Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  Halfway through, they began to see what they had been unable to see before. In the shadows were confused forms, bodies in pain, outstretched hands begging for mercy or release. With every step, the eyes that glowed at them grew more numerous, and the cries sharper.

  “I can’t explain it,” said Hardesty, “but the empty streets are full.” He took Virginia’s arm and they walked toward a fire that burned at the edge of the district. At a fire there would be firemen and police, perhaps even the press. And the firelight would brighten their way until they broke out of the Five Points.

  A row of tenements was engulfed in orange. Billows of black smoke reflected the light downward and damped the sparks. All around, for as far as the eye could see, rejoicing crowds with firelight in their eyes took pleasure. A roar went up as children fell back into the coals, and the spectators watched attentively as a fight progressed from roof to roof of the burning buildings. The fighters were so taken up in their combat that they ignored the fire which silhouetted them like cast-iron figures on a lantern stage and swallowed them up one by one as they dropped in defeat.

  Virginia was shaken, and Hardesty was sorry that he had insisted on going through the Five Points. “I didn’t know,” he said, still numb from watching the children perish, though they had fallen back without a sound and had disappeared quite neatly. “It’s completely different by day. I just didn’t know.”

  Men and women came running in from the streets, like lizards darting to catch some sun. The sidewalks were soon overflowing, and foodstands began to appear. With no fire department, no ambulances, no trucks, no spotlights to leach away the shuddering orange light, the fire blazed, the tenements crumbled, and the people died.

  Through the middle of the crowd came a mutilated and disfigured draft horse pulling a wagon loaded with refuse. The driver reined in the horse and tried to go around. But horse and wagon were soon engulfed, and moved in stops and starts.

  “Look at that animal,” Hardesty said, not knowing whether to feel compassion or disgust. “He’s the biggest dray horse I’ve ever seen, and he’s as slim as a thoroughbred. Imagine what he must have been through.”

  As a gang of children beat him about the face with switches and his master beat him from behind with a heavy whip, the horse held his head down and closed his bruised eyes. Scars cut across his flanks and withers. Old craters in his hide were overlaid with the more recent burns and sores he suffered from a primitive and rudely fashioned harness; his tail and mane were clipped to a stubble; he had only one ear left intact—the other had had several pieces taken from it.

  The wagon was heavy. And yet the horse, who was so badly cut up that he looked like a man who has been tortured by some unconquerable disease, pulled it easily. Despite his oppression, he was strong, and despite his enormous size, he was graceful. When the muscles moved in the difficult pace he had to hold between his master’s desires and the torment inflicted by the children, they showed themselves to be as solid and lean as those of a carefully bred racehorse, but many times as massive.

  When his horse and wagon cleared the crowd, the driver cracked the whip against the animal’s head and made him canter in harness. This he did with surprising grace, straining against the wood and leather that cut his flesh and rubbed against his sores, as if he were free and in an open field. The curves that he described were unaffected by the load. They were perfectly elated, full, and round. He lifted his head and pushed into the darkness as if motion itself were one of the dimensions of paradise.

  WINTER, THEN in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run. And what it did to northern forests can hardly be described, considering that it iced the branches of the sycamores on Chrystie Street and swept them back and forth until they rang like ranks of bells.

  It was ferociously cold by the time Hardesty and Virginia arrived at the apartment house on Mulberry Street and climbed the dimly lighted winding stairs, their faces red with the stinging remembrance of a wind which had whipped at them and blown Virginia’s scarf straight back. Now they were in the heated hallway, following the stairs, rising through the building in epicycles more appropriate to the planets. The ever-suspicious eye of Mrs. Solemnis, a Greek sponge fisherman’s widow, appeared in the door periscope and bounded back and forth like a radar blip. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It’s me,” answered Virginia.

  “Who is me?”

  “Virginia.”

  “Virginia who?”

  “Virginia Gamely. For goodness’ sake, Mrs. Solemnis, I live here. I employ you.”

