The Midnight Cool

by Lydia Peelle

  * * *

  Charles went. The streetcar came along and the newspaperman got off of it. Billy went over to him, meeting him at the stone wall of the park.

  I talked to my boss, he said. We’re gonna do a nice feature. We were going to do a piece on the suffragists but we’ll hold that till next week. Now where’d he go? I don’t want to miss nothing.

  Hang on, Billy said. He didn’t want him in there. That was something he could do for Charles. Keep it out of the paper. Hang on. I got another joke for you.

  I don’t want to miss anything.

  Oh, it’s going to be a while before anything happens in there. Stay out here. Sit down. I got a good one.

  * * *

  The office had a bare concrete floor, a potbelly stove, a lone sparrow hopping around, pecking at wisps of hay. A secretary put down her knitting and told Charles to wait. Bonnyman was on the telephone, she told him. Mister Huntington’s train had been delayed.

  She smiled at him, flirting.

  So you’re the Richfield man I’ve been hearing so much about. Mister Bonnyman sure does think highly of you. Just yesterday he was in here saying you’re on the up-and-up.

  He took off his hat and she caught her breath.

  What happened to your face?

  He reached up to touch his eye. It was throbbing, he realized.

  Ah, that’s nothing.

  You got a steady girl?

  Getting married.

  She scowled and turned off her smile. Well don’t everybody get a prize but me.

  When Bonnyman came out and brought him into his office he told him as soon as the door was shut behind them.

  Mister Bonnyman, sir. Four of them mules have glanders. I covered it up last night. You can’t let em off that boxcar.

  Bonnyman looked at him.

  Huntington’s going to be here in half an hour.

  You can’t unload those mules, sir. I covered it up. I blew alum up their noses and stuffed em with cotton batting.

  Bonnyman’s face contorted, finally falling to rest in a bitter disappointment. As if he had been waiting for this betrayal all along.

  Do you know how bad I’m going to look?

  I’ve had em three days, Charles said in a rush. That whole load’s probably got it. We can’t unload them.

  Like hell we can’t, Bonnyman said.

  Sir?

  You ever heard of something called the Old Army Game, McLaughlin? Pass the buck. Pass the buck. My neck’s on the line here. They’re gonna go through and tomorrow they’re gonna ship off to Newport News. After that, hell, I don’t care. They’re gonna be someone else’s problem.

  Charles’s heart fell. He saw in Bonnyman’s hard face that it was hopeless to argue. It was too late. He could not stop what was set in motion, coming down the siding, sliding and screeching towards him now.

  Bonnyman ran his thumb and forefinger down the lines on either side of his nose. Brought them together under his lip. Charles looked into his undertaker face, the eyes that saw the half-empty glass, worst in all things, and he understood for a moment the magnitude of war, the force so much greater than both of them that it rendered them utterly powerless, less than men.

  Do you have any idea what my wife’s doctors’ bills are, kid?

  * * *

  Billy couldn’t keep the newspaperman any longer. He was desperately trying to come up with another joke when he heard another switch engine on the siding. He turned to the tracks and saw the boxcar. Their mules.

  The man jumped up and jogged across the park. Billy was slow in following him, his side aching, a growing dread in his heart. When he got into the office there was Bonnyman and the newspaperman, but no Charles.

  Where’s McLaughlin?

  He’s gone, Bonnyman said.

  Gone.

  I ain’t got time to stand around and talk about it. I got Virgil Huntington coming in ten minutes. Virgil Huntington. The big boss.

  We’re gonna make it a feature, the newspaperman was saying to the girl. On the other side of the office window there was a great commotion of stablehands going out to meet the boxcar.

  Bonnyman turned his back on Billy and put his arm around the newspaperman and hustled him out towards the barns.

  Billy went to the girl at the desk.

  You see which way that kid went?

  He was in a real hurry. Rushed right past me. Got on the streetcar.

  Heading which way?

  Streetcar goes by fifty times a day. I don’t pay attention. North. South. East. West. I’m stuck here in this office stinks to high heaven of mules. Probably will be till I’m an old maid too. Streetcar comes and goes all day long. What’s it matter to me?

