The Coldest Night (18 page)

“You certainly don’t see that very often,” Lew said.

They waited and then walked on. The snow was blowing again and they were standing inside a skim of ash and gaseous oily melt-water pooling the ice. The napalm fires roared and blazed and the smoke rolled over them leaving behind the charred bones of men.

Then there came a grumbling in the sky and the second plane suddenly materialized. Tracers poured in from gun emplacements and converged and poured onto the wings. There was a puff of blue smoke and the plane wobbled and fell out of its turn. Slowly it rolled over and went into a long glide traversing the lake and disappearing into the mountains. There was a whispering in the sky and before they could move they were engulfed in a wall of flame. There was another explosion, its forces spreading across the ice. It slapped them down and sent them spinning across the surface.

“Lew,” Henry groaned.

He stood up and fell over and then he stood again.

The flaying wind bore down on him and the numbing shock of a bullet stroked his body. A spatter of bullets stripped the air. A man thirty yards away was holding the gun. Henry shook his head in disbelief and lunged forward and at the same time aimed unerringly, firing his own weapon and shot the man through his teeth.

“Go to hell,” Henry screamed, and was without guilt or shame and wanted only to kill. The skin was badly bruised and broken across his shoulders, but otherwise he was still able. He sucked in his lips and hurried forward, desperate to find Lew.

Shells were bursting around him. White phosphorous broke the icy air and exploded twenty-five yards to his left in a great flash of lighting. The next one exploded to the front and then a third one to his left. They were joining, as if bolides colliding in space. The next round would find him. He jumped up and ran, the shell exploding on the very spot he’d fled. There was an overwhelming flash of light and the concussion sent him skidding across the ice.

He stood, another flash, and he was caught on the near edge of the shell’s bursting radius. It threw him backward, his feet flying out from under him. The sudden change in the air pressure punched his lungs, the explosion sucking the air out of him. The shock of the explosion vibrated in his spine. He tried to catch his breath.

He felt cold and wet. He felt his eyes swelling shut.

The first sound he heard was the blood beating in his eardrums. He was on fire.

Move, he told himself, but his body would not move.

“Move,” he said aloud, intent that his body obey his command and he stood up.

The hot gates opened on him again. Another inferno lashed out at him, a curving unbreaking wave of violent flame caught him against his back and swirled between his legs and embraced him and knocked him down.

He held his breath. He cried in his mind. He did not want to breathe the fire into his lungs. His vision blackened as his eyes were swelling shut. Try as he might, he could not reach to put out the flames. His back felt as if burning nails had been melted into it.

Lew fell down next to him and cut open Henry’s clothes and then cut into his burning skin, his hands sizzling on the hot fragments. He stuffed handfuls of snow into the holes, and still they burned, the phosphorous taking the water from his skin down to the bone. Bullets skimmed the ice, but Lew kept cutting away and loading snow onto Henry’s back.

“We need to get out of here,” Lew said.

“My legs don’t work too good.”

“They’ll work.”

“I can’t take anymore,” Henry said, weeping.

“Come on, buddy,” Lew said, and then he was dragging him by his collar across the ice.

Chapter 26

W
HEN
H
ENRY CAME TO,
he was wrapped in woolen blankets and drifting across a vast plane of moonlit whiteness. The moon was so bright it stole the spangling starlight and made the heavens blue as skin. He charted its mountains and dry rivers and its deeply shadowed canyons.

Then there was sound: the muffled scree of runners sliding over ice. He was on a wooden sled and Lew was drawing him east across the frozen lake.

The pace was slow and timeless. Lew walked ahead, as effortlessly as a wolf. He did not know how far they traveled. He went in and out of sleep as he was conveyed on the ice under darkness. A troop of companionate dogs had picked them up and trotted alongside, flanking the fashioned sled.

He remembered as a little boy riding a horse-drawn sleigh into the forest to cut down the Christmas tree, the chuff of the horses’ hooves, his grandfather seated beside him. The fine powdery snow found his head and face and wreathed his neck. The snow was deep and the brush outgrew the hanging trail that wrapped the mountain. The first darkness was rising from the depths of the earth. Necks arched and shoulders hunched the horses trod on through shadow and snow. How enduring and resolute they were. From the wet pines came the sharp note of turpentine. The day’s golden time had passed and the full-rayed sun had become a diffusion of reds and violets. Night was coming on. Deer vanished through distant thickets to appear on a more distant ridge. They climbed higher to where the setting sun had shed a bluish twilight over the land and the cloudless sky and it was there they found their Christmas tree.

They came to the edge of the ice and a steep path leading into the craggy rocks and there came the sound of barking dogs and the dogs traveling with them sent up a howl. Lew helped him to his feet and he was suddenly cold and cried out and began to shiver. They staggered up the path and entered a cemetery and passed through its perimeter, a line of brush, and came into a small village of shuttered huts with tin roofs. Beside one hut stood an old man bundled in furs, a team of iron-shod bullocks head yoked to a sledge behind him, a goad balanced on his matted shoulder. He bowed from the waist and when he did binoculars dangled from a strap at his neck. With one hand he indicated they continue following the path; with the other hand he invited them into the hut.

The entrance was a wooden door on leather hinges. The old man swung back the door and the entrance became the black mouth of a warm tunnel. The hut’s interior seemed to expand in size and depth, the nave the main house and wings to the north and south formed the transept of a cross. To the north was housed a milch cow and penned pheasants and a goat. There were crated chickens, a pig and guinea fowl tied by a leg.

