The Coldest Night (16 page)

T
HE MORNING WAS LOW
and gray, but a wind had kicked up and would increase every hour whipping up the snow like flung gravel. All that morning Koreans kept coming in from the mountains, civilians. There were hundreds of them who’d been forced to work in the Monazite mines. They wanted to know which way it was to the sea. No one knew what else to do except point down the road in a southeasterly direction.

Henry hovered over the slat grill of an ambulance jeep and gasped for the odd strangeness of heat that blasted his body. He watched a lone figure ascending to the skyline on a distant ridge and standing erect.

“God damn fool,” someone muttered, and then a single shot rang out and the figure crumpled and fell from sight.

“Whose was he?” someone else said, rocking from foot to foot.

“Damned if I know,” the first one said.

“Sometimes you just can’t take the waiting,” Lew said.

However inconceivable, there was mail and he was handed a letter from his mother. He took off his glove and slit the seal with his sheath knife. She addressed him as
My Dearest Son
and confessed to missing him so very much and told him she loved him more than anyone else on earth.

They say it’s going to be a bad winter and I think it will be. I remember when I was a little girl the snow always came early and it was deep and the cold was most thorough and enduring. We laid up for winter barrels of apples, huge crocks of brined pork and smaller crocks of kraut. There were smoked bacons and sausages, bins of flour and meal, preserved cherries, peaches, plums, apples, and pears. On the hoof we had beef and milk, and from milk there would be cheese and butter. In coops were chickens and eggs. For sweet there was syrup and molasses . . .

The home place had roaring fires, laden tables, games and excursions. We took evening walks through the snow. Even at so young an age I felt the mortality in that season and knew it could not go on forever . . .

But tonight the oil lamps are being lit again and I am thinking of the old soldiers drinking and remembering their horses.

The old soldiers, they killed countless men. Your grandfathers and your uncles were not innocent. In taking you away I had hoped to save you from that. Little did I know it was not for me to decide. Little did I know the futility in our departing the home place. Little did I know that all things truly wicked start from innocence.

It is only when something starts to hurt that you understand it.

I have recently had a very bad diagnosis. If the doctor’s word is honest I may not be here when you return. But I am safe. Adelita is with me.

Humble yourself, do not close the door to your heart . . . You are the inheritor. You are held aloft by the singular strength and the will of your grandfathers. Know that you walk with the King for you have been to Calvary.

His mother’s words struck deep at his heart. She was the only one given to him in this life, and like his own father, he had abandoned her. His chest washed with the ache of sadness and in his throat he felt a soundless lament. In one hand he held the knife and in the other her letter.

“What is it this time,” Lew asked, gumdrops melting in his mouth.

“Nothing,” Henry said.

“Young hearts break hard.”

“It’s all right.”

“Nothing good ever comes in a letter,” Lew said. He spit away the gumdrop and fed a stick of gum into his mouth.

Word came to them a fire team was being gathered to go out and bring in a distant stranded outpost. They were ordered to move east by northeast and assume a forward position overlooking the reservoir and the main supply route.

“Let’s go!” said a young officer.

They loaded their backs with all the ammunition they could carry. They shouldered their weapons. There was a radio with good range and fresh batteries and the airships hunting from aloft. They fell in and on command stepped off onto unknown ground. It wasn’t until noon they came to the base of a hill that was their destination marked by the spoils cuffed to the fighting holes. The holes were in a crescent-shaped arc overlooking the frozen reservoir on one side, and on the other was a valley strewn with bodies. The killed of both sides were everywhere, their bones arrayed in the midst of mangled limbs.

The young officer took out a map the wind blew away before he could read it. Lew stepped forward and yelled out.

“Anyone there?”

“Who won the World Series?” a high, thin voice returned.

“Fuck you, dimwit,” Lew yelled back. “We’re coming in.”

He was a boy not much older than Henry and he was the lone survivor. The firing pin in his M1 had snapped and he’d lost his shoes and most of his teeth. The heavy machine gun was jammed and a bullet had pierced the water jacket and its water hung to the ground in icicles. All about the gun emplacements ammo belts were draped over boulders and brush. Blood-soaked battle dressings littered the ridge. Everywhere was the detritus of war: cartridge belts, pack straps, rifle slings, empty cartridge cases, ammo boxes, clips and the bodies of men in all poses of death.

The boy’s only weapons were a knife and a pile of grenades. Why he was not insane, no one could know.

“That fighting hole smells like shit. I ain’t getting in there,” one of them said.

“It’s a good hole,” the boy said. “But you suit yourself.”

“Where is everyone?” the young officer asked.

“I told them not to send no one,” the boy said, and looked away to the shrouded bodies he’d dragged into long file.

“We’ll tie in on the left,” Lew said, spurring the young officer to command.

They set out trip flares and registered their weapons. They tried the radio, but it failed them, the freezing temperatures depleting the batteries.

The young officer sent back a runner and then another. He told them they only had to last the night and they would return in the morning.

Their work finally done, they settled in for the night. Henry tucked his feet and legs into his sleeping bag, propped himself against a boulder, and under the slow wheel of the stars he peered into the blue darkness. There was a silence and as the hours of darkness passed, his mind became susceptible to the night, alive with a presence he could not see, but was translated through the earth and into his body.

“If the bastards come tonight, that’s where they will come from,” Lew said with a wave of his hand.

