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IN
THE COLD, DARK TIME For Neal Barrett It was the
time of the Icing, and the snow and razor winds blew across the lands and
before and behind them came the war and the war went across the lands worse
than the ice, like a plague, and there were those who took in the plague and
died by it, or were wounded deeply by it, and I was one of the wounded, and at
first I wished I was one of the dead. I lay in bed
hour on hour in the poorly heated hospital and watched the night come, then the
day, then the night, then the day, and no time of night or day seemed lost to
me, for I could not sleep, but could only cough out wads of blood-tainted
phlegm and saliva that rose from my injured lungs like blobby bubbly monsters
to remind me of my rendering flesh. I lay there and prayed for death, for I
knew all my life had been lost to me, and that my job in the war was no longer
mine, and when the war was over, if it was ever over, I would never return to
civilized life to continue the same necessary job I had pursued during wartime.
The job with the children. The poor children. Millions of them. Parentless,
homeless, forever being pushed onward by the ice and the war. It was a horror
to see them. Little, frost-bitten waifs without food or shelter or good coats
and there was no food or shelter or good coats to give them. Nothing to offer
them but the war and a cold, slow death. There
were more children than adults now, and the adults were about war and there
were only a few like myself there to help them. One of
the few that could be spared for the Army's Children Corp. And now I could help
no one, not even myself. In
the bed beside me in the crumbling, bomb-shook hospital, was an old man with
his arm blown off at the elbow and his face splotched with the familiar
frostbite of a front-line man. He lay turned toward me, staring, but not
speaking. And in the night, I would turn, and there would be his eyes, lit up
by the night-lamp or by the moonlight, and that glow of theirs would strike me
and I would imagine they contained the sparks of incendiary bombs for melting
ice, or the red-hot destruction of rockets and bullets. In the daylight the sunlight
toured the perimeters of his eyes like a firefight, but the night was the
worst, for then they were the brightest and the strangest. I
thought I should say something to him, but could never bring myself to utter a
word because I was too lost in my misery and waiting for the change of day to
night, night to day, and I was thinking of the
children. Or I tell myself that now. My thoughts were mostly on me and how sad
it was that a man like me had been born into a time of war and that none of
what was good in me and great about me could be given to the world. The
children crossed my mind, but I must admit I saw them less as my mission in
life than as crosses I had borne on my back while climbing Christ-like toward
the front lines. Heavy crosses that had caused me to fall hard to the ground,
driving the pain into my lungs, putting me here where I would die in inches far
from home. "Why
do you fret for yourself," the old man said one morning. I turned and
looked at him and his eyes were as animal bright as ever and there was no
expression on his crunched, little face. "I
fret for the children." "Ah,"
he said. "The children. Your job in the Corp." I
said nothing in reply and he said not another word
until the middle of the night when I drifted into sleep momentarily, for all my
sleep was momentary, and opened my eyes to the lamplight and the cold hospital
air. I pulled a Kleenex from the box beside my bed and coughed blood into it. "You
are getting better," he said. "I'm
dying," I said. "No.
You are getting better. You hardly cough at all. Your sleep is longer. You used
to cough all night." "You're
a doctor, I suppose?" "No,
but I am a soldier. Or was. Now I am a useless old man with no arm." "In
the old days a man your age would have been retired or put behind a desk. Not
out on the frontlines." "I
suppose you're right. But this is not the old days. This is now, and I'm
finished anyway because of the arm." "And
I'm finished because of my wound." "The
lungs heal faster than anything. You are only finished if you are too bitter
to heal. To be old and bitter is all right. It greases the path to the other
side. To be young and bitter is foolish." "How
do you know so much about me?" "I
listen to the nurses and I listen to you and I
observe." "Have
you nothing else to do but meddle in my affairs?" "No." "Leave
me be." "I
would if I could, but I'm an old man and will not live long anyway, wounded or
not. I have the pains of old age and no family and nothing I would be able to
do if I leave here. All I know is the life of a soldier. But you will recover
if you believe you will recover. It is up to you now." "So you are a doctor?" "An
old soldier has seen wounds and sickness, and he knows a man that can get well
if he chooses to get well. A coward will die. Which are you?" I
didn't answer and he didn't repeat the question. I turned my back to him and
went to sleep and later in the night I heard him calling. "Young
man." I
lay there and listened but did not move. "I
think you can hear me and this may be the last I have to say on the matter. You
are getting better. You sleep better. You cough less. The wound is healing. It
may not matter what your attitude is now, you may heal anyway, but let me tell
you this, if you heal, you must heal with your soul
intact You must not lose your love for the children, no matter what you've
seen. It isn't your wound that aches you, makes you want to die, it's the war.
