Free Ellis Island & Other Stories by Mark Helprin

watching every step) and asked, “What is that silly thing, Martin? Don’t you think you should clean it up before Father gets back from the village?”
    Martin was stung nearly to breathlessness, but he managed to reply, “It’s a wind indicator, so I can always know which way the wind is blowing, even if I’m inside with my eyes closed.”
    “What does it matter?”
    “It matters,” answered Martin, though he did not know why it did. “It matters.” Then they both turned at the sound of an automobile coming down the road that led across the potato fields. It was not Mr. Friebourg, for he had gone to town in the wagon.
    They watched in silence until a drab-colored car with a Marine colonel and his orderly, a lieutenant, pulled up to the hotel. There was an emergency camp at Montauk, across a savage spit of sand and scrub which gave the impression of a fortress and had the air of war, battles, and extremities. Vulnerable on both sides, it was at one point only about five hundred feet wide between the sea and the sound. This was called Napeague Neck. Hundreds of Marines lived on a clifftop above the ocean and practiced gunnery and drills, standing on the sand or knee-deep in low grasses, staring out upon a sea over which they imagined a cold and dark field of battle. When fall closed in, the colonel drove about in his car, looking for families to receive his men for Sunday dinners. It was lonely out there. The approaching autumn was full of fright, as if regenerative nature put to rest were linked to the future of their battalion—which they were sure was destined for France. That morning, it was arranged that the officers would eat at the hotel. The lieutenant evidently knew Christiana, for they spoke by the side of the car as the colonel wrote checks to Friebourg. Martin was awed by the lieutenant’s Sam Browne belt and field hat, not to mention the pistol, khaki puttees, lanyard, gold bars, and, most of all, the man’s speech. He was from South Carolina. To Martin’s delight, he was comfortable and fluent in his dialect. The lieutenant could not open his mouth without conjuring, for Martin, Martin’s idea of the South—burned mansions amid coconut palms, at the foot of which speedy alligators with dangling tongues ran as fast as greyhounds in pursuit of bonneted children and screaming slaves.
    When the two men left in the puffing automobile, Martin felt uncomfortable. He thought they were very high and brave, and he might even have wanted to be like them, but the equilibrium of the place had disappeared. They were attractive precisely because they were subject to the caprice of war. They had about them the uncertainty of a frontier, and were unsettling. He did not want them to come on Sunday, especially since Lydia had been magnetized like a needle on a lodestone, and suddenly looked as if she knew something that no one else knew. For Martin, the Marines were like night and cold.
    But that Sunday was like summer, and, in ranging the far stretches of beach in search of landed sharks or the magnificent sight of a Coast Guardsman galloping his mount along the water’s edge, Martin forgot about threats from outside. Even looking to the ocean’s horizon, he did not sense beyond the rim the haunting battles which, at other times, were felt by all as if they were the approaching storms of the hurricane season. That day was hot and blue, with a magnificent cold wind.
    Almost part of the landscape, Martin wandered down the beach. He wanted to go as far east as he could and then turn to make his way home. A breeze came from the sea, tossing spray off the tips of clear waves. Beach and surrounding duneland were abandoned to autumn. Martin crested the top of a high dune and looked over a pine forest and the multiple intrusions of sounds, bays, inlets, and broken spits with the risen water surging through to make pools in the midst of scrub trees. On the partly sand-covered macadam road, he saw the Marine colonel’s