Northern Lights

by Tim O'Brien

  Perry shrugged and grinned. “Pretty much. Has to cement seams or something. And put in the door bars and steps.”

  “Just in time,” said the old man. He was propped against three firm pillows. Bare-chested, covered to the knees with a sheet, he spoke harshly: “You think it’s crazy, don’t you? You never listened.”

  “I listened,” Perry said. The old man did not look as if he would die.

  “Harvey knows.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why are you grinning?”

  “I can’t help it,” Perry said.

  “Happy about something?”

  “No,” Perry said.

  The old man became silent. It was as if they hadn’t spoken at all.

  “Get some rest,” Perry said softly. He closed the door.

  “Love you,” he whispered.

  The old man didn’t really look like death.

  Grinning so that his eyes watered and his glasses steamed and his nose hurt dreadfully, Perry moved down the stairs.

  He turned on the television. Another bulletin, which was unreal and hapless as anything spouted from the old man’s pulpit.

  It was impossible, of course.

  The old man was ringing again in the spit bucket but Perry stayed away. And Harvey’s spade was clanging outside.

  The house was very cold.

  It was impossible, of course.

  “Love you,” he whispered, grateful that the old man couldn’t hear.

  On the television, a reporter was reading the text of a White House statement, smiling slightly as though both disbelieving and reassuring, and Perry had sympathy for the fellow. Nobody believed but they imagined, and Harvey’s spade clanked against the concrete bomb shelter as the reporter said, In summary, there is no evidence to date indicating that there is any intention to dismantle or discontinue work on these missile sites. On the contrary, the Soviets are rapidly continuing their construction of missile support and launch facilities … the language of the old man’s religion: facilities and missile support systems. Perry listened with a grin and without watching, listened as another reporter interviewed nailbiting breathholding flushfaced citizen prophets. Incredible. Disbelieved. Incredible that the old man’s craziest prophecy was not crazy at all, therefore perfectly crazy, completing a grand cycle. Perry sat and listened, primogeniture in a Finnish man-family of October doom and swamps at sea, while the truly sad thing was that the old man was dying, and nobody cared, least of all the old man, while ships moved to sea, alerts and re-alerts and civil defense, and the craziest thing of all was that the old man’s craziest prophecy was not really crazy. Nobody believed. It drove the old man crazy.

  The old house was cold.

  It got late and the old man slept for a while, but Harvey continued his work.

  Perry wandered the house. Once he looked in on the old man. His chest was fuzzed with black hair and the window was wide open.

  Around midnight the old man woke up and began clanging for attention.

  Perry remembered:

  The echo in the house.

  The banging of Harvey’s hammer at midnight in the mostly finished bomb shelter.

  Then the ringing in the bucket. The chiming, clattering demonic ringing of the old man’s spoon in the bucket.

  The thermostats turned to freezing for the old man’s dying comfort.

  The chill in the house.

  The persistent hammering and bucket ringing, while the radio went berserk with midnight Action Line call-in oracles: “And no one ever listened and now it’s too late, because I was warning of this twenty years ago when I lived in Mankato, twenty years ago. I warned about the Chinese slinking on the sidelines while we fought it out with the Russians, and who’ll be left? You guessed it. Just lucky we caught them, that’s all. Quemoy-Matsu. It’s the Chinese that’s behind it. When we had the chance, then we should’ve let them have it with both barrels at Quemoy-Matsu. Now all we can do is pray. Pray we win, that’s all. But, anyhow …”

  The house was cold.

  He built a fire.

  The television was all news and desperation, and the clanging and hammering rang like bulletins from the meat-hungry Caribes.

  Once, for relief from the incessant bucket thumping, Perry stepped outside and took a long walk around the yard. It was late enough for the moon to be on the descent. Its color was harvest red. There was no sun at all. The lights in the old man’s upstairs bedroom shined out and partly lit the crouching bomb shelter. Harvey was somewhere inside. Filling water jugs or something. For the moment he was quiet. But upstairs behind the lighted windows the old man still rattled in his spit bucket, and the mostly finished bomb shelter cowered like a concrete-scaled fossil.

  Perry went inside. An electric light dangled from the ceiling and Harvey was rocking in a rocking chair.

