The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  “That’s candy for you,” Lew said, and then he said, “This fucking road’s getting longer all the time.” His remark traveled backward and forward and across the road and continued until it returned to him and he agreed with silent assent as if it were a true spoken wisdom.

  “Something is out there,” Henry said.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Devine,” Gunny growled, and Lew turned back around.

  It was then a man, a ragged Korean soldier, passed south through the middle of their column. He stared in concentration at the space just before him where in seconds his body would be. His face held no expression but was scraped off on one side and on the other side his head shaved and bandaged. In a little while, there was another, unarmed and wounded in no apparent way, but similarly stared out in front as if a pilgrim inexplicably denied and sent back to his former life.

  “The little cocksuckers,” someone said, and a grumbling coursed the line.

  Then they were coming in a silent, determined stream and there was no more judgment from the marines. Coming down from the north were ranks of the bloodied and they passed through them, some shoeless and their feet black and making a clacking sound as they walked, and yet they kept marching in the direction of the long distant harbor. Some collapsed and fell in the road, staining it with their blood, and an aid station was established alongside the road dispensing blood, water, and morphine and then continuing them on their southern migration.

  Henry stopped at a waterfall frozen into a great blue stalk where the milky water had turned to ice and men set a fire and broke ice to melt in an iron kettle. They added their own wood, boards, boxes, and pallets to the fire and dipped their tin cups into the kettle and held them under the melting icicles and took long drinks.

  “This is real pretty,” one of them said.

  “Dream on,” Lew said, knocking his cup against his rifle butt.

  “Mind if I have a little?” Henry said, stepping up with his cup.

  “Yeah, knock yourself out,” the one said. He drank the cold water from the blue fall and then moved on so the next man could drink.

  All day long was to be experienced the dead weight of waiting as hour after hour they walked the hard road, waiting for the enemy who were invisible and yet seemed to be so many they were stirring the air itself. Still, no one saw them, but he knew they were out there.

  That night the setting sun shed a cold bluish twilight over the land and the evening sky was cloudless and metallic. Lew produced a bottle of Old Overholt whisky and he had a pull. They passed it around their circle, the skewed faces of the men in the light of the burning fire. Each had a drink and then they had another and continued until the bottle was empty and then tried to get a few hours sleep.

  In his pocket Henry carried Tootsie Rolls and a letter from his mother. He’d been carrying the letter for how many days he did not know. He slit the seal with his knife. The penmanship was from a hand as if learning to write. Her letter began, It’s four thirty here, and where you are your day is just beginning. I would be grateful to have some word from you.

  It was all he could read. He refolded the letter and slipped it back inside its envelope. He knew he should read it, knew he should write to her, but for some reason he could not bring himself to do these things. He carefully unfolded the letter and read again, Thank you again for this address. I cannot say I was surprised. You boys are the heirs of men and their inheritance is yours . . . Beware the snares of the evil one. May the love of the angels hold you inside their wings.

  He began to compose a letter in his mind: I am in the field, somewhere in Korea, north of the thirty-­eighth parallel. You are in my thoughts and in my heart . . . But he could not go on. He did not want to be loved, did not want to be remembered, and then sleep overtook him.

  Chapter 17

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN Henry awoke he lay under a foot of newly fallen snow. The trucks were revving up, but he could not see them or reach them to warm by their engines. He sat up and brushed the snow aside and realized he was the first to awake. He watched as each man came into the shock of the day. One by one they sat up and looked about. Their faces were those of helpless, ghostly children. They rubbed their eyes and stretched their arms and rolled over to stand upright in their wool underwear. It was as if each were reluctantly coming from his own private death to regretfully be born into life again.

  Henry stomped his feet in a clumsy dance and pounded his arms to his chest. His breath was white puffs of steam that quickly froze on his face and the chest of his parka.

  Lew hawked a gob of phlegm into his mittened hand and studied it. Someone said it was ten degrees and it was enough to start an occupying argument. An icy red glow flared in the southeast and the frozen and shuttered land became a profile of multiplicated spurs, razors, and spines many times folded.

  “Please kill me,” Lew said.

  “You know I can’t do that,” Henry said.

  “You got a cig?”

  Henry squeezed one from his pack and lit it. He rubbed his hands together and then he cupped a hand and lit one for himself. They drew quietly on their cigarettes, the smoke steely in their mouths.

  “What do you think is up there?”

  “I don’t know,” Lew said. “Nothing good.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “The enemy don’t hardly ever cooperate the way they should.”

  After his smoke Lew diagnosed himself sick and went to stand in line where he tipped back his head to receive aspirin pills and a solution of water and sick-­bay alcohol. When he returned he told Henry he found the experience so restorative he got back in line three more times. While waiting, he had the opportunity to slick a large can of pineapple juice and this they shared.

  There was also mail. Lew received a letter from his mother and Henry received another letter from his.

