The Midnight Cool Read online

  She said this gently enough, but the words stung like a whip. Just as when Tisdale had grilled him at the party. His blood surged. His hand curled into a fist.

  My mother was dealt a real bad hand, he said roughly. Someone like you can’t ever understand it.

  Catherine flinched, and he immediately wanted to take it back. She let out a heavy breath. Well I’ll tell you how my mother died, she said. My father killed her.

  He looked up at the storefronts across from them, the clothes on mannequins in the window of the department store, eerie headless human shapes. Then up at the hooked claw of the moon over the buildings. He thought about Hatcher’s eyes when he brought the bone down on the table. And about what Billy always said about the black mare, that she had suffered at the hands of a man capable of the vilest acts. A murderer? No. That was crazy. Crazy as Mexico taking back Texas.

  No, he said.

  A gust of wind at once warm and cold swept the litter of East Main Street. The indecision of March. Catherine pulled her collar tighter. She had red knuckles. Her eyes were fixed on a puddle a few feet in front of them.

  He did. She would still be alive if it wasn’t for him. She drove her car off the bridge that night on purpose. It was no accident. He gave her no choice. No other way out.

  She shook her head slowly, still staring at the ground. I know what happened. I heard them argue. He got a girl in trouble and my mother found out and wanted a divorce and he said no. ‘What would that look like to people around here,’ he said. ‘What would that do to me?’ They argued. Night after night. And then one night she got in her car and drove out to the Pike and drove it off that bridge. She knew there was no other way out.

  Catherine flung her cigarette into the puddle. It sizzled, then went out.

  She came into my room before she left that night. I pretended to be asleep. I could hear her breathing. She wasn’t crying anymore. She had made her decision by then, I see now. When I heard her car pull out I knew what she was going to do. I just knew.

  Catherine, Charles said, gentle as he could.

  Most women, they would just live with it, what my father did. As a matter of course. Just smile and keep up appearances. Missus Tisdale would. Missus Rich would. But not my mother. My mother was different.

  Charles looked back to the mannequins in the store window. He shook his head. The night felt suddenly so dark and hard.

  Your brother—does he know?

  Catherine pressed her hands to her eyes, then drew them away. Nodded.

  He was down at school. But he had been home for Christmas—we did not go to West Tennessee that year. He had been home and he had seen my father with her—Catherine broke a little—with the girl, with the colored girl.

  A colored girl, she said again, almost a whisper. She worked for us.

  Charles stood very stiff and very still. He thought about the day they had seen the Pierce-Arrow on Freedman’s Hill, and he wondered if that was the explanation, not that Hatcher was going to see some old fortune-teller, but that he still had a girl up there. And he thought of his mother, the straits she faced raising him alone, and could not help feeling sorry for the girl, whoever she was.

  The girl, he said slowly. What happened to her?

  Oh, who cares? Catherine said sharply. She’s gone. Edmund said she left town. I wish she had never been born. At Mother’s funeral we all stood there. I must have heard him say it a hundred times. ‘What a shocking accident.’ He said it to every single person who came down the receiving line and there wasn’t a soul in town who didn’t come. I think by the end of it he had convinced himself. So terrified of what people would say about a divorce. Well what would they say about a suicide?

  She pressed her hands to her face again. When she took them away he expected her to be crying. But she wasn’t. Her eyes were fierce.

  Those men up there, I’ve heard them say it: ‘Put your wife on a pedestal, and a colored girl in your bed.’ She laughed a harsh laugh. Those men he’s trying so hard to impress. Those men don’t listen to anyone, don’t hear anything but the sounds of their own voices. Well he killed her, I’d like to tell them, if they’d listen. To hell with them! To hell with all of them.

  The world is full of cheats and shams, Catherine. It’s too bad but it’s the truth.

  She began to sob. The pearls in her ears shook back and forth.

  I’ll tell you something. I’m never getting married, she said. The whole institution is bogus. There isn’t a man in this world I would marry.

  Charles did not know what to do. She looked awful, standing there crying, such terrible things coming out of her mouth. He wanted to take it all away from her, the sadness, lift it off of her like a shawl. He knew he had to act. He had to do something, or say something.

  Suddenly he had a vision of the black mare. Beautiful, ruined. Catherine had told him not to buy her and he had not listened. Billy had told him to give up on her but he hadn’t wanted to hear it, and so Billy had kept working her, against his judgment, just for him, and nearly been killed. So wasn’t he just as guilty as those men who did not listen, who did not hear anything but the sounds of their own voices? The thought made him want to run. Just run.

  He turned to her and gathered his breath in his chest.

  There’s good men in the world too, you know, he said.

  But those were just words and they felt empty as soon as they left his mouth. He wanted to prove it to her. All he had wanted to do since he met her was prove it to her. She was still crying, standing so far away, out of arm’s reach. He realized he had his hand on the plat in his pocket. He pulled it out. His speech was still in the front of his mind, the one he had been rehearsing all day.

  I’m buying some land, he said quickly, unfolding the plat. Gonna build a house. Best investment on earth.

