Snow in August (4 page)

He turned his eyes away from the icicles and trudged on, wishing again that he had a wristwatch. Seems like hours since I
left the house, he thought, but maybe it’s only been minutes. I don’t really know, and the storm doesn’t care anything about
time. He thought: Maybe this is crazy. What if the church is closed too? What if Father Heaney took one look at the storm
and decided to celebrate mass alone in the rectory? What if the electricity has failed and the altar is dark? And suppose
another tree falls, or a monster icicle, and hits me? Without warning. Nobody to shout: Watch it, kid. It would just happen.
And I’d be left here in the drifts, without a dog or a friend or a scout from the mining camp. My mother would have to bury
me and she’d be left completely alone. Or I’d end up crippled, a drag on her and everyone else. In one of the Jack London
stories, a prospector broke his leg in a storm and his best friend was forced to obey the wisdom of the trail by shooting
him in the head. Otherwise both of them would die.

Then, moving over a piled ridge, Michael imagined his father in the snows of Belgium. Many Americans had been killed there
by the Germans in what was called the Battle of the Bulge. Thousands of them. He saw his father in full uniform, with a helmet
and heavy boots, carrying a gun, and the snow driving even harder than this Brooklyn blizzard, and the wind whining, with
the goddamned Germans somewhere up ahead in the blinding storm: as close, maybe, as MacArthur Avenue, as near as the synagogue.
Unseen. Hidden. Ready to kill. Did Tommy Devlin think about turning around and running home? Of course not. He wasn’t a goddamned
coward. But did he have a friend with him? Or was he alone when he was shot, his blood oozing red into the white snow? Had
he lost all
feeling in his hands and feet before they killed him? Did he cry? Did he hear wolves? Did he think of Mom? Home in the top-floor
flat on Ellison Avenue? His blue suit? Did he think of me?

Suddenly, Michael Devlin heard a voice.

A human voice.

Not the wind, but the first real voice he’d heard since he left home.

He stopped and gazed around at the deserted world.

And then, through the slanting sheets of icy snow, he saw a man peering from a door on the Kelly Street side of the synagogue.
A man with a beard. And a black suit. Like the man in black who called to Billy Batson from the dark entrance to the subway.
He was waving at Michael.

“Hallo, hallo,” the bearded man called, his voice seeming to cross a distance much wider than the street. “Hallo.” As if coming
from another country.

Michael stood there. The man was beckoning to him.

“Hallo, please,” the man shouted. “Please to come over…”

The voice sounded very old, muffled by the falling snow. A voice as plain and direct as a spell. Michael still didn’t move.
This was the
synagogue
, the mysterious building in which the Jews worshiped their God. Michael had passed it hundreds of times, but except for Saturday
morning, the doors were almost always closed. In some ways, it didn’t seem to be part of the parish, in the way that Sacred
Heart was part of the parish, and the Venus, and Casement’s Bar. The synagogue rose about three stories off Kelly Street,
but Michael always felt that one dark midnight, it had been dropped on the corner from somewhere else.

That wasn’t all. To Michael there was something vaguely spooky about the synagogue, as if secret rites, maybe even terrible
crimes, took place behind its locked doors. After all, didn’t everybody on Ellison Avenue say that the Jews had killed Jesus?
And if they could kill the Son of God, what might they do to a mere kid in the middle of a blizzard in Brooklyn? Michael had
a sudden image of the bearded man tying him up, then heaving him into an oven, or bricking him up behind a wall, like the
guy in “The Cask of Amontillado.” He saw a headline in the
Daily News:
BOY VANISHES IN STORM
. And started to walk on.

The bearded man called to him again.

“Please.”

Michael stopped. There was a note in the man’s voice as he said the simple word
please
. The sound of distress. As if a life could depend upon what Michael did next. There was pain in the word too. And sadness.
Maybe the bearded man was just that: a bearded man, calling for help in a blizzard. Not some agent of the devil. They were
like two men in the trackless Arctic, specks in the ghostly wastes of a dead world.

If I walk away, Michael thought, it will be for one reason: I’m afraid. The Malemute Kid wouldn’t walk away. Neither would
Billy Batson. Shit, if Billy Batson had walked away from the man in the black suit he would never have become Captain Marvel.
And my father, Tommy Devlin, he would
never
walk away. Not from a thousand goddamned Nazis. And definitely not from a man who said
please
in that voice.

