The Heart in Winter: A Novel

BUTTE,

MONTANA

1891

One

The First Encounter

On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buckskin, wild tufts of hair sticking out the ears, the eyes burning now like hot stars, now clamped shut in a kind of ecstasy, and he lurched and tottered on broken boots like a nightmare overgrown child, like some massive obliterated eejit child, and he sang out his wares in a sweet clear lilting—

Pot-ay-toes?

Hot po-tay-toes?

Hot pot-ah-toes a pe-nny?

His verse swung across the raw naked street and back again, and was musical, but he had no potatoes at all. Tom Rourke turned and looked after the man with great feeling. To be old and mad and forgotten on the mountain—was it all laid out the fuck ahead of him?

—

It was the October again. Rourke himself approached the street at this hour in suave array and manic tatters. He was nine years climbing the slow hill of Wyoming Street and there was not a single medal pinned to his chest for it. In the evening sun the East Ridge glowed sombre and gold and an ignorant wind brought news of the winter. He was appalled at the charismatic light. He marched into the cold wind. He gave out yards to himself. He rejected once more the possibility of God. His body was tense and his mind abroad. He was turned first one way, now the other. He walked as calamity. He walked under Libra. He was living all this bullshit from the inside out. Oh, he scathed himself and harangued and to his own feet flung down fresh charges. But there were dreams of escape, too—one day you could ride south on a fine horse for the Monida Pass.

In truth he was often a bit shaky at the hour of dusk and switchable of mood but there was more to it this evening. Somehow his dreams were taking on contour and heft, and the odd stirrings that he felt were deep and premonitory, as at the approach of a dangerous fate.

Now a train eerily whistled as it entered the yards of the Union Pacific and he was twitching like a motherfucker out of control.

By Park and Main the darkness had fallen. He looked in at the Board of Trade for a consultation. He took a glass of whiskey and a beer chaser. He slapped the one and sipped the other. The bad nerves fell away on a quick grade to calmness and resolve. He gathered himself beautifully. He took out a pad and a length of pencil. He looked to the long mirror above the bar and spoke without turning to Patrick Holohan, of Eyeries, County Cork, a miner of the Whistler pit—

Object matrimony, he said.

Holohan in turn considered the mirror warily—

Go again, Tom?

It’s what we say early on. It’s cards on the fucken table time. Show that you’re not playing games with the girl. What’s it her name is anyhow?

Holohan with native shyness slid a letter along the bartop. The wet papery flutters of his breath meant a lunger in the long run. Tom Rourke unfolded the letter and briefly read—you’d need a heart of stone in this line—and he began fluently at once to write.

This’ll only be a rough go at it, he said. See if we can strike some manner of tone. Reassure the girl.

—

Moments passed by in the calm of composition. Looking up, briefly, in search of a word, he saw Pat Holohan in the mirror observing the work with guilt. There was terror in the man’s eyes that he might have a measure of happiness due.

Dear Miss Stapleton—Rourke spoke it now as he read over the words—or Margaret, if I may be so bold. It is my enormous good fortune to have the opportunity today to write to you, and if the marks on the page are not my own, you will know that the words are, and that they are full in earnest.

Oh, that’s lovely, Tom, Holohan said, his face unclenching. More of it, boy.

I write to you in the hope, Margaret, as desperate as it may be, that you will consider a path west from your present situation in Boston and come join me here in the most prosperous town to be found upon the high plateau.

Upon the fucken what?

Mountain, Pat.

He finished the beer and signalled for a shot. Slapped it as it landed. He spun the pencil urbanely in his hand—

How’s the health, Patrick?

Holohan considered the dreary slopes of himself and jawed on his bottom lip and laid a hand to his swollen gut—

Jesus, he said.

Tom Rourke put pencil to the page again—

My object, Margaret, is matrimony, and I wish to state here that I am in as hale and eager a condition as any man might be, at least given the usual reverses a hard working life can bestow.

He had it within himself to help others. He made no more than his dope and drink money from it. He had helped to marry off some wretched cases already. The halt and the lame, the mute and the hare-lipped, the wall-eyed men who heard voices in the night—they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of the page. Discretion, imagination and the careful edit were all that were required.

Do you think she might come, Tom?

Every possibility.

But do you think she’ll know what kind I am?

Hard to from a few letters. She might know enough to chance it. We just have to make sure you come across as genuine and not out for the one thing only.

Holohan blushed like a boy and drank up his beer. He signalled to the keep and a brace of shots appeared. The men slapped them and considered first wordlessly and then with a sense of growing warmth their ludicrous situation.

On Galena Street he walked the stations of the cross again. The lamps burned a mournful electric yellow above the drifting crowd and the girls of the line cribs called out in brash and intricate detail the index of their arrangements. They did so in seven languages. It had grown still colder and their words rang high on the brittle air. Tom Rourke picked his way along the street avoiding the muddier stretches in favour of his tan Colchester boots. He was this season denying himself the bodily release of the cribs and he ignored with a disdain almost priestly the flashing thighs and moaning lips of the commerce. He was anyhow distracted again on the nerves front. Crossing onto Broadway he carried that weight of weird knowledge or clairvoyance. There was the whisper of a foretelling but he could not make out the words of it. He believed in messages, signs, uncanny harbingers, and as he passed by the Southern Hotel the supper room lights sputtered and went dark and then flicked to life again, as if the joint was winking at him.

