Those Across the River (15 page)

Dora sensed that Estel and I wanted to talk man talk, and she left us on the porch, bringing out a bottle of bourbon for us to share. We shared it plenty. And Estel let loose.

 

 

 

“I CALLED THEM boys from Morgan, said we had a killin and I thought it might be someone holed up in the woods. I told em I think the boy surprised somebody while they was trying to get at them hogs. Mr. Falmouth had them penned up real tight what with a lock and wire over the top of them and all. I told em how it looked from the tracks like an animal drug him, something like a big wolf, and Big Joe—he’s the sheriff there—said they hadn’t been no wolves around here since the States’ War. Well, why don’t you come see, I said. But maybe I do hold with Miles Falmouth, that some bad customer, some drifter, come up on him. He would a got a round off at an animal. Joe said the boy was scared so maybe he missed, an I said, no shit he was scared,
I
was scared. I’m gonna be reading the Good Book to get myself to sleep every night. Only I cain’t pray. Not right. The words that keep comin ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus, just
Why did I seek this post, Lord? I am heartfully sorry I sought this post. I water my couch with tears. My sore ran in the night and ceased not. Selah.
All that Book of Psalms stuff. I don’t even know what
Selah
means.”

He took another drink of bourbon like it was weak tea.

“You know the worst thing, Mr. Nichols?”

“Frank.”

“I said I wanted whoever killed that boy in the ground. I didn’t want no trial, no lockup. Just wanted it done, in such a way that nobody had to talk about this no more. That’s what I said to Joe. And he took me at my word. And I think something real bad happened. But I wasn’t there when it did.”

 

 

 

I REMEMBERED SEEING the boys from Morgan arrive.

I was at the store, at my usual post at the far end of the porch.

There were lots of men there. The women had gone to the Falmouth place and offered to watch the girl children or do the cooking or slop the hogs, not because Edna needed these things but because there was nothing else to offer.

The men sat around the iron stove and talked with their low, buzzing voices about what to do. Everyone in town was desperate for something to do. The men didn’t know where to put their hands.

No music played. Peter Miller had removed what had been the communal radio to his own house. It was his now, as was the quiet store. He leaned with his knobby elbows on the counter, half listening to the grief of the men as if it had no bearing on him. I had the impression that his older brother’s death had also seemed far-off to him, as tiny as newsprint. Peter was nearing forty, and he had the noncommittal look of a man who was still waiting for his actual life to begin. He had still not met the better people who would eventually matter to him. He just leaned there with his narrow head turned away, like another feature of the counter that looked so sterile without the green water of the pickle jar.

“Lordy, here they come,” one-armed Mike said.

We all watched the cars from Morgan come around the corner as if from a great stillness. Even I heard the doors opening, one of them with a squeaky hinge, and then the abrupt pops as the doors closed.

The men came into view with their straw hats on and their shadows hugging tight on them since it was the middle of the day. Five of them following Estel, who came out of the hardware store and led the way across the town square. All of them looked bigger than him, or younger, or tougher. Two had shotguns. They walked with big steps like men about to do something. Their big strides carried them past the old pump and past the benches and the insulted rosebushes, and I wondered what mob or sea would not have parted to let them go by.

With their straw hats.

With their shadows tight and dark under them.

As they moved away on the other side of the square, finally looking less like giants, Martin Cranmer, who had ridden back from Morgan with them, walked in front of the window, just on the other side of the glass. He noticed the shapes looking out at him and he twitched his hand as if he were about to wave and then thought better of it. He passed with his head down and then he, too, receded off towards the woods where his home was.

 

 

 

THE YARD IN front of Miles Falmouth’s dirty little house was full of women. A few men, too, but we looked ignored and dispossessed. The connection between the women was humid. Languid. The hive had been broken into and honey had been stolen so they buzzed and crawled all over one another like drugged things. The men were not needed in the yard with talk of posses and guns and hangings, so we stuffed our hands in our pockets and orbited groups of women, or we leaned against the mossy trees and smoked.

