A good woman

by Louis Bromfield

10

It was a clear night, and very cold, when the moonlight painted the snow and the black houses of the Flats with a luminous blue light. As he walked, the hard-packed snow creaked and whined beneath his heels. The stars, for all their brilliance, seemed infinitely remote. As he walked, a little cloud of frozen breath trailed behind him.

By the railroad-tracks and in the narrow streets that bordered them, the Flats were empty. The houses stood silent and black. The fires, the little piles of household goods, were gone now, and with them the miserable, shivering women and children. At Hennessey’s corner there was the usual blaze of light, the jagged clamor of the mechanical piano, and the sound of drunken voices behind the swinging-doors. The lights, the sounds, hurt him in an inexplicable fashion, filling him with an acute and painful sense of loneliness.

It was an emotion which changed, as he entered the park, to one of vague fear. Inside the rusted gates the park lay frozen and solitary in the brilliant moonlight. The deep shadows were blue along the drive, black where the outline of a dead tree fell across the snow. The bits of statuary—the Venus of Cnidos, the Apollo Belvedere, the cast-iron Cupid—all had little caps and collars of frozen snow. The windows of the big house lay shuttered and dark, save for a room in the corner where little bars of yellow light filtered out. It was perhaps the room where Lily Shane sat waiting for her mother to die.

As he turned the corner on the stable side, there came to him all at once a feeling that he was not alone in the park. There were other creatures there, too, not human perhaps, but the ghosts of all the men and women who had been there in the gaudy days of the Castle when the trees were still alive, and the garden neatly kept, and the stable filled with horses. There had always been a mystery about the place, and for him, who had never seen the place while it was alive, it was a mystery enveloped in a romantic glamour. He understood suddenly how people are able to invest a place with the character of their own existence. It was the wicked old John Shane, dead so long that he had become a legend, and his dying widow, who owned this silent frozen park filled with dead trees.... It would still be theirs and theirs alone long after they had turned to dust, until at last the house was pulled down and the park buried beneath clamorous steel sheds and roaring furnaces. And even then ... as long as there remained alive one person who remembered them, the place would be known as Shane’s Hill, where once the Castle stood. It was an odd sort of immortality....

He saw, too, that the slate-colored house was like his mother: she had stamped it forever as her own, and that the huts at Megambo were oddly like Naomi, who had been so happy in them. And he saw suddenly why he had hated both places and how in a way they explained both his mother and Naomi, and the power they both possessed of making him wretched. This cold park and the silent house, peopled by creatures that were dead, seemed a dark and sinister place, yet it had, too, a sense of splendor, of barren grandeur, that for more than half a century had dominated the Town. It existed still in the very midst of the clamorous Mills.

The stable was silent, save for the sound of the fat horses tramping in their stalls, and in his room overhead the stove still burned, filling the room with warmth. It was a plain enough room, empty save for the iron cot where he slept, a table, two chairs and his painting materials. Yet for him a pleasant place. He had for the first time in all his life a sense of coming home. It was his; and it suited him with its barren emptiness. It was like the cell of a monk, bare and cold, and free of everything which might distract from a contemplation of the great mystery.

He did not trouble to light the kerosene lamp. The cold moonlight flooded in through the window, casting in black filigrees on the bare floor the shadow of the drooping vines that fell across the panes. Against the walls and ceiling the flames in the belly of the stove cast another pattern, different, outlined of warm and glowing light.

For a long time he stood there, his hands clasped behind him, looking out of the window, seized once more by the enchantment of the beauty with which the night invested all the expanse of the Flats. Far off, under the shadow of one of the seven hills, the flames of the furnaces in the Jupiter plant raised an arc of glowing light. He saw in his imagination all the spectacle that existed there—the bodies of the black men, the dancing shadows cast by the glaring lights, the angry hiss and bubble of boiling white-hot metal. He could smell the curious, pungent odor of burning coke. He saw the movement, the unearthly splendor, the immense energy that filled the whole scene.

Just beneath the hill, the sheds and furnaces lay in black shadows. There were fires there, built by the Mill guards, that burned like the red eyes of giants asleep in the velvety darkness. There was the sudden wild screech of an express locomotive, and a long serpent-like monster, lighted from within like a firefly, rushed through the darkness.