  He wrestled with it in the wind. See there—these lots are the prime lots—

  She wiped her eyes and looked at it, wrinkling her brow in confusion. Oh. Charles. Why are you showing me this?

  I’d marry you tonight, you know, he said. He took her hand. She pulled it away.

  Don’t be foolish!

  Her face was so ugly. Red and swollen and shiny with the tears, like scar tissue. He felt his mouth twist with shame.

  Ain’t I good enough for you?

  Charles!

  He got down on one knee. So hard he felt a little burst in his kneecap when it hit the ground.

  If I had the money I would do it, you know. I would get down like this and I would ask you to marry me.

  He couldn’t look at her face anymore. He stared at her feet, hanging on to her hand. She wasn’t saying anything. A group leaving the party catcalled from across the street, shouting something lewd. He squeezed her hand tighter.

  Charles! she hissed. Stop it.

  So I ain’t good enough. That’s it. You don’t think I’m good enough for you.

  Get up, she pleaded. Please.

  She wrenched her hand out of his. Broke free of him and ran around the corner of the building and left him there on one knee, with the wet of the March ground soaking through his pants to his skin.

  Women Get the Raw Deal

  Bristol

  Women get the raw deal, Maura tells Billy. There’s only one way for them to make it rich. And that is to find a man with a lot of money, or a lot of men with a little money, and shake it out of em. The only power a girl can hope for in this country.

  She takes out her scrapbook of actresses, opens it up for him. Points to one of the photographs.

  Do you see it now? What they all have?

  Tell me, he says.

  Look at their eyes. Not just beautiful. Smart. They have figured out what a man wants. Just like I did, when I used to do that monkey trick at the Nichols House.

  He thinks of the men’s eyes in the parlor, trained on her. The nasty thoughts behind them.

  On his knee his hand becomes a fist, then a claw.

  Well what is it? What does every man wa
nt?

  She closes the book with a snap.

  It’s simple, she says. Every man wants what he wants. The thing to do is figure out how to give it to him.

  Billy knocks his knee with his clenched hand, as if he can knock away the memory of the men’s eyes in the parlor.

  Well it don’t strike me as a way to make an honest living, he says. You might as well be a whore.

  Her eyes flash. Don’t you ever say that. I will never be a whore. I would die before I would be a whore.

  Sold

  Two days later Charles went to the land auction.

  It was a frigid gray day. No shadows, no hint of warmth. After a hard rain winter had returned. The blossoms on the trees hung on for dear life.

  Out in the field, folding chairs were lined up neatly in the dead grass and a table of barbeque sat under a tent. The sweet cooked-flesh smell made Charles’s stomach turn. He could hear the faint prickling sound of the rain settling into the earth. The chairs were nearly full, mostly women, balancing plates on their knees.

  He picked up a cardboard paddle and found a seat at the back. The auctioneer started the sale. One plot sold, then another, then another. He took out his pencil and the plat and began to makes X’s over them as they sold. He could hardly keep up. Soon the plat was a mess of X’s. He bid on those that he had circled, but he was outbid every time. After a while it began to feel as if all the other bidders were fighting him. Bidding solely just to keep him down.

  He had done it all wrong with her outside the party. He understood that now. The world was full of cheats and shams and he was just as bad as any of them. He glared at the people to his left and right. All these busy women gossiping in their big heavy coats, all these self-satisfied men murmuring to one another. Well to hell with them all, he thought, dropping his paddle, outbid again.

  The auctioneer whooped and hollered. A judge’s gavel, this fellow used, that he smashed down with every sale, a report like a pistol.

  It was an act of violence, what he had done to her, the way he had dropped down on one knee. As violent as the blow Hatcher had dealt the table with that bone. Now it was all he could do to try to beat away the memory with his paddle.

  Sold!

  Sold!

  He won the last lot that came up, the least desirable one, narrow, low, and full of standing water, bidding against a man fast and ferocious, striking the air with his paddle. The gavel fell. Sold.

  The woman behind him leaned over to her friend and whispered.

  Well that young man overpaid, now, didn’t he?

  Afterwards he rode the interurban out to the shack. Dropped his head when it passed Everbright. He wanted Billy to see the lot. He wanted him to say it was alright, and not make a joke about it. He just wanted somebody to say it was alright.

  They harnessed up Gin and headed back up towards town. The night of the party he had told Billy the story, what Catherine had told him, what he had done. The way Hatcher had smashed the table with the femur.

  Poor man, Billy had said.

  Poor man! What the hell are you talking about? I could kill that bastard. I swear I would.

  I’m just glad I ain’t standing in his shoes, is all. Just glad I ain’t in the old Hatchet’s shiny pair of shoes.

  Now, passing the Everbright gates for the second time that day, Charles again looked away.

  That day Catherine came down to see you in the shack, he said, looking over at Billy. She said that her father’s secrets and lies were to blame for everything. That his reputation was worth more to him than even that dead man’s life. She was talking about her mother, wasn’t she? Why, it’s so ugly and awful. And Hatcher up there strutting around with no remorse. Scot-free.

  Billy listening, sucking his tooth. Finally he said, You heard the story about the fellow this town is named for?

  What’s that got to do with anything?