  Billy stayed in Nashville three days, looking for him. Three days he walked the streets, checking the hotel registers and the blind tigers, the camps down by the river. At night he slept under his coat on the southern edge of town, out beyond the mansions south of Broadway, in a lot across from the City Cemetery.

  On the evening of the third day he found his name in the newspaper, in a list of those newly enlisted. Buried among those of thirty other men.

  McLaughlin, Charles. Hometown: Richfield, Sumner County.

  He went back up to Richfield. He didn’t know where else to go. Mice had ruined all the food in the shack. Waiting at the post office was the check from Bonnyman for the last load. He went to the bank and cashed it. The young clerk counted out the bills and then wouldn’t hand them over, trying to talk Billy into buying a Liberty Bond. He grew more and more persistent until finally Billy told him where he could shove his Liberty Bond. Two old women were waiting in line behind him, whispering.

  Irish, he heard one of them hiss when he passed, and when he opened the door he turned around and said, Boo!

  He took the money from Bonnyman’s check up to Freedman’s Hill and laid it by Ernestine’s door. He didn’t knock, because he didn’t need to see her. And he did not need to know what she would do with it. He did it because he did not want the weight of that money bearing down on his soul, nor did he want it fanning the flames of war, and he thought she might understand that and couldn’t think of anyone else in Richfield who would.

  He slept down by the creek. The creek didn’t give a shit about him and he liked that. It didn’t give a shit about the war. It had been there since before France and Germany and before the U. S. of America and it didn’t give a good goddamn.

  He stayed away from town, because people recognized him and wanted to ask about their mules. But then his beard grew out and no one recognized him anymore and everyone was too busy anyway doing his bit for the war to pay much attention to an old vagrant. And one day when the leaves were just changing to red and yellow he was picking through a rubbish barrel and saw a notice in the paper announcing that Catherine Hatcher would be married to Wad Taylor.

  After a long honeymoon in the Rocky Mountains, the couple will return to live in Richfield.

  The kind of long honeymoon—eleven months, a year—from which a girl came back with a baby unusually big for its age.

  Tell a story enough times, and it doesn’t matter that it’s a bald-faced lie. You can start to believe it yourself. The gun tangled in the dress. The missed turn onto the bridge over Defeated Creek. Your father was a big man. You are forgiven. A pair of painted-up mules with air blown into the sunken hollows over their eyes.

  He could have told Charles. The straight story. He had started to tell him sitting there in the park and he had stopped himself because he saw that it was not what Charles needed. But he could have told it to him then or at any moment of the nearly ten years they were together. Maybe he should have. He didn’t know. He didn’t know what he should have done or if he could have changed anything. He had not told him, and now he was gone. He missed him like a limb, like a piece of his own heart. If he was here, they would leave this place, go together to a place where no one had heard of the war. To the moon.

  Some mornings he would walk along the creek
to the graveyard to set rabbit snares, passing under the twin magnolias at the gates and hunting out the paths the rabbits followed along the tree line. Hatcher’s plot was here at the edge, in the new section, where he had spent a lot of money trying to emulate the old Richfield families. His plot, like theirs, was girded by a wrought-iron fence with an elaborate gate, and marked at the center by a tall obelisk, but his fence was bright black and new, not peeling with rust, the gate’s hinges were still strong, and the obelisk shone with harsh brightness, and wasn’t muted and mottled with green and black lichen as the old ones were.

  Every time he passed, Billy was sad for him, the Hatchet. He had tried hard to make this place look like the others but in the end couldn’t have what he wanted. Couldn’t buy the lichen. Couldn’t buy the rust. Couldn’t buy a fence rail swallowed by a tree. All those other families had something on him and that was time, and no amount of money in the world could buy that.

  Hatcher’s wife’s headstone, alone inside his iron fence, was oddly modern. Not a headstone at all but a concrete sculpture of a tree stump, realistic down to the leaves of the concrete ivy on its sides and the growth rings cut into the top. The inscription was chiseled in a peeled-back section of the delicately textured bark.

