The Midnight Cool Read online

  Dillehay’s son, Jack, had moved in. He was going to help his father modernize his operation and was building a house, right next door to his parents’. It was nearly all framed out. Down at the shack, Charles could hear the steady thwock thwock thwock of his hammer. It was like the ticking of a clock, and it had begun to drive him mad. All day every day, thwock thwock thwock, keeping track of his lost time.

  These days kids everywhere were playing with the slaughtered hogs’ bladders, which they inflated like balloons and tossed around the barnyards. After a few days the bladders ended up deflated and forgotten, beside a barn or behind a stove, shriveled up, fair game for varmints and ants. Charles’s heart felt like one of these forgotten balloons.

  Two weeks had passed since the night Charles spent up in the Barrens. In that time Catherine had broken all their dates but one, saying it was too cold, or she was too busy, or a party had come up. He did not understand what was happening. He had begun to wonder if she somehow knew what he had done with the girl. He would take out a nickel ten times a day and flip it. Heads, she knew. Tails, she didn’t. No matter which way it came out it left him miserable.

  Billy, he said.

  Charlie boy.

  I’m gonna quit drinking whiskey.

  Fine.

  I’m gonna walk the righteous path.

  Who said you were crooked?

  He went back up to see the girl. One blustery afternoon when the wind was making short work of the few leaves left on the trees he was nearby, hunting mules, and he found the house and knocked on the door and she came to it with a dish and a flour sack in her hand. A chicken with a filthy bottom came out around her legs. Then a kitten, all bone, stumbling as if drunk.

  Just so you know, I got a steady girl.

  She looked at him with her one eye. Someone was calling to her from inside the house.

  I gotta get, she said.

  He felt even worse, after that.

  He now ran an advertisement in the paper. wanted. good mules. Men sometimes showed up at the shack with all kinds of animals, from good stout quality mules to the sorriest worn-out creatures. A colored man sold them a mule to pay for a lawyer. He had been arrested after two white women accused him of not stepping down off the sidewalk to let them pass. He had a wife and three children and two jobs and stood to lose everything if he was found guilty.

  They wrote him a check for the mule and he set off determinedly up the road. Charles sat down on the step and tossed the checkbook aside and put his head in his hands.

  It’s an awful mean world, Billy. It’s a messed-up world.

  The next day they went out to the sawmill to look at some mules. It was on the eastern edge of town, out beyond the Rich addition. The stone plantation wall still stood along the roadside, nearly a mile long.

  They looked at two mules, log skidders.

  Oh, them mules can pull, the man said. They could pull the devil offa the cross.

  When they departed Charles turned back and regarded the mules, now tied to the back of the wagon. It was a raw day. Little needles of rain had begun to sting his face.

  We could just up and go, couldn’t we, Billy?

  Billy had his collar clenched up around his neck. Charles knew his pain was worse in this weather.

  In a heartbeat, Charlie boy.

  Oh, Catherine. Charles knocked his head. What am I gonna do about that girl?

  Well, Billy said from deep in his collar. Women like a man they can depend on, don’t they? Maybe you ought to buy yourself a little patch of dirt.

  Charles bit his lip, studying this. Billy was right. That was exactly what he needed to do. Buy some land and build a house like Jack Dillehay was doing. Invest in the future. To stay in one spot was the only way to get ahead in life. The only way to be a man in full. But what an odd thing to come out of Billy, who always said he had long ago given up on the pursuit of what other men called success.

  He looked over at him. Maybe the mare’s attack had changed something in him. Maybe it had helped him realize a man could not wander forever.

  Really, Monday?

  Billy smiled, pointing across the road. Why, there’s a place for sale right there.

  Charles looked. A foursquare farmhouse, a couple of cows. A few acres of tobacco. There was a sign in the front field. He had to squint, trying to read it through the rain. When they got a bit closer he finally saw it. hay for sale.

  That place? How do you know it’s even for sale?

  Well look at that sign. A grin cracked Billy’s face. Hey, for sale.

  Sonofabitch, Monday. Sometimes I could sock you.

