Snow in August (3 page)

He stepped into the narrow bathroom off the kitchen, closing the door behind him. The tiles were colder than the linoleum.
His teeth chattered. He urinated, pulled the chain to flush, and then washed his face quickly in the cold water of the sink,
thinking: I will go into it; I will face the storm, climb the hard hills, push into the wind of the blizzard to the church
on the hill. Father Heaney, a veteran of the war, will celebrate the eight o’clock mass, and I will be there at his side.
The only human being to make it through the blizzard. Even the old ladies in black, those strange old biddies who make it
to church through rainstorms and heat waves, even they will fail to make
it through the storm. The pews will be empty. The candles will flicker in the cold. But I will be there.

His heart raced at the prospect of the great test. He didn’t care now about the souls in Purgatory. He wanted the adventure.
He wished he had a dogsled waiting downstairs. He wished he could bundle himself in furs and lift a leather whip and urge
the huskies forward, shouting,
Mush, boys, mush!
He had the serum in a pouch and by God, he would get it to Nome.

He combed his hair, and when he stepped out of the bathroom, his mother, Kate, was raking the ashes in the coal stove, her
flannel robe pulled tightly around her, worn brown slippers on her feet. Steam leaked from her mouth into the frigid air.
A teapot rested on the black cast-iron top of the stove, waiting for heat.

“Let me do that, Mom,” the boy said. “That’s
my
job.”

“No, no, you’re already washed,” she said, in her soft Irish accent, a hair of irritation in her voice. Raking the dead ashes
was one of Michael’s chores, but in his excitement over the blizzard, he’d forgotten. “Just go and get dressed.”

“I’ll
do
it,” he said, taking the flat shovel from her and digging the ashes out of the bottom tray. He poured them into a paper bag,
a gray powder rising in the air to mix with the steam from his breath, then shoveled fresh coal from the bucket onto the grate.
The fine ash made him sneeze.

“For the love of God, Michael, get
dressed
,” she said now, pushing him aside. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

Back in his room, at the far end of the railroad flat, he pulled an undershirt over his head and a dark green shirt on top
of it, shoving the tails into his trousers. After tugging galoshes over his shoes, he finally raised the blackout shade. The
snow was piled against the windowpane at least two feet above the steel
slats of the fire escape. Beyond the steep drift, snow swirled like a fog so dense he could not see across Ellison Avenue.
He hurried back into the kitchen. A fire was burning now in the coal stove, its odor staining the air like rotten eggs. He
wished his mother would buy the Blue Coal advertised on
The Shadow
; it was harder—
anthracite
, they said in school—with almost no smell. But she told him once that they couldn’t afford it and he never asked again.

“I’m sure you could stay home if you like, Michael,” she said, the irritation out of her voice now. “They know how far you
have to come.”

“I can do it,” he said, combing his hair, choosing not to remind her that the church was eight blocks from 378 Ellison Avenue.
From the backyards he heard a sound that he was sure was the howling of a thousand wolves.

“Still,” she said, pouring water for tea, “it’s a terrible long way in this storm.”

He followed her glance to the wall clock: seven twenty-five. He had time. He was certain that she also looked at the framed
photograph of his father. Thomas Devlin. Michael was named for his mother’s father, who had died in Ireland long ago. The
photograph of his own father was hanging beside the picture of President Roosevelt that she’d cut out of the
Daily News
magazine when he died. For a moment, Michael wondered what she thought about when she looked at the picture of his father.
The boy didn’t remember many details about the man she called Tommy. He was a large man with dark hair and a rough, stubbled
beard who had gone off to the army when Michael was six. And had never come back. In the framed formal photograph, he was
wearing his army uniform. The skin on his smiling face looked smooth. Much smoother than it actually felt. His hair was covered
by the army cap, but at the
sides it was lighter than the boy remembered. That brown hair. And a deep voice with an Irish brogue. And a blue Sunday suit
and polished black shoes. And a song about the green glens of Antrim. And stories about a dog he had as a boy in Ireland,
a dog named Sticky, who could power a boat with his tail and fly over mountains. His mother surely remembered much more about
him. The boy knew his father had been killed in Belgium in the last winter of the war, and thought: Maybe the blizzard reminds
her of Tommy Devlin dead in the snow, a long way from Brooklyn. Maybe that’s why she’s irritated. It’s not my lollygagging.
It’s the snow.