  Morning Roberson Hatcher

  1873–1915

  Loving Wife and Mother

  She is Just Away

  When Edmund Hatcher came home from the war, Hatcher had thrown a parade. But Edmund had not shown up for it. Hatcher, up on the podium on Court Square, had kept the crowd waiting for over an hour, giving a speech that broke down into mumbled, feverish nonsense. The people stayed and listened, trying to make sense of his words, because he was Leland Hatcher, and because Edmund Hatcher was a hero, their first hero, to return from the Great War. A few did venture to whisper, He’s been under quite a strain. Finally the mayor came up and put his arm around him and walked him off and they all went home.

  And then, Monday morning, it was back to business as usual. The troop trains kept coming and going, and Hatcher was back at work making hobnail shoes for the Army. Leland Hatcher, Billy suspected, would endure. He might crack, and crack again, but he would never break.

  One November morning Billy saw Edmund Hatcher at the Hatcher plot. The Pierce-Arrow was parked on the other side of the path and there was Edmund Hatcher, standing outside the gate of his father’s fence, looking in at the obelisk. He wore a pair of glasses but otherwise he seemed unchanged. He did not even carry a cane.

  When Billy went by he looked over.

  Who the hell are you?

  I’m just passing through.

  Edmund Hatcher stuffed his hands into his coat. Smart man, he said. Get out of here quick as you can.

  Billy hesitated, then went to him.

  Your sister, Catherine, he said. I saw in the paper she got married.

  Edmund Hatcher grunted.

  I knew her, Billy said. Know her. Blessings on the union.

  Edmund grunted again. Wad’s a lucky man.

  Was there . . . another fellow? Another she was meant to marry?

  You mean the one who ditched her?

  Sure.

  Well can you keep a secret, buddy? Edmund took his hands out of his pockets and opened them and stared into them. My father managed to put the right spin on it. Told everyone he was called away on government business. There you are. You’ve got it now. Another secret for the Hatchers. I’m starting to lose sight of what I’m allowed to say. King Midas has ass’s ears. He waved his hand towards Billy. I’m thinking I might just start telling it all to strangers. Sometimes a man’s got to scurry off and whisper it all to the rushes if he doesn’t want to explode.

  Did he ever write to her, the other fellow?

  Edmund Hatcher ignored this. He looked up to the railroad trestle beyond the trees.

  Wad saves the day. Old Kissam Quick. It’s funny. Ever since his accident he was the one who was never going to get married. Now it’s me. Good old Wad. Straight-up, square, and on the level. He’s 110 percent, Wad.

  He looked at Billy and took off his glasses. The lower half of his face came off with them.

  Jesus.

  Billy had seen some awful things in his time but nothing like this. He looked where Hatcher’s nose and mouth should have been and instead felt he could see all the way down his throat. Without the mask he wasn’t even a man. He was a body and a neck carrying around a few scraps of flesh. A stump, like his mother’s headstone.

  He put the glasses back on, and his face became whole again. Billy let out his breath. Edmund Hatcher tapped the cheek of the mask.

  Pretty convincing, wouldn’t you say? Copper. You would never know, would you, unless you got close to me. Well I don’t got to worry about that. Anyone getting close to me, that is. He reached out and touched the gate, dropped his hand. Well now you know another Hatcher secret. My face ain’t a face. Those Frenchmen are artists, you know. Just look at that damn statue up there in New York.

  What did that to you?

  I just hope it doesn’t turn green. Then I’d really be a monster. He laughed a strained terrible laugh.

  What happened to you? Billy said again.

  You want to know what happened? No one wants to know. No one asks. They want to pump my hand and tell me I’m a hero but they don’t ever ask. Just want to tell me what I am. ‘Edmund, you’re a hero.’ Well Jesus. I’m not.

  Edmund Hatcher looked again to the trestle. A train crossed. They were both silent, watching it.

