The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  One day at lunchtime, as Henry was occupying his bench, he could see where Paul had moved up a floor. Paul waved down to him and he waved back. Paul wetted the window with cleaning solution, and as if blessing the sky he began his white-­handed circling, and then in the easiest way imaginable the window was coming out of the wall and he was coming with it. Four stories down, a tree fractured the diving sheet of glass and his fall broke through the branches and he lay there on the sidewalk like an upturned turtle, feebly waving his arms in the air as more glass rained down on him. His body was broken and blood was oozing from his mouth and the concrete around him sparkled with shards of shattered glass and shreds of green leaves.

  For some reason Henry did not cross the street and he did not wait around. It wasn’t such a hard thing to tell when someone is dead or about to be dead. He hurried away and back to the Quarter and climbed the stairs. The stairwell was dark and the lights would not work. He groped blindly through the upper hall and found their door. He dug up the key, let himself in, and locked the door behind him before he struck a match to find a candle.

  Henry called out to Mercy, but she did not answer. She was gone and in her place he felt there to be another presence in the dark room, and at first he could not tell who it was and then he could. It was Randall standing in the shadows. He looked at Henry and then hit him over the head with a flat iron. Henry’s vision exploded and blackened and he realized he may have gotten himself killed.

  “It is over and you are not forgiven. Not now. Not ever.”

  The man’s words seemed to be crossing a great distance on their way to Henry and were thick and slow.

  “Jesus God, just don’t hit me again,” he cried. He could feel the cool wet of his own blood beginning to soak his hair.

  “I don’t want any of your back sass,” Randall said, and he hit Henry again. Henry’s vision blackened and then a noose dropped over his neck and a hand cinched it tight at his throat and from behind he was dragged onto his knees.

  “It pays to be afraid,” another voice said. The man’s breath was hot and sour with tobacco. A stick match flared to light a cigar and then dropped to the floor where it slowly burned out.

  “Go away,” the voice said. “Don’t ever come back.”

  Then he was alone. He lay on the floor, paralyzed in the shadowed light. His head was burning up with a pain it could not fully embrace and so it vined into his neck and shoulders and down into his chest. So great was the pain, he could not move to the bed. He touched at his head to feel wetness and came away with a slick of blood in his palm and leaking down his wrist.

  Inside was a deep song he could not quite hear. Then there was the swashing of the blood in his heart and the hiss of air in his lungs and he knew that he was not dead. He held to the frayed end of the rope draped over his shoulder until he realized he was choking himself. He began to gasp and struggled to loosen the rope and let it drop to the floor.

  She was gone and every trace of her. Gone was her black book. He could not peel back the fat rubber bands to open it, to reveal the pages for their codes and drawings, their faint letters, scribblings, and strange words. He could not go inside its pages to find her.

  Left to him was the knife and the pistol, his inheritance passed onto him by his mother’s hand. She’d told him they were his and he was to take them with him where he was going.

  It was as if a door had opened on hellfire and he had entered. He had the recurring sensation that a belt was ever tightening and loosening about his chest. He could not escape the feeling of entombment and no wish, no words, could change what had happened.

  Part II

  There on the perilous open

  ground of war, in brave

  expectancy they lay all night

  while many campfires burned. As

  when in heaven principle

  stars shine out around the moon.

  Iliad 8.626–­31

  Chapter 13

  IT WAS OCTOBER 26, 1950, and harbored off the coast of North Korea were seventy-­one transports packed with twenty-­eight thousand marines waiting for the word to go.

  In the early morning when the tide was right, they would climb down the nets into the landing craft, the flat-­sided steel boats bucketing in the gray chop. A dirty rain had begun to fall on their shoulders. The air was rank with the smells of salt, paint, grease, tobacco, and sweat. Sky-­bound soot and ash and brick dust were being dragged back to the earth and water from hazy suspension.