  On Thanksgiving Day Charles and Billy ate two cans of beans and a rabbit Billy snared. Darkness fell fast and Charles lay on his bed smoking and listening to the mules braying in the pasture and thinking about Catherine in her squaw’s costume. It seemed a lifetime ago.

  He pulled out a nickel. Heads, he would tell her he had not been true. Tails, he would tell her nothing. He flipped it.

  Heads. He couldn’t remember what heads was.

  He left her a note in the Everbright wall to meet him behind the icehouse. He went up there early. A train was coming in. In the distance he could hear the bells of Bud Morgan’s goats as he went to meet it. There was a sign in the window of the Citizens’ Club laundry. we smooth everything but your family troubles.

  She was already there, waiting. Just seeing her, his blood ran fast and hot. He lifted her by the elbows and set her on the fence, and she kissed him, a little recklessly. But kissing her his thoughts wandered to the girl in the Barrens, Sally, her sharp animal teeth and cold nose. Her hunger.

  What’s the matter? Catherine said.

  He knocked the side of his head with his knuckles.

  It’s you, he said. You’re the only girl for me.

  She pulled back to look at him. There was a freckle near her ear he had never noticed before.

  If I went away, she said, would you be true to me?

  His blood ran cold. He wondered if she had read his thoughts.

  What kind of a question is that?

  She was leaving, she explained. She had not known how to tell him. Every year they went to see her father’s family in West Tennessee. They would be gone for eight weeks. Longer than usual.

  My father, she said bitterly, claims he needs to clear his head.

  Charles’s heart fell, smashed down by the idea of eight weeks without her. He had no idea how to express what he felt.

  You gonna be alright? was all he said.

  She shivered.

  Oh, it’s awful, she said. It’s an awful place. The farm. Nothing around for miles. And every year he tells everyone we’re going west. Just—she waved her hand—west. He likes for them to think we’re going to the West—someplace far, exotic. The mountains. Maybe even the coast.

  There was desperation in her voice but as she spoke Charles’s mind was elsewhere. His heart was lifting again. He saw that this could be an opportunity. He had a second chance. Eight weeks was a long time. When she returned, everything would be different. He thought of something Billy sometimes said: When opportunity knocks, you got to know enough to open the door. He had almost missed his chance but he wouldn’t again. He was going to become the kind of man he had always wanted to be. A good man. The kind who won the bread of life. Whose name wasn’t just on the sign above the building but the cornerstone at its base.

  Kiss me again, she said. It’s so cold.

  But it was too cold to be out and they gave up after a while. She told him she would write to him. He walked away with that now too-familiar icy tangle in his guts, the ache in his balls, the pent-up desire. But on top of it, the thrumming power of his resolve.

  A few days later, there it was, in the society column of the paper.

  Leland Hatcher and Miss Catherine Hatcher have gone west for the holidays. They will return in the New Year.

  Monuments

  Charles sometimes stood in front of the Court Square monument
for the men of Richfield who fought in the Spanish-American War. He would mouth the names as he read them. Rich, Markham, Sawyer, Shipp. There was something beautiful about the way the lichen filled in the letters, making them darker, austere, and noble. He would think about what Pendergrass said, about how George Washington’s greatest deed for the country had been not an act of military force but an act of the imagination. That a man could do more for his country with a vision than with a sword. And he would feel in his chest the dynamo of energy, the beautiful potential of America, the might of sixty mules pulling combine machines across oceans of golden wheat.

  His mother had loved America. Charles reckoned she had loved it as much as General Washington had, the way she talked about it. Or at least loved the vision of it, the promise of it, the picture of it that she held in her imagination. And she had fought for it too, fought to keep him alive and fed so that he might one day embody this vision. But no monument bore her name. She was buried with all the other whores in the paupers’ graveyard in Bristol, no headstone, no nothing. If he ever went back there he wouldn’t even know where to look for her. There was nothing to mark her now but grass. Those hundreds of mornings she made sure he got up to the schoolhouse. The thousand jokes she told to distract him from hunger. Or how she wiped the tears from her eyes and put on rosewater to mask the smell of the men at the Crimson Shawl. The times she rocked him to sleep at night. The countless songs she sang him. All that was left of it, all of it, was grass.

