The Coldest Night Page 15

  He inventoried his personal weapons: an M1, a .45, a sheath knife, and spare clips of ammunition.

  He cut the dog tag laced into Lew’s boot. He searched the sky as if it held an answer.

  He pivoted again and started back up the cold road he’d just come down. In a few hours it would be Christmas Eve.

  Part III

  As a man will bury his glowing brand in black ashes,

  off on a lonely farmstead, no neighbors near,

  to keep a spark alive—no need to kindle fire

  from somewhere else.

  Odyssey 5.540–­43

  Chapter 29

  IT WAS A CLEAR, very dark spring night as the Jean Carol entered the mouth of the Great Kanawha and began making headway up the river. She was a dying tug, coming apart at the seams, and since departing St. Louis a one-­and-­a-­half-­inch pump had worked off the engine to keep her from sinking. In her wheelhouse, engine vibration, accompanied by unwonted rumblings from below, came up through the deck.

  The air was warm and breathless as the river flowed beneath like molten silver. The captain, his face lit by the glowing compass inside the brass binnacle, was concluding another recitation, this one of fifteen names. Then he pulled at the bill of his cap and sighed, as if finally his journey were at end.

  “Who are they?” Henry asked.

  “Names of men.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “They are men I knew personally who died on this river.” The captain was eating a bologna sandwich and used it to point the river’s curve.

  The captain had done the same when the boat entered the Ohio below Cape Girardeau. At the time of entering the Ohio, the list had been much longer. Henry had only met him a few days ago when the captain took him on. He was coming across the country. It’d been the only information the two men exchanged and so it did not seem polite to inquire into the captain’s private ways at the time.

  “Anyone waiting on your return,” the captain said.

  “I ain’t in no rush. How about you?”

  “I don’t either.”

  “My aunt.”

  “But no one by the description of sweetheart.”

  “No,” Henry said.

  “But I take it there is someone like that. It seems you are determined to get home, but then again you do not seem to be in a hurry. It leaves me to conclusions.”

  “No one by that description. It’s been a long time.”

  “No plans?”

  “Maybe do some fishing.”

  “You have unsettled business.”

  “I’d like to harden up. I had the grippe and I haven’t felt right since.”

  The words lay in his mind as he spoke them. He did not know how much harder he could become. He did not know how much harder a man he could be than he was.

  “You seem hardy enough,” the captain said, and then he said, “Life’s a hard school.”

  In that moment, anything could have been said between them and they both knew it. For days they’d stood watch together in the wheelhouse, with Henry assuming the responsibilities of the engineer. The engineer had injured himself while in a state of drunkenness.

  “What was it like?” the captain said.

  “It doesn’t describe well. It was very cold. It’s warmer here.”

  “I was in the war before this one,” the captain said.

  “We got carved up pretty good.”

  “It’s okay to kill people if you don’t enjoy it.”

  “Your heart does get hard. I would have gone anyway,” Henry said. Then: “How do you stop knowing what you know?”

  “By an act of your mind.”

  “What if that doesn’t work?” Henry said.

  “Maybe you find something else to know.”

  “Like what? God? Church?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend either but anything that heals.”

  “They don’t heal.”

  “No. I don’t believe they do,” the captain said. “At least not what you have.”

  It was a conversation neither of them wanted or needed to have, the old man because he could not remember and the young man because he could not forget. Henry shook out a pair of cigarettes and lit them, passing one over and watching its ember cross the light of the small green-­lit room as he did.

  “It does make you appreciate the things you do in life.”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “Sometimes I think I’d have rather been there than anywhere else in the world.”

  They left behind the ever-­burning lights of the towns and now there were only cabin lights pinpointing mountain darkness or in the hollows and beneath the trestles of the train-­clattered bridges, the passages from glens into old oak. They traveled the waterway below stumped-­out meadows and parallel to the wooden bridges where turbulent white water necked in rocky narrows before commingling with the water of the Kanawha.

  Before them, the river was a flowing ribbon where scarves of fog were beginning to collect and it wasn’t long before they entered a cold unmoving wall. The distant west had all but vanished in banks of fog and darkness. Somewhere back there were the charmed shabby cities, the cold, the sunlight, the great trees in their vast forests, the rocky mountains, the river colliding with the ocean, the ocean, Korea, Lew Devine.

  “How long you say since you’ve been back?”

  Henry looked across time, past a blur of painful memories, and back again. He shrugged.

  The engine slowed and coughed and then it stopped altogether and then there was silence.

  “What in hell,” the captain said.

  Henry opened the side door of the wheelhouse and stepped out. He closed the door and descended the ladder to the lower deck. He was met with the smell of bilge water, oil, grease, tobacco. Down below, in the engine room, the engineer was still drunk and cursing whoever it was who’d started up the engine again. The engineer had been drunk since Cincinnati, where he’d stumbled and clasped hold of an exhaust pipe and burned his hands. When he let go, he left the skin of his hands still hissing and crackling and smoking on the pipe’s hot surface. The blisters covered his palms and his hands were red and swollen and seemed to pulse. He’d refused first aid and so the wounds were now black and leaking fluids.