  Some men took chaws out of their mouths and placed them in their caps while others retrieved the chaw they’d been saving and tucked it inside their cheek. Other men were sick and puked on their boots. Men squared their gear again. Men looked inside themselves for reason or meaning, but there was little there to be found. In their minds they dismantled and assembled their weapons again and again. They mouthed the words to prayers, and rosaries came out, the ticking beads entwining fingers grimed with Cosmoline. They cradled the little Jesus in the palm of a hand, whispered cadences, and for a moment Henry envied them their belief and passion. He envied them their pastoral moment for how unplaceable he felt himself to be. He was just seventeen.

  Marine Corsairs heaved into view. They came as if phantoms from beyond the orbit of the moon, their inexorable motion of speed, their trailings of sublunar vapors, resizing every second, and suddenly there were vast and terrifying and devouring sound explosions tearing the sky and they disappeared.

  Lew Devine took out his spearmint chewing gum, rolled it between his fingers, and stuck it behind his ear. He sucked the phlegm from his nose and spit it out. He patted his stomach and gave Henry a thumbs-­up and a skeletal grin, a gold tooth perched in his jaw. His mouth moved: Won’t be long now.

  Gunny moved among them in an eccentric amble, touching them, addressing them as if they were schoolboys headed off to their first recital. Usually fearsome, in the chaos of the landing he was suddenly patient and caring.

  “When you hit the beach do not stop,” he said. “Do not crawl; roll. Do not fire over; fire around. Fire from different positions behind your cover. Move those ammo pouches so you can get closer to the ground if you need to. You defend yourself by attacking.” He paused. “Try not to shoot yourself and do not shoot each other.”

  Henry was a hunter and Lew Devine was a hunter. This they shared as marines, but that was all Henry knew of him. Lew Devine was older and did not make friends. He’d fought in the Pacific, bloody Tarawa, Okinawa, the Solomons, where they stood back to back with one imperative: to hold the god damn position or die.

  Lew Devine could sit still and quiet longer than any of them. He could slow his breathing and his pulse, and the exhalations of his breath and his heartbeat became almost imperceptible. He chewed gum constantly and there was a roll of white scar tissue where his right eyebrow should have been. Lew had been sick for most of the three weeks at sea as they waited offshore for the minesweepers and the frogmen to do their work. He’d lost fifteen pounds and wore his dungarees gathered at his skinny waist.

  Lew uncapped his canteen. He leaned forward, bowed his head, and tipped the drink into his mouth.

  “That’s a good drink,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Water?” Henry said.

  “Yes. Water.”

  The stiffness in Henry’s legs began to melt away. Beneath his feet he could feel the vibrations of the mysterious and he felt to have traveled the eternal, circling half the world to reach the point that was this place in his life. For some seconds he thought of his mother, her beauty and grace, and his heart ached for her and he wished he’d been a better son.

  When it was their turn to go, one man fell from the nets and went into the water and disappeared under the weight of his gear. He could not be saved. Another man’s leg was crushed when he stepped between the scraping hulls. No sound could be heard coming from him, just the yaw of his open mouth as he screamed in agony, his boot torn away, and the crushed leg of his dungarees ragged and soa
ked with his blood.

  They crossed the treacherous harbor through a luminous mist and behind them was the apex of their widely spreading wake, the beacon lights reflecting on the swimming motes that densed in the wet sky. The lights bore through the thick air so powerfully they crackled in the ruptured atmosphere. Henry half closed his eyes to see better. What wandering current had he entered?

  The coxswain’s neck was stiff and bent back on his folded shoulders as he sought their designation for making land. There was a deafening explosion off the starboard and then they were drenched with seawater and debris, human and otherwise. The work of the frogmen and the minesweepers had not been perfect.

  The coxswain laid off but then, finding their smoke, veered to starboard and then port. They bucked the white breakers and the dodging tide and then he caught the breakwater and gunned the engine, leaving behind them a muddy guttering wake slick with fuel and the air filled with gouts of black exhaust. At the last instant the coxswain backed off, reversing the engine, and it gnashed as the gears reknit.

