Those Across the River

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THERE’S NOTHING IN it for me. Explaining that boy to you.”

Martin had only glanced at the photograph before putting it back down on the table. He drank from a bottle of gin.

“That is a curious statement,” I said.

“Then here’s one that makes clear sense. I mostly drink clear booze because the rest of it looks like it’s already been through a gentleman.”

So saying, Martin got up from the table and went to the workdesk where he finished pulling the skin from a rabbit he intended to have for his lunch. Smoke from the fire outside came in the window and the smell promised good roasting. Martin poked a stick through the animal in a way it might have found embarrassing as well as uncomfortable if it still cared about earthly matters. We went outside to the fire and Martin braced the spitted rabbit aloft over the fire using two Y-shaped branches planted in the ground.

“Wish you’d been here yesterday. I trapped some doves. Not much more meat than the heel of your hand on any one of them, but I had six and could have gotten by on three.”

“I was already engaged yesterday taking care of the Gordeau boy. He thinks he spent a night at the Devil’s underground spa.”

“Did he see it?”

We had both been standing with our arms folded the way men do when they watch a fire or especially something cooking on a fire, but now I turned my head and looked at Martin.

“See what?” I said. “The spa?”

Martin looked inscrutably at the fire for a moment before he spoke.

“Anything interesting.”

“Something specific and interesting? An it rather than a who?”

“You missed out on a fine career as a detective. It almost doesn’t sound like you’re interrogating me.”

“And you almost sound like you don’t know what’s going on past the river.”

“A check to the king! Black castles. Would you like a smoke?”

I took one of Martin’s strong cigarettes and lit it with a twig. “So are you going to kick me off your ancestral lands again if I keep asking questions like ‘Who is that boy?’ ”

“No.”

“Who is that boy?”

“They’re not ancestral. I picked this place for its vast, quiet woodlands. But now they’re not so vast and sure as hell not quiet and I’m thinking about pushing on.”

“Funny, so am I.”

“Brother, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Martin went back into his house and fetched out the gin, spritzing a little on the rabbit so the fire sizzled.

“There’s a fight coming and I don’t want to pick sides. It’s that simple.”

“A fight between what and what?” I said.

“Let’s go inside.”

Martin shut the door and drew the iron bolt. He sat down at the table and looked up at the stuffed beaver and then at me.

“Between the easy to believe and the difficult to believe.”

I waited.

“I like you, Mr. Nichols. Otherwise I’d have nothing to say. Every word out of my mouth is like a piece of glass I’ll have to pick out of my supper later. Or maybe everything I don’t say is going to hang over my bed later if something bad happens to you.”

“Who is that boy?”

“He’s a leper.”

“A leper?”

“That’s right. Or it’s close enough. He’s sick, and so are a few others.”

“You can speak plain English to me.”

“No, I can’t. They wouldn’t like that.”

“Then speak to me in parables.”

“They’re sick and their illness makes them hurtful.”

“Ah, the parable of the hurtful lepers.”

“They prefer to hurt animals.”

“Swine before pearls?”

“That’s it. That’s it exactly. But some horses’ asses decided to stop what had been a convenient if expensive compromise with… well, with the improbable. And if you think the poor folk of Whit-brow couldn’t afford to send the pigs over the river anymore, I promise you they can’t afford what’s happening now. If the situation doesn’t right itself soon I’m going to have to give this little patch of land back to the weeds.”

He drank. I winced at the amount of alcohol that went into the taxidermist’s mouth, but when he passed the bottle I drank, too.

“Why won’t you just tell me?”

“Have you noticed where I live? Geographically? Or maybe cartographically, I don’t know. Anyway, mine is the closest inhabited dwelling to the river. I am between the river and the town.”

“Jesus. You’re saying you have contact with them.”

“They’re sick, I told you. There are fevers in those woods and fevers make people do things that are not polite.”

“Whatever they are, they’re dangerous and they should be gotten rid of.”

“Someone with the Spanish influenza would be just as dangerous. But you don’t shoot sick people. You contain them.”

I reached for the bottle and Martin slid its cool glass into my hand.

“Besides,” Martin continued, “it’s not that easy.”

“For God’s sake, will you tell me what they are?”

“No.”

“You infuriate me. You do it on purpose.”

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t like.”

“Alright.”

“Conditionally.”

“What’s your condition?”

“Well, currently I seem to be enjoying the condition of a stool pigeon.”

“What don’t they like, Martin?”

“My condition.”

“Jesus bloody Jesus, I see why you live alone.”

“My condition is that you will not share what I tell you with anyone else in town. Because if you did, they might attempt to molest our sick friends. And if they were not wholly successful, the surviving… lepers would know where the good people of Whitbrow got their information. And they might come across the river to discuss this with me.”

“So why tell me at all?”

“The very question I ask myself. And I answer that I would hate to see harm befall you. And I answer that everything is going to hell anyway. And I answer that I would hate to see pretty… what’s-her-name?”

“My wife?”

“Sure.”

“Eudora.”

“I would hate to see pretty Eudora come to grief. It looks like you two have a good thing and you’re both thinkers and your mission is to pollute the world with thinking children.”

I did my best not to react to that.

“Swear on her legs,” he said.

“What?”

“Swear on her exquisite gams—and I am nothing but proper and respectful when I call them exquisite. Swear on them that you will not spread the information I am about to give you to the good folk of Whitbrow, but that you will only use such information in extremis to protect yourself and those legs.”

“I do so swear.”

“Silver. They have a reaction.”

“What do you do? Touch them? Stab them?”

“You don’t want to be that close.”

“Shoot them?”

