A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [84]
“I need to hire a sleigh to get out there today,” he said.
“Not likely,” said the man. “Not today, not tomorrow, probably not the day after that.”
“For heaven’s sake, why not?”
“Road’s closed. Road’s almost always closed. Snow in winter. Mud in summer. Waste of time if you ask me … roads.
“ Branwell was speechless.
“But,” the stranger offered, “judging by the good weather, you might get out there on snowshoes if you’ve got ‘em. Not today though. Too late. You’ll have to put up at Kelterborn’s Bar. Dreadful rooms, but good beer. Thanks to the railroad.” He touched his head and for the first time Branwell noticed the railway cap.
The wind rose and the station master disappeared, enveloped by a shroud of white. “At least it’s not snowing,” the man said. “Nice sunny day.”
“Not snowing?” said Branwell as the wind abated somewhat and the man came, once again, partially into view.
“This stuff is just blowing around. There’s a storm coming through, though. We’re proud of our storms here.” The currents of air, the station master cheerfully explained, coming from the far-off Great Lakes encountered one another directly over this region and, “By Jesus,” he slapped his gloved hands together, “don’t we get snow!” He took Branwell’s arm. “No more trains today,” he said. “Let’s go for a drink.”
That night, as Branwell lay on a straw mattress in a room above the bar, his sleep was interrupted by the wind rattling the windows and a strange, vigorous thumping. “Just the ghost,” Kelterborn told him when he inquired the following morning. “We’ve asked him to keep it down, but he won’t. He hates being imprisoned here, prefers to wander.”
Kelterborn was a large, pink German fellow who presided over his bar with an air of pompous dignity mixed with that of boredom and mild disapproval. Branwell had already learned that his taciturn host was not inclined to give advice of any kind—political, elemental, spiritual—and he declined with a shrug to discuss the state of the road. He refused, in effect, to commit to anything beyond the price of the drink in your hand, or that of your bed for the night. His smooth, broad forehead glowed. The bottles behind him on the shelf shone. The Quebec heater roared. And, as the station master had said, his beer was good. Branwell was not, in fact, much of a drinker, but he had consumed enough beer the previous night to produce both a morning headache and a general sense of unreality into which the notion of the ghost fit nicely.
“Like you,” Kelterborn offered, “the ghost has been trying to get out to Fryfogel’s. Been here for a couple of weeks at least, might be here all winter.”
Branwell rose at this point and, eager for some oxygen, headed for the porch, which, like the rest of the structure where he was sheltering, was made of rough-hewn logs. When he was finally able to push the front door open against the wind, it became evident that several Great Lake currents had collided during the night. A prodigious quantity of snow was falling from the sky, adding inches to the deep white sea that stretched off in all directions over the acres of townships that Branwell knew were named after the entrepreneurs who had cut them clean, divided them up, and sold them off. Everything else was named after European towns and villages. How absurd, he thought, that the spot where he now stood, a place where nothing happened but a succession of blizzards as far as he could tell, should be named after a tourist spa situated in a picturesque corner of the Austrian Alps. Even more absurd that the collection of squatters shanties and jagged stumps that he had heard existed