"s hot and reedy bays, the glittering silver ice, days of summer or days of snow submerged in an ocean of clear blue air, fields never-ending, the wind from Canada, and the great city to the south.
THE water of the Lake of the Coheeries was as lush and blue as the water of a round and opalescent glacial pool. Its plentiful fish were full of silvery fight (rising above the lake like flashing swords), and they fled from place to place in a spectral bath of intense and unvarying fidelity. It could be angry and brutal in storms, and drinking from it was an awakening and a blessing. And sometime not too deep in winter, each year, the Lake of the Coheeries would surprise everyone by freezing over during the night. In the second week of December at the latest, the inhabitants of Lake of the Coheeries Town sat by their fires after dinner and stared into the darkness around their rafters as Canadian winds rode in hordes and attacked their settlement from the north. These winds had been born and raised in the arctic, and had learned their manners on the way down, in Montreala"or so it was said, since the people of Lake of the Coheeries hadn"t much respect for the manners or mores of Montreal. The winds ripped off tiles, broke branches, and toppled unwired chimneys. When they came up, everyone knew that winter had begun, and that a long time would pa.s.s before the spring made the lake light yellow with melting streams that fled from newly breathing fields.
But one winter the winds were harder and colder than they had ever been. The night they started had seen birds smashed against cliffs and trees, children crying, and candles flickering. Mrs. Gamely, her daughter Virginia, and Virginia"s infant, Martin, stayed in their tiny house and imagined pure h.e.l.l on the lake. They could hear huge waves breaking against the soft wiglike tufts where the fields met the water. In the middle of the lake, said Mrs. Gamely, the water was being blown into giant foamy castles, and all the great monsters from the deep, including the Donamoula, were being ploughed up and turned over like roots in a new field."Listen," she said."You can hear them shrieking as they tumble about. Poor creatures! Even though they are a cross between seaborne spiders, writhing serpents, and the sharpest knives; even though their eyes are big and open and have no eyelashes, and they stare at you like c.o.c.keyed beggars; and even though their teeth are a forest of bony razors, still, it"s a shame to hear them crying like that."
Virginia fastened onto the darkness, listening for the shrieks of sea creatures being tossed like a salad in the middle of the lake. Allshe heard was the wind. Mrs. Gamely rolled her tiny eyes and held up one finger."Shh," she said, and listened."There! Hear them?"
"No!" answered Virginia."I hear only the wind."
"But don"t you hear the creatures, too, Virginia?"
"No, Mother, only the wind."
"I"ll bet the little warmkin hears them," Mrs. Gamely said referring to the baby sleeping soundly in its fat flannels."There are creatures, you know," she continued."I"ve seen them. When I was a little girl on the north side of the lake (way before I married Theodore), we used to see them all the time. Of course, that was long ago. They ran in schools, and came to the sh.o.r.e near the house, just like tame dogs. Sometimes they would leap over the dock, and sink a rowboat. My sister and I used to stand on the pier and feed them pies. They loved pies. The Donamoula, who was about two hundred feet long and fifty feet around, loved cherry pies. We would throw the cherry pie into the air, and he would catch it with his forty-foot tongue. One day, my father decided that this was too dangerous, and he made us stop. The Donamoula never came by after that." She knitted her brows."I wonder if he would remember me."
Ever challenged by her mother"s unorthodox views, Virginia thought of a means to answer the question that had just been posed. She looked at her mother and was pleased and amazed by the sly, robust intelligence in the old woman"s face, by her ma.s.sive form which was neither fat nor tall nor thick, by the large strong hands, the shapeless velvet and muslin dress with a green yoke, the two sweet little eyes set close together in a glowing cheeky face topped with a haystack of soft white hair, and the purring white rooster (his comb was mandarin red) that she held in her arms and occasionally stroked.
"If Jack went away for fifty years"a"Jack was the rooster, Quebec-born, originally Jacquesa""and then came back, would he recognize me?" Virginia asked.
"Roosters don"t live for fifty years, Virginia. And besides, he would go back to Canada and probably never return. They speak French there, you know, and can never do anything right. They would probably turn him into a cocoa van, or use him as a mold for a weather vane."
"Well, let"s just say he could go away for fifty years and then comeback."
"Okay. But where would he go?"
"To Peru."
"Why Peru?"
Conversations like these, touching on every subject known to man, would often usurp a good part of the night. Mrs. Gamely had never learned to read or write, and used her daughter as a scribe, and as a researcher among encyclopedias, questioning her at length about everything she found. The old woman"s sense of organization was a miracle of randomness as illogical and rich as the branches of a blossoming fruit tree. She could easily discuss 150 subjects in an hour and a half, and Virginia would still finish awed and enlightened by what seemed to be a relentless and perfect plan.
Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone"s guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely"s vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely"s usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds or dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, lirip.o.o.ps, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow"s ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ten could not have kept pace with her, and halfa dozen linguaphologists would have collapsed from hypercardia.
"Where did you learn all those words, Mother?" Virginia might ask.
Mrs. Gamely would shrug her shoulders."We were raised with them, I suppose." She didn"t always speak incomprehensibly. In fact she sometimes went for months at a time strapped down firmly to a strong and worthy matrix of Anglo-Saxon derivatives. Then, Virginia breathed easy, and the rooster was so happy that had he been a chicken he would have laid three eggs a day. Or was he a chicken? Who knows? The point is, he thought he was a cat.
The wind rose even more, leveling haystacks, collapsing barns, driving the lake onto the fields. Mrs. Gamely and Virginia could hear a ferocious jingling as billions of ice fragments shuffled together on the swells, sounding like the lost souls of all the insects that had ever lived. The house groaned and swayed, but it had been built to weather storms, and was the work of Theodore Gamely, who, before he had been killed, had intended it to shelter his wife and daughter no matter what might happen to him. Now his youthful wife was an old woman, the daughter in her thirties; and they had been in the house alone for all that time, except when Virginia went off to marry a French-Canadian named Boissy d"Anglas, and came back three years later with a newborn son.
"Do you think the house will fall down?" asked Mrs. Gamely."No, I don"t think so," Virginia answered."I"ve never known the wind to blow like this. The coming winter is going to be very difficult." "It"s always difficult."
"But this time," said the mother,"I think the cold is going to break the back of the land. Animals will die. Food will run out. People will get sick."
In combination with the wind, such p.r.o.nouncements sounded accurate. In fact, whenever Mrs. Gamely spoke solemnly, she was usually right. Whether or not what she predicted would come true, that night the wind reached almost two hundred miles an hour, and the temperature of the still air was minus five degrees Fahrenheit.
After an unusually bone-shaking blast, Mrs. Gamely got up and paced in circles about the center of the room. Wood burned in thestove, hot and bright. She circled the kitchen table, face upturned to he ceiling. Up there, it was a swirling purple, while the walls and floors were the color of warm rose, cream, and yellow. The roof rat-fled. Jack jumped into Mrs. Gamely"s arms, and she held him like a cat."Is there snow, Mother?" Virginia asked, almost as if she were still a child.
"Not in this wind," replied Mrs. Gamely. She threw some more wood into the stove, and went to the corner to get her double-barreled shotgun. She said that, on a night of great cold, bonds break, prisons open, lunatics are pushed over the brink, animals go berserk, and the monsters in the lake might try to come into the house.
They sat there all night, not bothering to go to bed. Although Christmas was some weeks off, it felt like Christmas Eve, and Virginia swayed slightly back and forth with her baby in her arms, dreaming and remembering. Their house was stocked with enough dry wood for two winters, and the pantry was packed up to the ceiling with smoked meats, fowl, and cheeses; dried beef and vegetables; sacks of rice, flour, and potatoes; canned goods; preserves; local wine; and things that the two women needed for their prodigious skills in cooking and baking. The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one"s soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule. On the beds, unused that night, were goosedown quilts as light as whipped cream and three feet thick. Virginia had had some difficult times, and there would undoubtedly be more hard times ahead. But now she was home, in a bay of tranquillity, and it was pleasant just to dream.
Canada: the name itself was as flat and cool as a snow-covered held. It took Virginia and Boissy d"Anglas two days on his sleigh to get to the Laurentians, and what pleasure to watch the moon swell up from the horizon amid the gaps between snow-bound trees. Her years in Canada were difficult to recall, but the memory of the journey there was clear, and all she really needed.
They started out one afternoon, when the sun was low and gold. The snow that day had been warmer than the air, and had shone with a yellowish glow like that of evening light against a brick wall. Two horses, one brown and one nearly red, had pulled north into thewilderness at an even canter which they might have sustained forever and did sustain deep into the nighta"through which they traveled as if in daylight, thanks to a blinding moon reflected by the snow.
The horses loved the fresh track before them, and ran across open fields and between stands of pine as if they were racing. Boissy d"Anglas and the young woman that he had nearly abducted were possessed. Their faces were on fire and their eyes were alight. Minute by minute, shadows were transformed into mountains or groves as they closed upon them and could see the winter-etching in ledges and leaves. Lakes and leaping streams appeared and disappeared on both sides of the road, and as they took the hills and curves the landscape seemed to roll as if it were the ocean. The perfectly round and frozen moon was as bright as ice. The horses were so happy to be running under the aurora that they probably could have gone all the way to Canada without stopping.
