The Midnight Cool Read online

  Dedication

  For the mules

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One In the Argonne Forest

  The Prettiest Horse Ever Drew Breath

  Caveat Emptor

  Kuntz and Son

  Money Matters

  Schrecklichkeit

  Edison Machine

  Round Robin

  Brave

  Money Matters

  At the Depot

  Boom Boom

  In the Dead Leaves

  The New Suit

  The Monkey Trick

  Chicken of the Woods

  Busted

  Nickerson’s

  California

  A Plan

  Plenty of Name

  Breed More Mules

  Working Stiff

  Heat

  Names

  Boneshakers

  Climbing up the Golden Stairs

  Freedman’s Hill

  Scandal

  The Battle of the Somme

  Cornhusking

  Cold

  Monuments

  Your Crowded Hour

  Money Matters

  Money

  Billy’s Pain

  False Spring

  Free

  Bone Dry

  Women Get the Raw Deal

  Sold

  April 6

  Part Two Spring 1917

  Money Matters

  Get in the Game with Uncle Sam

  The Monster of Liberty

  Money Matters

  Bluing

  Rain

  Red Paint

  Food

  Wheatless and Meatless

  Where Do You Get Your Facts?

  Holston Mountain

  Sacrifice

  Down the Stairs

  Two Minds

  August 7

  Second High

  The Midnight Cool

  Gone

  So Long, Richfield

  Duty

  A Fine Day

  The Last Mule in Sumner County

  Two Fifty

  You’ll See the World

  Heat

  Luck

  Love

  A Nice Little Story

  Panic

  A Fix

  Nashville

  American Wake

  Maura Carries Her Baby up the Stairs of the Crimson Shawl

  Somewhere in France

  Morning

  About the Author

  Also by Lydia Peelle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Epigraph

  Four things greater than all things are,—

  Women and Horses and Power and War.

  Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of the King’s Jest”

  Part One

  In the Argonne Forest

  France

  October 1918

  Another shell explodes in the distance. Charles and the mule are stuck, mired in the mud. It is dawn, and the sky is the color of mud, the earth is mud, the whole world is mud. The only thing that is not mud is a stand of wasted trees ahead. Beyond those trees the rest of Charles’s unit moves towards the Argonne Forest along a road that is a river of mud, studded with nails and barbed wire the Germans scattered to slow them. A unit was supposed to come through in front of them and clean it up. Nobody seems to know what happened to them.

  Charles tugs on his mule’s lead. They have fallen far behind the rest. The mule’s load is heavy: a Vickers machine gun and its tripod, ammo boxes with twenty pounds of ammunition. Sometimes he just plain quits.

  Get along, you old mule, Charles pleads. Get along. Come on, Champ.

  The mud sucks the animal’s feet. Charles tugs at the animal’s head again. He is thinking of Jones, dead now. Jones used to call Champ Sonofabitch Number Two.

  Get along, Sonofabitch Number Two, he pleads. Get.

  Jones is dead. Jones was a sonofabitch himself, but he misses him, his bad jokes, the constant drone of his voice. He was a city boy who knew nothing about mules. Now Jones is dead and so is Sonofabitch Number One, a bighearted mule whose real name was Rose. Both her front legs were blown off by a shell and she fell into a pit of mud and she would not quit trying to get up, scrambling with her back legs until they put a pistol to the hollow spot behind her eye and shot her, both of them crying, together, him and Jones. She was a real good mule, Rose.

  Champ lurches, slips, goes down to his knees. He struggles, only working himself farther into the mud, which covers him to his withers, covers the machine gun, sucks at his sides. Charles hears another shell in the distance. Whizbangs, they call them. The whiz sets his teeth, whistles inside his skull. The bang makes his guts jump and turns his stomach inside out. He throws himself against the mule. The men beyond the trees shout. A great wall of mud rains upwards. Guns toss into the air like matchsticks. Then, for a rare, odd moment: nothing.

  The mule is still, resting for a moment in his struggle. His ears are slung forward towards the place of the explosion, but his big intelligent eyes are calm. Mud on his cheeks and in his shaved mane. Charles rolls over and tries to work loose the hitch that holds the heavy gun to the animal. His hands fumble, useless in the muck, cold and trembling. He is crying now, cursing his hands. The tears run down his face and into his mouth. He isn’t going to leave him here. Another shell bursts. Charles lays his head against the mule’s wet warm shoulder. That one was close. Jesus. Damn close. He can feel the animal’s big heart pounding. He closes his eyes. He takes a breath.

  The Prettiest Horse Ever Drew Breath

  Richfield, Tennessee

  August 1916

  Their boxes were packed and the wagon nearly loaded. The morning had broken bright and almost cool, at least for a Tennessee August. It was a perfect day, Billy and Charles agreed, heading out to the pasture gate, the perfect day for traveling.