  “Looks pretty solid,” Perry said gently.

  Harvey kept rocking.

  “I say it does look strong,” said Perry. “You’ve done a good job on it.”

  Harvey got up, keeping his face in the dark. “It’ll take anything,” he said. “I made it that way. I guess it will take just about anything that comes.”

  “Are you going to come inside now?”

  “Nope.”

  “You can’t …”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Look. There’s no sense moping out here. It’d be better now if you come inside and look in on him. He’d like that. You’ve got it done now. He said so himself. He looked out and saw it was all done. You got it built.”

  “Just don’t tell me. You can stop telling me.”

  “What should I tell him then? Tell him you don’t want to look in? You got better things to do? Shall I tell him that?”

  “He knows.”

  “How does he know? What?”

  “You don’t know. Just don’t tell me anything. He knows. I don’t have to sit with him for him to know. You sit with him. You need to sit with him. Don’t try to tell me.”

  Harvey picked a hammer off the cement floor. He sat in the rocking chair. Slowly rocking, he banged the hammer against a thick wall, shooting sparks, tiny chips scattering.

  “You want to help?” he said.

  “Help what?”

  “If you don’t want, just hop along inside and sit some more by the television, see what good that does.”

  Outside, the ground had frosted. Perry stood alone. The old man’s bucket clanging had stopped. The window lights were on, falling full across the bomb shelter.

  Harvey’s hammering followed him inside, up the stairs, totally alone now except for Harvey’s cement hammering.

  There was immense vision in the old man’s eyes.

  Later Perry went to the bomb shelter and told Harvey. Then he asked: “Is there anything I can do?”

  “The work’s done,” Harvey said.

  “Let me do something.”

  “It happened, didn’t it? The old man was right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Finished it just in time.”

  “Just in the nick of time,” Perry said quietly.

  Harvey shrugged and gave Perry his hammer. “Just hammer at that there wall.” Then he left to go upstairs.

  In the morning they drove into town. Harvey went first to the church. Perry went to the drugstore, where everyone was. The place was arattle with frightened talk. A radio was playing behind the counter. Herb Wolff’s cash register sang as the town congregated for their coffee and hushed talk, and Perry let his dime clatter on the counter so that people looked up to see him grinning as he ordered his coffee, nothing outlandish but sufficient grinning to show them that the old man wasn’t so crazy after all. Old Jud Harmor came in carrying his straw hat, and they sat together. Bishop Markham was reading aloud the Tribune’s thick black front page. Others were listening. And Herb Wolff was shuffling between cash register and counter, counting coins up to the very end of the world, and nobody was joking about the old man being crazy. Perry could have
burst he was so proud. He could have laughed.

  “Talked with Harvey up at the church,” said Jud at last.

  “Yeah. The old man’s dead.”

  They were quiet awhile. Herb Wolff turned up the radio volume. Everyone was very quiet as the radio reported that the U.S. Navy was at that moment intercepting the Russian Navy somewhere in the Caribbean.

  “Funny, ain’t it?” old Jud said softly and without malice. “Your old man was a …”

  “He wasn’t so crazy after all,” Perry said.

  “That’s it,” Jud said. He paused. “Harvey sure loved him.”

  “He sure did,” Perry said.

  “Never saw anything like it.”

  “Yes,” Perry grinned. “Harvey sure loved him, all right. He sure did, didn’t he?”

  Crystalline sounds.

  Ice cracking, the frozen air, hard oxygen.

  The blizzard had ended. Towards dawn, it simply ended.

  Then long silence. A vacuum, nothing. Not even cold.

  Perry was part of that. Hunched against the broken chimney, blood still, he’d been sculpted into a great drift of snow. It wasn’t at all bad. He couldn’t think and he didn’t feel the cold. Like the elements. Like the earth and glazed lakes and silence and winter he was frozen in his tracks, stopped cold.

  The stillness lasted through dawn and into first light. He huddled at the foot of the old stone chimney. Daylight came and he was in the Ice Age. Frozen fast ahead, he was sightless with blue shiny eyes unrooted to memory or desire, and the image of the old man and the bomb shelter and Harvey and the great sadness was frozen fast. There was stillness and winter sun, and the sunlight charged the cold with complex tensions: ice cracking, the frozen air, hard oxygen.