But they were made to halt when they arrived at the edge of a frozen lake that stretched north like a highway between lines of hills and jagged mountains done in bristling silver."I don"t know if we should camp here and start out tomorrow, or drive until the horses drop. This is the road we follow for two hundred miles. If I set them off within the hour, they"ll die sooner than not finish."
"Can you sleep?" Virginia asked, implying that she could not."Do you think the horses could sleep?"
"No," he said, snapping the reins, and, as the sleigh thudded onto the snow-covered surface of the lake, they were off.
They crossed rivers, railroads, and roads; they pa.s.sed lighted settlements and whining mills; they penetrated high cold forests, lighting their way with lanterns when the moon was obscured by the trees. Virginia did not know if she were on the sleigh, racing through a freezing and dark pine forest and dreaming of home, or at home by the fire, dreaming of how she had once been taken up completely by the m.u.f.fled pounding of horses" hooves on the snow.
Morning came to Mrs. Gamely and Virginia the way it comes to a sick and feverish childa"slowly, overheated, and stale. Mrs. Gamely threw open the door and looked out. As a cold river of blue air came to redeem the hot room, she said,"Not one flake of snowfell in all that wind. What good was it? All it did was steal away the heat and make us burn a lot of wood."
"What about the lake?" Virginia asked."The lake?" "Did the lake freeze?"
Mrs. Gamely shrugged her shoulders. Virginia got up and put on a quilted jacket. The baby was placed gently into a coc.o.o.n of the same stuff, and they went down to the lake. Even before they rounded the corner of the house, they knew that the lake had frozen, for they heard no lapping or breaking waves, and the wind was even and shrill instead of being divided into a hundred different sounds, like bird-song, as it hit the whitecaps.
The lake had frozen in one night, which meant that a harsh winter was due. Just how difficult it would get could be forecast by the smoothness of the ice. The finer it was, the harder would be the succeeding months, althougha"in the days before it snoweda"ice-boating would be unlike anything on earth. Mrs. Gamely had seen the lake in its smooth state before, but never like this.
It lay there almost laughing at its own perfection. There was not a ripple, streak, or bubble to be seen. The terrible wind and the incessant castellations of foam had been banished and leveled by the fast freeze of heavy blue water. Not a flake of snow skidded across the endless gla.s.s, which was as perfect as an astronomer"s mirror.
"The monsters must be sealed in tight," Mrs. Gamely said. Then she grew silent in contemplation of the winter to come. The ice was airless, smooth, and dark.
FOR two weeks the sun rose and set on Lake of the Coheeries Town, low and burnished, spinning out a mane of golden bra.s.s threads. A steady and gentle breeze moved from west to east on the lake, sweeping the flawless black ice clean in a continuous procession of chattering icicles and twigs that fled from wind and sun like ranks of opera singers who run from their scenes gaily and full of energy in a stage direction stolen from streams, surf, and the storms which fleece autumnal forests.
Even though the air temperature never went above ten degrees the weather was mild because the wind was light and the sky cloudless. With their wells freezing up and their world nearly still, the inhabitants of the town took to the ice in a barrage of Dutch pursuits that saw the sun rise and set, and gave the village the busy and peculiar appearance of a Flemish winter scene. Perhaps they had inherited it; perhaps the historical memory deep within them, like the intense colors with which the landscape was painted, was renewable. A Dutch village arose along the lake. Iceboats raced from west to east and tacked back again, their voluminous sails like a hundred flowers gliding noiselessly across the ice. Up close, there was only a slight sound as gleaming steel runners made their magical cut. A little way in the distance, they sounded like a barely audible steam engine. Miniature villages sprang up on the lake, comprised of fish-ing booths ranged in circles, with flapping doors and curling pigtails of smoke from stovepipe chimneys. Firelight from these shelters reflected across the ice at night in orange and yellow lines that each came to a daggerlike point. Boys and girls disappeared together, on skates, pulled into the limitless distance by a ballooning sail attached to their thighs and shoulders. When they had traveled so far on the empty mirror that they could see no sh.o.r.e, they folded the sail, put it on the ice, and lay on its tame billows to fondle and kiss, keeping a sharp eye on the horizon for the faraway bloom of an iceboat sail, lest they be discovered and admired to death by the younger children who sailed boats into the empty sections just to see such things.