The boy crossed the street, struggling again for balance, found the wall of the synagogue in the twisting snow, and inched
his way to the side door. The bearded man’s face was clearer now. Under his heavy black hat, he had blue eyes behind thick
horn-rimmed glasses. His small nose made his beard seem larger, more solid, as if it were carved from wood instead of made
of hair. The beard was dark, with touches of
rusty red and gray, but the boy could not tell how old the man was. He was standing just inside the door, a heavy dark tweed
coat hanging loose over his shoulders. Everything else he wore was black.

“Please,” he said. “I am the rabbi. I need a help. Can you give me a help?”

Tense with fear, Michael stepped closer. The wind abruptly died, as if pausing for breath. The boy stared at the bearded man,
noticing his dirty fingernails, the ragged cuffs of the tweed coat, and wondered again if dark secrets lay behind him in the
synagogue.

“Well, you see, Rabbi, I—”

“One minute, it takes,” the rabbi said.

Michael fumbled for words, trembling with fear, curiosity, and the cold.

“I’m an altar boy up at Sacred Heart,” he said. “You know, a Catholic? And I’m late for the eight o’clock mass and—”

“Not even one minute,” the rabbi said.
“Bitte.”
He pulled the coat tighter. “Please.”

Michael glanced past him into the unlighted vestibule. Wood paneling rose about five feet from the floor, topped by a ridge.
The rest of the wall was painted a cream color. He could see nothing else in the gloom. What if he’s Svengali, he thought,
the bearded guy in the movie who could hypnotize people? Or like Fagin in
Oliver Twist
, who made the kids steal for him? No: his voice doesn’t sound like those bastards. The wind suddenly attacked again, like
a signal of urgency. Besides, the boy thought, I can always push him down the steps. I can knock off his glasses. I can kick
the door open. Or kick him in the balls. One false move.
Boom!
Knowing that he was talking to himself to kill his fear.

“Okay,” Michael said abruptly. “But it’s gotta be fast. What do you want me to do?”

The bearded man opened the door wide and Michael stepped in, suddenly warmer as he left the wind behind. There were three
steps leading down. The boy stood uneasily on the top step.

“A little light, is good, yes?” the rabbi said, waving a hand around the dark vestibule.

“I guess.”

“There,” the rabbi said. “You see?”

Michael moved down a step and peered through the dimness toward the wall to the right. A switch was cut into dark wood paneling.
The rabbi gestured nervously, as if flicking the switch, but he did not touch it.

“You mean turn it on?” Michael asked.

The rabbi nodded. “Is… uh… it’s dark, no?”

Michael was suddenly wary again.

“Why don’t
you
turn it on?”

“Is not… permitted,” the bearded man replied, as if groping for the correct word. “Today is
Shabbos
, you see, and—is simple, no? Just—”

He brushed the air with his hand to show how easy it would be. Michael took a breath, stepped down, and flicked the switch.
The space was suddenly brightened by an overhead globe. They were in a small vestibule; three steps up on the far side, there
was another door. The creamy ceiling paint was cracked and peeling. The boy exhaled slowly. No bomb had exploded. No steel
walls had descended to imprison him. No trapdoor had opened to drop him into a dungeon. The light switch was a light switch.
The rabbi smiled, showing uneven yellow teeth, and looked pleased. Michael felt loose and warm.

“Thanks you, thanks you,” the rabbi said. “
A dank
. Very good boy, you are.
Du bist zaier gut-hartsik
… Very good.”

Then he pointed to the ridge along the top of the wood paneling.

“Is for you,” he said. “Please to take. For you.”

It was a nickel, gleaming dully in the light.

“For you,” the rabbi said.

“No, it was nothing, I don’t need it….”

“Please.”

Michael was anxious again, about the time now and the four blocks he still had to journey through the blizzard. He picked
up the nickel and slipped it into the side pocket of his mackinaw.

“Good-bye,” the man said. “And thanks you.”

“You’re welcome, Rabbi.”

The boy opened the door and rushed into the storm, feeling taller and stronger and braver.

