by Lydia Peelle
Seconds or minutes or hours later, the calf reaches out her black tongue and licks Billy’s face. He laughs. She licks and licks and he keeps laughing and then he feels a shift at his neck, a tickle. The water has begun to recede. Slowly the tide pulls away and then it is low enough that they can splash out. He races up the strand towards home. Returns the calf to her pen. Changes into his traveling clothes, grabs his suitcase, pins his money inside his shirt. Thinking only one thought: America!
That day the entire island gathers at the harbor to see him off. His mother is smiling at him through her tears, holding her shawl at her chin against the breeze.
He runs to his friend Paddy.
I figured it out! he whispers. The riddle of the witch! I’m gonna live forever!
Well, Paddy says. What is it?
Can’t remember! Ask the calf! She was there!
Billy is already running down the strand to where his father waits at the water’s edge with the curragh to take him across to Skibbereen. When they push off into the choppy water, the islanders cheer. Each man and woman on the shore has a vision of where Billy is headed, this paradise, America. It fills them with hope, to see one of their own on his way. Their hearts lift as if they themselves are setting off for Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, heaven on earth. What a wonderful world, to contain such a place. What a wonderful ocean that would carry you there. What a wonderful sky, to stretch over it all!
Look out for Italians! they call. Watch your money! Eat a watermelon! Send letters home!
There will be gold and silver in the ditches, boy! And nothing to do but gather it.
Maura Carries Her Baby up the Stairs of the Crimson Shawl
Bristol
Spring 1898
In her arms, the newborn baby makes a sound in his sleep. A grunt. He moves his tiny lips.
Maura’s legs are still shaking from her long labor, smeared with blood that has seeped from the rags stuffed between her thighs. Her knees keep buckling. With each step the hot, thick air grows hotter and thicker, almost choking. From the landing above come the moans and murmurs of a whorehouse.
She hates to be here in this hateful place. But a baby boy will only rise in the world if he is carried up a staircase before the sun sets on his first day of life. Back home in Galway, the nearest house with two stories and a staircase was miles away on bad roads. Most women in her family were too weak from labor to make the journey. Misery plagued them for generations. This was no coincidence, she knows.
Her baby too was born in a house without stairs, but Maura has a friend here, at the Crimson Shawl, and she arranged this with her, weeks ago. And as soon as Maura had the strength to stand, she swaddled the tiny baby and came and her friend opened the door and let her in. In spite of the pain, not coming never even crossed her mind. Because this is America, not Ireland. There are no limits here. Up in America means all the way to the stars.
On the landing she stops. She looks down at the baby. His red face is peaceful, serene.
When she first knew that she was pregnant, she had prayed that he would die. More than that. She had let herself fall down the embankment of the river. She had spent a week’s paycheck to rent a bicycle. Riding a bicycle, some girls said, would do it for sure. When nothing worked she still did not give up hope. She still believed that there was some way out of it, that a plan of escape would come to her suddenly, as all her best ideas came, as her idea for that trick with the monkey had come, but then Billy came back down off of Holston Mountain. With Billy back, the hope disappeared. The two of them caged in the terrible house on Second High. She had run before the walls fell in on them. Run blind, with her cigar box full of money, and had only made it as far as Nashville, where she was robbed while she slept, exhausted, in Union Station. Had to beg for the money to get back to Bristol, grabbing well-dressed women’s arms as they brushed past her to the tracks. Even then she knew that it was all over, that if she could have sprouted wings and flown, it would not be fast enough to catch him, that he was gone. But she went back. She had no place else to go.
Missus King fired her. When Maura explained her condition, she had not taken pity, but instead said she would make sure she had trouble finding work anywhere in Bristol again.
And it will get harder and harder to find work. Finally she will end up here, at the Crimson Shawl, where she once vowed to Billy she would rather die than be found. But by that time, she is dying, without the strength to do anything but lie back and let men do to her what they want, what they will. Because the boy needs to eat. And the boy needs books for school. And when she knows she has only weeks left to live, in a bedroom just below where she now stands, she will tell the boy the story. Because she is going to die, and has nothing else to give.
Blood will tell, she will say to him.
But on the stairs that is all years ahead. At the moment Charles is only a few hours old. Named not for anyone but because it was the finest name she could think of. From the moment she saw his face she knew her life would now be dedicated to one purpose only. If she could not have what was promised, then he would.
And so she came here as soon as she could stand. Single-minded. With hackles raised and teeth set. A fox, Billy used to call her. Foxy little Maura McLaughlin. He had loved her. She does know that.
