Those Across the River (13 page)

Eudora went to this meeting without me.

I had begged off so I could work, but what really happened was that I sat in front of the typewriter and nursed three glasses of Drambuie.

Dora said not many came at all.

 

 

 

ALL THE DRAMA and the most compelling speakers had gone the night before; besides which, it had been widely believed that the ceremony would not survive a second vote, so few were surprised when the decision was entered.

What did surprise the community was the death of Paul Miller, alderman and owner of the general store.

It surprised Paul, too.

The pain hit him while he was standing on a stepladder to stack flour on a high shelf. It shocked him so that he stepped off the ladder wrong and cracked his head, dropping a sack of flour, which burst all over him and the floor. This happened early in the morning two days after the vote.

Dr. McElroy, an old-time black-bag doctor who kept his office in the back of his house, was the only one who was not surprised.

He filled us in at the general store.

“I told him his heart was not bad insofar as I heard no murmurs or irregular beats, but that his restin heart rate was high, and he didn’t need an MD to tell him he was carryin too much. I told him he had a clean bill of health so long as he’d promise to lay off the fat meat, cut his portions and start takin walks. He only heard what he wanted to hear. Like most of us, I reckon. Maggie Whaley found him all white with flour on his floor, an she came runnin for me. I told her he was dead when he hit the floor and she couldn’t of done a thing; truth is, he was probably still tickin, but that’s the kind a thing you say. Either way, he was all done when I listened to that big chest of his. No more prime rib for you, old man. It’s a sorry damn shame is what it is.”

Paul Miller was buried in a very large box. His funeral was well attended despite the rains that came on the tail end of a hurricane that had given hell to the Florida Keys. People strained to hear the pastor’s words in the wind.

Some of those hunching under newspapers or shared coats owed him money. Of these, I’ll bet some wondered if the list of debtors would be found by his wife, and struggled with whether or not to tell her. I was sorry that his big, generous face would no longer loom behind the pickle jar, and that he would be crushing no more hands with his aggressive handshakes. Many of the others were sorry, too, that his listless, rail-thin brother would likely take over the store, at least until he found out how much work it was.

The rain was heavy and warm and made small lakes on the potted road that led back from the churchyard. What we all felt that day, even those of us who were new in town, was that something had changed in Whitbrow, something had given way, and what would follow would not be to our liking.

E
UDORA STARTED TEACHING school the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, in the simple building on the outskirts of town that served as a high school. It had a tin roof, a potbellied stove, dirty windows and a sextet of rough-hewn tables with a few benches and mismatched chairs. The boys and girls shared pencils since ink for the pens had run out.

She saw right away that her biggest challenge was going to be keeping these grown-up-looking farmers’ kids in school. She expected to lose a few temporarily, maybe permanently, during the corn harvest that would follow soon. A girl like Ursie would pose little risk; she was not needed at her father’s businesses, nor in his peach or nut orchards where hired men worked the ladders. All she had to do was mind her younger sibling and do light chores at night while her mama cooked.

Sarah Woodruff, on the other hand, wore her older brother’s cast-off pants cinched around her waist with a leather strap, and her shoes had the backs cut off and the tops slit because she had long since outgrown them. Sarah was fifteen and fighting a losing battle with her parents to stay in school instead of helping them full-time with the farm. What good would numbers and letters do her when she was a wife? What could she want besides that? Her good looks had already caught Saul Gordeau’s eye; more than his eye, his daddy seemed to think. This could have just been wishful thinking on the old man’s part; the girl was more than just beautiful. She was positively
wholesome
. Pinup girl material, with her bright eyes and her chestnut hair and just that little bit of freckle.

Of course, Dora didn’t care about that. She loved Sarah because Sarah paid attention. She understood. None of the boys could keep up with her at reading or math, but one of them was going to be her lord and master soon; if not Saul, then maybe the squarish boy who sat up front and talked about going in the army. One of them would take her by her pretty hair and drag her into his house to make her peel things and wash things and mend things under his mother’s gaze. Eudora told me it would be her chief mission to keep that girl in school, whatever became of the rest of them.

One of the ways in which Dora hoped to keep the class together was by engaging them in conversation, reasoning that if they did enough talking to her and to one another they would develop a sense of belonging and they would fight harder to stay together.

So on the second day of school, Dora asked the class to talk about the pigs. She explained that since she was not from Whitbrow she needed to catch up on its stories. Did anyone know why people first started sending pigs out into the woods?

Sarah was the first to raise her hand.

“My daddy used to tell us scary stories about the woods east of town. Is that what you mean, Mrs. Nichols? Scary stories?”

“Yes, Sarah, any kind of story. Scary, nice. Anything you’ve heard.”

Then several of them had raised their hands, but she nodded at Sarah.

“My daddy used to tell us how once upon a time there was a plantation out there, like when they used to keep slaves. He said that since the man who owned the plantation was so bad, God let the Devil come and take the man’s soul away without waiting for Judgment Day. But now the Devil knows how to get out of Hell by a door he made back then, and when the moon gets full he comes up looking for a new soul to take away. And if you met up with him, it wouldn’t matter if you were good or bad, he would just eat up your body and take your soul away with him. The Devil likes pigs, though, because they have feet like him. So when he finds a pig he takes that instead.”

“Do you believe that?”

