The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  A hollow roar built from below the ridgeline, the strain of climbing engines overwhelming the shearing wind, the machine-­gun fire.

  “The future’s coming fast,” Lew said, when suddenly Corsairs and Mustangs heaved into view, contrails gyring, and they were splitting the sky. Henry lifted himself and slid over upon his back. He watched as they napalmed the gun emplacement and the enemy were incinerated, and more of them yet ran from caves and from deep furrows to warm themselves by the lighted fires. They stretched their frozen hands toward the fire and when the next plane made its passage they too were burned alive.

  They kept on, crossing the hilltops, following the ridgeways that joined them. They were drifting east by northeast. The sky turned from crimson to the darkening shape of violet until a chaplet of reddish light wreathed the valley below. Henry thought, Get to the water, get to the water. He broke snow, slipping and falling and getting up. When finally they scrambled up the next steep slope, the enemy manning their positions were dead of cold, the white snow piling up on their shoulders.

  He pulled himself erect and marched on. He thought to keep going. He thought, This is the last time I will exist.

  “What do you think our chances are?” Lew said.

  “I suppose they are impossible.”

  “Let’s just say if we don’t win, there ain’t no second prize.”

  They could hear the bugles in the distance, their ragged blatting echoing off the slopes. By that time he held no fear for the embrace of gathering darkness in that desolate landscape, no fear of the night shapes that would rise up before his eyes. His hands were cracked open and his feet ached with chilblains. Without the cold there was nothing else.

  He could not remember what happened to all of them, but one by one they were gone and it was as if they’d never really existed. And then it was only him and Lew.

  Chapter 25

  HIS TURN AGAIN, HENRY climbed the ridge to see what was beyond. He walked alone across the open ground and found another stony ridge and another glimpse of the road and the valley below. The last twilight was draining away this day’s gray, and way down below was a vehicle, the tires slewing away, careening over the edge and men jumping off in all directions.

  He waved and Lew joined him and they watched the last Sabre of the day hurtle its tank of fire-­jelly into the valley. It bounced and skidded and then was blossoming with black and red and yellow oily flames.

  Henry and Lew slid from the ridgeline and found a crag where they harbored for the moment’s rest. Lew opened a can of peanut butter and licked out the goo with his fingers. His eyes were sunken in his face, his fingers white as paper. He was as if an old man exhausted by a long life and retired to the porch.

  “What are we gonna do?” Henry said.

  “They’re down there and we’re up here,” Lew said, sucking his fingers.

  “Should we help?”

  “If we do, who’s going to help us?”

  They got up again and slogged on and then there was a ridge where could be seen the vast lake in the distance, with open spaces of black ice where the wind had blown away the snow. They watched the lake, the landscape white, gray, and black, making their decision.

  As the light faded the frozen lake turned to gold. A strand of thought came into his mind and he did not recognize it as such, did not recognize it as thought or the working of his mind. He was wandering somewhere between reality and vision.

  “This is some kind of bad shit,” Lew was saying.

  “I feel like I already died and I’m just walking with you for a while. What do you think our chances are?”

  “Fifty–fifty.”

  “In whose favor?”

  “Ours,” Lew said.

  In his mind Henry saw again the long wounded column bristling with weapons and armed men unwilling to die.

  “Time to giddyup.”

  “Not yet,” Henry said, pointing to the lake.

  They watched in silence as the icy surface of the reservoir began to move. There were thousands of them. They’d been on the white ice the whole afternoon under white sheets and canvases, having marched ten miles down lake and now they were on their hands and knees and crawling south toward the shore’s stony rim where they’d join the battle. Already their silhouettes were moving onto the ridgeline.

  Henry and Lew moved out again, letting the land make decisions for them. They picked up a frozen stream and then a winding stone trail that passed through an evergreen forest moving slowly. They went down the trail, settling on one foot, then the other, sometimes no more than twenty-­five yards in three minutes. It was snowing again and there was no visibility and they could smell smoke and came to a clearing and then a shoreline where suddenly before them was the vast frozen reservoir.

  “I say we head onto the ice,” Lew said.

  “Stay close to shore?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  They stepped onto the frozen plane and moved ever east. Near the shoreline lunules of snow waved across the ice and farther out the ice was rough surfaced but clean of snow as the wind swept it away. They moved farther out, where the going was easier and in the moonlight they could see better the paths of icy chutes where the inflow of streams and rivers was crowned and frozen. Farther out and they were periodically hidden inside a white cloak of snow. The ice groaned and cracked. The air was metallic with cold and tasted like a mouthful of gin.

  To the north they could see the wavering black silhouettes of soldiers crossing. At first there were a few and then the snow curtain opened and there were so many. They could not tell who they were and began to tack for cover along the shoreline when a machine gun opened up on them.

  There came the sound of an engine in the sky and then another, the engines screaming and straining. It scraped low and its underbelly exploded the snow in the tree tops. The first Corsair dropped its tanks and flames shot from the blackened gun ports as the napalm bounced and splattered fire. Parts began to fly from the Corsair’s fuselage. It speared into a low altitude as it passed over their heads, a burning trail of streaming fuel in its wake. The air dazzled with a flaming whiteness that smudged and smoked. As the ice rushed up to meet it a wing folded and it began to roll. When the pilot ejected, his chute was no more than a rag of laundry against the moon’s watery light.

