The Heart in Winter

Set in 1891 in Butte, Montana, a booming copper-mining city teeming with Irish immigrants, the novel follows Tom Rourke, a 29-year-old Irishman from Berehaven, County Cork, who has spent nine years scraping by in the mountain town. He writes courtship letters for lonesome miners seeking wives, composes songs for the bars, and works as an assistant to Lonegan Crane, an eccentric English photographer. He is also a heavy drinker and an opium user, deep in debt to dealers, saloons, and his landlady, Mama Horvat, who runs the Zagreb Boarding House. One October evening, a strange premonitory feeling settles over him, a sense that something significant is approaching.

At the Crane studio, Captain Anthony Harrington of the Anaconda mining company arrives with his new wife for a matrimonial portrait. Harrington is lean, tall, and deeply religious, visibly afraid to touch his own bride. The wife is slight and fair, about 30, with slightly crossed blue eyes. During a solo portrait, Rourke locks eyes with her and feels his heart turn in an instant, irrevocable falling. As she leaves, he offers polite congratulations to "Mrs. Harrington," and she hisses back: Her name is Polly Gillespie.

The narrative shifts to Polly's perspective. An orphan raised at Saint Dominic's, a Catholic institution, Polly has no family and hints at serious trouble in her past. Harrington married her within an hour of her arrival in Butte. That first evening, she witnessed his extreme penitential practice: whipping his own back with a horserope while praying in tongues. The marriage settled into mostly silent coexistence. About a week later, Tom appears at the house to deliver the photographs and kisses her. She does not resist. In the early visits they mostly talked, discovering a telepathic-like bond that Polly recognized from her childhood friendship with Jed, an old Scottish gardener at Saint Dominic's who had been her only true friend. When Harrington grows suspicious, Polly tells Tom they have to decide quickly.

One night they walk into the forest outside Butte and encounter Ding Dong, a former hotel bellhop living in the woods, who tells them about "intimations," stirrings in the blood that guide people toward certain actions as though under instruction from the moon and tides. He directs them to look at the moon, and they see fires on it, a sign that it is time to act. Tom reveals his plan: He will set fire to the Zagreb, steal Mama Horvat's cash, and they will ride for Pocatello Junction and on to San Francisco. Within a week, Tom carves the letter P over his heart, burns the boarding house, steals nearly $600, and with a stolen palomino they flee at dawn.

The lovers ride south, getting lost in thick mist before finding their bearings. They shelter in old shacks, confessing their guilt over Harrington and the Croatian residents of the Zagreb harmed by the arson. They encounter two Métis fiddlers, men of mixed Indigenous and French heritage, who share food, drink, and dried mushrooms. Under their influence, Tom and Polly make love in the snow beneath the northern lights. The next morning the fiddlers have departed, leaving a heart-with-arrow drawn in the ashes.

They discover a well-stocked hunting shack they name Providence and spend nearly two idyllic weeks there. Each morning they decide to move on but never do. He writes love songs; she works out dance steps. The days unfold into a peace neither has ever known. One late afternoon, a figure nearly seven feet tall pushes open the door and tells them gently that it is time.

Back in Butte, Sheriff Stephen Devane investigates. Fat Con Sullivan, the linecook at the M&M eating house, warns there is "a kind of witchery" about Rourke. Harrington, consumed by rage, hires Jago Marrak, a seven-foot Cornish gunman, along with two younger henchmen, Kitto Pengelly and Caden Spargo. The price is $5,000: Rourke is to face the worst, Polly brought back alive. The three guns ride south, and the city watches them go with pity for their quarry.

Marrak sends Kitto and Caden ahead to Pocatello to block the westward path while he tracks the lovers alone. He finds Providence and confronts them, drawing a hunting knife and threatening to castrate Tom. In the middle of his escalating demands, an unnatural flush rises from his chest. He clutches his throat and dies of a massive stroke. The lovers take his cash, weapons, and greatcoat, and ride out.

They follow the Pontneuf River toward Pocatello Junction. Polly takes the shotgun; she learned to shoot on turkey hunts with Jed. They arrive in the rain and check into the Perpetual Hotel, leaving the palomino with a pale, white-haired boy of about 14. They soak in a tub and order a feast, eating slowly, an unspoken foreboding hanging over them. Tom goes out for train tickets, but the office has closed. Racing back, he finds the door of their room open. Kitto and Caden sit on the bed. Polly lies on the floor in blood and pain.

A farm wagon races through town that night with signs of struggle beneath its canvas. Tom drifts in and out of consciousness at the home of old man Bergman, a Swedish settler, tended by the pale boy from the hotel. Tom's jaw is broken and his gut slashed. Bergman offers a bleak philosophy: Happiness is not the normal human achievement, but if someone can ease the pain of existence, Tom must do whatever is necessary to be with her.

Polly's perspective returns. Gagged and tied in the wagon, she hears her two abductors, Kitto and Caden, arguing about what to do with her. The wagon stops. The men walk off to argue out of earshot. A gunshot breaks the silence. One set of bootsteps returns, and the surviving captor turns the wagon around.

Tom tracks the dying Caden, who reveals that Kitto has taken Polly to a cabin near the town of Saint Anthony. Tom rides there, finds the cabin by following the river north of town, and watches smoke rise from the chimney. He waits for darkness. The cabin door opens. Kitto steps out with a long-blade knife. Tom draws his own knife and walks down to meet him.

Three months later, Polly lives with the mute storekeeper Tobe Delign in Saint Anthony, unable to speak, her hip badly injured. She pieces together the last night: the screaming and fighting in darkness, then terrible silence. Delign and others found her tied in the cabin with two men dead in the snow outside. Tom killed Kitto but died from his gut wound reopening. His body was sent back to Butte. Fat Con Sullivan later writes to Polly describing Tom's wake at the Board of Trade bar: his body laid on the bartop, silver coins weighting his eyelids, miners singing his songs. The wake coincided with the wedding of Patrick Holohan and Margaret Stapleton, the marriage Tom's courtship letters had arranged. Tom was buried in Butte, in the granite hills.

In the early summer of 1892, Polly reaches San Francisco. The first months are hard. Alone in evenings, she runs through her day for Tom, talking to him about every small thing. Over time, she realizes she is not going to die. Years pass. The narrative reveals Polly as an old woman of 71, still limping in damp weather, working evenings at the Alhambra theater. At midnight on Vallejo Street, she takes a brandy by her window. Cherry blossoms glow pink in the streetlight. A young drunk stumbles past singing, looks up and waves; she waves back. She can still go to the place where she and Tom exist together, can see their fire burning in the forest dark. But it is all a long time ago, and she does not think about it that often.