  When they punched onto Blue Beach and Henry stepped off, it was only to stumble and fall to his knees on the mudded and cobbled shore. They’d not been on land for almost three weeks and their legs were no longer quick enough to meet the hard rising earth. He strained under the heavy load that weighed his body. He carried a haversack, knapsack, cartridge belt, bayonet with scabbard, meat can with cover, knife-­fork-­spoon, canteen with cup and cover, first-­aid packet and pouch, poncho, shelter half, steel helmet with liner, helmet cover, gas mask, entrenching tool, and grenade pouch.

  He carried the BAR and two harnesses of .30-­caliber magazines. He wore the .45 in a shoulder holster that belonged to his old uncle and the sheath knife that was also his uncle’s. The BAR alone weighed twenty pounds and had a range of fifty-­five hundred yards, more than three miles. Men debated whether or not you could kill a man at that distance or if he just disappeared over the curvature of the earth.

  Gunny was running with them and then was down among them as they groaned and scrambled to their feet bearing the heavy weight of their armamentary. Gunny was tall and square built and born in 1905. He had been a marine since the age of sixteen and he was now forty-­five years old and wore a long handlebar mustache he waxed every morning. He was now ferocious and screaming and cursing and kicking them in the ass.

  “Get up, god dammit. Get up,” he screamed.

  “I’m trying,” the man said.

  “Quit your bitchin’,” he barked. “You volunteered for this lash-­up.”

  Gunny had told them that in battle one saw better and heard better and the body acted more quickly. The mind concentrated in battle. Old ailments and nagging injuries cleared up and in this way battle was very good for one’s health. Henry collected himself and stood erect and stumbled and fell again, but he was not afraid. The possibility of being afraid was only an idea to him and had not yet entered into his mind. Though he agonized for the immense weight he felt entering his legs and hips, his heart beat like strong machinery and he plodded forward on feet and knees and feet.

  “Good Lord,” Lew kept saying, his words sawing the noise stricken air. “Good Lord,” he cried as they staggered on their wobbly legs.

  They scaled the fifteen-­foot seawall on ladders to find a city disappeared in a pall of smoke and a veil of fog and dust eerily lit by fires burning on the distant landscape. The beacons jambed into the blown mess and stirred it like a wind. Overhead, the gull-­winged dark blue Corsairs ripped the air, their .50-­caliber guns silent as the amtracs dropped their tailgates and more men and machines and weapons entered the chaos and the equipment of war began to mass: jeeps, trucks, artillery, tanks, tractors, men. Hundreds of men in front of him and thousands behind him, and every fourth one of them screaming to be heard above the roar of the diesels belching black smoke, the clank of steel treads, the thousands of cogs, belts, cleats, tracks, pistons, and shivering cylinders exploding fuel, the yelling; the yelling slowly gave and inside all that noise he could hear a military band strike up to play.

  “We are the most fortunate men,” Henry said as he got his shoulder inside Lew’s to help him over the wall. That was what the colonel had told them. They were the most fortunate men, because most times professional soldiers have to wait twenty-­five years for another god damn war, but here they were with only five years wait for this one. He told them they would all be home by Christmas.

  “It’s a shitty deal. That’s all I’m saying,” Lew said.

  “Quit your bitching or I am going to slap your jaw,” Gunny said as he pushed by, a .45 clasped in his hand.

  “He’s a big operator, that one,” Lew said.

  “Fortunate, I say.”

  Henry looked at the black ocean behind him. Between his shoulder blades chafed a new tattoo, a blue and gray compass.

  Three months ago he signed up and they immediately put him in the hospital. When his head wound had healed, they taught him commando, sniper, tommy gun, and BAR. They taught him stream, swamp, river, desert, and mountain. They taught him compass and first aid. They gave him three meals a day and a roof over his head, and he fired his rifle and screamed and bayoneted straw dummies. They told him he would be one of them forever.

