The Midnight Cool

by Lydia Peelle

  In the unpainted house the woman poured them coffee, black, boiled hard, and then poured some onto a rag for the baby to suck on. She had signed her pledge card, she said proudly. She didn’t quite understand what it was about. Her two oldest boys had been drafted and they had to report somewhere at a certain time for their physical exam. She showed them the cards they had received in the mail. Maybe you can explain it to me, she said. The baby had begun to wail.

  Where Do You Get Your Facts?

  On the hottest, heaviest day of July, Charles got a letter from Catherine. Her brother had been wounded. He was in a hospital in Paris and they did not know the details. She had just heard, she wrote. He was the first person she had thought to tell.

  Now I know I have no choice but to go over, she wrote. Now I know I can’t live with myself unless I do.

  He looked at the envelope. The postmark was three days old. He had been working so hard rounding up mules that he had been sleeping most nights out on the road. Sometimes Billy went with him. But often he stayed behind, saying his side ached, or his head ached, or that he wanted to watch the grass grow.

  That evening Charles went up to his lot with cans of water for his garden. He adjusted the tarps over the stack of lumber that was the Raymond, disturbing a mockingbird that flew up into the hackberry, scolding him.

  He knew that she meant it, that she had no choice. He had seen it in her eyes at the Red Cross booth, this fierce resolve. He knew that he should not try to talk her out of it. There would be no more dropping to one knee. No more only being able to hear the sound of his own voice. These were extraordinary times and called for extraordinary measures. As the people of Richfield had all learned to say now, C’est la guerre. A man had to think not of himself anymore. But of his country.

  A time for war and a time for peace, he thought, retying the last tie of the tarp to its stake. A time to reap and a time to sow. A time to put away childish things.

  He wrote her a letter in reply, embarrassed by his chicken-scratch handwriting.

  You’re some girl, Catherine. I know that you’ll be alright.

  He went to see a picture. He needed to go pick up two mules he had bought from one of the tobacco warehouses, but they could wait. He wanted to sit in the dark, and not think. About Catherine, or about the war. Before the film started a slide came up.

  Leland Hatcher will speak for four minutes on a subject of national importance. He speaks under the authority of the Committee on Public Information.

  Ah, hell, Charles thought.

  Out strode Hatcher. He smashed one hand into the other and looked up at the balcony.

  Where do you get your facts? he boomed. Then went on without a pause. Richfield, there is an enemy on our shores. And it is the man who comes to us disguised as the dove of peace, the pacifist who questions this war. His poison spreads in the hearts and minds of men. We must combat this insidious foe. We must overcome his lies with the truth.

  Hatcher smacked his hands together again.

  Freedom of opinion? Yes. Liberty of speech? We must preserve it at all cost. The government will not stifle honest opinions. Yet it is our job to identify the difference between honest opinion and un-American motives.

  He kept going, smacking his hands and striding back and forth, and then ended with another booming volley at the balcony.

  The next time a man speaks to you of peace, you say to him: ‘Where do you get your facts?’

  Off he walked. No applause, no nothing, just Hatcher’s echoing footfall, and then the film began. A train robbery, a girl tied to the tracks. Charles slid down in his seat and lit a cigarette, and in the darkness all he could see was Catherine. His mind wandered for the thousandth time to the hot thrill of thrusting into her.

  He tried to follow the story. The villain had the same pinched-up face as Twitch. He had quit Kuntz’s last week, leaving him in a lurch, but Kuntz had laughed and said, Well who knows, with all the young men going, next I’ll have to hire women! Lord knows Gus would like it.

  Twitch was all balled up about the fact he was going to be exempt because, due to the fact of his father’s illness, he was the head of his household. For weeks he had been walking around saying, If they let me at him I’d stick it to the kaiser with one damn shot. The reason he gave for quitting Kuntz’s was that it just didn’t feel right, working for a German. Besides, he said, he still hasn’t paid me for the extra time I worked, cleaning up the damn barn when he thought glanders was gonna ruin em. Some thanks. He spat. Well I wish it had been glanders, and I wish it had ruined em.