Sleep began to descend as if a winding sheet. He felt it at the backs of his eyes and it was as if a hand was lowering his eyelids. He began to wish they would come: so he could kill them and they could kill him.

“What are you going to do after the war, Lew?”

“I think I will go to Tahiti.”

“What’s in Tahiti?”

“Tahitians.”

He was five thousand miles from home and this night there was a current running through him. He was not yet broken but completed and final. His mind and his being were fixed and he could not name what he felt, but he did not fear their coming again and he began to wish for the warmth of violence. He tried to remember the letter he received that morning and then he did.

Chapter 23

H
ENRY JERKED AWAKE.
SOMEHOW
he’d fallen into twitching sleep. The boy was in their midst and was talking to Lew. No one seemed to know what to do with him as he wandered about.

He was saying, “A person can bleed to death pretty quick.”

Henry hawked up a gob of phlegm. He rubbed at his face and then he climbed the fire step. It was a moonlit night and with the darkness came an inexplicable warming. Someone was whistling in the dark and someone else told the whistler to shut the fuck up with his whistling.

Henry kept his eyes fixed on the strip of ground before him. As the hours passed something strange began to grow inside him. He thought of Mercy. He thought, I was wrong to run. I will never run again.

Star shells and flares hissed in the cold atmosphere and when the shells’ white lights expired, the darkness came back more fiercely. The sound of weapons’ fire could be heard, but it was difficult to place. Across the vast white terrain he could see a thin sharp tongue of white flame, the muzzle blast of a mortar tube and then another. The mortars were finding their range. The first rounds began coming in, the shells marching up the heights and closing in on their position.

Dearest Mother . . . Your recent letter has caused such concern and there is nothing I can do . . . I am in the hellhole of the earth and it’s getting worse . . . What we do there can be no stopping . . . Not for a moment, not for a second . . . They are determined to kill us and we are determined to kill them . . . I never thought about that before . . . Once it begins it cannot be stopped . . . dearest Mother, please do not die . . .

Geysers of frozen earth and black smoke stalked in the air and collapsed back to the ground and then the shells were smashing into them, concussing their bodies. It seemed a mere rush of air, but it tore off a man’s cheek and another’s ear and a third was attempting to put back a dislocated thumb when his body was broken in half.

The granite that surrounded them splintered and fragmented as deadly as shrapnel.

“Time to beat feet,” Lew yelled and the men on the flank bailed out of their holes and scuttled down the backside of the ridge. They fell into a deep thin gully and clung to the trembling earth, waiting for the barrage to pass above them before crawling back to the ridgeline. Henry took out one of his chocolate bars and passed it around and they ate it while they waited.

“When I was a little kid,” Henry said, “I’d do anything for a chocolate bar.”

“Little did you know,” Lew said.

A distant explosion of guns and mortars began building into a single rumbling sound that rolled their way as the heavies in the valley responded and they knew that the dying beyond the valley had begun again.

“Jesus Christ,” one of them intoned, and slid on his belly to be further underground.

“Just be happy it isn’t you,” the boy said.

A single bugle sounded from across the valley. Then the night filled with the sounds of bugles. They knew within minutes of the first call another attack would be on the perimeter.

“My skin will crawl for the rest of my life when I hear a bugle,” one of them said.

“Pipe down.”

“Why?” the one said. “They might fucking know we’re here?”

They scrambled back up the ridge and took their positions. A shower of white-hot sparks rained down on them. A bullet tore through Henry’s sleeve. He turned to the young officer still in the shadows and held up his arm. They exchanged a knowing look and then a black circle popped in the young officer’s forehead and he was dead.

A row of shadows rose out of the darkness and then they disappeared and then they appeared again. There were hundreds of them, hunched and clad in white and running with the jut of a gun barrel at their hips. They came on as if born out of the explosions. In his mind he wrote,
When this reaches you I will be dead. A lot of us will be that way
.

“Comb it out,” Lew yelled, and Henry opened fire with the BAR held in his arms and beat off the attack. He changed out the magazine and triggered again and down the line the machine gunner triggered and sent forth the mangling fire of the flat tracking machine gun, its bloody, wearying cadence the race of their pulses, the pounding of their hearts.

Still, they came on, sifting through the night, wearing their quilted jackets and fur hats and they were shot down as fast as they came.

In Henry’s fighting hole the cartridge cases were now knee deep. He climbed to a higher parapet to see the fields beyond the glacis. The sheer number of dead that lay before him was overwhelming to his mind, blood and human viscera and men dragging themselves from the field of battle.

Then they were coming again and both flanks were caving in until it was as if the men were islanded on the summit and stood back to back fighting them off the ridge.

“Fix bayonets,” Lew ordered, and the men fixed their bayonets, their only chance to enter their midst and break their attack.

Henry stepped out of a mortar’s explosion and heaved a bayoneted carbine through the chest of the first man he encountered. He picked up the man’s Thompson, held it locked to his hip, and fired; its fire climbed into the night. The cries of the wounded faded as one by one, their guts ripped open, their limbs broken, they froze to death or died of their wounds in the low brush and on the open ground.

Near morning the boy came walking in his direction. His right arm was dangling at his side and he was saying he could not make it work. He said he believed it broken, but was not sure. Just then there was an explosion and a shard of knifing shrapnel nicked the boy’s carotid artery. A hot jet of blood, and he collapsed clutching at his neck. Henry applied a compress, but the boy was bleeding out. Henry cradled him in his arms until he died.