  “You certainly don’t see that very often,” Lew said.

  They waited and then walked on. The snow was blowing again and they were standing inside a skim of ash and gaseous oily melt-­water pooling the ice. The napalm fires roared and blazed and the smoke rolled over them leaving behind the charred bones of men.

  Then there came a grumbling in the sky and the second plane suddenly materialized. Tracers poured in from gun emplacements and converged and poured onto the wings. There was a puff of blue smoke and the plane wobbled and fell out of its turn. Slowly it rolled over and went into a long glide traversing the lake and disappearing into the mountains. There was a whispering in the sky and before they could move they were engulfed in a wall of flame. There was another explosion, its forces spreading across the ice. It slapped them down and sent them spinning across the surface.

  “Lew,” Henry groaned.

  He stood up and fell over and then he stood again.

  The flaying wind bore down on him and the numbing shock of a bullet stroked his body. A spatter of bullets stripped the air. A man thirty yards away was holding the gun. Henry shook his head in disbelief and lunged forward and at the same time aimed unerringly, firing his own weapon and shot the man through his teeth.

  “Go to hell,” Henry screamed, and was without guilt or shame and wanted only to kill. The skin was badly bruised and broken across his shoulders, but otherwise he was still able. He sucked in his lips and hurried forward, desperate to find Lew.

  Shells were bursting around him. White phosphorous broke the icy air and exploded twenty-­five yards to his left in a great flash of lighting. The next one exploded to the front and then a third one to his le
ft. They were joining, as if bolides colliding in space. The next round would find him. He jumped up and ran, the shell exploding on the very spot he’d fled. There was an overwhelming flash of light and the concussion sent him skidding across the ice.

  He stood, another flash, and he was caught on the near edge of the shell’s bursting radius. It threw him backward, his feet flying out from under him. The sudden change in the air pressure punched his lungs, the explosion sucking the air out of him. The shock of the explosion vibrated in his spine. He tried to catch his breath.

  He felt cold and wet. He felt his eyes swelling shut.

  The first sound he heard was the blood beating in his eardrums. He was on fire.

  Move, he told himself, but his body would not move.

  “Move,” he said aloud, intent that his body obey his command and he stood up.

  The hot gates opened on him again. Another inferno lashed out at him, a curving unbreaking wave of violent flame caught him against his back and swirled between his legs and embraced him and knocked him down.

  He held his breath. He cried in his mind. He did not want to breathe the fire into his lungs. His vision blackened as his eyes were swelling shut. Try as he might, he could not reach to put out the flames. His back felt as if burning nails had been melted into it.

  Lew fell down next to him and cut open Henry’s clothes and then cut into his burning skin, his hands sizzling on the hot fragments. He stuffed handfuls of snow into the holes, and still they burned, the phosphorous taking the water from his skin down to the bone. Bullets skimmed the ice, but Lew kept cutting away and loading snow onto Henry’s back.

  “We need to get out of here,” Lew said.

  “My legs don’t work too good.”

  “They’ll work.”

  “I can’t take anymore,” Henry said, weeping.

  “Come on, buddy,” Lew said, and then he was dragging him by his collar across the ice.

  Chapter 26

  WHEN HENRY CAME TO, he was wrapped in woolen blankets and drifting across a vast plane of moonlit whiteness. The moon was so bright it stole the spangling starlight and made the heavens blue as skin. He charted its mountains and dry rivers and its deeply shadowed canyons.

  Then there was sound: the muffled scree of runners sliding over ice. He was on a wooden sled and Lew was drawing him east across the frozen lake.

  The pace was slow and timeless. Lew walked ahead, as effortlessly as a wolf. He did not know how far they traveled. He went in and out of sleep as he was conveyed on the ice under darkness. A troop of companionate dogs had picked them up and trotted alongside, flanking the fashioned sled.

  He remembered as a little boy riding a horse-­drawn sleigh into the forest to cut down the Christmas tree, the chuff of the horses’ hooves, his grandfather seated beside him. The fine powdery snow found his head and face and wreathed his neck. The snow was deep and the brush outgrew the hanging trail that wrapped the mountain. The first darkness was rising from the depths of the earth. Necks arched and shoulders hunched the horses trod on through shadow and snow. How enduring and resolute they were. From the wet pines came the sharp note of turpentine. The day’s golden time had passed and the full-­rayed sun had become a diffusion of reds and violets. Night was coming on. Deer vanished through distant thickets to appear on a more distant ridge. They climbed higher to where the setting sun had shed a bluish twilight over the land and the cloudless sky and it was there they found their Christmas tree.