There are few who are willing to do your job, to care for the children. They
need you. They run in hungry, naked packs, and all that is between them and
suffering is the Children's Corp and people like you. The love of children, the
need not to see them hungry and in pain, is a necessary human trait if we are
to survive as a people. When . . . if
. . . this war is over, it must not be a war that has poisoned our hopes for
the future. Get well. Do your duty." I
lay there when he was finished and thought about all I had done for the
children and thought about the war and all that had to be done afterwards, knew
then that my love for the children, their needs, were the obsessions of my
life. They were my reason to live, more than just living to exist I knew then
that I had to let their cause stay with me, had to let my hatred of the world
and the war go, because there were the children. The
next day they came and took the old man away. He had pulled the bandage off of the nub of his arm during the night and chewed the
cauterized wound open with the viciousness of a tiger and had bled to death.
His sheets were the color of gunmetal rust when they came for him and pulled
the stained sheet over his head and rolled him away. They
brought in a young, wounded pilot then, and his eyes were cold and hard and the
color of grave dirt. I spoke to him and he wouldn't speak back, but I kept at
it, and finally he yelled at me, and said he didn't want to live, that he had
seen too much terror to want to go on, but I kept talking to him, and soon he
was chattering like a machine gun and we had long conversations into the night
about women and chess and the kind of beers we were missing back home. And he
told me his hopes for after the war, and I told him
mine. Told him how I would get out of my bed and go back to the frontlines to
help the refugee children, and after the war I would help those who remained. A
month later they let me out of the bed to wander. I
think often of the old man now, especially when the guns boom about the camp
and I'm helping the children, and sometimes I think of the young man and that I
may have helped do for him with a few well-placed words what the old man did
for me, but mostly I think of the old one and what he said to me the night
before he finished his life. It's a contradiction in a way, him giving me life
and taking his own, but he knew that my life was important to the children. I
wish I had turned and spoken to him, but that opportunity is long gone. Each
time they bring the sad little children in to me, one at a time, and I feed
them and hold them, I pray the war will end and there will be money for food
and shelter instead of the care of soldiers and the making of bullets, but
wishes are wishes, and what is, is. And
when I put the scarf around the children's necks and tighten it until I have
eased their pain, I am overcome with an even simpler wish for spare bullets or
drugs to make it quicker, and I have to mentally close my ears to the drumming
of their little feet and shut my nose to the smell of their defecation, but I
know that this is the best way, a warm meal, a moment of hope, a quick, dark
surrender, the only mercy available to them, and when I take the scarf from
their sad, little necks and lay them aside, I think again of the old man and
the life he gave me back and the mercy he gives the children through me. "In the Cold, Dark Time" was originally published in Dark Harvest Summer/Fall Preview, an
advertisement for Obsessions, a book
in which the story also appeared. It was later included in the Lansdale
short-stories collections Writer of the
Purple Rage, published by Carroll & Graf, and Bumper Crop, published by Golden Gryphon Press. "In the Cold,
Dark Time" © 1990 By Bizarre Hands, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Hop in your Buick and head back this way next
Thursday, July 16, for another yarn spun by Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R.
Lansdale! |
