The Coldest Night

ALSO BY
ROBERT OLMSTEAD

River Dogs

Soft Water

A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go

America by Land

Stay Here with Me

Coal Black Horse

Far Bright Star

The Coldest Night

A NOVEL BY

R
OBERT
O
LMSTEAD

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
2012

Part I

From whose womb comes the ice?

And the frost of heaven, who gives it birth?

The waters harden like stone,

And the surface of the deep is frozen.

JOB
38:29–30

Chapter 1

B
Y 1941 THERE WAS
little left to cut along the Elk and by then much of the land was sold to the government for National Forest. That February was a twenty-seven-inch snowfall on the mountain. The snow lay five to ten feet deep in the woods. The railroad was unable to operate and the twitch horses were starving in the logging camps, living off bark and harness leather, cribbing their stalls. The felled trees had disappeared under the snow and the Captain, who was on the Elk estimating the last timber on a twenty-thousand-acre tract, had to give up and return to the home place, breaking path all the way.

The Captain was ninety-one years old and his skin was the color of marble stone. What little was exposed to the wind and cold he’d covered with a layer of petroleum jelly. He traced his path back home, keeping on for a day and a night, his snowshoes silently lifting and falling, his cruising stick clasped in his mittened hand, because he knew to stop would be to stop forever.

When he returned, his daughter Clemmie was in the kitchen, in a rocking chair by the open fire. Her son, Henry, sat on the floor by her side, cross-legged on the wide stone hearth staring into the flames, his attention held by the sight of them and their oceanic noise.

She indicated that Henry should fetch more wood and so he stood, unfolding his body to its early awkward height. But he lingered in the doorway, half hidden by the jamb and listened.

“I must go,” Clemmie said to her father, “and you cannot stop me.”

“I know,” he said.

The Captain made no argument but looked to the window and through to the darkness beyond. Of all his children, as many as three wives could give him, Clemmie was the youngest, the one who knew him best and she would be the first to ever leave him in this way. The rest had married away from him or fled the mountain without confrontation.

“Daddy,” she said. “I cannot wait until you die. I can wait until spring,” she said, relenting a bit, “but I must go.”

Henry could read the Captain’s face for his thinking: he had reconciled himself to the inevitability of Clemmie’s leaving, but in waiting until spring, she would deny him the great impossible travel through the black and frozen land.

At melt time, the Captain escorted them down the miles of the Copperhead Road, some of the last land still treed, unmined, and inviolate.

They rode silently, on the backs of the offsprung generations of the coal black horses his grandfather loved so much. They rode down the rough track on the bloodlines of warriors, Clemmie riding behind her father and Henry following. They left behind the great looming house where she’d been born and he was born and the land where the Captain had been born. Henry looked back a last time and the house seemed to rise and climb the mountain. Still to see were the hanging terraces and curved steps, wet and gray and shining in the vitreous spring light.

In switchback turns they made their descent, in the cold perfume of the forest, the white pine, the laurel and dogwood understory, and he could feel in his chest an ache for the increasing density of the air as they descended.

Below them, a rising white torrent of runoff smashed through heads of stone. It suddenly disappeared inside the earth and then was with them again as they traveled its course. Clemmie and the Captain rode in silence, neither of them wanting to confront the confusion of their lives and the long histories that Henry did not understand. But he knew some of it, and it had to do with him and his mother’s weariness and she not married and the father he did not know. There were whole days she’d be lost to him, turned inward and silent, and then other days she could not contain her restlessness.

If they could have, they would have ridden forever, as if riding were their calling, as if they were pilgrims with their holy land always a little farther along the path. They wanted and needed no accounting, as long as there was a length of trail ahead of them and no parting at the end.

The Captain asked Clemmie if she was ever in the city for he could not recall a time when she was.

“Yes,” she said. “One time.”

They were stopped to let the horses blow. All about was the sound of a hollow wind running the land, but it was not the wind. It was the sound of the thaw, as what grew on the earth and clutched to the rock gave up the cold in an aching perceptible gasp.

“No,” Clemmie said, reconsidering. “I guess I never was. I guess I just took that I was.”

Her horse scuffed at the cobbled trail. Though noon, it was now dark again as if early in the morning and would be light for all but another few hours of the day as the cut where they stood was so deep and precipitous.

“Wherever you are, you will always think of me,” the Captain said to Henry, his voice seeming to break with regret.

The trail became a road rutted with threadlike rivulets and late that day they came to the swollen Twelve Mile. They would have to make a dangerous crossing on a rickety footbridge and the Captain seemed to hesitate, but then he did not. Fog enveloped their path and Clemmie commented on how strange it was, the cold and wet about her legs and ankles, while her upper body was warming to the light.

The Captain held the reins of the coal black horses as they unlashed their bundles and shouldered them. First Clemmie and then Henry embraced the old man and then they turned and made their crossing over the swaying bridge that would soon be washed away with the melt.

“Don’t look down,” she said, as if it were something she’d heard and now was telling him.

When they reached the other side, Henry looked back. The Captain was still there, astride a coal black horse, the other two in hand. He raised his other hand, stretching forward his arm. Henry made the slightest of gestures, a nod in the Captain’s direction, and the Captain stood in his stirrups, his old body arched in fierce salute.

