This Magnificent Desolation (2 page)

For a moment the sound of a transistor radio playing Handel's
Messiah
occupies the stillness and the measure of the train's wheels striking the divides. A young boy bedecked in a Great Northern service coat from another century dims the lamps in the carriage. Father Magnusson says a prayer to the patron saint of his Capuchin order, a benediction for those less fortunate and in need of God's blessing, and finally, because he is away from home and because his mother always made him do so before his bed hour as a child, he says the Lord's Prayer.

From within the darkened glass, the reflection of the lamps: flames flickering in miniature, twisting and bending with the rocking of the train. Peering from his window Father Magnusson recognizes nothing, the distance of the plain foreshortened by falling snow so that not even the lights of nearby Lac qui Parle can be seen.

He leans his head, with its tonsure of white hair, fine as a dandelion clock bristle, upon his pillow. Snow taps the glass, wind moans beneath the windows, and the engine's whistle sounds out the long depths of the dark Minnesota countryside. Father Magnusson closes his eyes and sleeps.

Where the wind abates and the shifting drifts momentarily cease, the land—hills and valleys and mountains—becomes visible, and against it, the small outcrops of the living: pinpricks of light flickering and fading abjectly upon the plain as the storm pushes and heaves its indeterminate way across the Northland. Throughout the night
the storm buries the land and the people with it. The temperature continues to plummet until, at Mount Cascade, it is the lowest recorded since the great blizzard of 1908. Winds, gusting at eighty miles per hour, press snow into drifts fifteen feet high. The newspaper accounts of that winter will describe tragedy after tragedy, of man and woman and animal lost and frozen in the worst winter blizzard in seventy years.

At Madelia, Alice Walker goes in search of her husband, Gerald, and both succumb, alone, to the cold, never having found each other.

Thomas Johnson, a farmer tending to his cows, freezes to death near Evansville in the north. His two hundred Holsteins freeze as well. In all, some twenty thousand head of livestock will be lost during the storm.

At New Ulm, Robert Kitchner ventures the storm seeking a doctor for his wife, Bonnie, and newborn baby boy, Joshua Michael Kitchner. All three freeze to death on the road to Perdition.

Sixteen schoolchildren, four parents, and a bus driver freeze to death on a bus stranded between Fort Ridgely and Beaverton Falls. The bus is headed toward Raleigh, one of the last way stations from which they can view the Holiday Train's passing.

No one will know the final death count of the storm until the first thaws two months later, when dozens more bodies are recovered in the snowmelt, like the drowned bodies of swimmers emerging from the sea.

When the Festival of Lights Holiday Train is found, an hour or so before dawn, rescuers see the train from far off in the night, its ten vintage Pullman cars outlined by the hundreds of thousands of glittering Christmas lights, the flickering light from the carriage windows casting a hazy and uncertain light through the swirling snow.

As they draw closer, they see the dark bulk of the train and its carriages, its roof and sides bristling with cables and wires that hold still burning bulbs, and the engine stack outlined against the unmoving gray sky.

Narrow bars of amber light spill from the carriage windows and curve across the high rounded snowdrifts pressed against the doors. The engine is cold and has been for most of the night. Everyone appears to be in a slumber, bodies knitted together and joined wherever space allows, beneath the dining car's tables, in the wide berthed carriage seats, their hands clasped in final rigor and in seeming prayer. Father Magnusson lies curled in his seat, his ligature contracted and rigid, his body pulled into itself in the position of a newborn. The transistor radio continues to play, its static, tinny music sounding hollowly throughout the silent carriages.

The thousands of Christmas lights continue to burn, powered by the four Cat diesel generators in the final boxcar, and only in the hours after the rescuers' grim discovery, as more rescuers arrive aboard mechanized snowcats and make their way toward the train from Shilo and Eden, do the generators fail. The lights flicker and then extinguish themselves, blinking out slowly, car by car, until only one car remains illuminated. And then that too fails and the rescuers are plunged into the skipping, fragmented darkness and shadow of their own slashing flashlights and broad headlights, disembodied shapes, voices, hollers, and cries. The absence of wind is broken at intervals by a sudden soft sobbing as a rescuer discovers, among the frozen bodies, a family member, a relative, a friend.