  He had a job down at the sawmill now. Charles missed him. He missed sitting at the depot all afternoon, watching the trains come and go. He missed packing the wagon and heading out of a place at sunrise. He missed going to a picture show and not having somebody holler at you for four minutes before it began.

  After the show the brightness of the lobby staggered him a little. There were posters on all the walls. enlist. conserve. buy a liberty bond. go or give. On most of them were stamped the letters C.P.I. The Committee on Public Information. It was almost as bad as the shack, with all the advertisements on the walls. The shack could make you crazy, after a while, words everywhere you looked that told you what to do or buy or think. The war posters did all that and more. Like Hatcher pacing around on the stage, they also told you how you were supposed to feel.

  There was a comment box in the middle of the room, for questions and comments for the Four Minute Men, though it wasn’t clear when or how they would answer you. Charles leaned against it to roll a cigarette. Catherine came out of the theater with a couple of girls. Seeing her, he stood up straight. Desire seized him and he wanted only to taste her and feel her all around him and then he thought of her letter and her brother and felt guilty and base. When she saw him she went right to him. She was smiling big. Beautiful as ever. And with a new lightness to the way she held herself.

  He felt a flush of relief.

  Then it’s good news? About your brother?

  She shook her head. We still don’t know anything. It’s been impossible to get any information about him. But I refuse to let my mind wander to worry. We simply don’t know. I’ve just got to have faith. I can expect the best as well as I can expect the worst, can’t I?

  I suppose you can.

  She smiled again.

  Oh, Charles, I’ve convinced him. I’m going to go over. First to nursing school, and then to the war.

  What? Charles’s heart lurched. How?

  She was still grinning. Well you saw him in there. Pacing around on the stage, whacking his fist in his hand. She lifted her eyebrow. Well I just did what he does. Four minutes. Walked in, walked out. She pounded her fist into her palm. Came back in with the check for him to write out for my enrollment. And he did.

  People moved around them, murmuring, laughing, making plans for later. He stood there looking at her beaming with triumph. He loved her. He loved her and she was leaving, going off to the war. He took her in his arms and held her and kissed her, and no one in the theater lobby even gave them a second glance.

  Holston Mountain

  Bristol

  Billy leaves in November to make some money. He joins a road crew. He has no choice. Winter is breathing down his neck, and Harkleroad is right. A girl is an expensive habit. The night before he leaves, under a thin blanket in his narrow bed, he kisses her again and again, as if he can save up the kisses.

  It is bad work. They are cutting in a road up on Holston Mountain. Terrible. Grinding. Men and mules against the mountain. Almost as bad as the Neversink mine. One of the coldest, wettest Novembers in years. They work like the devil, to beat the coming snow. The road seems pointless, connecting nowhere to nothing.

  His mule’s name is Bertha and she’s too smart for her own good. Hour after hour they set their shoulder to the same grueling task. Sometimes he thinks of the old gray veteran horse at Harkleroad’s and ponders what Harkleroad meant when he said that he loved the world. I
f men loved the world, would they cover up mountains like this?

  At this distance from Bristol and from Maura she begins to slip from his mind, fainter every day. He talks to the mule about her, trying to keep her close, and swears the animal sometimes gets jealous, pinning her long ears and making a sour face. She is happier when he sings.

  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do

  I’m half crazy all for the love of you

  Many times a day there are blasts, dynamite going off in the cut in front of them. At the sound of the blasts the mules all stop working and look, not scared, just thinking about it. And it makes him think of the poor mule he exploded at the Neversink mine and it gives him a heavy hopeless feeling. On Holston Mountain he is as low as he was then, him and the mule, both so expendable they weren’t worth the price of a bullet.

