The Coldest Night Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT OLMSTEAD

  River Dogs

  Soft Water

  A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go

  America by Land

  Stay Here with Me

  Coal Black Horse

  Far Bright Star

  The Coldest Night

  a novel by

  Robert Olmstead

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2012

  Part I

  From whose womb comes the ice?

  And the frost of heaven, who gives it birth?

  The waters harden like stone,

  And the surface of the deep is frozen.

  JOB 38:29–­30

  Chapter 1

  BY 1941 THERE WAS little left to cut along the Elk and by then much of the land was sold to the government for National Forest. That February was a twenty-­seven-­inch snowfall on the mountain. The snow lay five to ten feet deep in the woods. The railroad was unable to operate and the twitch horses were starving in the logging camps, living off bark and harness leather, cribbing their stalls. The felled trees had disappeared under the snow and the Captain, who was on the Elk estimating the last timber on a twenty-­thousand-­acre tract, had to give up and return to the home place, breaking path all the way.

  The Captain was ninety-­one years old and his skin was the color of marble stone. What little was exposed to the wind and cold he’d covered with a layer of petroleum jelly. He traced his path back home, keeping on for a day and a night, his snowshoes silently lifting and falling, his cruising stick clasped in his mittened hand, because he knew to stop would be to stop forever.

  When he returned, his daughter Clemmie was in the kitchen, in a rocking chair by the open fire. Her son, Henry, sat on the floor by her side, cross-­legged on the wide stone hearth staring into the flames, his attention held by the sight of them and their oceanic noise.

  She indicated that Henry should fetch more wood and so he stood, unfolding his body to its early awkward height. But he lingered in the doorway, half hidden by the jamb and listened.

  “I must go,” Clemmie said to her father, “and you cannot stop me.”

  “I know,” he said.

  The Captain made no argument but looked to the window and through to the darkness beyond. Of all his children, as many as three wives could give him, Clemmie was the youngest, the one who knew him best and she would be the first to ever leave him in this way. The rest had married away from him or fled the mountain without confrontation.

  “Daddy,” she said. “I cannot wait until you die. I can wait until spring,” she said, relenting a bit, “but I must go.”

  Henry could read the Captain’s face for his thinking: he had reconciled himself to the inevitability of Clemmie’s leaving, but in waiting until spring, she would deny him the great impossible travel through the black and frozen land.

  At melt time, the Captain escorted them down the miles of the Copperhead Road, some of the last land still treed, unmined, and inviolate.

  They rode silently, on the backs of the offsprung generations of the coal black horses his grandfather loved so much. They rode down the rough track on the bloodlines of warriors, Clemmie riding behind her father and Henry following. They left behind the great looming house where she’d been born and he was born and the land where the Captain had been born. Henry looked back a last time and the house seemed to rise and climb the mountain. Still to see were the hanging terraces and curved steps, wet and gray and shining in the vitreous spring light.

  In switchback turns they made their descent, in the cold perfume of the forest, the white pine, the laurel and dogwood understory, and he could feel in his chest an ache for the increasing density of the air as they descended.

  Below them, a rising white torrent of runoff smashed through heads of stone. It suddenly disappeared inside the earth and then was with them again as they traveled its course. Clemmie and the Captain rode in silence, neither of them wanting to confront the confusion of their lives and the long histories that Henry did not understand. But he knew some of it, and it had to do with him and his mother’s weariness and she not married and the father he did not know. There were whole days she’d be lost to him, turned inward and silent, and then other days she could not contain her restlessness.

  If they could have, they would have ridden forever, as if riding were their calling, as if they were pilgrims with their holy land always a little farther along the path. They wanted and needed no accounting, as long as there was a length of trail ahead of them and no parting at the end.

  The Captain asked Clemmie if she was ever in the city for he could not recall a time when she was.

  “Yes,” she said. “One time.”

  They were stopped to let the horses blow. All about was the sound of a hollow wind running the land, but it was not the wind. It was the sound of the thaw, as what grew on the earth and clutched to the rock gave up the cold in an aching perceptible gasp.

  “No,” Clemmie said, reconsidering. “I guess I never was. I guess I just took that I was.”

  Her horse scuffed at the cobbled trail. Though noon, it was now dark again as if early in the morning and would be light for all but another few hours of the day as the cut where they stood was so deep and precipitous.

  “Wherever you are, you will always think of me,” the Captain said to Henry, his voice seeming to break with regret.

  The trail became a road rutted with threadlike rivulets and late that day they came to the swollen Twelve Mile. They would have to make a dangerous crossing on a rickety footbridge and the Captain seemed to hesitate, but then he did not. Fog enveloped their path and Clemmie commented on how strange it was, the cold and wet about her legs and ankles, while her upper body was warming to the light.

  The Captain held the reins of the coal black horses as they unlashed their bundles and shouldered them. First Clemmie and then Henry embraced the old man and then they turned and made their crossing over the swaying bridge that would soon be washed away with the melt.