  I am sitting at the kitchen table. There is no word from Mercy though I do not travel in those circles. Your man Walter came by the other day. He said to tell you he sold the horse upcountry as well as the rest of them. He said you’d know which one. He is moving to the state of Florida and needed the money. He said he sold ever thing before the bank could close on him. He said you would know which horse and he trusted you would understand . . . Last night you came to me in a dream . . . I have seen your fate and it is not there and the light was not dark. You will learn what you need to know. You will return to me. That’s all I know and this morning I am so relieved.

  It was the most he could endure to read. Hers was a world of certainty and providence. She did not believe in accident. And he wondered on the Gaylen horse and where she might be. He had the passing thought he’d find her when he got home and buy her for himself.

  He worked down through the layers of clothing and put the letter in a breast pocket with the others.

  That day there was turkey with all the trimmings, cranberry sauce, and giblet gravy and it all froze after a few bites.

  “I don’t want no damn turkey,” Henry said.

  “What’s the matter, ain’t you hungry,” Lew said, hacking away at his plate.

  “Who could eat that? It’s all frozen as soon as it hits your plate.”

  “You don’t like Thanksgiving?”

  “We just never made much of it.”

  “Ain’t you American? What’s wrong with you?”

  “I was thinking, Lew, I have never killed anyone. There ain’t no practice for something like that.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You’re a funny one,” Lew said.

  “I’ll just trust you can tell.”

  While the others ate, Henry found a grinding wheel in an abandoned barn and for some hours he worked the treadle, sharpening bayonets and fighting knives, the skree of the blades, a rooster tail of sparks, as the wind swirled around them.

  Over the skree of the turning wheel, Lew told them about Borneo, or was it New Guinea? He was asleep i
n his tent one night and thought a Japanese soldier had snuck in and was going to kill him with a knife. But it was a gorilla snuck into his tent and it beat the living hell out of him. In the morning he was all black and blue.

  The sound made by the steel and stone was like a song to Henry and he did not mind as more and more men stood by quietly with their bayonets and personal knives for him to do his work.

  “Take these. I’m afraid they’ll get me today.” It was a marine standing by his side, holding a packet of letters, attempting to shove them into his hands. The marine was on suicide watch as he’d accidentally shot another marine.

  “Why are you giving them to me?” Henry said.

  “They’ll never get you. I can tell.”

  “What can you tell?” he said. It was the same as Lew told him not two hours ago.

  “They won’t get you,” the marine said.

  “I don’t want your letters,” Henry said. “I got my own to carry.”

  “That guy is bananas,” Lew said. “Don’t get personal,” he said. “These guys are a bunch of ignoramuses.”

  Lew gave to him a handful of dollar bills, the sum he’d been charging men to have Henry sharpen their blades.

  They climbed again that afternoon, the valley long distant and entered the high snow-­covered mountains. The road passed abandoned huts and thick belts of stunted pine. Where before the people had come to the roadside to beg for food, they’d now disappeared. Pushed down from the heights were tiny deer. They ran down the center of the column and wove among the jeeps and trucks, their hooves clicking on the stony road and then skittered down the off side.

  The wind blew like a scythe, but they kept north, crossing another plateau and marching up the road. It was an empty and evermore desolate country they entered, a landscape of stunted evergreen, granite boulders, and swirling winds of snow.

  On the road that day he saw a large lumber pile in the center of a field, farmhouses in a small valley, old tires mounted on their roofs to keep them in place. He saw a dead boy he took to be no more than fourteen. The boy’s face stared up at him. The look was mild, even peaceful, bored, and innocent. The look was nothing at all and as if the face had yet to be placed on the head of a man to lead him into life.

  In the evening the western sky lit scarlet and the call went out for them. It was their turn. They would now work ahead of the moving column and their time would be the loneliest time in the world.

  Gunny moved among them. He put his hands on each as he spoke to their assembly.

  “Do not get in a fight,” he said. “Go patiently. Don’t go far. See what you can see and let us know what you see. Keep your mouth shut and listen. You can hear pretty well at forty below zero. Do not get in a fight. That’s not your job. If you do get in a fight, do not get killed.”

  “When do we go?” Lew said.

  “You go now,” Gunny told him, placing his hands on Lew’s shoulders.

  “What’s the point of being born?” Lew said. “I have never understood.”

  “You’re a real wise guy,” Gunny said, his somber face never seeming to smile.

  Henry swapped off the BAR for a carbine he cradled across his chest. Rigged out with lightened packs, one after another they stepped off. They passed through the ranks of men eating and fallen out and the ranks of men who themselves had been in the lead and they entered the night. If there was anything more to know, no one told them.

  Lew went first and Henry was second with the others following. They staggered their departures and strung out along the evening road, somehow warmer at night, with enough space between them so that a shell or a machine gun would kill only one of them. Lew said the hunters were often allowed to pass unharmed. Lucky for them, but hell for the rest, so they were to keep their wits about them.

  That night there was a stillness in the sky. Day had been transformed into night and a blue light was resting on the land down to the orange banks of a frozen river. Henry walked on, more quickly than advised, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lew out ahead, and then he slowed and in the hours to come he followed as ordered. At times the road disappeared in snow and the wind made shadowy figures and he could have walked off the edge if not careful, and at other times the night was still and the road was swept clean, its gravel surface sparkling with moonlight. That was the beauty and the terror of this world and he was alone in it.

  Rounding a bend in the mountain he saw a man standing in the road. It was Lew smoking a cigarette while looking at something. He stopped and they stood together at an overlook.

  “Look at this,” Lew said, and there were hundreds of footprints in the snow coming from the offside, crossing the road and ascending the mountain.

  They turned to stand with their backs pressed tight against each other. The wind was getting up again, chasing away the footprints and all around them the environing cold and snow and darkness.

  “What kind of pie do you like best?” Lew said.

  “Apple.”

  “I like berry pies.”

  “Any particular kind?” Henry said, the darkness so close to his face he could feel it. He watched down the road for sight of the man who trailed him.

  “I like all berries and rhubarb too.”

  “Rhubarb’s good.”

  Henry allowed himself a glance over the precipice. There were jagged rocks thirty feet below and beyond them a steep drop down a cliff and below that was only darkness. He could not understand how anyone came up that side, let alone hundreds of men.

  “I do not like this moment,” Lew said.

  “What was it like in the Pacific?” Henry said.

  “You do not want to know.”

  “Something’s going to happen.”

  “Nothing happens until it happens.”

  The wind crossing their open position made all talk seem as if it were a constant chant. He let more of his weight against Lew’s back and felt a propping weight returned.

  “What are you thinking now,” Lew said, the words the need to keep talking.

  “I never thought hell would be so cold.”

  They stood aslant as the canalized wind blew about them, sharp as hunger. From the peaks and into the valleys the wind whooped and roared.

  “You want to know what it’s like?” Lew said.

  “I do.”

  “You save the last bullet for yourself. I know one thing,” Lew said.

  “What?”

  “When I get home I am going to eat a berry pie as big as a woman’s ass.”

  The wind blew and was like a blade to their bodies. Henry caught sight of the man trailing him. He turned and Lew stood erect and together they kept north, crossing the plateau.

  In the morning they’d report they’d seen nothing except hundreds of footprints in the snow. They’d breakfast on hamburger patties, fruit cocktail, and jelly beans and he’d be shocked how restorative a little food and water. One of them would not unfasten his brass roller belt buckle fast enough and he’d half piss himself and be ridiculed for it. Then they’d climb into a truck to get some sleep as it lumbered up the road. His body would shake with its rewarming and it’d be a nice way to end the day, the emptiness in his heart.

  As he walked he again saw his mother in her vegetable garden among the husking corn and frosted tomatoes, that time of the brittle and the dying. He wondered if he’d ever live to be a remembering man like his grandfather and his uncles, the kind of man who when old and tired sat in the dim light of fire and let his mind span the years and well up with the water of memory.

  Chapter 18

  ON THOSE BLACK NIGHTS, strung along the frozen road, there were two stories in his mind, the story of then and the story of the unfolding now.

  In his mind he wrote to her. Dear Mercy, all the tears in the world cannot cry enough for how much I miss you. Our days together were like a dream inside a dream inside a dream . . . And his mind papered with an account of the sadness and confusion and the deep mysterious event that they’d been.


  There were whole days when he could not now remember what she looked like, but he remembered her hair, chestnut and fine and straight and sometimes she wore it knotted at the back of her head, how her long bangs strayed across her forehead, masking her ivory face and eyes so bright. It was as though he dreamed that season. He fought for the memory of her. It was coming to him from far away. He stretched out his hand to touch the image as if it was not in his mind but standing before him. The image remained.

  “Am I really touching you,” he whispered. He stopped walking and touched his cold mittened hand to his own forehead. He tried to remember the tilt of her hips, her warm kisses, her trailing fingers. He knew you can only understand things after they’ve happened, but try as he might, he could not understand what happened and that told him it must still be happening and suddenly he was crushed by her memory.

  After the image faded it was again okay if he got killed. He would not have minded.

  He climbed to where the road bottlenecked in a steep narrow pass forty-­seven hundred feet high. At that elevation there were no forks in the road, just one steep side and the other steeper side, the winds slicing down from the north.

  Lew came from the rocks, came up behind him before he knew it. He’d managed to light a cigarette inside the cover of his fur-­lined hood.

  “We will have to hold this pass,” he said.

  Henry squinted and nodded his head. What Lew meant was they would have to hold this pass or they would be trapped and every man of them killed. Already their advance was way beyond any thought for the future.

  “Maybe she wasn’t the one for you,” Lew said, finishing his cigarette and letting the wind strip it away.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever it is those letters remind you of.”

  Henry knew there was nothing there to hold on to with Mercy, nothing that had lasted more than a hot season and yet he wanted that day to return when they were together. He knew she held some unknown part of him.