In Thule, at the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy, a bell tolls the hour of five A.M., the morning hours of the Divine Office, and a woman appears through the snow. Where Duncan's mother has come from or what roads she has traveled to reach the Capuchin monastery alive, no one knows. This in itself some call a miracle. A portent of something divine amidst the human tragedy.

She rings the night watchman's bell, and then when there is a stirring from within—through the leaded windows a hazy light illuminating the hall—she lays the baby upon the flagstone. The night watchman catches only a glimpse of her through the swirling snow, and if there is a car waiting for her, he sees no sight of it. She is simply
gone, lost in the swirling white; the wind is shearing the frozen surface of Lake Cunburnt and howling across the sound and this baby, bundled and protected in a vast layering of sheepskin blanket, is bawling ferociously at his feet.

There is a moment of cessation, when the storm momentarily abates and the sky clears, and the stars begin to fall from the heavens. Brother Canice says that on the night Duncan's mother arrived with him bundled in her arms, he witnessed from the chapel's tower a meteor shower flaring brightly over the Iron Range, and so distinct and singular was its effect that he swears that he heard each meteor's tail hissing—startling chromatic colors momentarily so brilliant that, when he closed his eyes, he saw them still.

The observatory in St. Paul confirms this. There
is
a meteor shower this night—a Leonid meteor shower; the dust grains of Comet Jacobs-Stein, which, in its return to perihelion, has created a meteor storm the likes of which will not be seen for another thirty years. And for those who might look skyward in the one brief moment when the storm pauses, the stars are falling from the heavens and arcing, fluorescent tails flickering, toward the north and a horizon upon which seems to burn a bright golden ring of incandescent fire. Then the night sky collapses back into itself, the stars disappear, and the blizzard rages once more.

Brother Canice leans back his chair, as if considering the narrative, and Duncan does the same. Two myths entwined together and inseparable from the other. Something akin to the Holy Trinity, yet absent the missing part, that part that contains his parents.

Wind moans in the pipe, breathes upon the embers so that they grow bright. Brother Canice sighs, chews loudly on his sunflower seeds and together they watch the glowing embers of wood in the stove pulsing like a heartbeat in the dark.

…

When Duncan tells this story to other children in the Home, Julie says that he's got it all wrong, that it was, in fact,
her
mother who arrived amidst a snowstorm, the worst storm of the century. And Julie says that her mother didn't lay her at the feet of just any watchman; rather, it was Bishop O'Connor himself who answered the door and into whose arms her mother pressed the small bundle that he would take as one of his own, before she ran off to her world-famous and final performance at the Humboldt Theater in New York City, never to be heard from again. Julie reminds Duncan that he has no memory and that, in his made-up life, he never knows truth from fiction. Billy shakes his head at the both of them and says they've watched Olivia de Havilland in
Whose Baby Are You Now?
one too many times.

But Duncan's not so sure. He doesn't ever remember seeing
Whose Baby Are You Now?

In the beginning, Duncan remembers the sense of cold, so strong it stilled his breath, made him feel as if a great weight were constricting his limbs and pressing upon his chest, and amidst this intense cold there was a brilliant white flash of light, stars exploding supernovae, and then falling collapsing, turning in upon themselves; and God's voice calling to him and so much pain and longing and Duncan—not knowing what those things meant then and having no way to say what he felt—just crying, bawling, his lungs filling with the raw, harsh air that seemed to seize in his throat, and nothing to see but blinding white light.

His mother was sitting with her knees up and apart and the room was dark about them. Through a haze of ice and mist, flickering lights swayed back and forth and Duncan was stuck between his mother's thighs, halfway out and halfway between this world and some other. She bent herself forward so that they were looking at each other for the first time; he could just see her there high above him, so very pale,
and suddenly he was calm. His mother gritted her teeth; a purple vein pulsed at her temple. He wonders how he looked to her then: calm or complacent or petulant perhaps, a stubborn little thing refusing to budge and not offering help of any kind.