  You mean you haven’t heard? Why, the original Mister Rich, he’s a murderer. All those years ago, he killed the girl he was supposed to marry, just because he wanted to marry someone else. Told everyone his gun got tangled in her dress. And that was that. But whatever he managed to convince the history books, he had the truth lodged in his heart the rest of his life. Might have grown over thick and hard like a burl grows over a wound in a tree, but it was always there. A man like Hatcher, it’s true, he can tell any damn story he wants to. He does something people don’t like, well all he’s got to do is tell them what they want to hear and they’ll believe him. Or hell, just get em talking about something else. Distract em. Buy himself a new automobile and drive it down the road. A man like that can tell any story and people will believe it. But that doesn’t mean that in the end he won’t have to pay his price.

  Billy clucked to Gin. He spoke with his eyes on the road.

  A man’s got a secret like that, after a while he’s got no friend in the world. Only the secret. He’s all alone, Charlie boy, and that’s the worst place a man can find himself in this world.

  Out in the field the chairs were still there, some of them knocked over. Broken tape hung from the stakes. The road cuts looked like raw wounds. Billy stood there. He looked and looked. Charles knew what he was thinking. He was wondering whoever got the crazy notion in his head to go and tear up such a prime piece of pasture.

  After a while he took out his pipe and packed it and lit it. Charles stared at the giant puddle in the depression in the center of the lot. Shifted his boots in the soggy ground. A great sinking feeling, as if it might swallow him up.

  There was one tree, a hackberry, a trash tree, in the corner by the stake. So young one hard push could have bent the trunk to the ground.

  Billy put his hand on it.

  Down there’s a magnolia, Charles said miserably. I didn’t get the one with the magnolia.

  Billy gave the hackberry a little shake. This tree will grow.

  But Charles hardly heard him. He could not grasp what he had done. They had taken a deposit from him after the sale. Biggest pile of money he had ever shelled out for anything. Then he had signed his name to a hundred sheets of paper.

  I ruined it, Billy, he said.

  April 6

  On March 18 the papers reported that the Germans had sunk two more American ships, the City of Memphis and the Illinois. A week later Bonnyman sent an urgent telegram. He had lost a load of mules on yet another torpedoed ship. The seas are a battleground, he wrote. We need more mules, and fast.

  They went on a buying trip up on the Highland Rim, camping out at night. Charles could hardly sleep. Now that war was inevitable, it seemed impossible. Charles thought of Catherine in the Everbright garden, saying that German spies had blown up Black Tom Island. Just because you say a thing’s impossible doesn’t mean it is, she had said. He lay on his bedroll and watched the stars in the sky and tried to imagine the nightmare of a zeppelin, the way it would silently appear over the trees, coming slowly but relentlessly, the gray ghost, the big whale’s belly of death.

  It could not be ruined. No. He would get her back.

  When they came back through Richfield something was happening. All the doors of the businesses were propped open. A group of people in the street were singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ like the Fourth of July. Only it was not the fourth of July but the sixth of April.

  Charles jumped out of the wagon. A man was standing in the doorway of Suddarth’s, waving a tiny flag. When Charles asked him what was going on, he quit waving it.

  Ain’t you heard?

  Heard what?

  President Wilson finally did it. Dragged his old bones up in front of Congress up there and told em, ‘The hell with it, boys. Unleash the sword.’

  What?

  The fellow grinned. It’s good news, buddy. We’re going to war.

  Part Two

  Spring 1917

  In the aisles at Kuntz’s the men stood close to one another and spoke in low serious tones.

  Well we will wait for what the future holds.

>   We must. We are making the world safe for democracy.

  This means we’ll send more guns, more ammo, certainly more money. Not men.

  Oh no! Of course not. We won’t need to send men. That’s one thing they have plenty of, over there. Men.

  In May the draft was announced.

  To begin there would be a nationwide registration of all men aged twenty-one to thirty. Regardless of their race, creed, or physical health.

  Shortly after this announcement, the first service star in Richfield went up in a window. Doc Walker’s son, called up from the Mexican border, would go over with the 30th Infantry Division. He was headed to Camp Sevier in just a few weeks.

  The paper announced the engagement of Miss Cherry Orchard Tisdale to Mister John Rich IV. There was a rumor going around that married men were going to be exempt from the draft. There had been such a run on the church that there was a term for girls like Cherry: slacker brides.

  Kuntz hung an American flag by the door of the office, another over the door of the barn. He added a 3 percent commission to every animal sold and gave it to the Red Cross. A few of the men who worked for him enlisted right away. So did Jack Dillehay, leaving his house unfinished.

  Rather decide my own fate, he said, than sit around and wait for it to be decided for me.

  In front of the Paradise Theater, instead of girls collecting money for the Society for the Aid of the Fatherless Children of France, there was a little booth set up by the Red Cross. Girls in white nurses’ uniforms with red crosses on their hats sold flowers and rattled collection boxes. They were organizing chapters up on Freedman’s Hill, teaching the colored women how to roll bandages and how to knit and how to go around collecting money too.

  A sign on the wall of the restaurant at the Sumner Hotel read: