The Coldest Night Page 21

  There was light behind the clouds that morning. By the time he made his coffee the sun was out and bright in the sky and the snow was melting away.

  He wanted to say something more to Adelita. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her and he would be back. He touched a pencil to his tongue and then to the paper and his hand ran out the words. He left the note on the table where she was most likely to see it when she returned in the evening.

  Chapter 38

  HE WALKED THAT DAY into night and his mother’s letter came back to him again and again. In the streets and doorways in the bad weather there was grace that appeared in the faces of the men and women he saw. The cold air smelled of leaves, opening buds, and soon the heavy smell of the lilacs. Soon the snowball bushes would mass their white blossoms in pink and lavender.

  He found the light in the boathouse and could see the city’s lights flattening on the water’s surface, a path to where thin lines of the water’s current pearled and sparkled. He crossed over the beclouded darkness of the river, where all night long were the murmurations of vapors, ghosts, and mists and climbed the bluff and followed down the switchback streets that led in the direction of the boathouse.

  He left the streets and waded through drifts of wet rotten leaves as he followed a line perpendicular to the fall of the mountain. Below his traverse was rock faced, slashed up, gullied land with trees draped in kudzu and then the river and beyond the river was the city.

  He lost the smell of the river and then he could smell the river below. Under the bluff were the somberest shadows of most neutral twilight. He traversed the steep wooded slope and walked out of the shadow of the trees. A tug was passing by, silently plowing the waters. Smoke from the tug’s funnel traveled in the air. The ground was soft with pine needles.

  He climbed a railing onto a long staircase and he descended to enter the porch shadows at the back of the boathouse where inside was a light. There were potted begonias and geraniums on the perimeter of the little deck and on the railings were petunias growing in square white boxes.

  He waited.

  He reflected on the times when things seemed utterly unbearable and now realized that he had been born into them and lived through them. He would live through this also.

  He knocked on the door to the boathouse. Someone inside was stirring. He stood at the door and waited and watched east the disappearing view of the river. A light went on.

  “Hello?” said a woman’s voice. “Who’s there?” she said.

  Noiselessly, the curtains separated and Mercy appeared at the door, her white shirt blued in the moonlight.

  “It’s me,” he said softly, and stepped back. Mercy stepped outside and into the night with him. Beyond them in the darkness came a whippoorwill’s call and then the banging sound of a train taking up slack.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “I have been to Korea.”

  “What did you go there for?”

  “There was a war.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  She’d come from sleep and seemed not surprised to see him. Her face was soft, almost childlike and this night seemed to exist in a trance of delight.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” she said.

  “It’s as dark as Egypt,” he said.

  “Do you think there’s life out there?” she asked. The moon was filling with light as she spoke of it.

  “Sometimes I wonder if there’s life right here.”

  “I am sorry about your mother,” Mercy said. “It was a sad thing to’ve happened.”

  Seeming to have returned from a distant place, she touched at his face.

  “Is it really you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “No one would tell me where you were,” she said, her face blued in the starlight.

  At the river’s edge a cold vapory mist twined over the tracing water. He closed his eyes to hold back his tears. He imagined his mother in her garden.

  “Your poor face,” she said. She leaned into him and smiled and when she smiled her wet eyes narrowed.

  “I am sorry about your brother,” Henry said. “I shouldn’t’ve done that.”

  “Don’t tell me that. I would’ve wanted you to kill him.”

  “I only wish I could have met you better in life,” he said.

  “What’s better?” she said.

  How could he reply? He lifted his hand and gestured the infinite. She spoke the truth. He clasped his hands behind his back, one hand holding the wrist of the other.

  “You’re my wandering Ishmael of the Genesis,” she said.

  Then she said, “There is someone I want you to meet,” and she went inside and when she came back out she was carrying a baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby was new and fragile, as if the beginning of knowledge itself. She held the baby out to him, indicating that he should take her in his arms. He unclasped his hands and held the baby in the crook of his arm.

  Mercy took his hand in hers and touched his finger to the baby’s forehead. He touched the baby’s hand and the baby wrapped her small fingers around one of his.

  “She’s like a little doll,” she said. “As soon as you lay her down she falls asleep.”

  She put her hand up to the back of Henry’s neck and held it there as if he was a baby with a baby’s weighted skull. She turned his face to look at her.

  “She is yours,” she said. A star was rising in her eye.

  “Mine?”

  “Yours and mine,” she said. She spoke as if to disclose what was to be kept secret, but no longer.

  “Say what you want,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Whisper it to me,” she said, and leaned into him.

  “I still love you,” he whispered, and he felt the way you feel when you say words you have always wanted to say in your life, to have someone receive them.

  “Please stay,” she said, and took his hand and led him inside the boathouse, the single room, long and projecting over the river and a staircase to the boat below. It was warm and smelled of wood and the river and the sparrowlike smells that attend a baby in its nursery.

  Mercy held on to him by the back of his belt as he let the baby down into her crib. He could feel the heat of her. She put her hand inside his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt.

  “I want you to stay with us,” she said, and he turned and gathered her in his arms. He then reached down and slipped his arm behind her knees. He lifted her and held her to his chest. Her head fell to his shoulder where she breathed into his open collar. She seemed to grow lighter in his arms, or rather, he became stronger in his carrying of her and she weighed no more than falling rain.