Breathe! Someone hollered and pleaded. You must breathe!

He stared into her eyes and they were filled with pain. Fine red cobwebs of broken capillaries shot through her eyes like inkblots. Red hair lay frozen in sharp-looking crystalline angles to her head. Her body shook and her jaws trembled. Her face, drained of all color, seemed to glisten and shine. In the darkness someone shouted something about his failing heartbeat, and only then, finally, did his mother at last breathe—a great bellowing, spittle-filled cry that steamed the air before them: Son of a Bitch!

Swaddled in a receiving blanket, Duncan watched in the darkness as they sewed her up. She went into shock as they worked on her, and as someone scrambled to plunge a hypodermic into her shuddering thigh, she turned to look at him one last time before her eyes rolled back in her head.

Duncan watched and listened without a voice, and although he couldn't speak, he knew it was God who had spoken to him at the first moment of his birth, just as he knew it was God's light and music he had been born from, and now—the cold, so very cold, and the dark and his mother's ashen blue, pain-washed face.

Brother Canice says it was all a dream, he couldn't possibly remember being born, that Duncan and his mother never saw each other—such a thing was impossible—and even if he could or had, God certainly didn't speak to him. Duncan reminds him that he's special, they all tell him he's special because he was born the night of the storm, and Brother Canice looks at the ceiling and far away, as if he's listening to the children tossing and struggling and moaning in their dreamsleep against the parents who abandoned them here and their
anguish like the caterwaul of distant animals, and says slowly, Oh, Duncan, you're special all right.

Perhaps Brother Canice was right. Perhaps it was all a dream. But that is all Duncan remembers: cold and light and pain and God's voice calling to him, the peace he felt looking upon his mother's face even amidst her terrible struggle, and then something akin to sleepwalking for a long, long time.

Then into this constantly shifting gray—with the sense of things half formed and a brief flickering awareness always dimming into shadow—comes music: the faint, distant sound of an old transistor radio and Elvis Presley singing “Blue Moon.” And it is raining. Duncan listens to the sound of raindrops tap-tap-tapping glass. Light trembles and shudders upon a far wall, and the shadow of rain trickles down the paint.

He is in a large room that smells slightly of disinfectant, a room that he would later learn the Brothers called the
pellegrinaro
, or sick room: dark wide-board floors burnished brown and gold with patterns of wear upon which moribund light briefly shimmers as if passing through a bowl of murky water; brightly colored frescoes adorning the walls and showing a narrative of some kind: robed figures journeying though pastureland amidst slanting sunlight, huddled men and women clinging to one another beneath tempestuous black clouds, all leading toward a far hill, where three crucifixes rise in stark silhouette. The image presses at his eyes to rise also, and he cranes his neck toward the ceiling, which, some thirty feet above, curves into a pinioned, gilt dome, bordered by elaborate filigree: a fiery ring in which the faces of the saints and martyrs, in bas-relief, stare down at him.

Panicked, he tries to follow the sound of Elvis's voice, for, with
his song, there comes peace and a sense of the divine. The transistor radio momentarily crackles and then its sound reverberates, haunting and thin, as if it were traveling the length of some tiled hallway between distant rooms.

He listens to Elvis's fragile, high, crooning voice and for a moment he closes his eyes and lets the sense of it fill him. If there had been a memory in his head of something other, a thought, or dream, he should have fled there and hid, but there was nothing. Nothing he could evoke and nothing in which he might find comfort besides the sound of Elvis.

A small, wizened old man with a large, almost perfectly rounded skull sits with his eyes closed in a chair opposite him, tapping a white walking stick on the floor in time to the music—or perhaps he is listening to another song, some other music somewhere else, deep inside his head, but it doesn't matter, because there is a big smile on his face and Duncan feels his face and realizes that he is smiling as well. Tall, leaded windows are open to the outside and the smell and sounds of the day drift in; Duncan can hear children laughing and shouting in play, and rainwater hissing through trees. He blinks rapidly and then a girl is standing before him, staring intently.