The Coldest Night (25 page)

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

H
E 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?”

“No, ma’am.”

“There’s a little fire inside,” she said.

“It’s a cold dark scene out there, buddy boy,” the man said. Henry thought how he too carried a shadow in his mind, the after-images burned deep in his retinas.

The woman held the door and Henry bumped the man in his wheelchair over the threshold. Inside was warm and dry and there was light and cushioned chairs to sit in. The woman took out a pack of cigarettes and a small box of stick matches from her apron pocket. She studied his face as she lit one for herself and then passed them to the man who did not offer to pass them along. They were waiting for him to speak.

“I knew your son, ma’am. I am here to pay my condolences.”

“Lew is dead?” she said. And then, “Lew is dead.”

“I am sorry, ma’am. I thought you already knew. I only came to pay my respects.”

“Who are you? How do you know?”

“I was with him, ma’am.”

“In Korea?”

“In Korea.”

“What happened to him?”

“We got hit pretty hard, ma’am.”

“Why don’t you just cut right through it,” the man said. He tipped back his head and released a plume of smoke.

Henry cleared his throat and as he did he scraped back his chair. The woman took his wrist before he could stand and implored him to stay with a litany of apologies.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry. You’ve come all this way.”

“I thought maybe you’d have known by now. I just wanted to tell you he was real brave.”

“That’s my Lew,” she said, and she began to weep. Henry gently tugged his wrist, but when he did her grasp tightened as if she were afraid one of them were about fall.

“Now he belongs to the angels,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They told me he was missing,” she said. “That much I knew.”

“He was very good company,” Henry said, “in some very hard times.”

“You couldn’t be mistaken?”

“No, ma’am.”

“He was a special boy,” the woman said.

“Yes, ma’am. Your son was a man far above average.”

“You’re just a boy yourself. How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“If he wasn’t before, he is now,” the man said. His was a dust yellow face with red spots. He took up a walking cane he’d never be able to use, perching his hands on the crook.

“I will thank the Lord you have come to me,” the woman said. “You were the last to ever see my son alive and now you are sitting in my home.”

“He was like my brother.”

“Do you not have a brother?”

“No, ma’am.”

Henry paused.

“He didn’t want me to leave him there, but I had to,” he finally said.

“Of course you did. You couldn’t very well carry him out.”

In moments he felt like a bomb looking for a place to go off.

“He always had to win,” she said. “He could even beat you at bingo.”

“How bad were it?” the man asked.

“It were bad,” Henry said.

“Your living, your wanting to live, does not make you bad,” the man said, wagging a finger at him.

“I struggle with that,” Henry said.

“Where are your wounds?”

“Ralph,” the woman cried.