Authors: Robert Olmstead
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 planted 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.
“What would you like for dinner?” she asked, busy with cracking eggs to scramble.
“No idea,” he said, still pondering his immediate thoughts.
“Beef or chicken.”
“Beef and some fried potatoes.”
“A steak?”
“A steak would be good,” Henry said.
“When I get back, how about if I make you lemon icebox pie?”
“That would be nice,” he said, and this time he kissed her on the forehead.
The morning was cool and gave way to warm and thin afternoon light roseate on the gray streets and whatever green was coming to the lawns.
Next door he could hear a woman chastising her cat for not loving her enough. In front of the woman’s house was a bottle tree, the sun on the glass tinkling when the wind blew. When he looked out the window he saw a white cat sunning itself on a rock and it seemed familiar to him, a cat he somehow knew.
A dog came onto the porch sniffing in the corners. Henry knocked on the window and it looked to the sound. It barked twice and then it slunk away. He lit a cigarette and went to the percolator for another cup of coffee and there was a knock at the front door. He carried his coffee and cigarette into the foyer.
It was a young man who introduced himself as a reporter for the newspaper and asked if he’d agree to talk. As the young man spoke Henry squinted through the cigarette smoke he was making.
“What do you want with me?”
“I just want to talk.”
“I don’t know what I have to say that’d be of any interest.”
“You were quite a ball player.”
“I played some.”
“Will you play this summer?”
“No.” Henry wished he’d never answered the door.
“What was it like?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Korea.”
“I don’t have anything to tell about that.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“You’ll have to ask the War Department.”
“I thought you might have some idea.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Henry said.
“You must know something. Do you think we should drop the bomb?”
“What bomb?”
“The atom bomb.”
“They aren’t afraid of the atom bomb.”
“What do you mean they aren’t afraid of the bomb?”
“Just because we’re afraid of the bomb doesn’t mean they are.”
When Adelita returned she’d been to the hospital pharmacy for ointment for his back, it being Sunday and everything closed. He told her of the visitor and it made her angry. When she saw Madge next she would give her a piece of her mind.
Chapter 33
T
HE LATE TULIPS WERE
coming early that year, prodding their way to the light from their loamy beds. The rains had not been fierce, but warm, steady, and insistent, and however warmly it fell, when the sun set and darkness descended, there was the constant feeling of wet and cold.
To stay in bed was to stay in bed all day. To get out in the morning and walk was to walk all day and into darkness, lose himself and hitchhike until he found a driver who knew the location of his address and could land him nearby and with the few necessary rights and lefts that would take him to his door to sleep. Then the copper morning again and he’d sit on the porch wrapped in a blanket and smoke away the day and read a book, starting wherever he picked it up and remembering nothing at all.
When the sun held two days, he would scrape and paint sides of the ramshackle house or tear at the vines that tangled the backyard. Each day was new and unplanned and empty or filled. It didn’t matter to him in the least. Each afternoon there was a little boy on the corner selling lemonade from a cold bucket wrapped in a towel.
As he walked the city streets the ambush of memory lurked in the droning sound of every airplane and siren, a cry heard outside the window, darkness. A smell could turn the clock backward as he traveled ever deeper into the spring and the heat and warmth he was so desperate for. At any time he expected to see Mercy running errands, on her way to somewhere. It was an encounter he did not want to have.
Then it was a Saturday afternoon and Adelita was working a double shift at the hospital. He walked the streets and down to the river. There were two boys pulling themselves ashore in a little flat-bottomed boat having given up on their fishing for the day. The boat was tethered to a willow where they turned it over in the shadows. For a while they skipped stones across the water’s black surface and then they began to pile the stones into cairns, as if possessed by the helpless need to build.
One of the boys lost interest and with a stick in hand was knocking the blossoms off the dandelion flowers that matted the grassy bank. There were children picking blackberries that grew on the waste ground, children that swung on old tires above the stagnant side streams backed and blunted against the flow of the river. There were cars without doors or windows and bobbing soft-drink bottles, a washing machine, and torn and flimsy cotton dresses ragged in the trees.
He kept walking. He passed a barbershop and in the window was an array of shaving mugs, and beside it was a drugstore with a soda fountain. A boy in the street let go a handful of paper scraps and he watched them blow away on a wind. Inside the barbershop the barber stood from the barber chair where he’d been seated. There was a man reading a newspaper and leaning on a broom was an old Negro.
Henry went inside the drugstore and considered an ice-cream sundae, but asked for a limeade with gas. Behind the marble counter was a young kid, a white-jacketed soda jerk. For some reason he derived a certain status from this job. He performed as if to say, I know the effect I have upon people. Henry quickly drank down the cold, tart concoction, and when he stepped back onto the street his belly was so full of gas he could not help but release a tremendous belch.
Eventually he stopped at a lunchroom where he sat at a table by the front window. He ordered a hamburger sandwich and french-fried potatoes. Two little boys stood outside with their hands on the glass. Then they let their mouths to the glass and licked it. Their intention was to get a rise out of him. He stuck his tongue out at them and they did the same to him. An old woman pushing a well-sprung baby carriage passed by on the sidewalk. A violent storm rolled in from the west and people disappeared from the sidewalk, dodging the rain, newspapers over their heads. It was a fierce storm, moving rapidly, but in minutes it had quickly expended itself and soon the sunlight was breaking through.
But that night, however tired, he could not sleep. All night his legs jumped and it wasn’t until morning that he slept for a few hours. It was in those few hours he began to dream again. He dreamed within the dream. He dreamed he was in battle and was dreaming that he wasn’t.
On Sunday Adelita pulled another shift at the VA and he was on his own again.
He paused on the street outside a church and listened to the drone of the minister, then voices singing about being sheltered in the arms of God.
At noon he swung by the same lunchroom and found it open. He ordered the blue plate special: roast turkey, cranberry sauce, carrots, and mashed potatoes. A woman led in an old man and sat him in a chair. The man was a relation of hers, perhaps her father. The old man’s eyes were clear, but he moved as if blind. Girls, stem thin, dressed for church, walked past the window, their posture erect and their eyes forward. A gaggle of boys followed shortly.
He climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Inside its raftered walls he found a quiet and steady peacefulness. He determined that it would be in this room, breathing its steam-heated air where he would learn to live again. He knew it could take months, even years, but hoped it would happen sooner rather than later. He was at the place of consciousness and memory. On this night he would not struggle against the storm inside him. He would be patient.
He entered the moment of first sleep where he remained until midnight and upon waking he sat up in the moonlit room, unsure of his surroundings at first, but then he recalled where he was.
He was still a boy when he first came here and he did not know why they were leaving. His memories of the home place and the Copperhead Road were vague but always remained fond. It was his grandfather’s house and was as removed and secluded as a place could be.