The Coldest Night Read online

  “What would you like for dinner?” she asked, busy with cracking eggs to scramble.

  “No idea,” he said, still pondering his immediate thoughts.

  “Beef or chicken.”

  “Beef and some fried potatoes.”

  “A steak?”

  “A steak would be good,” Henry said.

  “When I get back, how about if I make you lemon icebox pie?”

  “That would be nice,” he said, and this time he kissed her on the forehead.

  The morning was cool and gave way to warm and thin afternoon light roseate on the gray streets and whatever green was coming to the lawns.

  Next door he could hear a woman chastising her cat for not loving her enough. In front of the woman’s house was a bottle tree, the sun on the glass tinkling when the wind blew. When he looked out the window he saw a white cat sunning itself on a rock and it seemed familiar to him, a cat he somehow knew.

  A dog came onto the porch sniffing in the corners. Henry knocked on the window and it looked to the sound. It barked twice and then it slunk away. He lit a cigarette and went to the percolator for another cup of coffee and there was a knock at the front door. He carried his coffee and cigarette into the foyer.

  It was a young man who introduced himself as a reporter for the newspaper and asked if he’d agree to talk. As the young man spoke Henry squinted through the cigarette smoke he was making.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “I just want to talk.”

  “I don’t know what I have to say that’d be of any interest.”

  “You were quite a ball player.”

  “I played some.”

  “Will you play this summer?”

  “No.” Henry wished he’d never answered the door.

  “What was it like?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Korea.”

  “I don’t have anything to tell about that.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “You’ll have to ask the War Department.”

  “I thought you might have some idea.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Henry said.

  “You must know something. Do you think we should drop the bomb?”

  “What bomb?”

  “The atom bomb.”

  “They aren’t afraid of the atom bomb.”

  “What do you mean they aren’t afraid of the bomb?”

  “Just because we’re afraid of the bomb doesn’t mean they are.”

  When Adelita returned she’d been to the hospital pharmacy for ointment for his back, it being Sunday and everything closed. He told her of the visitor and it made her angry. When she saw Madge next she would give her a piece of her mind.

  Chapter 33

  THE LATE TULIPS WERE coming early that year, prodding their way to the light from their loamy beds. The rains had not been fierce, but warm, steady, and insistent, and however warmly it fell, when the sun set and darkness descended, there was the constant feeling of wet and cold.

  To stay in bed was to stay in bed all day. To get out in the morning and walk was to walk all day and into darkness, lose himself and hitchhike until he found a driver who knew the location of his address and could land him nearby and with the few necessary rights and lefts that would take him to his door to sleep. Then the copper morning again and he’d sit on the porch wrapped in a blanket and smoke away the day and read a book, starting wherever he picked it up and remembering nothing at all.

  When the sun held two days, he would scrape and paint sides of the ramshackle house or tear at the vines that tangled the backyard. Each day was new and unplanned and empty or filled. It didn’t matter to him in the least. Each afternoon there was a little boy on the corner selling lemonade from a cold bucket wrapped in a towel.

  As he walked the city streets the ambush of memory lurked in the droning sound of every airplane and siren, a cry heard outside the window, darkness. A smell could turn the clock backward as he traveled ever deeper into the spring and the heat and warmth he was so desperate for. At any time he expected to see Mercy running errands, on her way to somewhere. It was an encounter he did not want to have.

  Then it was a Saturday afternoon and Adelita was working a double shift at the hospital. He walked the streets and down to the river. There were two boys pulling themselves ashore in a little flat-­bottomed boat having given up on their fishing for the day. The boat was tethered to a willow where they turned it over in the shadows. For a while they skipped stones across the water’s black surface and then they began to pile the stones into cairns, as if possessed by the helpless need to build.

  One of the boys lost interest and with a stick in hand was knocking the blossoms off the dandelion flowers that matted the grassy bank. There were children picking black­berries that grew on the waste ground, children that swung on old tires above the stagnant side streams backed and blunted against the flow of the river. There were cars without doors or windows and bobbing soft-­drink bottles, a washing machine, and torn and flimsy cotton dresses ragged in the trees.

  He kept walking. He passed a barbershop and in the window was an array of shaving mugs, and beside it was a drugstore with a soda fountain. A boy in the street let go a handful of paper scraps and he watched them blow away on a wind. Inside the barbershop the barber stood from the barber chair where he’d been seated. There was a man reading a newspaper and leaning on a broom was an old Negro.

  Henry went inside the drugstore and considered an ice-­cream sundae, but asked for a limeade with gas. Behind the marble counter was a young kid, a white-­jacketed soda jerk. For some reason he derived a certain status from this job. He performed as if to say, I know the effect I have upon people. Henry quickly drank down the cold, tart concoction, and when he stepped back onto the street his belly was so full of gas he could not help but release a tremendous belch.

  Eventually he stopped at a lunchroom where he sat at a table by the front window. He ordered a hamburger sandwich and french-­fried potatoes. Two little boys stood outside with their hands on the glass. Then they let their mouths to the glass and licked it. Their intention was to get a rise out of him. He stuck his tongue out at them and they did the same to him. An old woman pushing a well-­sprung baby carriage passed by on the sidewalk. A violent storm rolled in from the west and people disappeared from the sidewalk, dodging the rain, newspapers over their heads. It was a fierce storm, moving rapidly, but in minutes it had quickly expended itself and soon the sunlight was breaking through.

  But that night, however tired, he could not sleep. All night his legs jumped and it wasn’t until morning that he slept for a few hours. It was in those few hours he began to dream again. He dreamed within the dream. He dreamed he was in battle and was dreaming that he wasn’t.

  On Sunday Adelita pulled another shift at the VA and he was on his own again.

  He paused on the street outside a church and listened to the drone of the minister, then voices singing about being sheltered in the arms of God.

  At noon he swung by the same lunchroom and found it open. He ordered the blue plate special: roast turkey, cranberry sauce, carrots, and mashed potatoes. A woman led in an old man and sat him in a chair. The man was a relation of hers, perhaps her father. The old man’s eyes were clear, but he moved as if blind. Girls, stem thin, dressed for church, walked past the window, their posture erect and their eyes forward. A gaggle of boys followed shortly.

  He climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Inside its raftered walls he found a quiet and steady peacefulness. He determined that it would be in this room, breathing its steam-­heated air where he would learn to live again. He knew it could take months, even years, but hoped it would happen sooner rather than later. He was at the place of consciousness and memory. On this night he would not struggle against the storm inside him. He would be patient.

  He entered the moment of first sleep where he remained until midnight and upon waking he sat up in
the moonlit room, unsure of his surroundings at first, but then he recalled where he was.

  He was still a boy when he first came here and he did not know why they were leaving. His memories of the home place and the Copperhead Road were vague but always remained fond. It was his grandfather’s house and was as removed and secluded as a place could be.

  He remembered crawling in bed with the Captain, all of the grandchildren and great-­grandchildren who were present and the Captain reading to them from his collected books. Henry could read but could not remember learning to read, and likewise, he could write but could not remember learning to write, and he could do numbers but could not remember ever learning such.

  They played chess on a pine slab, the squares cut with a knife, the black ones inked and underneath was a tripod of twisted pine branches. There were no jobs at the home place, so there was no need for clocks. He could never remember being told to do something or not to do something. They worked for no one except themselves and nightly, the Captain would assemble the children on the highest porch, the domain of the feathered and winged tribe, and they’d sit at the railing, their feet dangling in space, and at the Captain’s suggestion they’d mimic a cow, a bird, a horse, a donkey, a chicken, a goat, the whole menagerie of them going into a frenzy of cackling, crowing, shooing, braying, bellowing, and honking.

  Then he would lie down to sleep, his bed in the highest room of the lofty timber frame house, a sparsely furnished room, barrackslike in its furnishings where out his window was the view of air and below the air was the unending furl of mountain into mountain. Once asleep, he’d have recurring dreams, profound and symbolic of devouring beasts, wild violent animals, creatures part human and part not, dreams of serpents and the bird of hieroglyph, dreams of being frozen with fright and only to be delivered at the last moment on the wings of a dream horse creature.

  Someone was calling to him. It was Clemmie. He followed her voice through the cool, darkened hallway until he came to the door to her bedroom. She told him he could come in if he wanted to. It seemed the room had been closed forever until he entered and only now was it being opened as if a place unentombed. It was an airless shuttered room with the heavy scent of her soap and powder, but the room was empty.

  He went back to his room. The moon outside his window was so bright he was able to read his hand. He fell to sleep again and passed into a second sleep and this one took him into the dead of night and through to morning when there would be eggs, hot biscuits and red-­eye gravy, fried apples, honey, butter, fried steak, and coffee. Eating was what he knew how to do.

  He awoke to a branch rattling at the window. A gust of wind was forcing its bending and a scatter of spring rain like shot pellets. In his sleep he must’ve dressed himself. He was sitting on the floor wearing his clothes and shoes and a jacket and was holding his hat in his hands. He’d seen so much. He’d seen so little, but he’d seen the all of it. He felt the silence and aloneness of what it must have been like to dress in his sleep and crouch on the floor.

  “Is anyone there?” he said.

  “Yes,” he replied after a long silence of waiting.

  He looked out the morning window and down on the street there was a young police officer with gold braid running up the sides of his crisp trousers. There were men next door. They were drinking and other men were roughhousing on the lawn. Old men in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders were enjoying cigars perched in their palsied fingers.

  He did not know who they were and could not recall what day it was and he had the sense they’d been drinking all night.

  Adelita came out to the street to talk to the young police officer. She was wearing her apron tied over her dress and tall rubber boots. She leaned on the mudded spade she carried. She’d been working in the garden. The young police officer was smiling and ducking his head as they spoke.

  Later, when he went down the stairs, she was in the kitchen, the pan sizzling with bacon frying.

  “What did he want?”

  “These boys poured lighter fluid on a cat and set a match to it. He was looking for them.”

  He thought about Adelita, the losses she’d endured, her life as a nurse, her daily life of moderation and economy, haunting and tragic and sad and joyful. He then thought about the corpsmen carrying morphine syrettes in their cheeks so they would not freeze and plunging their hands into open wounds to find the bleeders, cutting into throats so someone could breathe. They answered the call whenever and they were stabbed and shot down and blown up just like everyone else.

  The rain came again. It came against the window as if long broad brushstrokes. Adelita picked up her cup of tea and drank from it, holding the cup in both her hands.

  He felt her affection and a desire to stay where he was and be taken care of by this woman who had taken care of his mother in her last days. He knew she would do it. But in his chest, there was an ache and an emptiness.

  “Where do you go at night?” she said, not looking at him but out the kitchen window.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Nowhere. I just walk.”

  After breakfast they took their coffee together on the porch. She told him yesterday she threaded a needle so an old soldier could sew missing buttons on his clothes. It was something for him to do. When she went back to see how he was doing, he’d accidentally sewn his finger to the garment.

  Chapter 34

  HE WALKED ON INTO darkness, the western edge of the city. He passed down the wet alley between the cross-­lit redbrick walls. Rusted downspouts leaked gray water in ever knocking drips. High overhead lighted windows threw squares of dirty yellow light into each other. He searched about in his mind for a time when he felt less singular, less alone and more at peace. He wanted nothing and had nothing the world wanted from him. Death had its chance with him and he had fared well. There was no man he could think of whom he would exchange places with, or become, or even whose small habits he would like to have.

  He stopped in front of the house he’d been looking for. It was not so far from his own. On the mailbox was the name Malvina Devine, and there on the shadowed porch was a woman watering flower boxes where the rain could not do the work.

  “Hello,” he called to her.

  “Hello to you,” she said, after finding who it was called to her from the darkness.

  “May I come up?”

  “I got nothing for you,” the woman said.

  “I ain’t asking you for anything.”

  “Then what is it you want?”

  “I just want to talk.”

  Henry nodded in the woman’s direction and she allowed him a guarded smile.

  By the time Henry had ascended the rickety stairway, he saw there was a man there too and the man had turned in his direction. He was wearing trousers with the legs folded neatly, pinned, and tucked underneath him where his legs should have been. Henry stopped to light a cigarette and then crossed the porch floor to where the man and the woman were sitting. He rested a hand on the railing.

  “Ain’t you gonna say something?” the man said. “Most people have a little something they like to say.”

  “What’s to say?”

  “Isn’t it a surprise?” The man’s teeth were broken and the color of yellow and black.

  “It is uncommon,” Henry said.

  “Imagine how I felt when I woke up. I was a touch surprised myself.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “It were three months back. We was upcountry salvaging equipment when a high cable broke away. It lashed out and knocked me down under it. I felled across a crop of ledge and that cable kept drawing. Did I mention that the cable were a mile long?”

  “No.”

  “Wal, it did not take but a few hunnerd feet to saw off one leg above the knee and the other leg below the knee. But I’ll tell you something about that. In its dragging, that cable heated and the hot cable cauterized the bleeders as it sawed and so whilst it took my legs, it left me my life.”

  “It was
God who cauterized the bleeders,” the woman said, point-­blank as if it were an argument yet resolved.

  “It were the cable,” the man said, and they went on like that as Henry stared off. People he did not know had begun to appear and gather. A tall girl stood by the porch, a breast baby on her hip.

  “P’raps,” he said, “it was God’s hand on the cable.” This gave them pause to think and for a moment relieved him of their quiet bickering.

  “The company said it were a freak accident, but you know something?”

  “What?” Henry said.

  “I have not heard of a accident that was not ever freak.”

  “I hear you,” Henry said.

  However much he did not want to be, he was drawn into the plight of the man and could not decide which act had been committed by God, the taking of his legs or the leaving him his life.

  “Since then,” the man said, “I been on the disability, the welfare, and the social security and have not done too badly.”

  “He just sits his days away in his wheelchair,” the woman said, “bossing everybody around like he was president of the United States.”

  “That was then,” the man said, meaning the day he lost his legs, “and now nothing happens.”

  “And he sits pretty heavy to boot,” the woman said.

  “When you are young you take life as it comes,” the man said. “But when you get older you have lived some and you have a few expectations.”

  “Such as what expectations have you ever had?” the woman said.

  “Such as being alive tomorrow.”

  Off the side of the house, a boy came out and lit a work light over a blocked-­up green Chevrolet without wheels. The hood was cocked and its parts were strewn on the ground in front of it as if disgorged from its maw. It was in a hopeless condition but clear to see the boy had intentions of revitalizing it. He stood with his hands thrust into the back pockets of his overalls and his hair cut in the shape of a bowl.

  Henry turned his attention to the woman.

  “May we go inside?”

  “You’re not here to sell me something?”