The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  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

  THE 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.”
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  “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

  THE 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.

  She moaned and at first he was not sure why, but then he understood it was simple and overwhelming pleasure.

  “Let’s make our own life,” she said. “Let’s not go back until we’re old.”

  She lay across the seat with her head in his lap and slept in those early hours of flight, making small movements and small sounds. In sleep her fists would clench and then open and then they would clench again. He held her to him and the sounds would subside and then after a while they would start up again and he could feel the rage that was inside him.

  “Would your father ever let that happen?” he asked.

  She did not say anything but responded with a look of fear and anxiety and he thought he’d never hated so virulently. He tried to understand but couldn’t. He’d never wanted to fight someone and beat them down as he did now.

  “It is a conversation I do not want to have,” she said, and then after a time, she said, “I miss the Gaylen horse most of all.”

  As the land flattened and dulled, constant was the mirage of water, blurring and gaseous, and in his head came a clicking sound for some miles and he thought it to be a feature of flatness, or an attribute of mirage, or caused by the blanketing heat until finally he found a throbbing vein in his forehead and pressed his finger to the skin lest it burst and fill his eyes.

  Henry let his hand rest on Mercy’s shoulder. Then he reached down and not wanting to wake her, he slowly pulled up her shirt. He wanted the skin of her back. He had studied her back and learned the names of its parts, and while she slept, and beneath the rucked cloth, he trailed his fingers along the vertebrae that supported her skull, that held her head erect when she stood. He counted her ribs, those long slender spines on heart-­shaped bodies and the lumbar of her column, curved, erect, mobile, balanced. Sometimes he thought the only reason to love her was her back.

  Henry pulled over and held Mercy to him as the engine idled and she came out of her dream. Long ago they’d come down from the mountains and crossed the moatlike Ohio River, its surface shiny and combustible. She flexed her body into his, her face to his belly as if inside was something precious she’d lost and then found. She bore no marks from her past, but inside she was like knotted ropes. He held her as tightly as he dared, which was as tightly as he could and felt for the deep muscles of her back, his left hand to the latissimus wrapping under her ribs and his right hand passing over top her deltoid to the teres major. She sighed and went back for better dreams, or no dreams at all, and he thought how holding her was holding himself.

  In her sleep she fetched his hand inside her shirt front to cover her breast and then with her own hand she covered his lap and told him to please keep driving. She wanted him not to be tired but to drive the car and take them away. They were bound for New Orleans where the Mississippi was yellow in the sunlight and slow running behind its high levees. They would live their days in New Orleans, shy and hidden away.

  They crossed the Ohio again and at a diner they ordered milkshakes, strawberry and vanilla, and hamburgers and fries. When they were asked to change tables for no apparent reason they looked at each other, suspicious of the simplest request. Henry scanned the diner for a face he might recognize, a man or woman, a couple eyeing them, and then turning to confer, maybe it’d be her brother or father. But he did not fix on anyone so his mind gave up the thought and did not care who it was or who it could be or what they wanted.

  I’m not nobody, he thought, and reached across the table so she might twine her fingers with his.

  That night they took a room on the Natchez Trace, all those thick vines and Spanish moss hung by live oak and catalpa outside the room, running alongside the walls. When she went to turn off the radio, he told her to leave it on because he liked to sleep with sound in the room.

  “You are like a little baby that way,” she said. “The way little babies like to have sound when they sleep.”

  “Then turn it off,” Henry said.

  “No,” she said. “I was only teasing.”

  Soon after they fell asleep, he awoke to Mercy making sound again and her body articulating that sound. It was like a cry or a whimper and then she woke with a fright, and when she turned on the light they discovered it was her time of month and she’d bled onto the sheets. She insisted they strip the bed and rinse out the sheets and hang them from the shower rod and they spent the rest of that night on the mattress covered with a blanket.

  In the morning he awoke to find her sleeping atop him. She woke too and asked him if it was morning.

  “What we are doing is not right. We should go back,” Mercy said. “I need to sort things out.”

  In that moment he could no longer imagine another future.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t be that way. My determination is fixed to have you.”

  She took his face in her hands. She was telling him her words were true and she was desperate he understand.

  Henry thought how all life must be strange and fantastic to Mercy, life without limitations. Hers was the charmed life.

  Then he was alone and she was gone to make a phone call. Is this love, he wondered, and why did it make him feel so alone even when he was with her? He did not know if he understood what she wanted from him.

  “What are you thinking?” she said when she returned. He was dressed and his satchel was packed and he was smoking a cigarette in a chair
by the door.

  “Nothing. I was just away in my mind.”

  “Can’t remember?”

  “No. Not really,” he said, and it was true, he could not remember.

  “My father,” she said, going down on her knees. “He is a thoroughly bad man.”

  In his mind he repeated her words and thought for the first time his own father might be the same, a bad man. It was then he understood his hatred of Mercy’s father, the distillate of so long a love, a hatred, a never knowing who his father was. He’d not so much cared before now, but now he did.

  “You can leave me here,” he said. “I will keep going on my own.”

  “I am always saying the wrong thing,” she said, and raised her hand from his knee to her mouth as if next time to catch the words. He felt her leaning toward him as she spoke. Her words came restive and urgent, as if more for herself, and they incited a dull aching restlessness inside him.

  “I am ready,” she said, reaching around his waist. “We can go now.”

  “Did you make your phone call?”

  “I have given you my heart,” she said. “I am your own forever.”

  “Is that so?” Henry said.

  “I promise.”

  “Who did you call?”

  “I called Walter to tell him we wouldn’t be there.”

  Nothing more was said and they did not talk about it again. He was thinking of love as if it were a place and not a person, not an emotion of the human kind, but where you stood and in the air you breathed. His mind was hopeless with the mystery of her, struggling for reasons why she did what she did.

  Outside their room the sunlit mist was a cloud of light. Before them was the long stretch of southwest highway, the roadsides rampant with vine and so hot the asphalt quaked and fumed.