  “Oh, you.” Mrs. Solemnis opened the door and thrust Martin into Hardesty’s arms, saying, “You take.”

  Although he had not been on earth for much longer than a year, Martin was perfect, from his tiny curled fists to the long blue flannel tail (a Coheeries baby gown constructed to accommodate him as he grew) that made him look like a small, breastless mermaid. He carefully rested a cheek against the cold cloth of Hardesty’s coat and closed his eyes in complete trust. Hardesty felt the slight weight in his arms, the baby’s breathing, and an occasional twitch of an arm or leg. He looked down at Martin’s soft sleepy face, and kissed him. “Yes,” he said, bouncing him gently, “sweet baby.”

  Hardesty left his coat on so as not to disturb Martin, and watched Virginia move about the apartment as she straightened up. She was very neat, and Mrs. Solemnis was not. She glided through the several rooms, knocking things into place and aligning them symmetrically. In her charcoal-gray suit and ruffled shirt, she looked like a portrait from another century, the kind in which the subject stares from half-light on into time. But despite the dignity of this portrait Hardesty could not restrain his laughter, because as she walked to and fro she would stop and turn to check on him and the baby, or to smile in embarrassment for being so neat, and when she did she seemed like the mechanical bears in shooting galleries, who pause and swivel so they can be shot. The effect was exaggerated when, explaining that she wanted to change, she backed into the bedroom in little mechanical steps, closing the door after her. Wondering if it had been wise to allow him inside (she had visions of a crazed lunatic tossing Martin great distances, probably because, in his Coheeries gown, Martin was shaped like a football), she peeped out the door several times in succession.

  “Do you moonlight in a shooting gallery?” Hardesty asked.

  “No,” she answered, reappearing in her charcoal suit because she had forgotten to change. “I’m practicing for an interview with Craig Binky. He has a notoriously short attention span. When you talk to him you have to make threatening motions and bizarre gestures. Otherwise, he doesn’t understand.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Harry Penn. He knows that Binky can’t resist any kind of flattery, so every once in a while he sends a reporter over to find out the secrets of The Ghost. Tomorrow it’s my turn. That’s how we know everything that goes on there and exactly what they intend to do in the future. But we are a mystery to them. Though we care little about secrecy, The Sun and The Whale are like the two halves of a clam. Nothing leaks, because everyone knows his job and has a share in the enterprise. As far as I know, the only tattle is someone from the home and ladies’ page. Last week, we ran the recipe for my mother’s saxophone pie, and The Ghost had it the same day. In all the world there’s only one saxophone pie (it’s made with peaches, resin, blueberries, rum, and mint), and I doubt that The Ghost spies—who tiptoe around our building in false beards and mustaches—were able to steal it from the composing rooms.”

  She took the baby. Hardesty threw his coat across a chair and stood near her in a way that made them look like a crèche in a town square. He, too, was dressed in a suit that might have been from a nineteenth-century portrait�
��it was a little too big for him, and it made him feel as if he had just stepped from a carriage.

  “Are you irrevocably divorced from his father?”

  “Yes,” she answered, with neither bitterness nor regret.

  “Do you ever want to go back to Lake of the Coheeries?”

  “Of course I do. It’s my home.”

  “Soon?”

  “When these winters end. Perhaps during the millennium. I think that, with the millennium, much will have changed; if not in the world, then in me. I hope to have seen something far better than anything I have ever seen before.”

  Hardesty did with his emotions what one does with one’s body in sitting bolt upright. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She dodged the question, for her only answer was one of faith and intuition, and she wanted neither to burden him nor to turn him away, though she did want to tell him, and she did want to embrace him, and to be embraced.

  Hardesty went to the window. Over courtyards and courtyards, a mile-long corridor of terra-cotta-colored buildings, vaulted stone windows, slate roofs, and trees that in summer were green billows rising from the private gardens of the poor, were the two battleship-gray towers of the Williamsburg Bridge, alive in lights like blue diamonds.

