The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  Henry turned back to face him and lifted his glass to his lips. He had been changed over there and tonight it was as if a gift conferred. The violence that seemed to be always inside him was pleased by this encounter. He stood and squared to meet Randall, who was a head taller than Henry. He wore a crew cut and his shoulders and arms filled his white linen jacket. His fists were balled at his sides.

  For some reason Randall held back. What did he see?

  “What are you doing here?” Randall said. “You are going to get hurt.”

  “Please,” Henry said, gesturing with his chin. “Get the fuck away from me.”

  Then he said again “please,” and he reached up with a hand as if to ward him off.

  A moment of fear and then anger crossed Randall’s face. He took a drink.

  “Nobody wants you here,” Randall said. His intoxicated breath was very close. It was hot and smelled the sour of liquor.

  “I will do as I like,” Henry said.

  He thought about the question, what are you doing here? Inside, he felt something like cold, blunt iron prodding at him. He understood the violence of existence and did not want to ever go through such again, but here he was. There was never any going back. In the company of violence was his sense of belonging.

  The barroom smelled of stale beer, human brine, cigarette smoke. The Christmas lights were so clear they etched the air. He looked down at his fists and they were the color of bone.

  But Randall would not relent. He moved in closer and crowded Henry where he stood.

  “Come on, then,” Henry whispered. “If you have to, come on.”

  Randall’s face darkened and his eyes were filled with anger and then he lashed out with a fist, and though Henry saw it coming, he did not block the punch. He hit Henry over the right cheek. Henry fell back against the bar. His eye was stung and clouded and black pennons radiated in his vision.

  Henry squared up and measured him, and when Randall stepped in closer he let himself be hit again. Randall shot out with a right to his stomach and Henry doubled over with an anguished and involuntary sound. He caught himself before he fell and held himself as he gasped for air.

  “Is that what you want?” Henry said, and Randall hit him again. Henry’s lip was opened and then his nose was bleeding. He let himself be hit again and his right eye began to close.

  “Is that what you want?” Henry said again, spitting his blood onto the barroom floor.

  When next he lunged, Henry went down on his left hip and he drove his right boot into Randall’s groin twice. Randall folded and twisted and Henry punched him in his throat and he collapsed clutching at his neck, writhing on the wet floor and desperate to breathe. His eyes and tongue bulged out and he breathed as if his last. Henry went down on top of him and struck him again and broke his nose across his face. Blood was everywhere. He would have fought him to death, but the crowd, having had their tremors of excitement, tore them apart. Henry stood over the man, his eyes bleared with pain and cursed him and spit blood on his white linen jacket.

  “I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll kill you dead, you son of a bitch.”

  Men hustled him out the door and once on the sidewalk held him against the brick wall. Henry was panting and snapping his hands in the air and then calming. He stood upright and told them it was okay and to let him be.

  His mind traveled the distance from the eruption of violence to this sidewalk where he stood.

  “I will be fine,” he said quietly.

  From the Red Pony he walked along the dense black river. It had turned a beautiful night with a splendid emerging moon, distant yellow lights contained in palls of darkness. There were the light towers of the chemical plants and into the very depths of those yellow lights, there was fog and smoke up against blackness and it was so very beautiful to him and he no longer felt purged and winnowed, but like a sinner. It was the war had taught him to call up the devil and he could feel the devil in his legs and arms.

  He walked until he paused on the banks of the river.

  He thought of how as a little boy he’d walk down here with his mother following the terraced stonework that led to nowhere. They’d pass beneath the willows through reticulated shade, through the reeds and the grasses to the banks of the swirling opaline water so that she could throw into the water a sealed medicine bottle with a folded note, intended for whom he did not know and did not ask. His mother had always performed such acts. She entertained superstitions derived from belief in a world without accident or mistake, where the workings were the way fate supposed them to be. For her, there was wonder to be found in a thunderstorm, a strange sound, a coincidence of numbers. For her life was desire, belief, death, and sweet despair.

  The main channel was a jewel in the moonlight, refracted light beneath its inky surface. On the opposite bank, above the city, there were lights and below the lights the darkened boathouses built overtop the water’s flow. The water played tricks with noises in the night making it impossible to judge their origin or distance.

  He’d wanted no summoning of the past, but that’s just what he’d gone and done. Upriver he fixed on the skewed window light of a single boathouse. He calculated the distance and then turned for home, his mind a torment of pain and his eyes beginning to close. He stumbled on, trying to keep a straight line. He had to clear his head. An automobile slowed behind him and a blue light strobed once. When he turned to face the light a patrol pulled alongside.

  “Get in,” the policeman said.

  It was the young policeman he’d seen Adelita talking to, the one who was a new father. He was sucking on a Life Saver, clicking it against his teeth.

  Henry let slide a stream of blood from his mouth and got into the patrol car.

  “Jesus Christ,” the policeman said. “How are you even walking?”

