Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “Okay,” said Cozad. “Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not. It’s started to snow out there. Turn up the stove. This game ends at mile marker five on the west side of St. Louis: not before, not after. The Denver—St. Louis game traditionally has a limit of ninety thousand dollars. Food and beverage on the dealer. Draw for deal.”

  People thought that gamblers were no good because they didn’t work. But anyone who thought this had obviously never stayed up all night between Denver and St. Louis staying sharp on the cards. It was sore comfort. The forward hurtling of a train through blinding snow and arctic winds was hypnosis in itself, and the warm club car, as quiet as a library, did not encourage taking risks. The snow-covered country outside was a rough place where it was possible to die just from the wind, and animals there were lowing just as if there had never been any men on earth. If a switchman someplace in Nebraska were to have overslept, the train might easily have flown off a fifty-foot bank. People didn’t like gamblers, because gamblers reminded them that they were gamblers, too. So they invented the libel that gambling isn’t work. It is work. It’s worse than work. It’s like working in a coal mine. Hardesty quickly found this out.

  His throat grew sore and his muscles started to ache. His head felt as if it had been bolted to his spine by a Visigoth mechanic. But all the time that he played cards on a green leather table as the Polaris shot across short-grass country in the long white night, he knew that he was doing what he was supposed to be doing. It was not just that Cozad, with his patrician’s beard and gentle eyes, was remarkably like his father. Nor was it that he was winning, and he was. It was, instead, that he had given himself to fortune entirely. And it had much to do with the hard beauty of the prairie outside. He couldn’t see much more than the surprised coils of snow dashing against the window like panicked sagebrush, and he sweated, because the old men (who were cold despite their angora vests) wanted the heat on as high as it could go.

  He put his cards down on the table, or took them up, with graceful exaggerated motions, because the tea and the sound of the rails had gotten to him. But he was winning. He never slipped below six thousand. Then he began to build over that, steadily, without fail, in complete blind confidence.

  “Which is higher, four of a kind or a flush?” he might ask, much embarrassed that the rules hadn’t stuck with him. For several hours, the old men lost a lot because they thought that he knew how to bluff. But he never bluffed once, he just won—if not the high hand, then the low hand. Once, when one of the old men had a flush with the queen as top card, Hardesty had a royal flush. If one of the old men had a hand of irredeemable garbage, Hardesty would throw out worse garbage, sometimes only by a point, or not even that if it were a tie and the issue was decided by who had put out first.

  “Things like this happen,” said Cozad the next morning as they passed mile marker five just west of St. Louis, and the game ended. Hardesty tried to give back his winnings. They wouldn’t let him.

  They got off in St. Louis. “Go to the bank in the station and get a check for that sum made out to you,” Cozad instructed. “People have been killed for a lot less. And another thing: it was just luck. An armadillo can play better cards than you can. Be grateful.”

  Hardesty was saddened when Cozad left, because Cozad looked like his father, and he would never see either one of them again. He went to a bank near the station to get his check, came back, bought himself a compartment on the train, and tipped the porters the way gambling winners were supposed to.

  He took a long shower, shaved, and went to bed. Winter air and daylight came in the partially open window until the compartment was blinding white and freezing cold. Hardesty peered from his warm bed at the bank check that was sticking out of his shirt pocket. It was drawn on the Harvesters and Planters Bank of St. Louis, and it was for $70,000, even. He had a few thousand in cash in the other pocket.

  The ground was covered with snow outside of St. Louis and on into Illinois. He had asked the porter to awaken him only in New York. The sleep that he wanted was perhaps not deserved, but it was well paid for. Long before they reached Chicago, he was dreaming of the darkened club car, the glowing cards, and the blood-red lamps.

