Read This Magnificent Desolation for Free Online Page B

from the conifers in the clefts of the valley, snow sheeting the upper peaks. He leaves the train and follows his footsteps back through the snow.
    Through the fields he trudges and now, here and there, candlelight sparks in windows of the farmhouses he passes, and he sees movement within. Smoke drifts from chimneys into the cold, clear air, and there is a pain in his heart as he glimpses through kitchen windows the glow of wood fires and tables with families gathered around them for breakfast and the doors closed and frost on the barred windowpanes, and him with nowhere to go but back across the fields to the Home.
    Down to the pond, and so through the courtyard, the walkway skinned with a gleaming ice, and by the chapel, deserted and silent so early in the morning before Lauds, window shutters still stamped shut and behind them sleeping girls and boys. He sees them curled up in bed, rows upon rows of them, stretching into infinity, all curled into fetal position as in a time prior to their birth, before their abandon.
    Awake now, and a flame to his face, blinding. A dead weight bears him down, his aching back, his blistered feet. Slowly, his senses come back to him. The floor beneath him, cold and hard. Spittle drooling from his mouth. There comes a pressure and pull on his shoulders, urging him up. Fingers, a hand, a face floating pale in the darkness: Billy.
    Duncan, are you all right?
    Billy, he says. Did you see her? Did you see my mother?
    Billy looks into his eyes—each time he sees Billy’s eyes in his mind he is reminded of their beauty and the heartbreaking knowledge that each time he stares into them he can never stop himself from thinking, however fleetingly,
He is going to die soon
. Billy considerswhat to say and is searching for the right words. A mouse is gnawing in the kitchen cabinets. Something—a small tree branch or some other windblown object—skitters down the roof.
    Yes, Duncan. I saw your mother. She’s beautiful.
    The wood in the stove has burned down to crackling embers and the chill of the night creeps quickly into the kitchen. Duncan’s feet soon fall numb upon the tiles and he looks down at them. On the floor, tracked from the door at the far end of the vestibule and surrounded by melting snow, dirt, and leaves, his bare footprints glisten wetly.
    Duncan, Billy says, staring at the floor, his eyes wide with wonder. Where have you been?
    Duncan’s fingertips and toes suffer a mild frostbite and develop soft, red, pinched lesions. In a warm room, after coming in out of the cold, they swell as blood rushes brightly into them and then they begin to itch and burn as if he’d been pricked by a needle. Julie rubs a salve over them to help but the only time he feels any relief is at night when Father Wilhelm lowers the thermostat and all warmth leaves the rooms. Brother Canice looks at Duncan’s feet when he comes into the kitchen and shakes his head and says I told you you’d get chilblains if you didn’t wear your slippers.
    The nights continue to shorten; soon there is still light at five o’clock, and when Mass ends and the Brothers are calling the children to supper, the courtyard is lit by the last bright angles of sunlight fading over the hillside and the lamplights come on shining blurrily through a warm mist that drifts slowly across the grounds, altering all sense of distance and space and sound. And so that strange and divine moment in which Duncan had seen his mother passes even before he can really and truly hold it to his heart and, for a little while, he stops thinking about her altogether.

Chapter 9
    I have sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.
    â€”VICTOR HUGO
    April 1981
    After Father Magnusson’s Requiem Mass, in the storm of 1970, his body was placed in the monastery’s charnel house, where it lay for two months