The Midnight Cool Page 17

  He knocked again, harder, and rubbed his hands to warm them. The air was brittle and he could see his breath.

  It made him ornerier than a hurt dog, this pain. Charles had come back from his lunch at Kuntz’s with a catalog for kit houses. Aladdin Homes, with a picture of a genie coming out of a bottle, and according to Charles it took little more than a wish to get one of these houses built. They had names: the Senator, the Charleston, the Belle. Kuntz’s was on page twenty-four: the Magnolia. They send everything but the windows and the nails, Charles said happily, to anyone who would listen. Send it on a boxcar!

  The cheapest was called the Raymond: $325, COD. This was the one Charles had his eye on. When he showed him the picture and the blueprints, four rooms, a pantry, a little front porch, Billy had snapped his teeth.

  Couldn’t they have given it a better name? What fool’s gonna shell out three hundred twenty-five dollars for something called the damn Raymond?

  He knocked again. Finally someone came to the door. A tiny colored woman in a pair of men’s shoes stuffed with newspaper and a coat that almost swallowed her. Her face was etched with a thousand lines of age, yet she was delicate as a child. Aunt Ernestine.

  When she asked what he needed he put his hand on his gut.

  Horse threw me. Got me pretty good right here, he said. Pain won’t leave me be.

  She brought him inside. A shock of warmth. A small table at the center of the room, covered in oilcloth, flanked by two stools. Stack of playing cards. Big fire in an open fireplace, with a phrenologist’s skull on the rough-hewn mantel. Next to it, a turtle shell.

  That’s a mighty fine mule you got out there, he said, looking out the window.

  She went to the wall, where a shelf of jars and bottles caught the light. Her gnarled hand hovered, went back and forth between two bottles.

  What color was the horse that did it to you?

  Black, he said, and she nodded and picked up the bottle on the left.

  You mean the damn thing’s color makes a difference what you give me?

  Course not, she said, her face unchanging. Just wondering.

  Billy laughed. Well I’ll tell you what, she belonged to a real high-class fellow down there. Name of Hatcher. We saw his automobile up here a while back. Maybe you know him.

  He my best customer, she said, without missing a beat.

  Billy laughed again. He liked this woman. She had a sense of humor. It was good to be out of the empty shack. Charles had been gone two days on a mule-buying trip. All this talk of houses and land hit Billy with a lonesome, desperate feeling, especially when Charles was out on the road. He couldn’t imagine the kid would really do it. He certainly wasn’t being too smart with his money. Last week Bonnyman had given him a raise and what had he done but spend two dollars on a stack of stereoscope cards and a stereoscope and given it all to Gus Kuntz. Then bought a cheap portrait of George Washington, and one of Teddy Roosevelt, and hung them up side by side on the wall.

  She filled a small bottle halfway with the contents of the one from the shelf. Instructed him on how and when to take it.

  That’ll be fifty cents, she said, uncurling her small hand.

  Fifty cents?

  Don’t try to bargain with me, she said. I don’t bargain. Prices are high on everything, these days. And besides. My son’s about to put me out of the laundry business. You know that Citizens’ Club down there? she said proudly. That’s him. He does real good, my boy. Smart boy.

  Billy thought of the punning signs in the window. we will dye for you.

  Well I see where he gets it from, he said.

  When he left she followed him out. She went to the mule and rubbed him along his back and picked a bit of grass out of his mane.

  Old Rattler here, he getting soft. Used to be it was his job, going down to town to collect the laundry. Your own son running you out of business. She clucked her tongue. Best a woman can hope for, I reckon.

  You want me to take him off your hands? Billy was looking him over and couldn’t find a fault. Mules are high. Highest they’ve ever been.

  She kept rubbing. The mule sighed.

  He’ll be a hero, Billy added.

  I had me a mule before him. Name was Robespierre. Worst mule ever walked this earth.

  What kind of a name is that?