  They came to the edge of the ice and a steep path leading into the craggy rocks and there came the sound of barking dogs and the dogs traveling with them sent up a howl. Lew helped him to his feet and he was suddenly cold and cried out and began to shiver. They staggered up the path and entered a cemetery and passed through its perimeter, a line of brush, and came into a small village of shuttered huts with tin roofs. Beside one hut stood an old man bundled in furs, a team of iron-­shod bullocks head yoked to a sledge behind him, a goad balanced on his matted shoulder. He bowed from the waist and when he did binoculars dangled from a strap at his neck. With one hand he indicated they continue following the path; with the other hand he invited them into the hut.

  The entrance was a wooden door on leather hinges. The old man swung back the door and the entrance became the black mouth of a warm tunnel. The hut’s interior seemed to expand in size and depth, the nave the main house and wings to the north and south formed the transept of a cross. To the north was housed a milch cow and penned pheasants and a goat. There were crated chickens, a pig and guinea fowl tied by a leg.

  The hut was built around its chimney and firepit and warmed by the animals’ heat. There was the smell of boiling cabbage and stale beer, a teakettle. Layers of old newspapers insulated the walls.

  Lew shouldered his rifle and stretched Henry out on a pallet by the fire. He asked if the pain had abated any.

  “No,” Henry said. “It still hurts fierce, but I don’t care anymore.”

  Lew took off Henry’s shoepacs and he felt his toes for the first time in days. He doubted he would ever again be warm, but already the heat was climbing into his body.

  “Where are we?” Henry said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “My insides are frozen.”

  Henry knew he had only so much left inside him and when it was gone he did not know if there would be more. He thought how death might be the only way you left this place.

  Lew worked on Henry’s back, daubing at it with copper sulfate.

  “I will see you in the next world,” Henry said.

  “Which one would that be?” Lew said, moving to the lesser burns on his shoulders.

  “The one or the tuther.”

  “Let’s just not count our chickens before they hatch.”

  There came the sound of a baby crying. Lew swept the room with a quick dark glance. He touched at his ears and nose as if to make sure they’d not fallen off. Then he shed his own shoepacs and dragged off his socks. Slowly the fire began to take the forward edge off the chill.

  “You stay here and rest.”

  “Where are you going?” Henry said.

  “I’ll be right beside you.”

  From a black iron cauldron the old man ladled bowls of soup with cabbage, potatoes, barley, carrots, and marrow-­bones. Lew tipped a bowl to his mouth and drank down the hot broth. With his fingers he fed the rest into his mouth and then he held Henry’s head and helped him drink some of the broth.

  The old man produced a carton of Lucky Strike. He tapped out smokes for each. He struck a wooden match and lit the ends. Lew sighed out with his first puff of smoke. He then scrutinized the cigarette at arm’s length as if trying to understand the depth of pleasure it gave him and then took another long drag.

  “What was that?” Henry said.

  “It was snow coming off the roof and passing by the window.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You sleep now.”

  Henry tried to sleep and when next he awoke he thought that he might have. Lew held up a syrette and he nodded. Henry felt the pinch and his mind languished as he waited for the morphine to find its way through his blood.

  When next he awoke an old woman hovered at a black kettle hung from a swing hook over the open flames, letting slices cut from a dead horse slide into the boiling water. Across the small room was the unsettling sight of Lew aiming his rifle at the floor. The old man knit and reknit his fingers, but Lew would not relent.

  Then a trap door opened in the floor and one by one people crawled out the cellar’s stony cavern and into the hut erected on top of it. They were people coughing and hacking, their chests caving each time. There was a woman with a whimpering baby. There was a pregnant woman in the pangs of labor who needed to be dragged onto the floor and finally a girl with ash rubbed on her face and her head wrapped in bandages. She stepped defiantly to the muzzle of the rifle. She unwrapped the bandages from her head. Her hair had been roughly shorn away.

  “You will
be safe in this village,” she said, touching her fingers to the rifle’s front sight and pushing it aside.

  “How so?” Lew said, his finger inside the trigger guard.

  In the air she wrote the letter T and then the letter B. They were in a colony for tuberculars. She told him they found the woman in labor lost on the ice. She told him the vibrations of the bombardment had brought on her labor.

  Lew returned to his side.

  “What’s it about?” Henry asked.

  “You get some sleep. Get that chill out of your bones and you’ll feel better.”

  “Tell me a story.”

  “The only story I know is my own,” Lew said.

  “Tell me. It must be better than mine.”

  “There’s nothing to it.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “Yes,” Henry said.

  As he slept this time, his mind took refuge in the dream world. When Lew tried to wake him, he fought him. He kicked out with his feet and scratched at the floor for a weapon as if his hands were claws. He was not afraid. He just did not want to leave the dream world where he and Mercy were gathered and whole. His mother was there and in the dream world they were undivided.

  As he became conscious and the morphine wore off the pain became intense.

  “You should make it out,” Henry said.

  “I know that.”

  “There ain’t nothing to discuss.”

  “I aint leaving you. We’ll get you fixed up and leave together.”

  “There’s no remedy for getting killed.”

  “You ain’t killed, not yet.”

  “I’d like a smoke,” he said, and Lew lit for him a Lucky Strike.

  “I thought Thanksgiving was real nice,” Lew said.

  “Me too.”