There was no fucking way he was going out tonight. He looked in briefly at the Pay Day but only for a straightener. He stood at the brass rail and was consoled by his boots, which were cut stylishly to the ankle length. He engaged a small whiskey and judiciously let it down with a splash of water. He thought fuck it and took to the bar mirrors again for a quiet inspection—

He wore the felt slouch hat at a wistful angle and the reefer jacket of mossgreen tweed and a black canvas shirt and in his eyes dimly gleaming the lyric poetry of an early grave and he was satisfied with the inspection. He felt for the Barlow jackknife of teardrop handle in the one pocket and for his dope tin in the other and was reassured.

—

All he wanted from life was quiet and stillness. There was hope of neither in this place. The pit shifts changed and the night heaved and the Pay Day shouldered its way to a condition of full abandon but Tom Rourke huddled into his thin frame at the bar and he was set apart from the hoarse and laughing crowd. He was at a distance of artistic remove from it was what he felt.

He looked in at the Collar & Elbow and sold an eighth of dope to Jeremiah The Chin Murphy there. He looked in at the Graveyard and slapped a shot with Danny the Dog-Boy who was dying of the chest, it was confided, though Dog-Boy had by now been some-and-twenty years in the dying. He was halfways down a glass of strong brown German beer at the Alley Cat and thinking about death and the poetic impulse in youth when he was informed that he was no longer tolerated on the premises on account of misdemeanours incalculable and here once more was a miscarriage of fucking justice.

He walked now on Granite Street—the stations—and the boards of the shanties moaned and creaked in the mountain night and you could not blame them. Even in the present moment there was a great hauntedness to it all. The city was only this short while confected but it was already strung with a legion of ghosts and Tom Rourke could make them out among the rooftops and he saluted them.

Midnight kind of direction he had his knife taken off him by a volcanic Mancunian named Shovel Burgess at the Big Stope bar and he took a blow to the nose which bled theatrically. Next he was turned away by a Celestial from a smoky roost of the Chicken Flats on account of dope money that was owed and had been spent instead on tan Colchester boots. He took a smoke of what meagre dope he had left in supply in a backroom full of gleaming Portuguesers on Nanny Goat Hill and he experienced the truth and glory of God the Almighty in the here and now of the opiate night.

Once he had a zealot belief that love would save him but now he had doubts. He didn’t even know of her existence yet, never mind that she was off the train already, had left the supper room at the Southern Hotel, and was established in a fresh new house on the uptown reaches.

He looked in at the Board of Trade again. He took a slow recuperative bottle of stout. He was dissatisfied with the ambience. Too many Irish. There were by now ten thousand Hibernian to the town and they had the place fucking destroyed. A fellow Corkman drinking at his westerly elbow leaned in with an accent from the rim of Bantry originally—

Hear about Two-Bit Billy?

Shot his own toes off, Tom Rourke recited, at the Alley Cat bar.

Not the way I heard it. Happen at the Big Stope. I seen eye witnesses describin. Two-Bit barred out of the Alley Cat since March. Mostly he been drinkin with the Finns down the Helsinki bar.

When did that all start?

March! They was drinkin for Saint Urho. The cunt what chase the grasshoppers out of Finland.

Two-Bit fell in?

Two-Bit fell in. Man’s companionable.

And where the grasshoppers head to?

We’re gettin off the track of it, boy. The right or the left toes the way you heard it?

Does it matter, friend?

All I’m sayin is you’re a honest workin man stood there tryin to have a peaceful drink and there’s toes all over the fucken floor? That’s lettin the place down something shocken and I don’t care what bar.

He looked in at the Southern Hotel. He looked in at the Cesspool. He gave a broad berth to the Bucket of Blood which was for newspapermen and touristic types only was his opinion. He denied himself once more the line cribs though he considered briefly a proposal of marriage to Greta of Bavaria at the Black Feather. It was three in the morning. He drank and smoked and moved his feet. Then the black haze descended. Then the music all stopped. Then he felt himself aloft suddenly. He was at an elevation. He was upon the fucking air. He was carried from the Open-All-Night and deposited arsewards to the street. He crawled the breadth of the street on his fours. There was little dignity to it. He rose with grave uncertainty and stumbled away into the night and he carried yet the great burden of youth.

He lost his faith in God again around half four in the morning. Now he believed in everything else instead. He believed in spells and enchantments. He believed for sure he could put a spell on the horse. He clamped one eye shut to keep her in focus but she danced about madly before him. A nervous animal, of golden aura, it was mostly palomino in her. She kicked at the frozen hard ground and a petulance of tiny stars flew up in sparks.

Ah go handy, he said, wouldn’t you? My head is fucken openin here.

The moon was near and pale at three-quarters. It showed over the East Ridge wanly. There was a witching in its blue milky light. The horse kicked and whined and her eyes flared with violence—

No call for that business, he said.

He tried to get on his feet for the stance of authority but failed it and slid the wall of some old shanty onto the bone of his butt again. Jesus Christ, the cold would go through you these nights. He looked up at the horse and the horse looked down at him. She was beautiful and high-bred and her every muscle shone—

Who the fuck’s are you anyhow? he said.

The horse quieted at this and relaxed her head to the one side and stared at him as if she was certain now that she had seen him before but couldn’t place him.

Tom Rourke,