“I wish you could eat something,” she said, sipping her tea, but not pouring a cup for Michael because she knew he could neither
eat nor drink before serving mass.

“I’ve got to receive Communion, Mom.”

“Well, hurry home. There’ll be bacon and eggs.”

Usually he was famished and thirsty on mornings before mass, but the excitement of the storm was driving him now. He took
his mackinaw from the closet beside the front door.

“Wear a hat, lad,” she said.

“This has a hood, Mom,” he said, “and it’s real warm. Don’t worry.”

She took the starched surplice from the clothesline and covered it with butcher paper, closing the wrapping with Scotch tape.
Then she kissed him on the cheek as he opened the door to the hall. Halfway down the first flight of stairs, he glanced back,
and she was watching him go, her arms folded, her husband smiling from the wall behind her, right next to the dead president
of the United States.

I wish she wasn’t so sad, he thought.

And then, leaping down the three flights of stairs to the street, he braced himself for the storm.

A
s the boy stepped out of the vestibule, into what Jack London called the Great White Silence, he felt as if his eyes had been
scoured. Down here, in those first moments on the open street, the snow wasn’t even white; here in its whirling center the
storm was as gray as the crystal core of a block of ice. Or the dead eyes of Blind Pew in
Treasure Island
. Michael blinked again and again, his eyelids moving without his command, as the tears welled up from the cold. He rubbed
his eyes to focus and felt cold tears on his cheeks. He rubbed until at last he could see. The only thing moving was the snow,
driven wildly by the wind.

He plunged his hands into the mackinaw’s pockets. And his gloves were not there. Goddamn. He remembered leaving them to dry
beside the kerosene stove in the living room. Wool gloves, with a hole in the right forefinger. Thinking: I should go upstairs
and get them. No. I can’t take the time. I’ll be late.
Can’t be late. And wishing he had a watch. I’ll just keep my hands in my pockets. If they freeze, I’ll offer it up.

Then he started to walk, the wrapped surplice under his right arm, hands in his coat pockets. In this block of Ellison Avenue
he was sheltered in part by the four-story buildings, and he stepped lumpily through the drifts piled against the tenements,
wishing he had snowshoes. As he squinted tightly and saw better, a phrase that he had memorized from Jack London rose in his
mind—
sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world
—and he tingled with excitement. These were ghostly wastes. This was a dead world. He was the sole speck of life.

The fallen snow was up over the tops of parked cars. It covered the newsstand outside Slowacki’s candy store, which for the
first time in memory was dark. All the other shops on the block were dark too, their doorways piled with snow. There wasn’t
even a light in Casement’s Bar across the street, where Alfred the porter usually mopped floors before the start of business.
Michael could see no sign of a trolley car, no traffic, no footprints in the snow. Somewhere, the wolves howled. Perhaps,
up ahead, he would find the Male-mute Kid. Or Sitka Charlie. He would build a fire on the frozen shores of Lake Lebarge. Up
ahead were the wild bars of Dawson. And the Chilkoot Pass. And the lost trail to All Gold Canyon. Here on Ellison Avenue,
Michael Devlin felt like so many of the men in those stories: the only person on earth.

He was not, however, afraid. He had been an altar boy for three years, and the route to Sacred Heart was as familiar as the
path through the flat he’d just left behind. Wolves howl, the wind blows, there is no sky. But there is no danger here, he
thought. Here I am safe.

Then he stepped past Pete’s Diner on the corner of Collins Street and the wind took him. No simple wind. A fierce, howling
wind, ripping up the street from the harbor, a wind angry at the earth, raging at its huge trees and proud houses and puny
people. The wind lifted the boy and then dropped him hard and tumbled him, whipping him across the icy avenue. Gripping the
surplice with one hand, Michael grabbed with the other for something, anything, and found only ice-crusted snow.

He rolled until he was thumped against the orange post of a fire alarm box.

“Holy God,” he said out loud. “Holy God.”

