The Coldest Night (28 page)

“He won’t bully me,” he said. The violence was in him again, in his hands and in his mind and in his gut. It came with him. He’d brought it home with him.

“The Lord’s hand will come and he will point to the way.”

“I do not care to take directions from him.”

“Don’t make me beg,” Adelita whispered, taking his arm in both of hers.

“They’ll not leave me alone.”

“You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“What life?” Henry said.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s finished. Can’t you start over?”

“I can’t imagine it,” he said.

“No, not yet you can’t, but you will.”

He let his eyes to the darkness and felt a sense of grief and desire. He held no opinion what should happen next. He remained at the window while the black Oldsmobile sat idling in the cold. Then it drove away.

Adelita asked that he sit and drink his tea. She had something for him and she would get it. When she returned she carried an envelope. She had been waiting for a good time to give it to him and she supposed tonight was as good a time as any.

Inside was a letter from his mother.

Dear Son,

I have come from sleep this night to write to you. I am so tired and the time I have left is short. I will not be cut on having so often witnessed the no good that comes of it. My only sadness is that I will not see you again until we meet in heaven, but I am braced for what I will do.

I am moved to finally tell you about your origins. You should know of your paternity, it being the right of every human being to possess such knowledge.

There was a man, a surveyor for a coal company who came on to our land. My father, your grandfather, was away so I went with him to point out our border across the valley. This land was granted to your great-great-grandfather for his service in war and has since been returned to the government and the money barons, the land taxes having never been paid.

I did not know what I wanted, but he knew what he wanted. I will not say I was against it. Afterward he said he was sorry for what he did to me and I think he meant it. I pulled myself together and I went home. I did not say anything that happened, but my father, having returned, took one look at me and picked up his rifle-gun and out he went the way I came running from.

I will never forget the echoing report of that rifle. I have heard it in my mind every day of my life ever since. That man was never heard from or seen again. They came around looking for him, but nobody ever said a word. That day in the forest was how you came to be. My father, your grandfather, he killed the man and I do not know how to explain it, but that day something was killed inside me as well . . .

I pray you are reading this for that means you have returned to us. Be a good boy for Adelita. Love her dearly. She has been a strong and consoling presence, a balm to my existence.

Henry refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. It was strange what little effect this news had upon him.

“My father,” he said. He handed the letter to Adelita and invited her to read it if she wished. He wanted to feel something, but inside him was as if an open mouth, empty and silent. After all this time, there was so little he cared about. He thought, I am my own father. I am my own.

“I apologize for how I have been,” he said, lifting his eyes to Adelita.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t like that. We are family.”

“You were so good to my mother and you have been so good to me.”

“Henry Childs,” she began, but then she stopped and she said, “I am the fortunate one. I lost my husband and my boys, and your mother, but not you. You came home.”

It was then he told her he would be leaving soon. His time was near up and he was obligated to return.

“You don’t have to go.”

“It is something I have to do.”

“You have put your mind to it?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In a few days’ time. It has nothing to do with this. It’s been that way all along. I just did not know how to tell you.”

That night he could hear her down the hall weeping. He was so tired and his body, his face hurt so much, but he waited until she found sleep before he allowed his own.

That night a dream forced him from sleep, the after-images of an old woman holding the knife with the jigged bone handle. He remembered waking up and in a morphine vision seeing the old woman go down on her knees and watching her as she cut the baby from the dying woman to save its life. He remembered the urge to scream or yell or sob, and did so, and afterward Lew asking him if he was okay.

The sheets were sweat through and knotted in his fists and when he woke up the pillow was bloody from his wounded face and he was more tired than before he had slept. He let himself remember the autumn, up through the dusty country where a little girl in a red skirt and white blouse picked a blade of grass and offered it to him.

However much he tried, this night he could not hold back the memories. Sharp and bitter and severe, his dreams were the memories he refused to have. He remembered Tex was in the snow when he found him and he was being knifed to death. He leaped on the man and they rolled in the blood-spattered drift. He fought the man, hand to hand, getting ahold of him and not letting go, but he could not kill him. He bit into the man’s face and held him with his teeth and stuffed his .45 in the man’s nose and pulled the trigger. The man’s blood and bone exploded into his mouth and Henry choked and he tried to swallow and his craw seized and he puked and then he could breathe again, but Tex lay dead in the snow.

On the next hill a marine, called Ski, had his entire abdomen shot away and his spine was revealed and the talons of his ribs, white as dove. And when the overwhelmed enemy tried to surrender, Lew said, we don’t take prisoners, and he emptied a clip into them.

He remembered an explosion and then Whitey, a foolish grin on his face, was walking in his direction and waving a hand at him. A claw of flying steel had torn off his other arm.

Slim’s legs were pulpified, and before they could get to him he put a pistol to his own head and pulled the trigger. Chief walked off a cliff and another man just up and left.

“Let him go,” Henry said when Lew tried to stop him.

“Leave, then,” Lew said, and the man set down his weapon and walked away. After that there was just him and Lew and now Lew was dead.

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

H
E 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.