  I’ll tell you what I am, he went on. I’ll tell you gladly. Because in this case it’s no damn secret, except nobody wants to hear it. We had been sitting in that trench for days. Just waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Wet and dark and the stink. Going crazy. Like we were all sitting in our grave. Bernard and I played about a thousand hands of poker, which I taught him, with these dirty playing cards, which were his. I can still see those girls. They’re stamped on my brain. Those Frenchmen, I’m telling you, they’re artists. They know how to sculpt a sculpture and they know how to take a dirty picture. It’s because they’re free, you know, or freer than us, anyhow. I mean, these pictures, Bernard’s wife sent them to him. His wife. They’ve got something figured out.

  But you want to know how this happened. Well this is how it happened. This is my war story. I got bored. I couldn’t stand the waiting any longer. ‘I got to get out of here,’ I says. ‘I’m just gonna take a little stroll and have a little smoke and then I’ll come right back. Just pass me a lucifer.’ That’s what they call matches, you see. ‘Give me a lucifer, Bernard, I’m gonna have a smoke and then go back and try to get some sleep.’ I climb out of there. Start walking towards no-man’s-land. Walking like I’m down here on East Main Street and I can walk wherever I please.

  And Bernard, he leaps out after me and he says, ‘’Atcher, non!’

  ‘What are you worried about, Bernard, for Christ’s sake’ I say. He takes my arm. ‘’Atcher, please,’ he’s saying. ‘Allons.’ Tugging my arm. ‘If they see a light they will shell you. S’il vous plaît.’ So damn polite, those goddamn Frenchmen. And I say, ‘Bernard, we’ve been sitting here in silence for five damn days. There isn’t even anybody out there. Relax. This war has made you all too damn jumpy.’ I strike the match. The lucifer. Next thing I know I hear a sound like a dozen champagne glasses dropped in a bathtub. Turns out that’s my face. And Bernard. Well. Bernard. Bernard just suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Bernard was just scraps and rags. Bernard. Blown to bits because I got bored. Shit.

  Edmund Hatcher turned back to the gate.

  If one more person calls me a goddamn hero, I am going to goddamn bust his goddamn face.

  It was time to get moving again. Before the snow began to fall. Billy got the Raymond sold, and the lot it sat on too, to a man who was exempt because of rheumatoid arthritis. Pennies on the dollar for what it was worth. He traded the wagon for a riding horse, dumb as rocks but reliable. He traded a string of hares for a saddlebag and pa
cked it with his few possessions. He left Richfield on a cold bright morning, headed north, with a hell of a lot less than he had come in with.

  American Wake

  Ireland

  July 1886

  The night before William O’Maonlai leaves for America, he nearly drowns in a sea cave with a stolen calf. He is too drunk to remember what got him into the cave, which is filling with the rising tide. It had been a dare at the party, his American wake, the first of what will be many such parties in the coming years as more and more young people leave for America, which might as well be Tír na nÓg. The land of eternal youth from which no man ever returns.

  The cold water is rising fast in the tiny cave. Billy has climbed onto a ledge, then onto the calf’s back. Her sides heave like a bellows. They both have their necks stretched towards the ceiling to breathe the last pocket of salty air, their faces together, close as lovers or twins in a womb.

  I am going to die, Billy thinks. Right here in this tomb of a cave with this calf, her and me together, before I ever even get to America. And he lays his head against her warm wet neck and closes his eyes.

  Then, in a flash, he sees a secret. The answer to the riddle of the goggle-eyed witch, high above him in the cave atop East Hill. The answer to the question of whether she is tearing herself open to receive a man or to give birth to one.

  She is not one or another, he sees. She is both. And yet, more than both. She is All. She is the constant loop of decay and regeneration, of blood and milk, the entire world slipping now and forever from the gash between her legs. With her claws she stretches that cave of herself so wide that it encompasses everything and the edges come around to meet on the other side of the universe, screaming an endless spiral of joy and pain and pain and joy until it is beyond pain, beyond joy, beyond suffering, beyond lover or mother or even man or woman or human or cow. She is the unknowable. She is what does not die.