People ate and drank and talked, but nobody laughed and nobody smiled, and only this distinguished the scene in Falmouth’s yard from a party. As I walked around the knots of women I heard things like “shame” and “awful” and “the Good Lord,” and then I saw Dora, and she came and draped herself against me, breathing in the smell of my chest and shirt. Her eyes were red from crying and her face was white and tired as if she had not slept, though it was only one o’clock.

I knew this face of hers. This was the face she wore through much of the divorce. How could things ever be right again? How could she face her students and tell them about fractions and the times table and Abraham Lincoln when there was a little boy chewed up under a tree? Only the sheriff had seen it and now the sheriff from Morgan and his men were looking at it, but the idea of it was planted there for all of us to keep forever. It didn’t matter if the boy had been handsomely freckled or quick to smile, or good at baseball or hunting squirrels; in Whitbrow’s memory his name would be henceforth married to the word murder. Not only would the boy never be a man; he would never leave the hole where the locust tree had been.

The dogs were baying behind the house like some bad engine coming to life and the lawmen were preparing to follow the dogs. Everyone knew the dogs would pull them into the woods, and they did.

The killer had come from the woods.

 

 

 

“I COULDN’T HARDLY stand them bastards from Morgan,” Estel said, owlishly drunk now.

Dora brought us sandwiches, giving me a look that said,
As long as you know I’m just playing domestic for the sake of company; you’re going to make me a drink and tell me what’s going on as soon as this man leaves.

The sheriff continued.

“Joe was half decent, but them other’n was puffed up like too much shit in a sack. Hell, Joe, too. He run Miles and Edna through all the same questions I already asked em, makin Edna cry all over again, and worse, if that was possible. Didn’t get nothin new. And they all shot their mouths off while we were runnin them dogs, sayin I hope we get that nigger by supper, and talkin about what they was hopin to eat and kiddin about how bad each other’s wives cooked. When I didn’t fun with em, they started funnin after me and I told em to shut their damn mouths. Joe said don’t mind him, he knew that kid. Like it was some prize he was givin me.

“Well, them dogs had a scent, and they didn’t like it. Lester knows how to run a hound. But they took us windin all around, finally up the trail and then where do you think? Martin goddamn Cranmer’s house. Well, I banged on his door and he come out with no shirt on and scratchin that beard a his, stinkin like . . . Well, you know how he stinks. I said, you think you had a visitor last night? He says, how would I know, I was in the pokey. Good thing for you, I said, and I wonder if you knew that when you was tearin up them flowers. He said I ought not to be jawin with somebody I knew was innocent, that I was runnin them hounds so slow he could get away on a one-legged horse, so I said, you’re right, I ain’t got time for this. Normally I got a lot of patience with your smart mouth, but today I am not in the mood. I looked him dead in the eye and said, if I thought you knew something about who killed that boy and you weren’t tellin me, I’d come back here and burn your damn house down. And he knew I would, too. He took his ass back in his little hut and shut the door.”

The dogs wanted to cross the river.

It’s easy to imagine Lester holding the dogs while the other men boarded the raft and then settling them on it. Perhaps he spoke to the hounds, handsome reddish things with slightly looser skin on their faces than most dogs had, and called them by their names. He would have told them how well they were doing, how brave and good they were, and he would have let them take water from the river. Some, like his father, would have said Lester was the kind of man to spoil a dog, but Lester never saw dogs as property. They were friends of his, friends that liked to work and were grateful for instruction. Lester would talk sweetly to the dogs after his father whipped them. Lester would sneak a shirt-full of food to them and get whipped himself. If Lester had been a saint, his statue would have featured him kneeling, getting his hand licked through the slats of a fence, with one eye out for his father.

It took two trips to get all the dogs and men across. Estel said the men from Morgan never stopped “funnin.” On the other side of the river one of them slapped at a deerfly on the back of his friend, but it was too fast.

