The Coldest Night (2 page)

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.”

T
HE 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.

“Easy as pie,” he said, his face to her cheek, and told her it was time for him to get going.

He pulled up his collar and stepped into the wet haze. He could see the lights in the city below and the lights on the river, sparkling like wire-strung jewels, the boats and barges and all the little boathouses. There was a flowery smell in the air, strange and sourceless, and from the stables the occasional tromp of slow bodies shifting hooves. He thought it would be a pretty night with the stars coming on.

Somebody was calling his name. Walter helloed again, slammed the door to his truck and leaned against it.

“What’s the good news?” Henry called out.

“There’s a devil on my shoulder whispering in my ear.”

“What’s he sayin’?”

“Life’s a game and it’s rigged. What’s your story?”

“I ain’t got one.”

“Dirty weather,” Walter said grimly when Henry came up. “Ain’t good for bid’ness. Keeps the money away.”

“That all he says?”

“That’s enough.”

Walter’s face was pale white and his lips were shaded blue. He had the arthritis bad and a twitchy airway. His respiration was slow and irregular. He quietly gasped when he breathed and conversation was difficult for him. Always about him was the smell of mentholatum.

“Chores done?”

“Yessir,” Henry said.

“Come in for coffee?” Walter said.

“No thanks.”

“I was going to have some for myself and I am asking you if you’d like some.”

Henry followed Walter inside to the tack room where he’d cut a door into the adjacent stall and fashioned a two-room apartment. He had a hot plate, kerosene heater, an icebox, and he’d installed a Murphy bed. He walked painfully, each step a decision. During the early days of the first war his unit was bombed and his knee shattered and he’d been shot in the eye. There were pink scars on his cheeks and he had medals he kept in a cigar box. The one eye was now glass and his good eye turned inward toward his nose.

“What’s for dinner?” Henry said.

“Oh, I’ll stodge up something,” Walter said.

The windows were open, but the damp shut out the air and the room smelled of the barn: hay, manure, sweat, leather, and oats.

“How’s your mother?” Walter said.

“She’s good.”

Most days Walter wore overalls and a blue and gold Legion cap, but today he was hatless, his skull bald and gaunt, and he wore creased khakis, a pressed blue chambray shirt, and tennis shoes.

“She is good,” Walter declared. “She is an angel walking the ground. I gave up women years ago, but she’s a good one.”

“How do you know she’s good?”

“I seen her today.”

“Where’d you see her?”

“Down at the VA. She looked good.”

Walter set out two mugs. He splashed rye whisky into his and held up the bottle. His good eye wet and glittering. Henry shrugged and Walter splashed some in his mug too and then he filled both mugs with coffee from a vacuum bottle.

“The main thing is to keep a woman busy,” Walter said.

Walter carried his mug to a splintered sideboard where he fixed a plate of ham, boiled eggs, bread, and butter.

“Baseball starts soon,” Walter said.

Henry held up his hands, his fingers spread.

“Ten day,” Walter said, tossing him an egg.

“Ten,” Henry said, catching the egg.

They drank quietly, Henry waiting patiently for what Walter had to say. He knew there was no point in hurrying him. He worked his thumb inside the eggshell and peeled it away.

At last Walter said, “I have to go into hospital. They are going to take care of this leg and tuther one.”

Henry’s first thought was the horses, their feed, water, and care, and whatever small business there was, who would conduct it.

“I have been praying for a long time it wouldn’t come to this.”

“What about the bid’ness?” Henry said.

“The bid’ness is not lost on me.”

“I can stay here.”

“That’s what I’m wantin’ to ask you,” Walter said.

“I can do that.”

“What about school and baseball and your good mother?”

“I will explain it to them.”

“That would be a great service to me.”

“When do you go?”

“Now,” Walter said.

“You going to make it?”

“I am not about to lay down and die, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Walter’s powers of endurance seemed extraordinary. There were days he could not mount a horse because of the pain and once on he rarely dismounted for fear of not being able to step back into the stirrup.

“It was first the one,” Walter said, “and now both knees burn like hell.”

He never complained, but there were whole days his face was the tight mask of pain and the cast of his spirit one of torment and suffering.

“They say you use more butter when it’s soft than when it’s hard. How can that be?”

“I never thought about it,” Henry said.

“What’s yor’ blood type?”

Henry shrugged.

“That’s something you ought to know.”

“What’s yours?”

“I don’t ’member,” Walter said. He finished buttering a slice of bread and folded it in half. He worked up his quid of tobacco, spit it into his hand, and tossed it aside.

“Someday,” Walter said, waving his fold of bread in the air, “there will be giant mechanical brains to cook and take dictation.” With a flourish, he stuffed half the folded slice into his mouth, closed his eyes, and chewed.

“That will be something to see,” Henry said.

“All my troubles,” Walter said, “come from the fact that my ’magination is a little more active than those of others.”

Walter pulled himself erect, and then hobbled over to a cupboard, its door hung with a cracked mirror. He paused and looked into the mirror.

“You look like shit,” he said.

From the cupboard he removed a white glass jar and a pair of tweezers and returned to the table.

“I am afraid my life is vanishing,” he said. “Do you ever feel that way?”

“No,” Henry said. “Sometimes.”

“I need a swallow of the strong,” Walter said, and took another drink of the whisky and coffee he favored. He unbuckled his belt and let his khakis fall to the floor before sitting down. Then he loosed the bale on the white glass jar and slid open the top. He went inside with the tweezers and came out with a bee in their gentle pinch.

“How bad is it?” Henry said.

“What?”

“The pain.”

“You won’t know until it happens to you.”

Walter held the bee’s abdomen to his bony knee. His eye flashed brightly and his nostrils widened. “Oh,” he said with each pull of the barb. “Oh.” His face reddened, his leg shook, his forehead broke with sweat. “Oh,” he said, releasing the bee. “Oh,” he said, closing his eyes and letting his head go back.

After a brief time, he discarded the bee and went into the jar for another. He gritted his teeth and administered to his other knee, receiving the venom as if a secret current of life. His shoulders drooped and he breathed slowly, carefully.

They sat for another spell, the stables silent, Walter in his skivvies, his trousers stacked at his shoe tops and Henry straddling a chair.

When Walter looked up again his face was red and drenched with sweat and he was laughing.