The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  There was a stir of the curtains and tin dishes rattling in a neighbor’s garden. There was the whistle of a freight train carried from far up the river. The screen door to the porch creaked on its hinges. He turned the knob and let himself in. Coming from the kitchen were the smells of apples and cinnamon and he felt the hand of memory and a sense of the familiar slowly begin to emerge, the patterned linoleum floor, the pots of geraniums by the window, the pendulum clock on the wall, the painted wooden kitchen table.

  “Who’s there,” a woman said, and she turned and looked at him as if in mystery. She’d not known he was coming. She dropped the glass she held back into the dishwater.

  “Adelita,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Henry Childs.”

  Henry knew that she could see how different his bearing. He was still young, no more than a boy, but now somewhere beyond old. She must’ve thought what have they done to this boy. I know what they have done to this boy. She stepped into him and gave to him a long wordless hug.

  “Where did you come from?” she said into his chest.

  “A long ways away,” he said.

  She started at the sound of his voice, as if a resurrection from the dead.

  “It’s been wet out there,” he said.

  “We could use a lot more of that,” she said.

  “Been dry?”

  “Too dry.”

  “It’s been a long time,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He felt a burning at the back of his eyes.

  “You must be so worn out,” Adelita said. “Have you eaten? Are you hungry?”

  “I ate good last night.”

  “You must be starving by now.”

  She reached her hand to his cheek. She touched his cheek and ran her warm fingers down the side of his injured face. She took his arm in hers.

  “You sit down and rest a bit,” she said, “and then I will feed you.”

  “I’m not that hungry, but I’ll have a bite.”

  She ushered him to a chair at the kitchen table and sat him down. The floor smelled of polish and there were flowers in vases, a woman’s house. She went to the pantry and brought back potatoes she took to the kitchen sink to peel. She told him she been there almost since the time he left and she was nursing at the VA. She told him when the cancer came it was like a wildfire. She told him there was a very nice memorial service and she was buried at the home place in the family cemetery. She was beloved and had so many dear friends and was so kind to everyone. She told him she could stay as long as he needed her to.

  “When you are ready,” Adelita said, “we can go visit her.”

  He held up his hand and shadowed his face.

  “Henry,” she said, his name a question in the voice of a kind mother, and then she said, “I can be a good listener.”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his temple. Every soldier knew that to tell was to remember and to remember was to experience and to experience was to kill and die all over again. So to tell was to risk death and to talk would be to lose Clemmie all over again.

  How was he to say, something in me died over there with everyone of them killed. How was he to say, I have lost my mother.

  He thought for a while about the things he did not want to think about. He tried to chase them from his mind.

  Then he said, “It’s not simple to forget and right now I’d like to stop remembering.”

  “The kingdom of men is a fragile kingdom,” she said.

  “The Lord is a man of war,” he said.

  She turned from the stove. She had a look in her eyes as if she were trying to understand the composition of his face, as if she were trying to understand him. He could feel her eyes on one cheek and then the other cheek, on his forehead and nose, his mouth and each temple and his hair and eyes. She softened and became lucid.

  “May I see you,” she said, and when he said nothing she rinsed her hands and took his left hand in hers and looked at the white burl of skin that covered his knuckle. She let down his hand and unbuttoned his shirt and slid it from his shoulders. She touched at his shoulders and turned him that light might shine on that side of his face and neck and ear. She stepped around him on that side and gently touched at the starburst scars where the bullet passed through his arm, the track marks left by the stitches. She turned his back to the light and he felt her fingers tracing the compass rose, the dozen knots in his back where the phosphorous burned into him. She asked if he felt the tightness in his skin that he surely must feel and he told her he did.

  “It’s a tearing feeling,” he said. “It never goes away.”

  “Any more?” she asked.

  He unbuckled his trousers, let his pants fall and directed her to his right leg. A spray of scars, as if a school of minnows, darted his leg.

  “My feet are always cold,” he said.

  “You sit,” she said, and helped him back into his shirt and trousers.

  When she set the coffee down in front of him he drank it hot enough to scald his tongue and a slight tremor went through his head and shoulders.

  She set a plate of fried eggs and ham and toast before him and took a place beside him at the table. She prayed to the angels that take pity upon the soldiers and that more angels would take pity upon them. After the blessing prayer he was hungry again and he ate what she’d set before him.

  She sat beside him. She held her cheek with one hand and the wrist of that hand with the other.

  “You are such a handsome boy,” she said.

  “This face?”

  “Your face.”

  He made a sound, the hell you say.

  “Handsome doesn’t mean pretty,” she said.

  “I am sorry,” he said, his voice cracking, “for not having written her more often. I read every letter she wrote.”

  “How were your travels?” she said.

  “It was a pretty rough road between here and there.”

  “What do you remember most?”