  EARLY ONE morning in the beginning of the second winter that she had spent without Virginia, Mrs. Gamely arose and peered out the attic window. She held Jack the rooster in her arms as if he were a fat white cat. After Virginia left, she had spoiled him silly, feeding him corn until he could hardly walk, and talking to him for hours on end as if he could understand her inimitable polysyllabic Latinates and her short, strong, Anglo-Saxon phrases as fresh as new hay and as powerful as a bowman’s arm. He had at least one quality which humans, especially students, might well have envied: no matter how many hours she talked, he would stare directly at her, transfixed. If there were a pause in her exposition, he would strut for a pace or two until she started up again, and then freeze in place with a look of rapture until the next silence allowed him to shift his foot or cluck to clear his throat. No chicken in her remembrance (and she could remember thousands of chickens individually) had ever had such an extraordinary attention span. Jack earned his keep. He was clever. He looked like a panorama of snow-covered hills behind which a blazing sun was just about to set (the effect of his red coxcomb). He was courteous, forbearing, bright, and sincere. And, had he been able to understand English, he would have learned a great deal. Mrs. Gamely had secrets that she had never shared even with Virginia, because she knew that all secrets worth knowing come clear in good time.

  After five days, the snow finally stopped a foot short of the eaves. When Mrs. Gamely looked west she saw the village standing firm in a sea of white, its chimneys smoking busily with the breakfast fires, the inhabitants barely visible as they stood upon their roofs to survey the arctic lake. It was said that the second winter was going to be harder than the first. Predictions such as this had been nurtured into gigantism by a summer so hot that the lake water was scalding and chickens laid soft-boiled eggs. That August, houses, trees, and sometimes whole forests had suddenly burst into flame as if the sun had been beaming at them through Priestley’s glass. “So the pendulum will swing,” said Mrs. Gamely to Jack, as they watched the wind whipping at the snow. “And so it has swung. Forever a balance. Nature hangs on stubbornly to rhetoric and ethics, even if human populations have long abandoned them, and its grammar is strict and idiosyncratic. Lookit there, Jack. The lake has become rolling hills of snow. God is treating us to fire and ice. He must be agitated. He must have something in mind.”

  A sharp knock on the front door startled her into a violent hiccup. She put her hand to her chest and said, “Daythril Moobcot tunneled.” Racing through the cottage as fast as she could, she wondered why they had come through so early, and hoped that it was not because of any bad news. When she opened the door, there was Daythril Moobcot, standing in an ice-blue tunnel that went all the way to the village. “Daythril! When did you start this tunnel?”

  “Two days ago, Mrs. Gamely.”

  “Why? I have plenty of provisions. You know its unwise to tunnel in a blizzard. You’re old enough to remember when Hagis Purgin and Ranulph Vonk were buried in their own tunnel and weren’t found until spring. Always wait to see how much snow there’ll be on top.”

  “I know that, Mrs. Gamely. But everyone’s moving around because we heard over the telegraph that the blizzard caught the Polaris somewhere within the county lines. There are two hundred people on it. If they’re still alive, we’ll be bringing them to the village. Can you take in five or six until the plough train gets through?”

  “Naturally I can. They won’t be too comfortable, but so what, they’ll be alive. How are they going to get from the railroad to the village? The shortest distance it could possibly be is fifteen miles. Won’t it be the death of all those city people in their city clothes to come that distance in deep snow at forty-five below?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Daythril Moobcot, proudly. “We’ve been plan
ning for two days. Fifty men left an hour ago. They’re pulling twenty-five sleds loaded with food, warm clothing, and skis that we scrounged up or made. When they get to the railroad line, two scouts will be waiting, having reconnoitered the whole length of track. We sent the two fastest skiers in the village. One of them will have found the train, and will lead the others to it. They’ll bring everyone back, in the dark. It’ll take a long time, since most of them probably don’t know how to ski.”

  “I’ll set out the bedding,” Mrs. Gamely said. “And I’d better start baking right away. They’ll need some hot breads and a boiling stew, especially if they’ve had nothing to eat for a few days. Will they know what has happened to them, and where they are?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “No matter. The ones with good souls will find out, and those who don’t know, don’t need to know.” She closed the door and began to rush about, assembling the best of her provisions, lighting her bee oven, and whipping up an ambrosial batter.