“It’s just a story. But I know I don’t like those woods and I’m not supposed to ever go out there.”

Eudora called on Saul next.

“Well, my brother likes to fish that river out where it gets deeper, and he’s took me with him before. But not across the river. He’s been, though. He says he ain’t never seen nothin bad out there but snakes and ground-wasps. But he don’t go much past the river, and he don’t go at night. I don’t neither. My daddy always held that sendin all them pigs was foolishness, but he did tell us some stories, too. To scare us, like, so we wouldn’t go off wanderin at night. I guess all daddies do that and I’m like to do it, too.”

“What did he tell you, Saul?”

“There’s this death-dog out there,” he said.

Other heads nodded.

“It’s called a Look-a-roo. And if you see this dog, you’s the next to die in town. They say it’s black, all black, and as big as two dogs, and if you see it, not all the prayin in the world’s gonna keep you from bein put in the ground real soon.”

Saul started to sing then.

Other voices joined in. They all knew this.

“We used to sing that skippin rope,” Saul said.

“Yeah,” said another boy, “and whoever starts that last part ‘nine-ten’ gets a punch.”

“We just go
awwww
at em,” offered a girl.

The boy said, “Yeah, my daddy says Mr. Miller saw it on the way home from the store. Couple nights afore he died.”

Eudora told me she was fed up with daddies and their ghosts, and I knew what she meant. Another way to keep the house in awe. It’s good to hear the strong snore of a daddy in the next room when something might be lurking in the hedge, waiting to test your window.

The would-be army boy up front raised his hand.

“Way I heard it was a nigger gave hisself up to the Devil back in slave days so the Devil would come and eat up his master. Used a witch doctor and everything. But I guess that’s like the other story,” he said, and flashed a look behind him at Sarah.

But then Sarah raised her hand again, and what she said next was what made Dora fall sloppily in love with her.

“I think there are stray dogs out there. Or maybe there used to be. Sometimes when dogs go stray they make a pack like wolves and hunt and they’re very dangerous. Might be someone got killed. Might be that’s why they told stories about a death-dog or the Devil eating somebody. Might be they got scared and started sending pigs out across the river to keep what they thought was out there from coming to town.”

A boy in the back said, “Yeah, but ain’t nobody scared a no dogs. They’d a just laid poison or shot em. Don’t make sense to give no pigs up for dogs.”

“Alright, smarty-pants,” Sarah said, “maybe it is the Devil. Why don’t you go out and see?”

 

 

 

I MET DORA after school that day, the storytelling day, and walked her home. I pointed out the diurnal moon, which was more than half full, hiding like a shy spirit behind the branches of a maple tree. I got a kiss for this, a peck at first, but more after she checked to see that no kids were lingering nearby.

Then we walked on.

“Funny how they think the Devil would actually be interested in queer little Whitbrow,” she said. Her hand slid up to feel the muscle in my arm. “But I’m glad you’re here all the same. You won’t let the Devil get me, will you, Frankie?”

“I’ll spit in his eye and tie a knot in his tail.”

“That’s just capital. And when he wipes the spit out of his eye and shakes the knot out of his tail?”

“We run like hell, of course.”

“Quite sane,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder.

Our lovemaking was sweet and slow that night. It seemed she kissed my whole body as if it were a newly minted gift she could not keep long. And afterwards, when she thought I was sleeping, I caught her talking to the moon through the lace curtains. I couldn’t hear her words, as low as they were, but I wasn’t half bad at reading her lips.

“I don’t need rescuing,” she said. “I don’t.”

THE DAY MARTIN Cranmer got himself arrested, Dora and I were having a soda at Harvey’s. I told her that Saul’s story about the death-dog reminded me of Black Shuck.

“What’s a ‘Black Shuck’?” she asked.

I took another drink of soda. We had come to the drugstore to get out of the heat even though both of us knew the town was stunned and the mood was unpleasant in the wake of Paul Miller’s death, and in the absence of a Social, which would have taken place that Sunday if anyone had the good will and energy to organize it. The town seemed lost without its heathen ritual. And without its affable grocer.

“Black Shuck was a sort of big, black hound that lurked in the barrows and fens in England. When I was in London, not long before I came home, I met some fellows in a pub. They had been soldiers, too, like everybody, part of that ghastly tank business in Amiens. They were from the East. Norwich or Norfolk, I can’t recall. When the barman called ‘Time, gentlemen,’ one of them said, ‘Let’s go through Hyde Park and look for Black Shuck.’ ”

Dora smiled at my put-on accent.

“ ‘He’s a great fukkin black dog, big as a calf. Just watch out for his one red eye right in the middle of his forehead; if he looks at you, you’re shyte. You’re dead.’ ”

My profanity caused Harvey to look up from his barely audible radio and from his endless wiping of clean things, though his expression was so flat I wasn’t sure at first if it was interest or reproach.

Then he turned up his radio and went back to wiping. Huey Long was getting buried in Baton Rouge and some reverend was speaking, calling him an unfinished symphony. Harvey was rapt.

“Anyway, we rolled out of the pub and went looking down dark alleys and under bridges and ended up passing out in Hyde Park. No Shuck. I always remembered that name. It sounds like a death-dog, doesn’t it? It sounds like little Gordeau has a piece of that same story. Funny how legends travel.”