The Coldest Night (5 page)

“Remember that,” she said. “Tell me you will.”

“I will,” he said.

“Do you love me?” she said.

“Don’t you know?” he said, and she smiled.

“I will see you later,” she said, and drove away.

He slept for a few hours and when he awoke it was to the scent of lilacs in the air. He could feel spring’s ascending light, its joyful degrees of increasing brightness. But the winter had held deep into the spring with the days still cold and dark and the nights requiring sweaters and a blanket.

He awoke to spring that morning, or turned around or blinked an eye, and it was as if those days of cold never were.

His head throbbed from so much drink. The champagne and the gin and then more champagne. The flannel suit lay draped on the chair and the room seemed particularly sad and desolate as if from an event canceled. He wiped at his face and Mercy was still on his hands, her faint scent, the trail of her perfume still on his skin. The night he remembered verged on the improbable and he wondered if it ever really happened at all.

That afternoon, the sun a perfect white disk in the sky, she did not come to the game as promised. Parked at the edge of the ball field was a black Oldsmobile and it was there for the length of the game. When he walked home the Oldsmobile pulled up beside him, the tar bubbles popping beneath the tread of its tires. It pulled ahead and then pulled over beside the road. He came alongside it and the window went down and he saw it was Mercy’s father sitting in the driver’s seat. Her father looked at him and raised his finger.

“You’re a real good ballplayer,” he said, letting his finger down.

“Thank you, sir.”

Mercy’s father unwrapped a cigar. He looked at it and set it in his mouth. He struck a stick match with his thumbnail and held it while it burned and then dropped it out the window. If he had intention of smoking the cigar, he made no further effort to light it. He turned his attention back to Henry.

“It’s over now, son. You go back to your people.”

Henry’s cheeks began to burn like hot brass as he understood his embarrassment and humiliation. He understood the disparity between her family and his, but his mind could not accept it. Shame washed through him, a boy’s shame burning like acid.

Mercy’s father held the gaze, secure in the dominion of self. Henry could not endure the man’s stare and had to look down. His hand dropped into his pocket. He felt the bluntness of unbelievable anguish. He was still a boy. He shuffled his feet. He knew it was not in his nature to live as one who feared. He let the baseball bat slip off his shoulder, and when he did, the passenger door of the black Oldsmobile flew open and Randall stepped out. Randall’d been an athlete himself and still moved with an athlete’s strength and ease. Henry had the sense there was someone else in the backseat, but he could not see who it was.

Randall stepped up to him and took his measure. He kicked away the bat and knocked off Henry’s ball cap. Randall made to step into him, but Mercy’s father stayed him with a raised hand and said for him to get back in the car and he obeyed.

“It will never be,” her father said, as if his words were fashioned from a god arrogant and enduring. He then rolled up his window and drove away.

Henry felt anger and hatred and then he just felt hatred.

Chapter 6

T
HE COLORS OF THE
day faded in the east while to the west they still flared in an angry burl of violet, reds, and deepening blue ash. In the kitchen there was coffee and butter cakes with a compote of wet cherries.

The hours ticked by as he sat at the kitchen table, still wearing his baseball uniform, shuffling again a deck of dog-eared cards. He dealt out another hand of solitaire. He scrutinized the tableau before him. He rubbed the stock deck with his thumb, but he did not play. He tried to remember: how many meaningless games, how many hours of killed time? Inside he remained kindled from the day’s confrontation and could not escape the burning smell in his nostrils, like the sulfur smell that comes from gunpowder.

Clemmie came down the stairs and into the kitchen. She wore her bathrobe and slippers and her hair tied back with an elastic. She’d worked a double shift at the VA and went up to bed after dinner and should have been sleeping, but she could not and was wandering the house.

“You’re still up,” she said, yet half awake, touching at her eyes with her fingertips.

“What about you?” he said.

“I can’t sleep,” she said, and waved her hand, such a bother.

At the sink she filled a glass and drank half. The pipes banged and echoed from beneath the house. She looked at the glass and then drank the rest.

“Why can’t you sleep?” Henry said.

“I had a bad dream,” she said. “I cannot seem to relieve my mind.”

She took his hand and pressed it to her chest. Outside the flying insects tapped at the window glass.

“Your heart’s beating so fast,” he said, and turned in his chair.

“I don’t remember most of it, but I can’t forget all of it,” she said. “Not the feel of it, not the worst.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“I feel like I have heavy stones in the pit of my stomach,” she said. “But talking about some things is worse than not talking about them.”

“But there’s something I want to say.”

“Go ahead,” she said, her hand at his face. “You can tell me whatever you want.”

“I am thinking of going away,” Henry said. He could see the sudden fright his words made in his mother’s face.

“You can’t,” she said, catching herself. “What about the team and your man Walter? He depends on you. Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind,” Henry said. He wanted to call back the words he’d spoken.

“What a funny thought—making up your mind. Like a bed or a story.”

Then her eyes seemed to gaze from a place far beyond the walls of their little house. She squeezed his hand.

“You are really leaving,” she said. There was a resignation in her voice and it was then she must have seen how shattered he was, how great the disquiet that possessed him. She took his face in her hands that she might see the truth in his eyes and then she pulled his face to her chest, finger-combing his hair.

“May I ask why?” she said.

“It’s a big world,” he whispered. “I can’t be staying around here forever.”

“Please,” she said, but before she could say more they were startled by a knock at the kitchen door.