“Shoot well. It’s not likely to come to that, but if it does, shoot well. They don’t just shrivel up and die. But silver’s the only thing that hurts them so they stay hurt. It’s the only metal that makes wounds they can’t heal almost instantly. Anything else and you’re just giving them a haircut. They come back, and quick. What else? Drowning would probably do it, if they stayed under a good while. Fire, of course. Fire kills everything. Even starfish.”

He leaned closer.

“If you put one down, do me the favor of burning what’s left so maybe they won’t know I told you. But they will. They smell everything. There. That’s all you get and I’m sure it’s too much. I’m probably a dead man. Pass down the holy water, will you? All that squealing makes a girl thirsty. Oh, and on the subject of burning the remains, let’s go on out and turn br’er rabbit.”

“Has it been long enough?”

“No, I guess not.”

THE STREETS OF the mill town held few people in the middle of the day. The people were hidden in the belly of the mill, seeing to the huge looms with the air loud around them and stinking of dye; they were gathering in the fields and turning wrenches at the auto garage; the people were mashing vegetables and spooning them into babies’ mouths and wiping those mouths after; the people were drowsing in furniture stores or changing flypaper in kitchens. Things were not easy here, but they were normal. And the children were in school.

I could tell Eudora felt truant in her summer dress walking through town with me, as though it were obvious to any who looked that she was a teacher and should be in school. It was not her fault she lived in a cursed town.

In Chicago the mornings would be cool now. Seagulls would ride kinder thermals over the sailboats that still planed across Lake Michigan. I ached for Northern air on my face.

I caught Dora looking at the reflections she and I cast in the windowpanes strolling together on a day trip for the last time as anything but legal husband and legal wife. We fit together despite my twelve-year surplus. Nobody uncle-and-nieced us. Men stole looks at her instead of staring because it was clear her bed was already warm. When I went into the silversmith’s to pick up a rather unusual order I had phoned in, I asked her to wait outside, and only then would the men from the shops across the street let their gazes rest on her. I saw through the window how one fat man stopped his car at the corner and removed the cigar from his mouth as if about to speak to her, but she turned her face from him so definitely that he drove on pretending he had not stopped.

“What are you getting, Frankie?” she asked me as I emerged from the silversmith’s.

“A present. I’m not at liberty to say for whom.” She had not seen me pocket the clip from my .45 before we left.

My smile disarmed her. It had been a good idea, coming here to an unbroken town. The moving company had said they would come Monday, October fourteenth. We went to the courthouse and made an appointment with the justice of the peace for Saturday, the twelfth. It felt good. It felt right. If we took nothing else away from this place, at least we would leave it as legal man and wife.

We sat in the town square. Across from us, various posters adorned the brick wall of the boarded-up hosiery mill; the largest featured an enormous Little Orphan Annie staring out at the world with her dead, white eyes, holding up a mug of Ovaltine. “Here’s Health!” the legend read. In the foreground, a bronze angel lamented Confederate dead, unconcerned with its veil of pigeon droppings. Dora fed sandwich crusts to the pigeons, which, she remarked, were smaller and meaner than the ones up north, who always seemed to make out, even when they had to compete with people for scraps.

OLD MAN GORDEAU spent the first days of October driving to other small towns in the county to buy dogs back from those he had sold dogs to before. The cousins and sons and daughters of the dogs he had lost, but the same muttish, red breed with the same unerring nose. He rebuilt his kennel closer to the house, easy shooting distance from his bedroom window, and he started in training the new dogs. It would not take him long with his sure hand to get the animals ready to track and hunt. He would have work for them soon.

Lester kept the feed shop running while Saul and the hired boys saw to the farm and the goats and horses. Saul was not well, but he was not talking about it. Old Man Gordeau let it be known around town that he wasn’t going to wait forever to go back into those woods, alone if he had to, and when he did he was bringing dogs and a fiery sword.

Dora and I started packing. It was a strangely joyful task, even more joyful than the unpacking had been. It didn’t feel like defeat. It felt like a setting right of something that had spun horribly wrong. It felt like we had been pardoned by the governor just before some fatal hand yanked the switch. I didn’t even mind that Paul Miller’s jerk brother charged us too much for the cardboard boxes he reluctantly parted with.

Estel Blake spent a lot of time in the general store since it was within earshot of the bell on the door to his hardware shop. He sat with those who gathered there even though the place was quiet and sad now and there were always enough seats by the stove. He talked about how the men would go into the woods again, and other men talked about it, too, but they were all tired of hearing themselves.

Estel knew that the town needed a captain, but since he had no idea how to help things, he tried to better himself by spending the hour before dark practicing with his revolver. As the moon waxed pale and chalky rising later and later in the daytime sky, he made the copse of trees behind his house shiver with gunshots. He got better than he ever had been at hitting small blocks of wood thirty paces off, until one day a neighbor showed him a bullet hole near the baseboards of his house.

The sheriff argued that the man’s house was at a safe angle from the targets he shot at, but the man just closed his eyes and shook his head. It was probably the same way he shook his head when he had been asked to help bury the dead, and again when he was asked to go into the woods.

“Cain’t no man tell which-a-way a bullet’s gonna rick-a-shore.”

Estel Blake fixed the board in the man’s house; I can see him walking away with black soil on the knees of his trousers. And he never did shoot behind his house again.

So now he sat in the general store with the rest of us, playing checkers sometimes, but mostly just sitting, smelling summer dying on the breeze that came through the screen door. He did not know that he was waiting for the full moon to come, but that was what the whole town was doing. For the next few days, Whitbrow lay as still as a bride waiting to meet her husband.