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life and hot water steams in the pipes he cannot control the chill that has taken hold of him. He pulls the sheets and blankets over his head and curls into a small shape beneath the blankets; when he lifts his head, his breath smokes the air. Eventually he rises and goes downstairs to the kitchen where a fire still burns in the woodstove, but there is no sign of Brother Canice. He sits on a hard-backed chair and listens to the wood crackling and popping in the cast-iron grate.
    He falls asleep and wakes to lights shimmering in the distance. He rises and experiences a moment of confusion, a strange disembodiedness as his body betrays him. The flickering lights add to the sense of dislocation. He feels no attachment to the limbs that paddle the darkness before him, rather he is looking upon a boy stumbling, sleepwalking through the snow. On the hill before him, perhaps a quarter mile away, he sees the thirteen cars outlined against the sky and the flickering Christmas lights of the Holiday Train. His feet drag him on as if with a will entirely their own, and though he resists—he wants to turn back toward the retreating lights of the monastery—the distance between himself and the train grows shorter and shorter.
    His arms are about him but he can no longer feel them; a sweet calm settles itself upon his thoughts and everything seems to slow. He knows that if only he pushes forward, ignoring the cold, the hollowness of his bones, the emptiness that seems to fill him and that is gradually replaced by a slow liquid warmth, he will discover something wondrous. On the hill before him he is certain there lies illuminationand an understanding of the type that only God grants. The drifts rise to his thighs and he seems to sink deeper and deeper with each step forward. He can see the vintage Pullman cars, ice gleaming across their red and green bodies and upon their curved roofs. From the wide windows a strange light casts its glow and the silhouettes of people within the cars move through this light, their shadows elongated and curved upon the snowdrifts, and there is the sound of voices and of laughter, of music crackling through an old radio’s tinny speakers.
    In front of him a blurred shape appears, becoming more and more distinct as he nears the train. And he knows before he can fully see her that this figure standing before him in the glow of the miniature lights with the storm raging about her is his mother. She stands at the edge of light cast by the Christmas lights, a light so brilliant in its incandescence that it extends twenty feet or so across the wind-polished snow. Her clothes are cloyed and damp with snow and her head is covered with a dark scarf, but how white her face is! How radiant and glowing!
    Light fragments, shifts, and fractures through the billows of snow so that at times his mother appears so near that he feels he can touch her and at other times she is a figure retreating, moving away across the plain. She speaks to him, and though it is cold, he does not feel cold, wrapped as he is in the warmth and peace of her presence and the low, soft hush of her voice. But now it begins to snow, heavy and thick, and the wind is gusting, pressing the snow slantways so that she sways and shimmers blurrily and then he can no longer see. All sight and sound is obliterated; only the wind and snow and cold remain and he bends his head into it.
    He sleeps again, and wakes sitting in one of the wide chairs of a Pullman carriage, looking out over the frozen landscape and the far glittering bell tower of the monastery. A transistor radio is playing Handel’s
Messiah
and he is filled with a sense of exhilaration now, the glorious feeling of no longer being alone, no longer stranded tothe wastes of Minnesota with a hundred abandoned children just like him.
    The slate-gray sky is slowly turning bluish at the farthest edges of the horizon and the mountains of the Iron Range begin to take shape, white mist rolling