“What the hell was that for?”

“Deerfly. Would a bit you.”

“Well, it wouldn’t a slapped me.”

The dogs picked up the scent again and pulled them deeper into the forest, baying constantly. Lester had never seen them so disturbed.

They pressed on past the gouged pine trees and kept going for nearly an hour before they saw him.

The dogs went right to him.

He was picking blackberries.

It was a big, muscular black man with a closely shaven head. He had a bucket half full of blackberries and his mouth and fingers were stained from eating them. His shirt was stained, too. He saw their guns and dogs and, because he felt he was expected to, he raised his hands.

The dogs were barking and howling now. They had their man. Gordeau trusted the dogs so much that their reaction to the blackberry eater was tantamount to a conviction in state court.

“That’s him,” he said.

The boys from Morgan started in immediately, asking him the questions that fit the circumstances. His name. His whereabouts last night. He would not speak. They cuffed his hands. One of them carried his bucket of blackberries and ate from it as they walked.

“Why don’t you talk, boy?”

“Maybe he’s a deaf-an-dumb.”

“Hey, are you a deaf-mute? If you are, say somethin.”

“Well if he is, how can he say somethin?”

“I was makin a joke, a funny joke. He couldn’t hear my question, neither, if’n he was a deaf-mute, see? That’s funny.”

“Oh, he can hear us okay. He hears every word we’s sayin.”

Lester Gordeau would later say he knew the man was no mute, and no idiot either. He thought that he had seen him in town before, though maybe not since he was a little boy. He remembered that in school he had learned about old-time sailing ships and how much work it was to pull those ropes and climb up all over the sails. When he saw the black man those ten or twelve years ago he thought he looked strong enough to be an old-time sailor. Walking behind him now, far behind him because the dogs still bayed after him, Lester thought that he still looked strong enough to pull sailor’s ropes. He remembered being glad for the guns the lawmen wore.

Estel walked next to the man, looking at him intently. He was trying to look straight through the man’s skull and into his brain to see if it contained the memory of the Falmouth boy. Tyson Falmouth looking up into this man’s eyes.
He’s going to hurt me. I’m too small.
Did it happen that way?

“Look at me,” Estel said.

He did. Eyes so brown they were almost black. Intelligent eyes. He knew what was going to happen to him. The Negro looked forward again. Did he recognize him? Yes. He had sold something from the hardware store to a bald colored a few weeks ago. What was it?

He couldn’t recollect.

But he remembered that face.

It was him.

“Why did you kill that kid?”

But it was over. The man had no words for any of them, and the next time Estel tried to meet his gaze by moving in front of him, the man looked right through him.

“Answer the man,” the sheriff from Morgan said. When the captive did not answer, but only marched forward and looked ahead with that passive look like paintings of Jesus, the sheriff from Morgan poked him stiffly in the ribs with the barrel of his shotgun. The man winced but said nothing. That was how the abuse began.

When they got to the river, three lawmen went across. Then Gordeau and the dogs with Estel pulling the rope. Then two lawmen transported the prisoner, one of them pulling while the other kept his revolver cocked under the black man’s chin. They mistrusted his silence and felt that he would surprise them if he could.

They were right about that, of course, but they could not guess how.

 

 

 

“IT WAS LONG about five in the evening when we got to Cranmer’s place the second time,” Estel said.

“I beat on his door, but he didn’t come out til I yelled, Goddamnit, I know you’re in there and I ain’t goin away. He opened the door buttonin up his shirt, with a big yawn on his face, and said you caught me nappin. Said he was dreamin of Mexican señoritas and we was a rude subsitute. I said I was just wonderin if this was a friend of your’n. Dogs seem to think he was here last night. He and the nigger looked at each other and he said, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I paid good money for this specimen, he said
specimen
, an it up an run away on me first chance it got. And then some more bullshit about thanks for returnin my rightful property and would we be good enough to help him tie it to a tree for a proper whippin, but I’d had enough.