Snow in August

by Pete Hamill

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Deeply affecting and wonderfully evocative of old New York, Snow in August is a brilliant fable for our time and all time—and another triumph for Pete Hamill.



Brooklyn, 1947. The war veterans have come home. Jackie Robinson is about to become a Dodger. And in one close-knit working-class neighborhood, an eleven-year-old Irish Catholic boy named Michael Devlin has just made friends with a lonely rabbi from Prague.



Snow in August is the story of that unlikely friendship—and of how the neighborhood reacts to it. For Michael, the rabbi opens a window to ancient learning and lore that rival anything in Captain Marvel. For the rabbi, Michael illuminates the everyday mysteries of America, including the strange language of baseball. But like their hero Jackie Robinson, neither can entirely escape from the swirling prejudices of the time. Terrorized by a local gang of anti-Semitic Irish toughs, Michael and the rabbi are caught in an escalating spiral of hate for which there's only one way out—a miracle . . .

Release date: October 31, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

“Simply a wonderful story and well told.”

—Mike Barnicle, Boston Globe



“A beautiful tale of pain, evil, retribution, and hope.”

—Fort Worth Star-Telegram



“Vivid… Hamill delivers… You can hear the sounds of kids playing stickball, taste the Communion wafers, and see Jackie Robinson
stealing home.”


—Associated Press



“Once again, Pete Hamill shows us how marvelous a writer he is. This novel is a delight.”

—Peter Maas



“Lovely yet heartbreaking…. [A] moving story of a boy confronting morality…. In Michael Devlin, Hamill has created one of
the most endearing characters in recent adult fiction…. SNOW IN AUGUST is a minor miracle in itself.”


—Hartford Courant




“Hamill is an effortless master at evoking a bygone era…. All [he] has to do is say ‘Shazam!’ and he brings to palpable life
the streets of postwar Brooklyn and the prepubescent soul of a boy coming of age.”


—San Jose Mercury News



“Charming and affecting.”

—Miami Herald



“In this beautifully woven tale, Hamill captures perfectly the daily working-class world of postwar Brooklyn… Will thrill
believers and make nonbelievers pause…. He examines with a cool head and a big heart the vulnerabilities and inevitable oneness
of humankind.”


—Publishers Weekly (starred review)



“Brings a fascinating time and place to very real life.”

—Orlando Sentinel



“Hamill is as readable as ever… the time-warp element and terrific descriptions will appeal to many.”

—Kirkus Reviews



“With a mastery of language and imagery that has made him the journalist-editor-novelist he is, Hamill meshes several disparate
works seamlessly, in lush colors.”


—Fort Worth Star-Telegram




“A godsend…. Only the hard-hearted could fail to be moved by this old-fashioned story about friendship.”


—St. Paul Pioneer Press



“Hamill blends fiction and fantasy to produce a masterpiece… in a book that comes along about as often as there is snow in
August…. All of the elements strike a chord without coming across as clichés…. He has written a great American novel.”


—Winston-Salem Journal



“Delightful… endearing… absorbing… Hamill has written a telling episode of faith, a faith which professes that major or minor
miracles might readily occur along the streets of ancient Prague or modern Brooklyn’s East New York.”


—Midstream



“Re-creates the Brooklyn of days gone by lovingly…. Hamill, the journalist, puts just the right amount of realistic detail
into the time and place and characters to make this story burst with life.”


—Kliatt

Once upon a cold and luminous Saturday morning, in an urban hamlet of tenements, factories, and trolley cars on the western
slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.


He was eleven years and three months old in this final week of the year 1946, and because he had slept in this room for as
long as he could remember, the darkness provoked neither mystery nor fear. He did not have to see the red wooden chair that
stood against the windowsill; he knew it was there. He knew his winter clothes were hanging on a hook on the door and that
his three good shirts and his clean underclothes were neatly stacked in the two drawers of the low green bureau. The Captain Marvel comic book he’d been reading before falling asleep was certain to be on the floor beside the narrow bed. And he knew that
when he turned on the light he would pick up the comic book and stack it with the other Captain Marvels on the top shelf of the metal cabinet beside the door.
Then he would rise in a flash, holding his breath to keep from shivering in his underwear, grab for clothes, and head for
the warmth of the kitchen. That was what he did on every dark winter morning of his life.


But this morning was different.

Because of the light.

