The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  “Well, you get some sleep,” she said. “I will come back tomorrow.”

  She stood and brushed off the seat of her blue jeans. The moon’s light was cutting a silvery path in the night down to the ground. She plucked a piece of straw from his flannel shirt and held it in her teeth. She was smiling with the play of her private thoughts before she spoke.

  “When I leave, will you remember me?” she asked.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then I will.”

  He watched her moving figure. She was walking away into what seemed an empty world, the silver stripped trees like skeletons. He could hear the engine and saw a sweep of light and she was gone.

  Chapter 4

  EACH DAY HE BECAME more and more aware of Mercy’s lovely face looking at him, her chestnut hair tied loosely beneath a scarf, her fragile blue eyes. Each day she seemed closer than the day before and each day he busied himself even more and tried to keep his distance, but nights she would find him and she would bring groceries and they would talk and they would share coffee and food.

  While she rode he hurried to finish his chores and made coffee and took it outside to a nearby picnic table.

  When she joined him she’d untied her hair. She sat down beside him and stretched and yawned.

  “It’s a fine night,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. They’d been eating together for how many nights now, he could not remember. Maybe six. Maybe seven. He tried to remember, but his mind fell away with the blended memories of each night’s events.

  “Can I get you anything?” he said.

  “Nothing. I came to keep you company,” she said, and sipped at her coffee.

  “I appreciate it,” Henry said, and offered her a cigarette, which she always declined.

  There was the rising of damp and the falling of cold. Their breath hung in the air under the dark spring sky. It was a silent night, the horses quiet and sleepy.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, looking into the sky. Her face was soft, almost childlike, and seemed almost in a trance of delight. She turned to him.

  “You’ve got the handsomest face,” Mercy said. She leaned into him, jostled him, and smiled. When she smiled her eyes narrowed and the light inside them was condensed.

  He thanked her and told her she was the prettiest girl.

  “You probably think that’s dumb,” she said.

  “No. I don’t think that’s dumb at all.”

  “All the time you rise up as if to say something and then you don’t say anything.”

  “I only wish I could have met you better in life,” Henry said.

  “Better than what?” she said, and slung an arm across his shoulders.

  He lifted his hand and made a dismissive gesture. How could he reply to that? He stood and stepped away, his hands behind his back, one hand holding the wrist of the other.

  “What are you thinking?” Mercy said.

  He told her he dreamt of her last night.

  “I dreamt of you last night too,” she said.

  Mercy went to him and reached her hand to his cheek. She ran her fingers down the side of his face. She told him the spots he must’ve missed when he shaved that morning. It seemed to take a long time. Her body was soft and close. She took him by his shirt front to hold him. He began to laugh. A mass of disheveled hair surrounded her face.

  “Are you in there?” he asked, sorting through her hair to her face with his fingers.

  “I am right here,” she said, and he took her in his arms and held her.

  This moment was enough forever and he wanted time to stop. Overhead was the twining of the stars and stars caught in the tops of the pine trees. The smell of her hair. The air so thick and heavy. She was entirely herself, her hair around her face and at the back of her neck. He almost could not breathe. She stroked his hair and for some reason she began to cry and he kissed away her wet salty eyes.

  She took a deep breath as if preparing to go still deeper. She said, her voice barely audible, “All my life I have been strong, but now it is a hard thing to do.”

  She stepped back and looked down at the ground.

  “Don’t be shy,” she said, as if talking to herself, and stepped forward and took his face in her hands. She closed her eyes and then she kissed him and she left.

  Sometime in the night he awoke. He left the bed and pulled a chair to the window where he sat and looked out. A star fell from the sky, hot and streaking and without reason. The place he was in was somewhere he did not know and where he had never been before, somewhere on the earth and under the sky. It was nighttime. Or earliest morning. He did not know.

  From the long galley there came a nickering sound. Gaylen.

  He believed he heard footsteps coming to his door. He hoped it was she and when the door swung dim light into the room he could see that it was. He reached to light a bulb for them to see by. Her hair was a braid she wore wrapped twice around her head. She was cold and held her arms clasped to her chest.

  The watery light pressed against the cold in the room. She was shivering. He crossed the room to start the little kerosene heater.

  “You are a thief,” she said.

  “Why am I a thief?”