He gasped for breath, sucking in darts of snow, his nose clogged with ice. But if he was hurt, he was too cold to know what
part of him was broken. Still holding the surplice, he skittered on hands and knees and braced his back against the leeward
side of the fire alarm box and huddled low, where the wind wasn’t so strong. No pain. Nothing broken. He looked around, keeping
his head down, and realized he’d been blown across all six lanes of Ellison Avenue. He saw the heavy neon sign above the entrance
of Unbeatable Joe’s bar dangling from a wire, tossing and shaking in the wind, then crunching against the side of the building.
But he couldn’t see very far down Collins Street, not even as far as home plate on the stickball court. Everything was white
and wild. Then he saw that his mackinaw was coated with snow, and he remembered how characters in those Yukon tales always
froze to death if they remained still, or if they fell asleep. They huddled with dogs, they held tight to wolves; anything
for warmth. Or they rose and walked. I have to get up, he thought. If I don’t, I will goddamn well die. Michael shoved the
surplice under his mackinaw,
stuffing it into his belt. Then, crouching low, he began to run.

He ran into the wind, and made it across Collins Street, grabbing for the picket fence outside the factory of the Universal
Lighting Company. The building rose above him like an ice mountain from the Klondike, one of those treacherous peaks that
killed men in winter and drowned them in spring, washing their bodies into the Yukon River. The black iron pickets were so
cold they seemed to burn his bare hands, and he was afraid the skin would be torn off his palms. But his skin held, and he
pulled himself along until he was free of the hammering force of the wind.

At Corrigan Street he repeated the process: head down, crouched, falling once, then up again, until he reached the shops untouched
by the wind. Away off, about three blocks, he could see the ghostly shape of a trolley car. Its lights were on but it wasn’t
moving. High above the avenue, the cables that gave the trolleys their power were quivering like bowstrings. Michael paused
under the shuddering marquee of the Venus, gazing at the showcards offering
The Four Feathers
and
Gunga Din
. He’d seen both at least three times and tried to conjure warm images of India or the vast deserts of Africa, with Fuzzy
Wuzzies charging in the dust and British soldiers sweating in the heat. The images only made him feel colder. And for the
first time, he was afraid.

I have to go now, he thought. I have to turn this corner and go up Kelly Street, past the armory, past the Jewish synagogue,
have to cross MacArthur Avenue, have to turn right at the park. I have to do this now. With the wind at my back. I must go.
Not just to serve mass. No. For a bigger reason. If I turn around and go home, I’ll be a goddamned coward. Nobody will see
me turn and run for home. But I’ll know.

He turned the corner into Kelly Street. There were three-story houses to his left, the humped shapes of parked cars to his
right, and around him and under him and above him he heard a high, thin, piercing whine, the savage, wordless wolf call of
the wind: penetrating him, lifting him and dropping him, driving him past the soaring drifts that concealed buried cars. The
whine was insistent and remorseless. Who are
you
, Michael Devlin, the voice said, to challenge
me
?

Then he looked up and his way was blocked. A giant elm had been smashed to the ground from the front yard of one of the houses.
As the tree fell before the wind, it had crushed the fence of the house and collapsed the roof of a parked car, and it was
now stretched out to the far side of the street. The branches of the tree seemed to reach toward the white sky in protest.
Snow gathered on the dying trunk. The windows of the crushed car had exploded, and snow was drifting onto its seats. The boy
thought: If the tree had hit me instead of the car, I’d be dead.

Holy God.

He pushed through loose waist-deep snow between two parked cars and crossed the street, skirting the murdered tree, until
he reached the side of the armory. This was no refuge. Behind its barred windows, the armory housed a boxing ring and dozens
of old jeeps and National Guardsmen called “weekend warriors.” But its sheer redbrick walls rose a forbidding six stories
above the street, and no doorways offered shelter. The boy saw now that the armory’s copper drainpipes had burst. High above
the ground, shoving their way from the ruptured seams of the drainpipes, giant icicles stabbed at the air, defying the wind.
They were thick, muscular icicles, a foot wide at the root, sharp as spears at the tip. Michael Devlin remembered photographs
in the encyclopedia of stalactites, gray
and dead; these icicles looked just as primitive and ancient and evil. And all of them were aimed at him.