This Magnificent Desolation Read Free Page B

cavernous. It’s as if he has bellowed the words, but the girl doesn’t hear him, and he must repeat himself. She leans forward and there is the scent of her hair and the rustle of her clothes as she moves.
    The same age as you, Julie says. I’m ten.
    And that, that’s Billy Bowen, she whispers, and then kicks the old man’s stick with her shoe. Hey, Billy, she says. Hey.
    Billy opens his eyes and they are large ovals, the dark blue irises occupying all. Billy, Julie tells Duncan, is a nine-year-old boy trapped in the body of an eighty-year-old man—he suffers from the rare disease progeria—and Duncan stares at him and Billy shrugs. It’s okay, he says, I’m meant to do something special. This is just my disguise.
    Julie pats his knee. Yes, she says, her brow furrowed and her lips pursed with conviction. It’s a good disguise, Billy.
    The notes of Elvis’s “Blue Moon” are fading again, and in the song’s echo and reverb there is a tremulous, hesitant quality that makes Duncan pause. And then the song ends and there is silence, and in that silence Duncan wonders if he has merely imagined the song. A delicate wind sighs in the crooked alleys above the windows, and there is a soft slapping sound of sandals on wet concrete outside. A crystalline metal peal breaks the silence: a bell tolling thehour. The sound is oddly familiar, and, with Elvis gone, he finds a strange comfort in that.
    I think I’m supposed to do something special too, Duncan says, and Billy smiles at him.
    You’ll need a disguise, he says.

Chapter 3
    You could see the Home for miles. It rose upon a hill between farmed valleys and the mining range and looked as if it did not belong to that part of the Midwest at all but rather as if it were a dwelling from Western Europe or Britain of five hundred years before, with its chevet and buttressed bell tower, its Romanesque archways and gilt-roofed chapels, beehive oratories and Cistercian-Gothic chancellery. Turning your gaze east and west on that Thule hillside, in the brisk autumn air, you see the landscape of the Home and of the Minnesota plains: the sweep of terrace and playing field, the perimeter wall with its red bricks glowing as if heated by flame, and, beyond the wall, the farms and rugose hills and highlands of coniferous forests and the far, wide crown of the Iron Range; the red peaks of dairy farms, of galvanized sheet-metal grain silos sparking silver; wooded uplands, fat white clouds blurring and breaking apart in the blustery twilit pewter-blue sky.
    The immensity of the land gathered you in and pressed you towardthe monastery’s stone walls, covered with hanging ivy whose leaves were a warm burnt orange, curved wide and open at their ends to receive you like welcome arms into the shelter of its mortared and gardened depths. Its halls and courtyards and prayer rooms held the memory and the ghosts of the dead: influenza patients from World War I, and, from later, those with tuberculosis, and later still, mad young men returned home with arms and limbs and minds missing, left behind in parts of Europe and Africa and Asia. Day after day and night after night, amidst the constant low hum of prayer, Duncan can still hear the ghostly echo of these men and their wide-mouthed screams filled with the nightmare of war.
    To the Capuchins who ran it, the abbey was known as the Blessed House of Gray Fathers of Mercy. To the children, it was simply the Home, for it was all they knew. The Home held their lives, their bodies and their souls, in its care. They were the children of God, and nothing but nothing could touch them there in that place, not if they were good. God would not let it. Father Toibin used to tell them this, remind them that if they trusted in God and had faith, then they would always be safe, no matter what else had befallen them.
    Duncan’s dormitory leads off the main hallway on the second floor of the east eave of the