  One day he overhears two men talking about their wives. The old ball and chain, one says, and it fills Billy’s heart with sadness, to hear a man talk like that. It occurs to him that he traded in his freedom as soon as he discovered it, and this makes him feel even lower. It didn’t seem right that he should have to choose. The girl he loves or freedom. Then, looking out to the hills below him, he has an idea. A revelation.

  He will take her to California. He will get his hands on a wagon and they will set off together and cross the country, trading along the way, sleeping under the stars, keeping each other warm. They don’t need to get married. They will slip along through the big country as two foxes would travel, noses to the ground, needing only each other. Free. Together and free. She will see that it is the same life as the one she thinks she wants, the one with all the diamonds and furs, that to have precisely nothing is the same as having everything.

  He quits the next day. Gives Bertha a kiss on her warm white nose, tells her he will never work for another man as long as he lives. His heart swells to bursting. Two months chipping away at big Holston Mountain building a road to nowhere, but it wasn’t all for nothing. He sets off for Bristol on foot, whistling, under a white sky and slowly drifting snow.

  Sacrifice

  Sacrifice. It was the word on everyone’s lips, and it could make you feel good and proud just saying it. There was a woman in Nashville with four sons in the Army, and her picture had been printed in the paper above the words A Mother’s Sacrifice is the greatest of them all. But now that Catherine was leaving, Charles wondered if his own sacrifice wasn’t the greatest a person could bear. Some days the fact of losing a girl to the war seemed righteous and noble, while other days it felt like a bad joke, a dirty trick. When he got a wire from Bonnyman asking him to meet at the Sumner Hotel to discuss an important matter, his first thought was that he would do whatever Bonnyman asked. He would take a pay cut. Take on more work, though he wasn’t sure if that was possible. Just say the word, he thought. I will give up anything.

  They sat at a little table in the restaurant. There was a card on it apologizing for the limited menu and small portions. This was not a mercenary act, it explained, but an act of patriotism.

  Bonnyman got right to it. No time for small talk these days, he said, clapping his hands once, as if he had once been a man to make small talk. There was a position opening up at the end of September. Manager of the Roan and Huntington feedlot. In charge of twenty men. It came with lodging, a house right on the premises. Virgil Huntington had called Bonnyman up about it personally, and he would like to be the one who delivered him the man for the job.

  Only thing is, he said, it’s down in Columbia.

  Columbia, Charles said. Of all the things he had expected Bonnyman might ask of him, something like this had not entered his mind. Columbia was seventy-five miles away, nearly in Alabama. It might as well be another country.

  I can’t go to Columbia, he heard himself say. Just bought a plot of land up here.

  Bonnyman was watching the waitress set coffee down in front of three women at another table.

  Use less sugar and stir like hell, one of the women said, with a devilish grin. They all laughed.

  Right now I got it planted with a victory garden, Charles said.

  My wife used to love to garden, Bonnyman said sadly.

  I’ve got some beans and some corn, Charles said. Greens too.

  His heart was racing. Columbia! He could not leave Richfield. Not now. When the war was over—and it would be over by Christmas, everyone was saying—Catherine would come back, and they would start new. This was the comfort he always arrived at, on both good days and bad. That somewhere on the other side of all this they would be together. That the sacrifice, in the end, was temporary.

  My wife grew flowers, Bonnyman said, his voice quavering. All kinds of flowers. You’ve never seen flowers like these. Not this year. But next year, God willing, next year—well we’ve got a new doctor who is giving us some hope. He’s from Chicago.

  Yessir, Charles said, stalling. Billy, he thought. And then there was Billy. He remembered Kuntz and Bonnyman, back in December, telling him he would never get anywhere until he split from Billy and cast off on his own. There was no place for Billy in the situation Bonnyman described. Manager of a feedlot with twenty men under him. What would Billy do? Lately he had been joking he was going to go someplace no one had ever heard of the war. The moon.