When she reaches the top stair she leans against the wall and closes her eyes against the small explosions of pain inside her. She has done it. She can carry him no higher. Her knees buckle again. Dizzy. When the wave passes she opens her eyes to look down at her boy, so new, still sleeping. All the world at his feet.
Somewhere in France
October 1918
Get up, you damn mule. Please.
The mule groans, struggles again, digs himself deeper into the mire.
Charles is on his knees. Another shell, much closer, sends up a rain of mud.
He rolls himself tight against the mule’s body. Catherine. Sometimes he tries to call her up, to remember the taste of her, her bare flesh under his hand in the Everbright springhouse, but he cannot.
Other things, he can remember. Clear as the night sky.
Can you do the Bunny Hug? The Turkey Trot? The Grizzly Bear?
Jones, before he died, had talked on and on about his girl back home. Charles had only said Catherine’s name once.
You don’t know nothing, Jones, till you’ve known a girl with a gap-toothed smile.
How many times had he wished Jones was Billy. Wished he would turn around and see Billy standing there, grinning. But he doesn’t even have Jones anymore.
Another thought of Catherine that comes back, clear: watching her eat an ice cream sundae in the window of the soda fountain that summer day when he knew little more about her than her name. Dragging her tongue along the spoon and studying it carefully, like it was the most important job in the world. Sometimes he thinks he ought to have just stayed put, there on the other side of the window, unseen. Just watching her. He could have saved her from all of it. He tried to say that, in the letter he sent her from Nashville.
But he had wanted her so badly. And it was no use, saying it to her then, and it is no use thinking about it now. Edmund Hatcher was right. The war made you want to forgive everybody. Even yourself.
The boom of the big artillery has started now. He feels it in his belly. The mule flinches. They’ve got to get up. The sky is lightning.
He struggles to his feet and leans back on the mule’s lead. His shoes slide in the mud, go out from under him.
Get up, Champ. Get up. Please get up.
Champ, with a groan and a great sucking sound, gets up out of the mud.
Charles jumps out of the way of the floundering feet. The mule shakes himself like a dog, sending the gun and ammunition clattering.
He kisses Champ on his nose.
Oh, you mule. You good mule. Come on, good buddy. Come on. You and me, let’s go.
They go on. Towards the sound of the guns.
Morning
Tennessee
1924
When Billy heard about the memorial they were building in Nashville, that they had put out a call to collect all the names of the soldiers who had died, he wrote a letter.
To whom it may concern,
A boy named Charles McLaughlin was in the fight. I lost track of him. He enlisted in September 1917 and that’s as far as I know. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive or running around in France but if he is dead, I know he’d want his name up there on that wall more than anything. That is why I am righting to you. If this ain’t the write address please right me back and let me know where I ought to send this letter. Like I say he would want his name up there real bad I know and I hear you want to be sure to get them all and I wouldn’t want him to be missed.
Sincerely,
William Monday
He put it in an envelope and put a return address care of the post office in the town he was in. The reply came quickly, in an official-looking envelope.
We regret to inform you that Private Charles McLaughlin was killed in action—
He didn’t finish it. He threw it away. Now he wished he had never written that damn letter in the first place. Sure enough he was never going down to Nashville to take a look at that wall.
There had been a bird whose story had been everywhere for a while. A carrier pigeon named Cher Ami. She carried a message ten miles through the flying shrapnel and bullets of no-man’s-land, not quitting when her leg was shot off, her eye shot out. She had saved five hundred men with that message, not knowing what she carried. Only to go. To fly. Fly.
There was a British cavalry mare who learned the difference between enemy aircraft and friendly aircraft by the way it sounded. She would give warning at the approach of the former but not the latter. After a while, her men figured out it was a good idea to pay attention to her.
And the dogs that carried guns, food, messages. And the canaries kept in cages to warn of mustard gas. What were their names? Where was their memorial? The mules. All those mules they had loaded onto the boxcars. Tennessee mules, the finest in the world.
All gone. All mud.
The next summer he went through Sumner County with a string of horses. He stopped at a service station on the outskirts of Richfield to water them. The young man who came out to work the pump for him wore a wristwatch. That was something new, after the war. The wristwatch was a lot easier on the battlefield. Pull out your shiny pocket watch, get shot. Dangerous as striking a lucifer.
Other things had changed. There were times it felt the world had been knocked off its axis. Just a little, but enough to throw off the spin. The bottom had fallen out of the horse-and-mule market after the war. Just fell out completely. But prices were back up. In fact, they were the highest they had ever been. Booming. A man would always be able to make a living dealing in horses. And Billy had little use for money these days. Living on wind, weeds, and water, just like an old horse put to pasture. But it was a fine feeling. As if he might just lift up on the breeze and float away.