The hut was built around its chimney and firepit and warmed by the animals’ heat. There was the smell of boiling cabbage and stale beer, a teakettle. Layers of old newspapers insulated the walls.

Lew shouldered his rifle and stretched Henry out on a pallet by the fire. He asked if the pain had abated any.

“No,” Henry said. “It still hurts fierce, but I don’t care anymore.”

Lew took off Henry’s shoepacs and he felt his toes for the first time in days. He doubted he would ever again be warm, but already the heat was climbing into his body.

“Where are we?” Henry said.

“I don’t know.”

“My insides are frozen.”

Henry knew he had only so much left inside him and when it was gone he did not know if there would be more. He thought how death might be the only way you left this place.

Lew worked on Henry’s back, daubing at it with copper sulfate.

“I will see you in the next world,” Henry said.

“Which one would that be?” Lew said, moving to the lesser burns on his shoulders.

“The one or the tuther.”

“Let’s just not count our chickens before they hatch.”

There came the sound of a baby crying. Lew swept the room with a quick dark glance. He touched at his ears and nose as if to make sure they’d not fallen off. Then he shed his own shoepacs and dragged off his socks. Slowly the fire began to take the forward edge off the chill.

“You stay here and rest.”

“Where are you going?” Henry said.

“I’ll be right beside you.”

From a black iron cauldron the old man ladled bowls of soup with cabbage, potatoes, barley, carrots, and marrow-bones. Lew tipped a bowl to his mouth and drank down the hot broth. With his fingers he fed the rest into his mouth and then he held Henry’s head and helped him drink some of the broth.

The old man produced a carton of Lucky Strike. He tapped out smokes for each. He struck a wooden match and lit the ends. Lew sighed out with his first puff of smoke. He then scrutinized the cigarette at arm’s length as if trying to understand the depth of pleasure it gave him and then took another long drag.

“What was that?” Henry said.

“It was snow coming off the roof and passing by the window.”

“Are you sure?”

“You sleep now.”

Henry tried to sleep and when next he awoke he thought that he might have. Lew held up a syrette and he nodded. Henry felt the pinch and his mind languished as he waited for the morphine to find its way through his blood.

When next he awoke an old woman hovered at a black kettle hung from a swing hook over the open flames, letting slices cut from a dead horse slide into the boiling water. Across the small room was the unsettling sight of Lew aiming his rifle at the floor. The old man knit and reknit his fingers, but Lew would not relent.

Then a trap door opened in the floor and one by one people crawled out the cellar’s stony cavern and into the hut erected on top of it. They were people coughing and hacking, their chests caving each time. There was a woman with a whimpering baby. There was a pregnant woman in the pangs of labor who needed to be dragged onto the floor and finally a girl with ash rubbed on her face and her head wrapped in bandages. She stepped defiantly to the muzzle of the rifle. She unwrapped the bandages from her head. Her hair had been roughly shorn away.

“You will be safe in this village,” she said, touching her fingers to the rifle’s front sight and pushing it aside.

“How so?” Lew said, his finger inside the trigger guard.

In the air she wrote the letter
T
and then the letter
B.
They were in a colony for tuberculars. She told him they found the woman in labor lost on the ice. She told him the vibrations of the bombardment had brought on her labor.

Lew returned to his side.

“What’s it about?” Henry asked.

“You get some sleep. Get that chill out of your bones and you’ll feel better.”

“Tell me a story.”

“The only story I know is my own,” Lew said.

“Tell me. It must be better than mine.”

“There’s nothing to it.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yes,” Henry said.

As he slept this time, his mind took refuge in the dream world. When Lew tried to wake him, he fought him. He kicked out with his feet and scratched at the floor for a weapon as if his hands were claws. He was not afraid. He just did not want to leave the dream world where he and Mercy were gathered and whole. His mother was there and in the dream world they were undivided.

As he became conscious and the morphine wore off the pain became intense.

“You should make it out,” Henry said.

“I know that.”

“There ain’t nothing to discuss.”

“I aint leaving you. We’ll get you fixed up and leave together.”

“There’s no remedy for getting killed.”

“You ain’t killed, not yet.”

“I’d like a smoke,” he said, and Lew lit for him a Lucky Strike.

“I thought Thanksgiving was real nice,” Lew said.

“Me too.”

“The girl was educated by American Methodist missionaries,” Lew said, and then told him the old man used to cross the river into Siberia to hunt tigers. He was a schoolteacher and now he was an ice cutter.

“Those are dangerous animals.”

“Not as dangerous as we are.”

“I cannot endure this,” Henry said.

“Yes, you can.”

“Do you pray?”

“No,” Lew said.

“Will you pray for me?”

“Yes.”

Henry went back to sleep and when he awoke there was a woman nursing an infant in a cotton sling. He thought of Mercy. He remembered the way she walked, her weaving step. He thought of the letter he would write if he could.
To the girl I love . . . I have just awakened . . . If you only knew how long it has been since I have slept . . . You will never know what you have meant to me these many nights . . . I pray that you have moved on with your life and you are happy . . . You will always be inside my lonely heart . . .

“It sure is quiet,” Henry said.

“We’ve been hit pretty hard,” Lew said.

“Time to get up,” Henry said. He stood and dizzied before Lew could stop him. He collected himself and stretched his spine and felt the pull of his back skin. The pain was so great that tears ran down his face.

In the firelight women and children were asleep on a straw-covered platform. The old man sat cross-legged and with a knife was stripping the insulation from a coil of copper wire.