  “Not one building that you can see,” she said, rocking the baby, “was built later than nineteen-fifteen. It’s as quiet as a meadow. In summer, the trees hold hundreds of birds that sing in the morning. Someone has a poultry roost, and when the sun comes up and floods the yards like the tide of Fundy, the cock crows. It always sounds to me as if he’s saying ‘Nineteen-hundred! Nineteen-hundred! Nineteen-hundred!’”

  “Do you think that in a few years he’ll be saying ‘Two thousand! Two thousand! Two thousand!’?”

  “I think, Mr. Marratta,” she answered, almost gravely, “that in a few years not only the cock will be crowing two thousand. Everyone will.”

  “Because it’s an even number?” he asked, narrowing in on her.

  “No,” she said, nearly shaking, because she wanted him to narrow in, and she was afraid. “Not because its an even number.”

  “Because these extraordinary winters will end?”

  “Yes, because these extraordinary winters will end.”

  “And the city will change?”

  “Yes, the city will change.”

  “And what if it doesn’t?”

  “It will.”

  “Why?”

  “If nothing happens whatsoever, still, the relief will change everything, as will the difficult schooling in expectations. It will change. That much I know.”

  “How do you know?” Hardesty asked.

  “You’ll think I’m crazy,” she replied, turning her head away as if she were hurt.

  “No, I won’t think you’re crazy.”

  “I know,” she said, “because these winters have not been for nothing. They are the plough. The wind and the stars are harrowing the land and battering the city. I feel it and can see it in everything. The animals know it is coming. The ships in the harbor rush about and have come alive because it is coming. I may be dead wrong, but I do believe that every act has significance, and that, in our time, all the ceaseless thunder is not for nothing.”

  “I believe it too,” Hardesty said, taking her hands. And thus, as fast as a whiplash, a marriage was made one evening in winter, in a city sure to rise.

  A New Life

  THERE WAS a lot of light on the sea, and a good-tempered wind rounded the headland in strength, pushing before it a trim outer-banks sloop with mainsail running full and a spinnaker swelling ahead. To the west was a long empty coast of fragrant green vegetation. The water flowed in currents and streams within the brine where cool rivers had broken clean of a bar and erupted into the ocean like a plume of expiring fireworks. The rigging creaked in protest, because the boat had not been made to fly at twenty-five knots. The sea was crowded with fish, and the beaches were whiter than a cut in new glass.

  Although they had not spoken since they had abandoned that day’s fishing and set sail to challenge the wind, Asbury Gunwillow and his brother Holman knew of one another’s concern with the sunny but insistent gale. It got stronger by degrees, never slackening, until it seemed powerful enough to blow the sea off the earth and into empty space. “Can we tack against this wind, Asbury?” Holman shouted.

  Asbury shook his head. “Nothing could tack against this wind,” he shouted back. “I’ve never seen anything like it. This is the kind of gale that sinks fleets of warships. If we try to come about, we’ll bust up for sure. Still, we’re lucky.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a wind like this should make sea state ten, but the sea is as flat as ice. That’s because the wind is so steady. If it wasn’t, it would make waves a hundred and fifty feet high. And we haven’t got much of a transom,” he said, looking at the water a foot below the top of the tiller post.

  “Let me try at least to unset the spinnaker,” Holman asked.

  “No,” ordered Asbury. “I’ll do it. It’s too dangerous for you to move. . . .” But before he could finish his sentence, young Holman, only twenty-one and rather slight, began to crawl toward the bow. Asbury called for him to come back, but he wouldn’t, and he inched forward, resisting the force of the wind like a man who is trying to hold his place in a rapids.

  “Just cut it loose,” Asbury shouted. But though the words were snatched away and propelled forward, Holman had no chance of hearing. With one foot braced on the cowling in front of the mainmast, and the other pressed against a winch, he began to undo the spinnaker line.

  “Cut it!” his brother yelled to no avail. “Cut it!”