  DURING THE five days of blizzard the trainmen and passengers of the Polaris had come to the end of their carefully rationed food and burned all the coal that had been in the hopper car. Now, huddled together in two sleeping coaches, they were wrapped in blankets, curtains, and rugs, and they faced small fires in improvised wood stoves fueled by ripped-up paneling and sacrificed baggage. The engineer had nearly frozen to death finding the telegraph line, only to discover that it was dead. Half a dozen men with pistols fitted to improvised stocks sat in the bright sunlight on top of the train, just about even with the snow, waiting for arctic hares and birds. As a result of their labor, three quail and a rabbit were boiling at length in a caldron down below. The idea was to cook the flesh out of existence, so that the watery soup could then be justly divided (infants were well fed from a special reserve of food that would remain until the last adult was unable to feed them).

  Cold and hunger in concert had quickly brought forth the essential qualities of those upon whom they were visited. Two men had already been lost to their impatience after they had foolishly set out in the snow and frozen to death, unseen, in drifts only a hundred feet from the train. A woman had surrendered to madness (or perhaps had been mad to start), quite a few were deathly ill, and one man was dead from gunshot wounds he suffered while trying to steal food from the common store. Those were the casualties. The trainmen, however, faced their responsibilities selflessly. And others were equally heroic in caring for the sick, giving up rations and blankets, and working to counter the influence of people who were easily disheartened.

  After the snow stopped, Hardesty spent most of his time on top of the train, scanning the sky and drifts for game. Neither he nor the other hunters talked. They were too far apart, they didn’t want to scare off their quarry, and it was too cold for conversation anyway. They wondered to themselves how long it would stay so frigid that the plough train would not be able to move. The nearest town on the map was a hundred miles distant, and they knew that it was too cold for machines to fly, since all forms of lubrication had become stickier than taffy.

  They sat bundled in parkas and blankets, watching their breath crystallize in front of them and remembering the five-day blizzard, when fine snow blown into perfect equilibrium by balanced and opposing winds had seemed to hesitate in midair and freeze the passage of time. They watched the sun traverse a subdued winter arc, and, occasionally, thinking that they had seen a rabbit, they fired their pistols into the snow.

  In this area it sometimes remained fifty below or less for weeks at a time. They knew that even if every single one of their remaining bullets had found its mark in a fat hare, there would not have been food sufficient for a day. Most distressing was that the fittings and freight would be burned up by the next morning, and there simply was not enough bedding or winter clothing to keep fifty people from freezing to death, much less two hundred. Even were someone somewhere to find a piece of functional, unburied, unblocked equipment that could travel over snow, would he know to go to them? Would they be an important priority, and could the many miles between the nearest settlement and the stranded train be covered in time? It seemed to those who could reason that everyone there was soon to die.

  Down below in the disheveled sleeping coaches, they didn’t know how fast the train was being gutted, or how terribly cold it was outside, or that drifts forty feet high were all that anyone on the roof of the train could see. Still, they took comfort from their number. Two hundred people, together, were safe, they thought. But Hardesty knew that this was a mistake, for his father had told him of the thirty thousand Turkish soldiers on the Russian frontier, near Ararat, who had been surprised by an early mountain winter and had later been found, grouped together, frozen to death. Cold, he knew, had never been impressed by numbers.

  He and the others stared at the blinding drifts, imagining at times that they were on a polar sea. Their hands and feet were long numbed, and had ceased to tingle. It was hard to believe that such freezing white light came from what they had once known as the sun. When this sun was most of the way through its short winter arc, and was so flat, cool, and tame that it looked like a metal disc trapped for show on the face of a grandfather clock, the men on the roof of the train prepared for the worst. Soon it would be dark, and the cold unbearable. Soon the fires would stutter and go out, sending up a last gray column of cooling smoke. The sun, their only hope, was quickly heading downward. They stared in its direction, trying to harvest the last of its light and warmth, but it was a cold and unfamiliar thing, and the hiss of the wind seemed like its dying exhalations.