  Your Crowded Hour

  The tobacco markets opened, and Kuntz’s closed for six weeks. Charles and Billy were out all the time buying mules now, flashing the gilt-edged checkbook, giving a little speech about how George Washington was the father of the American mule and how mules would win the war. Every week Charles would ship them down to Bonnyman on a boxcar. His paycheck was more money than he knew what to do with. And with Catherine gone he didn’t know what to do with the long winter evening hours either. He had sworn off liquor and the blind tiger. Most nights, to the tune of Billy’s snores across the room, he counted his money into a cigar box he kept under the bed. Counted and recounted it. Still he had loads more than he knew what to do with. He bought himself a new hat, beaver, and when Twitch admired it he bought him one too. He would go up to see a picture and buy tickets for the boys who hung around outside the theater. They all called him the mule man.

  One day the week before Christmas he got an invitation from Kuntz. He had just moved into his new house and was having Lloyd Bonnyman up to lunch, and Bonnyman had suggested that Charles join them.

  When he told Twitch, he knocked his shoulder.

  You’re in with the big bugs now, you lucky dog.

  He went to Suddarth’s and bought a new collar and, when he saw how dingy it made his shirt look, a new shirt too. He bought a pair of mercerized socks with gold stitching at the toe. The morning of the lunch he got a shave and a haircut and a shoeshine. He put on his new beaver hat.

  Kuntz’s house was on the edge of the Rich addition. It looked solid and respectable in a field of fresh thin snow, young saplings staked in front, an evergreen wreath on the front door, a finger of smoke reaching up from the chimney. There was a small barn with a few nice horses out in the paddock. On the white ground, steaming dark heaps of manure.

  A maid greeted him at the door. Stood there with a funny look on her face for a long time before Charles realized she was waiting to take his coat and hat. He held the hat a moment, feeling its plush quality. He did hate to hand it away.

  Bonnyman was already there. Kuntz was giving him a tour. When Charles joined them in the sunroom off the kitchen Kuntz hardly paused in his narration. It was a kit house, ordered through the mail, delivered from Michigan in pieces in three boxcars, everything except the windows and the nails. The pride with which Kuntz pointed out the details, you would have thought he built it himself from lumber he cut and hewed with his own hands. He took them from room to room, speaking with the same jumping drive he had on the auction podium. Charles was surprised he wasn’t cracking peanuts and tossing the shells on the floor. He reminded him of Pendergrass, showing off his donkeys and automatic waterers, and filled him with the same contagious energy.

  They went upstairs. Gus Kuntz was mopping an empty room that still smelled of sawdust.

  Get on top of that mop, Gus! Kuntz said. What do I always tell you? Get on top of a mop, and behind a broom.

  He looked at them and shook his head in mock exasperation.

  Apple of my eye, that boy.

  He took them into his own bedroom. There was a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt next to his bed.

  The greatest president of them all, Kuntz said, studying the picture. And the finest American who has ever drawn breath. His charge on San Juan Hill is the crystallizing moment of this country’s history. The fire, the tenacity, the overcoming of the odds. The rush and the push and the planting of the flag. As Roosevelt called it, his crowded hour.

  By his wife’s bed hung a needlepoint and a cross she’d brought from Germany. Charles stood in the doorway and looked at it and thought of the picture of Jesus on the cross at Twitch’s house. The meek shall inherit the earth. And he thought of Pen Pendergrass pumping his hand with his one good arm. This country was not built by the meek. For some time now he had been turning a new question over and over in his mind. How could a man set his course by both of those stars?

  He could just read the needlepoint from this distance.

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  1 Corinthians 13:11

  Kuntz was humming happily. He squeezed the tip of his mustache. His diamond ring caught the December light coming through the window.

  Well it’s nothing like your place in Nashville, Bonnyman, but it’s not bad, is it?