  When the line started smoking through the cleat, Holman realized that he was sitting on top of the coil. He raised himself a little to get away from it, the wind caught him, and he pitched forward into the sea.

  Asbury threw a life ring to starboard and began playing out the rope. After all one hundred feet of it had shot through his hands and Holman still hadn’t surfaced, he let go of the end, hoping to leave Holman something to hold on to.

  But then Asbury was stunned to see that Holman was still with him, half in and half out of the water on the starboard side, hanging on to the spinnaker line. He was repeatedly dashed against the sea. Sometimes he was lifted fifty or sixty feet into the air and thrown back against the water when the sail whipped down.

  Intending to free the spinnaker and haul his brother in on it, Asbury rushed forward. But the wind blew him off his feet and knocked him against the mainmast. With his vision darkened and half his strength gone, Asbury still managed to unfold his clasp knife. He cut the spinnaker halyard. But instead of lowering the pulley the way it normally would have, it allowed the sail to flap more wildly.

  While he was trying to decide what to do, Asbury looked at the end of the sail and saw that Holman had let go. Then the spinnaker flew into the air and collapsed onto the surface of the water. He peered through the blood that was thickening in his eyes, but had he been able to see he would not have seen Holman, who disappeared under the water. He determined to come about, even if it killed him.

  Slipping on his own blood, Asbury went to the helm. When he reached the tiller, he slumped against it and held on. His hand stuck to it because of the blood that was over everything. “Where’s it coming from?” he asked out loud, because there was blood in the wind, in hot droplets that, at first, he thought were rain. But it was his blood, spurting from an artery in his scalp. He tried to stop it with his hand, and it sprayed through his fingers.

  Deciding to jibe even though it would probably snap the mast, he leaned against the tiller hard and pushed it over. But the only thing that happened was that the stern rode up in the water and bumped along like a popper lure. Because there was nothing else to do, Asbury held the tiller over until his strength left him and he fell onto the floorboards. He tried to get up, and couldn’t. He pressed the wound against a rib in the hull, hoping to stanch the bleed
ing. The last thing he remembered was the sound of the wind.

  When he awoke he was desperately cold. Though he was not far north, and it was June, it was night on the sea and he had been badly injured. He thought that his neck would be forever paralyzed in the crooked position into which it had frozen against the rib in the hull, and he couldn’t open his eyes. Like someone who stays awake all night in the cold rather than get up to find an extra blanket, he remained in that uncomfortable position for a long time, many minutes, perhaps hours, until he was alert enough to understand that the smooth and varying motions of the boat signified temperate sleigh rides down shallow swells. The sound of relentless wind had vanished, leaving in its place the familiar gurgling of brine mixing itself up in the centerboard well, and the noises of rigging that ached like trees in the fall.

  To get free, he threw himself over on his side. Though he felt an overwhelming pain in his head, and though his ribs collided with the anchor, he found that moving had done him a great deal of good. He moved as much as he could. After freeing his lashes of caked blood, he opened his eyes. As the circulation was restored and he grew warmer and less stiff, he looked at the stars and realized that it was early morning, probably about four o’clock.

  Assuming that he had not slept through an entire cycle of nights and days, he calculated that Holman had been in the sea at least sixteen hours, and was probably three hundred miles away. Without benefit of a rogue wind such as that which had overpowered them, Asbury could not hope to get back to the approximate location where his brother had gone overboard, in less than three or four days.

  Since they had been coasting, they had had no navigational instruments other than a compass. Asbury could not know where he was except by the crudest dead reckoning, and instinct, which told him to steer west-northwest for the nearest land. He put on a sweatshirt and Holman’s leather jacket. He was still cold, but he knew that the sun would be coming up soon. And he finished off a roast beef sandwich and an apple that had been left from lunch the day before. In preparation for a long hard sail, he ate the core of the apple, and he considered and rejected the stem, thinking that, if it were to come to eating wood, there was plenty in the boat.