  Hypnotized and blinded, utterly still, they did not immediately see the miracle that made its way in from the west. Miles away, a line of strong winter-bred farmers moved in military formation, kicking and gliding on their long skis, dipping down into the depressions in the snow and taking them at speed to get momentum for the trip up. They came as steadily as a herd of reindeer or gazelles. Fifty men pulled twenty-five sleds. Stretched out in a wide phalanx with a sled between each pair, they looked like hills and mountains on the move, or a tide of trees. Breathing intently, they swept over the snow, heading for the stranded train—which the eastern scout had seen from a hill five miles to the northwest. He had then skied down to meet the others, who had set off on a ten-mile race with the sun at their backs.

  When the train appeared to them, it seemed to be floating upon the drifts, swamped, and the thin lines of smoke rising from it seemed about to expire. In this strangely immobilized excursion craft were two hundred men, women, and children who needed to be taken to a safe place. Making for them with all their strength, the farmers thought that danger was in truth a lovely thing that had to do with air and clouds and sea.

  As they closed, the men on the train began to hear their skis, their breathing, and the sound of the snow compressing as the column moved across it fifty abreast. They thought that it was the wind, risen to mark the sunset. Then they thought that it was an animal. When they finally could see through the glare, they could hardly believe their eyes. From the sheer white, from nothing, from a hundred miles of rolling drifts, an army of nearly silent skiers was closing upon them.

  The men on the train cried out, but the sounds that came from their frozen throats were just gurgles and moans, so they began to fire their pistols in the air, one shot after another. Upon hearing this, the Coheeries men began to whoop and cheer as they raced along on their skis. In the cold and smoky passenger cars, whose windows were silver-gray with piled snow, everyone knew what was happening, and quite a few of them began to weep, laugh, and even pray. The cars erupted in commotion, and those who had imagined that they were lost climbed out the hatches to stand in the open air and greet their rescuers.

  Who were these men in homespun and fur? There was no time to explain (they never would) if they were to get back to the settlement without too much traveling at night.

  “The moon is full, and it will light up the countryside like a flare,” one of the Coheeries m
en said to the train crew (who had never heard of Lake of the Coheeries). “But it’s best to start off in the light, so that those who don’t know how to ski can learn when it’s warmer. We have skis for everyone, and we’ll pull the sick and the children in sleds.”

  In an hour, everyone was fitted with skis, supplied with fur jackets and woolen anoraks, fed on dried fruit and chocolate, instructed, sledded, and eager to start out. They did not whistle across the drifts as their Coheeries rescuers had done, but, by evening, they were moving at a steady pace.

  Three Coheeries men led in a vee, carrying torches for everyone to follow. The others pushed a flat track across forests and fields, migrating in starlight, following the three pitch-pine torches and their ragged orange flames. The moon came up as they were emerging from a huge stand of pine onto a flat ten-mile-wide whitened plateau. The landscape was glowing, but they kept the torches because they looked so lovely sparkling ahead, and by that time the pace had increased and everyone had grown used to chasing the three lights.

  The city people, clad now in furs and wool, quickly grew accustomed to the melancholy brush of moonlight and the soft overwhelming light of the stars. They soon grew to love the cold air and the snow, and they quickly forgot why they were there. Their activity was self-justifying, far better than many things they had done before or would do in the future. They quarter-timed across the fields, with the aurora borealis faintly green and flashing off to their right.

  Then, from atop a long rise, they saw the village sparkling like a group of colored candles. It was on the edge of the lake, which was crowned by the blue-and-green aurora now hanging in the sky in astounding silent ribbons. Smoke from Coheeries chimneys crept up in intertwining white garlands and tangled on the moon. Now skiers, countrymen, they raced in contentment, hissing down the slope, speeding toward the Christmas candle that danced before them by the frozen lake, and as they skied into the town they saw the people of the village standing on their roofs or in their bright windows.