The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead Read Free Book Online Page B

its smells of sawdust and urine, past deserted shacks and abandoned stations, churches fallen in on themselves, sawmills, outhouses, bayous, piney woods. In the trembling heat, he felt their longing and rapture, their ruin, their persuading death. All day he was haunted by the morning’s sudden turn and return. All day was humid and the throb and stink of decay gathered as if from the entire earth. The lush and flaring grass of the planted levees, the radiating, suspiring earth rising and sinking.
    At a little store they stopped for gasoline and a pack of cigarettes, the hand pumps shaded by cottonwoods, the fluff of their catkins filling the air. Beyond the highway, past the brake fern was mud and muck and wetness. Little boys were swimming in the still water flats and when they stood they were naked in the unclear light of the brilliant sun. They held aloft the fish they’d caught, fat and alive.
    Inside the little store, its floor skiffed with sawdust, the old woman at the cash box was black, her skin almost purple, her eyes milky white and shaded blue as a robin’s egg. Behind her were broken cartons of Camels, Chesterfields, Kools, and open packs she sold by the cigarette. There were dusty bottles of Four Roses whisky and gallon jars of pickled eggs and ham hocks and sausages. A crutch hung by the door. In the shadowed back was a propped-up billiard table with three mahogany legs and leather pockets. Other blacks, men in their shirtsleeves, sat under the waves of a slowly nicking ceiling fan. They looked to be eating from a platter of chicken livers and drinking out of jelly glasses they filled from a stoppered jug.
    A girl wearing a pink cotton blouse came in with a bucket of ice.
    “Come here, girl,” one of the men said, and when she was near he handed her a silver dollar.
    A man with a cardboard suitcase bound with baling twine stepped up and asked him which way he was heading. He was long boned and as if built of pipe. On both cheeks he wore perfect scars that ran to the corners of his mouth. Henry told the man he was headed south and the man smiled and his scars rose and slowly he shook his head.
    “No. No. No,” he said as he conducted the air with a shaking hand. “That is the wrong answer,” he said, and the other men laughed and guffawed.
    As they came out of the store they were offered and declined the fish the boys had caught, moist in a bucket under a gunnysack. Mercy handed them a few dollars anyway and told them they could sell their fish to someone else.
    The evening was a cloudless sky and the setting sun cast a bluish twilight on the land as they traveled an endless cut through piney woods beside railroad tracks. Overhead was a hot starry night and the white strip of highway seemed to glow in the bending light.
    To the west the clouds were gray over gray and a mizzle-rain began to fall in the shineless black. Henry pulled over for a spell. He felt alone and he felt the loneliness of responsibility. Mercy stirred in the seat beside him.
    “Hush now,” he said. “You sleep while I rest a minute.”
    He let his head back and closed his eyes. The sound of an automobile at high speed woke him, the driver blaring his horn. The darkness was thinning with the climbing moon, the windshield wet with rain and fogged with the rising mist. The cottonwoods seemed waiting and unwhispering in the hot air. To look back was to lessen a sense of belonging where he was. He thought of the knife and pistol in the bottom of his satchel. When he awoke again she was looking at him. She stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.
    The mist had filled the pockets and there was a great winding sound, a bore of sound, and when the train came it came right at them and she screamed before it bent off. It was as if the bluish fog clung to the roaring clatter and hiss of steam the engines poured. They drove on until they saw lights and bumped across the tracks and stopped at a motor court, its neon sign flickering in the