  They ate lunch in the dining room at a table laid with a cloth and a mess of forks, knives, and spoons, waited on by Kuntz’s wife and the colored maid. Charles hunched and ate while Kuntz and Bonnyman talked. He had never seen Bonnyman without the derby hat on before, and his head was enormous, big as a bandbox, glaringly bald on the top. The maid and Missus Kuntz brought out dish after dish. Charles ate ravenously. Last week Billy had come back from town having traded the Edison cylinder player for three cases of Corn Flakes cereal. Nearly one hundred boxes of cereal. They had been eating Corn Flakes morning, noon, and night. Feeding them to the horses. Stacking up the boxes to make a card table. Billy was delighted. He said he’d got the deal of the century.

  Kuntz was talking about the time he spent buying cotton mules in Mississippi. Hundreds of mules were employed on every plantation.

  Those that say the horse and mule is going out, he said, I’d like to take them on a trip to see those cotton plantations.

  Oh, they’ll never go out, Bonnyman said, lifting his glass.

  Outside a blue jay landed on the windowsill, looked in, took off. The women were laughing in the kitchen.

  Kuntz turned to Charles. What do you think?

  Charles shrugged. I don’t know, sir.

  You don’t say much, do you, kid?

  Nossir. I guess not unless I got something to say.

  Charles shrank, realizing that Kuntz had taken offense at this. He was scowling, his fork in his fist on the table.

  Well. Good for you. My wife tells me to shut my trap all the time. She says I ought to go into politics.

  If they get the vote that’ll be it, Bonnyman said. He took his thumb and forefinger and ran them slowly down the lines on either side of his nose, stopping at the corners of his mouth. None of them will be able to make up their minds, queues will form at the polling places two miles long, and the wheels of democracy will screech to a halt.

  Kuntz quit scowling, pushed back from the table, and smiled to himself.

  Sometimes I think I ought to get into politics. I’ve got the thing a man needs, to have any effect at all in public o
ffice. He pointed between his eyes and looked directly at Charles. Optimism. Blind, ferocious optimism.

  After the meal they went to sit in the parlor to smoke. The maid brought in a pitcher of iced tea.

  Drink it all year long, Kuntz boasted, pouring their glasses. Never touched a drop of liquor in my entire life.

  The armchairs were the color of butter. Charles sat on the very edge of his chair, terrified he would get it dirty. There was a doily on each arm and one behind his head. When he sat down Kuntz’s wife had adjusted it behind him and he had jumped.

  Outside, the snow had begun to fall again. Missus Kuntz came in to speak to Kuntz. Then she went out and got the car to drive the colored girl home.

  Can only afford to keep her half days, Kuntz said, watching them go. We’ve been through three in as many months. But Missus Kuntz won’t take white help. Colored only. It was a white girl dropped Gus and she’ll never forget it. Every day she drives this one back and forth to the foot of Freedman’s Hill. He grimaced. I know the fellow who owns most of those places up there. Says you wouldn’t believe the way they live. On a summer day, the smell of the outhouses.

  Charles put his hands on his knees. Well if he don’t like it then maybe he ought to plumb the houses.

  Kuntz gave him a pitying look. Plumbing on Freedman’s Hill? What next?

  Bonnyman gave a little bark of a laugh. Charles’s ears burned. He excused himself and headed to the bathroom down the hall. He was really fouling this up. He wondered if Bonnyman had brought him here to fire him. Wouldn’t that be a fitting end to it.

  Catherine had sent a letter. Not much to it, just a few lines. It had made him miss her so much he rode out to their old meeting places. The women’s college boathouse, with the college out of session, was lonesome and haunted-looking. Ducks swimming forlorn circles on the pond. The lot behind the icehouse had all the color wrung out of it. He knew these places the way he knew her lips and tongue and teeth, secretly and intimately and as if they were a part of his own body. Every scrappy weed and resident crow and thornbush. Where the burrs would get you if you tried to lie down. Someday he wanted to kiss her someplace where he did not afterwards have to pick burrs off the hem of her skirt. Yet the idea felt so far out of reach.