  “I have some experience,” he said.

  “Do you know who his father is?”

  “What’s it matter? Behind every bastard is another one.”

  “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “Just take me home,” Henry said.

  When he arrived home he went to the backyard where he stripped to the waist and washed with the water from the hose. The water was cold on his skin and hard and his blood ran red down his body and then pink and then the water ran clear and silver.

  Under this cold moonlight he felt the shimmer of self. He felt no guilt, no pain, no remorse for what he’d done. He could have killed if he wanted to, but he did not. He felt as if he understood men, their discontent, their need to see what they’d not seen before, their need to be where they’d never been. He was one of them. He’d lived in a world of killing and blood and this world was returned to him. He’d lived in the silence and ineluctable mystery of violence. He knew the hold war had on him, the gore that would never come off in this world. He knew he could have killed Mercy’s brother with his hands and it was this knowledge that gave him peace.

  Chapter 37

  AT THE MIRROR OVER the bathroom sink Henry stitched his torn lip and split eyebrow with needle and thread. Stitch by stitch he worked the needle into his pinched skin and slowly drew out the thread until his skin was closed and the thread knotted.

  In the mirror he saw Adelita appearing in the doorway behind him. She held her arms in fold and her shoulders pressed to the doorjamb.

  “Can I look at you?” she said.

  “I got in a fight,” he said, turning to her.

  She went to him and she was so close he could smell her skin. She took his face in her hands and gently turned it to one side and then the other. Her eyes were blue and clear and her gaze sustained.

  “Come closer,” she said, and upon further inspection she told him he’d done an adequate job and with the scissors she snipped tight the thread ends where they sprang from knots.

  “You almost killed him,” she said.

  “Next time I will,” Henry said, but he knew she did not believe him. She did not understand he would have ki
lled him tonight if that was his intention, but it wasn’t.

  “Perhaps a better use of your time is called for,” she said quietly.

  How could he express to her the freedom he felt this night? He was possessed by no idea other than this one. How could he tell her he had a world of his own and one that could not be conceived by her?

  “Take them off and I’ll wash them for you,” she said, tugging at his bloody khakis.

  She bent to turn on the taps and draw him a hot bath. He waited for her to leave the room that he might take off his trousers, but she didn’t. She told him he didn’t have anything she hadn’t seen before and to hurry up before she lost her patience and inclination. He unbuckled his trousers and let them fall and tried to step out of them but tripped and slumped against her. She braced against him and held him up and he felt her strong smooth hands on his body as she helped him into the bath.

  “Henry?” she said, his name an invitation to explain his mind.

  He shrugged and turned his head away. He did not care to say anything. He did not want her to know what he had been through. He did not want to explain how different and how separate he was.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “What difference does it make?” he said. The powerful illusion of naming things held little sway with him. To say, to name this feeling, to name these thoughts, what would it matter?

  “What is it?” Adelita said again, her hand tight on his shoulder, the lines in her face drawn, her voice insistent.

  “I am a murderer,” Henry said, his voice flat and un­affected by the words he declared.

  “No,” she said. “You were a soldier.”

  “We killed them,” he said. “For what they did we killed them and we nailed their hearts to the door.”

  He remembered for her that morning in the warehouse. Each of their hearts was tough with muscle and in the odd light were garnet red and sketched with white and blue. He sliced open their chests and the cold blood washed through his hands, jelled and viscose, and the hearts, still dripping, he set aside while Lew watched and then he nailed them to the door of the warehouse.

  “You hush yourself,” she said.

  “You ask me these things,” he said.

  “You hush,” she said. “I am not afraid of you. Even if you did what you say, I still love you.”

  HE WAS ALONE in the front room watching the fire when Adelita came to him again. She placed a cup of tea beside him. She handed him pills and told him to take them lest his pain become a torment.

  “I am all right,” he said.

  “Maybe you are now, but you won’t be,” she said, and shook them in her hand.

  After he downed the pills she sat beside him and they were both quiet for a long time.

  There was a rattling of the windowpane, as if someone was knocking at the door. He listened to the cat lapping its milk. He was cold and shivering and she found a sweater for him and he pulled it onto his shoulders and buttoned it.

  “Snow is falling,” she said.

  He went to the window and the hemlocks beyond the porch were bent by the weight of the snow. One released and sprang up. A cascade of white sifted through the branches releasing more branches as it tumbled and the branches scraped the window. The tree seemed to shake the way a horse or a man might.

  Headlights opened on the street and a black Oldsmobile drove past the front gate. Henry stood at the window and watched as it came by again. This time it stopped and idled at the gate.

  “Don’t go out there,” she said. She was standing by his side.

  “He won’t bully me,” he said. The violence was in him again, in his hands and in his mind and in his gut. It came with him. He’d brought it home with him.

  “The Lord’s hand will come and he will point to the way.”

  “I do not care to take directions from him.”

  “Don’t make me beg,” Adelita whispered, taking his arm in both of hers.