  “You can put me down now,” she said.

  Henry set her on her feet. Mercy took his face in her hands and turned it side to side so she might look at it. Then she drew him to her and kissed him.

  “I love you,” he said, and she didn’t say anything for the longest time.

  “I love you too,” she finally said. “I love you too,” and his heart was as if pierced by a thorn.

  “Come into the bed,” she said, and the feel of her skin was shocking to him and he could not catch his breath for all of that time.

  Her body was soft and pliant and once she had received him with a sigh and a gasp, she surrounded him with her body. He could feel the beating of his heart against hers. There was the faint whisper sound of the water.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  And afterward, when he went to move, she held him, her ankles crossed over his legs. He felt her hand tracing his back and the slide of her foot along his leg. She shifted her hips and held him tight and then he felt her release him and he slipped from inside her.

  “I don’t sleep good,” he said. Then he slept for a while and was not unhappy waking up beside her. She climbed up and lay on his back and he felt the warmth and weight of her body. He felt her fingers on his back, his letheless skin. She traced the cicat
rix of the wounds made by the phosphorous and then she touched the compass rose between his shoulder blades and he felt the flat palm of her hand as she rested it there.

  Morning was only a few hours away. Beside them the baby girl slept peacefully.

  “How did you make it back?”

  He told her how he was left behind and so he went back north and was taken in at a logging camp. He told her they used maggots to treat the burns on his back and plaster of Paris. Then they smuggled him to the coast and one night he was taken off in a boat.

  “There was some more than just me,” he said, and then he said, “Do you think that God being God, that he loves the devil too?”

  “It’s God’s business who he loves and doesn’t love.”

  “Sometimes I think God looked the other way and forgot about us.”

  “But then he looked again and brought you home.”

  “It’s hard living without the war.”

  She finger combed his hair. The hair on his right temple had turned white.

  “Sometimes you think what you have seen is going to haunt your soul for the rest of your life.”

  “It must have been so horrible.’

  “Don’t say that,” Henry said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I was there and I did horrible things too.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault.’

  “It doesn’t matter,” Henry said.

  He thought, maybe the telling would break the spell of his long dream. He thought, maybe he was really dead. He said these things to her and watched her face.

  “I died every day,” he said.

  “You have seen too much,” Mercy said.

  “Yes . . . I have.”

  “You aren’t going to leave me just yet, are you?”

  “I will eventually need to go.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I have to go back.”

  “If I try harder, can I change your mind?”

  “No.”

  When he turned to her again she was smiling, but he knew she was sad. He knew she wanted him to stay. She laced round him with her arms and legs and held him tight and motionless, her face wet with her tears against his shoulder.

  “What if I said please?”

  The room was warm. He could smell her. He could smell them.

  “Take me outside,” she said.

  Hand in hand they stepped into the last moonlight, their bodies white with glow. The moonlight shined its path on the water and in all of its amplitude was as if the radiance of heaven come to earth.

  Down by the river a constant breeze came off the water. Weeping willows lined the banks and shaded the earth and water. He was almost cold. Inside he felt a twist and a tremble and fought back the quaking of his being.

  “Do you know what I feel for you?” she said.

  “We were young,” Henry said, and she looked at him strangely.

  “Ours is a love story,” she said. “I do not care about anything else.”

  The stars were fading in the sky. In the east the gray lifting mantle of night and a kindling of pale rose and silver that lengthened and brightened along the horizon. The dark green sluggish flow gave way to darkling pools and placid stretches and the world of living things. The sun was coming up. A sorrowful wind swept in and disappeared.

  “I have nothing,” Henry said.

  “I don’t want anything,” Mercy said.

  “I thought I would never see you again.”

  “Those were the best days,” Mercy said.

  “Yes, I think they were.”

  “I have to go back,” he said, and Mercy agreed and said she would wait again forever. He told her she did not know what she was agreeing to.

  “I’ll miss you when you are gone,” she said. “We’ll both miss you.”

  “There’ll be more room in the bed when I’m gone.”

  “I do not know how to let you go,” she said. “Not again. When do you leave?”

  “Two more days and I have to go.”

  “Then we will wait here for you.”

  They went back to the bed and there was still so much to talk about, but a weariness had descended and try as he might, he could not hold off sleep. He slept for a time and when he awoke she was in the rocker beside the bed nursing the baby girl. They were sleeping and yet the rocker still moved ever so quietly. He reached out to rest his hand on her knee where light from the window was draping her left leg. He let his head back on the pillow.

  The room was still as glass. When she stood, he slid over and she settled the baby inside his arm and between them. They felt each other in the darkness, their lives come back to them.

  She took his hand and held it to her bare skin, moving it from place to place, then kissing each of his fingers, and he felt the rise and seep of her body’s sweet waters, the fast blood inside his own body and he began to cry silently. She touched at his scarred cheek. She wiped away his tears. She was saying his name, a messenger calling. The quiet deepened and halfway between sleep and waking he could hear the low, same-­changing voice of the water flowing beneath them.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-­2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2012 by Robert Olmstead.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN 978-1-61620-148-7