  He come to me with that name. We was working a share back then. My husband was still alive. That mule, he was a smart mule! A bad mule too. If you was plowing and didn’t give him a rest every hour, why he’d just start stepping on the plants. Just start throwing his hooves trampling them until you gave him a rest.

  Rattler stuck his nose out to Billy, nostrils working, checking him over. Ernestine put her hand on his big dark shoulder.

  Rattler here, he’s a good mule. But Robespierre, he was a smart mule. He got what he wanted, whatever he had to do to get it.

  She gave the mule a hard scratch behind the ears.

  Well no more laundry anymore, right, Rattler? Maybe it’s better he’s retiring. White folk never liked seeing him in town. They thought he was too good a mule for an old colored woman. My son, he just built a new house. I told him, you better leave it unpainted, boy, or the white folk gonna think you’re getting above yourself. I had eight children and he’s the only one alive today. My littlest boy got killed by lightning hiding under a tree from a storm. I’ve worked all my life. I done everything from take in laundry to work shares to read fortunes and I reckon I will always get by.

  Someone was coming up through the side gate, a young colored girl with a crying baby on her hip and two children behind. Aunt Ernestine left him to meet them.

  Now you come back for more of that medicine when you run out, she called to him. You come right on back. Now you know where I am.

  False Spring

  On the thirty-first of January, a glanders scare hit Kuntz’s. Panic. Pandemonium in the lot. Men were cussing at one another, jostling horses and mules out of the barn and pens fast as they could move them.

  Glanders. The dread disease. Billy had seen it before and never wanted to again. It meant certain and agonizing death, eating a horse from the inside out until he was nothing but a pile of sores, an ulcerated skeleton racked with pain. And it started like nothing, only a peculiar, clammy, bird-limy drip of snot from the animal’s left nostril. Not only was it deadly but it spread like wildfire. Just the word itself was ugly. The name of a wanton woman who’d steal all your money and give you the clap for boot.

  It turned out to be a false alarm. The sick horse was put in quarantine, and after two days the veterinarian declared it was nothing but a cold. Kuntz had the whole premises cleaned and disinfected anyway. He personally supervised the removal of every scrap of sawdust, every cobweb. All the hay was hauled away, new hay trucked in. The floors were stripped and limed and every wood surface painted with turpentine. Shorty was made to crawl along the rafters and scrub each joist.

  Kuntz ran an ad in the newspaper, announcing the precautions he had taken. But when the sale opened up on Saturday it was sparsely attended. Those there were still telling glanders stories. Someone had heard of a lion in a zoo that had been fed the meat of a glandered horse and was dead by morning. Someone else had a friend who had a dog that had licked blood from the carcass of a glandered horse before it could be incinerated. Dead within the hour. Stories of empty barns where the disease had lingered for a year until a new string of horses was brought in and infected nearly immediately.

  Men were jumpy for another reason too. The Germans had declared their intention to sink American ships, anywhere and everywhere they found them. Any day now, people were saying, we would get into it. Washington had no choice now.

  In the aisle at Kuntz’s one farmer boasted that he had buried all his money in a safe behind his barn.

  My grandpa did the same thing when the Yankees came through, he said, standing in the middle of a knot of men. Only after the war he never could remember where he put it.

  Laughter. N
ervous, loud.

  Maybe I ought to go up to Freedman’s Hill, the man said. Go to that old woman who speaks to the dead. Ask her to call up heaven, ask him if he knows where it is.

  Ah, that woman’s nothing but a hoax! someone said.

  Oh no she ain’t, said someone else. She’s bona fide.

  The weather was warm that day, a false spring. Flies had hatched, along with little clouds of midges. The smell of mud and thawing earth and the unfamiliar feel of warm sun on your shoulders. Yet the pall of the glanders scare gave the warm weather an air of pestilence. The bidding was slow. It was all over by dusk. The place cleared out quickly. The Johnson twins hadn’t even come down.