  Charles McLaughlin and Billy Monday were on their way out of town. The last thing left to do now was catch the black mare out in the pasture, and then leave this place as they left all places, headed nowhere in particular, just on, trading horses as they went, a night here, two weeks there, always on, on to what might lie around the next bend in the road. The spring trading season had been miserable. In Celina they had been robbed blind by a ten-year-old boy. Along the Red River, they got lost in the woods and wandered for three days before coming out exactly where they started. The only good to come of the summer, as far as Charles could see, had been that sweet farm girl in Tuckertown, Kentucky, only they’d been run out of town just when he was getting somewhere with her. When last week they landed here, just hardly south of the border, in Richfield, Tennessee, it seemed like it would be more of the same. Then last night Charles hit the jackpot with the deal he got on this beautiful high-dollar horse.

  She was a jewel, out there in the green pasture. Her black hide shone in the morning sun. Delicate pipestem legs. Tail set high and proud on her hindquarters. If you drew a line around her she would fit into a square. The kind of horse that people stopped to watch on the street. She made him want to shout for joy.

  He had bought her from the richest man in town. Never mind that he had spent nearly everything they had on her, even after Billy had given him that speech about putting all his eggs in one basket. Look at her! She was a hell of a basket.

  Billy paused at the gate, tugging one big ear. Blue sun-shot eyes full of mirth.

  I bet you think that little Tuckertown girl would swoon to see you come riding in on a horse like this.

  Charles gave him the same long-suffering look he had given him after the egg speech. Billy was getting soft, in his opinion, t
aking fewer risks in his old age. Charles was eighteen and certain of one truth: that he would, as his mother promised years ago, someday rise up and win the bread of life.

  He opened the gate, whistling. The mare flung her head around at the sound of it and he should have noticed the change in her, but he strode right up and swung the lead rope to catch around her neck, and when it touched her she went after him, up on her hind legs, front hooves pummeling the air. He dodged and she came down hard, then reared again. Against the green of the grass she rose, a blur of black velvet hide and iron shoes and the yellow-white ivory of blunt horseteeth. He shouted and went to grab her mane, and for the third time she screamed and reared, thrashed the air just inches from his temple. When she landed she went after him with her teeth. That was when he dove for the fence, and she spun and thundered across the pasture.

  Billy was laughing so hard it took him a minute to give him a hand up. Charles stood and shook out his long lanky frame.

  Quit laughing.

  Haven’t ever seen you move that fast without a girl in the near vicinity, Charlie boy.

  Charles dug dust out of his eye with his thumb. The horse was far away, watching them.

  Sonofabitch, he said. Something was slowly coming to him. She must have been doped up.

  He looked at Billy, who regarded him with one eyebrow tented, the corner of his mouth upturned. His hair stuck out wild beneath the brim of his hat. Billy’s laugh was like a force of nature and always left him looking like a stiff wind had knocked him around.

  You knew it, didn’t you? Knew it soon as I brought her in here last night.

  Billy only grinned.

  Monday, you sonofabitch.

  Billy jogged out to retrieve Charles’s hat where it had landed in the grass. Before returning it he flipped it in the air, where it somersaulted three times.

  Charles took it and jammed it back on his head.

  Ah, don’t look so glum, Billy said. She’s only a touch hot.

  Charles spat and yanked his shirt.

  Touch hot? Liked to have killed me.

  They must have had her doped to the gills. Wonder what they used. Did a beautiful job of it. Just enough of a dose.

  But I don’t understand. Charles shook his head. This wasn’t no usual place. It was high-class. Fellow’s got a pedigree long as the horse does. He drives a damn Pierce-Arrow.

  Up on the road, a passing Model T sounded its horn at the landlord’s flock of chickens. The noise set the horse off again. She sprang into the air and cartwheeled to the other end of the pasture. Clods of grass flew up behind her. When she tore past the oak tree, four crows startled out of it, cackling.

  Sonofabitch, Charles said, watching her. She’s bughouse crazy. He grabbed his forelock and groaned. All that money.

  Billy put his hand on Charles’s shoulder. A strong big-spanned hand that Charles had felt on his shoulder a thousand times, with a weight which, after all the years, could speak to him nearly as plain as words.

  Think of it as an investment in your education, Charlie boy. Like I always say, you get burned you got to learn to sit on the blister. If it makes you feel better, you got burned on what’s got to be one of the prettiest horses ever drew breath.

  Let that damn horse catch herself, Charles said, shrugging off Billy’s hand and turning back to the shack. I need a drink.

  Ain’t got nothing to drink, Billy called after him.

  In Tuckertown, where they had spent the end of June and most of July, camped in the back of a cornfield, eating beans and tinned sardines, Billy had tried to teach two spotted ponies how to bow. They had been hauling the ponies around in their string for weeks, unable to unload them, and when they saw the poster for a coming circus on the side of the Tuckertown general store, Billy got the bright idea: teach the ponies a couple tricks, sell them to the circus for good cash money, make back everything the kid in Celina stole from them, get back on their feet in time for the fall season.

  It hadn’t taken long for Charles to find the girl: Fern, sweet and cool as her name.

  I got to be honest with you, he said to her after a week, the fireworks set off by young boys popping in the street behind them. They were standing across from the general store, in a little crowd waiting to see the town parade. We’re just here till the circus comes.

  The circus?

  He pointed to the poster on the side of the building.