  Henry helped the engineer back to his cabin where he kept a parrot and locked him in. He then restarted the engine. When he returned to the wheelhouse the captain asked him where the engineer was and he explained.

  “It’s for the best,” the captain said.

  “He’s in there with the bird.”

  “Sometimes I think that bird is not so good for him.”

  “The bird doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “How’s that tooth?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “It’s back in Huntington.”

  “Then how’s your tooth hole?”

  “Aching a little.”

  They continued on through the envelope of fog, the running lights held in a sconce of whiteness. The searchlight was no good as its glare was returned to them in the window glass and blinded them in its hold. The vibration of the engine and the thump of the rods seemed to increase.

  “This is the Christliest fog I ever seen.”

  “It’s a bad fog,” Henry said.

  There was a brief slashing rain and it tore into the river water. Fingers of lightning quivered around them. They moved slowly ahead as the windows beaded and streaked with rivulets of fog. The captain asked if he had another cigarette, and Henry lit one and placed it between the captain’s lips. The captain slowed even more and then they were barely moving, just holding against the current. They rolled slightly to the starboard, the stern came up and they regained even keel.

  “I believe we touched something,” the captain said. “You get in shallow water a boat will suck down and scrape. You better have a look see below.”

  Henry came back up with a jar of hot coffee wrapped in a cloth. The captain lived for the most on black coffee, countless cigarett
es and tots of brandy. He uncapped the jar and handed it to the captain, who drank staring straight ahead into the nothingness that lay before them, as if the wheelhouse had become but a small world on an eternal river. He told the captain everything seemed to be okay down below.

  “What’s he doing down there?” the captain said.

  “Chewing the rag with the bird.”

  “What are they talking about?”

  “Children.”

  “I need you to go forward and listen so as I can tell where I am.”

  Henry went down the ladder and moved into the bow as the captain shut down the engine. A warm rain had begun to fall. However warm the night, the rain and fog cut him like a whetted knife. There was no dividing line between the air and the water, the low amorphous cloud having no definable base, but he could hear the current trickling under the gunnels as they continued forward.

  The memory of Mercy descended upon him. It was as if a dream from which he could not awaken. She was with him and her skin was cool and the strength in her arms and legs held him and he could not move. Her mouth was wet and she was kissing him so hard he ached.

  He knelt and wiped at his eyes. His jaw throbbed and he felt the skin on his back pinch and flexed his shoulders as if bee stung. For all that he’d endured he feared for what he might find, his face so damaged. Did she still love him and was there any love left inside him? He decided he was better off not knowing the answer.

  The captain bounced echoes off the shore and then gave three quick blasts on the whistle. A great fish rose and splashed in the invisibility. Henry cocked his head and cupped a hand to his ear. He listened intently while cold water pearled on his skin and clothes and he gritted his teeth to hold off a shiver that threatened to rack his body. They passed through the roused smell of waste and discharge and then the air cleared.

  “Can you hear anything,” the captain yelled down.

  “Nothing but a barking dog.”

  “You come on back.”

  Henry climbed to the wheelhouse and took up the jar of coffee. He held it for the chill in his hands and arms. Shaking, he lit a cigarette and pulled tight the collar of his jacket. Alternately, he blew hot air into his cupped hands and trod in place. He coughed and thought the best thing about the cold was that you felt nothing.

  “You scared?” the captain said.

  “Just cold. My tolerance isn’t up to what it used to be.”

  “You know when to get scared?”

  “When?”

  “When you see me get scared. We’re all right now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know that dog.”

  He hadn’t been scared in the least and wondered if that was a sign and how was it to be read. The past was coming and soon he would descend into its whelm.

  They could see a black stream of river running below and the captain asked him to go forward again and look under the fog as it was beginning to lift. Henry moved up to the bow and went down on his knees. He tucked in his chin and clasped his hands to his chest. His hands ached in the cold dampness and he could not straighten his fingers for how many times they’d been frozen. One by one he could see lights coming on underneath the fog as if they’d once been extinguished and were now electrified. Where the shore met the river came a clear line, the black water meeting the black land, rusty coal barges bleeding into the flow and beneath him the phosphorescent bow wave.

  He held a hand to the side of his face as a surge of pain traveled his jawline. It passed and he spit a mouthful of blood into the river. There was a tang in the air and his sweat cooled to his skin and his mouth became sweet and dry and tannic.

  Each time he closed his eyes he saw her face.

  He dragged a sleeve across his wet face, but soon enough it wetted again. The river was black and the tank lights, tiny pinholes in the darkness, seemed miles away, though he knew he could kick off his boots and swim to shore if he had to. It was that close, that deceptive on the river.

  He stayed like that, ducked under the fog, and hand signaled to the starboard.

  The Jean Carol moved ahead, turning slowly to port from propeller torque, and then the rudder took effect and she started to swing smartly into the main channel and deeper water. Henry stayed on his knees, on watch, as the fog lifted above the sight line of the wheelhouse and even then did not climb back up the ladder to the wheelhouse until the captain yelled down to him that he could see and the river was his again.

  “I never had children,” the captain said as Henry shucked the water from his coat.

  “Me neither.”

  “I had reasons, though.”

  “What makes you think I don’t?”

  The captain paused, as if realizing the truth of the story he’d gotten himself into and was trying to decide whether to go on or not. Clearly, it was a story he did not like to tell.

  “My first time across,” the captain said.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s all right. It was a long ways back ago. Though time as a healer is much overrated.”

  The lifting fog left a new world framed in the window glass where the shore lights cut the darkness more sharply than before and the sound returned and what had been cold became warm.

  “My first time across,” the captain said, “we were to put in at Shanghai and from there we moved up the river. It was a dirty river and I started seeing tiny bodies swolled up and floating in its water. The bosun told me they were little girls for the most and not so wanted as little boys in that place and how in time I would get used to it.”

  Henry carried such shadows in his own mind, the after-­images burned deep in his retinas and Henry thought to tell him so but did not see any reason in it. He felt the gnaw of hunger and lit a cigarette. The captain apologized to him for the story he had told. Henry told him it was all right, but the captain insisted that he had taken liberties with their friendship and it was a story he shouldn’t ought to have told.

  “It’s all right,” Henry said. “No apology is necessary.”

  “It won’t be long now,” the captain said. “You can go and get your tooth hole looked at.”

  “The dog,” Henry said.

  “What about it?”

  “What if the barking dog back there were sick or died?”

  “We’d be in trouble, then, wouldn’t we?”

  Then came a fierce belt of dense rain that flattened the river, but it passed too quickly to be of concern and with its passing, the thump in the engine room seemed to diminish as if the bearing and crankshaft had scraped in on their own. The night remained bleak and leaden thereafter, but they could glimpse stars and the night continued warming and seemed less dangerous.

  “He used to have children,” the captain said.

  “What happened?”

  “They drowned. Them and his wife. She was real pretty and so were the children. Like angels, they were. It was a very sad event to have happened.”

  “That’s got to do with the bird?”

  “The bird was hers.”

  “She taught it to speak?”

  “You wouldn’t think it could be so, but it sounds just like her. It says everything she used to say and the two of them have regular conversations together.”

  “I don’t know if I could live that way.”

  “You wouldn’t have a choice now, would you.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you would,” Henry said.

  “If you ask me my opinion,” the captain said, “love is the foremost disease of the chest.”

  The night was now quiet. In moonlight the river shone like brass. The ceiling was still low and there was a thin horizon.

  He looked back. Left behind were the deads and yet death still followed him. The thought was real and natural and unshakable as nature itself. There was nothing that mattered to him. There was nothing he needed. He would live on what remained.

  As they neared the city, the mountains became backlit and
then they rounded a wide bend and there was a long reach and they could see the city lights reflected in the weather. As they approached the outskirts of the city, they passed the walls of low-­slung sulfurous factories, their corrugated walls bleeding long trails of rust into the ground. They passed the black hulks of boxcars on sidings and the sunken hulls of blistered scows, great mounds of slack coal leeching into the river. In pockets, the smell of the river burned their nostrils and streets could be seen and there was silent traffic stopped at the intersections. They passed under the steel stanchions of a bridge and then another, and under the second there was fire inside a square of cinder blocks. An iron tripod held a soot-­streaked kettle suspended over the fire that flashed and shined with darting yellow light. Cats’ eyes glinted in the weeds. Black silhouettes moved in the fire’s glow, an encampment of paupers. A skiff had been pushed onto the concrete apron and descending from a girder were stringers of great gutted catfish. One of the men came down to where the scum and bubbles marked the water line and urinated.

  “It won’t be long,” the captain said. “You’ll be home soon.”

  “What about you?” Henry said.

  “I’ll deliver this old scow to salvage and then there’ll be something else. There always is.”

  “I want to thank you for the ride.”

  “Anytime, son. It has been my pleasure. Without you, I will always be a little short-­handed from now on.”

  “I feel like this is something I have to do.”

  “I understand,” the captain said, saluting him and without pause, Henry returned the salute.

  The captain took Henry’s hands in his own and held them in the lap of his palms. He held them over the glowing compass. He cocked his head and stared into their hands, the workings of his mind writ on his troubled face. He was to say something, but then he changed his mind and gave back to Henry his hands. He took the wheel again and nothing more was said.