His room, on the top floor of the tenement at 378 Ellison Avenue, was at once dark and bright, with tiny pearls of silver
glistening in the blue shadows. From the bed, Michael could see a radiant paleness beyond the black window shade and gashes
of hard white light along its sides. He lay there under the covers, his eyes filled with the bright darkness. A holy light,
he thought. The light of Fatima. Or the Garden of Eden. Or the magic places in storybooks. Suddenly, he was sure it was like
the light in the Cave of the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man. That secret place in the comic book where the faceless man in the
black suit first took Billy Batson to meet the ancient Egyptian wizard named Shazam. Yes: the newsboy must have seen a light
like this. Down there, beyond the subway tunnel, in that long stone cave where the white-bearded wizard gave him the magic
word that called down the lightning bolt. The lightning bolt that turned the boy into Captain Marvel, the world’s mightiest
man.


Michael knew that the magic word was the same as the name of the wizard: Shazam! And he had learned from the comic book that the letters of the name stood for Solomon, Hercules, and Atlas, Zeus, Achilles,
and Mercury. Ancient gods and heroes. Except for Solomon, who was a wise king from Bible days. Mighty symbols of strength,
stamina, power, courage, and speed. They weren’t just names in a comic book either; Michael had looked them up in the encyclopedia.
And their powers were all combined in Captain Marvel. On that
night in the mysterious cave, the wizard named Shazam told Billy Batson he had been chosen to fight the forces of evil because
he was pure of heart. And no matter how sinister his enemies were, no matter how monstrous their weapons, all he needed to
fight them was to shout the magic word. Shazam!

Alas, on the streets of the parish, the magic word did not work for Michael Devlin and his friends, and for at least three
years they had debated the reasons. Maybe they needed to get the powers directly from the Egyptian wizard. Maybe the word
didn’t work because they weren’t pure enough. Or because, as his friend Sonny Montemarano put it, Captain Marvel was just
a story in a fucking comic book. Still, Michael insisted, it might be true. Who could ever know? Maybe all they had to do
was believe hard enough for it to happen.


Michael was snapped back into the present by the sound of the wind. First a low moan. Then a high-pitched whine. A trombone
choir, then a soprano saxophone. Tommy Dorsey’s band, and then Sidney Bechet. The names and music he had learned from the
radio. It sounded to Michael like the voice of the light. He sat up, his heart pounding, wondering what time it was, afraid
that he had overslept, and swung his feet around to the floor. They landed on the Captain Marvel comic book.


I wish I didn’t have to do this, he thought. Sometimes being an altar boy was a huge pain in the ass. I wish I could just
lie in bed and listen to the wind. Instead of dragging myself all the way to Sacred Heart to mouth a lot of mumbo jumbo in
a language nobody even speaks. I wish I could fall back into this warm bed, pull the covers around me, and sleep.


But he did not sink back into the warmth. In his mind, he saw his mother’s disappointed face and Father Heaney’s angry eyes.
Worse: he felt suddenly alarmed, as if he had come close to the sin of sloth. Even Shazam warned against sloth, listing
it among the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man, and Shazam wasn’t even a Catholic. The word itself had a disgusting sound, and he
remembered a picture of an animal called a sloth that he’d seen in a dictionary. Thick, furry, nasty. He imagined it growing
to the size of King Kong, waddling wetly through the city, stinking of filth and laziness and animal shit. A dirty goddamned
giant sloth, with P-38s firing machine guns at it, the bullets vanishing into the hairy mush of its formless body, its open mouth a pit
of slobber. Jesus Christ.


So Michael did not even raise the black window shade. He grabbed his trousers, thinking: The antonym for sloth must be self-denial.
Or movement. Or a word that said get off your ass, get up and go. When the priests, brothers, and nuns were not drilling them
in synonyms or antonyms or the eleven times table, they were forever hammering away about self-denial. And so, buttoning his
fly in the dark, he refused himself the pleasure of pulling the shade aside, or rolling it up, and thus revealing the source
of the luminous light. He would wait. He would put off that vision. He would offer up his discomfort, as his teachers commanded
him to do, for the suffering souls in Purgatory. Be good. Be pure. Accept some pain and thus redeem those who are burning
for their sins. He could hear the chilly orders of his catechism teachers as clearly as he could hear Shazam.


Shirtless and shoeless, he hurried through the dark living room and past his mother’s closed bedroom door to the kitchen,
which faced the harbor of New York. The fire in the coal stove had guttered and died during the night, and the linoleum floors
were frigid on his bare feet. He didn’t care. Now he would deny himself no longer. He lifted the kitchen window shade, and
his heart tripped.


There was the source of the light.


Snow.


Still falling on the rooftops and backyards of Brooklyn.

Snow now so deep, so dense and packed, that the world glowed in its blinding whiteness.