  Fern strained to see around the woman in front of her, then shook her head.

  There ain’t no circus coming. That there poster is two years old.

  When Charles reported this back to Billy, Billy only laughed, and in a couple of weeks got the two ponies traded off to a hayseed farmer for a crate of peaches and a bicycle, just by the skin of his teeth. When he demonstrated their trick, the farmer watched the animals bend their knees with his brow furrowed over dull suspicious eyes.

  What on God’s green earth do I need with two ponies that can bow?

  They ain’t bowing, Billy said, as always hiding his Irish brogue behind a dead-on imitation of the man’s accent. Nossir, they ain’t bowing. They praying.

  The next day Billy rode the bicycle out the Franklin Road and came back on an old pelter with a pint of homemade whiskey he’d taken as boot in the trade. They filed the horse’s teeth, blackened his gray hairs, fed him some corn mash, tied him up outside the store, and sat down nearby, minding their own business. Soon enough a man had come along to look the horse over.

  Billy got up to meet him. It was the town sheriff.

  You in the market for a horse?

  Maybe.

  Well I wasn’t planning on selling him, Billy said. But I like the looks of you.

  The sheriff hemmed and hawed and muttered over the horse while Billy stood silently, letting the man talk himself into it. Finally he did and Billy piped up to name a price. They went back and forth for a while before settling on one with a handshake. Then Billy stepped close.

  One last thing, Mister Sheriff. Do you believe that horses go to heaven?

  The sheriff was already pulling out his wallet. He looked up and shrugged. I don’t see why not.

  This little horse here is going to go to heaven.

  Well a good honest horse is just what I need.

  Two mornings later, the sheriff was standing above their bedrolls in the cornfield, his pistol in his hand.

  That horse you sold me. Well I walked into that horse’s stall this morning. And he was dead.

  Dead? Billy said, rubbing his face.

  Dead.

  Charles looked at Billy and shrugged. He’s never done that before.

  The sheriff raised the pistol. Well you got some explaining to do.

  Billy looked back at him, cool as anything.

  Now, Mister Sheriff, sir. I told you that horse was going to go to heaven, didn’t I? He grinned and tapped the side of his nose. I just didn’t say how soon.

  They got out of Tuckertown sort of quick. Coming down off the Highland Rim Charles had seen a boulder painted with one word: repent.

  Hell, he thought, with a feeling it had been put there just for him. Poor Fern. He was always doing it to them, girls. Picking them up and leaving them like that. It made him feel awful, but he couldn’t help it. She was probably still waiting for him to meet her in their spot by the tobacco warehouse. The thought was terrible: her waiting, hopeful. Billy tried to cheer him up. There will be plenty more girls, Charlie boy. But what did Billy know about girls.

  Over by the shack, in the measly shade of a sick poplar, Gin was standing in the wagon traces. She perked up when Charles passed. Gin was Billy’s horse and devoted to him, but she was always polite to Charles, as she was to all creatures. She lifted a front hoof and scraped the ground once, lightly, with decorum. Blinked her deer eyes.

  Don’t look at me like that, he told her. I’m ready to get out of here too.

  Gin snorted and shook her head. The yard around her was worn down to dirt, littered with the trash of previou
s tenants. Cans, broken chairs, a water trough gone to rust, hemmed with lacy holes. Billy had managed to convince the farmer who owned it to rent it to them for just a few nights. Dillehay was his name. There had been a sign up in the yard of his place across the road. When they knocked he had told them he would not rent to Negroes, gamblers, drinkers, Dagos, Chinks, Yankees, or Irishmen. As he spoke he refused to open the front door more than halfway. His wife, watching, was a hand at the curtain in the window.

  We’re good respectable men, Billy assured him.

  Dillehay shifted first the tobacco in his lip and then his beady turkey eyes.

  A man can’t trust anyone these days, he said. Just look at what happened up there in New York City.

  On the thirtieth of July there had been an explosion in New York Harbor. Two million pounds of explosives and ammunition, bound for the war and packed in freight cars and barges at a place called Black Tom Island in New Jersey, had caught fire and blown up. The blast picked up boats out of the water, busted the windows of buildings all the way from the Battery to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, rang church bells in Philadelphia. Killed seven people asleep in their beds, including an infant thrown from his cradle. And the word was that it had blown the arm off the Statue of Liberty, and set her skirts on fire.

  Dillehay had a wattle at his neck to match his turkey eyes, and it wobbled furiously while he recounted these details. In the past days they had heard the story told by many men. New York City was a long way away, but the gross injury to the Statue of Liberty made the news everyone’s business, even an old farmer like Dillehay.

  Well it’s the Irish dockworkers they can blame, he said. Lazy careless cheats cut every corner they can and look what happens.

  His small eyes moved between them. From Charles to Billy back to Charles.

  You ain’t Irish, are you?

  At the window, the wife disappeared like a fish in a creek. Billy sucked a tooth. Charles was staring at the wash line, thinking about Fern. The way the wind had whipped her thin dress against her legs while she stretched to pin up the laundry, the first day he saw her out in her father’s yard.