  “You stole my heart.”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” Henry said.

  “I want you,” she said.

  “How much do you want?”

  “How much do I want? I want everything you have.”

  “I don’t have anything,” he said.

  “Maybe you will have to learn to see yourself in a different way,” Mercy said.

  “Maybe we will both need to see ourselves differently.”

  She unbuttoned her riding pants and slid them down over her hips. The room was cold with night and she shivered again as she pulled off her sweater.

  He threw back the blanket, and she let her body, light and smooth skinned, as if she were the petals of a rose, lay down in the warmth he’d left behind. He slid in beside her and took her in his arms. He liked how dense and thick and well muscled her thighs and hips were from so much riding.

  “Tell me about the girls you have been with. Who were they and what were they like?”

  “I’ve never been with anyone,” he said.

  “Me neither,” she said.

  Her skin smelled of nutmeg and clove. His hands fit her ribs and he could hold her ass in his open palms. At first he shied from her mouth and then she was insistent. She found his mouth and that first night was his hands and his mouth and their bodies.

  As he hovered over her, she held him by his elbows and she told him she felt her body dividing. She closed on him and kept him inside her and bit his shoulder.

  “Don’t move,” she said, and he answered her by not moving and then she splayed her legs and there were contractions deep inside her and she gasped. She folded herself around him again and held him inside her and she would not let him go.

  When he came it was as if a violence inside his body. His legs shook and his arms quivered.

  She had wanted it and he had wanted it too. She said she hoped for it to happen and then she said she prayed for it to happen. She said it was what she wanted even more than she wanted him. But he did not mind.

  Then she told him he could move and he rolled to his side. She stared up at the rafters and told him she loved him, and when he told her he loved her too she told him he didn’t have to tell her that.

  “Not even if I want to?” he said.

  “If you want to, you can,” she said.

  Outside the window was north and the stars and the cold river.

  “Will you always love me?” Mercy said.

  “Always,” he said.

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what.”

  He held her in his arms and sometime after, while she slept, he slipped from the bed and across the room he found the water pitcher and drank from it. He shivered in his naked­ne
ss. He was still wet with their lovemaking. That’s how soon she’d fallen asleep and how soon he left the warm bed. He could not imagine being so far away from her and went back and pulled up a chair beside the bed. He thought to sleep but never wanted to sleep again.

  She turned in her sleep. He wondered what she was dreaming. Her dream seemed intense and possessive. He thought to hear his name, but it was only a sound she made. She turned again in the bed. He reached to touch her, to assure her of his presence, but she startled and turned away from his touch.

  “Is everything all right,” she asked suddenly, sitting up in the bed.

  “I feel like you took my spine,” Henry said, and smiled.

  “Your spine,” she said, as if she’d finally captured the prize.

  “Sleep some more,” he said.

  “I think it’s the best thing,” she said, and drew him into the bed and turned the side of her face to his chest and was asleep again.

  He thought about their lovemaking and how it had been like speaking to each other. Their lovemaking was like finding the only other person on earth who spoke the same words in the same way you did.

  A bird had awakened and was beginning its morning song. It was that close to sunrise. He thought how he loved her and how he had never loved a girl before. Or perhaps he had never loved at all. It could have been that, though he knew he loved his mother.

  He smiled at how strange his thoughts.

  It was cold in the room. It was the cold the sun pushes in its distant rising. The bird went silent. Henry lifted from the bed and as quietly as possible he dressed, pulled on his ball cap and went outside. In the east was a kindling of pale rose and silver that lengthened and brightened along the horizon. A garland of mist roped through the crowns.

  He thought maybe he’d not wanted to confront the death of his grandfather until this very morning and now he could think of nothing else. But how could that be? His chest ached and his face burned. He thought how shallow his history and yet how complex the threads of memory. He never once thought he’d die and thought there was all the time in the world and he’d see him again. He wanted a home feeling, but he just couldn’t find it.

  He heard Mercy before he saw her. Her hair was combed exactly down the middle and tied. She knelt beside him. She picked up a stick and scratched at the ground. Down the valley was the sun-­glittering edge of the water, its dark green sluggish flow, the placid stretches, its darkling pools.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Did you ever think about the rocks?” he said.

  “How does that one go?”