  He took one last look homeward the thousands of miles away, a ragged and empty wind, the verdigris light like burning copper in the quivering air. He knew he’d finally entered the enormity of existence, the sphere of the incredible.

  Chapter 14

  IT WAS THE KOREAN autumn when the division marched north through the dusty barren countryside, marched up through the rice fields and apple orchards. It was the shineless autumn sky in the season of mortality and turning into winter as they marched north along the east coast highway through the tiny villages. The fruit trees were leafless and stripped bare of their fruit and some were split and shivved and splintered with bullets and their upturned roots exploded from below the ground in broken claws.

  They left the port that very day and they followed the colors north, the blue diamond, the scarlet and gold guidon, the stars and stripes. They crossed the hot plains, passing by fire-­gutted warehouses and exploded factories, the nature of their industry made indecipherable for the work of the Corsairs and the distant naval guns. So complete was their work, Henry thought, perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps they were factories in the production of smashed brick, tangled wire cable, contorted and twisted steel machinery. Perhaps this strange land manufactured bent and fire-­scarred lathes; perhaps it peeled barrels, shredded motors, and violently dismantled substations.

  They passed a little girl in a red plaid skirt and white blouse. She was wearing gray knee socks and white saddle shoes. She stood among burned timbers, crumbled bricks, and ruptured antitank mounts. She wore her school bag hiked over her thin shoulder and her black hair tied in a pony­tail. She picked a stem of dry grass and offered it to him, and when he accepted it she smiled and plucked another for herself and placed the end in her white teeth.

  They passed an old woman begging for food, her outstretched hands purple and arthritic, an old man beside her wearing a black top hat and flowing white robe. He was leaning on a staff and his beard was so long he wore it tucked under his belt. The old man had only one foot and in the calmness of his face was the news that they were not the first foreign army he’d seen march in his life.

  Everywhere there were small rectangular American and Korean flags on strawlike stems and there were swallows disappearing into a riverbank; and houses, their roofs thatched and the walls made of mud plastered to bundles of cornstalks and sorghum; an ox raised on scant feed pulling a wooden plow. There was a man with his dead strapped to his back, his head bowed with grief and a little boy walking beside him, his back crooked and his body bent to a crutch.

  For a while there were children among them and nobody knew where they came from and then they disappeared.

  It was a land of wood, hay, and stubble, a land as if he’d dreamt it, a
nd he could not yet tell that these were the witnessings a man never forgets. He would remember it all in random unbidden moments and they would spring on him, and these would be among his occupying memories for the rest of his natural life.

  They pushed north in parallel columns along both sides of the road toward Hamhung forty miles distant from the landing. Korean laborers bearing packed A-­frames walked an interior line of march. They bore food and ammunition, batteries and medical supplies, wire and needles. After three weeks aboard the LSTs everyone’s legs were weak and their bodies racked with flu. The sun was hot on the plains and many of the men passed out under their heavy loads and were picked up by shuttling jeeps and taken to the aid stations.

  Lew was marching in front of Henry when suddenly he turned around and was marching backward. His body was squat and thickly muscled, but he had a high-­fluting voice and sounded more like a girl than a man when he spoke. His hair was red and flat, and more out of habit than vanity he combed it every chance he could. He smiled; his gold tooth flashed.

  He told Henry he was from Charleston and wanted to know where Henry was from.

  “Charleston,” Henry told him.

  “Charleston, West Virginia,” Lew clarified.

  “The same,” Henry said.

  “Someone tol’ me that,” Lew said, and snapped about.

  Another mile and he turned backward again. He told Henry he’d been in the Pacific and joined up again because he wanted to buy a persimmon yellow Jaguar automobile and have it shipped from England to America. His mother was a widow, and if he died instead of lived, she would have the money he was saving for his Jaguar automobile and she would also be the beneficiary of his National Service Life Insurance Policy.