This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley Read Free Book Online Page A

slapping the stone. They are the audience to her mother’s final dramatic performance at the Humboldt Theater in New York City, a week after Julie was left at the home.
    Watching, Duncan feels the air humming at his fingertips as if it is a charged, violent thing, stirred from its sleeping suspension by Julie’s emotions. He sits as though entranced and listens to the minute, almost imperceptible reverberations of the charnel house and the Home. Dust motes tumble in frenetic cartwheels in the bright shafts of white light.
    When she is done, Julie bows and the white, center part in herhair is visible. Duncan and Billy applaud as she sits, and Duncan’s heart quickens at the sight of sweat gleaming upon the insides of her thighs and in the naked, hollow spaces at the back of her knees. She sighs, leans against the cool wall, and looks upward. On the domed ceiling there is a painted sky of varying shades of blue, white clouds, and a thousand silver stars, all arranged in distinct constellations. And in the center of this is the skylight through which the true sky is visible.
    Even the children’s graveyard can only hold so many bodies, Julie says, sighing, for these are some of the things she knows about the monastery. Often she reminds them that she has been here the longest. Stay with me, she says, mimicking Father Toibin, and nothing will touch you.
    She nods toward the barrel vaults and toward the stairs beneath, where the babies are interned. After the corpse has decayed, its remains are brought here, she continues, or to St. Katrine’s ossuary in Stockholdt. This is where they brought the dead from the blizzard of ’70, the winter my mother abandoned me here.
    All those people aboard the train?
    The train, the fields, all the homes about Thule. I think it was thirty or forty in all.
    The children too?
    The children too.
    From the far vault a host of blank, grinning skulls stares back. Duncan looks at the hollowed cavities of the eyes sockets, the flared holes of the nostrils, and the bare, gleaming row of cruel-looking teeth on the exposed jawbone, and wonders which ones belong to the dead of the Holiday Train. But of course they are not here—they were placed in the ground as soon as it could receive them that spring.
    What about you, Billy? he asks. Duncan must stare at him for a moment until the image of the skulls is gone and there is only Billybefore him, pale and wizened and chewing on his cracked lips and looking much like a skull himself. When Julie admonishes him, Billy stops and purses them thoughtfully instead.
    My father was a Green Beret, he says. Fought in Vietnam and won the Purple Heart. Got shot—
    In the butt, Julie says.
    â€”in the …, Billy laughs, in the butt!
    Their laughter resounds in the large stone expanse. Water sloshes and ripples and churns in the fountain. Duncan has the sensation of the bones shifting and settling with the vibration of their laughter. The skulls grin back from the dark recesses. Sunlight refracts off the water pooling in the font and shimmers wavily upon the stone floor.
    That’s why, Billy continues, that’s why he couldn’t be with me. He was needed in the war. He risked his life saving his platoon at Khe Lhong. If he’d been with me, they would all have died. He nods to himself. Just imagine that, he says, that’s got to be thirty men, right?
    But what about your mother, Billy? Where was she?
    My mother? I don’t know. I don’t know where she was, but that’s not important anyway.
    Why?
    Billy stares at the skulls as if in silent communion with them. The air smells of ash and loam and of wood smoke from a Brother burning the damp bales of ruined hay cut during last season’s topping. There will be leaves and rotted deadfall cleared from the fields for the plow, stones piled atop one another along the wall before the windbreak in preparation of the sowing and planting. A thin thread of black smoke