  “Maybe they are alive and their hearts beat once every thousand years and they only need to take a breath every five hundred.”

  “You shouldn’t feel so alone again,” she said.

  The brassy light hit her and her skin soon mottled from how intense the sunlight. She pulled on his ball cap and adjusted her collar. She found her gloves in her back pocket and tucked her hands inside them. Then she tugged at his sleeve and told him she’d started breakfast.

  When they went in she had for him bread, milk, bacon, coffee, and eggs. And then she worked away with a mop and a bucket until the room was clean smelling.

  Chapter 5

  THAT SPRING, FOR MERCY’S graduation, Henry wore a dark suit, a starched white shirt, and a red tie. He wore new shoes and they were stiff and still wore a store shine. That night there was a dinner dance at the country club for the graduates whose families were members.

  She had a brand-­new Mercury convertible she received as a graduation present. It was maroon with a white leather interior and that night when she picked him up she brought for him a gray flannel suit. She wore bare touches of rouge and lipstick and a strand of white pearls. She kissed him on the cheek and laughed and wiped away the kiss mark. She was going to the university in the fall and he still had another year of high school, but it did not matter to them. She’d have her own automobile and they would see each other often.

  “But I can’t take that,” he said, dry mouthed and light headed.

  “You have to know how to take,” she said, and smiled and passed the new suit into his hands and then she kissed him again.

  At the country club, the lights changed from orange to red to yellow, and paper trees swayed gently all in the same direction as if leaned by an invisible wind.

  Mercy’s father was there and her brother, Randall. Randall was a lawyer and married and had a family and was there with his wife. Randall was tall like his father and both men wore white linen suits and silk bow ties. They smoked cigars and held glasses of bourbon and were surrounded by men much like themselves.

  When Mercy introduced Henry they were polite and firmly shook his hand. Randall’s wife, Beverly, was delighted to finally meet him. She’d heard so much.

  A man in a black tuxedo with satin piping sang into a microphone. He was slender and had a pencil-­thin mustache, slicked-back and shiny black hair. His voice was soothing and seemed more an instrument of music than a voice. He held a gourd in each hand and when he shook them the sound was like water on the shore. Henry and Mercy danced, but they did not really dance. It was more the shape of dancing and the gesture of dancing as they slowly moved across the floor. Henry’s sleeve caught a glass and it tumbled to the floor and smashed, and everyone cheered. On the lawn, under the spangled sky, they played a game of croquet with an older couple she knew and who called him young man.

  A storm had been threatening all that day and it exploded and the power went out and for the time he lost her in the darkness and did not find her again until the lights came back on. After the dance she handed him the keys to the Mercury. She was upset and would not tell him why. He started the engine and the dashboard lit up and glowed. He cut on the lights and shined the river.

  “Just drive,” she said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Go,” she said, and after waiting for him to make a move, she said it again. “Go.”

  They left the city and climbed into the mountains. They drove the long balconies of stone, a world extant from the world of the street, a world womblike in its whispery green luxuriance. The world up there was newly wet and cooler by degrees, cooler than the street world. The rooms of the forest were deep and cathedral and what rose to them was scent and closeness, and nothing could be heard but the gently soughing wind.

  He told her he was looking for her when the lights went out and was afraid he’d lost her. She hiked up her skirt and crossed her leg over his.

  “Do you want some of this?” Mercy said.

  She folded closer and he kissed her ear and her neck as he drove. She unknotted his tie and unbuttoned his shirt enough to drag it off his shoulder and lay her face against his chest. She took his hand and held it between her legs.

  He was in a world where his ascension was never lost to him. It was a world where she would always want him between her legs. She would bite down hard on the muscle that strapped his shoulder cuff, the insides of her strong legs, her fingers in his mouth, the runnels of sweat streaking his back and pooling in the skin of her sunken belly. Her fingers bruising his skin. The fury and the rush of their pumping blood.

  Henry knew he would never forget her if it ever ended. He did not know why, but this night he had the sad feeling it would never again in his life be this way.

  At four in the morning they drove the dark streets to his house and when she dropped him off she pulled away slowly and he walked along with her, his arms still resting on the window. She stopped to kiss him one more time. She told him if he ever lost her again he could find her at the boathouse.

  “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 sl
ept 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.