  “They’ll not leave me alone.”

  “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  “What life?” Henry said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s finished. Can’t you start over?”

  “I can’t imagine it,” he said.

  “No, not yet you can’t, but you will.”

  He let his eyes to the darkness and felt a sense of grief and desire. He held no opinion what should happen next. He remained at the window while the black Oldsmobile sat idling in the cold. Then it drove away.

  Adelita asked that he sit and drink his tea. She had something for him and she would get it. When she returned she carried an envelope. She had been waiting for a good time to give it to him and she supposed tonight was as good a time as any.

  Inside was a letter from his mother.

  Dear Son,

  I have come from sleep this night to write to you. I am so tired and the time I have left is short. I will not be cut on having so often witnessed the no good that comes of it. My only sadness is that I will not see you again until we meet in heaven, but I am braced for what I will do.

  I am moved to finally tell you about your origins. You should know of your paternity, it being the right of every human being to possess such knowledge.

  There was a man, a surveyor for a coal company who came on to our land. My father, your grandfather, was away so I went with him to point out our border across the valley. This land was granted to your great-­great-­grandfather for his service in war and has since been returned to the government and the money barons, the land taxes having never been paid.

  I did not know what I wanted, but he knew what he wanted. I will not say I was against it. Afterward he said he was sorry for what he did to me and I think he meant it. I pulled myself together and I went home. I did not say anything that happened, but my father, having returned, took one look at me and picked up his rifle-­gun and out he went the way I came running from.

  I will never forget the echoing report of that rifle. I have heard it in my mind every day of my life ever since. That man was never heard from or seen again. They came around looking for him, but nobody ever said a word. That day in the forest was how you came to be. My father, your grandfather, he killed the man and I do not know how to explain it, but that day something was killed inside me as well . . .

  I pray you are reading this for that means you have returned to us. Be a good boy for Adelita. Love her dearly. She has been a strong and consoling presence, a balm to my existence.

  Henry refolded the letter and placed it back in the en­velope. It was strange what little effect this news had upon him.

  “My father,” he said. He handed the letter to Adelita and invited her to read it if she wished. He wanted to feel something, but inside him was as if an open mouth, empty and silent. After all this time, there was so little he cared about. He thought, I am my own father. I am my own.

  “I apologize for how I have been,” he said, lifting his eyes to Adelita.

  “No,” she said. “It isn’t like that. We are family.”

  “You were so good to my mother and you have been so good to me.”

  “Henry Childs,” she began, but then she stopped and she said, “I am the fortunate one. I lost my husband and my boys, and your mother, but not you. You came home.”

  It was then he told her he would be leaving soon. His time was near up and he was obligated to return.

  “You don’t have to go.”

  “It is something I have to do.”

  “You have put your mind to it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “In a few days’ time. It has nothing to do with this. It’s been that way all along. I just did not know how to tell you.”

  That night he could hear her down the hall weeping. He was so tired and his body, his face hurt so much, but he waited until she found sleep before he allowed his own.

  That night a dream forced him from sleep, the after-­i
mages of an old woman holding the knife with the jigged bone handle. He remembered waking up and in a morphine vision seeing the old woman go down on her knees and watching her as she cut the baby from the dying woman to save its life. He remembered the urge to scream or yell or sob, and did so, and afterward Lew asking him if he was okay.

  The sheets were sweat through and knotted in his fists and when he woke up the pillow was bloody from his wounded face and he was more tired than before he had slept. He let himself remember the autumn, up through the dusty country where a little girl in a red skirt and white blouse picked a blade of grass and offered it to him.

  However much he tried, this night he could not hold back the memories. Sharp and bitter and severe, his dreams were the memories he refused to have. He remembered Tex was in the snow when he found him and he was being knifed to death. He leaped on the man and they rolled in the blood-­spattered drift. He fought the man, hand to hand, getting ahold of him and not letting go, but he could not kill him. He bit into the man’s face and held him with his teeth and stuffed his .45 in the man’s nose and pulled the trigger. The man’s blood and bone exploded into his mouth and Henry choked and he tried to swallow and his craw seized and he puked and then he could breathe again, but Tex lay dead in the snow.

  On the next hill a marine, called Ski, had his entire abdomen shot away and his spine was revealed and the talons of his ribs, white as dove. And when the overwhelmed enemy tried to surrender, Lew said, we don’t take prisoners, and he emptied a clip into them.

  He remembered an explosion and then Whitey, a foolish grin on his face, was walking in his direction and waving a hand at him. A claw of flying steel had torn off his other arm.

  Slim’s legs were pulpified, and before they could get to him he put a pistol to his own head and pulled the trigger. Chief walked off a cliff and another man just up and left.

  “Let him go,” Henry said when Lew tried to stop him.

  “Leave, then,” Lew said, and the man set down his weapon and walked away. After that there was just him and Lew and now Lew was dead.