He did have an ache, when it rained. His keepsake of Leland Hatcher’s mare.
You didn’t see horses like her anymore. They were gone from the world. When the prices fell after the war, the breeding stock had suffered. Generations of bloodlines had been lost. There would never be another like her.
The horses sucked at the water in greedy pulls. They were hot and breathing hard, lathers of sweat on their bellies. He spoke to them and moved the bucket a little closer. Then he squatted, his bad knees popping, and dipped his hands in it and wet the back of his neck. He thought about all the boys in Richfield. Twitch. Jack Dillehay. Ernestine’s son, and Doc Walker’s, John Rich IV, all of them, and he knew they had either gone to war or hadn’t. They were either dead or alive or, like Edmund Hatcher, had been destroyed by it. But he did not want to know their fates. Just as he never wanted to see that wall in Nashville. There were times when not knowing was better than knowing. A man didn’t have to know everything.
A line of cars was waiting at the gas pump. One by one the fellow filled them up and they drove off. Then a big Chevrolet pulled in, and a man got out. He walked up to the door of the filling station on a cane.
Wad Taylor. Running behind him was a little girl. Hair the color of ash bark, and a blue dress. He called her name, and she streaked past him through the door. It closed with a bang behind them.
Billy got out of there fast. He did not want to be there when they came out. He did not need to see her face.
That night he camped in a field by the road. There was a three-quarter moon, no clouds. Fast crickets. The air was hot and heavy. He staked the horses and laid out his bedroll and stretched himself out on it. He did not bother to make a fire. He lay there uncovered to the stars and waited for some relief from the heat. Sometimes it felt as if he waited all day for it, the short hours in the middle of the night when a coolness opened up like wings.
That little girl.
How strange, that he had seen her. Yet maybe not so strange at all. This was something that happened, to a traveling man. If you did not push yourself in any one direction, something seemed to pull you. Put you in the right place at the right time.
Morning Hatcher Taylor. With a name that meant beginning. A child who would never have to hustle. She had been there all along, Billy thought, even before she was born. All those years that Maura survived, fighting to stay alive and to keep her boy alive. She was there, this little girl, the way an entire tree was held in a tiny seed, folded, waiting.
She will never know your story, Maura, he thought. Not a hint of it. But that’s alright. By now the story doesn’t matter. If only we could bring back the dead, just for one moment or two, to show them. But the mystery was too great for such a simple solution, in spite of what Ernestine promised those who sought one. Maybe the other animals understood the mystery, as Harkleroad had said. But man had to go on faith, and faith alone.
He looked up at the stars. For the first time in decades he thought of his baby sister, the one dead from hunger, buried on top of East Hill, next to the cave where the goggle-eyed witch still howled. She had died and he had not. He survived the Winter of Darkness. He survived the caverns of the Bowery. He survived his drunken night in the cave with the calf and he survived the Neversink mine. All those times he ought to have died but for some reason, luck or wits or strength or otherwise, he had survived.
But Charles. Charles had been born at the wrong time for young men. He had gone into the flames of the crucible and never came out again.
Well there would never be another one. That was what they all said, that was the good that could come out of the madness. That was what they all died for. The men, the pigeons, the horses, the dogs, the canaries, the mules, all those lost, gone in places with names Billy could not even pronounce.
Morning Hatcher Taylor. He said the name aloud. Morning McLaughlin. Morning Monday. The mongrel Morning, in her starched blue dress. She would never know her story but she would be alright. He was certain of that, if nothing else.
He was tired in all his bones but he did not sleep deeply. He woke up many times in the night. Once it was a whip-poor-will. Later it was the almost weightless patter of a field mouse running across his legs. Once he sat bolt upright, heart pounding. He got up and hurried over to check on the horses. Whatever woke him must have woken them too. Their ears were pricked and their heads were raised. Their eyes were shining in the dark.
About the Author
Lydia Peelle holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and is the author of the acclaimed story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications, have won two Pushcart Prizes and an O. Henry Prize, and have been featured in Best New American Voices. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. The Midnight Cool is her first novel.
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Also by Lydia Peelle
Reasons for and Advantage
s of Breathing
Credits
Jacket design by Joanne O’Neill
Jacket photographs: Courtesy of the Library of Congress (street); © ke77kz / Getty Images (texture)
Author photograph by Andrea Behrends
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are drawn from the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the midnight cool. Copyright © 2017 by Lydia Peelle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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first edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Peelle, Lydia, author.
Title: The midnight cool : a novel / Lydia Peelle.
Description: First edition. | New York : Harper, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032307| ISBN 9780062475466 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062475497 (ebook)