  Bonnyman leaned forward and pressed a finger to the table.

  Listen. McLaughlin. You’d be a fool not to take this. All I have to do is put in a word with Huntington for you and it’s a sealed deal.

  I don’t know nothing about Columbia, Mister Bonnyman. Or twenty men working under me. Don’t know if I’m the man for that. And right now I got this land. Soon enough I’ll get the house put up on it. Once the war’s over.

  Bonnyman leaned back and sighed. Then he clucked his tongue and shook his head.

  Someday you will learn, McLaughlin. A man can make plans, but in the end they’re worthless, nothing but dust. Things change. That’s the one constant a man can count on. That, and death. He clasped his hands. There’s a story of a king who wanted to put up an inscription in stone at the gates of his kingdom, and he asked his wisest adviser to think of the words that would last for a thousand years, words that could never be laughed at or spit at or disproved. You know what the wise man came up with? The one immutable phrase he could think of. ‘This too shall pass.’

  Bonnyman stared at his twined fingers.

  There was a time, he said slowly, way back in the long-gone days, we thought we might stay in Belgium, have a little brood of children, breed horses, an orchard, a little farm. But now all of that’s gone. Up in smoke. Burned. Gone.

  He trailed off, eyes far away. The women’s cups clanked against their saucers.

  I’d have to think on it, Charles said finally.

  Think on it! Bonnyman’s eyes came back to Charles. Why? Are you considering enlisting? Racing off to the fight?

  Charles cleared his throat. The thought of enlisting, which came to him sometimes now that Catherine was going, left him almost sick with doubt and fear. Though he would never admit that to anyone. Not even Billy.

  Listen to me, young man, Bonnyman said. Seize the opportunity. Trust me. You can do more for the war effort with twenty men under you in Columbia than you can blown to bits in a trench on the Western Front.

  Sir?

  It’s how they’ll all end up. He thrust his hand at the window. Every boy who goes over there. Human kindling for the great insatiable furnace of war.

  Charles’s stomach lurched. Mister Bonnyman, sir?

  Bonnyman let out a heavy breath and sat back. When he spoke again his voice was almost a whisper.

  Do nothing, McLaughlin. Buy yourself a violin and fiddle while it burns. Do nothing. Because nothing any of us do will make a speck of difference. From this sort of madness the world will not recover. Doing nothing in the end is the same as doing something. As doing anything.

  Charles looked out the window. Suddenly nothing Bonnyman was saying made sense. A veil of confusion had dropped
over him. He felt sweat under his collar. In the street some boys were playing Bear in the Pit. The boy in the middle was throwing his weight around frantically.

  Bonnyman took his handkerchief from his pocket, unfolded it all the way, put his elbows on his knees, and pressed his face into it. He did not take it away. Just sat there with his face hidden, one hand over each eye. After a while the table of ladies next to them fell quiet and looked over. Charles cleared his throat and nodded at them, then looked back at Bonnyman. His face was still hidden, and now his shoulders shook.

  The ladies began to whisper. One of them was a teacher at the college. Charles used to pass her when he went up to the boathouse to meet Catherine in the hot days of fall. Here it was, nearly fall again, everything changed, everything turned backwards and upside down. Columbia! He could not do it. He could not go. He stole a look at Bonnyman, then gave the women a little smile and a nod. He had no idea what to do and so he just sat there and waited, sweating through his shirt, his hands between his knees. Outside the boy in the middle of the bear pit broke out and ran down the street, hooting.

  Finally Bonnyman pulled the handkerchief away. He held it in front of him, matched the corners, folded it, matched the corners, folded again, gave it a tidy shake, slipped it back into his pocket. He straightened the knot of his tie. The lines around his mouth had grown redder and deeper. Otherwise his face was as always. He cleared his throat with one short tidy cough.

  Well let me know when you’ve done your thinking, he said.

  Down the Stairs

  Bristol