  Billy and Charles bought only one mule, dark with a half-moon of white on his face. Billy walked outside while Charles went into the office. The change in the weather had brought on the ache in his ribs and all down his left side. He sat down on a stack of boards. Whatever it was Aunt Ernestine had given him, it was the only thing that worked on the pain. But he had run out of the medicine the day Charles went up to town and opened himself a bank account. The kid was talking about renting an apartment now. Getting out of the shack until he could build his own place.

  Twitch, coming by with a load of hay, stopped in front of him.

  You alright, Monday?

  Sure.

  Looked for a minute like you might be coming down with it yourself. Glanders.

  Twitch spat and blew out a glob of snot. Shit. Kuntz had me in here picking up bits of straw with a tweezer. Don’t know how much longer I’m gonna last here. McLaughlin’s been showing me that catalog he’s got. Them kit houses. Says there ain’t no reason why any man can’t do it. I reminded him that his paycheck’s three times as big as mine. He said, it’s a free country! A man works hard, he can have anything he wants.

  As Twitch spoke Billy could hear Charles saying it, truly believing it, and he knew that he had no right to try to talk him out of any of it.

  Twitch, he said, shaking his head. Sometimes I feel like the last free man in the entire U. S. of A.

  He stood up. In the lot a stranger was circling Gin.

  Billy hadn’t moved so quick in a long time.

  What the hell are you doing, buddy?

  What’ll you take for her?

  She ain’t for sale.

  I’ll give you two hundred dollars.

  Mister, her left hind foot’s worth more’n two hundred dollars.

  Two seventy-five.

  Billy let out a breath. Well shoo. You don’t mess around.

  Two eighty-five. She looks just like one my wife lost last year.

  Nossir. This horse ain’t for sale.

  The man recircled her.

  She’s got a thick ankle back there.

  Like hell she’s got a thick ankle. That’s no thick ankle.

  Three hundred.

  The man kept going up and Billy kept shaking his head. Finally he got to three twenty-five. Precisely the number Charles was walking around chanting. Billy told him to take his money and go to hell, and he gave up, spat once, and walked off.

  Billy put his arm on Gin’s mane.

  He put his forehead on his arm.

  He put his face against her warm neck and closed his eyes for a minute.

  Because, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, three hundred twenty-five dollars was a hell of a lot of money.

  Free

  On Sunday, February 4, there were two items of note in the newspaper. The German ambassador had packed up and left Washington for good. And the Hatchers had returned to Richfield.

  In Charles’s mind, these were both pieces of good news. War, so many men were now saying, was necessary if the stalemate was ever to be broken. Bonnyman said that this business of sinking American ships would surely be the thing that tipped President Wilson’s hand. The ambassador’s departure seemed to prove him right.

  Get ready, he had told Charles. If we get in it, you’re going to need to work twice as hard as you do now.

  Charles was ready. For anything. He had pinned up above his bed a line he clipped from an old Money Matters column.

  In the words of Andrew Carnegie, friends: Nothing can keep success from the man prepared for it.

  He had opened a bank account, and already had almost enough money in it to afford the Raymond. Lately he had been going out to the Tisdale addition and just sitting, watching the work being done to divide the field into lots. To him it was a beautiful place, peaceful even when it was full of shouting men and trucks and mules pulling graders. He loved the possibility it held, and he loved the vision of all the houses, the streets, children playing, men coming and going to work. Happy, safe, industrious lives. He could see it all so clearly, even though now it was nothing but an old torn-up cow field full of tire ruts.

  All through the cold bitter days of January, out in the wagon hunting mules, he had thought about Kuntz and Pendergrass. Both men were driven by a great optimistic energy. But while Pendergrass’s vision of the future was of an America that was an island unto itself, Kuntz’s utopia stretched all the way around the globe.

