This Magnificent Desolation (43 page)

Mom? he calls to her. Mom? But he realizes even as he takes her
limp hand in his that she is gone. Leaning his head against her shoulder, he tries to force his own life back into her, pretends that he can hear her heartbeat, the pulse of blood in her hand beneath his own, the rise and fall of her chest, and the reassuring warm exhale of her breath. There is the smell of her skin and of her clothes and he clings to this. And she remains warm for a long time, and when her warmth begins to fade, he presses himself closer to her and sits there weeping and then falls asleep and wakes with his hands in hers and she is cold and stiff and it is dark. He calls her name softly in the darkness, whispering to her as she used to whisper to him in the night when the nightmares came, and the hours pass in the resuscitation of her name like a prayer.

In the early hours of the morning a light flickers through the dark, the short diffuse beam of a small flashlight through which dust motes shudder as it sweeps slowly across the back of the theater and across the seats. When the beam reaches them, Clay's voice sounds at his shoulder:
Duncan? Maggie? Are you okay?
But Duncan is walking arm in arm with his mother through the snow of Scollay Square now. When he looks back, he sees his mother and himself sitting amongst the empty rows of seats staring blankly up at the stage, and Clay's flashlight searching the dark for them.

Upon the stage snow falls unabated. Mother and Duncan look at each other and smile. He stares at the paleness of her face, the intensity of her blue eyes, sharpened now by the white snow that surrounds them. He feels the weight of her pressed against him and his arm looped warmly through hers. The snow is falling upon their faces, pelting cold upon the skin, caught perfectly formed and then slowly melting in his mother's hair as they move through old Scollay Square,
Duncan?
farther and farther into the snow-whitened alleys until,
Duncan, are you okay?
there is nothing to see of them—all sight and sound is obliterated: He and mother are together and then they are no more and then they are gone.

It is 1972 and Duncan sees the Festival of Lights Holiday Train, a 1928 GNR Empire Builder steam engine streaking along the snow-blown Minnesota tracks, with coal roaring in the engine's coal port and spilling in fiery embers from the tender in the way that he remembers embers tumbling from the kitchen woodstove when Brother Canice stoked the ashes before telling his stories. Aboard the train one of the performers—his mother as a young woman—passes Father Magnusson and glances at him briefly and then pauses before his chair, transfixed by and in awe of the storm beyond the glass. The light in the carriage flickers and then dims and the swaying, trembling car is in darkness. The electric Christmas lights upon the exterior of the carriage continue to burn and their phosphorescent glow shows the rills of snow beyond the blurred rails, and in the dark the vast and inexorable sense of such snow hurtling down.

Father Magnusson stirs and glances up at Mother, who continues to stare beyond the glass.

My, it's some storm, Father, she says. Do you think we'll be all right? Instinctively, something she has done since her belly became so prominent and vulnerably exposed to every doorway, wall, passerby, Mother clutches her stomach and cradles it with both hands.

I think we'll be fine, child. Don't you worry. And as if to reassure her, he reaches out and briefly touches his hand upon hers. You'll both be fine.

Mother looks out at the night. The lights within the carriage slowly burn up to their peak, and the car is lit once more. Father Magnusson lays his head back upon the pillow. She nods and glances at the priest, but he has already closed his eyes and turned away, his old head lolling toward the whispers and sighs of the storm. Goodnight, Father, she whispers and moves toward the vestibule.

Beyond the plate glass window the landscape is lost in snowfall; it swirls and presses against the glass, and the wind pushes it beneath the sill, where it moans and sighs and then sweeps the sides and tops
of the carriage, down, down, down the length of its fifteen cars and at the train's end the snow and ice form a great tail: a comet shooting along the tracks.

Duncan sees the rescuers moving through the frozen vestibules of the train, their flashlights and lamps flickering. Over here! a man hollers. There's footprints! One of them is out in the storm! and then comes the sound of pounding footfalls banging the hard metal dividers between the carriages, as other men, already exhausted and numbed by their daylong trek through the cold and by experiencing the sensation of death everywhere before them, come running, their lanterncaps sweeping the carriages frantically.

Mother is struggling through the snow, stumbling, blinded by the wind and the cold, and her strength is fading, her heartbeat sluggish in her chest, the air seeming to freeze the breath in her throat. With her arms wrapped about her newborn child, she can feel that other heart now slowing and becoming so soft she can barely detect it and then it stops completely. Gritting her teeth, she falters, sinks to her waist, and wrestles forward and up again—she and her child cannot die here like this.

They track Mother's footsteps for what seems hours, disappearing out over the white, windswept plains, farther and farther from the train, and finally find her, partially covered in a snowdrift. A doctor holds her wrist and listens through a stethoscope to her heart and from mother's nostrils a meager tendril of breath smokes the air. Her skin is ashen and pale, icicles hang from her closed eyelashes; and only when they've pulled her from the snow do they discover Duncan beneath her and the doctor hushes the men so that he might hear Duncan's heartbeat, faint and almost imperceptible. They cover them in blankets and, returning to the train carriage, carry in industrial heaters to warm them until the doctor decides they are ready to be moved onto one of the snowcats. Every twenty minutes the doctor presses a warm solution through a small incision he's made in Duncan's stomach, and as his core temperature rises, the men nod to
one another, touch one another's backs and shoulders reassuringly, almost tenderly. More than one man cries but the cold immediately freezes the tears upon their cheeks.

Although Duncan is alive, his heartbeat is almost too weak to be heard, and they pray before they wrap him in blankets and transport him outside. And now they are taking him and Mother through the swirling snow and above them the storm momentarily pauses, the sky clears, and he sees the stars falling from the heavens. The brightness collapses and the storm rages on and he is carried through the blizzard, and in the cold and coming darkness he turns toward his mother but can no longer see her face.

Maggie? Duncan? Are you okay?

We shall find peace.
We shall hear angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

—ANTON CHEKOV

Beyond the rail yards and the rented house on Ipswich Street, the first strakes of freewheeling snow drifts across the railway tracks, dusting the metal with a fine white powder, and Duncan pulls the collar of his jacket tighter about his neck. The siren from the Edison plant bellows as twilight fades and his stomach cramps with hunger. The ground is cold and wet and the pressing darkness has turned the sky the color of a plum halved in two. For a moment he is caught in that strange going-down of light: dark clouds pressing with the night from above but through the tree line the slivered impression of everything in flame, and beyond the trees and hills, and far away in the
distance, so far it might even be another country, the suggestion of light like dawn. The voices of workmen come to him, cajoling and distant, their lanterns trembling like small flames as they traverse the tracks. Foghorns sound out in the bay. The distant bridge is a flickering band of bowed, unceasing light, the beams of car headlights merging and coalescing, sparkling through the crystals of snow.

When the train comes, its lights shuddering through the dusk, he sees the snakelike silhouette of its load: a hundred or more dump cars swaying upon the rails, and it is moving so slowly from the yard that he is able to climb aboard easily, his heart hammering in his chest and his breath smoking the air relentlessly. Searching behind him, he pauses on the ladder, as if his mother might suddenly reach her hand out of the dark to him, but there is only the trembling impression of things passing darkly before his eyes as the train picks up speed, and he climbs the ladder and drops down into the tin.

The car rocks from side to side, bangs and thumps on the rails as the engineer opens the valves. Duncan closes his eyes and dreams and then wakes again and it is still dark. He is riding all the points of the compass, traversing all the great and strange meridians of the wide earth to a place where he might finally see those things that his mother dreamed of seeing, her red hair whipping about her face as she peered over the lip of an open dump car out upon the vast expanse of America: goldenrod and larkspur trembling at the edges of the tracks and the land falling away behind her in one endless, spiraling revolution.

The train lurches forward and into the dump car comes snow. Duncan can feel it on his face and in his hair. He holds out his tongue to taste it. Through scattered storm clouds the stars are glittering, and crumbling satellites spin through their lonely orbits. A hundred astronauts are floating up there, at the edge of night, arms outstretched like the wings of angels. Michael Collins stares down upon the moon from the command module
Columbia
and listens to the mission's
audio files. Father Magnusson stands upon the edge of the great, striated mare, the Sea of Tranquility, scattering the ashes of the stranded astronauts and commending their souls to the deepest of the deep. Billy and Julie are there as well, lowering their heads as Father Magnusson prays, and holding each other's hands like small paper dolls. Joshua is sitting before the sea, dangling his feet over the edge of its precipice. He's wearing his olive field jacket and his blue bandanna and Maggie stands above him, softly kneading his shoulders. She bends to his ear, whispers something, and Joshua nods, reaches back and takes her hand. She's wearing her blue sequined dress from the Windsor Tap, and though it is stretched across the protuberance of her cancerous belly, it sparkles with starlight, the fading iridescence of a passing comet. And Duncan looks up at them and smiles and tells them that everything will be okay, that he is okay, and somewhere out in the dark, like a spark of dimming light, Elvis begins to sing a halting version of “Blue Moon.”

Michael Collins touches his intercom console, clicks the Play button, and through the vacuum of space, comes a ghostly static followed by the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the audio files of Buzz and Armstrong from twenty years before, looping over and over and over, and always he is spinning, spiraling farther and farther away through all the dark, silent corridors of space where night begins but there is also light and everything that God made possible in his slow turn toward them.

109:43:16 ALDRIN: Beautiful view!

109:43:18 ARMSTRONG: Isn't that something! Magnificent sight out here.

109:43:24 ALDRIN: Magnificent desolation
.

109:43:16 ALDRIN: Beautiful view!

109:43:18 ARMSTRONG: Isn't that something! Magnificent sight out here
.

109:43:24 ALDRIN: Magnificent desolation
.

109:43:16 ALDRIN: Beautiful view!

109:43:18 ARMSTRONG: Isn't that something! Magnificent sight out here
.

109:43:24 ALDRIN: Magnificent desolation
.

000:00:00 Tranquility to Columbia. Michael, are you there? Over. My God, Michael, you should see this. What a sight!

000:00:00 Are you there?

000:00:00 Michael? Are you there?

000:00:00 Michael?

000:00:00 Michael?

000:00:00: Michael?
Are you there?

With thanks and appreciation for funding provided by the Burke Foundation and the Walter and Constance Burke Award, which contributed greatly to the completion of this book.

To my agent, Richard Abate, for his unwavering faith. To my colleagues at Dartmouth, and specifically to Darsie Riccio, Andrew McCann, Michael Chaney, and Patricia McKee.

To Douglas Purdy, with respect and admiration, for his inspiration, friendship, and brotherhood.

To my daughter, Colette Gráinne, who always makes me remember what is most important and who keeps me real.

And with love and gratitude to Jen Purdy, for all the things you make seem possible and for the beauty of your wild heart.

Thank you, and bless you all.

Thomas O'Malley is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently on the faculty of Dartmouth College's creative writing program. He lives in the Boston area.

In the Province of Saints

First published in Great Britain 2013

This electronic edition published in February 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2013 by Thomas O'Malley

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