The thrilling view pebbled his skin. It had been snowing for two days and nights, great white flakes on the first day and
then harder, finer snow driven by the wind off the harbor. The boy had seen nothing like it. Ever. He could remember six of
his eleven winters on the earth, and there had never been snow like this. This was snow out of movies about the Yukon that
he watched in the Venus. This was like the great Arctic blizzards in the stories of Jack London that he read in the library
on Garibaldi Street. Snow that hid wolves and covered automobiles and crushed cabins and halted trolley cars. Snow that caused
avalanches to cover the entrances of gold mines and snow that cracked limbs off trees in Prospect Park. Snow from a mighty
storm. The night before, someone on the radio said that the blizzard had paralyzed the city. Here it was, the next morning,
and the snow was still coming down, erasing the world.


He stepped into the narrow bathroom off the kitchen, closing the door behind him. The tiles were colder than the linoleum.
His teeth chattered. He urinated, pulled the chain to flush, and then washed his face quickly in the cold water of the sink,
thinking: I will go into it; I will face the storm, climb the hard hills, push into the wind of the blizzard to the church
on the hill. Father Heaney, a veteran of the war, will celebrate the eight o’clock mass, and I will be there at his side.
The only human being to make it through the blizzard. Even the old ladies in black, those strange old biddies who make it
to church through rainstorms and heat waves, even they will fail to make
it through the storm. The pews will be empty. The candles will flicker in the cold. But I will be there.


His heart raced at the prospect of the great test. He didn’t care now about the souls in Purgatory. He wanted the adventure.
He wished he had a dogsled waiting downstairs. He wished he could bundle himself in furs and lift a leather whip and urge
the huskies forward, shouting, Mush, boys, mush! He had the serum in a pouch and by God, he would get it to Nome.


He combed his hair, and when he stepped out of the bathroom, his mother, Kate, was raking the ashes in the coal stove, her
flannel robe pulled tightly around her, worn brown slippers on her feet. Steam leaked from her mouth into the frigid air.
A teapot rested on the black cast-iron top of the stove, waiting for heat.


“Let me do that, Mom,” the boy said. “That’s my job.”


“No, no, you’re already washed,” she said, in her soft Irish accent, a hair of irritation in her voice. Raking the dead ashes
was one of Michael’s chores, but in his excitement over the blizzard, he’d forgotten. “Just go and get dressed.”


“I’ll do it,” he said, taking the flat shovel from her and digging the ashes out of the bottom tray. He poured them into a paper bag,
a gray powder rising in the air to mix with the steam from his breath, then shoveled fresh coal from the bucket onto the grate.
The fine ash made him sneeze.


“For the love of God, Michael, get dressed,” she said now, pushing him aside. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”


Back in his room, at the far end of the railroad flat, he pulled an undershirt over his head and a dark green shirt on top
of it, shoving the tails into his trousers. After tugging galoshes over his shoes, he finally raised the blackout shade. The
snow was piled against the windowpane at least two feet above the steel
slats of the fire escape. Beyond the steep drift, snow swirled like a fog so dense he could not see across Ellison Avenue.
He hurried back into the kitchen. A fire was burning now in the coal stove, its odor staining the air like rotten eggs. He
wished his mother would buy the Blue Coal advertised on The Shadow; it was harder—anthracite, they said in school—with almost no smell. But she told him once that they couldn’t afford it and he never asked again.


“I’m sure you could stay home if you like, Michael,” she said, the irritation out of her voice now. “They know how far you
have to come.”


“I can do it,” he said, combing his hair, choosing not to remind her that the church was eight blocks from 378 Ellison Avenue.
From the backyards he heard a sound that he was sure was the howling of a thousand wolves.


“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.


At Corrigan Street he repeated the process: head down, crouched, falling once, then up again, until he reached the shops untouched
by the wind. Away off, about three blocks, he could see the ghostly shape of a trolley car. Its lights were on but it wasn’t
moving. High above the avenue, the cables that gave the trolleys their power were quivering like bowstrings. Michael paused
under the shuddering marquee of the Venus, gazing at the showcards offering The Four Feathers and Gunga Din. He’d seen both at least three times and tried to conjure warm images of India or the vast deserts of Africa, with Fuzzy
Wuzzies charging in the dust and British soldiers sweating in the heat. The images only made him feel colder. And for the
first time, he was afraid.