Blazing fires on sh.o.r.e ringed inward bays and harbors like necklaces. At each one, there was steaming chocolate, or rum and cider, and venison roasting on a spit. Skating on the lake in darkness, firing a pistol to keep in touch with a friend, was like traveling in s.p.a.ce, for there were painfully bright stars above and all the way down to a horizon that rested on the lake like a bell jar. The stars were reflected perfectly, though dimly, in the ice, frozen until they could not sparkle. Long before, someone had had the idea of laying down wide runners, setting the light-as-a-white-wedding-cake village bandstand on them, and hitching up a half-dozen plough horses with ice shoes to tow the whole thing around at night. With lights shining from the sh.e.l.l, an entire enchanted village skated behind it as theCoheeries orchestra played a lovely, lucid, magical piece such as "Rhythm of Winter," by A. P. Clarissa. When the farmers all along the undulating lakesh.o.r.e saw a chain of tiny orange flames, and the shining white castle moving dreamlike through the dark (like a dancer making quick steps under concealing skirts), they strapped on their skates and pogoed through their fields to leap onto the ice and race to the magic that glided across the horizon. As they approached, they were astonished by the music, and by the ghostly legions of men, women, and children skating in the darkness behind the bandsh.e.l.l. They looked like the unlit tail of a comet. Young girls twirled and pirouetted to the music: others were content just to follow.
This carnival used up much of the stored reserves of firewood, food, supplies, and feed. It was a foolish thing to do, but the people of Lake of the Coheeries were not able to ignore the perfect weather, which got them rolling at fever pitch. They were careless and crazy. Squandering their gains in the relaxation of their souls, they danced, they sang, and they d.a.m.ned the hard winter to come, affirming their trust in nature by following to the letter its paradoxical orchestrations. Even Mrs. Gamely, a paragon of conservation, gave freely of her stores and partic.i.p.ated in the ruthless cooking of a dozen feasts and the fearless baking of a hundred pies. She and Virginia skated behind the bandsh.e.l.l. They danced on the sh.o.r.e in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and, most of all, to trust. No one could be blind to this lesson after seeing Mrs. Gamely, a widow upon whom the years had come down hard, dancing and laughing on the soft sh.o.r.e, or even on the ice.
BY the middle of January, no one had enough food. They were stretching it out, hoping that it might last until summer (which was impossible), and everyone was disastrously fat and unhealthy from the wild eating in December."The icicles have come home to roost," declared Mrs. Gamely, slightly subdued, but not yet melancholy. The way I figure it," she said, sweeping the pantry with her motile and patibulary eyes,"we have enough food to last until about March.
So what. March is cold. Lamston Tarko and his dog froze to death on the last day of March, thirty seven. How are we going to eat? That"s the question."
"Don"t the other villages have food that they can give us?" asked Virginia.
"No. Their harvests were ruined by hail. Ours weren"t, and we did so well that we gave them enough to survive on. We didn"t even sell it, we gave it. But now we"re all on the same goat. The way the wind blows in winter, no one will come to help. Besides, we"ve always done for ourselves. I wish Antoine Bonticue were here. He could think of something, and so might have Theodore."
"Who was Antoine Bonticue?"
"He died before you were born. He used to live between Coheeries and the march-lands. He was Swiss, and he went around in a spider cart."
"He was Swiss and he went around in a spider cart?" repeated Virginia.
"Yes," said Mrs. Gamely."Spider carts are wonderful. They"re very quiet, and you can"t drive them on busy roads, because the spiders tend to get crushed. They"re also somewhat slow, but they"re quite economical, especially for light loads. As you might be able to tell from his name, Antoine Bonticue weighed less than a hundred pounds. He was some sort of engineer, and he used to stretch cables and pulleys from one place to another. Evidently, rigging cables is therapy for the Swiss: or part of their theology. What was it that he used to say? *A balanced arc between mountain rows / as servant to his master shows / the power of besieged belief/ in something something something, something something somethinga"something to do with ducks, or rainbows."
"Theodore would know what to do. We will, too. After all, we have until March."
Then they made dinner by slicing off a chunk of smoked beef, spilling upon the table half a pound of dried corn, and grating some hard cheese into a small pile of dairy sawdust. A pur *e of these three things went to feed the baby. The rest became a kind of landlocked bouillabaisse into which dill brought its springlike scent and red pepper was shaken until the dish that they cooked had enough life toattack them as they devoured it. The sting was satisfying, but the two women were left hungry. What will we do in March? they wondered.
That night, perhaps because it was already the fifth night that they had gone to bed hungry, the answer came to Virginia in a dream that was served up as richly and elegantly as hotel food that lives deep inside booming silver domes and rides from place to place on noiseless carts.