T
HEY WENT TO
LIVE
in the city and Clemmie took a job working at the veterans’ hospital where they got their cast-off towels and bedding and soap. She also saved for Henry the newspapers and magazines and books that were left behind.

It was near impossible to imagine not being in the mountains, but in the city the earth became the land at Henry’s feet. To the west he could see what lay between himself and the horizon and it was without hollow, valley, defile, ravine, or stony turret. The mountains were never far away, but the site of the city was like something made by an originator, the mountains seemingly split open and pushed back by hand and then coved and held in place. He’d never walked so far in a straight flat line and felt turned out and naked.

Clemmie fell from a station in life she’d not known she occupied. Never before did they have to pay for water, heat, and a roof. They had a small house with a sun-filled kitchen and the hospital had a cafeteria where they often took their meals. On Saturday mornings Henry would go to the library with his mother. They’d walk through the back streets where clothes were hung on the lines to dry. The clothes wore a yellow hue from the burning of coal and they’d go to the library so he might pore over maps, atlases, and books of natural history, as if assuaging the privations of childhood. Then in the afternoon they’d purchase Italian ice sodas, almond, orange, or banana with shaved ice in tall, cloudy glasses. In the evenings Clemmie went to school and in time she became a nurse.

Sometimes they had visitors, relatives he’d never met before who’d been shunned by the Captain for having given themselves over to the life of the wage earner in the coal mines.

These relatives now lived in the city, or passed through, returning whenever they could. Uncle Golden came through when he was flush with money, and Aunt Adelita stayed with them for a time after her husband and two sons died in the Bartley No. 1 shaft mine. Ninety-one men and boys died that day, killed by explosion and fire, and his mother told him Aunt Adelita had been one of God’s wandering souls ever since.

Aunt Adelita had unruly black hair she wore tied off in a ponytail. She cooked pot roast and mashed potatoes with string bean salad and bowls of chopped-up lettuce, and for dessert there’d be strawberry rhubarb pies or pineapple pies with blue cheese. It was as if she could not cook enough food to satisfy herself.

There were so many women, aunts and great-aunts, who’d buried husbands, dead from the wars, dead from the trauma of accidents—the celerity of white pine turned and twisted, split and shattered and descending from the sky, or under the earth where the kettlebottoms, petrified tree stumps, dropped from the roofs of mines to break a shoulder or stave in a skull. The women watched their children be hobbled by rickets, go deaf from untreated ear infections. They knew what it was to live on corn bread, molasses, and scrap and see their children eating dirt for the mineral it contained, and after a time they turned a bend in life and their teeth went bad, their lovely strong backs and shoulders grew humped and stooped, their knuckles thickened from chores and cold, and their cheeks and necks grew hollow.

The men in Henry’s family, they were big, sprawling, raw boned. They were angular, muscular, warlike and discontented. They farmed and mined and logged and framed out houses and worked the shipyards, and they quarreled beyond reconciliation and then it would be forgotten. From them Henry learned the stories of his grandfather and his old uncles. He learned that if any one of them was threatened they would descend with all stealth and fury, with gun or knife or torch or dynamite. They were a family relentless in their hatreds.

It was in one of those newspapers where they read that Uncle Golden died by his own hand after an eight-hour standoff along the highway. There’d been a high-speed chase, reaching ninety miles an hour, until finally he lost control and went off the road. He lay in the wreck the whole time threatening to shoot anyone who came near and finally put the gun to his own head. In the newspaper, it never said why.

But for the most, they were homesick castaway men who worked in the shipyards in Norfolk, men who built the Golden Gate Bridge, Boulder Dam, the Holland Tunnel. They smoked Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes and carried them rolled in the sleeves of their T-shirts. They drove old Pontiacs that chugged exhaust fumes and they moved as tender and wary animals. They were polite and solicitous of Clemmie. They’d ask her of the Captain as if they were supplicants and she the last of the blessed, and as the years passed and as Henry grew older, one by one, they disappeared.

Chapter 2

T
HE CINNAMON BAY NAMED
Gaylen was the sweetest horse Henry ever knew. She was not standoffish but always interested in him and what he was about and would walk right up to him to see what he was doing. Walter said she was a peach and a natural beauty. He called her a poetic horse.

Walter was a horseman and veteran of the first war and owned the stables across the river. Walter knew Henry’s mother from the veterans’ hospital where they worked on his legs. One day he mentioned that he needed a hired hand and the next day Henry rode his bicycle across the river and up the mountain and asked him for the job. That was three years ago when the Gaylen horse first arrived.

The stables weren’t much. They were rundown and ramshackle and by then there were few who paid to ride or take lessons or board their horses. The horses were grades of indeterminate parentage and small and heavily muscled cobs with strong bones and steady dispositions that the children liked to ride. They were all easy keepers and constituted with a steady temperament, strength, and stamina and no great turn of speed. They liked to be with each other and when they were in the barn they needed to see each other between the stalls. They tolerated well each other’s personalities, faults, and vices.