I have to go now, he thought. I have to turn this corner and go up Kelly Street, past the armory, past the Jewish synagogue,
have to cross MacArthur Avenue, have to turn right at the park. I have to do this now. With the wind at my back. I must go.
Not just to serve mass. No. For a bigger reason. If I turn around and go home, I’ll be a goddamned coward. Nobody will see
me turn and run for home. But I’ll know.



He turned the corner into Kelly Street. There were three-story houses to his left, the humped shapes of parked cars to his
right, and around him and under him and above him he heard a high, thin, piercing whine, the savage, wordless wolf call of
the wind: penetrating him, lifting him and dropping him, driving him past the soaring drifts that concealed buried cars. The
whine was insistent and remorseless. Who are you, Michael Devlin, the voice said, to challenge me?


Then he looked up and his way was blocked. A giant elm had been smashed to the ground from the front yard of one of the houses.
As the tree fell before the wind, it had crushed the fence of the house and collapsed the roof of a parked car, and it was
now stretched out to the far side of the street. The branches of the tree seemed to reach toward the white sky in protest.
Snow gathered on the dying trunk. The windows of the crushed car had exploded, and snow was drifting onto its seats. The boy
thought: If the tree had hit me instead of the car, I’d be dead.


Holy God.

He pushed through loose waist-deep snow between two parked cars and crossed the street, skirting the murdered tree, until
he reached the side of the armory. This was no refuge. Behind its barred windows, the armory housed a boxing ring and dozens
of old jeeps and National Guardsmen called “weekend warriors.” But its sheer redbrick walls rose a forbidding six stories
above the street, and no doorways offered shelter. The boy saw now that the armory’s copper drainpipes had burst. High above
the ground, shoving their way from the ruptured seams of the drainpipes, giant icicles stabbed at the air, defying the wind.
They were thick, muscular icicles, a foot wide at the root, sharp as spears at the tip. Michael Devlin remembered photographs
in the encyclopedia of stalactites, gray
and dead; these icicles looked just as primitive and ancient and evil. And all of them were aimed at him.


He turned his eyes away from the icicles and trudged on, wishing again that he had a wristwatch. Seems like hours since I
left the house, he thought, but maybe it’s only been minutes. I don’t really know, and the storm doesn’t care anything about
time. He thought: Maybe this is crazy. What if the church is closed too? What if Father Heaney took one look at the storm
and decided to celebrate mass alone in the rectory? What if the electricity has failed and the altar is dark? And suppose
another tree falls, or a monster icicle, and hits me? Without warning. Nobody to shout: Watch it, kid. It would just happen.
And I’d be left here in the drifts, without a dog or a friend or a scout from the mining camp. My mother would have to bury
me and she’d be left completely alone. Or I’d end up crippled, a drag on her and everyone else. In one of the Jack London
stories, a prospector broke his leg in a storm and his best friend was forced to obey the wisdom of the trail by shooting
him in the head. Otherwise both of them would die.


Then, moving over a piled ridge, Michael imagined his father in the snows of Belgium. Many Americans had been killed there
by the Germans in what was called the Battle of the Bulge. Thousands of them. He saw his father in full uniform, with a helmet
and heavy boots, carrying a gun, and the snow driving even harder than this Brooklyn blizzard, and the wind whining, with
the goddamned Germans somewhere up ahead in the blinding storm: as close, maybe, as MacArthur Avenue, as near as the synagogue.
Unseen. Hidden. Ready to kill. Did Tommy Devlin think about turning around and running home? Of course not. He wasn’t a goddamned
coward. But did he have a friend with him? Or was he alone when he was shot, his blood oozing red into the white snow? Had
he lost all
feeling in his hands and feet before they killed him? Did he cry? Did he hear wolves? Did he think of Mom? Home in the top-floor
flat on Ellison Avenue? His blue suit? Did he think of me?


Suddenly, Michael Devlin heard a voice.

A human voice.

Not the wind, but the first real voice he’d heard since he left home.

He stopped and gazed around at the deserted world.

And then, through the slanting sheets of icy snow, he saw a man peering from a door on the Kelly Street side of the synagogue.
A man with a beard. And a black suit. Like the man in black who called to Billy Batson from the dark entrance to the subway.
He was waving at Michael.


“Hallo, hallo,” the bearded man called, his voice seeming to cross a distance much wider than the street. “Hallo.” As if coming
from another country.


Michael stood there. The man was beckoning to him.

“Hallo, please,” the man shouted. “Please to come over…”

The voice sounded very old, muffled by the falling snow. A voice as plain and direct as a spell. Michael still didn’t move.
This was the synagogue, the mysterious building in which the Jews worshiped their God. Michael had passed it hundreds of times, but except for Saturday