  Charles now believed Kuntz was right. That America not only should get into the war but needed to. Same as he had to get that bank account, and now a piece of land and a house built. The only road to the bright future was through responsibility and hard work and, yes, sacrifice. As it said in the needlepoint by Kuntz’s wife’s bed, it was time to put aside childish things.

  As soon as he put down the paper he went up to Everbright and left a note in the wall. The next evening they found each other behind the icehouse, together after two months. She wore a heavy fur coat, and it gave him a new thrill, as if he was kissing some sort of wild animal.

  You look different, she said, finally pulling back to study him.

  I should, he said happily. I’m a new man.

  He helped her up onto the fence and she took off her coat and draped it over both of them, and they sat close, sharing a cigarette. She told him the same things as what her few letters had all said, that the winter had been terrible.

  Cows and mud, she said, shaking her head. Nothing but cows and mud. I thought I was going to go out of my mind. I have never been happier to pull in at the Richfield train depot.

  Charles searched the side of her face, looking for the freckle he had discovered the last time they were together. Couldn’t find it.

  And your father?

  She took a drag, let out smoke. You want to know something, Charles? I realized something. He never suspected me. He hardly even knows I’m alive. Why, these days he’s so lost up here—she tapped her temple. Something’s going on. I heard him talking one night to my uncle about heaven and hell. Other realms. He’s never been a churchman, my father. Oh, he goes, every Sunday, but he just shows up and sits there. But I think I’ve figured it out. I think—she lowered her voice to a whisper—I think he might be seeing a spirit medium.

  What?

  I think he’s trying to communicate with my mother.

  Charles thought of the woman on Freedman’s Hill who sold Billy the medicine. Billy said that she had joked that Leland Hatcher was her best customer.

  That don’t make sense, he said. A man like your father.

  You never know with my father. Catherine took a long drag. Her body was tense. He presents one face to the world. But what’s going on behind it—it’s a complete mystery.

  You think—you think people really can speak to the dead?

  Not if my father’s gone in for it. It has to be a hoax. She let out a stream of smoke and studied the tip of the cigarette. You know how I know? Because if there really was a line to heaven, my mother would refuse to speak to him. If I was dead, I’d refuse to speak to him too.

  She shivered and pulled closer to him, grinding out the cigarette. He could not resist her magnetic heat and kissed her. It was better to kiss than to sit there talking about her father, anyway. For a while they were quiet, close beneath the heavy fur, breathing the cold air together
. They watched a fox sneak across the grassy lot. She asked about the mules and he told her about his travels, the men who so willingly gave up their animals for the cause. She nodded soberly. Her brother was at the Front now, she said, and the war, which had felt so far away, suddenly felt so close.

  Can I ask you something? he said. That day we met. In your garden. You told me the Statue of Liberty was a farce. You said it should have been blown into the ocean. Don’t you love America?

  I do, she said, matter-of-factly.

  Good. My mother always said it is the greatest country in the history of the world.

  Catherine pulled the fur coat closer around her shoulder. This knocked her hip against his. He felt another shiver of desire.

  But I still think that statue’s a farce, she said. Liberty. My mother didn’t have it. I don’t. No woman does. Not the colored folks. They don’t have it either. I love this country for what it might be. Not what it is. And there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Loving something’s potential? I see it through a clouded glass, I suppose. But you can’t say that to anyone in this town. They’d call it treason.

  He kissed her again, in spite of the cold knot already bound up in his gut. The kisses could be torture. He wanted her so badly. It occurred to him that he could simply say that to her. Just say that unspeakable thing. This thought made him burn with shame. No. He had already nearly ruined it once. And she wasn’t that kind of girl, and he wasn’t that kind of man anymore. He pulled away, ducking out from under the coat.

  If it was true, about her father. That he did not and had never suspected them. Charles thought this ought to mean that they were free. That he might even come up and knock on the Everbright door, sit with her in the parlor like a proper courting. He was that kind of man, now. Wasn’t he? No more sneaking around.