  “Don’t look down,” she said, as if it were something she’d heard and now was telling him.

  When they reached the other side, Henry looked back. The Captain was still there, astride a coal black horse, the other two in hand. He raised his other hand, stretching forward his arm. Henry made the slightest of gestures, a nod in the Captain’s direction, and the Captain stood in his stirrups, his old body arched in fierce salute.

  THEY WENT TO LIVE in the city and Clemmie took a job working at the veterans’ hospital where they got their cast-­off towels and bedding and soap. She also saved for Henry the newspapers and magazines and books that were left behind.

  It was near impossible to imagine not being in the mountains, but in the city the earth became the land at Henry’s feet. To the west he could see what lay between himself and the horizon and it was without hollow, valley, defile, ravine, or stony turret. The mountains were never far away, but the site of the city was like something made by an originator, the mountains seemingly split open and pushed back by hand and then coved and held in place. He’d never walked so far in a straight flat line and felt turned out and naked.

  Clemmie fell from a station in life she’d not known she occupied. Never before did they have to pay for water, heat, and a roof. They had a small house with a sun-­filled kitchen and the hospital had a cafeteria where they often took their meals. On Saturday mornings Henry would go to the library with his mother. They’d walk through the back streets where clothes were hung on the lines to dry. The clothes wore a yellow hue from the burning of coal and they’d go to the library so he might pore over maps, atlases, and books of natural history, as if assuaging the privations of childhood. Then in the afternoon they’d purchase Italian ice sodas, a
lmond, orange, or banana with shaved ice in tall, cloudy glasses. In the evenings Clemmie went to school and in time she became a nurse.

  Sometimes they had visitors, relatives he’d never met before who’d been shunned by the Captain for having given themselves over to the life of the wage earner in the coal mines.

  These relatives now lived in the city, or passed through, returning whenever they could. Uncle Golden came through when he was flush with money, and Aunt Adelita stayed with them for a time after her husband and two sons died in the Bartley No. 1 shaft mine. Ninety-­one men and boys died that day, killed by explosion and fire, and his mother told him Aunt Adelita had been one of God’s wandering souls ever since.

  Aunt Adelita had unruly black hair she wore tied off in a ponytail. She cooked pot roast and mashed potatoes with string bean salad and bowls of chopped-­up lettuce, and for dessert there’d be strawberry rhubarb pies or pineapple pies with blue cheese. It was as if she could not cook enough food to satisfy herself.

  There were so many women, aunts and great-­aunts, who’d buried husbands, dead from the wars, dead from the trauma of accidents—the celerity of white pine turned and twisted, split and shattered and descending from the sky, or under the earth where the kettlebottoms, petrified tree stumps, dropped from the roofs of mines to break a shoulder or stave in a skull. The women watched their children be hobbled by rickets, go deaf from untreated ear infections. They knew what it was to live on corn bread, molasses, and scrap and see their children eating dirt for the mineral it contained, and after a time they turned a bend in life and their teeth went bad, their lovely strong backs and shoulders grew humped and stooped, their knuckles thickened from chores and cold, and their cheeks and necks grew hollow.

  The men in Henry’s family, they were big, sprawling, raw boned. They were angular, muscular, warlike and discontented. They farmed and mined and logged and framed out houses and worked the shipyards, and they quarreled beyond reconciliation and then it would be forgotten. From them Henry learned the stories of his grandfather and his old uncles. He learned that if any one of them was threatened they would descend with all stealth and fury, with gun or knife or torch or dynamite. They were a family relentless in their hatreds.

  It was in one of those newspapers where they read that Uncle Golden died by his own hand after an eight-­hour standoff along the highway. There’d been a high-­speed chase, reaching ninety miles an hour, until finally he lost control and went off the road. He lay in the wreck the whole time threatening to shoot anyone who came near and finally put the gun to his own head. In the newspaper, it never said why.

  But for the most, they were homesick castaway men who worked in the shipyards in Norfolk, men who built the Golden Gate Bridge, Boulder Dam, the Holland Tunnel. They smoked Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes and carried them rolled in the sleeves of their T-­shirts. They drove old Pontiacs that chugged exhaust fumes and they moved as tender and wary animals. They were polite and solicitous of Clemmie. They’d ask her of the Captain as if they were supplicants and she the last of the blessed, and as the years passed and as Henry grew older, one by one, they disappeared.

  Chapter 2

  THE CINNAMON BAY NAMED Gaylen was the sweetest horse Henry ever knew. She was not standoffish but always interested in him and what he was about and would walk right up to him to see what he was doing. Walter said she was a peach and a natural beauty. He called her a poetic horse.

  Walter was a horseman and veteran of the first war and owned the stables across the river. Walter knew Henry’s mother from the veterans’ hospital where they worked on his legs. One day he mentioned that he needed a hired hand and the next day Henry rode his bicycle across the river and up the mountain and asked him for the job. That was three years ago when the Gaylen horse first arrived.

