Authors: Robert Olmstead

The Coldest Night (29 page)

“You can put me down now,” she said.

Henry set her on her feet. Mercy took his face in her hands and turned it side to side so she might look at it. Then she drew him to her and kissed him.

“I love you,” he said, and she didn’t say anything for the longest time.

“I love you too,” she finally said. “I love you too,” and his heart was as if pierced by a thorn.

“Come into the bed,” she said, and the feel of her skin was shocking to him and he could not catch his breath for all of that time.

Her body was soft and pliant and once she had received him with a sigh and a gasp, she surrounded him with her body. He could feel the beating of his heart against hers. There was the faint whisper sound of the water.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said.

And afterward, when he went to move, she held him, her ankles crossed over his legs. He felt her hand tracing his back and the slide of her foot along his leg. She shifted her hips and held him tight and then he felt her release him and he slipped from inside her.

“I don’t sleep good,” he said. Then he slept for a while and was not unhappy waking up beside her. She climbed up and lay on his back and he felt the warmth and weight of her body. He felt her fingers on his back, his letheless skin. She traced the cicatrix of the wounds made by the phosphorous and then she touched the compass rose between his shoulder blades and he felt the flat palm of her hand as she rested it there.

Morning was only a few hours away. Beside them the baby girl slept peacefully.

“How did you make it back?”

He told her how he was left behind and so he went back north and was taken in at a logging camp. He told her they used maggots to treat the burns on his back and plaster of Paris. Then they smuggled him to the coast and one night he was taken off in a boat.

“There was some more than just me,” he said, and then he said, “Do you think that God being God, that he loves the devil too?”

“It’s God’s business who he loves and doesn’t love.”

“Sometimes I think God looked the other way and forgot about us.”

“But then he looked again and brought you home.”

“It’s hard living without the war.”

She finger combed his hair. The hair on his right temple had turned white.

“Sometimes you think what you have seen is going to haunt your soul for the rest of your life.”

“It must have been so horrible.’

“Don’t say that,” Henry said.

“Why?”

“Because I was there and I did horrible things too.”

“But it wasn’t your fault.’

“It doesn’t matter,” Henry said.

He thought, maybe the telling would break the spell of his long dream. He thought, maybe he was really dead. He said these things to her and watched her face.

“I died every day,” he said.

“You have seen too much,” Mercy said.

“Yes . . . I have.”

“You aren’t going to leave me just yet, are you?”

“I will eventually need to go.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I have to go back.”

“If I try harder, can I change your mind?”

“No.”

When he turned to her again she was smiling, but he knew she was sad. He knew she wanted him to stay. She laced round him with her arms and legs and held him tight and motionless, her face wet with her tears against his shoulder.

“What if I said please?”

The room was warm. He could smell her. He could smell them.

“Take me outside,” she said.

Hand in hand they stepped into the last moonlight, their bodies white with glow. The moonlight shined its path on the water and in all of its amplitude was as if the radiance of heaven come to earth.

Down by the river a constant breeze came off the water. Weeping willows lined the banks and shaded the earth and water. He was almost cold. Inside he felt a twist and a tremble and fought back the quaking of his being.

“Do you know what I feel for you?” she said.

“We were young,” Henry said, and she looked at him strangely.

“Ours is a love story,” she said. “I do not care about anything else.”

The stars were fading in the sky. In the east the gray lifting mantle of night and a kindling of pale rose and silver that lengthened and brightened along the horizon. The dark green sluggish flow gave way to darkling pools and placid stretches and the world of living things. The sun was coming up. A sorrowful wind swept in and disappeared.

“I have nothing,” Henry said.

“I don’t want anything,” Mercy said.

“I thought I would never see you again.”

“Those were the best days,” Mercy said.

“Yes, I think they were.”

“I have to go back,” he said, and Mercy agreed and said she would wait again forever. He told her she did not know what she was agreeing to.

“I’ll miss you when you are gone,” she said. “We’ll both miss you.”

“There’ll be more room in the bed when I’m gone.”

“I do not know how to let you go,” she said. “Not again. When do you leave?”

“Two more days and I have to go.”

“Then we will wait here for you.”

They went back to the bed and there was still so much to talk about, but a weariness had descended and try as he might, he could not hold off sleep. He slept for a time and when he awoke she was in the rocker beside the bed nursing the baby girl. They were sleeping and yet the rocker still moved ever so quietly. He reached out to rest his hand on her knee where light from the window was draping her left leg. He let his head back on the pillow.

The room was still as glass. When she stood, he slid over and she settled the baby inside his arm and between them. They felt each other in the darkness, their lives come back to them.

She took his hand and held it to her bare skin, moving it from place to place, then kissing each of his fingers, and he felt the rise and seep of her body’s sweet waters, the fast blood inside his own body and he began to cry silently. She touched at his scarred cheek. She wiped away his tears. She was saying his name, a messenger calling. The quiet deepened and halfway between sleep and waking he could hear the low, same-changing voice of the water flowing beneath them.

Published by

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of

Workman Publishing

225 Varick Street

New York, New York 10014

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN 978-1-61620-148-7

Table of Contents

Also by Robert Olmstead

Title

Part I