  “I guess I have a lot I remember but not much memory to hold it.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” she said.

  “I have just wandered through. I just did what I did.”

  “Did you picture it to yourself as you found it?” Adelita said.

  “I am not sure.”

  “She would be proud of you.”

  “I just wanted to last as long as I could.”

  “You did,” she said. “You lasted.”

  She stood and went to him and wrapped him into her arms and it was not so much an act of affection as it was natural, as it is the way family carries each other.

  “I thought I was done for,” Henry said. He did not want to break the deep silence around him, but he was remembering.

  She collected his plate and his fork and took them to the sink. When he spoke again she turned from the sink, her hands still in the water.

  “The mind is a funny thing,” he said.

  “Sometimes it can’t be explained and sometimes it needs to explain itself.” She smiled at the notion expressed and when she did the faint crow’s feet around her eyes made her look young and mischievous. “There are so many experiences we do not understand and yet somehow they are meaningful.”

  “I do not understand that,” he said.

  “It means it will get better,” Adelita said.

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You are made of stronger stuff than that.”

  “There are a lot of days I’d just like to forget.”

  He broke off his telling. That was enough, and for now, the time in the past would remain unaccounted for. She busied herself with laundry and there were pots and pans to scrub and dishes and the floor to sweep. He sat teetering back and forth on the hind legs of his chair. Then he pushed against the table and stood.

  “Don’t leave yet,” she said.

  “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  She went to him with a tea bag and indicated he should open his mouth. She took his chin in her hand and ge
ntly packed the tea bag in the space where his tooth had been. She held his chin in her hand, her finger still pressed to the tea bag as the pain dulled. He looked up into her face, into her eyes, and he could see the flecks of color held within.

  Chapter 32

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER AUNT Adelita returned from her shift at the hospital and they ate dinner, they sat on the porch where after a while she quietly dozed.

  On nights like this his mother would ask him to unbraid her hair and he would array it on her shoulders and brush it. Her hair was long and black and streaked with gray and white. She’d take up the brush and untangle it and then hand the brush back to him. He’d begin at her forehead and draw back slowly to where it was longest. It was how she taught him to do it. He’d brush gently, drawing the bristles through the length of her thick hair. It was a moment of taking care and he always felt suspended and peaceful. She’d reach up to take the hand that rested on her shoulder.

  “You’re always so good to me,” she’d say.

  “I miss you,” he whispered.

  The clock on the mantel struck the hour and it crossed his mind how strange he felt inside this house. Not this house but any house. This was the inside world that for so long he’d been away from.

  Adelita reached over and covered his hand with her own.

  “Did you say something, honey?”

  “It’s late,” he said. “You must be tired.”

  Darkness and nighttime were the hours of haunt and despair for him. He could sleep or not. He could nightmare or not. He never knew how it would go.

  “A little bit longer,” she said.

  He lit a cigarette and smoked quietly. In his mind he brushed some more until finally Clemmie thanked him and said good night and receded from his mind.

  “Were you homesick?” Adelita said.

  “I was,” Henry said, “and then it didn’t matter.”

  She kissed the tip of her finger and touched his nose.

  “I have the darkest spells early in the morning and late at night. It’s where I understand how people can kill themselves.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” she said.

  “I am afraid they will grow.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. Try and get some rest. Try and get over it.”

  “Please get some sleep now,” she said. “Please try.”

  “Was she in a lot of pain?”

  “No,” Adelita said, a fierceness in her voice. “You can rest assured she was in no pain. We saw to that.”

  “You go to sleep,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “Sleep well.”

  She stood and yawned and stretched her arms over her head. She let them sway in the air and then she let them down on his shoulders and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  When she went up the stairs he poured himself a drink. In the parlor the cat was playing with something it had found, maybe a mouse. Whatever it might have been it was gone. He spoke to the cat and it rolled onto its back and pawed the air. He was alone again, not yet lonely, and wanted little comfort: no bed, no cushion, no rug, no pillow to sleep on. He thought he would go for a walk or have another drink.

  He poured himself another drink and went up the stairs. His upstairs room smelled of coal oil, wax, and ammonia. It was as he’d left it. There was a cross over the bed where he slept and photographs and baseball trophies on the high chest of drawers. The night was so still and the air was so dry he was cold in his shirtsleeves.

  He set down his empty glass. From the window he had a view of the chemical plant. He opened the top drawer of his bureau. Resting on top of his clothes was the .45 and the knife with the white jig-­boned handle. He slid the drawer shut.

  He took off his boots and lay down. He lay there with his eyes open, feeling the ragged thing inside him. He counted the lost: his grandfather, his mother, Walter, the Gaylen horse, the father he never knew, Lew, and Mercy, and the boy he was. The past was vanished and where to find it? He realized that he was afraid being home for all that it meant.