  The stables weren’t much. They were rundown and ramshackle and by then there were few who paid to ride or take lessons or board their horses. The horses were grades of indeterminate parentage and small and heavily muscled cobs with strong bones and steady dispositions that the children liked to ride. They were all easy keepers and constituted with a steady temperament, strength, and stamina and no great turn of speed. They liked to be with each other and when they were in the barn they needed to see each other between the stalls. They tolerated well each other’s personalities, faults, and vices.

  But Gaylen was different. She came from up north. She stood fifteen hands and was light and muscular, well knit with flat-­boned legs, laid-­back shoulders, a deep and compact body that was smooth over the top line and into the croup. She had a nice length of neck and clean-­cut throatlatch. Her eyes were large and revealing. The Gaylen horse was a free-­going, graceful, enduring traveler and Walter claimed he’d been offered ten times over what he paid for her, but no matter what, he wouldn’t sell her.

  The Gaylen horse was favored by Mercy, a senior in high school. Henry was a junior that spring of 1950 and he did not know Mercy before she started riding at the stables because she went to a private academy for girls. Her father was a judge known for the empery of his opinions, his craggy face, his low bulging forehead, gold incisor, and wealth. Mercy seemed not to have a mother as she never made mention of her.

  The stables were prettiest in the spring and summer when the flowers bloomed in long thin beds of loam and dried horse manure. There were tended ranks of tulips and daffodils and in the summer came huddles of stalky gladiolas. Snowball bushes with masses of blossoms in white, pink, and lavender and lilacs and dogwood and rose-­bays fixed the corners. There were hives where Walter kept bees that made a floral honey he sold by the jar. There were times Walter reminded Henry of his grandfather and the stables the home place.

  Henry had worked into the night and had school in the morning and was waiting for Walter to return from a mysterious appointment.

  But he was not eager to get home. Three days ago word had come that his grandfather died and each night thereafter Clemmie had fallen into an uneasy sleep: waking, starting, sleeping again, her grief so consuming. She did not so much live within her being but occupied it the way one holds to a strange land with unpredictable weather.

  He grieved for the old man too. The Captain was the only father he’d ever known, and though he sometimes wondered about his own father it was hard to miss something he’d never had.

  Last night in his sleep he sensed she was awake and so he woke too. It was raining outside and on his ceiling was the watery play of the streetlights. She told him she was hot and asked for water. He poured a glass from the pitcher. He opened the window and fetched a damp cloth to cool her forehead.

  “No rest for the wicked,” she sighed, holding his hand.

  “You are not wicked,” he said.

  “I dreamt it was winter and snowing. Bitter cold.”

  “It will be soon enough again.”

  “I am so sad,” she said.

  He took her into his arms and held her against his chest.

  “Is it horrible of me to be relieved?” she asked, and he assured her that it was not.

  She stared at him and he didn’t know what to do. He could not console her. She bit at the damp cloth and held it in her teeth. She turned her face and began to weep again.

  “Something is going to happen,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever it is, it isn’t going to be good.”

  He could not penetrate the strange wildness of her expression. Her world was too complex, bewildering: the attacks of loneliness, the black dogs of her twitching sleep, her sleepwalking. There were moments when she seemed to have lost all touch with the earth and she’d just sit, her dark-­ringed eyes staring at nothing, not speaking.

  He knew enough of the past to know how it could haunt a being, and as much as it was grief it seemed to be that kind of pain as well: dim, historical, and universal. His mother cared about sin. She cared about the long dead and prayed for their well-­being though seldom inside the
walls of a church. She cared about the poor and the hungry and was fond of giving away whatever she had to give. Of late, their little house in the city had taken on the austerity of a nunnery.

  “Something bad?” he said, but she had no more to say, and however discontent her sleep might be, each morning she inhabited her kitchen with a strange radiance and the next morning was no different.

  “You have always been such a good boy,” she said, thanking him for his care and tenderness. She was cooking his breakfast and packing their lunches and told him how much she loved him and wanted to know about his life.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” he said.

  “You have a sweetheart yet?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “You will,” she said, and told him someday he would leave her for someone else and when that happened it would be okay.

  “I worry about you,” he said.

  “It doesn’t happen all at once,” she said, and smiled. “You lose your mind in stages. I will be okay.”

  THE RAIN WAS letting up. He drew deeply on his cigarette. He tried to make sense of the indecipherable. He did not know if he understood love. He knew he loved his mother and she loved him, but he did not understand if he could love someone else or not.

  Drops of water continued to fall from the eaves of the low-­spreading roof. He fingered a frayed buttonhole as he stared off into the pines. He thought of his grandfather. Death was not difficult to understand. You were alive and then you were not.

  He felt the eyes of the Gaylen horse on his back. He finished his smoke and pinched it off. When he turned to her she nickered and stretched toward him. In the damp lightless barn he let her nuzzle his open coat until she found the licorice he carried. He lifted the flap on his breast pocket to reveal the sticks and the horse ate them as if eating from his chest. She blew gently and nosed his chest and then she let her chin rest on his shoulder.