Pete Hamill: Snow in August

“Still,” she said, pouring water for tea, “it’s a terrible long way in this storm.”

He followed her glance to the wall clock: seven twenty-five. He had time. He was certain that she also looked at the framed photograph of his father. Thomas Devlin. Michael was named for his mother’s father, who had died in Ireland long ago. The photograph of his own father was hanging beside the picture of President Roosevelt that she’d cut out of the Daily News magazine when he died. For a moment, Michael wondered what she thought about when she looked at the picture of his father. The boy didn’t remember many details about the man she called Tommy. He was a large man with dark hair and a rough, stubbled beard who had gone off to the army when Michael was six. And had never come back. In the framed formal photograph, he was wearing his army uniform. The skin on his smiling face looked smooth. Much smoother than it actually felt. His hair was covered by the army cap, but at the sides it was lighter than the boy remembered. That brown hair. And a deep voice with an Irish brogue. And a blue Sunday suit and polished black shoes. And a song about the green glens of Antrim. And stories about a dog he had as a boy in Ireland, a dog named Sticky, who could power a boat with his tail and fly over mountains. His mother surely remembered much more about him. The boy knew his father had been killed in Belgium in the last winter of the war, and thought: Maybe the blizzard reminds her of Tommy Devlin dead in the snow, a long way from Brooklyn. Maybe that’s why she’s irritated. It’s not my lollygagging. It’s the snow.

“I wish you could eat something,” she said, sipping her tea, but not pouring a cup for Michael because she knew he could neither eat nor drink before serving mass.

“I’ve got to receive Communion, Mom.”

“Well, hurry home. There’ll be bacon and eggs.”

Usually he was famished and thirsty on mornings before mass, but the excitement of the storm was driving him now. He took his mackinaw from the closet beside the front door.

“Wear a hat, lad,” she said.

“This has a hood, Mom,” he said, “and it’s real warm. Don’t worry.”

She took the starched surplice from the clothesline and covered it with butcher paper, closing the wrapping with Scotch tape. Then she kissed him on the cheek as he opened the door to the hall. Halfway down the first flight of stairs, he glanced back, and she was watching him go, her arms folded, her husband smiling from the wall behind her, right next to the dead president of the United States.

I wish she wasn’t so sad, he thought.

And then, leaping down the three flights of stairs to the street, he braced himself for the storm.

As the boy stepped out of the vestibule, into what Jack London called the Great White Silence, he felt as if his eyes had been scoured. Down here, in those first moments on the open street, the snow wasn’t even white; here in its whirling center the storm was as gray as the crystal core of a block of ice. Or the dead eyes of Blind Pew in Treasure Island . Michael blinked again and again, his eyelids moving without his command, as the tears welled up from the cold. He rubbed his eyes to focus and felt cold tears on his cheeks. He rubbed until at last he could see. The only thing moving was the snow, driven wildly by the wind.

He plunged his hands into the mackinaw’s pockets. And his gloves were not there. Goddamn. He remembered leaving them to dry beside the kerosene stove in the living room. Wool gloves, with a hole in the right forefinger. Thinking: I should go upstairs and get them. No. I can’t take the time. I’ll be late. Can’t be late. And wishing he had a watch. I’ll just keep my hands in my pockets. If they freeze, I’ll offer it up.

Then he started to walk, the wrapped surplice under his right arm, hands in his coat pockets. In this block of Ellison Avenue he was sheltered in part by the four-story buildings, and he stepped lumpily through the drifts piled against the tenements, wishing he had snowshoes. As he squinted tightly and saw better, a phrase that he had memorized from Jack London rose in his mind— sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world —and he tingled with excitement. These were ghostly wastes. This was a dead world. He was the sole speck of life.

The fallen snow was up over the tops of parked cars. It covered the newsstand outside Slowacki’s candy store, which for the first time in memory was dark. All the other shops on the block were dark too, their doorways piled with snow. There wasn’t even a light in Casement’s Bar across the street, where Alfred the porter usually mopped floors before the start of business. Michael could see no sign of a trolley car, no traffic, no footprints in the snow. Somewhere, the wolves howled. Perhaps, up ahead, he would find the Male-mute Kid. Or Sitka Charlie. He would build a fire on the frozen shores of Lake Lebarge. Up ahead were the wild bars of Dawson. And the Chilkoot Pass. And the lost trail to All Gold Canyon. Here on Ellison Avenue, Michael Devlin felt like so many of the men in those stories: the only person on earth.

He was not, however, afraid. He had been an altar boy for three years, and the route to Sacred Heart was as familiar as the path through the flat he’d just left behind. Wolves howl, the wind blows, there is no sky. But there is no danger here, he thought. Here I am safe.

Then he stepped past Pete’s Diner on the corner of Collins Street and the wind took him. No simple wind. A fierce, howling wind, ripping up the street from the harbor, a wind angry at the earth, raging at its huge trees and proud houses and puny people. The wind lifted the boy and then dropped him hard and tumbled him, whipping him across the icy avenue. Gripping the surplice with one hand, Michael grabbed with the other for something, anything, and found only ice-crusted snow.

He rolled until he was thumped against the orange post of a fire alarm box.

“Holy God,” he said out loud. “Holy God.”

He gasped for breath, sucking in darts of snow, his nose clogged with ice. But if he was hurt, he was too cold to know what part of him was broken. Still holding the surplice, he skittered on hands and knees and braced his back against the leeward side of the fire alarm box and huddled low, where the wind wasn’t so strong. No pain. Nothing broken. He looked around, keeping his head down, and realized he’d been blown across all six lanes of Ellison Avenue. He saw the heavy neon sign above the entrance of Unbeatable Joe’s bar dangling from a wire, tossing and shaking in the wind, then crunching against the side of the building. But he couldn’t see very far down Collins Street, not even as far as home plate on the stickball court. Everything was white and wild. Then he saw that his mackinaw was coated with snow, and he remembered how characters in those Yukon tales always froze to death if they remained still, or if they fell asleep. They huddled with dogs, they held tight to wolves; anything for warmth. Or they rose and walked. I have to get up, he thought. If I don’t, I will goddamn well die. Michael shoved the surplice under his mackinaw, stuffing it into his belt. Then, crouching low, he began to run.

He ran into the wind, and made it across Collins Street, grabbing for the picket fence outside the factory of the Universal Lighting Company. The building rose above him like an ice mountain from the Klondike, one of those treacherous peaks that killed men in winter and drowned them in spring, washing their bodies into the Yukon River. The black iron pickets were so cold they seemed to burn his bare hands, and he was afraid the skin would be torn off his palms. But his skin held, and he pulled himself along until he was free of the hammering force of the wind.