F
ather Heaney looked as if he too wished he had stayed in bed. His halo of uncombed gray hair combined with his wild black
eyebrows and unshaven chin to create a vision of distraction and carelessness. Only his eyes seemed to belong to the man whose
war record made him a hero to Michael and some of the other altar boys. His slits of eyes were more hooded than ever, causing
Michael to imagine him posing as a Japanese submarine commander spying for the OSS. This was not too absurd a possibility;
they had heard from other priests that Father Heaney had been a chaplain in North Africa and Sicily and Anzio; he had gone
into Germany with General Patton. He had not been in the Battle of the Bulge, although when Michael asked him about it, he
said, in a tight-lipped way, that he’d known men who died there. In his sermons, or in the mornings in the sacristy, Father
Heaney never talked about the war. But Michael was sure the war hung over him
like a dark cloud; after all, less than two years ago, he was giving the last rites to dying soldiers.

To be sure, Father Heaney’s silences were not confined to the war. He was silent about most things. In the mornings before
mass, he seldom said anything to the altar boys, but on this morning he was more silent than ever. He grunted when he saw
Michael arrive breathlessly at ten after eight. He grunted at Michael’s apologies. Then he grunted and motioned with his head
for the boy to precede him out to the altar.

The priest’s style was to say the mass very quickly, like a man announcing a horse race, and the other altar boys always joked
that he was in a hurry to get back to his bottle. Michael had never seen him drinking, or even smelled whiskey seeping from
his pores, but on this arctic morning, Father Heaney’s impatient, hurtling style hadn’t changed. He raced through the mass
in the cold, empty church while Michael tried valiantly to keep pace. Usually there were two altar boys, but Michael’s partner
had been defeated by the blizzard, and Michael made all the Latin responses himself. At one point, Father Heaney cut Michael
off in midsentence; at another, he completely dropped a long piece of Latin. It was as if even the words of the ancient ritual
were more than he wanted to say. Michael moved the heavy leather-bound missal from one side of the altar to the other. He
did what he was supposed to do with wine and cruets. As the priest mumbled before the tabernacle, with a plaster statue of
the bleeding Christ above him, Michael tried to pray for his father in his Belgian grave and the souls in Purgatory and the
starving people in Europe and Japan. But only the impulse rose in his breast; the actual words of prayers did not follow.
Father Heaney wouldn’t let them, driven as he was to cross the finish line. The priest blessed the great dark
space of the church and skipped the sermon, while far above, the steeple of Sacred Heart of Jesus R.C. Church shuddered and
creaked under the assault of the wind.

Then Michael remembered the injured tone of the bearded man’s voice: that
please
. And he decided that the rabbi had been desperate. That he needed Michael to turn on those lights or he would suffer for
the rest of the day. There was raw pain in his voice. Not pain that had to do with the light switch. Some other kind of pain.
Coming from that man. That rabbi. That Jew.

Then he heard a phrase:
Domine non sum dignus
…

And a whisper from Father Heaney: “Pay attention, boy. We’ve got two customers.”

They had reached the moment when the priest hands out Holy Communion, and somehow, from the vast wind-creaking darkness, two
old women in black clothes had made their separate ways to the rail of the altar. Michael quickly lifted the gold dish called
the paten and followed Father Heaney to the railing and the kneeling women, wondering: How did they get here? Did they walk
through this blizzard that knocked me flat? Did someone drive them in a car? Maybe they
live
here. Mumbling Latin, his left hand holding the gold chalice known as the ciborium, Father Heaney deposited a host upon each
outstretched tongue, while Michael held the paten under their chins. This was so that no fragment of the host, which had been
transformed into the body of Jesus Christ during the Consecration, would fall upon the polished floor.

The first woman’s eyes were wide and glassy, like the eyes of a zombie from a movie. The other closed her eyes tight, as if
fearful of gazing too brazenly at the divine white wafer. The second one had a mole on her chin, with white hairs sprouting
as if from the eye of a potato. They each took the host the same
way: the lips closing over it, but the mouth stretched high and taut to form a closed little fleshy cave. To chew the host,
after all, was to chew Jesus. Bowing in piety and gratitude, they rose and went back to the dark pews to pray until the host
softened and they could swallow.