  He got up and carried his drink to the bathroom where he turned on the shower and sealed the bottom of the door with a towel to hold the steam. He nudged the stopper into place and sat on the floor by the claw-­footed tub while the shower water filled for a bath. The pipes growled and rattled and heat began to emanate from the radiators. Outside the temperature was dropping.

  He could not sleep that first night and lay awake thinking about how easy the thought of sleep was when he was freezing to death. He woke up several times and finally went outside and smoked a cigarette on the porch. He carried the ashtray with him as he paced. A casque-­headed dog slunk by and paused to sniff the air in his direction. He went down the steps, walked in its direction and it moved on.

  Inside a light went on and he could hear tap water running in the kitchen. For an instant he thought it his mother, but it was Adelita in her nightclothes standing at the sink. He sat down on the cold ground. He took a deep breath and began to cry. It wasn’t much but a little bit and then he stopped.

  He went back to bed. The memories came at night when he closed his eyes. As he had often dreamed of home when he was there, he now dreamed of cold and desolation. That land was a world away and yet it came to him nightly and only in his dreams could he not ward off the visitations of memory and experience. He shuddered and then shook to throw it off as if memory were water or cold. But he could feel its grip tighten inside his chest and across his belly. His eyes began to burn. He slid from the bed and went down on his knees and fought to breathe but he could not and could not speak and could not cry because he could not breathe.

  He remembered going down into a field with other men. He sank down on his knees and talked to the man next to him before he realized everyone was dead. The man staring out at him was dead and his eyes still open. The dead looked like big wax dolls laid out in the snow. Some, their arms were frozen in position to hold a rifle that way and the rifles were gone. One was in a kneeling position resting on his elbows and the top of his head was blown off and as his body froze his brain expanded and rose up out of his cranium. Another was as if cast in stone.

  Late that night, his exhaustion became so pure and complete he wanted to stay awake a bit longer just to experience it. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again a bird had awakened and was beginning its morning song. His body ached for having slept in the soft bed. Sleep in a soft bed was so strange and foreign to him. He could see a band of light to the east. It was that close to sunrise.

  He thought to get out of bed, but he didn’t. He pulled the blanket tighter to his chest, his hands prayerfully grasping its edge. He rolled over and tried to sleep but only lay there in a spell of thought. He’d made it through another night and was not concerned. He knew in a few days time he would be too tired to dream and he would sleep again and then there would be the days in row when he could not sleep.

  Outside his window the morning blued. He could hear a sewing machine. There was the faint sound of a pipe organ. It was Sunday. The room was hot and still. His hand began to shake. He gripped the window sash until it stopped. Who’d come last night in his sleep? It was someone: his mother, his father, Mercy?

  Downstairs someone arrived, a woman named Madge, a friend of Adelita’s. He could hear them talking.

  “People steal,” Madge was saying. “Plants. Any little thing you have that’s nice.”

  “I hate to think you are right,” Adelita said.

  “Everything here?”

  “I did have a little glass ashtray, out there on the porch,” Adelita said. “But now I think it’s gone.”

  “Who would have taken it?”

  “Kids.”

  “Kids are like crows.”

  Then they were talking about him and suddenly he felt dead and risen. He felt the anguish of being alone and the spectre of his death. He got out of bed and padded quietly into the bathroom. In back of the house were his mother’s pl
anted apple, peach, cherry, and plum trees which ran down to the edge of the river.

  He looked up and found his face in the glass above the washbasin. In the mirror he could see the eyes returned from hell, his face skin darkened to bronze, what the abrading wind and frigid cold and burning flames had done to his neck and face and back.

  Half of it was a nice-­enough face. Healed and returned to itself, half of his face was still nearer the boy’s face than the man’s. For all that he’d put that face through, for all that’d gone into the mind behind the face, it was still tolerable to look at from one side and revealed little of its recent past. He wondered how it could be, how this face could return and save itself from him who had been so careless with it?

  Then he turned his head to the other side and there it was: the maimed ear, the scarred and contracted skin, the evidence of everything.

  He cupped water and held it up to his face. It was hot and steamy, and when he let his face into his cupped hands the warmth poured into his head and down his neck and into his shoulders. He did it again and again, sluicing the water over his skin. It made him strong in his heart, the simple act of washing his face. He’d been lost and now he wasn’t. He would be again, but for now he wasn’t.

  He went down the stairs and in the pantry were pears preserved in jars. He opened one. They were sweet and the juices ran into his hand and down his wrist and this is where Adelita found him.

  “You already have company this morning?” he said.

  “That one,” she said. “She’s got a hundred and one stories.”

  “With that many it doesn’t seem worth beginning.”

  “She gets to talking and day turns into night.”

  She gestured to the table and poured him a cup of coffee. She hovered over him for a bit, her hand on his shoulder and then went to the stove.