The Coldest Night

A NOVEL By ROBERT OLMSTEAD

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Copyright © 2012 Robert Olmstead
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61620-043-5

Chapter One

By 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.

They 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...