“It’s me,” came a muffled voice, and then another knock.

It was Mercy at the kitchen door, the vapor of her breath, the silver-brook of moonlight making her skin so pale.

“Don’t answer,” he said, but already his mother was turning on the outside light and unlocking the door.

“Look who’s here,” she said, ushering Mercy into the kitchen.

“What are you doing here?” he said, looking at her with surprise and distrust. Her hair was short and raggedly cut. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying and no matter how hard he tried he could not temper the severity of his reaction.

“I was wondering how long you were going to avoid me,” Mercy said, her voice barely a whisper.

“I am sorry,” Clemmie said to Mercy. “I don’t feel very well. Perhaps you’ll visit again?” She clutched at her robe and went up the stairs.

“Are you angry at me?” Mercy said.

“You should go,” he said.

“I have something for you,” she said, holding out her clasped hand. “What will you do with it when you have it?”

“How can I say if I don’t know what it is?”

“Give me your hand,” she said, and when he gave her his hand, she said, “It’s a good hand, Henry Childs,” and then she gave it back to him with a folded piece of paper.

He unfolded the piece of paper to see the drawing of a heart shot with an arrow. The initials were his and hers.

“What’s this?”

“A gift.”

“To me?”

“To you.”

She then spoke of her love for him as if it was a distant country full of wonders and she had recently arrived. She did not know what happened to him today, but she knew what happened to herself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but inside him was something hard, pitiless and cold.

“What is it?” she said. “Say it.”

But he made no reply. His hands felt thick and heavy and he could not move them.

“Answer me,” she said. “Say something.”

“I am sorry,” he said again.

Her face softened. “When I first met you, I thought you were nice. But you aren’t. It’s just your face and it’s inside you you’re cold.”

Henry said nothing.

“Nothing makes a dent in you,” she said.

“Your heart is not so soft,” he said. “It was you in that automobile watched it happen.”

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

“You are a liar,” Henry said. “Can’t you see, I don’t love you anymore.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“God damn you,” she said. “I have told you I love you. What more can I say?”

There was the sound of someone at the top of the stairs, his mother. Mercy placed her hands on his hips and he watched her mouth open as she could not catch her breath. When the sound upstairs went silent she raised her face to his and she kissed him and he kissed her back.

“I am going,” she whispered into his ear. “The car is packed and I am going whether you want to come or not.”

He would remember feeling his way along the unlighted back hall and in his room packing a satchel of clothes. His bag in hand, he paused at his mother’s door, his heart like the wing beating of a bird, but did not knock.

“You are going?” he heard her say from behind her door. There was no worry in his mother’s voice and he could not understand that. He opened her door and stepped inside as she lit the lamp on the nightstand and propped herself with a pillow. In the shaded white light there was a pain ghosting her face.

At her window he touched the glass with his fingertips. He let his palm go flat on its cold surface. Outside was the moon inside a pale circle amid the eddying stars. She reached over and switched off the light and then he told her he was running away with Mercy and he did not want her to be worried about him.

“Take her, then,” his mother said. “Before it’s too late. You never want to find out it is too late in life.”

“I think it’s what I want,” he said.

“Is it so complicated?”

“She said she wasn’t there today. She wasn’t inside her father’s automobile.”

“She wasn’t,” his mother said, and he turned from the window to face her. She’d pressed her wrist to her mouth.

He could see how sorry and tired her eyes, could hear it in her breath.

“It was me,” she said. “I was in the backseat. I was the one.”

He put his face in his hands. The shudders came and went and he was left empty and tired.

“I did not want you hurt,” she said. Her face silvered in the darkness and her eyes burned into him.

He scarcely dared breathe. The longer he stood there, the less he knew what to say, and then he lied and told her he knew she was the one and he knew it was because she did not want him to get hurt.

“I love you,” he said, and he kissed her right hand and then her left and then she spoke in a bare whisper.

“I love you too,” she said and his heart was as if a thin cry.

In the desperation of his mind he’d not thought of his mother and he’d not thought of Mercy and felt himself alone and to be surrounded by misery. But now he knew.

“You asked after my dream,” she said, her face pale and red eyed. “I am afraid this was my night’s dream and now I cannot escape it.”

She left her bed and from the bottom drawer of her bureau unwrapped a cloth bundle that held a knife with a white jigged bone handle and then she unwrapped another cloth to reveal a pistol. She wrapped them again and placed them in his hands. She told him they’d belonged to his old uncle and now they were his and he was to take them with him where he was going.

Chapter 7

T
HE MORNING HAD BEEN
uneventful, even pleasant at times. Mercy was hatless and looked very beautiful with the sun on her face.

He would remember it was a day in June and the red iron sun made the heat dazzle in the air. The wind through the open windows was only so cooling as to measure the sweat on their skin, and the weather being clement, they put the top down and the light became fantastic.

He was driving the Mercury and trying to get as much distance between where they were and where they no longer wanted to be. Mercy was riding beside him and yet for them it was two different places they occupied and he imagined it would always be so.

Now that Mercy’s hair was cut short she would no doubt be mistook by some to be a young boy. She wore blue jeans, a black and red flannel shirt and work boots scuffed blond as pine and stained from the muck and manure of the stables. Her clothes and boots smelled of the horse barn, but it wasn’t a few hours down the road before she became the very spirit of flight. She raised her chin until the angle of the sun’s rays were perpendicular to her face.