  Crystalline sounds. And he blinked. Snapping sounds, and again he blinked.

  Heat Storm

  He blinked but he did not move. The sun cleared the pines.

  Crystalline sounds, cracking ice beneath the drifts. A bough snapped and again he blinked. He waited for a great nuclear explosion. It seemed to him he’d been waiting a long time, and the chancre was growing and filled with black bile that puffed to explode. But he was not cold.

  He had no real thoughts. The image of the old man and the bomb shelter and Harvey had frozen stiff and mostly clogged his thinking. He would have to do something, he knew, but he was not sure what, and he was too tired and too lazy and too numb to move from the drift.

  Crystalline sounds, snapping crusts of snow. Again he blinked.

  Then his eyes closed. For a time he seemed to sleep, but it was not quite sleep. He was back in the blizzard again, and the light had no color or warmth but rather a kind of primitive photochemistry, and with all the cracking and snapping and breaking sounds, the sun rose higher, and the snapping sounds gradually sweetened and there was no great nuclear explosion, the world survived in a calm diathermy, and the new-sounds seemed promising. Then he truly slept. He slept as the sun arched northeast to northwest and paused from the white pine at the far edge of the clearing to a stand of birch at the near edge. The deformed forest began its thaw. Clumps of snow dropped like paste from the trees, and the great drifts fashioned by the storm began to sag and buckle, and the crystalline sounds changed into soft sounds: feathers into a pillow, air into lungs, coffee into a cup, silent respiration, and the world would survive.

  He emerged from his drift at dusk.

  He was single-minded. He moved mechanically. He pulled his sleeping bag from the snow and draped it over the broken chimney. He took each thing at a time.

  Bending stiffly and still not thinking properly, he burrowed in the great drift, searching, finally finding the orange rucksack. The image of the squatting gray bomb shelter still clogged his thinking. He kicked at the snow and uncovered his pile of wood. Picking up each log separately, he clapped the wood against the chimney, shaking off chunks of ice and then stacking it in a dark pile. It was hard to think beyond the separate motions. He was not hungry. He was not hungry and it was hard to think, but he imagined a fire, and he opened the rucksack and found the matches and dropped to his knees. Then he dug into the drift. Dusk ended and dark began but he did not notice. He burrowed into the drift, carving out a firehollow at the foot of the chimney.

  He cleared the hearth, cleared the flue and the stack.

  Rubble of the old homesteader’s house lay around him, stones and frozen timber, but the broken chimney still stood, the fireplace was there, and he whisked it clean.

  He placed the logs in the fireplace. He took great care. He piled the wood neatly, forming a box into which he dropped his store of twigs. Without his glasses he was nearly blind, and he squinted as he worked, taking care.

  Behind him the snow sobbed. He stopped, listened, tried to remember. He could not think. There was a white winter moon.

  He removed his mittens and struck the first match.

  Cupping it in his hands, he leaned forward and took heavy drafts of heat and sulphur. He held the flame to his eyes. Then like a woman bending for potatoes, he reached down and touched the flame to a single twig. The flame shriveled. It held its beaded shape but shrank away, dwindling like a Doppler and carrying Perry after it, chasing the flame into the darkness. When the flame was gone, he held the match for its warmth.

  He struck the second match. Again he cupped the flame and breathed deep, then touched it to the twig. The moon was white. He watched the flame, his fingers, his fingers dangling like Christmas tinsel. He envisioned raw heat. The elements. It was impulse and he could not remember. The old recollections … his own church, the high apse, reading as his father from the pulpit of Damascus Lutheran. Defrocked by the mockery of child’s play, pretending, practising, play-acting. “Take that robe off,” his father had said. “You’re just pretending and it’s a mockery.” And Perry: “I was practising.” And his father: “Go on outside and play with your brother.” And Perry over supper: “I’m not goin’ to church no more.” And Perry, sitting on his tricycle: “Poooooooooooor me.” Not understanding. Anything. The boastful old thoughts had been stiffened to stone by the blizzard. Storm fury defeated thought fury. He could not remember. He squatted down. He held the match to the twig and hovered close and coaxed the flame. He wanted to speak, and he tried to think of the words. He watched the flame burn down its stem, shrinking away, and when the flame died, he could not think of the words, and he quickly struck a third match and held it to the twig. Behind him the snow sobbed. He listened but he could not remember. He held more matches to the twig, drying it and raising its temperature, and on the ninth try the twig took. It smoldered, then for a moment flowed red like lava, then burned. Again the snow sobbed, somewhere behind him in the drifts of blizzard snow, buried somewhere, and he stopped and listened but he could not remember. He turned to the flame. The twig burned white, turned gray, ash, and Perry guarded it. He wanted to speak. He made clucking sounds instead. The flame shuddered then burned steady. He held the match tight against the twig, afraid to remove it. The match burned red and blue, the twig burned yellow and blue. He breathed slowly. When the match flame died away, the twig continued to burn. It burned from the center out, breaking into separate twin flames.

  Perry wanted to speak, but instead he clucked to the fire. He took out a pile of matches and stacked them against the twig, watched the flames creep towards the poised sulphur, and he grinned—grinned when the matches took in three fast explosions, flaring and cracking open, grinning when another twig went afire.

  He wanted to speak. Behind him, the snow sobbed again and again with soft respiring sounds.

  He had plenty of matches. It was the one thing Harvey had done right, insisting on carrying hundreds of stiff kitchen matches. Harvey, that was it, old Harvey. Behind him, the snow sobbed, the pouring sound, the delicate respiration.

  He wanted to speak, but instead he stacked a handful of matches against the promising part of the fire and watched them burst in a tight fist of fire. He arranged the twigs around the ball
of flame, placing each twig with exact care, watching as the fist of fire clenched white and hot and began to grow. He let the fire eat at its own pace. He was careful. He wasn’t a woodsman, but he knew a little about fires and he was careful. Fires have to breathe: Harvey’s teaching. Old Harvey, the woodsman.

  Gradually he added larger branches. He moved slowly. He watched the fire. He leaned close. His eyes were now hot, but he peered steadily into the flame, greedy, clucking and guarding it and waiting for it to grab hold of the larger logs. Snow melted from the chimney and slowly trickled down the stack, sliding and melting and sputtering like grease, forming a pool of water at his feet.

  At last it was done. The fire filled the old homesteader’s hearth, and Perry stood up and watched to be sure, his arms hanging low.

  It was done.

  He looked up, saw the moon, and tried to remember. He wasn’t hungry. Harvey, he was thinking, trying to form the word on his lips. The Bull. “Sure loved your old man,” old Jud had said. I loved him, too, goddammit. That was it, old Harvey. Could have been a minister, could have done acts of mercy and acts of love. Performing acts of mercy and acts of love. Saving souls, ministerial balm, unction. It could have been, all right. It was Harvey’s fault, old Harvey.

  He turned his mittens inside out and laid them on the hearth, then he spread his sleeping bag to dry. He moved woodenly.

  His feet hurt. Harvey said aching feet are a good sign, no frostbite. Old Harvey.

  Perry bent once and reached for his ankles. He felt brittle. His spine would not give.

  Stamping his feet, flexing and bending, he exercised, stopped to add wood to the fire, then marched in a circle around the chimney until his feet were tingling. He fed the fire and waited. His face was raw. The skin was drawn tight around his nose and cheekbones. He was weak but he exercised, marched around the fireplace. The moon was out. He thought he should be hungry. That had been one of the old thoughts. Before the blizzard—food and hunger and self-pity. Angry. Starving and being angry, angry and self-pity, sadness and hunger, anger and hunger and melancholy, fear and hunger. The nightlong images had lumbered. But, now, nothing more to do. The hunger was gone. It had been beyond anything, a cadaverous emptiness that had moved from belly to brain and became its own great giant thought, a great beast that stalked and ravaged and gobbled all the other frantic thoughts, foraging and kicking and thrashing and shrieking, ravenous, attacking. He could not remember much about it. The blizzard iced it and stopped it cold. Another numbness, a bad sign, but he was grateful.